The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

TV Review: Star Trek, season 3

TV #36 of 2016:

Star Trek, season 3

Star Trek: TOS ended up faltering in its final season, which is a huge shame. There’s still stuff to enjoy in most of the episodes, but lazy clunkers are the norm and I’d be hard-pressed to name a single real classic. (Let That Be Your Last Battlefield, I guess. Maybe) Oh well! I guess it was good enough that the franchise did eventually continue, but this is not really a batch of episodes I think I’ll need to return to in the future.

This season: ★★☆☆☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Season ranking: 2 > 1 > 3

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TV Review: Jane the Virgin, season 1

TV #35 of 2016:

Jane the Virgin, season 1

Jane the Virgin is such a sweet, hilarious, and amazingly character-driven TV show. It comes roaring out of the gate with such an over-the-top premise that you’re worried the whole thing will just be silly, but its devotion to its characters and to the heightened reality of a telenovela grabs you right away and never lets you go. This is the most confident premiere season of a show since perhaps Veronica Mars, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

★★★★★

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Book Review: The Pun Also Rises: How the Humble Pun Revolutionized Language, Changed History, and Made Wordplay More Than Some Antics by John Pollack

Book #56 of 2016:

The Pun Also Rises: How the Humble Pun Revolutionized Language, Changed History, and Made Wordplay More Than Some Antics by John Pollack

The Pun Also Rises is a fun little book that argues from research for the prominence of puns in the history of our species. Writer John Pollack presents a convincing argument that our current “no pun intended” era of considering puns groan-worthy is actually unusual when measured against the span of recorded history. As a pun-lover and a linguist, I loved learning more about this oft-neglected part of language. I also found The Pun Also Rises to be the rare popular science book about language that didn’t make me squirm over the way it simplified linguistic concepts.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Book #55 of 2016:

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Americanah is a fascinating look at America (and Nigeria) both from the outside and the in. It’s also a frank examination of the subtler effects of race and racism, which writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie manages without ever becoming didactic about it. Her characters are sharp and well-written, and her observations about the social issues they run up against are always on-point. Americanah is fiction, but I still felt like I learned a lot about my country through reading it.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Dolores Claiborne by Stephen King

Book #54 of 2016:

Dolores Claiborne by Stephen King

Stephen King’s Dolores Claiborne begins with an irresistible premise: a crotchety old Maine woman walking into a police station to confess to a murder. It largely lives up to that premise, helped along by the unique (for King) narrative structure, which presents Dolores’s story as one long, unbroken monologue. It’s also a rare Stephen King story for having little-to-none of the supernatural in it, other than a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reference to his book Gerald’s Game. A quick read, but very fun, especially as an audiobook.

★★★★☆

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Movie Review: Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)

Movie #13 of 2016:

Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)

I wanted so badly to like Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and I think it does have elements that work for it. I like that, coming ten years after the end of TOS, the film’s characters have actually aged ten years and some of them are even in different situations than we last saw them. Kirk as an admiral getting the old gang back together to take the Enterprise on a mission to save the earth works pretty well.

Unfortunately, the plot that that serves in the back half of the movie is a warmed-over repeat of an episode plot that wasn’t so good the first time around and feels even sillier here. Plus the new characters in the film are kind of a drag, and the filmmakers spend way too much time trying to ape the sense of visual wonder from contemporary films like 2001: A Space Odyssey or Close Encounters of the Third Kind, rather than just buckling down and telling a decent story. I honestly think that you could probably shave a whole hour off the running time of the motion picture just by cutting down on the number of shots of visual effects and/or characters staring at them. Like TOS season 3, I’m kind of at a loss as to how this wasn’t the end of the franchise, but I guess I’m glad that there’s still more Trek for me to watch after it.

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: Salvation City by Sigrid Nunez

Book #53 of 2016:

Salvation City by Sigrid Nunez

I’m a sucker for post-apocalyptic fiction, but Salvation City is such a bland example of the genre. It’s no Station Eleven or The Stand – it’s not even an Earth Abides. Instead, it’s just a fairly boring story of one fairly boring child after a plague kills his parents and leaves him being raised by a much more religious couple. There’s almost no worldbuilding here, to the point where it could practically have been a regular disease that leaves the protagonist orphaned rather than a supposedly civilization-shattering epidemic. This would be less of an issue if the central plot were more engaging, but it just never really gets off the ground.

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones

Book #52 of 2016:

Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones

This book is very well-written, and it excels at bringing these characters and 1970s Atlanta to life. I don’t go for literary fiction all that often, but I couldn’t resist this premise, of two black girls growing up in the same town with the same father, but with one of them his legitimate daughter by his wife and the other one part of a secret second family. Tayari Jones spools out the story effortlessly, and it’s fascinating as a reader to both want the father to be punished for his duplicity and to want to protect the girls from the fallout you know will be coming when that happens.

My only criticism is that the book just sort of… ends. The story feels more than a little incomplete when it does, and I certainly wouldn’t have minded spending more time with these characters. I liked the novel, but I definitely walked away from it feeling disappointed by the ending.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Star-Touched Queen by Roshani Chokshi

Book #51 of 2016:

The Star-Touched Queen by Roshani Chokshi (The Star-Touched Queen #1)

The Star-Touched Queen is about a young princess who gets saved from death through a marriage to a mysterious stranger, followed by her quest to save him from a force of evil once his secrets finally come out. It’s really a lovely fantasy story, richly steeped in the mythology of India. A lot of the fantasy genre is Eurocentric in nature, so it’s always refreshing to read a book like this, where nagas and rakshas take center stage.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

Book #50 of 2016:

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

An exciting blockbuster of a novel that absolutely deserves the Steven Spielberg adaptation it’s now getting, Ready Player One tells the story of a group of video game nerds going up against an evil corporation to follow a series of obscure clues left in the will of a reclusive billionaire. Most of the novel takes place within a virtual computer environment, and it’s to writer Ernest Cline’s great credit that the action is so clear and easy-to-follow. The whole novel is a great treasure trove of 80s pop / nerd culture references (as you might expect, given that the author also wrote the screenplay for the movie Fanboys), and the plot is great fun even when somewhat predictable. I really liked reading this one, and can’t wait for the movie to come out.

★★★★☆

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