The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

TV Review: Star Trek: The Animated Series, season 1

TV #39 of 2016:

Star Trek: The Animated Series, season 1

I was expecting this show to be a pretty shameless cash-grab (kind of like 1975′s awful Return to the Planet of the Apes cartoon), but it ended up being a pleasant surprise. Yes, the animators sometimes take shortcuts like having a character’s face take up the entire screen to limit what they had to draw, but the animated format also opens up storytelling avenues that the live-action Star Trek could never have managed – like the Enterprise crew shrinking down to the size of insects or losing the ship’s artificial gravity and floating around the bridge. There are also a lot more aliens looking a lot less human, which does further fleshes out the Star Trek universe. And of course, the episodes being only half an hour in length necessarily tightens up the storytelling, which was always one of the weaker elements in the live-action show. With the main TOS cast returning to do the voice-acting, TAS is definitely a great addition to the canon.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Crenshaw by Katherine Applegate

Book #64 of 2016:

Crenshaw by Katherine Applegate

This novel about a giant talking cat that only the protagonist can see really ended up being more about the boy’s family falling on hard times, and how his imaginary friend was something of a coping mechanism for that. It was honestly a very stressful read for someone who worries about money issues as much as I do, and I’m not sure I would have kept reading if it had been any longer of a book. Applegate paints a very scary picture of how easily a family can become homeless, and of how helpless a kid can feel over things completely outside their control. Well-written, but tough to read.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Terrier by Tamora Pierce

Book #63 of 2016:

Terrier by Tamora Pierce (Beka Cooper #1)

This was only my second ever Tamora Pierce book — counting the four-part The Song of the Lioness as a single volume, as my edition was — but I liked it even better than the first. This prequel world feels very lived-in, with fun details that tie into TSotL (and presumably the rest of the Tortall series) and yet still establish Beka Cooper’s period as distinct. The running metaphor of city guards as dogs / puppies / terriers is both cute and poignant, and it also helps this book feel more distinct from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld City Watch novels, which it otherwise could resemble a lot. Alanna didn’t hook me on Tortall, but Beka Cooper may have done just that.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson

Book #62 of 2016:

The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson (Millennium #2)

Not nearly as good as Larsson’s first book, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, in large part due to the sudden genre shift. Tattoo was primarily a detective novel, with a central mystery, two investigator protagonists, and clues that a clever reader might be able to use to solve the matter first. Fire, in contrast, is just a straight-up thriller. There is suspense here, but no mysteries, and the narrative is worse for it.

I did rather enjoy the opening chapters, where Lisbeth Salander is vacationing in Grenada, but that’s probably because I just got back from my honeymoon there, and it was fun to see the island again from Salander’s perspective. (I’m glad there was neither a hurricane nor a murder while my wife and I were visiting!) As a whole, Fire was so overwrought as to be kind of silly, with a nationwide police manhunt, a secret government conspiracy, and a villain with “bones of concrete” who literally can’t feel pain. It was a big letdown after the first novel, so I don’t think I’ll be rushing to pick up the third one.

★★☆☆☆

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TV Review: Deadwood, season 3

TV #38 of 2016:

Deadwood, season 3

It’s surprising this final season works as well as it does, given that (as I understand it) it wasn’t originally intended to close out the series. The original plan was for Deadwood to run for at least four seasons, most likely culminating in the fire that burned down the entire town in real life. And there are a lot of elements in this season in particular that don’t feel like they really came to their full fruition, so it’s a little jarring to realize that some very good setups don’t really have any payoff after all.

Still, this season mostly works as a series finale regardless. It’s anticlimactic, sure, but there’s some really great character moments, and by the time the last credits are rolling you really feel like the show has come into its own. Deadwood was always a show about people coming together to form a community, especially as that pertains to the lies we need to pretend are true in order to make things go smoothly. This last season made the camp almost feel like a single organism in that way, with its various parts uniting against the outside threat that George Hearst represented. Maybe it’s for the best that we don’t actually get to see that organism die.

This season: ★★★★☆

Overall series: ★★★★☆

Season ranking: 3 > 2 > 1

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TV Review: Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, season 2

TV #37 of 2016:

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, season 2

Wow, Kimmy Schmidt really came into its own this season. The first season was very funny in a 30 Rock sort of way, but it didn’t really do much on the emotional level for me. Season 2 maintained that humor, but it also became very interested in exploring its characters, especially with regards to the abuse in Kimmy’s past. Season 1 of this show made her time in the bunker mostly just a premise and a punchline; season 2 actually interrogates the different facets of surviving that sort of trauma (while, again, keeping up the funny). For the first time, it really feels like the show is earning that first word in its title.

★★★★☆

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Movie Review: Star Trek Beyond (2016)

Movie #14 of 2016:

Star Trek Beyond (2016)

This new Star Trek film feels exactly like a feature-length episode, which unsurprisingly works great as a showcase for the series. I think I still like the first movie in this new continuity the best, but Beyond is lightyears ahead of Into Darkness, and that’s really all I wanted from it. (This was also the first new Trek movie I’d seen since going back and watching all of TOS, which I hadn’t seen any of when I last saw Star Trek and Star Trek: Into Darkness. I ended up liking it a lot both as a sequel to a movie I like and as a reboot to various elements in the original series.)

★★★★☆

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Book Review: People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks

Book #61 of 2016:

People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks

The Sarajevo Haggadah is a real book, a 500-year-old illustrated manuscript depicting scenes from the Jewish Passover saga. People of the Book is a beautiful work of historical fiction, tracing a possible history of the Haggadah back through the centuries with a series of vignettes showcasing life at various moments surrounding the book. Author Geraldine Brooks has clearly done her research, and she excels at bringing the different time periods to life as the Haggadah passes through the Holocaust, the Spanish Inquisition, and more. Taken as a whole, the novel is a powerful testament to perseverance and people’s ability to leave marks on the world that long outlast them.

★★★★★

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Book Review: Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie

Book #60 of 2016:

Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie (Imperial Radch #2)

Ancillary Sword is just as good as its predecessor, but with the added bonus that the reader now understands Leckie’s odd system of ancillaries, ships, and tea ceremonies right from the start. (I ended up loving Ancillary Justice, but that story took far too long to clarify how the rules of its universe worked.) It’s a little strange as a sequel, since most of the drama that came to a head at the end of Ancillary Justice just continues to boil off-screen here while the main character gets shunted off on a glorified side quest. But the new storyline of a seasoned officer investigating backwater corruption is well-told, and Leckie continues her fascinating contemplation of what constitutes identity when multiple bodies can be plugged into (and unplugged from) a single consciousness. I’m not really sure what to expect from the next book in this series after this one went off in such an unexpected direction, but I do know I’m looking forward to it.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

Book #59 of 2016:

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson (Millennium #1)

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was a satisfyingly well-told detective story; I was quite surprised to learn after reading it that it was a first novel, found among the author’s papers and published after his death. I enjoyed that the story revolved around a cold case, since that’s a spin that I don’t think I’ve seen too often in detective fiction. But Larsson is also quite skilled at periodically dropping in those little reminders that although the murder his characters are investigating happened decades ago, the killer is almost certainly still out there in the small Swedish village where they live.

I didn’t like how much time was spent at the end of the novel focusing on the corruption storyline after the murder case is resolved, and I could have done without Salander’s rather silly super-hacking skills, but on the whole this novel was rather good. Trigger warning for graphic depictions of sex crimes, as you might expect from a book whose original title translates to The Men Who Hate Women.

★★★★☆

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