The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances by Neil Gaiman

Book #19 of 2016:

Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances by Neil Gaiman

This Neil Gaiman short story collection is about what you would expect if you’ve read a Neil Gaiman short story collection before. I really liked the Sherlock Holmes story The Case of Death and Honey, and of course it’s always fun to check in on Shadow Moon again, but the other stories were hit or miss for me. The Sleeper and the Spindle is a particular gem, albeit one I had read before as a standalone publication, but there’s a lot of other stories included in this book that just feel like the author is spinning his wheels.

I’m also disgruntled at the title of the collection and its explanation in the book’s introduction – it feels both appropriative and mocking, as though Gaiman is claiming a phrase he clearly doesn’t see a need for but just finds fascinating when others use it. I don’t know — your mileage may vary, but I’ve definitely found myself growing out of Neil Gaiman the older I get, and his explanation of why he named this book Trigger Warning really rubbed me the wrong way.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Another Day by David Levithan

Book #18 of 2016:

Another Day by David Levithan (Every Day #2)

Another Day is a “companion novel” to Levithan’s earlier book Every Day – it covers the exact same span of time and tell the exact same story, but from a different character’s point of view. I know some people don’t like that sort of thing (and this particular retelling), but I really enjoyed it. I think it fleshes out both viewpoint characters to see things both from their perspective and from another. In particular, I think Another Day makes Rhiannon seem like less of a manic pixie dream girl, and I think the character A would seem like more of a Nice Guy TM in this book if the reader hadn’t already read Every Day. So I really like the two books as halves of a common whole.

Narratively, though, this one doesn’t stand on its own nearly as well as the other one does. So while I get that David Levithan didn’t want to get people’s hopes up by calling this book a sequel, I hope that nobody makes the mistake of reading this one before the other.

★★★☆☆

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TV Review: Star Trek, season 1

TV #12 of 2016:

Star Trek, season 1

How do you even begin to describe something like Star Trek? I’m now watching it through from the beginning, and I’m coming into it fairly fresh – or at least, as fresh as one can be in this culture. I’ve seen the two J. J. Abrams films (loved the first; hated the second), but otherwise only a scattered handful of Star Trek episodes from various series, none of which I remember particularly well. I knew who the main TOS characters were, and I had heard of various odds and ends like Klingons and the Prime Directive, but basically I’m encountering all of this for the first time.

So what do I think of this first season? Honestly, I think it holds up pretty well. These episodes came out almost 50 years ago, and there are of course some things that seem outrageous or poorly-executed in today’s media landscape. Well-meaning 60s sexism is rampant, the special effects are often a joke, and at 50 minutes each, the episodes could stand to be tightened up. But there are some great science-fiction scenarios that get explored, and it’s very easy to see how this series ignited the popular imagination and grew to be such a success. (And honestly, Star Trek is leaps and bounds beyond early Doctor Who, which premiered only three years earlier across the pond. The fact that Doctor Who is still so popular today is far more surprising than the fact that Trek is, when you consider their first seasons.)

This first season of Star Trek has its share of clunkers, and the writers go to the ‘superpowered god beings’ well a bit too frequently, but it also gives us episodes like Balance of Terror and The City on the Edge of Forever. For that alone, I am excited to press on and see what happens next.

★★★☆☆

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TV Review: The Shannara Chronicles, season 1

TV #11 of 2016:

The Shannara Chronicles, season 1

The Elfstones of Shannara is a thoroughly mediocre novel, the kind of thing that you devour in middle school but in no way holds up to a reread later in life. (I did reread it in anticipation of this MTV adaptation, and it’s fairly unremarkable. Like the first Dragonlance trilogy, there are flashes of brilliance, but most of it is just generic fantasy filler.) So I don’t really mind that this adaptation changed so much of it – as far as faithfulness goes, this is just about as egregious as the movie versions of Ella Enchanted or The Running Man, but those ones hurt more because of how amazing the books were. Before watching this show, I would have said that changing Elfstones could only lead to something better.

Unfortunately, MTV somehow managed to take a sub-par reading experience and transform it into a spectacularly awful TV series. The gender politics are a little bit improved from the source material, but the character motivations are murky, the plot is clunky and undeveloped, and the magic is so under-explained that the stakes are never wholly clear. The series ends on a “To Be Continued,” but it really shouldn’t. This program was painful enough to spend ten episodes on. Letting it end there would be a mercy.

★☆☆☆☆

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TV Review: Marvel’s Agent Carter, season 2

TV #10 of 2016:

Marvel’s Agent Carter, season 2

A solid follow-up, but a definite step down from this show’s first season. Way too much focus on the hetero romance stuff, too. (And a terrible ending, on that front.) Still, I really love how this show helps build out the world of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, especially as a way of bringing in non-contemporary elements from the comics. I’m not sure if Agent Carter is going to get a third season, but I would love to see more MCU projects in different time periods.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Dawn by Octavia E. Butler

Book #17 of 2016:

Dawn by Octavia E. Butler (Xenogenesis #1)

Dawn is the first novel in a trilogy by Octavia Butler, known alternately as Lilith’s Brood and Xenogenesis. This first book was good, albeit a little bleak. (But, I mean, it’s from the author of the Parable books, Kindred, and Fledgling. Bleakness was not exactly a surprise.)

I really like how when you read more and more of an author, you start to get more of a sense of her worldview and her priorities. Butler is so interested in groups of mixed backgrounds coming together to build something new, and that probably gets taken to its extreme here with humans being brought into an extraterrestrial sociosexual arrangement. The parts about Lilith considering which survivors of the destruction of earth to Awaken next also reminded me very strongly of how the Earthseed movement grew in Parable of the Talents.

At the same time, this novel is so far out there I’m not really sure how I feel about it or whether I’d recommend it. Like, I think I like it? I definitely love the author and her (strong, black, female) characters. But I’m having a harder time than usual grokking what she’s trying to say with this one. Idk. I’ll definitely be reading the sequels, and maybe that will help me sort out how I feel about Dawn.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Dark Half by Stephen King

Book #16 of 2016:

The Dark Half by Stephen King

Like much of Stephen King’s mid-career output, this horror thriller was just okay. I could see the novel having special significance for the writer himself, since it’s about an author forced to go public about his pseudonym (which then comes to life and starts murdering people, naturally), but it didn’t really have any particularly iconic characters or scenes that feel like they’re going to linger like King at his best. It wasn’t as bad as, say, The Tommyknockers or Dreamcatcher, but I’d still recommend giving it a pass unless you’re a fellow completionist.

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: Fledgling by Octavia E. Butler

Book #15 of 2016:

Fledgling by Octavia E. Butler

I really really liked this one. I mean, its main character is a black female vampire in an interracial polyamorous coven, whose dark skin is actually an advantage because it lets her burn more slowly in the sunlight than other vamps. What’s not to love? And it’s got great vampire politics – like, the stuff Stephanie Meyer was going for with the later Twilight books, only done much better. This is probably my second-favorite vampire book, to be honest… Maybe even my first-favorite; I’d have to reread Of Saints and Shadows (my current top pick) to decide between them. Both are excellent for how they interrogate and interpret the vampire mythos; I might have to give the win to Fledgling for the brilliant ways it tackles race as well. (In other words, the author who’s a black woman writes more insightful social commentary than the one who’s a white man. Surprise surprise?)

I do have to mention some trigger warnings alongside my endorsement of this book, though. For one: the main character is 53 years old, but she’s regularly described as looking like a ten-year-old human girl. That made it very uncomfortable for me to read the love and sex scenes between her and the adult human characters. There’s also some rather dubious consent issues, in that a vampire’s bite makes a human want them both sexually and emotionally, and it’s pretty clear that at least initially, some of those humans would not have wanted that contact. This is a thread that weirdly gets raised and then dropped in the narrative, but again, it can make for some uncomfortable reading.

And finally, there’s just the racial aspects of the story. The main character is the world’s only black vampire, and the main storyline is about her being attacked by others of her kind who think she’s an abomination that should never be allowed to breed. So all throughout the book, there’s racism and promotion of eugenics and even the occasional slur. It’s a powerful story, and the racists are clearly the villains and clearly in the wrong, but still. Tread carefully if any of this is not something you want in your escapism.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters by Mark Dunn

Book #14 of 2016:

Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters by Mark Dunn

I really love the idea behind this book, and the author’s talent is definitely on display in carrying it out, but I’m not really sure whether I like the finished product or not. It’s about a small island society with a statue to their most famous resident, the guy who supposedly came up with the sentence “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” (which uses every letter of the English alphabet, with very few repeats). That sentence is written in tiles attached to the statue, and when they start dropping off one by one, the island government decides to ban the use of all the missing letters. This is an epistolary novel – hence the second pun in the book’s title – and as the book progresses, the characters have to avoid more and more words due to their banned components, leading to some adroit linguistic acrobatics on their / the author’s part.

And that’s fun, as far as it goes. But the actual story is pretty dark – people don’t like the government’s actions, and there are public lashings and other really chilling events that feel very ill at ease amid the book’s playful language. And then about three-quarters of the way through, the author / the government changes the rules, so that people are allowed to use nonstandard spellings with the remaining letters, and to me, that kind of ruined it. (At first, if a Y fell off the statue, the characters couldn’t write a word like YOU anymore, so maybe they would switch to something like THOU. But after the law changes, they just start writing EWE. Or they’ll write OPH instead of OF, APOWT instead of ABOUT, etc.)

Anyway… the first 75% of the book is a neat exercise on the author’s part, but the rest just doesn’t hang together in my opinion.

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: Modern Romance: An Investigation by Aziz Ansari and Eric Klinenberg

Book #13 of 2016:

Modern Romance: An Investigation by Aziz Ansari and Eric Klinenberg

On the whole, I really liked this one, although it’s definitely not what you would expect from a stand-up comic / comedic actor like Aziz Ansari’s first book. He makes jokes throughout, but this is mostly a data-driven examination of love and dating in the age of smartphones. I disagree with the authors’ conclusions on a few points – mostly to do with digital interactions being inherently inferior to face-to-face ones, but also I can’t respect any take on the increase in divorce rates that doesn’t at least mention how abuse victims couldn’t easily leave their abusers back in the day – but mostly they’ve done the work on digging up interesting facts and figures about how dating has changed over the years.

This was an eye-opening ethnography for me at times, especially since I haven’t directly experienced anything like Tinder or sexting a crush. (My fiancée and I just celebrated our seventh anniversary together. It doesn’t feel like that long, but neither of us even had a smartphone back when we started dating.) Probably worth a read no matter what your own romantic history is; I’m pretty sure we’d all learn something from it.

★★★★☆

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