The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: The Colorado Kid by Stephen King

Book #30 of 2015:

The Colorado Kid by Stephen King

This short book reminds me somewhat of the author’s earlier From a Buick 8 with its lack of resolution at the end, but I think that aspect is handled a lot better here. Although we don’t really get any answers about the cold case of the title, we do see very clearly how important it is to King’s characters. The result is a mystery novel with no real tension of any sorts, because the action is just three adorable people puzzling over something that happened a long time ago that they realize they can never know in full. It’s ultimately not about the dead man at all; it’s more a meditation on how stories get passed down and come to mean so much to those who remember them.

(Apparently the show Haven is based loosely on this book — and it would have to be pretty loose, I would think — so maybe I’ll check that out sometime.)

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Nature Girl by Carl Hiaasen

Book #29 of 2015:

Nature Girl by Carl Hiaasen

I know Carl Hiaasen is supposed to be this great comedy writer, and his stuff is mostly set in my home state of Florida, so I should be predisposed to like — or at least relate to — the jokes. But I really didn’t enjoy any of the intended humor in this book, and a lot of it made me pretty uncomfortable. There’s casual racism and stereotyping against Seminole Indians for starters, plus this ridiculous and classist judgment of people for being telemarketers, as though the capitalist need for employment is not a thing. (I was a door-to-door salesman for 6 months when I couldn’t find any other work. I am predisposed to hate anyone who lashes out at employees for doing an unpopular job.)

Worst of all, though, is the weird super-sexualization of all the female characters that pervades this novel, coupled with a constant threat of sexual violence. The narrative invites us to laugh at a madcap comedy, while the villain is literally tying up a woman and describing what he’s going to do to her body. I kept telling myself it would get better, but it just never did.

All in all, this story gets my strong dis-recommendation. And this first Carl Hiaasen that I’ve tried is definitely going to be my last as well.

★☆☆☆☆

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Book Review: Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson

Book Review:

Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson (The Stormlight Archive #2)

This Stormlight Archive sequel is much better and more eventful than the first one, which could seem like just a massive prologue in a lot of ways. (The Way of Kings does have great writing, worldbuilding, and character work, but so very little actually happens to advance the series plot that whole book.) My only real issue is that there are so many new things introduced that are clearly just set-up for future volumes and can’t really get dealt with right now… and it’s a little hard to keep all of the various scheming factions (Ghostbloods, Diagram, Darkness, etc.) straight from one another, since we don’t really get to see that much of them quite yet.

But minor quibbles aside, this story is really great. I like the stuff with Shallan’s powers a lot – I think Pattern might be my favorite character in the series so far, though it’s hard not to love Kaladin on those occasions when he can pull his head out of his rear end. (Lift, the thirteen-year-old girl who can metabolize Stormlight from what she eats, is also pretty fantastic even if limited to a single chapter here. I hope we see more of her!) And this is a bit spoilery, but I’m glad Jasnah’s not dead, although I’m disappointed that Szeth isn’t – and that the next book is reportedly going to center on him.

And of course, it’s frustrating that that next installment isn’t due to come out for another two years, which means not only do I have to wait that long, but also that I’ll probably have to reread the first two novels (which are over a thousand pages each) by the time it finally gets here. At least Sanderson is keeping up his typical productivity, so that I’ll have new Mistborn, Legion, and Steelheart sequels to keep me entertained in the meantime.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: The Bro Code by Barney Stinson with Matt Kuhn

Book #48 of 2011:

The Bro Code by Barney Stinson with Matt Kuhn

Eh, not recommended. This was a last-minute Christmas gift from my dad after he found out I’d started watching How I Met Your Mother. And it’s funny for what it is, which is a list of amusing life tips (mostly of the picking-up-chicks variety) supposedly from the character Barney Stinson on that show. It was funny to read, especially if you already know the character and can imagine him saying them out loud to someone in earnest. But there were enough in there that weren’t terribly funny that the book as a whole kind of dragged – or maybe that was a result of reading it cover-to-cover over a fairly short period of time. Approach it like a bathroom reader, and maybe it would be better. Still, I’m pretty sure I’m not going to ever feel picking this one up again.

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: Shade’s Children by Garth Nix

Book #36 of 2020:

Shade’s Children by Garth Nix

Shade’s Children is really not that similar to The Hunger Games, but they both feature young people being forced to fight for their lives in a dystopian future, and I think anyone who enjoyed the one story would probably like the other as well. (A studio would also be quite wise to option it for film, given the high interest in that sort of thing right now. I think the mutants in Shade’s Children would translate well to the screen, too.)

The premise of Shade’s Children is that one day all of the adults on the planet disappeared, and strange creatures came in and started capturing children to harvest their body parts. It’s a pretty gruesome concept, but the plot centers around a band of kids who are fighting back against the overseers with the help of an artificial intelligence program named Shade that survived when all of the adults were taken away. (Because despite having his own personality and goals, he isn’t really a living human.) It’s a good story with a pretty quick pace, tight adventures, and the perfect amount of plotting and double-crossing. The chapters from Shade’s point of view, with him trying to decide if he’s doing the right thing, are some of the best in the book.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine

Book #33 of 2011:

Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine

I reread this childhood favorite for the first time in years, and was amazed at how good it still was. Its protagonist is clever and headstrong, its villains are fun to despise, and its love story is understated and touching. The main character even has a love of languages (and gets appointed Court Linguist in the epilogue)! I definitely didn’t remember that about this book, but it was a lovely addition to an already fantastic story. Highly recommended – just stay well away from the 2004 film adaptation, which is astonishingly bad.

★★★★★

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Book Review: House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

Book #13 of 2011:

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

I feel like this is an easy novel to appreciate but a tough one to cherish. Yes, it’s different than anything else I’ve ever read. Yes, it was startlingly original. Yes, parts of it were very well-written, and yes, several of my friends love it. I can almost even see the appeal… but I found actually reading this book to be a very frustrating experience. Its innovations largely struck me as pretentious, and most of them interfered with my ability to read the book without really adding anything substantial to my understanding of events or characters. I’m talking things like text written backwards, footnotes that wrap around page edges, and sections that were nothing but lists of names. Presumably all of this was done to illustrate the mental instability of the narrator(s) and/or the chaotic nature of the titular house, and I commend Danielewski for trying it… But for me, at least, it did not succeed in its goals. I just thought it made for an irritating reading experience.

Plot summary in a nutshell, in case you do think all this sounds interesting: a man finds a manuscript of a book about a documentary about a house that appears to hold a dark labyrinth of infinite size within its walls. The house shifts, the people in the documentary believe/act as though the house is real, the manuscript takes a scholarly approach to the matter in extensive detail, and the guy reading the manuscript can find no evidence that the documentary or the house ever really existed. Except he’s quite clearly crazy, and after you finish the ordeal of reading this book, you’ll probably feel that way too.

I applaud the bold experimentation, but there are really too many artistic flourishes here that simply don’t amount to anything more than a gimmick.

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster

Book #12 of 2011:

The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster

An old favorite. It’s just so delightfully heartfelt and punny, and it definitely helped shape my love of language at an early age. Milo, a bored and boring young child, gets whisked away to a magical land where he must rescue the princesses Rhyme and Reason from the Demons of Ignorance. Along the way he meets many colorful characters, learns some things, and comes to view life as a grand adventure. Juster wields his language beautifully, and there are any number of delightful turns of phrase and inventive re-interpretations of common expressions as actual characters and concepts, from the Whether Man and the Spelling Bee to eating your words and jumping to Conclusions. I identify far too strongly with the Ever-Present Word Snatcher, and I suspect Norton Juster may have as well.

★★★★★

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Book Review: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

Book #2 of 2011:

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (The Hunger Games #1)

Very similar to the novel Battle Royale, which I love, except there’s much more of a focus on the kind of dystopian society that would make children fight to the death in the first place – which is definitely a rich topic to explore! Katniss is a great protagonist, and she’s fun to root for both in and out of the arena. I usually get frustrated by love triangles in young adult fiction, but the one in this book is actually a fresh take on that trope, and is handled very well. (I don’t entirely care for the direction it goes in the sequels, but that’s a different matter.)

★★★★☆

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