The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Blitz by Daniel O’Malley

Book #138 of 2024:

Blitz by Daniel O’Malley (The Checquy Files #3)

I have a lingering fondness for the Checquy, author Daniel O’Malley’s fictional and exceedingly dysfunctional British intelligence agency tasked with containing all threats of a magical nature, and I’m glad that this novel stands so apart from its predecessors, as it’s been over eight years since I read those and I was able to pick up this third volume without missing a beat. I think a new reader could start here and pretty rapidly get the gist. Nevertheless, it’s not the finest hour for the series, and it marks a rather slow-paced return to what should be a dangerously fraught supernatural world.

The vibes are great, as usual — stodgy bureaucracy meets inventive powers with a heaping dose of frequent body horror. I’ve always appreciated how, like the X-Men, every person’s special abilities in this universe are different, with a comically wide range of potential combat applications. Someone impenetrable to bullets or who can alter the direction of localized gravity fields, for instance, can be relied upon for discrete fieldwork, while someone who involuntarily causes all milk within a certain radius to curdle will likely just get assigned to a comfortable desk job instead.

Such details offer a fun background texture to the setting, and put me in mind of similar offhand worldbuilding comments offered on the podcast Welcome to Night Vale. Unfortunately, however, they don’t automatically support an engaging plot, and this is where the project stumbles for me.

The actual storyline here plays out over two distinct timelines and casts of characters, although they don’t really affect one another and only ever loosely connect. The one giving the work its title takes place during the Second World War, while the other is set in the present day (and represents a loose sequel to the first two books). Both involve a character who can generate electricity from their bare skin, but they are broadly unrelated — which feels like a strange writing choice, given that we know there are folks in the Checquy who don’t age at normal mortal rates and could plausibly have been around for all of these events.

The bigger issue is that the two parallel tracks are each fairly unfocused, with no clear urgency driving the action. A trio of junior agents in the past are attempting to find and eliminate a German airman whose plane they brought down over London against orders, and while there’s nominal tension in whether their superiors will learn of their insubordination, the stakes never seem especially personal, and there’s a seemingly endless stream of side matters that pop up to otherwise occupy their attention. Meanwhile, the remainder of the narrative follows a modern recruit to the agency as she moves from wide-eyed newbie to deadly trained professional, but her own story doesn’t kick into gear until midway through, when she realizes she’ll be falsely accused of a string of murders that matches the MO of her powers and has to go on the run. That section of the book where she’s a fugitive striving to clear her name and stay one step ahead of her coworkers-turned-hunters is legitimately fantastic, but since it’s only about a quarter of the overall text — and since the rest involves a frustrating degree of coincidence and an uncomfortable equivocation over Nazi politics — I don’t feel like I can rate the whole thing terribly highly.

[Content warning for torture, gun violence, racism, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Athyra by Steven Brust

Book #137 of 2024:

Athyra by Steven Brust (Vlad Taltos #6)

Given how the last volume in this series sort of blew up the overall premise, and how author Steven Brust has bounced around in the timeline before now, it would have been unsurprising for this sixth novel to be another flashback entry, taking place in the days when antihero Vlad Taltos was still an assassin and neighborhood crime boss for the Jhereg organization. Instead, it’s a welcome sequel to #5 Phoenix, which ended — spoiler alert — with the protagonist on the run from his former superiors, having acquired both some newly-developed scruples and a massive price on his head.

This one isn’t a direct follow-up, since several years (and one of Vlad’s fingers) have gone by in the meantime, a gap that Brust would later return to in #11 Jhegaala. But it’s great to see him resisting the safe choice here and telling a story about a mafiosa absent the mafia — a hired killer without anyone to kill — well beyond the familiar Adrilankha setting and its regular cast of supporting characters. While subsequent installments like #8 Dragon and #16 Tsalmoth would indeed go back to that earlier era, Athyra positions its central criminal as a wandering ronin figure, a drifter who passes through a small town in the wilderness and gets drawn into the local troubles there (which admittedly do turn out to be more personal in nature for the reformed hitman, due to the presence of a returning villain from #4 Taltos).

The presentation of the plot marks a refreshing change, too. For the first time we’re outside the assassin’s immediate first-person narration, seeing him from the third-person limited perspective of a village boy unfamiliar with his secrets and his past (or even his short-lived species, as the human/Easterner is the only one the eighty-year-old Dragaeran youth has ever met). Although I do miss getting to hear the sarcastic psychic commentary from Vlad’s jhereg familiar Loiosh, the shift in focus is an interesting stylistic difference, as is the new look at the wider worldbuilding details that come to us through the healer’s apprentice. Savn is even a reasonably compelling protagonist in his own right, though his new friend rightfully remains the primary attraction.

This is not a book that moves the broader storyline too much, but as a distinctive episodic adventure, it easily stands out against its predecessors.

[Content warning for torture and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

Book #136 of 2024:

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

The first third or so of this novel is frustratingly disjointed, with flashbacks nested inside flashbacks as though the storyteller isn’t confident of the best way to approach and present the material at hand. It’s a particularly strange decision given how after that point, the narrative straightens out and becomes basically all linear for the remainder of the text. The beginning is also difficult for the darkness on display: sexist slurs and a graphic rape against the protagonist, a revelation that her brother committed suicide as a teen due to homophobic abuse from their parents, and the grisly death of another main character with similar tragedy in his past. It’s frankly a lot for the reader to take in, and it cuts against the quirky tone that debut author Bonnie Garmus seems to be aiming for at other moments — a 50s cooking show presented by a no-nonsense lady scientist who insists on calling commonplace kitchen items like salt and water by their chemical compounds, a child prodigy who’s reading Nabokov before she enters kindergarten, multiple scenes narrated from the anthropomorphic perspective of the equally-genius family dog, and so on.

I pushed on because this book came so highly recommended, but I left that early section expecting I would likely award the title a two-star rating in the end. It’s a testament to the strength of what follows that I’ve ultimately landed in the next higher tier instead, but I still wouldn’t call myself a fan of the work as a whole.

The core of the story, once it settles down from that initial roughness, concerns the unusual TV host and how she navigates that career whilst quietly mourning both her lost love and the research path she was forced to abandon due to sexism. We also follow her precocious daughter and a handful of supporting characters who likewise run up against mid-century misogyny and other such narrow views, which they of course push back on to the extent that they can. There’s a triumph of sorts in the eventual ending, but still a lot of ugly bigotry (and annoying canine opinions and tragically farcical miscommunications) to get through along the way. Despite all the presumably-intentional parallels to The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, in my opinion that series did a much better job depicting the realistic challenges faced by professional women of the past without ever seeming like the plot was fashioned to be cruel to them for cruelty’s sake alone.

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Seinfeld, season 9

TV #39 of 2024:

Seinfeld, season 9

And so this 90s sitcom goes out like it came in, as a reliably funny but seldom spectacular viewing experience. (I’m not trying to damn the show with faint praise here, but you can see why it became such a mainstay of network television syndication, where audiences could tune in and tune out whenever, perfectly able to enjoy any random half-hour without worrying too much about overarching plot developments or personal growth. No hugging, no learning, as series co-creator Larry David reportedly always stressed to the writers. The finale at least packs in a slew of cameos and other callbacks to reward faithful viewers and send off the program with a reminder of some of its characters’ absolute worst behaviors, but it’s the rare example of Seinfeld caring much about continuity at this stage of the game.)

The heightened excess of recent seasons continues in this final year, especially where Kramer is concerned, leading us to subplots like him cooking a full dinner in his shower or somehow recreating the entire set of an old talk show in his living room and forcing his friends to come on as guests. My favorite episodes, perhaps unsurprisingly, tend to be those that are structurally more daring: 9×8 The Betrayal, for instance, which plays its scenes in reverse order for Memento-like twists, or 9×11 The Dealership, which spends most of its runtime finding humor in an extended mundane scenario like the earlier classics 3×6 The Parking Garage or 2×11 The Chinese Restaurant. On the other hand, I was disappointed to finally get introduced to the holiday of Festivus, which isn’t nearly as hilarious as I’d been led to believe after decades of references to it. (Heck, it’s not even the best part of its own particular episode — that prize would have to go to George telling people he’s made a donation in their name to a fake charity in lieu of getting them actual Christmas presents.)

Season 9 is noteworthy for giving George a new job where everyone else is as perennially checked-out as he is, and for bringing back Patrick Warburton as David Puddy, Elaine’s boyfriend from two appearances in season 6. He’s elevated here to an on-again / off-again relationship with her, and adds a nice understated sarcasm to the show’s usual rhythms. Overall, though? Yada, yada, yada.

This season: ★★★☆☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Seasons ranked: 4 > 5 > 7 > 9 > 3 > 8 > 6 > 2 > 1

Book Review: Blackcurrant Fool by Victoria Goddard

Book #135 of 2024:

Blackcurrant Fool by Victoria Goddard (Greenwing & Dart #4)

I keep thinking that the Greenwing & Dart sequence is finally going to make the leap from good to great for me — in line with the other entries I’ve read in author Victoria Goddard’s sprawling Nine Worlds fantasy setting — only to have those hopes ultimately dashed again as the present story unfolds. In this case, we at least manage to get through the first half of the book with an interesting (if admittedly slow-paced) plot that showcases the writer’s usual talent for juggling all the various intrigues that surround our young protagonist Jemis Greenwing. He’s still dealing with the fallout of several recent developments from previous volumes, but now finds himself enlisted to journey to a distant city to help escort his friend Mr. Dart’s newly-discovered relations there, in addition to pursuing a few of his own personal errands in the area. Indeed, one of the definite strengths of this novel is that we get to see so much more of Dart, who only now feels as though he’s earned that position as co-lead in the series title.

Things even seem to be looking up at the volume’s midpoint, when an antagonist who’s long been lurking in the backstory emerges to confront our hero once again. Unfortunately, what follows is a lengthy digression of Jemis and his friends breaking out of an enchanted prison based on esoteric clues in an obscure poem he happens to have memorized, which is like my least favorite part of book 3 (where he applied similar cryptographic principles to someone’s letter) magnified many times over. This eventually devolves into a strange mystical experience in some version of the afterlife, and never does come back around to advancing any of the new concerns that were introduced earlier.

There’s nevertheless a lot to enjoy here in the character interactions, and I adore the subtle link to The Hands of the Emperor in the form of the local innkeeper Mr. White, whom readers of that longer text will plainly recognize as Kip’s lost cousin Basil, the connection between their lands having been severed by the Fall of Astandalas. But overall, Mr. Greenwing’s portion of the saga continues idling in the three-star tier for me.

[Content warning for drug abuse.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Finlay Donovan Is Killing It by Elle Cosimano

Book #134 of 2024:

Finlay Donovan Is Killing It by Elle Cosimano (Finlay Donovan #1)

A fun suburban crime thriller that feels sort of like northern Virginia’s answer to the ‘zany Florida’ books of writers like Carl Hiaasen, Dave Barry, and Tim Dorsey. The premise here is just as wild: an author talking to her agent about problems in the story she’s writing is overheard by a stranger, who misunderstands and thinks she’s a hired killer renegotiating a contract. (So shades of Pest Control by Bill Fitzhugh, I suppose, which features a similar plot about an exterminator service, or the movie Throw Momma from the Train, which hinges on yet another confusion of fiction with reality.) The next thing you know, our cash-strapped protagonist — divorced with two kids and no income stream besides finally finishing her novel — has been approached and asked to kill the woman’s husband, for a fee so astronomical that she decides it’d be interesting to scope him out and see what she can learn. Whereupon of course things go south, and the screwball satire spins out from there.

Finlay is an engaging heroine, and I loved spotting all the familiar DC-suburb place names and local institutions, but I do think the front half of this book is stronger than the back, which grows extremely coincidence-heavy by the end and never quite gets me to care about either of the two hunky love interests. It also suffers from the same issue as shows like Dexter or Dead to Me, where everyone is quick to trust the wrong person and include them in their confidential conversations without ever realizing that that’s the exact suspect they’re trying to find. I’m surprised to discover this is a whole series now, with the fifth volume expected next year, as this one already struggles to keep its central character in the mix while still maintaining a conscience and not actually doing any intentional killing. But I’ve liked it enough to check out the first sequel, at least.

[Content warning for gun violence, rape, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Unmaking of June Farrow by Adrienne Young

Book #133 of 2024:

The Unmaking of June Farrow by Adrienne Young

This novel is largely fine, but I want so much more from it. The premise is convoluted in a River Song / The Time Traveler’s Wife sort of way, and it takes so long to get fully established that it seems like the story is over before anything is really resolved.

In summary: our protagonist learns that the women in her family have the ability to travel through time, although they can only ever do it three times each. Her own mother traveled back to the early 20th century, but then fled an abusive marriage there to bring her daughter (aka the heroine as a baby) home to the present. Now in her mid-thirties, June finds herself drawn to 1951 — except she’s already been there before without her knowledge, because she initially visited slightly earlier in that era in a personal timeline that subsequently got erased due to someone’s actions in the meanwhile. So she’s greeted with people who know her and have complicated feelings about that, including a husband, a young child, and a police detective who suspects that she murdered his father (who’s also HER father) when she was there the last time. And the longer she stays in the past, the more her memories from her previous self are overwriting her own.

It’s a decent scenario, but by the time it’s all spelled out for us, there’s not enough book remaining to dig into all the implications or process the subsequent fallout. I’m not a big fan of the whole Outlander ‘woman from today falls for a gruff man from the past’ style development either, especially in this case where it feels as though she’s just remembering their prior connection, which a) reads like boring instalove and b) has some unsettling consent issues that aren’t addressed at all. (There’s also the setup for a love triangle with a close friend she left in 2023 that winds up completely dropped, as do her concerns about a hereditary mental illness.) I do appreciate the twistiness of the plot and a few eventual reveals on that front, but I think a title attempting to do so much would have needed substantially more pages to wholly succeed for me.

[Content warning for gun violence and suicide.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Babylon 5, season 1

TV #38 of 2024:

Babylon 5, season 1

Although an improvement over the pilot movie The Gathering, this first full season of Babylon 5 still isn’t at a consistent quality level for me to raise it higher than my personal 3-star rating tier. I thought I might, during a few episodes! The comparison to its 90s contemporary Star Trek: Deep Space Nine — my favorite of that rival franchise — remains apt, with a slowly-unfolding serialized story taking place on a frontier space station where tensions and intrigues between clashing alien species add a rich background depth to the episodic business of the day. (There are shades of something like Deadwood in the town square setting too, for a non-sci-fi point of reference.)

But the larger plot and character arcs don’t build to much, at least not yet, and a lot of those filler hours are deeply silly, like the one where an old man is searching the archives for any sign of the literal holy grail. It’s times like that when the Trek series that this one most resembles is instead the worst indulgences of hokey early TNG. The acting and writing can also each seem rather stilted, especially at such moments.

We’re on firmer ground with the stories that stem from dynamics among the main cast: the respective ambassadors of the Centauri and the Narn, for instance, whose peoples are only just emerging from a fraught colonial relationship and whose personal interactions are colored by that as much as by their own distinctive personalities. I also like the backstory that gets revealed for the human officer Susan Ivanova, whose family is Russian Jewish — already more ethnoreligious representation than is present in all of Star Trek, I’m afraid.

I keep coming back to that other series as a contrast for this one, perhaps because it was the dominant TV space opera of the late 20th century, and so formed a context in which Babylon 5 would inevitably be received. This show is scrappy, and much less interested in a utopian society or wondrous new technology of the future. It’s a grittier look at the genre that presages later works like Battlestar Galactica, which is definitely an argument in its favor and a reason for me to continue watching. But it doesn’t quite pull enough of its threads together to satisfy in this initial run.

[Content warning for gun violence, torture, and genocide.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The January 6th Report by The Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol

Book #132 of 2024:

The January 6th Report by The Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol

An incredibly damning account of the January 2021 riot and then-President Donald Trump’s role in fomenting it, as meticulously assembled by the members of a bipartisan congressional committee and their staff who investigated the matter. I was expecting this book to cover only the events of that bloody day itself, but it’s actually a far more extensive deep dive into Trump’s antidemocratic efforts from November 2020 onwards to subvert the results of the presidential election where he was defeated by Democrat Joe Biden, and how those actions ultimately culminated in violence.

As the evidence laid out in this report makes clear, the president repeatedly spread outlandish conspiracy theories about fake ballots, rigged voting machines, and corrupt local officials, some of whom he doxxed and called out by name, leading to confrontations at their homes and racial slurs, accusations of pedophilia, and rape and death threats launched against them and their families. His top advisors and White House legal experts informed him at every stage that there was no proof to his claims, which they dutifully investigated every time the fringe rightwing circles of the internet convinced him of something new. Nevertheless, he continued to repeat them as fact with increasingly violent rhetoric and got his lawyers to file dozens of spurious lawsuits across the country, which were — barring one small win on a meaningless procedural matter — universally thrown out for lack of evidence.

Despite knowing that the charges of voter misconduct were baseless, Trump pressed on with an illegal attempt to arrange alternate slates of electors in key battleground states (and pressure people like Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to falsely amend their vote count figures, in order to provide theoretical grounds for the move). This was part of an effort to convince Vice President Mike Pence, in his role as president of the Senate overseeing the certification of the election results, to either set aside the authorized electors in favor of the false ones or else to use the apparent existence of both sets to justify handing over the decision of which slates to recognize to the Republican-controlled state legislatures. When Pence refused to do this by correctly noting that his role in proceedings was strictly ceremonial — and that no one could possibly think that the Vice President had the legal power to overrule millions of voters and effectively single-handedly determine elections — Trump incorporated the VP into his angry Twitter rants and TV appearances, publicly identifying him as the person with the supposed power to act and increasingly pressuring him to do so at the upcoming hearing on January 6th.

In the lead-up to that day, he repeated all those lies and encouraged his followers to visit Washington, D.C. on the 6th, using the language of violent revolution and promising that he’d be on their side both physically and legally. At a rally that morning, he spoke for an hour on similar themes, after which a large mob did indeed storm the Capitol building, where they killed several police officers, injured over a hundred more, and actively hunted for Pence and other perceived traitors.

Not all of this can be laid at Trump’s feet. The book also discusses the organized militia movement of the Proud Boys and similar far-right agitator groups who were galvanized by his statements and made their own plans to ensure the gathering on January 6th turned violent. However, some of their online chatter was intercepted in advance and passed to the president, who did nothing to act on it. In fact, witnesses told the committee that he was enraged at the security procedures that were in place for his speech, because screening for weapons was limiting his crowd size. Later that day, he retired to the White House dining room to watch the ensuing riot on TV, where he sat for three hours refusing to speak out to calm the protestors or call in military or other government resources to repel them, even as his closest allies and relatives implored him to intervene.

A lot of these events will be familiar to those of us who lived through them, but this volume is helpful for walking readers through the sprawling ‘stop the steal’ movement that Trump championed over the months following the election. It’s occasionally repetitive to read through as a single text, as its various chapters all have their own focuses and were not specifically written as segments of a larger whole, but it adds up to an utterly disqualifying dereliction of duty on the former president’s part.

For me, the main takeaway is how knowingly Trump acted throughout — how he was told over and over again that he lost the race, that there was no evidence of fraud, and that the strategy to get Pence to declare him the winner was entirely illegal. He wasn’t some low-information voter deluded by conspiracies like many of those supporters he convinced to storm the Capitol; he was a shameless knowing spreader of the lies himself, with no care for the rule of law or the human impact of his words. Heaven help us if we ever elect him to office again.

★★★★☆

Book Review: Doctor Who: The Church on Ruby Road by Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson

Book #131 of 2024:

Doctor Who: The Church on Ruby Road by Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson

Novelizations are an interesting business. There’s a long history of them in the Doctor Who franchise, and back in the days before home video recording and on-demand streaming, they originally served the purpose of making TV stories more accessible to anyone who missed the initial broadcast and/or wanted to revisit a certain episode any way that they could. In an era where the show is always available at a click, that’s obviously less of a concern, and so such book treatments today are generally pitched as bonus content: a chance to explore a familiar plot at greater depth of detail, especially when it comes to internal characterization of thoughts and feelings that wouldn’t have already appeared on-screen.

By that rubric, this title is a success. It helps that the adventure it’s adapting is a fun one — the 2023 Christmas special that was Ncuti Gatwa and Millie Gibson’s first full-time outing as the Fifteenth Doctor and Ruby Sunday, respectively — because adaptations also rest pretty heavily on the quality of the material they happen to be drawing from. But even beyond all that, we get more insight into these new friends at the start of their time together, with narration that emphasizes a neat story structure audiences might not have noticed while watching — the beginning of this holiday romp is shown through Ruby’s (and briefly a random police officer’s) perspective, with the Doctor as an elusive dashing figure who swoops into her life to save the day against the uncanny menace of baby-stealing goblins, and it’s only when she too vanishes in the final act that the action switches over to center on the Time Lord as a protagonist with his own interiority. (Contrast this with, for example, the introductory Ninth Doctor episode in 2005, where we have exactly zero scenes that situate us in his POV over Rose Tyler’s. Or the Eleventh Doctor’s debut in 2010, which splits the focal role between him and Amy Pond in roughly equal shares.)

Getting to see first Ruby and then Fifteen thinking and reacting to events strengthens them as characters, with author Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson plausibly fleshing out the concepts inherited from Russell T. Davies’s original script. Of particular note would be the Doctor’s reflection on his recently-discovered adoption and his companion’s reaction to seeing him dance from across the club, which are each rendered rather beautifully here. The only thing we’re really missing besides the acting is that delightful show-stopping goblin song, which unfortunately doesn’t quite carry the same impact on paper. But overall, the project has me feeling satisfied and hopeful about this latest run of Whovian novelizations.

★★★★☆