The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

TV Review: The Acolyte, season 1

TV #32 of 2024:

The Acolyte, season 1

Despite a few unfortunate structural flaws, this is easily in the top tier of live-action Star Wars shows — which is to say, a step below Andor but about on par with the first two seasons of The Mandalorian, while far more confident and engaging than The Book of Boba Fett, Mando season 3, Obi-Wan Kenobi, or Ahsoka. Set roughly a hundred years before The Phantom Menace in the time of the so-called High Republic (an era that’s been explored in licensed canonical novels but never before on-screen), it tells the story of a group of Jedi who get targeted by a Dark Side assassin, with the gradual reveal that the situation is more complicated and ethically murky than it initially appears.

That’s one of the primary strengths of the series for me, painting the Jedi Knights in as unflattering a light as we’ve ever seen them. The Jedi of the prequels / Clone Wars era were complacent and ineffectual, but they were still broadly the force for justice that we’d expect from how Obi-Wan and Yoda represent their fallen Order in the original film trilogy. Here, they are more like space cops operating as an iron hand in a velvet glove, and we get to see them from an outside perspective as they go about recruiting a young girl by spying on her, breaking into her home, and separating her from her family to lay on the sales pressure. It’s in some ways a logical extension of what we’ve been told about Jedi recruitment practices in the past, but it’s so much more damning when it’s not the noble Qui-Gon rescuing Jake Lloyd from child slavery.

Yet even that encounter gets revisited Rashomon-like to explore from a different angle, adding up to a more rounded impression for the audience as the season unfolds and certain figures who first seem either wholly good or evil gradually come to reverse those positions and meet somewhere in the middle. By the end, there are no clear-cut villains or heroes here. Instead it’s almost a classic tragedy, where well-meaning people on both sides of a divide make understandable choices that nonetheless manage to destroy a tenuous peace. If you’ve been reading my reviews for a while, you probably know that I absolutely eat that thematic stuff up.

Sadly, the plot mechanics to get to that point are occasionally pretty strained. Several characters act without legible motivations, especially looking backward in the light of subsequent reveals. The overall narrative feels like it was constructed with an eye towards the impact of those twists in the moment, and so isn’t totally satisfying once the bigger picture is available in hindsight. There are also a few questions that are left oddly open, like the issue of why Osha abandoned her initial padawan training, and the general storyline is hampered by the decision to spend two full episodes — of only eight total! — in extended flashback. That sort of indulgence wouldn’t be such a problem with a greater ultimate runtime, but it’s too ambitious to entirely succeed in the limited space provided here. The finale likewise offers a reasonable enough conclusion to most of the immediate problems, but it’s far too ambiguous given how the program has yet to be greenlit for any additional seasons that might pick up the thread.

On the bright side: the acting is incredible and from a notably diverse cast, the stakes loom deadlier for the protagonists than they have in this franchise since perhaps Rogue One, and there’s a Dark Side seduction arc that, although shortchanged as everything else, nevertheless registers as a more effective redo of the Kylo-Rey enemies-to-lovers dynamic. Plus the show is populated with all sorts of charming nods to the wider canon, from the existence of the lightsaber-blocking cortosis metal to the Trade Federation already chafing against Jedi interference in their affairs. And of course, the fight scenes are top-notch — arguably the finest we’ve ever had in Star Wars, with an obvious Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon influence that helps distinguish this period setting from the familiar later ones. All in all it’s a remarkable relaunch for the science-fantasy saga, and I’ll be irritated if the chances for renewal are scratched over the review-bombing from reactionaries who think white men alone should get to save that galaxy far, far away.

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

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Murdle: Volume 1 by G. T. Karber

Book #100 of 2024:

Murdle: Volume 1 by G. T. Karber

I wouldn’t ordinarily rate and review a puzzle book like this, but this one is special enough that it seems worthwhile to highlight its unexpected strengths. It’s not just a collection of those logic puzzles that are solved with the conventional square grids — there’s also a loose ongoing storyline linking all 100 murder mysteries together, with recurring characters and plot twists and everything. The text is riddled with loving Agatha Christie riffs and punny names like Earl Grey or Sir Rulean, not to mention impressively queer-normative throughout: a same-sex romantic interest for the hero, plenty of women in traditionally male roles like bishop, and multiple non-binary suspects with they/them pronouns. The result is far richer than an ephemeral one-time-use product like this could have been, so major kudos are due to author G. T. Karber there.

It’s a gorgeous production too, elegantly arranged with symbols for every suspect, location, weapon, and (in the more challenging entries) motive that must be deduced via the available clues. The tasks get harder as the work goes on, such as the eventual inclusion of witness statements that aren’t necessarily the truth, as the unknown murderer in each whodunnit is always a liar. That element adds a neat extra layer of logic to the affair that I don’t recall ever encountering elsewhere.

It’s a pretty lightweight read — no gore, despite all the death — and my five-year-old had a lot of fun acting as my assistant, reading out the clues and flipping back to the character descriptions to remind me who was left-handed, or brown-haired, or a Capricorn, or whatever. I don’t think I’ll be diving straight into Murdle: Volume 2 myself, but I’ll probably get to it at some point and I’ve already preordered the forthcoming Murdle Jr. as a holiday gift for her.

★★★★☆

Book Review: Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie

Book #99 of 2024:

Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie

Interesting yet somewhat rambling, though short enough overall that that discursiveness doesn’t bother me too much. I’ve never read any Salman Rushdie before, but I was attracted to this title by the story behind it, which I saw the author describe on The Daily Show earlier this year. After being famously targeted with an extremist fatwā execution order for his novel The Satanic Verses in 1988, he lived with that target on his back for decades before a young man stormed the stage at a lecture he was giving in 2022 and stabbed him repeatedly in the face, neck, and chest. While the initial prognosis was dire, the writer did ultimately pull through in surgery, albeit with a loss of vision in one eye and other medical difficulties that continue to afflict him.

Rushdie discusses all of that here, alongside a digression into how he met his latest wife and a few similarly off-topic matters. He chose not to ever confront his attacker, or to even name him in this work, but in one extended section of the text, he relates an imaginary conversation that the two men might have had if he did decide to meet with him in prison after the assault. (The would-be assassin was apprehended at the scene, although he later pled not-guilty and is currently awaiting trial.) It’s more than a little smugly self-indulgent, but understandably so, given the circumstances.

I wouldn’t say that this volume has made me any more or less likely to seek out the author’s fiction, but it’s at least a distinctive mini-memoir of an experience that few people could share. He mentions several times that it’s not the book he wanted to write next, but that he felt like he had to in order to clear his mind and move past the trauma — which is totally fair from his own perspective, yet doesn’t exactly translate to an overwhelming case for readership on our end.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Doctor Who: Ruby Red by Georgia Cook

Book #98 of 2024:

Doctor Who: Ruby Red by Georgia Cook

A fine but ultimately forgettable Doctor Who adventure. I had high hopes for this project as the first novel to feature Ncuti Gatwa’s Fifteenth Doctor, but there really isn’t much here that feels distinctive to his particular incarnation of that regenerating alien hero (like his queerness or his Blackness, for example). The title, which seems to suggest we’ll at least be getting a personal angle for the Time Lord’s current companion, is likewise instead a misnomer that actually stems from the glowing red eyes of anyone possessed by the one-off villain. There are a few minor references to plot arcs from the recent season of the television show, like the TARDIS groaning unnaturally and snow appearing near Millie Gibson’s Ruby Sunday, but overall it’s a pretty generic outing for the franchise.

That’s a bit of a letdown, but since the book came out before the final two episodes, I’d imagine that the BBC editorial team had strict limitations for what early readers could potentially glean from its pages. Hopefully future releases get to have a little more fun with how they play around in the TV continuity, as I know author Georgia Cook has been able to do with some of her work for the licensed Big Finish audio dramas. This one doesn’t even establish roughly when it takes place for its pair of time-traveling protagonists.

As for the immediate premise, the Doctor and Ruby answer a distress call that leads them to 13th-century Estonia a few days before the historical ‘Battle on the Ice’ near Lake Peipus. There the teenage daughter of an interstellar mercenary clan has been left to prove her worth in combat, even though she’d personally rather tinker with her inventions and leave off fighting altogether. That’s a neat concept that could have fueled a compelling quiet character study, but that hope’s dashed by the reveal that her family’s ancient enemy has tracked her to Earth and is now sending out parasites to infest and conquer the world, which of course the Doctor must help the reluctant young warrior to foil. Yawn.

I mean, look — this isn’t a bad science-fiction story by any means (although Gibson narrating the audiobook delivers a fairly atrocious impression of her costar). But it’s very Doctor Who by-the-numbers, when I’m always more interested in titles for this series that manage to flex and push the boundaries of what it can do.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Sleeping Murder: Miss Marple’s Last Case by Agatha Christie

Book #97 of 2024:

Sleeping Murder: Miss Marple’s Last Case by Agatha Christie (Miss Marple #12)

More or less the end of author Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple series, published posthumously in 1976 although written and set several decades beforehand. (It would be followed by one final short story anthology a few years later, collecting tales that had previously appeared in various magazines.) Unlike Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case, which was likewise held back by the writer for later release, this title doesn’t feel specifically intended to represent a farewell to its main character or to make any grand statement about her underlying nature. Instead it is merely another mystery in which the elderly lady consults, offers insights to help steer the investigation, and eventually nabs the culprit.

As a standard whodunnit, it’s solid enough. The setup to the premise is the weakest part, relying on some remarkably flimsy coincidences to get the initial plot rolling: a distant relative of Miss Jane Marple, orphaned as a child and now recently married, has the strangest feeling of déjà vu in the house that she’s bought with her new husband. She even has a sudden vision of herself peering through the railing of the upper stairs at a woman being strangled to death below. In talking it over with her spinster cousin-in-law, she becomes convinced that she must have lived in the same home as a very young girl and actually witnessed a murder there, presumably of her stepmother who vanished around that time.

Once the parties start looking into that cold case, it’s an interesting puzzle that’s vintage Christie — not as groundbreaking or as clever as some of her other work, but a pleasant head-scratcher with a few plausible suspects nonetheless. I’m not sure why she authorized Curtain to be printed before this, as that volume seems like it would have been the more impactful bearer of the “Agatha Christie’s last novel” claim, but it’s not the worst thing I’ve seen from her, either.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

Book #96 of 2024:

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

The publisher’s description of this novel calls it “a time travel romance, a spy thriller, a workplace comedy, and an ingenious exploration of the nature of power and the potential for love to change it all.” I would contend that it is none of those things, or at least, not a particularly great example of any of them.

Is it a story about time travel? Yes, at a distance. The protagonist is a civil servant in near-future semi-dystopian Britain, tasked with chaperoning an individual who has been plucked out of history by some newly-discovered technology. (Literal history, in fact: author Kaliane Bradley makes the interesting choice to pull in real-life military officer Graham Gore, who was lost in an 1840s arctic expedition, rather than inventing an original character for this purpose. Whether this is all self-insert fanfiction for The Terror, a recent popular dramatization of those events, has been left as an exercise for the reader.) Nominally there’s a degree of culture-clash tension as he and the other travelers learn to adapt to their new century, but in practice they all catch on fairly quickly beyond him being a bit prudish and unintentionally racist.

Narratively, he’s there as an object of desire for the heroine to develop feelings for and eventually sleep with. This romance is not especially well-developed in my opinion, nor does it spark any of the consequences I would have assumed would follow for such professional misconduct. Meanwhile a spy thriller is sort of going on around the edges of the plot, but this mainly manifests as the woman’s superior getting increasingly flustered and dropping urgently ominous comments that she totally fails to follow up on.

It’s all pretty underbaked, with a few twists at the end that fail to land properly as a result. A lot more could have been done with this premise.

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

★★☆☆☆

TV Review: Seinfeld, season 7

TV #31 of 2024:

Seinfeld, season 7

We have an ongoing plot again! Sort of. This one doesn’t really develop and shift as the year goes on, but it does bookend and provide a distinctive atmosphere to that run. In the first episode, George suddenly decides that it’s time for him to settle down, leading him to go and propose to Susan, his ex-girlfriend from back in season 4. And for some unclear reason, she says yes. (This trope of exes getting engaged instead of just resuming their old dating relationship has always struck me as odd, and it’s hard to understand what any partner could see in George long-term anyway. He’s such an odious little weasel.) Of course, George being the self-sabotager that he is, he swiftly regrets that decision and spends the following episodes complaining about his new fiancée to his friends and brainstorming non-confrontational ways to call off the wedding, up until a certain final dark twist ends the matter for good.

I suppose it’s funny how awful and pathetic he’s being, but that’s never exactly been my favorite brand of humor. Otherwise, the only new element in this stretch is Elaine’s job writing catalog descriptions for J. Peterman — which feels like one of those 90s premises that’s lost its comic edge over subsequent decades, though at least it’s a more productive use of her character than the randomness with Mr. Pitt the year before.

But the rest of the show delivers fairly business-as-usual sitcom hijinks, relying heavily on Kramer’s physical comedy and not fully committing to the proto-Arrested Development style callbacks that occasionally pop up. That is, the series plainly wants to reward faithful audiences by referring without explanation to concepts from previous scripts like calling a romantic prospect “spongeworthy,” but at the same time, it’ll frequently revert to a status quo between episodes rather than letting any particular story development stick. Elaine ends one week still majorly flirting with Jerry after finding out he’s gotten rich, but then once the credits roll, the issue is never addressed again. Meanwhile Susan punches George after learning he’s lied to her and gone on a date with another woman (a memorable cameo from Oscar-winner Marisa Tomei as herself), but then likewise seems to forget all about it by the time the next installment arrives.

It’s hard to have much faith in the writing team with that degree of inconsistency, and knowing that this was co-creator Larry David’s last season, I’m curious whether I’ll like the remainder of the program any better or worse in his absence. For all my critical points above, I don’t hate this show and am often entertained by it on an episode-by-episode basis. (Yes, 7×6 “The Soup Nazi” is as fun and quotable as everyone always says it is, and you do have to admire the audacity of 7×24 “The Invitations.”) But at this point Seinfeld is hitting a baseline of solid comedy for me with only occasional flashes of brilliance, which isn’t enough to raise it out of my personal three-star / good-but-not-great rating tier.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Will of the Many by James Islington

Book #95 of 2024:

The Will of the Many by James Islington (The Hierarchy #1)

This fantasy novel starts off strong and gets even better from there, spinning a tale that’s rather reminiscent of Red Rising in both its Roman-inflected worldbuilding and its rage-filled protagonist infiltrating the high society of his enemies (and subsequently feeling conflicted over the friendships that he builds there). But unlike Darrow, Vis isn’t merely a member of the oppressed underclass; he’s also the deposed and presumed-dead heir of a smaller nation that the dominant civilization conquered, lending him a further degree of private stakes in the matter more like Sage in The False Prince. In fact, one of the things I love most about this series debut concerns all of the factions and divided loyalties that the young orphan hero must secretly juggle: there’s his cover story as an ordinary student trying to rise through the ranks of the cutthroat academy, the mission his powerful adopted father has sent him on — under threat of imprisonment and torture — to discreetly investigate a deadly conspiracy at the school, his own true identity that would mark him for execution if anyone ever found out, and the rebel group who have learned of it and are blackmailing him for their own hypocritical ends.

The magical element is neat too, although oddly dropped for a large section of the book, since students aren’t allowed to utilize it on-campus. Early on, however, we’re briefed on the mechanics: people are organized into pyramid-like hierarchies, ceding a portion of their energy to the members above them in exchange for social benefit. The higher-ranked individuals can draw upon the lower to gain disproportionate physical strength, or else to power the country’s machinery like Sandersonian investiture. While not a major focus of the plot, it’s a fun background note that helps distinguish the setting in a crowded literary landscape.

Mostly, though, we are following the very personal journey of our narrator as he outwits and ruthlessly outfights his way through a succession of tricky scenarios. At every moment, this character is thinking not only of how he can turn the present situation to his advantage, but also how it could fuel his growing legendary reputation among his peers. (Again: heavy vibes of Darrow from Red Rising, alongside the tensely unfair wargame challenges of Fourth Wing, The Hunger Games, or Ender’s Game.)

The ending unfortunately loses me a bit. There are just too many threads left unresolved, as well as a pretty massive genre-bending twist in the final pages that would have needed way more development than it receives here in order to land with the proper impact. I understand multiple sequels are planned and cliffhangers are a fine storytelling tradition, but this volume ends so messily that I’m forced to scale back the five-star rating I spent a lot of the book assuming I’d be giving it.

Still! I do like this title a lot overall, and will be eagerly reading on to see where the series goes next.

[Content warning for amputation and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Husbands by Holly Gramazio

Book #94 of 2024:

The Husbands by Holly Gramazio

I was initially charmed but ultimately dissatisfied with this paths-not-taken novel, in which an unmarried London woman suddenly finds a husband of several years sharing her flat. No sooner has he arrived than he’s gone again, replaced by yet another stranger — for it turns out that the attic of her home has somehow become the trigger for this uncanny revolving door, and every time her current partner climbs up the ladder, reality shifts so that the heroine is married to somebody new climbing back down.

Gradually she realizes that her recent past is being rewritten entirely with each new spouse; although she retains her memories throughout, everyone else immediately forgets and she keeps discovering she’s inadvertently altered some detail like her job or her friend group dynamic along with the change in fellow. (The idea seems to be that she’s repeatedly displacing some different universe’s version of herself, but that element isn’t really addressed. It does have troubling implications for how frequently she empties her bank account, quits her career, or otherwise acts rashly under the justification that she’ll soon be moving on to a new blank slate of circumstances, however.)

I don’t necessarily need a story’s protagonist to be likable, but this one is pretty selfish and cruel throughout. She has to drug one husband to get him to go back into the attic, and threaten to shoot another. On several occasions, she abuses her knowledge of people she was close with in a previous life to break into their houses and steal from them, and of course, she’s keeping her predicament / ability a secret from everybody the entire time. She’s also often obnoxiously shallow, rejecting certain spouses on sight without even getting to know why some iteration of her would have fallen in love and married the guys. Over the course of several months, she winds up going through literal hundreds of them in this way.

The plot is relatively engaging — though the ending is a bit abrupt — and I think the piece as a whole works well as a bitter commentary on modern dating apps, which likewise encourage folks to churn through romantic options and make superficial snap judgements to swipe away prospective matches they might have been perfectly happy with. But it’s not much fun to read, or even clear what sort of outcome we should be rooting for as we go along.

★★★☆☆

Movie Review: Enchanted (2007)

Movie #16 of 2024:

Enchanted (2007)

Basically as delightful as I had remembered, and my 3y/o and 5y/o seemed to like it too, despite not being very into live-action stuff yet as a rule. This movie is so fascinating to me, because it rides a really fine line between lovingly mocking various Disney Princess tropes and representing just a straightforward example of them in turn. Still, bringing such characters out of animation and confronting them with relatively realistic New Yorkers remains a fun postmodern twist for the genre, and I especially adore how it skewers the conventional love-at-first-sight plot by turning into a stealth romantic comedy between the two protagonists we’ve actually spent the movie watching grow closer. (The fact that they’re each initially attached to someone else provides good cover for this angle of the script, and throwing those two quasi-spurned lovers together in the end is a pretty tidy solution. It’s almost Shakesperean!) In a way, this seems like a prototype for several later relationships from the same studio; both Frozen and Tangled come to mind for offering similar optimist/cynic dynamics that blossom slowly into romance.

On the flip side: I’m less enamored of the wacky CGI chipmunk sidekick and Nathaniel’s violence against him than I probably once was, and I don’t love how that minor antagonist goes through multiple ethnic stereotypes for his successive disguises, which doesn’t even make sense given his particular background and knowledge of the world. The dragon bit at the film’s grand climax is also a tad over-the-top, and the story feels like it’s maybe missing a beat where Robert comes to terms with the idea that magic is legitimately real beyond the manic-pixie-dream-girl breaking him out of his divorcee doldrums.

But Amy Adams is indeed magical in that role, and “That’s How You Know” is a classic Disney bop. That cements the matter, in my book.

★★★★☆