The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: When I Was Your Age: Life Lessons, Funny Stories & Questionable Parenting Advice from a Professional Clown by Kenan Thompson

Book #67 of 2024:

When I Was Your Age: Life Lessons, Funny Stories & Questionable Parenting Advice from a Professional Clown by Kenan Thompson

An entertaining if disjointed memoir from the lifelong sketch comic, currently enjoying an unprecedented third decade at Saturday Night Live. I’ll repeat that: at 21 seasons on the show and counting, author Kenan Thompson has blown past the previous record of 14 years set by former cast member Darrell Hammond back in 2009, and despite saying in this book that he might finally be leaving soon himself, he apparently has no specific departure plan that he’s ready to share just yet.

Given that degree of longevity on the program, this title is honestly a bit of a missed opportunity. Although the writer shares plenty of charming backstage anecdotes, there’s no real effort here to critique it seriously or capture how the series has changed over the course of his tenure, in a long-term view that he’d be uniquely positioned to offer. He likewise doesn’t really address the underlying question of why he’s stayed on SNL all this time, while so many other talented performers have continued to come and go from its soundstage. An introspective exploration of that topic could have been particularly interesting and insightful, but the text instead steers smoothly around it.

In its place, we’re offered the nuts and bolts of Thompson’s upbringing in Atlanta, his big break as a child actor on Nickelodeon’s All That, subsequent TV and movie projects, and ultimately, the revered late-night institution at NBC. The amount of celebrity name-dropping is unavoidable / expected in a work like this, and it’s neat to learn about the comedy touchstones that Kenan idolized and how they influenced his own approach to the business, not to mention the difficulties he faced as a short Black kid “on the rounder side of things” in an industry so focused on biased superficial beauty standards. We also hear some about his two daughters and his philosophies on parenting them — inspired heavily by the peers he’s lost to gun violence, drug abuse, and suicide — as well as his complicated feelings on Bill Cosby, whose squeaky-clean comedic persona was so formative for the young man before all his horrendous sex crimes came to light. (And a weird focus on the zodiac, too. The author doesn’t list the astrological sign of every single person he mentions, but he includes way more of them than you’d think and seems to genuinely believe they’re indicative of people’s behavioral patterns or something.)

Anyway. Not a bad read overall, but nothing too exceptional, either.

★★★☆☆

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TV Review: Shōgun, season 1

TV #14 of 2024:

Shōgun, season 1

An exquisitely-rendered adaptation of the classic historical fiction novel about simmering political tensions and warfare in 17th-century feudal Japan. I can’t compare it to the 1980 NBC miniseries, which I haven’t seen, but I’m impressed with how closely this one hews to the original book in its plot and tone, particularly in decentering the white male lead, an Englishman who stumbles into the escalating drama and finds himself enlisted as an unwitting pawn. As our initial viewpoint character, it would be easy for the show to frame everything through his western gaze, but he’s instead positioned as only one important figure among many in the ensemble, which resists exoticization at every turn.

I’ll quote here from my own review of the source material, as so much of it still applies:

“I think it helps that Clavell presents us with a large cast of fleshed-out characters, most of them Japanese, with clear differences of philosophy and temperament across the lot. While the novel engages in some broad East/West dichotomies, neither side of the cultural exchange is portrayed as wholly good or bad, and the primary arc of the piece involves the European protagonist gaining a deeper understanding and appreciation for the people around him. Likewise, his own reputation gradually shifts from that of an uncivilized curiosity to a strange but honorable outsider, particularly after he agrees to start bathing more than once a year.

“Against that framework, the story is a slow-burning coil of intrigues and oblique threats punctuated by sudden outbursts of graphic violence a la Game of Thrones or Red Rising, with tensions among rival samurai factions as well as the respective representatives of the Anglican, Catholic, and Shinto religions. Plots are hatched, vengeance is wreaked, seppuku is required, and honor is upheld. It’s definitely a romanticized view of the era, but as an immersive and swashbuckling adventure, it holds up pretty nicely.”

HBO’s Game of Thrones is a key comparison point for the FX/Hulu series, which likewise throws audiences into an immersive world and trusts us to follow along in sorting out the various factions, personalities, and relevant backstory as the action hits the ground running. Although a dubbed edition is available via Hulu submenu, the primary broadcast is presented mostly in Japanese with English subtitles, with many scenes featuring no English speakers at all. (My one quirky complaint is that for some reason, English is used when characters are actually speaking other European languages like Portuguese or Dutch, which somewhat breaks the immersion once you realize it. But thankfully, the Japanese is left alone, as rendering that in accented English would have considerably weakened both the overall impact and the theme of cross-cultural communication difficulties.)

The acting is terrific, and the characters shine even though they’re often making their strategic moves via subtle implications in their dialogue. Blackthorne provides a necessary role in cutting through all that and forcing certain items out into the open, but it’s Toranaga’s high-stakes stone-faced maneuvers, Mariko’s quiet fatalism, and Yabushige’s desperate Littlefinger-esque scheming that really deliver the spectacle and underline the tragedy of particular developments.

This season adapts the entirety of the James Clavell novel, which the producers clearly understand inside and out. The changes they’ve made are small but categorically improve the text, such as when the Anjin mournfully volunteers for a duty in episode nine that on the page was assigned to Yabu basically by default. I don’t imagine they’ll go on to make any further seasons of this now that the storyline has reached its natural conclusion, but even as a standalone run, these ten episodes are a real wonder to behold.

[Content warning for gun violence, torture, suicide, domestic abuse, and gore.]

★★★★★

Book Review: Olivetti by Allie Millington

Book #66 of 2024:

Olivetti by Allie Millington

I understand that when the premise of a book includes half of its chapters being narrated by a sentient typewriter, you kind of have to suspend a lot of your disbelief going into the thing. All the more so for the twelve-year-old other narrator and the overall middle-grade atmosphere, I suppose. But I’ve still had a hard time with this debut novel from author Allie Millington, which, yes, posits that typewriters are self-aware and can talk to one another when no one is looking, yet are sworn to a Toy Story-like code of silence around humanity. Our local Olivetti decides to break that rule after the boy’s mother vanishes, however, typing out messages from himself and recreating old personal writings from the missing woman that he hopes will aid the family in their search.

Even setting aside the quirky magic machinery and how nonchalantly everyone in this story seems to accept it, the characters are a dismal bunch. I’m bothered by how the mom treats the rest of them, running away from all her responsibilities and relationships without any conversation or note about why, and I don’t like how the plot keeps her reason and a key related development in the backstory as a big dramatic secret for so long. The others violate her privacy in return, of course, and the narrative totally breezes past the fact that — spoiler alert — she’s literally on the verge of killing herself when they finally piece together enough clues to track her down.

The tone here is all over the place, as you can probably tell from my summary. I can’t help comparing this to Where’d You Go, Bernadette? by Maria Semple, which spun a similar tale over a decade ago but was clearer that a) the title character was unquestionably in the wrong for her actions, and b) there were nuanced mental health issues at play that sometimes drive irrational behavior. That earlier work was a lot funnier, too — and all without any gimmicky talking office equipment, to boot.

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: Dream Girl by Laura Lippman

Book #65 of 2024:

Dream Girl by Laura Lippman

This 2021 thriller feels like a take on Stephen King’s Misery for the #metoo era, in which a bedridden white male writer is held accountable and ultimately held captive by an overbearing nurse figure for the sins of his past, oblivious to most of them though he is. Strictly speaking, the beginning of the novel aims for some ambiguity — are the strange phone calls the protagonist is receiving perhaps mere hallucinations, brought on by either the pills he’s taking or the genetic predisposition for his mother’s dementia? That would explain why the voice is impossibly claiming to be a character from one of his books who’s famous for being abused by an older lover (or the secret inspiration behind her in his own life, despite his insistence that no such person exists). But the genre conventions make it pretty likely that someone’s gaslighting him instead, and the circumstances around the messages point to the culprit well before he reaches that conclusion himself.

Author Laura Lippman plays a difficult game here, rendering a hero who’s significantly flawed by design and asking us to nevertheless invest in his struggle. Gerry Andersen is casually racist, sexist, homophobic, and beyond, while of course inwardly complaining that the world has just grown too sensitive for a man like him to navigate. It’s similar to the stunt that R. F. Kuang pulls with the narrator in Yellowface, but in my opinion, that later title achieves a greater success in balancing the despicability of its lead with the needs of the larger plot and its driving themes. Here, the twists aren’t frequent or surprising enough, and the straits never seem particularly dire. Everything in the story falls out more or less as expected, which leaves me a bit lukewarm overall.

[Content for incest, rape, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Book of Doom by John Peel

Book #64 of 2024:

Book of Doom by John Peel (Diadem: Worlds of Magic #10)

This is the last of the second wave of author John Peel’s Diadem novels, the four published from 2005 to 2006 under Llewellyn (following the original six volumes put out by Scholastic from 1997 to 1998). It also functions as the conclusion to a two-part story begun in the previous title, concerning the dystopian computer Overmind running Pixel’s homeworld of Calomir, although it doesn’t do much to wrap up the larger overall saga. (The writer would later self-publish two final entries in 2012, presumably to fill that role. Those are the only ones I haven’t read before, as my most recent time through this series was back in 2008.)

It’s a thrilling tale with multiple villains to defeat: both the artificial intelligence still in power across the planet and Nantor, the blue boy’s tyrannical past/future self who broke free and took over his body in the preceding cliffhanger. Pixel’s viewpoint chapters here reduce him to a spectator presence in his own mind rather like an Animorphs Controller, still self-aware and in private communication with the intruder who’s displaced him, but outwardly unable to move a muscle. Furthermore, magic throughout the Diadem is now unbalanced again as it was in the early books, and the enemy aims to restore the full Three Who Rule by awakening his comrades in Score and Helaine. Their efforts to resist that fate are complicated by Oracle and Shanara launching the contingency plans they’ve prepared, essentially betraying their friends to death before they can be turned.

The plot moves lightning-quick, and is strengthened by splitting up the four protagonists so thoroughly that we are continually bouncing from one deadly peril to the next. I appreciate too what we get to see of the characters’ internal battles against their darker natures, with the danger not only of literally freeing the old tyrants, but also in reaching such a level of arrogance and callousness in the process that they would threaten the universe all by themselves. Helaine is the one who struggles the most with this, but Score has some good moments as well, especially when Jenna has to talk him down from lashing out in violence against Shanara.

Diadem has come a long way since the speech distortions and silly codes that riddled its earliest installments, but the story isn’t over just yet. The mystery antagonist from Brine is still unknown and unconfronted, and it feels like Oracle might have hidden depths remaining to unveil, along with the fallout of Shanara’s revelation to Score in the final pages of this book and the young man’s heritage back on Ordin. Oh — and for any of my fellow shippers out there, this is the volume where he and Helaine finally admit their feelings for each other and share a first kiss, so that’s another new dynamic that the sequels will hopefully continue to develop and explore. But as an end to this particular stretch of the narrative, it’s a pretty satisfying finale.

[Content for torture, ableism, and incest.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Elephants Can Remember by Agatha Christie

Book #63 of 2024:

Elephants Can Remember by Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot #42)

This is the last Hercule Poirot novel that Agatha Christie wrote, although it would be followed in publication by Curtain, which she’d completed decades earlier and kept locked away in a vault. It’s an odd story, with a rather obvious twist and a convoluted initial premise: the detective’s friend and author stand-in Ariadne Oliver is reminded by a stranger at a party that her goddaughter’s parents were killed years ago in an apparent murder-suicide that was never officially resolved. (They were found shot dead with the gun nearby, but the police couldn’t determine who died first or whether either was the shooter at all.) That setup adds some slight personal stakes to the ensuing investigation… but at the cost of making the woman the type of person who doesn’t seem to care when her friends die! She apparently didn’t even bother checking in on the girl after reading about the event in the newspaper.

Still, she promises to finally look into the matter now, and swiftly recruits Poirot to join her. It’s a cold case by this point, and the protagonists proceed by tracking down and questioning witnesses, whose memories prove not as reliable as the titular pachyderms. There are a lot of references to previous mysteries that the two have solved together, which is a little fun for loyal readers, but isn’t particularly well-integrated into the plot. Emphasizing the minimal continuity of the series also feels like a misstep, given how many such details wind up contradicting one another, of course. Even from what’s established in this book alone, good luck to anyone trying to sort out the timeline of how long the various characters have known each other! And as usual for this writer, there are plenty of regrettable social attitudes on display throughout, from misconceptions about mental health to disdains of youth and liberal values to the suggestion that adopted relations are somehow inauthentic.

Against that backdrop, the letdown of a conclusion registers as even weaker. I do overall enjoy the old Belgian and Mrs. Oliver (who’s less insightful but somewhat like Miss Marple in her general approach), but this is far from Christie’s best showcase for either of them.

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson

Book #62 of 2024:

Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson

[Disclaimer: I am Facebook friends with this author.]

I should admit upfront that I didn’t care much for this novel upon its initial release back in 2009. But I’ve heard so many people praise it over the years (and I’m such a big fan of author Brandon Sanderson overall) that I wanted to reevaluate the work and see how it strikes me a decade-and-a-half later on. Would I like it any better now, especially given my greater understanding of how these events and characters play into the writer’s broader Cosmere saga?

Unfortunately, I still think it’s one of his weaker efforts. The basic story structure is sound, spinning a tale of intrigues and mounting tensions in a fantasy city-state on the brink of war, but the worldbuilding revelations and similar plot twists pile up at the end, without enough lead-in foundation or space for their various implications to breathe. There’s also a degree of misogyny in the narrative’s treatment of its two heroines, both of whom are forced to strip in front of men who remained clothed — one by a mugger at knifepoint, and the other repeatedly before her new husband and his servants as part of their arranged marriage. The explicit threat of even worse sexual violence hangs over these young women at such moments, and although it never materializes, it cuts against their status as plucky princess figures and the family-friendly genre tone that Sanderson generally aims for in his books.

Despite being his fifth published novel (following Elantris and the original Mistborn trilogy, all of which I’d say are considerably stronger), this title comes across as the early product of a creator still honing his craft. Even the setting’s trademark magical system, usually a Sandersonian highlight, reads like a less impressive and rather more loosely-defined version of what was already on display throughout Mistborn. As a book it’s not terrible, but I’d maybe only recommend it for completionists excited by the Hoid cameo or anyone looking for background on The Stormlight Archive, the author’s newer series that features a return of the sentient sword Nightblood and two of the other Warbreaker characters under pseudonyms. For everyone else, it’s just not a very good introduction to or representative example of his style.

[Content warning for torture and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: He Who Drowned the World by Shelley Parker-Chan

Book #61 of 2024:

He Who Drowned the World by Shelley Parker-Chan (The Radiant Emperor #2)

I think that objectively speaking, this sequel is generally of the same high quality as its predecessor She Who Became the Sun, which began this queer fantasy retelling of the 14th-century founding of China’s Ming Dynasty (which appears to terminate here, unless author Shelley Parker-Chan intends to extend the story into the actual reign of that new emperor). It’s just as action-packed, and it continues the development of richly-defined characters and interrogations of gender / sexuality amid a detailed pseudo-historical setting. It even brings together the two primary protagonists of the series, as I definitely wanted to see happen more frequently in the previous book.

Yet on a personal level, I don’t know that I’ve actually enjoyed this one! The writer has officially stated that they don’t consider their work to be an example of the “grimdark” sub-genre, but I’m not sure how else to categorize a plot with this much maiming, sadism, and other forms of interpersonal violence — to say nothing of how these antiheroic figures (primarily a self-harming eunuch, a one-handed woman pretending to be her dead brother, and a gang rape survivor subsequently luring an abusive man into his bed for political gain) regularly torture themselves for their perceived transgressions against the supposed natural order. There’s a lot of internalized sexism, ableism, and homophobia that’s simply part of the background radiation of their lives, along with a general air of bleak nihilism that reaches throughout the entire narrative.

And while that may have been true of the first novel to a certain degree as well, I’d argue that that volume balanced the darkness better with the occasional scene of genuine human connection and warmth. Here, sex is all vindictively transactional, emotional numbness is viewed in aspirational terms, and the cost of success is so high that it’s a wonder any of these wounded souls are still willing to pay it. The final pages pull back from the horrors slightly, but it’s a real trek to even get to that point.

Three-and-a-half stars rounded up for a tale I can recognize as excellently crafted despite not caring for it much myself.

This volume: ★★★★☆

Overall series: ★★★★☆

Volumes ranked: 1 > 2

Book Review: Doctor Who: The Legends of River Song edited by Justin Richards

Book #60 of 2024:

Doctor Who: The Legends of River Song edited by Justin Richards

The year is 2016. The latest episode to air on the show Doctor Who was the recent holiday special The Husbands of River Song, which brought back the titular time-traveling archaeologist for her single on-screen adventure alongside the Twelfth Doctor, following a string of appearances opposite Eleven (and her memorable introduction with Ten). It remains, to date, the last time she’ll ever appear on the program.

Several months later, BBC Books releases this volume, a collection of five licensed short stories about the character. All assume an existing audience familiarity, which seems fair — although the professor was originally introduced with plenty of mysteries surrounding her, by this point, there don’t seem to be any big secrets left unexplored. So this book will spoil details like the identity of her parents and her precise relationship with the Doctor, if for some reason you’re the sort of reader to pick it up without seeing all the relevant episodes yet.

Each tale is told in first-person from River’s perspective as a diary entry about a different escape from Stormcage, which is a distinctive (though not totally unique) choice for Whoniverse fiction. Some are better than others, and I’d particularly highlight the opening “Picnic at Asgard” by Jenny T. Colgan and the closing “River of Time” by Andrew Lane as doing interesting things with the assignment. The former fleshes out a brief reference from the television dialogue for a River/Doctor encounter that also has her privately evaluating him as a partner and wondering if she wants to have kids, which is an aspect of her character that hasn’t been dealt with in canon before. And while the latter isn’t so personally insightful, it takes our heroine to a fraught place in the franchise history, investigating the ruins of one of the ancient races that coexisted with the Time Lords in their prime.

The remaining legends* are fine as filler plots, but not especially noteworthy. “Death in New Venice” by Guy Adams is the worst, for both getting the character voice subtly wrong and unnecessarily subjecting her to multiple occasions of ‘wandering hands,’ but the primary charge I can level against all three is that they don’t really tell us anything new about their subject and aren’t clever enough in their premise or execution to be compelling in their own right otherwise. It’s a wasted opportunity, which is why I’d honestly only recommend reading the two entries that bookend this text.

*It’s a weird title, yeah? Legends don’t usually come straight from the horse’s mouth, and it’s not like these stories are framed as retellings of popular but inaccurate accounts. One suspects that the publisher might have gone with The Diary of River Song instead, if Big Finish hadn’t snagged that name for the series of full-cast audio adventures that they launched in 2015.

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, season 1

TV #13 of 2024:

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, season 1

I went into this latest Star Trek series with fairly low expectations. In addition to being another prequel in a franchise that could stand to be more forward-facing, it is moreover a direct spin-off from the messiest season of Star Trek: Discovery. On paper, it also seems like it could be a reactionary course correction to complaints about the diversity of that parent show and its Black female lead, not only returning us to the TOS era but starring another square-jawed Captain Kirk type in the form of Christopher Pike (his canonical predecessor to helm the USS Enterprise).

Luckily, the show proves vastly superior to those reservations and has turned in probably the strongest debut season of any Trek iteration to date. Interestingly enough, it’s positioned much more as a prequel than a spinoff — I think you could watch this without having seen Discovery and not feel lost / confused that this version of Pike, Spock, and Una have already had a few on-screen adventures together, but you’d lose a lot of the creative texture if you hadn’t first watched the original 1960s program, which it’s very much in conversation with. Whereas Discovery seemed to pick its initial prequel status almost arbitrarily and then spent two years tripping over the established canon before rocketing off for a better fit in the distant future, Strange New Worlds is explicitly a story about the Enterprise pre-Kirk and how its crew will become the sort of people they’ll need to be later on.

That’s most apparent for Spock, who has the clearest existing character arc already. For others like Uhura or Nurse Chapel who aren’t as fleshed out in TOS, that blank canvas has given the writers an opportunity to create newly compelling backstories that can inform those later performances without undercutting them. It’s a delicate balancing act, but one that the series is so far carrying out rather well.

Plus, it’s just plain fun! The short ten-episode season order is a hindrance as it is for many modern shows, yet the scripts do a fine job in that confined space of introducing us to these characters and putting them through a variety of engaging plots. (Uhura’s cadet rotation shadowing the senior staff is a particularly smart way of showcasing everyone in turn.) This is not a propulsive serialized drama like Deep Space Nine, Discovery, or Picard, but it feels of a piece with other Treks like TNG or Voyager that play out recurring concerns across their runs. So we get Pike’s conflict over his eventual fate — revealed to him on Discovery, but which viewers already knew awaited him in “The Menagerie” — together with Spock’s relationship troubles, the lurking threat of the Gorn, and so on. No issue is present every week, but they add up to a cohesive character-led exercise that still manages to feel episodic and light, despite the occasional serious themes. If the goal was to craft a modernized version of the classic Shatner show, synthesizing the rhythms of TV then with TV now, it’s a pretty clear success.

[Content warning for gun violence, child sacrifice, and gore.]

★★★★☆