The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

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.]

★★★☆☆

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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.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Alien Blood by Chris Archer

Book #59 of 2024:

Alien Blood by Chris Archer (Mindwarp #2)

This sequel is an improvement over the first book, but I’m still not yet loving the middle-grade 90s Mindwarp series on this adult reread. We’ve switched protagonists, and the new girl’s plot plays out along similar lines to the boy’s from the novel before: strange new powers on her thirteenth birthday, shapeshifting alien with jet-black eyes trying to kill her, the need to balance all that with her regular teenage school stuff a la the Animorph kids, etc. There’s the shared feeling that this is a junior version of the sci-fi conspiracy thrillers of the day like Terminator 2 or The X-Files, too. And I appreciate that Ethan is around as a background character attempting to talk to Ashley throughout, although that crossover element will probably be more fun once they can really team up and compare notes later on.

Her abilities aren’t quite the same as his — more survival skills like rapid healing and superhuman senses than his instinctive weapons training and combat reflexes — and that helps this from seeming like just a second-episode rehash. Yet it’s too short to land with much impact, and it keeps its best piece, the reason for a few puzzling irregularities in the heroine’s experiences, as a secret with a big reveal in the final pages of the text. I would much rather have read a story about her finding out right away and having to process that information than one that holds it back as a mystery like this. But hopefully, the subsequent volumes continue to improve as the broader narrative deepens.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: One True Loves by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Book #58 of 2024:

One True Loves by Taylor Jenkins Reid

This 2016 release was the last remaining Taylor Jenkins Reid novel that I had yet to read, as well as the last one the author wrote that’s more in the generic literary fiction tradition before finding her clear niche documenting fictional celebrities with The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and beyond. I really enjoy how this writer depicts her characters processing their emotions amid the unexpected twists of life, but this particular title is like her other early works in not quite jumping the threshold from good to great for me. Its plot feels rather like a rehash of those previous stories, too — the protagonist is a young widow as in Forever, Interrupted, and she takes a step back from a separate relationship to see if time apart can save it as in After I Do.

The exact premise has more specificity to it, at least, albeit of a somewhat outlandish nature. The heroine’s husband, her high school sweetheart, dies in a tragic helicopter crash at sea that leaves her understandably devastated. After years of grieving, she slowly opens herself up again and eventually winds up kindling a new romance with a friend who’s always carried a torch for her. Soon before her second wedding, however, she gets a call that her former partner is still alive after all! He’s somehow been marooned on a desert island this whole time, and now that he’s been rescued, he wants / expects to get back together with her and resume their old marriage.

It’s a goofy concept straight out of Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor, crossed with something like Arrow or Castaway, I guess. The ensuing conundrum poses an interesting enough love triangle, and I like how it resolves with the conclusion that we all change and it’s okay for different people to mean different things to you at different lifestages. But it’s hard to get fully invested in the drama of the situation, especially with the main character sleeping with both men while trying to make up her mind between them. Just settle down and be polyamorous, girl.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Book of Reality by John Peel

Book #57 of 2024:

Book of Reality by John Peel (Diadem: Worlds of Magic #9)

It’s finally Pixel’s turn to revisit his original homeworld, and just like Score in Book #5 and Helaine in Book #7, the protagonist’s reentry into the wreckage of his previous life offers certain immediate stakes and pre-existing relationships to help drive the plot. In fact, the initial premise here is rather simple: the blue-skinned boy is happy with his new girlfriend Jenna and wants to introduce her to his parents, whom he remembers fondly even though the family mostly all kept to their own separate virtual reality pods when he was growing up.

Upon arrival, however, he discovers that the situation on Calomir is even more dystopian than he’d realized — not only a stratified society where unseen slave labor keeps people in his class comfortable, but one ruled by a malevolent A.I. secretly draining their intelligence to power its own. (A great pulpy line from the villain’s introductory scene, about Pixel going offworld: “What he has done is so unthinkably forbidden that I have not even decreed laws against it yet.”) The hero’s mother and father aren’t even real; it turns out that each smart House contains merely a single child with standard implanted memories of distant caregivers to render them docile. When the kids burn out or prove otherwise unsuitable for the program, they are removed and sentenced to the nearest work camp.

So of course, the young magic-users have to do something about that (and readers have to ignore how Pixel, who was horrified to learn about the camps back in the first novel, has never bothered to return here and address the problem before now). Author John Peel is also a Doctor Who writer, and this story made me belatedly realize how by this point, he’s basically transformed the Diadem series into a YA fantasy version of that. The good guys arrive somewhere new at the start of an installment, foil the evil scheme that’s currently underfoot or whatever the local injustice happens to be, and then depart again ahead of the fallout without ever really explaining who they are to the resident bystanders.

But hey, it’s a formula that works, and it’s deployed pretty well in this particular title. The teens outthink their artificial enemy and surprise it with abilities beyond its understanding, inspire an uprising against the system, and drop in some pointed ACAB critiques of the jackbooted police enablers. Score and Helaine take a few further steps towards emotional intimacy and honesty about their romantic feelings for each other. The ending drops the ball a little with the sudden cliffhanger swap of one antagonist for another without much build-up, and the book at large completely ignores the still-open mystery of what hidden foe was behind the events of the last volume, but overall, I’d say that this is one of the better entries of its saga.

[Content warning for torture and implied rape / forced breeding.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon by Wole Talabi

Book #56 of 2024:

Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon by Wole Talabi

A rollicking debut novel from Nigerian author Wole Talabi, spinning a daring heist of the titular magical artifact from the high-security British Museum. The genre is urban fantasy noir by way of American Gods, where pantheons of deities from all world religions coexist and gain relative power based on the beliefs and prayers of their respective adherents. In the modern age, that’s led to a hardscrabble existence for some of the older and more obscure spirits like our hero, one of the original Yoruba orishas, who finds himself scraping by in a capitalistic drudgery not so unlike our own. When he partners up with a friendly succubus for a chance to flee that life, the two beings swiftly wind up over their heads and in debt to a powerful god, tasked with carrying out the raid to regain his lost treasure.

The actual mission isn’t too complex, but the book is fleshed out by the narrative hopping around in time a bit to provide the relevant backstory of the various players involved. (When the couple realizes they need the help of a mortal magician, for instance, a flashback depicts her meeting the real-life occultist Aleister Crowley, whose fictionalized self apparently used the demon woman’s powers to live on into the 21st century. Back in the present, she and Shigidi then go cash in that favor and recruit him to join the team.) The plot tropes are familiar but excellently rendered — I laughed in delight when the shady benefactor tells the protagonists they have to strike that very night, and even more so at the inevitable betrayal later on — with all the ludicrous joy of an episode of Leverage, just in a rather different sort of heightened reality.

It all resolves well enough in the end, and although this volume has been marketed as a standalone adventure, I’d say there’s definitely potential for a longer series here. Personally, I’d be happy to return for a sequel with these folks.

[Content warning for body horror, gore, fatphobia, racism, and rape.]

★★★★☆

Movie Review: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)

Movie #2 of 2024:

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)

2018’s surprise animated hit Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was always going to be a tough act to follow, and sure enough, this sequel suffers a bit by comparison while still being an above-average film in its own right. It’s funny! Just not quite as hilarious as the last one, which handled its share of gloomy topics with a lighter touch. It’s visually inventive! But perhaps not as thrillingly / impressively so as its predecessor, whose established comics-inspired patterns it largely mimics. It’s mind-bending in its storytelling and worldbuilding! Yet in a way that doesn’t hold up as much under logical scrutiny, unfortunately.

(There’s a lot of talk in the back half of this movie about certain “canon events” being necessary components of every spider-themed hero’s journey, with the death of a friendly police captain the one that understandably most upsets our returning protagonist Miles Morales, son of such a cop. But that’s a weirdly esoteric detail that doesn’t line up with any previous audience understanding of Spider-Man lore, nor does it make sense that seemingly every superhero in the multiverse besides him would be okay with sacrificing innocent lives to keep an abstract story on track. If the one antagonistic figure at the top were making that cold-hearted calculus, it would be a fine character note that could be interrogated and pushed back against. And I do like the idea that Miles wasn’t originally supposed to get his powers, and so is inherently something of a dangerous aberration. But to have everyone else go placidly along with the agenda of his dad’s upcoming demise simply doesn’t present a plot that’s believable or worth investing in. To say nothing of how that whole extended interlude at spider headquarters cuts away from the main villain right as he’s gained transcendent superpowers and declared his intention to ruin the boy’s life, a thread we never even return to before the cliffhanger drops and the credits roll.)

More successful is the dynamic between the teen and his friend Gwen, each now a year older and more plainly positioned as star-crossed love interests for one another. Framing the beginning of the movie from her perspective is a smart choice, as is the amount of time we spend lingering quietly with the two of them once they finally reconnect. The busiest parts of the later action-fest practically demand a repeat viewing or a quick deployment of the pause button to catch all the various easter eggs — Peter Parkedcar, etc. — but those obscure references yield diminishing returns and aren’t nearly as fun as the smaller cast from the first adventure, whose quirks were generally fleshed out beyond mere punchlines. Luckily the lower-scale personal stakes at the start and end of this one are exactly how I want a hero to be challenged, and ultimately leave me pretty excited for the final installment of the trilogy.

★★★★☆

Book Review: Romney: A Reckoning by McKay Coppins

Book #55 of 2024:

Romney: A Reckoning by McKay Coppins

A remarkable inside look at a complicated political figure: the 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, who as a senator during the Trump presidency then became one of the few members of that party willing to publicly stand against the president’s erratic, abusive, and outright illegal behavior. This book is a biography of his career, but it’s one built on a near-unprecedented level of access to its high-profile subject, with journalist McKay Coppins conducting around 50 one-on-one interviews with the man from 2021 to 2023 and being granted more than a decade’s worth of private journals, emails, and text messages to consult. What emerges are Romney’s candid — if often gossipy — critiques of specific fellow politicians, his frustrations over how the GOP has abandoned certain traditional conservative positions he still sees as important, and his personal commitment to always act according to his moral / religious values.

His contradictions and hypocrisies are apparent in this account as well, including his role in Donald Trump’s rise by accepting the tycoon’s endorsement along with his birtherism conspiracies. As he bemoans the MAGA base’s vindictive animosity and racist xenophobia, he’s forced to struggle with the question of how much of that strain was already dominant on the right during his own White House bids, just better hidden under the veneer of fiscal conservatism. And for all his complaints about modern Republicans abandoning those Reagan-era principles in their lurch towards authoritarianism, his biographer makes plain how Mitt himself has flip-flopped and shifted his stances on various issues over the years — perhaps a necessary step for anyone hoping to get elected in states as different as Massachusetts and Utah, but hardly a track record that supports his claim to be an idealistic maverick unswayed by public opinion.

I don’t agree with Mitt Romney on much politically (though I now know we share an unexpected love of Brandon Sanderson‘s fantasy novels), and I remain proud to have voted against him to reelect Barack Obama. The author quotes him saying of Hillary Clinton in 2016 that she “is wrong on every issue… but she’s wrong within the normal parameters,” and that’s more or less how I view the guy in turn myself. But I appreciate the work he’s done to oppose his colleagues who have strayed so far beyond those parameters, and I think this title does a fine job of capturing the ethos that’s driven him to speak out, no matter the consequences.

★★★★☆