The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Orion and the Conqueror by Ben Bova

Book #118 of 2023:

Orion and the Conqueror by Ben Bova (Orion #4)

This isn’t the worst title of the Orion saga — it’s a noticeable step up from the angst-ridden previous volume — but it might well be the most boring. Much how the first half of Vengeance of Orion was little more than a straightforward retelling of traditional accounts of the Trojan War, this fourth novel is almost entirely just a factual presentation of the later years in the reign of Philip of Macedon, leading up to his assassination and the succession of his son Alexander the Great. Oh, there are some nominal sci-fi trappings: the reincarnated super-human warrior Orion is there as our witness to events, of course, and the king’s wife Olympias is quickly revealed to be Hera, one of the far-future advanced beings of this series who have gained time-travel and retroactively inspired the pantheons of various world religions. But neither of them make any particular impact on the established timeline, in the end.

Historical fiction has its place, and author Ben Bova seems to have done all the appropriate research for it here, but that’s not really what I’m looking for in a story like this. It doesn’t help that the protagonist’s current mission is so obscure for so long, or that he’s lost most of his memories again (including his original twentieth-century textbook knowledge of Philip and Alexander, which could have at least added some pathos and dramatic irony to the affair). And it’s certainly not great that the divine villainess’s main role in the plot is to repeatedly torture and rape the hero, a topic which this 1994 pulp adventure is not remotely able to handle with the care that it deserves. But this is primarily just a novel-length treatment of a real military leader’s rise and fall, which I guess is fine as far as it goes.

[Content warning for pedophilia, incest, suicide, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

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TV Review: Party Down, season 3

TV #54 of 2023:

Party Down, season 3

This workplace sitcom about a crew of hapless Hollywood caterers hoping to make it as actors ironically never found much of an audience in its two original 10-episode seasons back in 2009 and 2010, and even today, I don’t know that I would say it’s popular enough to be considered a cult classic, despite the iconic pink bow ties. But the cast is stacked with talented performers like Adam Scott and Jane Lynch and a creative team led by Paul Rudd and Veronica Mars creator Rob Thomas, which I imagine gave them just enough cachet in the industry to eventually get this belated follow-up greenlit. It’s probably still one of the more unexpected modern TV revivals, and at only six episodes, it’s hard for it to truly stake out a justification for its existence, but it brings back and updates the old formula rather nicely overall.

Is it believable that most of the gang would still be stuck in the same dead-end food-service jobs over a decade later? Not necessarily, and a couple of them do need to get roped back in due to sudden changed circumstances, but at its best the new season makes that static status quo textual by forcing the characters to consider how their dreams haven’t come true and perhaps need to change after all this time. Mostly, though, it breezes by on its considerable charm and some imaginative writing choices to work around limited actor availability and COVID constraints. Newcomers Tyrel Jackson Williams and Zoë Chao round out the cast well — not to mention add some welcome diversity to the program — and Jennifer Garner as Henry’s new love interest helps the lack of Lizzy Caplan not sting as much, even if it strains credulity that a high-powered outsider would show up to so many of his catering gigs.

Still, one of the fun aspects of this series has always been its commitment to only depicting those work engagements themselves, with the clear implication that these coworkers are not friends who would hang out with one another outside of their professional obligations. They chat about their personal lives and aspiring entertainment careers while on the job, but we don’t get to see much of those firsthand, and that remains true in the 2023 version. It’s a sad but funny state of affairs, and that’s really this show in a nutshell with its cringe humor and expert Ken Marino pratfalls. I have no idea if they’ll ever make any more of it, but if they do, I’m sure it’ll be eagerly received by the dozens of fans like me.

[Content warning for racism, antisemitism, and drug abuse.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: A Stitch in Time by Andrew J. Robinson

Book #117 of 2023:

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: A Stitch in Time by Andrew J. Robinson (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine #27)

This Star Trek novel was originally published back in the year 2000, soon after the series Deep Space Nine had come to an end. In it, author Andrew J. Robinson writes from the perspective of the recurring character he played on that show across its seven seasons, the fan-favorite Cardassian tailor and former intelligence officer Elim Garak. The book reportedly grew out of a long-running writing exercise the actor maintained as a journal of potential backstory to help him approach the role, which he was later encouraged to expand in this way and cement as canon.

As expected, it demonstrates great insight into the tricky operator and the sort of plots that would involve him in a typical episode. Presented as a letter to his friend Dr. Bashir sometime following the DS9 finale, it primarily relates events from Garak’s earlier life, along with his feelings on the invasion of Cardassia and a few other key moments from the television program, and a little about what he finds himself doing later on. Now admittedly, given how duplicitous we’ve seen the spy could be on the show, I suppose it’s an open question if he can necessarily be considered a reliable narrator in this account. But the yarn he spins is an engaging one, whether taken at face-value or as just another passing facet he’s invented to suit his purposes.

From a lonely childhood and cutthroat military academy to a career under his coldhearted biological father Enabran Tain, there’s a lot here for Garak fans to dig into and enjoy, including some nice further worldbuilding for his people’s culture. It’s more a memoir than a single contained adventure, but it’s all the stronger for that choice, which allows us to see the protagonist gradually shrink from a sensitive youth to the jaded exile we meet in season one. I’d honestly recommend it to anyone who’s finished watching Deep Space Nine, and I particularly suggest listening to the new audiobook version that just came out, which Robinson reads in his familiar character voice.

[Content warning for torture and mention of rape.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac by Gabrielle Zevin

Book #116 of 2023:

Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac by Gabrielle Zevin

Is it a little gimmicky and unrealistic that a 16-year-old would bump her head and lose all memory of the last four years? Sure. But in the hands of author Gabrielle Zevin, that premise turns into a neat exploration of high school identity, at least for a while. YA literature is often at its strongest when it’s mirroring real-world dilemmas faced by young adults, and although few are likely to find themselves in this protagonist’s particular position, that circumstance provides her with the freedom to redefine herself in a way that I think rings true to the adolescent experience overall. Teen cliques are permeable — that’s the insight that gave Freaks and Geeks such lasting power, and Naomi’s amnesia is a great allegory for that rush of changing up your hairstyle, quitting an extracurricular that no longer interests you, and falling headlong into an entirely new social circle.

I also appreciate the subtle indicators throughout the first half of the story that the original version of the girl was different — and specifically meaner — than the new one we’re getting to know. She doesn’t understand what she saw in her boyfriend, who now strikes her as a stuck-up jerk. She isn’t sure how she became one of the popular kids, or why she’s lost touch with some old middle-school friends. She doesn’t know why she’s in a feud with her mom. Like Jason Bourne or the aged-up teenager in 13 Going on 30, she has all these inherited pieces of a life that feels like somebody else’s, and the ability to start over again as someone altogether more pleasant.

Unfortunately, the end of the novel doesn’t live up to its beginning. The plot largely collapses into some love triangle foolishness, and we spend a lot of time on one boy whose mental health issues might be interesting to examine in his own book but make him hard to take seriously as a viable romantic interest here. (He leaves her alone on the beach with no phone and no car for five hours! Come on now.) I’m also disappointed that the main character does eventually get her memories back, and that when she does, there’s not really any conflict with reconciling her past and present selves. It all adds up to a letdown for a title that I was genuinely enjoying early on, so a final rating of three-out-of-five stars seems fair.

[Content warning for disordered eating, suicide, self-harm, and mention of rape.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Star Trek: Short Treks, season 2

TV #53 of 2023:

Star Trek: Short Treks, season 2

This second — and so far, final — batch of quick Trek adventures remedies one of my complaints about the first season: that it was too beholden to the show Discovery in particular, instead of taking advantage of the wider canon at its disposal. And yet, I’m still not totally satisfied by the result, and on balance I’d have to say that this year is actually a step down in overall quality from the one before.

Three of its six episodes feature Captain Pike, which makes them Discovery spinoffs — or perhaps proof-of-concept sketches for his own series Strange New Worlds, which would go on to debut two years later. (I’m watching through the franchise in release order, so I haven’t seen it yet.) Another installment technically ties in more closely with its original parent program by presenting Discovery’s main character Michael Burnham as a child being comforted with a bedtime story. But it’s a pretty generic incident that doesn’t tell us anything new about her, and there’s otherwise no look at any of the DSC main cast, which is both surprising and frustrating given how their sophomore season ended.

But my biggest gripe has to be the sense that compliance with canon is starting to fade in importance for this show, which inherently weakens its appeal for me as a viewer. I honestly don’t know what to do with the animated “Ephraim and Dot” which includes quick glances of iconic TOS moments but seems riddled with continuity errors and weird framing choices that are rather hard to square away. Likewise the jokey commercial at the end of “The Trouble with Edward,” which couldn’t possibly be taken at face-value as canonical. Although I can objectively see why people might enjoy such works that coast by on vibes and gestures at familiar concepts rather than needing to explicitly fit in with established events, they’re not at all what I personally want from this title, or indeed any project in an expanded multimedia universe.

The best showing is the final piece, “Children of Mars,” which I understand is a prequel of sorts to Star Trek: Picard. While not any longer than the others, it feels like a more complete tale and one that nicely threads the needle between universal emotion and Star Trek specificity. Two earth girls (one human and one not) with parents who work on Mars wind up in a schoolyard conflict with each other that plainly stems from their respective dissatisfaction at home rather than any deep rivalry. Like “Calypso” in season one, it builds a small and personal world for us centered around compelling new characters, reveals new information about the surrounding timeline, and doesn’t trip over any contradictions therein. If only every episode could meet that standard, I’d be so much happier with this anthology.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Tomb Sweeping by Alexandra Chang

Book #115 of 2023:

Tomb Sweeping by Alexandra Chang

The short stories in this collection are largely fine, but even the best among them — I’d personally single out “Klara” about an intense college friendship with unexpressed queer undertones and the opening entry “Unknown by Unknown” about a house-sitter’s uncanny interactions with a mysterious painting — don’t have a strong enough conclusion to really tie the piece together. Although the works span a range of genres, most are fairly-grounded character pieces that find their Chinese or Chinese American protagonists struggling in ways that seem drawn from author Alexandra Chang’s #ownvoices experiences. Still, each one seems to trail off in the end, leaving a favorable impression without much follow-through, and there are multiple instances of uncomfortable boundary-overstepping that I wish would have been explicitly addressed. Ultimately I would read more from this writer, but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this particular title.

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Fantasy Bedtime Hour, season 1

TV #52 of 2023:

Fantasy Bedtime Hour, season 1

Okay, this is probably the most obscure show that I’ll ever review, but here goes. Fantasy Bedtime Hour was a public-access cable television series that aired in San Francisco and a few other California markets from 2002 to 2007. It consists of its two hosts, Heatherly and Julie, playing exaggeratedly ditzy versions of themselves as they lie in bed together, seemingly nude under the covers, and discuss the 1977 novel Lord Foul’s Bane, the first volume in Stephen R. Donaldson’s epic fantasy saga The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever. In each of its forty episodes, the girls read/paraphrase a short extract of the book, attempt to analyze it, cut to a pre-filmed and very low-budget recreation of the week’s scenes, and then invite on an ‘expert’ (really just anyone who’s read the novel before) who either patiently tries to correct their many misunderstandings of the text or else gives in to the goofy vibes and just riffs along with them.

And it is absolutely hysterical. I’m sure it helps to already be a fan of the source material, but the specific ways that the creators find to misinterpret Donaldson’s writing are truly inspired. They get character names wrong and draw specious conclusions of meaning from them — Atiaran becomes Atrium, Lord Mhoram becomes Lord Mormon, Tuvor becomes Tuvok, Fangthane becomes Fangthang, etc. — and take clearly-metaphorical turns of phrasing quite literally, to disastrous effect. In my favorite bit, they interpret the villain’s comment that the powerful artifact the Staff of Law “was lost ten times a hundred years ago” not as an archaic way of describing a millennium, but rather to mean that one hundred years ago, the device was lost ten times. Cut to that episode’s reenactment, which is filmed like an old-timey silent movie and, sure enough, shows somebody misplacing or being tricked out of his walking stick over and over and over again.

But for as much as they get hilariously wrong about the story, it’s a clear labor of love. (It would have to be, right, to spend five years on a project like this?) Donaldson himself even appears on the program late in its run, and seems tickled by the attention even as he playfully chastises them for some of their more egregious errors. Yet their commitment to that Ali G / Cunk / Colbert Report stance of comedic ignorance can’t hide how well they themselves understand the book and what they’re doing with it. Still, they start every interview by asking the current expert, “How many times have you read Lord Foul’s Bane?” — followed swiftly by, “And how many times would you say that you understood Lord Foul’s Bane?” — and act suitably impressed no matter what the answer is.

The Covenant books have never been super popular, and for fans like me, it’s poignant both to see a TV show dedicated to them and to realize that its silly little ‘fantasy action sequences’ may well be the closest we ever get to a true film adaptation. I imagine I’ll have the actors’ stilted intonation of lines like “Don’t touch me! I’m a leper!” running through my head the next time I reread the series myself. Yet I think the jokes would still land just fine even if you’re unfamiliar with the novels and are as perplexed by the Unbeliever’s strange journey as Julie and Heatherly seem to be.

Tragically, the one-season show is verging on lost media today. It never got an official DVD release or anything, and I doubt that any of its music was licensed through proper channels, though setting the opening credits to “What’s Up?” by 4 Non Blondes remains a pretty apt choice. The website http://www.fantasybedtimehour.com was still online when I began watching the program earlier this year, but now appears to have gone down, presumably for good. At least a version has been preserved on the Internet Archive, along with copies of every episode (which I’ll link below, as they’re so hard to track down these days).

That’s a lucky fluke, as two decades on, the Fantasy Bedtime Hour has become a curious time capsule and representation of the disposability inherent to entertainment of its pre-streaming, Web 1.0 era. I can’t find much surviving documentation of how contemporary audiences received the thing, or whether the networks censored any of the profanity that persists in the digital uploads (and which grows more blatant as the series goes on, along with the hosts’ drinking of stronger and stronger alcohol on-camera). The whole effort feels like a passion project among friends that, although made for broadcast, perhaps wasn’t supposed to stick around for this long afterwards. But personally, I’m glad that it has and that I got to see it before it disappeared forever.

[Content warning for ableism including slurs and discussion of rape.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Book #114 of 2023:

Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid

I suppose it says something about the overall quality of author Taylor Jenkins Reid’s extended saga of fictional twentieth-century celebrities that this 2021 novel (the third of four so far, though they are so discrete that they can really be read in any order) is my least favorite of the lot. This volume tracks the children of Mick Riva — the famous singer who’s one of the titular spouses from The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and an acquaintance of Daisy Jones & The Six — first in childhood and then as young adults, throwing a party that eventually gets out of hand. The story progresses nonlinearly, with flashbacks exploring different elements of everyone’s history and especially the romantic past of the protagonists’ parents. Those are actually my favorite parts of the text: the doomed love affair, the sad fate of their mother after their dad walked out, and how the eldest daughter had to step up to become a de-facto parent to the three younger kids, despite only being a teen herself. It’s an exquisite family tragedy a la Celeste Ng, and I’ve relished every moment of it.

I don’t like the second half of the narrative nearly as much. The idea is that everybody’s separate issues come crashing together in one chaotic evening, but the melodrama runs high and the setup for all of those threads to converge at once doesn’t feel particularly organic to me. There’s also a major disconnect between the characterization of the central figures in the backstory versus the present day, which is wilder when you remember they’re still only supposed to be in their late teens or twenties. (Categorically, I would have pegged them all as at least a decade older, and the world-weariness that comes of having to grow up too soon doesn’t quite explain that away.) Plus they’re all rich models and professional surfers and such by now, which makes their problems a little harder to take seriously, too.

It’s not a total failure, and I would say that the better pieces make the whole thing worth reading, whether you’re an existing fan of the loose series around this book or not. Certainly, having already read the follow-up Carrie Soto Is Back which mentions the incident in passing, it was super interesting to see that future heroine in a much less flattering light here, as the woman who sleeps with Nina Riva’s husband. Connections like that are fun to spot, but that and a certain queer awakening are the rare bright spots as the plot winds its way to an explosively overwrought close.

[Content warning for gun violence, alcoholism, and drug abuse.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English by Valerie Fridland

Book #113 of 2023:

Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English by Valerie Fridland

I taught a few undergraduate sociolinguistics courses when I was in grad school, and if this book had been available back then, I could see myself including a few of its chapters as assigned reading. It’s an engaging popular science text, and I applaud its stated aim to bring its subject matter out of obscure academic journals and to the attention of a wider audience. Specifically, author and linguist Valerie Fridland wants more people to know that certain features in speech that get derided as “bad English” in fact carry great social meaning and have surprisingly lengthy histories as established variants from the norm, despite being commonly mistaken as recent deviations.

It’s a valuable lesson, to be sure, and well-supported with findings from historical linguistics on how such elements have developed and changed over time. Nevertheless, I don’t feel that this title represents a coherent argument along those lines so much as just an interesting survey of particular speech items. The writer points out for instance what’s communicated about background and stance when someone ends a verb with -in’ instead of -ing, and talks about why the former might be an appealing option despite the stigma of being considered improper, but she doesn’t really ground that in any broader discussion of how all language standards are artificially constructed, socially enforced, and inherently marginalizing.

The thesis seems to be: look at how neat these specific things that people don’t like actually are! But it doesn’t deconstruct the nature of that dislike in a satisfying or convincing manner, nor ever make the case that we shouldn’t need a compelling story about an element of language variation in order to stand up for linguistic pluralism in and of itself. Also notably absent is any significant coverage of accents and dialect markers that correlate with race; despite being frequent prescriptivist targets and impetus for discrimination, these are overlooked in favor of expressions like “like” and “literally” that are more linked to the speech of younger women / youth in general. (That’s not to imply that sexism and ageism aren’t worthy attitudes to confront, but leaving out racism is an odd oversight and the book never explicitly narrows its intended focus to exclude it.)

All of which is to say, I’ve found this to be more of a good read than a great one, though I will wholly admit that I might be too knowledgeable and opinionated on the overall field of linguistics to be the ideal reader here. Still, I have learned a lot of new information, and am particularly interested in the research on filled pauses like “um” and “uh” — what they subtly indicate about what’s about to follow in a sentence, and how they are becoming more lexicalized as meaningful words rather than continuing to be strictly automatic in spoken language. It’s the discrete factoids like that that I imagine will stick with me about the work, even as I wish that all those separate pieces had been woven together more strongly throughout.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The House Is on Fire by Rachel Beanland

Book #112 of 2023:

The House Is on Fire by Rachel Beanland

A fascinating work of historical fiction about the Richmond Theatre fire, a now-obscure tragedy that in 1811 became our young nation’s first national news story about an event of such mass casualties. 72 people died in the flames, including the sitting governor of Virginia, and author Rachel Beanland has done a great job with the available archive material to flesh out this plausible account of the night and its aftermath. (I particularly appreciate that she places the fire itself fairly early in the narrative — not so much tracing the journeys that terminated there in some dramatic climax, but instead exploring the slower and sadder ramifications that followed for the community and a few specific individuals who survived.)

The greatest triumph of the book is in its reading between the lines of the official records to carefully prod at that received history, like questioning why three-quarters of the dead were women and if perhaps the fleeing men left their partners behind in the chaos. Several of Beanland’s viewpoint figures are enslaved persons, and she writes with deep empathy of how the regular abuses they already suffered would have been compounded and catalyzed by this new trauma — and by the theatre owners’ attempts to blame their own stagehand’s mishap on a fictitious slave revolt. She also mentions in an afterword the intriguing detail that contemporary reports suspected some folks who went missing that evening simply took the opportunity to flee for their freedom. And although her story dramatizes one such attempt, it likewise emphasizes how the horrors of slavery continued on unchanged for most in the wake of the affair.

This was my first real exposure to the Richmond disaster, and I’m sure that the writer has tweaked certain hopefully-small details to better suit the needs of her novel’s plot. But it’s immersive and clearly well-researched, and it closes with a bibliography of suggested nonfiction on the subject. So I’m overall glad she’s brought the tale to life this way and allowed it to once more reach a wide audience.

[Content warning for rape, incest, pedophilia, domestic abuse, racism, sexism, and antisemitism.]

★★★★☆