The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Book of Time by John Peel

Book #70 of 2024:

Book of Time by John Peel (Diadem #11)

The middle-grade / YA Diadem line was released in waves under a succession of publishers: first Scholastic for the original six novels from 1997 to 1998, then Llewellyn (who gave the saga a temporary new subtitle of “Worlds of Magic”) for the next four from 2005 to 2006. I don’t know what went on behind the scenes either time, but the final sprint saw author John Peel self-publish two additional installments in 2012 as a single bound volume, which I have to imagine was intended to wrap everything up.

…and it’s unfortunately not very good, at least in this front half. The bones of a story are here in #11, but it’s really only a promising rough draft at best. An editor was sorely needed: for the many typos and awkward phrasings that riddle the text, for the inconsistent tone to the previous adventures, and for all the basic scene and plot mechanics that are confusingly presented herein.

It’s a shame, because this is the sort of premise that should be an easy layup for a seasoned writer so deep into an ongoing serialized project. We pick up a few dangling threads from before, with a shadowy foe scheming in the wings and Score reeling from the revelation that Shanara — spoiler alert — is his long-lost mother from his girlfriend Helaine’s homeworld. The antagonist is revealed to be an agent of Destiny, whose consciousness somehow survived her mortal fate back in book #6 and is understandably now bent on revenge against the heroes, while the earth boy is angry about all the lies and demanding that his duplicitous parent explain herself. Yet when she tries to summon a vision to do just that, the villains twist the spell to send the party hurtling back in time to the Diadem’s ancient past.

Pixel, Jenna, and Shanara find themselves at the height of the Triad’s power from the initial series backstory, when the tyrants’ servant Sarman had yet to betray and overthrow them to seize the mantle on Jewel for himself. The Three Who Rule are cruel torturers, as we see firsthand when they create the incorporeal Oracle from the shade of a man that they just slaughtered and wish to continue abusing. But the future visitors worry that if they do anything to intervene in such atrocities, they’ll disrupt the proper flow of history and perhaps paradoxically prevent their own births. Meanwhile, Score and Helaine have arrived centuries earlier on Ordin, where they learn that Traxis and Sarman were both members of the royal family as well (Queen Shanara’s brother-in-law and his cousin, respectively) before they ever set their sights on conquering the wider Diadem. The testy lovebirds likewise cannot alter the course of known events, which makes for a somewhat flat narrative even if it didn’t end on a cliffhanger with so much unresolved.

Most of this could have worked, with a little polish. Take out Score’s anxiety that people will think he’s gay for kissing Helaine-dressed-as-Renald, the totally unnecessary use of the r-slur, and Jenna’s sudden insecure cattiness; clean up the action so that it reads more clearly; give the protagonists actual accomplishments and meaningful obstacles to overcome instead of reducing them to passive witnesses… These are the kinds of things I might have suggested to raise this sequel to the level of its predecessors, if I had been the one tasked with editing such a flawed manuscript. Too bad nobody else seems to have gotten the gig, either.

★★☆☆☆

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TV Review: Star Trek: Lower Decks, season 3

TV #17 of 2024:

Star Trek: Lower Decks, season 3

This season starts out a little slowly, but it certainly hits its stride again by the end, with the episode set on Deep Space Nine and the one with the unexpected return of wayward ensign Peanut Hamper as particular formula-breaking standouts. At its best — and a lot of this run is up there! — the animated Star Trek comedy is both telling lovingly esoteric jokes about the franchise lore and spinning engaging new stories to further develop its characters. At this point, the crew of the Cerritos (the titular bottom ranks and the bridge officers alike) have been through so many adventures together that the ship’s initial characterization as a place for perpetual second-stringers doing all the boring work no longer really makes sense, so it’s good to see the show / the other people in Starfleet recognizing that and shifting the framing accordingly.

(Would I still watch a series that was legitimately about the unsung menial side of life in Trek’s version of the future? Absolutely. But it’s also great for these heroes to actually get treated as such while they continue to riff on the absurdities of the science-fiction universe around them.)

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Bronzed Beasts by Roshani Chokshi

Book #69 of 2024:

The Bronzed Beasts by Roshani Chokshi (The Gilded Wolves #3)

This is the seventh book I’ve read from YA author Roshani Chokshi, and while I’m glad I finally got around to finishing this particular trilogy, I think this is where I part ways with the writer for good, as her style has unfortunately just never really clicked for me. I joked that the first volume in this series felt like thinly-disguised Six of Crows fanfiction in a National Treasure AU, and those parallels have remained throughout the sequels, without ever blossoming into anything more distinctive. The comparison does a disservice to Leigh Bardugo’s Crows, however, who are generally much richer-drawn as characters and placed within more interesting and challenging plots and fantasy settings.

The storyline here is largely a repeat of what’s happened already, including an absurd degree of continued mutual pining between protagonists who obviously like each other and don’t have any excuse not to talk about their feelings. The only meaningful new wrinkle is that one specific individual spends the beginning of the novel away from his friends who believe he’s betrayed them, which is merely non-romantic angst built on further miscommunication. And there are the requisite puzzles and clues that some ancient benefactors have helpfully laid out to help guide the heroes to their latest macguffin, of course.

On the whole, the Gilded Wolves sequence isn’t terrible, especially for readers who may not have read widely in its genre quite yet. The cast is cross-culturally diverse (though somewhat tokenized), and the affectionate banter among the juvenile grave-robbing heist crew is fun, at least when the resident historian isn’t explaining rudimentary concepts like scapegoats or the myth of Icarus. But this title is the clear worst of its lot, even before its unsatisfying nonsequitur of an ending that does nothing to clarify the lingering vagueness of the historical fiction worldbuilding. I can’t bring myself to give it even the middle-of-the-road three-star rating that I’ve awarded to every Chokshi book before this.

[Content warning for gore.]

This volume: ★★☆☆☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Volumes ranked: 1 > 2 > 3

TV Review: American Gods, season 2

TV #16 of 2024:

American Gods, season 2

I’m finally circling back around to this show almost six years after I saw season one, so my memory of it isn’t necessarily the clearest. (Luckily, I reread the original Neil Gaiman novel so many times as a theology-obsessed teenager that it’s burned pretty strongly into my mind.) I do remember being initially upset with how much had been altered from the book, but gradually won over across that first year by the striking visuals and the greater characterization given to the protagonist Shadow Moon. I also really appreciated the new character pairing of Laura and Mad Sweeney, each more prominent than they were on the page and absolutely dynamite now together, while being not quite as taken with the same expansion of Salim and the Jinn or Bilquis, who mostly use their increased screentime to just stand around talking.

Between seasons, the showrunner changed and at least one high-profile cast member departed amid reports of a troubled set (Gillian Anderson as Media), which is one reason I didn’t make it a priority to keep watching. Now that I have, I’d agree with the general consensus that this sophomore outing represents an unfortunate step down for the series. Periodic moments are tremendous at channeling the basic premise here — human belief through storytelling creates and empowers supernatural beings who struggle once it falters, although some of them manage to redefine themselves to survive in the modern world — and Laura and Sweeney remain fun, but the larger plot stalls out to a considerable degree. Wednesday is still traveling the country recruiting the old gods to join his cause for a war against the new ones, but he doesn’t make any particular tangible progress on that front, and his enemies like Mr. World aren’t especially well-defined in their own goals either, leading to a lot of ominous-sounding scenes on both sides that don’t ever amount to anything real. It’s become a show that’s fairly uneven overall, though the better elements continue to impress.

Now that I’m relatively back on board, I’ll go ahead and watch the last season too, since it’s only ten more episodes and I do want to see how this program handles the Lakeside subplot (in the red-flag hands of yet another new showrunner). I don’t imagine events will reach the end of the source material, as I know a fourth season was being planned when the thing got canceled, so I’m not exactly expecting a satisfying conclusion to all this. But a little more time with these characters is justification enough to push on, I suppose.

[Content warning for gun violence, torture, body horror, suicide, gore, homophobia, and racism including slurs.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Seinfeld, season 6

TV #15 of 2024:

Seinfeld, season 6

I don’t know if this qualifies as a hot take nearly three decades after the fact, but I personally think that Seinfeld is a stronger, funnier, and more distinctive sitcom when it leans away from its instincts for wacky zaniness and into the pedantically mundane (the opposing Kramer and Jerry poles of the show’s DNA, if you will). That’s why my favorite episodes tend to be the ones where the characters are just talking with each other over the inherent absurdities of life, like a long wait to be seated at a restaurant or a parking garage where no one can remember where they left the car.

Unfortunately, the series is too often veering to the opposite extreme at this point in its span, devising outlandish scenarios that could never remotely happen to anyone watching in the audience at home. Back in season 4, George gets called out for the gross behavior of double-dipping a chip into a shared salsa dish between bites, and a lively conversation ensues about the appropriateness of that. Relatable! Two years further on, a comparable plot now has him rescuing someone else’s half-eaten food from the garbage to finish it himself, which presumably fewer of us have ever considered.

Season 6 also finds new jobs for both George and Elaine that are not particularly interesting. He got the position with the Yankees that he interviewed for in the previous finale, despite how such a bumbling schlemiel type is always more comedic in his failures, and it mostly seems like an excuse for cameos and references that mean nothing to me as a non-fan so far removed from the players’ heyday. I don’t really get the intended humor of his rambling offscreen boss voiced by Larry David, either. Meanwhile, Elaine’s career has taken a complete 180 from her previously grounded work in the publishing business, and she randomly becomes an overqualified personal assistant to Mr. Pitt, a man who’s more of a loose bundle of eccentricities than a consistently-defined character. I’m having flashbacks to the later seasons of Dawson’s Creek, when the writers couldn’t figure out what to do with Pacey once he was out of high school and so kept throwing him into one bizarre employment situation after another with basically no justification at all.

Is it funny? Sure, for the most part. The episode “The Jimmy” has definitely aged the worst, featuring both a running joke about Kramer being mistaken for someone with a mental disability and the suggestion that Jerry’s dentist — played by Bryan Cranston in another new recurring role — may have sexually assaulted him while he was knocked out by nitrous oxide. It’s hard to muster any kind of defense for stories like that, and thankfully most of the rest in this era aren’t quite so awful, especially with all the fun callbacks that are starting to pile up. Still, even at its best, this season isn’t really playing to the program’s particular strengths.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times by Michelle Obama

Book #68 of 2024:

The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times by Michelle Obama

As a follow-up to her acclaimed 2018 title Becoming, this 2022 release from former First Lady Michelle Obama isn’t nearly so noteworthy. Whereas that debut work was a powerful but straightforward memoir, this one blends the autobiographical genre with self-help, to somewhat mixed effect. Some pieces of advice here, like strategies for channeling your fears, dealing with anxiety, and advocating for yourself and your marginalized background, seem genuinely useful! Others I feel more skeptical towards, especially when they register as empty generational complaints about participation trophies, actions and relations in the outside world being inherently more meaningful than their digital equivalents, and so on. And since the author doesn’t cite any particular experts or studies to support her various claims, it all reads like just a catalog of tools she’s anecdotally found to work well for challenges in her own life situation — which is obviously quite different from what the rest of us are going through!

The best sections are those which do focus specifically on her own experiences, and I’m glad that they mostly cover separate material from Becoming. But I think I would have preferred a second volume that was entirely in that vein, rather than this hybrid approach.

★★★☆☆

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.

★★★☆☆

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.]

★★★☆☆