The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

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.

★★★☆☆

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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.]

★★★★☆

TV Review: Star Trek: Discovery, season 2

TV #51 of 2023:

Star Trek: Discovery, season 2

The cast still does a fine job emoting with the material they’re given in this second season of Star Trek: Discovery, but there aren’t enough smaller personal moments to convincingly sell the relationships before they wind up in crisis. It also doesn’t help that I like science-fiction primarily for the plot, and everything here is even more of a mess on that front. To some extent it emulates the giddy propulsion of the show’s first year, but that story burned through ideas in the service of its big twisty reveals, which were fun to see deployed even when predicted in advance. This time, we don’t get plot twists so much as a sequence of sudden developments that spring out of nowhere and are never adequately explained. Mysterious signals in space; visions of angels; hallucinations of a dead friend no one else can see — what is this, Battlestar Galactica?

We do learn the reasons behind all of those events after a while, but it generally boils down to a rogue A.I. and a time-travel predestination paradox, neither of which holds up well under logical scrutiny. The villain of the piece is the most frustrating, in both its motivations and the means of its eventual defeat, though that’s probably too spoilerish to describe in more detail in this review. Yet the build-up to that threat is absurd, too. The previous finale teased the arrival of the USS Enterprise, and it’s quickly confirmed here that this is the ship pre-Kirk, with his predecessor Christopher Pike beaming aboard Discovery and taking over as acting captain. So we don’t get the fan-service of a recast William Shatner / Chris Pine, but his loyal lieutenant Spock should still be present in this era. And he does eventually arrive in the form of new actor Ethan Peck, but there are no fewer than four fake-outs first, lifting audience expectations only to have someone else step off the transporter bay instead.

This is a series that just can’t commit to what it wants to be. The writers could choose to either fold existing major characters like Spock into the narrative organically — these are the adventures that the Vulcan had before TOS! — or else have those figures function as quick fun cameos — check out who else was around for this! — but this year tries to chart a middle course that really doesn’t work for me, perpetually delaying the foregone conclusion of the man’s appearance while talking up how important he is to the action unfolding in the meantime. It’s an approach that already had dubious success back in the 1984 movie Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, and is even less effective for the franchise to repeat decades later.

Speaking of diminishing returns, Section 31 plays a rather large role too, less clandestine and thematically opposed to the nobility of Starfleet than ever. The concept of the dark underbelly to Gene Roddenberry’s utopian dreams once had real bite to it, but at this point, they just seem to be a faction like any other and are apparently known widely across the fleet. Maybe that’s the next item that Star Trek: Discovery will retcon, as there is a noticeable effort this season to try and address some of the things that made the previous run fit poorly as a prequel to established canon. (Personally, I like the idea that Pike is a bit of a luddite who insists that the shiny new technology on Discovery doesn’t have a place on Enterprise, which is a goofy but reasonable workaround to why we never saw all those bells and whistles in the 1960s program. But the ultimate declaration that it’s now become treason for anyone to mention certain topics like the spore drive is too silly by far.)

In the end, the Discovery narrowly escapes in a way that strands it somewhere unexpected, which I guess means we’re getting a Voyager sort of premise beginning in season 3. That’s a retooling that will require the creative team to start over largely from scratch, which can only be a good thing after all the misfires here.

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

★★☆☆☆

Movie Review: Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour (2023)

Movie #6 of 2023:

Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour (2023)

After ten smash albums over the past seventeen years — roughly half her life to date — the country-turned-pop artist Taylor Swift has amassed a body of work well worthy of retrospective. That’s the motivation behind her recent Eras tour, and so too this concert film, which was recorded over several of those shows and faithfully channels the superstar’s charismatic act on-stage. It’s probably still a poor substitute for the energy of seeing the spectacle live in a sold-out stadium, but the movie version does a fine job at bringing its subject to life, particularly in capturing her facial expressions, choreography, and other details that wouldn’t have been nearly so easy to spot from the typical venue seating. The singer knows how to play to the cameras as well as the crowd, and there’s a resulting intimacy in her performance that’s as magnetic as the impressive string of showstopping numbers from across her career.

The background sets and stage effects are imaginatively stunning too, changing along with Taylor’s costume to mark her various ‘eras’ over the course of the affair. That organization and the accompanying song selection represent my only real critique of the project: while the picks from each individual album are generally grouped together, the records themselves don’t progress chronologically (or in any other logical way I could determine) as the concert goes on, which makes it harder to track her evolving musical style as I assumed was kind of the whole point here. There’s also a heavy recency bias, with for example six tracks each from her later albums Folklore and Midnights, while poor Speak Now gets only two if you include what plays over the credits, and her self-titled country debut is represented just once. That adds a certain unevenness to the evening, which might not have been so noticeable had not every section been given a dramatic announcement screen demarcating its arrival.

Nevertheless: if you’re any sort of fan of Swift’s music, this is an undeniable treat. It’s an immersive recreation of the concert experience, with no cuts to behind-the-scenes antics or interviews or anything, and while a few songs have apparently been dropped from the filmed setlist, the runtime still comes in at almost three hours of hit after hit. Catching the limited theatrical run is a fun experience in and of itself, with (in my showing at least) a clearly multi-generational audience often singing along or getting up out of their chairs to dance. Granted, three hours of back-to-back Taylor Swift songs presumably self-selects a specific type of viewer anyway, but if that sounds like you, I do recommend finding time for this.

Fun random bonus: perhaps to the chagrin of the middle-schooler chaperone sitting near me, this is the rare PG-13 movie to feature multiple uses of the f-word, as the relevant lyrics from “champagne problems,” “betty,” and “All Too Well (10 Minute Version)” have not been censored in any way. The more you know!

★★★★☆

Book Review: A Caribbean Mystery by Agatha Christie

Book #111 of 2023:

A Caribbean Mystery by Agatha Christie (Miss Marple #10)

I always find it somewhat absurd when one of author Agatha Christie’s detective characters simply happens to stumble over a murder, but this premise has to be in the running for among her most ludicrous. Whilst on vacation, Miss Marple talks to another traveler who mentions having a photograph someone gave him of a likely serial wife-killer: a man who twice, under two different names, had a spouse supposedly attempt suicide and then soon afterward die for real. The person who gifted him the snapshot suspected but could not prove foul play, and he’s just kept it in his wallet as a fun story to share ever since. Upon this particular telling, he goes pale right as he’s about to pull it out to show the old lady, with the implication being that he’s suddenly recognized the murderer nearby. But there are several other men in the vicinity, so even after the chatty fellow himself is shortly killed, she can’t be sure who silenced him — only that presumably, the killer is once again planning to strike down his current partner and didn’t want anyone around who could identify his pattern.

It’s all as convoluted as it sounds, even before getting into the various suspects and their marital relations, and the text is peppered with all sorts of racist characterizations about the local staff at the Caribbean resort. I still like Marple herself as a protagonist, and she’s joined in her sleuthing for part of this novel by an even more elderly gentleman who’s the undisputed cantankerous bright spot of the affair. But overall, I can’t say that it’s one of the writer’s finest mysteries.

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: Holly by Stephen King

Book #110 of 2023:

Holly by Stephen King

This is the sixth Stephen King story to feature private investigator Holly Gibney, following the Bill Hodges trilogy (Mr. Mercedes; Finders Keepers; End of Watch), the novel The Outsider, and the novella If It Bleeds. The previous three entries all found that protagonist and her friends facing off against some sort of supernatural being, so it’s a bit surprising to see this volume return to the saga’s slightly more-grounded crime thriller roots. Granted, the macabre premise is still pretty unrealistic — a pair of elderly cannibalistic serial killers preying undetected on a small community — but it’s firmly wicked as opposed to spooky. There’s a shout-out at one point in the text to Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch novels, and this is the kind of plot you might expect to see in that type of series, just with a more sickening degree of psychological horror and gore.

Like many Bosch books — or the Bill Hodges ones, for that matter — there’s no mystery here for readers to solve alongside the detective. We’re instead given the names of the villains and treated to multiple scenes of their foul acts, so that the tension rests squarely on how they’ll be caught, whether their latest victim will survive, and what other damage they’ll cause in the meantime. And they are a creepy couple: two married college professors in their twilight years, outwardly respectable, who have somehow convinced themselves that a diet of human flesh will help keep them young. (In some Stephen King projects, that conjecture might turn out to be true, but here the evidence mostly suggests that they’re deluding themselves, which of course does little to mitigate the terror.) They get to know their targets socially, learn their schedules and waylay them on a dark street sometime, and then lock them in a cell in their basement until it’s time for the butcher’s knife to come out.

By striking only once every few years — freezing the meat and parceling it out slowly as brain parfaits and other such stomach-churning concoctions — they’ve managed to avoid anyone linking those disappearances together, until Holly Gibney is hired to look into the current case by the missing woman’s mother. She’s as fun a character as ever in the ensuing investigation, though her obsessive-compulsive tics and hypochondriac nature are on full display in the era of COVID-19. I know King has gotten criticism from some quarters for his portrayal of the pandemic in this book, but in my opinion, it’s no different from how he’s always allowed the cultural issues of the day to inflect his fiction. The coronavirus was/is a heavily politicized event, in which people’s personal choices like wearing a mask or getting vaccinated represent powerful social signals to everyone around them. It seems fair game, in depicting the world of 2021, to include such touchstones and what they would mean to a person like Holly. Heck, you could even read this and think she’s a flawed antiheroine being unreasonable in her precautions and judgments of others, though my own perspective and what I know of the author’s politics wouldn’t agree.

No, I think King is more revealing in his treatment of the antagonists, sick as they are. They’re older than him by a good decade or so, but his sorrowful descriptions of dealing with an aging body and mind feel rooted in real-life experience and empathy, as does the anger and smug satisfaction at overcoming ageist underestimations. In his mid-seventies, King is still writing some of his very best material, while his invented killers succeed in their own craft by likewise defying expectations of what someone could do at their age. Even once Gibney has them in her sights, she wrongly assumes that they’re covering for, or at worst abetting, some unknown younger relation, rather than being the actual murderers she’s hunting.

Overall the novel is quite sharp, and it picks up steam as it goes along. I think the title is a bit odd — there’s nothing about this particular adventure that makes it strike me as the definitive tale of its heroine or anything, and it seems like it would be a bad place for a fresh reader to start — but that’s not a fault against the work itself. If you can handle the inherent ghoulishness of the subject matter, the cat-and-mouse game between the cannibals and their quirky new adversary is simply superb.

[Content warning for gun violence, rape, suicide, homophobia including slurs, and racism including slurs.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Sunlit Man by Brandon Sanderson

Book #109 of 2023:

The Sunlit Man by Brandon Sanderson

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

This is the fourth and final ‘Secret Project’ release from author Brandon Sanderson, representing the novels he wrote in his spare time during the early COVID-19 pandemic and later dramatically unveiled via a record-setting Kickstarter for their publication. As perhaps expected, it is much closer in feel (and I would say quality) to its fellow Cosmere adventures Tress of the Emerald Sea and Yumi and the Nightmare Painter than the unrelated offbeat comedy The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England. It’s also well-placed at the end of that loose sequence, sending off the entire experiment quite nicely.

The story is set in the cosmere, that interconnected universe that contains many of the writer’s other works, on a spinning world too close to its sun where humanity clings to survival on flying cities that perpetually flee into the night to escape the ravages of the intense solar rays. There a character we’ve met before in The Stormlight Archives appears, on the run from his own dangerous foes, and reluctantly gets caught up in local affairs whilst continuing to look over his shoulder for the much deadlier threat that’s after him. In other words, it’s the timeworn trope of the drifter who comes to town not looking for trouble yet ultimately becoming an unlikely champion for the community, which Sanderson executes with his usual aplomb.

The broader appeal for returning readers is that all of this is set sometime in the future, substantially after the contemporary events unfolding in places like Scadrial and Roshar. (That’s why I won’t spoil the former name of our protagonist, who goes by Nomad here, even though his identity is clear fairly early in the text and the eventual confirmation isn’t played as any kind of twist.) It’s our first official glimpse at this later era, and while the details are largely just intriguing footnotes for now, those are the exact sort of breadcrumbs that have long powered the cottage industry of fans scouring Sanderson’s writing for clues about the larger ongoing narrative and updating the Coppermind wiki accordingly. It’s not my own favorite way of engaging with his fiction — I much prefer the smaller personal scope than the big implied crossovers, at least so far — but it’s still a thrill to see certain pieces clicking into place. If you’ve ever wondered how the shades from the novella Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell fit into the bigger plan for the franchise, this book will help you draw those connections.

But personally, I’m more here for the immediate tale of a weary stranger who forges his own unexpected connections and finds new reasons to keep on fighting another day. The hero and the friends he makes are well-drawn, and their struggles against a tyrant in the inhospitable environment are exciting even outside of any grand serialized implications. An authorial afterword cites the Mad Max films as among the title’s influences, and I can definitely see how elements of Fury Road could have inspired particular scenes and plot developments. Overall a fine read, though probably one requiring a heavy grounding in the relevant cosmere background in order to fully understand and appreciate.

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

★★★★☆