The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Magical Bears in the Context of Contemporary Political Theory by Jenna Katerin Moran

Book #83 of 2023:

Magical Bears in the Context of Contemporary Political Theory by Jenna Katerin Moran

I had complicated feelings about the intense weirdness of author Jenna Katerin Moran’s novels Fable of the Swan and The Night-Bird’s Feather, but in each case, I gradually came around to the volume’s charms and felt like it ultimately managed to achieve something sublime. When I saw this collection of short fiction, I was curious to see whether the constraints of that medium would help offset the writer’s unorthodox sensibilities (since short stories by their nature allow for more unexplained elements in service to their emotional impact) or amplify them (since there wouldn’t be as much time for the absurdities to accumulate gravity and finally click). Unfortunately for me as a reader, I’m afraid the result falls more toward the latter option.

The running throughline that gives this book its title is an urban fantasy realm populated by Care Bear knockoffs with darker powers and a general noir tone: Femme Fatale Bear, Nihilism Bear, Transgression Bear, and so on. Not every chapter connects directly to that setting, although the whole work apparently takes place within the wider ‘Hitherby Dragons’ series, whatever that entails. But whether ursine-related or not, these entries generally leave me cold. They do manage to amuse with puns and other witticisms, and as usual, there is a strong streak of the surreally absurd that leads to some ridiculous imagery, like fetuses using placenta as currency — because ‘plaquarteras’ would be too much money; get it? — or a Fisher-Price playset that becomes a postapocalyptic weapon. But none of it moves me the way the characters in those longer plots eventually could. It instead mostly reads like a sequence of unedited free-writes, and while I hope that it finds its proper audience, I just don’t get it overall.

★★☆☆☆

Like this review?
–Throw me a quick one-time donation here!
https://ko-fi.com/lesserjoke
–Subscribe here to support my writing and weigh in on what I read next!
https://patreon.com/lesserjoke
–Follow along on Goodreads here!
https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/6288479-joe-kessler
–Or click here to browse through all my previous reviews!
https://lesserjoke.home.blog

Book Review: Orion by Ben Bova

Book #82 of 2023:

Orion by Ben Bova (Orion #1)

I loved this science-fiction novel — and to a lesser extent the loose series that follows — when I was a teen, and I’m glad to find that it holds up pretty well today. It’s definitely a product of its 1984 publication date in some ways: the hero is a muscular ubermensch with such complete control over his body that he can consciously regulate his temperature or speed up his perceptions during battle, his love-at-first-sight romantic interest is practically the only woman in the book and doesn’t get nearly as much characterization as the men, and the perspective on non-western cultures can be a bit simplistic (in addition to using some now-outdated racial terminology). But it’s also a great time-travel story that helped spark my lifelong interests in anthropology, history, and comparative religions.

Our titular protagonist is living in the late 20th century when he learns that he is actually the champion of a godlike being, who directs him to stop an enemy intent on destroying humanity’s progress towards a utopian galactic civilization. They use the names Ormazd and Ahriman respectively, the Zoroastrian deities of light and darkness, and it’s eventually revealed that all earth’s various divine legends are based on them and their ilk (although we don’t get to see much of them until the sequels). Here, the dark figure is attempting to destroy an experimental fusion reactor, and when Orion successfully stops him, he next finds himself relocated over time and space to the Mongol Empire a few generations after Genghis Khan. It turns out he and his adversary are moving in opposite directions across history, and in each era, the warrior must uncover and oppose Ahriman’s plan to subvert the natural timeline. And in their every encounter, he knows the other man better while being less well-known in return, River Song-style. A reincarnation of the same woman accompanies him too, although she doesn’t retain her memories from life to life, only her personality, her physical appearance, and her attraction to Orion.

The plot ultimately reaches back to the Stone Age and beyond, where there are some solid sci-fi twists, which I won’t spoil here but will merely note have stayed with me for a good long while. The saga goes in some odd directions after this point — I believe the next volume dumps Orion into the Trojan War for some reason — but this first one was always my favorite, and it’s been fun reencountering it as an adult, even if the flaws are a bit more evident than I had remembered.

[Content warning for gun violence, gore, violence against children, genocide, and rape.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: A Flaw in the Design by Nathan Oates

Book #81 of 2023:

A Flaw in the Design by Nathan Oates

This story idea had potential! English professor Gil has been estranged from his millionaire sister for years, ever since her troubled son tried drowning the man’s daughter when they were kids. Now he’s 17 and orphaned, and his parents’ will has sent him to live with his uncle’s family, where everyone else seems convinced that he’s turned his life around but our hero believes that he’s still the same sociopath underneath — and possibly even responsible for the car crash that killed his mom and dad. Unable to make anyone else see reason, the protagonist steadily declines into an angry and paranoid wreck, especially after his precocious nephew joins his creative writing class and starts submitting assignments of fiction that read like thinly-veiled confessions and threats.

All of this could have worked, were it not for how little I cared for either character. The teacher repeatedly lies to his wife and children for no particular reason, and there’s a quasi-predatory vibe to the way he talks about both his female students and his teenage daughters that really set me on edge, even when he isn’t lashing out at them directly. Meanwhile the boy is pretty far from a criminal mastermind, and I found it impossible to root for him either, no matter how much I came to dislike his older relative over the course of the novel. He’s set up as some sort of evil genius, but his actions belie that at every turn, making all manner of mistakes that any reasonably sharp opponent could have seized on to prove his guilt. Luckily for him, he’s instead given Gil, who brings plenty of his own unforced errors to their contest.

I kept reading in the hope that some postmodern twist at the end would help redeem this project. Maybe the kid is innocent, and all the evidence against him is just combined coincidence and delusion? Or maybe the uncle is the truly wicked one, and he’s trying to frame the youth in order to steal away his fortune? But no — it’s exactly as straightforward as it first appears, with one mediocre figure squaring off against another such that neither’s victory could ever feel particularly well-earned. How tedious, save for the chuckle I got at the book’s ironically apt title.

[Content warning for rape, racism, incest, and suicide.]

★★☆☆☆

TV Review: I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson, season 3

TV #31 of 2023:

I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson, season 3

I laughed during every episode, if not necessarily during each sketch. As usual, comedian Tim Robinson’s offbeat humor fluctuates between entertaining and simply off-putting, with a bit too much angry shouting for my tastes and plenty a skit that either goes on too long or lacks that solid punchline ending that would really bring it all together (or both, of course). Still, the season is short enough at six 16-minute episodes, and the writing retains that sense of earworm catchphrases that are destined to be memed, from “shirt brother” to “They’re trying to make it look fake!”

My favorite installments this year: Tim Meadows at his daughter’s wedding reception, the rat mom at her boss’s birthday party, the man on a date with an unfortunate hairstyle, and the ad for the Darmine Doggy Door.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Witch King by Martha Wells

Book #80 of 2023:

Witch King by Martha Wells

I am all for complex fantasy worldbuilding, but it’s not a great sign that at the end of this standalone novel, I still don’t believe I could accurately summarize the distinctions it draws between demons, witches, expositors, blessed immortals, hierarchs, and the like, all of whom theoretically use magic in different ways, let alone keep track of the extensive cast of characters that populate each faction. It never feels as though author Martha Wells has neglected to invent the important details per se, but they aren’t really presented in a readily-internalized manner for us. I’ll join the other reviews I’ve seen in speculating that this all might be easier to follow in print than on audio — although I’d also note that as someone who listens to hundreds of audiobooks a year, I am rarely this adrift.

I think part of the problem is that this story is pretty narrowly focused on its protagonist (in two unfolding timelines), leaving the other characters and the realms around them as far more of a basic sketch. And while I was initially intrigued by the setup in the present, when that nigh-immortal hero wakes up in a tomb and has to scramble to escape and learn who betrayed him and left him for dead, both his hunt for answers and the flashbacks detailing his original rise to power gradually lose my interest due to the continued murkiness of their overall stakes. I enjoy Kai’s sardonic voice, which carries echoes of the writer’s famous Murderbot, but I just am never clear on why I should care about what he’s trying to achieve either then or now.

Two-and-a-half stars, rounded up.

[Content warning for gore.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Gilmore Girls, season 5

TV #30 of 2023:

Gilmore Girls, season 5

This is kind of a weird season of television! I’m not sure if I ever noticed before this rewatch, but this does seem to be the point where the series starts running out of ideas, making some choices that don’t feel especially true to the established characters and others that are clear repeats of the past, to predictably diminishing returns. Richard and Emily begin in a prolonged fight, but since the Jason Stiles subplot that was the catalyst to that last year has been unceremoniously dropped, there’s no real further discussion of why they’re continuing to squabble, even though they do. Meanwhile, Rory is likewise fighting with Lorelei over the subject of her renewed relationship with the sullen Dean, who’s by now married to someone else and (unsurprisingly) still no more appealing as a romantic option for his ex. It’s the first of many odd choices the Yale sophomore will make in this run.

In other developments, Lorelei and Luke are now dating, which is great payoff for their long-standing flirtatious dynamic. Except then her parents, who have previously limited themselves to arch comments about her love life, take it upon themselves to break up the happy couple — and Luke allows it, despite plainly not caring for their opinions, revealing on an earlier date that he’s carried a torch for Lorelei the whole time he’s known her, and promising her that he’s seriously committed to making things work now that they’re together. In light of that context, the breakup feels like simple arbitrary drama, particularly when the pair ultimately reconcile a few episodes later.

Rory’s own next romance reads as somewhat groundless too, for while I like Logan in the eventual boyfriend role, he’s a smug jerk throwing his money around the first few times they meet, and neither the writing nor the acting sells Rory’s attraction well enough to mitigate that negative impression for me. It’s also pretty silly that a) his family interprets a girlfriend of a week as a marriage prospect, and b) they reject Rory, a fellow Yale student and grandchild of their high-society friends, so forcefully. It’s more empty melodrama that’s hard to take at face-value, especially coming after Richard Gilmore earlier in the season helped Rory play a prank on Logan to suggest the families truly were in courtship talks.

In a similar vein, Mitchum Huntzberger negging the girl in his workplace evaluation is abrupt and mean-spirited, and while it’s not clear whether he means it as genuine professional feedback or as another effort to steer her out of his son’s life, it’s patently obvious to the viewer that his comments are wrong. We’ve seen Rory thrive and meet all manner of challenges for five years now, and just this season we’ve witnessed her grow in competence and confidence from her timid arrival at the newspaper to an integrated intern teammate in a few short weeks. It’s difficult to see Mitchum’s dismissive view of her journalism skills as remotely legitimate, which also makes it tough to accept that Rory ever could — let alone to make sense of her disastrous final choices here.

Elsewhere Paris starts dating Doyle, which seems reasonable, and Lane starts dating her roommate / bandmate Zach, which…. does not. The intended trajectory of Lane’s love life got messed up by her previous beau’s actor leaving for a different show, and the attempt to graft whatever that would have become onto his friend who’s still around reads as a desperate stretch to keep Rory’s nominal bestie still relevant to the plot despite the distance between Stars Hollow and Yale. Like many elements this year, it’s effective enough in the moment to fill out the weekly 45 minutes, but not entirely satisfying from a bigger-picture perspective.

[Content warning for transphobia.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Noli Me Tángere (Touch Me Not) by José Rizal

Book #79 of 2023:

Noli Me Tángere (Touch Me Not) by José Rizal

By sheer coincidence, I finished reading this title on the Philippines’ Independence Day, exactly 125 years since that nation’s revolutionaries declared its freedom from Spain. That’s rather fitting, as the 1887 novel in some ways seems to have inspired their movement against the colonial authorities, via its depicting the corruption of the Spanish ruling class, the hypocrisy of the contemporary Catholic priesthood, and the general plight of the Filipino people under them. Originally published in Germany, the text was swiftly banned in the land where it’s set, but bootleg versions flourished, helping to bring both domestic and international attention to the situation in the Philippines and articulate a resistance ideology. While author José Rizal himself would be executed by firing squad in the midst of the ensuing revolution, dying a martyr at age 35, his writing lives on and is celebrated today as one of the major works of his homeland.

As for the story itself, it holds up pretty well even so far removed from its original time and place! The last hundred pages or so is where it really settles into its role as a blisteringly revolutionary tract, with emotional denunciations that speak to the unique abuses of the local rulers and their lawless police force yet resonate with any similar societal injustice as well. And even before this stage, we can trace the rising tensions in the plot, while also being entertained by the writer’s playful satirical touch. With a wit rivaling Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Rizal paints droll scenarios for his colorful characters, from a Spanish hospital porter who passes himself off as a skilled doctor in the colony by charging more than any genuine practitioner, to a priest who takes confessions in Tagalog without ever bothering to learn the language. At one point, after a fishing expedition has encountered and narrowly killed an angry crocodile, one member fears that their misfortune has come about because they left early that morning and thereby skipped attending mass. Another drily notes that the animal was even more unlucky — which stands to reason, since “Of all the crocodiles who frequent the church, I’ve never seen him among them.”

The humor in the book gradually bleeds away into the pointed political commentary, and with a modern critical eye, I might wish for that transition to happen quicker and for a general tightening-up of a few digressive subplots that pad out the narrative unnecessarily. But overall, I have really enjoyed this read and appreciate a friend bringing it to my attention, given its seeming obscurity here in America.

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

★★★★☆

Book Review: Clariel by Garth Nix

Book #78 of 2023:

Clariel by Garth Nix (The Old Kingdom #4)

I like a lot of things about this Old Kingdom prequel, but it’s objectively a pretty disjointed novel. The first two-thirds paint a fascinating picture of the setting as we’ve never seen it, both by virtue of being so far in the past — six hundred years before the start of the original book Sabriel, as per an introductory author’s note — and by being firmly rooted in Old Kingdom cultural life, when previous protagonists in this series have all been outsiders to the land in one way or another. In addition, we find the country in a newly precarious state, full of political scheming and growing unrest against the corrupt and decadent upper class. Even those representatives of the magical Charter are surprisingly toothless compared to the heroes we know will be their eventual successors: the grieving king has effectively withdrawn from ruling, creating an unstable power vacuum that villains conspire to fill, and the legendary Abhorsen has shirked his own hereditary duties to the extent that he views the name as an empty title.

Against that backdrop, a sullen teen arrives in the capital city and finds herself unwittingly drawn into becoming a pawn in the various intrigues. She’s scrambling to get a read on the situation collapsing around her and to claw together some shred of personal agency for herself, whilst wanting nothing more than to retreat back to her former home and train to be a simple forest warden. It feels very much of a common flavor with Game of Thrones, particularly the moment early in that other fantasy saga when young Arya Stark witnesses the Lannister treachery against her father and is forced on the run.

The last section of the plot, however, transitions to Clariel’s time at the Abhorsen’s House, where the creature Mogget (less faithfully bound to service than we’ve seen him before) gradually lures her into embracing the awful power of Free Magic that he represents. This part is a tragedy of sorts, although it plays off no particular tragic flaw in the title character beyond youthful naivety, and author Garth Nix never really resolves the thematic questions he raises about whether the girl’s yearning for social isolation is antithetical to the knitting of Charter Magic / naturally aligns her with Mogget and his ilk. The very ending also seems a bit rushed, with several promising subplots reduced to a final flurry of quick exposition.

The bigger issue, of course, is how a reader is supposed to grapple with Clariel’s future identity as a previously-seen antagonist of a different name, which is hinted at throughout the text (and in its original subtitle of The Lost Abhorsen) and then matter-of-factly acknowledged via postscript. I don’t think this book works too well as an explanation for her downfall, and the story definitely feels incomplete where it leaves off, even given the further pieces revealed in the next novel, Goldenhand. Clariel’s ultimate villainy and steps in that direction here moreover muddy the optics of her asexuality, which is a fairly prominent aspect of her characterization. I’m not sure Nix means to imply a connection between her not feeling sexual attraction and being susceptible to wickedness, but, well, I’m not certain that he doesn’t, either. That’s the problem.

All in all it’s a mixed bag of a book, and while I started this reread and even this review expecting I’d give it a four-star rating, writing out the thoughts above has clarified (pun intended) my reaction considerably. I’d maintain that the volume has its share of strengths, but those are unfortunately balanced out by some genuine issues across the board.

[Content warning for gore.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Star Trek: Enterprise, season 3

TV #29 of 2023:

Star Trek: Enterprise, season 3

Credit where credit’s due: this season is a solid step up in quality for what’s previously been the weakest iteration of Star Trek to date. It’s still not a total success story, but this run makes a lot of smart choices to shake up its formerly lackluster status quo. Let’s go through them, one at a time.

First: a proper sense of mission for the crew and a true ongoing serialized plot. The surprise attack against earth in the previous finale already carried significant 9/11 vibes, and this year finds the program doubling down on the parallel as the Enterprise hunts for answers and takes the fight to the new enemy, who’s building an even bigger weapon to destroy the planet completely. It’s a somewhat uncomfortable allegory, but a welcome change from the days of Archer puttering aimlessly around the galaxy, and in the last string of episodes I would say that the show even approaches Deep Space Nine levels of dramatic serialization. Well done!

There’s also both a new romance among the main cast and the addition of a military presence of soldiers on-board, each of which alters the usual dynamics and gives rise to different possibilities for episodic subplots. Similarly, the Enterprise’s quest brings it into a region of space riddled with strange alien artifacts and ‘spatial anomalies’ that cause widespread damage to the ship, which likewise allows for some distinct new challenges as the larger story unfolds.

As for the weaknesses, well, none of the above is necessarily all that engaging, and the eventual revelation linking the Xindi to the transdimensional sphere-builders seems far too pat. We also don’t get a great sense of personality from any of the recurring adversaries outside of Degra and the returning Andorian played by Jeffrey Combs, and the worldbuilding behind the various Xindi factions is too surface-level to register as particularly meaningful. Scott Bakula and the others do their best with all the dry exposition about needing to sway three of five council votes or whatever, but it’s hard to get worked up about any of it absent a more emotional character-based connection to the drama.

I’ll also mention that the seriousness is severely compromised by the start of every hour cutting from a moment of high tension to that awful theme song, an effect that’s been made even worse now via the introduction of a jaunty riff to the affair. Whose idea was that?? It’s a minor issue, but it does launch each episode with the exact wrong energy for the steadily-deepening plot.

[Content warning for racism, gun violence, and torture.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Double Sin and Other Stories by Agatha Christie

Book #77 of 2023:

Double Sin and Other Stories by Agatha Christie

An odd little collection, published in 1961 (and then only in the US) but including stories from as far back as 1925. Three of the eight entries had even been previously released in other Agatha Christie volumes — “The Last Seance” in 1933’s The Hound of Death; “The Theft of the Royal Ruby” and “Greenshaw’s Folly” in 1960’s The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding — which results in a rather repetitive read for anyone making their way through the author’s body of work. The assortment is also somewhat eclectic, containing four mysteries solved by Hercule Poirot, two by Miss Jane Marple, and two that turn out to not be mysteries at all, but rather spooky tales of the genuine supernatural with nary a detective in sight. Some of these are fun, but even the better ones tend to lean hard on coincidence, which is not this writer’s strongest tool. It’s not a bad sampler introduction to her style, though.

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

★★★☆☆