The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organizing by KC Davis, LPC

Book #76 of 2023:

How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organizing by KC Davis, LPC

Probably the best self-help book I’ve ever read, and all the more so for its short length, with author KC Davis evincing none of that genre’s usual need to belabor her points ad nauseum just to beef up the page count. As a licensed therapist with significant disclosed mental health issues herself, she instead presents readers with a straightforward yet radical new paradigm for thinking about our regular chores — which she refers to as care tasks, applying to upkeep of either one’s household or one’s physical body — in a way that’s compassionate, morally neutral, and utterly free of shame.

If you’re the sort of person who believes in a ‘tough love’ approach to motivate either yourself or others, this might not be the right book for you! (Although I hope you’d still consider it with an open mind.) For the rest of us, it’s a truly kind reminder that your living space is there to serve you rather than the other way around, that even minimal progress on a to-do item is better than a paralysis of executive functioning that keeps you from starting the activity at all, and that rest is a vital human requirement like any other. Most striking for me is the idea that taking any of those maintenance actions is a gift you can bestow on your future self — but also that you can always choose not to do so in the moment, if that’s what your present self needs more.

Davis includes commentary on how privilege can intersect with these topics, from gender inequity in expectations / share of household duties, to the greater social pressures in some marginalized communities to maintain appearances, to the negative response behaviors that can become associated with particular tasks due to one’s personal history of trauma. Above all, she stresses: you are not lazy for struggling with things that (seem to) come easily for others. And you can find strategies for handling those things in your own way without having to feel like you’re drowning.

It’s a lesson I expect to resonate with me for quite some time to come.

★★★★★

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Book Review: Lost in the Moment and Found by Seanan McGuire

Book #75 of 2023:

Lost in the Moment and Found by Seanan McGuire (Wayward Children #8)

Four-and-a-half stars, rounded up. My previous ratings for this fantasy novella series have ranged from two stars (#6) to four stars (#1, #2, and #3), and this is easily the finest of the lot to date. If you aren’t familiar, the overall premise of the franchise concerns children who discover Narnia-style portals to other worlds and return from the experience forever changed. But the stories are fairly discrete from one another, and this volume stands just fine on its own.

Here, the girl who slips away has good reason to. The first third of the book before she finds her mystic door is excellent but just brutal to read, with heavy themes of domestic abuse and the steady erosion of that sense of security that any child rightfully deserves. She’s five years old when her father dies in front of her, and when her mother remarries a year later, her new stepdad proves to be a gaslighting tyrant who undermines her relationship with her mom at every turn. He doesn’t quite assault her physically, but he walks right up to that line, and there’s a definite atmosphere of sexualized grooming to it, as author Seanan McGuire warns in an introductory note. It’s harrowing to observe, especially given the character perspective of a little kid who’s increasingly frantic over the situation but doesn’t have the ability to understand or express why.

Anyway. Eventually she finds her way into a different dimension, and that’s the weakest part of the story for me. Her idyllic adventures there in a shop that stores up all lost things are fine but nothing special, beyond some ominous indications of a possible darker underbelly to the business. It’s only when that revelation finally arrives that the plot regains its grip on me, turning into a rather brilliant metaphorical exploration of both the cycle of abuse and how the lingering trauma of surviving such an ordeal can make a person feel like they’ve had to grow up before their time. When the heroine rejects that path and speaks up for herself against certain people who have betrayed her trust, it’s a wonderfully cathartic moment.

So a great beginning and ending, with a somewhat looser section linking the two. It’s still, as I’ve said, the best of the Wayward Children books yet.

★★★★★

Book Review: My Darkest Prayer by S. A. Cosby

Book #74 of 2023:

My Darkest Prayer by S. A. Cosby

I went back to read this 2019 debut novel on the strength of author S. A. Cosby’s later works Blacktop Wasteland and Razorblade Tears, and I can confirm that his talent for immersive storytelling is already apparent here. It’s another crime thriller / southern noir, in which an unconventional investigator digs into a local mystery, gets impressively bloodied by the various factions he riles up, and deals back his own damage twice as hard. I once saw someone refer to Cosby as the Black Elmore Leonard, and that’s honestly not too far off the mark!

On the other hand, there are some definite weaknesses in this earlier text, like a reliance on character archetypes he’d subsequently learn to either skew or avoid altogether. The romantic interest feels particularly egregious in this regard, as a literal porn star who falls for the protagonist immediately and assures him that he’s better in bed than anyone she’s ever been with before. (Sex workers of course deserve love stories just like everyone else, but this femme fatale seems less like an attempt at representation and more like a juvenile bit of wish fulfillment for the writer’s stand-in.) The plot is also fairly straightforward, again using familiar pieces very well but never quite elevating them into something distinctive. Still, it’s a first book with a lot of promise, and I’m delighted the author has now fully grown into that.

[Content warning for racism including slurs, gun violence, torture, child rape, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: It’s OK to Be Angry about Capitalism by Bernie Sanders

Book #73 of 2023:

It’s OK to Be Angry about Capitalism by Bernie Sanders

This new release is the third book I’ve read from Senator Bernie Sanders, following 2016’s Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In and 2018’s Where We Go from Here: Two Years in the Resistance. If that first title laid out the author’s political philosophy of modern democratic socialism in the wake of his surprisingly strong but ultimately unsuccessful presidential primary campaign against Hillary Clinton, and the second one made the case for his renewed 2020 run, it’s not immediately clear what the point of this next volume is. (It’s possible Sanders will throw his hat into the ring for president again, in which case a political book would be a standard early move, but the text itself gives no indication of that. His Senate seat is up for re-election in 2024, so perhaps he’s just laying the groundwork for that statewide race.)

From the name of it, I would have expected this publication to be more of a narrow diatribe against the victimization and inequality allowed to fester under an unchecked capitalistic society, but as before, it’s more of a split between the latest iteration of the politician’s overall stump speech calling for various progressive reforms — which admittedly encompasses those themes — and a touting of his own record in advancing that agenda, in this case with a focus on the 2020 primary season, his efforts to both support Joe Biden and push him leftward after losing out on the Democratic Party nomination to that more moderate rival, and the Biden presidency to date. There are no big revelations here for anyone who followed the news over that span — again raising the question of this book’s intended audience — but I suppose it’s an interesting play-by-play recap if you didn’t know / forgot Bernie’s role in all that.

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Seinfeld, season 1

TV #28 of 2023:

Seinfeld, season 1

This classic 90s sitcom gets off to a bit of a rough start — the first season is made up of only five episodes, the pilot of which feels particularly unfinished, with no Elaine, a misnamed Kramer, and a somewhat backwards George-and-Jerry dynamic. Even after that, these early installments are both using too much of the star’s standup material and struggling to incorporate its topics into the primary plot of the day.

The show has also become a strange time capsule, in ways both good and bad. On the downside: lots of hackneyed jokes about the stereotypical supposed differences between men and women, and a rather white cast for a series set in NYC (although I suppose the implicit Jewishness of the main characters and the overall tone of the writing is a nice piece of representation, especially for the era). On the upside, it’s a fascinating viewpoint into a now-bygone world without social media or cell phones, which has a direct impact on how events in any given episode play out differently than they would today. Because this is a program so obsessed with minutiae and rambling conversations that wind up fussing over such mundane details, we get a lot of that sort of slice-of-life focus that isn’t always as present in other series from the same period.

The pieces are generally here for the powerhouse comedy that the title would become, but the storytelling isn’t quite clicking into gear yet, particularly when it comes to incorporating Kramer into everything else. We also haven’t seen any recurring guest stars or other signs of serialization / worldbuilding at this stage — and yes, I know that co-creator Larry David famously mandated that there would be no learning or growing for Jerry and his friends. But he also called this a show about nothing, and it’s already clear that that’s not entirely accurate either. So I am expecting some minor continuity to help strengthen the affair at some point, in addition to a tighter plot engine and more memorable quotes all-around.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Swamp Story by Dave Barry

Book #72 of 2023:

Swamp Story by Dave Barry

This comic novel fits squarely in the ‘zany Florida’ genre popularized by writers like Carl Hiaasen, Tim Dorsey, or indeed, author Dave Barry himself. If you like such stories of madcap plots colliding against a backdrop of alligators, rednecks, treasure hunters, corrupt politicians, and other Sunshine State institutions, you’ll probably find this one satisfying as well, although I can’t say that it does much to stand out from that existing literary tradition. I also think a few of Barry’s weaknesses are unfortunately on display here, from fatphobic physical descriptions to the use / threat of sexual assault to increase the stakes, not to mention his rather repetitive and pedestrian sentence construction. It’s still a funny piece, but the character voices all sound pretty much alike, which makes it hard to keep track of everyone in the large ensemble cast (especially but not only due to the author’s performance as his own audiobook narrator).

Some of the intersecting threads here include: gold bars from the Civil War era discovered in the Everglades, an effort to fake footage of a new cryptid to rival Florida’s infamous skunk ape (don’t ask), a variety of bumbling crooks and mobsters, a would-be reality TV star, an emotional-support boar, viral TikTok memes, a python hunt, and all manner of absurdly inane conversations. These elements come crashing together more or less as expected, and it all basically works for the overall narrative. But it feels like the kind of thing Dave Barry could crank out in his sleep these days, and I’m not entirely convinced that he hasn’t.

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

[Content warning for drug and alcohol abuse, gun violence, gore, and infant endangerment.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, season 5

TV #27 of 2023:

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, season 5

I’m not a big fan of the decision to pepper this final season with flash-forward scenes to decades in the future, where we learn that the titular comedienne — and her manager! — will eventually achieve their dream of striking it big in showbusiness. For me at least, the knowledge of that forthcoming fame rather punctures the tension back in the moment, fun as it is to see glimpses of the kids’ adult lives and the main actors in old-age makeup. It reframes the story to be one of Midge definitively on the cusp of stardom, which flattens the usual issue of her self-sabotaging pride and proves somewhat tedious to watch play out in slow motion.

With that being said, the episode with the Friars Club roast is truly well done, and the series finale does a good job of making the heroine’s breakthrough feel earned by her specific choices, not to mention paralleling and commenting on certain events from way back in the pilot. I’m still not convinced that her material or her delivery has actually improved between then and now, but we’ve seen her grinding away at it for so long that it’s easy to root for and celebrate the win.

Giving the protagonist a position as a late-night screenwriter seems largely an excuse for the production team to recreate yet another fixture of mid-century Americana, but I’m okay with it, since those lush visuals are one of the elements I’ll miss most about the show, along with its thorough Jewishness and extended cast of characters who are all just as funny as the stand-up comic lead (but I repeat myself). Anyway, it’s an improvement over the last couple of seasons and ultimately a decent farewell act, so I’ll go with a rating of three-and-a-half stars, rounded up.

This season: ★★★★☆

Overall series: ★★★★☆

Season rated: 1 > 2 > 5 > 3 > 4

TV Review: The Shield, season 6

TV #26 of 2023:

The Shield, season 6

This season of The Shield is a bit scattered compared to the ones before it. It’s initially exciting to see that Forest Whitaker is sticking around past his initial one-year-arc, given how thrilling the Kavanaugh investigation of Mackey has been, but then after a couple episodes, he’s abruptly out of the picture. Instead it seems like most of this run will be about the tightening noose of Vic getting closer to finding out what really happened to his friend in the previous finale — but then he learns that information halfway through and the story again has to reorient. These shifts keep the audience on our toes, and they wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if they were in service to some greater narrative purpose taking shape in their wake. But here, too much of it just feels like random noise.

It doesn’t help that a few of the characters are making choices that don’t register as particularly well-motivated, from Shane’s sudden partnership with the Armenians to Dutch’s weird escalating feud with Billings. Strike team newcomer Kevin Hiatt is especially egregious in this regard, his characterization seemingly mutating by the week to serve the writers’ current needs. And the background politics are murkier than usual too, with a lot of exposition about a nebulous Mexican / Salvadoran cartel war that seldom hits home for the cast in any meaningful ways. In prior dealings with the various gangland factions, we’ve gotten more specific personalities for antagonists, but now that element largely reads as an afterthought of context for Vic and Shane’s extralegal maneuvering.

With that being said, this series is generally competent enough that an off-year is still fun to watch. It’s great to finally get to see the new captain’s style of leadership, and plenty of scenes have that signature twisted Shield humor to them, along with the ever-present critiques both implicit and explicit that policing is an inherently flawed arrangement that breeds corruption and rarely serves the community’s true interests in the long run. The ticking-clock of Mackey’s impending forced retirement adds some good tension and desperate scrabbling, which is the mode his antihero protagonist tends to work best in. But overall I would call this outing a weaker effort.

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

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Marley by Jon Clinch

Book #71 of 2023:

Marley by Jon Clinch

Jacob Marley is a bit of a blank slate in the Charles Dickens classic A Christmas Carol — which is not a fault; he serves his purpose in the narrative there most admirably — and so he represents a logical candidate for this sort of treatment by a later writer, expanding scant kernels of characterization into a full-fledged backstory. Unfortunately, however, the resulting text here bears so little resemblance to the original that I can scarcely understand why author Jon Clinch has bothered positioning it as a related story at all.

What are we told by Dickens about Marley, the former business partner of Ebenezer Scrooge who has been dead for seven years when that famous tale opens? Simply that he was a miser in life, every bit the equal of the still-living associate whom his ghost now returns to warn. That shade appears bound in chains reflecting his mortal focus on profits to the exclusion of all else, and he calls it the mirror of one awaiting Scrooge, who’s so similar he has kept the firm called Scrooge and Marley and answers readily to either name in his dealings. In short: the piece is a morality play on unchecked capitalism, and Marley is the cautionary example whose path Scrooge must steer away from, once his eyes are opened by the three spirits which follow.

Not so in Clinch’s version. Here, Marley is a moral reprobate and a conniver of the highest order. He gleefully participates in the African slave trade, and sets up elaborate false identities and record books to hide the practice from Scrooge when Ebenezer’s fiancee objects. He impersonates police officers to shake down local brothels for protection money and a free sampling of their wares. He spins an extravagant web of lies to woo Scrooge’s sister, after hiring a man to kill her husband. In short, his sins are far greater than pure greed, and while his machinations known and unknown take their toll on Ebenezer, winnowing him over time from a well-meaning naif to the familiar coldhearted figure, the two men are in no way responsible for equivalent crimes. It’s downright silly to imagine that this Marley would be punished in the hereafter for the trifle of his lack of charity, nor that this Scrooge would be in line for his same fate.

But even if this novella isn’t meant to be approached as a plausibly canonical prequel, it’s not terribly satisfying in and of itself. The first half in particular is very dry in its rote accounting of the antihero’s misdeeds, and while he eventually feels more like a real person making active choices to overcome fresh challenges, the lingering sense remains that of a criminal mastermind effortlessly executing a variety of schemes on his unsuspecting victims. His deathbed regrets are likewise thin and unconvincing, and perhaps worst of all, there’s just too little sign of any actual Scrooge/Marley partnership throughout. For me as a reader, the book doesn’t work as either a Christmas Carol reimagining or an independent plot on its own terms.

[Content warning for gun violence.]

★★☆☆☆

TV Review: Saturday Night Live, season 48

TV #25 of 2023:

Saturday Night Live, season 48

I’m a little behind on this review, since I only belatedly found out that the venerable sketch-comedy series had officially canceled its remaining episodes of this production batch due to the ongoing writers’ strike, rather than postponing them indefinitely. Strictly speaking, then, this was the 16th television season that I finished watching in 2023, even though I didn’t know it at the time (and don’t feel like going back to update the numbering now).

Despite the unexpected truncation, this run acquits itself well. I always like to assess each iteration of SNL by noting what made it different, and in this case, the biggest change is that eight cast members from the year before did not return, and a ninth, Cecily Strong, popped up for only a few weeks in the middle before making her official departure as well. While their talent is missed — except for Aristotle Athari, sorry — I’d say that in their wake, the ensemble feels like a leaner and more cohesive troupe. We’ve still added four new featured players and have the Please Don’t Destroy guys knocking around for a second year with their prerecorded skits, but everyone’s getting more screen time on average than they had been for a while there.

As far as the newcomers go, Molly Kearney is a delightful self-sabotaging physical actor in the Chris Farley tradition, who also breaks ground as the program’s first nonbinary cast member — a status which allows for some unique humor without ever making them seem like a punchline themself. Fluent Spanish speaker Marcello Hernandez brings his own manic energy to the table as well, especially when paired with likewise bilingual hosts such as Pedro Pascal or Ana de Armas. Michael Longfellow and Devon Walker haven’t made as strong an impression on me, but I’d expect at least one of them to probably return next season anyway.

Overall, the sketches are solid too. Some favorites of mine from this stretch include “Wing Pit” (a clear unhinged successor to the old Taco Town bit), “COVID Commercial” (a scathing piece of social commentary on the present apathetic state of our collective pandemic response), and “A Christmas Carol” (just an absurdly over-the-top gorefest punctuated by Steve Martin and Martin Short’s impeccable comic timing). But the winner has got to be Michael B. Jordan in “Jake from State Farm,” which extends that handsome corporate spokesman to his hilariously logical extreme.

I’m sad that we aren’t getting the last few planned episodes of this run, but I of course support the strike and hope that it leads to more equitable contracts for the writers of this show and all the others. And even at a shortened length without any big sendoff, I would call season 48 a win.

★★★★☆