The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

TV Review: Six Feet Under, season 2

TV #11 of 2023:

Six Feet Under, season 2

Credit where credit’s due: the second year of this funeral home drama is a noticeable step up from the first, and it continues to improve over the course of its run, building to a finale that’s a clear series high point thus far. The show appears to have finally gotten a lot of the early silliness out of its system — characters still occasionally engage in whimsical daydreams, but they’re at least having fewer conversations with the cadavers they’re processing and whatnot. And the deaths this season in general don’t feel as cheap, like they’re an excuse for jokes or for overwrought melodrama. That’s a hard balance to strike, and I can see how it would take a while for the writers to get there, but there’s now a definite gravity and a sense of meaningfulness about the business that just wasn’t present at the start.

And yet. Measured against that, the petty human subplots that flesh out this family beyond their associations with death remain a very mixed bag for me. Brenda is by far the worst, now adding serial cheating with strangers to her bullying mind games and overall poor treatment of her boyfriend. Not that Nate is a particularly great partner in return, of course, even before he learns about the adultery! Much as I admire the ambiguous cliffhanger ending to the last episode and how that arc gets handled this year in and of itself — sorry, but I do try to avoid going into major spoilers in these reviews, and sometimes that means I need to keep things vague — it’s all the more enjoyable for the sheer fact that however it resolves, it seems likely that Brenda may be out of the Fishers’ lives / this program for good. Here’s hoping!

The rest of the ensemble have their ups and downs, but flawed protagonists are okay so long as they’re either nuanced enough to be offset by some redemptive qualities or simple but clearly intended to be read as awful. I don’t know that anyone outside of the rival Kroehner conglomerate falls into that latter category for me, but David, Claire, and Ruth are certainly all qualifying for the former, at least by the season two finale. When I step back and consider these 13 episodes as a whole, I don’t think they’re at the quality level for me to award them a rating of four-out-of-five stars overall, because while certain elements are really starting to click, there’s quite a bit of weaker material each hour as well. But if the current trajectory holds, I do feel I could get there for this title soon.

[Content warning for gun violence, police brutality, domestic abuse, gore, racism, and homophobia.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Cat Among the Pigeons by Agatha Christie

Book #44 of 2023:

Cat Among the Pigeons by Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot #36)

I like the espionage hijinks of this novel, although the plot never reaches the thrills of author Agatha Christie’s stories that are more focused in that domain, such as those in her Tommy and Tuppence series. And the setting of a high-society finishing school for girls is pleasantly distinctive for the writer too. But overall, this is a rather poor mystery, with a perfunctory string of murders beginning about a third of the way through the text and Hercule Poirot only swooping in at the 70% mark to solve everything.

The problem is, while it’s fun to watch the jewels of a fictional Middle Eastern country get passed around from one secret location to another, that part of the action is all relatively straightforward and easy to track. The single element puzzling to readers is the matter of which characters should or shouldn’t be trusted at face value, and the ultimate solutions to those questions tend to rely on extreme coincidence and the detective’s thinly-supported deductions, which seem like they could have easily gone in a different direction. It’s better as a simple spy caper than as a true showcase of the investigator’s wits.

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

★★★☆☆

Book Review: What Happened To You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing by Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD and Oprah Winfrey

Book #43 of 2023:

What Happened To You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing by Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD and Oprah Winfrey

A difficult but insightful read, with lots of detailed discussion about early childhood traumas, including the specific situations of kids who witnessed or experienced sexual abuse and graphic violence. As a parent of young children, I am particularly struck by the research on how important even the first few months of life can be at building up either positive or negative associations in a child’s mind, and how those can subconsciously affect us across the rest of our days. While this is not a parenting guide, I suspect it’s going to lead me to be more mindful in my interactions with my little ones and the behaviors I model around them.

The chapters on PTSD and other trauma responses, along with potential strategies for reducing their strength over a person, are also quite interesting, as are the writers’ observations about the inherently traumatic nature of existing as a member of a marginalized group within a society, which both feeds into and is reinforced by systemic issues like racism. (Not that it will traumatize everyone who grows up in such a social environment, just that the conditions are there and a detectable correlation in outcomes exists.) And while Oprah primarily functions in her usual role as interviewer for her expert coauthor Dr. Perry, the moments when she shares memoir-like passages about her own traumatic upbringing are deeply affecting.

I’m less sold on the end of the book, which shifts its focus to individual alienation and the supposed perils of digital communication platforms over face-to-face contact. That’s a topic I’m personally skeptical about and used to study academically in grad school, and without launching into a full-blown thesis paper in this review, I would say that the situation is far more nuanced and conditional than these authors make it out to be. (Surprise surprise, it matters much more what kinds of interactions you’re having, and with whom and how regularly, than the medium in which all that occurs.) It doesn’t escape me that Winfrey and Perry are both in their late 60s, and thus come at modern technology from a very different perspective than someone of my own generation or younger. To throw their own words about shifting mores back at them with only the word ‘young’ changed, “This is not to say that [older] people are bad or worse, but it’s a clear example of how our life experiences shape us; what happens to you matters, and we all reflect to some degree the relational attributes of our family, community, and culture.”

My gripes about that section aside, this seems like a valuable text for most readers, whether you carry any significant personal trauma yourself or not. I give it three-and-a-half stars, rounded up.

★★★★☆

TV Review: The Shield, season 5

TV #10 of 2023:

The Shield, season 5

Easily the best run of this series since the first. Forest Whitaker is an outstanding new addition to the cast, and while it’s simple to peg him as the latest Hollywood heavy hitter to come to TV for a one-season arc — like Glenn Close the year before, or similar guest stars on shows like Dexter — that doesn’t diminish the power he wields as the Internal Affairs lieutenant heading up the long-simmering investigation into the corrupt Strike Team at the heart of this program. Going from a whisper to a friendly wheedling to a blinding rage, he’s captivating to observe throughout, and he proves an excellent foil for our antihero lead as the two engage in an extended cat-and-mouse game.

Kavanaugh knows Mackey is a dirty cop, but he needs stronger evidence to put him away. Vic in turn needs to keep covering up the sins of his past, but also to partake in further underhanded and illegal activities to try and discredit his opponent and clear everyone’s name. And poor tragic Lem, the guy directly under IA’s bootheel, is tugged back and forth between them, growing ever more visibly exhausted. His fate is pretty telegraphed (by the title of the penultimate episode, if nothing else), but like any good tragedy, it’s still quietly devastating to watch unfold in detail. And Shane’s now set up for quite an interesting arc ahead as well.

From the start, The Shield has had what I’d consider two main goals: to critique law enforcement in general as cruel and ineffective, and to invite viewer discomfort by getting us to root for the bad guy. And those threads are often intertwined, as it’s hard to imagine or hope for Vic’s downfall in a world where justice is such a sick joke. Poverty, drug abuse, and violent crime are continually presented as endemic in Farmington, an ugly stain that can’t be substantively changed by the flawed mortals policing the area. Besides, the protagonist has his good qualities, like his swagger, his sense of humor, and his fierce loyalty to those he considers his own. In the moment he can often seem a charming rogue, a trickster figure who thumbs his nose at stuffy authority and takes care of the worst criminals on his own terms.

This season doesn’t let us dwell in that fantasy of Mackey as hero for long. Instead we’re reminded of the times he’s crossed major lines already, and we see him return close to that edge again and again. And yet Kavanaugh is so hostile and abusive of his position, do we really want this to be the person who finally manages to take the Strike Team down? The ensuing tension raises the narrative to new heights, even while subplots like Tina’s incompetent rise and the interim captain’s own obvious ineptitude emphasize the writers’ disdain for police as a whole. Dutch is compromised in several ways, and Claudette is hindered by her illness and her stubborn streak. None of them are helping the community, because for every drug dealer or serial killer or assailant lining glory holes with mousetraps that they take into custody, another one seems to pop up immediately. Against that backdrop, how can we want either Mackey or Kavanaugh to succeed?

It’s a riveting drama, and I appreciate how everything converges together in the end, adding context and great pathos to the final scenes. My personal high point of the season actually comes earlier, at the sting in episode 5, but it’s not as though we only get falling action from there on out. Whether Kavanaugh’s around next year or not, he certainly leaves his mark here, and the Strike Team will never be the same.

[Content warning for gun violence, gore, rape, violence against children, human trafficking, police brutality, racism, homophobia, and probably a whole lot else that I’m forgetting besides. Just another day in Farmington.]

★★★★★

Book Review: Belladonna by Adalyn Grace

Book #42 of 2023:

Belladonna by Adalyn Grace (Belladonna #1)

I realize that some of my issues with this title stem from my personal tastes, and that other readers may find themselves more able to get on its particular wavelength. (It might be popular among the Twilight crowd, for instance?) Certainly, if I had realized that the genre veered toward paranormal romance and not the simple YA horror/fantasy I was expecting, I would have approached the book differently or perhaps not at all. But I’ve never claimed my ratings and reviews to be anything but an attempt to work through and express what in a given piece of entertainment does or doesn’t succeed for me, subjectively, and so for this one I have to say: this ain’t it.

Let’s start at the beginning. An entire household party is murdered by poison, Masque of the Red Death style, except for an infant who somehow proves immune. No reason is ever provided for the mass murder, and the child’s survival is only explained tautologically, eg. she’s special because she’s special. Meanwhile death himself, the literal ageless grim reaper, has shown up and seems struck by the baby and her unnatural gift at avoiding him. Later he’ll reappear repeatedly throughout her childhood, killing off a string of cruel guardians, until she’s nineteen and he’s free to declare his love in the creepiest of grooming terms, like, “I have waited for you for millennia.” Dealing with an immortal stalker could be the setup for an interesting plot, but unfortunately, she’s into it.

Even accepting this figure as a love interest, I just have so many logistical questions about the romance that follows. There are a few steamy scenes, and the heroine voices the usual Victorian concerns about premarital sex destroying her reputation, but, um. Her gentleman caller is made of shadows and no one else can see him. It doesn’t seem likely that he’d be able to get her pregnant. (In the timeless words of Scary Movie 2, “Cindy, this is a skeleton! This is bones!”) It’s also simply an easy / boring choice to cast this primordial avatar as an attractive man in a conventional hetero relationship, with no effort on author Adalyn Grace’s part to play with gender or otherwise embrace the weirdness that such a partner could allow. There’s not even a throwaway line that the protagonist is only seeing him the way she wants to or anything; he apparently really does present as a human male with a handsome face within his cowl. How lucky!

Elsewhere, the young woman is settling into her latest home, preparing for her societal debut, and trying to uncover who’s been poisoning her cousin, a straightforward subplot that manages to fill out most of the remaining pages. That gets resolved satisfactorily if not too surprisingly, and the venture ends on a sudden cliffhanger that does more to set up the sequel than contribute any meaningful notes to the preceding drama. Does it get any better from here? Do we ever learn who killed the girl’s parents and why? I for one will not be reading on to find out.

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: Hell Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph White

Book #41 of 2023:

Hell Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph White

Living in a post-apocalyptic world ravaged by mutant abominations is tough. Especially if you’re Benji, a trans kid being held prisoner by the fundamentalist cult who originally unleashed the plague and have now injected him with an experimental strain to create their greatest bioweapon yet, all the while misgendering and deadnaming him. At least when he escapes, he’s able to meet up with a local gang of his fellow queer youths, who are determined to bring the fight back against the Christofascists as violently as necessary.

By design, this is a brutal, uncomfortable read. The gore is extreme, as are the parallels that #ownvoices author Andrew Joseph White draws between the hero’s gender dysphoria and the surrounding dystopian environment. His uncontrollable transformation over the course of the text, in which his skin sloughs off and he vomits up his internal organs on his way to become ever more monstrous and yet powerful and ultimately freed from the need to keep himself hidden, is a complicated metaphor itself. Sometimes it feels like the protagonist’s bodily change is meant to evoke the messy yet empowering elements of transition, and sometimes it feels like a shorthand for the unwanted roles that society forces on people like him in the first place. Honestly, I think we’re supposed to grapple with that disconnect, and this is not a book with easy answers.

But it’s potent in its imposed disquietudes, and the representation is a marvel. Multiple transgender characters and gay characters, categories which partially overlap as in real life. An autistic same-sex love interest. Some diversity of race and disability in the supporting cast. I don’t know if this novel could have been published even a decade ago without major editorial overhaul, particularly as a piece of nominally Young Adult literature like this. But I’m glad we have it in its present form, and I expect that the kinds of younger readers drawn to it will likely find an important touchstone for articulating their identity and their rage.

[Content warning for gun violence including to children, domestic abuse, and self-harm.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Dark One: Forgotten by Brandon Sanderson and Dan Wells

Book #40 of 2023:

Dark One: Forgotten by Brandon Sanderson and Dan Wells

[Disclaimer: I am Facebook friends with the first author.]

I’m torn between three and four stars for this title. I have enough critiques and reservations that I think I’ll go with the lower rating, but I have enjoyed it, for the most part. It’s an audiobook original, presented in the form of a six-part podcast series, telling the story of a missing-person cold case (subsequently confirmed to be murder) whose victim seems to have been entirely forgotten. Not just lost in the system: the police officers don’t recall investigating and the dead woman’s surviving friends and family can barely even remember her. As the college student protagonists pursue the matter decades later, they uncover similar slayings, the work of a still-active serial killer with the supernatural ability to be utterly forgettable. In the process, of course, they also learn that they’ve forgotten things they already know about him and his crimes, and ultimately start becoming unmemorable to others themselves.

But let me back up a second. I’ll try to avoid the obvious memory jokes, but if that premise sounds somewhat familiar, you’re not mistaken. From the movie Memento to novels like The Sudden Appearance of Hope or The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, there have been plenty of tales presenting fantastical riffs on something like perpetual amnesia, and this one struggles to feel distinctive within that genre. Doctor Who literally just put out its official Redacted podcast last year about people being erased from history and forgotten, which by coincidence — I assume — hits a lot of the same plot beats. (Speaking of that august sci-fi franchise, it gets namechecked in this project when the main heroine reflects that she’s seen every episode and wishes the Doctor were there to help her sort out the weirdness. But she makes no mention of the villains the Silence whose power resembles what she’s up against, and she uses he/him pronouns to refer to the Time Lord, despite the fact that actress Jodie Whittaker would have been playing the role for most of her adult life in 2022 when this all takes place. It’s an odd authorial/editorial misstep to find in a narrative that specifically cites the program for inspiration.)

Anyway. The storyline here is largely predictable but not bad. I haven’t read the 2021 Dark One graphic novel, which I understand is more of a straightforward portal fantasy to another realm, yet I suppose that puts me in the same headspace as the characters, who are getting oblique hints of a larger Lovecraftian mystery behind their adversary but no real explanations of the wider worldbuilding. I think it still more or less works as a standalone piece regardless, although I guess I should get around to the previous volume at some point now. All in all, I’d say that this has been a successful experiment in medium/style for the two coauthors, if only I hadn’t remembered seeing so many of its best ideas elsewhere beforehand.

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Star Trek: Enterprise, season 2

TV #9 of 2023:

Star Trek: Enterprise, season 2

I will grudgingly allow that this sophomore season represents a degree of improvement over its shaky predecessor. While the early 2000s Trek prequel series remains the weakest iteration of the franchise that I’ve seen to date, the typical episode in this second year generally approaches the baseline quality level of the previous shows. In other words, the writers are figuring out how to tell decent science-fiction stories with this cast, even though those characters remain jingoistic and xenophobic in a way that doesn’t always feel like an intentional creative choice. They assert that their human morality gives them the right to meddle with the rest of the universe’s intelligent species, and make no mention of how it doesn’t seem to have progressed much from America’s attitude of a century-and-a-half before (most egregiously in the episode where Trip is dumbfounded by the concept of beings with a third gender and refuses to use the correct pronouns for it, which the script frustratingly treats as a brave stance on his part). Sometimes, the parallels are so direct that it hurts, as when the season finale introduces a surprise attack on earth framed very much like 9/11 — although I imagine I’ll have more to say about that as it influences the plot going forward.

The hour when Archer is on trial before a Klingon tribunal is pretty good, as is the one where he helps negotiate a Vulcan/Andorian ceasefire. Against these, however, you’d have to weigh the absurdities around space princess Padma Lakshmi in “Precious Cargo,” or how the camera continues to sexually objectify Hoshi and T’Pol, gratuitously filming them naked or nearly so on multiple occasions. The latter figure, easily the second-most important role on the program, additionally sees her telepathic assault from 1×17 revisited and its subtext as rape reemphasized, all for a clumsy but probably well-meaning AIDS allegory. It’s a show with a lot of problems.

But I’m halfway through it at this point, and I’ve heard that it gets even better later on. I’m not happy that it’s taking this long to reach that stage, especially so soon after the serialized highs of Deep Space Nine, but at least things are moving in the right direction. Two-and-a-half stars, rounded up.

[Content warning for gun violence and suicide.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Mysteries of Thorn Manor by Margaret Rogerson

Book #39 of 2023:

Mysteries of Thorn Manor by Margaret Rogerson

A fun novella-length follow-up to Margaret Rogerson’s earlier fantasy novel Sorcery of Thorns. With minimal plot and a fairly narrow scope, it’s not a full-on sequel — she describes it on Goodreads as “author written fanfiction” — but simply a chance to spend a little while longer with the charming characters of the volume before, now firmly and goofily in love. Swapping the gothic Garth Nix mode of its predecessor for more of a domestic Diana Wynne Jones vibe, this story finds the protagonists dealing with a fusty household curse that seems to be punishing them (with minor nuisances like locked doors and stormy weather on the manor grounds) for not observing the proper courting protocols in their new relationship. There are still demons and murder and such in the background premise, but overall, it’s just a cozy interlude where the heroes get to grow even closer with one another whilst continuing to upend traditional gender roles in their dynamic. Although I do hope for a legitimate sequel someday, this title is everything I could want from a bonus epilogue to book one.

★★★★☆

Book Review: Shōgun by James Clavell

Book #38 of 2023:

Shōgun by James Clavell (Asian Saga #1)

I went into this 1975 bestseller somewhat skeptically, both for its length at 1152 pages and for its potential Orientalism, being a white British writer’s take on feudal Japan circa the early 17th century. And it is firmly a work of historical fiction, albeit one based upon the life of the first Englishman to visit the island nation and the local warlord who rose to power around that time. Yet author James Clavell seems to have done his research and approached his subject with care and respect, such that the various technical inaccuracies tend to register as deliberate creative choices and not anything especially stereotypical or offensive (at least to this white American reader a few decades later).

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.

[Content warning for slavery, rape, torture, suicide, gun violence, gore, pedophilia, racism, and homophobia.]

★★★★☆