The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Jews Don’t Count by David Baddiel

Book #108 of 2023:

Jews Don’t Count by David Baddiel

A short but scathing call-out of author David Baddiel’s fellow progressive-leaning individuals for too often ignoring the problem of antisemitism: either not noticing it at all or downplaying its impact and the importance of challenging it compared to other bigotries. If you are a non-Jewish person who isn’t familiar with this phenomenon, the writer has supplied plenty of illuminating examples that I hope would challenge you to confront your own potential biases on that front — times when dehumanizing stereotypes, blatant falsehoods, and overt calls for violence against our people gather minimal notice even amongst a movement of social-justice advocates who regularly critique the same rhetoric targeted at other demographics. Personally, I can report that the account echoes much of my own Jewish lived experience in such activist spaces.

Baddiel cuts right to the heart of the matter when he observes that for many in his target audience, Jews seem to register as too high-status to be harmed by this negativity. We are rich and powerful, or just a variety of white folks with all the privilege that implies, or somehow bringing the treatment on ourselves, or blowing things out of proportion and rabble-rousing when we dare to complain about any of it — justifications, whether conscious or not, that are themselves pretty deeply antisemitic! In the process, hook-nosed bankers get depicted as secretly running the world, because the patently anti-Jewish tropes involved there are either unnoticed or else seen as an acceptable cost for the noble anticapitalist message that they’ve been employed to illustrate.

‘Whataboutism’ can be a harmful derailing tactic when used to deflect a conversation about one group by bringing up supposedly parallel points about another, but the author’s contention throughout is that Jews deserve to be treated like other marginalized populations by the very people who purport to care about issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion. There should be no rankings of oppression that dismiss antisemitism as a lesser concern in the attitude conveyed by this book’s provocative title, nor is he necessarily insisting that, say, ‘Jewface’ in Hollywood — casting non-Jews to play Jewish roles, often by exaggerating perceived stereotypical behaviors — is as bad or worse than the practices of whitewashing parts written for POC or casting cis actors as trans folk that likewise persist in the entertainment industry. But why does something like the former rarely seem to make waves outside of Jewish circles?

I do worry whether Baddiel as a writer and I as a reader are coming at this discussion with our own share of misconceptions. (Surely, anyone experiencing any axis of threat against their particular marginalized identity feels that the rest of the world isn’t paying enough attention, right?) He is also quite clearly situated in the specific context of his life as a British Jew, which differs in some ways large and small from my own experiences in America and should not be taken as representative of monolithic Jewishness. And while I appreciate his blunt insistence that antisemitism is a form of racism simply because racists see Jews as a race (and specifically a race of their inferiors), it does tend to sidestep the fact that many Jews are themselves non-white-passing people of color who are subjected to further racism/colorism in both Jewish and gentile domains. The overall piece could stand to be a lot more intersectional throughout, considering for instance how gay Jews or disabled Jews (subcategories which of course contain overlaps too!) might experience antisemitism differently from the author rather than merely comparing antisemitism writ large to the theoretically separate ills of homophobia, ableism, and so on.

Those critiques temper my wholesale endorsement of Jews Don’t Count, which I haven’t found to be quite as solid an argument as Dara Horn’s People Love Dead Jews, despite the two publications from 2021 occupying a somewhat similar rhetorical ground. Baddiel’s default position seems to be in objecting that certain conversations need to be more widespread among non-Jewish leftists, whilst proclaiming an odd agnosticism towards the actual outcome of those debates. (I also think the book’s focus on scolding generally well-meaning agents on the left is a fairly narrow niche that downplays how much more dangerous the sort of antisemitism fostered among paranoid rightwingers can be.) But I do consider the text to be an important pushback against a real and underappreciated problem, and thus overall worth the read.

★★★★☆

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: Whalefall by Daniel Kraus

Book #107 of 2023:

Whalefall by Daniel Kraus

I didn’t know that I particularly needed a YA version of “The Mariner’s Revenge Song,” but this novel was a delightful (if often viscerally unpleasant) read. Its genre flutters between wilderness survival and straight-up horror, telling the story of a teenage boy who winds up swallowed by a massive sperm whale during an ill-considered scuba trip to locate his father’s mortal remains. Flashbacks establish how abusive of a parent the man was, as well as how he threw himself off of a friend’s boat following a cancer diagnosis, and why the protagonist has now come seeking some sort of closure to help process all his lingering trauma. Instead he finds himself in an incredible deadly situation, where he must apply all of his meager resources and half-forgotten ocean knowledge against a dwindling oxygen supply and the inevitable moment when the creature will dive to a deeper pressure. Meanwhile, he’s begun hallucinating further conversations with his dead dad, in a sign of growing delirium and reminder that he can’t necessarily trust his senses.

Author Daniel Kraus has done his homework to construct as plausible a scenario as possible, but the result is still obviously pretty far-fetched, and I confess I’ve found it harder to suspend my disbelief here than over other similar plots like The Martian. Both the setup necessary to strand the hero in his predicament and many of the desperate steps he takes once in there seem a bit overly-convenient, like a video game where every random item has an eventual important use, but the book is ultimately too much of an enjoyable thrill-ride to complain about that aspect at length. If you can stomach — pun very much intended — all the claustrophobia and gore, Whalefall is a real wild time.

★★★★☆

Book Review: Mammoths at the Gates by Nghi Vo

Book #106 of 2023:

Mammoths at the Gates by Nghi Vo (The Singing Hills Cycle #4)

At its best, this fantasy series offers powerful meditations on stories: why we share and find meaning in them, how they don’t necessarily match an objective historical record even when purporting to, the reasons they might shift over time or from speaker to speaker, and so on. Via the perspective of wandering protagonist Cleric Chih, we’ve heard many such tales around this East Asian-inspired setting, with #ownvoices author Nghi Vo generally threading a needle to convey a sense of the possible different truth behind someone’s spoken words while allowing each of the conflicting accounts to resonate.

And there’s still an element of that storytelling focus in this latest volume, but it comes rather late in the text, which as a novella doesn’t have too much room to begin with. This book finds Chih finally returning to their home, the Singing Hills monastery, which we’ve never before gotten to see firsthand. There they discover that their mentor has recently passed away, and two granddaughters have arrived (on mammoth-back) to demand the body for their homeland’s funeral rites, which the clerics’ custom will not allow.

The plot involves hashing out those cultural differences, but also the difficulty of reconciling how people and places change when you’re away from them, as particularly exhibited in one of Chih’s old friends and their former traveling companion, the talking bird Almost Brilliant. It’s a fine quick comfort read for fans of this loose saga, but I’m sadly not finding the same depth that drew me in initially.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Carrie Soto Is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Book #105 of 2023:

Carrie Soto Is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid

A feel-good comeback story from the master of other such recent historical fiction celebrity novels as Daisy Jones & The Six or The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (all of which apparently share a loose continuity). In this one, our heroine Carrie Soto retired from professional tennis after setting the world record for the most women’s Grand Slam titles, but is lured out of retirement years later when another player threatens to surpass her. Now in her late thirties, she finds that no one expects her to be able to compete at her old level, but with her father as her coach, she sets about aiming to prove them all wrong.

Like many sports narratives, the book loses a bit of dramatic tension from the necessary structure of the competition it’s built around. The character announces she’ll be playing the four eligible events in the 1994 pro season to try and squeeze out another win, so… obviously she’s not just going to clinch the first one and walk away, you know? But the individual matches manage to be exciting nonetheless, as do her endless practice sessions as we can gradually see her skills and confidence increasing. I’m sure the upcoming film adaptation is going to generate some nice montage scenes from this material.

Carrie’s also a great flawed protagonist: she doesn’t make friends easily and is painfully focused on her athletic career, to the clear detriment of anything else in her life. She doesn’t smile or appear grateful enough for the patriarchal standards of the media, who long ago dubbed her “the Battleaxe,” and has alienated so many competitors over the years that none of them will agree to train with her following her announced return. The true heart of this plot isn’t a former champion striving to convince everyone she’s still a contender — it’s a lonely woman rediscovering the things she loved about the game in the first place, deepening her connections with the few people who are meaningful to her, and learning to accept the limitations of an aging body. Regardless of her performance on the court (which I won’t spoil!), she’s so much happier at the end of the story than the beginning, and it’s a real joy as a reader to get to go on that journey with her.

[Content warning for disordered eating and death of a parent.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Secret Identity by Alex Segura

Book #104 of 2023:

Secret Identity by Alex Segura

[Disclaimer: I won a free paperback copy of this title from the publisher Flatiron Books on Goodreads, in exchange for an honest review.]

For many readers, the natural comparison point for this 2022 novel will be The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer-winning story about a pair of fictional comic book creators in the 1940s and 50s. Unfortunately, it’s a parallel that does no favors for author Alex Segura’s work here, about an aspiring comics writer in 1974. Carmen Valdez is a compelling protagonist, a gay Cuban-American woman working as a publisher’s secretary while trying to break into her male-dominated field, but there’s little of Chabon’s expansive alternate history, evolving character arcs, or thematic weight to her tale.

The main problem with the narrative is that it just lacks all sense of urgency. Our long-suffering heroine is approached by a colleague who wants to collaborate with her in secret, which she reluctantly agrees to. The superhero line they create together is a hit, but he’s shot dead before revealing her involvement to their chauvinist boss. She then theoretically faces two important tasks: figuring out who killed her co-writer and finding a way to take over the ongoing writing assignment herself. But in practice, she doesn’t really do much to proactively advance either angle, instead generally sitting back and letting other people (read: men) make choices for her while she mopes about an ex-girlfriend who’s unexpectedly come into town. She doesn’t try to make maneuvers and build alliances at work to win the gig even when she learns of the hack who’s been chosen in her place, and she only half-heartedly carries out any kind of investigation into her friend’s murder. Eight months go by before she even thinks to check his apartment for clues!

Carmen is well-drawn as a character, as is the historical New York City setting, and what we hear of her superheroine creation The Lynx is pretty neat, too. Example pages from the comic are peppered throughout the text, both demonstrating what makes it special and drawing pointed parallels between the two women’s respective situations. But she just doesn’t act like the star of her own adventure, and when the villainous plot is finally unveiled, it honestly doesn’t make a whole lot of sense as motivation for either making money or killing someone. So although the better qualities of the book are enough for me to give it a rating of three-out-of-five stars on the Goodreads scale, I’d have to say that the flaws are all too apparent.

[Content warning for suicide, gore, and homophobia including slurs.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Star Trek: Short Treks, season 1

TV #49 of 2023:

Star Trek: Short Treks, season 1

I wasn’t sure what to expect of this series going into it, and I’m still somewhat bemused after finishing this quick debut season. It turns out to consist of only four episodes, each about ten-to-fifteen minutes long and spinning off in some way from Star Trek: Discovery, which had recently finished airing its own first year. The first and last of these installments, about Ensign Tilly and Harry Mudd respectively, take place in some undetermined time after we’d last seen those characters (but presumably before Discovery season 2), while another is a flashback origin story for Saru. The second episode, Calypso, is the most intriguing, gradually revealing itself to be set in the far-distant future when only an advanced A.I. remains aboard the otherwise-derelict U.S.S. Discovery as it picks up a passing escape pod. The title suggests a retelling of the passage in Homer’s Odyssey when a temptress waylays the wandering hero, but in practice the plot is gentler than that and speaks to a genuine connection between the two characters. It’s a well-acted showcase for Aldis Hodge and raises some very interesting questions of the canon, particularly as it appears to represent the latest period of Star Trek yet to be portrayed in any show.

The other three episodes aren’t as gripping, but they’re all fine in their own way. Saru’s seems a bit of a retcon — I don’t remember any mention before this of him being the only Kelpian in Starfleet, or that his species is pre-Warp — but not egregiously so, and his new history adds valuable shading to his personality. The Mudd and Tilly adventures meanwhile don’t tell us much we didn’t already know about them, but they’re entertaining enough in the moment (contingent on a viewer’s tolerance for those particular focal figures, I suppose).

My biggest critique of this program, which I hope gets rectified later on, is that neither the name nor the format requires it to be this beholden to Star Trek: Discovery alone. It would be a great platform to tell these smaller stories with characters from across the franchise history, much as Big Finish does with its similarly-named Short Trips range of Doctor Who audio dramas, and it’s odd that only Discovery gets that honor in this initial go-round. That results in a weaker anthology than it could have been, not to mention one that’s difficult to rate with so few stories included. Nevertheless, I feel generally positive towards the experiment, and Calypso is a genuinely impressive move in the overall Trek narrative. I’ll go with 3.5 stars, rounded up.

★★★★☆

TV Review: Wednesday, season 1

TV #48 of 2023:

Wednesday, season 1

A pitch-perfect Addams Family update, made even stronger by the choice to focus on the title character alone. While her relatives are also included on the series, they’re generally relegated to a few quick scenes that are charming but don’t overstay their welcome, a structure that allows the girl to command our attention without the distraction of juggling full subplots for everyone else. It’s a breakout, bravura performance from star Jenna Ortega, whom I’d previously only seen as a child actress on Jane the Virgin (and SNL host, I guess), following the spooky teen as she is sent to a new high school and swiftly finds herself at the center of an occult murder mystery.

There’s so much to love here, from this version of Wednesday herself — not merely a sardonic goth but plainly neurodivergent as well, with her intense interests, discomfort with physical affection, and difficulty reading social cues — to how she’s positioned as an outcast among outcasts, somehow the weirdo in a student body of werewolves, gorgons, psychics, and sirens. The surrounding worldbuilding is light but interesting, and the whodunnit storyline plays out just as its genre should, with an abundance of off-color suspects and a steady progression of competing clues. Wednesday is a capable and clever investigator throughout, but the scripts are careful to give her humanizing flaws and have her experience her share of losses and setbacks as well. The voiceover further emphasizes her status as noir detective — or neo noir, like early Veronica Mars — offering world-weary commentary on those same disappointing developments. The result is that her tenacious pursuit of the truth feels wholly earned, in addition to simply being entertaining to watch as her droll wit and flat delivery skewers a variety of would-be authority figures.

Above all, this is a funny show, with plenty of off-beat comedy from the protagonist and others. A specific shout-out on that front is due to Victor Dorobantu as Thing, an actor who’s able to express surprising amounts of humor and emotion in a performance that’s been green-screened out to only his detached hand. The rest of the cast is pretty fun too, including a special role for Christina Ricci, who famously played the young antiheroine herself back in the two 90s movies. And while it’s an easy layup to cast ringers like Luis Guzmán and Catherine Zeta-Jones as Gomez and Morticia, given how little they’re involved in the main narrative, they do a great job in their minimal screentime to flesh out that aspect of the family and contribute to the testy relationship that their daughter clearly feels towards them.

Although I correctly predicted the villain reveal(s) well in advance, the final clues and red herrings are still enjoyable to see fall into place alongside the other interpersonal arcs that have to get resolved by the end of these eight episodes, like Wednesday’s romantic foibles or evolving Odd Couple dynamic with her chipper werewolf roommate. Executive producer Tim Burton ensures that the visuals are his usual quirky gothic feast, and the whole thing is just a delight through and through. I’m so pleased with this as a standalone feature, but also thrilled to see that it’s been renewed for a second season.

[Content warning for gun violence and gore.]

★★★★★

Book Review: Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros

Book #103 of 2023:

Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros (The Empyrean #1)

The majority of this fantasy novel is pretty terrific, a fine addition to that thriving sub-genre of speculative fiction about specialized academies that blatantly allow/encourage/require their enterprising cadets to murder one another to get ahead (Ender’s Game, Battle Royale, The Scholomance, Red Rising, etc.). In this case, the students are enrolled for a chance to become dragon-riders, the most prestigious order of their nation’s military, and the training is literally cutthroat for the limited number of matches available. The protagonist is at a distinct disadvantage here, both by being physically smaller and weaker than her peers and by having been suddenly thrust into the program after years of assuming her parents would let her study to be a scribe instead. However, she proves to be a determined and capable young woman in this new arena, and her fierce embrace of the curriculum’s challenges is quite endearing. Author Rebecca Yarros also draws on her background as a romance writer to pen a scorching enemies-to-lovers arc with the resident bad boy, the captured son of an executed rebel leader.

Those scenes can get fairly graphic, which isn’t a problem in and of itself, yet rings oddly in a story that otherwise has so many traditional YA hallmarks. (The heroine is twenty, but she’s very much coming of age and learning to push back against her mother’s generation in this book. She’s even caught up in a tired love triangle for a while, although the other fellow isn’t ever sold as a convincing alternative in my opinion, even before he turns more controlling and unwilling to listen to her on anything.) I’d also critique the ending for being too fast-paced and filled with hairpin twists that aren’t given enough room to be properly unpacked, from character betrayals and big secrets coming to light to Sandersonian-style reveals about worldbuilding and societal misinformation. And I wonder whether the general’s daughter is the most effective choice as a viewpoint into all this: she gradually learns, predictably enough, that there’s more to the rebellion of the backstory than she’s been told all her life, and that the rebels’ orphaned children are not necessarily evil, but a plot that rooted readers in that group’s perspective from the start might have been more engaging. As written, this is somewhat like a version of The Hunger Games set in the Capitol that only belatedly incorporates an outsider like Katniss.

Those nitpicks aside, I have generally enjoyed this title, and especially getting to know Violet, her friends, and the local dragons, who can psychically bond with their chosen humans and bestow magical gifts upon them. There’s a lot that the volume does well, both in service to the immediate narrative of her first year in the training corps and in setting up threads for the remainder of the series. It’s a little too messy for me to give this effort my highest rating or a complete rave review, but I’m definitely looking forward to the sequel.

[Content warning for gore.]

★★★★☆

TV Review: Star Trek: Enterprise, season 4

TV #47 of 2023:

Star Trek: Enterprise, season 4

I gather conventional wisdom holds that the latter two seasons of this TOS prequel series are better than the first, and sure, I’ll mildly agree to that. The writers understand their characters and the other strengths (and limitations) of the program a little more clearly now, and there are some serialized plot arcs that allow for interesting and meaningful stakes. Personally, though, I still found the penultimate run to be among the weaker Trek efforts overall, and this last one is yet more uneven in comparison to that. Eschewing one big continuous storyline like the Xindi threat, it instead presents a sequence of two- or three-part episode strings, which tend to be both fairly discrete from one another and rather variable in quality across the year.

The two hours spent in the parallel universe, for instance, work well on their own and as a follow-up to the classic outings “Mirror, Mirror” and “The Tholian Web,” but they’re utterly disconnected from anything else in their own show. No actual Enterprise characters appear — only their Terran Empire equivalents — and the events never cross over to impact the main continuity in the slightest. It’s a good microcosm of the season as a whole, really, yet still better by itself than certain other stories this year, like the hasty wrap-up of the temporal cold war or the attempt to finally and laboriously explain on-screen why Klingons didn’t have their now-standard forehead ridges in their earliest appearances in canon. It’s a new anthology approach to the narrative, and a bit of a mixed bag by result.

There’s not much of a grand conclusion or send-off to the enterprise (sorry), either. The literal finale is almost hilariously inept in that regard, jumping forward by six years for the starship crew and then representing not even a proper last adventure for them but only an inspirational holodeck reconstruction accessed by TNG figures in the distant future, during the events of their own episode “The Pegasus.” Unlike the earlier stunt casting of Brent Spiner as the ancestor of Data’s creator, which is otherwise in service to a solid piece of Enterprise storytelling, this nostalgia bait reads as a simple effort to remind fans of a show and cast that they probably liked much better and robs a few would-be important developments of the space they’d need for full effect. Even given my many critiques of this title as I’ve watched through the thing, it’s an unnecessary and insulting disservice in its final hour — and perhaps speaks to why this would wind up being the last new televised Star Trek for a hiatus of a dozen years.

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

This season: ★★★☆☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Seasons ranked: 3 > 4 > 2 > 1

TV Review: Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, season 1

TV #46 of 2023:

Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, season 1

Three-and-a-half stars, rounded up. There’s a lot of things I enjoy about this unexpected Netflix revival, which aired in 2016 after the original WB/CW program ended in 2007. In a review at the time, I mentioned:

“It really feels like ten years have gone by for these characters. So many TV series that get brought back after a long absence either try to act like no time has passed (e.g. Arrested Development) or make it into a reunion where most of the characters are seeing each other again for the first time since the show ended (e.g. Veronica Mars). But watching Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life is like watching the latest season from a world where the show never went off the air.”

And that remains largely true, even coming directly from a rewatch of the older seasons this time. The primary driver of that verisimilitude is in the returning cast: not just the main actors, but all of the smaller supporting roles around them that help make Stars Hollow seem like a living, breathing community. Some of those familiar faces only pop in for a quick scene or two — presumably due to their other commitments, especially for performers like Jared Padalecki and Melissa McCarthy whose careers had taken off over the previous decade — but they collectively work to flesh out the enterprise considerably. I can’t help but compare this to another recent TV sequel, the mediocre Justified: City Primeval that tried to get by with only bringing back its core protagonist, and vastly prefer this approach. It’s simply great to get to check in on so many beloved characters throughout this four-part miniseries.

As for the weaker elements, well… I suppose it wouldn’t be Gilmore Girls if there wasn’t some degree of random manufactured drama hanging over the affair. Four 90-minute episodes paradoxically represent both too much and too little of a canvas here. Certain character beats seem rushed and ill-supported, while the program indulgently lingers on wackier moments that should have been trimmed, like Taylor’s awful Stars Hollow musical or Lorelai’s bizarre ‘Wild’ excursion (a plot device that already seemed dated in 2016 and is downright creaky when viewed today). Overall, I think the winter and spring segments are significantly better than the two quarters that follow them — and not just because that first half directly confronts the absence of patriarch Richard Gilmore, whose actor Edward Herrmann had passed away in the meantime. They also spend more of their runtime catching viewers up on what everyone else has been doing since 2007, and thus don’t have as much room for the sort of petty new fights (between Lorelai and Emily, between Lorelai and Luke, between Lorelai and Rory, etc.) that get picked later on.

I don’t really mind the very ending, though I know it remains divisive among fans. Likewise for the younger Gilmore’s aimlessness throughout the year, which might be disappointing given her promising early academics, but seems to me relatively in line with the struggles she evinced in the last few original seasons. Still, I wish this project didn’t ignore how Rory is the same age now that her mother was when that older show began, which could have been a productive lens to filter the nostalgia that a revival like this is inherently built upon.

Overall, though, there’s plenty here for anyone who loved the classic run of the series, and the production stands as a welcome return for writer-showrunners Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino, who were infamously fired before the start of work on the last season back then. It’s fitting to have them as the creative force behind this follow-up installment, especially if it’s meant to stand as an overall finale to the extended franchise.

Will we ever get more Gilmore Girls? Seven years further on (and in the midst of an ongoing writers and actors strike), the prospect of reassembling the entire cast again seems somewhat unlikely, and Kelly Bishop in particular isn’t getting any younger. I could maybe imagine a ‘next generation’ approach sometime down the road that more explicitly slots Rory into the former Lorelai role with a teenage child of her own, but is anyone really clamoring for that sort of sequel if it couldn’t have all the old familiar figures? For those of us who love the series, all the original episodes are always there to return to, and I can personally attest that they hold up pretty well. Generally speaking, this miniseries does too.

[Content warning for fatphobia / body-shaming.]

★★★★☆