The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Watergate: A New History by Garrett M. Graff

Book #14 of 2023:

Watergate: A New History by Garrett M. Graff

This 2022 publication is a clear and exceedingly thorough account of the various misdeeds, investigations, and cover-ups that dogged the end of Richard Nixon’s presidency. Historian and journalist Garrett M. Graff has conducted no fresh interviews — which would not necessarily be possible or even all that helpful nearly a half-century after the fact — but he has read and synthesized an extraordinary volume of the existing primary and secondary materials, much of which had apparently never been collected together into one place before.

(As always, it’s difficult to adequately rate / review a nonfiction title without being an expert on the subject oneself. But the obvious level of scholarship and the degree to which the author points out errors and inconsistencies in earlier reporting leads me to believe he’s been careful about researching and presenting the facts himself. It also reads as objective and nonpartisan, although that’s presumably easier for a modern writer to achieve than a contemporary one.)

While the ensuing work is heavy on information both available at the time and in some cases revealed only decades later, it paints a vivid sense of the confusing miasma of scandal and corruption swirling around the Nixon campaign and White House, where one crisis and its illegal, unethical response would often blend seamlessly into the next. Graff pointedly avoids drawing the comparison himself, but the atmosphere will surely seem familiar to younger readers like me who have no firsthand memories of the Watergate era but did follow political news over the Trump years, which in many ways traced a similar pattern.

There are no revelations or new conclusions in this book, but there are plenty of items that had been previously lacking from my general pop-cultural understanding of this moment in American history. Like that the president probably wasn’t initially aware of the hotel burglary that eventually became emblematic of his downfall; he had just encouraged such a corrupt culture among his staff that enterprising underlings would routinely attempt such criminal acts of their own volition. (Regardless, he still knew about and tried to hide the affair soon afterward, and was more directly responsible for other offenses from money laundering to blackmail.) Or that there’s still no agreement on what the point of the Watergate break-in even was, or that Nixon and his team knew the identity of the infamous ‘Deep Throat’ leaker to Woodward and Bernstein pretty much right from the start.

All in all it’s a hefty tome, some 832 pages in hardcover, but it’s well worth reading for the deep dive into its chosen topic. I look forward to someday seeing a book like this on the Trump administration, when all the dust has finally settled.

[Content warning for gun violence, suicide, and antisemitism.]

★★★★☆

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TV Review: Leverage: Redemption, season 2

TV #5 of 2023:

Leverage: Redemption, season 2

Another pleasantly satisfying year of the Leverage revival, although I think I’ve finally keyed into why it’s not quite soaring for me as its predecessor often did. It’s hard to spot at first, because the cast is nearly all the same, and they are still adults facing ostensibly adult problems… but this is middle-grade fiction now. That’s not to say that tweens are the only ones who could enjoy the show — and I have no idea how it’s being marketed — but the overall sensibility of the program feels built around a simpler cartoon logic than the more grounded original. Bad guys gloat about their evil plans, then walk straight into the traps that the heroes have laid out for them. Those protagonists remain con artists pulling heists to help the underdog defeat the rich abuser of the hour, but they are rarely challenged in a way that isn’t easily overcome or later revealed as the sort of misdirection that’s standard for this genre, where an apparent setback turns out to be a necessary part of the plan all along.

It’s still a good time, mind you! I particularly like the finale and the episode where the main crew are in the background secretly helping a pair of civilians crack the case on their own. The character interactions and the numerous disguises are fun, and I appreciate the concept behind the serialized plot involving Sophie’s backstory, even if it doesn’t prove especially revelatory in practice. But bottom line, this is the kind of zany series where Hardison can just randomly spend most of the season floating in a space capsule, with all of the logistics for either that or any of the episodic missions breezily waved aside by the scripts. And the difficulty of reconciling that with what I remember of the more mature parent program is keeping me at a distance from Redemption.

[Content warning for gun violence and gaslighting.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Stars Undying by Emery Robin

Book #13 of 2023:

The Stars Undying by Emery Robin (Empire Without End #1)

[Thank you to the publisher Orbit for providing me with a free copy of this title in exchange for an honest review!]

I appreciate this debut novel as an intellectual exercise, but somewhat less as an engaging story in the moment. It’s a loose sci-fi retelling of the history / legend of Cleopatra and Julius Caesar, and while it’s fun to play spot-the-parallels — which are not exactly subtle, e.g. Anita for Mark Antony or Otávio for Octavius — that and the impressively-detailed, queer-normative worldbuilding are not quite enough to make up for the thinness of the plot.

Things start off well, with the presentation of two parallel civil wars: one spanning a massive intergalactic empire, and the other on a small sovereign planet that’s under its influence but just outside its current boundaries. Yet merely a quarter of the way through the text, both conflicts have been summarily resolved, and from then on, there’s very little in the way of significant developments, or stakes, or explicit goals, or challenges facing the two main characters until the end. I think this issue was exacerbated by how strongly the Roman-inflected space opera reminded me of Red Rising, leading me to expect much more betrayal and bloodshed and far less slow-paced political intrigue.

Mostly, though, I simply don’t understand the dynamic between the dual protagonists, who metaphorically and literally hop into bed together as soon as they meet and subsequently never seem to question one another’s loyalty or feel torn between the romance and their sense of what’s best for their respective peoples. That rings false for such ostensibly canny operators, each the head of an entire government, and makes it difficult for me to ever wholly invest in the grand tragic narrative surrounding them.

[Content warning for gore.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Star Trek: Voyager, season 6

TV #4 of 2023:

Star Trek: Voyager, season 6

Right now in my Star Trek watch-through, I am alternating a season of Voyager with a season of Enterprise, which provides an interesting and productive contrast. While this will never be my favorite iteration of the franchise, and I have to say that this penultimate year makes a few particularly frustrating creative decisions, it has a certain baseline competence, a compelling overall plot, and a well-fleshed out main cast, which are all qualities that that other series has been majorly lacking, at least in the episodes I’ve seen so far. Like its predecessors, I am giving this run of Voyager three-out-of-five stars as a solid piece of science-fiction that nevertheless leaves me wishing it would lean more into its strengths and avoid a few obvious blunders.

As for those missteps: the producers were apparently not content with the one junior member of the crew already roaming the ship, and so Naomi Wildman is now joined by four essentially indistinguishable Borg children, with Seven of Nine tasked to be their teacher / surrogate mother. It feels like a desperate grab for ratings in a younger demographic, but the juvenile subplots in practice continue to land poorly and distract from the adult concerns at hand (as they have since the early days of Wesley Crusher on TNG). In another minor bit of continuity, we are introduced to an Irish holo-village that seems like the latest attempt at establishing a sociological ‘third place’ between work and home for the characters, following the tropical resort program and Captain Proton scenario of seasons past. If the show could stick with one of these concepts long-term it could perhaps acquire deeper significance, but for some reason, they instead each tend to put in a few appearances and then get discarded. Here, for instance, Fair Haven mostly serves for the requisite Holodeck-run-amock episode — and to showcase Janeway’s ruthlessness, although as ever, I’m not sure that’s entirely intentional in the scripts.

Let’s review. In exploring this digital environment — on a series that has always emphasized the personhood and dignity of its holographic Doctor — the captain sees a person that she likes and proceeds to edit him shamelessly in ways large and small to suit her even better. She even deletes his wife from existence, a fact that never comes up again, even after he gains sentience and she promises honesty later on! To be clear, I’m not saying these character choices represent bad writing, any more so than the heroine’s decision to pull another Tuvix in 6×6 “Riddles” and kill off the new version of Tuvok’s consciousness that’s begging her not to. On the contrary, the idea of a Starfleet officer far from home exercising terrible deadly judgment that no one can question or countermand has real teeth to it. But the writers don’t actually appear to recognize and fault the woman for any of this, which is an unfortunate missed opportunity.

In terms of who does get faulted, former co-star Kes gets a head-scratcher of a return for an hour, randomly evil and then redeemed by being reminded that she used to be nicer (in a time-travel solution that also frustratingly suggests Janeway has known about three years of developments like Seven joining the crew before they happened). And rounding out the big cameos, Deanna Troi and Reg Barclay of all people pop up a few times, reestablishing contact with the Alpha Quadrant once more despite how that weakens the basic narrative tension of the show. It’s all so unnecessary… and yet it’s still better than Enterprise, at least.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Tales from Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin

Book #12 of 2023:

Tales from Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin (Earthsea #5)

Although I’ve generally been enjoying the Earthsea setting / franchise, I confess that I expected this 2001 book of short stories to be somewhat extraneous and non-essential. Luckily, however, with the exception of the dry historical account “A Description of Earthsea” that closes out the volume, the entries here capture both the narrative charm of the preceding novels and author Ursula K. Le Guin’s latter interest in interrogating and revising the sexism inherent in her early worldbuilding. Thus we see (in a range of adventures across the centuries) how women were among the original founders of the great school of wizardry on Roke, how one woman in the modern age shattered convention to gain entrance to that institute, and how despite the names, the powers of male ‘sorcery’ and female ‘witchiness’ in this fantasy realm are more alike and overlapping than categorically opposed.

These tales moreover feature bold and compelling protagonists: some who are familiar to the series, others who are new, and at least one who is reportedly important in the final novel The Other Wind, which followed later the same year. While I have not read that one yet, I’m already satisfied that this title has earned its place as a proper installment of the Earthsea cycle, rather than the supplementary work I initially mistook it for.

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Burden by Mary Westmacott

Book #11 of 2023:

The Burden by Mary Westmacott

The sixth and final novel that author Agatha Christie published under her Mary Westmacott pseudonym is unfortunately also the weakest. It starts off alright, tracing the childhood of a girl whose mother and father both resent her for living when her older brother dies of polio, and how she initially hates her younger sister in turn before eventually saving her from a fire and then stepping up to raise her when the parents are killed in a plane crash. But all that death speeds by rather quickly, and just when it seems like the narrative is going to slow down and focus on the two surviving characters as adults, we switch to an entirely different protagonist who then spends most of the rest of the book philosophizing about religion until his story finally reconnects with that of the young women. It’s overall a bit of a mess, with multiple proclamations of love and marriage proposals following after an acquaintanceship of mere weeks, and what feels intended to be a shocking reveal in the last few pages is built up so poorly that it barely even registers.

Generally I think that the psychological Westmacott titles are unfairly overlooked amid the writer’s more famous mystery career, but this one, like the earlier Unfinished Portrait, absolutely deserves the modern obscurity.

[Content warning for racism, sexism, and alcohol abuse.]

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: After I Do by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Book #10 of 2023:

After I Do by Taylor Jenkins Reid

One-and-a-half stars, begrudgingly rounded up for my enjoyment of the heroine’s extended family. I nearly quit this book several times, and it’s by far my least favorite of the five Taylor Jenkins Reid titles I’ve now read. The characters are decently fleshed-out, and the basic premise of a couple realizing their marriage is in trouble and embarking on a one-year trial separation is an interesting hook. But they’re both such awful, destructive people to each other and themselves that I’ve found it impossible to stay invested in their respective happiness and the question of whether they’ll ultimately find it by staying apart or getting back together.

I think for the structure of this piece to work, we would need to see that Lauren and Ryan used to be great partners, that they’re currently in crisis, and that they eventually manage to improve again. And although the writer does provide initial flashbacks to their eleven-year romantic history, their dynamic feels aggressive and off-putting to me all throughout. They’ve sunk to a new low at the story’s start only in that they’ve become outwardly hostile and resentful, but they were already belittling and picking fights with one another on their honeymoon! There are no good times to ever return to — which could still be the setup to a solid narrative, but it’s not the one we’re presented with here. Instead, all the talk is on these ex-lovers recapturing a magic that I’m not convinced was real in the first place.

And they’re no better further into the experiment, either. While separated, she logs into his inbox and reads his emails, including the unsent drafts addressed to her. (Some folks in her life call her out on this blatant invasion of privacy, but she keeps doing it and appears to be reassured by her friend’s bizarre victim-blaming logic that if he really wanted to shield those messages from her, he would have changed his password.) He later confesses some wildly inappropriate and violent thoughts, like that he wants to punch a wall every time she suggests getting international food like pho or that he’s had dreams of killing her new boyfriend, despite the hypocritical fact that he’s now dating someone else at that point too. Please save these things for therapy, sir! At least his domestic abuse stays mostly inside his head; she actually does throw a vase across the room at him just before they decide to try splitting up.

I don’t require protagonists in fiction to be perfect. Most of the time, their flaws render them more believably human and feed a stronger drama around them. Yet for the thrust of a novel to be about nominally recognizing and addressing such faults, it’s galling to see no evidence of personal growth whatsoever. I guess by the end both spouses have learned that they should communicate better and make fewer assumptions about what the other one is thinking? But this is not a revelation that seems remotely earned in the text.

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: The Secret History by Donna Tartt

Book #9 of 2023:

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

I’ve seen so many book reviews and even official publishing descriptions that compare other titles to Donna Tartt’s The Secret History — it’s apparently a belated inspiration for the modern ‘dark academia’ genre — so I knew that I would eventually need to check out this 1992 novel for myself. And although the slow pace and apparent aimlessness at the beginning doesn’t thrill me, everything clicks into place and starts humming along nicely about a quarter of the way through, with the revelation of the big secret that the narrator’s new classmates have been keeping from him and its grisly aftermath tensely driving the remainder of the text.

But let me back up a second and set the scene. The story dawns at a small liberal arts college in New England, where the protagonist has just transferred and joined an exclusive clique of classics students. He’s looking back on this time from much later, and one of the first things we’re told is that the study group will eventually band together and murder one of its members. At that aforementioned pivot point, we learn it’s because the future victim has been blackmailing the others and threatening to go to the police over his knowledge of their crimes, but until then, the newcomer is on the outside of all that, vaguely sensing an occasionally charged atmosphere but generally oblivious to its specific contours.

Once we know why Bunny is in the crosshairs, the narrative progresses to the planning and execution (sorry) of his demise, followed by the repercussions on campus, the ensuing investigation, and the steady unraveling of his murderers’ psyches. It should be obvious that none of these characters are particularly nice people, but I appreciate how richly they’re drawn, especially our matter-of-fact hero who never stops to consider whether killing someone for inconveniencing your friends might be in any way morally wrong or even up for debate. The implicit sociopathy there reminds me of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, and indeed, our leading man is the only one of the killers who doesn’t seem to be spiraling into a crisis in the period after, although none of them ever evince significant guilt or remorse. At one point, one appears genuinely perplexed at the idea of punishment and accountability, saying, “It was an unfortunate incident and I am sorry that it happened, but frankly I do not see how well either the taxpayers’ interests or my own would be served by my spending sixty or seventy years in a Vermont jail.”

To a certain extent, this is also a blistering commentary on the insistent privilege of the uber-wealthy, since the original crew are all scions of the upper crust, although Richard’s own status as the poorer outsider who becomes equally complicit somewhat muddies that reading. But I personally don’t think Tartt is condemning their social class per se, so much as the moral emptiness endemic to it, which the latest arrival happens to share despite his own lack of wealth. Left unspoken is whether the author is suggesting that the study of ancient Greek and Roman civilizations precisely inspires such nihilism, which is an interpretation I know some have advanced.

The most surprising aspect of this work to me is that the students’ professor / advisor is barely in it beyond being introduced with the major red flag that he will be the sole teacher and guidance counselor for his program, leaving his pupils isolated and with no easy avenue to report him for any perceived misconduct. I also know from other tales of this sort that a charismatic figure is typically to blame for the initial fall from grace, so I was expecting either him or one of the undergraduates or even the narrator himself to eventually fill this role. But the book subverts that expectation, keeping Julian largely outside of the sphere of drama and in his absence never really coalescing around a leader who’s primarily responsible for all the discord. If any temptation derailed the trajectories of these bright young folks, it must have happened well before the plot begins.

That’s a wonderfully unsettling notion, as intriguing as the barest hints of the supernatural that we get on the outskirts of the story, or the writer’s immersively textured portrayal of campus life amid all the hedonism and violence. I would not want to attend the fictional Hampden myself — or Tartt’s real alma mater of Bennington whose decadence in the 80s reportedly inspired it — but its miscreants are presented in a way that’s difficult to look away from, all the way through to their deservedly sordid ends.

[Content warning for drug and alcohol abuse, gun violence, suicide, gore, incest, disordered eating, domestic abuse, racism, antisemitism, and homophobia including slurs.]

★★★★☆

TV Review: Gilmore Girls, season 1

TV #3 of 2023:

Gilmore Girls, season 1

This will be at least my third full watch-through of Gilmore Girls, which I think speaks to the overall quality of the program, but also to the ways in which a multigenerational drama like this can resonate with various audiences at various ages. The first time I watched this show, I identified strongly with Rory, the overachieving A-student bookworm who’s struggling with making friends at her new school and navigating her initial forays into dating. The big hook to the series is of course that she’s the child of a teen mom, now at that same age herself — and while Lorelai’s background is thus very different from mine, when I returned for a rewatch closer in age to her than to her kid, I found her adult plots had grown more relevant and I’d often see things more from her perspective during the occasional mother-daughter squabbles.

I’m now slightly older than Lorelai, and with young kids of my own, so I was interested to see whether she’d still be my primary point of entry and identification here. (Surely I’m not old enough to be an Emily yet, right? I’ll admit there are a few fights this year where I take the matriarch’s side and think Lorelai is being immature and needlessly hostile.) But honestly, I’m not sure if I’m feeling that sense of affiliation with any of them right now. I’m between Gilmores for once! If anything, I think I am vibing most heavily with Rory’s academic rival Paris, who is blisteringly funny, just as intelligent as her friend/nemesis, and quite plainly somewhere on the neurodivergent spectrum. Her prickly exterior is a clear cover for a lot of pain, and I look forward to seeing her character get explored and developed further in the seasons ahead.

Overall, it’s a joy to become reacquainted with Stars Hollow, that impossibly cute and quirky small town in New England populated with troubadours and ridiculous community meetings and brunettes who talk with the fast patter of Aaron Sorkin’s West Wing staffers. I love how this is a serialized narrative about these people’s lives that unfolds naturally over time, and will continue to do so from here on out, with every episode carrying a clear sense of the prior context it’s building upon. Showrunner Amy Sherman-Palladino makes it all look easy, especially given the TV landscape in the year 2000 when this debuted. (She was only 34 then, too — my current age!)

Two decades on, it’s also impressive how timeless these moments feel. Beyond the presence of pagers and a few dated cultural references, it all seems more or less set in the present day still. That’s the nature of this sort of slice-of-life storytelling, I suppose: homework and relationship troubles and family arguments remain topical forever.

Not all of the plots entirely land for me, at least when grading on a curve in memory of what’s yet to come. Luke and Lorelai’s mutually skittish interest is a real winner, as is the general premise of the program and how the setup of Friday night dinners brings Emily and Richard Gilmore back into their daughter and granddaughter’s lives. Dean as Rory’s first boyfriend is generally fine. But neither Max nor Rachel ever feels like a wholly fleshed-out creation, with each registering more as an obviously temporary roadblock than a legitimate romantic option for their respective partner. And for all that the season one finale tries to dramatically summarize and wrap up several important ongoing threads, it makes the major misstep of leaving out the older generation of Gilmores completely.

So four-out-of-five stars (Hollow) seems appropriate for this debut run of the series. It’s a strong foundation, and I can’t wait to see it get even better from here.

[Content warning for homophobia.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Book Lovers by Emily Henry

Book #8 of 2023:

Book Lovers by Emily Henry

Romance is not one of my typical genres, but every once in a while, a title picks up enough positive chatter to break through and catch my attention. It probably helps that this particular novel is about two very bookish characters — the heroine a literary agent and her eventual love interest an editor — which means that folks in my social circles who follow such new releases have been very eager to buzz about their fictional counterparts.

And it is a fun story, with a handful of personal caveats. I like how driven and genre-savvy the protagonist is, and how she immediately establishes that she’s the kind of person who gets dumped at the end of a Hallmark movie — the Peloton-riding, big city career woman whose boyfriend has chosen to ditch her for the Christmas tree farmer or whoever he just met while traveling through the American heartland. I also enjoy that although she herself does experience a reawakening of sorts during a visit to a small town in rural North Carolina, it’s with a fellow New Yorker she already knows professionally, rather than the type of yokel she’s been left for in the past. That setting is cute in a Stars Hollow sort of way too, complete with ridiculous community meetings full of colorful personalities. And I appreciate how the family drama with Nora’s sister is ultimately of greater importance than the prospect of whether she’ll end up with the guy or not.

As for the negatives, I don’t feel like the inclusion of a secondary romantic interest is ever necessary to the plot or justified as in-character for the heroine to pursue when she’s already quite smitten with his cousin. Similarly, the stretch of the book when the couple keep insisting that they can never be together despite their obvious attraction and burgeoning feelings strikes me as pretty flimsy, as though manufactured for maximum melodrama by authorial fiat rather than arising organically from the people and situations themselves. But maybe readers who are more into this kind of rom-com narrative in the first place wouldn’t mind those tropes as much.

Finally, I have to say that as strongly as I can identify with these lovers as fellow bookworms and relate to how they feel about stories in the abstract, I am very pleased that author Emily Henry hasn’t gone the route of peppering her text with constant name-dropping of her/their favorite books and writers. I’ve read novels like that before, and they always turn out sounding smug and self-satisfied whether I get the references or not. It works much better here for the main authors under discussion to be the protagonist’s (fictional) clients, rather than a stream of real-life plugs. So overall, this was a fine read for me, and a reminder that sometimes it’s nice to wander a bit from our familiar routines.

★★★★☆