The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

TV Review: Gilmore Girls, season 2

TV #6 of 2023:

Gilmore Girls, season 2

Another strong outing of this multigenerational family drama, with more cracks evident between ‘best friends’ Lorelai and her daughter Rory as the latter navigates her junior year of high school. The storytelling all-around feels more competent than in the debut run, and I appreciate the early course-correction of writing out Mr. Max Medina, who never fit well with the overall Gilmore vibe. The writers have figured out the same thing about Dean, of course, but they take the more nuanced approach this season of turning that into a slow-motion tragedy. Before, Rory’s first boyfriend was generally inoffensive / bland, but here he’s regularly if subtly positioned as a legitimately poor match for her. They don’t have the same interests, or passions, or hobbies, or friends. They talk past one another, fight over petty matters, and hurry to make up without delving into the issues underlying their strife. At a certain point, the audience is forced to ask: why is our young academic-minded heroine still in a relationship with this jock, beyond teenage hormones and a simple feeling that she should be?

And then there’s the Jess of it all. We don’t get to see Rory and Luke’s nephew as a couple here, but their mutual interest becomes increasingly obvious, and he’s a great thematic stand-in for all the important qualities that Dean is lacking. While he’s not an A-student either, he’s well-read and clever enough to keep up with the rapid-fire Stars Hollow banter, and his bad-boy attitude is a clear draw for a girl feeling stifled by her present circumstances. As Dean’s girlfriend pulls away, she’s not exactly choosing the new kid over him — although it makes perfect sense that Lorelai would see things that way and try desperately to interfere with his perceived bad influence. Instead Jess is more of the catalyst awakening Rory to her existing dissatisfaction, as well as just a fun character who brings out interesting new dimensions in his uncle and the rest of the town. The attraction eventually turns romantic, and viewers can keep tuning in to see that descend into its own brand of toxic dysfunctionality, but his role in this year’s story is primarily to serve as a wake-up call to the fact that you don’t have to settle for the first person to ever ask you out.

Lorelai’s on the show too, but she’s largely in reactive mode at this juncture, with her social life put somewhat on pause after the engagement falls through. She finishes business school, makes some bad decisions with her ex Christopher, quarrels with Luke over their respective parenting styles, and continues butting heads with her own folks, but it’s all rather subordinate to what’s going on with her daughter and reads as more of the background texture of the program for now. Richard quits his long-term job, exasperating Emily before he finds a stable new outlet for his energy. Paris gains further dimension as Rory’s best frenemy and editor of the school paper over her. Sookie gets engaged and then married. Lane develops an interest in drumming. Such B-plots mark the passage of time for the serialized narrative, but our main attention is rightly on Rory’s love life and the tensions brewing therein.

★★★★☆

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: World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks

Book #26 of 2023:

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks

The modern ‘zombie apocalypse’ genre was already in full swing in 2006 when this book made its rather curious debut, with the associated tropes well-known enough to be mined for comedy in films like Shaun of the Dead (2004) or the later Zombieland (2009). Anyone paying attention to the project’s pedigree likely would have expected such a light touch here too, since author Max Brooks is the son of famed humorist Mel Brooks and a former Saturday Night Live writer in his own right, whose previous publication, 2003’s The Zombie Survival Guide, seemed a low-effort and tongue-in-cheek way to cash in on the undead craze. Surprisingly, though, this follow-up strikes a tone both deadly earnest and terrifically insightful, cementing its status as a major touchstone for subsequent zombie fiction.

It’s not a traditional novel with a core protagonist and a sustained storyline, either, although I understand the poorly-received film adaptation tries to graft such a narrative into place. The text is instead presented as a sequence of interviews with various survivors of a recent global catastrophe, each of whom has a distinctive recollection and perspective on events. A minor plot arc traces the outbreak through to the logistics of its spread and eventual containment efforts, but most chapters are still pretty discrete from one another in terms of causality, cast, space, and time.

The title benefits from its expansive approach, underscored on audiobook by a fantastic assortment of narrators with the ensuing range of accents. We hop from country to country, seeing how cultural differences have manifested in an array of responses to the crisis, none of which have been especially successful. I’ve seen some contemporary reviews identifying this as a veiled critique of the Bush administration’s handling of Iraq and/or Hurricane Katrina, but nearly two decades on, it seems more timeless to me, grimly highlighting how the human elements of personal ambition, xenophobia, and slow-moving bureaucracy could enable any disaster to spiral out of control. The early sections are particularly bracing to read after witnessing the real-life COVID-19 pandemic similarly move faster than any of our imperfect quarantine attempts could manage to prevent.

There are moments of bravery, sacrifice, and fierce joy in these pages too, so it’s not a total downer. (And after all, the very premise does situate the ‘war’ as a problem of the immediate past, with humanity weakened and reduced but ultimately triumphant.) Certain scenes, along with the overall atmosphere, have proven indelible distillations of our species at its highest and its lowest both. It’s decidedly not for the faint-of-heart, but there’s a textured vividness to everything Brooks has the characters relate, his writing always refusing to turn and share that satirical wink that would allow us to take this less seriously or cheer on the carnage at a bloodless distance. Zombies can be a punchline elsewhere, but here they’re simply the terrible and relentless enemy that almost destroyed us all.

[Content warning for gun violence, suicide, cannibalism, gore, pedophilia, rape, ableism, racism, antisemitism, and homophobia including slurs.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Station Eternity by Mur Lafferty

Book #25 of 2023:

Station Eternity by Mur Lafferty (The Midsolar Murders #1)

I really dig the initial premise of this story, which is that the heroine somehow has the bad luck to repeatedly find herself at the scene of one murder after another. (She’s not a killer, to be clear, even though law enforcement agents have investigated her connections to plenty of these crimes. She’s more like that Douglas Adams character who can never convince anyone he’s perpetually stuck in the rain, with the bonus that she’s now pretty good at solving the cases around her on her own.) I’m even on-board with the subsequent sci-fi twist of this woman fleeing the planet to an alien space station where she hopes, as one of only three human residents, that she won’t inspire / discover any more deaths. And of course, the ultimate setup is that there turns out to be a matter on her new home that she’s uniquely qualified to look into, regardless.

The execution here quickly grows a bit wobbly, however. The number of viewpoint characters increases exponentially, and the action slows to a crawl as we tediously retread how everyone knows one another and see events play out that have already been described if not outright depicted from a different point of view. Nor do these repeats serve a clear function like establishing that prior testimony was biased / dishonest and thereby muddying a reader’s understanding of the official record. Instead, they mostly just run out the clock and sink what has briefly seemed the beginnings of a fun, zippy adventure.

The worldbuilding proves to be a bust, too. Author Mur Lafferty throws around a few interesting extraterrestrial concepts, but so much of what we’re told about various species in terms of their communication abilities, temperament, etc. isn’t consistently upheld. (One race naturally rumbles in a frequency too low for human ears, for instance, and has to make a conscious effort to talk so we can hear them. Except that the protagonist walks into the middle of a conversation among such beings on multiple occasions, overhearing words not meant for her.) Whether that’s an editing mistake or another flawed attempt to make us question the narrative, I can’t say. I can only report that this book loses my faith early on via such measures, and never manages to recapture it — a real letdown after the writer’s earlier, thankfully unrelated novel Six Wakes, which I genuinely enjoyed. I will not be returning for any Midsolar sequels.

[Content warning for gun violence, body horror, and gore.]

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: The Dragonslayer’s Apprentice by David Calder

Book #24 of 2023:

The Dragonslayer’s Apprentice by David Calder

I remember checking out this book from the library on multiple occasions as a kid, but upon belatedly getting around to an adult reread, I’m disappointed to report that it seems an utterly unremarkable story. The setting is the most generic medieval fantasy land, with few distinguishing cultural flourishes or other worldbuilding elements. The characters are not particularly clever or funny, nor are they ever significantly challenged in a way that’s not immediately overcome. In the barest hint of a plot arc, the title figure turns out to be a runaway princess who doubts the royal family will approve of her new profession, which comes to a bit of a head right before the abrupt ending. She also faces a great deal of heavy-handed sexism throughout, usually in the form of someone being surprised by her gender and then astonished when she in fact proves quite capable at dispatching monsters.

The novel is presented from her boss’s point of view anyway, and most of the action consists of their small band traveling from one location to another and defeating the creature / villain of the day: first a giant kitten, then a literal dragon, next a pair of monstrous killer birds, and finally a woman claiming to be a witch. There’s some discussion of the varying levels of organizational competence in each successive township, but it’s too scattered to feel like it’s meant to build to any particular thesis.

The thing that’s stuck with me most over the years is the taciturn assistant dragonslayer Ron, whose gestures and brief utterances are interpreted at greater eloquence by the viewpoint protagonist, for instance mentally translating a nod as, “I’ve unpacked the equipment, checked it, sharpened everything, made repairs where necessary, oiled everything, laid it out in order and locked it up safely.” And that remains amusing, but it does suggest a certain comic tone a la Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett that isn’t really met in the rest of the text.

I was hoping I’d be able to herald this as a hidden gem unfairly doomed to obscurity by the vagaries of the reading public, but it’s simply nothing special even by the standards of children’s fiction from 1997. The girl-power message is appreciated, but you’d get all that and more from someone like Tamora Pierce. This one unfortunately brings very little else to the table.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Other Wind by Ursula K. Le Guin

Book #23 of 2023:

The Other Wind by Ursula K. Le Guin (Earthsea #6)

This final Earthsea volume is fine, but it hasn’t grabbed me like the series can at its best. We again find author Ursula K. Le Guin in course-correction mode, and if books 4 and 5 were primarily intended to rectify and add nuance to the role of women in her fictional seafaring civilization, this one takes aim at the unsettling implication from the third novel that the souls of all dead people are languishing in the great hereafter. Drawing together several threads and characters from across the saga, this text reveals more of the ancient connections between humans and dragons, before ultimately resolving that depressing situation with the afterlife. It seems like it should be a big cathartic moment, but it all feels a bit pat to me instead — either because the short stories in the previous title largely give the game away in advance or because Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials finale The Amber Spyglass, published one year earlier, weirdly poses a similar dilemma and solution.

Moreover, the majority of the plot here consists of folks traveling somewhere, trading legends with whoever they encounter, and then journeying on to start the process over. I know that the heavy focus on walking and talking is a criticism often launched at the fantasy genre as a whole, but typically there are action sequences and/or personal arcs to help break up and add color to the events. The protagonists in this book appear dourly focused on uncovering the remaining worldbuilding details and solving the big crises of the day, but few of them face any real individual challenges or stakes along the way. Le Guin can still rattle off a satisfying fairy tale, especially in the quieter domestic scenes, but I have to say that this last installment is my least favorite of its line.

This volume: ★★★☆☆

Overall series: ★★★★☆

Volumes ranked: 2 > 4 > 5 > 1 > 3 > 6

Book Review: 4.50 from Paddington by Agatha Christie

Book #22 of 2023:

4.50 from Paddington by Agatha Christie (Miss Marple #8)

A most delightful little mystery. I enjoy how author Agatha Christie plays with her usual formulae in this one, while still treating readers fairly with the facts and sticking firmly within the grand whodunnit tradition. As suggested by the novel’s rather exclamatory US title What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw!, the action begins with a setpiece that would likely inspire later works like The Girl on the Train: an elderly passenger happens to witness a murder in the cabin of a locomotive across from her, during the brief moment that the two trains are in sync on the tracks. She alerts the authorities at the next station, but no body can be discovered and the police don’t seem to believe her wild story. Desperate, she passes the investigating baton to her good friend Miss Jane Marple, who subsequently takes over as protagonist — before deciding that a more active presence is required and enlisting a plucky young acquaintance of her own to continue the search.

Beyond the three sequential heroines, there’s also the fun nature of the puzzle(s) at the core of this text. Typically in a murder mystery, only the culprit is unknown, along with their exact means and motive. Here, the women must first deduce where the corpse has been hidden in order to prove that there’s been a crime at all, and even then, the victim turns out to be a Jane Doe with no identification, which makes the hunt for her killer a far more difficult task. Nevertheless, the investigators are clever and capable, and they slowly manage to put everything together and catch the murderer in their net.

Throughout it all, Christie weaves her customary red herrings and amusing character sketches, and I’m impressed by how much of the apparent misdirection and stray detailing winds up relevant to the solution in the end. The suspect is neither too obvious nor too unlikely / removed from the plot, which is a balance the writer sometimes misjudges. It’s overall one of the better entries in this series, albeit not one where Miss Marple is the undisputed star.

[Content warning for ableism.]

★★★★☆

Movie Review: Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022)

Movie #2 of 2023:

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022)

Perhaps inevitably, this sequel is not as strong as its rather extraordinary 2018 predecessor. But it nears that level of quality at times, and might well be the best possible follow-up given the awful loss of original star Chadwick Boseman to colon cancer in the intervening years. The studio made the surprising but appreciated call to kill off his title role rather than recast it, and this movie plays out in part as a memorial to them both. Indeed, it’s hard to shake the feeling in one early funeral scene that everyone involved is mourning their real-life friend as much as his on-screen alias.

I like too that because of the events of the first film, there is no immediate heir apparent to T’Challa’s position as Wakandan protector / superhero. While someone does eventually don that mantle, the bulk of the story is focused on a disparate group of individuals taking time to grieve and sort out their feelings, rather than rushing into the next Black Panther’s era. That, and defending the nation from a new power that’s risen up from the ocean depths in challenge, which seems likely to have been the only element retained from the earliest drafts of this script.

Namor and his people are serviceable antagonists at worst, and sometimes offer striking messages on indigenous sovereignty. They’re a great fit for this series and narrative foil for Wakanda overall, and the movie does a good job of showing how the two communities could be natural allies against the colonialist regimes of the world, yet still different enough to reasonably end up at each other’s throats instead. In that light, I think updating Atlantis in the comics to the Mayan-descended Talokan is a particularly smart adaptation choice, even though the exact plot logistics and motivations behind their actions don’t always track for me.

In the end, we circle back around to grief and a verdict on its appropriate responses, which is not unexpected by the standards of the Marvel franchise. (A lot of dialogue is devoted to the question of whether a certain character will intentionally kill the villain, despite the fact that that’s obviously not how Disney’s going to let this morality tale conclude.) And while the 161-minute runtime is simultaneously over-long and overstuffed, featuring too many hard-to-see underwater combat shots and giving short shrift to elements like American college whiz Riri Williams, it hits enough of the right notes enough of the time. There’s no one here with the easy charisma of Boseman, and the project decidedly suffers for it. But director Ryan Coogler’s vision of Black excellence and a bastion where it thrives still lives on, and that’s as fitting a tribute as one could imagine.

[Content warning for gun violence, slavery, and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean

Book #21 of 2023:

The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean

This is certainly a distinctive fantasy novel, but it’s not one that entirely works for me in execution. Part of the problem is the split timeline, alternating between the heroine’s experiences leading up to her separation from her family and her subsequent life on the run from them. Telling the story this way keeps a few surprises preserved for longer, but early on it makes it hard to grasp the stakes of the situation, and later there are chapters that feel like they’re simply providing information that everyone ought to have figured out already by then.

The minimal worldbuilding also proves a letdown for me. True to the title, the protagonist is of a supernatural species that generally subsists on books, whose contents they internalize via digestion. This has some thematic resonance to the ultimate point that their society cannot progress because generation after generation sticks to the same familiar volumes and shuns all new ideas, but its actual mechanics and implications are pretty vague. (Why do they keep hidden from humanity? Why can the main character recognize written words on at least two occasions without comment, when we’re repeatedly told that her people are physically unable to read at all? Why are some of them instead born as vampiric creatures who feed on the souls of their prey, and why are those ones alternately called mind eaters, dragons, and saints throughout the text? Why are there so many tossed-off references to a wider global community that are never developed at any significant depth?)

I like the core of this plot, with its rebellion against an oppressive patriarchy and the acute personal anguish of a woman forced into marriage, raped and impregnated, and then separated from her beloved children. The fact that she’s a lesbian who at one point makes an asexual male friend — likewise marginalized in their culture — and starts the tale as a single parent raising a child who can be read as disabled is valuable representation for the genre. But overall this feels more like a swirling assortment of promising brainstorming results than a satisfyingly edited final draft.

[Content warning for gun violence, domestic abuse, drug addiction, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: How to Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix

Book #20 of 2023:

How to Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix

Three-and-a-half stars, rounded up. This is far from my favorite Grady Hendrix novel, but I do think it’s closer in quality to his typical output than to Horrorstör, the only title I’ve previously rated lower than four stars. A lot of this will come down to personal taste, but I’m not a big fan of the horror sub-genre where people are tormented by a malevolent doll — or creepy clown puppet, in this case — and I was definitely expecting more of a straightforward haunting with ghosts when I picked up this book. I was also looking forward to the real estate element, which winds up being a fairly minor part of the text. For most of the read, the heroine and her brother are not actually trying to sell the house that they’ve inherited; they’re warding off attacks from the little imp, seeking to exorcise it, or belatedly processing old family secrets and the associated generational trauma. (Contrast this with The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires from the same writer, in which the titular social group is of key importance to the plot.)

It doesn’t help that I strongly disliked both protagonists for their stubborn refusal to ever see things from one another’s perspective, or that as a parent of young children, I felt very on edge during the many scenes of preschooler / toddler endangerment and distress — whether from the literal peril of the monstrous antagonist or even at the beginning, receiving news of the grandparents’ sudden death. The gore was beyond my comfort level too, with amputations and hammer blows to the head and needles going into eyes and such. And to some extent, all of that speaks to the talent and craft behind this work, of course! The adult siblings especially seem well-constructed in their eventually-revealed complexities. But recognizing and appreciating that fact unfortunately hasn’t led me to enjoy this as a piece of entertainment as much as I imagine other readers might.

★★★★☆

Book Review: Butts: A Backstory by Heather Radke

Book #19 of 2023:

Butts: A Backstory by Heather Radke

An interesting little popular science book, but not nearly as funny as I was expecting it to be from the title. This is a cultural history of the human backside, focusing specifically on our conceptions of the female form and how they’ve generally been racialized over the past couple centuries, with women of color alternately exoticized and admired for their perceived deviation from the imagined ideal of a ‘normal’ thin cis white posterior. I think author Heather Radke overstates her arguments at times, presenting reasonable yet ultimately unsupported theories, and she breezes through a lot of heavy material that seems like it could have benefited from a longer treatment. She also limits her discussion to western (and relatively modern) beauty standards, which necessarily leaves out much from the finished picture. Still, it’s a decent overview of a universal yet oddly niche subject, and of how beliefs about everything from promiscuity to fashion to health have interacted with this feature of natural physical variation over the eras, from the flappers through to the Kardashians.

[Content warning for eugenics.]

★★★☆☆