The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

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.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Hell Bent by Leigh Bardugo

Book #18 of 2023:

Hell Bent by Leigh Bardugo (Alex Stern #2)

Overall a three-star read for me, and a marked step down from its predecessor. I actually do like the middle of this book — the slowest part of many novels — when, as promised by the title, the protagonist and her companions invoke a ritual to descend into hell and rescue the soul of their friend who’s trapped there. The demonic horrors they encounter are genuinely creepy, and represent just about the only time in which this sequel carries the visceral impact of the first volume.

Mostly, though, this all feels like somewhat generic urban fantasy, and the beginning especially struggles to regain any particular plot momentum. The ending fizzles a bit too in my opinion, and the nine squabbling societies whose internal politics were so important before are largely absent throughout. Also, while the Yale setting continues to benefit from author Leigh Bardugo’s personal history at the school, conveying a detailed and lived-in impression of campus, the idea that certain public architectural choices (presumably real) are hiding the riddles to arcane secrets (presumably fictional) is a bit too silly and Da Vinci Code-esque for me.

I’m invested enough in the character arcs that I’ll probably check out any further installments, but I’ll admit I had hoped for more from this series after its startling debut.

[Content warning for rape, gore, racism, gun violence, drowning, and violence against animals.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: A Jewish Bestiary: Fabulous Creatures from Hebraic Legend & Lore by Mark Podwal

Book #17 of 2023:

A Jewish Bestiary: Fabulous Creatures from Hebraic Legend & Lore by Mark Podwal

An interesting read, but not quite what I was expecting and definitely not as in-depth or exhaustive as it seems like it could have been. This modern title presents encyclopedic entries for 35 different animals described in the Torah, Talmud, or other traditional Jewish texts, explaining how each one was characterized within the teachings and practices of ancient Judaism. As with a true medieval bestiary, some of these are recognizably real fauna like bears, rams, or spiders, while others are plainly apocryphal beings like the phoenix, the unicorn, or the ziz. (My favorites are those that seem to exist solely within Judaic folklore, like the re’emim — a duo of giant horned beasts that are said to walk in opposite directions around the world, meeting only to mate and give birth to a new pair and then die.)

The articles are short but well-researched, and each is accompanied by an original drawing from author / artist Mark Podwal. Still, I think I’d prefer for this to be more mythologically-focused throughout, or at least to include every creature from the writer’s sources, rather than simply a few dozen hand-picked examples. If this book were a complete concordance of greater length I might round my rating up to four stars, but in this abbreviated format, I’m feeling a bit less enthusiastic about the project overall.

[Content warning for antisemitism.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Petty Treasons by Victoria Goddard

Book #16 of 2023:

Petty Treasons by Victoria Goddard

This novella revisits and expands upon a slice of backstory previously mentioned in author Victoria Goddard’s excellent fantasy doorstopper The Hands of the Emperor, when Cliopher Mdang first began service as His Radiancy’s personal secretary. Except while that book was generally presented from Kip’s third-person limited point-of-view, this one shifts to the perspective of his liege lord, and is interestingly told in both first- and second-person, as though the man is reflecting upon his private memories and drawing a distinction between “I” the individual and “you” the public figurehead of his recently-shattered empire. That’s a device I don’t believe I’ve encountered in fiction before, but it allows for great insight into his character, especially in those moments when he starts a thought with one pronoun but then switches in mid-sentence to the other.

The plot here is minimal — basically just the protagonist meeting his new servant, sending that underling on his first big diplomatic mission, starting to fix the world’s magic, and considering the limitations of his situation and the oblique things he misses from before he came to power — but the careful study of a careful ruler waking up from his inadvertent lethargy (with a little bit of outside help and inspiration) is pitch-perfect. I imagine the story probably works best for an audience already familiar with / fond of both figures from the preceding volume, but it stands well enough on its own that I might recommend it to anyone tentatively interested in the Nine Worlds saga (or merely its Lays of the Hearth-Fire sequence focused on Kip) yet daunted by the length of some of the longer titles. As other readers have indicated, the series seems to be a rather forgiving, Discworld-style hypertext with multiple possible entry points that build contextually and enrich one another the more you explore. This is only my second read in this setting, and I am already itching to come at it again from some other angle altogether.

★★★★☆

Book Review: Bravely by Maggie Stiefvater

Book #15 of 2023:

Bravely by Maggie Stiefvater

This seems like it should have been an easy layup: beloved YA fantasist (and Celticist) Maggie Stiefvater writing an officially licensed sequel to Pixar’s Brave, the one about ancient Scottish magic, the mom who turns into a bear, and the headstrong daughter who breaks the curse by learning to mend their fraught relationship. That all feels squarely within the author’s wheelhouse, yet the result on the page is unfortunately a convoluted mess.

Set an ambiguous “many years” later, but with Merida and her triplet brothers still living at home with their parents, the main plot of this novel involves a bizarre contest between two gods: a force of destruction who vows to destroy the family’s castle and kill off its residents unless they can change — whatever that means, and no, it’s never clear just what they’re supposedly doing so wrong — and his trickster opposite who manages to buy the princess a year in which to save them. Her strategy to achieve this is to take her relatives in turn to visit neighboring kingdoms, where they either see a different way of life and decide they want to emulate it, or are inspired Scrooge-like to take steps to avert a possible fate they witness playing out elsewhere.

It’s all pretty abstract in terms of stakes, and since the protagonist has been bound not to speak of the immortals’ wager, she can’t even guide the others or tell them what the true point of their traveling is. Amid that silence, we also don’t really dig into her interpersonal dynamics with any of her loved ones, despite that element being a highlight of the film. Then on top of everything else, there’s an undercooked subplot with an aggressive rival chieftain pressuring the clan into joining his confederation, and, perhaps most frustratingly of all, a romantic interest for the heroine whose defining characteristic was previously her desire to stay independent and keep practicing her archery rather than marry any of the suitors for her hand. While the Disney script is circumspect about sexuality, she’s been hailed as both a queer and an asexual icon by fans, which makes it galling to find her falling for a handsome lad in this book… even before getting into his problematic identity as — spoiler alert — that same age-old deity who’s been threatening to murder her entire household.

I’m rating this as highly as two stars because some individual scenes are nice, and Stiefvater generally gets the character voices right. But it’s altogether an odd tale that’s nowhere near as good as either the original movie or the potential for how this follow-up project could have gone.

★★☆☆☆

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.]

★★★★☆

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.

★★★★☆