The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Star Wars: Shadow of the Sith by Adam Christopher

Book #128 of 2022:

Star Wars: Shadow of the Sith by Adam Christopher

This new Star Wars novel is intended as a bridge into the sequel trilogy of films, which means it’s unfortunately saddled with fleshing out some of the stranger plot decisions introduced by The Rise of Skywalker. So Rey’s parents are — spoiler alert — the clone son and daughter-in-law of Emperor Palpatine, and most of this book follows their ongoing attempt to flee from Sith agents with the unlikely team of Luke Skywalker and Lando Calrissian seeking to protect them but somehow continually a few steps behind. We also get a subplot of that latter protagonist agonizing over the daughter who was kidnapped from him as an infant, a concept that featured in early promotional materials for Episode IX but was ultimately cut from the finished movie.

Overall, the story is fine if a bit long and tedious. (We know that the heroes can’t actually catch up with six-year-old Rey’s family, for instance, since it’s important to her later character arc that she doesn’t know any Jedi yet here. And this is a lot of pages spent just to explain why she’s alone on Jakku at the start of The Force Awakens.) There’s some neat new lore surrounding the Dark Side — sythology, if you will — and of course the franchise’s requisite number of space battles. But generally speaking, I don’t think this is a title that casual fans need to particularly worry about picking up.

★★★☆☆

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: The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 by Garrett M. Graff

Book #127 of 2022:

The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 by Garrett M. Graff

A mosaic firsthand account of how Americans in their own words experienced the unfolding tragedies of September 11th, 2001, drawing on author Garrett M. Graff’s interviews with hundreds of subjects as well as several thousand pre-existing statements, ranging from the days immediately following through Spring 2019. My lone complaint about this methodology is that it becomes exceedingly hard to track each speaker’s identity and recall exactly who they are throughout the text, particularly in audiobook format. (I also wish that that version had not mixed traditional narration with available archival recordings, as some of those are quite grainy and rapidly spoken, and the transition between the opposite styles/speeds is somewhat jarring.) But if you relax that need for attribution and take in the composite narrative as the gestalt chorus that the writer intends, it’s a profoundly moving rendition of a familiar story.

I think the effect would succeed even for readers too young to remember 9/11 themselves, but for those of us who do, this work offers a steady ping of recognition alongside harrowing details likely too specifically personal to have ever encountered before. Two decades on and in the face of the numbing daily death toll of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s only natural for the horrors of the unprecedented terrorist attack and its aftermath to have receded into abstraction, and this title brings them roaring back in all their immediacy. From lost loved ones to unfathomable chance escapes to the ordeal of rescuing survivors from the burning towers as they collapse, this is certainly far from an easy read. But it’s an important testament to a moment that changed the course of history for so many individual lives, not to mention the fate of entire nations.

[Content warning for gore, suicide, claustrophobia, Islamophobia, etc.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: How to Raise an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi

Book #126 of 2022:

How to Raise an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi

A thoughtful guide on modeling conversations about race and racism for young kids, in recognition of the fact that they will be exposed to a lot of prejudiced situations and ideas that can be internalized if not actively confronted. This book definitely builds on author Ibram X. Kendi’s previous works like Stamped from the Beginning or especially How to Be an Antiracist, suggesting a framework in which individual actions either uphold or oppose bigotry — with neutrality always defaulting to the former in a bigoted society like ours — but I think it would still succeed for readers entering the curriculum here. (My advice for parents/caregivers might even be to start with this title, and only backtrack to those others if you find yourself resisting or confused by the writer’s definitions and assertions.)

Some of the material can be a bit off-topic. The medical racism experienced by Kendi’s wife during her first pregnancy, for instance, although harrowing and illustrative of a widespread problem driving Black maternal mortality rates, doesn’t have much to do with raising children in an antiracist mindset. And there are a lot of passages that might be better suited for memoir, given how they reflect on moments in the author’s childhood when adults did not push back on racism that he was encountering then. But generally speaking, this is a valuable text for prompting proactive household discussions, featuring plenty of real-life examples to draw on and illustrating why a so-called “colorblind” approach of ignoring race and other human differences tends to reinforce bias rather than diminish it.

[Content warning for gun violence, lynching, and racial slurs.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Two Kinds of Truth by Michael Connelly

Book #125 of 2022:

Two Kinds of Truth by Michael Connelly (Harry Bosch #20)

A disappointingly underwhelming Bosch story. There are two parallel cases that the semi-retired detective is working on here, and we spend too long on the less interesting one, which is obviously author Michael Connelly’s attempt at tackling the hot topic of the modern opioid crisis in his fiction. Thus, Harry is sent undercover to investigate a drug ring of phony prescription pushers, in a highly sensationalized approach to a legitimately serious problem in our society. This plot also has him acting as a white knight to a random woman that he meets on the job, forcing her into treatment she clearly isn’t ready to seek for herself and generally denying her agency in order to act as a savior.

It all feels like an unnecessary distraction from the other half of the novel, in which an old case gets dug up and our hero accused of planting evidence, which could lead to a convicted killer walking free from death row. Those stakes are more engaging and authentic to the character, but he doesn’t act any better, as the necessary proof against the charges largely just falls into his lap in lieu of any significant investigation or critical insights on his part. Even the denouement turns out to be a clumsy rendition of attorney Mickey Haller telling a judge all the details of a conspiracy we already know about by that point, in ways that any decent opposing counsel could easily discredit.

I like these guys enough that I have gotten some minimal enjoyment out of this title here and there, but overall it doesn’t showcase either half-brother at his best.

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

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: The Ultimate by K. A. Applegate

Book #124 of 2022:

The Ultimate by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #50)

The Animorphs franchise has a complicated relationship with disability, which I think can charitably be described as author K. A. Applegate occasionally straying into insensitivity while generally having her heart in the right place. Thus, “crazy” is used as a go-to insult, but the battle trauma and other mental health issues of the team are taken seriously throughout. Just last book, a character healed of her blindness by the morphing technology — yet expecting the condition to return upon demorphing — acted as though death would be preferable to losing her sight again. But Ax and the other Andalites are regularly called out for their bigoted attitudes towards wounded warriors like Mertil the vecol in #40 The Other, as are the parasitic Yeerks for disprefering disabled hosts overall.

That last detail is what drives the heroes’ decision in this volume to finally expand the human resistance corps by recruiting new members at a local children’s hospital. At a tense meeting in the woods where they’re all now living as refugees, the teens decide that their parents’ slowness to accept the reality of their situation is probably how any adult would react, and so they instead need to focus on their fellow youths — a viewpoint I find shortsighted as a grownup now, but which is wholly appropriate for the typical audience of a YA saga like this. And because their enemies have written off certain bodies as unattractive for potential Controllers, those are the exact kids they can safely reach out to without worrying about getting caught.

It’s a fraught debate, especially after Cassie’s dad overhears and makes his disapproval known, but the group (and the narrative at large) eventually comes down on the side of trusting disabled people with the choice of self-agency. Sure enough, the patients they talk to quickly overcome their initial skepticism and accept the mission to defend the earth, even though they don’t know whether they’ll be healed or not and might be exceedingly vulnerable anytime they’re between morphs. Before long, there are seventeen new additions: a nearly threefold expansion of the Animorphs we’ve followed up until this point, and the first since the ill-fated David back in #20 The Discovery. Not all of them get much characterization, and none of them ever gets to narrate the action, which again is arguably a bit ableist on the part of Applegate and returning ghostwriter Kimberly Morris, confining these newcomers to the second string. But the representation is still commendable in my opinion, and I appreciate that we’re explicitly told only three of them are made able-bodied by the process, a trope that could be problematic otherwise. It’s neat that they seem to have an easier time resisting the instinctual animal minds too, which is explained by their greater experience with managing bodily frustrations.

On a plot level, this is a pretty propulsive installment. Beyond the introduction of the auxiliaries, we see the emotional fallout of everyone’s secret identities being blown in the previous novel, which is hitting Jake particularly hard. Cassie is still the resident moralist, but she is far more jaded now than in the early days (as is evident by contrast with her naïve parents), and she spends a lot of this book manipulating her boyfriend into sticking with / reclaiming the mantle of leadership, longing for him to be the firm but compassionate commander that she recognizes their force needs. This leads to a rupture between the two lovebirds, and ultimately for the Yeerk infesting Tom to escape a deadly confrontation with the morphing cube in hand, since our narrator can’t bear for Jake’s soul to carry the weight of killing his brother. There’s also an epic showdown against Visser One — I believe the first since he got that promotion — and his apparent rage and fear at the growing size of their army, coupled with the great lie that they’ve actually always had that many soldiers in their ranks. It marks a major escalation in the invasion conflict, which will of course be responded to in kind over the few remaining titles. And the recruits acquit themselves well in their debut fight, with everyone surviving… at least for now.

I do wish we were getting Jake’s interior monologue in either this story or the prior one, given everything he’s going through in this period of the series, but his struggle is still compelling to observe from the outside, as is Cassie’s clear heartbreak over feeling him slip away. Her own final solo narration is a worthy sendoff to her unique perspective among the fighters, and possibly the last time there will be room to pause for her brand of ethical consideration here. After all, we are squarely in the endgame now, with our protagonists on the run with new allies but a villain holding the morphing power. Only four more books to see how it all finishes off.

[Content warning for body horror, gore, and a racial slur.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Pandora’s Jar: Women in the Greek Myths by Natalie Haynes

Book #123 of 2022:

Pandora’s Jar: Women in the Greek Myths by Natalie Haynes

An interesting collection of essays, each one focusing on a different woman from Greek mythology and exploring how she’s changed from her earliest surviving depictions through to popular culture impressions today. The focus of the project is already somewhat automatically feminist, but author Natalie Haynes further utilizes a keen lens for how sexism — both historical and modern — has affected our perceptions of these figures. The text thus offers a reclamation of sorts, although even its most radical assertions are well-sourced in research and plausible reading between the lines of antiquity.

This work hasn’t wowed me as much as the writer’s own novel-length attempt at retelling the Trojan War from a variety of female perspectives, A Thousand Ships, but it’s certainly worth the read for anyone into gender studies and/or folklore.

[Content warning for rape, incest, suicide, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda

Book #122 of 2022:

Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda

A neat little character study of a modern “vegan” vampire — her own term, although she actually means that she drinks pigs’ blood to avoid feeding on humans — who despite her unique circumstances is as overwhelmed and directionless as any other 23-year-old unpaid intern. I especially like her resigned observation that vampires in fiction always seem to be independently wealthy even when their morals, like hers, preclude them from killing and stealing from their victims. Unfortunately the story around this heroine never really grabs me, and it feels as though there are too many open questions and plot avenues remaining when the novella draws to a close. I was enjoying the narrative voice and would’ve happily continued reading on, but I’m a bit dissatisfied with this title as a finished product.

[Content warning for gore, sexual assault, disordered eating, gaslighting, and racism.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Better Call Saul, season 6

TV #39 of 2022:

Better Call Saul, season 6

An utterly masterful end to one of the great modern dramas of our time. This Breaking Bad prequel about Walter White’s shady lawyer has always been stronger than anyone could have predicted, and its final outing is truly one of its best. At long last we learn why certain figures like Nacho Varga and Kim Wexler weren’t around during the events of that parent show, and while the answers are predictably sad, their specifics are gripping to watch unfold. Even BCS original Howard Hamlin earns a certain dignity in his ultimate fate, and it’s a testament to how thoroughly this series has built up its world that viewers likely feel a pang at the prospect of leaving the law offices of Hamlin, Hamlin & McGill for the very last time.

Not everyone’s story concludes here, of course. As a prologue to an existing text, this program has also been fleshing out the origins of particular Breaking Bad characters like Mike and Gus whom we know — spoiler alert — will survive their present straits only to come to an unhappy end further down the line. In that context, this final season works to seamlessly bind them to their paths ahead, presenting each with possible off-ramps to lay aside their respective missions and walk away with their lives. Instead they decline those opportunities and agentively choose to stay in the game. These men are thus doomed not by some abstract tragic flaw or random chance, but by the active choices they make that set them on an eventual collision course with that corrosive catalyst named Heisenberg.

As for Saul himself, this series has always aimed to chart his downward trajectory from the corner-cutting but fundamentally decent Jimmy McGill to the jaded crook who suggests killing Badger in one of his earliest Breaking Bad scenes. He too makes rash decisions that lead him in that direction, but he’s also perpetually ground down by a world that won’t allow him to be any better. His tragedy, I’d argue, is that his moments of weakness continually come at the worst possible time, and for six seasons, we’ve watched the deepening repercussions of his moral descent on the extended Albuquerque community around him. That’s been regularly juxtaposed against both a thematically-similar backstory of cartel infighting — which on a practical level could sometimes feel too removed from our main protagonist, but comes together beautifully / awfully this year in one sudden horrendous instant — and brief yet stark looks into his post-BB future of bleak midwestern anonymity.

One of the smartest and riskiest production choices, though, is that that familiar structure of Better Call Saul’s prequel mode only lasts for the first nine episodes of this run. At that point, we are effectively caught up with the original timeline, and the creative team realizes there’s little to be gained by the overlap beyond a few fun scenes that can plausibly fit around previous ones. For the last four installments, therefore, we are suddenly thrust full-time into the black-and-white world of Gene Takevic, the latest iteration of our many-named hero. And while BCS the prequel has clearly always been positioned as a tragedy for everyone involved, BCS the sequel has the freedom to maybe allow for a different sort of ending. And that restores quite a lot of agency to a character who has long shown himself alternately able to self-destruct, able to repent, and most of all, able to surprise. There is literally no way of predicting as we watch which version of him will definitively close out the title (and likely this whole long-running fictional universe).

I won’t give away the ending, except to say that I adored it, and not only for some great callback cameos. It’s a finale as fittingly slow-paced as the show leading up to it, and one that takes the time to explicitly ruminate on regret and wonder whether people can ever really change their nature. If you’ll indulge my own look backwards, it seems to me a perfect reflection of the themes I laid out in my review of season one:

“Better Call Saul, by contrast [to Breaking Bad], is all about change. And choices. Its own protagonist is actively seeking to be a better person, only for a cruel universe to strike him down for it again and again. There’s great dramatic irony in this being a prequel, since the audience knows Saul Goodman as the jaded figure he’ll be in 2008 when his storyline intersects with White’s. But when we meet him here in 2002, he’s still going by the name Jimmy McGill, and he’s so much more earnest and decent than anyone could have imagined. True, he’s already bending the truth as well as the law, but he continually surprises us with hidden depths and the lengths he’ll go to on behalf of his loved ones and clients.

After all, this is also a story about the grind, about putting an unfathomable amount of effort into a task in the hopes of achieving some sublime reward. That’s true in a macro, thematic sense of the hero’s futile journey toward self-improvement, as well as in the smaller moments of hustle that we get to see him employ. Jimmy is willing to do the work, even while he’s hindered by his own worst impulses and the people like his brother who can’t see beyond his past as a small-time con artist.”

Those strengths have been present all along, as has the steadfast core of Jimmy within Saul within Gene. This series owes a massive debt to Breaking Bad and can’t really stand without it, so deeply are the two entwined logistically and in plain thematic conversation with one another (not to mention the common writers, producers, cast, cinematography style, and so on). But I will always cherish this follow-up more, and love that its gentle absurdist streak gets the final word over its predecessor’s stricter nihilism.

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

This season: ★★★★★

Overall series: ★★★★★

Season ranking: 3 > 6 > 4 > 2 > 5 > 1

Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O’Brien

Book #121 of 2022:

Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O’Brien (Rats of NIMH #1)

I’m happy to revisit this beloved childhood classic today and discover that yes, it’s still an outstanding (though quick) story. The characters make an indelible impression, and the structure is fun, with a relatively lengthy nested narrative that’s just as compelling as the supporting frame around it. In the present plot, the protagonist is a widowed fieldmouse whose youngest child is too sick to travel from their winter home, which the family will need to do soon to avoid being plowed over by the local farmer. She bravely steps further and further from her comfort zone to find a solution, eventually intersecting with the other titular party, a secretive community of rats who live nearby. And then they show her technological wonders and explain their origins via that extended flashback, relating how they were once experimental subjects who grew more intelligent than their researchers realized and ultimately used those skills to break free and create a new home for themselves.

That education and escape from captivity is the core of the book, and it’s rendered as thrillingly as any jailbreak in fiction, while never losing the overarching stakes of young Timothy’s health, a crisis that’s subsequently returned to and resolved. Along the way there are new dangers that emerge for the mice and rats alike, and the entire venture ends on a bittersweet yet triumphant note.

The worldbuilding of these creatures’ society is simple yet effective, skillfully conveying their lived reality with a minimum of exposition, and the publication only really shows its half-century of age in some creaky paternalism here and there. (The heroine is great and repeatedly passes the Bechdel test, but the male figures dominate events and make passing reference to the more frivolous pursuits of “the wives” of their colony.) I also think author Robert C. O’Brien could have hit his intended moral of the value of hard work over lazy reliance / stealing from others a bit less stridently, given the problematic potential implications of that assertion, but at least that’s a concern that will likely pass over the heads of his primary audience.

For the most part it’s a lovely tale overall, and although I don’t intend to continue on to the two sequels written by the writer’s daughter Jane Leslie Conly after his death — or the animated Don Bluth adaptation of this volume that adds an unnecessary and bizarre supernatural element — it’s been a joy to see the original again with fresh eyes.

★★★★★

What We Do in the Shadows, season 2

TV #38 of 2022:

What We Do in the Shadows, season 2

Another great yet too short season of this hilarious undead mockumentary. (Ten episodes may not be enough space to develop and deliver a truly superb storyline, especially given how meandering this series tends to be. I love the characters and laugh a lot at their antics, but I’m holding off a five-star rating until we get a run that impresses me with the plotting just a bit more.)

The main throughline here, following up on a clear strength from the previous year, is Guillermo the familiar, who is under-appreciated by his master and now learning that he has an unfortunate talent for vampire-slaying to boot. His dynamic with Nandor is not quite romantic, but it does read as a marriage of sorts, particularly as things get increasingly rocky and the servant starts standing up for himself to ask for better treatment. I wouldn’t call this queer-baiting exactly — there’s a few totally casual remarks about Nandor having sex with his housemate Laszlo, and the whole vibe of the program feels pretty open-minded on that front — but I’ll be interested to see whether or not that central relationship gets reframed as explicitly non-platonic at some point later on.

Regardless, this is a comedy first and foremost, and the jokes remain fantastic. Haley Joel Osment and Mark Hamill each turn in some uproarious guest spots, and the regular cast easily matches them. The energy draining Colin Robinson is promoted at work and gains unfathomable power over everyone. Nadia acquires a creepy doll possessed by her own dead spirit. Laszlo runs away by donning the disguise of blue jeans and a toothpick in his mouth, which seems to honestly fool other vampires into accepting him as “normal human bartender Jackie Daytona.” Such absurdities fuel perfectly fine individual half-hours of sitcom television, but they’re not on the level of the arcs being drawn for Guillermo (and to a lesser extent Nandor), which I’d say is a slight weakness in the writing. Still, I am enjoying this show and would continue to recommend it for anyone who can handle the occasional splash of gore.

★★★★☆