The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: The Under Dog and Other Stories by Agatha Christie

Book #107 of 2022:

The Under Dog and Other Stories by Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot #31)

Hercule Poirot remains a character I can find either entertaining or frustrating on occasion, and I regret to report that in this collection, he leans decidedly towards the latter. He makes more guesses than strict deductions, and when his friend Hastings calls him out on that, he protests that he is simply applying “psychology” to the situation. At several points, he also lies to a witness or suspect in order to entrap them and secure their cooperation, which is both a devious trick and a sign of how unchallenging these particular cases are when everyone is so easily hoodwinked. (One culprit is caught merely by the detective loudly announcing he has found a piece of evidence that will be kept securely in his room and then having his valet wait to see who comes to steal it.)

There’s some repetition for anyone reading through the Poirot series in publication order too, for although this volume was released in 1951, the nine stories within all date back to the 1920s, and a few had already been reworked into other titles that author Agatha Christie published separately. “The Plymouth Express” is an early version of her 1928 novel The Mystery of the Blue Train, for instance, and “The Submarine Plans” was expanded into the novella The Incredible Theft and included in the 1937 book Murder in the Mews. None of these are nearly strong or remarkable enough to be worth revisiting in this way, which further adds to my low impression here.

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

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: The Ellimist Chronicles by K. A. Applegate

Book #106 of 2022:

The Ellimist Chronicles by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs Chronicles #4)

This final Animorphs companion novel is a risky departure even by the standards of the Chronicles sub-series, which has previously left the teenage morphers behind solely to flesh out backstory periods of galactic history whose species and major events are already known to the audience as deeply impacting the present. It was important to see those prequels up-close, in a way that doesn’t feel as immediately evident for the Ellimist’s origin. He’s a nearly-omnipotent meddler locked in a universe-spanning conflict with his opposite, theoretically wanting to help against the Yeerk invasion but bound by the rules of his ineffable game to only effect the subtlest interventions. That’s always been a reasonable enough concept within the genre of science-fiction, and learning more about how this particular being got to that position isn’t especially necessary or rewarding to our understanding of the canon, beyond the tidbit that he was once a youth suddenly thrust into battle himself.

So this story is a bit adrift, vaguely paralleling our customary heroes inasmuch as any YA protagonist would, but largely painting upon a brand-new canvas. We’re millennia in the past and lightyears away from anything familiar for the bulk of this plot, so it really has to stand on its own far more than any other release in the extended Animorphs saga.

Luckily, in the confident hands of author K. A. Applegate, the project still more or less succeeds. The space opera worldbuilding is inventive and fun, following the protagonist’s unusual journey from daydreaming gamer to warrior, refugee, last surviving member of his people, tortured prisoner, cyborg gestalt, and on into the vast consciousness that exists beyond space and time as we’ve known it before. These shifts between “lives” are sometimes rather abrupt, but it’s altogether a neat transhumanist fable (despite the character never being exactly human in the first place). And I do love how this book functions to open up the setting, recontextualizing the massive drama that we’ve witnessed from Andalites, Hork-Bajir, and humans in all their heartfelt and hard-fought blood, sweat, and tears as ultimately occupying one small corner of an unimaginably big reality.

Where the Ellimist’s account falters for me is when it does finally bump up against that existing framework, awkwardly shoehorning in too many coincidental connections. In a crisis of faith, the narrator hides out among the residents of a random planet, who happen to be early Andalites. As he reemerges to thwart his eldritch enemy Crayak, it’s with the fate of earth in the era of dinosaurs on the line. Earlier, he personally creates the Pemalites, a species formerly unlinked to him in the mythos. It’s all a little hard to accept, particularly without the go-to excuse of a higher intelligence — aka, the Ellimist himself — that can usually be posited to explain away plotting contrivances. While no single one of these individual elements is out of place here, they seem odd as they stack up without any overt discussion of destiny or repercussions. We’re apparently meant to ascribe no deeper meaning to the recurrences, which is not the most satisfying writing choice.

I also think the war with Crayak, which occupies the last quarter of the text, misses the opportunity to incorporate things already associated with it, like that creature’s servants the Howlers or the Drode. The former represent a particularly baffling omission: previous entries have established that the Pemalites were killed off by Howlers, that the Howlers are Crayak’s prized legions, and that Crayak and the Ellimist are rivals. This title explicitly connects the remaining side of that square by naming the Pemalites as children of the Ellimist, but doesn’t so much as mention the shock troops opposing them.

Like many Animorphs volumes, then, this is a strong but not a flawless work, and I’d certainly call it the low point of the generally-outstanding Chronicles run. It’s distinctive in focus, but it tends to pull its punches in the rare moments when it doesn’t need to be. As much as I’ve enjoy the read regardless, I feel frustrated to recognize the shape of the potential better story we could have gotten instead.

All that’s left to address is the framing device of its start and end, which reveal — spoiler alert — that one of the Animorphs is dying, and reaching out to the Ellimist for the boon of reassurance that the fight was worth it. Upon publication alongside #47 in the main series, that constituted a flash-forward surprise, although this book could probably be picked up just about anywhere, especially on a reread. Strictly speaking, the child soldier isn’t identified by name or gender, but the context clues narrow it down to being presumably Jake or Rachel, “an unwitting contribution from the human race to its own survival” (in contrast to Tobias and Marco with their family ties and Cassie as a temporal anomaly, all of whom were confirmed chosen by the Ellimist in Megamorphs #4). And I guess in a continuity with time-travel and alternate realities, we can’t know for certain at this juncture that that death is genuine and irreversible. But it’s a moving sequence nevertheless, and one that casts a dark cloud of foreboding over the upcoming final stretch, in addition to adding a touch more weight to the proceedings here. That’s enough to cement a four-star rating, for me.

[Content warning for body horror, genocide, and gore.]

This volume: ★★★★☆

Overall series: ★★★★★

Volumes ranked: The Hork-Bajir Chronicles > Visser > The Andalite Chronicles > The Ellimist Chronicles

Book Review: The Week: A History of the Unnatural Rhythms That Made Us Who We Are by David M. Henkin

Book #105 of 2022:

The Week: A History of the Unnatural Rhythms That Made Us Who We Are by David M. Henkin

This nonfiction title explores an interesting and new-to-me topic, which is the obvious yet rarely-considered point that the seven-day cycle we know as a week is entirely cultural, having no relation to observable patterns in nature like a day (one rotation of the earth on its axis, measured in a period of light and then one of darkness), month (one revolution of the moon around the earth, measured in its appearing to wax and wane when seen from here), or year (one trip of the earth around the sun, measured in the changing of the seasons). Although the week may seem just as natural to us as these, its length of time is wholly arbitrary — and in fact, there are some cultures that did not develop such a concept, with the modern-style week really only establishing a global dominance in the past two hundred years.

As author David M. Henkin details, we use the artificial structure of weeks to divide work from leisure, but also to organize our recurring commitments (like a class that meets each Wednesday) and to take regular inventory of our lives in terms of last week / this week / next week. Even historical calendar reforms that alter the month and date have generally left the progression of weekdays alone, and in that steady unfolding, particular days with their associated activities come to acquire certain individual characteristics for us. Accordingly, we are unsettled whenever we realize we’ve gotten the day wrong, or even simply when we experience, e.g. a Tuesday that doesn’t feel like a Tuesday for whatever reason. In the height of the early Covid-19 pandemic, amid usual scheduled routines getting disrupted by widespread lockdowns and telework, that sort of untethering was commonly reported as days and weeks stretching uncomfortably into one long indistinguishable span that some sardonically nicknamed “Blursday.” In a somewhat roundabout fashion, this work attempts to get at why people reacted so strongly to the perceived lack of that traditional framework, and how we continue to rely upon the week to apply order to our existence.

Unfortunately, while such provocative ideas are floated throughout the text, the writer primarily focuses on his own existing area of expertise, which is the journal-keeping habits of nineteenth-century America. I believe the intent here is to showcase the different uses of the week that were then entering into common practice, but it reads more as just a dry catalog of recitation tenuously linked to Henkin’s surrounding theoretical thesis. He spends a lot of space, for instance, discussing the evidence that Thursday was once a popular day for weddings, but then doesn’t build to any specific conclusions from that. I would have loved a book that actually flowed from the discussion raised in the Introduction, but I don’t think this one ever quite gets there for me.

★★★☆☆

TV Review: The Shield, season 2

TV #32 of 2022:

The Shield, season 2

The same bitterly funny anti-cop police drama, back for a follow-up round of continued corruption, complicity, and arrogant ignorance. I’d rate this season as a slight step down from the debut, but mainly only because as great as all that remains, the series has already staked out that particular thematic territory and proven itself there, and this second year doesn’t ever really escalate matters appreciably. In fact, with Chief Aceveda now explicitly agreeing to turn a blind eye to the strike team’s methods in exchange for their success boosting his political campaign, there’s less internal pressure on Vic and his crew, and so our antihero protagonist spends a lot of this run going up against a crime boss who seems written so heinously as to make it easier for us to root for his downfall at the hands of the crooked detective.

Luckily Claudette has started catching on to his extracurriculars as well, part of her steadily emerging as the effective conscience of this department. Don’t get me wrong: she’s still as compromised as the rest of them, hindered by her moralizing and her snap judgments and certainly willing to bend the rules or look the other way herself upon occasion. But with Dutch too often puffed-up on his own ego or fretting about his failures, the patrol officers like Danny and Julien unable to set their own biases and poor impulses aside, and the remainder of the ensemble basically criminals with a badge, she’s the closest thing we’ve got to a straightforward force for good. Having such a flawed would-be savior is very in line with the overall ethos of this program, and it makes her apparent career trajectory opposite Vic’s particularly exciting.

Nevertheless, a lot of that feels more like setup for future fireworks than a full story here and now, as do the Mackey marriage troubles, new arrival Tavon, and the robbery of the Armenian money train that closes out this stretch of the plot. These are minor structural critiques of a show I’m very much enjoying watching despite the preponderance of disturbing material, and hopefully a sign of pieces being moved into play for another strong presentation of anti-copaganda ahead.

[Content warning for gun violence, torture, gore, burning alive, drug abuse, pedophilia, rape, racism including slurs and lynching, homophobia including slurs and lynching, transphobia, domestic abuse, Islamophobia, fatphobia, and sexism.]

★★★★☆

TV Review: Stranger Things, season 4

TV #31 of 2022:

Stranger Things, season 4

Late-stage Stranger Things has a character problem, in that there are simply too many of them at this point for the narrative to function remotely efficiently. Even with the cast (somewhat clumsily) split into four or five geographically separate storylines, this season often finds six or more of the protagonists all sharing a scene together. In that sort of chaos, it’s hard for anyone’s personal dilemmas to register, and so we end up with a lot less specific character work in the writing, and more dialogue that’s just trading exposition back and forth. I can’t help but compare this to Game of Thrones, which for all its eventual faults understood throughout that you build compelling arcs primarily out of scenes with 2-to-4 people, max. Swapping them around can still let you manage a massive ensemble that way, without individual voices getting lost in the crowd. The best moments on this show tend to be when pairs or trios do find a way to steal away from the bigger party they’re in and have some quiet conversations, but that’s obviously more difficult to orchestrate the more folks there are crammed into a single location.

The bloating also manifests in a certain degree of plot armor, where despite how deadly Hawkins / the Upside Down can be in general, our numerous heroes are continually making it out of their scrapes unscathed. I know it’s silly to talk about realism in a series with psychic children and mind flayers and all that, but the absurd lack of consequences to any of the supposed danger — setting aside the finale, which I’ll try not to spoil — does limit my audience buy-in. And since new additions continue to join the pack and its accompanying protective umbrella, this is an issue that’s only growing worse with time. At one point this year four of the teens are stranded out in California — Mike, Jonathan, Will, and new dude Argyle — and I couldn’t help but think about how little any of them are actually adding to the main story. A more disciplined creative team could have written off that entire delegation, whether terminally or not, but instead, we spend valuable minutes each episode checking back in on them in a delayed plot that serves only to eventually reunite them with El. Elsewhere, Joyce and Murray are on a similar zero-progression quest to sneak into Russia and link up with Hopper again.

It’s all frankly a bit of a mess. Vecna at least presents a big-bad antagonist with some personality for once, and I do love the Kate Bush runner and how it’s apparently doing unexpected wonders for her real-life music career. Overall the program is skating by on inherited investment in familiar faces and its fun 80s horror pastiche vibes, but this penultimate outing hasn’t exactly been its finest hour. Hopefully the upcoming final season can straighten out its act to give us a proper meaningful conclusion.

[Content warning for gun violence, violence against children, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Abbott Elementary, season 1

TV #30 of 2022:

Abbott Elementary, season 1

A really strong and funny sitcom debut! I have a couple critiques that are holding me back from an utterly glowing five-star review, but this mockumentary series about teachers at an underfunded, majority-Black, inner-city Philadelphia school is generally sweet and hilarious alike. It also feels fresh in its subject matter, at least compared to other comedies that I’ve watched, thanks to the distinctive workplace rhythms and events of the elementary curriculum. There’s a real confidence and specificity to the writing that helps the characters pop, both in service to and beyond their immediate punchlines. I’m looking forward to seeing what gets built on such a solid foundation after this.

As for my nitpicking: logistically, it’s very weird to me that our main cast so far consists of one kindergarten teacher, one first-grade teacher, two second-grade teachers, a social studies teacher, and their principal, with little of an extended supporting ensemble behind them. There is one custodian in a recurring role, but otherwise no other faculty or students who register as consistent presences throughout this run. Maybe the documentarians are only following a handful of staff who all share the same lunch schedule or something? It gets odder the more you think about it, though, like when those particular classes take a field trip to the zoo and their kids who didn’t get permission have to stay with the janitor, rather than in one of the countless classrooms that apparently aren’t attending either.

My other issue is that this first year leans hard on a Jim/Pam dynamic between two coworkers while missing what exactly made that relationship on The Office so special. On that program, the pair are already intimate pals and the single one is struggling with the blossoming romantic interest he’s feeling for his friend who’s unfortunately seeing someone else (a manchild we’re encouraged by the narrative to root against). That framework gets mapped pretty directly onto the people at Abbott in the early episodes, complete with Gregory’s best deadpan Halpert stares at the camera, but it doesn’t fly when he’s a new long-term sub who’s never even met Janine before. Staring longingly at a stranger you work with isn’t a cute crush or a mark of a star-crossed love affair; it’s just plain creepy!

So the concept has some problems that will hopefully be workshopped and smoothed out as the show continues, but overall these thirteen initial installments represent a terrific start.

★★★★☆

Book Review: Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica

Book #104 of 2022:

Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica

This Argentinian novel is a stomach-churning dark satire, presenting a dystopian future where all animals have caught a virus making them poisonous for human consumption and people have resorted to widespread cannibalism in order to satisfy their protein needs. Some individuals give up their flesh upon death, and some volunteer to be hunted in exchange for a massive payout if they elude capture, but mostly, this new demand is met by converting the existing slaughterhouse supply chain and raising an entire class of undesirables as livestock. I cannot overemphasize how disgustingly brutal a read this is, even as someone who just finished Battle Royale, with author Agustina Bazterrica matter-of-factly covering every step of the process from forced breeding and removal of infant vocal cords to a lifetime in solitary cages all the way through to an early end in a grisly abattoir, sometimes with individual limbs harvested piecemeal in advance.

It’s effective cultural commentary, both on the awful things that humans have done and continue to do to one another — this feels so over-the-top, but it’s admittedly hard to draw clear-cut lines between it and the worst excesses of chattel slavery — and on the way we currently treat farmed creatures like chickens and cows. In the exaggerated style of an offensive PETA ad, it traffics in highly-problematic imagery of dehumanization, and while it probably won’t convert you to veganism, it might well get you feeling defensive and introspective about that choice.

My problem here is twofold. First, I don’t think the premise is set up well enough to make the leap necessary to suspend disbelief. (Folks can’t just turn to tofu, or beans, or lab-grown meat, or Impossible / Beyond Burgers, or any of the countless other commonplace strategies that vegetarians use everyday without eating anyone? These cannibals are honestly fine with serving, cooking, and consuming recognizable body parts, something that many of us are too squeamish to do even for other species today?) And secondly, in a world of such horrors, I simply don’t have much patience for the butcher protagonist’s angst about his dead son, elderly father, or estranged wife, let alone the way he illegally domesticates and impregnates one of the female subjects under his jurisdiction. Maybe that’s intentional on the writer’s part, to emphasize how we apply euphemisms to the ugliness around us and focus on our petty personal lives; I don’t know. But it comes off more as a weak counterbalance to the shock-effect grossness on display, and doesn’t offer anyone or anything worth investing in as a reader.

[Content warning for racism, rape, and homophobia including slurs.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Battle Royale by Koushun Takami

Book #103 of 2022:

Battle Royale by Koushun Takami

First published in 1999 (or 2003, for the English translation), this controversial thriller posits a dystopian Japan where school classes of fifteen-year-olds, selected by random lottery, are forced to fight one another to the death each year. The children are kidnapped, locked into metal collars lined with explosives and GPS trackers, given an assortment of weapons and the instruction to kill their classmates, and then set loose on a deserted island that will steadily grow more and more off-limits as the time goes on. It’s one part The Long Walk, one part Lord of the Flies, and one part obvious early precursor to The Hunger Games.

It’s also astonishingly graphic in its violence, even by the standards of those already-bloody comparison works. Although written pre-Columbine, it’s hard to read now, two decades of school shootings later, without at least a twinge of unease at all the juvenile murder. Not that books like this have necessarily normalized or even encouraged such massacres, but author Koushun Takami is clearly being political with this concept as a critique of totalitarian government, and it’s discomforting to realize how his provocative excess has grown less and less removed from our reality today, and accordingly difficult to enjoy the subject as fiction. I’ve never seen the movie adaptation, and I certainly don’t intend to now.

Yet for all those qualms, it really is a fantastic story. The presentation of 42 Japanese character names is initially somewhat overwhelming, but many die soon after becoming the focus of a chapter, which makes it easier to track the ten or so who predominate throughout the text. What follows is a pulse-pounding page-turner, especially with each section ending on a dwindling reminder of how many students remain alive. And while the Hunger Games similarities are unavoidable for a modern reader, I greatly prefer how this novel takes us from perspective to perspective, rather than staying fixed on just a single hero like Katniss. Takami writes with great empathy for these doomed schoolchildren, only a couple of whom are truly bloodthirsty and relishing the opportunity to lash out at the cohort they’ve known all their lives. For the most part, they are just frightened and trapped by circumstances into becoming the worst versions of themselves at the least convenient moment. It’s a trust exercise writ large, and it’s heartbreaking yet understandable as we successively get to know them and see them fail.

In fact, I’d argue that the real thematic point of the project, beyond its gore and its pointed digs at bureaucratic notions of acceptable losses, is in the importance of community-building. Again and again across the plot, the players who band together survive for a while longer, while the loners or the groups who fracture under the strain inevitably come to a sorry end. It’s a tragic arc that repeats itself in various configurations till the end, and it’s why that conclusion does not actually follow a particularly grim fake-out in the final pages, besides just the fun of the twist. For the moral heart of the tale being told, it matters who ultimately leaves the island and how.

Even setting all that aside, the book is packed with iconic scenes and personalities (many of which are expanded upon further in the manga version by the same author). They live and breathe until they don’t, feeling like real teenagers in their nobility and foolishness alike. An overactive sex drive distracts and kills some, while a core protagonist goes out of his way to protect a dead friend’s crush. There are kids who willingly if not eagerly participate in the game, while others aim only for survival and a few seek a way to bring down the system on its overseers. All in all I can understand exactly why I found it so striking back in high school myself, although I don’t think I’ll need to reread it again now for quite a long time to come.

[Content warning for rape, underage prostitution, suicide, homophobia including slurs, domestic abuse, and gun violence.]

★★★★★

TV Review: Bob’s Burgers, season 5

TV #29 of 2022:

Bob’s Burgers, season 5

Another strong year of Bob’s Burgers, albeit maybe a slight step down from the one before, if only because I don’t know that I’d include any of these individual episodes on an all-time favorites list. But they generally remain funny and confident explorations of characters, with the writers periodically coming up with new insights that still feel familiar and true to this wacky family and their even weirder extended town. So we get some deeper shading of Louise’s mixed jealousy and protectiveness of her sister in bits like “Tina Tailor Soldier Spy,” for instance, or a good look at Gene’s particular sort of eleven-year-old flightiness in “Best Burger” or “The Itty Bitty Ditty Committee.” While he continues to be more of a caricature than anyone else in the main cast, any further development on that front is most appreciated.

Sitcoms are hard to review, but this one reliably surprises me and makes me laugh, and by this point it’s rare for the plots to seem either derivative or predictable (although the water balloon fight in “The Oeder Games” surely owes quite a bit to Community‘s paintball adventures). For now, I’m happy to keep on watching.

★★★★☆

Book Review: This Rebel Heart by Katherine Locke

Book #102 of 2022:

This Rebel Heart by Katherine Locke

Author Katherine Locke nails the tense and paranoid atmosphere in this fictionalized account of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 (a student-led uprising against Soviet control that ultimately failed, although the novel doesn’t track the conflict all the way to its bitter end). And as ever with this writer, I enjoy the #ownvoices Jewish representation that they have incorporated in the text, including but not limited to some ugly yet realistic antisemitism from people on either side of the struggle. However, the more fantastic / magical realist pieces here don’t quite succeed for me, from the river in Budapest randomly turning into stone and back to the late-reveal that everything before has been in grayscale, with the blue sky glimpsed through a torn flag the first color that the revolutionaries have seen in years.

One of the love interests for the heroine is also a literal angel of death who’s there to escort fallen children to the beyond, which is the sort of idea that could work, but would need a much stronger foundation supporting it, especially given this being’s status as a secondary viewpoint protagonist. Like the other supernatural elements, his nature is described in an unsatisfyingly vague and oblique way, and never questioned by the characters who seem otherwise grounded in a recognizable reality. I do appreciate how he settles into a polyamorous relationship with Csilla and a human boy, one of several queer touches throughout the story, but overall this just doesn’t read as a cohesive whole to me.

[Content warning for gun violence, secret police, torture, and gore.]

★★★☆☆