The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany

Book #47 of 2023:

Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany

This 1966 Nebula Award co-winner is a product of its time and the New Wave movement that grew into the cyberpunk aesthetic, the sort of hard sci-fi that tends to be more interested in big ideas than compelling characters. It’s practically overflowing with tossed-off worldbuilding details that could have easily merited a closer look, while being preoccupied throughout with a flawed exploration of what linguists call the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, the proposition that language determines or at least influences the way people think, such that speakers of eg. English and Japanese may be processing the world differently due to the different semantic categories encoded in their respective vocabulary and grammar. In real life the evidence for this claim is mixed at best, but in genre fiction like this or the later works like Story of Your Life / Arrival or Embassytown that it has likely inspired, artificial and/or alien tongues can be weaponized and used to warp reality by individuals trained in their cognitive pathways.

A half-century on, the novel feels surprisingly progressive in some degrees, like its casual acceptance of body modification and queer and polyamorous relationships, and regrettably dated in others. The far-future heroine, herself described by a term that’s now generally seen as a slur for Asians, blithely asserts at one point that Mayans and Seminoles are effectively the same thing, whilst attributing to the former a cultural practice that in actuality was associated with the Incan civilization instead. There’s also a perfunctory romance, of the kind that seems to happen by default when a certain type of author writes a man and a woman into a scene together, weakened further by the silly notion that this particular love interest initially doesn’t have a conception of the self because he doesn’t know any words like “you” or “me.”

Overall the story has potential. I could have stayed longer in this setting to learn more about its various inventions, but the plot never really grabs my attention and the folks within it don’t register as more than archetypal sketches. Two-and-a-half stars rounded up, with the recognition that the title was probably a lot more impressive in the context of its original publication.

★★★☆☆

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TV Review: Shadow and Bone, season 2

TV #12 of 2023:

Shadow and Bone, season 2

I continue to enjoy this YA fantasy adaptation, but I think this second season fumbles its ending enough that downgrading my rating to three-out-of-five stars feels appropriate overall. After rushing through a condensed version of the novels Siege and Storm and Ruin and Rising that close out the original Grisha trilogy — as well as fitting in another brand-new prequel subplot for the Six of Crows team — the finale seems unable to split the difference between a satisfying conclusion to all threads if the program isn’t renewed by Netflix (as is still officially unannounced) and the setup for whatever comes next if it is, which appears to be increasingly divergent from how author Leigh Bardugo had things go before.

And I get it — much as the TV rendition has genuinely benefited from incorporating the Crows into its narrative so early, the producers are going to want to keep their main character Alina centrally involved in a way she isn’t in the written Nikolai duology. But perhaps because this is such a new configuration for the show, it lands awkwardly at least for this reader and my expectations of her personal arc. And the same goes for all the other attempts at establishing closing status quos for everyone else around the map in the final hour, which rarely track well onto the chronology of the books.

On the brighter side: Sturmhond is an amazing and hilarious new addition this year, as he was on the page, and I continue to love all the Crows, even as the invented material for them strikes me as more obviously a stalling tactic this time around. I also have some concerns, if their story does go on in either a third season or a more focused spinoff, after so much of it has by now been lifted outright or majorly riffed upon before the proper Six of Crows / Crooked Kingdom plot arrives. But setting that aside, they remain my favorite element of this series, and watching them go up against rival gang leader Pekka Rollins is enjoyable even so far ahead of schedule. And generally speaking, this second season benefits from the strong casting and production choices it inherits from the year before, although when everything converges by the end it starts running into the Stranger Things problem of having so many focal protagonists in a scene at once that no one especially stands out.

So there are some ups and some downs, but I hope this isn’t our last look at this world on-screen. I do like it and will miss it if this turns out to be the end.

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

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Life and Crimes of Hoodie Rosen by Isaac Blum

Book #46 of 2023:

The Life and Crimes of Hoodie Rosen by Isaac Blum

Overall an excellent #ownvoices slice-of-life YA contemporary, about a frum — ultra-observant Orthodox — Jewish teen who finds himself shunned by his insular community for striking up a friendship and potential romance with an outside girl. Hoodie (short for Yehudah) is a great protagonist in the vein of Darius the Great Is Not Okay or The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian: earnest and funny but clearly carrying his share of flaws, including a stubborn streak, some anger issues, and an extreme naivety about the gentile world. It’s plain to the reader that Anna-Marie is not his girlfriend, for instance, despite him describing her that way after they’ve hung out a few times and hugged. Luckily, that particular misunderstanding is eventually confronted and doesn’t majorly derail the plot or anything.

Outside those characters, the main story concerns rising antisemitism in the area, fueled by a perception that recent Jewish arrivals are displacing older residents and altering the local culture of the place. Drawing on and mirroring real incidents of hatred, gravestones are desecrated with spray-paint swastikas, yeshiva schoolboys are mocked and attacked in the streets, and in a horrific moment late in the text, the fifteen-year-old hero is one of the surviving victims of a mass shooting at a kosher market that sees several of his personal acquaintances killed right in front of him.

That point marks a massive pivot in the novel, and I’m not wholly convinced that it needed to be included in order to get author Isaac Blum’s message across. It’s certainly a jarring tonal shift from the celebration of Jewish life earlier on, as well as a dramatic escalation from the low-level bigotry that has previously struck the sheltered Hoodie as more surreal than hurtful. Ultimately I like the book and its titular narrator too much to offer a rating any lower than four-out-of-five stars, but my favorite parts are the combative classroom arguments about Torah and the wistfully tentative cross-cultural connection between two lonely kids, not the bloody violence that upends all that or its traumatic aftermath.

★★★★☆

Book Review: Lirael by Garth Nix

Book #45 of 2023:

Lirael by Garth Nix (The Old Kingdom #2)

Another fine fantasy adventure, although I have never loved it quite as much as its predecessor. Jumping forward a couple decades and following an entirely new cast is a risky maneuver, and while I feel it pays off fairly well, I do miss the original heroine of Sabriel, here seen only fleetingly as the action follows a new generation instead. My favorite invention from this novel is the icy home of the Clayr, and the life that Lirael builds there as seemingly the sole resident to not inherit the power of prophetic visions. The early chapters, detailing her lonely childhood, her friendship with the Disreputable Dog, her apprenticeship in the glacier’s library, and her growing confidence as she secretly quests after danger and hidden knowledge are all top-notch, presenting the additional worldbuilding in a naturalistic manner somewhere between C. S. Lewis and Diana Wynne Jones.

Unfortunately, a larger plot soon beckons, and there the material falters for me. The biggest flaw in this volume is probably its abrupt and anticlimactic ending, cementing it as the first half of a duology with many unresolved threads rather than a satisfying standalone. But even before then, I’m not as taken with Sabriel’s teenage son Sameth, our other central protagonist. I think his trauma-fueled reluctance to follow her path as the kingdom’s sworn necromancer is an interesting character note, and together with Lirael’s old depression and suicide attempt, it makes the story confront mental health issues not often found in the genre. But I just don’t enjoy reading his sections as much, nor do I find learning more vague lore about the founding of Charter Magic as engaging as these eventual travel companions do.

It is good to see Mogget again, though, especially for his interactions with the Dog. The two talking animals can be exasperating for their cryptic references to that shared history that the humans don’t know, but they add a nice touch of humor to the proceedings as well. That and the other things I like about this title certainly outweigh the elements that I don’t, but I’d ultimately class the sequel as a noticeable step down for the series.

[Content warning for incest, gun violence, drowning, and gore.]

★★★★☆

TV Review: Six Feet Under, season 2

TV #11 of 2023:

Six Feet Under, season 2

Credit where credit’s due: the second year of this funeral home drama is a noticeable step up from the first, and it continues to improve over the course of its run, building to a finale that’s a clear series high point thus far. The show appears to have finally gotten a lot of the early silliness out of its system — characters still occasionally engage in whimsical daydreams, but they’re at least having fewer conversations with the cadavers they’re processing and whatnot. And the deaths this season in general don’t feel as cheap, like they’re an excuse for jokes or for overwrought melodrama. That’s a hard balance to strike, and I can see how it would take a while for the writers to get there, but there’s now a definite gravity and a sense of meaningfulness about the business that just wasn’t present at the start.

And yet. Measured against that, the petty human subplots that flesh out this family beyond their associations with death remain a very mixed bag for me. Brenda is by far the worst, now adding serial cheating with strangers to her bullying mind games and overall poor treatment of her boyfriend. Not that Nate is a particularly great partner in return, of course, even before he learns about the adultery! Much as I admire the ambiguous cliffhanger ending to the last episode and how that arc gets handled this year in and of itself — sorry, but I do try to avoid going into major spoilers in these reviews, and sometimes that means I need to keep things vague — it’s all the more enjoyable for the sheer fact that however it resolves, it seems likely that Brenda may be out of the Fishers’ lives / this program for good. Here’s hoping!

The rest of the ensemble have their ups and downs, but flawed protagonists are okay so long as they’re either nuanced enough to be offset by some redemptive qualities or simple but clearly intended to be read as awful. I don’t know that anyone outside of the rival Kroehner conglomerate falls into that latter category for me, but David, Claire, and Ruth are certainly all qualifying for the former, at least by the season two finale. When I step back and consider these 13 episodes as a whole, I don’t think they’re at the quality level for me to award them a rating of four-out-of-five stars overall, because while certain elements are really starting to click, there’s quite a bit of weaker material each hour as well. But if the current trajectory holds, I do feel I could get there for this title soon.

[Content warning for gun violence, police brutality, domestic abuse, gore, racism, and homophobia.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Cat Among the Pigeons by Agatha Christie

Book #44 of 2023:

Cat Among the Pigeons by Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot #36)

I like the espionage hijinks of this novel, although the plot never reaches the thrills of author Agatha Christie’s stories that are more focused in that domain, such as those in her Tommy and Tuppence series. And the setting of a high-society finishing school for girls is pleasantly distinctive for the writer too. But overall, this is a rather poor mystery, with a perfunctory string of murders beginning about a third of the way through the text and Hercule Poirot only swooping in at the 70% mark to solve everything.

The problem is, while it’s fun to watch the jewels of a fictional Middle Eastern country get passed around from one secret location to another, that part of the action is all relatively straightforward and easy to track. The single element puzzling to readers is the matter of which characters should or shouldn’t be trusted at face value, and the ultimate solutions to those questions tend to rely on extreme coincidence and the detective’s thinly-supported deductions, which seem like they could have easily gone in a different direction. It’s better as a simple spy caper than as a true showcase of the investigator’s wits.

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

★★★☆☆

Book Review: What Happened To You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing by Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD and Oprah Winfrey

Book #43 of 2023:

What Happened To You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing by Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD and Oprah Winfrey

A difficult but insightful read, with lots of detailed discussion about early childhood traumas, including the specific situations of kids who witnessed or experienced sexual abuse and graphic violence. As a parent of young children, I am particularly struck by the research on how important even the first few months of life can be at building up either positive or negative associations in a child’s mind, and how those can subconsciously affect us across the rest of our days. While this is not a parenting guide, I suspect it’s going to lead me to be more mindful in my interactions with my little ones and the behaviors I model around them.

The chapters on PTSD and other trauma responses, along with potential strategies for reducing their strength over a person, are also quite interesting, as are the writers’ observations about the inherently traumatic nature of existing as a member of a marginalized group within a society, which both feeds into and is reinforced by systemic issues like racism. (Not that it will traumatize everyone who grows up in such a social environment, just that the conditions are there and a detectable correlation in outcomes exists.) And while Oprah primarily functions in her usual role as interviewer for her expert coauthor Dr. Perry, the moments when she shares memoir-like passages about her own traumatic upbringing are deeply affecting.

I’m less sold on the end of the book, which shifts its focus to individual alienation and the supposed perils of digital communication platforms over face-to-face contact. That’s a topic I’m personally skeptical about and used to study academically in grad school, and without launching into a full-blown thesis paper in this review, I would say that the situation is far more nuanced and conditional than these authors make it out to be. (Surprise surprise, it matters much more what kinds of interactions you’re having, and with whom and how regularly, than the medium in which all that occurs.) It doesn’t escape me that Winfrey and Perry are both in their late 60s, and thus come at modern technology from a very different perspective than someone of my own generation or younger. To throw their own words about shifting mores back at them with only the word ‘young’ changed, “This is not to say that [older] people are bad or worse, but it’s a clear example of how our life experiences shape us; what happens to you matters, and we all reflect to some degree the relational attributes of our family, community, and culture.”

My gripes about that section aside, this seems like a valuable text for most readers, whether you carry any significant personal trauma yourself or not. I give it three-and-a-half stars, rounded up.

★★★★☆

TV Review: The Shield, season 5

TV #10 of 2023:

The Shield, season 5

Easily the best run of this series since the first. Forest Whitaker is an outstanding new addition to the cast, and while it’s simple to peg him as the latest Hollywood heavy hitter to come to TV for a one-season arc — like Glenn Close the year before, or similar guest stars on shows like Dexter — that doesn’t diminish the power he wields as the Internal Affairs lieutenant heading up the long-simmering investigation into the corrupt Strike Team at the heart of this program. Going from a whisper to a friendly wheedling to a blinding rage, he’s captivating to observe throughout, and he proves an excellent foil for our antihero lead as the two engage in an extended cat-and-mouse game.

Kavanaugh knows Mackey is a dirty cop, but he needs stronger evidence to put him away. Vic in turn needs to keep covering up the sins of his past, but also to partake in further underhanded and illegal activities to try and discredit his opponent and clear everyone’s name. And poor tragic Lem, the guy directly under IA’s bootheel, is tugged back and forth between them, growing ever more visibly exhausted. His fate is pretty telegraphed (by the title of the penultimate episode, if nothing else), but like any good tragedy, it’s still quietly devastating to watch unfold in detail. And Shane’s now set up for quite an interesting arc ahead as well.

From the start, The Shield has had what I’d consider two main goals: to critique law enforcement in general as cruel and ineffective, and to invite viewer discomfort by getting us to root for the bad guy. And those threads are often intertwined, as it’s hard to imagine or hope for Vic’s downfall in a world where justice is such a sick joke. Poverty, drug abuse, and violent crime are continually presented as endemic in Farmington, an ugly stain that can’t be substantively changed by the flawed mortals policing the area. Besides, the protagonist has his good qualities, like his swagger, his sense of humor, and his fierce loyalty to those he considers his own. In the moment he can often seem a charming rogue, a trickster figure who thumbs his nose at stuffy authority and takes care of the worst criminals on his own terms.

This season doesn’t let us dwell in that fantasy of Mackey as hero for long. Instead we’re reminded of the times he’s crossed major lines already, and we see him return close to that edge again and again. And yet Kavanaugh is so hostile and abusive of his position, do we really want this to be the person who finally manages to take the Strike Team down? The ensuing tension raises the narrative to new heights, even while subplots like Tina’s incompetent rise and the interim captain’s own obvious ineptitude emphasize the writers’ disdain for police as a whole. Dutch is compromised in several ways, and Claudette is hindered by her illness and her stubborn streak. None of them are helping the community, because for every drug dealer or serial killer or assailant lining glory holes with mousetraps that they take into custody, another one seems to pop up immediately. Against that backdrop, how can we want either Mackey or Kavanaugh to succeed?

It’s a riveting drama, and I appreciate how everything converges together in the end, adding context and great pathos to the final scenes. My personal high point of the season actually comes earlier, at the sting in episode 5, but it’s not as though we only get falling action from there on out. Whether Kavanaugh’s around next year or not, he certainly leaves his mark here, and the Strike Team will never be the same.

[Content warning for gun violence, gore, rape, violence against children, human trafficking, police brutality, racism, homophobia, and probably a whole lot else that I’m forgetting besides. Just another day in Farmington.]

★★★★★

Book Review: Belladonna by Adalyn Grace

Book #42 of 2023:

Belladonna by Adalyn Grace (Belladonna #1)

I realize that some of my issues with this title stem from my personal tastes, and that other readers may find themselves more able to get on its particular wavelength. (It might be popular among the Twilight crowd, for instance?) Certainly, if I had realized that the genre veered toward paranormal romance and not the simple YA horror/fantasy I was expecting, I would have approached the book differently or perhaps not at all. But I’ve never claimed my ratings and reviews to be anything but an attempt to work through and express what in a given piece of entertainment does or doesn’t succeed for me, subjectively, and so for this one I have to say: this ain’t it.

Let’s start at the beginning. An entire household party is murdered by poison, Masque of the Red Death style, except for an infant who somehow proves immune. No reason is ever provided for the mass murder, and the child’s survival is only explained tautologically, eg. she’s special because she’s special. Meanwhile death himself, the literal ageless grim reaper, has shown up and seems struck by the baby and her unnatural gift at avoiding him. Later he’ll reappear repeatedly throughout her childhood, killing off a string of cruel guardians, until she’s nineteen and he’s free to declare his love in the creepiest of grooming terms, like, “I have waited for you for millennia.” Dealing with an immortal stalker could be the setup for an interesting plot, but unfortunately, she’s into it.

Even accepting this figure as a love interest, I just have so many logistical questions about the romance that follows. There are a few steamy scenes, and the heroine voices the usual Victorian concerns about premarital sex destroying her reputation, but, um. Her gentleman caller is made of shadows and no one else can see him. It doesn’t seem likely that he’d be able to get her pregnant. (In the timeless words of Scary Movie 2, “Cindy, this is a skeleton! This is bones!”) It’s also simply an easy / boring choice to cast this primordial avatar as an attractive man in a conventional hetero relationship, with no effort on author Adalyn Grace’s part to play with gender or otherwise embrace the weirdness that such a partner could allow. There’s not even a throwaway line that the protagonist is only seeing him the way she wants to or anything; he apparently really does present as a human male with a handsome face within his cowl. How lucky!

Elsewhere, the young woman is settling into her latest home, preparing for her societal debut, and trying to uncover who’s been poisoning her cousin, a straightforward subplot that manages to fill out most of the remaining pages. That gets resolved satisfactorily if not too surprisingly, and the venture ends on a sudden cliffhanger that does more to set up the sequel than contribute any meaningful notes to the preceding drama. Does it get any better from here? Do we ever learn who killed the girl’s parents and why? I for one will not be reading on to find out.

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: Hell Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph White

Book #41 of 2023:

Hell Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph White

Living in a post-apocalyptic world ravaged by mutant abominations is tough. Especially if you’re Benji, a trans kid being held prisoner by the fundamentalist cult who originally unleashed the plague and have now injected him with an experimental strain to create their greatest bioweapon yet, all the while misgendering and deadnaming him. At least when he escapes, he’s able to meet up with a local gang of his fellow queer youths, who are determined to bring the fight back against the Christofascists as violently as necessary.

By design, this is a brutal, uncomfortable read. The gore is extreme, as are the parallels that #ownvoices author Andrew Joseph White draws between the hero’s gender dysphoria and the surrounding dystopian environment. His uncontrollable transformation over the course of the text, in which his skin sloughs off and he vomits up his internal organs on his way to become ever more monstrous and yet powerful and ultimately freed from the need to keep himself hidden, is a complicated metaphor itself. Sometimes it feels like the protagonist’s bodily change is meant to evoke the messy yet empowering elements of transition, and sometimes it feels like a shorthand for the unwanted roles that society forces on people like him in the first place. Honestly, I think we’re supposed to grapple with that disconnect, and this is not a book with easy answers.

But it’s potent in its imposed disquietudes, and the representation is a marvel. Multiple transgender characters and gay characters, categories which partially overlap as in real life. An autistic same-sex love interest. Some diversity of race and disability in the supporting cast. I don’t know if this novel could have been published even a decade ago without major editorial overhaul, particularly as a piece of nominally Young Adult literature like this. But I’m glad we have it in its present form, and I expect that the kinds of younger readers drawn to it will likely find an important touchstone for articulating their identity and their rage.

[Content warning for gun violence including to children, domestic abuse, and self-harm.]

★★★★☆