The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Crooked House by Agatha Christie

Book #59 of 2022:

Crooked House by Agatha Christie

This 1949 standalone novel is one of the more excellent Agatha Christie mysteries, with a tight plot, a plethora of solid suspects, and a fiendishly distinctive — though totally fair — ultimate solution to its puzzle. I think it helps that the protagonist is not one of the author’s usual investigators, or even a detective at all. He’s a soldier fresh from the second world war who’s arrived at the titular manor intending to propose to his friend who lives there, only to find her distraught at the recent poisoning of her grandfather and unwilling to marry until the murderer has been discovered and the fog of suspicion over the rest of the family lifted. Motives, conflicting wills, and red herrings abound, and the sudden conclusion seems guaranteed to linger in purposefully unresolved tension regardless of whether a reader sees the twist coming or not. I would rank this book alongside The Murder of Roger Ackroyd among the writer’s best, and definitely recommend it as one to pick up outside of her main Poirot and Marple series.

Fun bonus: Christie later named it as one of her favorites, too!

★★★★☆

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Book Review: The Next Passage by K. A. Applegate

Book #58 of 2022:

The Next Passage by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs Alternamorphs #2)

Here is the nicest thing I can say about this second Animorphs choose-your-own-adventure title: it is better than the first one. (It’s not a sequel, though: the “you” before was another kid who was wandering through the abandoned construction site of Animorphs #1 The Invasion at the same time as the regular group and also given morphing powers by Elfangor. The “you” here is a David analogue, experiencing the attack on his house from book #20 The Discovery.) Whereas the previous volume had only six actual decision points, each of which led to either immediate death or the tale’s intended continuation, this followup has nine, including a genuine fork with each branch continuing through additional nodes to a separate possible conclusion. As an activity, the structure / gameplay is thus notably more complex.

The plot is busier, too. The First Journey covered parts of Animorphs #1 and #11 The Forgotten, jumping over the events in-between, but The Next Passage handles #20, #26 The Attack, and Megamorphs #2 In the Time of Dinosaurs, under the premise that the Ellimist appears once you’ve joined the team to send you off on one of those last two paths. That’s not great writing — especially since the options are presented as simply “button A” and “button B” on an unlabeled remote control — but at least it feels like more thought went into the idea than anything in the lazy cash-grab of Alternamorphs #1. Maybe that’s why the first ghostwriter remains unknown, while this one has been openly identified as Emily Costello, who would return a few months later for #42 The Journey in the main series.

As for the weaknesses…. It’s really not a very well-developed story, nor does it seem all that fun or compelling to play. The angst, wartime trauma, and nuanced coming-of-age themes of the franchise are in short supply, and the heroes regularly act out-of-character, as when they trap you as a fly nothlit in one ending, doomed to die within two weeks because you didn’t agree to stay out of their way during future fights. Good luck trying to determine where this alternate universe diverges from the real canon, too — the Animorphs mention having fought the Howlers on Iskoort already, but they give no indication that the morphing cube’s discovery or their prehistoric excursion has likewise happened, even though those adventures came earlier in the proper continuity. There’s no internal consistency or apparent point to the Ellimist’s challenge either, which altogether adds up for a frustrating and weightless read.

I would imagine the intended appeal of a project like this is to immerse the readers in a beloved media property, letting us literally see ourselves joining the action alongside the familiar characters. But even with a less simple narrative shape in place, that attempt can’t possibly succeed in a work that’s so hollow and patronizing about what we supposedly like in these books. A publisher’s impression of Animorphs may sound wacky, with its garish covers of teens turning into animals, but the novels are generally deadly earnest in a way these spinoffs have never managed. I just can’t suspend my disbelief far enough.

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

This volume: ★★☆☆☆

Overall series: ★☆☆☆☆

Volumes ranked: 2 > 1

TV Review: Scandal, season 6

TV #15 of 2022:

Scandal, season 6

This penultimate outing starts with a bang, and winds up structuring its entire year a bit like a whodunnit mystery. For a while, the show is almost hypnotically-recursive, returning Rashomon-like to Election Night again and again, each time filling in yet another person’s perspective along with some additional context of what happened between the nominating conventions of the previous finale and now. Even after leaving that framework behind, the season hums with a tension that Scandal doesn’t often manage, perhaps helped by its airing during the early months of the Trump administration when our own America seemed likewise upside-down.

Of course, this series can only stray so far from its inherent soapiness, and so we still end up with new plot twists and secret character motivations that don’t hold up under the lightest scrutiny. We’re introduced to what I believe is our fourth all-powerful conspiracy in the heart of Washington — whose leaders brag that they cannot be stopped and can easily be replaced from their ranks despite the fact that it really seems like there’s just the two of them and a few flunkies — with Liv herself taking moves to form a fifth shadow organization in the final hour of this run.

It’s more ridiculous than scandalous, as ever. But the effect remains fun so long as you don’t let yourself think too hard about any of these developments or their implications, especially when punctuated with nice moments of personal growth for much of the main cast. And if the upcoming last eighteen episodes represent a showdown between a newly-ruthless Olivia and her former friends back at the old firm, as appears to be suggested? That might be the most satisfying ending that showrunner Shonda Rhimes could deliver at this point.

[Content warning for gun violence, torture, suicide, sexual assault, claustrophobia, drowning, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

Book #57 of 2022:

The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

As a satire, this 1966 novel about an apparent conspiracy surrounding an illegal alternate postal system is sporadically effective, with a handful of amusing developments and witty turns-of-phrase. As pretty much anything else, it’s not really what I’m looking for in a story. The punnily-named characters (Genghis Cohen, Manny di Presso, Emory Bortz, Mucho Maas, etc.) aren’t particularly defined beyond interchangeable punchline machines, the teased mysteries remain unsolved, and the discursive plot never quite justifies the sinister atmosphere. I don’t necessarily need answers in my fiction — I love S. and The Starless Sea, and I’ve even come around to Lemony Snicket‘s brand of melancholic ambiguity — but hollow absurdism strictly for its own sake can often result in feelings of tedium and frustration, which has largely been my experience here.

I picked up this title as an introduction to author Thomas Pynchon, as it’s apparently shorter and more linear than his other works, and I can just about see the weird genius that has gained him a cult following. Yet I think at this point I can safely say that his talents are wasted — or should that be W.A.S.T.E.d — on me as a reader.

[Content warning for incest, rape, torture, gore, Nazi medical experimentation, desecration of human remains, drug abuse, homophobia including slurs, and racism including slurs.]

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith

Book #56 of 2022:

How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith

A deeply-moving account of author Clint Smith’s visits to sites across the country (and one abroad, in Senegal) that have links to slavery, from former plantations like Angola Prison and Jefferson’s Monticello estate to a Confederate cemetery and Wall Street. There’s a lot of information on the ‘peculiar institution’ in this book — often rendered in visceral, unflinching detail that centers the human cost of its ongoing atrocities — but the writer is a sociologist rather than a historian, and so his primary focus is less on the facts and more on how contemporary people grapple with them. To that end, he interviews tour guides and his fellow guests, seeking to draw out their understandings of the subject, and how that fits with their sense of American history more broadly.

Understandably, he encounters a lot of ignorance among the white folks that he talks to, and although he pushes back against that in-person and is even clearer in his text where they’re wrong, it’s disquieting to see the extent of the stubborn conviction behind such long-disproven claims (like the idea that the Civil War was fought over the noble ideal of states’ rights in the abstract or that the majority of enslaved persons were not treated cruelly by the class who bought, sold, whipped, raped, and orphaned them). Smith is remarkably empathetic with his interlocutors and notes for us how centuries of propaganda have shaped and cemented these narratives, but in reading over their insistent misconceptions, it is hard to imagine how we will ever get to a point of universal education and acknowledgement of such matters, let alone begin to seriously redress them.

If I have one complaint regarding this project, it’s that it feels designed to say big, important things about our society, and yet the author seems to place a great deal of emphasis on what a few particular presenters have had to say on the occasion of his appearance before them, reifying and enshrining their attitudes into more than perhaps they ought to be taken as. In my opinion, that sort of individualized and diary-like approach can sensationalize either a good or a bad experience when a more holistic representation might have proved more neutral. Still, this is altogether a strong and recommended read on race and racism in America.

[Content warning for racial slurs, lynching, and gore.]

★★★★☆

Movie Review: Luca (2021)

Movie #7 of 2022:

Luca (2021)

This Disney-Pixar adventure about an underwater creature who appears human when dry is probably unlikely to go down as an all-time classic, but it’s still charmingly fun. The coming-of-age storyline involves the hero first hiding and then embracing his true self alongside an older boy who shares his identity and outsider status in the face of family worries and a world prepared to hate them for it — which has strong queer undertones to me, though I understand the studio has officially denied that that was their intended reading. But even on a basic level of generic pro-tolerance and anti-bigotry, it’s a good message for kids in the main audience to take in (along with the normalized appearance of a supporting character with just one arm, whose disability is never coded as villainy). I like how the two species respectively call one another sea monsters and land monsters, too, subtly emphasizing the ways language can frame Otherness as a threat.

The mid-century Italian setting adds some further distinctiveness to the affair, offering a locale that’s quaint, endearing, and hopefully only mildly offensive in its pasta-guzzling stereotypes. The low-stakes plot revolves around a bike race to show up a town bully, which is one of the reasons I wouldn’t say this is a must-see if you don’t have young children in your household yourself. But it’s a significant cut above the likes of Onward or The Good Dinosaur or the umpteenth Cars title, at least.

★★★★☆

Book Review: Notes from the Burning Age by Claire North

Book #55 of 2022:

Notes from the Burning Age by Claire North

Author Claire North has written some of my very favorite novels, but this is one of her efforts that doesn’t quite hit the mark for me. The premise of the setting is sound: a post-apocalyptic future where holy priests try to recover digital records of the past, both to unlock the secrets of our lost technology and to learn more about who we were as a people before climate disasters wiped out our civilization. That has major A Canticle for Leibowitz vibes, which I love. Yet the slow-moving plot of a recruit for a criminal organization looking to foment revolution and the subsequent cat-and-mouse spy game / war story leaves me cold, in part because I never really feel like I understand what either the protagonist or any of the other characters are specifically aiming to achieve. He gets captured and released several times as the conflict lumbers along, but his motivation beyond his immediate survival is rather unclear, which makes it hard for me to remain invested as a reader. I appreciate the nonbinary representation, though!

[Content warning for torture and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Black Box by Michael Connelly

Book #54 of 2022:

The Black Box by Michael Connelly (Harry Bosch #16)

Another solid detective story — author Michael Connelly’s 25th book overall, released on the 20th anniversary of his original Bosch vehicle The Black Echo. Befittingly, this volume involves a cold case from two decades prior, of a foreign journalist found murdered in a Los Angeles alleyway during the Rodney King riots, when department resources were stretched thin. The investigation takes some unexpected turns, but it never quite kicks into higher gear as this series can do at its best. The copaganda elements are also a bit blatant this time around, with the protagonist unlawfully detaining a suspect, faking a search warrant, and laughing at a colleague for issuing bogus parking tickets to civilians who annoy him. I don’t need fictional officers to always follow proper procedure on everything, but it muddles Harry’s passion for justice to show him so blatantly abusing the power of his position this way at the expense of people’s rights. What’s the takeaway supposed to be here, especially in a novel that consciously evokes a notorious protest against police brutality?

But that’s a minor issue, and the plot for the most part is fine, keeping me in suspense as to how exactly the mystery would be solved after so long without any major breaks. This is far from the writer’s worst showing; I just know he can do better than this, on pretty much all fronts.

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

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine by Serhii Plokhy

Book #53 of 2022:

The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine by Serhii Plokhy

This 2015 title offers a decent crash-course on the history of the region that became today’s country of Ukraine, although author Serhii Plokhy spends a bit too much time on the events of early eras, which in addition to their overall turbulence can sometimes seem more like legend and speculation than verified fact. Luckily it’s smoother sailing once we reach the seventeenth century about a third of the way through the text, and from there on the book presents an informative account of how the territory bounced between Russian/Soviet and Polish control before ultimately asserting its own independence in 1991.

I’m sure this narrative has been simplified and carries its share of biases that I’m ill-equipped to register, but it seems like a solid primer for understanding the forces behind the current (2022) conflict, from the extraordinary degree of antisemitism among the population to the ethnonationalist push for recognition and protection of Ukrainian sovereign identity on the world stage to the mutual grievances between this nation and Putin’s Russia. I certainly don’t feel like an expert on the local geopolitics now, but at least I’ve got more of a background for following the news, not to mention greater context for my Jewish family who emigrated to America in 1909 when my great-grandmother was 2. Learning about this area I’m distantly connected to has been long overdue on my part, and this was as good a place as any to begin.

[Content warning for antisemitic violence and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Back to Before by K. A. Applegate

Book #52 of 2022:

Back to Before by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs Megamorphs #4)

The fourth and final Megamorphs volume opens in media res, with the bloody aftermath of a recent Animorph skirmish against the Yeerks. By this point in the wider franchise, we don’t need any specifics about that particular mission; we can simply see that it’s been a rough one. Jake in tiger morph is pinned beneath a Hork-Bajir corpse, staring at one of his own severed legs across the room. Tobias is lying stunned and crumpled, likewise buried amid the carnage. Marco has just recently demorphed from an almost-fatal neck slash. And a dying human Controller keeps repeating, “Help me. I’m so cold,” as the kids wearily pick themselves up and flee for home.

It’s a quick scene, but it really sets the stage for how brutal and bleak this adventure will be. That night, Crayak’s agent the Drode visits Jake and tempts him as the boy tosses and turns, unable to put the battle behind him and sleep. The offer is simple: grant those forces of destruction permission to rewrite reality so that Jake and the others never cut through the abandoned construction site and found a wounded Andalite prince who told them about the invasion and gave them the power to morph. Put this whole endless war out of mind and let it be someone else’s responsibility. In a moment of weakness, the team leader agrees.

Immediately, we return to the day of Animorphs #1 and watch that alternate timeline play out. It’s a fascinating what-if, drawing powerfully on our long familiarity with the characters and how they’ve developed under the stress of their grim resistance campaign. These versions of the teens are so young and carefree by contrast, but we can still recognize the kernel of strength and capability to them, particularly as they get caught up in the conflict regardless.

Well… not Tobias, I guess. Sadly, without circumstances leading him to become an Animorph and then a nothlit, he drifts away from his new friendship with Jake. Bullied in school and neglected by his family, he is an easy mark for the Sharing, the front organization for recruiting Yeerk host bodies. This is our most in-depth look at their cultish methods, and it’s eerie to see how effectively the program works on a loner like Tobias. He’s drawn in by the promise of community and joining something bigger than himself, and infested despite getting cold feet at the last minute. There’s no happy ending for him in this universe, and readers expecting a rescue will be in for an unpleasant surprise.

As for the other heroes, they — especially Cassie — are seeing occasional flashes of their former world, like her conviction that a hawk should be sitting in the rafters at her parents’ barn. But the major development comes when Ax, who in lieu of his recruitment in Animorphs #4 has freed himself from his sunken ship and journeyed up to the surface alone, appears in a local television studio to broadcast a warning about the alien oppressors to any humans willing to listen. That sets off alarms at the Sharing, and Jake, already suspicious of his brother Tom, follows him to the site only to observe him pull out a futuristic ‘ray gun’ and start blasting witnesses. (Earlier, Marco and Rachel see similar weapons after another time eddy briefly causes Visser One to appear before them. They’re shot at by her bodyguards as they pursue, in a fun instance of the blond mallrat realizing how much she enjoys the thrill of the chase and the life-or-death stakes. However, I personally appreciate that chapter more for the fact that Marco asks her out and she seems to accept, a vindication for every shipper who’s felt the possibility of romance in their regular prickly-yet-understanding dynamic.)

The butterfly effect of the new chain of events is interesting, with the Yeerks resorting to open warfare on humanity in a way they haven’t so far in the plot of the main novels. Lacking their morphing or their hard-won experience, our protagonists are even more outmatched than usual, and not all of them survive through the end of the title. Yet ultimately, they come close to dealing a huge blow against the invaders, by capturing the Blade ship with Ax and preparing to fire on the orbiting craft containing the majority of Yeerk reinforcements waiting in their pool. At that point the Drode huffily freezes time and ends the experiment, not because the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of noncombatants would be an obvious atrocity — our babies’ first / latest war crime — but because he and his master have decided the odds are actually better for them back in the original reality.

It’s a bit of a narrative cheat, but only barely. This ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ gimmick was obviously never going to be a permanent shift even before folks started dying, and in my opinion, the trickster discovering that his gambit made things worse for his side is a fine way to end it. The detail that that victory and its steep cost were possible merely because Cassie is an anomaly whose sensitivity to the changing timeline helped disrupt the scheme is a clever wrinkle too — though maybe difficult to reconcile with stories such as Animorphs #11 or Megamorphs #3 — and I like the further reveal that Crayak’s adversary the Ellimist has understood that about the girl and foreseen everything playing out this way all along.

I don’t love how no one will clearly remember any of this happening, although that’s probably for the best for Jake and Tobias alike, but at least we the audience have gotten to see the characters prove their mettle all over again in a most unusual situation. It’s a strong what-if, one that demonstrates not just how everyone’s core self would remain the same absent the crucible of trauma they’ve endured, but also that even the worst of those experiences have saved lives and brought about possibilities that aren’t worth undoing. That’s a great note to end the multi-perspective blockbuster Megamorphs on, as the larger series itself winds down.

This volume: ★★★★★

Overall series: ★★★★☆

Volumes ranked: 4 > 2 > 3 > 1