Book #31 of 2022: Stoner by John Williams This 1965 novel is a quiet story of a quiet life, about a turn-of-the-century man who leaves his parents’ Missouri farm to study agriculture at college but ends up discovering a fascination with literature, changing his major, and never leaving, going on to become a professor at …
Author Archives: Joe Kessler
Book Review: Tess of the Road by Rachel Hartman
Book #30 of 2022: Tess of the Road by Rachel Hartman (Tess of the Road #1) My original review from when I read an Advance Reader’s Copy of this book in 2018: Practically from the start, I’ve been reeling over the emotional journey that the heroine makes in this intensely personal fantasy novel. Largely eschewing …
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Book Review: Angle of Investigation: Three Harry Bosch Stories by Michael Connelly
Book #29 of 2022: Angle of Investigation: Three Harry Bosch Stories by Michael Connelly Another three short stories featuring detective Harry Bosch, published just one month after the previous collection Suicide Run in 2011. (It remains unclear to me why they were not combined.) This one I like a little bit better on average, so …
Book Review: The Weakness by K. A. Applegate
Book #28 of 2022: The Weakness by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs #37) I’ve used the word “goofy” in the past to describe the handful of Animorphs volumes that I haven’t really cared for in this reread, reflecting those one-off premises that are simply too outlandish to take seriously even in the context of a YA …
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TV Review: Bob’s Burgers, season 1
TV #9 of 2022: Bob’s Burgers, season 1 The 2011 launch to this animated family series is generally charming and funny, yet it doesn’t quite feel fully-formed, especially from a rewatch perspective. (I dropped the show from my regular viewing roster at some point, but I know I’ve seen at least the first nine seasons.) …
Book Review: Anatomy: A Love Story by Dana Schwartz
Book #27 of 2022: Anatomy: A Love Story by Dana Schwartz This YA novel has a well-drawn teenage heroine at its heart: an early nineteenth-century daughter of the Scottish nobility who longs to become a medical surgeon in an era when that was considered unthinkably inappropriate for women. At first she attends lectures dressed as …
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Book Review: Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Book #26 of 2022: Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell I would not call this experimental novel from 2004 a stone-cold classic, but it’s a surprisingly readable tome with an interesting structure of six nested narratives, each of which is reasonably compelling in its own right while offering thematic parallels forward and backwards in time to …
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Book Review: The Gilded Wolves by Roshani Chokshi
Book #25 of 2022: The Gilded Wolves by Roshani Chokshi (The Gilded Wolves #1) This YA fantasy novel reads as a blend of National Treasure with Six of Crows, which is not a combination that entirely works for me. (I’m not using that latter title as a shorthand for any heist story, either: this is …
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Book Review: The Labours of Hercules by Agatha Christie
Book #24 of 2022: The Labours of Hercules by Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot #27) The loose thread linking the twelve detective stories in this collection is that Hercule Poirot is planning to retire, but first wants to solve a sequence of grand cases mirroring the legendary feats of his namesake, the Greco-Roman demigod Hercules. Honestly, …
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Movie Review: Star Trek: Insurrection (1998)
Movie #6 of 2022: Star Trek: Insurrection (1998) A solid yet ultimately unambitious Star Trek vehicle, with a title and premise that sound more exciting that what’s actually delivered. Theoretically speaking, this is a story about the Federation trying to force an indigenous(-ish) species off of their planet, so that its unique properties that keep …
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The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 