TV #13 of 2025: The Bear, season 2 I wasn’t as immediately impressed with this sophomore effort, since the switch from the characters managing a struggling restaurant to launching a fancy new one made everything feel somewhat tamer. There’s still a great deal of chaotic scrambling and neurotic vulgarity, but in this case it’s all …
Author Archives: Joe Kessler
Book Review: Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte
Book #51 of 2025: Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte This collection of interconnected stories offers some pretty sharp observations on modern internet culture, and it reminds me of R. F. Kuang’s Yellowface in its sympathetic depictions of certain objectively horrible protagonists, whom we can at least understand no matter how much we presumably disapprove. Author Tony …
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Book Review: Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins
Book #50 of 2025: Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins I wasn’t a huge fan of author Suzanne Collins’s first prequel effort The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, but this new title thankfully recaptures the old Hunger Games magic. It’s a challenging target for this sort of release to hit — similar enough to …
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Book Review: Stephen King’s The Dark Tower: The Drawing of the Three Omnibus by Robin Furth, Peter David, Piotr Kowalski, Jonathan Marks, Nick Filardi, and Lee Loughridge
Book #49 of 2025: Stephen King’s The Dark Tower: The Drawing of the Three Omnibus by Robin Furth, Peter David, Piotr Kowalski, Jonathan Marks, Nick Filardi, and Lee Loughridge Nearly but not quite the last of Marvel’s Dark Tower comic adaptations, as this volume — already smaller than the first two — for some reason …
Book Review: Vallista by Steven Brust
Book #48 of 2025: Vallista by Steven Brust (Vlad Taltos #15) In this installment, Vlad Taltos goes full Gormenghast, and the results are somewhat underwhelming. I do appreciate how author Steven Brust continues to periodically shake up his usual storytelling rhythms for this series, and it’s hard to name a bigger change than this adventure, …
Book Review: Ring of Solomon by Aden Polydoros
Book #47 of 2025: Ring of Solomon by Aden Polydoros (Ring of Solomon #1) [Disclaimer: I am Twitter mutuals with this author.] Overall a solid entry in the Percy Jackson genre of middle-grade fiction, where tweens battle fantastical monsters drawn from some culture’s traditional mythology (increasingly #ownvoices for the writer’s particular background, as here). In …
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Book Review: Traditional Culture Days at Uni by Victoria Goddard
Book #46 of 2025: Traditional Culture Days at Uni by Victoria Goddard This Discord-exclusive story is a lightweight snippet, depicting Kip Mdang from The Hands of the Emperor as a young person at university. It’s fun to glimpse him at that age with friends and family we’ve previously seen when they’re substantially older — namely …
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Book Review: The Art of Power: My Story as America’s First Woman Speaker of the House by Nancy Pelosi
Book #45 of 2025: The Art of Power: My Story as America’s First Woman Speaker of the House by Nancy Pelosi An interesting overview of the author’s time in politics, though this is mostly a matter of emphasizing what had been obfuscated or ignored in the public record, rather than providing any revelatory new insights. …
Book Review: The Widow’s Husband’s Secret Lie by Freida McFadden
Book #44 of 2025: The Widow’s Husband’s Secret Lie by Freida McFadden I was initially worried that this satire would be a two-star read for me, but it’s significantly funnier in the back half as it leans more into the absurd tropes that riddle this suburban crime thriller genre. Secret identical twins! Characters who might …
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Book Review: The Autobiography of Mark Twain edited by Charles Neider
Book #43 of 2025: The Autobiography of Mark Twain edited by Charles Neider Mark Twain (1835-1910) didn’t actually write an autobiography. That is to say, he wrote — and dictated — many things over the last forty years of his life that he characterized as part of that great undertaking, but they were disjointed, incomplete, …
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The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 