TV #54 of 2023: Party Down, season 3 This workplace sitcom about a crew of hapless Hollywood caterers hoping to make it as actors ironically never found much of an audience in its two original 10-episode seasons back in 2009 and 2010, and even today, I don’t know that I would say it’s popular enough …
Author Archives: Joe Kessler
Book Review: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: A Stitch in Time by Andrew J. Robinson
Book #117 of 2023: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: A Stitch in Time by Andrew J. Robinson (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine #27) This Star Trek novel was originally published back in the year 2000, soon after the series Deep Space Nine had come to an end. In it, author Andrew J. Robinson writes from …
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Book Review: Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac by Gabrielle Zevin
Book #116 of 2023: Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac by Gabrielle Zevin Is it a little gimmicky and unrealistic that a 16-year-old would bump her head and lose all memory of the last four years? Sure. But in the hands of author Gabrielle Zevin, that premise turns into a neat exploration of high school identity, …
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TV Review: Star Trek: Short Treks, season 2
TV #53 of 2023: Star Trek: Short Treks, season 2 This second — and so far, final — batch of quick Trek adventures remedies one of my complaints about the first season: that it was too beholden to the show Discovery in particular, instead of taking advantage of the wider canon at its disposal. And …
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Book Review: Tomb Sweeping by Alexandra Chang
Book #115 of 2023: Tomb Sweeping by Alexandra Chang The short stories in this collection are largely fine, but even the best among them — I’d personally single out “Klara” about an intense college friendship with unexpressed queer undertones and the opening entry “Unknown by Unknown” about a house-sitter’s uncanny interactions with a mysterious painting …
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TV Review: Fantasy Bedtime Hour, season 1
TV #52 of 2023: Fantasy Bedtime Hour, season 1 Okay, this is probably the most obscure show that I’ll ever review, but here goes. Fantasy Bedtime Hour was a public-access cable television series that aired in San Francisco and a few other California markets from 2002 to 2007. It consists of its two hosts, Heatherly …
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Book Review: Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Book #114 of 2023: Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid I suppose it says something about the overall quality of author Taylor Jenkins Reid’s extended saga of fictional twentieth-century celebrities that this 2021 novel (the third of four so far, though they are so discrete that they can really be read in any order) is …
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Book Review: Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English by Valerie Fridland
Book #113 of 2023: Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English by Valerie Fridland I taught a few undergraduate sociolinguistics courses when I was in grad school, and if this book had been available back then, I could see myself including a few of its chapters as assigned reading. It’s an engaging …
Book Review: The House Is on Fire by Rachel Beanland
Book #112 of 2023: The House Is on Fire by Rachel Beanland A fascinating work of historical fiction about the Richmond Theatre fire, a now-obscure tragedy that in 1811 became our young nation’s first national news story about an event of such mass casualties. 72 people died in the flames, including the sitting governor of …
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TV Review: Star Trek: Discovery, season 2
TV #51 of 2023: Star Trek: Discovery, season 2 The cast still does a fine job emoting with the material they’re given in this second season of Star Trek: Discovery, but there aren’t enough smaller personal moments to convincingly sell the relationships before they wind up in crisis. It also doesn’t help that I like …
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The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 