Book #199 of 2022: The Night-Bird’s Feather by Jenna Katerin Moran [I read and reviewed this title at a Patreon donor’s request. Want to nominate your own books for me to read and review (or otherwise support my writing)? Sign up for a small monthly donation at https://patreon.com/lesserjoke today!] I don’t love every part of …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Night-Bird’s Feather by Jenna Katerin Moran”
TV #61 of 2022: His Dark Materials, season 3 This adaptation has long struggled to capture and distill the complex themes of Philip Pullman’s classic fantasy trilogy, and this final season faces the additional hurdle of navigating the events of its most complicated volume, The Amber Spyglass. Theoretically, it’s a pretty faithful representation! The series …
Book #198 of 2022: When the Angels Left the Old Country by Sacha Lamb My shorthand pitch for this debut novel would probably be something like “Good Omens meets The Golem and the Jinni“: a tale of the early twentieth century, richly steeped in #ownvoices Jewish elements, in which a friendly angel and demon who …
Continue reading “Book Review: When the Angels Left the Old Country by Sacha Lamb”
Book #197 of 2022: The Hole by Hye-Young Pyun A bitter little novella about a Korean man who’s bedridden and initially only able to communicate by blinking, having been severely disabled by the car accident that also killed his wife. Lacking any other family to take him in, he’s looked after by his mother-in-law, who …
Book #196 of 2022: Dead Silence by S. A. Barnes A thrillingly creepy sci-fi horror novel in the same general vein as movies like Event Horizon, Alien, or Sunshine, where human/corporate greed may be the true enemy (for anyone who can survive the crazed assault of its previous victims). Out on the far vestiges of …
Continue reading “Book Review: Dead Silence by S. A. Barnes”
Book #195 of 2022: Eight Nights of Flirting by Hannah Reynolds I was hoping this would be a cute little Hanukkah read, but it’s instead been a source of perpetual frustration and discomfort for me. The basic premise is that the narrator is desperate to get with the crush who’ll be visiting her grandparents’ house …
Continue reading “Book Review: Eight Nights of Flirting by Hannah Reynolds”
TV #60 of 2022: Classic Doctor Who, season 4 This is the most incomplete surviving season of Doctor Who, meaning it has the highest number of episodes currently missing from any modern archive: 33 gone, and only 10 available to be viewed. As with all of the absent material for Who, we do have audio …
Book #194 of 2022: Desert Star by Michael Connelly (Ballard and Bosch #4) Author Michael Connelly’s latest Harry Bosch story — his 38th book in this broad continuity of LA cops, lawyers, and reporters, if my math is right — finds the detective once again ensconced in the department where he spent most of his …
Continue reading “Book Review: Desert Star by Michael Connelly”
Book #193 of 2022: The Lost Metal by Brandon Sanderson (Wax and Wayne #4 / Mistborn #7) [Disclaimer: I am Facebook friends with this author.] Despite retaining its fantasy wild west trappings, the remainder of “Mistborn Era 2” has never lived up to the sheer entertainment value of The Alloy of Law for me, and …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Lost Metal by Brandon Sanderson”
TV #59 of 2022: Bob’s Burgers, season 11 Maybe a slight step up from the year before? Most episodes of this family cartoon remain unchallenging comfort television with a group of characters we know and love, but there’s at least some effort here to occasionally push one or another of them into unfamiliar growth territory. …
The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more