The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

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Hello! My name is Joe Kessler, and I’ve been blogging in one form or another since 2004. This is the launch of my new home for that, where I’ll be posting book reviews and other short pieces of writing. I’m also debuting a Patreon site for anyone who would like to support my efforts through a small monthly pledge.

I’ve always been a massive bookworm, and I’m lucky to have a job as a data analyst where I can listen to audiobooks while I do my work. For years now I’ve written up short reviews of every title that I’ve finished, critically examining which elements are / are not effective for me as a reader. I now have over 800 such reviews, and in the days ahead I’ll be putting them up as backdated posts on here as well as continuing to write and publish new ones.

Whether you become a recurring donor or not, feedback is always 100% welcome on my critiques — If I say something in one of these posts that sparks a reaction, I would love to hear how you agree, disagree, or have some other insight. Thank you for reading!

Book Review: Tailored Realities by Brandon Sanderson

Book #195 of 2025:

Tailored Realities by Brandon Sanderson

[Disclaimer: I am Facebook friends with this author.]

This is Brandon Sanderson’s second collection of short fiction, following Arcanum Unbounded in 2016. That earlier volume collected all the writer’s smaller works in his expansive Cosmere setting, while this one contains the opposite: ten tales expressly not set in that particular fantasy multiverse. Instead they lean more towards science-fiction (and, oddly enough, detective stories), with several entries concerning virtual Matrix/Holodeck-like constructs that give the project its title.

Most of these contents were already available elsewhere, either as standalone novellas or in mixed-author anthologies or magazines. I know I’d previously read at least half of them myself — Snapshot, Perfect State, Defending Elysium, Firstborn, and Mitosis — and none of them were examples I’d highlight as among Sanderson’s best, although Snapshot and Mitosis are probably my favorites of the options here. In his defense, the book spans a full quarter-century of his writing career, dating back to some of his earliest published pieces, and you can tell how he’s improved as a storyteller over time. Still, that doesn’t make this exercise itself any stronger, and I’m a little confused about the criteria for inclusion, since other non-Cosmere curiosities like the Infinity Blade tie-ins have been left out.

I’m not going to review all ten of the stories individually, and I do think they’re interesting from a Sanderson fandom perspective to see him trying out new ideas, no matter how unsuccessfully. But overall, it’s a bit grim for my tastes. There’s a lot of gun violence and gore, including multiple suicides, and a tendency to overexplain the worldbuilding mechanisms rather than just step back and let the plots and characters flow. It’s a quintessential three-star read for me, unfortunately.

★★★☆☆

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Bill & Ted movies, ranked

1. Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989)
2. Bill & Ted Face the Music (2020)
3. Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991)

Overall rating: ★★★☆☆

Previously on Film Franchise Fridays:

★★★★☆ Indiana Jones
★★★☆☆ Jason Bourne

Movie Review: Bill & Ted Face the Music (2020)

Movie #27 of 2025:

Bill & Ted Face the Music (2020)

A fun but muddled legacy sequel, picking up with the titular dudes several decades after their previous adventures. Overall I would say this movie is better than I expected it to be, and easily stronger than Bogus Journey (1991). It just could have benefited from another few script passes to smooth and improve certain story items.

First, the totally righteous: Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves slip seamlessly back into their old roles of the affably dim Californians, as does Hal Landon Jr. as Ted’s dad. (William Sadler and Amy Stoch reprise their respective characters of Death and Missy too, but their performances don’t feel as specifically keyed-in to me. I do love the joke that she’s now romantically involved with Ted’s little brother, though, having previously served as each hero’s stepmother in turn.) Meanwhile newcomers Jack Haven and Samara Weaving are a nice addition as the next generation of music-loving slackers, with the former doing a particularly great job of channeling the mannerisms of their father Ted. In contrast, Kristen Schaal doesn’t really do anything to sell herself as Rufus’s daughter and not any other random do-gooder from his era.

The crisis this time is some underexplained disaster that’s going to rip apart the universe if Bill and Ted don’t create one song to unify the world before a ticking-clock deadline, which is an acceptable enough retcon from their band’s music generally inspiring a distant utopia. I like how they and their daughters go about it in two different ways, too: the girls by gathering historical musicians similar to the original Excellent Adventure (1989), and the men by attempting to pick up the track from their own future selves. The latter path sees the protagonists finding darker and darker fates as they progress fruitlessly forward in time, and the movie seems like it’s setting up a realization that they’re wrong to do so — that it is in fact cheating to jump ahead to the finished version, whereas Billie and Thea are putting in the true creative effort from which great art can be born.

Unfortunately, the film never quite manages to articulate that. Instead, a robot assassin kills most of the characters, sending them straight to hell. I sort of get where this is coming from — Bogus Journey is a full half of the initial franchise, so I suppose this piece does need to engage with its themes to a degree — but it’s an unnecessary narrative swerve with uncomfortable implications. (When Bill and Ted died in the last installment, they wandered around seeing a wide range of possible afterlife destinations. Why are their children immediately sentenced to labor for eternity under the watchful eye of demons in the pit? This 2020 title may not have the homophobic slurs of its predecessors, but it goes out of its way to punish the two people who appear to flout traditional gender expectations, and that’s something we should definitely question.)

The ending, in addition to bringing them all back to life without explanation, then has the team distribute musical instruments to literally every person throughout time and space to join in their jam session. A quick voiceover from the ladies reveals, “And so, it wasn’t so much the song that made the difference. It was everyone playing it together.” Which… again could be fine in theory with a little workshopping, but doesn’t entirely flow from what we’ve been told beforehand, and doesn’t benefit here from the immediate smash-cut to the credits right afterwards. It’s clearly meant to be a feel-good moment, but it’s too unsupported to land the way the screenwriters intended.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Sapling Cage by Margaret Killjoy

Book #194 of 2025:

The Sapling Cage by Margaret Killjoy (Daughters of the Empty Throne #1)

I’m not blown away by the generic fantasy setting or the one-dimensional villainous motivations here, but as a personal story rooted in its protagonist’s gender identity, it’s certainly a more distinctive entry in the genre. Sixteen-year-old Lorel is someone who would likely identify as transgender in our world — as does #ownvoices author Margaret Killjoy — having long ago realized that she’s a girl despite everyone else continuing to call her a boy. When her best friend confesses that she’d rather join up to become a knight than enter the coven of witches her mother had promised her to, our heroine eagerly borrows some dresses to swap places with her, so that she’s the one who goes off to learn magic with the women instead.

The character’s euphoria over finally getting to present and be seen as feminine is heartwarming, and though she initially keeps her true background hidden, she eventually learns that her newfound sisters are a pretty accepting bunch. She’s not the first of their number to be drawn from outside the conventional ranks, and there are even advanced spells that could allow her to alter her form via shapeshifting, if she ever chooses to do so. It’s a clear parallel to surgical and hormonal options for trans people in real life, right down to the fact that certain folks see the act as empowering and desirable while others don’t feel a need for it themselves. The debate doesn’t have a universal answer, nor do we get the sense as readers that one is remotely required.

If this novel has a fault, it’s perhaps a bit safe, even for YA. There’s no homophobia in the land, as the teen’s own bisexuality and her father’s marriage to another man are both treated as unremarkable, and although transphobia clearly does exist, she manages to find such a welcoming community that it doesn’t provide much plot friction either. Instead we get the simple growing pains of making new friends and worrying needlessly about how they’ll react to her secret, while the antagonists are destroying the area’s natural resources in a shortsighted power grab (which I have to assume is meant as a metaphor for climate change).

Overall I’m going to give the title a rating of three-and-a-half stars, rounded up, because I do think the narrator’s perspective is well-rendered and I can imagine this being an important read for younger audiences. Still, I’m undecided if I’ll continue on with the forthcoming sequels or not.

★★★★☆

Book Review: Star Wars: The Last Order by Kwame Mbalia

Book #193 of 2025:

Star Wars: The Last Order by Kwame Mbalia

This Star Wars title has definite potential, but it unfortunately doesn’t live up to it in my opinion. The action unfolds across three different timelines, one of which at least should have automatic appeal for any fan — it’s canonically the latest story yet in this setting, as the first novel to take place following the 2019 movie The Rise of Skywalker. How disappointing, then, that that era turns out to be little beyond a framing device, with only the barest sketch of a post-Exegol galaxy revealed to us. (I assume Disney holds more blame there than author Kwame Mbalia, but recognizing that does nothing to make the work any stronger. It’s been six years, folks!)

The other two sequences are told in flashback, flimsily justified by the mission that the Resistance protagonists are on in the present. Here we see film heroes Finn and Jannah when they were still loyal First Order soldiers, although the established canon requires that they never met back then. Thus FN-2187 and TZ-1719’s plot threads don’t intersect directly, resulting in another structural weakness for the book. Each considered as a standalone novella wouldn’t be so bad, and they cover similar thematic territory as the separate troopers both grow disillusioned with their situation and the amorality of their superior officers, but overall this is the sort of prequel that contains few surprises. Events play out basically as we would expect them to, bringing the young man to near the headspace he was in for The Force Awakens (2015) and expanding on the woman’s own defection that she mentioned in Rise. It’s all competent enough, and I’m glad the corporation entrusted these Black characters to a bestselling Black writer, but the end result is hardly a showstopper.

[Content warning for gun violence and child kidnapping / exploitation.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Boy Who Followed Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

Book #192 of 2025:

The Boy Who Followed Ripley by Patricia Highsmith (The Ripliad #4)

Two observations I made earlier in this series continue to prove fruitful in shaping my understanding of Mr. Thomas Ripley: that his adventures can be as ludicrous as those of Dexter Morgan on TV, and that he’s best read as a gay character, despite that element being largely relegated to the subtext. Take this penultimate installment, in which a sixteen-year-old stranger seeks out our familiar antihero. The boy has recently killed his own father, and having seen Ripley’s name in the news as an exonerated but likely-guilty murderer, he feels a sense of kinship that leads him to Tom’s doorstep. That’s absolutely a Dexter plot, linking the protagonist up with a fellow killer so that their knowledge of each other’s secrets guarantees a mutually-assured destruction, and yet it seems rather obvious here that the characters’ shared connection could be an unspoken queerness instead of / in addition to their violent crimes.

After all, Tom does take the teenager under his wing, and although nothing physical passes between them, a charge of grooming wouldn’t be entirely off-base. The older man is very interested in Frank’s love life — like the fact that he couldn’t perform the one time he tried to have sex with his girlfriend — and his admiration of the teen verges on both romantic and sensual. They visit multiple gay bars and drag shows in the cosmopolitan city of West Berlin, remarking how free and comfortable they feel there, and Ripley at one point even dresses up as a woman himself to gain the upper hand on a few ruffians. Author Patricia Highsmith’s own sexuality was an open secret that her private letters later confirmed, and it’s true that she never explicitly says that either of these individuals is gay. But she does have Ripley’s wife — of whom he reflects that “the infrequency of their making love […was] convenient too, for him. He couldn’t have borne a woman who made demands several times a week: that really would have turned him off, maybe at once and permanently” — directly ask him whether their young houseguest is a homosexual (to which he calmly replies, “Not that I can see. Do you think so?”).

If this is a romance, it’s clearly a problematic one given the couple’s wildly different ages and levels of worldliness, but we don’t need to belabor the point or pass contemporary judgement on a fictional [non-]relationship from 1980. The more damning criticism here is that the book is just kind of boring. A kidnapping / Taken subplot briefly introduces some excitement near the middle, giving the hero his expected chance to increase his body count yet again, but it’s almost perfunctory in how tacked-on it feels and how strangely everyone has to act in order for it to work (like the lad’s mother letting Ripley collect $2 million from her banks for the ransom payment — more than $8 million in today’s dollars — when she doesn’t know him at all). Mostly the two rogues are simply enjoying one another’s company while being unable to quite express the matter, which isn’t a wholly terrible time in this writer’s hands but does still make for the dullest Ripliad story yet.

[Content warning for gun violence, suicide, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: A Hard Day’s Knight by Simon R. Green

Book #191 of 2025:

A Hard Day’s Knight by Simon R. Green (Nightside #11)

This isn’t the worst entry in its urban fantasy series, but it might be the most generic. Our protagonist received the legendary sword Excalibur at the end of the previous volume, and in this one, he has to return it to its rightful owner King Arthur. That means he’ll need to find the famously-vanished lord, and in the process navigate both an elf civil war and a parallel world where the kingdom of Camelot was a bastion of evil. Meanwhile he’s theoretically adjusting to being the new authority figure in the Nightside, although in practice that doesn’t take up a lot of the text or change much of his usual approach.

In truth, we don’t get enough of Taylor’s presence in this novel, or of the customary weirdness of the setting. Even an early interlude where he visits the regular part of London for the first time since book one falls flat without giving the character anything particularly meaningful or clever to do. He’s normally full of insights and cheap bluffing tricks, but here he’s much more of a passing spectator on events. It’s as though author Simon R. Green primarily wanted to relate his version of the Arthurian legends, and so wrote it there for the detective to witness without actually crafting an interesting case for him to pursue.

That’s all the more maddening given how this title represents the penultimate installment of the saga, when important characters should be doing important things to bring any remaining plot arcs to a crescendo. Instead we’ve got a quieter book that’s not quite bad, but isn’t especially good either. I give it two-and-a-half stars, rounded up.

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

★★★☆☆

Movie Review: Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991)

Movie #26 of 2025:

Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991)

One of the strangest genre pivots for a sequel that I’ve ever seen, swapping the time-travel shenanigans of the first movie for the afterlife experience of this installment’s title. Things here start out fine: the last film established that a utopian future was somehow built on the music of Bill and Ted, so it’s plausible enough for a malcontent of that era to send nefarious robot doppelgangers into the past to kill and replace the originals. (I really do enjoy those metallic henchmen, who are just as dim as the guys they’re impersonating and insist on calling each other Evil Bill and Evil Ted.) The problem is that they actually succeed in their murderous mission, causing the human protagonists to wake up as spirits in the great beyond, looking down at their slain mortal bodies.

The bulk of the adventure thus takes place after the heroes are dead, and this isn’t only a poor fit for the tone and narrative rules that we’ve previously known. It’s also just not a very strong story, delivering a succession of old tropes about Heaven, Hell, possessions, seances, and so on without ever landing on a specific creative vision. There’s no marijuana in either of these movies, but this feels more like a stoner comedy to me, encouraging us to simply laugh at the clown show of the slacker dudes reacting to heavy subjects with their usual befuddlement and not think too deeply about any of it. How else to explain the bizarre parody of The Seventh Seal (1957), in which the boys defeat the Grim Reaper in games like Battleship and Twister, leading him to tag along as their sidekick for the rest of the film? Again and again we’re encouraged to find it funny that such a serious figure is saying or doing something ridiculous, and though I’m not entirely immune to the charm of that, it wears out its welcome well before the end.

It’s likewise an amusing bit of random worldbuilding detail when the people several centuries from now are using “Station!” as an exclamation of agreement, but significantly less so once a Martian scientist of that name who can apparently say nothing else starts repeating the word every few seconds like a deranged Pokémon. Someone involved in the production clearly thought that catchphrase would be hilarious, but I’m afraid it doesn’t work for me.

The script eventually remembers to revive its titular corpses and resolve the crisis with their robotic imposters, who are defeated with a new pair of good robots, while the bad guy loses to another round of the young musicians remembering to use their time machine to go back and set the scene to their advantage. They then disappear and return to the same moment after having finally learned how to play guitar (and married their princess girlfriends and had kids), which makes for a pretty cute ending. But overall, bogus is the right term for this.

[Content warning for homophobic slurs and sexual assault.]

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: Silverlock by John Myers Myers

Book #190 of 2025:

Silverlock by John Myers Myers

This 1949 novel is a quaint picaresque adventure tale, similar in plot and spirit to a work like Gulliver’s Travels, except that the foreign land our titular protagonist visits is populated by existing characters of literature and myth. (He even encounters Gulliver’s own talking horses and domesticated wild humans at one point.) It’s fun to play spot-the-allusion, especially as certain figures don’t appear under their conventional names, but overall the book is a bit aimless and decidedly dated in its rampant misogyny.

I’m not sure the basic premise really holds up under scrutiny, either. I love the concept of a literal public domain where old stories coexist, but how is it that the important parts like Beowulf feasting at Heorot or Gawain returning to the Green Knight are always happening right when Silverlock arrives? (Do they reset and repeat? If so, are they aware of those cycles?) Why does he never give any indication that he’s heard of any of these people before — and would surely have considered some of them to be fictional — even when meeting someone as famous as Circe or Robin Hood? If he’s meant to be understood as just comically ignorant, why is he able to reference Paul Bunyan while distracting Don Quixote?

So it’s a rather odd project, and less amusing as it goes along, since the final chapters involve the hero descending into a version of the underworld to see various individuals from Raskolnikov to Hamlet being tortured for their sins. I only knew about it in the first place because the later writer Stephen R. Donaldson used lines from one of the original poems here as titles for his Mordant’s Need series (“Steeped in the vacuum of her dreams / A mirror’s empty till / A man rides through it.”), and in retrospect that probably wasn’t enough to justify the interlibrary loan request. I suppose I still like this more than I dislike it on balance, but I’m not surprised that it seems to have fallen into obscurity today.

[Content warning for racism, suicide, rape, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: The Sopranos, season 5

TV #57 of 2025:

The Sopranos, season 5

There’s a strong sense of inevitable fatalism running throughout this penultimate run* of The Sopranos, ultimately rendering it my favorite season yet. I love it when TV is structured around a single cohesive storyline for the year, and while serialization leads to the typical open ends here, we also have a clear plot anchoring the narrative. This is the season where Tony’s cousin comes home from prison, and it’s likewise the time when that antihero is separated from his wife, processing what led to their estrangement. Both arcs find various characters trying to break free and establish healthier lives for themselves, only to eventually succumb to their worst impulses — or someone else’s — and revert back to their familiar toxic ways, assuming they survive at all.

Let’s begin with the two Tonys (which is amusingly the name of episode 5×1, although there it refers to the protagonist’s claim that he has a nicer side Dr. Melfi hasn’t seen and not to him and his cousin Tony Blundetto, who won’t be properly introduced until the following week). Tony B. is another character the writers spring on us as somebody the whole cast knows but have somehow never mentioned, though it flows naturally enough with how he’s been off serving a sentence until now. We haven’t seen an ex-con on the program like this before, and especially not one who seems genuinely committed to putting his criminal life behind him and making a fresh start of things. Of course, Tony Soprano is like his genre successor Walter White in representing a corruptive influence on everyone around him — or maybe a crab in a bucket pulling back anyone attempting to escape his clutches — and so it’s not long before Steve Buscemi’s new arrival is just the latest thug heading for an unhappy end.

(While we’re on the topic of animal metaphors, Tony S. is clearly set up as a parallel to the brown bear here in the show’s own visual language, as a wild threat who lumbers out of the woods to bring danger to his family home. I love how the finale underscores that bookend without drawing the comparison explicitly.)

Blundetto’s arc connects with the developing conflict between the New York and New Jersey mafias, which reaches an unexpected resolution of sorts in the final episode. It’s anticlimactic, but I appreciate the extra ironical twist it lends Tony’s actions immediately prior, which were a source of great distress for him but perhaps Gift of the Magi-like weren’t actually needed after all. Less uncertain is the fate of Adriana as another major figure who exits the proceedings around then, cementing her role as one of the story’s few relative innocents. Her greatest sin proves thinking her love could be more powerful than the malign inertia surrounding her prospective cousin-in-law, which finally grinds her down as well.

I don’t have as much to say about Carmela here, but her time apart from Tony at least gives her some new concerns and overall makes more sense for her character than her fixation on Furio last season. She’s yet another soul who tries to leave the awful purgatory she’s built for herself through her complacency with her husband’s crimes, but in the end is drawn right back in again. The two of them each wonder if there was a moment in the past when they could have made different choices, but if any such opportunity ever existed, the series is clear that it’s long since been lost.

Above all, this year of The Sopranos is funny. Beyond the dark themes and outbursts of graphic violence, the mob activities are presented as more bickering over payment percentages than usual, with everybody demanding their cut in return for even the smallest of favors. It’s hilariously petty, and adds a welcome surreal humor to what’s otherwise a pretty bleak look at the human condition around organized crime.

*I understand that the final season of the show was nearly twice as long as usual and aired in two halves almost a year apart. I nevertheless intend to watch and review those 21 remaining episodes as the single collective unit that they’re marketed as, unless anyone has an argument to the contrary.

[Content warning for domestic abuse, drug abuse, racism, homophobia, gun violence, sexual assault, and gore.]

★★★★☆