The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

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Blog Launch

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!

TV Review: The Lincoln Lawyer, season 4

TV #8 of 2026:

The Lincoln Lawyer, season 4

I feel like this show is perpetually on the bubble between three and four stars for me, in that it’s a generally enjoyable legal thriller that isn’t doing anything remotely revolutionary in terms of its cinematography, plot, or so on (beyond I guess staging each season around a single case, rather than the more typical episodic procedural approach). Much like the Michael Connelly book series it’s based upon, it will probably never win any major awards, but it’s still a fun piece of popcorn entertainment, and that’s at least a cut above some of the other programming in its genre.

This latest batch of episodes carries the best built-in hook and stakes for our hero by adapting the novel The Law of Innocence, in which he’s arrested at a traffic stop with the dead body of a delinquent client discovered in his trunk. It’s a frame job from an unknown party, and whether the prosecution and the police are in on it or not, they’re clearly relishing the chance to get back at the defense attorney who’s beaten them in court so many times before. He’s thus subjected to all manner of dirty tricks and indignities, in addition to the serious sentence hanging over his head if he happens to lose.

One strength of the source material that unfortunately but understandably gets dropped is its original early 2020 setting, whereby our knowledge of the ticking Covid clock adds a further stress to Mickey’s stay in an overcrowded prison. But even without that element, this is obviously his most important trial yet, and the program basically delivers on the inherent tension there. Again, this isn’t exactly reinventing the wheel, but three-and-a-half stars rounded up seems fair.

[Content warning for gun violence, police brutality, and gore.]

★★★★☆

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Movie Review: Rocky IV (1985)

Movie #8 of 2026:

Rocky IV (1985)

There’s the seed of a good idea in this movie when Apollo Creed, by now close friends with his former rival Rocky, is killed in the ring while boxing against their latest opponent. (It is, notably, the thread that filmmaker Ryan Coogler would later pick up for his own successful sequel series.) That’s a bit of a rehash of Mick dying in the previous installment, but it’s a development with obvious built-in pathos for the hero, whom audiences would expect to avenge his fallen comrade in some fashion. And he does, sort of — he challenges Ivan Drago to another match, and after the powers that be forbid that for whatever reason, he renounces his heavyweight champion title and goes to train and fight against the man in his native Soviet Union.

The problem is that our protagonist’s motivation here isn’t exactly clear, nor are we shown how/why his rustic training regimen in the snowy wilderness would make him any better a boxer than he was before. We do hear at the beginning how Apollo is past his prime, but that doesn’t appear to apply to the Italian Stallion, who makes no mention of how he was on the verge of retiring in Rocky III. Once the fight commences, he impresses first Drago and then eventually the hostile home crowd, I guess with his resilience in getting back up again every time the much taller and stronger Russian knocks him down. Then when he manages to land the winning punch in the end, he gives a hamfisted speech about how their two countries should get along, though the whole point of the exercise metatextually seems to be in showing America’s dominance over its Cold War enemy.

None of this is an appealing story rooted in a character we’re given cause to support beyond his familiar face and prior experiences. The music is also worse this time around, with no sign of the classic “Gonna Fly Now” and some truly awful lyrics in Survivor’s “Burning Heart” that have to be seen to be believed:

“Two worlds collide, rival nations
It’s a primitive clash venting years of frustrations
Bravely we hope against all hope
There is so much at stake
Seems our freedom’s up against the ropes
Does the crowd understand?
Is it East versus West or man against man?
Can any nation stand alone?”

Oh — and Paulie is gifted a robot that rolls around and serves him drinks in a seductive female tone, the less said about which the better. I can’t believe I ever thought this film was in the same caliber as its predecessors when I was a kid.

[Content warning for gore.]

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: The Dead Husband Cookbook by Danielle Valentine

Book #30 of 2026:

The Dead Husband Cookbook by Danielle Valentine

An entertaining blend of Taylor Jenkins Reid with Ruth Ware, in which a down-on-her-luck publishing editor, expecting to soon be fired, is instead tasked with handling the upcoming tell-all memoir from a beloved but secretive celebrity chef. In this novel Maria Capello is a household name and head of a media empire like Martha Stewart, but rumors have always swirled around her husband Damien, whose disappearance and presumed suicide first launched her into the limelight thirty years ago. Now she’s finally willing to share her version of what happened that night, but she insists that the protagonist come read through the manuscript at her private estate, with no access to contact the outside world. Of course, once there the younger woman finds all manner of suspicious details that don’t add up, but surely the urban legends about her hostess being a cannibal can’t possibly be true… right?

It’s a fun story, though you have to put up with some coincidences and other unlikely developments, not to mention the genre convention that the heroine only gets to review a few pages at a time, so as to preserve the big twist reveal(s) for the end of the book. That last quarter of the text is also a bit too convoluted for my tastes, and I wish the main character were smarter and more agentive throughout the plot, rather than meekly accepting whatever she’s told. Still, I’ve enjoyed the ride enough that I think I’ll give this one three-and-a-half stars overall, rounded up.

[Content warning for gun violence and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Buried Deep and Other Stories by Naomi Novik

Book #29 of 2026:

Buried Deep and Other Stories by Naomi Novik

A solid mix of 3s and 4s, collecting eleven pieces of short fiction by fantasy author Naomi Novik previously published elsewhere between 2008 and 2019. The remaining two entries that are new to this volume (“After Hours,” which follows her Scholomance trilogy, and “The Long Way Round,” set in the world of an upcoming project) complete the ensemble with a taste of her more recent work, though I can’t say that I prefer the earlier or later items overall.

There’s also a mix of stories that tie into the writer’s existing series — including the original “Spinning Silver” that she subsequently expanded into a full novel — and ones that are utterly standalone. Some are better than others, but even my least favorite, “Dragons & Decorum,” feels like just a poor match for me as a reader; I’m not overly fond of either the Temeraire books or Pride and Prejudice, so retelling the latter in the setting of the former was probably never going to win me over. And it’s clearly not the public-domain fanfiction aspect that I object to, as “Commonplaces” is one of the tales here that I like best, and that’s a Sherlock Holmes what-if that imagines Irene Adler figuring out the truth behind Reichenbach Falls and tracking down the wayward detective before he’s ready to announce his survival to Watson.

As I often note about such anthologies, my rating is an average across a range of stronger and weaker offerings, rather than a uniform judgement of the lot. I’ve enjoyed the read as a whole myself, and would recommend it for any of my fellow Novik fans as well.

[Content warning for body horror and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Fer-de-Lance by Rex Stout

Book #28 of 2026:

Fer-de-Lance by Rex Stout (Nero Wolfe #1)

This 1934 novel introduces the character of Nero Wolfe, as well as his assistant Archie Goodwin and a few other members of their inner circle. The former is a genius consulting detective in the style of Hercule Poirot (who had debuted in 1920) or especially Sherlock Holmes (1887), sharing with each of those predecessors not only a profession but also the presence of an outside narrator there to marvel at his brilliance. The key difference between a Hastings or a Watson and our protagonist in this series is that he’s additionally his employer’s main means of interacting with the world, the investigator himself being an agoraphobe who rarely leaves his luxurious New York City brownstone.

Wolfe is, hands down, the most interesting thing about this story. He represents a more nuanced depiction of neurodivergence than I was honestly expecting for the era, displaying eccentricities like an insistence on a familiar daily schedule that read as classic behaviors for someone on the autism spectrum. He also suffers from bouts of depression during which he has to set all work aside, and yet none of these qualities are viewed negatively by the cast around him, merely as elements that must be factored into their business arrangements. The narrative does occasionally stray into judgmental territory over his weight, but it’s generally a pretty refreshing tale for a book soon approaching a century in age.

I am less sold on this initial mystery, which involves a convoluted plot around a poison dart concealed in a golf club and some accordingly silly levels of insight from the wealthy recluse, not to mention an overly-long endgame after he’s correctly identified the culprit. Odd too is just how cavalier he is about his riches, at one point wagering $10,000 — almost $250,000 in today’s dollars — that an exhumed body will show the cause of death he’s deduced, in order to pressure the local authorities into digging up the corpse to conduct a new autopsy. But the overall concept and the droll humor has solid enough potential for me to check out the next few sequels, at least.

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

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Empire Builders by Ben Bova

Book #27 of 2026:

Empire Builders by Ben Bova

I don’t know if this third Grand Tour installment (in chronological order) is objectively any weaker than the stories before, but at a minimum I’m growing pretty tired of our recurring hero Dan Randolph, dashing genius billionaire tech CEO and inveterate womanizer. A decade has passed for the character and his world since Privateers, but the now-50-year-old hasn’t changed much beyond getting divorced, and he now finds himself caught up in yet another political action thriller. It’s fun to an extent — his enemies try to imprison him and seize his companies, turning him into a merry fugitive for a while — and it’s interesting to see a 1993 novel centered around the emergent threat of climate change, though there’s of course a lot of science that author Ben Bova unwittingly gets wrong. But it’s the politics that I think really sink this one, even more egregiously than the speculation of future Soviet dominance in the previous title.

The premise here is that scientists have just discovered a looming ecological cliff: a ten-year window after which the Earth will become swiftly inhospitable if humans don’t take steps to start addressing the problem. Our all-American protagonist thinks every country and private corporation should be freed from regulations to pursue solutions as they see fit, with the international body that oversees them limited to providing cash incentives for doing so. His Russian opponent, meanwhile, believes that uniting all that chaos under control of his organization will optimize the approach, although he belatedly realizes the effort has been compromised by the literal mafia infiltrating his team.

It’s awfully blunt in its capitalism-versus-socialism themes, and it ends with the foreigner changing his mind and siding with the egotistical cowboy after all, which doesn’t feel like an honest engagement with the terms of their dispute. But rah-rah freedom, I guess? Good thing the real villains have once again kidnapped a woman that the businessman loves, so that he can be morally superior as well as correct about the ideal path forward for the planet.

I understand how these early works form an important backdrop to the tales of space exploration that follow, which thankfully focus on different characters. The developing worldbuilding in that direction is neat to observe, too, like the beginnings of a colony on the moon that Dan visits this time. But I’m very glad that his own role in the saga is now finally starting to wane.

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

★★☆☆☆

TV Review: The Sopranos, season 6

TV #7 of 2026:

The Sopranos, season 6

As with its contemporary crime drama The Shield, the infamous ending to The Sopranos was one of the few concrete spoilers I knew about the show going into it, which admittedly shaped my expectations along the way. (To quickly weigh in on the controversy: I don’t think Tony unambiguously gets killed when the final scene cuts to black, but I would agree that the editing intentionally builds up audience tension to specifically license that possibility. My interpretation is that we’re meant to understand his life could be snuffed out as suddenly as Phil Leotardo’s at any point now, but also that he could end up like Uncle Junior in their confrontation right before, having improbably survived a long career in the mafia yet ultimately lost everything that matters anyway.)

If you do view this last season as the ratcheting prelude to the antihero’s potential death, either actively or in hindsight, there are plenty of thematic indicators pointing in that direction. From his initial foray into a comatose purgatory to how he steadily drives a wedge between himself and each of his closest associates over the episodes that follow, this year functions to isolate the man as never before, while also emphasizing what Dr. Melfi comes to see as his unrepentant sociopathy. Still, I don’t feel as though the overall thesis of this series is anything as trivial as “crime doesn’t pay” or even that Anthony Soprano’s particular character flaws have doomed him. In my last review I likened him to a crab in a bucket refusing to let anyone else escape the bad situation they’re in, and I think that’s where these closing hours land as well. After all, for as much as that ambiguous moment in the restaurant might linger with us, far more of the finale beforehand concerns the protagonist’s son A.J., and how he’s lured back into the comfortable materialism that he briefly seemed on the brink of leaving, one way or another.

Change isn’t impossible on The Sopranos, but it’s hard work that most people eventually give up on. Tony feels like a new man upon waking up from his coma, but it doesn’t take long for him to fall back into his old ways again. An addict like Christopher will likewise always be an addict, and parents have a habit of revisiting their own childhood traumas on the next generation. Even in the slow-brewing conflict between the New York and New Jersey mobs that finally comes to a head here, negotiations repeatedly break down because of both parties’ grievances over sins of the past. Every hurt or imagined slight resurfaces as an inflexible link in a heavy chain binding the warring mafiosos to their present path, no matter how they might privately wish otherwise.

That’s good stuff, but the season isn’t without its weaknesses. It was expanded somewhere in the production process to be nearly twice the usual length, with a large hiatus in the middle, and the story drags a little as a result. I’ve opted to watch and review both halves as the single entity that they were officially named, but the arcs across it could definitely have been tighter, with less attention given to diversions like Vito’s panicked exit after his sexuality is discovered by the crew. There are some weird hiccups following the time jump, too — Chris apparently breaking things off with the Julianna Margulies character, for instance, or Meadow similarly ending her engagement to Finn entirely offscreen. And although the body count ticks higher near the end, the program doesn’t always establish those departing characters beyond a vaguely-familiar face and a name, which obviously minimizes the impact of their loss.

I’m satisfied, though, and if I ever rewatch this title, I’m guessing some of these items might stand out less, given the tendency for figures to float through the background of scenes before suddenly gaining prominence in the narrative. (And there are shocking deaths of genuinely important individuals too, especially this season.) In the meantime I’ll be happy enough with the plot as it is, and not overly concerned about whether the hero survives past it or not.

[Content warning for racism, antisemitism, homophobia, slurs, domestic abuse, drug abuse, gun violence, lynching, suicide, torture, and gore.]

This season: ★★★★☆

Overall series: ★★★★☆

Seasons ranked: 5 > 2 > 1 > 6 > 3 > 4

Book Review: Doctor Who: The Well by Gareth L. Powell

Book #26 of 2026:

Doctor Who: The Well by Gareth L. Powell

As usual, a strong episode of Doctor Who leads to one of the better novelizations, helped along in this case by a few neat additions that author Gareth L. Powell has sprinkled in throughout. (In an afterword, he mentions that he grew up reading this imprint in the days when home recordings of the show weren’t as widely available, and he’s clearly relishing the opportunity to write for it now himself.) Thus we get military dossier excerpts and scenes from the enemy creature’s point of view that weren’t part of the original story on TV, in addition to good insights into the Fifteenth Doctor and Belinda Chandra’s respective characterizations at this stage of their journey together.

I still think the exact mechanics of how the monster stalks and kills its victims are a bit confusing, especially given the eventual reveal that this is a sequel to a Tenth Doctor adventure where it acted completely differently, but the sinister vibes and bleak ending are as top-notch as they were on television. If you’re unfamiliar, this is the one where the time-traveling Doctor and his latest companion arrive on a spaceship in the distant future, only to fall in with a squadron of soldiers investigating a mystery on the planet below. There they find slaughtered corpses and one scared survivor, who seems to have something hiding just out of sight behind her back…

It’s a spooky tale told well, while also contributing to the larger plot arc for its season of Bel not being able to return home in the TARDIS like normal. The novel is of course no substitute for watching that yourself, but it’s a solid revisiting with its own fun spin and continuity nods, recommended for the kind of fan who likes that sort of thing.

[Content warning for gun violence and suicide.]

★★★★☆

Movie Review: Rocky III (1982)

Movie #7 of 2026:

Rocky III (1982)

“Eye of the Tiger” is a great song, but I’m not sure in the final analysis if Rocky III is a great movie or not. Length isn’t always a determination of that, but this one shaves about 20 minutes off the runtime of its predecessors, resulting in a leaner picture that doesn’t have space for much outside the ring. Rocky is the reigning heavyweight champ after his victory in the previous film, and though he successfully defends his title, he seems to have grown complacent, and a hungrier opponent eventually defeats him, in addition to sparking a fatal heart attack in his trainer Mick. This causes the hero to do some soul-searching, accept the replacement training offer of his old rival and fellow former champion Apollo Creed, and ultimately come back with a more agile fighting method that once again wins the day.

It’s a classic feel-good formula, not too different from Rocky II, and Mr. T. in his acting debut is easy to root against as the arrogant Clubber Lang. It never quite justifies certain character choices, however. The protagonist initially announces that his first match opposite Lang will be the last fight of his career, so what makes him change his mind afterwards and seek to reclaim the championship? Why has Apollo retired himself instead of trying to overthrow Rocky and/or Clubber, and for that matter — although this is more of a meta-question for the series, I guess — why don’t we see that fool-pitying antagonist take another shot following this? Why is Balboa the only fighter in this world allowed to rise from defeat for a redemption bout?

One of the odder elements that the script does make time for — besides Paulie’s obnoxious racism — is a charity exhibition versus “Thunderlips” (these names!), a professional wrestler played by Hulk Hogan. The boxing/wrestling competition is an interesting idea, but it’s pretty silly in execution, with the kind of nonsense that goes on in that other arena played straight: fighters hurled into the audience, chairs broken over backs, and so forth. Those things are funny when part of the campy showmanship of the scripted entertainment sport, but hard to believe would happen to Rocky within the more grounded reality of his setting. In the end I think it weakens the effectiveness of the surrounding story, which is why I’ve settled on a three-star rating for this effort overall.

[Content warning for gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear by Seanan McGuire

Book #25 of 2026:

Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear by Seanan McGuire (Wayward Children #10)

This fantasy series follows various children who stumble into Narnia-style portals to other worlds, generally by showing us the unhappy homes they fled, a bit of their wonderful new lives, and then the resulting angst when they inevitably find their way back to Earth. It’s a loose sequence, but some entries are more standalone than others; this one in particular, for instance, probably works best for readers who remember Nadya from #3 Beneath the Sugar Sky, which introduced her and established the ending of her personal arc. This tenth volume is a prequel to all that, in which the young Russian girl is adopted by a Christian missionary couple from America and eventually escapes to a land of underwater rivers.

The strongest parts of the title come early, depicting the heroine’s fraught relationship with her adoptive parents, who see her as more of a status symbol than a real person. They especially don’t understand her neutral-to-positive feelings about having been born with only one arm, seeing the disability as something that makes her lesser and that she would of course want to fix with a prosthetic. It’s the kind of quietly devastating childhood that author Seanan McGuire writes so well, and helps us to see why a fresh start in Belyyreka would be so appealing for her character.

That realm itself isn’t anything special, though, and the story loses its focus and impact after the protagonist crosses over. It’s a little problematic too in giving the child a magical water appendage to wield, which she accepts despite it being the exact sort of cure that she rejected before on the reasonable grounds that there’s nothing inherently wrong with her body as is. The plot also cuts off abruptly in the end without resolution, even for those of us who know what happens to her next.

I do like the beginning a lot, and I’m disappointed that the rest of the work doesn’t live up to it. But at least it’s a short enough novella that it doesn’t overstay its welcome, I suppose.

★★★☆☆