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!

Book Review: The Magician of Tiger Castle by Louis Sachar

Book #8 of 2026:

The Magician of Tiger Castle by Louis Sachar

This 2025 novel has been promoted as author Louis Sachar’s first story for grown-ups, but I feel as though it only earns that designation via the adult narrator and the slightly higher page count. The tone isn’t noticeably different from his previous offerings, and the fifteen- and seventeen-year-old characters who are supposed to be in love read more like his usual young adolescents. While the plot touches on a few mature themes like marital rape or drug addiction, I wouldn’t say it’s any darker in its depictions of such matters than something like Holes.

My bigger issue is with the protagonist himself, however. He’s introduced to us as an ancient alchemist reflecting back on the sixteenth century, but he doesn’t gain that immortality until the very end of the tale, at which point he has to quickly summarize the next five hundred years of his life. He also apparently doesn’t have any friends in the flashback timeline besides the aforementioned teens, which is a bit strange for a man in his forties, and although he’s nominally trying to help them escape their awful fates — the princess ordered to marry someone horrid and the apprentice scribe sentenced to death for loving her — his method for the first half of the book is to simply try perfecting a potion to make them permanently forget one another. That’s an incredibly bizarre goal for a hero to focus on, and it definitely keeps me from investing in the situation as fully as I otherwise might have.

They do all eventually flee the castle together, but by then the targeted amnesia elixir has worked, so the boy and girl don’t remember any of their personal history with one another. In theory I guess the idea here is that they fall for each other all over again, but they’re promptly rushed off the page as soon as that really starts happening, so who knows? To repeat: odd writing choice!

Despite those flaws, I do think the title is more forgivable if approached as another middle-grade volume instead of how the publisher has been marketing it. But I can’t honestly say that I’ve enjoyed the reading experience myself.

★★☆☆☆

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Movie Review: The Matrix Reloaded (2003)

Movie #2 of 2026:

The Matrix Reloaded (2003)

As a movie, The Matrix (1999) is perfectly standalone. As a box office hit and a genuine cultural phenomenon, however, it was probably always going to launch a franchise, and this first sequel is a pretty solid follow-up. It’s messy and overstuffed by comparison, even ignoring the cliffhanger ending, but it makes some smart writing choices and is overall a lot of fun. Let’s dive in!

The first thing I appreciate about this chapter of the saga is that it starts in media res, after a time jump from the last one. We haven’t skipped far ahead, but it’s enough that we don’t need to see Neo’s wide-eyed introduction to the city of Zion or the evolution of his relationship with Trinity or anything. Instead we’re simply put down in the new status quo, with the plot picking up from there. That pair’s dynamic is also a major improvement; my biggest critique of the previous film is that her declaration of love comes out of nowhere and reads like the trope of the guy getting the girl basically by default. Now a few months later, they’re opening up emotionally and can’t keep their hands off of each other in private — a much more believable love story that raises the personal stakes considerably.

That degree of sensuality marks another welcome change, as The Matrix, for all its strengths, is a largely sexless movie. Cypher looms in an aggressive manner over Trinity’s helpless body, and the men of the Nebuchadnezzar crew talk crudely about women in general, but there’s no real sense of physical intimacy anywhere. This time, our heroes get to tenderly embrace, looking almost identically androgynous in how the camera frames their entwined limbs. As if to emphasize this fluidity of form, the scene cuts back and forth between the couple’s love-making and images of people writhing together in an indiscriminately-gendered crowd at the nearby underground rave. If that’s not a queer statement of purpose (and an early indicator of the Wachowskis’ interests on their show Sense8), it’s at least as near as one could imagine in a 2003 blockbuster. The characters subsequently meet the married programs of the Merovingian and Persephone, who are likewise obsessed with human sexuality and touch, while the rogue Smith seems overwhelmed by the senses of his stolen host outside. In short, it’s a work that grounds its embodied feelings, especially as a shorthand for what divides us from the machines.

But back to the plot. This entry significantly widens the worldbuilding, beginning with showing us other ships and a hierarchy of power in Zion that Morpheus must nominally report to. The detail that not everyone believes in the prophecy of the One like he does is a neat development, particularly as background for the emerging threat: humanity’s enemies are burrowing down to destroy the free city, with a projected arrival mere hours away. There’s thus an instant conflict between those who want every ally to stay and fight the incoming force of sentinel drones, no matter how outnumbered, and those who think Neo and his team can somehow save the day inside the Matrix.

From there, the story gets a little complicated. Our savior protagonist is trying to find the Oracle, who tells him he needs to rescue the Keymaker from the Merovingian in order to be able to fulfill his destiny by accessing the Source, and that’s just a lot of important-sounding titles disguising an elaborate fetch quest. We’re drowning in competing factions here, and it’s not always clear who’s working together or why. (Do the agents know that Neo has to reach the Architect for the Matrix to survive? Is Smith’s deviation an anticipated part of the plan or an independent element changing the calculus? Etc.) There’s also an impression sometimes that we’re missing key elements, perhaps because sections of the script were indeed siphoned off to supplemental media like the video game Enter the Matrix or the cartoon compilation The Animatrix, which both came out around this time. I’m a fan of extended universes of continuity in general, but the cardinal rule should be that the primary piece stands fine on its own, and I’m not sure that’s entirely achieved here. Yet even with those omissions, the narrative feels overly busy, leaving certain reveals like the existence of werewolves or the idea that the Matrix has been secretly reset (and Zion destroyed) five times already without the necessary room to breathe.

Luckily the action sequences are spectacular enough to help mitigate such concerns. Everything is bigger now: the martial arts fights are more complex, the car chase setpiece on the highway is a true standout, and there are several brawls against an absurd number of Smiths, who’s survived his apparent death and learned how to replicate himself. (He’ll have more to do in the next film, but recognizing that the energy Hugo Weaving brought to the antagonist role was a vital contribution to the first movie’s success and finding a way for the series to retain him reflects another great instinct from the creators). If I have a complaint here, it’s that the new ‘virtual camera’ technology is not as seamlessly integrated as I would like; there are multiple shots throughout that look distractingly like smoothly rendered gaming graphics, which wasn’t really ever the case before.

In the end it’s not as coherent a production as its predecessor, and I don’t love the unresolved arcs that stem from filming this title and the next one back-to-back as a two-part story. But it’s still an entertaining installment that expands the Matrix mythos nicely, and for that I give it four-out-of-five stars.

[Content warning for gun violence, self-harm, and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: A Libertarian Walks into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (and Some Bears) by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling

Book #7 of 2026:

A Libertarian Walks into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (and Some Bears) by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling

A darkly-ironic case, not always written about very well in this particular book. The town in question is Grafton, NH (population 1,385 in the latest census), which we’re told was already somewhat libertarian-leaning even before an organized movement from out-of-state convinced people to move there in 2004 and steer the politics further in that direction. Several hundred newcomers, predominantly men, came to the area and began voting for immediate reductions in pretty much every government service in pursuit of their Ayn Rand-style utopia. They talked a big game about freedom as they dismantled the social safety net and other matters of the public good, insisting that private enterprise would soon step in with more efficient alternatives.

Needless to say, it did not. It turns out that slashing the fire department’s budget, for example, does not actually lead to fewer incidents or better outcomes in that domain, particularly when accompanied by an increase in the attitude that laws regulating outdoor burns are an unconscionable infringement on a person’s liberty. Potholes likewise went unfilled, schools and libraries were given fewer resources, crime reports rose, and the number of violent run-ins with the local black bear population surged.

You see, certain townspeople were exercising their claimed sovereignty over their personal property lines by refusing to abide by the regulations to use bear-resistant food and garbage containers. Others were blithely putting out meals for the animals specifically, which for some reason the busybodies in the state Fish and Game Department didn’t want to allow. In consequence the wild beasts encroached further and further into areas of human settlement, to predictably disastrous result. It would be funny, if not for how many innocent victims among both species ended up hurt or killed before the ‘Free Town Project’ was eventually disbanded in 2016.

It’s a fascinating story, but author Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling is not the best messenger for it, despite his valuable on-the-ground reporting. He can tell us how he was repeatedly threatened by gun-toting residents for asking too many questions, but his writing struggles to remain on point and he sometimes speculates wildly, like when he proposes without evidence that locals might have parasites driving their reckless behaviors. He also starts each of his short chapters with a random quote about bears, most of which have no connection to anything else about his subject. (“He is an atrocity that carries its own punishment along with it–a bear that gnaws himself” from a Charles Dickens novel, for instance). One or two of these would have served fine as cute epigraphs for the entire work, but placing them every few pages is just too much. Thus, while I’ve enjoyed the righteous skewering of the libertarian ethos here, I can’t help thinking that someone with a stronger command of nonfiction narrative could have done a lot more with the material.

[Content warning for suicide and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Rise of Neptune by Scott Reintgen

Book #6 of 2026:

The Rise of Neptune by Scott Reintgen (The Dragonships #2)

The first volume in this middle-grade sci-fi series about dragons in outer space didn’t blow me away, but it was promising enough that I decided to check out this sequel to see how the cliffhanger resolved. And I guess I’m reasonably satisfied on that front, although overall this entry is heavier on the action and lighter on the character dynamics than I would ideally prefer. Unlike in the last book, the plot never seems to seriously challenge the teenage hero beyond his having to figure out military campaign tactics, which isn’t the most interesting way to spend a novel. I also miss how the friendship bonds and a sense of the daily struggle for life on Mars provided some nice background texture to the story before.

Two-and-a-half stars rounded up, in recognition that I am not the target audience here, but I don’t intend to read any further in the saga at this point.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Powersat by Ben Bova

Book #5 of 2026:

Powersat by Ben Bova

From 1985 through his death in 2020, author Ben Bova wrote around 30 interconnected novels in a loose sci-fi series he eventually called his Grand Tour. (It’s actually surprisingly difficult to get an exact count there, since this was seldom used as a marketing term and there are some entries with a more tangential connection to the continuity than others. His estate has also continued to publish volumes posthumously from his notes.) I read several of these stories when I was a teen, although I don’t think I ever got to this one, which came out in 2005 but is chronologically the earliest in the setting.

It’s a political thriller of the near-future, roughly analogous to the works of an airport / dad-lit writer like Michael Crichton. Our protagonist is a brilliant tech CEO named Dan Randolph, who has created a geostationary satellite that can collect power directly from the sun and beam it back to Earth at low cost. That would obviously revolutionize the energy industry, which is why a shadowy group of his competitors is trying to sabotage the project by any means necessary. In addition to navigating the resulting corporate espionage and terrorist attacks staged to look like equipment malfunctions, this character is also pining for his beautiful ex-girlfriend, who happens to be a United States senator.

Hopefully you already know from that description alone whether this is your flavor of pulp or not, but just to answer the obvious questions: yes, this is the sort of book where seemingly every woman is young, attractive, and interested in sleeping with the hero, and no, the Middle Eastern villains are not handled with particular nuance. I mean, the main antagonist risks his big scheme of turning the powersat into a weapon of mass destruction and targeting DC with a killer heat wave in order to drug and kidnap the executive’s secretary with the intent of later raping her, which is all really hard to justify under any kind of coherent motivation. I wouldn’t say it’s the worst product of its era, but it certainly hasn’t aged well in the decades since.

Still, this is a propulsive page-turner that sets the stage nicely for the tales of exploration and expansion ahead, as humanity builds off the technologies here to start visiting the rest of our solar system. I’m sure I’ll find some of those installments better and some worse as I progress through them, but this title successfully manages to launch it all with a bang.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Doctor Who: Lux by James Goss

Book #4 of 2026:

Doctor Who: Lux by James Goss

Novelizations are obviously set up for success on the strength of the source material that they inherit, and so one of Ncuti Gatwa’s best outings as the Fifteenth Doctor on Doctor Who unsurprisingly makes for a pretty fun read. And yet that characterization risks shortchanging the great work that author James Goss has done here, not only capturing the entertaining spirit of the piece but also finding ways to present it in an interesting new light — pun intended — or otherwise deepen its themes. It’s a real testament to his abilities that such a visual adventure, in which a living cartoon terrorizes a movie theater and at one point traps the protagonists within a film strip, still feels so engaging on the page. Although not quite as creatively daring as his previous stint adapting The Giggle, this volume shares a playful approach that’s unafraid to put a different spin on an original Russell T. Davies script.

That attitude comes out the clearest in the scenes featuring the three Doctor Who fans, who get to meet their heroes when the Doctor and his companion Belinda Chandra seemingly break the fourth wall to climb out of their television set. It’s a mindbending metafictional gambit in either medium, but the writer opts to use it as an overall framing device, rather than a midway plot twist. If you’re reading this book ahead of watching the episode, you’ll discover the story more like those characters themselves do, right down to their discussing before the program starts how it’ll be novelized by the guy who did The Giggle.

Our heroine likewise gets rendered well here, so early in her travels through time. She’s still learning the ropes and somewhat skeptical of her new alien friend, and she’s particularly affronted by his apparent acceptance of the racism they encounter upon their arrival in 1950s Miami. As on TV, the Doctor explains, “I have toppled worlds. Sometimes I wait for people to topple their world,” which is a reasonable enough answer to a question the franchise has historically had to dance around. But in this version, he goes further to mention, “I have seen this come and I see it go. And then I see it come back again. Don’t think you’re better than history, babes. Your world is burning, so all those old hatreds are waking up. Everything that happens, happens again.” It’s a timely warning that jolts both her and us, and is exactly the sort of addition we wouldn’t get if Goss were penning a more straightforward adaptation.

★★★★☆

Book Review: Two Twisted Crowns by Rachel Gillig

Book #3 of 2026:

Two Twisted Crowns by Rachel Gillig (The Shepherd King #2)

I liked the first volume of this fantasy series enough to pick up this sequel, and I do think it concludes the overarching story reasonably well. Unfortunately it does this in sort of a weird way, jettisoning the parts I enjoyed both most and least about its predecessor! That novel centered around a young woman with an ancient evil secretly sharing space in her head, granting her advice and a share of his power in exchange for following his obscure instructions. She also had a bland love-at-first-sight romance with a member of the oppressive upper-class who would kill her for her hidden magical abilities, although it turns out he’s one of the good ones trying to bring down the system from the inside. I found the heroine’s Venom-like repartee with the Nightmare to be fun, while not caring as much for the rest of the plot outside them.

In this book, that being has taken over her body completely, relegating our former protagonist to a largely passive role witnessing his old memories. The creature instead gets to walk around and have interactions with the love interest, who mostly pines and complains as a result, while they continue to track down the various mystical maguffins. I’ve seen some readers praising the two men’s banter, but it doesn’t carry the same spark as when he was only a whisper in the mind, in my opinion.

Where this installment shines for me is in its unexpected development of a few side characters, who step up to fill the void left by our original lead. Their own love story is one I haven’t encountered before in the genre — she overused an artifact that enhanced her beauty at the cost of her ability to feel deep emotions, and though they’re attracted to each other, he doesn’t want to act on it until they can manage to break the curse and undo its effects, which she knows might end his attraction altogether. That’s an interesting conundrum that plays out nicely, and if this were a standalone piece focusing on just those tragic figures alone, I probably would give it a four-star rating. As is, it dovetails back with the other thread in order to resolve everything, which works out alright, I suppose. But on the whole, it’s another uneven effort.

[Content warning for domestic abuse, sexual assault, and gore.]

This volume: ★★★☆☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Volumes ranked: 2 > 1

Book Review: World Tales edited by G. Randal Rau

Book #2 of 2026:

World Tales edited by G. Randal Rau

The 1985 World Fantasy Convention, held that year in Tucson, AZ with a theme of “Writers of the Southwest,” produced this souvenir book to resemble an issue of the old pulp magazine Weird Tales. (Seriously, look it up; designer Donald D. Markstein did an amazing job imitating the classic appearance, with a new cover illustration and two full-page inserts provided by special guest artist Victoria Poyser.) It was a limited print run of just 1200 copies, but you can find them online today for a pretty reasonable price.

The guest of honor for the weekend was author Stephen R. Donaldson, who contributed one of three original stories to this volume. His effort, the Arabian Nights-inspired fable “The Djinn Who Watches Over the Accursed,” is by far the most confident and stylistically impressive, although it’s still not a favorite of mine — I rated it as three-out-of-five stars when I reviewed it as part of his later collection Reave the Just and Other Tales. Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s “Such Nice Neighbors” is meanwhile fine but forgettable, while Evangeline Walton’s “The Forest That Would Not Be Cut Down” feels incomplete, as though excerpted from a larger work that would have better contextualized its characters and plot dilemmas.

Joining these pieces are a few nonfiction tributes, mostly for Donaldson himself. I would say those offer a nice treat for fans, but are obviously far from essential. And of course, the entire production stands as a time capsule of sorts, full of advertisements for recent and upcoming genre titles, most but not all of which have fallen entirely by the wayside over the following decades. I’ve personally read only Stephen King and Peter Straub’s The Talisman and Douglas Adams’s So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, though I recognize a few others like George R. R. Martin’s Night-Flyers and Clive Barker’s Books of Blood as well.

Overall it’s a neat find that I’m happy to have on my shelves, but I doubt I’ll ever open it again unless I need to look something up for whatever reason.

[Content warning for rape and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Movie Review: The Matrix (1999)

Movie #1 of 2026:

The Matrix (1999)

This sci-fi parable of an artificial reality that surrounds us all is just a stone-cold classic, instantly iconic in its confident vision and worldbuilding. The Matrix really was like no other movie to come before it, or even any that followed, including its own sequels. The script is a masterpiece too, gradually easing us into the rules of its setting alongside our everyman-turned-prophesied-savior. (My favorite lines early on that become ironic in hindsight: Neo’s friend calling him “My own personal Jesus Christ!” when it turns out he basically is, and his boss telling him, “You believe that you are special, that somehow the rules do not apply to you. Obviously, you are mistaken,” when he very much is not.) An excellent story structure seamlessly transitions us from the strangeness to the explanations to the action crisis of the endgame, all without missing a beat.

It’s maybe a bit more exposition-heavy than I would ideally prefer, but when those scenes are as visually interesting as the ones here, that’s easy enough to forgive. Likewise the trope where the neophyte male protagonist easily outpaces the woman who’s been there for longer, and she proceeds to fall in love with him with no particular build-up. And like Fight Club or Office Space, which each came out the same year, it’s a little funny and incredibly 90s that the hero’s initial ennui — “You’ve felt it your whole life, felt that something is wrong with the world,” etc. — is accompanied by what appears to be a comfortable white-collar career. Like, okay, Gen X! Let us know when you have some real problems beyond selling out to the man.

But back to the visuals. The Wachowskis were making up their own iconography here, from the green tinge of the Matrix itself to the black leather, sunglasses, and trenchcoat costumes to of course the famous slow-mo ‘bullet time’ effects. They invented brand-new technologies for this film, which mostly still look great today, while also launching or restarting the careers of all the main cast. The whole thing works phenomenally in its own right, yet is all the more fascinating to reexplore through a queer lens given that the creators both subsequently came out as trans. And the soundtrack’s pretty outstanding too.

How could I possibly give this less than a full five-out-of-five stars?

[Content warning for body horror, gun violence, sexual assault, and gore.]

★★★★★

Book Review: Star Wars: Master of Evil by Adam Christopher

Book #1 of 2026:

Star Wars: Master of Evil by Adam Christopher

This is a solid but basically unspectacular Star Wars novel, unfortunately saddled with a misleading title, publisher’s summary, and cover art. It’s only a Darth Vader story in that he’s around for a lot of the plot, but he gets just a handful of POV chapters here himself, all concerning mystical Force visions. Instead we’re primarily in the viewpoint of an officer of the Emperor’s red-clad royal guard, who’s secretly assigned to spy on the former Jedi. This is early enough after the prequel film trilogy that Vader is largely an unknown entity across the Empire, and forces like the newly-formed Imperial Security Bureau are jockeying for any available information on him.

There are stronger tales that could be told in that transition era, and the best parts of this one happen near the start, sketching out that element of the worldbuilding. Soon, however, everyone blasts off into hyperspace to look for the latest maguffin, which isn’t nearly as interesting. Along the way author Adam Christopher does some cool stuff with droids overwriting each other’s personalities, and it’s commendable how he deepens the franchise’s treatment of disability with a protagonist suffering a chronic illness, but this is pretty far from the dark descent of Anakin Skywalker that it’s been advertised as.

★★★☆☆