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!

Movie Review: KPop Demon Hunters (2025)

Movie #13 of 2026:

KPop Demon Hunters (2025)

Even after it won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature last night, I sort of assumed that this musical fantasy cartoon was being overhyped on the basis of its ubiquitous breakout track “Golden” (which also won Best Original Song). As it turns out, however, the rest of the film around that single is actually pretty great too, and the earworm itself is even better in the context of the full story.

I do wish the supporting characters and worldbuilding concepts were a little more fleshed-out, and I think the movie overall would have benefitted from a longer runtime. On the other hand, this is a picture aimed predominantly at younger audiences, and I can’t fault the main plot beats here. Our heroine Rumi is a singer in a popular vocal group and also a secret warrior against evil, which is a fun Buffy/Miraculous/Animorphs-meets-Hannah-Montana kind of premise even before we get the additional twist that she has demonic ancestry herself and is hiding that from her friends, whom she imagines would turn on her if they learned the truth. It makes for a neat allegory about queerness or self-harm or anything else that a person might want to keep private, and it builds to a transcendent moment when her armor is symbolically ripped away and she finds that her bandmates love her all the more once she’s able to share her whole identity authentically in front of them.

In the meantime there are villains in the form of a rival act who are demons in disguise, although their powers and exact motives are again a bit undefined and I’m not a big fan of how one of them is positioned as the morally-ambiguous romantic interest for the protagonist. (A young human falling for a centuries-old immortal has got to be one of my least favorite genre tropes, and though there are titles that manage to sell it reasonably well, this one doesn’t get there for me.) Still, their maneuvering back and forth whenever the cameras are off creates some nice bits of action comedy, and the soundtrack on both sides is full of catchy tunes that deliver solid emotional breakthroughs.

I’m not familiar enough with either K-pop or Korean culture in general to pick up on all of the background that’s clearly informing the production, but it all feels like such a specific #ownvoices perspective and body of reference material, which I always appreciate. The end result isn’t flawless, but it’s distinctive as heck and easily deserving of its various accolades.

★★★★☆

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Movie Review: Creed (2015)

Movie #12 of 2026:

Creed (2015)

An unexpected franchise spinoff that swiftly establishes its own unique vision around a different protagonist played by an outstanding Michael B. Jordan. The Rocky movies ended for the natural reason of the titular character’s advancing age, and it was already silly in 2006, thirty years after his debut, to see him climbing into the ring again. This next installment wisely looks to a new generation instead, casting the 70-year-old Italian Stallion as the trainer and mentor figure he was initially supposed to be back in Rocky V, rather than a still-active boxer.

It’s a nice extension of his previous character arc, but the real genius of the film rests in the new hero that’s set up in his place. Adonis is the son of Rocky’s old friend Apollo Creed, but he was born out of wedlock and after the former champ had already died. As we see in the short prologue that launches this picture, he didn’t even know who his father was until the man’s widow found him as a child in a juvenile detention facility and offered to bring him home with her, and although there’s a resulting chip on his shoulder about the Creed name — which he at first rejects and is pressured into adopting professionally, before finally embracing it — the script offers no doubt that he’s the rightful inheritor of that legacy. He was a fighter even before learning the truth, and despite wanting to follow in Apollo’s footsteps now that he’s grown, he’s not trying to coast on someone else’s reputation.

To that end he moves from L.A. to Philadelphia, where he corners Balboa at his restaurant, reveals his identity, and asks the septuagenarian to train him. The scenes between the two of them are electric throughout, which is a particular achievement given that it’s all the brainchild of writer-director Ryan Coogler and his cowriter Aaron Covington, the first time that Rocky has been penned by anyone but Sylvester Stallone (or directed by anyone but him and John G. Avildsen). So Rocky starts training Don, who’s meanwhile falling for his cute neighbor played by Tessa Thompson, and their partnership gets media attention that soon provides the hotheaded athlete with his own chance to compete for a title championship.

There are the inspiring training montages you’d expect, but also a left-field lurch when Rocky is diagnosed with a serious cancer requiring immediate chemotherapy treatment. In the end he and Adonis push one another to keep fighting, and the climactic bout is as thrilling as anything from the original series. This Creed is neither Rocky nor Apollo, but he brings a young, modern energy that’s just what their story needed to continue on. He’s moreover a channel for Coogler’s meditations on Black culture and men who grow up fatherless, which is obviously a theme that none of the Balboa-centered predecessors could remotely have handled. Both stylish and fun, it’s almost automatically one of the better entries of its saga.

[Content warning for gore.]

★★★★☆

TV Review: Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, season 1

TV #12 of 2026:

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, season 1

A reasonably successful merger of the larger Star Trek franchise with the rhythms of a CW-ish teen drama. This is a Discovery spinoff by means of Jett Reno and Admiral Vance in the supporting cast, but the main focus is on a small cohort of cadets (and their chancellor, played by Holly Hunter) who have genre-typical coming-of-age moments as they navigate their particular difficulties and learn to pull together as a team. It also features the holographic Doctor from Voyager and Prodigy as one of their teachers, although it never quite gets around to exploring what it’s been like for him to have survived the last eight centuries.

In truth, there’s a lot about the logic to the premise here that’s unfortunately underdeveloped. What exactly is the relationship between the central institution and the nearby War College, which seems to share some of its facilities and instructors? What drew our protagonists to join the one and not the other? What are their regular classes like, in between the inevitable crises? I’m often taken out of the action by such questions while watching, which is never a great sign for a program. (On the other hand, my favorite episode is the Deep Space Nine retrospective “Series Acclimation Mil,” which practically demands that you set all practicalities aside and yet soars regardless. So take this criticism with a grain of salt vampire, I suppose.)

As for the teens, well, they’re the nervous and hormonal bunch you might expect. Our primary viewpoint character is a streetwise criminal recruited from prison against his better judgement, who clashes nicely with a scenery-chewing Paul Giamatti as his archenemy but is otherwise a bit too prominent over the rest of the ensemble. There’s the resident Spock/Data/Odo/etc. outsider who doesn’t understand human emotions — in this case a bubbly photonic Black girl who quickly latches onto the Doctor for guidance — alongside an overachiever with daddy issues, a Klingon who eschews his people’s traditional violence, and so on. None of these archetypes are radically new for Trek, but the younger bent at least provides a slightly different window into them.

As usual for a modern TV series, the short season length cuts against the effectiveness significantly. The cast is still gelling and the writers are still perfecting their approach after only ten episodes, but since the second season finished shooting before this one even aired, they’ll have no chance to incorporate critical feedback on what elements are working or not anytime soon. I’m satisfied enough to keep tuning in, and this is certainly lightyears stronger than late-stage Discovery or the lousy Section 31 movie, but it’s not winning me over just yet.

[Content warning for gun violence, torture, genocide, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Classic Doctor Who, season 24

TV #11 of 2026:

Classic Doctor Who, season 24

One of the last real times of change for the old British series before its long hiatus, introducing us to the final classic TV Doctor and (eventually) companion. The transition is bumpy and short, spanning only four stories and fourteen episodes in total, which is down from a height of eight and forty-two respectively back in the debut season of the show. Given that smaller size, let’s examine them each in turn:

TIME AND THE RANI (24×1 – 24×4): The titular villain was introduced two years before, but she’s more fun in the sequel now that she’s not playing second fiddle to the Master. She also spends half her screentime imitating Mel to fool an addled post-regenerative Seventh Doctor, which is a broad performance but a generally good time. The main thing to note about this serial is that we do have a new star, and rather suddenly, too; whereas every previous outgoing Doctor had regenerated at the end of an adventure that taxed them to their limits, Six merely trips and falls at the start of this one and changes there on the TARDIS floor. He’s furthermore clearly played by Sylvester McCoy in a wig, in a case of the production team making the best of a bad situation: Sixth Doctor Colin Baker was fired between seasons, and although he was invited to return and film a regeneration scene, he understandably declined. Those circumstances cast a pall over the story that follows, but McCoy’s Seven makes a decent first showing even if he is a bit more clownish than he’ll soon grow to be. The writing quality isn’t quite there yet, but it’s a breath of fresh air and an improvement over much of the Sixth Doctor era already. ★★★☆☆

PARADISE TOWERS (24×5 – 24×8). This one gets knocked some by critics, but in my view the campy acting and costumes are a part of the charm. It’s a heady social satire placed in a superbly original dystopian setting, a highrise apartment building that was supposed to be the next elevation of fine living but has instead become a graffiti-filled squalor populated with killer robots, cannibal matrons, and teenage gangs. This came out the same year as the Schwarzenegger version of The Running Man, and if you cross that movie with The Warriors, you’ll be in the right general ballpark for the tone. The worldbuilding is full of neat details like the particular slang the kids use, which hilariously from a 2026 perspective includes “unalive” as a synonym for dead. The Seventh Doctor is really coming into his own, too, and I love any premise where that errant time-traveler is aiming somewhere but winds up wildly off-course. Quite a few of the later Virgin New Adventures books would seem to take their inspiration from this serial directly, and it’s pretty easy to see why. ★★★★☆

DELTA AND THE BANNERMEN (24×9 – 24×11). I can just about glimpse the potential here, and I appreciate a few elements like the futuristic spaceship that’s been painstakingly remodeled to look like a beat-up old bus, but it needed several more rounds of rewrites for it to develop its ideas properly. As is, the scripts aren’t sufficient to sell the scope of the conflict or the different characters and cultures that populate it, and though it’s meant to be funny, the comedy suffers as a result, even before you consider the genocide plot. It’s largely a drag, in my opinion. ★★☆☆☆

DRAGONFIRE (24×12 – 24×14). Another story that feels half-baked throughout, which is a shame since it’s our introduction to Ace, who will remain by the Doctor’s side through the rest of the classic era and beyond. She’s fine, and it’s unexpected but welcome to get a repeat dose of the rogue Sabalom Glitz from the previous season, but the plot around them never really comes together in a satisfying way. Mel exits the TARDIS rather perfunctorily too, which is the wrong sort of throwback to how companions used to come and go without any sort of drama and cements her as one of the more boring main characters on the program. The writers would begin pushing and developing her replacement after this, making Ace in effect the first “modern” companion, but we get the mere glimmers of that here. And don’t even get me started on that literal cliffhanger at the end of episode 1, in which the Doctor climbs out on a ledge for no clear reason and gets stuck. The writing was probably already on the wall, as the show would last just two more seasons in this form, but the production thankfully only improves from this point onward. ★★★☆☆

Overall season rating: ★★★☆☆

Book Review: Shining in the Dark: Celebrating Twenty Years of Lilja’s Library edited by Hans-Åke Lilja

Book #41 of 2026:

Shining in the Dark: Celebrating Twenty Years of Lilja’s Library edited by Hans-Åke Lilja

Although I’ve generally enjoyed the short stories in this collection, I have to admit that I don’t quite get the point of it as a project. Lilja’s Library is a website dedicated to the writing of Stephen King, a one-man operation run by editor Hans-Åke Lilja in his native Sweden where he’s posted news about his literary idol for thirty years now. A decade ago, for the site’s twentieth anniversary, he decided to put out a commemorative anthology, but it’s not clear to me what the criteria for inclusion are supposed to be, beyond the broad genre of horror. Are these works all in some way similar to King’s? I would guess that maybe the authors are just friends or fans of Lilja’s, but since one of them is Edgar Allen Poe with “The Tell Tale Heart,” that obviously can’t be right.

Regardless, it’s an interesting mix of obscurities. Per the introduction, six of the twelve pieces have never been published anywhere before, and a few of the others have previously appeared in magazines alone. That last category includes the sole entry by Stephen King himself, “The Blue Air Compressor,” which can only be found collected here. (Unfortunately, you’ll understand why when you read it — while I’d love to call it a hidden gem, it’s in fact one of the weaker things I’ve ever seen from him.)

Grading as a whole, the book still has more hits than misses, I’d say. My favorite titles include “The Net” by Jack Ketchum and P. D. Cacek, in which an online flirtation goes horribly wrong, “An End To All Things” by Brian Keene, in which a man contemplates the bleakness of his future after his son’s accidental death and his wife’s subsequent suicide, and “The Keeper’s Companion” by John Ajvide Lindqvist (translated by Marlaine Delargy), in which teens getting into Lovecraftian role-playing games discover they’ve opened a link to true cosmic terror.

Do these and the rest really all belong in a single publication honoring a fansite for one of the writers in particular? Perhaps not. But I like them well enough overall to give this a Goodreads three-out-of-five star rating.

[Content warning for child sex abuse, gun violence, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Ordinary and Extraordinary Auden Greene by Corey Ann Haydu

Book #40 of 2026:

The Ordinary and Extraordinary Auden Greene by Corey Ann Haydu

Pretty much everything I could want from a middle-grade contemporary/fantasy novel. Our story follows two identical girls on the cusp of their twelfth birthdays, who magically switch places and must navigate one another’s worlds. Princess Auden is the heir to a realm beset by dragons, while her counterpart Denny is dealing with a former best friend who’s thrown her over for the cooler class bully, not to mention a mother struggling with alcoholism and depression and a father who’s too worried about that ordeal to pay much attention to his lonely daughter. These are heavy topics, but handled sensitively enough for the younger readers who might pick this title up.

Each heroine is overwhelmed by the new situation before her, along with thoughts of the challenges waiting back home, but both eventually find the inner strength to triumph in age-and-genre-appropriate ways. Although I wish the protagonists could have actually met and interacted, I’ve found their respective dynamics really appealing, and I think the mundane problems of fitting in at school in particular have a bracingly lived-in authenticity to them. I might have wanted more complex worldbuilding in a work aimed at an older audience — or a closer interrogation of the idea that everything in Sorrowfeld was created by the ex-friends writing about it over the years — but the fairy tale setting fits the tone here while still providing ample stakes and dangers. Overall, it’s just outstanding.

★★★★★

Movie Review: The Many Saints of Newark (2021)

Movie #11 of 2026:

The Many Saints of Newark (2021)

I came into this movie pretty skeptical — did The Sopranos really need a spinoff prequel, over a decade after the show went off the air? — but it grew on me a little by the end. Although I didn’t think there were any mysteries remaining to the series besides a few that were intentionally left ambiguous, it is genuinely interesting to see the late 60s / early 70s era of mob boss Tony Soprano’s childhood, which was often mentioned and occasionally depicted on the program, but never at such length. The end result is no Better Call Saul in terms of enriching our understanding of any major arcs or anything, but it’s not a bad way to spend two hours, either. And it does ultimately resolve the lingering question of who killed Dickie Moltisanti, at least.

The audience is presumably self-selected for existing fans, but it’s still an odd choice for one of the characters who died in the original run to narrate the story as a ghost, immediately spoiling the circumstances of his death for any viewers who do decide to start here. For the rest of us, we bring our knowledge of particular details like who’s going to survive to the present day, as well as our memory of the performances from different actors. That recasting was probably necessary due to the long years separating the two narratives, but the results are mixed, in my opinion: Corey Stoll is outstanding at channeling a recognizable young Uncle Junior, for example, but John Magaro feels like a caricature parody of Silvio Dante. The remainder of the cast falls somewhere between those two extremes, including unfortunately Michael Gandolfini inheriting the role of Tony from his late father. (I can suspend my disbelief that they’re portraying the same person, much as I can for William Ludwig as the child version or the various other boys who played him in flashback on the show. But his mannerisms don’t leap off the screen as clearly as Stoll’s do for me.)

Another neat thing that this title achieves is depicting the historic 1967 Newark race riots, which would have roughly coincided with this period of Sopranos backstory and offer an obvious parallel to the George Floyd protests of our time. Along with Leslie Odom Jr. as an associate of the Mafia who eventually strikes out on his own, this element brings a welcome Black perspective that was largely minimized in the franchise before. It does so at the cost of rearranging the timeline and certain people’s ages a bit, but I’d say the benefit is worth the slight retcon there. Overall, however, I’d liken this piece to the Breaking Bad sequel El Camino, telling an unnecessary yet generally solid addition to the familiar main series plot.

[Content warning for domestic abuse, racism including slurs, gun violence, torture, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The League of Frightened Men by Rex Stout

Book #39 of 2026:

The League of Frightened Men by Rex Stout (Nero Wolfe #2)

I’m enjoying this old mystery series enough to keep reading, but I have yet to be blown away by the execution. The most enjoyable aspect remains the narrator’s banter and overall relationship with his boss the reclusive detective, which means the best sequence in this second installment comes when a threat to the former’s life prompts the latter to make a rare exit from his brownstone — as clear a sign of love between two men as you could hope to find in a novel published in 1935, I suppose.

As for the surrounding case, it rests on some behaviors and supposed psychological insights that don’t exactly ring true for me. In the backstory, a group of college students hazed an underclassman into taking a foolish action that broke his leg and has caused him to walk with a cane ever since. These characters are now older, but they worry that their victim has long nursed a grudge, especially after several die under suspicious circumstances and the rest begin receiving cryptic taunting poems by mail (which they interpret as threats, although I don’t feel that’s necessarily intuitive from the actual language used). At Wolfe’s not-so-subtle urging, the members of the titular “league” contract him to investigate the matter and guarantee their safety from the unassuming handicapped author.

That suspect is obviously either guilty or not, and a stronger work could have teased out that ambiguity nicely. This one is much more straightforward, as the protagonist’s employer reads his novels and decides that a person who writes so eloquently couldn’t possibly have murdered anyone. He’s right, because he seemingly always is, and so the plot becomes more of a traditional whodunnit with few remaining options. We also learn early on that the writer did send those strange letters, for reasons that are not really any better explained.

It’s a fine book for its era, again providing a neat American spin on the patterns of Doyle and Christie, but it’s still pretty far from an all-time classic.

[Content warning for gun violence and racial slurs.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Mars by Ben Bova

Book #38 of 2026:

Mars by Ben Bova

This is probably the Grand Tour novel that stood out the clearest in my memory before my current reread, telling a thrilling yet grounded tale of outer space exploration that paved the way for so many subsequent releases (and not just from author Ben Bova, though it did form a template for him — it’s very easy to draw a direct line from this title to Andy Weir’s The Martian, for instance, to pick the most obvious example). In fact, I don’t think it was even intended as part of a wider series at this point, for although Privateers was written beforehand, there’s no sign of tech CEO Dan Randolph here and a few continuity details between the two books that directly contradict one another. Still, further sequels would eventually encompass them both and smooth out any differences.

Published in 1992, this story tells of humanity’s first visit to the titular planet via a small crew of multinational scientists. Our main viewpoint protagonist is a Navajo geologist who was a late addition to the team, serving as an understudy for the original member who got sick at the last minute. Overwhelmed upon arrival, he forgoes his prepared speech to say only “Ya’aa’tey” in his people’s language (roughly, “It is good”), inadvertently setting off a minor political storm back on Earth. In the meantime, he and his fellow doctors are exploring the area around their landing site, making some exciting discoveries, and surviving the sort of accidents that can so easily occur in an inhospitable land so far from home.

In Bova’s confident hands it all feels startlingly plausible, with even the hero’s possible evidence of intelligent life treated skeptically by his peers and left ambiguous at the volume’s end. There’s also a great twist involving a medical crisis that sneaks up on the reader and the characters alike, which was just as fun for me to track having remembered it from decades ago. The astronauts are admittedly more sex-obsessed than such professionals should be, and Jamie has to endure a few racist comments that I’d hope our future pioneers would have long grown beyond, but it’s overall a vivid launch to this phase of the saga.

★★★★☆

Movie Review: Rocky Balboa (2006)

Movie #10 of 2026:

Rocky Balboa (2006)

Any story that restarts a dormant franchise carries an additional burden of justification that immediate sequels lack. The first five Rocky movies had their ups and downs, but together they formed a cohesive unit about the life and career of a Philadelphia boxer from roughly 1976 to 1990. This next installment followed after a gap longer than the entire span of the original series, which raises the question: why? What was left to say about the titular hero that needed to be explored so much later on?

As it turns out, quite a lot. These films have always been stronger outside the ring in my opinion, and so it is legitimately interesting to check in on the Italian Stallion with his boxing days apparently long behind him. We find Rocky a lonely widower running a restaurant named after his late wife Adrian, as well as a local celebrity whom everyone greets warmly but no one except his brother-in-law Paulie seems to really know. His son Robert, now played by Milo Ventimiglia, feels perpetually overshadowed by his father’s fame, resulting in an estrangement that neither man sees how to bridge. Around this time, the aging protagonist strikes up a new friendship / potential romance with a woman that he knew as a child back in the first picture.

It’s a good character study overall, but unfortunately, the surrounding sports genre eventually swallows it. The current heavyweight champion, a guy with the ludicrous name of Mason “The Line” Dixon, is getting disrespected by fans who don’t think he’s ever faced a real challenger, while a computerized match between him and Balboa in his prime predicts that the older boxer would triumph. As a result, Dixon’s managers challenge Rocky to an actual fight, which he accepts and trains for, forming the climax of the piece.

The bout is only supposed to be an exhibition, but still, it’s a development that I just can’t suspend my disbelief over — a former athlete in his late 50s, who was diagnosed with brain damage and other serious injuries over a decade before and who has not kept his body in any sort of shape, fighting the literal champ (and, spoiler alert, managing to hold his own)? It’s a feel-good fairy tale about persistence, or as writer/director/star Sylvester Stallone has his character declare in a rousing speech to Robert beforehand, “It ain’t about how hard you hit – it’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward!” Which is a nice motto, but an implausible retreat into fantasy on this particular occasion.

In the end, Rocky exits the arena much like he did after first battling Apollo Creed, having proved himself a contender against all the odds. But it’s a lot harder to take at this point, not to mention a distraction from the other things he had going on earlier in the movie.

[Content warning for gore.]

★★★☆☆