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: Doctor Who: Shirley Jackson and the Chaos Box by Kalynn Bayron

Book #92 of 2026:

Doctor Who: Shirley Jackson and the Chaos Box by Kalynn Bayron (Icons #3)

Pretty good as a Fifteenth Doctor and Ruby story, neatly slipping into the dynamic they shared together over their one season on TV. I can’t help feeling like the title figure falls through the cracks a bit, though, despite the whole point of this Doctor Who novella series being to offer those celebrity historicals where the Time Lord teams up with somebody famous. In this case that’s the horror writer Shirley Jackson, who’s revealed to have been inspired in part by an adventure with the Doctor to pen her classic piece “The Lottery.”

It’s a fairly tenuous link, roughly akin to how the episode The Unquiet Dead handles Charles Dickens seeing some ghosts, but I’m honestly fine with that, as it avoids directly attributing a real artist’s accomplishments to a fictional hero. The bigger problem with an alien ‘chaos box’ that stirs crowds into a frenzy so that the wielder can feed off the negative energy is that there are actually two of them: two boxes and two villains, operating in 2024 and 1937 respectively, who have a common backstory but never interact on the page. And since the protagonists dispatch one and then the other in turn, this doesn’t give either enemy much of a chance to shine in the busy plot.

A streamlined version of this tale, with the guest star more prominent and only one extraterrestrial threat in one time period, might have been the better approach here.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Queen of Sorcery by David Eddings

Book #91 of 2026:

Queen of Sorcery by David Eddings (The Belgariad #2)

More interesting and distinctive than the first volume in this series, but not to the degree I feel obligated to bump my rating up at all. I’m starting to understand why people say the authors’ later standalone novel The Redemption of Althalus reminds them of the Belgariad story, and having read that one multiple times when I was younger, I’m particularly unimpressed to see it playing out more slowly here. (If you aren’t familiar with either but you know your Lord of the Rings, imagine an entire epic fantasy plot built around Gandalf trying to rally the kings like Théoden and Denethor to unite against a distant but gathering evil. Just throw in a plucky farmboy with a destiny, as well.)

Still, it’s solid enough for me to continue on with the saga regardless, and I can forgive some of the weaker elements like the petulant princess love interest, given the state of the genre publishing landscape in 1982. But I do hope that the next sequel is even better yet.

[Content warning for racism, slavery, torture, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Classic Doctor Who, season 26

TV #28 of 2026:

Classic Doctor Who, season 26

By certain metrics, what we now call the “Classic” iteration of Doctor Who had already gone on too long when it was eventually cancelled in 1989. Twenty-six seasons is far more than most TV shows get to have, and the program had passed through some dire creative stretches that rightfully could have deserved cancellation before. On the other hand, it’s a sad fact that every season with the Seventh Doctor improved upon its predecessor, and this final run was one of the best the show ever produced. In other words, Doctor Who got axed right as it was getting good again — which admittedly probably contributed to it staying alive offscreen in the so-called Wilderness Years of the franchise, not to mention the eventual revivals in 1996 and 2005.

Because, yeah, this is pretty great. With the exception of GHOST LIGHT, which I personally find to be an under-explained mess, these last few stories are outstanding. The Doctor is once again something of an omniscient strategist here, arriving in situations he knows all about with moves and counter-moves planned out in advance, only now he’s additionally manipulating his companion Ace to push her to grow. That aforementioned serial finds him secretly taking her to a Victorian manor that will later become the haunted house that scared her when she was younger, for instance, while SURVIVAL brings her back to her hometown to confront the life she left behind (along with his old foe the Master, which is a nice touch for what ended up being the series finale). But the game is reversed on the Time Lord in BATTLEFIELD — also the final appearance of UNIT and Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, returning for the first time since the anniversary special The Five Doctors in 1983 — as our hero gets caught up in the schemes of either a future or alternate-dimension version of himself, operating as Merlin for another reality’s Camelot and King Arthur. It’s a real treat!

Finally there’s THE CURSE OF FENRIC, which maybe overreaches a bit with its lore implications of the Doctor being a primordial force for good in the universe, but is generally just extraordinary. An ancient Viking evil, Ace’s mom as a baby, World War II codebreaking with an Alan Turing analogue, aquatic vampire descendants of humanity that have been brought back to the past to hunt us, a precursor to the moment in the modern episode The God Complex where the protagonist has to cruelly break his companion’s faith in him in order to save the day… Truly this adventure has it all.

Taken all together, the season represents a bold step up in quality for Doctor Who, while also suggesting a path forward for the VNA novels to take in the aftermath of the low ratings ultimately catching up to the production. Once the writing was on the wall, script editor Andrew Cartmel penned a short voiceover for Seven’s actor Sylvester McCoy to intone over the closing moments of the last episode, as the characters return to the TARDIS in triumph. It’s a brief but achingly beautiful piece that conveys how their journeying will have to go on without us now, and I feel it’s worth quoting in full as my Classic Who rewatch comes to an end:

“There are worlds out there where the sky is burning, the sea’s asleep, and the rivers dream. People made of smoke, and cities made of song. Somewhere there’s danger, somewhere there’s injustice, and somewhere else the tea’s getting cold. Come on, Ace – we’ve got work to do!”

Serials ranked from worst to best:

★★☆☆☆
GHOST LIGHT (26×5 – 26×7)

★★★★☆
SURVIVAL (26×12 – 26×14)
BATTLEFIELD (26×1 – 26×4)

★★★★★
THE CURSE OF FENRIC (26×8 – 26×11)

Overall season: ★★★★☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Seasons ranked: 14 > 8 > 26 > 12 > 10 > 13 > 21 > 5 > 17 > 9 > 20 > 6 > 25 > 24 > 7 > 1 > 4 > 18 > 19 > 16 > 11 > 22 > 15 > 3 > 2 > 23

Doctors ranked: 7 > 3 > 4 > 2 > 5 > 1 > 6

Book Review: Gregor and the Marks of Secret by Suzanne Collins

Book #90 of 2026:

Gregor and the Marks of Secret by Suzanne Collins (The Underland Chronicles #4)

This penultimate volume is easily the strongest of its series since the debut, largely for dispensing with the tired structure of yet another ancient prophecy sending our returning tween hero on yet another quest. (Granted, those elements both still do recur, but at least it doesn’t feel like literally the same exact plot repeating again.) There’s a welcome darker tone too, for although named characters have died in every story so far, this is the first time that the protagonist’s three-year-old sister has really had to grapple with that, which is fairly devastating to watch through his eyes. He’s also struggling to articulate to his love interest and their other allies his inchoate moral sense that genocide of one’s enemies is wrong no matter their crimes and will only perpetuate the cycle of vengeance — a theme that presages this author’s later work in The Hunger Games more plainly than anything else I’ve seen in these books.

I don’t love how the novel ends on a cliffhanger, but I always appreciate when a middle-grade saga matures with its cast and its intended core audience to be closer to YA, which seems to be happening here. I’m satisfied with giving this title three-and-a-half stars, rounded up, and I look forward to seeing how it all resolves.

[Content warning for gore.]

★★★★☆

Movie Review: Dogma (1999)

Movie #28 of 2026:

Dogma (1999)

This was the first movie that I ever saw in Kevin Smith’s View Askewniverse series, and together with the novel Good Omens, it represented a fairly seminal text for an agnostic humanist kid from a Jewish-Unitarian household in my heavily Christian town — a way of grappling with the teachings and iconography of the church in a looser and more open-minded fashion. Although I hadn’t rewatched it in decades, the memory loomed so large that I was almost afraid to do so now, lest I find it wasn’t nearly so good as a jaded adult.

Folks, it’s honestly even better. I think I’ve praised the writer-director’s gift for dialogue in every one of these reviews, but he outdoes himself here in the way he bounces multiple styles off each other — the loftier theological matters alternating with the heroine’s grounded skepticism and Jay’s hilariously profane motormouth ramblings, often within the same scene, but resulting in a feeling of symphony rather than cacophony throughout. It’s an extraordinarily difficult task that the script completely nails, and it does a lot to sell the admittedly wild premise: two renegade angels, stranded on Earth for millennia, are attempting to use a supposed loophole in Catholic doctrine to have their sins forgiven and reenter Heaven, which would inadvertently trigger the apocalypse, and all that’s stopping them is an ordinary woman, a reanimated apostle (Chris Rock, whose character claims he was left out of the Bible due to racism), and those two drug dealers from Smith’s previous films.

These events sit uneasily within that larger franchise, loose as it is. It’s hard to watch the other titles that either preceded or followed this one with the knowledge that it’s all canonical and we’re meant to care about petty human squabbles in the face of the certain existence of supernatural beings that interfere in mortal affairs! But that concern falls away while enjoying the picture itself, which leaves me with merely two more minor critiques: that Loki is a bizarre name for the angelic presence who razed Sodom and Gomorrah, and that the Golgothan demon made out of bubbling feces is too grossly juvenile an element for this story. There are plenty of truly hysterical and quotable jokes across its runtime — “Holy bartender! I get it; that’s a great one!” — but the confrontation with that creature is the only moment that reads like Smith directly mocking his audience’s discomfort.

Elsewise, it’s a near-perfect production. Characters and concepts are introduced at a steady enough pace to not overwhelm us, and structurally, the opposing sides even get a quiet interlude together to talk and forge a connection, rather than simply meeting when they clash at the climax. It uses its lower budget to nice effect — another reason that the toilet monster stands out — generally trusting the excellent cast to convey their performances without the help of visual flourishes. And those actors! I know Ben Affleck and Matt Damon were early in their careers and had already worked with Kevin Smith before, but it still feels amazing to see them in an offbeat indie work like this, not to mention other ringers like Alan Rickman or George Carlin.

Nor has it aged poorly, beyond a regrettable single use of the r-slur. The piece comes out swinging against homophobia and similar forms of intolerance, and it’s downright trans-positive by implication, given its insistence that certain figures have a gender identity unrelated to whatever’s between their legs (or not) and the casting of both Alanis Morisette and Bud Cort as different aspects of the Almighty. It’s sacrilegious, but not cruelly so, and its satirical targets tend to be religious hypocrites, not Christianity itself. In fact, I’d say overall that it’s basically timeless — certainly Bartleby and Loki’s rant against the greed and sin of the fictional Mooby corporation seems just as relevant today as it did a quarter-century ago, as does Bethany’s personal crisis of faith that opens the tale.

And in the end, it’s about regular people saving the world and forming a relationship to the divine by engaging with what they know in their hearts to be right, instead of relying on the dusty dogma of the title to be handed down to them from on high. All that, and pretty darn funny, too.

[Content warning for gun violence, gore, and brief mention of pedophilia, incest, and rape.]

★★★★★

Book Review: Vigil by George Saunders

Book #89 of 2026:

Vigil by George Saunders

This one is a bit of a head-scratcher for me. The writing is absolutely gorgeous, which suggests that I should probably go ahead and read the author’s earlier novel Lincoln in the Bardo, as I’ve seen several reviews of this title comparing it disfavorably to that. But I’m in the camp of readers who don’t really understand or see the point of this particular story itself.

Our heroine is a psychopomp of sorts, a dead woman ascended into some kind of angelic being who has now arrived to usher the soul of a dying man to whatever comes next for him. Who has sent her? What precisely is she supposed to do there? It’s unclear. She mostly attempts to soothe him and bring up pleasant memories from his life, and seems surprised by the appearance of other spirits like herself, who take the opposite approach instead. They’ve come to chastise him for his sins — namely that as an oil tycoon who downplayed evidence of climate change throughout his long career, he has indirectly caused a rise in natural disasters and their resulting casualties, the extinction of multiple species, and so on. It’s a depressingly familiar litany to those of us who follow the news and trust the science, but it’s again far from apparent what these characters are aiming to achieve. The elderly hospice patient is surely past the point of any earthly Scrooge-like redemption, so do they want a deathbed conversion? A simple acknowledgement of the hurt that he’s provoked? The book never quite spells it out, which makes any conflict between the ghosts feel fairly abstract.

Adding to this bloodless impression are the philosophical debates that arise, most notably the old nature-vs-nurture question, with the protagonist surprisingly taking a hard stance on the former. In fact, she’s so fatalistic about it that she essentially absolves her charge of all his mortal actions, insisting that anyone would have done the exact same things in his place. It’s a rather passive position for the person who’s presumably intended as our moral center for this narrative, although she’s more interesting and active as she processes and works through her own unfinished business in a subplot.

But the quality of the prose is strong, and the worldbuilding is engaging even if somewhat under-defined. (I’m told that Bardo operates on a similar model of the afterlife, though I haven’t heard any suggestion these stories are meant to share a common reality / setting.) I’m still willing to give George Saunders another try after this, but I’d have to rate this immediate effort at only 2.5 stars, rounded up.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Wake Up and Open Your Eyes by Clay McLeod Chapman

Book #88 of 2026:

Wake Up and Open Your Eyes by Clay McLeod Chapman

I have any number of issues with this story, but let me start with the most basic and subjective, which is that I simply don’t like it. This is essentially splatterpunk — the transgressive celebration of gore for its own sake — and that’s never been my favorite approach to horror. It represents the genre at its most nihilistic, with few heroes to realistically root for, only victims to watch suffer for a bit. In mainstream Stephen King terms, I’m reminded of titles like The Regulators or The Tommyknockers that I wouldn’t hold up as his best, where ordinary folks steadily succumb to madness and graphic violence before ultimately expiring in a variety of gruesome ways.

Even for readers who enjoy that sort of thing, however, this seems like a weaker effort. The fundamental premise involves a signal going out that brainwashes people into becoming paranoid maniacs, and the opening section at least manages a trenchant political critique in centering that around a right-wing news broadcast affecting the protagonist’s elderly parents. It’s an allegory that works well for how such sensationalized misinformation on gender transition, the great replacement conspiracy theory, and the like can gradually transform loved ones into monsters, which is why it’s baffling that the novel then abandons that plot after the first chapter. The bulk of the text instead shifts to focus on the initial hero’s brother and his family, who are being exposed to the same corruptive influence from wellness gurus and social media / screentime in general, which feels a lot more aimless and generic to me. The original couple obviously opened the door to the evil with their choices beforehand, whereas there’s no comparable sin apparent for why their son, daughter-in-law, and teenage grandson swiftly fall prey to it in turn.

What we do get is a relentless stream of stomach-churning shock moments involving incest and sexual assault, self-harm including auto-cannibalism, and beyond. Several characters go on violent sprees at local schools. Another kills, cooks, and eats the family dog. All of these are elements that I could potentially tolerate in a different kind of narrative in service to a greater point, but here it just reads as empty torment and doesn’t build to an especially satisfying conclusion. The nebulous villains — who may or may not be literal demons — don’t even have any clear aim besides the mayhem itself, and although the book establishes that this is a widespread terror happening all over the country if not the world, we remain mostly locked within a single household, with no real insights into the full ramifications of that wider scope. Overall it’s a poor execution of an idea that I admittedly wouldn’t love even if it had been carried out better than this.

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: Foster Dade Explores the Cosmos by Nash Jenkins

Book #87 of 2026:

Foster Dade Explores the Cosmos by Nash Jenkins

Like its characters, this 2023 coming-of-age novel grows on me as it winds along, although I’m still not totally satisfied with the framing conceit that it’s the result of a relative stranger piecing together the fractured evidence to reconstruct the events in question. The narrative goes into uncomfortable levels of detail about private thoughts and personal matters like teenage masturbation sessions, which to me breaks the central illusion of how the story has supposedly reached us.

But to the extent that a reader can set all that aside, it’s an engagingly immersive tale of the titular protagonist’s sophomore and junior year at a fictional boarding school in New Jersey, as he struggles with love and somewhat bemusedly finds himself at the center of an opioid distribution ring. (This is another place where the book falters for me — for all his introspection, it’s not entirely clear why Foster falls into dealing drugs; his best effort at explaining himself near the end is that it made him happy to feel useful in delivering the pills to his classmates who insisted they needed them for various studying, partying, or mood-altering reasons.)

The primary triumph here is the immediacy of the setting, as manifested through the slice-of-life, plot-minimal storytelling. Debut author Nash Jenkins nails so many small details that ground us in the specific time period of fall 2008 to spring 2010, which comes back to me in vivid color while reading this. I was in college then, five years older than this particular cohort, but the depiction of music playlists and blogs and digital cameras and Facebook messages and such — the ways in which technology was just starting to heavily mediate our social lives in those halcyon pre-smartphone days — feels breathtakingly familiar. There’s a certain degree of power in any work about adolescence and the fumbling steps of people coming to understand themselves and their nearest peers, but it’s especially potent in so richly recognizable an era.

That pervasive atmosphere of historical fiction done right deepens throughout and easily carries the text past the inevitable immaturities of its cast and the long, alternatively endearing and frustrating dance that the hero does around the close friend that he likes, whom we sense would probably date him if he could ever get far enough out of his head to ask her. She in turn is more nuanced a creation than the stock manic-pixie-dream-girl type one might expect, and there’s a real tragedy in the way their fates never quite align.

Overall I’ve enjoyed this piece more than I initially thought that I would, and I’m sorry to hear that Hulu has apparently passed on the pilot treatment they had previously ordered for an adaptation.

[Content warning for homophobia, hazing / bullying, drug addiction and abuse, incest, suicide, and rape.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald

Book #86 of 2026:

The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald (Princess Irene and Curdie #1)

Surprisingly readable for a fantasy novel first published in 1872, with a warm tone reminiscent of genre successors like J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, or Diana Wynne Jones. The plot is kind of a mess by modern standards, though, and I’m particularly dissatisfied with the character of the child heroine’s magical great-grandmother, who’s maddeningly inscrutable in how she acts and why. Don’t expect nuance in the two warring races, either — the humans are all clever and honorable victims, while the goblins are uniformly wicked and ugly. It’s still an interesting text to approach through a historical lens of how fairy tales and grand mythical epics evolved into the storytelling traditions more common today, but in its own right I wouldn’t especially recommend it. I doubt I’ll bother with the sequel.

[Content warning for racist and ableist slurs.]

★★★☆☆

Movie Review: Chasing Amy (1997)

Movie #27 of 2026:

Chasing Amy (1997)

There’s a central tension in Kevin Smith’s third film, especially considered critically several decades on, which I think boils down to how much the audience is supposed to identify / agree with its main character. This is, after all, the tale of a man who confesses his love to a self-professed lesbian, is rewarded with her agreeing to date him anyway, and then prudishly pushes her away after learning more about her sexual history (namely that she’d had other male partners before him, including two high school classmates at the same time). That has the makings of a good drama, and it’s certainly a universal experience to fall for a person who seems unattainable, but it feels significantly cheaper if we assume we’re meant to take his side over it all.

The cultural conversation around sex and sexuality has continued to evolve since 1997, and there’s a general recognition of the fluidity of such labels now that didn’t exist back then — or at least, not to the extent that a random twenty-something dude from New Jersey could have been its best messenger. There are plenty of real people like Alyssa who prefer one gender but not exclusively, and/or whose understandings of their preferences change naturally over time. It shouldn’t be juicy or scandalous that she winds up reciprocating Holden’s feelings, nor should it be a moment of triumph for him that he’s able to win someone from the so-called ‘other team.’

But that’s more or less how it plays out here, unfortunately, and it’s particularly hard not to see our everyman protagonist as an intended audience-identification figure when Smith appears in his Silent Bob guise to literally tell him he reminds him of himself. Returning viewers will likely remember how the hero in Clerks had hangups about his girlfriend’s past experiences as well, which really makes the whole thing feel distinctly autobiographical. Alyssa is more of an object for Holden to obsess about than a character with her own interiority and personal arc, and neither she nor anyone else dares mention the word bisexual. Nor is there any consideration through a trans lens of decoupling genitalia from presentation or attraction, despite all the discussion of intercourse mechanics 101.

The one saving grace here — besides reminding ourselves that this was the 90s, and refreshing for the era in even broaching queer themes at all — is that the guy doesn’t get the girl in the end. While it may strain credulity for him to land her in the first place, she does call him out for his entitled attitude (and his ludicrous suggestion that they have a threesome with his friend he diagnoses as having a closeted crush on him), and his ultimate happy ending is limited to the fact that he’s able to turn the events into an independent comic book. If Holden is Smith and by extension somebody we’re all supposed to see ourselves in, at least his opinions are challenged by the text, rather than uncritically reified.

But I can’t help feeling that a stronger story would have centered its leading lady more throughout. It also could have eased up on the edgy sophomoric humor about bestiality and child molestation and the like, although Jason Lee’s sardonic slacker sidekick is at least more tolerable than his previous role in Mallrats or Randal in Clerks, who feel like minor variations of a common type. The writer-director’s gift for snappy dialogue and nerdish pop-culture observations is likewise honed to perfection here — the first time I’ve felt like the cast could uniformly handle one of his scripts — and he wisely limits the always-outrageous Jay and Silent Bob to a single scene that’s overall pretty effective. These are the sorts of elements that I wish could have been built into a better version of this movie, instead of the problematic one that actually exists for us today.

[Content warning for gun violence, racism, and homophobia including slurs.]

★★★☆☆