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!

Movie Review: Ghostbusters (1984)

Movie #49 of 2026:

Ghostbusters (1984)

Certain elements of the Ghostbusters iconography are truly iconic, and it’s easy to get swept away in the excitement of New York City celebrating its unlikely heroes at this first movie’s conclusion, especially with that excellent theme song roaring in our ears. But is it actually a good picture? I’m not so sure. It’s hard to judge anything so entrenched in popular culture, but I do think the story could have been tightened up some: expanding the role of Winston so he doesn’t arrive out of nowhere and contribute little to the plot, for instance, or doing more to build up the idea of the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man before Gozer the Gozerian takes on that appearance for its avatar. The triumphant ending isn’t exactly earned either, despite the technobabble about crossing the streams.

But this is a horror-action-comedy at heart, and if its various setpieces are primarily used as a framework for Bill Murray to deliver his deadpan sardonic quips against, I suppose it’s a reasonable success. It’s a shame his character is such a sleaze, though — introduced as a college professor blatantly hitting on a female undergrad (and administering shock treatments to her male classmate), and then pressing Sigourney Weaver’s Dana for a date in spite of her repeated rejections. The fact that the script rewards him for this behavior with eventually winning her over doesn’t make it any more endearing, although at least it gives the actress a nice acting showcase when she later gets possessed. (Rick Moranis as well, who in my opinion is both funnier and making more interesting choices as a performer than Murray or the other leads here.)

The conservative ideology is a drag, too. A lot has been written about this already, but this is fundamentally a film where independent businessmen succeed by delivering a service that the market isn’t yet providing, and the federal government in the form of the EPA exists not to protect the environment, but only to stymie those entrepreneurs with meaningless red tape. The working-class Ghostbusters — who leave academia at the beginning bemoaning that now they’ll have to produce actual results — are the experts at their chosen field of spectral containment, and the petty bureaucrat insisting they turn off their machines is an out-of-touch pencil-pusher who doesn’t know the facts on the ground. It’s a Republican fantasy that doesn’t quite match the record of who tends to be responsible in reality for contaminating the atmosphere and putting the population at risk in that sort of scenario.

But I can’t be too harsh on the production. It’s fun! It’s funny and it’s quotable! It probably didn’t need to be followed by a full-on multimedia franchise, and I won’t be surprised if I look back at the end of this series and determine that this was the high point all along, but it’s not a total trainwreck. And I mean… who else are you gonna call when there’s something strange in your neighborhood?

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: We Burned So Bright by TJ Klune

Book #155 of 2026:

We Burned So Bright by TJ Klune

This is the third novel that I’ve read from author TJ Klune, following The House in the Cerulean Sea and The Extraordinaries, and I think it’s time to concede that his style is just not a great match for me as a reader. I appreciate the commitment to diversity, which here includes an elderly gay couple as the central heroes, but the characters are so blunt in their dialogue that they wind up sounding like empty mouthpieces instead of actual people. The plot in this story also feels overly predictable in its one big twist, which is the kind of secret that’s plainly top-of-mind for the protagonists but kept from readers for a calculated impact at the right moment — a move that understandably backfires when you see it coming so far in advance.

The setting is more distinctive, but I’ve read works with this same general premise before. An encroaching anomaly in outer space is expected to destroy all life on the planet, leaving everyone angsty and reaching for what meaning and solace they can find in their limited time remaining. How I Spent My Last Night On Earth by Todd Strasser and The Last Policeman by Ben H. Winters both come to mind as titles that explore similar scenarios, and while this volume does so competently as well, it doesn’t really do anything shockingly original within that framework.

My favorite aspect of the text is when the imminent disaster is treated as a metaphor for old age or living with a terminal illness, when one’s own personal mortality is looming in a way that must be faced or avoided as the individual sees fit. It’s interesting to apply that mentality to society at large and examine the resulting fracture points, but it’s not enough to get me to love this experiment overall.

[Content warning for domestic abuse, homophobia, gun violence, drug abuse, death of children, suicide, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Fires of December by Brandon Sanderson

Book #154 of 2026:

The Fires of December by Brandon Sanderson (Hoid’s Travails #3)

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

This is the first official release in author Brandon Sanderson’s “Hoid’s Travails” series, which is the name he’s now retroactively applying to his earlier volumes Tress of the Emerald Sea and Yumi and the Nightmare Painter as well. Like them, this new novel is set within his sprawling Cosmere universe and told by a certain sardonic and nigh-immortal storyteller, but perfectly approachable as a standalone read instead. Those who have sampled further will likely recognize particular elements and characters from previous works, but newcomers shouldn’t be too lost by the occasional mentions of investiture and the like.

That’s an approach that I think allows the writer to play to his strengths, focusing on the immediate tale at hand and not on maneuvering any larger plot concerns into place. In spite of Hoid’s narration and expansive knowledge, we stick pretty closely to the heroine December, in a storybook tone much like Tress received for her own adventure. Her world hasn’t featured in Sanderson’s published fiction until now, but it’s the kind of fantasy realm he delivers well, with a form of magic that feels distinctive but thematically adjacent to his other systems: in this case a river of blood flowing from a giant demon that was bound centuries ago, which people can use to perform minor spells like the manifestation of clothing from designs in their minds.

More important than the setting, however, is the protagonist herself, who lives an ordinary life that slowly becomes more and more tragic across the first chapter, both in her own personal affairs and in the news that gradually spreads to her backwater village that the king has been murdered, the beast has been freed, and the kingdom is falling into anarchy and civil war. A deadly plague ravages the land too, and although she survives it, she eventually passes away as an octogenarian, full of sorrows for everything that she’s seen.

And then she wakes up again on the morning of her twenty-first birthday, and the story can really begin. (You didn’t believe I was spoiling anything significant, did you?)

Sanderson has dabbled in time-travel before — Snapshot, Legion, and The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England all come to mind — but never in the Cosmere or for an extended narrative like this, and the result is surprisingly refreshing. (Okay, technically, yes, there are established methods like cadmium-burning in the later Mistborn installments that can allow someone to get to the future faster by altering their relativisitic perceptions, but nothing in the classic trope of moving from the present to the past.)

Like the hero in Ken Grimwood’s Replay, the old-turned-young character must grapple with the weight of those decades of memories, including relationships with individuals who don’t know her anymore, while simultaneously adjusting to society viewing her so differently from her mental image of herself. Of course, she’s additionally trying to avert a genre-specific disaster that only she’s aware is coming and get anyone in power to listen and help, which ultimately entails becoming the sort of person who can accomplish great things all on her own.

Overall, it’s a lot of fun, and though this author’s romantic arcs aren’t generally his best creations, I enjoy the way he plays with the concept of a problematic age gap here, as the woman has to convince her sixty-something love interest that she’s an appropriate match for him despite her outward appearance. There’s also a neat cat-shaped spirit familiar that reminds me of Mogget from Sabriel, which is a dynamic I’ll never complain about! One section near the climax does seem a tad rushed to me, and the book doesn’t quite answer all of the questions that it raises, but in general, I’ve had a good time with this.

[Content warning for domestic abuse, gore, and the fantasy equivalent of paparazzi voyeurism.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Dead Beat by Leigh Bardugo

Book #153 of 2026:

Dead Beat by Leigh Bardugo (Alex Stern #3)

A decent conclusion to this urban fantasy trilogy, although I think the way the demon villain is finally defeated after so much build-up isn’t entirely satisfactory. It feels as though author Leigh Bardugo may have written herself into a corner there, which has been effective in ratcheting the tension and a sense of stakes along the way, but then lacks the earned moment of triumph when the heroes (inevitably) pull off a surprise maneuver to win.

Luckily, it’s a fun enough read otherwise. Following their disastrous visit to hell in the previous story, the surviving characters are faced with an open portal through which more fiends are steadily emerging, the monster that’s in the process of destroying / supplanting Darlington’s soul, and the usual dark academia campus politics involving the secret societies at Yale. There’s also further Da Vinci Code silliness about secrets hidden in the university’s architecture, and the ghosts that were once so prominent in the plot barely register as an afterthought anymore.

This is a saga that has grown and shifted a lot as it goes along, and now settles into a vengeful Babel / Scholomance mode of tearing down corrupt institutions, which is as good an ending as any, I suppose. I’ve enjoyed going on that journey with the protagonists, but it’s ultimately a bit too uneven for me to say that I’ve wholly loved the experience.

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

This volume: ★★★☆☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Volumes ranked: 1 > 3 > 2

Book Review: Bleak House by Charles Dickens

Book #152 of 2026:

Bleak House by Charles Dickens

Black House by Stephen King and Peter Straub features two people reading this similarly-titled 1853 novel by Charles Dickens, so when I got to that part in my current reread, I decided to check it out as well. That was a wasted effort as far as overt connections go — both works use present tense and tell a sprawling story across a large community of characters, but otherwise lack any significant parallels that I could detect — but not an unenjoyable time in and of itself. While I can’t honestly say that I’ve loved this older book overall, it’s solid enough for me to give it the Goodreads “I liked it” rating of three-out-of-five stars.

The best element in my opinion is the satirical heart of events, concerning an ongoing probate case called Jarndyce and Jarndyce. We never get to hear the exact details of the matter, but it involves two conflicting wills and has reportedly been going on for years with every expectation of continuing indefinitely without resolution, as a legion of lawyers and clerks wage daily battle over the smallest particulars. In the end — spoiler alert! — it finally does get resolved, but only because the estate runs out of money to pay any further legal fees, and everyone goes home empty-handed.

That’s a nasty and ingenious-seeming creation that apparently a) wasn’t that much of an exaggeration from certain real-life cases that inspired the author and b) led to public outcry and reforms in turn. But on the page it’s kind of the same point repeated over and over again until the final twist, which gets tiresome rather quickly.

Weaving around this are the main storyline and various subplots, told partly in third-person and partly in first-person from our heroine, the young ward and later fiancée of one of the Mr. Jarndyces in question. As you might expect, a modern reader needs to suffer through some dated social attitudes here, including cousin marriage and periodic expressions of racism and antisemitism, although Dickens is more forward-thinking in other ways: holding sympathy for children conceived out of wedlock and their parents, for instance, or for the underclass of servants who flit about the periphery of the tale.

It’s not a production without its flaws, and its original nature as serialized fiction becomes apparent at times when a particular development seems to arrive out of nowhere, since the writer wasn’t able to go back and thread things retroactively. At one point this results in the solution to a murder mystery being revealed in proto-Agatha Christie sitting room fashion, and yet everything the detective declaims is new information to us, rather than a synthesis of earlier evidence. It’s also a very jumbled affair with many separate storylines competing for our attention, not all of which are equally compelling.

Still, select passages are striking indeed, like a mad dash to locate a woman who has fled her home after leaving a suicide note, and the prose style is pretty enjoyable throughout. But taken as an aggregate, I’ve found it sometimes a struggle to keep all the pieces straight or enjoy the larger pattern of how they do or don’t relate to one another.

★★★☆☆

Movie Review: Doctor Who: The Christmas Invasion (2005)

Movie #48 of 2026:

Doctor Who: The Christmas Invasion (2005)

This is the debut of what would become an annual tradition for the rebooted version of Doctor Who, delivering a one-hour festive holiday special during the break between proper seasons of the show. It also comes at a delicate time for the fledgling series, with former star Christopher Eccleston having left the central role at the end of its initial batch of thirteen episodes. David Tennant was now the incumbent Doctor, but he’d been seen only fleetingly in that last story to air, plus a seven-minute bonus scene produced for the Children in Need charity telethon that presumably not everyone caught.

Would audiences who didn’t necessarily know the twentieth-century ‘Classic’ mode of the franchise (which churned through seven Time Lord heroes from 1963 to 1989, then another one in 1996) accept this concept of regeneration? It’s a legitimate concern, and showrunner-writer Russell T. Davies takes a safe but effective approach to defusing it here, structuring the adventure as one where the alien protagonist sits out events for the majority of its runtime. Tennant’s Tenth Doctor is legitimately dazzling once he arrives in full force, but that’s only in the final twenty minutes. Until then, we have a situation growing more and more desperate and the other characters largely waiting around pining for his predecessor. Rose Tyler, our returning companion, is the obvious viewer identification figure: a familiar face who gets to express our own reservations about this change and mourn the loss of how we understand the Doctor is supposed to act.

She’s joined again by her mother Jackie and estranged boyfriend Mickey, in addition to the politician Harriet Jones, a season one guest star who has since been elected Prime Minister. The latter is off in her own plot for the most part, dealing with the seemingly-unstoppable titular invasion, while Rose and the others anxiously tend to the unconscious Doctor. The Sycorax mind-control two billion people around the world into climbing up to the highest roof in their area, and tell Jones they will command those victims to jump unless humanity accepts a future as their slaves. Meanwhile the Tylers are fending off some bizarre smaller threats — flamethrower-wielding robot Santas and a whirling Christmas tree — which fills the time but is admittedly rather daft.

Eventually the two halves of the narrative unite, and soon after, Ten steps forward in all his glory. It’s a showstopper and a return to the expected order of things, as he proceeds to run circles around the would-be conquerors just by swaggering up with his confidence, intelligence, and new mile-a-minute conversational patter. Before long he’s reduced them to a silly inconvenience as well, although he gets in a moment of icy ruthlessness when he kills the leader who was trying to take a swing at his back. (“No second chances. I’m that sort of a man.”)

That interaction has a degree of bite to it, as does a subsequent exchange when the PM orders the retreating vessel to be shot down. The Doctor isn’t happy, but it’s not so easy to say which of them is in the wrong, especially given his over-the-top response to topple her career (destroying what he’d previously said was in the history books as a Golden Age for Britain and inadvertently creating a power vacuum that one of his enemies would later exploit, not to mention trafficking in ugly misogynistic tropes about women’s professional appearance). It’s those aspects that linger and provide a welcome darker undercurrent, distracting us from how little either the Doctor or Rose have really managed to do here.

But as a short film, it fulfills its transparent purpose to get us to love the incoming Doctor, introducing him and his newly-charged romantic dynamic with his costar for the episodes ahead. Rose may not be much of an agentive lead this time, but she goes on a journey from skepticism to relief to adoration, and so of course we’re meant to as well. The script sneaks in the first reference to Torchwood too, a secret government project that would recur across the season and ultimately merit its own spinoff program.

It’s not the best that Doctor Who has to offer, but it’s probably the kind of installment that was reasonably needed at this point. I give it three-and-a-half stars, rounded up.

★★★★☆

Movie Review: Jurassic World Rebirth (2025)

Movie #47 of 2026:

Jurassic World Rebirth (2025)

The ongoing story of Jurassic Park needed a good reset after the franchise low point of Jurassic World Dominion (2022), and while I think we could have let it rest for longer before cranking the machinery back up, this next film ably pushes forward into new territory. No former characters return at all, and none are even mentioned outside of one passing reference to Alan Grant. There’s not much continuity to worry about either; the opening quickly establishes that dinosaurs have spread around the world but in practice are isolated around the Equator, and from there it’s an entirely fresh start.

The acting, I could critique. Scarlett Johansson isn’t necessarily bad as the lead, but her line readings are exactly what you’d get in one of her Marvel pictures rather than establishing any sort of novel characterization for the special ops heroine. Manuel García-Rulfo likewise turns in the same worried dad role he plays on his show The Lincoln Lawyer, and Jonathan Bailey is hilariously miscast as a bookish professor type, looking and acting like a standard rugged action hero instead. Mahershala Ali alone in the main cast seems to have taken the job seriously by actually developing a distinctive personage to inhabit here.

Luckily the project around them fares better. The plot involves a group of mercenaries hired to help a pharmaceutical company extract dino DNA from a few specific specimens, which means everybody is going into the situation with eyes open for once — other than a family of bystanders who get caught up in the ensuing events — although they all land in a serious crisis anyway. The writing deepens the characters as well, helping them to feel like people with a common past together and not simply generic figures for the script to rip through. And when the inevitable attacks do arrive, the beasts generally seem to behave more like recognizable animals than the monsters of the previous films, which is a welcome change. Meanwhile, the colors are mostly bright and vivid throughout, and that counts for a lot in an age when so many properties opt for a dim gray sludge for their special effects. This is a movie that’s genuinely fun to look at!

I’ve never been especially fond of the hybrid creatures in this series, and I would again say they’re the weakest part of this latest title, particularly the big bad “Distortus rex” that shows up at the beginning and end and is basically just an overgrown rancor from Star Wars. But setting that element and my quibbles on the performances aside, this is a solid argument that the JP universe still has the capacity to surprise and thrill us. I give it three-and-a-half stars, rounded up, and I look forward to whenever the next sequel rolls around.

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

★★★★☆

TV Review: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, season 4

TV #43 of 2026:

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, season 4

A step up from the previous year, but not to the level of the first two seasons, unfortunately. As usual, the best parts of this Star Trek spinoff come when it drills into its characters and its status as an origin story, finding arcs to showcase everyone steadily developing into who they’ll be at the start of the TOS era. At its worst, it can be very gimmick-heavy — which I’m not inherently opposed to, but which sets a high bar for quality that the execution isn’t necessarily able to deliver on, with the most egregious cases here being a puppet episode and a Casablanca riff, each of which is too full of frustrating logistical holes for me to sit back and enjoy the playful meta hijinks for what they are.

(To take just “Level Five Transporter Accident” as an illustrative example: Why do the puppet versions of the regular cast all look like Muppets specifically when that wasn’t even the style of the thing that Scotty was trying to transport? Why was the obvious concept of the hour ‘a Muppet movie where ____ is the only human[oid crew member]’ when that meme isn’t even accurate to the films that people think they’re referencing? Why are there all those scenes with no Spock POV around if he’s — spoiler alert — supposedly dreaming it all in the end?)

In general I don’t mind the show experimentally hopping genres à la Community or Doctor Who as long as the results are strong enough — I enjoyed the dips into melodramatic soap opera territory for “Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass” and space horror for “The Griffin Incident” — but here in my opinion they mostly aren’t. It also feels like a misstep in a season with only ten episodes to devote so many of them to that kind of disruption, with not enough moments of normalcy in between. (The actors, it should be noted, remain talented and game for all these different spins on their normal performances — the problem is a writing staff that’s too eager to lean into the flimsiest scenarios to justify those spins, and not disciplined enough to offset the experimental material with the more straightforward premises that the divergences should ideally be in conversation with.)

There’s not much of an overarching plot this year, but that’s not such a deal-breaker for me. The clearest throughline is La’an struggling to contain her rage and worrying that it’s something about her genetic heritage breaking through, but since that’s largely punted before the finale, I assume it’s laying the groundwork for the next run of the program, which has already been confirmed to be its last. The ending of a series always carries the potential for great pathos, and perhaps particularly in a prequel’s handoff to established events, with certain known fates locked-in and folks who were new to this story generating a degree of tension over how exactly they’ll get written off in time for James Kirk to take command of the Enterprise. While the show has fallen off its early heights for me, I find I’m still looking forward to seeing how the writers ultimately wrap everything up to bid farewell to it all.

[Content warning for torture and gore.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Blake’s 7, season 2

TV #42 of 2026:

Blake’s 7, season 2

I was lukewarm on the first season of this late-70s / early-80s British sci-fi series, and I think this follow-up is only a marginal improvement. I’m still not even sure what the title is supposed to refer to, and my theory that it’s the main cast including the spaceship A.I. takes a hit with the introduction of a second super-intelligent computer onboard — a pretty ludicrous development when their characters aren’t especially distinguished from one another and in fact are voiced by the same actor! Granted, one of the human crew members does get killed off midway through this year, which both raises the narrative stakes and admittedly brings the overall number of sentient beings on the Liberator back down to seven.

Although I love serialized fiction, I’d so far say that this particular show is stronger when it leans more into episodic storytelling, which is why I’d give this run a slight edge over its predecessor. The rebel Blake and his gang of fugitives arrive somewhere, encounter a situation that may or may not involve the galactic authorities chasing after them, and then have to resolve that immediate crisis within the hour. It’s a different surface dynamic than you’d see on, say, Star Trek or Doctor Who, but the programs are all fairly similar on a structural level, and that’s a formula for solid results.

Some of the ensuing adventures are better than others; I remember reflecting during the excellent sequence of 2×3 – 2×5 that I might wind up giving this season a higher rating than I did the last, as those stories were all individually so great. Unfortunately soon afterwards the quality dips again in my opinion, and the ending is an incoherent mess that aims for spectacle but moves too rapidly to be effective, to the point of dispatching one of the primary recurring villains almost as an afterthought.

It remains perfectly watchable, though, which I realize sounds like faint praise but is honestly somewhat commendable for the era. This is fine! But so far I’m not really seeing much to justify the diehard fandom that I know is out there.

[Content warning for gun violence, torture, and incest.]

★★★☆☆

Movie Review: Jurassic World Dominion (2022)

Movie #46 of 2026:

Jurassic World Dominion (2022)

I suppose all franchises have to evolve and take risks to avoid feeling derivative, but this sixth Jurassic Park installment seems like a profound miscalculation of what audiences are looking for from the series. Despite the last film ending on the explicit promise that the dinosaurs would now be living free in the wild — like some sort of, you know, Jurassic World — this next title features very little about humanity actually having to coexist with the sudden megafauna in their midst. Outside of a few isolated scenes, the status quo doesn’t appear radically different for our species, which is an odd choice for the future of the saga.

Instead, we learn that most of the dinos have been rounded up to a new location, under the control of a company with ties back to the first picture. Dodgson was the guy who hired Nedry to smuggle embryos out of the original park, and now he’s recast and running the place, amid a few other comically evil schemes. Part of the story involves people trying to flee his compound with the expected prehistoric animals on the loose, but certain rival subplots seem to come out of nowhere.

That clone girl from Fallen Kingdom? Owen and Claire are now raising her off the grid, where she has time to voice the usual teenage complaints of unfair parent rules before the villain’s poacher / human trafficker goons prove them right by kidnapping her. Meanwhile, he’s also bioengineered a variety of giant locusts to eat all crops on the planet except those sold by his firm, in a shortsighted move that brings the old trilogy’s scientist heroes Ellie Sattler, Alan Grant, and Ian Malcolm to his door (although it really isn’t any of their previously-established specialties).

And, look… Is it fun to get the team together again and see them eventually meet up with their JW successors? Sure, to a degree. But there are just too many competing movie concepts going on here simultaneously — including a bizarre Jason Bourne motorcycle chase through a generic international city — and when everyone does finally unite, we’re faced with that late-stage Stranger Things problem of having a group of eight or nine characters all bunched up to share the screen, where no one’s able to exhibit much personality on their own.

It’s a real mess, and a perfect illustration of how throwing blockbuster spectacle money into a project doesn’t matter if not enough attention has been spent on developing a decent script to support it.

[Content warning for gun violence and gore.]

★★☆☆☆