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: Songs of the Dead by Brandon Sanderson and Peter Orullian

Book #106 of 2026:

Songs of the Dead by Brandon Sanderson and Peter Orullian (The Strata Wars #1)

[Disclaimer: I am Facebook friends with the first author.]

This collaborative foray into the urban fantasy genre leaves a lot to be desired, and reading between the lines of the co-writers’ public statements, it sounds like the finished product — which languished in various draft forms for over a decade — is much more Peter Orullian than Brandon Sanderson, who contributed to the early worldbuilding and outlining stages instead. I’m not interested in the characters, setting, or ongoing story enough to continue on with any eventual sequels, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the series gets published under Orullian’s name alone going forward.

The premise involves a heavy metal singer who learns he’s a powerful mage in London’s hidden wizarding society, able to bind people’s souls in such a way that they can live on after death. The most distinctive part of this arrangement is that entire societies of the deceased have taken up residence in a sort of imagined version of the city existing in the collective subconscious, which the wizards — sorry, “thanatists” — can access by climbing down special staircases into what looks and feels like an anachronistic past. But these strata are subject to change based on how they’re remembered in the world above, leading a resentful villain to try and raise an army to somehow conquer reality and impose his vision of proper culture upon it. It’s a pretty fascist plan, but hard to take seriously given how his primary complaint seems to be that today’s music isn’t aesthetically pleasing to his ears.

I am not a musician myself, though Orullian reportedly is, and I’ve had difficulty connecting with the protagonist’s effort to keep tinkering with one of his autobiographical songs for years on end in order to get the lyrics just right. It plays out as a big cathartic moment when he finally processes a certain trauma to accomplish that, but the effect is muddled by the cost of his spells requiring him to give up especially meaningful memories anyway, with no real examination of the conflict or inherent horror there. I also don’t love the plot device of a neophyte learning all about a universe as our entry viewpoint into it; although it can be done well (as in Sanderson’s first Mistborn novel, for example), it tends to necessitate a lot of hand-holding exposition, which is certainly the case here. A stronger work could have hit the ground running with a hero who already knows the ins and outs of the magical system, leaving more room to develop the supporting cast and the immediate crisis around them.

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

★★☆☆☆

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TV Review: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, season 2

TV #31 of 2026:

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, season 2

On an episodic level, this second and final run of the late-aughts Terminator show works alright, I guess. The character dynamics of a fraught relationship between mother and son and the awkward peace with their spectrum-coded cyborg ally remain compelling, and the action sequences are competent enough for the TV genre and budget. At its best, it continues to achieve a loose Whedonesque hangout vibe that serves it well from scene to scene with the central family, all things considered.

But the larger plot is an aimless and overstuffed mess. Subplots move fitfully with boring mysteries like what three dots painted on a wall might mean, and the protagonists don’t really have any legible goals that they’re working towards. The villains aren’t any better either, pursuing their own ill-defined missions and regularly letting important characters escape rather than, you know, terminating them. It’s like the series doesn’t want to actually grapple with what it would mean to live in this franchise, or at least not at the expense of upsetting the established balance of the ensemble. Even when the heroes do finally manage to kill off their main adversary Cromartie, it isn’t long before his body is brought back in a different guise — taking the Deadwood approach of keeping Garret Dillahunt on the payroll postmortem, I suppose, although granted it’s more textually-supported here.

But as a cohesive story, this is all just so nebulous and poorly thought-out, which makes for a fairly tedious viewing experience. I knew going into the program that it ended on an unresolved cliffhanger, but I wasn’t expecting to have so many earlier threads likewise lead nowhere and go totally unexplained. The conclusion isn’t unsatisfying simply because we’ll never get to see what comes of those closing developments — the subsequent movies don’t try to reconcile their own canonical timelines, let alone that of this oddball television branch — but also because nothing beforehand has any significant weight to even reach that point at all. What a waste of a promising premise and cast.

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

This season: ★★☆☆☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Seasons ranked: 1 > 2

Book Review: Minute Cryptic by Angas Tiernan and Liam Runnalls

Book #105 of 2026:

Minute Cryptic by Angas Tiernan and Liam Runnalls

Cryptic crosswords are a sort of puzzle, more common in England, in which the answers to clues involve creative wordplay rather than outside trivia. Generally the solution will be a synonym for either the start or the end of the prompt, with the remainder subtly instructing us how to combine it all together and a number in parentheses indicating the proper length. Thus for example in “Very nice purse ransacked by head of bank” (6), the letters from “purse” can be ransacked, or rearranged, to form SUPER, and the head or beginning of “bank” is B, which collectively yield SUPERB as another term for “very nice.” Likewise for “Farm animal in toboggan looked unhappy” (7), we can put the farm animal COW into the replacement word for toboggan SLED to get SCOWLED, which is a somewhat-stretched way of saying “looked unhappy.”

This book, a spinoff of the daily online challenge of the same name, walks us through all that with lessons and tips on how to handle such matters. Across eight chapters, author Angas Tiernan patiently and engagingly explains the different sorts of maneuvers that cryptics require — anagrams, selectors, hiddens, reversals, substitutions, containers, deletions, and homophones — with plenty of opportunity for hands-on practice and clever problems designed by his cowriter Liam Runnalls, many of which include some delightful puns or other trickery. (A favorite of mine: “City increasin’ twofold, say” (6), which resolves to DUBLIN. Can you see why?) The work builds on itself to level up a reader’s skill gradually, and offers hints to help nudge you in the right direction whenever you might get stuck. It’s a fun read for the novice and the expert alike, rendering a potentially-daunting pastime considerably more approachable without sanding the difficulty off entirely.

Here’s one last exercise to send you on your way: “Did butterfly finally flutter away from insect group?” (4). The answer will rely on rephrasing part of that question and then correctly identifying and removing one or more characters from it, while keeping an open mind to a less-obvious meaning behind the definition. Give it a try for yourself, and dive into the rest of this volume for more!

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Rock Rats by Ben Bova

Book #104 of 2026:

The Rock Rats by Ben Bova (The Asteroid Wars #2)

Author Ben Bova’s Grand Tour stories of outer space exploration continue to be hit-or-miss for me, and this title unfortunately isn’t one of the better ones. There’s the core of a neat idea here, involving the small community that’s grown up among miners in the asteroid belt realizing that without a formalized government, they’re at the mercy of lawless strongmen, but reducing that to a conflict between two tech CEOs, largely over their common love interest, isn’t the most interesting approach to that concept of a galactic frontier. The action that follows is pretty disjointed too, with a lot of time jumps and no particular effort to flesh out supporting characters like the crew of the Nautilus who theoretically should be key to the plot. Pancho and Amanda feel so much blander than they did in the previous volume as well, while the only other notable woman is a bit of a generic femme fatale.

It’s not a complete bust, and I always enjoy checking in on some of the returning protagonists and seeing the history of this fictional universe push forward, but I do hope the remainder of the sub-series is able to pull out of the skid.

[Content warning for domestic abuse, gun violence, forced pregnancy, and gore.]

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: Doctor Who: White Darkness by David A. McIntee

Book #103 of 2026:

Doctor Who: White Darkness by David A. McIntee (Virgin New Adventures #15)

Largely a back-to-basics reset for the series, bringing the Seventh Doctor and his companions Ace and Bernice to Haiti in 1915, amid the unrest that ultimately led to an American invasion and occupation of the island country. While not a straight historical adventure — cultists are trying to raise one of H. P. Lovecraft’s Old Ones, in the first explicit connection of that mythos to Doctor Who — it’s a pretty well-researched period piece that is generally content to get the protagonists caught up in various earthly intrigues and keep the wilder sci-fi business to a minimum. For most of the plot, the main threat isn’t even the unnamed extradimensional being lurking in the background, but rather that outsiders are appropriating and corrupting the traditional vodoun practices, researching ways to enhance the pharmacological properties that induce a pacifying ‘zombi’ state.

I had my hesitations about this story (especially once I realized the Lovecraftian angle), but I think it treats its subject fairly respectfully overall. There is overt racism in the text, including racial slurs, but our viewpoint time-travelers are firmly against such nonsense and one senses that author David A. McIntee was striving to write the Haitians as a real and multifaceted society to the best of his abilities. Plotwise it’s a bit overstuffed with characters and action beats that involve them running from one location to another, and other than the setting, it doesn’t really showcase the cleverness or ambition that I’d prefer in a work like this. But I’ve certainly seen worse from this franchise before.

[Content warning for slavery, suicide, gun violence, threat of rape, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Movie Review: Jay and Silent Bob Reboot (2019)

Movie #31 of 2026:

Jay and Silent Bob Reboot (2019)

Here’s a picture that lives up to its title, effectively repeating the premise from Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001): those slacker stoners again going on a cross-country journey to Hollywood, in order to stop a film being made about the comic book superheroes that are based on them. (In one of many meta-twists, including writer-director Kevin Smith now playing himself as well as Silent Bob, the new project is itself a reboot of the one they failed to prevent the last time around.) It also features another fun assembly of callbacks to previous View Askewniverse releases and other Smith productions, most notably an epilogue of sorts to Chasing Amy (1997) that openly addresses some of that story’s flaws.

What distinguishes this from its predecessor, besides the humor seeming somewhat less outrageous and immature, is an extra focus on the passage of time and particularly on certain characters having become parents. Franchise sequels often pretend that the status quo freezes between installments, and this one feints in that direction with the initial setup that Jay and Silent Bob — and Dante, running the Quick Stop — are basically up to the same old business we saw from Clerks (1994) through Clerks II (2006). But in fact it’s been eighteen years since Strike Back, and while the protagonists might not have matured all that much in the meantime, Jay does discover that he now has a teenager with his ex from that movie (though she’s played, amusingly / distractingly, by Smith’s own daughter instead).

This development adds a nice energy of parental bonding as the girl and her friends join the wayward pair on their latest road trip to California, although he doesn’t tell her right away that he’s her father. It’s not exactly great cinema, but it provides an effective scaffold for the laughs, which include two of my favorite bits in the series yet: a courtroom appearance in front of Judge Jerry N. Executioner and a Clerks reunion panel in which the cast somehow appears entirely in black-and-white. Sure, a lot of the rest of this is just lazy slapstick and referential comedy — cue Bob distracting a Klan rally with quotes from Glengarry Glen Ross for long enough that Jay can empty a porta-potty on them — but at least the dick jokes and edgy homophobia have been toned down.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Magician’s Gambit by David Eddings

Book #102 of 2026:

Magician’s Gambit by David Eddings (The Belgariad #3)

I continue to struggle with how generic this 80s fantasy series seems to me, like The Lord of the Rings or The Chronicles of Prydain with the more interesting worldbuilding, character, and plot details sanded down. It’s very much a product of its time, faithfully offering tropes that stronger works in the genre would manage to subvert or avoid entirely. (And it’s not as though the era was a complete desert there, either — The Belgariad postdates the original Thomas Covenant and Earthsea sagas, to pick just two easy counterexamples. But this is something that later authors have gotten better about, as publishing trends mature.)

This volume honestly feels like it could have been the ending of a trilogy, as the heroes finally reveal, confront, and defeat their shadowy enemy, while the young farmboy protagonist hones his magic abilities and awkwardly flirts with his petulant princess love interest. Yet somehow there are another two volumes ahead regardless, so I’ll push on, I suppose. As usual, my three-star rating for this title is meant to capture that it isn’t bad per se; it’s simply not doing a lot I can point to as being exciting or worth specifically recommending to anyone. Isolated parts remain enjoyable or intriguing enough to keep reading, but they’ve been few and far between for me across these first few stories.

[Content warning for suicide and slavery.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Homicide: Life on the Street, season 4

TV #30 of 2026:

Homicide: Life on the Street, season 4

Still enjoyable, but too uneven compared to previous years, which is going to result in a lower rating from me. I do commend the writers for experimenting a bit with the conventional procedural format, and the results include two of my favorite episodes yet: Full Moon, which plays out like an indie film as Lewis and his new partner investigate a middle-of-the-night shooting at a seedy motel, and Stakeout, which offers a theatrical structure I’ve literally never seen on television before. In that latter installment, the heroes are monitoring an empty house for when a suspect will arrive, in two-person shifts that rotate one member every three hours. Over the course of an entire day, the whole team passes through, and we get treated to a succession of fascinating heart-to-heart conversations with no particular action to speak of. If you’re going to watch only one episode of this series, I’d recommend tracking that one down for sure.

And the rest isn’t all bad, either. It’s nice to see Kay get made sergeant, and Bruce Campbell turns in a great dramatic performance in a two-part guest arc. Reed Diamond is a solid addition to the squad that’s otherwise down a couple members too, as is Isabella Hofmann in her own expanded role. (In contrast to the lovely tribute when Crosetti’s actor was fired, however, Felton and Bolander’s absence is crudely attributed to them being suspended for getting naked, drunk, and disorderly somewhere, which feels like petty revenge for their performers quitting over rumored contract disputes.) But opposite the better qualities is the introduction of the pointless videographer character Brodie and an overall weakening of the verisimilitude of the drama.

For the first time, the homicide cops are shown covering non-lethal shootings as well as their typical beat, with no explanation on-screen for the change. We also get probably the worst story so far, in which a slavering Jeffrey Donovan plays identical twins on an interstate murder spree, and for some reason that’s handed to the Baltimore detectives to intercept and apprehend them. There’s a full crossover with Law & Order — “For God and Country” following the other program’s season 6 episode “Charm City” — which seems to leave behind its liberties with realistic procedure, resulting in cases that go immediately to trial and names that don’t get switched from red to black on the board until a conviction, rather than a simple arrest. And in general, the average case here just strikes me as more sensationalized, with serial killers and snipers and whatnot that make everything that much less grounded.

So it’s not the best, despite the aforementioned highlights, but I’ll keep watching in hopes that the future of the show trends closer to the parts that do continue to work really well.

[Content warning for racism, homophobia, domestic abuse, sexual assault, gun violence, suicide, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Gregor and the Code of Claw by Suzanne Collins

Book #101 of 2026:

Gregor and the Code of Claw by Suzanne Collins (The Underland Chronicles #5)

This series has had its ups and downs, but it concludes on a high note that ties everything together rather gracefully. Following the cliffhanger from the last volume, the story resumes with the humans and their allies in the underground city of Regalia on the brink of a siege war, with our twelve-year-old protagonist scrambling to defend his friends and keep his loved ones safe. The similarities to the author’s later Hunger Games novels have never been clearer, as Gregor faces bloodthirsty and underhanded people on his own side who would sink to the same cruel methods as their enemies in the very name of opposing them. Like Katniss, he’s moved to speak out against the cycle of violence and insist on a path forward that doesn’t wind up perpetuating the conflict into future generations.

Along the way there are thrills and heartaches, as readers hopefully expect by now. This is the sort of saga to start as a middle-grade romp and darken considerably as it progresses, and so the character deaths hit harder this time, while the specific dynamics the hero shares with Luxa, Ares, and Ripred feel fuller and more mature. The hokier prophecy stuff is almost absent at this point, and when it does arise, the characters are more appropriately skeptical of how the interpretations can be manipulated to fit a chosen narrative.

In the end I’m not sure all the meandering quest plots of the earlier books were necessary, and I don’t know that I would ever need to reread the entire Underland Chronicles. But I appreciate what Suzanne Collins has managed to achieve here, and I think this is about as strong a sendoff for the setting as we realistically could have gotten.

[Content warning for genocide and gore.]

This volume: ★★★★☆

Overall series: ★★★★☆

Volumes ranked: 5 > 1 > 4 > 2 > 3

Book Review: The Golem of Brooklyn by Adam Mansbach

Book #100 of 2026:

The Golem of Brooklyn by Adam Mansbach

A golem is a creature out of Jewish mythology, said to be carved from clay and brought to life with the proper incantations to defend its maker’s community during times of strife. This 2023 volume places one in a modern madcap satire, although I’d say the attempts at humor are no more than sporadically effective. Better is the twist on the traditional lore that there has only ever been one such being, whose same consciousness manifests whenever a new avatar is built and awakened in the right way. And of course, the prospect of directing this fabled defender of Judaism against a Charlottesville-style rally of torch-wielding and conspiracy-chanting white nationalists carries a certain delirious appeal, even if our main protagonist objects that killing them would be wrong.

In truth, an entire story could have been forged from that debate alone, with passionate Talmudic arguments getting assayed back and forth over the morality of bloody eye-for-an-eye justice. Here, however, the argument is fairly truncated, which tends to blunt the impact considerably. So too the idea of the golem missing the Holocaust and only learning about it decades after the fact, or the question of how it went unsummoned for so long when a random secular art teacher was able to figure out how to construct the thing from the internet. This book is unfortunately just too short to handle these matters appropriately, especially given its tendency to fly off on bizarre tangents like a supporting character’s plan for a screenplay involving interspecies human-dolphin erotica.

There are still elements to enjoy in this title. It’s the clear work of a savvy cultural Jew (with an extended cameo from Larry David, even), it’s one of the rare novels from the past decade to actually feature and critique the racism of the alt-right political movement, and it delivers some fun wordplay and lines of reasoning throughout. “Did the existence of a golem imply the existence of God?” someone muses at one point. “One hundred percent. But this was an easy answer, as the existence of bees also implied the existence of God.” That’s an incredibly Jewish take on the situation, but it doesn’t necessarily do anything to strengthen the surrounding plot.

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

★★★☆☆