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: In Lonely Lands by Victoria Goddard

Book #63 of 2026:

In Lonely Lands by Victoria Goddard

This is the sort of title that I almost hate to see released as a standalone item, because it’s too insubstantial to bear much scrutiny but could be perfectly situated as a part of a larger story collection. In this case, it’s a ‘tale of Ysthar,’ which is author Victoria Goddard’s way of indicating an entry in her expansive Nine Worlds fantasy setting that nevertheless occupies a recognizable version of our reality. The immediate genre is maybe more like magical realism, since the paper-thin plot concerns a woman standing by the seaside cliff outside her home and seeing a giant eagle pass nearby — perhaps intelligent, perhaps looking at her, but ultimately just hovering there for a few moments and then departing. In its wake, she finds a feather on the ground seemingly made of bronze, and… that’s it.

I don’t mean to shortchange this; it’s a lovely and evocative piece of writing, and I can easily imagine how it fits within the gentle sorceries of Goddard’s other works. But even readers who bring that background context to the experience will find little to properly dig into here, and I don’t know that newcomers would get much out of it at all. There’s definite potential to the main character and her circumstances, but it’s an intriguing wisp that leaves me less than satisfied in the end.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: 84K by Claire North

Book #62 of 2026:

84K by Claire North

This novel has an interesting dystopian setting, which reads sort of like Gattaca meets V for Vendetta meets some of the depressing ultra-capitalist futures from Black Mirror. The justice system has shifted all crimes to be punished with indemnity charges rather than jail time, meaning that even the most depraved rapes and murders can result in only a steep fine for the perpetrator. In consequence, the extremely rich who can pay for such things have the freedom to do essentially whatever they wish, while the poorer citizens live in fear that any perceived misstep could bankrupt them into indentured servitude. At one point, we see a bored hitwoman call the police to report herself after a job, because she knows her employers will pay the fee and she wants to avoid the tedium of an official investigation.

The plot involves an everyman figure (who’d previously taken over the identity of a dead wealthy classmate) finally reaching his limit and trying to bring down the regime, although neither he nor anybody else can ever quite articulate his precise motives. In fact, articulation in general is a bit of a struggle in this book. For some reason, author Claire North has written the story with a significant number of run-on sentences and broken fragments, resulting in passages like the following:

“Silence from the couch. She passed him a mug, and maybe he said thank you, his lips moved and there was air in his throat, but the sound didn’t quite come out whole. She cast around for something else to do, putting a saucepan away, poking at the fire in the stove, still burning strong but who cares, more wood, do excuse me I’m just going to …

more wood, taken from the pile under the tarp on top of the deck, her breath frozen in the air, the cold a sudden shock that lets her feel how fast her heart is pumping …

a moment to catch the chill, letting the cold through her skin, taking her time grasping the log, enjoying the feel of it beneath her fingers, broken bark and dry splinters

then back in.

More wood.

Well isn’t that lovely it’s just

it’s just

Well.”

To a certain extent, that style does mirror how people tend to actually talk / think, but it makes for a more challenging read and I’m not convinced that it adds much to the overall tale. And even setting that aspect aside, the work never really settles into itself with a sense of urgency or a case for why the protagonist’s actions would have the kind of results that they eventually do. I still like it more than I dislike it in the end, but it’s not on the level that I typically expect from this writer.

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

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Matlock, season 2

TV #19 of 2026:

Matlock, season 2

The modern gender-swapped Matlock is a CBS legal procedural that loves to over-explain things to its audience, but I still rated the debut season at four-out-of-five stars for how propulsively fun the core premise can be at its best: an elderly lawyer infiltrating a law firm under an assumed name and phony folksy mannerisms, in order to snoop around and discover who hid documents in an old court case that could have exposed the dangers of opioids and had them taken off the market much earlier. But the shine unfortunately comes off a fair bit in this second outing, especially given its rushed and anticlimactic finale. As a result I’d give this one only two-and-a-half stars, rounded up, for a shaky effort that collapses entirely by the end.

On the positive side: now that Olympia knows Matty’s secret, the two of them make a good team and deepen their friendship significantly once they decide to start fully trusting one another again. The show also handles an awful unexpected casting shakeup midway through — a supporting actor fired for sexually assaulting a castmate — about as smoothly as it could, and it does ultimately wrap up the larger Wellbrexa conspiracy, rather than continuing to spin that plot out indefinitely.

The problem is, the conclusion falls absurdly flat, which in turn makes everything leading up to it feel far flimsier. After all that investigating, with the twists and turns and the heroine’s true identity in constant danger of exposure, the eventual method of taking down the bad guy seems like something the heroes could have done forever ago. And Matty doesn’t get to gloat about her victory or give a big speech about her dead daughter or anything, either! Meanwhile she’s been a bad friend to Sarah, and the groundwork is laid for an interesting development there over the inevitable feelings of betrayal that will surely surface once that last main player finally learns the truth. But instead the junior associate meekly backs down from her suspicions — i.e., her reasonable observations that her trusted colleagues have spent months gaslighting her about — and then gets told the big news by someone she doesn’t have any sort of relationship with. The camera even cuts away before getting a reaction from her, which is just an astonishingly poor treatment of a major character by a story that really doesn’t have very many of them in the first place.

I could understand such moves if this were a hastily-written ending for the program, or if its future remained uncertain at the time the scripts were due. But no, it somehow got an early renewal, and showrunner Jennie Snyder Urman has promised that the next year will have a brand-new focus outside of the primary storyline that’s bracketed the series thus far. Personally, I doubt I’ll be watching it.

★★★☆☆

Movie Review: Terminator Salvation (2009)

Movie #19 of 2026:

Terminator Salvation (2009)

A competent action spectacle that finally shows us John Connor in his element as a resistance soldier (though not yet a leader) in the post-apocalyptic future that the franchise had repeatedly warned us was looming. That’s a reasonable premise to explore and one that never plays like much of an empty nostalgic retread, although it threatens to jettison the primary hallmarks of the series in the process: the pursuit of a single unstoppable killer across an otherwise-recognizable modern world, the time-travel paradoxes, the fish-out-of-water comedy, and so on. This is a grim and serious installment — as perhaps over-emphasized by the desaturated visuals — and it largely works as a story about humans fighting back against the deadly robots who have destroyed their civilization. I’m just not entirely sure it feels like a Terminator film.

The plot splits its attention between Connor and a new character Marcus, who seems to have slept through the doomsday of Terminator 3 and its aftermath. He’s eventually and unsurprisingly revealed to be a cyborg, but the ultimate goal that Skynet is aiming to achieve with him proves oddly elusive. (He’s an infiltration unit designed to lure the main protagonist into a trap, but he’s alone with John at several points when he could easily just assassinate him himself. The machines likewise have Kyle Reese in their custody for a long while without killing him, which is not a mistake the Terminators we’ve seen before would ever make. It’s also not explained why that random teenager is supposedly the #1 target on their hit list, and if that means they know of his importance to the past — which the hero is trying to preserve to keep himself and humanity’s chances of survival alive, but which the mechanical beings technically need to maintain for their own existence as well, as established in Terminator 2.)

Such logic gaps drag the experience down for me, as does the acting. Sam Worthington’s American accent comes and goes, Christian Bale as the latest John Connor has seemingly no modes beyond his basic scowl, and Linda Hamilton as a voice on tape is the only returning actor from any previous release, although the CGI effects at putting young Arnold’s face on a T-800 are reasonably effective. The end result delivers more of a generic dystopia than a must-watch continuation of the saga, but it’s at least marginally better than I had remembered. I give it two-and-a-half stars, rounded up.

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

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Red Box by Rex Stout

Book #61 of 2026:

The Red Box by Rex Stout (Nero Wolfe #4)

These 1930s mysteries remain solid enough as a sort of American pastiche of Agatha Christie, but so far they’ve failed to hit the heights that she could periodically achieve for me. The premise to this novel, for example, is initially interesting — a young woman dies eating a poisoned chocolate intended for someone else, who is subsequently killed by different methods — but the eventual resolution feels frankly a bit absurd. (The culprit’s motives at least are relatively straightforward, but exactly how our eccentric agoraphobic detective Nero Wolfe deduces it all from the comfort of his brownstone seems to rely on guesswork and flimsy pseudo-psychology like why the second victim gave a favorite employee diamonds rather than another stone.)

The character work continues to be the best part, as wryly narrated by the investigator’s assistant Archie. Accompanying his boss on a rare excursion outdoors, for instance, he intentionally drives into potholes whenever the latter offers one of his maddeningly obscure hints about the case, which is a fun bit of petty revenge. But overall, I’d have to say this is a straightforwardly forgettable kind of story.

[Content warning for incest and suicide.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Abbott Elementary, season 5

TV #18 of 2026:

Abbott Elementary, season 5

As a sitcom, this series has always had a somewhat tenuous connection to any sort of grounded reality, but like The Office, it feels as though the comedy is getting broader and the characters more flanderized as the program ages. So here, for example, the teachers spend a few episodes relocated to an empty shopping mall while their school is under repair, and Mr. Johnson’s date to the Janitors Ball gets canceled when all attendees are rerouted to clean up the crash of a semi-truck full of glitter bombs. That’s the kind of zany logic that wouldn’t have flown in earlier seasons, and it’s matched by low-effort episodic premises like a trip to the DMV that suggest the writers might just be running out of story ideas about elementary education.

In other developments this year, Janine and Gregory get more serious about their relationship, with a nice arc surrounding their moving in together. Unfortunately that’s balanced by a random breakup later on that the scripts never manage to sell as well-motivated or likely to stick, which sure enough, it doesn’t. Overall it’s a fairly aimless run for the show, still generally enjoyable to watch — minus a few inane corporate product placements for Wayfair and the latest Avatar movie — but not landing nearly as strongly as it did in its prime.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Moonwar by Ben Bova

Book #60 of 2026:

Moonwar by Ben Bova (Moonbase Saga #2)

Author Ben Bova’s novel Moonrise was a somewhat scattered prelude about life in a near-future lunar settlement, but it built nicely to the situation that’s front and center for this sequel: the facility’s leaders declaring their independence from Earth, so as not to be bound by an international treaty banning the nanotechnology that their systems require to operate.

The result is a neat political thriller, very reminiscent of my favorite arc on Babylon 5 when that station likewise breaks away from the corrupt planetary government. The self-styled “lunatics” have few weapons with which to defend themselves against an aggressive military force of U.N. peacekeepers, but they do have the home advantage and the scientific know-how to engage in clever resistance tactics while stalling for time and trying to win the war of public approval back on the ground.

Some of this feels a little dated a few decades on, like the communications blackout that the United Nations is able to get all news agencies to abide by, and the writer’s characters continue to display a higher libido than seems appropriate for either their circumstances or their professional responsibilities. But overall, it’s a great plot, and one that rewards loyal readers by bringing back a minor figure from the otherwise-unrelated title Mars. With an MCU-style crossover like that, it’s the first time that Bova’s Grand Tour has felt like a cohesive series to me and not just a random group of stories all set around a vaguely common theme of early space exploration. I never read much further than this before, so I’m hoping that’s an atmosphere that’s kept up as the wider saga goes on!

[Content warning for racism including slurs, gun violence, rape, suicide, and gore.]

This volume: ★★★★☆

Overall series: ★★★★☆

Volumes ranked 1 > 2

Book Review: Doctor Who: Deceit by Peter Darvill-Evans

Book #59 of 2026:

Doctor Who: Deceit by Peter Darvill-Evans (Virgin New Adventures #13)

One of the better entries that I’ve read in this 90s spinoff series so far, and especially notable for a few fun developments on the side. First, this is the sole VNA novel written by editor Peter Darvill-Evans, and so offers an exceptionally clear demonstration of his vision for how these stories were meant to continue the Doctor Who franchise following its cancellation on television (in both the main text and an even more direct afterword on the subject). The Seventh Doctor, for instance, is by now a master manipulator who sets long chains of events into motion and then follows through to clean up the consequences, often with a false air of innocence and a ruthless alien morality driving his actions. He’s particularly motivated to protect humanity’s timeline from the malevolent interference of other time-travelers, since — in a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy — he’s become so intimately involved with the species over his lengthy association with us.

Here, his interest is in an emerging gestalt intelligence on a distant corporate-run colony world, although as usual, he keeps his exact aims pretty close to the chest. Having finally cured his TARDIS of its lingering instabilities — which sadly never amounted to much across the past few installments — he’s able to fall into the customary Doctorish pattern of arriving somewhere new, talking to the locals, and toppling the neighborhood tyrant. He’s aided in this effort by his current companion Professor Bernice Summerfield, but also by her predecessor Ace, who makes a triumphant return after three years apart (or six months for readers and roughly half that time for her friends). In her absence she’s finished her transformation from the plucky teenager she was on TV into a grimmer and battle-hardened young woman, and has joined up with a squadron of space marines who are on their way to the planet to investigate its mysteries.

Rounding out the party is Abslom Daak, a brutish fan-favorite antihero from the pages of the Doctor Who comic books. His inclusion is kind of silly — his whole gimmick is that he’s a dedicated Dalek killer, and those enemies aren’t even present in this particular adventure — and though Ace spends the volume trying to keep him alive because she knows he dies in glory elsewhere, she’s ultimately unsuccessful only to learn that he’s a clone whose death won’t impact the course of history anyway. Still, it’s a neat and then-unprecedented crossover that serves to mutually reinforce the canonical nature of both the comics and this sequence of novels.

The plot isn’t the most original, but it’s fine enough as a backdrop for these elements, not to mention the returning cyberpunk era setting and a certain toxic lesbian relationship that the characters encounter. I’ve enjoyed the work for itself and for what it represents alike, and I’m looking forward to seeing more of “New Ace” (as the fandom calls her) in the sequels ahead.

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

★★★★☆

TV Review: Homicide: Life on the Street, season 3

TV #17 of 2026:

Homicide: Life on the Street, season 3

At 20 episodes, this is Homicide’s first full-length season, following two with 9 and 4 respectively while it was still an uncertain property on the bubble of cancellation. It’s another strong one, taking advantage of the greater space with more serialized arcs — though they didn’t always air in the right order — and experimentation in format like stories that decenter the main cast or end without a suspect getting caught for their crimes. I don’t find the running subplot of some of the detectives buying a neighborhood bar to be particularly enthralling, but it’s nice to see major cases take weeks to resolve and serious injuries linger to the extent that they should. And in a further sign of the program’s growing popularity, it has a brief crossover with Law & Order (a cameo drop-in from Chris Noth as Det. Mike Logan), which would prove to be the first of several such connections and culminate in Richard Belzer’s John Munch joining the Special Victims Unit spinoff after this series ended.

A few casting changes mark the year as well. Reportedly to improve the gender ratio, the new character of Lt. Megan Russert is introduced, while Jon Polito as Steve Crosetti becomes the first original star not to return (so chosen due to NBC not liking his physical appearance, allegedly). In seeming protest of that network decision, the writers turn his departure into a tragic suicide, spending the hour when his squadmates learn the news on a fittingly somber tribute to the man. Actors Daniel Baldwin and Ned Beatty would also choose to leave at the conclusion of this run, although I don’t know yet how that will be handled on-screen.

Notable guest stars this time include Steve Buscemi, John Waters, Bruno Kirby, and Jerry Stiller, while Beau Felton’s previously unseen wife finally appears to give more shape to his nebulous unhappy marriage. It’s a fine outing all around, and one that continues to offer interesting predicaments beyond the typical limitations of a tidy police procedural.

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

★★★★☆

Book Review: Tom’s Crossing by Mark Z. Danielewski

Book #58 of 2026:

Tom’s Crossing by Mark Z. Danielewski

This is an incredibly long novel — 1232 pages in hardback; 58 hours to listen to the audiobook on regular speed — that in my opinion never quite manages to justify its heft. It’s a pretty straightforward story, especially compared to author Mark Z. Danielewski’s infamously experimental House of Leaves: two teenagers in 1982 Utah rescue a pair of horses that their legal owner was going to slaughter, then lead them through a difficult mountain pass to reach a national preserve where they can roam free. Unbeknownst to the young thieves, they also make convenient scapegoats for a murder that happens soon after their departure, leading to an angry posse stirred up by the real killer on their trail.

The effect reads a lot like vintage Stephen King, and was obviously strong enough for me to finish the thing despite its size. But I have a hard time accepting the sixteen-year-old protagonist as such a riding and shooting prodigy, and I don’t care much for the device the writer uses of regularly interjecting random asides of opinions from future strangers as a sort of ramshackle Greek chorus. (Apparently the teens’ ordeal will someday be so well-known as to be the subject of countless songs and paintings and academic papers and beyond. There’s one late stretch of the narrative devoted to an entire art exhibition on the matter that feels particularly egregious and interminable.)

Still, when it sticks to the central action it’s a decent western / wilderness survival tale, and I like how the characters are accompanied by the ghost of a dead friend only one of them can see, who in turn reports that he’s joined by an additional spirit invisible to the living as well. Plenty of individual moments within that framework are striking, but I’d look far more favorably on the title at a fraction of its length.

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

★★★☆☆