The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Doctor Who: Cat’s Cradle: Witch Mark by Andrew Hunt

Book #130 of 2025:

Doctor Who: Cat’s Cradle: Witch Mark by Andrew Hunt (Virgin New Adventures #7)

A continuation (and end) of the Cat’s Cradle arc solely in that the TARDIS remains largely out of commission while it finishes its repairs, thereby stranding Ace and the Seventh Doctor in modern rural Wales. There they proceed to stumble across some local intrigues that mostly read as an excuse to get unicorns and centaurs and the like into Doctor Who, which I understand certain fans absolutely detested.

I don’t really mind the eventual logic here myself — a powerful alien has specifically fashioned these beings to resemble creatures from Earth’s mythology — but the story doesn’t have much of a point to it beyond explaining the original premise and its foray into the fantasy genre. Meanwhile subplots get dropped without resolution, the tone veers all over the place, and our heroine has rather disappointingly regressed from the capable operative she was in the previous installment into more of a generic teenager. Ultimately the time machine is restored via nonsensical deus ex machina, bringing both the adventure and this weak attempt at an ongoing multi-volume storyline to a close.

This was author Andrew Hunt’s first and only published novel, and it shows. (He was reportedly working as a veterinarian when he pitched it, which makes me suspect the character who shares that profession may have been a bit of a self-insert.) Still, I blame the editors more than anything else. I know the franchise was in a tailspin at the time, but this is not how you go about producing a series. Could we at least have gotten a version of this tale that didn’t implicitly suggest that witch burnings were justified?

[Content warning for violence against children, genocide, and gore.]

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: Oathbound by Tracy Deonn

Book #129 of 2025:

Oathbound by Tracy Deonn (The Legendborn Cycle #3)

It’s rarely a good sign when an author revises the projected length of a series midway through to tack on some additional volume(s). This particular YA fantasy story, for instance, winds up taking quite a lot of pages and yet accomplishing very little to move the larger plot along. I believe this is where I’ll personally be parting ways with the Legendborn Cycle, which after a promising start has offered diminishing returns for me as a reader. I haven’t gone back for a reread, so I can’t say if the writing has truly gotten worse, but I’ve definitely noticed more issues with it this time amid such a slow-paced installment where no one’s motivations feel especially urgent or well-defined.

(One illustrative example of the prose in question: “Our gazes lock together. His, a hot blaze against my face and my lips, sends a shudder down my spine without my permission.” To which I have to ask our heroine: Are your lips not a part of your face? And do you often find yourself shuddering… with permission?)

The protagonist ran away with the big bad demon at the end of the previous title for unclear reasons, and as this one picks up, he starts nebulously training her to strengthen her various magics. He’s also cast a spell that causes her to forget her friends and their history together, although I really don’t understand the point of that, since when she runs into them later, she still has enough residual familiarity to trust them implicitly, and they proceed to fill her back in on what she’s lost with no adverse effects. For much of this novel, a few of the characters are confined to a single location — they’ve tracked down a mystical artifact that wasn’t particularly hidden and then had to stay in the compound when their failed efforts to steal it trigger certain safeguards — and it all reads like a thin fanfiction-y justification for forcing Bree and her estranged love interest to pose as a happy couple and share a bed for the weekend.

I’m trying not to be a hater here, but this whole book is packed with scenes that would seem to raise plot holes upon closer consideration, and the narrative loses all sense of which factions are squabbling with one another or why. We’re now splitting our focus among multiple POVs too, most of which could have been excised without any appreciable impact. I will miss some of these people and their odd version of inherited Arthurian powers, but I don’t think I can justify coming back for any more sequels at this point.

[Content warning for racism and gore.]

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: Diet, Drugs, and Dopamine: The New Science of Achieving a Healthy Weight by David A. Kessler, MD

Book #128 of 2025:

Diet, Drugs, and Dopamine: The New Science of Achieving a Healthy Weight by David A. Kessler, MD

This is not a weight-loss book. Rather, it’s an overview from former FDA Commissioner David Kessler (no relation) on the current medical understanding of nutrition and dieting, the widespread problem that he calls food addiction, and the new class of GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic which seem promising to help treat it. The author shares that he’s struggled to maintain an ideal weight and resist certain cravings his whole life, and that he’s recently achieved results with such medications himself, although he has misgivings about their understudied long-term effects.

The arguments laid out in the text sound generally reasonable to my layman’s read, though I note that the writer fudges a bit on the exact science of ‘food addiction.’ That is, he regularly cites experts on addiction, describes an aspect of our modern western diet, and then concludes that the latter should qualify as an example of the former, with no indication that anyone he’s consulted has necessarily signed off on that designation. In the process, I suspect he’s rather overstating the case against ultra-processed foods beyond what a consensus of the research community would perhaps support. There certainly doesn’t appear to be any large-scale movement calling for the sort of nutritional packaging reforms that he suggests, interesting as it is to hear him comparing food companies to the cigarette manufacturers he helped better regulate in the 1990s.

Nevertheless, the addict language does feel like a helpful framework for conceptualizing snacking and other unwanted consumption behaviors, and I could see the establishment wisdom catching up to him there at some point. The volume has plenty of information to assist readers in making informed choices about their own caloric intake, including descriptions of how a few popular dieting plans function in the body and the reminder that sleep regulation is an important part of feeling properly satiated by whatever we eat. I also appreciate that a distinction is drawn between excess weight as a medical concern of fatty tissue surrounding a person’s internal organs and the faulty idea that particular sizes / shapes / problematic calculations like BMI are inherently unhealthy.

Overall it’s not a bad job, even if the repetitive matter-of-fact prose leaves something to be desired. (A sample passage: “This genetics test did not help me understand why I have a difficult time controlling my weight. Could a different genetics test help me better understand why I have a difficult time controlling my weight?”) Get an editor, Kessler!

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

Book #127 of 2025:

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

On paper, there’s perhaps not much of a plot to this 700-page winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction: a thirteen-year-old boy acquires a famous piece of artwork under extraordinary circumstances, and then spends the next decade-and-a-half fretting about it while falling steadily into a life of deceptions and outright crime. In practice, however, this unconventional bildungsroman is grippingly immersive, with long passages of Dickensian detail exploring both the protagonist’s coming-of-age and his lingering trauma from the experience he survived as a boy. Author Donna Tartt creates a masterful distancing effect here amid the striking vistas of New York City, Las Vegas, and Amsterdam, as though her viewpoint creation is numb to the very world around him that she paints in such vivid colors for the rest of us.

He’s a tough character to love, seldom troubled by the (im)morality of a chosen action so much as the potential repercussions if he happens to get caught. Although not quite as sociopathic, he reminds me in that sense of the antihero from Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley — which is also a reaction I had to this writer’s The Secret History, so it may just be an aspect of how she tends to write her narrators. Even when he isn’t lying to everyone he knows or actively engaged in one of his many antiquities swindles, he’s unhealthily fixated on a particular female acquaintance who gives no indication of ever returning that interest. (Certain stories would reward a guy like Theo by having him ‘get the girl’ at the end; at this risk of spoilers, this is thankfully not that sort of tale.)

I do slightly prefer the first half of the novel, in which our teenage hero moves listlessly from one new living arrangement and close childhood friendship to another, over the next part, which picks back up with him as an adult after an eight-year time jump. On the other hand, the latter includes a pretty excellent twist and even some meaningful growth for the man, at least eventually. Overall I would say that this is a work about how obsessions gnaw at us and drag us into unhealthy versions of ourselves, with the chained bird in the titular Dutch painting proving an apt metaphor for the lead figure himself. In many ways he’s bound to his own worst past decisions, and until he can find a way out of those self-inflicted chains, he’ll never be able to fly free. His journey to get there makes for a slow and somewhat infuriating read, but the landscapes along the way are worthwhile, even if he himself might not be.

[Content warning for parental death, drug and alcohol abuse, gun violence, suicide, and gore.]

★★★★☆

Movie Review: Babylon 5: A Call to Arms (1999)

Movie #9 of 2025:

Babylon 5: A Call to Arms (1999)

This was the first of Babylon 5‘s various TV movies to air after the show ended its regular run, and my understanding is that it functions primarily as a bridge to the upcoming spinoff Crusade, which ran for one abbreviated season later that year. I wouldn’t call the film a pilot for that second series — the main characters are B5’s Sheridan and Garibaldi, who wouldn’t appear in a single episode — but it introduces a couple important faces and then in the last five minutes deploys a twist that will form the premise of the program to come.

It’s not great, but it’s at least a step up from The Legend of the Rangers (which was produced afterwards but set earlier, hence why I’ve already seen it). This is unexceptionally competent science-fiction for the most part, and although the returning actors know their roles well, the writing doesn’t do much to draw upon that sense of personal history. It almost feels like a script that’s wary of frightening off newcomers with undue outside references, so while there’s brief mentions of Delenn and Z’ha’dum, the full weight of the existing continuity doesn’t register to any significant degree. If you started here, you wouldn’t really understand what the protagonists mean to one another — though that might make it easier to accept everyone’s skepticism over John’s visions, I suppose! Personally, if I knew someone who had been through everything that he had, I’d trust that he was probably on the level with his latest prophetic warning, all lack of evidence be damned.

Among the newer heroes, the one who makes the biggest impression on me doesn’t survive the ordeal, which is kind of a bummer. The others are more archetypes than anything else for now, so I’ll have to see whether their own series does a better job of fleshing them out.

★★★☆☆

TV Review: The Sopranos, season 1

TV #41 of 2025:

The Sopranos, season 1

I’ve never seen The Sopranos before, but my understanding is that the show is widely considered both great on its own terms and very influential on the television industry at large. (Personally The Americans kept coming to mind as a relevant successor program as I watched this debut season, since the two share an obvious interest in parents figuring out how to tell their children about their secret criminal occupations.) Among other strengths, it helped popularize the art of telling an ongoing serialized story with rich complex character arcs, rather than having its cast generally revert back to the same status quo at the end of every episode. That’s not to say that this series was the only one of its kind — it followed Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and premiered the same year as The West Wing, to pick just two other examples — but it’s commonly been regarded as a trailblazer within that cohort.

There are some growing pains and missteps in this first run, strong as it is overall. 1×9 “Boca,” for instance, suddenly reveals that the protagonist’s daughter Meadow plays soccer for her high school, that he and his mafia friends show up to cheer on every game, and that another girl on the team has been sleeping over at their house for several weeks. Those are all details that should have been introduced naturalistically in previous episodes, not made up out of whole cloth once they were needed for the immediate plot of the hour (and then never mentioned again afterwards). It inevitably seems like a cheap retcon, which weakens the impact of that particular storyline and flies against the exact praise I was laying out above. And let’s not even talk about the absurdity of the title figure from 1×12 “Isabella.”

Luckily, the majority of the season is better. We’re presented with a version of Italian-American organized crime that sits comfortably in the same genre as classic predecessors like The Godfather trilogy and Goodfellas — which the characters have all seen and repeatedly reference — but is skewed more towards scenes of quiet suburban living. While the typical power struggles, FBI investigations, and occasional moments of shocking violence are still included, they’re really not a dominant focus of the text. The inciting event of the pilot is not some dramatic escalation in a mob war, after all, but just that our tough-seeming New Jersey antihero has collapsed due to a panic attack and begun seeing a psychiatrist. Over the course of his ensuing conversations with her, he starts processing his emotions and learning tools for self-reflection, which he somewhat hilariously deploys to run his illegal business operations more smoothly.

Another major throughline here is Tony’s mother Livia Soprano, who feels increasingly marginalized and insulted by the rest of the family. She’s bitter, deluded, and rude about that and in no way registers as remotely sympathetic with the audience, but she’s still a phenomenal creation as written and performed, and there’s an air of tragedy in how she lashes out over those perceived injustices. Her reactions aren’t reasonable or taken seriously by anyone on-screen, but they do cause headaches and heartache as she uses them to twist her thin-skinned and overly tractable brother-in-law to her own abusive ends. But again — placing such narrative importance on a woman in her seventies? That’s just not a common feature of this kind of story.

The older generations loom large over The Sopranos, at least in this initial year. There’s a general sense that the American Dream has tarnished for these characters: that nothing is as easy or as meaningful as it was for their forebears in their prime, and that those halcyon days that they idealize are totally inaccessible from the grubby present. To some extent this is standard 90s Baby Boomer malaise — boohoo, I don’t feel fulfilled by my gorgeous home, stable job, loving family, and comfortable middle-class lifestyle — but it’s still rendered well as a compelling fiction.

The action ends on an upswing, and of course I’m going to keep watching. (Among other things, I’ll be keeping an eye on how the show does or doesn’t adapt to post-9/11 anxieties in its later seasons, since that shot of the twin towers in the opening credits sure feels ominous in hindsight.) I don’t know that I would have thought to label this an all-time best TV program if I didn’t already have that outside context, but it’s definitely a cut above many other contenders.

[Content warning for racism, homophobia, antisemitism, fatphobia, rape, child sexual abuse, gun violence, self-harm, suicide, and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Lost Story by Meg Shaffer

Book #126 of 2025:

The Lost Story by Meg Shaffer

At the beginning of the fourth Thomas Covenant volume The Wounded Land, the returning protagonist tells the new one, “I’m on the inside of this thing, and you aren’t. I know it. You don’t. It can’t be explained[…] It’s a question of experience. You’re just not equipped to understand.” He’s cautioning her, in a roundabout fashion, that there’s no real way to convincingly explain the truth that he’s lived through: that he was once magically transported to another world, which now seems to be reaching out for him again. If the good doctor comes along, she’ll see it for herself. But no rational human would accept that story without proof, to the point where he thinks there’s no sense in even having the conversation.

All of that kept running through my head as I read this 2024 title, in which a woman asks an expert on finding missing persons to help track down her half-sister, who vanished as a teenager twenty years before. His own backstory is startlingly similar: he and a classmate wandered into the same West Virginia woods in their youth, only to emerge six months later and never speak about what they went through. He tells the heroine — and his friend, who lost all memory of their ordeal — cryptic things, but he refuses to outright disclose how the boys spent that time in a magical alternate dimension, where the girl ruled as queen. That information doesn’t come out until halfway through the novel, when the trio journey there to find her.

The difference between these two books is that the former is explicitly in the fantasy genre from the start — Covenant readers have presumably read the earlier adventures and know what to expect, even if Dr. Linden Avery doesn’t, and the characters find themselves translated to the Land by the 10% mark anyway — whereas this one plays more coy about its fantastical elements for almost the entire first half. This puts us in the somewhat awkward position of suspecting the plot from the Narnian archetypes, publisher’s blurb, etc. (not to mention the snarky intrusions of a meta ‘storyteller’ who keeps going on about fairy tales, which I personally found a little irritating), but not really knowing the specifics of what we’re in for until relatively late in the text.

I’ve still had a pretty good time with this, regardless. I especially enjoy the idea that the amnesiac had to give up his memories as the price of leaving the kingdom originally, and that he and the tracker fell in love while they were away, only for him to promptly forget that relationship along with everything else. I just would have preferred to read a story that properly foregrounded that loss and its associated queer themes, rather than centering a third character and waiting so long to reveal it! (That applies to the passage of time in-universe as well, given how the guy who remembered the romance cut off all contact with his one true love for over a decade, which is a trope that I loathe.) I also want so much more from the worldbuilding here — it’s all fairly generic and incohesive, particularly in light of the TC comparison that my brain kept drawing, and the implication that the realm was born from its monarch’s middle-school dreams isn’t a terribly satisfying one. In the end it all feels remarkably juvenile, despite the protagonists being nominally in their twenties and thirties.

Luckily, the characters shine enough to largely set such complaints aside, and I like that one of them at least has a private trauma to confront and work through before coming out the other side of the experience, which is something that fantasy tends to do well. But overall it all adds up to a piece that I can appreciate in the abstract more than I viscerally love it.

[Content warning for child molestation, domestic abuse, homophobia, and suicide.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Paths Not Taken by Simon R. Green

Book #125 of 2025:

Paths Not Taken by Simon R. Green (Nightside #5)

This is one of the better entries of its urban fantasy series, I think, propulsively moving the major plot arc along while also delivering immediate thrills and significant character work. After several volumes of throat-clearing on that first front, the previous novel finally revealed that the protagonist’s mysterious mother is the apocryphal Lilith, creator of the Nightside itself, who has now returned to tear it all down again. This story picks up right there, with the hero understandably desperate for answers on how she can be defeated. His plan involves requesting the help of the one local being who can facilitate targeted time-travel, so that he can visit the distant past and learn how the demoness was originally weakened and banished back then.

The case-of-the-week that gives this book its title (and keeps it nominally a work of detective fiction) is fun, but easily disposed of: a client beset by alternate versions of himself at various ages, the younger ones outraged that he’s sold out and become a corporate drone and the older ones cross that he’s prioritized his family over securing more cutthroat promotions. Relatable! Taylor rightly deduces that the matter has been thrown his way as a distraction, and once it’s resolved, he continues on with his mission, accompanied by his mercenary friend Shotgun Suzie (and initially by a PI colleague Larry Oblivion, although he doesn’t last long). Together the characters journey sequentially further and further into the Nightside’s dangerous history, getting increasingly bloodied and weary as they locate another figure at each stop with enough magic to boost them ever onward.

The ensuing tale offers some nice moments of dramatic irony and predestination paradoxes, as well as early looks at a few familiar ancient powers in their heyday. It also results in the detective and his female companion growing steadily closer over the course of their shared ordeal, transitioning her into a clear love interest for the man. In a twist, however, she also loses an eye and has half her face cauterized into scar tissue — making her resemble the potential future version of herself who once tried to murder him and said he’d be responsible for destroying the world in an earlier volume. That’s a much more ominous development now, as Taylor returns with his own Suzie to their present having figured out how to wield his mother’s power against her.

I remember the Nightside books losing steam by the end, but at this particular moment, they’re firing on all cylinders. Bring on the confrontation with Lilith, our first real “big bad” of the series.

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

★★★★☆

Book Review: Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language by Adam Aleksic

Book #124 of 2025:

Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language by Adam Aleksic

I’ve been out of academia for almost a decade now, but back when I was working as a sociolinguist, I studied how people use language on the internet and how traditional emblems of group identity in speech can manifest in similar or different ways online. This new pop science book is thus firmly in my wheelhouse, although its author Adam Aleksic is of a younger generational cohort than me — he mentions being in middle school in the 2010s, when I was already a grad student — and he comes at the topic not as a fellow researcher per se, but rather as a former undergrad major who’s spun his interest in the field into a new career as a social media personality. I don’t even have a TikTok account, whereas he’s amassed over 750,000 followers on there by commentating on emerging language trends and the domain of linguistics more broadly.

That biography is important, because it ends up shaping a lot of what he has to share with us within these pages. This is a book about language, yes, and how new forms are spreading thanks to the communities that arise naturally on algorithmic apps, but it often feels more like a self-aggrandizing how-to guide on becoming an effective influencer within that space. Do we really need to parse which specific videos from the writer garnered the most views, or hear about how he used to be one of Reddit’s top-rated posters? I’m sure there’s a market for that, but it’s not a subject I’m especially interested in or would have expected to find in this sort of volume. (I also give a side-eye to anyone who claims to be chronically online in the year 2025 and yet writes cheerfully of Harry Potter without ever acknowledging how its creator’s status as a transphobic extremist has led many former fans like myself to boycott her works. Or has that honestly not made it into his particular filtered bubble?)

The content that stays more on-topic is fine. It’s a wide-ranging sampler text, containing some things I already knew, a lot that I didn’t, and nothing that pinged my sense from my existing expertise as probably being incorrect, which is exactly the balance that I look for in a title like this. I appreciate the descriptivist stress that there’s no wrong way to use language, and I found the discussion of how words like “unalive” (which are coined to get around platform censorship rules) in some ways mirror offline euphemisms (like “deceased” originating as a Latin word for departure) to be a particularly helpful framing. I do wish the writing were more disciplined throughout, and that Aleksic cited actual published studies from professional linguists instead of just his own observations and conversations with peers, but I can’t say I haven’t learned anything from it.

[Content warning for racism.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Derry Girls, season 2

TV #40 of 2025:

Derry Girls, season 2

Another funny year of a show that nevertheless seems like it could be doing more with its distinctive setting and its character work. There are a few recurring bits, but nothing that resembles any sort of ongoing storyline or concern that’s maintained over multiple episodes (though that’s admittedly difficult to achieve in a season that’s again comprised of only six twenty-minute installments). As a result, I still don’t feel like I know the cast especially well, which robs the humor of some potential specificity.

The finale at least aims for big personal stakes, with the announced departure of one of the leads. The others rally together in an almost romcom fashion, and when said member doesn’t leave after all, it’s framed like a great triumph for the central friend group. But we don’t really have much of a build to explain why they suddenly care, after all the nonstop belittling that precedes this moment. I guess we’re supposed to be invested in the dynamic based on proximity and longevity alone, and not actual interactions that demonstrate what these people theoretically mean to each other?

It’s fine. It doesn’t significantly detract from the comedy, which continues to provide the requisite laughs. But this remains a solidly three-star series for me.

★★★☆☆