The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: The Plot Against America by Philip Roth

Book #146 of 2025:

The Plot Against America by Philip Roth

This 2004 alternate history strikes me as a modernized take on Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, again imagining the United States of that era following Europe’s descent into strongman fascism. But whereas Lewis was writing contemporary fiction with invented characters, Philip Roth grounds his retrospective in actual fact. The celebrity pilot Charles Lindbergh really was an isolationist and an outspoken antisemite, and while he never ran for president in real life, the author begins by considering what might have happened if he did. His 1940 election over FDR on a promise to keep us out of war sets the country on a radically different path, which Roth recounts as though from his own younger self, featuring fictionalized versions of his childhood family and friends.

The pseudo-memoir is an odd approach, and my primary critique here is that we don’t get much of a sense of the protagonist narrator at all. As a Jewish child in New York, he’s able to relate to us the tenor of the times and the ways in which antisemitism becomes steadily more socially acceptable, but his presence as a concrete personality comes and goes. In hindsight, it’s also easy to object that Roth’s nightmare doesn’t reach nearly far enough, since our own political moment has seen minorities like undocumented immigrants treated far worse than this story’s Jews. Although there are violent pogroms by the end of the tale, the government’s most extreme actions are to pressure companies into relocating certain positions to force employees to move and thereby break up Jewish community enclaves. Ultimately, however, the Lindbergh presidency is short-lived and Roosevelt is elected to follow him after all, bringing the nation back in line with our familiar established events.

It’s a decent thought experiment, and I can see why liberal audiences have appreciated it from the George W. Bush years through today, but I can’t help feeling like so much more could have been done with the overall concept / premise.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Olive and the Dragon by Victoria Goddard

Book #145 of 2025:

Olive and the Dragon by Victoria Goddard

Author Victoria Goddard’s latest Nine Worlds title offers her usual brand of wholesome cozy fantasy, fleshing out a new corner of that ever-expanding saga. This time it’s a prequel to her Greenwing & Dart series, which normally centers around a young gentleman scholar named Jemis Greenwing. We find him here as a precocious nine-year-old instead, with his witchy mother — already deceased by the point when the main stories start — filling the role of protagonist in his place.

Her magic is different from anything we’ve seen before in this setting, manifesting as visions of potential futures for everyone she encounters, and it’s interesting to hear how she sensed the darkness that’s presumably the upcoming Fall of Astandalas. At the same time, however, this volume shares a certain weakness with many of the writer’s other novellas, in that the short length doesn’t provide much room in which to actually tell a satisfying plot. All that happens in this installment is that the heroine takes a walk through the woods near her ancestral home, gradually immerses herself into the fae sorceries there, and eventually meets with the titular dragon for a brief conversation.

The fairy-tale structure is neat, as is the further insight into Jemis’s family and their powers, but this is ultimately way too slim to blow me away like Goddard can do at her best.

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Ripley, season 1

TV #47 of 2025:

Ripley, season 1

It’s been seven years since I read Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, and I’ve never seen any of the previous adaptations, so I’ll mostly be judging this Netflix miniseries on its own terms. And the first thing to note is that it’s a strikingly gorgeous production, filmed on-location in Italy in stunning black-and-white. The show is practically worth a watch for that baroque cinematography alone, but it’s all in service to the tense thriller at its core, about a sociopathic conman who takes advantage of a distant acquaintance before ultimately killing him, stealing his identity, and taking over his opulent lifestyle. As the investigation closes in, our dastardly antihero must figure out how to throw the detectives off his trail whilst continuing to dodge the people who knew the real Dickie Greenleaf and thus could catch the imposter in his ever-escalating lies.

It’s an older story, but I really appreciate the creative decision to keep this a midcentury period piece instead of updating it to the modern day. The original novel was of course contemporary when it came out in 1955, but its specific plot moves and countermoves — the means by which the chameleonic Tom Ripley is able to evade detection for so long — feel so contingent on this particular time and place. As a result we get plenty of well-observed texture surrounding the minutiae of hotel check-ins, passport arrangements, and the like, bringing the setting to life in all its stark beauty. On a pretty basic level, this sort of impersonation scheme just wouldn’t work in anything approaching our current surveillance state of panopticon digital records (or not without significant changes, at least), and it’s great that the creators appear to have recognized that.

Andrew Scott is superb in the lead role, modulating his performance somewhere between its Fleabag and Sherlock extremes as the situation requires. His Ripley is a skittish creature, always convinced that police or other strangers are watching him, and there’s an undercurrent of queerness at such moments that amplifies the subtext of the book. Are men on the street clocking him as one of their own, or is it sheer Hitchcockian paranoia over his many crimes? The protagonist isn’t explicitly gay on either page or screen, but Scott is and Highsmith was, and this version openly invites us to wonder whether the connection between Dickie and Tom involves sexual attraction in either direction. Meanwhile the character of Freddie has been updated to be queer himself, in addition to being played by nonbinary actor Eliot Sumner.

In the end it’s a fun cat-and-mouse game full of noir moodiness, with an ending that even incorporates a small part for John Malkovich, who starred as Ripley in one of the movies. This appears to be a one-and-done for the streaming platform, but if the same team ever wanted to reassemble and adapt any of the sequels, I know I’d eagerly tune back in.

[Content warning for gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Curious Tides by Pascale Lacelle

Book #144 of 2025:

Curious Tides by Pascale Lacelle (Drowned Gods #1)

I like the worldbuilding and the initial premise of this fantasy novel, in which a student is returning to her magical school for the new semester after her best friend and several classmates tragically died. (It turns out they were pursuing some sort of esoteric ritual connected to a secret society on campus, which she learned when she snuck after them and was somehow the only one to survive.) It loses me as it goes on, however, with a dull plot and a tediously bland love-triangle romance peppered with overwrought lines like, “She wished to drown in his molten gaze.” Our whiny teenage heroine is also revealed to be a mysterious chosen one with an incredible power no one else can wield, which is a trope I personally don’t have much patience with lately. And for a story that seems to aim for dark academia — the publisher’s blurb has the audacity to compare it to both Ninth House and the Scholomance — the actual schoolwork and interactions with the faculty here are practically nonexistent.

The action picks up a bit at the very end, and yet I’ve still found the twists to be overly predictable and the protagonist rather insufferable. There’s obvious potential throughout, but the pieces never cohere together enough to convince me to continue on with the sequels.

★★☆☆☆

TV Review: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, season 3

TV #46 of 2025:

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, season 3

I enjoyed the first two seasons of this Discovery spinoff / TOS prequel immensely, but have unfortunately found this third year to constitute a significant step down. The show still occasionally manages to fire on all cylinders — both 3×6 “The Selat Who Ate Its Tail” which incorporates Jim Kirk into the action to start setting up more of the relationships he’ll hold with the Enterprise crew later on and 3×9 “Terrarium” which strands Ortegas and a Gorn together for an Enemy Mine riff are clear highlights for me — but the hits-to-misses ratio is off across the episodes as a whole. And with only ten of them as usual, there’s not really room for that sort of fail rate, leaving an overall impression of a series that’s starting to lose its way. At this point I’m not even bemoaning the announcement that the program will end with season 6, since maybe the solidity of a known timeframe will help the writers better structure their work going forward to meet it.

I can forgive a lot of the Spock / Chapel / Korby emotional drama as being hemmed in by the existing canon, but throwing the half-Vulcan at a different costar after just getting him out of that failed romance seems wholly unmotivated. (It’s also the latest straight pairing of many here, in what’s become a troubling 180 from the everyday queerness represented on Discovery.) Another running plot concern wraps up the Gorn threat well enough, but the biggest new idea is an ancient evil that the team awakens, which is the kind of mysticism that the franchise isn’t quite built to handle. Thus we get a heavy dose of death traps and laser blasts and zombies and creepy possessions, all feeling more like generic cosmic horror than anything quintessentially Star Trek.

Finally, on an episodic level, too many character dynamics and attempts at comedy are falling flat in my opinion, with the hour that inexplicably turns several protagonists into Vulcans offering the most egregious example yet. I’m not objecting to such farce in general — the crossover with Lower Decks in 2×7 remains one of my very favorite installments, and that was a fairly goofy concept to begin with — but this one is so marred by terrible writing and hammy acting that it’s almost embarrassing to watch.

I still believe in the potential of this show and its cast (and the hope that they someday might actually explore a strange new world or two), but this is pretty far from its finest outing.

[Content warning for gun violence and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Aviator and the Showman: Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and the Marriage that Made an American Icon by Laurie Gwen Shapiro

Book #143 of 2025:

The Aviator and the Showman: Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and the Marriage that Made an American Icon by Laurie Gwen Shapiro

These days, Amelia Earhart is probably best remembered for two things: her status as a pioneering female pilot, including her being the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean, and her ill-fated final journey, in which her plane was lost on one of the last legs of an attempt to circumnavigate the globe. To a large extent, popular culture has forgotten what a real celebrity she was throughout the decade leading up to her 1937 disappearance, along with the man whose name was once practically synonymous with hers: her husband, manager, and overall promoter, the publisher George Palmer Putnam.

Author Laurie Gwen Shapiro’s new biography attempts to rectify that, placing the relationship between the two Jazz Age figures at the center of her tale. This is a competent piece of scholarship, drawing on a few new primary source documents that previous accounts had overlooked, and it reveals how carefully constructed the aviator’s media image was. Putnam was a shameless hustler with a fierce temper who didn’t mind bending the truth for a good story, and while he and Earhart appeared genuinely fond of one another, their affiliation often struck observers as a marriage of convenience over anything else. (Certainly he continued having extramarital affairs throughout their time together, after initially cheating on his first wife with Amelia herself.) Meanwhile, the writer shares more of his ‘Lady Lindy’ — so called for her resemblance and shared career with the famous Charles Lindbergh — than might come through in the sanitized histories. We hear about her outspoken feminist and pacifist politics, for instance, as well as the recklessness that contributed to her tragic end.

Understandably enough, Shapiro goes painstakingly through her subject’s fatal flight, emphasizing every safety protocol or bit of advice that the woman ignored (along with the alcoholism and similar derelictions of her accompanying navigator Fred Noonan). She also catalogues the many deaths of other pilots Earhart would have heard about in her insular aviation community over the years, and how the practice of flying was still so uncharted that such dangers were considered a regular accepted risk. Spurred on by her grandstanding spouse / business partner, the aviatrix seemed to believe she had to hazard riskier and riskier stunts in order to remain a trailblazer in the public eye.

I sometimes have a hard time rating works of nonfiction, but I’m going to go with a midrange three-out-of-five stars for this one. The contents are fine but not revelatory, and I don’t know that I’ve learned anything that reshakes my own impressions from when I performed the role of Putnam in a play about Amelia Earhart as a teen. I think the author could have spent longer on the period following her presumed death too, like how her widower continued to trade on her legacy in absentia or how her legend grew to where it is today. She swats down conspiracy theories and conveys the consensus opinion of where in the Pacific the small aircraft likely crashed, but doesn’t offer much reflection on why Amelia’s story has resonated with so many people over the decades. Ultimately I just wanted more than what this title was able to provide.

[Content warning for racism, antisemitism, and domestic abuse.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation by Rabbi Alan Lew

Book #142 of 2025:

This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation by Rabbi Alan Lew

The Jewish High Holy Days are approaching, which means my library’s circulation figures for this self-help title are seeing their usual annual bump. This year I remembered to place my hold early enough to finally check it out for myself, although the experience was not quite as moving / insightful as I had expected it to be.

I’m not sure whether the divergence rests more in author Alan Lew and me representing different branches of our common faith tradition or in our diverse backgrounds more generally. He’s a Conservative rabbi who came around to the community after a secular upbringing and initial exploration of Buddhism, while I’ve always belonged to one Reform congregation or another. But he was also a 60-year-old member of the Silent Generation writing in 2003, whereas I’m a Millennial in my late 30s reading his words a couple decades later. Some parts of his approach feel timeless, but others grate on me: the subtle assumption of a straight male audience, an assertion that ritual is meaningless without a divine presence on the other end of it, overconfident claims about specific hypotheses or interpretations, a certain cavalierness towards sensitive topics like rape and miscarriage, and so on.

At its strongest, this book encourages mindful meditation and open acknowledgement of one’s shortcomings, and it frames the time around Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur as a period expressly accommodating of such mental and spiritual check-ins. I’m especially struck by the writer’s parallel between these holidays and what we know of deathbed reflections, drawing on his own history with hospice patients sharing their regrets and what matters most to them in the end. These are, he suggests, the exact conversations we should be having with ourselves, our loved ones, and the Lord our G-d on a regular basis, with the Days of Awe functioning as a handy recurring reminder to prompt us in the right direction. That’s the message I’ll be taking into my own engagement with the old familiar practices, while doing my best to let go of the ways that this particular volume let me down.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Exterminate! Regenerate!: The Story of Doctor Who by John Higgs

Book #141 of 2025:

Exterminate! Regenerate!: The Story of Doctor Who by John Higgs

I’ve read — and, okay, written — quite a lot about Doctor Who, so please believe me when I say that this new history from author John Higgs is truly remarkable within that space. It’s an engaging account of how the series first came into being and then changed over the years, with the writer displaying a masterful ability to drill down to the important details and summarize the core animating themes of each passing era. He has a great eye for the perfect anecdotes to share throughout, and while the result isn’t exhaustive, it’s both thorough and eminently readable.

Every actor to play the Doctor and every production team behind them is explored, with Higgs covering how they all contributed to the steadily evolving mythos of the program. (The similarities he draws between various iterations of the protagonist and their respective showrunners are particularly striking.) He highlights the praiseworthy aspects, like the unusual diversity — for 1963 at the BBC — of the show’s original creators, but doesn’t shy away from the darker moments offscreen, either. Thus we hear about William Hartnell’s racism, Tom Baker’s suicide attempts, John-Nathan Turner’s abusive behavior towards Nicola Bryant and reputation of sexually preying on young men in the fandom, and so on through John Barrowmen exposing himself on the set of the modern series and the regressive ‘Not My Doctor’ backlash among a vocal minority of viewers who hated that the main character became a woman with the casting of Jodie Whittaker.

British politics and culture come into play as well, as the popular franchise inevitably reflects the shifting circumstances around its ongoing development. Against that backdrop, the title traces the highs and lows of Doctor Who and how it defies easy categorization. It’s a media property without a singular vision at its helm, as is especially clear during the discussion of the so-called Wilderness Years after the classic series was cancelled in 1989. Off TV the phenomenon carried on in the hands of dedicated fans, sometimes with the right official license permissions and sometimes not, and it was from that community that the subsequent producers were drawn when the show was rebooted in 2005. In the time since, it has continued to permeate and grow into a globally recognized brand, in the process acquiring an ever-more-complicated fictional backstory and relationship with its audience at home. Higgs aims to distill all that for us, perennially returning to the question of why this particular saga has amassed the fanatical, quasi-religious following that it has for so many adherents.

If this volume has a fault, it’s an unavoidable one. Like any history, it can’t hope to be as objective in its coverage of events nearing its own publication date, and so the chapter on Ncuti Gatwa and the Disney+ era feels somewhat incomplete. This book came out in April 2025 right as his second (and now apparently final) season was starting, and there’s plenty of discourse about potential futures that the author unfortunately misses the mark on. Still, this is about as comprehensive and enjoyable of an overview as I could imagine on the subject.

★★★★☆

Movie Review: Doctor Who: The Five Doctors (1983)

Movie #10 of 2025:

Doctor Who: The Five Doctors (1983)

For the tenth anniversary of Doctor Who in 1973, the producers hit upon a great idea: since the show is about a time-traveler, they could devise a story where the previous incarnations of the main character turn up to help the current version, then played by Third Doctor Jon Pertwee. The resulting serial The Three Doctors launched the tenth season of the classic series, and it was a generally fun affair, despite First Doctor William Hartnell’s failing health requiring him to be sidelined for much of the proceedings. Still, Pertwee bounced nicely off his immediate predecessor Patrick Troughton, which made their adventure together an obvious model for subsequent anniversary specials like this one that followed another decade later.

The Five Doctors is a 90-minute standalone piece that aired several months after season 20, and its ambition is clearly to provide a big celebratory event to commemorate the 20th birthday of the program. The scope is right there in the title, aiming to surpass the previous team-up with the full weight of the amassed series history, and yet it’s sort of hopelessly compromised from the start. Hartnell had passed away in 1975, and so his part is handled by the confusingly-similarly-named Richard Hurndall doing a passable impression of the man. Meanwhile Fourth Doctor Tom Baker declined to return so soon after departing the role, reducing his own appearance to a quick scene of footage from the unfinished serial Shada (canceled due to a labor strike in season 17) and some dialogue about how the time scoop that gathered the other regenerations wasn’t able to successfully retrieve him. In short, this is a tale of five Doctors in name only — it’s really more like four with an asterisk, which presumably would have been harder to advertise.

But if this is a project whose reach exceeds its grasp, at least it manages to reassemble many components of its target past glories. For the first time, previous companions are brought back too: Elisabeth Sladen as Third and Fourth Doctor friend Sarah Jane Smith, Nicholas Courtney as the long-recurring Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart of UNIT, and original cast member Carole Ann Ford as the Doctor’s granddaughter Susan Foreman join in the primary action, along with UNIT colleagues Liz Shaw and Mike Yates, robot dog K-9, and Second Doctor associates Jamie McCrimmon and Zoe Heriot in quick cameos. Not to mention the Master and a few other Time Lords, the Cybermen, a Dalek, and a Yeti, of course, plus the regular contemporary cast members of Peter Davison’s Fifth Doctor, Janet Fielding’s Tegan Jovanka, and Mark Strickson’s Vislor Turlough, whose lives the others interrupt.

If that all sounds overstuffed, it absolutely is, and the script struggles to handle them all. It mostly does this by splitting the protagonists up into smaller groups, although the pairings can be a bit puzzling. The Brig shared only two TV stories with the Second Doctor and sixteen with the Third, so why is he thrown together with the former here? Why strand Susan in the TARDIS with Turlough instead of letting her share scenes with her grandfather? Some of these combinations could have worked, delightfully mashing up different eras of the franchise into specific personality clashes, but in practice, the writing isn’t that deep. Collectively the heroes are all mainly rushing either from or into danger, and while the actors bring their best efforts, the material doesn’t do them many favors. (The less said about the spandexed Raston Warrior Robot, the better.)

It’s ultimately a television film that gestures at twenty years of continuity, rather than actively engaging with or building on it. And I’m not immune to the charm of seeing those old faces again! This movie proudly proclaims that Doctor Who has reached a milestone of televised longevity, and it drags out all the signifiers to prove it without worrying too much about any ensuing plot holes. But at the end of the day, it’s pretty low-level pandering.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson

Book #140 of 2025:

The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson (Eternal Path Trilogy #1)

A seriously strong fantasy debut. I thought while reading this novel that I might wind up giving it my top rating of five-out-of-five stars, and though it falls short of that in the end, I’ve still really enjoyed the piece and am looking forward to the rest of the series.

The plot takes a little time to establish itself — there’s even a fake-out with a temporary protagonist at the start — but eventually there are two major tasks facing our titular heroine: to investigate the recent murder of a scholarly peer and to take her place as the representative of their order vying to become the next emperor. In this setting the monarch reigns for a period of twenty-four years, after which eight champions compete to be crowned heir. The extensive mythology explains how each house represents a different animal god from their pantheon, who are said to have saved the realm in ancient times. No one quite believes in them anymore, however, or in the legend that their return will bring about the end of days — which is a problem for the woman, who comes to realize that the avatar of the raven has chosen her for some inscrutable purpose.

Such worldbuilding is thoroughly built-out and incorporated into the narrative, and the various challenges grow deadlier as certain palace intrigues heat up. Author Antonia Hodgson also uses the lore to deliver an outstanding twist midway through the volume, although in my opinion it’s weakened by a similar one later on. And despite the story not being a romantasy, we do get a nice share of sparks between the main character and the dashing ex from her same lower-class background, who’s of course one of her rival competitors for the throne.

The ending feels maybe a smidge too generic after all that, and I don’t find the ultimate villain to be a compelling figure just yet. Nevertheless, I would recommend the book for genre fans overall, and I know I’ll plan to read those sequels as soon as they’re available.

[Content warning for gore.]

★★★★☆