The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Silverlock by John Myers Myers

Book #190 of 2025:

Silverlock by John Myers Myers

This 1949 novel is a quaint picaresque adventure tale, similar in plot and spirit to a work like Gulliver’s Travels, except that the foreign land our titular protagonist visits is populated by existing characters of literature and myth. (He even encounters Gulliver’s own talking horses and domesticated wild humans at one point.) It’s fun to play spot-the-allusion, especially as certain figures don’t appear under their conventional names, but overall the book is a bit aimless and decidedly dated in its rampant misogyny.

I’m not sure the basic premise really holds up under scrutiny, either. I love the concept of a literal public domain where old stories coexist, but how is it that the important parts like Beowulf feasting at Heorot or Gawain returning to the Green Knight are always happening right when Silverlock arrives? (Do they reset and repeat? If so, are they aware of those cycles?) Why does he never give any indication that he’s heard of any of these people before — and would surely have considered some of them to be fictional — even when meeting someone as famous as Circe or Robin Hood? If he’s meant to be understood as just comically ignorant, why is he able to reference Paul Bunyan while distracting Don Quixote?

So it’s a rather odd project, and less amusing as it goes along, since the final chapters involve the hero descending into a version of the underworld to see various individuals from Raskolnikov to Hamlet being tortured for their sins. I only knew about it in the first place because the later writer Stephen R. Donaldson used lines from one of the original poems here as titles for his Mordant’s Need series (“Steeped in the vacuum of her dreams / A mirror’s empty till / A man rides through it.”), and in retrospect that probably wasn’t enough to justify the interlibrary loan request. I suppose I still like this more than I dislike it on balance, but I’m not surprised that it seems to have fallen into obscurity today.

[Content warning for racism, suicide, rape, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Like this review?
–Throw me a quick one-time donation here!
https://ko-fi.com/lesserjoke
–Subscribe here to support my writing and weigh in on what I read next!
https://patreon.com/lesserjoke
–Follow along on Goodreads here!
https://www.goodreads.com/lesserjoke
–Or click here to browse through all my reviews!
https://lesserjoke.home.blog

TV Review: The Sopranos, season 5

TV #57 of 2025:

The Sopranos, season 5

There’s a strong sense of inevitable fatalism running throughout this penultimate run* of The Sopranos, ultimately rendering it my favorite season yet. I love it when TV is structured around a single cohesive storyline for the year, and while serialization leads to the typical open ends here, we also have a clear plot anchoring the narrative. This is the season where Tony’s cousin comes home from prison, and it’s likewise the time when that antihero is separated from his wife, processing what led to their estrangement. Both arcs find various characters trying to break free and establish healthier lives for themselves, only to eventually succumb to their worst impulses — or someone else’s — and revert back to their familiar toxic ways, assuming they survive at all.

Let’s begin with the two Tonys (which is amusingly the name of episode 5×1, although there it refers to the protagonist’s claim that he has a nicer side Dr. Melfi hasn’t seen and not to him and his cousin Tony Blundetto, who won’t be properly introduced until the following week). Tony B. is another character the writers spring on us as somebody the whole cast knows but have somehow never mentioned, though it flows naturally enough with how he’s been off serving a sentence until now. We haven’t seen an ex-con on the program like this before, and especially not one who seems genuinely committed to putting his criminal life behind him and making a fresh start of things. Of course, Tony Soprano is like his genre successor Walter White in representing a corruptive influence on everyone around him — or maybe a crab in a bucket pulling back anyone attempting to escape his clutches — and so it’s not long before Steve Buscemi’s new arrival is just the latest thug heading for an unhappy end.

(While we’re on the topic of animal metaphors, Tony S. is clearly set up as a parallel to the brown bear here in the show’s own visual language, as a wild threat who lumbers out of the woods to bring danger to his family home. I love how the finale underscores that bookend without drawing the comparison explicitly.)

Blundetto’s arc connects with the developing conflict between the New York and New Jersey mafias, which reaches an unexpected resolution of sorts in the final episode. It’s anticlimactic, but I appreciate the extra ironical twist it lends Tony’s actions immediately prior, which were a source of great distress for him but perhaps Gift of the Magi-like weren’t actually needed after all. Less uncertain is the fate of Adriana as another major figure who exits the proceedings around then, cementing her role as one of the story’s few relative innocents. Her greatest sin proves thinking her love could be more powerful than the malign inertia surrounding her prospective cousin-in-law, which finally grinds her down as well.

I don’t have as much to say about Carmela here, but her time apart from Tony at least gives her some new concerns and overall makes more sense for her character than her fixation on Furio last season. She’s yet another soul who tries to leave the awful purgatory she’s built for herself through her complacency with her husband’s crimes, but in the end is drawn right back in again. The two of them each wonder if there was a moment in the past when they could have made different choices, but if any such opportunity ever existed, the series is clear that it’s long since been lost.

Above all, this year of The Sopranos is funny. Beyond the dark themes and outbursts of graphic violence, the mob activities are presented as more bickering over payment percentages than usual, with everybody demanding their cut in return for even the smallest of favors. It’s hilariously petty, and adds a welcome surreal humor to what’s otherwise a pretty bleak look at the human condition around organized crime.

*I understand that the final season of the show was nearly twice as long as usual and aired in two halves almost a year apart. I nevertheless intend to watch and review those 21 remaining episodes as the single collective unit that they’re marketed as, unless anyone has an argument to the contrary.

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

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Last Dragon on Mars by Scott Reintgen

Book #189 of 2025:

The Last Dragon on Mars by Scott Reintgen (The Dragonships #1)

A fun little blend of Ender’s Game, Red Rising, and Fourth Wing, all age-appropriate for the middle-grade audience. Dragons exist in this setting as avatars of every planet and moon, and they each choose one human rider in a generation to bond with and bestow certain magical talents upon. That fantastical element aside, the story is otherwise basically in the military sci-fi genre, with our hero an orphaned thirteen-year-old leading a hardscrabble life scrounging space junk along the bleak Martian frontier. When he stumbles across a secret base of other teens training to be the personal support squad of a hitherto-unknown dragon, who proceeds to select him over all the rival candidates, he soon finds himself caught up in a cosmic power struggle that will take him far from the world he thought he knew.

It’s neat but a bit breezier than I would prefer, with the plot and worldbuilding alike needing more room to be explored to their full potential in my opinion. There’s also a lot of exposition dumped on us early on, and the ending already feels abrupt even before we reach the ultimate twist-reveal cliffhanger. Younger readers might well enjoy it better, but I think it reads more like a three-star effort than a four for me personally. Still, I’ve had a good enough time that I’ll probably carry on with the sequel at some point.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Humboldt’s Gift by Saul Bellow

Book #188 of 2025:

Humboldt’s Gift by Saul Bellow

A dense and meandering novel, full of witty observations and [pseudo-]intellectual digressions but light on any actual story. This 1976 Pulitzer Prize winner is apparently author Saul Bellow’s most autobiographical work, detailing his fixation on an influential older writer who ended up dying penniless and alone — the titular Humboldt, based loosely on the poet Delmore Schwartz — but that metatextual connection doesn’t automatically produce an engaging read. In truth I’ve struggled to stay invested in this one, enjoying the protagonist’s wry tone and comic misadventures but often growing exasperated over his romantic and financial woes and insistence on overthinking seemingly every aspect of his life.

The plot, such as it is: the main character is in his 60s, suffering from an acrimonious divorce, and seeing a woman less-than-half his age who now wants him to propose. He’s been successful professionally but has a hard time keeping track of his wealth, with the implication that various business partners are fleecing him, but he’s also trying to spend down as much as he can before his ex-wife can seize the rest in her ongoing lawsuits against him. He had a falling-out with his late mentor about money as well, but eventually learns that the dead man has bequeathed him the rights to a movie idea he thinks would make a fortune at the box office. Meanwhile a petty mobster has attached himself to the hero, initially to claim the illicit poker debts that he’s been dodging but then out of a lingering odd sense of kinship and belief that they can strike a profit together too.

In other words, not much is really happening here to justify the length of the book. The slice-of-life texture is interesting for capturing a bygone twentieth-century America (and secular Jewish perspective thereof), but the endless asides and generally slow-paced narrative result in a bit of a slog. I think I still like the piece more than I dislike it on balance, but it’s a near thing.

[Content warning for racism, sexism, homophobia, antisemitism, domestic abuse, cannibalism, and rape.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Classic Doctor Who, season 22

TV #56 of 2025:

Classic Doctor Who, season 22

Colin Baker’s Sixth Doctor is a hard incarnation to love, especially here in his first full season (after regenerating near the end of the last one). He’s pompous and insulting to everyone, but particularly to his companion Peri, whom he yells at, belittles, fat-shames, leaves for dead, and even offers to a villain as a potential sexual prize. I’m glad the later Big Finish audio dramas with Baker reprising the role have been able to channel that arrogant streak more productively / heroically and generally redeem the character, but he’s pretty awful as the originally-envisioned TV protagonist here. If you’re a New Who fan who didn’t like how rude the Twelfth Doctor could be at times, you’ll absolutely loathe Six.

Centering an ostensibly family-friendly series around such an abusive jerk is a bizarre choice that significantly impacts the enjoyment factor of these stories, while their propensity for gratuitous violence opened up criticism from another direction, leading to an 18-month hiatus following this run. This is edgy sci-fi, but largely without the quality of storytelling or smart use of a limited budget to back up that stance. It just looks cheap and petulant, for the most part.

It’s not all bad, thankfully. This is the Classic era’s singular experimentation with 45-minute episodes, which of course would be the ultimate format when the revival launched in 2005, and I do enjoy when Doctor Who tries new things. The villainous Rani appears for the first time as well, while the return of the Second Doctor and Jamie, knowing more than they seemingly should, has allowed fans to solve that plot hole by positing a host of unseen adventures in a fun theory known as “Season 6B.” Meanwhile VENGEANCE ON VAROS is a delightfully gritty and self-referential anticapitalist black comedy, and THE MARK OF THE RANI and TIMELASH introduce the franchise trope of a historical celebrity helping the heroes against the latest alien threat with their respective inclusions of George Stephenson and H. G. Wells, as previous real-life figures like Marco Polo had only ever featured in grounded earthbound plots.

Still, this is a bit of a slog throughout. If I averaged my ratings of each individual serial I would get a 2.8 out of 5, but in this case I’m going to round that down to a 2 overall. With its rot at the moral center, I simply don’t find enough of this to meet my standards for what I look for in Doctor Who.

Serials ranked from worst to best:

★★☆☆☆
REVELATION OF THE DALEKS (22×12 – 22×13)
TIMELASH (22×10 – 22×11)

★★★☆☆
THE MARK OF THE RANI (22×5 – 22×6)
ATTACK OF THE CYBERMEN (22×1 – 22×2)
THE TWO DOCTORS (22×7 – 22×9)

★★★★☆
VENGEANCE ON VAROS (22×3 – 22×4)

Overall rating for the season: ★★☆☆☆

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

Book Review: The Summer War by Naomi Novik

Book #187 of 2025:

The Summer War by Naomi Novik

A lovely little fantasy novella that feels creatively adjacent to author Naomi Novik’s earlier title Spinning Silver, as both involve an engagement to an austere fae lord who must be cleverly manipulated via magic binding oaths. (I do think the longer work is the better one, but since it’s also one of my all-time favorite novels, that’s perhaps not a fair comparison.) The worldbuilding and background history here are interesting, and the characters are suitably brave and resourceful in overcoming particular obstacles, but what I really like is how the plot prioritizes sibling bonds over romance — and the person who gets the closest to a traditional love story anyway is the brother who’s gay.

The whole thing moves to the rhythms of a fairy tale, and although I have some minor nitpicks that a greater length could likely have mitigated, this is overall a charming standalone genre piece with just the right degree of darkness on the edges.

[Content warning for suicide, gore, and threat of sexual assault.]

★★★★☆

Movie Review: Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989)

Movie #25 of 2025:

Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989)

A fun little story about two California slackers who travel around in a time machine that looks like a phone booth — surprisingly not intended as a Doctor Who reference — collecting famous historical figures to include in their class project. The boys are dim but easy to love in their affable enthusiasm, and their surfer-dude dialect offers plenty of hilarious quotes. (One particular favorite of mine has always been how they address a certain Wild West outlaw as “Mr. The Kid.”)

The plot holes are there if you look for them. Way too many events are packed into the characters’ final two hours before the deadline — which they’re apparently unable to circumvent, despite at one point revisiting the night they left — and the school presentation itself likewise goes on for too long and features technical effects and a genuine knowledge of history that the guys couldn’t really have prepared in advance. On the other hand, the premise here is that those heroes will someday start a band whose music is so powerful it leads to a future utopia that paradoxically grants them the mechanism to ensure they don’t flunk out before it happens, which does license a sort of comic looseness to the affair. And the film at least makes an effort to render the various people and periods they visit with a degree of accuracy, which I appreciate as someone who probably first learned about some of them from this exact production.

The humor holds up well, with one glaring exception when the teens embrace after a near-death experience and then break apart to call each other a homophobic slur. It’s a mostly white male cast but otherwise isn’t egregiously racist or sexist — yes Bill’s dad has remarried a woman only a few years older than his son, but we’re supposed to find that off-putting — and besides that one line, it’s a charming celebration of a close homosocial friendship. I adore the clever moments where they solve a problem by remembering to come back and do it later, too.

This movie feels like it should have been an isolated cult classic, but against all odds, it somehow spawned a franchise with an immediate sequel and a belated legacy follow-up, not to mention a cartoon show, a live-action sitcom, multiple video games, and even a short-lived breakfast cereal. I can’t decide whether that’s most heinous or most righteous indeed.

[Content warning for gun violence.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Julie Chan Is Dead by Liann Zhang

Book #186 of 2025:

Julie Chan Is Dead by Liann Zhang

This title starts off well, as a sort of YA Yellowface meets Ripley, but it takes some decidedly odd turns and gets pretty unhinged by the end. The initial premise at least is fun — the protagonist stumbles across the body of her estranged identical twin, who’s become a wealthy social media influencer, and spontaneously decides to take her place, telling police that she’s the one who died instead. Suddenly she’s traded her grueling paycheck-to-paycheck existence for a life of glamorous sponsored deals, designer brands, and avid followers, while spending her free time scouring her sister’s old content for the clues she’ll need to fake her way forward.

It’s inherently ludicrous, but debut author Liann Zhang does a nice job of showing the plausible smaller choices Julie makes to get her into the big lie she then can’t escape. Midway through, however, the character departs for an island retreat with a group of her elite new peers, which turns out to be the front for a brainwashed cult making sacrifices they think will manifest further success. It’s kind of like the arcane ritual at the heart of The Secret History — especially in the novel remaining ambiguous over whether anything supernatural truly ensues or not — and it’s overall an odd fit for a story that had previously revolved around the logistics of keeping a stolen identity hidden. The heroine could have been any newcomer to that inner circle, not specifically an imposter, and the book loses a lot of focus as a result.

Does it ultimately have something critical to say about celebrity and contemporary internet culture? I guess! But the women are such over-the-top caricatures and the plot eventually such a pulpy spectacle that it’s hard to take those satirical points seriously at all.

[Content warning for drug abuse, domestic abuse, miscarriage, racism, sexual assault, slavery, cruelty to animals, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Doctor Who: The Robot Revolution by Una McCormack

Book #185 of 2025:

Doctor Who: The Robot Revolution by Una McCormack

Una McCormack makes it look easy. She takes a fun but messy installment of Doctor Who, which on TV struggles to balance introducing the new companion and season-long plot with the immediate wacky adventure at hand — involving an ordinary nurse getting whisked away to a strange planet that shares her name and is in the middle of the titular uprising — and spins out a delightfully well-integrated tale in a warm storyteller’s tone. Some of the author’s additions feel like they were probably repurposed cuts from the original Russell T. Davies script, but either way, she delivers them with finesse. Belinda Chandra, her controlling ex Alan, and even her parents and roommates back home all gain further depths here, and we actually get to see the Fifteenth Doctor’s budding friendship with the doomed Sasha 55, rather than glossing over it in a quick line of exposition.

My favorite change from the screen version, however, comes near the end of the book, when the heroine calls out the dashing time-traveler for taking liberties like scanning her DNA without asking. That’s already a powerful moment as aired, offering the rare critique of the alien protagonist and his conventional approach that the franchise typically avoids, but it’s enhanced by the human character explicitly raising a parallel from the television subtext: how the Time Lord is just like the villain of the piece as a man who needs to learn she’s a person with her own agency and not simply a supporting accessory for whatever he alone decides to do. That thread ultimately didn’t get developed enough in the following episodes for my liking, but it’s an excellent way to establish a co-lead who’s more skeptical of the Doctor than his usual wide-eyed recruits.

Certain flaws like the convoluted time-travel logistics remain, but overall this is exactly what I’m looking for from a novelization like this — the chance for a series to tell the thing over again with greater confidence and fresh details or perspectives that were missing before. Many writers fail to meet that benchmark, but this is hands-down an improvement on the source material.

★★★★☆

Book Review: Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman

Book #184 of 2025:

Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman (Dungeon Crawler Carl #1)

I hate to be contrarian when I’ve heard such promising chatter about the title, but this 2020 series debut is an unfortunate miss for me. Although I can understand why it’s found an audience, it’s not a piece I’ve particularly enjoyed and I can’t imagine I’ll be checking out the sequels.

The genre here is that of a LitRPG or progression fantasy, meaning the plot is structured like a video game quest for the protagonist to achieve increasingly powerful spells, combat stats, and equipment. That’s not an automatic dealbreaker for me — some writers like Brandon Sanderson work in that same general range and prove captivating — but in this specific case, there’s not much else to distinguish the story. The worldbuilding is extremely generic, and the characters explicitly acknowledge that their reality functions like a sequence of dungeon levels in a program like Diablo, with the goal always to simply vanquish any immediate obstacles, gather the resulting loot, and progress further down.

The premise is roughly The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy meets The Running Man: aliens have strip-mined the earth, killing most of its inhabitants and sending the rest underground into the aforementioned arena, where the resident monster species all want to kill them and successful combatants can attract devoted patrons as their exploits are broadcast across the universe. Our hero is an everyman literally caught without his pants or shoes on, together with his ex-girlfriend’s cat who is soon magically gifted the ability to talk and begins bossing him around with her snobby princess personality (in between the two exchanging Whedonesque quips about their situation).

As that description might suggest, a big drawing point here is theoretically the snarky humor, but its execution leaves me cold. Everything carries a crude sophomoric quality that I personally find grating, as though it’s being delivered by a bro slapping you on the back over his own low-effort jokes. The narrative is regularly interrupted by player achievements like, “Boom! You’ve caused a wall-shaking explosion within the dungeon! The last time the walls shook like this was when your mom came over for a visit!” or comments like how a druidic energy aura is “a great spell to have if you’re a club kid or trying to bang a vegan.” We’re treated to a lot of such background misogyny in the text, along with fatphobia, rape culture, racism, and more. Carl bravely lets us know that he’s neither gay nor homophobic himself, but that doesn’t change how a phony sex tape between him and an enemy orc is seen as hilarious among his raiding party.

When I started this review I was intending to grudgingly concede the book’s craft and award it a passing rating of three-out-of-five stars, but as sometimes happens, the act of writing out my reactions has clarified them for me. Goodreads says that a three means “liked it,” and folks, I really didn’t.

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

★★☆☆☆