The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Book #94 of 2025:

Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid

As fully expected, she’s done it again: author Taylor Jenkins Reid has once more delivered a triumphantly emotional novel about fictional historical celebrities, this time turning her attention to the second class of female American astronauts in the early 1980s. (Trailblazer Sally Ride is at least name-checked here, but it does seem a little weird that the invented characters are taking the place of real women like Judith Resnik, which wasn’t so much of an issue for the entertainment industries that this loose series* previously covered. Or is that how tennis fans felt towards Carrie Soto Is Back?)

Our heroine is serving as ground control CAPCOM in the opening chapter, although we learn that she’s already been up to space herself at this point. Suddenly a disaster breaks out aboard the distant shuttle, but before we can see how that resolves, the narrative rewinds a few years to recount the backstory, which winds up constituting the majority of the plot. As the unofficial subtitle on the cover suggests, it’s also a love story — and specifically a queer one, of the protagonist feeling drawn to one of her fellow cadets, having a minor gay awakening crisis, and ultimately consummating those feelings. As she did in The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, the writer excels at capturing the tenor of same-sex attraction in a bygone era, when there were often no easy resources or communities at hand and the public revelation of a ‘deviant lifestyle’ could easily end a career.

In the present of 1984, which we cut back to sporadically, the object of Joan’s affections is one of the survivors still in danger on the damaged spacecraft. Structurally, this is a bit of an odd choice: we start out ignorant of what Vanessa means to her, and then remain unsure whether the two are current partners, or exes, or what until the timelines finally connect at the very end. But there’s no big twist reveal that’s kept hidden from readers, which makes that tension sit strangely for me. (This is maybe just a personal preference, but in general, I like knowing whatever a viewpoint character knows. And since the women are obviously aware of the nature of their own relationship, it reads as artificial for that not to be reflected in their thoughts.)

But the interpersonal drama leading up to the launch is great, from the romance to the struggles against sexism a la Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Calculating Stars to the various family entanglements. I especially love the protagonist’s closeness with her niece and more complicated bond with the girl’s resentful mother, her sister, which isn’t a kind of dynamic I see modeled in fiction very often. And one supporting figure who is plainly on the neurodivergent spectrum captured my heart completely, even though — realistically! — no one of the time has anywhere close to the right language to describe her.

I probably would have liked this title better without the riff on the Apollo 13 and Challenger tragedies, which honestly strikes me as somewhat distasteful, beyond the life-or-death stakes simply not being a clear fit for Reid’s usual talents. I got way more out of the cast interactions back on earth, and I really wanted to discover where their journey would go after the doom-struck mission ended. But that’s enough to award it three-and-a-half stars rounded up, I suppose.

*I didn’t spot any overt connections to Reid’s previous books, but given the common themes, I’m assuming until I hear otherwise that this one is meant to be set in the same continuity.

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service edited by Michael Lewis

Book #93 of 2025:

Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service edited by Michael Lewis

This 2025 title — a collection of previously-published Washington Post articles — is an attempt to put a face to the American federal government and the ranks of civil servants who work on complicated problems for immeasurable benefit that most people never even know about. Like the professions of its subject matter, it’s a book that ought to be strictly nonpartisan and yet winds up feeling decidedly political due to the uninformed opposition of the right-wing pundit class and their champion, President Donald Trump. The implicit thesis seems to be that maybe those folks would realize the error of their ways if they could only see the accomplishments of our civilian workforce, though that ignores the challenge inherent in arguing with someone who isn’t interested in carefully reviewing evidence that might contradict their gut beliefs.

So this project is sort of fatally flawed from the start, but it’s also a lot shorter than I would like. It takes the form of eight deep-dive case studies from various reporters, with little effort to capture the scope of the service at large. The best chapters are the first and last, penned by editor Michael Lewis himself, respectively telling us about a coal mine safety researcher and an FDA bureaucrat working to collect and disseminate cases of rare infectious diseases not profitable enough for industry clinical trials, so that successful treatments aren’t lost in the obscurity of random doctor notes. The pieces from his fellow writers are generally interesting too, but they collectively cover a tiny fraction of what our tax dollars pay for, and there’s obviously a great deal of selection bias in which individuals have been deemed worthy to write about. (I’m a federal contractor myself, a role that’s practically invisible within these pages.) The end result is a text I’ve found educational yet unsatisfying all the same, especially as a theoretical counterargument to any DOGE-like plans to radically downsize the bureaucratic payroll.

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Leverage: Redemption, season 3

TV #30 of 2025:

Leverage: Redemption, season 3

Another fine but generally unremarkable run of this legacy sequel, which by now has thoroughly cemented its tone as a zanier version of the original parent show. The disguises for the cons are broader and the villains a lot more gullible, which means that the heroes rarely seem sufficiently challenged as their plans go off without a hitch. Those Robin Hood schemes remain satisfying to see carried out, but less so than they might be if delivered against a truly competent three-dimensional antagonist.

I’m still not sure anyone really needed this series, but I suppose it’s interesting how the Leverage model is adapting to modern technologies like deepfakes and AI bots (albeit as tools of the good guys, which is maybe a little problematic). The characters can create elaborate documentation for their cover IDs at the click of a button, and the marks get taken in completely with seemingly no suspicions or ability to independently corroborate anything — which again makes things pretty easy for the heist crew.

There aren’t many major plot or character arcs this season, and I continue to think that the program would be stronger with a consistent cast from week to week, rather than Aldis Hodge dropping in every once in a while. (There’s a very funny moment when Parker starts to ask if the group counts as a polycule only to be interrupted by a smash cut to the credits, but it would have landed even better in an episode with Hardison.) Noah Wyle is downgraded to a recurring guest star this year too, presumably due to his commitments on The Pitt.

But at the end of the day, shows like this represent nice comfort watches where the sneering wealthy abusers always get their comeuppance, and there’s value in that regardless of how I feel the execution could be improved.

[Content warning for gun violence and gaslighting.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Agents of Light and Darkness by Simon R. Green

Book #92 of 2025:

Agents of Light and Darkness by Simon R. Green (Nightside #2)

[Note: this is a modified version of my review from 2018.]

This urban fantasy series still has issues like an oversexualization of its female characters, but this second novel is better than I remembered and a vast improvement over the debut. If the previous volume feels a bit like a TV pilot, laboriously introducing the players and the overall setting at the expense of the immediate story at hand, this one is a solid sophomore episode, establishing / reinforcing the general procedural beats that we should expect going forward in a way that doesn’t just repeat what’s come before. So our detective protagonist again gets a case from a client keeping secrets from him, and he again follows a fairly straightforward path from clue to clue until he finds his quarry, but author Simon R. Green’s command of the plot seems more confident this time, and he’s able to squeeze in some meaningful character growth and advancement of the larger arc about Taylor’s mysterious inhuman mother as well. I’ll take it!

The tone remains something like Raymond-Chandler-meets-Welcome-to-Night-Vale, but it’s settled into more offbeat irreverence than pure noir nihilism, and the worldbuilding offers a steady stream of clever invention and weird pulpy action. The premise of this specific installment is that everyone in the Nightside is trying to track down the “Unholy Grail” that Judas drank from at the Last Supper, while angels from both Heaven and Hell — basically indistinguishable, which is the sort of subtle but pointed detail I appreciate — tear the place apart to find it first. The hero’s also been hired to look for the powerful artifact, with return appearances from his sometimes-allies Shotgun Suzie and Razor Eddie, and the nature of the angelic host prevents him from utilizing his supernatural abilities, which is a nice handicap that forces him to rely more on his reputation and bluffing. I like the twist in the eventual resolution, too.

As that paragraph and my warnings below might suggest, I recognize that this is not a title for every kind of reader out there. But if you can get on board with its particular vibe, the ensuing adventure is a lot of fun and a promising sign for the remaining sequels ahead.

[Content warning for gun violence, suicide, gore, incest, rape, child sexual abuse, and abortion.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: All the Water in the World by Eiren Caffall

Book #91 of 2025:

All the Water in the World by Eiren Caffall

Theoretically, this is gentle post-apocalyptic fiction in the Station Eleven tradition, tracking a small family unit as they lose their home to the rising floodwaters and attempt to find refuge elsewhere. Our teenage heroine has only dim memories of life before the fall of civilization, but she’s spent the years since then living in a makeshift community in and atop the former American Museum of Natural History in New York City. When a devastating new hurricane arrives, the survivors are forced to flee even that scant shelter and make their way through an empty but dangerous remnant of the urban area.

In practice, I’ve had a hard time with this novel, both in relating to the characters and in understanding the setting around them. There are hints of deeper characterization, like the protagonist’s possible neurodivergence or her sister’s discomfort with expressing her gender, but nothing that’s really fleshed out enough to make them register as distinctive personalities for me. The geography is confusing as well, to the point where I’m never clear on which places are supposed to be waterlogged or what’s still accessible by foot. And finally, I just want more worldbuilding here in general — greater indications of how the culture would have shifted once all the familiar institutions crumbled apart. It sometimes feels like author Eiren Caffall is so focused on alluding to our contemporary problems like climate change that she neglects to describe the very future she’s cautioning us about.

All of that adds up to a story with solid potential that doesn’t quite land in a satisfying fashion, at least in my opinion. It’s good enough to get a three-star rating on the Goodreads scale, but ultimately a pretty generic example of its genre.

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

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Glassblower by Victoria Goddard

Book #90 of 2025:

The Glassblower by Victoria Goddard (The Glassblower Diptych #1)

“This was another story beginning, the tale unfurling beneath her feet with every breath she took, every question on her tongue.”

That line comes at 97% of the way through this slim novella in author Victoria Goddard’s sprawling Nine Worlds fantasy saga, which is sort of the problem here — it’s clearly just the start of an adventure, rather than a satisfyingly self-contained installment. It follows the heroine Scheherezade in between her appearance in the short story collection In the Realms of Gold — in which she escaped her abusive husband in the ancient Persian Empire — and the novel Till Human Voices Wake Us, which is set in modern London. This particular tale finds the storyteller in 18th-century Venice, having recently returned to our world after a jaunt in fairyland that took only a year for her but saw centuries pass back home.

There she meets a stranger who is presumably her once and future friend the Lord of Ysthar, though he isn’t explicitly identified as such and she doesn’t seem to recognize him from their last encounter. The two of them flee together from danger and consider sharing their respective pasts… and then the title ends.

Goddard’s writing is lovely and gentle as ever, but this is one of many novellas she’s now released that feel like they would have been stronger at greater length. It may help fill in the gaps in one little section of her grand series narrative, but it’s merely a tease in any immediate plot terms and isn’t even substantial enough to register as a solid character study. At least there’s a promised sequel coming, at some point.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams

Book #89 of 2025:

Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams

I first heard about this book through the news that Facebook had unsuccessfully sued to prevent its publication, which of course cemented my desire to read the thing. It’s easy to see why the company’s not happy, too: this memoir from a former executive paints a pretty damning picture of the internal culture there, from their complicity in war crimes and authoritarian power grabs around the world to sexual harassment from named leaders like Sheryl Sandberg of “Lean In” fame. Author Sarah Wynn-Williams takes us on her personal journey from a true believer in the technology platform’s potential to connect the world (who got the job in 2011 by pitching the need for an international policy role) through to her growing disillusionment and eventual dismissal in 2017 after filing abuse complaints against her boss Joel Kaplan.

“Move fast and break things” is now infamous in tech circles as a corporate motto coined by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, but this piece underlines the implicit corollary of that philosophy, which is that such pioneers are often making everything up as they go along, without enough input from experts or consideration given to the real human impact of their actions. Wynn-Williams describes many times when either she or the legal department had to intervene to stop a plan that was blatantly illegal, as well as a general attitude among leadership that they didn’t have to comply with any local laws in the markets where they operated. Then as the drive for growth consumed the company, there was a push to abandon all principles to accede to requests from governments that might otherwise block the product, with Facebook facilitating Chinese censorship, allowing bad actors to continue spreading misinformation of the sort that got Donald Trump elected in 2016, and intentionally ignoring a genocidal movement in Myanmar that was organized via its user groups. The writer wasn’t as directly involved with the advertising wing, but she also shares disturbing findings about how they were using personal data around this time, such as marketing beauty products to teenage girls who had recently uploaded and then deleted a selfie.

A lot of this reporting has been previously covered elsewhere, but there’s value in hearing it firsthand from an insider’s tell-all. Wynn-Williams presumably has an axe to grind, and she’s obviously presenting herself in the best light as a conscientious reformer who couldn’t make headway against the cutthroat forces at her workplace, but she’s convincing in her argument that stronger guardrails could have mitigated a lot of the damage. The story she weaves involves both the corporation’s strategic missteps and their continued mistreatment of her as a person — pressured to work from a hospital bed and during her maternity leave, even — and while some of her non-professional anecdotes seem extraneous, the overall portrait is grim.

[Content warning for racism, rape, pregnancy complications, and gore.]

★★★★☆

TV Review: Doctor Who, season 2

TV #29 of 2025:

Doctor Who, season 2

The Whoniverse is in a weird place right now. Back in 2022, the BBC struck a deal with Disney to co-produce 26 new episodes of the long-running British franchise, after which the parties would reassess the viability of the brand going forward. And now it appears we’ve reached the end of that particular rope: three specials with David Tennant’s surprise Fourteenth Doctor, two Christmas specials and two eight-episode seasons with Ncuti Gatwa’s Fifteen, and an upcoming five-episode UNIT spinoff miniseries The War Between the Land and the Sea, which arrives at an especially baffling time when the fate of the main hero and the core series are so up in the air.

Which is to say, there have been no signs of any forthcoming Doctor Who renewal, and the smart money seems to be that the show is heading for another cancellation hiatus like the one that befell the Classic series in 1989. I don’t want to parse who’s to blame for what behind the scenes, but the final moments of this season feel particularly tacked-on as though in a desperate bid for attention. Is [SPOILER] really [SPOILER]? A cliffhanger like that is just begging to be picked up and resolved, right? Right?

(Honestly not, in my opinion. I much prefer the dignified exit given to the last Classic TV Doctor, Sylvester McCoy’s Seven, who went out like he was leaving any other adventure and was implied to be carrying on having more of them offscreen — as indeed he did in a subsequent booming canon of novels and comics and beyond. That Gatwa, the show’s first Black lead, isn’t awarded the same chance to have his incarnation live on as the incumbent hero into the likely next wilderness era feels both shortsighted and cruel.)

But let’s set the talk of the program’s uncertain future aside. Here and now, how does “season 2” stack up?

Still not great, I have to say. For all the marketing insistence that the Disney+ stage would be a refresh for the series to welcome new viewers — as the renumbering of seasons would suggest — this second iteration is even more bogged down in pointless minutia from the show’s deep past. If you didn’t like last year’s use of Sutekh, a Classic villain brought back with no real buildup and a radically different characterization, I can’t imagine you’re going to love when this run does the same thing with two other such figures. At least the long-awaited return of Carole Ann Ford as Susan — one of the First Doctor’s original companions from the 1960s and his granddaughter, whom he promised he’d see again someday — is more emotionally meaningful, though plotwise it’s ultimately just a cameo vision that might be setting up something more substantial for later on. Or not! Who knows.

This season also introduces a new companion, Belinda Chandra, which ticks off one final milestone achievement: the first time in Doctor Who history that no one in the primary cast is white. Her character is initially promising in pushing against the Time Lord protagonist — she just wants to get home, like Fifth Doctor companion Tegan Jovanka from the 80s — but by the end of things, her entire personality and background have been rewritten and her arc reduced to a sexist mess. It’s sort of emblematic of the season as a whole, actually, with episodes that all evince some clear potential yet seem to unravel in the execution. Only 2×2 “Lux” stands out in my mind as a distinct gem of the year.

It takes a lot to get me to dislike Doctor Who, and for all the wasted opportunity here, I still enjoy enough of what we’re presented to award it a passing grade of three-out-of-five stars overall. But Gatwa’s version of the Doctor deserved stronger material than this, and it’s a shame how it increasingly looks like he’ll never get it.

[Content warning for gun violence, genocide, ableism, eugenics, racism, torture, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Movie Review: Babylon 5: In the Beginning (1998)

Movie #6 of 2025:

Babylon 5: In the Beginning (1998)

Produced in the run-up to the fifth and final season of the TV show, which would soon be airing on a new network, this Babylon 5 film seems partially aimed at attracting new viewers to the sci-fi franchise. It’s a presentation via flashback of certain events in the original series backstory, most of which had already been established in dialogue over the course of the previous four years. There’s still some enjoyment for returning fans in finally seeing those moments play out for real, but a lot of it feels perfunctory — and more than a little credulity-straining in terms of which characters knew one another and were apparently involved with pivotal negotiations and stratagems back then. I think the ending would likely come across as anticlimactic too, for any audiences who really are tuning in for the first time here.

On the other hand, the writers, directors, and cast have all honed their craft with experience, and so I’ll concede that this is a stronger and more confident production than the initial television pilot movie The Gathering. A prequel like this isn’t a bad creative impulse, either, although most shows would do so within the space of a single regular episode (as B5 had done before too, some footage of which is even reused for this occasion). I’d probably recommend the piece if you had tried getting into Babylon 5 the normal way and been put off by it, but otherwise it’s pretty far from essential.

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars, season 1

TV #28 of 2025:

Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars, season 1

This 2004 miniseries, airing a couple years after the premature cancellation of the regular Farscape TV show, reminds me a lot of the movie Serenity (2005) and its relation to Firefly. Like that film, it aims to offer a stronger conclusion to the ongoing storyline that birthed it than was initially feasible, resolve a few other open threads, and still tell a self-contained adventure that would be approachable and enjoyable for new audiences.

Unfortunately, I don’t think it manages to accomplish any of those tasks nearly as well as the comparable big-screen Joss Whedon feature. Partly that’s due to the hand this production starts with: the Peacekeeper-Scarran conflict, though a major backdrop of the later seasons of Farscape, was never an issue that seemingly had to be wrapped up in order for our protagonists to feel fulfilled. Instead the big cliffhanger at the end of season 4 was the sudden death of two of that number, albeit in a sci-fi manner that suggested a reversal would somehow be possible. I can understand fans clamoring to see that beat play out, but it’s not very dramatically interesting or surprising as delivered here. (The cast members in question are front and center on the poster, after all.) And sure enough, neither that development nor the outbreak of actual war prove especially urgent as the story unfolds.

All that’s left, beyond checking a few boxes like a belated explanation of why Aeryn’s people resemble humans, is to finally deal with the theoretical wormhole weapon everyone’s obsessed with and deliver some goodbyes to our familiar characters. Those both more or less get achieved, although a few of the peripheral figures suffer from the shortened screentime and there isn’t room for many old guest favorites from the television run to make a reappearance. Again, quite like Serenity — right down to one shocking death in each instance that is properly affective.

But would this work for viewers who hadn’t seen everything that came before? Not really, in my opinion! It’s a condensed version of the season 5 that never was, and its strongest moments are built on the investment we have in the winding journey to get to this point. That makes it a better sendoff than the original program’s finale, but still not a stone-cold classic or anything.

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

★★★☆☆