The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: The Golem of Brooklyn by Adam Mansbach

Book #100 of 2026:

The Golem of Brooklyn by Adam Mansbach

A golem is a creature out of Jewish mythology, said to be carved from clay and brought to life with the proper incantations to defend its maker’s community during times of strife. This 2023 volume places one in a modern madcap satire, although I’d say the attempts at humor are no more than sporadically effective. Better is the twist on the traditional lore that there has only ever been one such being, whose same consciousness manifests whenever a new avatar is built and awakened in the right way. And of course, the prospect of directing this fabled defender of Judaism against a Charlottesville-style rally of torch-wielding and conspiracy-chanting white nationalists carries a certain delirious appeal, even if our main protagonist objects that killing them would be wrong.

In truth, an entire story could have been forged from that debate alone, with passionate Talmudic arguments getting assayed back and forth over the morality of bloody eye-for-an-eye justice. Here, however, the argument is fairly truncated, which tends to blunt the impact considerably. So too the idea of the golem missing the Holocaust and only learning about it decades after the fact, or the question of how it went unsummoned for so long when a random secular art teacher was able to figure out how to construct the thing from the internet. This book is unfortunately just too short to handle these matters appropriately, especially given its tendency to fly off on bizarre tangents like a supporting character’s plan for a screenplay involving interspecies human-dolphin erotica.

There are still elements to enjoy in this title. It’s the clear work of a savvy cultural Jew (with an extended cameo from Larry David, even), it’s one of the rare novels from the past decade to actually feature and critique the racism of the alt-right political movement, and it delivers some fun wordplay and lines of reasoning throughout. “Did the existence of a golem imply the existence of God?” someone muses at one point. “One hundred percent. But this was an easy answer, as the existence of bees also implied the existence of God.” That’s an incredibly Jewish take on the situation, but it doesn’t necessarily do anything to strengthen the surrounding plot.

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

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Midnight Train by Matt Haig

Book #99 of 2026:

The Midnight Train by Matt Haig (The Midnight World #2)

I don’t like the beginning of this story nearly as much as author Matt Haig’s previous novel The Midnight Library — to which it is eventually revealed to be a spinoff sequel — but it grows into itself once it develops more of an A Christmas Carol plot midway through. Up until that point it’s the somewhat bland tale of a dead octogenarian revisiting his life, via the titular contraption that escorts his spirit back throughout his entire existence and allows him to stop and observe certain key moments again. The rules for exactly how this functions are a bit obscure, and the exercise feels largely pointless given the incorporeal nature of our late protagonist, who can’t realistically work towards any goals beyond acknowledging and processing his belated regrets.

Until suddenly he can, by virtue of somehow kidnapping one of the younger versions of himself that he finds along the way (much to the ghostly conductor’s chagrin). The mission then becomes to convince that earlier man to make different choices and avoid his fate, which theoretically lends greater agency and stakes to the proceedings. Yet even still, this is not Scrooge the miser who has to learn the error of his ways, but rather an eager romantic who needs no persuasion at all to commit to his wife and proactively reject the path that leads to the materialistic loneliness of our older original hero.

So it ends stronger than it begins, but it remains too neat and preordained for my tastes, and I’m not sure that the tie-in to that other volume is entirely satisfactory, either (though this one would stand fine on its own for readers who don’t spot the connection). As fun as it always is to see an Ebenezer or a George Bailey wake up from their ordeal feeling recommitted to what matters, the setup to get there just never effectively grabs me this time.

[Content warning for miscarriage, suicide, and alcohol abuse.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History by S. C. Gwynne

Book #98 of 2026:

Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History by S. C. Gwynne

An interesting topic that I’d previously known little about, how the warriors of the nomadic Comanche tribe resisted (and terrorized) white settlers across the nineteenth century. Modern histories tend to characterize the land-grabbing newcomers in that dynamic as the aggressors, rightfully pushing back against the older portrayal of the indigenous population as simple bloodthirsty brutes, but in the process they risk painting the natives as noble suffering victims instead. This text charts more of a middle course, in which their actions are contextualized by the racism and relentless expansionism that they faced and yet the atrocities they committed in turn are never once downplayed.

Contemporary sources document how formidable the Comanches were in battle, but also how gruesome they could be towards their perceived enemies. They tortured and mutilated unarmed opponents, they enslaved and gang-raped women, and in at least one case, they seized and murdered a defenseless infant right in front of his mother. Author S. C. Gwynne recounts all that for us in harrowing detail, although in my opinion the specifics of the various military engagements kind of blur into each other after a while. Then in the back half of the book, he turns his attention to the particular subject of Quanah Parker, a brilliant strategic leader who nonetheless saw his people ultimately reduced and defeated and went on to live a strange second life as a reservation celebrity and unofficial ambassador for his race.

It’s a compelling and informative tale, if overly long, but I do have to object to some of the language that the writer uses, in which the tribal members are described as uncivilized, barbarian, primitive, savage, stone-aged, and all manner of other colorful terms to suggest an overall inferiority to the western forces opposite them. It’s maddeningly bigoted and unprofessional for a title published as recently as 2010, and casts a pallor over the entire work as a result.

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Mad Men, season 1

TV #29 of 2026:

Mad Men, season 1

There’s a lot to enjoy in the first season of this stylish period drama, which is already living up to its reputation as one of the better shows of the so-called Peak TV era. It’s an antihero character study supported by a healthy ensemble — nearer to The Sopranos than Breaking Bad in that regard, which fits with its pedigree — while further representing a meditation on its chosen moment in American history. The sixties are here, and they’re bringing a closer consideration and rejection of traditional roles like gendered expectations in the workplace. It’s quite telling how the Nixon-Kennedy presidential campaign largely brackets this debut run, and that the employees of the Sterling Cooper advertising agency seemingly all support the former candidate — and yet it’s his younger and more liberal opponent who ultimately wins, as we the audience with the dramatic irony of our future knowledge have known all along that he would. We can likewise sense similar upsets to the established order on the horizon, even if none of them have sprung for these particular New Yorkers just yet.

Amidst all the cigarette smoke is our protagonist Don Draper, who doesn’t resemble Tony Soprano much on the surface but does share some of his borderline-sociopathic tendencies. The two figures are also alike in often being surrounded by even worse people, which makes it easier for them to win our allegiance despite their massive flaws. Don may be an adulterer, but he’s relatively committed to the two love interests outside his marriage, in contrast to his boss Roger who seems to chase anything in a skirt. He may patronizingly belittle his wife, but he becomes an unexpected advocate for his secretary Peggy, granting her brainstorming and copywriting opportunities that the other men at his firm don’t think a woman like her should deserve. And so on.

As we learn, he’s hiding a big secret about his past and his true identity too, in a way that could only really work in that time before easy-to-access digitized records. I’m sure there’s more to dig into on that front ahead, but I like how it plays out here, with a would-be blackmailing plot that gets neatly punctured with the four sharp words of, “Mr. Campbell, who cares?”: a neat thematic reminder of the program’s apparent thesis that the illusion being sold can come to supplant the reality of any situation, if you aren’t careful about holding onto what matters.

A few stray issues keep me from delivering this year my highest critical rating. There’s an office romance and subsequent pregnancy revelation that both feel implausible to me, as though dictated by the writers rather than arising organically from the characters in question, and although I appreciate that the scripts don’t hold our hands in explaining every last detail, the subtleties of the plotting sometimes land as too inscrutable for my tastes. (It’s fun as a viewer to figure out what Don is doing with the oysters and the elevator, for example. It’s less enjoyable to scratch our heads over Betty giving a neighbor kid a cutting of her hair.) But those elements aside, I’m generally appreciating this story and looking forward to seeing where it goes next.

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

★★★★☆

Movie Review: Clerks II (2006)

Movie #30 of 2026:

Clerks II (2006)

Probably nobody’s favorite Kevin Smith picture, but a perfectly cromulent film nonetheless. It’s a worthy follow-up to the writer-director’s 1994 debut, bringing back the characters of Dante and Randal for a repeat round of dead-end drudgery while they indulge in existential crises and vulgarity respectively in front of their aghast customers and sheltered younger coworker. The two friends have shifted from the adjoining convenience and video rental stores to a fast-food restaurant — and specifically Mooby’s, the fictional McDonald’s knockoff previously featured in Dogma (1999) and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001) — but otherwise their lives haven’t changed much across the preceding decade.

Or, rather, Dante’s is about to, and it’s giving him all kinds of nervous angst. He’s on the cusp of moving out of state with his fiancée, but as we soon learn, he’s not all that into her and is instead harboring a pretty massive mutual crush on his manager Becky, as played by a charming early-career Rosario Dawson. His bossy current partner doesn’t really seem to love him either, which makes it easy to root for the workers to make things work and ignore how our hero is firmly established as a serial adulterer by this point.

With the exception of a brief intro and coda bookending the story, all this plays out over the course of a single day, as did the original Clerks. It’s another fun dose of Seinfeldian nothingness peppered with pop culture references and Randal’s offensive philosophical musings, which here include him misunderstanding and then insisting he can ‘reclaim’ a racial slur. It’s absurdly outrageous — as is the bestiality performance he arranges later on — and reads like Smith seeing how far he can push the envelope on an R-rating, but at least he’s not our viewpoint character. That is, we’re clearly meant to find his antics as inappropriate as everyone else does, while still hopefully laughing at them regardless (and accepting him as a worldly voice of reason when he speaks up to puncture his buddy’s performative self-righteousness and moping). Jay and Silent Bob are also on hand, fulfilling their usual role of additional profane comic relief.

This movie came out the year I graduated high school, and 20 years on, it remains the latest View Askewniverse title that I’ve ever seen. But I can certainly relate to the cast better now as a thirty-something in the workforce myself, and I don’t think it’s aged as poorly as some of the other releases in this loose series have. After all, what could be more timeless than the feeling of being stuck on a shift with a loudmouth offering his unsolicited advice and complaints about the Lord of the Rings trilogy?

[Content warning for ableism and homophobia, including slurs.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Meet the Newmans by Jennifer Niven

Book #97 of 2026:

Meet the Newmans by Jennifer Niven

I was expecting this story about a family with their own sixties sitcom to read like Taylor Jenkins Reid, but I don’t think author Jennifer Niven does nearly as good a job at channeling the historical era. I also don’t care for how she populates the background with real celebrities of the time rather than inventing them all — a choice that may help strengthen the verisimilitude of the piece, but seems disrespectful when it involves one of your fictional creations dating the drowned actress Natalie Wood!

Overall the characters feel too modern in their enlightened social attitudes, and although it’s easy to agree with them, it sounds both anachronistic and heavy-handed as they bluntly describe how the patriarchy keeps women (and other folks) confined to their traditional roles. I’m reminded of a similar Feminism 101 speech in the recent Barbie movie, which I suppose is probably a helpful message for some audiences to hear, but doesn’t really translate to effective fiction in my opinion. I happened to pick this novel up soon after starting to watch Mad Men too, which is not a comparison that works in the former’s favor in terms of offering a believable and compelling take on the decade.

The personal drama lands somewhat better. The father of the household gets hospitalized right as the current season of the show is ending, leaving his wife and sons to scramble to figure out a finale while working through their own separate issues as well. Those include her feeling unfulfilled by life in general, the younger boy nursing a crush on a costar, and his brother being scared to come out of the closet and admit that his roommate is his boyfriend. These various subplots are solid enough to keep my attention, but they’re hampered by the poor execution of the setting throughout and ultimately fail to lift the work up to a passing grade for me.

[Content warning for racism, alcohol and drug abuse, and sexual assault.]

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: The Chosen by Chaim Potok

Book #96 of 2026:

The Chosen by Chaim Potok

First published in 1967 and set in the waning days and aftermath of World War II, this bestseller presents readers with a nuanced impression of American Judaism and some of its internal divisions. Author Chaim Potok at times veers too far in that direction and reduces his creations to didactic mouthpieces, but the heart of the story concerns two teenage boys growing to adulthood and their relationships with their respective fathers, with the religious elements providing specific cultural texture as a backdrop.

The protagonist’s friend belongs to a more traditionally-observant chassidic sect, and from a modern perspective, it might seem surprising that his lot are the anti-Zionists when that topic arises — the ones opposed to the founding of Israel as a dedicated country for Jews in the Palestinian territory after the Holocaust, in contrast to the more secular (though still Orthodox) hero’s father, who’s an outspoken advocate for it. That dispute causes a rift between the sons that drives the action at the end of the novel, but the main conflict is one we see only from the outside, as the child raised to become a tzaddik like his forefathers — a sort of spiritual leader for the enclave — comes to reject that inheritance and start building a different path for himself.

Like the Talmudic passages that the characters study, this book is full of subtle complexities. If you can look past the dated politics, it raises questions of parenting strategies and generational cycles that remain relevant today, while delivering an engaging My Brilliant Friend-style bildungsroman of historical fiction. It had long been on my radar as a classic of Jewish literature that I should probably get around to reading someday, and I’m so glad that I finally did.

★★★★☆

Book Review: Coffin Moon by Keith Rosson

Book #95 of 2026:

Coffin Moon by Keith Rosson

If S. A. Cosby ever turned his hand to writing Stephen King-style supernatural horror, the result might be something like this: a 70s revenge noir in which a Vietnam veteran bartender and his teenage niece embark on a cross-country journey to track down the vampire who slaughtered the rest of their family. The resulting story is pretty straightforward, and it doesn’t do anything especially noteworthy to embellish upon the familiar mythos, but it’s appropriately dark and emotionally gripping throughout. I’ll even forgive it the 18-month time jump that elides a lot of that quest, although I do think it would have been stronger had it actually depicted those moments instead.

The characters are where the novel really sings, with both the protagonists and their violent opposite feeling sharply-drawn and compelling to follow on their eventual collision course. Do we truly want the heroes to enact their wild-west justice on the villain, avenging his past crimes and preventing any future ones, but at the potential cost of their own humanity? It’s a dread-laced tension that author Keith Rosson maintains nicely across the plot, delivering perilous thrills all the way through to an excellent resolution in the end. I will definitely have to check out more from him at some point.

[Content warning for gun violence, drug and alcohol abuse, homophobia including slurs, child endangerment, suicide, and gore.]

★★★★☆

Movie Review: Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001)

Movie #29 of 2026:

Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001)

It should be no surprise that a movie built around the stoner comic relief from Kevin Smith’s View Askewniverse turns out to be so slapsticky and crude, and if you can manage to get on that level, there are genuine laughs to be found here. The premise that the title characters are trying to stop a film adaptation of the superhero comics based on them allows for some nice meta-humor about Hollywood, including several famous actors and directors appearing as heightened versions of themselves. (My favorite this time is probably James Van Der Beek, whose Dawson’s Creek references are much funnier now that I’ve actually seen that show, although I appreciate the scene of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck filming the fictional Good Will Hunting 2: Hunting Season as well.) It’s also packed full of unexpected callbacks to the four previous installments in this loose series, which is fun for returning fans, albeit at the expense of a little confusing double-casting.

But a lot of this is simply too childish to enjoy, not to mention frequently sexist and homophobic. That’s just kind of who Jay is as a person, and while it was channeled productively in Dogma and Chasing Amy, it’s harder to accept for 104 minutes with him as the primary hero whose immature viewpoint and antics are basically supported by the text. So he mouths off about gay sex and bestiality, he sexually assaults a nun, and he somehow wins the heart of his jewel-thief love interest through sheer earnestness or something. Along the way, he and Silent Bob steal an orangutan and get chased by an inept federal wildlife marshal played by an over-the-top Will Ferrell, and the story ends with the protagonists literally beating up the children and other critics who have said rude things about them online.

What’s that worth, in the end? I don’t know — maybe two-and-a-half-stars, rounded up? It’s better than Mallrats, at least.

[Content warning for gun violence and ableist slurs.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: As Many Souls as Stars by Natasha Siegel

Book #94 of 2026:

As Many Souls as Stars by Natasha Siegel

This title offers an exquisite toxic lesbian horror-fantasy romance that is easily my top new read of 2026 so far. It’s everything that I wanted and didn’t quite get from last year’s Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil, whose angsty vampires never managed to escape their heavy Anne Rice influence for me. This work in contrast feels wholly fresh, and it’s wowed me despite trafficking in two particular tropes that I seldom care for: the centuries-old figure who falls for a young mortal and the latter’s inheritance of memories and even a love interest from a previous life.

The creature in question is a monstrous shadow thing who tricks humans into selling their souls, while her latest target is a woman with witchy powers of her own, initially living in Elizabethan England. As they circle, they discover an unexpected sense of kinship and refuge in one another, which neither of them really knows how to process. (Refreshingly, there’s no gay panic here: both women openly acknowledge their attraction, and though we can infer a wider societal homophobia given that this isn’t meant to be an alternate history of the world, it isn’t ever a pressing concern. Happy Pride!)

Tragedy soon befalls — hence the reincarnation — and in time when the younger lover is again grown to adulthood, the couple return to warily feeling each other out. Their push and pull of genuine hatred warring with passionate desire yields a spectacularly heady combination, and the magic they share is interesting without requiring complicated exposition to explain. Across multiple iterations of their charged dynamic, they come closer and closer to the point where the living partner will owe her soul to her supernatural counterpart, unless one of her selves can finally find a way to break that infernal contract.

Overall it’s a great read. My sole complaint is that I wish it were textually Jewish! That’s the author’s family background, a few of the characters have traditional names like Miriam, Esther, and Isaac, and the transactional nature of the magical bargains seems drawn from the demonology of Judaic folklore. Yet for some reason, there’s no inclusion of any religious practice or beliefs on the page beyond a few scattered references to Christian vicars and the like. It’s in no way a deal-breaker, but I do think an element of #ownvoices Judaism would have made the novel even better, much as it gains heightened resonance by being a queer love story specifically and not just any tale of star-crossed yearning.

Still, regardless of that missed opportunity, I devoured this whole and was left craving more of its twisted dark plot. Top marks from me! I wouldn’t want what those two ladies have together myself, but it sure makes for mesmerizing fiction.

[Content warning for self-harm, suicide, incest, domestic abuse, and gore.]

★★★★★