The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: In the Realms of Gold by Victoria Goddard

Book #79 of 2025:

In the Realms of Gold by Victoria Goddard

Within the context of author Victoria Goddard’s Nine Worlds fantasy saga, Ysthar is another name for Earth, and so these five stories take place in what’s seemingly a version of our own reality — albeit one that the protagonists discover is rather more magical than they had expected. Theoretically, this 2020 collection is intended as a followup prequel to the 2014 novel Till Human Voices Wake Us, as its entries all in some way or another connect to characters from that larger piece. In practice, however, it’s a pretty standalone work, and for newer readers, I’d actually recommend checking out this one first. I personally found the longer title to be somewhat aimless, and I think I might have liked it better had I been more invested in the cast from their early appearances here going into that experience.

On the other hand, returning audiences will be able to spot a unity linking these disparate tales that might elude newcomers, which is the common presence of a certain otherworldly figure throughout. He goes by various names or no name at all within these pages, but he’s recognizably the same hero from the novel, out upon his duties as Lord of Ysthar (a cameo role I prefer to his moping about as the lead). But whether he and the others are known to you already or not, this is an engaging ensemble of spells waiting just around the corner from normal life and an apt addition to the wider series mythos.

[Content warning for domestic abuse, incest, and rape.]

★★★★☆

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TV Review: Andor, season 2

TV #21 of 2025:

Andor, season 2

I went into the second and final season of this Star Wars prequel prequel with reservations on two separate fronts. First, the debut run back in 2022 was simply astonishing, representing the franchise at its utter best. Was there any way the followup could possibly match it? It sometimes seemed while watching season one that it had slipped past Disney’s editorial oversight somehow, delivering a thrillingly mature take on how fascist governments operate and can be resisted. Showrunner Tony Gilroy may have managed to get away with that once, but Disney as a company is notoriously risk-averse and ostensibly apolitical, especially in the current climate. Now that they must fully understand what he was up to with this show and how it had been received, would they really let him do it again?

I was also hesitant due to my background knowledge of how the plan for the series had evolved. Andor was initially envisioned as a five-season storyline, with each season taking us another year forward towards the events of the 2016 movie Rogue One (which Gilroy co-wrote and co-directed). Over time, however, that intention was scaled back, until the announcement came that this second season would now be the last. The time jumps remain, however, with these twelve episodes split into four arcs for each year from BBY4 to BBY1, the in-universe designation for years before the Battle of Yavin at the end of A New Hope. Essentially we’d be jumping forward by a year repeatedly throughout this season, which is an approach to television that I’ve never seen attempted before, let alone on the heels of a more straightforward season one. I had my doubts it could be done effectively without losing all audience investment in the characters and their ongoing plots.

Luckily, it turns out my concerns were misplaced. Although I mourn the full five-season Andor we once could have gotten, and I do think there are a few places where this run has to truncate an arc that might have been stronger with more room to develop, it’s overall another remarkable achievement. In the final analysis, I maybe slightly prefer season one, but it’s so close I could easily feel differently tomorrow. I will say that structurally season two sets a much higher bar for itself, and it clears it with aplomb.

Every moment on the timeline is crisply defined, and while the characters have moved on to new circumstances each time we skip forward, the writing confidently clues us in as needed. The span of years also helps us witness larger schemes unfolding, from the steady coalescence of the Rebel Alliance into the organized force it’ll be by Luke Skywalker’s day to the Empire’s subtle plans regarding the planet Ghorman. If you’re enough of a Star Wars buff, you’ll know that that world is the site of an eventual imperial massacre, which is the final impetus for Senator Mon Mothma to speak out against the Emperor and flee her lofty position. (You can even go back as I did to watch the 2017 episode “Secret Cargo” from the Star Wars: Rebels cartoon to see what she does immediately next; that’s how carefully Gilroy and his team have plotted everything around the existing canon.) But even for viewers lacking that context, the mounting tension is clear and straight out of the Nazi playbook in how the Ghor are slowly positioned as troublesome Others in the Empire’s propaganda machine as the heavy-handed occupation intensifies. I love the oh-so-appropriate French Resistance flavor to their local worldbuilding, too.

This remains a Star Wars high point, but it also sits proudly in the company of other prestige TV series as well. The Americans comes to mind for the spycraft arms race, the unraveling cover identities, and the tense sequences of listening devices being planted, detected, and recovered, but I’d actually highlight Better Call Saul as an even closer comparison. Like on that acclaimed franchise vehicle, these writers trust the audience to follow along without spelling everything out for us, especially as they thoughtfully engage with their program’s status as a prequel text. On a big picture level, we know where Andor is headed: to the beginning of Rogue One, when Cassian is a trusted Rebel operative, Mon is a commander over him, and the information about the nearly-completed Death Star is only starting to reach them. But the personal journey to get there is rendered an interesting one, as is the way the scripts play with our understanding of that path. It’s of course a tragedy too, given Cassian’s fated end, as every step we see him take binds him further to his upcoming death on the beach at Scarif. And for the newer characters like Luthen, Dedra, Syril, or Bix, the question naturally becomes as it did for Saul’s Nacho Varga and Kim Wexler: why are they not around later on? The answers involve some heartache and some surprise reprieves, yet everyone’s fate feels justified to a degree of nigh inevitability in hindsight. Now that’s good writing!

It’s a marvel, honestly. In a fictional setting known for its wacky space wizard adventures — and I say that affectionately, having loved for instance the very juvenile Skeleton Crew — there stands this quiet and defiant tribute to the power of ordinary people to jam up the machinery of empire with their lives, and how authoritarian overreach invariably contains the seeds of its own destruction and eventually turns on its most faithful adherents. It’s even a genre series unafraid to call out attempted rape by name, when such threats normally stay festering in the unexamined subtext. (How would this creative team have handled Princess Leia’s sexual exploitation and slavery in Jabba’s palace, I wonder? Probably not by putting the actress in chains and a metal bikini for the male gaze of the audience, I’d wager.)

And all of this comes with nary a Jedi or a Sith in sight — not even the Emperor or Darth Vader, because as scary as the imperial intelligence and security forces here are, they’re operating at a level of bureaucracy still below the grand leaders’ attention — and barely even any mention of the Force. The wider continuity ties are subtler than that, in contrast to how Rogue One controversially used digital recreations of certain original trilogy characters. While that technology has improved by leaps and bounds in the time since, so has Gilroy’s restraint, and he now seems to recognize that it’s enough to merely invoke those individuals by name rather than turn their late performers into virtual puppets for us.

Meanwhile he has fun incorporating additional Rogue One characters like Krennic, Draven, and K-2SO, all so organically that if you watched Andor through without first seeing the film, you wouldn’t necessarily register any of them as an artificial intrusion. And as with Better Call Saul, there’s no effort here to de-age anyone with special effects; we’re simply asked to accept that these folks are younger than they were in Rogue One despite looking almost a decade older. It’s a theatrical approach that I appreciate, and doesn’t break the immersion any more than the unfortunate recasting of Bail Organa due to Jimmy Smits’s outside commitments.

In the end, it all leads fairly seamlessly into its big-screen predecessor, as of course it must. The plot threads that don’t continue on are wrapped up well, while the others reinvigorate and recontextualize our sense of where those protagonists will go from here. Cassian never does reunite with his long-lost sister, but one of the last scenes of the show confirms how her absence still haunts him (and thank goodness there’s no Luke-and-Leia twist with her revealed as Kleya or Dedra or some other female character, as I’d seen some corners of the internet speculating). And when it arrives, the ultimate closing image circles back in a really pleasing fashion to emphasize how no matter the title, both this story and the Rebel movement were always so much larger than Cassian Andor as a person.

I said this after the first season and again up top, but I’ll repeat once more that this is Star Wars at its absolute finest, and a must-watch for any serious fan of the saga. I miss it already, and I fear we may never again see its like.

[Content warning for gun violence, police violence, torture, suicide, genocide, sexual assault, drug abuse, and gore.]

This season: ★★★★★

Overall series: ★★★★★

Seasons ranked: 1 > 2

Book Review: The Expert of Subtle Revisions by Kirsten Menger-Anderson

Book #78 of 2025:

The Expert of Subtle Revisions by Kirsten Menger-Anderson

I’ll fully admit that I picked up this novel on the basis of its clever cover design resembling a Wikipedia article, and that site does in fact wind up impacting the plot, albeit not as much as I would have expected. But overall, I’m a little underwhelmed by the execution here. Although there are pieces that feel like they could have been effective if presented differently, as a whole it’s a blandly uneven affair.

The heroine is overly precious and special, to begin with. Her genius mathematician father has raised her totally off the grid, with no documentation or even knowledge of her full name. Now in her mid-twenties in 2016, she’s neither curious nor resentful of that strange upbringing, accepting at face-value how he lives on a boat, only contacts her at prearranged times, and believes he’s the target of a vast conspiracy persecuting him — which admittedly is strengthened in plausibility when he mysteriously vanishes. Meanwhile, her story is intercut with those of two additional protagonists in 1933 Austria, each of whom is struggling to succeed in academia and resist the anti-intellectual forces that are rising in the era.

Ultimately this is a tale about time travel, though that isn’t revealed until the final quarter of the text (despite being apparent for quite a while beforehand). Once it is established, the shape of the work is further explained with a lot of rote exposition that isn’t very dramatically engaging. In a way, it’s closer to a wiki summary of events than a firsthand view of them, which is a disappointing creative choice in my opinion.

Sometimes, the tangential approach works for me in fiction. I’ve seen other reviews comparing this book to The Starless Sea, which I enjoyed while noting that it “obliquely hints at larger designs instead of ever giving us the full picture… and often feels more like just an overheard conversation.” Here, unfortunately, I’m left more frustrated than impressed by that sort of narrative construction.

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell

Book #77 of 2025:

Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell

One of fantasy’s most truly distinctive protagonists anchors this delightful tale, achieving a tone that’s somewhere between Hell Followed With Us and Killing Eve. Our antiheroine narrator is an inhuman creature who begins her story by describing how she ate her way out of her father’s chest as a broodling, and has survived ever since then by devouring the people foolish enough to cross her. She can approximate a human appearance by repurposing the body parts of victims she’s ingested, and after a chance encounter in that form during a rare moment of weakness, she finds herself growing closer to a woman whom she ordinarily would have eaten without a second thought.

I really just love almost everything about this plot. The character is one of my favorite genre stock types, the neurodivergent-coded outsider who struggles to understand normal social interactions — Anya on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation, Ax in the Animorphs books, etc. — and the asexual sapphic romance that develops with her new acquaintance is rather sweet. There’s no explicit homophobia in this setting, but the love interest has a lot of historic and ongoing trauma from her abusive mother and siblings, so that reading is definitely present in the subtext. It’s overall a celebration of personal agency, found family, and rending your tormentors within your bloody maw, which is all pretty queer and pretty punk, I have to say.

The action stalls out and gets a little repetitive near the middle of the work, and I’d ideally have preferred to see more worldbuilding details to bring the generic surroundings to life. But those are fairly minor quibbles considering how fun and surprisingly affirmational this novel turns out to be. I give it four-and-a-half stars, rounded up.

[Content warning for body horror, incest, and gore.]

★★★★★

Book Review: Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language by Amanda Montell

Book #76 of 2025:

Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language by Amanda Montell

As a reader with a master’s degree in linguistics who used to research and lecture within its sociolinguistics branch, there are three main things I’m looking for in a popular science title like this:

1) Does it seem like the book would be comprehensible to a layperson without any preexisting knowledge of the field?

2) Does it offer me any information I don’t already know, rather than just representing a 101 introduction to the subject?

And 3), Is it accurate, so far as I can tell from the extent that it does overlap with my prior expertise?

Luckily, this 2019 publication hits every one of those targets. The tone is entertainingly colloquial but thorough, walking us through the ways in which language variation both encodes and enacts gender identity. Author Amanda Montell also talks about the sexist cultural assumptions implicit in the terminology we use, providing easy-to-follow if occasionally risqué examples. (Why do we call certain sex acts penetrative instead of enveloping, for instance? Or why does “sissy” have negative connotations that “buddy” doesn’t, given how they derive from the equivalent gendered words for siblings?)

It’s a whirlwind sampler, touching on topics as varied as catcalling to nonbinary pronouns to conversational power dynamics to vocal fry and beyond. A lot of this does constitute the basic fundamentals of linguistics, like how definitions can change over time or how scientists need to approach language descriptively to capture actual usage without judgment rather than prescriptively to dictate right and wrong, but it’s carried off with a gentle hand to ease the audience into such concepts. I wouldn’t necessarily assign this as a textbook if I were ever teaching a socio module again — the writer isn’t an academic researcher herself, just an interested former undergrad major, and while she cites experts and mentions a few studies, there’s no comprehensive bibliography here, nor much effort to cover varieties outside standard American English — but it’s plainly not aiming to fulfill that particular function. This is instead a book intended to inform novices and get them curious about the wider discipline, and by that measure, I would consider it a success.

★★★★☆

TV Review: Classic Doctor Who, season 18

TV #20 of 2025:

Classic Doctor Who, season 18

Airing from 1980 to 1981, Tom Baker’s final season is a turbulent time for Doctor Who — and not just because it finds him finally departing the series after a still-unbroken record of seven years / 172 episodes as its star. This run also sends off his companions Romana and K9, while gradually introducing the three replacements who would go on to subsequent adventures with the Fifth Doctor. Meanwhile the villainous Master returns after four years off the program with a new face he’ll hold until it’s canceled in 1989, and behind the scenes, John Nathan-Turner has taken over as the showrunning producer, a position he’ll likewise keep for the remainder of Classic Who. One of his first big changes is a new title sequence and theme song arrangement, which immediately sets this season apart from its Fourth Doctor predecessors.

The stories themselves are uneven, but they demonstrate a marked improvement as the year goes on. After two weaker entries in THE LEISURE HIVE and MEGLOS, we get the loose “E-space Trilogy” of FULL CIRCLE, STATE OF DECAY, and WARRIORS’ GATE, which offer a rare sort of ongoing continuity for the show. While traveling outside our regular dimension there, the protagonist gains Adric as a TARDIS stowaway and says goodbye to his fellow Time Lord, who stays behind with the robot dog. After that THE KEEPER OF TRAKEN introduces Nyssa and the next Master, and LOGOPOLIS sees that enemy first try to conquer the universe and then reluctantly team up with the Doctor and his friends (including reluctant late arrival Tegan) to save it. That regeneration serial doesn’t wholly work for me — I think the ‘Watcher’ who lurks around and eventually helps usher in Peter Davison is a goofy and contradictory idea that seriously detracts from the plot — but it has enough fun parts to send the hero off accordingly.

Baker looks pretty tired across all these episodes, however, and he spends the opening half having to share a screen with his costar Lalla Ward, who had already divorced him after their whirlwind marriage fell apart. That subtext adds a certain melancholy to the entertainment, as does the modern viewer’s knowledge that we’re building to a departure and a massive overhaul for the franchise. It’s the end of an era, but at least the moment has been prepared for.

Serials ranked from worst to best:

★★☆☆☆
MEGLOS (18×5 – 18×8)
THE LEISURE HIVE (18×1 – 18×4)

★★★☆☆
FULL CIRCLE (18×9 – 18×12)
THE KEEPER OF TRAKEN (18×21 – 18×24)

★★★★☆
WARRIORS’ GATE (18×17 – 18×20)
STATE OF DECAY (18×13 – 18×16)
LOGOPOLIS (18×25 – 18×28)

Overall rating for the season: ★★★☆☆

Book Review: Doctor Who: The Cloud Exiles & Other Stories edited by Michael Stevens

Book #75 of 2025:

Doctor Who: The Cloud Exiles & Other Stories edited by Michael Stevens

I’m going to quote from my own review of 2024’s Doctor Who: The Phaser Aliens & Other Stories — which I coincidentally listened to one year ago today — as so much of it applies to this subsequent release as well:

“A new audio production collecting six previously-published Doctor Who stories, one for each of the first half-dozen incarnations of that sci-fi franchise’s Time Lord hero. It’s an interesting snapshot of the series history, since the contents were originally written contemporaneously from 196[6] to 198[5] — and so in the earlier entries, the protagonist is sometimes called “Dr. Who” instead of “the Doctor,” his ship is sometimes just “TARDIS” without the definite article, and he’s strongly implied to be a human from Earth’s future rather than any sort of alien, because such continuity details either had yet to be solidified on-screen or were simply not a concern for the BBC editorial team at that point.

On their own merits, the tales are all fine but somewhat unremarkable. I’m at a loss as to why these particular titles have been selected for a new life in 202[5], although the cynical part of me notes that none of the original authors are known and wonders if that played a role in their curation, to minimize the payout of royalties. The audiobook features the voice talents of actors from across the classic […] show as well as the licensed Big Finish spinoffs, which I suppose is a further draw. But overall, this is a pretty insignificant and forgettable collection.”

I do think these mini-adventures are maybe slightly superior to the last batch, and they also include a 1982 bulletin from then-showrunner John Nathan-Turner talking about the production process, which is a neat little historical artifact. Still, it’s a solidly mid-tier Doctor Who offering all around.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Half Life of Valery K by Natasha Pulley

Book #74 of 2025:

The Half Life of Valery K by Natasha Pulley

This title is a good example of why I often struggle with historical fiction as a genre. On the one hand: author Natasha Pulley has plainly done her homework here, and she ably depicts her chosen setting, which is a clandestine Soviet research site studying nuclear fallout. Her protagonist is a fictional academic reassigned from a Siberian gulag to assist in the radiation surveys, where he encounters a callous disregard for human life and widespread fascist-style lies. Everyone is forced to agree under threat of death that the environment is perfectly safe to live and work in, even though all the scientists can privately see that it’s obviously not.

On the other hand, I don’t feel that the characters or the storyline — the parts the writer has invented, in other words — are especially memorable or believable. The hero seems gay and neurodivergent, although he lacks the language to express such things about himself, and he has an understated romance with a local KGB officer who openly acknowledges executing people who ask too many questions. No effort is made to give that love interest a redemption plot or otherwise justify his actions, and the whole thing reads as less of an inherently compelling novel and more of a thin excuse to show off what Pulley has learned about the wider subject matter. Which I suppose is fine so far as it goes, but at a certain point, I think I’d rather just read the nonfiction sources myself.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins

Book #73 of 2025:

Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins (The Hunger Games #2)

In certain ways, I think this dystopian YA sequel improves upon its predecessor. Whereas the series debut focused — understandably! — on the setting, the characters, and the inherent brutality of the premise, this volume is more able to expand on the worldbuilding and the larger plot beyond the protagonist’s immediate struggles. The Hunger Games could have been a self-contained story, but this title intentionally sets out to explore the question of what would logically come next for a heroine who defied the authoritarian government long enough to escape its machinations with her life (and that of a friend).

The answer here is crackdowns. The Capitol under President Snow — actually a character now, making terrifying personal threats instead of just lurking as a sinister background figure — restricts its subjugated population even further than before, while at the same time inadvertently fanning the rebellious spirit that Katniss has helped inspire. (It’s very Star Wars, how the repressive regime sows the seeds of its own defeat.) That movement of a popular uprising wasn’t really hinted at in the original installment with its narrow goal of survival, but it’s a reasonable consequence and an engaging development overall.

But then there’s the Quarter Quell. I don’t want to dismiss this concept entirely, because there’s an element here that works in the gamemakers changing the rules to force the survivors of the last Hunger Games back into the arena. On paper, that’s positioned as a way for the antagonists to both retaliate against the recent victors and try to crush widespread dissent, but in practice, it feels like author Suzanne Collins repeating herself. This novel is so much more interesting in its first half, as a Hunger Games book without the Games, than following that sudden twist. While I appreciate that it’s not deployed right away and the deadly competition only takes up about the last third of the text, it does make that ending into something of a rehash. It doesn’t help that the new tournament is less dramatic in its rigid clockwork hazards and its lack of enemy personalities, either.

The ultimate conclusion of the piece is rather underwhelming, too. It’s not quite unsupported, but it’s conveyed as a flat exposition dump, and it hinges structurally on the viewpoint narrator being kept out of the loop all along for no clear reason except to similarly hide things from the reader. That’s a disappointment at a stage where the work has already been losing steam, and it’s why (in addition to some hokey love triangle nonsense) I’ve gone with a three-star rating on this reread, despite the promising start.

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

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Traitor by John Peel

Book #72 of 2025:

Traitor by John Peel (2099 #3)

Another quick but propulsive adventure, bringing us to the halfway point of this middle-grade sci-fi series from 1999-2000. Our main hero Tristan begins this installment in police custody (thanks to innocently sharing identical DNA to his terrorist clone twin), and after dodging an attack from his mysterious enemies, he swiftly finds himself put on trial and then sentenced to life imprisonment at the secure facility in Antarctica. There, of course, he meets up with Genia, and it isn’t long before the two teenage hackers have teamed up and managed to escape. Meanwhile, the cop who arrested him is looking into a mole in her organization — the titular traitor, I guess — and the various villains are up to their respective schemes. Tristan’s ex-girlfriend is also still convinced that he’s guilty, which leads to her linking up with a criminal underworld element intent on getting her revenge.

It all moves with a zippy confidence, and the action bounces nicely around the different viewpoint characters, who by now feel linked even when off pursuing their own separate affairs. The one exception is the new protagonist Jame, who was introduced for a short scene in the previous volume without much explanation beyond his presence on the Mars colony. He’s now revealed to be a third clone brother, further strengthening the proto-Orphan Black vibes, but because he hasn’t really interacted with anyone else we care about, his storyline doesn’t seem quite as relevant just yet, though it’s certainly horrifying to see him witness corrupt security officers opening fire on an unarmed crowd.

Although the novel doesn’t offer as many fun worldbuilding details of life a century hence, it advances the overall plot while never slowing down for a minute. That’s worth another four-star rating, in my opinion.

★★★★☆