The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Traditional Culture Days at Uni by Victoria Goddard

Book #46 of 2025:

Traditional Culture Days at Uni by Victoria Goddard

This Discord-exclusive story is a lightweight snippet, depicting Kip Mdang from The Hands of the Emperor as a young person at university. It’s fun to glimpse him at that age with friends and family we’ve previously seen when they’re substantially older — namely Cora, Ghilly, Bertie, Basil, and Toucan — and the limited nature of this particular release ensures that it’s only committed fans of author Victoria Goddard’s Nine Worlds saga who would be seeking it out, so I can’t quite fault the title for not being more substantial than this. But still, there isn’t much of a plot and it ends rather abruptly, especially compared to the other short prequels we’ve gotten in this setting like Those Who Hold the Fire (about Kip’s even younger days). It’s a pleasant diversion that slightly enriches our understanding of the characters and their interpersonal dynamics, but pretty far from a must-read.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Art of Power: My Story as America’s First Woman Speaker of the House by Nancy Pelosi

Book #45 of 2025:

The Art of Power: My Story as America’s First Woman Speaker of the House by Nancy Pelosi

An interesting overview of the author’s time in politics, though this is mostly a matter of emphasizing what had been obfuscated or ignored in the public record, rather than providing any revelatory new insights. (With an August 2024 publication date, it leaves off before her involvement in any conversations about President Biden dropping out of his reelection campaign, not to mention the eventual result of the Harris/Trump race.) The material is organized strangely, too: beginning with the terrifying home invasion and assault on the congresswoman’s husband in 2022, then discussing the first Trump administration, then the war in Iraq, and then 9/11. We’re not strictly moving backwards, however, as the narrative later jumps forward again to the legislative battle over what became the Affordable Care Act, the events of January 6th, and so on.

There’s little rhyme or reason I can determine for this structure, and the book is occasionally repetitive, leading me to wonder how seriously it’s been edited throughout. (Twice the writer shares the witticism that the Republicans in the House of Representatives are merely the opposition, while the Senate is the actual enemy. Two other times, she explains how many votes are needed to overcome a filibuster.) She also undermines her own argument, advanced early on, that Donald Trump’s White House was a uniquely poor negotiation partner — it’s a great soundbite that laws are generally passed by well-meaning people with different priorities and preferred levers of power engaging in a careful give-and-take that Trump totally upended, but she ultimately relates the same sort of dishonesty and refusal to compromise among the GOP during the ACA fight, which makes Trump and his team seem like far less of an aberration.

There are a few good parts, here and there. Pelosi’s description of the attack on Paul and the gleeful celebration of it by some on the right is raw and angry, and the detailed explanation of why she never felt that the available intelligence supported an invasion of Iraq is laced with frustration at the Bush administration’s insistence on marching the nation off to war regardless. But overall this is somewhat of a hodgepodge affair, with no clear thesis or concluding lesson. There’s not much focus on the author’s personal life or reflection on the trailblazing nature of her position either, let alone the specific tactics she employed across her decades of wrangling the Democratic caucus or what she might have done differently in hindsight. I remain grateful to the former Speaker for her career and her role in passing many progressive achievements, but in the ultimate analysis I don’t think this title is a particularly strong encapsulation of that work.

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: The Widow’s Husband’s Secret Lie by Freida McFadden

Book #44 of 2025:

The Widow’s Husband’s Secret Lie by Freida McFadden

I was initially worried that this satire would be a two-star read for me, but it’s significantly funnier in the back half as it leans more into the absurd tropes that riddle this suburban crime thriller genre. Secret identical twins! Characters who might be hallucinations and vice versa! I laughed out loud when the protagonist finds someone’s diary and confidently relates how it probably has all the answers she seeks, but she’ll still pace it out by reading only two to four pages a day. That’s the sort of sharp observation into the kind of books author Freida McFadden is skewering — and which she apparently also writes herself in earnest — that I wish had been present throughout the rest of the text.

The plot is intentionally generic and thin, but the humor doesn’t always serve it well. This novella was published in 2024 — why are there so many jokes about the band Nickelback or the internet’s infamous blue-and-black / white-and-gold dress debate of a decade ago? The heroine being so exaggeratedly ditzy that she mixes up things like IUDs and LCDs likewise strikes me as a false note, in that it feels both less relevant to the satirical point and not as immediately funny.

In the end I suppose it’s a short enough work that doesn’t overstay its welcome, so I’ll toss it a three-star rating and be done. But I’m in no hurry to pick up the writer’s other titles on the merits of this one.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Autobiography of Mark Twain edited by Charles Neider

Book #43 of 2025:

The Autobiography of Mark Twain edited by Charles Neider

Mark Twain (1835-1910) didn’t actually write an autobiography. That is to say, he wrote — and dictated — many things over the last forty years of his life that he characterized as part of that great undertaking, but they were disjointed, incomplete, and ultimately left scattered amongst his other papers. He also provided contradictory instructions for how the project should be published, some of which called for an entire century’s port-mortem delay, although he nevertheless released several chapters himself during his own lifetime.

It’s a problem for a scholar to tackle, and this particular version from 1959 opts to include most of the material, organized roughly chronologically. (Two previous efforts in 1924 and 1940 cut more of the chaff and were arranged by approximate date of writing and by topic, respectively. A three-volume edition put out in 2010 purports to be exhaustive, though that entails lumping in plenty of clearly non-biographical fragments.) Yet even with the impositions of an editor — and thus removed from the original intellect, no matter how well-meaning or rigorous — the writer’s wit and garrulous charm shine through. The whole work lacks polish and can’t exactly claim to be authoritative, but in a way I suppose that’s only befitting the folksy Samuel Clemens brand.

It is not, one assumes, a strictly factual account. Twain is too playful a storyteller for that, and so while it’s interesting to hear him discuss for example the childhood inspiration behind certain Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn moments, he openly admits at other turns that he’s never let the truth get in the way of a good yarn. He’s also hyper-aware of his writing as a legacy meant to outlive him, commenting at one point, “I am saying these vain things in this frank way because I am a dead person speaking from the grave. Even I would be too modest to say them in life. I think we never become really and genuinely our entire and honest selves until we are dead—and not then until we have been dead years and years. People ought to start dead and then they would be honest so much earlier.”

Deviously clever yet outwardly self-effacing: that’s this author for you. He’s a consummate entertainer as he relates his early adventures, family ties, and various career foibles, perennially rambling away from his present subject in pursuit of a greater laugh elsewhere. Those bons mots are no less funny for the passage of time; if anything the conversational style and slightly archaic diction allow each successive punchline more room to sneak up on a modern reader. One of my favorites comes as he describes his small hometown of Florida, Missouri: “I was born there in 1835. The village contained a hundred people and I increased the population by 1 percent. It is more than many of the best men in history could have done for a town. It may not be modest in me to refer to this, but it is true. There is no record of a person doing as much⁠—not even Shakespeare. But I did it for Florida, and it shows that I could have done it for any place⁠—even London, I suppose.”

At times the mood grows somber, as when he discusses the passing of his wife and daughters, and the specter of his own mortality certainly looms large over those sections. But overall the effect is of a dazzling conversationalist regaling us with the tallest of tales, some of which may perhaps bear some slight resemblance to his actual recollections.

[Content warning for slavery and racism including slurs.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Doctor Who: Timewyrm: Exodus by Terrance Dicks

Book #42 of 2025:

Doctor Who: Timewyrm: Exodus by Terrance Dicks (Virgin New Adventures #2)

Categorically an improvement over the John Peel title that launched this series, thank goodness. We’re still traveling with final Classic Who TV heroes the Seventh Doctor and Ace, but the writing this time feels more sure of itself, with less to prove and none of the prurient elements that marked the previous volume. Terrance Dicks, having worked as a writer and script editor for the television program as well as an author on numerous episode novelizations, is a steady hand at these characters and the broader sci-fi saga around them, and he delivers a fine tale of alternate history and genre derring-do.

The plot: the villainous Timewyrm, cast out into the void at the end of the first book (which you absolutely don’t need to read in order to follow along here), has survived by latching onto the brain patterns of one Adolf Hitler. Subsumed within his mind, she’s able to exert enough influence to alter the course of World War II — as Ace and the Doctor discover when they land in 1951 London to find it a dystopian occupied territory. For the first half of this novel, they are scrambling around in that time period, making contact with the resistance and trying to stay one step ahead of the local authorities and their collaborators while figuring out the scope of the changes to the timeline. Next they travel back to the war itself and infiltrate the German high command, whereupon the story pivots to become a surprise sequel to an old Second Doctor serial that Dicks co-wrote, The War Games. The Time Lord’s enemy the War Chief and his people have a nefarious scheme of their own in progress, which the protagonists must now manage to foil without giving either the Nazis or the greater alien threat an undue advantage in the meantime.

The whole thing moves with a propulsive energy, and the time-travelers feel like themselves again while still pushing the franchise forward into new arenas. It’s just what these spinoff books needed to cement the concept as a viable continuation of the Doctor Who brand.

[Content warning for gun violence, antisemitism including Nazi atrocities and slurs, and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Starling House by Alix E. Harrow

Book #41 of 2025:

Starling House by Alix E. Harrow

An atmospheric modern gothic / romantasy, in which a feisty heroine from the wrong side of the tracks is drawn to the creepy haunted house in her community and its reclusive and volatile caretaker. My favorite part of this story is its rural Kentucky setting, and how the local oil company has wormed its dirty way into all the major institutions. There may be strange magics operating inside the manor and hellish beasts stalking the lands outside, but the original sin of the piece is ultimately corporate corruption and capitalistic greed. It’s also a tale about generational trauma and complicated legacies, with a neat metafictional angle in the dark children’s fantasy classic written nearby that may be truer than anyone ever realized.

This title wears its genre influences on its sleeve, with textual references to Wuthering Heights and Beauty and the Beast alike, which I personally find more refreshing than having those parallels exist without a savvy enough protagonist to call them out. Not everything about the novel works for me — I think the ending is a little loose, and the occasional footnotes seem like more of a distraction than a substantive addition to the plot — but the characters’ various sharp edges serve to keep me interested and invested throughout.

[Content warning for incest, racism, slavery, self-harm, and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Lonely Castle in the Mirror by Mizuki Tsujimura

Book #40 of 2025:

Lonely Castle in the Mirror by Mizuki Tsujimura

This is an odd little story. It’s a translated version of a Japanese bestseller, and I’m sure there are some cultural nuances that I’m missing, as I’ve had a particularly hard time swallowing the basic premise here. Not the mirror that magically transports the tween protagonist to a mysterious castle; that’s a perfectly fine fantasy element as far as I’m concerned. But she and the other young kids she meets there are just indefinitely staying home from school, for various personal reasons? No parent or government authority compels them to attend? Apparently this is a genuine phenomenon in Japan known as futoko, but it’s so far removed from my expectations and understanding of educational pedagogy that I think I’ve struggled with how to approach this novel as a result.

For our heroine, the inciting cause of her seclusion was a severe case of bullying and bodily threats that’s led her to quit being a student and stay home all day while her parents continue to go into work. Once through the looking glass, she encounters six fellow dropouts, who gradually share their own sad backstories as they come to bond Breakfast Club-style. They’re additionally greeted by a strange girl in a mask, who tells them that they can come and go via their mirrors during normal school hours until the term ends in March. If they ever linger past curfew, a wolf will eat them. If they can find a secret key that’s hidden somewhere in the building, one of them will be granted their heart’s desire at the cost of the whole group losing their memories of the castle. If no one finds the prize or uses it to make a wish, the portals will still close for them in April, but at least they’ll get to remember it all.

Those rules are a bit too weird for me as well, and although the overall experience is eventually explained (in what’s easily the book’s most moving sequence at the end), the arbitrary logic still chafes. There’s also a connection between the children — who don’t know each other in their real lives — that seems so obvious that I wish it had been moved up earlier in the text, as I’ve spent too long impatiently waiting for the characters to realize it for themselves.

I do like certain parts of the plot, and I’ll readily grant that I’m outside of the original intended audience, but in my opinion not enough of the project coheres together for me to wholly embrace it.

[Content warning for incest and child sexual abuse.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Wild Robot by Peter Brown

Book #39 of 2025:

The Wild Robot by Peter Brown (The Wild Robot #1)

A cute but aimless little story about an industrial robot who washes ashore on an island after a shipwreck and begins to make a home for itself. She’s fresh from her factory and there are no humans around to give her directions, so she instead teaches herself to communicate with the local wildlife, who eventually accept her as one of their own. The plot, such as it is, involves the protagonist gradually winning the trust of those creatures and raising a young gosling she adopts as an orphaned egg.

It’s pretty lightweight, but falls easily within the talking-animal tradition of pastoral children’s literature like The Jungle Book or The Wind in the Willows. I could imagine younger readers being hooked on these proceedings, although I myself would prefer greater character stakes and harder-to-resolve conflicts throughout. (Author Peter Brown nods to the reality of carnivore diets, but he still has predators and their prey working together as a happy community more often than not.) I’ve heard the recent movie adaptation is good, so I might check that out at some point, but I doubt I’ll continue on with any of the sequel novels.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett

Book #38 of 2025:

Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett (Discworld #26)

Circling back to one of the Discworld novels I’d never read before. I’ve been away from the series for a while, but this one strikes me as even more of a random mishmash than usual, with characters wandering in from other titles and not really explained or developed fully in the present adventure. The stuff about the horsemen of the apocalypse also seems like a rehash of what author Terry Pratchett had already done with the concept a decade earlier in Good Omens, and the plot gets a bit hard to follow once time freezes around the midway point of the story. The monks whose job it is to keep history happening on schedule show a certain Doctor Who-meets-James Bond potential, but that element is bogged down in some dubious Asian stereotyping that hasn’t aged well since 2001.

As ever, the wry humor is endearing enough to earn at least a passing grade regardless, and I do like the little touches of neurodiversity here, like the protagonist who’s very passionate about his niche interest and takes medication to help regulate that. Unfortunately he disappears from the narrative rather abruptly — merging with another character and subsequently displaying none of his former personality — and his other half is so effortlessly gifted at everything he does as to become uninteresting to me. (I have a massive side-eye for the ending suggesting that this sixteen-year-old has gotten romantically involved with his adult schoolteacher companion, as well.)

Overall not Pratchett’s best work, but the clever jokes just about make up for it.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Hawk by Steven Brust

Book #37 of 2025:

Hawk by Steven Brust (Vlad Taltos #14)

Way back in the fifth volume of this fantasy series, the hitman / mob boss Vladimir Taltos turned on the criminal organization that had previously employed him, resulting in them putting a bounty on his head and forcing him to flee his familiar home and friends. He’s had a bumpy journey since then, but it was always an untenable turn of events, and it finally comes to a boil here, nine years further on (or 24, for readers following along with the releases in real time).

Having returned to the city in the previous novel, and resolved to stay there at the end to remain close to his ex-wife and son, the protagonist has found the Jhereg attention on him steadily amping up, to the point where he’s now pressing his luck dodging multiple assassin teams a day. With no obvious solution besides leaving for the wilderness again, he spends this installment setting up a way to get out from under his former bosses forever, which will take every last scrap of his cleverness, his witchcraft, and the remaining friendships he can call upon.

His ultimate scheme is ingenious in all its contingencies, though the logistics are a little shaky upon closer consideration. (Spoiler alert: all he had to do was essentially catch the higher-ups conspiring to do something illegal? When it’s an open secret their operations are nearly all illicit anyway? Unauthorized psychic surveillance is somehow a bigger deal than all the murdering? I just don’t get it.) But it’s fun to watch him deploy the endgame and run circles around the enemies who think they’ve got him cornered, at least.

It’s not my favorite Vlad adventure — there’s no real emotional depth or feeling of significant challenge anywhere — but I appreciate how it seems to clear away the longstanding threat hanging over the character and reset the basic premise / stakes going forward. I’ve never read this far into the saga before, so I wonder where his story goes from here?

[Content warning for gore.]

★★★☆☆