The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: At the Feet of the Sun by Victoria Goddard

Book #134 of 2025:

At the Feet of the Sun by Victoria Goddard (Lays of the Hearth-Fire #2)

The Hands of the Emperor is my very favorite novel, which perhaps paradoxically is why I took my time in getting to this direct sequel. While Hands remains a great entry point for the wider Nine Worlds fantasy setting, author Victoria Goddard has by now written over 30 other titles that make up that loose Discworld-style tapestry, and since her works often contain sly allusions to one another, I decided to be a completionist before finally picking up this one.

(In truth, however, that level of homework isn’t strictly necessary. I do think a reader could go straight from the first Lays of the Hearth-Fire volume to here without feeling lost, with the understanding that the characters will occasionally reference events you could read firsthand in The Return of Fitzroy Angursell and The Redoutable Pali Avramapul in particular.)

So: our protagonist is once again Cliopher Mdang, who rose from a backwater island province to become the second-most powerful person in the former empire. Along the way he learned to be a better advocate for both himself and his home culture and forged a tentative friendship with the man he’d once called his Radiancy. At the end of the previous tale, that ruler had left the government in Kip’s trusted hands while he embarked on a personal quest to find his magical heir, reunite with some old friends from his pre-imperial days, and generally rediscover who he could be outside of the palace strictures.

When we pick back up with the stalwart viceroy, he is capably fulfilling his assigned duties, although also beginning to make arrangements to step back from power himself. In time, he too departs from the familiar bounds of Solaara to go traveling: sometimes on his own, sometimes with one or more companions, and eventually into the heightened mystical realm of his people’s mythology. In the process, he claims his place as an epic hero in his own right, as well as an equal partner for the man he’d long served with such tender fealty.

Yes, this is a romance, albeit a pretty slow burn. I’d argue that was always/only a possible reading of the men’s dynamic in the last book, but this volume pushes it further into an explicit love story. Kip loves the ex-emperor — whose identity is more complicated than readers who skipped over the peripheral entries may realize — and will go to extraordinary lengths to prove himself worthy of him in return. Both figures, as it happens, are attempting to navigate that shift in their relationship, and a lot of the ensuing plot involves the two of them having a series of frank conversations tentatively feeling out one another and their respective traumas and misconceptions. One specific sticking point is that Cliopher is asexual, and the islander finds he has trouble articulating the sort of intimacy he’s looking for without hurting his would-be lover in rejecting his physical advances.

It’s thrilling to see them gradually emerge from those talks and establish themselves as a true romantic couple, and not only for the continued queernormativity of this cozy fantasy saga. (In so many ways, this is everything I wanted and never quite got from Robin Hobb’s Fitz and the Fool sequence. There are references to homophobia — and transphobia including deadnaming — but in the firm context of historical wrongs that have thankfully been set aside.) Their journeys together and apart read like a fairy tale filtered through the distinctive cultural lens of the Wide Sea Islanders, whose Polynesian-inspired traditions are even more prominent here than before. We get answers to a few longstanding mysteries, appearances from beloved favorites in all their domestic bliss, and of course significant promises of even further excitement ahead.

It’s a messy work of necessity, transitioning from the quiet political rhythms of the previous installment to this grand nautical adventure. Early on, the hero spends an extended interlude in a parallel reality where his past self made a different choice at some key juncture, which is a genre switch that’s mostly earned but can likewise seem a little jarring in the moment. As a result I don’t ultimately feel the novel is as strong or cohesive as its predecessor, but I’ve definitely still enjoyed it and am already looking forward to my next reread of that one with the knowledge of the closeness these two lonely souls will someday attain.

★★★★☆

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TV Review: Classic Doctor Who, season 20

TV #43 of 2025:

Classic Doctor Who, season 20

Doctor Who’s 1983 season may not have any all-time classic stories, but overall it’s a fun watch that I would say is stronger than the sum of its parts. The big idea for the twentieth anniversary run was to feature returning villains in every serial, and while some of those are a bit silly for a landmark celebration — the Mara was introduced only the year before, which was also the last time we saw the Master — it is neat to get the Black Guardian and Omega again for the first time since 1979 and 1973, respectively. (The Daleks, likewise absent since 1979, were originally planned to appear here as well, before their adventure was delayed to the following year due to an electricians strike.) And although not a baddie, the Doctor’s old soldier friend the Brig makes a return visit too, after appearing regularly on the show from 1970 to 1975.

There’s also interesting movement on the companions front, starting with Tegan coming back just one serial after she had departed at the end of season 19. Nyssa then bows out midway through the year — sadly setting a probable record for the most under-utilized cast member ever — but she stays just long enough to meet her replacement humanoid alien, Turlough. He’s a character type we haven’t seen on the TARDIS before: both in the plot sense that he’s secretly working for a villain ordering him to betray and kill the Time Lord and in that he is very clearly (if problematically) queer-coded — an aesthete and cowardly schoolboy established leading a classmate astray, subsequently falling under the corrupting influence of another older male figure, and so on. I don’t know to what extent that characterization was intentional, but it’s not hard to read him through such a lens, especially given how the current series producer John Nathan-Turner was an out gay man himself.

Finally, the very last episode introduces another new companion / companion type in Kamelion the shapeshifting robot, although technical difficulties with the unit — they built an actual machine to walk around for some reason! — would considerably shortchange the character going forward.

In summary it’s an entertaining and ambitious outing for the venerable science-fiction program, and though the classic series ultimately wouldn’t make it to a full three decades, this is a nice way to mark the first two. Even better is the choice to more fully reflect on the show’s complete history that year with the upcoming anniversary special The Five Doctors, which I’ll be reviewing as a separate film.

Serials ranked from worst to best:

★★☆☆☆
ARC OF INFINITY (20×1 – 20×4)

★★★☆☆
TERMINUS (20×13 – 20×16)
SNAKEDANCE (20×5 – 20×8)

★★★★☆
THE KING’S DEMONS (20×21 – 20×22)
MAWDRYN UNDEAD (20×9 – 20×12)
ENLIGHTENMENT (20×17 – 20×20)

Overall rating for the season: ★★★★☆

Book Review: The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

Book #133 of 2025:

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

I haven’t loved this 1980 Italian classic as much as I expected to from the premise, which seems like it should be right up my alley: two fourteenth-century monks investigating a string of suspicious deaths at a secluded monastery. They aren’t called detectives, but their methods are plainly modeled off their literary forebears like Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie‘s various leads, and that genre mashup is initially pretty fun. It wears out its welcome well before the end, however, devolving instead into endless church politics and a proto-Da Vinci Code conclusion (which I’ve personally found to be too heavily telegraphed / guessable to land with any particular impact).

Author Umberto Eco has done his homework, at least! The setting feels suitably immersive, and the characters have believable biases and focal interests for the era. I can admire the craft, despite finding it somewhat tiresome in actual practice.

[Content warning for sexism, racism, homophobia, and antisemitism.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Bob’s Burgers, season 15

TV #42 of 2025:

Bob’s Burgers, season 15

I’m rounding up a bit on the basis of the delightful (if sadly relatable) finale “InsomniBob,” which finds our hero growing increasingly unhinged as he sacrifices sleep for extra creativity time in his ‘night kitchen,’ but overall, this is another winning season from the Bob’s Burgers crew. The best episodes go to some dark places amid the comedy — “Boogie Days” involving certain characters’ near-drowning and “Dog Christmas Day After Afternoon” featuring the very real possibility of the titular animal dying when it runs away after eating chocolate — but it’s still a reliable source of laughs, too.

I don’t have much more to say about the animated sitcom that I haven’t written ad-nauseum before, and it’s not like this run represents any significant break from previous years, either. But Fox just renewed the show for an additional four seasons, so I guess I’ll be on this beat for a while yet regardless. Not that I’m complaining! It’s not structurally daring enough to ever be a serious favorite of mine, but it excels at delivering a comforable hangout watch that can occasionally push forward into true excellence. That’s worth a four-star rating, more or less.

★★★★☆

Book Review: Deep Cuts by Holly Brickley

Book #132 of 2025:

Deep Cuts by Holly Brickley

Reading almost like a cross between Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Daisy Jones & The Six and Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, this 2025 novel traces a tumultuous creative partnership throughout the first decade of the 21st century. (The title has a double meaning — not just obscure musical selections, but also the sort of sharp wounds that can only be inflicted by the people who know you best.) Sometimes songwriting collaborators, sometimes romantic partners, and sometimes not even speaking to one another, the two central characters repeatedly come together and apart again as they navigate their changing lives and the wider culture around them.

I honestly haven’t gotten very much out of the many actual songs that are name-dropped in the book, but I appreciate the more general touchstones: the transition from CDs to mp3s to YouTube, for instance, or the background Bush-era politics and eventual recession. I came of age in that era, and the nostalgia factor is a considerable part of this volume’s appeal. For readers who do love the music itself, there’s an official Spotify playlist collecting everything that gets mentioned herein: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6ZN7YF1Kn24S2kaEGF5JOz

My strongest critique is that I want the story to be longer. I really enjoy the heroine in all her dysfunction, and I’m so curious to learn what happens next in her personal journey, either with or without the guy! I likewise think it might have been worthwhile to incorporate him into the text as a second narrator; as is, he occasionally disappears from the narrative for literal years on end, with minimal explanation of what he’s been doing in the meantime whenever the estranged lovers reconnect. We’re pretty immersively grounded in her perspective and the minutiae of her life, which makes him feel a lot less substantial by comparison.

But overall, I’d say that this is a delightful and impressive debut from author Holly Brickley, whose career I’ll be following with great interest.

[Content warning for sexual assault and drug abuse.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Murdle: Volume 2 by G. T. Karber

Book #131 of 2025:

Murdle: Volume 2 by G. T. Karber

Roughly comparable to Volume 1, in that it’s a collection of bite-size murder mysteries in the form of 100 logic-grid puzzles of increasing difficulty, linked together into a loose ongoing storyline. Once again, half of the entries incorporate not only straightforward clues, but also witness statements where the secretly guilty suspect is always lying, which adds an extra wrinkle to deduce.

The challenge is fun enough and the comedic tone remains amusing, but I don’t think the underlying plot of the book is as strong as the last one, nor do I feel like author G. T. Karber has noticeably improved his game for this sequel. Instead, I was occasionally frustrated by reader-unfriendly design choices throughout, like very similar row or column icons used within the space of a single puzzle. And unless I’m mistaken, the penultimate item #99 is actually unsolvable as printed, so that’s obviously disappointing. (I haven’t seen any other reviews mentioning this, but I did find a Reddit thread with a few people complaining about the same thing, and no one rebutting them: https://www.reddit.com/r/murdle/comments/1fff1iu/volume_2_puzzle_99).

Three-out-of-five stars for a flawed but generally enjoyable experience seems fair. And since one of my kids has already gotten me a copy of the next installment, I suppose I’ll be continuing on with the series regardless.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Doctor Who: Cat’s Cradle: Witch Mark by Andrew Hunt

Book #130 of 2025:

Doctor Who: Cat’s Cradle: Witch Mark by Andrew Hunt (Virgin New Adventures #7)

A continuation (and end) of the Cat’s Cradle arc solely in that the TARDIS remains largely out of commission while it finishes its repairs, thereby stranding Ace and the Seventh Doctor in modern rural Wales. There they proceed to stumble across some local intrigues that mostly read as an excuse to get unicorns and centaurs and the like into Doctor Who, which I understand certain fans absolutely detested.

I don’t really mind the eventual logic here myself — a powerful alien has specifically fashioned these beings to resemble creatures from Earth’s mythology — but the story doesn’t have much of a point to it beyond explaining the original premise and its foray into the fantasy genre. Meanwhile subplots get dropped without resolution, the tone veers all over the place, and our heroine has rather disappointingly regressed from the capable operative she was in the previous installment into more of a generic teenager. Ultimately the time machine is restored via nonsensical deus ex machina, bringing both the adventure and this weak attempt at an ongoing multi-volume storyline to a close.

This was author Andrew Hunt’s first and only published novel, and it shows. (He was reportedly working as a veterinarian when he pitched it, which makes me suspect the character who shares that profession may have been a bit of a self-insert.) Still, I blame the editors more than anything else. I know the franchise was in a tailspin at the time, but this is not how you go about producing a series. Could we at least have gotten a version of this tale that didn’t implicitly suggest that witch burnings were justified?

[Content warning for violence against children, genocide, and gore.]

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: Oathbound by Tracy Deonn

Book #129 of 2025:

Oathbound by Tracy Deonn (The Legendborn Cycle #3)

It’s rarely a good sign when an author revises the projected length of a series midway through to tack on some additional volume(s). This particular YA fantasy story, for instance, winds up taking quite a lot of pages and yet accomplishing very little to move the larger plot along. I believe this is where I’ll personally be parting ways with the Legendborn Cycle, which after a promising start has offered diminishing returns for me as a reader. I haven’t gone back for a reread, so I can’t say if the writing has truly gotten worse, but I’ve definitely noticed more issues with it this time amid such a slow-paced installment where no one’s motivations feel especially urgent or well-defined.

(One illustrative example of the prose in question: “Our gazes lock together. His, a hot blaze against my face and my lips, sends a shudder down my spine without my permission.” To which I have to ask our heroine: Are your lips not a part of your face? And do you often find yourself shuddering… with permission?)

The protagonist ran away with the big bad demon at the end of the previous title for unclear reasons, and as this one picks up, he starts nebulously training her to strengthen her various magics. He’s also cast a spell that causes her to forget her friends and their history together, although I really don’t understand the point of that, since when she runs into them later, she still has enough residual familiarity to trust them implicitly, and they proceed to fill her back in on what she’s lost with no adverse effects. For much of this novel, a few of the characters are confined to a single location — they’ve tracked down a mystical artifact that wasn’t particularly hidden and then had to stay in the compound when their failed efforts to steal it trigger certain safeguards — and it all reads like a thin fanfiction-y justification for forcing Bree and her estranged love interest to pose as a happy couple and share a bed for the weekend.

I’m trying not to be a hater here, but this whole book is packed with scenes that would seem to raise plot holes upon closer consideration, and the narrative loses all sense of which factions are squabbling with one another or why. We’re now splitting our focus among multiple POVs too, most of which could have been excised without any appreciable impact. I will miss some of these people and their odd version of inherited Arthurian powers, but I don’t think I can justify coming back for any more sequels at this point.

[Content warning for racism and gore.]

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: Diet, Drugs, and Dopamine: The New Science of Achieving a Healthy Weight by David A. Kessler, MD

Book #128 of 2025:

Diet, Drugs, and Dopamine: The New Science of Achieving a Healthy Weight by David A. Kessler, MD

This is not a weight-loss book. Rather, it’s an overview from former FDA Commissioner David Kessler (no relation) on the current medical understanding of nutrition and dieting, the widespread problem that he calls food addiction, and the new class of GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic which seem promising to help treat it. The author shares that he’s struggled to maintain an ideal weight and resist certain cravings his whole life, and that he’s recently achieved results with such medications himself, although he has misgivings about their understudied long-term effects.

The arguments laid out in the text sound generally reasonable to my layman’s read, though I note that the writer fudges a bit on the exact science of ‘food addiction.’ That is, he regularly cites experts on addiction, describes an aspect of our modern western diet, and then concludes that the latter should qualify as an example of the former, with no indication that anyone he’s consulted has necessarily signed off on that designation. In the process, I suspect he’s rather overstating the case against ultra-processed foods beyond what a consensus of the research community would perhaps support. There certainly doesn’t appear to be any large-scale movement calling for the sort of nutritional packaging reforms that he suggests, interesting as it is to hear him comparing food companies to the cigarette manufacturers he helped better regulate in the 1990s.

Nevertheless, the addict language does feel like a helpful framework for conceptualizing snacking and other unwanted consumption behaviors, and I could see the establishment wisdom catching up to him there at some point. The volume has plenty of information to assist readers in making informed choices about their own caloric intake, including descriptions of how a few popular dieting plans function in the body and the reminder that sleep regulation is an important part of feeling properly satiated by whatever we eat. I also appreciate that a distinction is drawn between excess weight as a medical concern of fatty tissue surrounding a person’s internal organs and the faulty idea that particular sizes / shapes / problematic calculations like BMI are inherently unhealthy.

Overall it’s not a bad job, even if the repetitive matter-of-fact prose leaves something to be desired. (A sample passage: “This genetics test did not help me understand why I have a difficult time controlling my weight. Could a different genetics test help me better understand why I have a difficult time controlling my weight?”) Get an editor, Kessler!

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

Book #127 of 2025:

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

On paper, there’s perhaps not much of a plot to this 700-page winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction: a thirteen-year-old boy acquires a famous piece of artwork under extraordinary circumstances, and then spends the next decade-and-a-half fretting about it while falling steadily into a life of deceptions and outright crime. In practice, however, this unconventional bildungsroman is grippingly immersive, with long passages of Dickensian detail exploring both the protagonist’s coming-of-age and his lingering trauma from the experience he survived as a boy. Author Donna Tartt creates a masterful distancing effect here amid the striking vistas of New York City, Las Vegas, and Amsterdam, as though her viewpoint creation is numb to the very world around him that she paints in such vivid colors for the rest of us.

He’s a tough character to love, seldom troubled by the (im)morality of a chosen action so much as the potential repercussions if he happens to get caught. Although not quite as sociopathic, he reminds me in that sense of the antihero from Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley — which is also a reaction I had to this writer’s The Secret History, so it may just be an aspect of how she tends to write her narrators. Even when he isn’t lying to everyone he knows or actively engaged in one of his many antiquities swindles, he’s unhealthily fixated on a particular female acquaintance who gives no indication of ever returning that interest. (Certain stories would reward a guy like Theo by having him ‘get the girl’ at the end; at this risk of spoilers, this is thankfully not that sort of tale.)

I do slightly prefer the first half of the novel, in which our teenage hero moves listlessly from one new living arrangement and close childhood friendship to another, over the next part, which picks back up with him as an adult after an eight-year time jump. On the other hand, the latter includes a pretty excellent twist and even some meaningful growth for the man, at least eventually. Overall I would say that this is a work about how obsessions gnaw at us and drag us into unhealthy versions of ourselves, with the chained bird in the titular Dutch painting proving an apt metaphor for the lead figure himself. In many ways he’s bound to his own worst past decisions, and until he can find a way out of those self-inflicted chains, he’ll never be able to fly free. His journey to get there makes for a slow and somewhat infuriating read, but the landscapes along the way are worthwhile, even if he himself might not be.

[Content warning for parental death, drug and alcohol abuse, gun violence, suicide, and gore.]

★★★★☆