The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins

Book #50 of 2025:

Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins

I wasn’t a huge fan of author Suzanne Collins’s first prequel effort The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, but this new title thankfully recaptures the old Hunger Games magic. It’s a challenging target for this sort of release to hit — similar enough to the original to carry the same appeal, different enough to not feel like a simple repeat, and moreover developing some interesting new angle of canon to really justify the return. In this case, the premise of finally telling the story of Haymitch Abernathy’s time in the arena is a solid hook to begin with, but the novel that plays out from there contains unexpected riches that distinguish this from any number of potential accounts of the second Quarter Quell that fanfic writers have imagined over the years.

Most readers will come at this volume with the background knowledge that the teenage protagonist is due to be selected as one of his district’s tributes and ultimately wind up the lone survivor of the ensuing slaughter. Luckily, the plot involves more than merely bullet-point summaries of how exactly that transpires. It’s instead a character piece exploring just how the hero gets ground down into the jaded alcoholic of the later era, fueled by the poignant mystery of what fate will befall his tender romance, given that his young sweetheart doesn’t seem to still be around as an adult. We also get a more intriguingly revolutionary motivation for the boy beyond pure survival, plus fascinating early looks at the dystopian Capitol setting and other familiar figures like Plutarch Heavensbee.

In finishing this book, I’m left with the urge to revisit the original trilogy with fresh eyes for how those characters are informed by their new backstory, as well as to spot any additional connections that I may have missed. That’s the sign of an exceptional prequel, in my opinion.

[Content warning for gun violence and gore.]

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Stephen King’s The Dark Tower: The Drawing of the Three Omnibus by Robin Furth, Peter David, Piotr Kowalski, Jonathan Marks, Nick Filardi, and Lee Loughridge

Book #49 of 2025:

Stephen King’s The Dark Tower: The Drawing of the Three Omnibus by Robin Furth, Peter David, Piotr Kowalski, Jonathan Marks, Nick Filardi, and Lee Loughridge

Nearly but not quite the last of Marvel’s Dark Tower comic adaptations, as this volume — already smaller than the first two — for some reason leaves out the closing arc The Sailor. Instead it includes only The Prisoner, House of Cards, Lady of Shadows, and Bitter Medicine, which collectively represent volumes 61-80 of the 85-issue series, covering the early lives of several key people from our world and how they eventually get drawn into the gunslinger Roland’s epic quest.

Most of this material comes from the novel The Drawing of the Three, although Eddie’s section in particular has expanded upon the available backstory, to somewhat mixed effect. In general I like his first-person narration, but I don’t think we especially needed so much detail about his childhood or how Roland’s enemy Walter was apparently trying to kill him back then. The story also doesn’t come to any major conclusion at the end, presumably in part because the present publication cuts off before the ending of the comics run. On the other hand, the artistic choices for Odetta’s chapters are very striking, and really illuminate her inner struggles with her dissociative identity disorder.

In reviewing the previous two omnibus releases, I observed that the one adapting The Gunslinger was stronger than the one handling Wizard and Glass, perhaps since the weaker Gunslinger source book represented a flawed canvas that could more readily be improved in adaptation. The Drawing of the Three, by contrast, is like Wizard and Glass in being an excellent novel to begin with that the illustrated version fails to wholly replicate or surpass. (The romance here feels significantly shortchanged from the original Stephen King prose, for instance, much as was the case before.)

Ultimately: if you’re an existing fan, I do feel this is an interesting attempt at a new take on the tale. But it’s not essential or definitive by any means, and it must be noted how many of the threads developed here never wind up going anywhere, as Marvel canceled the overall Dark Tower line shortly thereafter.

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

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Vallista by Steven Brust

Book #48 of 2025:

Vallista by Steven Brust (Vlad Taltos #15)

In this installment, Vlad Taltos goes full Gormenghast, and the results are somewhat underwhelming. I do appreciate how author Steven Brust continues to periodically shake up his usual storytelling rhythms for this series, and it’s hard to name a bigger change than this adventure, which confines the ex-assassin to a magical manor of shifting realities populated by members of a decadent household. As he moves from room to room and through the surrounding environs having one-off conversations with the various lonely residents, the geography of the place seems disconnected in both space and time, resulting in him traveling back and forth across the centuries as he goes. It’s all very weird, and while he eventually pieces together a few family mysteries, learns more about the larger franchise worldbuilding, and manages to escape intact, it’s not the most satisfying plot. I give it two stars for providing another fun hangout session with the protagonist and his snarky reptilian familiar, but I need more from a story than a character wandering around being told stuff for 350 pages.

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: Ring of Solomon by Aden Polydoros

Book #47 of 2025:

Ring of Solomon by Aden Polydoros (Ring of Solomon #1)

[Disclaimer: I am Twitter mutuals with this author.]

Overall a solid entry in the Percy Jackson genre of middle-grade fiction, where tweens battle fantastical monsters drawn from some culture’s traditional mythology (increasingly #ownvoices for the writer’s particular background, as here). In this case the source domain is ancient Jewish folklore, with the demon lord Ashmedai, King Solomon, a ziz, a behemoth, and a leviathan all making an appearance. The twelve-year-old protagonist is also gay and subjected to intense antisemitic bullying from a tormenter at school, which further helps the title stand out among a crowded field of peers. Generally speaking, however, this feels too much like a sort of story I’ve encountered many times before, with not enough to specifically recommend it that I haven’t mentioned already. It’s apparently the launch to a series, so I hope that author Aden Polydoros manages to find a more distinctive key for the worldbuilding and plot going forward.

★★★☆☆

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.

★★★☆☆

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.]

★★★★☆