The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Ironwood by Michael Connelly

Book #78 of 2026:

Ironwood by Michael Connelly (Catalina #2)

Author Michael Connelly could probably write a crime novel like this in his sleep at this point, and occasionally I wonder if he has. His latest volume returns to the setting and characters of last year’s Nightshade, where a detective has been punished for still-murky past transgressions and reassigned to a small island off the coast of California as punishment. The action picks up here shortly after, and as usual for this writer consists of a few overlapping investigations, most of which don’t directly relate to one another but simply capture the protagonist’s busy caseload.

This is all about as solid as long-time readers would expect, and we even get a crossover with Renée Ballard of the LA cold cases division (plus silent cameos from Harry Bosch and his daughter) for anyone fooled into thinking the Catalina books represented a separate continuity from Connelly’s primary works. A couple issues keep it from being among his best, however. First, the balance of the plots is off in my opinion, with the more interesting one — a serial killer taunting the police over their inability to catch him — wrapping up too soon, while the aftermath of a deputy’s shooting ends up occupying the majority of the climax. And second, at the risk of minor spoilers, it feels too convenient that the captain who’s been rude to Stilwell for the whole story winds up implicated in some of the wrongdoing in the end too. Sometimes bad bosses are just a pain to work with, and not coincidentally also corrupt criminals that you can righteously take down!

But it remains a joy to watch a clever investigator follow leads and build up evidence against his suspects, and Ballard / Stilwell seems like a productive partnership to continue exploring when the inevitable sequels roll around. I imagine genre fans will appreciate this, though it lands as more good than great overall.

[Content warning for suicide and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Like this review? Find more of my writing on:
–https://www.goodreads.com/lesserjoke
–https://letterboxd.com/lesserjoke
–https://lesserjoke.home.blog
Or check out these ways to support me, if you’d like:
–https://ko-fi.com/lesserjoke
–https://patreon.com/lesserjoke

TV Review: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, season 1

TV #25 of 2026:

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, season 1

This show is very much Terminator filtered through the particular ethos of a 2000s teen drama, which is not an approach I felt like I needed to watch after the first few episodes back when it originally aired. (The network may have been Fox, but in my heart, this is a WB/CW property. It even filmed on the old Stars Hollow sets from Gilmore Girls!) That means the titular heroine and her son John are dodging robot assassins from the future, but also juggling a lot of hurt feelings and relationship melodrama, not to mention obligatory subplots about relatively trivial high school matters.

Some of this works well for me, and some of it really doesn’t. I’ve always been more of a story and character guy than an action fiend anyway, so I don’t mind the skew away from the car chases and gun fights of the original Hollywood movies in favor of more talk-heavy scenes throughout. Summer Glau as the resident cyborg ally is a character type that I enjoy too, even if it feels like merely a minor variation on her career-defining role as River Tam in Firefly / Serenity: the spectrum-coded outsider who doesn’t understand our curious human ways. And I’ll never say no to Garret Dillahunt as the primary Skynet villain opposite her, either. There’s a lot to potentially dig into there as the protagonists flee from both him and a dogged FBI agent on their trail, while vaguely seeking to prevent the latest iteration of the nuclear doomsday awaiting our planet.

Still, it’s an awkward fit for the franchise, even if its decision to follow directly from T2 and ignore T3 entirely is more defensible in hindsight now that Terminator: Dark Fate (2019) made the same bizarre choice (probably best understood as a multiverse, alternate-reality thing, rather than a change to a single definitive timeline brought about by time-travel). The season is shorter than was initially planned due to an ongoing writers strike, and yet there are so many issues that go nowhere and seem like obvious wheel-spinning regardless. Though I appreciate the loose Whedon hangout vibe to a degree, especially once John’s uncle Derek joins the team, I need more of a sense of the specific larger mission here, and fewer squabbles with random classmates or Armenian gangsters or other one-off enemies.

Lena Headey and Thomas Dekker do fine with the parts they’ve inherited, presuming you can set aside how she’s not that much older than him in real life, and I’m interested to see where the concept goes in the second, longer season ahead. But for now, I’d say this series is only about as good as the mid-tier sequels that it replaces.

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

★★★☆☆

Terminator movies, ranked

Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
The Terminator (1984)
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003)
Terminator Genisys (2015)
Terminator Salvation (2009)
Terminator: Dark Fate (2019)

Overall rating: ★★★★☆

Previously on Film Franchise Fridays:

★★★☆☆ Bill & Ted
★★★★☆ Indiana Jones
★★★☆☆ Jason Bourne
★★★★☆ Rocky / Creed
★★★★☆ The Matrix

Rocky / Creed movies, ranked

Rocky II (1979)
Rocky (1976)
Creed (2015)
Creed II (2018)
Creed III (2023)
Rocky V (1990)
Rocky Balboa (2006)
Rocky III (1982)
Rocky IV (1985)

Overall rating: ★★★★☆

Previously on Film Franchise Fridays:

★★★☆☆ Bill & Ted
★★★★☆ Indiana Jones
★★★☆☆ Jason Bourne
★★★★☆ The Matrix

Book Review: The Astral Library by Kate Quinn

Book #77 of 2026:

The Astral Library by Kate Quinn

I struggled a lot with this heroine early on, finding her woe-is-me, not-like-other-girls attitude incredibly childish and off-putting. She’s also the sort of character who bemoans her supposedly plain looks while ignoring how the romantic interest is practically throwing himself at her feet in worship. Her extreme poverty and foster kid childhood do make her slightly more sympathetic, and the premise is of course specifically designed to be catnip for book lovers, but I had to work harder to get into this one than I would ideally prefer.

Our protagonist is having an exceptionally poor day when she stumbles into a mystical library offering sanctuary to people in need like her. She gets the rules speedily infodumped at her: visitors can pick out a story to enter into the background of, they can’t disrupt established events, if they die in the Matrix they die in real life, and so on. The worldbuilding is pretty haphazard and contradictory — time in the outside world stands still when you’re in the library, but not once you’re in one of its novels; the shelves have unpublished works like the next A Song of Ice and Fire entry (although the contents keep shifting as authors change their minds), but you can only go live in volumes that have entered the public domain; the place is magic but still has to adhere to local laws and the wishes of a board of directors; there are ghosts in the stacks whose to-read lists constituted unfinished business, but they’re not actually interested in reading those books and can in fact get distracted by other titles they might like better. And so forth.

It’s kind of exhausting, even before the obligatory larger plot of someone attacking the institution arrives. (It’s obviously more exciting to tell a tale in which the setting is threatened than one in which it works exactly as expected, but the execution feels particularly artless.) This part of the story is a bit fun, as the woman dodges from Sherlock Holmes to The Great Gatsby to The Three Musketeers and whatnot, but it builds to a preachy diatribe against private equity and capitalism in general having no right to get involved in the sacred trust between a library and its patrons. I’ve seen reviews from conservative readers who don’t like all the sniping about book bans and such in here, but even as a person whose politics are largely in line with most of what’s being slung, I just don’t think this is very well-written.

[Content warning for domestic violence, slavery, racism, and gore.]

★★☆☆☆

TV Review: Barry, season 1

TV #24 of 2026:

Barry, season 1

SNL alumnus Bill Hader isn’t as funny in the title role of this series as I would have expected, but he’s certainly not the first established comedian to pivot to a more dramatic footing (Bryan Cranston and Bob Odenkirk both coming immediately to mind). And there is a darkly comic story happening around him, with its premise of a hitman bouncing off a succession of strange L.A. personalities — after deciding in a bit of a midlife crisis that he’d like to take up a career in acting instead — carrying a general impression of Grosse Pointe Blank meets Get Shorty, with shades of something like Dexter / Breaking Bad / The Americans / etc. in how he has to hide his criminal activities from the other people in his life as well. I think I’m most surprised by how terrible Barry turns out to be at his new vocation thus far, although everyone else is so myopically focused on their own attempts to break into show business that they barely notice his relative lack of talent.

The cast is a lot of fun, including old pros Stephen Root and Henry Winkler, and the writers prove refreshingly willing to kill off named characters (though they thankfully course-correct and spare Anthony Carrigan as the Chechen mobster NoHo Hank after seemingly dispatching him in the pilot, as he’s easily the funniest part on the show). In the end I’m not wholly satisfied by the looseness of the plot or the way everything keeps conveniently working out for the protagonist, but at only eight episodes a season, I’m invested enough to continue watching for now.

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

★★★☆☆

Book Review: All the Colors of the Dark by Chris Whitaker

Book #76 of 2026:

All the Colors of the Dark by Chris Whitaker

This novel carries a strong feeling of True Detective seasons 1 and 3 for me, and not only for the core plot involving a string of unsolved child abductions. It also spends a long time on people processing trauma and obsessing about those same open cases, which unfold over several decades (albeit without the gimmicky structure of an alternating timeline back and forth). We watch as the main characters here grow from innocent young teens to damaged adults, and while I don’t always feel as though their subsequent self-destructive behaviors are well-explained, it’s obvious how the hurt from their past lingers on.

The story starts with a boy intervening when a masked figure assaults a female classmate, giving her the opportunity to escape but getting captured himself in her place. He’s kept in total darkness for months, unsure of what his captor wants, while the girl and his best friend outside try to find an angle that the police haven’t considered. After they do and he’s ultimately rescued, the villain is presumed dead in the resulting house fire, and another captive that the teenager has forged a unique bond with can’t be found, either. But her real identity is unknown, and the authorities conclude that she must have been just a figment of his traumatized imagination, concocted to help give him strength throughout his ordeal — although he continues to insist otherwise and attempt fruitlessly to discover her name and where she came from, believing that unlocking her origins will allow him to locate and potentially rescue her in turn.

It’s a tale heavy on questions that the respective protagonists are unable to stop asking themselves and ever move beyond, no matter how much happier they know they’d be if they could. And those answers do eventually come out — some details more plausible than others — but the primary thrust of the piece isn’t interested in wrapping everything up in a neat little bow for us. Instead it’s more concerned with how lives are shattered by unfathomable violence, and how small choices for good or ill reverberate across the days and years that follow.

[Content warning for gun violence, domestic abuse, suicide, incest, pedophilia, rape, and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Radiant Star by Ann Leckie

Book #75 of 2026:

Radiant Star by Ann Leckie

This latest entry is probably the weakest of the six novels in author Ann Leckie’s extended Imperial Radch saga so far, but it’s still an enjoyable enough time that I’m comfortable giving it three-and-a-half stars (radiant or otherwise), rounded up. It takes place during / after the big civil war from the original trilogy, but you don’t necessarily need to have read that first if you don’t mind encountering a few minor spoilers for it. Likewise, although it would help to come into this book with the background understanding of how spaceships in this setting have artificial intelligences that they can distribute around to pilot a network of donated corpses, I think that aspect might actually be easier for a new reader to grasp in-context here than it was back when it was introduced in Ancillary Justice.

The standalone plot concerns a small planet on the fringes of Radchaai space, which has been gradually falling under the influence of the expanding empire at the point when communications and resource deliveries across it are interrupted by the conflict. As usual the story benefits from the writer’s immersive cultural worldbuilding details and interrogation of gender norms, but the core feels a bit farcical despite the impending danger of famine for everyone. Characters scheme and repeatedly ricochet off one another, with a major focus on the local religion and its teaching that people can become living saints by being brought close to death and left mummified in a chamber to await the return of their messiah, which is a literal star. And all this action is narrated to us by some unnamed future scholar, whose playful tone further diminishes the tension and limits us from ever getting too far inside the minds of the various players.

Again: not a favorite given what we’ve seen from this universe in the past, but an above-average piece of intelligent science-fiction, nonetheless.

[Content warning for slavery and mention of cannibalism.]

★★★★☆

Movie Review: Clerks (1994)

Movie #24 of 2026:

Clerks (1994)

Even on a rewatch decades on, Clerks feels like a marvel. Filmed in black-and-white on a shoestring budget in the adjoining convenience and video rental stores where writer-director Kevin Smith worked at the time, it captures the aimless Gen X burnout spirit of works like Office Space (1999), but filtered through the particular malaise of the young and working-class. The plot is just a random day of Seinfeldian nothingness in that life, from open to close — albeit with certain events unfolding to provide a semblance of structure, especially in the romance department.

The writing is very clever and funny (not to mention frequently off-color), although it ping-pongs between sounding naturalistic and too heavily stylized to be believed, and not every actor is equally up to the task of delivering it. Given that aspect, the relatively static camera work, and the creative ways of reducing costs by describing outside developments in the dialogue more often than showing them directly, there’s the feeling of a stage play throughout, which ends up fitting the mood of the piece entirely. In another cost-cutting measure, the story is supposed to be set during the daylight hours but was clearly shot overnight while the real shops were closed, adding a further impression of unreality and oddball night owl energy to the affair. Smith brings a lot of his own experiences and perspective to the script as well, mostly in the inane interactions with rude customers across the shift, but likewise in a few pointed jabs at people like guidance counselors.

Some of this is timeless, as though the essence of it could still be happening in businesses now or at any point in the last half-century, but it also seems quintessentially 1990s in a way, and not only from the matter of the videotape rentals. The conversations on nerdy pop culture subjects like whether independent contractors were working on the second Death Star when the Rebels destroyed it in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi may be commonplace on the internet today, but they were far more of a rarity in the pre-Reddit era and helped viewers feel like we were all in on the joke and members of the same private club. That’s the element that most presages the auteur creator’s subsequent career too, far more than the sad-sack protagonist and his inexplicable hold over multiple women. (This film does not remotely pass the Bechdel test, but it does feature a woman having sex in the dark with a corpse she mistakes for her living ex-boyfriend. All off-screen, but you can understand why the MPAA initially wanted to give this an NC-17 rating before relenting and settling on R. The nineties, am I right?)

Dante exasperatedly repeats his refrain, “I wasn’t even supposed to be here today!” at several key moments, and the original intended ending would have culminated in his getting killed by an armed robber just before finally closing up to go home. The finished production pulls back from that darkness, which is probably for the best, but still doesn’t do anything to suggest a future for these characters beyond their current dead-end jobs. Many of them would recur nonetheless, most notably the breakout drug dealers Jay and Silent Bob (the latter played by Smith himself), but none of those more typical Hollywood projects that followed could ever quite carry the same despondent attitude of this one.

★★★★☆

Book Review: Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke

Book #74 of 2026:

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke

A neat premise, a compellingly unlikeable narrator reminiscent of June in Yellowface, and a scathing critique of the tradwife / manosphere / social media influencer ecosystem. What’s not to love? Natalie is one of those women peddling a faux traditional lifestyle to her millions of followers online, carefully cultivating her image as a rustic housewife while hiding all the nannies and other behind-the-scenes staff that keep the operation moving. She’s also an absent and abusive parent to her six kids, barely knowing them as individuals and ignoring their regular insistence that they don’t want to be filmed for her content anymore. Our protagonist is a clear villain in this, but a victim in her own way too: trapped in a loveless marriage, chafing against the sexist expectations that society puts on mothers, and deeply messed-up by her own fundamentalist Christian upbringing.

It’s a character type in dire need of a righteous takedown, and the novel soon provides one as that heroine wakes up to find herself seemingly transported back to the early 1800s and tasked with running a pioneer farm for real. She now has to carry out the sort of backbreaking work she’d only pretended to do before, whilst having no idea how she got there or how she’ll ever manage to escape.

The text unfolds in two timelines, alternating between filling us in on her grotesquely charmed backstory up until that point and further exploring her terrible new circumstances beyond it. The big mystery is just what happened to this woman — actual time-travel, a cruel prank, or some kind of psychotic break seeming the most likely options — although it’s easy to guess from the structure that we’re building to a big twist reveal to explain it all. I don’t think that belated exposition is entirely satisfactory when it arrives, but the logic more or less works, and the earlier story is too enjoyable for the ending to sink it.

I’m ultimately not sure whether I hate or pity Natalie more, or whether I believe the universe has punished her enough for her sins. But she’s a fascinating creation whose warped psyche is pretty richly crafted, and that’s definitely worth the read.

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

★★★★☆