The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Humboldt’s Gift by Saul Bellow

Book #188 of 2025:

Humboldt’s Gift by Saul Bellow

A dense and meandering novel, full of witty observations and [pseudo-]intellectual digressions but light on any actual story. This 1976 Pulitzer Prize winner is apparently author Saul Bellow’s most autobiographical work, detailing his fixation on an influential older writer who ended up dying penniless and alone — the titular Humboldt, based loosely on the poet Delmore Schwartz — but that metatextual connection doesn’t automatically produce an engaging read. In truth I’ve struggled to stay invested in this one, enjoying the protagonist’s wry tone and comic misadventures but often growing exasperated over his romantic and financial woes and insistence on overthinking seemingly every aspect of his life.

The plot, such as it is: the main character is in his 60s, suffering from an acrimonious divorce, and seeing a woman less-than-half his age who now wants him to propose. He’s been successful professionally but has a hard time keeping track of his wealth, with the implication that various business partners are fleecing him, but he’s also trying to spend down as much as he can before his ex-wife can seize the rest in her ongoing lawsuits against him. He had a falling-out with his late mentor about money as well, but eventually learns that the dead man has bequeathed him the rights to a movie idea he thinks would make a fortune at the box office. Meanwhile a petty mobster has attached himself to the hero, initially to claim the illicit poker debts that he’s been dodging but then out of a lingering odd sense of kinship and belief that they can strike a profit together too.

In other words, not much is really happening here to justify the length of the book. The slice-of-life texture is interesting for capturing a bygone twentieth-century America (and secular Jewish perspective thereof), but the endless asides and generally slow-paced narrative result in a bit of a slog. I think I still like the piece more than I dislike it on balance, but it’s a near thing.

[Content warning for racism, sexism, homophobia, antisemitism, domestic abuse, cannibalism, and rape.]

★★★☆☆

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TV Review: Classic Doctor Who, season 22

TV #56 of 2025:

Classic Doctor Who, season 22

Colin Baker’s Sixth Doctor is a hard incarnation to love, especially here in his first full season (after regenerating near the end of the last one). He’s pompous and insulting to everyone, but particularly to his companion Peri, whom he yells at, belittles, fat-shames, leaves for dead, and even offers to a villain as a potential sexual prize. I’m glad the later Big Finish audio dramas with Baker reprising the role have been able to channel that arrogant streak more productively / heroically and generally redeem the character, but he’s pretty awful as the originally-envisioned TV protagonist here. If you’re a New Who fan who didn’t like how rude the Twelfth Doctor could be at times, you’ll absolutely loathe Six.

Centering an ostensibly family-friendly series around such an abusive jerk is a bizarre choice that significantly impacts the enjoyment factor of these stories, while their propensity for gratuitous violence opened up criticism from another direction, leading to an 18-month hiatus following this run. This is edgy sci-fi, but largely without the quality of storytelling or smart use of a limited budget to back up that stance. It just looks cheap and petulant, for the most part.

It’s not all bad, thankfully. This is the Classic era’s singular experimentation with 45-minute episodes, which of course would be the ultimate format when the revival launched in 2005, and I do enjoy when Doctor Who tries new things. The villainous Rani appears for the first time as well, while the return of the Second Doctor and Jamie, knowing more than they seemingly should, has allowed fans to solve that plot hole by positing a host of unseen adventures in a fun theory known as “Season 6B.” Meanwhile VENGEANCE ON VAROS is a delightfully gritty and self-referential anticapitalist black comedy, and THE MARK OF THE RANI and TIMELASH introduce the franchise trope of a historical celebrity helping the heroes against the latest alien threat with their respective inclusions of George Stephenson and H. G. Wells, as previous real-life figures like Marco Polo had only ever featured in grounded earthbound plots.

Still, this is a bit of a slog throughout. If I averaged my ratings of each individual serial I would get a 2.8 out of 5, but in this case I’m going to round that down to a 2 overall. With its rot at the moral center, I simply don’t find enough of this to meet my standards for what I look for in Doctor Who.

Serials ranked from worst to best:

★★☆☆☆
REVELATION OF THE DALEKS (22×12 – 22×13)
TIMELASH (22×10 – 22×11)

★★★☆☆
THE MARK OF THE RANI (22×5 – 22×6)
ATTACK OF THE CYBERMEN (22×1 – 22×2)
THE TWO DOCTORS (22×7 – 22×9)

★★★★☆
VENGEANCE ON VAROS (22×3 – 22×4)

Overall rating for the season: ★★☆☆☆

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

Book Review: The Summer War by Naomi Novik

Book #187 of 2025:

The Summer War by Naomi Novik

A lovely little fantasy novella that feels creatively adjacent to author Naomi Novik’s earlier title Spinning Silver, as both involve an engagement to an austere fae lord who must be cleverly manipulated via magic binding oaths. (I do think the longer work is the better one, but since it’s also one of my all-time favorite novels, that’s perhaps not a fair comparison.) The worldbuilding and background history here are interesting, and the characters are suitably brave and resourceful in overcoming particular obstacles, but what I really like is how the plot prioritizes sibling bonds over romance — and the person who gets the closest to a traditional love story anyway is the brother who’s gay.

The whole thing moves to the rhythms of a fairy tale, and although I have some minor nitpicks that a greater length could likely have mitigated, this is overall a charming standalone genre piece with just the right degree of darkness on the edges.

[Content warning for suicide, gore, and threat of sexual assault.]

★★★★☆

Movie Review: Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989)

Movie #25 of 2025:

Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989)

A fun little story about two California slackers who travel around in a time machine that looks like a phone booth — surprisingly not intended as a Doctor Who reference — collecting famous historical figures to include in their class project. The boys are dim but easy to love in their affable enthusiasm, and their surfer-dude dialect offers plenty of hilarious quotes. (One particular favorite of mine has always been how they address a certain Wild West outlaw as “Mr. The Kid.”)

The plot holes are there if you look for them. Way too many events are packed into the characters’ final two hours before the deadline — which they’re apparently unable to circumvent, despite at one point revisiting the night they left — and the school presentation itself likewise goes on for too long and features technical effects and a genuine knowledge of history that the guys couldn’t really have prepared in advance. On the other hand, the premise here is that those heroes will someday start a band whose music is so powerful it leads to a future utopia that paradoxically grants them the mechanism to ensure they don’t flunk out before it happens, which does license a sort of comic looseness to the affair. And the film at least makes an effort to render the various people and periods they visit with a degree of accuracy, which I appreciate as someone who probably first learned about some of them from this exact production.

The humor holds up well, with one glaring exception when the teens embrace after a near-death experience and then break apart to call each other a homophobic slur. It’s a mostly white male cast but otherwise isn’t egregiously racist or sexist — yes Bill’s dad has remarried a woman only a few years older than his son, but we’re supposed to find that off-putting — and besides that one line, it’s a charming celebration of a close homosocial friendship. I adore the clever moments where they solve a problem by remembering to come back and do it later, too.

This movie feels like it should have been an isolated cult classic, but against all odds, it somehow spawned a franchise with an immediate sequel and a belated legacy follow-up, not to mention a cartoon show, a live-action sitcom, multiple video games, and even a short-lived breakfast cereal. I can’t decide whether that’s most heinous or most righteous indeed.

[Content warning for gun violence.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Julie Chan Is Dead by Liann Zhang

Book #186 of 2025:

Julie Chan Is Dead by Liann Zhang

This title starts off well, as a sort of YA Yellowface meets Ripley, but it takes some decidedly odd turns and gets pretty unhinged by the end. The initial premise at least is fun — the protagonist stumbles across the body of her estranged identical twin, who’s become a wealthy social media influencer, and spontaneously decides to take her place, telling police that she’s the one who died instead. Suddenly she’s traded her grueling paycheck-to-paycheck existence for a life of glamorous sponsored deals, designer brands, and avid followers, while spending her free time scouring her sister’s old content for the clues she’ll need to fake her way forward.

It’s inherently ludicrous, but debut author Liann Zhang does a nice job of showing the plausible smaller choices Julie makes to get her into the big lie she then can’t escape. Midway through, however, the character departs for an island retreat with a group of her elite new peers, which turns out to be the front for a brainwashed cult making sacrifices they think will manifest further success. It’s kind of like the arcane ritual at the heart of The Secret History — especially in the novel remaining ambiguous over whether anything supernatural truly ensues or not — and it’s overall an odd fit for a story that had previously revolved around the logistics of keeping a stolen identity hidden. The heroine could have been any newcomer to that inner circle, not specifically an imposter, and the book loses a lot of focus as a result.

Does it ultimately have something critical to say about celebrity and contemporary internet culture? I guess! But the women are such over-the-top caricatures and the plot eventually such a pulpy spectacle that it’s hard to take those satirical points seriously at all.

[Content warning for drug abuse, domestic abuse, miscarriage, racism, sexual assault, slavery, cruelty to animals, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Doctor Who: The Robot Revolution by Una McCormack

Book #185 of 2025:

Doctor Who: The Robot Revolution by Una McCormack

Una McCormack makes it look easy. She takes a fun but messy installment of Doctor Who, which on TV struggles to balance introducing the new companion and season-long plot with the immediate wacky adventure at hand — involving an ordinary nurse getting whisked away to a strange planet that shares her name and is in the middle of the titular uprising — and spins out a delightfully well-integrated tale in a warm storyteller’s tone. Some of the author’s additions feel like they were probably repurposed cuts from the original Russell T. Davies script, but either way, she delivers them with finesse. Belinda Chandra, her controlling ex Alan, and even her parents and roommates back home all gain further depths here, and we actually get to see the Fifteenth Doctor’s budding friendship with the doomed Sasha 55, rather than glossing over it in a quick line of exposition.

My favorite change from the screen version, however, comes near the end of the book, when the heroine calls out the dashing time-traveler for taking liberties like scanning her DNA without asking. That’s already a powerful moment as aired, offering the rare critique of the alien protagonist and his conventional approach that the franchise typically avoids, but it’s enhanced by the human character explicitly raising a parallel from the television subtext: how the Time Lord is just like the villain of the piece as a man who needs to learn she’s a person with her own agency and not simply a supporting accessory for whatever he alone decides to do. That thread ultimately didn’t get developed enough in the following episodes for my liking, but it’s an excellent way to establish a co-lead who’s more skeptical of the Doctor than his usual wide-eyed recruits.

Certain flaws like the convoluted time-travel logistics remain, but overall this is exactly what I’m looking for from a novelization like this — the chance for a series to tell the thing over again with greater confidence and fresh details or perspectives that were missing before. Many writers fail to meet that benchmark, but this is hands-down an improvement on the source material.

★★★★☆

Book Review: Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman

Book #184 of 2025:

Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman (Dungeon Crawler Carl #1)

I hate to be contrarian when I’ve heard such promising chatter about the title, but this 2020 series debut is an unfortunate miss for me. Although I can understand why it’s found an audience, it’s not a piece I’ve particularly enjoyed and I can’t imagine I’ll be checking out the sequels.

The genre here is that of a LitRPG or progression fantasy, meaning the plot is structured like a video game quest for the protagonist to achieve increasingly powerful spells, combat stats, and equipment. That’s not an automatic dealbreaker for me — some writers like Brandon Sanderson work in that same general range and prove captivating — but in this specific case, there’s not much else to distinguish the story. The worldbuilding is extremely generic, and the characters explicitly acknowledge that their reality functions like a sequence of dungeon levels in a program like Diablo, with the goal always to simply vanquish any immediate obstacles, gather the resulting loot, and progress further down.

The premise is roughly The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy meets The Running Man: aliens have strip-mined the earth, killing most of its inhabitants and sending the rest underground into the aforementioned arena, where the resident monster species all want to kill them and successful combatants can attract devoted patrons as their exploits are broadcast across the universe. Our hero is an everyman literally caught without his pants or shoes on, together with his ex-girlfriend’s cat who is soon magically gifted the ability to talk and begins bossing him around with her snobby princess personality (in between the two exchanging Whedonesque quips about their situation).

As that description might suggest, a big drawing point here is theoretically the snarky humor, but its execution leaves me cold. Everything carries a crude sophomoric quality that I personally find grating, as though it’s being delivered by a bro slapping you on the back over his own low-effort jokes. The narrative is regularly interrupted by player achievements like, “Boom! You’ve caused a wall-shaking explosion within the dungeon! The last time the walls shook like this was when your mom came over for a visit!” or comments like how a druidic energy aura is “a great spell to have if you’re a club kid or trying to bang a vegan.” We’re treated to a lot of such background misogyny in the text, along with fatphobia, rape culture, racism, and more. Carl bravely lets us know that he’s neither gay nor homophobic himself, but that doesn’t change how a phony sex tape between him and an enemy orc is seen as hilarious among his raiding party.

When I started this review I was intending to grudgingly concede the book’s craft and award it a passing rating of three-out-of-five stars, but as sometimes happens, the act of writing out my reactions has clarified them for me. Goodreads says that a three means “liked it,” and folks, I really didn’t.

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

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: The Man Who Died Seven Times by Yasuhiko Nishizawa

Book #183 of 2025:

The Man Who Died Seven Times by Yasuhiko Nishizawa

I’m a sucker for a good time loop story, but I’m afraid this 1995 Japanese novel, newly translated into English, doesn’t get there for me. It’s not a fault in the premise, which isn’t that absurd for this particular genre: the teenage protagonist has a strange affliction where he sometimes has to repeat the same day nine times in a row, and though it occurs at random, it happens to spring while he’s visiting his wealthy grandfather’s house and witnesses his host die of an apparent murder. When the 24-hour cycle resets, our hero must figure out what different choices he could make to save the victim, as well as determine which of his conniving relatives, each vying to be named the heir, might actually be the killer. Complicating matters is the fact that whenever he blocks one likely suspect from having an opportunity, another always seems to strike instead. And before long, he’s running out of attempts left to create the perfect timeline.

All these elements could theoretically work, but in execution the investigation goes nowhere interesting, and several big revelations of people’s backgrounds or motives are laughably silly. The tale is slow to even reach that part of the plot, however, as it first must laboriously explain the character’s abilities in an extended exposition dump. There’s also both regular incest between cousins and pedophilia — including the 16-year-old narrator having a 23-year-old love interest who doesn’t know his secret but can problematically just tell he’s more mentally mature than his age — and though that might be a cultural difference between the intended readership and myself, I’ve found it offputting in how unremarkable it’s supposed to be within the narrative. Ultimately none of these figures behave in ways that feel logical to me, and with the mystery around them a bust as well, there’s simply not much to recommend the title.

[Content warning for underage alcohol abuse.]

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: Star Wars: The Acolyte: The Crystal Crown by Tessa Gratton

Book #182 of 2025:

Star Wars: The Acolyte: The Crystal Crown by Tessa Gratton

I remain dissatisfied with Disney’s treatment of the Acolyte branch of its Star Wars universe: first canceling the flawed-but-engaging TV show after a single season that ended on several obvious cliffhangers, and then, presumably recognizing that the program had amassed a dedicated following anyway, issuing two novels that do not continue forward in the canon to reveal what happens next either, but rather fill in backstory for some of the supporting cast. This prequel is at least more interesting and competently told than the previous title Wayseeker, in part because Jecki and Yord are more entertaining characters than Vernestra and Indara. Their novel also feels like a story built specifically to showcase the younger pair, whereas its predecessor seemingly functioned as a capstone to the tangentially-related High Republic era instead.

The two Padawans — Yord hasn’t undergone his trials yet to become a Jedi Knight — take center stage here, and author Tessa Gratton captures their bickering-siblings tone well. As part of a diplomatic mission for the Order, they wind up competing in a planet’s local youth tournament that’s sort of like a non-lethal Hunger Games, which offers an adventure that’s both fun in the moment and a vehicle for personal growth towards the later selves we already know. Readers can thus revisit these fan favorites and gain insight into their development, although there’s not much to suggest the tragic end most of us are aware is coming.

But if you can set the greater shape of the franchise aside and accept the sanitized YA terms of the contest, this is a neat little Star Wars volume. It features one nonbinary human who uses they/them pronouns and a genderfluid member of a different species who shifts between she/her and he/him on occasion, which is the kind of diversity I love to see in this genre. It may not be the genuine followup to The Acolyte that audiences are still craving, but it’s a decent enough diversion. I give it three-and-a-half stars, rounded up.

★★★★☆

Book Review: Ripley’s Game by Patricia Highsmith

Book #181 of 2025:

Ripley’s Game by Patricia Highsmith (The Ripliad #3)

On a plot level, this third Tom Ripley novel plays out similarly to the first two, seeing our sociopathic protagonist get involved in yet another illegal enterprise that seems like it could have been avoided, whereupon he’s eventually driven to murder, dispose of his victims’ corpses, and then dodge the official investigation that ensues. This time he drags an innocent civilian along with him, correctly gambling that a man six years into a fatal leukemia diagnosis might be willing to kill for a payout of money to leave behind for his family after he’s gone.

The mafioso enemies represent a more capable opponent than usual, but what really elevates the matter is the rich queer subtext, although to get there, we need to discuss the previous titles as well. The Talented Mr. Ripley addresses its antihero’s sexuality head-on: other characters directly accuse him of liking men, which he denies, inviting readers to determine whether he’s a reliable narrator or not. And the evidence is substantial — to quote my own review of those early adventures in Europe, the American expat displays “both a fascination for male bodies and the sort of platonic masculinity he somehow can’t perform and a hatred of women and the idea of any conventional romance or sex with them.”

In Ripley Under Ground, any queerness is considerably repressed. Though Tom’s primary relationships are all still with men, he no longer struggles with how he’s perceived by them, and he enjoys a comfortable marriage to a woman with whom he’s physically affectionate. If this story were not a sequel and its author not known to us as a lesbian, I doubt any reader would imagine the character had greater depths to his affairs beyond what’s textually on the page.

This volume, as the final panel of that triptych (although two more Ripliad entries would subsequently follow), complicates the picture further. Strictly speaking, no one voices any thought in Ripley’s Game that the titular figure might feel a romantic inclination towards his own gender. And yet he steadily persuades an upright married man into becoming his intimate acquaintance and co-conspirator, which leads the fellow’s wife to rightly view Tom as an interloper in their formerly happy home. All throughout, the luring of Jonathan is framed as a seduction, with the lamb unable to explain the appeal he sees in the more worldly con artist and his hitman job offer. And since half the text is from his perspective, in a departure for a series that has previously stuck wholly to its original POV, we understand that confusion to be genuine.

The two men are bound together by forces they can’t define and no one else can appreciate, sharing secret late-night rendezvous and private phone calls and repeatedly saving one another’s lives. Their connection is never identified as a romance — nor do I think the pair would welcome that label themselves — but the book is almost fundamentally impossible to fathom otherwise. There’s some initial trickery on Ripley’s part to make the disease prognosis seem even more serious, but by the time he agrees to become an assassin, the younger man has seen through that ruse and decided to accept the proposal anyway. He wonders what signals he gave off for Tom to have recognized him as a potential killer, which reads very much like someone in the closet panicking over a more experienced gay person clocking and flirting with them. Considered through that lens, it’s no wonder he appears helplessly drawn towards the ruthless criminal.

And does Tom Ripley care for Jonathan in return? Perhaps! He does step in and help him when the smarter play would be to stay out of events altogether, and our devious hero has never been given to overt self-reflection. At the same time, however, he’s quick to brush off the ultimate unhappy ending that spoils their frantic close association, as I suppose we’ve always known he would be.

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

★★★★☆