The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Nonesuch by Francis Spufford

Book #66 of 2026:

Nonesuch by Francis Spufford

I really like the first half of this historical fantasy novel, in which an enterprising young British woman stumbles into some occult secrets in the early days of World War II. Despite the plot shenanigans, it’s a very character-driven piece, and our heroine is an interesting figure to follow as she determines to learn more about her new circumstances whilst chafing under the professional limitations placed upon her gender and class in that era (and falling in love, against her better judgment).

Unfortunately, the back end of the story is significantly weaker. The protagonist and her beau discover that their fascist enemies are trying to unlock a ritual that would allow them to change the past and preemptively weaken Britain’s defense against the Nazis, but they can only attempt each step once a month. As a result, the rest of the book concerns the couple otherwise experiencing the London Blitz with lots of aimless waiting between their supernatural missions, and with the ultimate ending arriving out of nowhere and proving highly unsatisfying after all that. It’s a far cry from the initial quality of the work, so although I remained invested enough in the cast to see it through, I doubt I’d return for a sequel even if that odd conclusion was meant as a mere cliffhanger.

[Content warning for gun violence, sexual assault, torture, antisemitism, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It by Cory Doctorow

Book #65 of 2026:

Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It by Cory Doctorow

This 2025 title is an expansion of several essays that activist-journalist Cory Doctorow had previously published on the subject, including the one where he originally coined the word “enshittification.” Although many people have since adopted that term to describe any degradation in service — a shift in meaning that the writer says he’s fine with, citing natural processes of language change — his original definition is more technically precise. A product becomes enshittified in this sense not just from getting worse, but by following a specific common cycle that can be seen across many disparate industries. First the offering is made attractive to users, then value is clawed back from them to benefit business partners, and finally it’s extracted from them as well, to yield pure profits for the shareholders. And crucially, each step only progresses to the next once enough of the market has been captured to make divestment close to impossible.

Facebook marks an obvious example. Its initial proposition was that it could connect people with other members of their offline social network, in order to follow their shared activities online. The concept worked and got a sizable population hooked, after which the company began selling our feeds to advertisers who wanted to put their own preferred content before our eyes. Some fraction of the userbase left at that point, but most of us were too enmeshed in the ecosystem and didn’t have an easy way to exit and stay in touch with our whole friends list. Later when the advertising customers too were committed to producing Facebook-specific materials, they were undercut by algorithms designed to keep posters active on the site rather than passively seeing ads that might send them elsewhere. (And of course, the social media posts fed to us now from sources we didn’t choose to follow are those more likely to produce a strong emotional reaction, often at the cost of accuracy or nuance.)

Amazon, although a very different platform on the surface, has demonstrated a remarkably similar trajectory. Its prices are no lower than its competitors these days, especially now that it’s driven so many of them out of business, and its top search results no longer return the best products or even those whose manufacturers pay the company to promote them. The current iteration of Google search likewise skews away from what a person is actually looking to find with their query in favor of artificially-boosted links, or even A.I. summaries of dubious veracity that serve no one but Google itself.

The pattern repeats, from Uber to Apple to Microsoft to Hewlett Packard and any other corporation that now expects you to pay a recurring subscription fee rather than buying their product and owning it outright in perpetuity. Once-promising digital media like ebooks and video games or even Adobe pdfs can be removed from a customer’s library or otherwise rendered unusable at the subsequent discretion of the seller, in addition to being mined for personal data and A.I. training purposes. Meanwhile, anti-consumer legislation prevents legal owners from protecting their purchases from these encroachments, using them as fully as they see fit, or even sharing instructions on how to do so with others.

Doctorow walks us through many such examples, while clarifying that these practices are not necessarily synonymous with capitalism. They instead reflect how that system’s relentless drive for profit growth has in recent years surpassed the restraints that formerly kept it in check, helped along by a weakening of labor’s collective bargaining power against it and private equity buy-outs, mergers, and similar consolidations that have left a mere handful of powerful players in every major industry. But despite how the firms in question might like to gaslight us, things haven’t always been this bad and they don’t have to remain so forever.

It’s this last part of the text that falters a little for me, the “what to do about it” of the project’s subtitle. There are certain remedies to the enshittification problem that the author identifies, but they are primarily antitrust actions of the kind he correctly notes the Biden administration spent four years pursuing (yet have been summarily rolled back under Trump 2.0). There’s not much here for individuals to do on our own beyond supporting anti-monopoly political candidates, joining a union, and resisting internal pressures to enshittify whatever goods or services our own employer provides. Still, simply seeing the shady playbook of our would-be corporate oligarchs laid bare may hopefully be enough to convince some readers to begin breaking up with those platforms where possible.

★★★★☆

Movie Review: Terminator Genisys (2015)

Movie #20 of 2026:

Terminator Genisys (2015)

[Note: this is an updated version of my review from 2016.]

The fifth Terminator movie is a fun but deeply incoherent action spectacle, enjoyable only to the extent you can turn off the parts of your brain that obsess over plot holes or try to keep track of the twisted logic. The first twenty minutes or so play out largely as a prelude to The Terminator (1984), showing us human resistance leader John Connor in a dystopian future winning a war against the killer robots, but not before they can send one back in time to murder his mother. He orders his trusted lieutenant Kyle Reese to follow after and save her, and it’s all a straightforward execution of the familiar but previously-unseen backstory, closing the long loop that’s at last brought events to this point.

Then a hidden figure intervenes, attacking John and potentially disrupting the time-travel process. The writers’ intent appears to be for this development to create a branching timeline, although we soon learn that other things have changed that don’t exactly flow from that scenario. For starters, some unknown party — and it’s never established who — has sent a reprogrammed T-800 even further back to when Sarah was a child, where it has protected her and raised her as a soldier. As a result she’s now more like the battle-hardened Linda Hamilton from T2 than her original T1-era self, and new actress Emilia Clarke does a decent job of channeling that characterization, give or take her faltering American accent. (In contrast, Jai Courtney is nothing like either of the previous actors to play Reese — and while I don’t usually care when franchises recast, it’s harder to swallow when both this movie and its predecessor Terminator Salvation (2009) use digital effects to painstakingly render a 1980s Arnold Schwarzenegger for a few minutes.) The now-former governor turns in a fine performance as the woman’s guardian too, with the explanation that his synthetic skin ages like the real stuff providing a reasonable justification for why he looks older this go-around.

So she and “Pops” have become a tight-knit father-daughter duo by the time the warring agents from 2029 arrive, and they dispatch the younger T-800 — aka the one from the first film — with ease. These scenes recreate exact beats from the 1984 picture, except there’s also now a liquid metal T-1000 in the mix for some reason, and once everyone is safe, a shaken Reese describes how he’s gained a new set of memories and Judgment Day will now take place in 2017, rather than 1997. He and Sarah then strip down and hop into a makeshift time machine that the friendly robot has built for her, and the rest of the storyline carries on from there. They’re met by the Arnold who waited for them, a scene-stealing J. K. Simmons as a conspiracy-brained cop who’s absolutely correct about what’s going on, and… John Connor (Jason Clarke, no relation to Emilia, again not displaying much similarity to his forerunners in the role), who’s somehow been transformed to a Terminator himself and gone there to stop them.

Although the act of turning the series hero into a villain is appropriately shocking, it doesn’t make a lick of sense when you pause to think about it, especially if you try to parse his specific motivations here. He’s an infiltrator assassin who repeatedly lets his targets live before they’re onto him, and then I guess changes his mind and does try to kill them, though since they’re his own parents who haven’t conceived him yet, that seems remarkably short-sighted. Then again, the protagonists themselves are trying to blow up the new facility for Skynet — now a smartphone operating system or something — before it comes online, which would likewise presumably have the effect of negating the causal chain that led them there. (As the dean on Community once wailed: “Time travel is really hard to write about!”) They get away from John and go to a weapons cache that he apparently knows about and corners them at, though he hilariously stops by the company headquarters for a meaningless stakeholder sync on the way there.

This movie frustrates me because it is genuinely entertaining — in mostly intentional ways — and the script feels so close to being good, like another round or two of rewrites to shore up the story could have made it as classic as the first two features. Revisiting and altering the 1984 plot has a definite Back to the Future Part II vibe, which is an outstanding fit for the paradoxically-looping Terminator saga, and so many of its core ideas could have worked with just a degree of tweaking in the brainstorming stage. Unfortunately as an aggregate finished product it’s completely nonsensical, even by the pretty loose standards of this particular franchise.

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

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Sword of Kaigen by M. L. Wang

Book #64 of 2026:

The Sword of Kaigen by M. L. Wang

This fantasy novel starts out strong, gets legitimately great around midway through, but then unfortunately peters out in the end, without really resolving some of the larger plot threads that it introduces (which might be excusable for the launch of a series, but this 2019 title is both a standalone spinoff prequel and so far still the latest release in the wider ‘Theonite’ saga). The last act instead winds up serving mainly as a direct prelude to author M. L. Wang’s earlier YA story Planet Adyn, which features two of the minor characters from this world dimension-hopping into ours.

It’s a shame, because when this volume isn’t concerning itself with belatedly cramming in those extraneous franchise connections, it’s an outstanding piece of speculative military writing. It even overcomes my initial skepticism about a contemporary-inspired setting full of bullets and airplanes and high schools and the like, which is not my favorite approach to genre worldbuilding. And although I don’t like how much is ultimately left open, I do appreciate the structure here, which veers away from a lot of the expected familiar tropes. (Many epic adventures begin with a young hero’s idyllic home getting surprised by the arrival of violent enemy forces — Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, The Wheel of Time, Dragonlance, Children of Blood and Bone, Avatar: The Last Airbender, etc. — but far fewer are the ones that keep the action centered on that community throughout and beyond the conflict, or that switch to primarily focus on the teenager’s mother in the back half of the tale).

It’s an effective and affecting choice, illustrating the chilling power of repressive government propaganda and the harsh realities of war without veering too far into grimdark cynicism. The various magic systems are neat too, with a Sanderson-esque flair for both the basics of how they function and the ways a master can learn to wield one against another. And of course, the detail of the #ownvoices East Asian infuences remains an underutilized and appreciated design element that further helps this work stand out amongst its peers.

I did think at one point that I would probably give this a five-star rating — as I did for the writer’s unrelated later book Blood Over Bright Haven — and I’m disappointed to have to scale my praise backwards from that. But I have still enjoyed this overall and would happily return for a sequel to address those lingering matters, if one should ever materialize.

[Content warning for racism, rape, torture, gun violence, violence against children, domestic abuse, suicide, and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: In Lonely Lands by Victoria Goddard

Book #63 of 2026:

In Lonely Lands by Victoria Goddard

This is the sort of title that I almost hate to see released as a standalone item, because it’s too insubstantial to bear much scrutiny but could be perfectly situated as a part of a larger story collection. In this case, it’s a ‘tale of Ysthar,’ which is author Victoria Goddard’s way of indicating an entry in her expansive Nine Worlds fantasy setting that nevertheless occupies a recognizable version of our reality. The immediate genre is maybe more like magical realism, since the paper-thin plot concerns a woman standing by the seaside cliff outside her home and seeing a giant eagle pass nearby — perhaps intelligent, perhaps looking at her, but ultimately just hovering there for a few moments and then departing. In its wake, she finds a feather on the ground seemingly made of bronze, and… that’s it.

I don’t mean to shortchange this; it’s a lovely and evocative piece of writing, and I can easily imagine how it fits within the gentle sorceries of Goddard’s other works. But even readers who bring that background context to the experience will find little to properly dig into here, and I don’t know that newcomers would get much out of it at all. There’s definite potential to the main character and her circumstances, but it’s an intriguing wisp that leaves me less than satisfied in the end.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: 84K by Claire North

Book #62 of 2026:

84K by Claire North

This novel has an interesting dystopian setting, which reads sort of like Gattaca meets V for Vendetta meets some of the depressing ultra-capitalist futures from Black Mirror. The justice system has shifted all crimes to be punished with indemnity charges rather than jail time, meaning that even the most depraved rapes and murders can result in only a steep fine for the perpetrator. In consequence, the extremely rich who can pay for such things have the freedom to do essentially whatever they wish, while the poorer citizens live in fear that any perceived misstep could bankrupt them into indentured servitude. At one point, we see a bored hitwoman call the police to report herself after a job, because she knows her employers will pay the fee and she wants to avoid the tedium of an official investigation.

The plot involves an everyman figure (who’d previously taken over the identity of a dead wealthy classmate) finally reaching his limit and trying to bring down the regime, although neither he nor anybody else can ever quite articulate his precise motives. In fact, articulation in general is a bit of a struggle in this book. For some reason, author Claire North has written the story with a significant number of run-on sentences and broken fragments, resulting in passages like the following:

“Silence from the couch. She passed him a mug, and maybe he said thank you, his lips moved and there was air in his throat, but the sound didn’t quite come out whole. She cast around for something else to do, putting a saucepan away, poking at the fire in the stove, still burning strong but who cares, more wood, do excuse me I’m just going to …

more wood, taken from the pile under the tarp on top of the deck, her breath frozen in the air, the cold a sudden shock that lets her feel how fast her heart is pumping …

a moment to catch the chill, letting the cold through her skin, taking her time grasping the log, enjoying the feel of it beneath her fingers, broken bark and dry splinters

then back in.

More wood.

Well isn’t that lovely it’s just

it’s just

Well.”

To a certain extent, that style does mirror how people tend to actually talk / think, but it makes for a more challenging read and I’m not convinced that it adds much to the overall tale. And even setting that aspect aside, the work never really settles into itself with a sense of urgency or a case for why the protagonist’s actions would have the kind of results that they eventually do. I still like it more than I dislike it in the end, but it’s not on the level that I typically expect from this writer.

[Content warning for gun violence, child sexual abuse, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Matlock, season 2

TV #19 of 2026:

Matlock, season 2

The modern gender-swapped Matlock is a CBS legal procedural that loves to over-explain things to its audience, but I still rated the debut season at four-out-of-five stars for how propulsively fun the core premise can be at its best: an elderly lawyer infiltrating a law firm under an assumed name and phony folksy mannerisms, in order to snoop around and discover who hid documents in an old court case that could have exposed the dangers of opioids and had them taken off the market much earlier. But the shine unfortunately comes off a fair bit in this second outing, especially given its rushed and anticlimactic finale. As a result I’d give this one only two-and-a-half stars, rounded up, for a shaky effort that collapses entirely by the end.

On the positive side: now that Olympia knows Matty’s secret, the two of them make a good team and deepen their friendship significantly once they decide to start fully trusting one another again. The show also handles an awful unexpected casting shakeup midway through — a supporting actor fired for sexually assaulting a castmate — about as smoothly as it could, and it does ultimately wrap up the larger Wellbrexa conspiracy, rather than continuing to spin that plot out indefinitely.

The problem is, the conclusion falls absurdly flat, which in turn makes everything leading up to it feel far flimsier. After all that investigating, with the twists and turns and the heroine’s true identity in constant danger of exposure, the eventual method of taking down the bad guy seems like something the heroes could have done forever ago. And Matty doesn’t get to gloat about her victory or give a big speech about her dead daughter or anything, either! Meanwhile she’s been a bad friend to Sarah, and the groundwork is laid for an interesting development there over the inevitable feelings of betrayal that will surely surface once that last main player finally learns the truth. But instead the junior associate meekly backs down from her suspicions — i.e., her reasonable observations that her trusted colleagues have spent months gaslighting her about — and then gets told the big news by someone she doesn’t have any sort of relationship with. The camera even cuts away before getting a reaction from her, which is just an astonishingly poor treatment of a major character by a story that really doesn’t have very many of them in the first place.

I could understand such moves if this were a hastily-written ending for the program, or if its future remained uncertain at the time the scripts were due. But no, it somehow got an early renewal, and showrunner Jennie Snyder Urman has promised that the next year will have a brand-new focus outside of the primary storyline that’s bracketed the series thus far. Personally, I doubt I’ll be watching it.

★★★☆☆

Movie Review: Terminator Salvation (2009)

Movie #19 of 2026:

Terminator Salvation (2009)

A competent action spectacle that finally shows us John Connor in his element as a resistance soldier (though not yet a leader) in the post-apocalyptic future that the franchise had repeatedly warned us was looming. That’s a reasonable premise to explore and one that never plays like much of an empty nostalgic retread, although it threatens to jettison the primary hallmarks of the series in the process: the pursuit of a single unstoppable killer across an otherwise-recognizable modern world, the time-travel paradoxes, the fish-out-of-water comedy, and so on. This is a grim and serious installment — as perhaps over-emphasized by the desaturated visuals — and it largely works as a story about humans fighting back against the deadly robots who have destroyed their civilization. I’m just not entirely sure it feels like a Terminator film.

The plot splits its attention between Connor and a new character Marcus, who seems to have slept through the doomsday of Terminator 3 and its aftermath. He’s eventually and unsurprisingly revealed to be a cyborg, but the ultimate goal that Skynet is aiming to achieve with him proves oddly elusive. (He’s an infiltration unit designed to lure the main protagonist into a trap, but he’s alone with John at several points when he could easily just assassinate him himself. The machines likewise have Kyle Reese in their custody for a long while without killing him, which is not a mistake the Terminators we’ve seen before would ever make. It’s also not explained why that random teenager is supposedly the #1 target on their hit list, and if that means they know of his importance to the past — which the hero is trying to preserve to keep himself and humanity’s chances of survival alive, but which the mechanical beings technically need to maintain for their own existence as well, as established in Terminator 2.)

Such logic gaps drag the experience down for me, as does the acting. Sam Worthington’s American accent comes and goes, Christian Bale as the latest John Connor has seemingly no modes beyond his basic scowl, and Linda Hamilton as a voice on tape is the only returning actor from any previous release, although the CGI effects at putting young Arnold’s face on a T-800 are reasonably effective. The end result delivers more of a generic dystopia than a must-watch continuation of the saga, but it’s at least marginally better than I had remembered. I give it two-and-a-half stars, rounded up.

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

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Red Box by Rex Stout

Book #61 of 2026:

The Red Box by Rex Stout (Nero Wolfe #4)

These 1930s mysteries remain solid enough as a sort of American pastiche of Agatha Christie, but so far they’ve failed to hit the heights that she could periodically achieve for me. The premise to this novel, for example, is initially interesting — a young woman dies eating a poisoned chocolate intended for someone else, who is subsequently killed by different methods — but the eventual resolution feels frankly a bit absurd. (The culprit’s motives at least are relatively straightforward, but exactly how our eccentric agoraphobic detective Nero Wolfe deduces it all from the comfort of his brownstone seems to rely on guesswork and flimsy pseudo-psychology like why the second victim gave a favorite employee diamonds rather than another stone.)

The character work continues to be the best part, as wryly narrated by the investigator’s assistant Archie. Accompanying his boss on a rare excursion outdoors, for instance, he intentionally drives into potholes whenever the latter offers one of his maddeningly obscure hints about the case, which is a fun bit of petty revenge. But overall, I’d have to say this is a straightforwardly forgettable kind of story.

[Content warning for incest and suicide.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Abbott Elementary, season 5

TV #18 of 2026:

Abbott Elementary, season 5

As a sitcom, this series has always had a somewhat tenuous connection to any sort of grounded reality, but like The Office, it feels as though the comedy is getting broader and the characters more flanderized as the program ages. So here, for example, the teachers spend a few episodes relocated to an empty shopping mall while their school is under repair, and Mr. Johnson’s date to the Janitors Ball gets canceled when all attendees are rerouted to clean up the crash of a semi-truck full of glitter bombs. That’s the kind of zany logic that wouldn’t have flown in earlier seasons, and it’s matched by low-effort episodic premises like a trip to the DMV that suggest the writers might just be running out of story ideas about elementary education.

In other developments this year, Janine and Gregory get more serious about their relationship, with a nice arc surrounding their moving in together. Unfortunately that’s balanced by a random breakup later on that the scripts never manage to sell as well-motivated or likely to stick, which sure enough, it doesn’t. Overall it’s a fairly aimless run for the show, still generally enjoyable to watch — minus a few inane corporate product placements for Wayfair and the latest Avatar movie — but not landing nearly as strongly as it did in its prime.

★★★☆☆