The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

TV Review: 12 Monkeys, season 2

TV #58 of 2025:

12 Monkeys, season 2

The debut year of this program offered an uneven but promising sci-fi premise of a dystopian soldier and a contemporary doctor working together to try to prevent the pandemic that’s ravaged the planet by his era. It’s a loose reboot of the 1995 Terry Gilliam movie, less concerned about mental illness and ambiguous grips on reality and more focused on the twisty time-travel mechanics. I didn’t always love that initial outing, but I gave it three stars in appreciation of the mad-science Fringe vibes and how the characters deepened over the course of those episodes.

Unfortunately, this second run is a major step in the wrong direction. It starts out by immediately walking back the cliffhangers of the previous finale — despite the implication that the unstable Jennifer Goines would be kicking off the plague by spreading the virus around the world, she’s now revealed to still have the sample in her possession, where it can be safely procured and neutralized (though the outbreak remains on the horizon). Meanwhile, our new lovers had seemingly switched positions, with him stuck in the past and her sent forward to the future. That jolt to the status quo carried great potential and is clearly what the poster depicts, but it’s soon enough discarded too, in lieu of those protagonists both being relocated to 2044 as agents for further missions.

That’s disappointing, but the bigger issue concerns everything that spins out from there. The story grows ever more convoluted, at the cost of any larger moral clarity or legible motivations for anyone. Before, they were fighting to stop the disease from being released and bringing on doomsday. At this point, the talk is instead all on preserving or breaking the timeline itself, which is substantially goofier. The added lore regarding the mysterious Witness, the Monkeys themselves, and the people like Jennifer who somehow maintain the continuum is all a lot to take, but the narrative also fractures on the smaller level of face-to-face interactions. This season is packed with scenes of someone either betraying an ally or suddenly teaming up with an enemy, but it all feels weightless because we aren’t given enough room to let those relationships build up in the first place. Likewise, the worldbuilding rules on how/whether history can be changed at all remain maddeningly ill-defined and inconsistent, which limits the impact of any particular development or character goal.

With only two shorter seasons remaining, I’ll likely continue watching, and it’s not like this is entirely bad. Michael Hogan of BSG and Jay Karnes of The Shield are each a fun if short-lived addition to the cast, and Deacon’s promotion from recurring antagonist to prickly henchman for the heroes reflects a good writing instinct as well. I even like Cassie’s new battle-hardened characterization and that obligatory time-loop episode! But overall, this is a considerably messier effort that I hope doesn’t speak for the rest of the show to come.

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

★★☆☆☆

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Book Review: Superboy: A Celebration of 75 Years by various

Book #201 of 2025:

Superboy: A Celebration of 75 Years by various

This 2020 anthology commemorates three-quarters of a century of the titular junior superhero via a selection of comic book issues from across that span. In fact, it turns out that four different Kryptonians have each worn the mantle of Superboy at one point or another, all of whom are represented here: there’s Clark Kent himself as a young man (having origin adventures roughly similar to TV’s Smallville), a parallel-universe version of him eventually known as Superboy-Prime, a later clone named Conner who adopts the S.B. title too, and finally Superman’s own son Jon.

It’s an interesting history, thankfully accompanied by a few interstitial pages from writer Karl Kesel explaining and contextualizing such matters. I haven’t read very widely in DC Comics myself, but I love hearing about how any fictional mythos builds up over time like that. It’s especially neat in the earlier installments to see the introduction of elements and individuals like Krypto the superdog, Lana Lang, and the futuristic Legion of Super-Heroes who will go on to be somewhat iconic in the canon.

With that being said, I do have some caveats here. This isn’t an omnibus, so the selected stories often have huge gaps between them, which is a particular problem in the pieces from the past few decades, when comics have grown highly serialized. Whereas the initial tales are basically standalone, the more recent ones presented in this fashion feel confusing and incomplete — containing extraneous links to larger ongoing narratives that aren’t readily comprehensible in isolation, and generally not even coming to any immediately satisfying conclusion. The overall result becomes more of a piecemeal sampler, which rather undercuts my enjoyment in the end.

Admittedly those contents were never meant to be read this way, but then again, I’m not rating or reviewing them in their original runs. As an intentionally-designed production itself, the present volume doesn’t exactly sell me on the charms that it’s aiming to.

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

★★★☆☆

Book Review: A Mouthful of Dust by Nghi Vo

Book #200 of 2025:

A Mouthful of Dust by Nghi Vo (The Singing Hills Cycle #6)

Another short but immersive tale of Cleric Chih on their wanderings around this East Asian-inspired fantasy land, recording local stories and trying to sift fact from legend. As usual it’s a fairly standalone adventure that doesn’t rely on readers having read the previous volumes, though there are a few references to The Empress of Salt and Fortune that are fun to spot for anyone who has.

In this installment, our nonbinary protagonist has journeyed to a region that suffered a terrible famine several decades ago, reportedly due to a literal demon roosting there and feeding on the people’s hunger and related agonies. They hear a lot about proud family recipes and resilience during the lean years, while sensing animosity and secrets from the nearby magistrate. Eventually a fuller picture emerges, although the narrative feels a little lopsided to me — not quite explaining how the cat ties in with everything, and saving the reveal of one particular atrocity for the end, after the main character has already uncovered acts of cannibalism that in my opinion are substantially more shocking.

I’d still call this novella a gripping read regardless, but not necessarily a series-best. Let’s say three-and-a-half stars, rounded up.

★★★★☆

Book Review: We Could Be Magic by Marissa Meyer and Joelle Murray

Book #199 of 2025:

We Could Be Magic by Marissa Meyer and Joelle Murray

I don’t read a ton of graphic novels, but this one came so highly recommended that I wanted to make a point to check it out. And it is super cute — less so for the romance, which is fine but not as major an element as the publisher’s blurb would suggest, and more for the real love story here, between the heroine and the Disney-style theme park where she works as a summer intern. Or perhaps “love/hate” would be more accurate, as author Marissa Meyer excels at conveying the uneasy push and pull that fans of such establishments know all too well. On the one hand, those kinds of vacation spots are magical destinations that bring dreams to life and have many true believers on staff who live to make the guest experience spectacular. But they’re also unavoidably cutthroat corporate ventures with strict rules and conformist expectations behind the scenes, which is a tension that customers and employees alike must learn to navigate.

In this case, the protagonist longs to serve as a face character at Sommerland, rather than a food vendor or a masked mascot role. The problem is that she’s a shorter and plus-sized girl, and although no one wants to come out and say it, none of the princesses look like her. (She’s also dark-skinned, but that’s one area where the fictional version outpaces its real-world counterpart, as the royalty lineup seems pretty diverse and there’s no indication that racism is a factor anywhere in the book.) She gets given worse assignments because of her weight, while coworkers who clearly don’t care as much about the intended mission of the job squander their ignorant privilege. It’s realistically disheartening and exploitative, despite building to a triumphantly implausible feel-good conclusion in the end.

I’m of two minds about the Disney angle. The parallel to the off-brand corollary is so exact as to be distracting — the park even has “hidden kitties” everywhere to find — and it’s obvious that the writer and her artist Joelle Murray are purposefully engaging with that established iconography, instead of aiming to tell a story about a wholly original type of circumstance. So wouldn’t this be a stronger work if it dispensed with the pretense and simply featured the House of Mouse directly? On the other hand, fictionalizing it does license a few key departures, in addition to the plausible deniability that keeps Walt’s lawyers at bay. Ultimately I suppose the overall piece is breezy enough to set such concerns aside, and just enjoy the atmospheric tale of a young person standing up for herself and the idea that she deserves representation like anybody else.

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Book #198 of 2025:

The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

An excellent horror novel that unfolds across three quasi-related timelines. Primarily we’re following a graduate student in 1998 as she pursues research on her thesis topic, which concerns a lesser-known (fictional) female contemporary of H. P. Lovecraft. She’s investigating a rumor that one of the author’s macabre stories was based on the 1934 disappearance of a classmate at the same New England university that she now attends, but as she learns more, she starts finding signs that malevolent forces are still at work in the area. Intertwined with these chapters are the writer’s personal account of when her friend went missing as well as the main heroine’s grandmother’s tale of a supernatural ordeal she experienced back in Mexico in 1908, which the younger woman has grown up hearing.

If I have a structural critique, it’s that that last branch of the narrative doesn’t connect much with the others, and to the extent that it does, we’re ultimately left with sheer coincidence that such similar threats happened in two very different times and places, which isn’t the most satisfying construction. I also don’t have patience for how long it takes that protagonist to realize who the witch that’s been cursing her family farm is, which feels rather obvious to me all along — or perhaps my problem is that author Silvia Moreno-Garcia doesn’t hide the villain’s identity from the reader well enough. Luckily, however, the culprits behind the later attacks are better-integrated into the ongoing plot, with plenty of red-herring smokescreens to keep us guessing.

Overall, though, I’ve had a pretty good time with this title. The action is suitably spooky, the grad school character is relatable in her struggles with her academic career and her mental health, and the two settings are evoked well in the prose descriptions. Moreno-Garcia can be hit-or-miss for me, but I’d say this is one of her stronger efforts.

[Content warning for incest, racism, antisemitism, alcohol abuse, animal cruelty, and gore.]

★★★★☆

Top Authors of 2025

I’m still hoping to hit 200 books by the end of the year, which is why I haven’t posted my top reads yet. (Three more to go!) But for now, here are the authors I read the most in 2025:

(Honorable mention to Stephen King, who would be x5 if I included the Dark Tower graphic novel adaptations and the short story collection set in the world of The Stand, which weren’t written by him but are pretty direct engagements with his work.)

For franchises with multiple authors, the winners were:

Book Review: The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann

Book #197 of 2025:

The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann

An interesting nonfiction account of a 1740s maritime disaster, in which the British vessel HMS Wager was shipwrecked in the South Pacific, near modern Chile. The incident occurred during the so-called “War of Jenkins’ Ear” conflict with Spain — a prelude to the larger War of the Austrian Succession — and is one of those curious historical affairs that was apparently widely discussed at the time but subsequently fell out of common knowledge (until Killers of the Flower Moon author David Grann repopularized it with this 2023 bestseller, at least).

I think the writer does a good job of synthesizing the available primary documents to discuss the lead-up to the wreck and the months that the sailors spent on a nearby island, including the rising tensions and eventual mutiny against the captain there. I could see this title being a valuable resource for anyone crafting their own fictional spin on such an ordeal, as it ably captures the limitations facing the men: not only in their immediate predicament, but also in the general context of the era, when shipbuilding and mid-voyage repairs were still evolving arts and diseases like scurvy and typhoid weren’t remotely understood. As Grann notes, their desperate struggle to eke out an existence was practically another Robinson Crusoe story, and it was received in exactly those terms once the survivors made it home and began spreading the tale.

Regrettably, that part of the book feels a little thin to me, despite presumably having a greater volume of documentation to draw upon. One of the distinguishing features of the Wager business, after all, is that the mutineers arrived back in England two years before the commanding officer they’d marooned, and thus were able to seize that window to publicize their version of events, casting themselves in the best possible light and him as a deranged murderer. Later on when it was likewise shared, the thrust of his own perspective obviously contradicted theirs, and I would love to hear more about a) the evidence for and against each side and b) how the dispute was seen among contemporary audiences. Unfortunately, those topics are not really addressed to any significant degree herein.

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

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Doctor Who: Transit by Ben Aaronovitch

Book #196 of 2025:

Doctor Who: Transit by Ben Aaronovitch (Virgin New Adventures #10)

This cyberpunk / cosmic horror mashup is big on worldbuilding texture but light on plot and character work. The worst thing about it, though, stems from its place in the Doctor Who Virgin New Adventures series, as the first installment with Professor Bernice Summerfield as the Doctor’s traveling companion. Benny featured prominently in the last volume, which introduced her on planet Heaven and then culminated in her joining the TARDIS while Ace stayed behind, but we still don’t really know her as an active protagonist or partner for the Seventh Doctor yet. Theoretically this novel should be all about establishing that characterization and relationship, showcasing the two of them working closely together to define the strengths and conflicts that the new heroine brings to the arrangement.

Instead, the characters are separated almost immediately, and the archaeologist is absent for the majority of the text. When she finally resurfaces, she’s been possessed by the extradimensional villain, and so isn’t exactly functioning as herself, anyway. In addition to shortchanging the reader’s investment in the woman, this writing choice also limits the impact of the Doctor’s struggle over how to defeat the sentient virus-monster without killing her, since there’s no real lived-in dynamic there to imbue the dilemma with any significant stakes for him.

It’s not all bad. In the professor’s absence we get a de-facto assistant in Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart — an adopted distant descendent of the Brig — who’s a capable augmented supersoldier as well as a genius. (She develops her own form of time-travel at the end of this adventure, and apparently returns in a few sequels somewhere down the line.) And the setting is pretty fun too, concerning the titular future mass transportation system that connects human civilization across our region of space but accidentally opens the door for the aforementioned incursion from beyond this reality. It’s the sort of wild genre blend that Doctor Who tends to do well, populated with somewhat-interchangeable residents with colorful names like Credit Card and Dogface. I especially like the mindbending climax of the tale, whereupon our Time Lord hero ventures into the antagonist’s home dimension and has to visualize the mental subroutines that he’s both using and fighting against to ultimately save the day.

Overall I think this would be a stronger piece if it had happened later on in its saga, and/or if Bernice had been incorporated more fully into the story. But I suppose it’s solid enough for what it is.

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

★★★☆☆

2025 TV

This year I finished 57* seasons of television, which is about on par with recent years. (I watched 53 in 2024.) Overall my favorites were:

1. Andor, season 2
2. Ripley, season 1
3. The Sopranos, season 5
4. The Sopranos, season 1
5. Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, season 1
6. The Sopranos, season 2
7. Reservation Dogs, season 1
8. The Bear, season 1
9. Black Mirror, season 7
10. Galavant, season 2

*12 Monkeys, season 2 will probably bring me to 58 before the year is up, but I can already tell that that one won’t make the cut.

2025 Movies

This year I watched 26 movies, which is a lot more than I usually do! (I watched 17 in 2024.) That increase was due in part to my new Film Franchise Fridays routine, where I’ve so far watched all of the Jason Bourne, Indiana Jones, and Bill & Ted movies. Overall my favorites were:

1. Sinners (2025)
2. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)
3. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
4. V for Vendetta (2005)
5. Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989)
6. The Bourne Identity (2002)
7. Thunderbolts* (2025)
8. Babylon 5: Thirdspace (1998)
9. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)
10. Babylon 5: The Lost Tales (2007)

(I’ll update this if I watch something else in the next week, but at this point, I’m not expecting to.)