The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Behooved by M. Stevenson

Book #33 of 2026:

Behooved by M. Stevenson

The punny premise that lends this romantasy novel its title doesn’t technically spring until almost a quarter of the way through the text, which is late enough that I normally wouldn’t mention it in a review. But since the publisher’s description gives it away anyway, and it really is the most ludicrous sort of fun, let’s talk about it: the main character’s new husband gets struck by a curse right after their wedding, which makes him turn into a horse every day between sunrise and sunset. He’s human again after nightfall, though of course he always transforms back without any clothes on, which is a problem since the two of them are actively fleeing through the countryside at this point to avoid the assassins of their unknown adversaries and seek for a magical cure.

It’s admittedly a lot, but I suspect you can probably already tell from that brief synopsis whether this is your kind of story or not. I was personally hooked from the start, when the noble heroine is pressured into her arranged marriage with the heir to a neighboring kingdom but still given the choice to refuse, and her parents matter-of-factly note how her sister wouldn’t be as ideal an option for securing their treaty because she favors women in bed, whereas the protagonist doesn’t have a preference in the gender of her partners. We’re also told how she’s suffering from an unnamed chronic illness, whose flare-ups and symptoms are reportedly inspired by author M. Stevenson’s own struggles with celiac disease.

Is this a “good” book? I don’t know! Is Jupiter Ascending a good movie? She’s married to a horse, y’all. The plot is full of ridiculous romcom and fanfiction-y tropes, like characters laboring under obvious misunderstandings that a quick conversation would resolve or inns having only one bed (which they destroy when they forget to get the prince back outside before dawn, whoops). Could the worldbuilding have been more cohesive and the enemies-to-lovers arc less predictable? Sure. But did I have a bad time with any of this? Neigh.

[Content warning for gun violence and gore.]

★★★★☆

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Book Review: Berserker Base edited by Fred Saberhagen

Book #32 of 2026:

Berserker Base edited by Fred Saberhagen (Berserker #7)

I’ve never read anything else in Fred Saberhagen’s classic Berserker series (1963-2005), but I know that its core idea of killer self-replicating spaceships programmed by a long-dead race to destroy all life in the universe has been fairly influential in the science-fiction genre. (Mass Effect’s Reapers in particular are just berserkers with the serial numbers filed off, while other popular villains like Terminators, Cylons, or the Borg obviously tap into similar fears about unchecked machine intelligence.)

This seventh volume, published in 1985, was a collaborative effort among Saberhagen and several invited peers, each of whom contributed a short story in the setting. Their pieces do not overtly connect with one another — humanity in this future is so widespread across the cosmos that individual colony worlds are completely isolated — but Saberhagen as editor then wrote interstitial chapters about telepathic prisoners tuning into those stories to theoretically unite them under a single cohesive plot.

It’s too uneven a work overall for me to grant this more than three out of five stars, but I’m glad to have more context now for Stephen R. Donaldson’s “What Makes Us Human,” which I had previously encountered in his collection Reave the Just and Other Tales. And despite my lack of familiarity with the wider saga beforehand, I do think this book stands well enough on its own, in addition to offering an interesting look at this corner of pulp-fiction history. So I guess I liked it in the final analysis, which is what the Goodreads three-star rating is meant to reflect.

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

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette for Young Ladies of Mad Science by Kate McKinnon

Book #31 of 2026:

The Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette for Young Ladies of Mad Science by Kate McKinnon (The Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette for Young Ladies of Mad Science #1)

This 2024 title unfortunately hasn’t hit the mark for me, much as I love author Kate McKinnon’s work on Saturday Night Live. The obvious intent here is to tell an offbeat Lemony Snicket sort of middle-grade tale — it’s even about three orphaned siblings who can’t make the authority figures in their life understand the peril they’re up against — but the execution is way too wacky and over-the-top in my opinion. It’s also incredibly shouty, especially in the audiobook format, which includes repeated chastising demands for the listener to go look at the attached pdf for illustrations. Even in print, however, I think this kind of prose would be pretty unbearable:

“‘Hahahahaha!’ Millicent cackled. ‘My trap worked. I’ve got you cornered! And now I’m going to pickle your brains! AHHHAHAHAAAAHAHA!’

The jaws of the Porch Sisters flew open as they set to screaming. Eugenia screamed! Gertrude screamed! Even Dee-Dee, who had never screamed before, pulled the toothpick from her mouth and gave it a whirl!”

And then a few pages later, after the child heroines have recovered their wits:

“‘Enough of this… psychological torture!’ Eugenia said, her usual sarcasm tempered by a sudden shortness of breath. ‘Why don’t you just… pickle our brains and get it over with!’

‘Nonsense!’ Millicent said, clutching the lapels of her lab coat. ‘I would never pickle a human brain!’ The children each heaved a sigh of relief. ‘They’re too bitter, you have to candy them.’

Their collective sigh turned into another collective scream.”

I know that different people’s tastes may vary, but that’s just far too many exclamation points for mine.

★★☆☆☆

TV Review: The Lincoln Lawyer, season 4

TV #8 of 2026:

The Lincoln Lawyer, season 4

I feel like this show is perpetually on the bubble between three and four stars for me, in that it’s a generally enjoyable legal thriller that isn’t doing anything remotely revolutionary in terms of its cinematography, plot, or so on (beyond I guess staging each season around a single case, rather than the more typical episodic procedural approach). Much like the Michael Connelly book series it’s based upon, it will probably never win any major awards, but it’s still a fun piece of popcorn entertainment, and that’s at least a cut above some of the other programming in its genre.

This latest batch of episodes carries the best built-in hook and stakes for our hero by adapting the novel The Law of Innocence, in which he’s arrested at a traffic stop with the dead body of a delinquent client discovered in his trunk. It’s a frame job from an unknown party, and whether the prosecution and the police are in on it or not, they’re clearly relishing the chance to get back at the defense attorney who’s beaten them in court so many times before. He’s thus subjected to all manner of dirty tricks and indignities, in addition to the serious sentence hanging over his head if he happens to lose.

One strength of the source material that unfortunately but understandably gets dropped is its original early 2020 setting, whereby our knowledge of the ticking Covid clock adds a further stress to Mickey’s stay in an overcrowded prison. But even without that element, this is obviously his most important trial yet, and the program basically delivers on the inherent tension there. Again, this isn’t exactly reinventing the wheel, but three-and-a-half stars rounded up seems fair.

[Content warning for gun violence, police brutality, and gore.]

★★★★☆

Movie Review: Rocky IV (1985)

Movie #8 of 2026:

Rocky IV (1985)

There’s the seed of a good idea in this movie when Apollo Creed, by now close friends with his former rival Rocky, is killed in the ring while boxing against their latest opponent. (It is, notably, the thread that filmmaker Ryan Coogler would later pick up for his own successful sequel series.) That’s a bit of a rehash of Mick dying in the previous installment, but it’s a development with obvious built-in pathos for the hero, whom audiences would expect to avenge his fallen comrade in some fashion. And he does, sort of — he challenges Ivan Drago to another match, and after the powers that be forbid that for whatever reason, he renounces his heavyweight champion title and goes to train and fight against the man in his native Soviet Union.

The problem is that our protagonist’s motivation here isn’t exactly clear, nor are we shown how/why his rustic training regimen in the snowy wilderness would make him any better a boxer than he was before. We do hear at the beginning how Apollo is past his prime, but that doesn’t appear to apply to the Italian Stallion, who makes no mention of how he was on the verge of retiring in Rocky III. Once the fight commences, he impresses first Drago and then eventually the hostile home crowd, I guess with his resilience in getting back up again every time the much taller and stronger Russian knocks him down. Then when he manages to land the winning punch in the end, he gives a hamfisted speech about how their two countries should get along, though the whole point of the exercise metatextually seems to be in showing America’s dominance over its Cold War enemy.

None of this is an appealing story rooted in a character we’re given cause to support beyond his familiar face and prior experiences. The music is also worse this time around, with no sign of the classic “Gonna Fly Now” and some truly awful lyrics in Survivor’s “Burning Heart” that have to be seen to be believed:

“Two worlds collide, rival nations
It’s a primitive clash venting years of frustrations
Bravely we hope against all hope
There is so much at stake
Seems our freedom’s up against the ropes
Does the crowd understand?
Is it East versus West or man against man?
Can any nation stand alone?”

Oh — and Paulie is gifted a robot that rolls around and serves him drinks in a seductive female tone, the less said about which the better. I can’t believe I ever thought this film was in the same caliber as its predecessors when I was a kid.

[Content warning for gore.]

★★☆☆☆

Book Review: The Dead Husband Cookbook by Danielle Valentine

Book #30 of 2026:

The Dead Husband Cookbook by Danielle Valentine

An entertaining blend of Taylor Jenkins Reid with Ruth Ware, in which a down-on-her-luck publishing editor, expecting to soon be fired, is instead tasked with handling the upcoming tell-all memoir from a beloved but secretive celebrity chef. In this novel Maria Capello is a household name and head of a media empire like Martha Stewart, but rumors have always swirled around her husband Damien, whose disappearance and presumed suicide first launched her into the limelight thirty years ago. Now she’s finally willing to share her version of what happened that night, but she insists that the protagonist come read through the manuscript at her private estate, with no access to contact the outside world. Of course, once there the younger woman finds all manner of suspicious details that don’t add up, but surely the urban legends about her hostess being a cannibal can’t possibly be true… right?

It’s a fun story, though you have to put up with some coincidences and other unlikely developments, not to mention the genre convention that the heroine only gets to review a few pages at a time, so as to preserve the big twist reveal(s) for the end of the book. That last quarter of the text is also a bit too convoluted for my tastes, and I wish the main character were smarter and more agentive throughout the plot, rather than meekly accepting whatever she’s told. Still, I’ve enjoyed the ride enough that I think I’ll give this one three-and-a-half stars overall, rounded up.

[Content warning for gun violence and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: Buried Deep and Other Stories by Naomi Novik

Book #29 of 2026:

Buried Deep and Other Stories by Naomi Novik

A solid mix of 3s and 4s, collecting eleven pieces of short fiction by fantasy author Naomi Novik previously published elsewhere between 2008 and 2019. The remaining two entries that are new to this volume (“After Hours,” which follows her Scholomance trilogy, and “The Long Way Round,” set in the world of an upcoming project) complete the ensemble with a taste of her more recent work, though I can’t say that I prefer the earlier or later items overall.

There’s also a mix of stories that tie into the writer’s existing series — including the original “Spinning Silver” that she subsequently expanded into a full novel — and ones that are utterly standalone. Some are better than others, but even my least favorite, “Dragons & Decorum,” feels like just a poor match for me as a reader; I’m not overly fond of either the Temeraire books or Pride and Prejudice, so retelling the latter in the setting of the former was probably never going to win me over. And it’s clearly not the public-domain fanfiction aspect that I object to, as “Commonplaces” is one of the tales here that I like best, and that’s a Sherlock Holmes what-if that imagines Irene Adler figuring out the truth behind Reichenbach Falls and tracking down the wayward detective before he’s ready to announce his survival to Watson.

As I often note about such anthologies, my rating is an average across a range of stronger and weaker offerings, rather than a uniform judgement of the lot. I’ve enjoyed the read as a whole myself, and would recommend it for any of my fellow Novik fans as well.

[Content warning for body horror and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Fer-de-Lance by Rex Stout

Book #28 of 2026:

Fer-de-Lance by Rex Stout (Nero Wolfe #1)

This 1934 novel introduces the character of Nero Wolfe, as well as his assistant Archie Goodwin and a few other members of their inner circle. The former is a genius consulting detective in the style of Hercule Poirot (who had debuted in 1920) or especially Sherlock Holmes (1887), sharing with each of those predecessors not only a profession but also the presence of an outside narrator there to marvel at his brilliance. The key difference between a Hastings or a Watson and our protagonist in this series is that he’s additionally his employer’s main means of interacting with the world, the investigator himself being an agoraphobe who rarely leaves his luxurious New York City brownstone.

Wolfe is, hands down, the most interesting thing about this story. He represents a more nuanced depiction of neurodivergence than I was honestly expecting for the era, displaying eccentricities like an insistence on a familiar daily schedule that read as classic behaviors for someone on the autism spectrum. He also suffers from bouts of depression during which he has to set all work aside, and yet none of these qualities are viewed negatively by the cast around him, merely as elements that must be factored into their business arrangements. The narrative does occasionally stray into judgmental territory over his weight, but it’s generally a pretty refreshing tale for a book soon approaching a century in age.

I am less sold on this initial mystery, which involves a convoluted plot around a poison dart concealed in a golf club and some accordingly silly levels of insight from the wealthy recluse, not to mention an overly-long endgame after he’s correctly identified the culprit. Odd too is just how cavalier he is about his riches, at one point wagering $10,000 — almost $250,000 in today’s dollars — that an exhumed body will show the cause of death he’s deduced, in order to pressure the local authorities into digging up the corpse to conduct a new autopsy. But the overall concept and the droll humor has solid enough potential for me to check out the next few sequels, at least.

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

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Empire Builders by Ben Bova

Book #27 of 2026:

Empire Builders by Ben Bova

I don’t know if this third Grand Tour installment (in chronological order) is objectively any weaker than the stories before, but at a minimum I’m growing pretty tired of our recurring hero Dan Randolph, dashing genius billionaire tech CEO and inveterate womanizer. A decade has passed for the character and his world since Privateers, but the now-50-year-old hasn’t changed much beyond getting divorced, and he now finds himself caught up in yet another political action thriller. It’s fun to an extent — his enemies try to imprison him and seize his companies, turning him into a merry fugitive for a while — and it’s interesting to see a 1993 novel centered around the emergent threat of climate change, though there’s of course a lot of science that author Ben Bova unwittingly gets wrong. But it’s the politics that I think really sink this one, even more egregiously than the speculation of future Soviet dominance in the previous title.

The premise here is that scientists have just discovered a looming ecological cliff: a ten-year window after which the Earth will become swiftly inhospitable if humans don’t take steps to start addressing the problem. Our all-American protagonist thinks every country and private corporation should be freed from regulations to pursue solutions as they see fit, with the international body that oversees them limited to providing cash incentives for doing so. His Russian opponent, meanwhile, believes that uniting all that chaos under control of his organization will optimize the approach, although he belatedly realizes the effort has been compromised by the literal mafia infiltrating his team.

It’s awfully blunt in its capitalism-versus-socialism themes, and it ends with the foreigner changing his mind and siding with the egotistical cowboy after all, which doesn’t feel like an honest engagement with the terms of their dispute. But rah-rah freedom, I guess? Good thing the real villains have once again kidnapped a woman that the businessman loves, so that he can be morally superior as well as correct about the ideal path forward for the planet.

I understand how these early works form an important backdrop to the tales of space exploration that follow, which thankfully focus on different characters. The developing worldbuilding in that direction is neat to observe, too, like the beginnings of a colony on the moon that Dan visits this time. But I’m very glad that his own role in the saga is now finally starting to wane.

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

★★☆☆☆

TV Review: The Sopranos, season 6

TV #7 of 2026:

The Sopranos, season 6

As with its contemporary crime drama The Shield, the infamous ending to The Sopranos was one of the few concrete spoilers I knew about the show going into it, which admittedly shaped my expectations along the way. (To quickly weigh in on the controversy: I don’t think Tony unambiguously gets killed when the final scene cuts to black, but I would agree that the editing intentionally builds up audience tension to specifically license that possibility. My interpretation is that we’re meant to understand his life could be snuffed out as suddenly as Phil Leotardo’s at any point now, but also that he could end up like Uncle Junior in their confrontation right before, having improbably survived a long career in the mafia yet ultimately lost everything that matters anyway.)

If you do view this last season as the ratcheting prelude to the antihero’s potential death, either actively or in hindsight, there are plenty of thematic indicators pointing in that direction. From his initial foray into a comatose purgatory to how he steadily drives a wedge between himself and each of his closest associates over the episodes that follow, this year functions to isolate the man as never before, while also emphasizing what Dr. Melfi comes to see as his unrepentant sociopathy. Still, I don’t feel as though the overall thesis of this series is anything as trivial as “crime doesn’t pay” or even that Anthony Soprano’s particular character flaws have doomed him. In my last review I likened him to a crab in a bucket refusing to let anyone else escape the bad situation they’re in, and I think that’s where these closing hours land as well. After all, for as much as that ambiguous moment in the restaurant might linger with us, far more of the finale beforehand concerns the protagonist’s son A.J., and how he’s lured back into the comfortable materialism that he briefly seemed on the brink of leaving, one way or another.

Change isn’t impossible on The Sopranos, but it’s hard work that most people eventually give up on. Tony feels like a new man upon waking up from his coma, but it doesn’t take long for him to fall back into his old ways again. An addict like Christopher will likewise always be an addict, and parents have a habit of revisiting their own childhood traumas on the next generation. Even in the slow-brewing conflict between the New York and New Jersey mobs that finally comes to a head here, negotiations repeatedly break down because of both parties’ grievances over sins of the past. Every hurt or imagined slight resurfaces as an inflexible link in a heavy chain binding the warring mafiosos to their present path, no matter how they might privately wish otherwise.

That’s good stuff, but the season isn’t without its weaknesses. It was expanded somewhere in the production process to be nearly twice the usual length, with a large hiatus in the middle, and the story drags a little as a result. I’ve opted to watch and review both halves as the single entity that they were officially named, but the arcs across it could definitely have been tighter, with less attention given to diversions like Vito’s panicked exit after his sexuality is discovered by the crew. There are some weird hiccups following the time jump, too — Chris apparently breaking things off with the Julianna Margulies character, for instance, or Meadow similarly ending her engagement to Finn entirely offscreen. And although the body count ticks higher near the end, the program doesn’t always establish those departing characters beyond a vaguely-familiar face and a name, which obviously minimizes the impact of their loss.

I’m satisfied, though, and if I ever rewatch this title, I’m guessing some of these items might stand out less, given the tendency for figures to float through the background of scenes before suddenly gaining prominence in the narrative. (And there are shocking deaths of genuinely important individuals too, especially this season.) In the meantime I’ll be happy enough with the plot as it is, and not overly concerned about whether the hero survives past it or not.

[Content warning for racism, antisemitism, homophobia, slurs, domestic abuse, drug abuse, gun violence, lynching, suicide, torture, and gore.]

This season: ★★★★☆

Overall series: ★★★★☆

Seasons ranked: 5 > 2 > 1 > 6 > 3 > 4