The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Mickey7 by Edward Ashton

Book #155 of 2025:

Mickey7 by Edward Ashton (Mickey7 #1)

A fine little science-fiction novel that never quite kicks into a higher gear. The premise and obvious anticapitalist themes seem fun: the protagonist is of the ‘expendable’ underclass on his inhospitable colony world, meaning that he’s given all the truly dangerous tasks and cloned from a saved backup in the event of his inevitable demise. (He technically signed up for the position, although it was a last resort brought on by gambling debts and a bloodthirsty bookie.) As the title suggests, Mickey7 is the latest iteration of himself, and the trouble begins when he survives what’s been written off as another fatal accident. By the time he makes it back to the settlement, an eighth version of him has already been printed out, in an error that’s supposed to result in one of them sacrificing their life so that they don’t drain the community’s scant resources. Instead, the two clones decide to coexist in secret, taking turns venturing out of their quarters and splitting their assigned rations to starvation levels.

But all of that is the basic setup, and the plot doesn’t really go anywhere interesting from there. We get a dose of backstory and worldbuilding dumps, and the hero butts heads with the local authoritarian leader, but things neither escalate in action nor achieve the madcap black comedy tone that feels promised at the start. The Mickeys mostly just sit around hungry and at one point hook up with each other and their shared girlfriend. And while the text nods to philosophical ideas like the ship of Theseus, the character gives no real sign of ever grappling with the fundamental issue that he won’t survive his looming death sentence, even if somebody else wakes up with his stored memories later on. I realize plenty of genre works like Star Trek have problematic readings in that vein, but here it reads as too central to so thoroughly ignore.

It’s possible these matters are improved in the sequel — or in the film adaptation, which for some reason changed the name of the piece to Mickey 17. Running through more of the duplicates, rather than sticking with the same couple for the entirety of the storyline outside of flashbacks, might help liven everything up. But as is, this volume is ultimately landing as more good than great for me overall.

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

★★★☆☆

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Movie Review: The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)

Movie #13 of 2025:

The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)

Although still an amnesiac, Matt Damon’s Jason Bourne has by this point in the franchise firmly established himself as a skilled super-spy, seemingly able to infiltrate any security setup and evade detection in any crowded metropolitan area. He’s also continuing to hunt for answers about his past, which kicks off this third film, set only six weeks following the last one. (Amusingly, it even recontextualizes the closing coda from The Bourne Supremacy to be part of the middle of the drama here.) In an eyeroll-inducing development, it turns out that neither of the previous two CIA bosses he’d confronted were really the head of the program that once deployed him as an assassin, and the actual commander is now gunning for him after he gets in the way of a strike on a reporter who was getting too close to the truth.

This is apparently the highest-rated Bourne movie, but in my opinion, it’s the weakest of the original trilogy. Take that duplicated scene that I mentioned above, where the protagonist is calling an agency contact: the Supremacy version ends on the line, “Get some rest, Pam. You look tired,” coolly revealing to both her and us that he’s been in the building opposite her this whole time. In this updated take, the surprise is ruined for the audience by showing him setting up in the first place, and then further underscored by the eavesdropping villain helpfully spelling out, “He’s looking right at her!” The script is full of clunky moments like that, although I do enjoy the hero’s later phone exchange with that same antagonist:

“Where are you now?”
“I’m sitting in my office.”
“I doubt that.”
“Why would you doubt that?”
“If you were in your office right now, we’d be having this conversation face-to-face.”

The hand-to-hand combat and requisite car chases are fun as always, and I think the decision to deepen the series mythology by establishing that Bourne and his cohort were brainwashed is a good instinct. The shakycam is more egregious than ever, though, especially with the preponderance of overly dramatic zooms throughout, and the amount of physical damage Damon’s character can shake off is truly absurd. Ultimately it’s a fine enough action spectacle, and curiously prescient in its pre-Snowden premise of massive illegal government surveillance, but it’s pretty far from the smart thriller it believes itself to be.

[Content warning for gun violence and gore.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: I See You’ve Called in Dead by John Kenney

Book #154 of 2025:

I See You’ve Called in Dead by John Kenney

The initial satirical premise of this novel — in which a newspaper obituary-writer drunkenly posts a sardonic memorial for himself, resulting in the company software miscategorizing him as deceased — got enough of a chuckle out of me that I pushed on to finish the story, but in hindsight, I wish I hadn’t. That protagonist is the worst sort of pretentious middle-aged divorced man, nowhere near as funny as he thinks he is, who at the instigation of a local manic pixie dream girl begins attending the funerals of strangers. He’s also accompanied by his inspirational disabled friend, who seems blatantly in the narrative only to die at the end and theoretically tug on our heartstrings in furtherance of the hero’s self-actualization.

I saw another review compare the idea here to Fight Club meets Tuesdays with Morrie, and I can’t really argue with that description, although I’d add that it’s more like A Man Called Ove if the title character weren’t ravaged by grief but merely obdurately full of himself. Are we supposed to be on his side as he jokes about people’s pronouns and sexuality and paints himself as the victim in the ensuing HR conversation? Or later when he shows up at work after being fired and violently assaults his replacement (to the cheers of the surrounding office, for some unfathomable reason)? Nothing about this book works, on any level.

★☆☆☆☆

Book Review: Katabasis by R. F. Kuang

Book #153 of 2025:

Katabasis by R. F. Kuang

This fantasy novel does a great job capturing the terrifyingly mundane lows of graduate school: the uncertainty, the depression, the stress, the disordered sleep and eating habits, the precarious financial situation, the emotionally abusive professors, and so on. My own experience wasn’t ever so bad that I would have considered literally descending into hell in pursuit of the diploma, but, like, I get it.

This is a story about two grad students going into the underworld to retrieve the soul of their dead advisor, but I also think it reads best as a metaphor for higher education itself. (They have to give up years off their life expectancy to activate the spell! The denizens of the afterlife they encounter are obsessed with writing papers to satisfy some absent authority’s inscrutable standards! It’s too perfect, really.) Author R. F. Kuang draws on her academic background for both text and subtext here, and the result is a thoroughly unglamorous depiction of what it’s like to toil away at the lonely research of a doctoral program.

Unfortunately, I don’t feel that it works as well as an actual plot. The worldbuilding is too vague and the characters too unlikeable, and their eventual romance seems more generically proximity-based than grounded in anything specific about their personalities and interactions. The tone is off too, alternating moments of despair and extreme gore with flippantly silly magical theory using logical paradoxes to trick the universe into misbehaving. It’s by far my least favorite title that I’ve read from this writer, despite the commentary on academia delivering a seriously welcome sting.

[Content warning for sexism, ableism, and sexual assault.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Doctor Who: Nightshade by Mark Gatiss

Book #152 of 2025:

Doctor Who: Nightshade by Mark Gatiss (Virgin New Adventures #8)

Mark Gatiss is a true Doctor Who multihyphenate, having written nine scripts for the revived post-2005 series and appeared as an actor in another five episodes (with one overlap, in the uncredited cameo role of a spitfire pilot in his own Victory of the Daleks). As an author, he was also an early contributor during the so-called Wilderness Years when the show was off the air after 1989, beginning with this 1992 novel in Virgin Publishing’s New Adventures line.

It’s a horror title, specifically reminiscent of that Stephen King archetype of a secluded village getting gradually overrun by a malign influence (‘Salem’s Lot, The Tommyknockers, Needful Things, etc.). In this case, a buried presence in 1960s northern Britain is awakened by a local research station and begins manifesting ghastly figures drawn from people’s strongest memories — often their dead loved ones, but for one retired actor from a program that seems an amalgam of The Quatermass Experiment and Doctor Who itself, the fictional bug-eyed aliens he once fought on-screen. These ghouls then proceed to feed off the residents they’re haunting, thereby causing the size of the cast to steadily shrink.

The Seventh Doctor and Ace arrive in the middle of this, and she’s frustratingly in her generic plucky teenager phase, rather than the capable world-weary operator Andrew Cartmel gave us a couple installments ago. She even falls instantly in love with another youth in the area, for no apparent reason that I can ever detect. Immediate attraction to a guest star like that is the kind of thing that the television show could occasionally carry off with the help of committed performances, but on paper, there’s just nothing that stands out about the guy to justify her extreme reaction. A few serialized elements don’t quite work, either: the Doctor thinking about giving up his wandering, Ace planning to stay with her new beau whether he does or not, the Time Lord then betraying his companion and essentially kidnapping her at the end, and so on. These developments aren’t terrible in and of themselves, but they come out of nowhere and to my understanding are never picked up by any further sequels. That’s a fault of the series editors more than Gatiss in my opinion, but it does make the volume harder to appreciate on its own terms.

Still, the plotting is otherwise fine, the apparitions are suitably creepy, and the writer is plainly having fun with all his references to the franchise’s past, in addition to the meta angle of the TV monsters coming to life. The story’s flaws hold it back, and the author’s future involvement with the Whoniverse makes it seem more momentous than it properly is, but it’s certainly not the worst of its lot.

[Content warning for racism, domestic abuse, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: Derry Girls, season 3

TV #49 of 2025:

Derry Girls, season 3

I rated the first two seasons of this show as three stars each, and in some ways, this closing run feels like a minor improvement. I especially like the episode that flashes back to the regular protagonists’ mothers as teenagers themselves, which arrives with a surprising degree of confidence considering we’ve only had around a dozen half-hour episodes to get to know them as adults beforehand (most of which feature just Mary and Sarah anyway). That divergence, like Clare missing the train in a previous plot, does a reasonable job of masking how her actress was off filming Bridgerton at the time, and the series even quasi-delivers on the possible romantic spark between Erin and James before the end.

Unfortunately, it seriously loses itself in the last couple installments. The penultimate one veers off-course into a sudden tragedy that’s neither established nor followed through with very well, and then the finale jumps forward a whole year, which saps the momentum entirely. That leap brings us to the dawn of the Good Friday Accords, thereby offering a measure of resolution to the Troubles of the era, but it doesn’t really serve the characters at all. In fact, writer-creator Lisa McGee bizarrely chooses that moment to reveal that Michelle has a brother in prison for a political murder, which seems like the kind of thing we should have been told about her family from the start.

I’ve always struggled to wholly embrace this program, and the short season length again does it no favors. I’ve laughed at the humor and enjoyed the specificity of the 90s Northern Ireland setting, but I ultimately don’t think the scripts are ever able to develop and unpack the concept to its full potential.

This season: ★★★☆☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Seasons ranked: 3 > 1 > 2

Movie Review: The Bourne Supremacy (2004)

Movie #12 of 2025:

The Bourne Supremacy (2004)

The problem with giving your hero a happy ending is that when a sequel gets greenlit — presumably over studio desire to keep monetizing a successful IP, rather than anyone’s feeling that the Jason Bourne story as presented in the first movie was at all unfinished — you have to come up with a way to undo it. In this case, the writers’ solution to the character’s contented off-the-grid retirement with his girlfriend Marie is to kill her off less than 20 minutes into the piece as part of some convoluted plan to pin a different crime on him, which isn’t exactly the most airtight plot. Beyond the sexism and the shallow writing, her fridging is additionally frustrating for fans of the original Robert Ludlum novels, who know that she lives out the entire trilogy on paper as the protagonist’s beloved wife. But whereas The Bourne Identity (2002) kept many elements of the book it was adapting, the film series from this point onward is entirely separate, retaining the Ludlum titles alone for this installment and the next one but none of their actual contents.

It’s a decent flick, if structurally a little odd. The unsurprising antagonist is revealed and dispatched by the end of the second act, leaving an extra half-hour that feels included simply to justify a massive car chase and conveniently let Bourne confront Marie’s hired killer (an early-career Karl Urban) and not just the person who arranged the hit. But Joan Allen is good as the no-nonsense CIA chief trying to get answers and find Jason this time, and the franchise gets incrementally closer to passing the Bechdel Test by having her directly interact with Julia Stiles as Nicky, though they obviously only talk about their target. I also like how that Matt Damon role is now clearly a trained super-spy as well as a former assassin; the scene where he lets himself get caught by border security so that he can clone a phone and start figuring out who’s chasing him is particularly delightful. His full memories may not have returned, but it’s nice to see him putting more tactical skills to work instead of running wholly on instinct.

We end once again without any major open issues and with the latest global manhunt called off, although it’s easier to imagine our amnesiac lead having further spycraft adventures now that he’s a lone wolf with known agency contacts. And of course, that’s precisely what the producers would continue to deliver.

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

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Finn and Ezra’s Bar Mitzvah Time Loop by Joshua S. Levy

Book #151 of 2025:

Finn and Ezra’s Bar Mitzvah Time Loop by Joshua S. Levy

This is a cute middle-grade novel about two thirteen-year-old boys who are stuck repeating their common bar mitzvah weekend over and over again. I like the distinctiveness of the two protagonists, who narrate in alternating chapters: hyperactive Finn is an overachieving only child from a more secular family, while the reserved Ezra is the third of five kids in his observant household. The #ownvoices aspect that gives the story its texture is most welcome, with author Joshua S. Levy striking a good balance between not explaining every last detail and not overwhelming non-Jewish readers with elements irrelevant to the plot. I also appreciate how the teenage heroes and their respective communities are completely accepting of their differing traditions and degrees of engagement with Judaism, which sadly isn’t always the case in either fiction or real life.

Time loop tropes abound — although just one of the teens is familiar with them — but it’s fun to see characters this young scrambling to do the usual strategies like convincing someone of their situation or trying to secure funds for something they think would help. (Sure, any of us could probably rob a bank if we had infinite attempts to hone our strategy, but a seventh-grader is going to find it substantially harder!) The guys compare such challenges to a difficult video game level, which seems pretty apt for their age.

Unfortunately, I do feel like the piece falls apart a little in the end. We never really learn what started the cycle in the first place or why they’re eventually able to bust out of it, though at least there’s an emotional breakthrough that more or less tracks. The ending packs in a few too many twists in not enough space, however, bringing down my overall enjoyment. The work is so strong before then to still award it four-out-of-five stars, especially considering the audience, but I like the beginning and middle far more than what passes for any resolution at the close.

★★★★☆

Book Review: A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith

Book #150 of 2025:

A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith

This 2023 title is an informative popular science book, with a handful of caveats. My first issue is that it’s really two works in one, and that those halves don’t naturally fit together as a single cohesive whole. Roughly two-thirds of this text is spent detailing the logistical challenges that would be involved in setting up a sizable population anywhere offworld, which is a fair overview even if I’d prefer a more objective assessment rather than the authors’ snarky pessimism. This larger section is also somewhat familiar / unoriginal — while the Weinersmiths have plainly done their research and synthesized their own important takeaways, it’s overall a subject that plenty of writers have opined on over the years. This volume follows in the footsteps of previous releases like Mary Roach’s 2010 Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void (which is quoted from repeatedly here) without ever feeling like a necessary addition to that body of writing.

The remainder near the middle of this book spins off in a different direction, however, and one that I’ve personally found far more fascinating and insightful. There the married cowriters provide a thorough account of the status of laws in outer space: what so far seems to be accepted among the current and prospective spacefaring nations, what’s still in dispute, and what more dubious interpretations various parties have asserted at one point or another. They bemoan how legality is often brushed aside by would-be futurists, and proceed to make a case for why these questions matter and how they might be resolved. In the process, they consider as possible precedents how international law has handled other uninhabited regions like Antarctica or the bottom of the ocean, which offer their own benefits and shortcomings.

If the entire piece were focused on that latter topic, or if the separate parts were integrated more clearly, or if the tone were less jokey throughout, I could see myself rating this as highly as four-out-of-five stars. But with those flaws detracting from the experience, I’m going to go with a neutral three instead.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Star Wars: The Acolyte: Wayseeker by Justina Ireland

Book #149 of 2025:

Star Wars: The Acolyte: Wayseeker by Justina Ireland

This Star Wars novel is misleadingly labeled, and I suspect I would have given it a pass if it had been correctly identified as a part of the franchise’s High Republic line — which I largely haven’t read — rather than a prequel tie-in to the show The Acolyte. True, the characters Vernestra and Indara from that Disney+ series are the protagonists here, but the former originated as a High Republic creation (from author Justina Ireland, even), and the work as a whole seems aimed more at giving closure to the associated plot arcs there than at engaging with anything shown onscreen.

That’s a particularly frustrating turn of events because The Acolyte itself feels so sadly unfinished as a story. I enjoyed watching the title as it aired last year, but its first season ended on a sequence of revelations and cliffhangers that were plainly intended to carry on into another chapter that didn’t materialize. Instead the program was canceled, leaving plenty of open questions in its wake. What happens to Osha and Mae next, after their respective shocking changes of circumstance in the finale? What’s the full backstory that led the Stranger down his path? These are matters that a wider universe of licensed canon media should be perfect to explore — and yet this release eschews all that to deliver a wacky adventure of the two warrior women, decades before the show, hunting down the pirates and black market dealers who’ve discovered a new lightsaber-disabling technology, which the book never really manages to sell as a problem for anyone in the galaxy but the Jedi Order themselves.

I’m sure there’s an audience for this, and it’s all told competently enough (give or take your opinion on first-person narration in Star Wars) but it’s pretty far from the volume it’s been marketed as. I’ll hand it two-and-a-half stars, rounded up.

[Content warning for gun violence and gore.]

★★★☆☆