Book Club 2025: Naked Once More by Elizabeth Peters

I was unnaturally exhausted after the metal fest, but I realised why yesterday: I was coming down with some virus or other. So I had to pick some book appropriate to read while having a fever, and I picked an Elizabeth Peters — she writes books that are easy on the brain.

Cracking open this book, it just looks very strange. I mean, the margins are unusually wide for a text that’s that compact… and it’s a bit blurry? And then I realised: This must be a print-on-demand book! That’s printed from a scan of a paperback, but not printed the same size. And after flipping to the last page, that turned out to be true: It’s printed by Lightning Source, a print-on-demand firm. Mystery solved!

If I’d known, I’d have bought a used copy instead. Butl this is a pretty nice print-on-demand book — it doesn’t have that icky soft-touch phthalate coating that many of them use to mysteriously “class things up”, but achieve the opposite effect. And I quite prefer a facsimile version (even with the slightly blurred text) over a cheaply OCR’d and barely proof-read one — those things can be truly horrible.

Oh, what’s the, like text like? It’s pretty good. Peters writes in an amusing way, and she’s good with characters, but she often gets lost in the weeds when it comes to the actual mystery and the plot. You can just tell how she struggled to manage to get to the end of this one — it’s 360 pages, and that’s mostly because she’s set up so many complications that she has to work through, and halfway through she starts to get a bit desperate. At least that’s how I read it.

Which led to me not only guessing who the red herring was, but also what the solution was way ahead of time, and that’s not fun. And I still have a fever! If somebody feverish manages to figure out the mystery, you were struggling while writing it.

But it’s perfectly entertaining nonetheless.

Naked Once More (1989) by Elizabeth Peters (buy new, buy used, 3.91 on Goodreads)

Book Club 2025: Third Man Out by Richard Stevenson

I’m exhausted after two days of Desertfest, so I thought that another mystery might be the right thing to vegetate with.

And it is indeed. This is another quite amusing and pretty smart mystery. But — it’s not as good as the two preceding books in this series. Those two books were so chock full of ideas and jokes, while this is way more straightforward. There was a six year pause between this and the previous book, so I’m going to go ahead and guess that Stevenson had used up all his plot twists and didn’t quite know how to continue.

Which doesn’t bode well for the rest of the books in this series, but I think I’ll keep reading and see how things go. At least a couple more books, because while not as good, this book was still a very pleasant way to zone out.

Third Man Out (1992) by Richard Stevenson (buy new, buy used, 4.1 on Goodreads)

Metal Festival

I thought it was kinda beautiful:

There’s one pair of air buds left, because nobody wanted to take the last pair.

(I’ve got my own.)

Chat Pile won the festival, or course (but I already love them), but the surprise was Whores., who I didn’t know anything about. They were fantastic. And now I’m gonna buy their albums.

Book Club 2025: I’ll Be Your Mirror by Nan Goldin

I don’t really buy a lot of art books — it’s weird. I mean, I’m really into comics, so it would be natural to also be into art books, but I’m not. I usually just get bored after a few dozen pages and flip through the rest of the pages quickly.

But this one is awesome. I guess there’s something almost narrative going on in the pictures, and between the pictures?

It’s just one banger after another.

And it’s funny.

This was published by the Whitney museum in conjunction with a retrospective, and the printing is awesome, too. And the binding! As a physical object, it’s impeccable. Why can’t they print comics this well?

There’s also a whole bunch of essays/interviews included in this hefty book. I found some of them to be a bit… dry, and there were some pieces that were just about how rad New York was in the late 70s. I love that genre, but it feels clichéd when you stack several after one another.

But mostly good text pieces. One by David Wojnarowicz, for instance.

Perhaps I should start looking more at books in the art section of the bookstore…

I’ll Be Your Mirror (1996) by Nan Goldin (buy used, 4.64 on Goodreads)