Book Club 2025: Tales of St Austin’s by P. G. Wodehouse

I used to dislike Wodehouse — I’d read one or two books back in the 90s, and I found those to be annoying and mannered. I don’t remember why now, but I decided to give him another go five years ago (oh yeah! the pandemic!), and… I loved it. So I bought a couple more, and I loved them, too, so I went and bought all his novels (in the Everyman’s Library editions, because I like the typesetting and the physical format).

And then I started reading chronologically, and I’m up to 1938 now. But I sorted the remaining books some weeks ago, and I discovered that I’d skipped a handful, so I thought I’d read those before continuing.

So this is from 1903, and is a short story collection. I hadn’t actually planned on reading Wodehouse’s short stories, too, but I must have bought this by mistake.

Wodehouse was born in 1881, and unless my university maths education fails me, that means that he was 22 when this was published. And like most of his earliest books, these are school boy stories originally published in magazines for school boys, which means that Wodehouse was writing about something he wasn’t far removed from.

And these are indeed very entertaining stories. They’re perhaps more… is “earnest” the right word?… than later stories. Less cynical, perhaps. And Wodehouse would never become a complex writer, but these stories are super duper straightforward.

It’s also fun to see how early he used some of his favourite expressions, like “Scarcely was he outside the promised ice cream” for “he ate the ice cream”, which Wodehouse used many variations from over the years…

The book is slightly oddly put together, though. Most of the stories are around eight pages long, but there’s a fifty page story in the middle. And then the book rounds out with three humorous essays, and then finally and essay in story form, and these things read like they were written a lot earlier. They read like they were written by a smart(-ass) seventeen year old, so now I’m going to google whether that’s the case.

Aha!

“Work”

Published in Public School Magazine, December 1900.

OK, it was published when Wodehouse was nineteen, but it could be stuff he wrote while at school, eh? Eh?

Tales of St Austin’s (1903) by P. G. Wodehouse (buy new, buy used, 3.46 on Goodreads)

Comics Daze

I think it’s time to read some comics. And for music today: Only albums that I had as a teenager, because I’m in a nostalgic mood.

Sade: Promise

13:19: Undead Artifacts by Matt Lock (Hollow Press)

Oh, this was published by Hollow Press? I think I blanked on that when I bought this from the Wig Shop — it would have made more sense to buy it directly from Hollow Press, since they’re in Europa. D’oh!

This comes in a box…

Wow, that’s a lot of little books in various formats.

This box collects books previously published (by a number of different publishers), apparently in the original formats. I really like that — when you read collections of works like this, they’re often shoe horned into the same format, and that’s never entirely satisfactory. That is, whether you enlarge/shrink the artwork, or leave really big margins, or put several pages on one page — it always looks odd. I wish more publishers would collect works in this manner instead.

And it’s not just a problem with different formats, either — works can lose some impact when being packed into a thick book. I’m thinking of the recent Julia Gförer collection: It was great, but reading the original minis was even better.

Apparently isn’t not that expensive? This was 28 euros from Hollow Press, and it’s 400 pages of stuff. That’s just incredibly cheap.

Anyway, almost all of these books are collection of illustrations anyway.

But they’re illustrations that seem to hint at a narrative — like they’re taken from the middle of some longer book (and they aren’t, I think).

It’s good stuff.

Robert Fripp: Network

Most of the publishers I haven’t heard of, but this was in a Mould Map issue…

Anyway — the production of this collection is excellent, and the contents are enjoyable.

Propaganda: A Secret Wish

13:54: Nej! #3 by Mats Jonsson

Jonsson has been doing “serious” books the last few years (which have been very successful, commercially and otherwise), so this is his one man anthology for goofing off.

So it’s autobio stuff, and it’s very funny.

Hm… why is this out of focus… odd. Anyway, it’s class.

Jonsson puzzlingly refers to Noah van Sciver as his nemesis (or was it enemy?) and here we get the explanation why: He was the editor for an anthology that published him in an anthology a long time ago, but he didn’t have his contact info, and then things happened, so it took months for him to get payment to Van Sciver. So Van Sciver got his friends to write on the anthology’s Facebook that they were crooks etc. “I got pretty depressed.”

Prince: Around The World In A Day

14:47: Bare snabel #32

Huh, this is apparently a long-running Norwegian comics anthology? I’ve never heard of it before.

I like the artwork.

Oh, I’ve read this one before — it was published in a collected edition recently…

Heh heh heh.

15:01: Wrong by Skeleton Bones

Hey, this is great! Love it.

Phranc: Folksinger

15:05: It’s Oola/The Place We’re In Now by Karl Christian Krumpholz

The printing on the first one is kinda odd — the blacks are all washed out…

Anyway, it’s pretty fun. I like the artwork. These cat strips are apparently excerpted from a longer diary comics project, and I’m guessing they perhaps made more sense in that original context. Presented like this, one strip after another about a really hyperactive cat, I’m just sitting here thinking “they should get another cat to keep her company, because she sounds really bored”.

The final book is all illustrations of city landscapes, and it’s very nice.

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds: The Firstborn Is Dead

15:38: Butterface by Matt Seneca

Well, this is all kinds of fucked up.

I’m not at all sure what Seneca is trying to express with this book, but I’m pretty sure it’s not successful.

15:58: Misery of Love by Yvan Alagbé (New York Review Comics)

This is really well told…

Everything happens in several time periods, all at once. It’s impressive how clear it is considering how vague it is, if that makes any sense.

The only problem with this is that when there is dialogue (and there isn’t that much), then it’s not at all convincing — it reads like lines taken from a movie.

But it’s still an impressive book, although the plot (as it is) is pretty much self evident from the start.

16:14: Red Night by Hanawa Kazuichi (Breakdown Press)

This is yet another collection of things published in Garo — it’s time that somebody just translated the entire run, eh?

This is sexualised horror, but I’m not at all sure whether it’s intended as parody or not. And is the guy in the pot a Beckett reference?

I guess the artist’s obvious shortcomings might be what lends everything a ridiculous air, and it might actually be 4 Real? Because the stories are pretty gruesome, and not my thing at all, so I ditched this after a handful of stories.

16:34: Bizness is Bizness by Kikifruit (Desert Island)

This is a collection of illustrations.

Eh… eh…

New Order: Low Life

16:36: Smoke Signal #44 by Gary Panter (Desert Island)

WHAT!? An entire issue of Smoke Signals by Gary Panter!? *gasp* *swoon* Why didn’t anybody warn me!?

Oh yeah, I got this from the Mystery Box subscription.

Wow, this is amazing.

These pages were all apparently drawn this April/May. I love it.

Latin Quarter: Modern Times

17:20: Cat + Crazy 1 by Wataru Nadatani (Dark Horse)

This starts off as a pretty normal book for cat fanciers…

… and then turns totally bonkers.

Kate Bush: Running Up That Hill

See?

It’s pretty amusing, but it’s also very didactic when it comes to cats — there’s pages and pages of tips on how to get cats to like you and so on.

I can totally see a child that’s incredibly into cats thinking this is the best comic book ever, but…

Kate Bush: Hounds of Love

18:00: Whispered Words by David Enos

This is fantastic.

It’s funny, sure, but it’s also oddly engrossing. There’s so much going on, but nothing is clearly stated. It’s got a dream like quality about it, but avoids all dream clichés. It’s great!

18:07: The Shifting Ground vol. 1 by Joe Walsh

This is also good — it’s very philosophomatical (that’s a word), which usually annoys me, but this one didn’t.

And it’s funny.

I like the way the artwork is done — printed with no black ink.

This is the third printing, so it’s a commercial success, too. Which is nice.

Joni Mitchell: Dog Eat Dog

18:29: The End

I was gonna read a bunch more comics today, but then I remembered that I’ve got stuff to do and errands to run, so I guess I’ll call it a day.

Book Club 2025: Flesh And Gold by Phyllis Gotlieb

I bought this around 2014, but apparently never got around to reading it (which is somewhat unusual for science fiction novels — I usually read those without much delay).

I suspect I bought this because it was recommended by Ursula K. Le Guin — there’s a blurb from her on the cover, at least.

Uhm uhm uhm… There’s something about the style this is written is that I find annoying. Over the first 20 pages, we’re introduced to at least a dozen and a half named characters, apparently from a lot of different species, but none are described or seem distinct, and it’s just… It’s such a slippery way of writing — there’s so many pronouns flying, and it’s never quite clear who that “he” is referring to. I found myself rereading sentences several times, and it doesn’t help — I think the phenomenon is called “pronouns with ambiguous attachment”, and I hate it so much.

And when I got to page 17 I found a dog ear, which probably means that I tried reading this once before, but then put it back in the bookcase. I’m not doing that again — I ditched this book after about 25 pages this time around.

OK, it’s not just me.

That’s harsh! Not written by an AI!

Oh, OK. I guess I’ll never know.

Flesh And Gold (1998) by Phyllis Gotlieb (buy used, 3.39 on Goodreads)

Random Comics

Here’s some comics I’ve read over the past couple weeks.

I’m not at all sure what’s up with the X-Men continuity, but this is apparently set before the current status quo, but after Krakoa (yeah I know).

It’s yet another one of those “ooo Wolverine is all savage now, in the woods” story that I think must have been done a few hundred times before, but I guess the Marvel edict is “back to basics”.

It’s not horrible, but it seems like they’re also trying to create a more mythosey (that’s a word) mythos around the adamantium metal — probably making it sentient or something, and just I can’t.

I’ve only been reading these things for like half a decade…

The new development this time around is that Ben Snakepit is drawing things on a tablet. And amazingly enough, it works! There’s quite a few that move from drawing with a pencil to a tablet and lose whatever they had going for them, but this is fine. The only problem is that the lettering is way too small for me — I couldn’t really read the first year or so of this.

But when he ups the lettering size a bit, everything’s fine.

And it’s a pretty eventful couple years, so it’s pretty entertaining.

This is a long-running Swedish sort-of-fanzine — there’s a lot of different texts (poetry, rants, reviews, interviews), but also comics.

There’s a kinda gnarly aesthetic to the comics that I like. (And boy is the story above fucked up.)

All the stories are kinda devastating.

But some are funny!

In one issue, there’s dozens of illustrations by Caroline Sury, and that’s pretty neat.

OK, this story is even more fucked up.

It’s mostly Swedish artists, but here’s Grace Wilson, who I assume is British? It’s a really strong piece.

But then again, there’s a lot of strong pieces here.

This batch of Spirous isn’t all that exciting…

But there’s a new Spirou serialisation (yes I know — Spirou in Spirou magazine — so unusual) written by Lewis Trondheim, so that’s fun.

And this thing was pretty surprising (and unusual for Spirou).

I’ve been buying these DC Finest collections, but then giving up on them half-way through, because most DC comics from before the 70s are pretty lame. But this one I did read!

It’s an odd collection, though — it starts with the tail end of Jim Shooter’s reign in the late 60s, and then there’s a couple hundred pages from that era where the Legion ran as 10-ish page backups, before rounding out the book with the start of the Legion resurgence (when Dave Cockrum came aboard). And these collections never even try to hint at why the collection contains whatever issues they contain.

If I’m to hazard a guess, I think this is basically the period nobody wants to read — the early parts of the Legion story has been collected in those “archive” books, and the mid-70s period (after Mike Grell entered the picture) is a perennial seller. But you can’t really put that on the back cover: “This is for completists only! Don’t buy this!” It’s not good salesmanship, probably.

Shooter is obviously mostly out of ideas by this point (he was a teenager when he wrote this run), but I quite like the stories. Shooter ups the soap opera factor, so we get Matter Eating Lad having conflict with his horrible parents, for instance.

E. Nelson Bridwell writes stories in between Shooter, and they’re just. so. fucking. awful.

Then Cary Bates takes over, but it’s not until Dave Cockrum takes over the art that things start getting entertaining again. I’m biased — these are comics that I read when first when I was, like, ten years old, so it’s a thrill to see them again after all these years, but they’re just solid super-hero comics.

It’s one of the major comics mysteries why they can’t seem to keep the Legion going as a viable series — it was huge in the 60s for a time, then for a time in the 70s, and finally it was super duper popular in the early 80s. I guess some parts of the 90s were also popular, but it’s not been a success the last three decades.

Is it because people who read super-hero comics are The Elderly these days, and they don’t like reading about teenagers? I doubt it — I read most of the Legion comics like 15 years ago, and it seemed like all the fun was sucked out of it after the Crisis on Infinite Earths thing: Instead of just writing fun super-hero stories, they spent year after year trying to retcon everything, what with “pocket universes” and alternate time lines and all that tedious stuff.

And then the book ends with the first issue Mike Grell did the artwork for, because why not. Very puzzling selection!

(And I wonder whether the two top left panels were supposed to have a blurrification effect applied?)

While reading this collection, I’ve also been reading this blog. It’s fun! They concentrate on recapping the stories, which I find to be a rather incomprehensible hobby to have, but there’s a lot of good, snarky comments.

I apparently bought this last Xmas? But never got around to reading it.

We get a kinda amusing Don Rosa…

… but the rest isn’t very exciting. I mean, even for a child.

New Clifton! Written by Zidrou.

It’s fun, but it’s an oddly brutal album. No less than three of Clifton’s relatives are killed off. I expected that at least his father’s death would be a fake-out, but nope — not only just dead as a doornail, but also cremated.

The humour is mostly based on French and English stereotypes, and it works well. Zidrou keeps the gags coming seemingly effortlessly, and while few of them make you laugh out loud, there’s just so many of them that it doesn’t matter.

And that’s it.