Book Club 2025: The Little Disturbances of Man by Grace Paley

I bought this because I was quite intrigued by her interview in an old issue of the Paris Review.

It’s very… it’s very 50s? Think Streetcar Named Desire but New York instead. And more geared toward being printed in magazines, so you get more humour and stuff (lots of jokes), but it’s still that Serious Picaresque Drama that seemed to be hegemonic for a minute.

And the text is very worked through — it feels like it’s been tweaked a lot so that every single sentence is a work of genius *crosses fingers*. This writing style gets to be really annoying if there’s not a lot to back it up, and I feel there really isn’t here. Some of the tableaux aren’t that far from Thomas Pynchon, really, but…

The Little Disturbances of Man (1959) by Grace Paley (buy new, buy used, 3.94 on Goodreads)

Book Club 2025: Pathways edited by Mercedes Lackey

I bought this book in 2018 by mistake — I thought it was a new book by Mercedes Lackey, but instead it’s a collection of short short stories by people I’ve never heard of. I guess it’s what kids these days call “fic”, i. e., fan fiction?

So I never attempted to read it… until now.

And it’s not as bad as I assumed it would be! But, on the other hand, it’s not very interesting, either, so I ditched the book after reading three of these.

There’s also a 15 page story by Lackey herself at the end, and I read that one, too — it was much better than the rest. There’s a reason why Mercedes Lackey is an industry — she writes very charming books. I think I’ve read over 50 of them, but it’s been a minute since the last one. Let’s see… has she published anything after 2017? I’ll ask Perplexity via Emacs!

Huh… What if I ask OpenAI instead?

Hey! There’s some overlap! The lists have two books in common! Who says LLMs are useless!

Well, Wikipedia seems to agree with OpenAI a bit…

Oh, there’s the Perplexity books? Man, she’s been productive.

And they only had one of these three.

Anyway, lessons to be learned from this is that, well, LLMs still suck.

Pathways (2017) edited by Mercedes Lackey (buy new, buy used, 4.1 on Goodreads)

Book Club 2025: Blood Link by Claire McNab

Claire McNab wrote about 30 mysteries between 1988 and 2007, and I thought I’d read them all until Emacs told me I’d missed this one.

These books are decidedly old-fashioned: The detective isn’t an alcoholic or anything, and doesn’t have a traumatic background, and there’s no scenes of prolonged torture in these books, and they’re all pretty short (under 200 pages). But on the other hand, these aren’t “cozies” (*shiver*) either.

And this is OK. There’s a spate of mysterious deaths, and Our Hero investigates, and that’s it. I think you can see that perhaps she’d lost some enthusiasm for the series (the next year she’d launch a new series of funnier mysteries) by this point, but it works fine.

I think McNab was right to think about ditching this series — only 66 ratings? That’s not a lot, so I guess it sold very badly. Let’s see how the first book of the new series (published the next year) fared…

Yeah, that’s what I’d have guessed.

Blood Link (2003) by Claire McNab (buy new, buy used, 3.91 on Goodreads)

What is going on with comics shopping these days

So I was using Mile High Comics to buy new comics for decades, but they sort of went non-responsive, and then I used TFAW, and they shut down, and now I’m using G-Mart and DCBS, but as you can see above — the most basic things, like a new Tadao Tsuge book published by Drawn & Quarterly, and DCBS doesn’t even have that.

So the last few months I’ve had to buy most comics through bookshop.org:

Because they have all this stuff, except:

They don’t have Robert Crumb’s first new book in several decades, Tales of Paranoia, because they don’t do pamphlets. So where do I buy that then? Is DCBS going the way of TFAW and is going into shut down mode?

Are there no Internet comic shops left that carry basic US comics? The situation after the Diamond collapse — is everybody going bankrupt?

Do we have to order directly from each publisher now? Buying US comics now takes 10x as long even if I know perfectly well what to buy. All of this has meant that my supply of new American comics has tapered off severely.

Let’s see… Oh yeah, I used to use Midtown Comics, but stopped. Perhaps they suck less than DCBS these days? Yup, they have both Boat Life and Tales of Paranoia… but not the Spy Seal collection:

DCBS has that one:

*sigh*

Oh, if I search for “Spy Seal TP”, then I get it, but not if I just search for “Spy Seal”.

*slow clap*

Comics web sites aren’t very impressive, are they? Anyway, I wonder whether the reason for all this kerfuffle is that they’re just confused by all the distributors they have to deal with these days.

But Midtown looks promising, at least, so I think I’ll switch to them again. I last used them in 2018, and I have no idea why I ditched them in the first place. Oh well.