Book Club 2025: The Paris Review #122

I finished this book today (I’ve been reading it over the past few weeks), and that means that I can tell you my story about American customer service!

A few years back I ran out of new issues of The Paris Review to read, and as I was in the US at the time, I wondered idly whether any used bookstores would have any old issues I could snap up. We were strolling down Haight Street (San Francisco, that is) and passed some random (pretty large) book store, so we popped in. I found the more literary section and they had some anthologies and stuff there, but I didn’t see any Paris Reviews.

So I did something I never do — I asked the woman behind the counter whether they happened to have any. “What? Paris Review? Is that that poetry magazine!? I don’t know where you’re from, mister, but in this country rents aren’t cheap, and we can’t afford to carry that crap! It’s worth nothing! Are you insane!? Try Amazon! They’re giving it away!” She may still have been ranting after I exited the shop; I can’t quite remember…

Anyway, I bought this at a different used book store on the same trip, but didn’t get around to reading it until now. This is from 1992, and it’s an oddball issue — it starts off with an 80 page “seance” by James Merrill and David Jackson. The conceit is that they use a Ouija board to interview a whole bunch of dead authors. It’s funny, and it’s quite obscene.

The rest is more normal, but man, people in 1992 were chatty! I guess this was at the tail end of the post-modern literature era, where books got longer and longer. Somebody theorised that it’s because text processing became something that most authors used, and it’s so much easier to just go on and on and on typing on a computer vs on a typewriter or (gasp

This one by Laurie Sheck is good, too:

*gulp*


There’s an interview with Yehuda Amichai that’s really interesting.

One other stark difference between this 1992 issue and more recent issues is how much poetry there is in it. I’d say that modern issues are four fifths prose (at least) by page, but here it more than half poetry.

I’m not complaining, though.

Anyway, recalling that anecdote about that kindly bookstore owner made me wonder what these things go for these days. She’s probably right that these don’t turn over often, though — I mean, the demand is probably extremely marginal.

When I got home from the trip, I bought a whole bunch of older issues, but I bought them directly from The Paris Review. I bought a couple from each decade, but I haven’t gotten around to reading any of them yet.

The Paris Review #122 (1992) (buy used, buy new)

Book Club 2025: A Presumption of Death by Jill Paton Walsh

I stumbled across this while doing some testing of the “missed books” command in bookiez.el. It’s one of those “… and FAMOUS DEAD AUTHOR” books, so I assumed it was going to be totally awful. But I saw that it had positive reviews, so I gave it a shot.

It’s pretty bad. I mean, it’s competently written on a sentence by sentence basis, but it’s got none of Sayers’ charm and wit. It’s just incredibly tedious. I made it one quarter through before realising I just didn’t care at all about what was going on, and I ditched it.

A Presumption of Death (2002) by Jill Paton Walsh (buy used, 4.02 on Goodreads)

Perplexingly Book-Learned Emacs

As I was whining yesterday, it’s perplexingly difficult to find a (semi-)programmatic way of determining whether an author has written a new book. Or even manually in some cases. The best advice is, like, “Follow them on Goodreads” or something?

(To recap those two previous posts for those who hate clicking links — there’s plenty of databases of published books, but as far as I can tell, there are no databases of “published works”. That is, if the book was published today, would you consider it to be “a new work by this author” and not a new edition, a reprint, a translation, or whatever.)

But I wondered whether I could finally find something useful for an LLM to do? Sure, LLMs are plagiarism machines that use all of the world’s energy, but what can it do for me? So I signed up for the Perplexity AI, and an hour later:

Yes, I’m a prompt engineer now.

I’ve gotta give it to Perplexity — signing up for the API, adding some money and getting it to spew some data at me was totally painless. I created a little library called perplexity.el (and put it on Microsoft Github), but it’s totally trivial: It just does a url-retrieve request with some headers set, and you get JSON back.

So in the screenshot above, it’s listing all the books by David Sedaris it knows about, and also helpfully what kind of book it is.

That’s OK, and it’s of course trivial to just use that to list books that are newer than the last book I have from him. So I guess I could use this to automatically get all new books from the authors I’m interested in.

I also did a variation where I asked “list all the books by this author, but exclude books on this list:”, and then list all the books I already have by this author.

And as you can see, that, er, kinda changed what it’s outputting? Now it’s including a lots of plays that it didn’t before?

Typically enough, LLMs give different answers every time I ask, so this isn’t, you know, data to be relied on in any way. Sure, it’d be better if it was actual data instead of hallucinations and LLM navel lint, but it’s better than nothing.

The response times from Perplexity are all over the place — sometimes it responds within a couple seconds, and sometimes it takes a minute, but whatchagonnado.

Let’s test another author:

Amy Hempel. She’s awesome. I hit the m command (to list “missing” books), and:

All those three are books that exist! And that I don’t have.

I tried asking it again, and then it only listed two of these books — the non-repeatability of the results is annoying, but again, LLMs are toys, and if you get anything useful out of them, that’s nice, but your expectations can’t be low enough.

For giggles, let’s try this a “list missing books” on Megan Whalen a few times:

1st.

2nd.

3rd.

Oh well. I tried adjusting the temperature, but no go. I guess I could run the query several times and aggregate the results, but it’s already pretty slow…

After using this for a handful of authors, I’m now deep in debt. OK, perhaps not from the API usage, but because I’ve bought, like, fifteen books while just testing things out here…

I’ve added convenient commands to the search buffer to go to bookshop.org so that I can shop, as well as Goodreads to check whether the books actually exist. (They mostly do, but there are of course some hallucinations.)

And now I can also do that thing I wanted where there are certain authors that I track, and then query Perplexity for books they’ve released the last few years. Let’s see, I’ve marked a few authors, and:

Let’s repeat that:

And again:

*sigh*

Heh, if I remove Anthony Horowitz, I get:

Sure, sure… If I have just Stross and MacLeod, I get:

OK OK OK.

Is there a way to make Perplexity try, like, harder? (This is with Sonar Pro.) The prompts are in the package.

[Edit an hour later: OK, I guess I get it… Perplexity is based on web searches, and it just doesn’t like to do a lot of searches? So I’m going to have to loop through each tracked author and then aggregate the results.]

But… it does actually kinda look like even I managed to find something actually useful to use an LLM for, even if it’s literally janky? Actually?

Whodathunk.

[Edit a couple days later:]

I couldn’t help myself, and checked what results OpenAI and Gemini gave me. Of course they can’t tell me about “what’s new” because they don’t get “knowledge updates” very often, but I can ask them for missing books, for instance. Let’s do David Sedaris as an example again, and the query is basically “list all books by David Sedaris, but exclude books from this list:”, and then the list of the books I already have.

Here’s Perplexity (sonar-pro).

Here’s Gemini (gemini-2.0.flash).

Here’s OpenAI (gpt-4o).

I’ve put all the query stuff in query-assistant.el on Microsoft Github. I didn’t really expect them to be better — and they aren’t — so no big surprises there.

Book Club 2025: Djevelkysset by Unni Lindell

The week of mysteries continues…

Lindell is one of the most successful mystery writers in Norway, and reading this, it’s both obvious and a bit confusing why this is the case. At the same time.

The story is told in extremely short scenes — if this was a TV series, it would be one of those where you get 15 seconds per scene before it switches to the next one. There’s over a dozen central characters, and we flit by them all constantly, and this both makes reading this exhausting and kinda thrilling simultaneously. I guess you could call the viewpoint a close third person in a malfunctioning washing machine on a constant spin cycle? Every time we flit to a new person, we get some of what they’re thinking, even if it’s just “the smell of the glass reminded her of the catastrophe” — often infuriatingly vague, and but more often trivial.

I kinda hated the book? But I can’t deny that it’s also pretty successful in doing what it’s trying to do.

Djevelkysset (2012) by Unni Lindell (3.49 on Goodreads)

Do Lists Of Published Works Exist?

tl;dr: Does anybody know of a site/API where I can find a list of books published by an author? Before you answer “just use Wikipedia/Goodreads/Amazon/openlibrary”, read on…

After tinkering with my bookiez.el package today, I naturally started to want to buy more books. I was thinking about implementing something that would alert me when authors I particularly like release something new, if that’s simple to implement.

So I was looking at (to take a random example) David Sedaris:

The last book I have is from 2018? He must have published something after that, but how to find out?

Because if you go to Goodreads and sort by publication year, you get this:

And there two things on the top there do indeed look like new books, and I bought them from Bookshop.org. But what are the rest of those things? Yes, indeed, they’re radio shows, and then a collection, and then… er… a Kindle essay, and then there’s…

OK, so I tried openlibrary.org, but it has the similar problems, as evidenced by the first screenshot up there. Among the 122 books Sedaris has published (apparently), there’s “A Carnival of Snackery Lib/E”, “A Carnival of Snackery”, “Carnival of Snackeries : Diaries”, “Carnival of Snackery : Diaries”, and finally of course, “Carnival of Snackery”.

I don’t know whether this phenomenon has a name… “The Tragedy Of The Pedantry?” You see this problem all the time, like on discogs. If you’re trying to buy all albums by Joe Jackson, you get an overview that starts with this:

The first two things are indeed his first two albums, but then you get an “album” by the BBC Transcription Service (these were vinyls they sent out to far-away broadcasting outposts like the BBC offices in Gibraltar, so that they could play some rockin’ Joe Jackson live to the people in Gibraltar — good work by the BBC). BUT I DIGRESS.

If only there was a button on the form where people submit data like this like “is this something you thing that reasonable people would consider an actual ‘new release’ by this person?” button. I know, that takes using common sense and having some taste (is a collected edition a “new release”? a translation? an illustrated edition?), so it’s basically impossible, but it sure would be nice to have a button when viewing these lists that says “hide effluvia”.

I guess the best one can hope for is Wikipedia:

But the nerds at Wikipedia are so geeky — it’s not as apparent here, but if you look at somebody who does series, it’s almost impossible to see whether they’ve done any new books lately. As an example, C. J. Cherryh:

And that goes on and on, and you basically have to read the entire thing to see whether she’s done anything new lately.

I find all this not only annoying, but slightly bewildering: There’s readers that want to buy books, and they’re fans of certain authors, so they want to be reminded that there are new books when there are new books. And by “new books” all readers mean “has this author written a new book and it has been published?”, and usually nothing else.

If you manage to eventually find the “all books” for an author on Amazon, for instance, and manage to select “publication date”, you get this:

OK, English only…

What? Oh, there’s a 3 book collection set… and a kindle edition… OK, I don’t care about Kindle, I just want papery books:

GAAAH

So there is no way on Amazon to get it to list out new books by an author — they’d have to do the tagging I describe above, and obviously that’s not something a small startup like Amazon has the means to do.

Sorry for the lame joke, but they actually used to do this when they were a small startup — you could get a list of “works by” sorted by publication order, so that you can, you know, buy stuff.

And of course, just searching for “david sedaris” just gives you popular books…

Changing to “newest arrivals” gives you junk — OK, there’s two things in the first line by David Sedaris, but nothing that could be called “a new work by”.

So I’m just asking the Internet in general: Has anybody, somewhere, made a web site that lists works by authors in a way that can be used to check whether somebody has published a new book lately?

I’m guessing not, because that just seems totally impossible, but I thought I’d ask.

Oh, for giggles I tried ChatGPT:

Which starts off pretty reasonably…

But ends in 2003!? (Same with 4.5.)

After chatting a bit with it to list David Sedaris books, I got it to stop trying to divide things into sections, but it includes things like “Themes and Variations” that’s a Kindle essay, as well as “The Best Of Me” which is a compilation. But this doesn’t stop in 2003, at least.

LLMs are notoriously not very up-to-date, so it’s not ideal for the functionality I have in mind. And I don’t want to. But I’m guessing that’s going to be my best bet? I have to get a doctorate in prompt engineering first.