OK, @pluralistic 's The Bezzle finally bubbled up to the top of my to-read stack, and hot damn! Such a great read, in turns hilarious and infuriating and heart breaking.
And I had a thought about why I find his writing so compelling - he's something of a 21st century Dickens; his daily threads show you the pieces of the puzzle, much as Dickens' serializations of his work doled out a story in bite-sized chunks. Then, you sit down and read the whole, and it you see the whole, and... damn.