Since late 2003, I’ve been recording (almost) every book that I have read. At 200-300 books a year, that’s over 5,000 books that I have written up here. These are the most recent; I also record the books I have read each week and each month. These days each review includes the second paragraph of the third chapter of each book, just for fun; and also a purchase link for Amazon UK. (Yes, I know; but I get no other financial reward for writing all of this.)
This WordPress blog replaced my Livejournal in March 2022. I was able to copy across all of my old Livejournal posts; unfortunately the internal links in old posts will still in general point back to Livejournal, and though I was able to import images, I wasn’t able to import videos, so it’s a little imperfect.
A strong start to the year – I had several big books almost finished by 31 December, and then several short ones last week.
Current Renaissance- en barokarchitectuur in België, by Rutger J. Thijs River Mumma, by Zalika Reid-Benta TheDomino Effect, by David Bishop
Last books finished This Way Up: When Maps Go Wrong (And Why It Matters), by Mark Cooper-Jones and Jay Foreman Best American Comics 2011, ed. Alison Bechdel House of Plastic, by Mike Tucker Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships, by Robin Dunbar The Mystery of the Blue Train, by Agatha Christie Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, by Patrick Radden Keefe Collected Folk Tales, by Alan Garner Time Trials: The Wolves of Winter, by Richard Dinnick et al Counterstrike, by Una McCormack Agent of the Daleks, by Steve Lyons The Colony, by Audrey Magee
Next books Frankenstein & Patchwork Man, by Jack Heath The Forgotten and the Fantastical: Modern Fables and Ancient Tales: No. 2, ed. Taika Bellamy Kristin Lavransdatter: The Wreath, by Sigrid Undset
‘That acolyte of yours? Jamieson? He was worried about you, so he called me, and we went to your house and found the note she left you, Tas.’ His mother’s hand was dry and frail, yet somehow comforting in this chill, efficient hospital where doctors moved among acolytes of their own. ‘He got a search party out after you right away. They found you in the car, out near the Enigma. You’d been knocked in the head pretty badly. You’ve got some pins and things in your skull.’ She had always talked to him this way, telling him the worst in a calm, unfrightened voice. ‘You’ll be all right, the doctors say.’
Back around 1990, I went through a real Sherri S. Tepper phase and read as many of her books as I could find, starting with Grass. I didn’t remember this one at all clearly, but once I got into it, it all came back – a settler planet where specially trained singers must pacify the mysterious giant crystals which otherwise explode and kill travellers; the evil capitalists and bigots who want to destroy the entire ecology to make it useful for humans; and the cute cuddly alien viggies, which are in fact more than they seem. And it’s not just about pacifying the crystal Presences, but about opening up communication between the humans and the indigenous inhabitants of the planet. A chunky book, perhaps a bit old-fashioned by twenty-first century standards, but there’s a lot in it. You can get The Enigma Score here.
(Apparently it’s a direct riposte to The Crystal Singer by Anne McCaffrey, which I have not read.)
This was my top unread book by a woman. Next on that pile is Looking Glass Sound, by Catriona Ward.
Second paragraph of third story (“Demons in Levenshulme”, by Paul Magrs):
Yaz was used to this kind of sudden call-to-arms while with her time-travelling friend. ‘What is it?’
An anthology of sequels to broadcast Doctor Who stories. Some real jewels here, including the first one, “The Verge of Death”, a sequel to The Edge of Destruction credited to Carole Ann Ford, Rob Craine, and Beth Axford; “Demons in Levenshulme”, by Paul Magrs, which is a Thirteenth Doctor sequel to The Dæmons; “Take Our Breath Away”, credited to Katy Manning, a breathless what-happened-to-Jo-Grant story; “Harry Sullivan and the Chalice of Vengeance”, by Mark Griffiths, which is a Fourth Doctor sequel (sorta) to The Christmas Invasion; and “Afterlife”, by Alfie Shaw, expanding on the moving webcast P.S. by Chris Chibnall, about Rory’s father and son awkwardly bonding after the events of The Angels Take Manhattan. The fact that I’ve mentioned more than half of the eight stories as particularly good speaks for itself. You can get The Adventures After here.
I normally like to credit the editors of anthologies, but no editing credit is given here. BBC, please do let your talented editors emerge blinking into the light!
“The way ’e notices, you know. Never forgets so much as anything,” she would confide to other nurses as they pursued their way toward the gardens. “Knows ’is own mind, ’e does, and isn’t afraid to let you know it, either.”
I was moved to pick this up by a mention in Jon Pertwee’s autobiography that this was the book which established his father as a successful writer. I am not sure if that is true, but it’s definitely the case that it was published in 1919, the year that Jon was born. (Jon was the younger of two sons; his older brother Michael was an actor and screenwriter, whose most famous credit is probably adapting Stephen Sondheim’s musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum for the cinema.)
Our Wonderful Selves is not a great book, and having recently read all of H.G. Wells’ fictional output from the start of the twentieth century, I think I know what Roland Pertwee was trying and failing to match.
His protagonist is a really unpleasant writer, who manages through arrogance to get a big theatrical opportunity for his Art; he bullies and plans to betray his wife, who has dedicated herself to making it possible for him to promote his talents; and his much smarter uncle saves the day by reconciling them. Really, it’s not a very convincingly happy ending; he is unlikely to reform, and she would be much better off without him. Given the writer’s own shaky marriage, he may have been writing in part to work through his own demons.
Pertwee’s top book on both Goodreads and LibraryThing is The Islanders (1951), for younger readers, about three boys who get to live by themselves on an island in Devon and fight off the Romani. I think I’ll give it a miss.
This was the non-genre novel that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that list is Annette Vallon: A Novel of the French Revolution, by James Tipton, but I will leave it until either I finish all the books acquired in 2022, or it bubbles to the top of my 2023 pile, which will probably happen first.
He turned from that at last, and made his way back inland. He felt empty and light-headed. He supposed he should try to find something to eat—it must be late morning, and he had vomited up the few sardines he had had. But the hunger which had been ravenous then was as markedly absent now. The feeling was something like drunkenness: he contemplated his state with mingled pity and grandeur. The last man left alive? The Robinson Crusoe of planet Earth? It might be so. The silence went on, and the sky stayed blue and vacant.
I had read this as a teenager, and spotted it in Buxton and decided to return to it. I feel it’s an overlooked classic, probably due to the success of the same author’s more optimistic The Death of Grass from a few years earlier.
The premise is that massive global earthquakes destroy civilisation; our protagonist finds himself one of the few survivors on Guernsey, and sets off on a quest to find his daughter in Sussex, made easier by the fact that the English Channel is now dry.
The depiction of the devastated landscape is vivid, but even more so the portrayal of a human society which has degenerated into straggling groups of survivors perpetrating rape and pillage on each other. It does take us some time before we meet a convincing woman character, and there’s a bit of a sense that the worst of the disaster is that the comfortable middle classes have been eradicated, leaving the world to the yobs, but all the same it’s a memorable picture. There were lines that I remembered well from thirty-plus years ago, and there are striking images that will linger with me for a long time.
See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Jordan under today’s boundaries.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
Appointment with Death
Agatha Christie
68,580
4,513
Leap of Faith: Memoirs of an Unexpected Life
Queen Noor
10,227
1,459
Mrs. Pollifax, Innocent Tourist
Dorothy Gilman
4,792
859
Married to a Bedouin
Marguerite van Geldermalsen
3,786
261
Forbidden Love / Honor Lost: Love and Death in Modern-Day Jordan
Norma Khouri
1,688
313
Our Last Best Chance: The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril
Abdullah II of Jordan
935
169
Fencing with the King
Diana Abu-Jaber
1,088
83
Pillars of Salt
Fadia Faqir
710
110
Starting the year with a colonial adventure, in which Poirot is summoned to the rose-red city of Petra to solve the murder of a tourist. Agatha Christie also featured on the lists for Syria, Morocco and Iraq (twice), and topped the Egypt chart, though I disqualified her from Zimbabwe.
It is striking how many books on the list are about foreign women encountering Jordan. Queen Noor is an American who married a Jordanian in 1978, Marguerite van Geldermalsen is a New Zealander who also married a (less prominent) Jordanian in 1978, Norma Khouri is another American (and her supposedly factual book was exposed as a hoax), and Diana Abu-Jaber was also born and brought up in America to a Jordanian family. The fictional Mrs Pollifax is an American secret agent pretending to be a tourist.
The top author on the list who is actually from Jordan is King Abdullah II, and the top woman author from Jordan (given my caveats about the others) is Fadia Faqir.
I disqualified all of Robert Jordan’s books, which are frequently tagged “jordan” by Goodreads and LibraryThing users. I also disqualified Six Days of War, by Michael Oren, because most of the then Jordanian territory where the 1967 war was fought is no longer regarded as Jordanian, including by the Jordanian government. There is additionally some confusion about other Middle Eastern countries, with books set in Syria and Lebanon (and possibly Saudi Arabia) popping up too.
Three of the next four countries will be Caribbean: we head to the Dominican Republic next week, then back to the Middle East for the U.A.E., then back over again for Honduras and Cuba.
I set myself a little project at the start of November: to post a list on Bluesky of my favorite book published each year since 1846, three a day, so covering the 60 days from 2 November to 31 December. Obviously I prepared the list several days in advance, and then published the posts usually along with my mid-morning coffee.
In almost every case, my choice for top book of the year is the one whose title makes me go “Oooh! I have good memories of reading that!” Often these are classics, because almost by definition a classic has provoked that reaction from a lot of readers. Sometimes they are books you may not have heard of, and maybe I’ll inspire you to give them a go.
To get the books for each year, I used a combination of sources.
The Wikipedia page for “Year X in Literature” was a starting point, but not always a good one. It gets longer and less useful the closer you get to the present.
Up to the end of the twentieth century, the most helpful source, nine years out of ten, was the Goodreads page for books tagged with each year by Goodreads users. This was not so good for years ending in 0, as there are enough Goodreads users who tag books by decade to swamp the signal in those cases.
In the most recent period, the really useful source was my own LibraryThing catalogue, sorted by year of publication and by my rating of the books published in that year. This still needed to be checked, as the majority of my books are not first editions but later reprints, and so the publication date of my own copy is often later than the date of first publication.
And speaking of the date of first publication, that’s not always easy to define. For a play, is it first performance or the first printing of the script for sale? For a nineteenth century novel published originally as a series, is it the date the series concluded or the date that the book was published as a book? For Middlemarch, I went with both and listed it twice. There is one other book that I give two years to because of its publication history. If you know me at all, you will not be surprised by which book it is.
In the early years, the choice was sometimes easy if there was only one book published that year that I had actually read. (For example Immensee, and Black Beauty.) Even so, I hate The Mill on the Floss, so I have left 1860 blank; there are a couple of others where I really don’t seem to have read anything from that year.
In later years, the problem was not too few but too many books, particularly (and this did surprise me though perhaps it shouldn’t have) in the last quarter of the twentieth century; the number of books that I have read from each year then drops a bit from the year 2000, though it’s still a lot higher than pre-1950.
When I got to the end, I realised that it’s too early to be sure what my favourite book published in 2024 or 2025 will be (and of course I reserve the right to change my mind about earlier years too). So the eventual list covers 178 of the last 180 years, starting in 1846 and ending in 2023.
I list books by the date of first publication in the original language, but use the English language title – except for Les Misérables, where the French title is better known in English. Likewise if the author is generally known by a variant of their name in English, I use the familiar version – Leo Tolstoy rather than Lev.
Each link in the list below links to my Bluesky post for that day. Each post includes a cover picture for each book, a link to my online review if I have written one, and shout outs to other books published in that year which I have read and like (which really mount up in the second half of the list). In general I skip books I didn’t like, though there are a couple of early years where I mention them to avoid leaving the year blank (eg 1849, 1875).
The list is more male and whiter than I would really like, but I guess it also reflects my years of reading voraciously. Having said that, the first two entries are by a writer of colour (Alexandre Dumas, grandson of an enslaved woman) and by a woman (Charlotte Brontë); and my most recent five are all by women, two of them women of colour.
The Doctor made a few half-hearted attempts to outmanoeuvre the complex restructuring the saboteur had made to the control units but he knew it would be to no avail. He shone the torch over the sealed magnetic systems box welded to the engine relays. The noise in here was incredible; the power stacks were primed well over maximum. Heat stole the oxygen from the depths of the ship.
Next in the sequence of Eighth Doctor books which I read years ago and failed to write up at the time. The Doctor, Fitz and Anji have slipped into a parallel universe where they encounter the mysterious Sabbath, once again, and get involved with a race that is more than it seems. I’m not a fan of the Sabbath arc, and the racing story has been done better elseWho; also Messingham uses first-person narration from both Fitz and Anji, and doesn’t really get convincing voices for either. Not very memorable, for me anyway. You can get The Infinity Race here (at a price).
For the last few years, I’ve succeeded in putting together a decent list, and sometimes even a video, of the sf works set in the year to come (with the caveat that they must have been published or released at least twenty years before). I started with 2020 (little did we know…), and went on to 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025.
2026 is surprisingly sparse for this project. There are small parts of two very well known novels set in this year; there is the framing narrative of a forgotten radio play; there is a very small part of a deservedly obscure film; there are two video games from the 1990s; there is also a very famous film based on a novel which is generally described as set in 2026; and there are three classic short stories by Ray Bradbury. You’ve probably read or seen several of these.
(I’ll add that AI research was pretty useless for this project, and threw up several false positives which I had to waste time checking, notably telling me that the later volumes of the well-known manga series Akira are set in 2026. They are not.)
Mars
Kim Stanley Robinson’s epic Mars trilogy is mainly set many decades in the future. But its internal chronology begins (on page 30 of Red Mars, the first book, which was published in 1992) with the launch of a spaceship carrying the first wave of colonists from Earth, on 21 December 2026. The first manned landing on Mars was in 2020 in this timeline. In our timeline, there is no chance that we’ll be sending even one person to Mars this year, let alone a mixed crew of a hundred scientists mainly from the USA and Russia; human spaceflight has frankly not advanced much since 1992. You can get Red Mars here.
You don’t have to go to Mars by rocket. The 2005 film Doom, loosely based on the game and generally panned by critics, starts with Rosamund Pike as Samantha Grimm telling us, “In the year 2026, archaeologists working in the Nevada desert discovered a portal to an ancient city on Mars. They called this portal the Ark. Twenty years later, we’re still struggling to understand why it was built, and what happened to the civilisation that built it.” The rest of the film is set in 2046.
There is also a 1981 BBC radio play, Return from Mars, in which the legendary Jet Morgan and his crew turn up in Earth orbit in 2026, having been to Mars and another planet in the meantime, but most of the story is about their adventures elsewhere, with the framing narrative being their attempts to explain themselves to Space Traffic Control in 2026. You can listen to Return from Mars here.
Last but definitely not least, the three last stories of Ray Bradbury’s classic 1951 collection The Martian Chronicles are set in this coming year. “April 2026: The Long Years”, originally published in 1948, sees a rescue party finding a lost astronaut and his family, and realising that all is not as it seems. I’ll save the next story to the end, as it is set on Earth rather than Mars. But the final story, “October 2026: The Million Year Picnic”, originally published in 1946, is the one where one of the few surviving humans on Mars takes his wife and three sons to a canal to show them the Martians.
They reached the canal. It was long and straight and cool and wet and reflective in the night. “I’ve always wanted to see a Martian,” said Michael. “Where are they, Dad? You promised.” “There they are,” said Dad, and he shifted Michael on his shoulder and pointed straight down. The Martians were there. Timothy began to shiver. The Martians were there–in the canal–reflected in the water. Timothy and Michael and Robert and Mom and Dad. The Martians stared back up at them for a long, long silent time from the rippling water….
Dystopia
Fifty pages out of 330 in Octavia E. Butler’s classic Parable of the Sower (published in 1993) are set between June and December 2026. This is the grim section in which both the brother and father of Lauren, the protagonist, are killed by the forces of violent chaos lurking outside their fragile Californian community, in a USA which is disintegrating into anarchy. Lauren at least gets some action with her boyfriend, but their world is a very bad and decaying place, uncomfortably closer to our own than when it was written. You can get Parable of the Sower here and the graphic novel version here.
A different kind of dystopia is portrayed in the 1925 novel Metropolis, by Thea von Harbou, and in the 1927 film based on the book and directed by her husband Fritz Lang. Here, the workers are enslaved by the ruling classes and must service the monstrous machines that keep the city going, while the toffs party on. The son of the city’s ruler, and his more plebeian girlfriend, lead a cathartic process of social disruption and reconciliation, unwittingly triggered by the mad scientist who was originally responsible for the city’s growth through the use of the girl’s psychotic robot double. The film is spectacular and there is a happy ending, but, as one might have said in Germany in 1927, for how long? The machines are of course late industrial, but it’s difficult not to think of today’s techbros when watching it.
There are also two video games from the 1990s in which the player goes around a dystopian city of the year 2026, biffing the bad guys. In the 1991 arcade game Captain Commando (キャプテンコマンド), Captain Commando and his three buddies Fight Crime in Metro City. In the 1995 Sega Game Gear game Arena, Maze of Death, you’re fighting the evil corporation who control the population by broadcasting brainwashing propaganda. So two somewhat different takes.
Devastation
Most chillingly, Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains”, first published in 1950 and included in The Martian Chronicles under the title “August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains”, starts with the attempts of a house computer to wake up its humans.
“Today is August 4, 2026,” said a second voice from the kitchen ceiling, “in the city of Allendale, California.” It repeated the date three times for memory’s sake. “Today is Mr. Featherstone’s birthday. Today is the anniversary of Tilita’s marriage. Insurance is payable, as are the water, gas, and light bills.”
But the humans will not wake up; along with most of Allendale, they were vaporised the previous afternoon by an atomic bomb, leaving only their silhouettes etched onto the outside wall. The house valiantly functions without them, but is destroyed in an accidental fire, leaving almost nothing behind:
Among the ruins, one wall stood alone. Within the wall, a last voice said, over and over again and again, even as the sun rose to shine upon the heaped rubble and steam: “Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is…”
5 August is the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. (It was the morning of 6 August in Japan, but still 5 August in the USA.)
From the 1953 comic strip adaptation of the story by Wally Wood, colours added 1992 by Paul Rivoche
Travel to Mars through rocket launch or alien portal; social disintegration or rule by tech lords; dystopian urban combat; nuclear devastation. Take your pick. Let’s hope it works out.
I read 314 books this year, the fourth highest of the twenty-two years that I have been keeping count, and 77,700 pages, which is ninth highest of the twenty-two. That’s about average for my current circumstances.
118 (38%) of those books were by non-male writers, which is the fourth highest number and sixth highest percentage in my records.
44 (11%) were by non-white writers, which is the fourth highest number and fifth highest percentage of the twenty-two years.
My top author of the year was H.G. Wells; as I worked through his less well-known fiction, and a couple of others as well, I read ten of his books.
SF
I read 120 sf books this year, the sixth highest number and tenth highest percentage in my records.
Best of the year Emily Tesh’s second full novel, The Incandescent, is a brutal look at what a magic school would really be like in today’s England. (Review; get it here.) I Who Have Never Known Men, by the Belgian writer Jacqueline Harpman, got rediscovered by a lot of people this year, including me. It’s a great creepy post-apocalyptic feminist story. (Review; get it here.)
Welcome rereads A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens. (Review; get it here.) Childhood’s End, by Arthur C. Clarke. (Review; get it here.) The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate, by Ted Chiang. (Review; get it here, at a price.)
Honourable mentions Three collections of short fiction by women. Five Ways to Forgiveness, by Ursula Le Guin, has five stories linked by a common setting and shared characters, about revolution and social justice on a twin planet system. (Review; get it here.) Spirits Abroad, by Zen Cho, is a set of excellent short stories reflecting Malay Chinese culture, some set in Malaysia, some in Britain, some elsewhere, all great. (Review; get it here.) And back to the classics with The Birds and other stories, by Daphne Du Maurier, six very spooky stories by the author of Rebecca, the title story also made into a Hitchcock film. (Review; get it here.)
The one to avoid In The Undying Fire, H.G. Wells attempted to rewrite the Book of Job for an English audience in 1919. For the love of God, why? (Review; get it here)
The one you haven’t heard of As I worked through the 2020 Hugo packet, five years on, one book particularly jumped out: Dark Winds Over Wellington, a collection of short stories by T.L. Wood, set in New Zealand’s capital. A great read. (Review; get it here)
Non-fiction
I read 79 non-fiction books (25%) this year, the fifth highest number and eighth highest percentage of the twenty-two years that I have counted.
A lot of this non-fiction was very good – I went a bit overboard, actually, and I’ve given five stars out of five to 22 non-fiction books on LibraryThing. So whittling these down to a few was quite a tough choice. In the end, I think my top recommendation goes to:
Best of the year Free: Coming of Age at the End of History, by Lea Ypi, is an Albanian autobiography. Albania has changed a lot in Lea Ypi’s lifetime, and indeed it is changing rapidly now, as I saw when I was there only a month ago. It’s a fascinating story of social control followed by disintegration of old dogmas. (Review; get it here.)
Honourable mentions Of many good books about history, especially Irish history, I think the best was The Partition: Ireland Divided, 1885-1925, by Charles Townshend, which looks at how the division of the island became inevitable. (Review; get it here.) It’s an old collection, and you can get all of the contents for free online, but I hugely enjoyed Decline of the English Murder, and other essays, by George Orwell, published by Penguin in 1965. (Review; get it here.)
Two to avoid The Ancient Paths, by Graham Robb, attempts to unfold Celtic history and prehistory but descends into boring conspiracy theory. (Review; get it here) Improbable History, ed. Michael Dobson, is a collection of historical essays celebrating “the weird, the obscure and the strangely important”. I tried the first three and they were very dull. (Review; get it here)
The one you haven’t heard of Ireland in the Renaissance, 1540-1660, eds. Thomas Herron and Michael Potterton, is a jewel of a book: sixteen substantial essays with lovely plates and illustrations, and none of them is a dud, which is really unusual for any book with separately commissioned pieces by that many authors. All of them address the proposition that there are many interesting things to say about Ireland and the Renaissance. (Review; get it here)
Doctor Who
Almost all the other numbers for this year are above my average, but the stats for Doctor Who books are on the lower side; this is simply because I have read almost all of them, and am now mainly just keeping up with new publications, with a little retrospection. My total for all Doctor Who books this year is 57 (18%), the sixteenth highest number and nineteenth highest percentage of all years. For Doctor Who fiction, excluding comics, the number is 31 (10%), the eleventh highest number (thus slightly above the median) and sixteenth highest percentage.
Best of the year Andrew Orton’s Black Archive analysis of the first Peter Davison story, Castrovalva, takes all the things that intrigued me about it and digs deeper, taking my appreciation to a new level. The best this year of a (mostly) excellent series. (Review; get it here.)
Honourable mentions BBC spin-off merchandise: The TARDIS Type 40 Instruction Manual, by Richard Atkinson and Mike Tucker, is a real delight from 2018. (Review; get it here.) Novelisations: As I had hoped, Doctor Who: Lux, by James Goss, takes the televised story and gives it new depth and warmth. Excellent stuff. (Review; get it here.) Other non-fiction:Exterminate/Regenerate: The Story of Doctor Who, by John Higgs, is a nice chunky book about the history of Doctor Who, from 1963 to 2024, Doctor by Doctor, in the wider political context. (Review; get it here.)
The one to avoid In general I am very supportive of the Black Archive series; however the volume on The Mysterious Planet, by Jez Strickley, is a rare but definite miss, filled with incomprehensible jargon. (Review; get it here)
The one you haven’t heard of I have been very much enjoying Cutaway Comics’ return to classic Doctor Who stories, exploring both the before and after of the plots; the best for my money is Inferno, by Gary Russell and John Ridgway, looking at how the parallel universe got to be like that. (Review; get it here)
Non-genre
I read 43 (14%) non-genre fiction books this year, which is the seventh highest number, but only the thirteenth highest percentage.
Best of the year Margaret Atwood’s short story collection, Old Babes in the Wood, is full of jewels, and is my top recommendation from a crowded field. (Review; get it here.)
Honourable mentions Not So Quiet…, by Helen Zenna Smith, is the story of a nurse’s experiences in the first world war, one of the most visceral portrayals of trench warfare that I have read, with also reflections on gender and class. (Review; get it here.) I can’t decide which of Zen Cho’s contemporary romances to choose, so have both of them, brilliant, funny and moving stories of love between young Asians in today’s London: The Friend Zone Experiment (review; get it here) and Behind Frenemy Lines (review; get it here).
The one to avoid Glorious Exploits, by Ferdia Lennon, has Ancient Greeks in Sicily being brutal to each other while talking with Irish accents, and that seems to be the point. I gave up. (Review; get it here)
The one you may not have heard of I loved Our Song, a Dublin-set romance novel by Anna Carey, but it has less than ten owners on LibraryThing so I feel it ought to be better known. It’s doing better on Goodreads, with over 500 ratings as of this writing. (Review; get it here)
Comics
Including Doctor Who comics, I read 36 (11%) comics and graphic novels this year. That’s the same number as last year, equal third highest in my records, and the eighth highest percentage.
Best of the year One old, one new here. Alison Bechdel is still on form, with her loosely autobiographical Spent taking a humorous look at life on a goat refuge in rural New England, as the tentacles of fame and social media influencing insert themselves into her world. (Review; get it here.) I had not previously read Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza, based on research in 2002 and 2003 on the 1956 massacres of hundreds of unarmed civilians in Gaza by Israeli forces. It is a vivid portrayal of life and death in the Strip both at the start of this century and in the middle of the last. (Review; get it here.)
Honourable mentions Two of this year’s Hugo finalists particularly appealed to me. (Review.) The winner, Star Trek Lower Decks – Warp Your Own Way, by Ryan North and Chris Fenoglio, preserves the parent TV show’s humour and adds a cheeky breach of the usual format for graphic choose-your-own-adventure books. (Get it here.) And The Deep Dark, by Molly Scott Ostertag, is a queer coming-of-age story with a monster in the basement. (Get it here.)
The one to avoid Charlotte impératrice, Tome 1: La Princesse et l’Archiduc, by Fabien Nury and Matthieu Bonhomme, takes a rather minor figure from nineteenth-century history and fails to make her very interesting, while also distorting the historical record. (Review; get it here)
The one you haven’t heard of In Who Killed Nessie?, Paul Cornell and Rachael Wood, both of them creators whose other works I have enjoyed, come together to solve a murder at a convention for mythical creatures. Great fun. (Review; get it here)
Plays and Poetry
I read four works of poetry (counting an anthology which was more poetry than anything else). I strongly recommend Emily Wilson’s translation of The Iliad. (Review; get it here), Also a shout out for Oliver Langmead’s sf novel in verse form, Calypso.(Review; get it here.)
I read one book of scripts this year, The Dramatic Works of Denis Johnston, vol 3: Radio and Television Plays which includes two theatre plays omitted from the two previous volumes. Some of them are good, some have aged less well. (Review; get it here.)
Top book of 2025
I found this a terribly difficult choice. In the end I’m going for Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza, with its reflections on violence, history, experience and truth. Examining events in 1956, researched in 2002-03, published in 2009, it remains horribly relevant today. Strongly recommended. (Review; get it here.)
Previous Books of the Year:
2003 (2 months): The Separation, by Christopher Priest (review; get it here) 2004: (reread) The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien (review; get it here) – Best new read: Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, by Claire Tomalin (review; get it here) 2005: The Island at the Centre of the World, by Russell Shorto (review; get it here) 2006: Lost Lives: The stories of the men, women and children who died as a result of the Northern Ireland troubles, by David McKittrick, Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeney, Chris Thornton and David McVea (review; get it here) 2007: Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, by Alison Bechdel (review; get it here) 2008: (reread) The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition, by Anne Frank (review; get it here) – Best new read: Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero, by William Makepeace Thackeray (review; get it here) 2009: (had seen it on stage previously) Hamlet, by William Shakespeare (review; get it here) – Best new read: Persepolis 2: the Story of a Return, by Marjane Satrapi (first volume just pipped by Samuel Pepys in 2004) (review; get it here) 2010: The Bloody Sunday Report, by Lord Savile et al. (review of vol I; get it here) 2011: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbon (started in 2009!) (review; get it here) 2012: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Brontë (review; get it here) 2013: A Room of One’s Own, by Virginia Woolf (review; get it here) 2014: Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell (review; get it here) 2015: collectively, the Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist, in particular the winner, Station Eleven, by Emily St John Mandel (review; get it here). – Best book I actually blogged about in 2015: The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, by Claire Tomalin (review; get it here) 2016: Alice in Sunderland, by Bryan Talbot (review; get it here) 2017: Common People: The History of an English Family, by Alison Light (review; get it here) 2018: Factfulness, by Hans Rosling (review; get it here) 2019: Girl, Woman, Other, by Bernardine Evaristo (review; get it here) 2020: From A Clear Blue Sky: Surviving the Mountbatten Bomb, by Timothy Knatchbull (review; get it here) 2021: Carrying the Fire, by Michael Collins (review; get it here) 2022: The Sun is Open, by Gail McConnell (review; get it here) 2023: Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman (review; get it here) 2024: The Cazalet Saga, by Elizabeth Jane Howard (reviews; get them here)
My last weekly roundup of this year; the next one will be on Thursday 8 January.
Also my last monthly roundup of 2025. Analytical post to follow.
Last books finished Five Little Pigs, by Agatha Christie Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, by Laura Spinney
December reading
Non-fiction 3 (Year total 79) Winning Ugly: NATO’s War to Save Kosovo, by Ivo H. Daalder and Michael E. O’Hanlon Mawdryn Undead, by Kara Dennison Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, by Laura Spinney
Non-genre 5 (Year total 43) Hallowe’en Party, by Agatha Christie Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, by Agatha Christie Reeds in the Wind, by Grazia Deledda Our Wonderful Selves, by Roland Pertwee Five Little Pigs, by Agatha Christie
SF 9 (Year total120) If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, by Italo Calvino Adventures in Space, eds. Patrick Parrinder and Yao Haijun The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport, by Samit Basu (did not finish) Elidor, by Alan Garner A Wrinkle in the Skin, by John Christopher The Enigma Score, by Sheri S. Tepper Yet More Penguin Science Fiction, ed. Brian Aldiss The Moon of Gomrath, by Alan Garner The Leviathan, by Rosie Andrews (did not finish)
Doctor Who 3 (Year total31) The Infinity Race, by Simon Messingham Doctor Who: The Adventures After, by Carole Ann Ford et al Doctor Who: Mawdryn Undead, by Peter Grimwade
Comics 1 (Year total36) The Terror Beneath, by George Mann et al
5,000 pages (2025 total 77,700) 9/21 (2025 total 118/314) by non-male writers (Dennison, Spinney, Christie x 3, Deledda, Tepper, Andrews, Ford) 2/21 (2024 total 34/314) by non-white writers (Obama, Yu/Yang, Emezi, Falaise) 9 or 10/21 rereads (maybe Hallowe’en Party, definitely Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, Five Little Pigs, Elidor, A Wrinkle in the Skin, The Enigma Score, Yet More Penguin Science Fiction, The Moon of Gomrath, The Infinity Race, Doctor Who: Mawdryn Undead)
193 books currently tagged unread, up 8 from last month, down 68 from December 2024.
Reading now
This Way Up: When Maps Go Wrong (And Why It Matters), by Mark Cooper-Jones and Jay Foreman Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships, by Robin Dunbar Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, by Patrick Radden Keefe Best American Comics 2011, ed. Alison Bechdel
Coming soon (perhaps)
Time Trials: The Wolves of Winter, by Richard Dinnick et al Domino Effect, by David Bishop Ghost Stories, ed. George Mann Renaissance- en barokarchitectuur in België, by Rutger J. Thijs The Forgotten and the Fantastical: Modern Fables and Ancient Tales: No. 2, ed. Taika Bellamy Utterly Dark and the Face of the Deep, by Philip Reeve Lost In Time, by A.G. Riddle Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy, by Christopher R. Hill River Mumma, by Zalika Reid-Benta Kristin Lavransdatter: The Wreath, by Sigrid Undset Looking Glass Sound, by Catriona Ward Bruxelles 43, by Patrick Weber and Baudouin Deville Red Planet, by Robert A. Heinlein The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi The Dead Take the A Train, by Richard Kadrey Stone and Sky, by Ben Aaronovitch Killing Thatcher: The IRA, the Manhunt and the Long War on the Crown, by Rory Carroll The Fifth Elephant, by Terry Pratchett The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins Drome, by Jesse Lonergan Oscar Wilde: A Biography, by Richard Ellmann
I normally post this much earlier in December – my last trip was at the end of last month – but just forgot.
List the places where you spent a night away from home in 2025; indicate non-consecutive stays with an asterisk. This is the twenty-first successive year that I have made this list.
Leiden NL Los Angeles USA * London UK * Beijing (Chaoyang, east of the centre) China Beijing (Shijinshan, west of the centre), also China (counting separately as it’s 30 km from Chaoyang) Bramley, Surrey, UK Belfast, Norn Iron * Loughbrickland, Norn Iron Steendam, Groningen province, NL Dunkirk harbour, France Cherbourg-Dublin ferry Rosslare-Dunkirk ferry Chengdu, China Paris, France Buxton, Derbyshire, England Podgorica, Montenegro
That’s 16 places, on the low side for the years since I have been counting (since 2005). I’m counting the overnight ferries separately, since they were different routes. I am not counting overnight flights to and from China, and back from California.
Those 16 places are in six countries (counting NI as UK), and I also travelled through Albania to reach Montenegro, so my country total for the year is seven, the second lowest since I have been tallying (which I did not do consistently before 2012).
For a while the road passed charred stumps of buildings, and field rank with nettle. Dust, or ash, kicked up under Roland’s feet, muffling his walk and coating his body so aridly that his skin rasped. Flies whined round him, and crawled in his hair, and tried to settle on his lips. The sky was dull, yet there was a brittleness in the light that hurt. It was no longer wonder that led him, but dislike of being alone.
A recently reacquired Alan Garner novel, this one an intensely imagined story of four siblings who are drawn into the mythic struggle of the parallel world of Elidor from their home in early 1960s Manchester. Garner is very good at painting emotional landscapes with few words, and his realisation of Manchester and the surrounding territories in our world and in Elidor are very vivid. Glad to return to this one. You can get Elidor here.
Surprisingly perhaps, a Bechdel pass even though one of the brothers, Roland, is the viewpoint character; his sister Helen and their mother (whose name is I think given only as “Mrs Watson”) have a couple of exchanges which are not about men.
Bador and Lina are practiced loiterers: no one would suspect them of any untoward thoughts as they gaze innocently at Tiger Palace, with its immaculate white- brick walls and ever- sparkling rotating dome, at the historical hologram displays of Tiger Central heroes lighting up one by one on Jomidar’s Square, at the government tower complexes on the square’s east side with their sculpted vertical gardens, and the ever- shifting array of Tiger drones doing combat maneuvers in the sky.
One of the remaining books from the 2024 Hugo packet. There’s a nice innovation in that the viewpoint character is a drone-bot, but otherwise I’m afraid I didn’t have the patience for yet another secondary world and dropped it after fifty pages. You can get The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport here.
This was my top unread book by a writer of colour. Next on that pile is The Proposal, by Bae Myung-hoon.
Donna Ester fece fare il pane apposta, un pane bianco e sottile come ostia, quale si fa solo per le feste, e di nascosto dalle sorelle comprò anche un cestino di biscotti. Dopo tutto era un ospite, che arrivava, e l’ospitalità è sacra. Donna Ruth a sua volta sognava ogni notte l’arrivo del nipote, e ogni giorno verso le tre, ora dell’arrivo della diligenza, spiava dal portone. Ma l’ora passava e tutto restava immoto intorno.
Ester made bread just for the occasion, white and thin as a holy wafer, the kind usually made only for festivities. She also secretly bought a basket of cookies. After all, a guest was coming and hospitality is sacred. Every night Ruth dreamed about their nephew’s arrival, and every day around three, the hour the coach came, she would spy from the doorway. But the hour went by and everything was quiet.
Grazia Deledda won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1926, the second woman to get it after Selma Lagerlöf, and the second Italian after Giosuè Carducci (who I must admit I have not otherwise heard of). The citation was “for her idealistically inspired writings which with plastic clarity picture the life on her native island and with depth and sympathy deal with human problems in general”. She had been nominated almost every year since 1914 by the former Swedish ambassador to Italy, Carl Bildt, whose great-great-great-nephew of the same name served as prime minister and then foreign minister of Sweden.
Reeds in the Wind / Canne al vento, is her best known book, and it’s noticeable that her Nobel nominations started as soon as it was published in 1912. I have to say it’s not very cheerful. It’s about a declining noble family in Sardinia, and the tension between the two surviving sisters, the son of the sister who fled to the mainland years before, and the old retainer who is the guardian of the dark family secret that is eventually revealed.
It reminded me of The Leopard, but the Deledda’s Pintor family are more decayed and less up themselves than di Lampedusa’s Salina family. There are some nice landscape moments, but otherwise I was not overwhelmed by it. You can get Reeds in the Wind here.
I know it’s a small sample, but two out of two European winners of early Nobel Prizes for Literature that I have sampled so far have gone in for rural drama. Next up in this project is Kristin Lavransdottir, by Sigrid Undset, which I fear is going to be more of the same.
I have been whining about the lack of analytical tools to measure how well my Bluesky posts are performing – this was one of the nice things about Twitter in the old days. But now I have actually found the lovely https://www.blueskypulse.io/ site which does everything I want, namely recording likes, reposts, replies, and quotes. From it I learn that my best performing post ever, with by far the most likes and reposts, is this sadly meaningless and now out of date statistic:
Nobody under the age of 38 has voted in a U.S. presidential election where the Republicans got the most votes. Nobody under the age of 54 has voted in *two* presidential elections where the Republicans got the most votes.
Ending the year with my adopted home country. For those of you who are new to this, I’m going through every country in the world, trying to identify the best known books set there (or at least more than half set there).
See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Belgium.
There are a couple of these which aren’t explicitly set in Belgium, but I am allowing them for reasons that I will explain. This week’s winner, Villette, is set in the eponymous fictional city, capital of the small fictional country of Labassecour. But there can be no doubt in the minds of any informed reader that Villette is Brussels and Labassecour is Belgium. The protagonist comes to the city to teach in a girls’ school and has an unhappy romantic adventure; this is drawn from Charlotte Brontë’s own experience in the 1840s. In her first novel The Professor, published only after her death, she is more explicit about the setting and more lyrical:
Belgium! name unromantic and unpoetic, yet name that whenever uttered has in my ear a sound, in my heart an echo, such as no other assemblage of syllables, however sweet or classic, can produce. Belgium! I repeat the word, now as I sit alone near midnight.
The other book on the list where a bit of special pleading may be required is Amélie Nothomb’s first novel, Hygiene and the Assassin, in which a dying writer gives obnoxious interviews to journalists in his apartment. Most readers assume that the apartment is in Paris, but no explicit Parisian cue is given. On the other hand, I note the following passage (on page 37 of the English translation):
Il y a des publicités à n’en plus finir, surtout des publicités alimentaires. Je zappe de manière à me constituer la séquence publicitaire la plus longue du monde: avec les seize chaînes européennes, il est tout à fait possible, en zappant intelligemment d’avoir une demi-heure de réclames sans interruption. C’est un merveilleux opéra multilingue: le shampooing hollandais, les biscuits italiens, la lessive biologique allemande, le beurre français, etc. Je me régale.
There are endless amounts of commercials, primarily about food. I channel surf in order to put together the longest sequence of commercials on earth: with the sixteen European channels, it is perfectly feasible, if you surf intelligently, to get a full half-hour of uninterrupted commercials. It’s a marvelous multilingual opera: Dutch shampoo, Italian cookies, German organic washing powder, French butter, and so on. What a treat.
(Note that “to channel surf” in French is “zapper”.)
Now, I ask you, if you were a French person in France, would you identify French butter as such, in that way, fourth in a list of products from other countries? To adapt a line from Friends, in France they just call it ‘butter’. I think that the protagonist’s apartment is in Europe but not in France, and given Nothomb’s Belgian roots, it’s more likely to be in Belgium than anywhere else. Dutch shampoo is less likely to be found in Geneva or Lausanne; and we are told that the protagonist speaks no language other than French, which means that he cannot be from Luxembourg, where all schoolchildren are fluent in at least three languages before they leave elementary school.
I disqualified a lot of books this time. Top of the list were Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell, and Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackeray, both of which have memorable passages set in Belgium but for much less than 50% of the book. I scratched my head for some time about I Who Have Never Known Men, by Jacqueline Harpman, but decided in the end that the blasted and desolate landscape in which her protagonist finds herself doesn’t really fit a Belgian setting, even post-apocalypse. King Leopold’s Ghost, by Adam Hochschild, was on my DR Congo list last year, because it is about Congo and what Belgians did there. I disqualified two of Amélie Nothomb’s other books, Fear and Loathing and The Character of Rain, because they are set in Japan. And Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memories of Hadrian has no connection with Belgium, apart from the birthplace of its author.
On top of that, I disqualified seventeen of the twenty classic Tintin books by Hergé because they are not set in Belgium. But The Secret of the Unicorn and The Seven Crystal Balls are; they are both first parts of two-part stories, where our hero and friends prepare at home for the adventures concluded respectively in Red Rackham’s Treasure (set at sea) and Prisoners of the Sun (set in Peru); and also The Castafiore Emerald, with all its eccentricities, is definitely set not just in Belgium but in Captain Haddock’s home, Marlinspike Manor.
When I did this calculation in 2015, I got much the same answer, though I’m also just going to note that The Warm Hands of Ghosts, by Katherine Arden, is scoring very well, especially on Goodreads, for a book that was only published last year.
Coming in 2026: Jordan, the Dominican Republic, the United Arab Emirates and Honduras.
The core of the church is possibly twelfth century, and a choir (behind the altar) was added in the fourteenth century. The red brick aisles on the sides were added in the nineteenth century, so you have to imagine a thinner, more externally austere building for most of its history.
(I’m glad to say that in 2023 the Belgian popular history journal Monumenten en Landschappen published a very good article (in Dutch) about the church and Hansche, by Jan Caluwaerts, Valerie Herremans, and Jan Verbeke, from which I have raided some of the information in this post.)
The church was refurbished in the late 1660s by the Brussels lawyer and writer Frederick van Martselaer (1594-1670), who would have been well into his eighties by then. He commissioned Jan Christiaan Hansche, who was at the height of his career, to decorate the interior. (Hansche’s earliest known work is dated 1653, and his latest 1684. Three of his surviving ceilings date from the 1650s, three, including the one in Perk, were started in the 1660s, four, and another three that have ben destroyed, are dated in the 1670s and one in the 1680s.)
Often Hansche signed his name to his work; he didn’t in this case (or if he did, it has been lost) but luckily his invoice for ninety days of work by him and three assistants to do the job has been preserved, so we know it was him (as if the characteristic style wasn’t enough).
Before we get to the ceiling, here are the decorations around the arches leading from the nave to the transepts and the choir.
The two transepts, which you can only see end-on here, are decorated with garlands and bunches of grapes, which turn up a lot in Hansche’s work (see for instance the saints in Antwerp). The central one however is a bit spookier – a winged child’s face, and claws at the bottom. Apparently these are linked with the symbolism of angels.
My 2021 picture of the nave is better than the one I took today, so here’s the view towards the altar from the church door, with particular attention to the ceiling panels.
There are six of them, though unfortunately one is hidden by the organ (even more hidden now than on my previous visit). But the others have been cleaned up nicely. The stars are the two central panels, depicting the church’s original patron, the Blessed Virgin, and its current patron, St Nicholas. In both of them the subjects are leaning out of the ceiling, holding an object that protrudes into our space, whose shadows you can see on the ceiling. The recent cleanup has made the fine details much clearer.
Both of these panels are framed between the arms of Frederick van Marselaer and his wife Margareta de Baronaige (1590-1646), who had died thirty years before but through whom van Marselaer had inherited the church. (The lozenges on the left are his, the bars on the right are hers.)
The evangelists have also been improved by the restoration.
St Matthew with the angel
St Mark with the lion
St Luke with the ox
(St John unfortunately is hidden by the church organ.)
They are framed by more abstract designs than St Nicholas and the Blessed Virgin.
I took the time also to look at a couple of the other artworks in the church. In the north transept, there is a painting of Jesus being presented by his mother to St Dominic by David Teniers the Younger (1610-1690). who I admit I had not really heard of before, but he was artistic royalty – his first wife was a daughter of Jan Bruegel the Elder, and Rubens was a witness at his wedding. The painting is right next to the tomb of Teniers’ second wife, and the implication is that he must be somewhere in the neighbourhood too. I love the dog wandering around in the church on the right.
In the south transept there’s a sixteenth century painting of the Holy Family, unattrributed unfortunately. I had to photograph it from the side to avoid glare from the lights.
For those who are based in Brussels and want to sample some exciting stucco and other baroque art. which you can see for free between 0930 and 1015 on a Sunday morning, the church at Perk is an easy drive from the city centre. You come off the E40 at Sterrebeek and keep going north, through the tunnel under the airport runway, and it’s 7.5 km north of the motorway exit.
“He had a nasty cold,” said Hercule Poirot, “and no doubt, in spite of the remedies that I have handy here, he would probably have given it to me. It is better that he should not come. Tout de meme,” he added, with a sigh, “it will mean that now I shall pass a dull evening.”
A late Agatha Christie novel, set in a dormitory village in the 1960s. The young people are awful, with long hair and drugs, and the moral fundament of society has been undermined by the abolition of the death penalty (this is mentioned several times). Meanwhile a ten-year-old girl is drowned in a tub at a Hallowe’en party, and Poirot is called in to solve the mystery. Bear in mind that Poirot was already an old man in The Mysterious Affair at Styles, written fifty years earlier. But his moustaches endure.
The murderer’s identity is established by a massive clue which we are given at quite an early stage, and at first I felt that this made it a fair puzzle. but having said that, the hapless police had access to the same information, and could surely have put the pieces together a bit more quickly; and the connection of the crime to other recent murders and disappearances leads us to an improbably convoluted plot, with secret identities a plenty.
As well as casting aspersion on the moral decay of the 1960s, there’s quite a lyrical passage describing the Italian sunken garden on Ilnacullin island in Bantry Bay. It obviously inspired one of the strands of the overall plot.
Second frame of third issue of first story (“Beneath the Waves”):
Compilation of two Titan Twelfth Doctor stories, a four-parter and a one-shot. “Beneath the Waves” by George Mann was an unexpected hit for me, in that I normally bounce off Mann’s writing, but this is a competently done tale of creepy alien seaweed monsters in an English town, with Hattie the future rock star pulled back into the Doctor’s adventures from the previous volume. “The Boy With The Displaced Smile”, by James Peaty, has an alien incursion into a Western American town, another standard enough story, competently done.
There was no beauty in her careless, haggard face, but it had distinction. Her voice was charming.
For the day that’s in it, Happy Christmas everyone! And let me take you back to 1938, where Hercule Poirot is called in by the local police to solve the spectacular murder of a patriarch whose children, both acknowledged and unacknowledged, are all conveniently clustered around the crime scene, as the Christmas season unfolds around them.
Agatha Christie’s characterisation isn’t always her strong point, but she has some memorable bit players here – the insecure oldest son who is now an MP, the black sheep who has returned to the fold, the daughters-in-law, the Spanish granddaughter escaping the Civil War.
The actual solution to the crime bends the usual rules a bit, in a way that Christie also used elsewhere, but vital clues are given to the attentive reader from quite an early stage, so it’s fair enough. If you need something to take you out of your own holiday environment, you can get Hercule Poirot’s Christmas here.
Current This Way Up, by Mark Cooper-Jones and Jay Foreman Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships, by Robin Dunbar Say Nothing, by Patrick Radden Keefe Best American Comics 2011, ed. Alison Bechdel
Last books finished The Enigma Score, by Sheri S. Tepper Yet More Penguin Science Fiction, ed. Brian Aldiss The Moon of Gomrath, by Alan Garner Doctor Who: Mawdryn Undead, by Peter Grimwade Mawdryn Undead, by Kara Dennison The Leviathan, by Rosie Andrews (did not finish)
Next books Lost In Time, by A G Riddle The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi
Second paragraph of third story (“On the Ship”, by Leah Cypess):
It was as if they knew childhood was all we would ever have.
A collection of thirteen stories by authors writing in Chinese and English, published simultaneously in China and the USA in 2023. I knew three of them already because they had got onto the 2024 Hugo ballot, which I administered, but it was interesting to see them in context.
It’s actually quite an old-fashioned collection – most of the stories are about people on spaceships or on alien planets getting into trouble, which of course a lot of SF is still about, but few of these stories really touch on anything else. “Answerless Journey”, by Han Song, one of the Hugo finalists, takes this in an interesting direction by de-humanising its space travellers (if indeed they are human, which is – deliberately? – not clear). The thirteen stories range in length from 65 pages (“Shine”, by Chen Zijun) to 13 (“The Darkness of Mirror Planet”, by Zhao Haihong), most on the shorter side. Still, it’s an interesting step in intercultural communication.
Surveying the sight, Ambassador William Walker, a seasoned American diplomat who had witnessed his share of atrocities while serving in Central America and who now headed the KVM, described what he had seen: [gory details redacted]
A good full-throated defence of the NATO conflict with Serbia over Kosovo in 1999, written shortly after the event, and coinciding largely with my own views: the conflict was a deliberate, unforced choice by Slobodan Milošević, and western policy rather floundered into NATO participation, but once a ground invasion was seriously being discussed, the Serbian leadership folded and the conflict ended with NATO and the UN, and of course the Kosovars, taking control.
It was written so soon after the conflict that a lot of important later developments are missing because they had not happened yet: the 2001 Macedonia conflict, the 2004 Kosovo riots, the 2006-08 independence process. This last, the future status of Kosovo, is the one point that the authors are a bit mealy-mouthed about, as the Western policy community had not quite got to the stage of comprehending that it was only going in one direction. (I am glad to have been part of the debate pushing that comprehension.)
But otherwise, the authors deal efficiently with a number of counter scenarios as to how the conflict could have been averted; the fact is that the USA and the rest of the western alliance had limited scope for affecting events, and while that limited scope was not always exploited to the full, in particular in the early phase of the NATO bombing campaign, this was not the big problem; the big problem was Milošević and his policies.
This was my top unread book about Kosovo acquired in 2022. Next on that pile is Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy, by Christopher R. Hill.
Second paragraph of Chapter Three (which is not the third chapter):
Il romanzo che stai leggendo vorrebbe presentarti un mondo corposo, denso, minuzioso. Immerso nella lettura, muovi macchinalmente il tagliacarte nello spessore del volume: a leggere non sei ancora alla fine del primo capitolo, ma a tagliare sei già molto avanti. Ed ecco che, nel momento in cui la tua attenzione è più sospesa, volti il foglio a metà d’una frase decisiva e ti trovi davanti due pagine bianche.
The novel you are reading wants to present to you a corporeal world, thick, detailed. Immersed in your reading, you move the paper knife mechanically in the depth of the volume: your reading has not yet reached the end of the first chapter, but your cutting has already gone far ahead. And there, at the moment when your attention is gripped by the suspense, in the middle of a decisive sentence, you turn the page and find yourself facing two blank sheets.
I had never attempted this previously, but it was one of the books I liberated from Ireland during the summer. It’s a surreal narrative where the sequentially numbered chapters, told in the second person, tell the story of investigating a fictional country and language which have disappeared, interspersed with the opening passages of a dozen fictional novels that tie into the narrative. I think it required more concentration and attention than I was able to give it during my commute and other travels, but at least it was fairly short. You can get If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, by Italo Calvino here.
This was my top unread sf book; next on that pile is Red Planet, by Robert A. Heinlein.
See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Haiti.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
Island Beneath the Sea
Isabel Allende
46,230
2,717
Breath, Eyes, Memory
Edwidge Danticat
31,110
3,114
The Comedians
Graham Greene
10,038
2,893
An Untamed State
Roxane Gay
19,695
1,053
Libertie
Kaitlyn Greenidge
15,751
857
Krik? Krak!
Edwidge Danticat
9,653
1,326
The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution
C.L.R. James
7,433
1,676
The Kingdom of This World
Alejo Carpentier
8,185
1,355
Quite a close result at the top, with Isabelle Allende’s tale of slavery in Saint-Domingue in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Island Beneath the Sea, sufficiently in the lead on Goodreads to beat Edwidge Danticat’s best known novel, the coming of age story Breath, Eyes, Memory, which however had the lead on LibraryThing. I was not quite sure about Breath, Eyes, Memory, part of which is set in New York, but as far as I could tell the majority of it is on Danticat’s native island. Danticat has two books on this week’s list; Krik? Krak! is a short story collection.
I disqualified five books. Mountains Beyond Mountains, by Tracy Kidder, is a biography of the doctor Paul Farmer, who worked also in Peru and Rwanda. Deadeye Dick, by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., is told in flashback from the narrator’s later life in Haiti, but the setting of the majority of it is the USA. The Black Count, by Tom Reiss, is about the father of Alexandre Dumas, who was born in Saint-Domingue but moved to Paris as a teenager. American Street, by Ibi Zoboi, is about the immigrant experience in the USA. And The Farming of Bones, by Edwidge Danticat again, is set across the border in the Dominican Republic.
This was one of the easier countries to rank – on the whole, users of LibraryThing and Goodreads are in agreement about which books are relevant to Haiti.
I’ll end the year next week with my adopted home country, Belgium, and will start 2026 with Jordan; followed by Haiti’s neighbour, the Dominican Republic, and then the United Arab Emirates.
This is the middle volume of a planned trilogy about early twentieth century Belgian detective Hendrikus Ansor, who Solves Crime. In this case he is brought in by Princess Clémentine (I wasn’t sure if she was a real historical person, but she was) to investigate mysterious deaths – apparently suicides – in the eastern resort town of Spa, which has given its name to an entire way of life.
Ansor obviously owes something to a later fictional Belgian detective, not least his magnificent moustache, but he’s a well-rounded if not always likeable character here, and the classical buildings of Spa and the royals and other celebrities are lovingly depicted by artist Olivier Wozniak. The mood of the book depicts a Belgium morally corroded by the reign of Leopold II rather well. I found the plot a bit convoluted, but I suppose that’s normal enough for a detective novel. It’s a nice one to have on the shelf. You can get Spa 1906 here.
The kitchen crew filled plates with scrambled eggs, scones, and fresh fruit for Renzie and Tuck. They seated themselves in the stark unadorned room that served as the dining commons.
Michaela Roessner won the John W. Campbell Award (as it then was) in 1990 on the strength of her first novel, Walkabout Woman; Vanishing Point was her second novel of four. She was actually first well known as an artist who produced quite a lot of SF illustrations in the first half of the 1980s. She doesn’t seem to have published any new fiction since 2011. I picked this up at Eastercon in 2022 in order to try a new woman writer.
I’m conscious that my last few reviews on here have been somewhat negative, so I’m, glad to say that I thought Vanishing Point was rather good. It is set in California, thirty years after the mysterious vanishing of ninety per cent of the human race. A small community of researchers based in the Winchester House (or something very like it) is trying to work out what actually happened. A woman scientist from farther east joins them after a dangerous trek across country. They are beset by fanatics who think that the Vanishing was the Christian fundamentalist Rapture. Everyone is suffering post-traumatic disorientation and survivors’ guilt. It’s all very nicely and credibly put together. I see a couple of reviewers complaining that the science doesn’t make sense, but really, it’s all handwavium anyway, isn’t it?
In past years I was able to do detailed analysis of my social media impact, using stats from Facebook, Twitter, etc etc. Nowadays, they have all hidden the statistics from the casual user, but on the flipside I have very good stats for this blog thanks to Jetpack. This ranking probably isn’t going to change in the next 12 days, so these lists are based on year-to-date as of today, 19 December.
1) Top 2025 blog posts, written in 2025
I’m doing two more brief sections, but these are the ten blog posts published this year that got the most hits.
1.10) Reforming the WSFS committee elections (26 July)
This was a topic that had been close to my heart for some time: I was, and am, concerned that under current rules, a single faction with less than majority support could nonetheless win all the seats on offer in the WSFS internal elections. This year’s elections dramatically illustrated the problem when the leading candidate endorsed two other candidates and they won all three available seats between them. In an ironic twist, that leading candidate was, er, me.
One of two posts in the top ten which were not about science fiction, this picked up on a couple of significant points that I had not seen properly covered elsewhere, including Pope Leo’s choice of regnal name.
1.8) 2025 Hugo final ballot: Goodreads / LibraryThing stats (6 April)
This is a post I do every year, running the Hugo final ballot through the numbers of the Goodreads and LibraryThing websites. This year, the books with the highest reader ratings on both systems won Best Novel and Best Graphic Story or Comic, and the Lodestar Award was won by the book with the highest LibraryThing ratings; but Best Novella went to a dark horse.
1.7) The Baby in the Park, a consolidated account (25 October)
My top non-science-fiction-related post of this year; I had written this story up previously, but in two different posts, as I discovered different parts of the process in 2020-21, and was able to solve the mystery of the parentage of a baby born in 1917 who turned out to be my second cousin once removed. This post pulled the whole story together into a single account.
My traditional dig into the voting numbers. Several categories were very close, and under the old rules, Best Editor Long Form and Best Fanzine would have been No-Awarded.
1.3) What science fiction predicted about 2025 (1 January)
My annual post looking at books and films which are a) more than twenty years old and b) set in the current calendar year. There were a lot for 2025, which is of course a nice quarter-century number. Spoiler: there will be a lot fewer for 2026.
1.2) Pronouncing the names correctly at the Hugo ceremony (23 August)
This year’s massive Hugo scandal was the mangling of the names of finalists at the Hugo ceremony, which I took personally as I had been involved with gathering information for the convention about how the names should be pronounced, which the convention then ignored. The presenters subsequently apologized, asserting that their carelessness should not be seen as a lack of care. Hmm.
1.1) How Christopher Priest wrote for Doctor Who, and what happened next (21 June)
This turned into one of my best performing blog posts ever, a recounting of my correspondence with Chris Priest soon after I got to know him in 2007, about the events of twenty-five years before when he was commissioned twice to write Doctor Who stories which were never made. I suspect that my post was picked up by Doctor Who fandom, and also to a lesser extent by fans who knew Chris.
2) The top old blog posts of this year
Those were the top blog posts which were written in 2025. However, a lot of blog posts from previous years are still performing very well. The top five of these are as follows:
2.5) The Cure at Troy, by Seamus Heaney (1 August 2024)
This is my third most viewed book review from any year – I think because Heaney himself is very prominent, but this play is not one of his more widely reviewed works. I would not be surprised if this piece has ended up on some college reading lists.
2.4) Rauf Denktaş, a Private Portrait, by Yvonne Çerkez (21 November 2022)
This is my second most viewed book review on this site. I don’t think either my review or the book is exceptional in quality, but Denktaş was a very big fish in his not very big pond, and this account of his side of the story is not widely available – at least, not as widely available as my review.
2.3) Beijing: the Forbidden City, and people wearing pretty dresses (19 October 2023)
I am proud of this post, which consists of photographs taken on the very first day I ever spent in China, in 2023. The Forbidden City itself is stunning, and the custom of local women dressing up in historical costumes on a Sunday is charming. This and the posts on The Cure at Troy and Rauf Denktaş had fewer views than the post about sf set in 2025, but more than the post about the 2025 Hugo statistics.
2.2) The multiplication of descendants of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert (12 February 2023)
This is another post that I am proud of, simply tracking in raw numbers the increase over time of (known) descendants of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. I wrote it in early 2023 and predicted that their number of living descendants would pass the 1,000 mark in the following twelve months, and would pass 1,024 probably in 2025. I have not checked to see if either of these milestones was met on schedule.
2.1) William Wordsworth, Annette Vallon and their daughter Caroline (12 April 2023)
My top post of the year written in a previous year, and I suppose also my top book review since it’s framed as a review of two monographs about the subject. I am honestly a bit surprised by its popularity, though, the story of Wordsworth’s French daughter didn’t impact much on his life or indeed on hers; he fled revolutionary France leaving his pro-monarchist lover behind with their unborn baby, and they subsequently met only twice, though relations seem to have been mostly civil. I was charmed to get a nice message recently from one of Wordsworth’s 5x great-grandchildren through Caroline and her great-great-grandson Emmanuel Hublot.
These two posts on Wordsworth’s daughter and the descendants of Vic and Al got more views than the Hugo pronunciation post but less than Chris Priest on Doctor Who.
3) The top book reviews of 2025
I actually think of this blog as mainly book reviews with some other cultural and political commentary, so while I’m pleased that the latter gets plenty of clicks, I’m a little sorry that the contemporary book reviews don’t do quite as well. My top five book reviews from 2025 were:
3.5) My Secret Brexit Diary: A Glorious Illusion, by Michel Barnier (13 September)
Not purely a book review, also an examination of the marriages of two very significant science fiction figures (who both married much younger American women).
3.1) I Who Have Never Known Men aka The Mistress Of Silence, by Jacqueline Harpman (24 January)
Glad to say that I was an early adopter of this surreal but grim story by one of Belgium’s great writers. I think it’s a great book.
Four of the above five were published in the first quarter of the year, which makes me suspect that for the book reviews at least there’s more of a slow constant burn of attention.
I think that’s enough analysis for now. At least it’s reassuring that in this age of micro-attention spans, the longer form still has its plcae.
This is another bande dessinée that I acquired at the Brussels comics festival, the first of five volumes about the life of Princess Charlotte of Belgium, later Empress of Mexico. This volume takes us from the death of Charlotte’s mother in 1850 to her installation in Mexico in 1864, from the age of 10 to the age of 24, including the first years of her marriage at the age of 17 to the Archduke Maximilian, younger brother of the Austrian emperor Franz Joseph I.
Monarchy has many flaws, and not least is its impact on the actual royals, who are shown here as trapped in a gilded cage of privilege. Maximilian is a womaniser who is sterile because of venereal disease. Napoleon III is a sleazebag. Charlotte is rather obviously a Princess Di figure in this story, though history suggests that she was more assertive. The characterisation is a little stiff but you always know who is who.
Speaking of history, the story here has some serious omissions. It is implied that Maximilian’s term as viceroy of northern Italy was ended by the Battle of Solferino in 1859, which kicked the Hapsburgs out of Lombardy and Venice, but in fact he had been sacked by his brother two months earlier for being too liberal. Also historically Maximilian spent an awful lot of time pursuing his personal interests in Brazil, leaving Charlotte stranded on Madeira, and that simply isn’t mentioned here.
I don’t think I’ll bother with the rest; Charlotte is a tragic historical figure, but in the end her story is marginal to the real sweep of history, and while it’s OK not to let the facts get in the way of a good story, it’s important not to get too far away from them if you’re telling a historical tale. If you want, you can get Charlotte impératrice, Tome 1 here.
