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 usually 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.
So, the BSFA Awards Long List is out – I make it 368 nominees across 9 categories, an average of almost 41. I’ve said it before, but I do wonder to what extent a ‘Long List’ of this length is useful for readers or voters. Of course I am pleased for my friends and for the writers who I admire who are on the Long List; but how much does it really mean? Being on the Long List means that 1 (one) BSFA member nominated you; not being on the Long List means that your friends, if any, in the BSFA ignored you.
I also wonder if the BSFA needs nine award categories, and if so, if it has the right ones. (Plus the tenth, juried, Translation category.) I did think that four or five was too few, back in the old days. This is the third year since the number of categories was almost doubled; it would be interesting to see which of the new awards actually has traction with voters, but I’m not aware that the voting numbers for any stage of the process have been made public.
We do know at least how many works are on each category’s long list. There is some variation, to put it mildly.
Best Fiction for Younger Readers – 17 Best Audio Fiction – 18 Best Non Fiction (Long) – 18 Best Short Non-Fiction – 28 Best Art Work – 37 Best Collection – 41 Best Shorter Fiction – 51 Best Short Fiction – 76 Best Novel – 82
While I’m on the topic of If I Ran The BSFA Awards, I find the ordering of the categories both weird and inconsistent. This week’s long-list announcement has them roughly in alphabetical order, with “Best Non Fiction (Long)” three places away from “Best Short Non-Fiction”, and Best Fiction for Younger Readers at the end. The BSFA website, however, lists the categories roughly in the order that they were created.
Best Audio Fiction Best Artwork Best Collection Best Non-Fiction (Long) Best Novel Best Short Fiction Best Short Non Fiction Best Shorter Fiction Best Fiction for Younger Readers
Best Novel Best Short Fiction Best Shorter Fiction Best Artwork Best Short Non-Fiction Best Long Non-Fiction Best Fiction for Younger Readers Best Collection Best Original Audio Fiction
I think it would be clearer and more helpful for voters and commentators to group like with like, and to adopt something like the following canonical order for the BSFA award categories, with the announcement at the ceremony going through them in reverse:
Best Novel Best Short Fiction Best Shorter Fiction
Fiction (traditional categories)
Best Collection Best Fiction for Younger Readers Best Original Audio Fiction
Fiction (newer categories)
Best Long Non-Fiction Best Short Non-Fiction Best Artwork
Non-fiction and art
The sequencing of the Hugo categories has been developed and honed over the decades, most recently changed by swapping the order of “Best Related Work” and “Best Graphic Story or Comic” in order to group all the fiction categories together.
Anyway. This main point of this post is the analysis of each category, in terms of how well the nominated works score among users of the main book-tracking sites. This isn’t a measure of quality; it’s not a strong predictor of the outcome of the second round voting either; but it is an indication of the extent to which nominees reflect wider popular taste.
I’m bringing in something new – as well as Goodreads and LibraryThing, I’m adding the number of reviewers from Storygraph, which is perhaps a bit more fannish than the other two. In general the Storygraph numbers are four or five times less than the Goodreads numbers, and ten or twenty times more than the LibraryThing numbers. It’s all useful data. (If you find this analysis useful at all.)
I found 158 of the nominees on all three systems, and another 34 on at least one of them. There are six which are presented as separately published works, but don’t have anyone rating them on Goodreads, logging them as owned on LibraryThing or reviewing them on Storygraph. They can all now describe themselves as BSFA long-listees, because one person voted for them.
At the top end of the scale, the most logged book on all three systems is the Hunger Games prequel, Sunrise on the Reaping, by Suzanne Collins, in the Best Fiction for Young Readers category. Next, but a very long way behind, is Katabasis by R.F. Kuang, in Best Novel. Third on Goodreads and LibraryThing is The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, by Stephen Graham Jones, also in Best Novel; third on Storygraph is The River Has Roots, by Amal El-Mohtar, in Best Shorter Fiction.
Thought-provoking novel set on an island off the west of Ireland in the summer of 1979. An English painter and a French linguist come to stay, one to capture the landscapes and peoplescapes, and the other to record the decline of the Irish language, which is helpfully translated diegetically every time it is used. The main narrative is interspersed with the real-time events of the Troubles, culminating in the Mountbatten and Narrow Water bombings, which are geographically not all that close to the setting of the story, but have a big psychological impact on the people who live there. It’s a vivid depiction of an isolated community whose engagement with the outside world is limited, but also a book that looks at what is effectively raiding of its cultural resources by artist and linguist (who naturally dislike each other). A good read.
Current Looking Glass Sound, by Catriona Ward House of Open Wounds, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Last books finished Frankenstein and the Patchwork Man, by Jack Heath The Cuddled Little Vice, by Elizabeth Sandifer Katabasis, by R.F. Kuang Charlie vs Garret: The Rivalry That Shaped Modern Ireland, by Eoin O’Malley Kristin Lavransdatter: The Wreath, by Sigrid Undset Utterly Dark and the Face of the Deep, by Philip Reeve
Next books Lost In Time, by A.G. Riddle Bruxelles 43, by Patrick Weber and Baudouin Deville Red Planet, by Robert A. Heinlein
Vukub-Cakix, the Great Macaw, was nothing but trouble. He shone with the brilliance of gold and silver, and his teeth were emeralds, and he owned the nanze-tree of succulent fruit. He was a boaster, and his sons were no better. Their names were Zipacna the Earthmaker and Cabrakan the Earthshaker. The sons made mountains and then toppled them, and the father guzzled the harvests, so that between them they were a plague in Guatemala.
This is a collection of fifty-odd folk tales from various cultures – I did not count, but I think at least half are English or at least British, and slightly more than half were first published in another collection in 1969 (this one dates from 2011). They are all a bit enigmatic, pricking complacency about the universe. The best are short. A 47-page extract from the Ramayana was the one piece which I felt rather misfired. And it includes also some poetry by Garner himself:
Mist
The mist will always come from the fen. It bore on its breath the boating men, Saxon, Viking, iron swords, Burning thatch and crystal words. And their sons’ sons and grandsons still Built house upon house in the lee of the hill. And the latest house shows on the wall How they shuttered and barred the lord’s great hall From the mist and what the mist must hold; And what it is must never be told. For the mist will always come from the fen. And now it is killing the motorway men.
A book to sip slowly from rather than to rush through. You can get Collected Folk Tales here.
The news that J.D. Vance and his wife Usha are expecting a baby in July spurred me to research previous cases of babies born to incumbent Vice-Presidents (four boys, to three Veeps) and Presidents (three, two girls and a boy, to two POTUSes).
It has been inaccurately stated in some sources that Floride Calhoun (1792-1866) was the only previous Second Lady to have a baby during the Vice-Presidential term of her husband, in this case John C. Calhoun (1782-1850, Veep 1825-1832). She was the first but not the last.
The Calhouns’ ninth and tenth children (of ten) were born during his term, James Edward Calhoun (1826-1861) and William Lowndes Calhoun (1829-1858). Both were born in South Carolina. James became a lawyer and went to California. He died aged 36 and is not known to have had children.
William stayed in South Carolina, married twice and had three sons with his second wife (incidentally she was the widow of one of their older brothers) before dying aged 29. I think he has living descendants.
Floride Calhoun outlived all but one of her ten children, including John and William.
Frank Hamlin (1862-1922), son of Hannibal Hamlin (1809-1891, Veep 1861-1865) and his second wife Ellen Hamlin née Emery (1835-1925), was the longest lived (so far) of the Vice-Presidential babies. He was born in Maine, became a lawyer and moved to Chicago. I don’t know that he had any children.
The most recent Veep baby was Schuyler Colfax III (1870-1925), only child of Schuyler Colfax (1823-1885) and his second wife Ellen née Wade (1836-1911). He became Mayor of South Bend, Indiana at 28, and then worked for Kodak. Two of his three children died young but the third has living descendants.
The three Presidential babies were all born more recently. Grover Cleveland (1837-1908, POTUS 1885-89 & 1893-97) married Frances Folsom (1864-1947) in 1886 during his first term and they had two of their five children during his second term.
Esther Cleveland (1893-1980) was the second of her parents’ five kids. She married a British army officer and had two daughters, one of whom was the philosopher Philippa Foot, the co-inventor of the Trolley Problem. (Her photo illustrates this post)
Marion Cleveland (1895-1977) married twice and had four children. Her second husband was John Harlan Amen, the chief interrogator at the Nuremberg tribunal.
Both Cleveland sisters have living descendants – indeed four of their six children lived into this century.
Last and saddest, the fourth child of John F. Kennedy (1917-1963, POTUS 1961-63) and his wife Jacqueline née Bouvier 1929-1994) was Patrick Bouvier Kennedy (1963-63), who was born prematurely and lived for only two days.
Coincidentally Marion Cleveland and Patrick Kennedy were born quite close to each other geographically (if 68 years apart), she in Buzzards Bay at the base of Cape Cod and he in the nearby Otis Air Force Base.
Of the seven babies on my list, only two were born in Washington DC were Schuyler Colfax in 1870, and Esther Cleveland in 1893. Perhaps the Vances will add a third.
She was born Jean Murray, in 1934, to Thomas and May Murray, a Protestant couple in East Belfast. Belfast was a sooty, grey city of chimneys and steeples, flanked by a flat green mountain on one side and the Belfast Lough, an inlet of the North Channel, on the other. It had linen mills and tobacco factories, a deepwater harbour where ships were built, and row upon row of identical brick workers’ houses. The Murrays lived on Avoniel Road, not far from the Harland & Wolff shipyard, where the Titanic had been built. Jean’s father worked at Harland & Wolff. Every morning when she was a child, he would join the thousands of men plodding past her house on their way to the shipyard, and every evening he would return as the procession of men plodded home in the opposite direction. When the Second World War broke out, Belfast’s linen factor produced millions of uniforms and the shipyards churned out navy vessels. Then, one night in 1941, not long before Jean’s seventh birthday, air raid sirens wailed as a formation of Luftwaffe bombers streaked across the waterfront, scattering parachute mines and incendiary bombs, and Harland & Wolff erupted into flame.
This is a tremendous book about one particular aspect of the Northern Ireland conflict, tracking two intertwined stories through the decades: first, the history of sisters and IRA members Dolours and Marian Price, and second the mystery of Jean McConville née Murray, who was abducted and murdered by the IRA in 1972. Keefe has interviewed, and read interviews with, many of the surviving protagonists, and of course the story was made into a major Disney+ TV drama. It’s a chilling narrative of violence and death, sometimes political and sometimes just thuggery.
It is a book that has evoked sharp reactions. One person on social media responded to my note that I had read the book by fuming that it was “IRA propaganda. Complete bullshit”, though he later admitted that he had not actually read it himself. On the other hand, mainstream Republicans find both book and series sensationalist and unduly hostile to Gerry Adams. (Links are to two separate reviews by Tim O’Grady on Danny Morrison’s blog.)
By telling one particular set of stories, others are not told. Of course, everyone must write the book that they want to write; but the fact is that Northern Ireland is a lot wider than the dynamics of Republican West Belfast, and the experiences of the Prices and McConvilles, awful as they were, are representative of a part of society but not the whole. Keefe does make the occasional effort to acknowledge this, but I think a reader who knew nothing about the Troubles might get the impression that there was nothing else happening. Lost Lives would be a very good corrective.
The question is, what does one want to make of the past? At the end of the peace process, both the Prices and McConvilles felt cheated for different reasons. The McConvilles eventually did get closure with the discovery of their mother’s body, but that came about by chance rather than by any help from political factors. The Prices on the other hand felt that if the British remained in Northern Ireland, the entire armed struggle looked pointless, and they were revolted by that thought.
But the armed struggle was pointless; and it was evil. This is my analysis, not Keefe’s. The 1998 Good Friday Agreement was much the same as the 1974 power-sharing structure. The most significant differences were the provisions for ex-paramilitary prisoners, and police reform. (Some would argue that the D’Hondt coalition government is also a major change, but I would say that the forced coalition was there in 1974 and the D’Hondt process is a detail of implementation.) Was that worth the lives lost and devastated over thirty years?
This of course does not excuse or minimise the role of the British and Unionists in the story. If Unionists had run Stormont better in the first place, especially if the British had leaned on them to do so, there would have been no conflict. Loyalist violence, directed by Unionist leaders, was the initiating factor in the Troubles (as shown in the early episodes of Say Nothing), and Loyalists killed more civilians than either Republicans or the British Army. Bloody Sunday was an atrocity, and the cover-up was a crime (though Bloody Friday was an atrocity too). The Price sisters were brutalised in jail, and they were not the only ones.
Books like Say Nothing are very valuable to help understand the past – especially so if the reader keeps in mind that they show only part of the whole story.
I had occasional shocks of personal connection. In 1996, I was an election candidate in North Belfast as was Gerry Kelly, one of the Price sisters’ colleagues in the 1973 London bombings. He won, I lost; I have particular memories of a hustings in the Ardoyne where the audience was basically deciding between voting for him or not voting at all, and I left in such a rush that I had to go back the next day to collect my coat. (He doesn’t get a named speaking part in the TV show.)
A couple of the minor characters in the story mentioned are on my Facebook friends list – I won’t embarrass them by naming them, but they are played in the TV series by Seamus O’Hara and Charlotte McCurry. The idea behind the Boston College archives, on which more in a moment, came from Paul Bew, who I have known since I was roughly thirteen. Northern Ireland is a small place.
The Boston College archives play a large part in how much of the story came to light. These were a set of taped interviews with paramilitaries which unexpectedly became a source of evidence for the police investigating the murder of Jean McConville. I had a lot of respect and affection for Ed Moloney, the director of the project who died last year, and I corresponded warmly and sympathetically with him in 2011 when it started seriously running into trouble. But I have to say that he does not appear to have done the necessary due diligence on the extent to which his carefully gathered records could be used in future criminal investigations, and relied unwisely on the doctrine of the protection of journalistic sources. Expert legal advice was simply never sought, and that is a big error – on Keefe’s telling, Ed Moloney’s error rather than anyone else’s.
Whatever you make of the political intentions of the author, it is a well told story. I groaned a bit when I looked at 404 pages of dense text, with 93 pages of footnotes, but it really slips by quickly – even when you know what happened in the end. And here Keefe’s choice to focus on the McConvilles and the Prices does make sense, because by focusing on the human cost of the conflict to two families, you turn historical facts and statistics into stories that can be related to by any reader.
Published in 2018, the book got a new lease of life with the 2024 drama, which I finally got around to watching at the end of last year. I think it’s very well done. In particular, Lola Petticrew and Maxine Peake excel as Dolours Price in her youth and in her middle age, and Rory Kinnear is very memorable as Frank Kitson. I was surprised to see Josh Finan, who plays the young Gerry Adams here, pop up again as Dan, the philosophy teacherwhose students are convicts, in Waiting for the Out, which we have been watching more recently.
On the downside, the early episodes tastelessly play the Prices’ IRA activities for laughs, and the whole thing is more sympathetic to the Prices than perhaps they deserve. The darkness is acknowledged too, but I felt the balance could have been put in a better place.
Watching it with my son, who was born in 1999 and has never lived in Northern Ireland, was also instructive. The two standout episodes are the sixth, which centres on the brutal force-feeding of the Price sisters on hunger strike in Brixton, and the eighth (of the nine) which concludes with the McConville children, now thirty years after their mother was taken from them, clustering together in the hope that her body will be found. With the caveats above, it’s very watchable.
“Pleased to see you back again, Mr Van Aldin,” he said.”
Yeah, I’m working through the less celebrated novels of Agatha Christie (having read all the best known ones in 2013). This one dates from 1928, and features Poirot dragged into the investigation of a murder and jewel theft on Le Train Bleu, which used to run direct overnight from Calais via Paris to the French Riviera. (No point in such a route now that you can get from Paris to Nice in five hours by TGV, or a bit less by air.)
Some of this environment has become familiar to me as I work through my grandmother’s memoirs. The victim here is a rich young American woman moving between England and France (as was my grandmother), and there is another older rich woman living in the Riviera who ran a hospital during the Great War (as did my grandmother’s aunt). It’s also notable that all characters are expected to be fluent if not perfect in French.
Agatha Christie herself was reportedly dissatisfied with this book, and I can see some of the flaws that she possibly was conscious of, and some that she possibly was unaware of. There’s some gratuitous anti-semitism. She doesn’t have a good ear for names – “Van Aldin” doesn’t work for a New Yorker with Dutch ancestors; nor does “Papopolous” for a Greek, especially a Greek Jew. The actual murder plot is hilariously convoluted and Poirot’s solution to it is spun almost out of thin air.
But there’s one very well drawn character, Katherine Grey, who benefits from a recent inheritance and gets sucked into the mystery on her way to the Riviera – she reminded me a bit of Anne Beddingfeld in The Man in the Brown Suit, who heads off to Africa in similar circumstances, but a bit older and perhaps more rooted in reality. She is romantically pursued by The Wrong Chap but ends up with The Right Chap, to the frustration of the Teenage Girl – who herself is a standard Christie trope, done a bit better than usual here.
In the early 1990s, I turned my attention to what I thought at the time was a very trivial, albeit rather irritating, problem, namely why primates spend so much time grooming each other. The conventional view at the time was that grooming was simply about hygiene – removing burrs and other bits of vegetation from the fur and generally keeping the skin clean and healthy. Grooming certainly does that, but after many years watching monkeys in the wild I had been deeply impressed by the fact that they groomed far more than they ever needed to for purely hygienic purposes. It seemed obvious that grooming was intensely social and pleasurable.
Robin Dunbar is famous for the “Dunbar number”, the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships, which he says research has borne out as the average size of human communities from prehistory to the present day. This book looks at the nature of friendship, including its roots in primate behaviour and its future in the online world.
Dunbar is very big on his own research, though he does mention other researchers too (with occasional asides about the fate of his PhD and doctoral students). I found the prose a bit dry, to be honest, and no space is given to any critique of his findings, or alternative explanations. Maybe there isn’t any, but I recently also read Proto by Laura Spinney which does make space for alternative theories.
I also wondered about the people and societies at the ends of the bell curve. Dunbar is very pleased that all of the studies he cites find that people to have 5-ish close friends and an extended circle of 150-ish; but what’s the variation? What can we learn from and about super-connectors, or from people who are socially isolated? The dragging towards the mean got a bit tiring.
So, yes, lots of interesting stuff here, but it raised questions as well as answers. You can get Friends here.
See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in the UAE.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
The Dog
Joseph O’Neill
2,371
351
Layover in Dubai
Dan Fesperman
894
186
Temporary People
Deepak Unnikrishnan
1,025
135
City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism
Jim Krane
764
122
The Sand Fish
Maha Gargash
820
109
Desperate in Dubai
Ameera Al Hakawati
1,464
33
From Rags to Riches: A Story of Abu Dhabi
Mohammed Al Fahim
362
61
Sleepless in Dubai
Sajni Patel
882
24
It was surprisingly tough to find books set in the UAE – using my usual methodology, I checked for ‘uae’, ‘dubai’ and ‘abu-dhabi’ tags on both GR and LT, and found rather a limited output. (Yes, I did check for the smaller emirates on Goodreads, and didn’t find much; I didn’t bother checking them on LibraryThing.) This week’s winner, The Dog, by Joseph O’Neill, has the lowest aggregate score for any of the winners for any of the countries I have covered. (Other contenders: Niger and Benin.)
The Dog is about a chap from New York who moves to Dubai and finds himself perpetually in the metaphorical doghouse for one reason or another. It got a couple of award nominations (including the Booker Prize longlist) but doesn’t seem to have resonated strongly with the market. The author is much better known for his New York-set novel, Netherland.
I excluded a lot of books without hesitation, but I will note two here that gave me a moment or two’s pause for thought. Omar Saif Ghobash, the author of Letters to a Young Muslim, is a senior UAE diplomat; but the book is written from the vantage point of the Emirati embassy in Moscow, and also apparently has a global scope in its content, so I don’t think it qualifies under my criteria. And Arabian Sands, by Wifred Thesiger, has troubled me before (see Saudi Arabia and Yemen) but unfortunately it seems to be split between several countries without being more than 50% in any one of them (and anyway more in Oman than in the UAE).
Coming next: Honduras, Cuba, Tajikistan and then Papua New Guinea.
Back in November 2012, I decided to read all of the winners of the BSFA Award for best Novel, the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the James Tiptree Jr. Award, now the Otherwise Award. I started with Non-stop, by Brian Aldiss, which was given a retrospective BSFA Award in 2008, and thought I had finished with Annie Bot, by Sierra Greer, which (rather surprisingly) won the Clarke Award last year.
It took me thirteen years, in the course of which the Tiptree Award renamed itself the Otherwise Award and then had a hiatus, and I myself was a Clarke Award judge twice and physically counted the BSFA Award votes several times. (I was also involved with Hugo administration for seven of the intervening Worldcons.) I flipped back and forth between reading the books one by one, and reading and reviewing all the books from one particular year in a single go. Links in this post are to this blog archive; more recent entries include purchase links at the end of each post.
I have learned that like everything, the awards go through phases. The BSFA gave the Best Novel Award to twenty-seven books by men before they chose one by a woman (The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell), and fourteen of the next fifteen winners were also by men (the exception is Ash, by Mary Gentle). Starting with 2013, however, the picture is more balanced, with seven winners by women and six by men – six different women, including two women of colour, and three different men. All the male winners so far have been white. Christopher Priest won it four times, Brian Aldiss, Ian McDonald and Adrian Tchaikovsky three times (so far); Ann Leckie is the only woman to have won twice. (Full list of winners and finalists on Wikipedia.)
The Arthur C. Clarke Award has been going since 1987. It is decided by different judges each year; the panels have included the likes of Neil Gaiman, John Gribbin and, er, me. It’s therefore much more difficult to identify trends, since each year’s panel makes its own decisions. I count sixteen winners by women, twenty-one by men, and one by a non-binary writer, which is not too bad. Four winners, as far as I know, are by writers of colour, one woman and three men. Novels by China Miéville have won three times, by Pat Cadigan and Geoff Ryman twice. (List of winners and shortlisted novels on Wikipedia.)
My favourite is probably The Handmaid’s Tale, though I also think we made a very good call with Station Eleven. Both have turned out to be somewhat prophetic in different ways. At the more obscure end, I really liked Deep Wheel Orcadia. On the other hand, I thought the 2007 winner, Nova Swing by M. John Harrison, was unmemorable and uninteresting.
I had intended to compare the history of the BSFA, Clarke and Tiptree/Otherwise awards here. But I have discovered while drafting this that the Otherwise Award was presented to three novels and a short story last year, after a four-year hiatus, so I’m going to save my analysis of its history and my personal recommendations and disrecommendations until I’ve read the latest winners. It’s also a bit more difficult to assess, because it has gone to short fiction as well as novels. So, stand by. Meanwhile you can get Ash: A Secret History here and The Handmaid’s Tale here.
Second frame of third section: (“New Year’s Eve, 2004”, from Monsters by Gabby Schulz [Ken Dahl]):
I picked this up when I was in Portland in 2016, and somehow forgot to log it in my system, but realised that it was still on my shelves, years after I had read all the other books I got in 2016. I should not have left it so long; it’s a great collection of work by a very diverse group of creators, and literally the only piece I had read before was an extract from Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza, which was my book of the year last year.
There is a lot of very strong work here, starting with Bechdel’s editorial introduction, about her own relationship with comics over the years and her criteria for choosing. The very first piece, “Manifestation” by Gabrielle Bell (a new name for me) is a hilarious and pointed account of her research into the political thought of Valerie Solanas (best remembered, alas, for her attempt to murder Andy Warhol). Joe Sacco’s piece is also very strong. There’s an interesting format-breaking story, “Soixante-Neuf”, about Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin by David Lasky and Mairead Case. Lasky is back for the single-page “The Ultimate Graphic Novel (in Six Panels”, which closes the book. I must also mention Jeff Smith’s “The Mad Scientist”, about Nikola Tesla, and Paul Pope’s “1977” about encountering David Bowie in the early days. But really, it’s all pretty good stuff, and the above named are excellent. Glad I finally got around to it. You can get The Best American Comics 2011 here.
Current Kristin Lavransdatter: The Wreath, by Sigrid Undset Frankenstein and the Patchwork Man, by Jack Heath Katabasis, by R.F. Kuang
Last books finished Renaissance- en barokarchitectuur in België, by Rutger J. Thijs The Secret Adversary, by Agatha Christie The Domino Effect, by David Bishop What Still Remains, by Adam Christopher River Mumma, by Zalika Reid-Benta Deep Secret, by Diana Wynne Jones The Forgotten and the Fantastical: Modern Fables and Ancient Tales: No. 2, ed. Teika Bellamy
Next books Utterly Dark and the Face of the Deep, by Philip Reeve Looking Glass Sound, by Catriona Ward Bruxelles 43, by Patrick Weber and Baudouin Deville
If you have Spotify, snap the handy QR code below for a carefully curated playlist.
I confess that I wasn’t previously aware of the Map Men, who have a popular YouTube channel about the making of maps. This is one of their latest videos, including lots of (reasonably well pronounced) Dutch, about the making of the Netherlands:
Their book boils down sixteen cases of maps that were, are, or became incorrect, and has a jolly look at the history of each case. To be honest I prefer my history and cartography without extra tinsel, and in particular the fifty pages devoted to the story of the Donner Party dramatised as a debate between a fictional American and his high-school teacher seemed rather self-indulgent. (Not to mention the fictionalised debate between different parts of President Truman’s brain in the last chapter.)
However there’s some brilliant stuff here too. Chapter 5, on the UK’s ‘regions’ for Independent Television broadcasters, truly informs and entertains; I knew that the map was wonky, but I had no ide just how wonky, with King’s Lynn and Leeds getting the same ‘local’ news. Actually, let’s have a musical interlude in honour of the one UK region whose borders were pretty fixed, Ulster Television:
Chapter 14, on the development of the satnav and why we should not forget about more traditional ways of navigation, has lots of lovely details that I was unaware of. And despite the Truman’s brain joke, the final chapter, on the Marshall Islands, is tragic (I have some experience of that country).
Me and the Marshall Islands’ special climate envoy and equivalent of vice-president, the late Tony deBrum, relaxing at the Beer Factory on Place du Luxembourg in April 2013
Hrozný had just broken the code of the first Indo-European language ever to be written down: Hittite. Though he didn’t know it at the time, the document that had given him the key was the last will and testament of an early Hittite king, Hattushili I, who had ruled in north-central Anatolia in the seventeenth century BCE. Hattushili was a master of spin, especially when it came to himself: ‘his frame is new, his breast is new, his penis is new, his head is of tin, his teeth are those of a lion, his eyes are those of an eagle, and he sees like an eagle’. But he was also an accomplished warrior who had laid the foundations of one of the great empires of the preclassical world. As he lay dying he dictated his plan for his succession, but in the ancient equivalent of the microphone being left on after the interview has concluded, an over-enthusiastic scribe kept scribbling and captured his last words.’ As death rushed up to meet him, Hattushili the Lion was seized by terror: “Wash my corpse well! Hold me to your bosom! Keep me from the earth! Three thousand years after its ancestor was first spoken on the shores of the Black Sea, the first Indo-European cry to reach us is heartrending in its humanity.
I’ve always been fascinated by linguistics, especially the evolution of languages over the millennia, and a friend very rightly recommended this book to me for Christmas. It looks at the history of the Indo-European languages, cross-referencing the evidence from the languages themselves with the latest archaeological findings and, crucially, DNA evidence about the people who lived and died in various places and times.
I just love the concept of Proto-Indo-European, from which six of the top seven languages in the world are descended (not Chinese, obviously, but Spanish, English, Hindi, Portuguese, Bengali and Russian), spoken 5,000 years ago, and some of whose words are eerily similar to ours and some startlingly different.
Spinney goes with the standard theory which has been around for decades, that the speakers of PIE were the Yamnaya culture, a subset of the Kurgan culture, north of the Black Sea, and named after their burial practice of funeral pits (яма, yama) with tumuli on top (курган, kurgan). The latest DNA research strongly supports this, though she gives time to other explanations as well (notably the Anatolian and ‘Out Of India’ theories), and gives personal glimpses of Gimbutas and Renfrew in their debates, also citing David Anthony whose book I enjoyed a few years back.
The movements of population and language were initially driven by climate change as Eurasia recovered from the Ice Age, and then by technology as the horse was domesticated, the wheel was developed and agriculture began to be adopted. (NB that in the story of Cain and Abel, Cain is the bad guy and the farmer, Abel is the good guy and the herder.)
She follows up with individual chapters, each prefaced by a helpful map, on the extinct Anatolian and Tocharian languages, on the western Celtic/Germanic/Italic branch, on the eastern Indo-Iranian languages, on the northern Baltic and Slavic groups, and on the isolated Albanian, Armenian and Greek, the last of which has the longest continuous literary tradition. I love little snippets like the extinct Venetic language, known from a few hundred inscriptions, most of which are dedications to Reitia, the goddess of writing.
There’s interesting stuff in the DNA too. Apparently when the Beaker People arrived in Britain in 2450 BC, the result was that they took over 90% of the British gene pool and 100% of British Y-chromosomes, and the same when they reached Ireland 200 years later. Did they speak Celtic? It’s a little too early from the linguistic change point of view, but otherwise it’s not clear how Celtic language came to Ireland. I actually bought J.P. Mallory’s book to find out more.
This is a great book, filled with history, science and literature. Spinney has gone light on the technicalities of linguistics, so as not to deter the faint-hearted, though I would have been happy with more detailed reconstructions; still, these are easy enough to find. Lots to learn. You can get Proto here.
This was the last book that I finished in 2025, so it’s good to end on a high note. Thanks to Aoife White for the recommendation.
“Have I convinced you that it was a straightforward case?” he said.
You’ll have noticed that I’m going through a bit of an Agatha Christie thing recently. I read maybe half of the total œuvre when was twelve or thirteen, and am fairly sure this was one of them, but I had completely forgotten the details. Poirot is called in to re-investigate a murder of sixteen years earlier (the book was published in 1942, so that would be 1926), by the daughter of the woman who was jailed for the crime. The murder weapon is hemlock, strictly speaking coniine, used to dispatch an unpleasant artist who was flaunting his affair with his latest model in front of his wife and their house guests.
Poirot gets each of the five suspects to write down their memories of the day of the murder. Christie breaks each of those accounts across chapters, which is convenient for keeping up the narrative pace but a bit annoying for the historically trained reader whose instincts are to give each source its own place in the sun. In a dramatic denouement he reveals why the artist’s widow allowed herself to be convicted for a crime she did not commit, and also who the real murderer was, though there is a strong implication that justice will never be served due to the passage of time and paucity of firm evidence.
I have to admit that it did make me go back to the court ruling quashing the prosecution of Soldier F for several of the Bloody Sunday killings, on the grounds, similarly to the witness statements in Five Little Pigs, that the statements of F’s fellow soldiers made at the time and to the Savile Inquiry were not admissible evidence – although the judge condemns Bloody Sunday in the strongest terms. It still doesn’t explain to me why Soldier F was prosecuted for the wrong crimes.
I did not know, then, that fear itself could take form, could become a tangible thing. That lesson lay ahead.
One of the leftovers from the 2023 Clarke Award submissions list which was obviously fantasy rather than sf, but I though might be worth hanging onto for later reading. Unfortunately it put me off at the very beginning, with an intense attempt to portray England in the 17th century which totally failed to convince me on many of the circumstantial details. I gave it fifty pages but no more. You can get The Leviathan here.
“Do you think there was anything in the quarry?” said Susan.
I had read this years ago, of course; it is the sequel to Garner’s first book, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen. I see a lot of online reviewers saying that they like The Moon of Gomrath better; I must admit that I still have sharp memories of The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, and it must be thirty years since I last re-read it. Still, The Moon of Gomrath is a great fantasy story, with the young protagonists sucked into epic battle with ancient magical forces across the richly depicted landscape of Alderley Edge and Macclesfield. It’s not long since I was near that part of the world myself. You can get it here.
See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in the Dominican Republic.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
In the Time of the Butterflies
Julia Alvarez
79,101
4,961
Clap When You Land
Elizabeth Acevedo
109,418
1,869
The Feast of the Goat
Mario Vargas Llosa
42,462
3,596
The Farming of Bones
Edwidge Danticat
9,907
1,510
Before We Were Free
Julia Alvarez
9,474
1,427
Pirate Hunters: Treasure, Obsession, and the Search for a Legendary Pirate Ship
Robert Kurson
11,821
591
The Cemetery of Untold Stories
Julia Alvarez
15,639
439
The Color of My Words
Lynn Joseph
2,109
650
The dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, from 1930 to 1961, looms large over the Dominican Republic. This week’s winner, In the Time of the Butterflies, is about the four Mirabal sisters, who fought back against the regime, which then killed three of them. It has been adapted into a film produced by and starring Selma Hayek. The Feast of the Goat is about the assassination of Trujillo in 1961. The Farming of Bones is about the Trujillo regime’s 1937 Parsley massacre of tens of thousands of resident Haitians. Before We Were Free is set at the end of Trujillo rule in 1960-61. The Cemetery of Untold Stories is about a writer in the 2020s who is researching the life of one of Trujillo’s wives. The Color of My Words is also set during the Trujillo regime, though as far as I know the precise date is not specified.
The other constant in the literature of the Dominican Republic is the relationship with the United States, and in particular the emigrant experience. This week’s Goodreads winner, Clap When You Land, is about two girls, one in the Dominican Republic and one in New York, who discover that they have the same father when he suddenly dies.
Most of the books by Dominican writers about the emigrant experience are set mainly in the USA. I disqualified no less than sixteen books for that reason – six more by Julia Alvarez, four by Junot Diaz (including The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao), and two by Angie Cruz, another two by Elizabeth Acevedo, and two by other writers. I also disqualified Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys, which is set in Jamaica, and Collapse, by Jared Diamond, whose remit is worldwide.
Although Pirate Hunters is set off the coast of the Dominican Republic rather than on the country’s land territory, it seems to be close enough to the shore to qualify for the list by my criteria.
Next week’s country is the United Arab Emirates, which provides a challenge to my research strategy, followed by a return to Latin America for Honduras and Cuba, and then over to Central Asia for Tajikistan.
As usual, I’m looking back to the best known books (by Goodreads and LibraryThing numbers) published 50, 100, 150 and 200 years ago. Unusually, I have actually read, or at least attempted, the top book on each of the four lists – I liked two of them and not the other two – so this isn’t going to inform my 2026 reading in the way that it has done in previous years. I’m also flagging up some interesting 1776 publications.
I’ve set up my habitual tables, ranking the books by the aggregate of their number of raters on Goodreads and owners on LibraryThing, with all the bias that implies. For 1976, I am listing the top 20 on that system; for 1926, the top 15; for 1876, the top 10; and for 1826 just the top 3. I’ve also noted a few works of 1776. Where I have read other books published in that year, I note them below.
How many of the below have you read? (Back in the old LJ days I would have run a poll which would have had dozens of respondents; those days are gone for ever, I think.)
Links below are to my online reviews of the books in question.
I described Interview with the Vampire as “the most utter tosh” when I read it in 2008. Apart from Letters from Father Christmas, I am sure that I have also read Roots and Slapstick, or Lonesome No More, and fairly sure that I have read Children of Dune, The Selfish Gene, Dragonsong, Sleeping Murder, Raise the Titanic! and Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less (though all the Jeffrey Archers kind of merge into one in my mind).
Of the lot, I’d say that my favourite is Roots, which I read when I was unsuitably young but which left a strong impression.
The best-selling book of 1976 in the USA, according to Publisher’s Weekly, was Trinity, by Leon Uris, an Irish-set saga that just missed my cutoff, followed by Sleeping Murder.
I’m not going to go back and re-read Interview with the Vampire, but I might give Children of Dune another go some time.
None of the above features on the Publishers’ Weekly list of best-selling books of the year, which is topped by two books published in 1925: The Private Life of Helen of Troy, by John Erskine, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, by Anita Loos.
I’m willing to admit that The Sun Also Rises is a great work of literature, and Winnie-the-Pooh has certainly demonstrated staying power, but I have had very few reading experiences like the shock I got from Agatha Christie at the end of Roger Ackroyd.
Well ahead of any other book mentioned in this post, including Hemingway and Rice, 1876’s winner is definitely Tom Sawyer, and I have to say that although I admire George Eliot for Daniel Deronda, Mark Twain is much more fun. I have not read any of the others, or, I think, any other book published in 1876. The Prime Minister sounds intriguing, The Hand of Ethelberta also sounds entertaining, and Adam Roberts has piqued my interest with an essay on L’Assommoir.
Books of 1826
There are three books published in 1826 which have shown anything resembling staying power: The Last of the Mohicans, by James Fenimore Cooper; The Last Man, by Mary Shelley; and Life of a Good-for-Nothing, by Joseph von Eichendorff. The Last of the Mohicans is far ahead of the other two on both LT and GR, but I could not get into it when I tried many years ago. The Last Man on the other hand is great.
Second paragraph of third story (“Before Eden”, by Arthur C. Clarke):
There was no way forward; neither on its jets nor its tractors could S.5—to give the Wreck its official name—scale the escarpment that lay ahead. The South Pole of Venus was only thirty miles away, but it might have been on another planet. They would have to turn back, and retrace their four-hundred-mile journey through this nightmare landscape.
An anthology of cutting edge SF as of the year 1964, when the book retailed for three shillings and sixpence, equivalent to 17½ new pence. There are twelve stories, nine first published in the 1950s and three in the 1960s, all by white men, eight Americans (one of whom was the naturalised Canadian-born A.E. van Vogt) and four British. This was the third of a series of Penguin anthologies edited by Aldiss with the intention of bringing new readers into SF.
All of the stories feature memorable concepts, maybe some of them out of date now (eg the magic-using community sealed off from the scientific world, the defeated white Americans who decide to try and conquer Europe), but stimulating for the Penguin reader of 1964. The standout piece is probably Arthur C. Clarke’s “Before Eden”, in which two cynical technicians accidentally discover life on Venus and unwittingly destroy it as they leave.
The stories do not at all reflect the coming New Wave, but I guess that can be forgiven for a collection which was probably assembled in 1962 and 1963, and perhaps the New Wave might not have appealed to the average Penguin reader as much. It’s an interesting snapshot of the genre at a particular time, and from a particular angle. You can still get Yet More Penguin Science Fiction here.
This was both the shortest unread book that I acquired in 2022, and the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on those piles respectively are The Forgotten and the Fantastical, ed. Teika Bellamy, and Utterly Dark and the Face of the Deep, by Philip Reeve.
A strong start to the year – I had several big books almost finished by 31 December, and then several short ones in the 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)
