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.)
I have a couple of other blogging projects. Every 1 January, I post about science fiction stories set in the year to come, but written more than twenty years before. So far I have done this for 2020 (little did we know…), 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026.
I am also posting weekly analysis of the most well-known book set in every country, by the imperfect measure of ownership on the three main bookshelf sites, LibraryThing, Goodreads and Storygraph. You can find those posts here.
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.
Current Oscar Wilde: A Biography, by Richard Ellmann The Light That Failed: A Reckoning, by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes Dr Who and the Daleks, by “Alan Smithee”
Last books finished The Enchanted April, by Elizabeth von Arnim War Over Kosovo: Politics and Strategy in a Global Age, eds Andrew Bacevich and Eliot Cohen The Chimes of Midnight, by Robert Shearman The Sins of Winter, by James Goss Star Eater, by Kerstin Hall (did not finish) NATO’s Air War for Kosovo: A Strategic and Operational Assessment, by Benjamin S. Lambeth (did not finish) Doctor Who and the Daleks, by David Whitaker
Next books The Daleks, by Oliver Wake Between Serb and Albanian, by Miranda Vickers Selected Prose and Prose-Poems, by Gabriela Mistral
This case is illustrative of the conditions in Kosovo during the late Ottoman period, when religious divisions were still more important than ethnic ones. Religion was the dominant marker of identity, in this case dividing Albanians into Muslims and Christians, or into those conservative circles who were determined to defend Muslim hegemony against those who were or intended to become Catholics. Yet this case also marks the beginning of a new period of Ottoman reforms, which led to attempts by the Roman Catholic church, notably the Franciscan order, to gain back some of the souls which had been lost to Islam during the long period of Ottoman rule. The development of the Marian devotion in Letnica, as well as the policy of conferring the sacrament on non-Catholics, were the main devices used to accomplish this, i.e. to re-Catholicize part of the population in the Karadag mountains. The concept of crypto-Christianity was instrumental in church policy. Instead of taking crypto-Catholicism simply for granted, I would like to suggest that initially (i.e. in the first decades of the nineteenth century) it was primarily a church category which did not correspond with the ‘lived realities’ of those who received this label.¹ It was designed to redefine the identity of people who had a vague or ambivalent sense of religious belonging, and to explicate and justify a church policy of Catholic recovery and expansion into Ottoman territory. Through the workings of the devotional and missionary regime in the parish of Letnica, however, the category became increasingly real for those involved. ¹ I do not dispute that at an earlier stage, at the time when Albanian Catholics were converting to Islam (during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), crypto-Catholicism was a ‘lived reality’ indeed. There is ample documentary evidence for that (see for instance Malcolm 1998: 173-175). I want to question, however, the common assumption that there was a clear continuity of crypto-Catholicism up to the nineteenth century. I believe that the awareness of belonging to two different and radically opposed religious traditions was gradually lost among ordinary converts (after two or three generations).
Published in 1999, before the dynamics around Kosova changed completely, this is a study of several interesting cases of religious and ethnic identity in the region, making the case that both are much more fluid than you might think from public discourse. I’m always on for some good anthropological field work, and this is good anthropological field work.
In fact for anyone who knows the region, Duijzings’ core theme is not new. Back in 2024, I was talking with two fairly well-known political figures from Serbia and North Macedonia, and we discovered that each of them had a parent who had been expelled from the same part of northern Greece in the 1940s, and also had cousins who had remained and are now ‘Greek’. Identity is what you make it.
Duijzings approaches the topic with empathy and care, and brings to life the cases he looks at. These are:
Christian shrines which are also the subject of Muslim pilgrimages and other religious practices
The ‘crypto-Catholics’ of the Albanian lands
Dervishes and Bektashi, and their clashes with the state-sanctions Muslim authorities
The Egyptian minority in Kosova and Albania
He then looks at the structure and impact of two nationalist cultural projects, contrasting the unsuccessful attempt by Naim Frashëri to promote Bektashism as a core part of Albanian identity with the successful use of Serbian epic poetry, notably “The Battle of Kosovo”, to do the same for Orthodox Christianity and Serbian nationalism.
Another in the series of BBC original audiobooks, this has the original TARDIS crew arriving on a space liner in what we are told are the early days of interstellar space flight, and at the same time there is also an alien presence and an ancient mystery, treacherous crew members and terrified passengers. It’s reminiscent of Terror of the Vervoids, but done much better (and I am one of those who actually rate Terror of the Vervoids higher than the consensus). Paul Hayes is a radio producer who write two non-fiction books about Doctor Who for the 60th anniversary in 2023; this seems to be his first fiction for the Whoniverse, but I think he has an assured touch. You can get Star Flight here.
In most places in the world, the air is moist and fresh, even in cities. It feels a lot like walking through a forest, and very likely this is exactly what you are doing. The air is cleaner than it has been since before the Industrial Revolution.
Published in 2020, and reflecting on decades of climate negotiations (Figueres was one of the key people behind the 2015 Paris Agreement), this is a surprisingly upbeat book, very clear about the scale of the climate crisis and the devastating consequences for humanity if we don’t get a grip on it, but also clear that there are things that can be done at national, local and individual levels which will all make a difference. Not preachy, very digestible. You can get The Future We Choose here.
I wonder how the authors would assess the situation six years on. The book came out just before the pandemic, which of course showed us that massive disruptions to our economic well-being are entirely possible, and natural disasters linked to climate change have been stacking up. The USA has largely turned its back on the fight against climate change. But at the same time, China, Europe and the growing economies of the middle income countries are pushing ahead with a shift to renewable energy and more sustainable economic practices. So I think stubborn optimism is still appropriate.
This was both the top unread book on my shelves acquired in 2022, and the shortest unread book acquired that year. Next on those piles respectively are Mantel Pieces, by Hilary Mantel, and Religion and the Politics of Identity in Kosovo, by Ger Duijzings.
Lots of people loved this graphic novel published last year. It tells, with very few words, a story of ancient mythic creatures at the dawn of a Sumerian-style mythos, moving from creating to struggles over control of the human city. I was not as convinced; I think words are useful to give a sense of what makes the characters tick, and it’s much more difficult to convey that with pictures alone (or even mostly with pictures). Still, it’s an interesting experiment. You can get Drome here.
This was my top unread comic in English. Next on that pile is Tuki: Fight for Fire, by Jeff Smith.
See here for methodology, though NB that I am now also using numbers from StoryGraph. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Togo.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
Title
Author
GR raters
LT owners
SG reviews
The Village of Waiting
George Packer
479
151
61
The Shadow of Things to Come
Kossi Efoui
61
24
12
Adikou
Raphaëlle Red
125
4
25
Descent into Night
Edem Awumey
72
13
13
Dirty Feet
Edem Awumey
57
25
8
Neyla
Kossi Komla-Ebri
50
31
1
The Fixer: Visa Lottery Chronicles
Charles Piot
39
3
8
Cola Cola Jazz
Kangni Alem
9
5
3
This was particularly challenging, with a lot of people having tagged their books “to go” as “togo”, which is confusing, and additionally there are many fans of the well-known 1920s sled dog Togo. In the end, I found only eight books which have owners on all three of GR, LT and SG and which also appear to be more than 50% set in Togo, so they are all listed above.
The Village of Waiting sets a new record for the least widely owned winner in any country, beating the UAE handily. I’m afraid it’s by a chap who worked there in the Peace Corps. The Fixer: Visa Lottery Chronicles is also by a white American guy, about how US visas are allocated to applicant Togolese.
My research indicated that none of the other six novels on the list is explicitly set in Togo, but that in each case the unnamed country in which most or all of the action takes place is pretty clearly based on their home countries by the Togolese writers. I am not totally certain about the two books by Edem Awumey.
Raphaëlle Red is the only woman writer on the list. My research indicated that more than half of Do They Hear You When You Cry, by Fauziya Kassindja, is set after she escaped the threat of mutilation in Togo and went first to Germany and then the USA, where she was treated brutally by the authorities. Une Esclave Moderne, by Henriette Akofa, is about her life in Paris. Fetish, by Christine Garnier, has no StoryGraph owners and may not be set in Togo. Very Young Catholics In Togo, by Emily Koczela, has no Goodreads or StoryGraph owners. I can see that as I get to less well-known countries I may have to tweak my listing criteria.
One comparatively popular book by a Togolese writer that I disqualified after research was An African in Greenland, by Tété-Michel Kpomassie; it does indeed start with his birth and early life in Togo, but more than half of it seems to be about his later travels, ending up in Greenland.
Jumping over to Israel next, then back to Europe for Hungary, Austria and Switzerland.
Doing my best to track the media I have been consuming other than books here.
F and I went to the cinema two weeks ago to watch Project Hail Mary. I didn’t think the book was all that great – I was Deputy Hugo Administrator that year, and I see from my records that I put it fifth on the ballot (and Hugo voters actually ranked it sixth out of six, though it had the third highest number of first preferences). It was far ahead on Goodreads/LibraryThing ownership, while the actual winner was third on average ratings and fourth on number of owners. But there was enough squee about the film that it seemed worth a Whyte father-and-son expedition to the cinema.
Yes, folks, it’s a really fun film. Andy Weir has managed to grab a few headlines by asserting that the story is not political and he doesn’t understand why anyone would want it to be. Of course both film and novel are political, even if he wants to pretend otherwise, but a lot of the things that annoyed me about the novel have been taken out of the film.
There are lots of silly things – the protagonist’s amnesia is just sufficient to carry the plot, the (complicated) science mostly happens in parentheses, millions (perhaps billions) die on Earth while the mission is happening out at Tau Ceti and we are not really invited to care. But the energy of the single chap carrying the hopes of the world on his mission is compulsive, rather like Neil Armstrong (and who was p[laying him in First Man? Oh yeah). In particular, the effects are brilliant, with Rocky the alien stealing your heart. I’m sure it will be a Hugo finalist next year (and I don’t plan to be involved).
The other thing I’ve watched since my last update is “The Long Morrow”, an episode of The Twilight Zone from 1964. This is the first step in my project of reading and watching sf set next year, ie in 2027. There’s quite a lot of it (2026 was surprisingly sparse).
“The Long Morrow” has a simple punchline. An astronaut sent on a 40-year mission in 1987 falls in love just before his launch. He decides to forego the usual suspended animation, so that he can age at the same rate as his girlfriend back home. BUT she doesn’t know that this is his plan, and puts herself in suspended animation in anticipation of his return, so at the end of his mission, in the far distant future of 2027, she is still 26 and he is 70. As science fiction, it’s very well done, a great example of Philip K. Dick’s line about wanting to move from “What if…?” to “My God! What if…”.
The last eight minutes (of 25) are set in 2027, and feature the confrontation between girlfriend and astronaut. Mariette Harley really glows as the girl. The script does its best to focus on Robert Lansing as the astronaut, but Harley steals it.
Unfortunately all we see of 2027 is a corridor in the space control centre, so we can’t deduce much about Rod Serling’s predictions for what next year will look like. This story apparently inspired the opening episode of Season 7 of The Gilmore Girls, which has the same title, but I have little information about that.
Like a lot of you I was tremendously excited and pleased to hear last month that two of the missing episodes of The Daleks’ Master Plan had been found, and what’s more that they would be released on iPlayer at Easter weekend. I have been a huge fan of The Daleks’ Master Plan since I first listened to it in 2007, and also enjoyed the Big Finish sort-of follow-up stories (there’s a great First Doctor / Second Doctor crossover called Daughter of the Gods). And over Eastercon I sneaked aside for an hour to watch the new discoveries.
The first episode, “The Nightmare Begins”, pleased me beyond my expectations. Hartnell has taken on the mantle of being the action hero of the story in a way that would have been unthinkable when he first started the show two years earlier. There is lots of Sixties angst about world government, peace, and combat in jungles (this is not Vietnam, but Malaysia, possibly Kenya, and going back a bit further Burma and Nagaland). The most important human being is visibly not a white man (though played, shamefully, by a blacked-up white actor). Women give men orders. And the Daleks are back. The BBC are very lucky that the first of the two recovered episodes is really one of the good ones. (Though it’s difficult to think of a lost Hartnell episode which is likely to have been a complete dud.)
The third episode, “Devil’s Planet”, isn’t quite as good, but it’s still attractive, with some great lines, as the Doctor shows his technological snobbery about the stolen ‘Spar’ spaceship. One wonders a bit about the prison planet Desperus. Are there any, er, women there? And where do raw materials and food come from? But it’s far from the least plausible planet ever seen on Doctor Who, or even in this story. And the ending of the episode, with Katarina held prisoner at knifepoint, is genuinely tense – especially when you know what happens next.
One of the more bizarre reactions to the recovery of the two episodes was a piece in The Spectator by Gareth Roberts. Roberts, in case you missed the memo, wrote or co-wrote six episodes of New Who, nine stories of The Sarah Jane Adventures and ten Doctor Who novels, but was basically booted out of the Whoniverse in 2019 for his offensive tweets about trans women. (He was also pretty offensive about Muslims.)
Since then he has gone full-on culture warrior for the Right, and has been a regular writer in The Spectator since 2022. This week’s piece on “The surprising conservatism of the old Doctor Who” (I won’t link, but you can evade the paywall easily enough), asserts but fails to prove that Terry Nation, the writer of the story, and Douglas Camfield, the director, were “unusually politically conservative”.
Of course, what you get from art is often what you bring to it, but most people would agree that Doctor Who leans left – see, for instance, Alex Wilcock’s classic essay “How Doctor Who Made Me A Liberal”. Malcolm Hulke, one of the classic series’ more prolific writers, was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party. Roberts’ evidence to the contrary is slim to the point of invisibility.
Roberts starts by pointing out (entirely correctly) that Nation’s writing “is often of the two-fisted war story kind, often featuring – as here – desperate commando missions in jungle terrain.” There’s nothing particularly right-wing about war stories in the context of mid-twentieth-century Britain. Bear in mind that the 1945 election was swung to Labour by the mailed-in votes of soldiers in the field. Roberts also points out that the (fascinating) scene set in the space command centre is implicitly critical of the complacent and affluent society of Earth in the year 4000. Again, nothing very right-wing about that.
In any case, the idea that the creator of Blake’s 7, which is about rebels against a militaristic regime led by a woman, was “unusually politically conservative” is ridiculous. Terry Nation often wrote about politics; but his strength was satire, coming as he did from comedy, and he applied his satire liberally to all. In “The Secret Invasion”, a Dalek novella published in 1979 but set in 1974, we read:
Now two more men were hurrying toward the conference room. One wore spectacles and a worried expression. The other had a fawn raincoat and was smoking a pipe. He reminded David of Mike Yarwood.
Emilie nudged her brother excitedly and whispered, ‘That’s Roy Jenkins, the Home Secretary. And that’s the Prime Minister.’
David stared. ‘That’s not Mr Heath,’ he said derisively.
‘Of course it’s not,’ Emilie said impatiently. ‘It’s Mr Wilson’s turn this month.’ Emilie knew about politics.
As for Camfield, Roberts presents little evidence about his political views, other than that he had wanted a military career (but was ruled out on health grounds), and was friends with a right-wing writer. (A number of people in Doctor Who fandom used to be friends with a right-wing writer, before Roberts pushed them away.)
And Roberts presents literally no evidence that Camfield’s political views, whatever they may have been, had any influence on his work. True, he “conducted his TV work with incredibly precise and indeed military levels of planning”, but this is hardly an ideological quality. Looking in the other direction, it will not take you long to think of several examples of utterly incompetent and disorganised right-wing leaders.
I strongly recommend Michael Seely’s biography of Camfield, which goes deeply into his work but has little to say about his politics. There is a case to be made about his political views – apparently he opposed the closed shop, though as far as I recall this was a pretty centrist position in the 1970s – but you won’t find it in Roberts’ article, which is an intellectually lazy attempt to project the culture wars of today onto a TV show made before either of us was born (and I turn 59 in two weeks), written to confirm Spectator readers in their somewhat uncomfortable prejudices.
But do go and watch The Daleks’ Master Plan. It’s brilliant (what there is of it).
Fairly high on the list, however, was: Why breakfast?
Third in Marske’s The Last Binding trilogy. I was not totally convinced by the first of this series, but liked the second much more. I’m afraid that the third lost me not quite half way through, with the protagonists of the previous two books bouncing off each other and around various Victorian (or was it Edwardian?) stately homes. I wasn’t interested enough in the characters or convinced enough by the details of the settings. So I put it down. You can get A Power Unbound here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2024 (as part of the Hugo packet). Next on that pile is Red Rabbit, by Alex Grecian.
Current Enchanted April, by Elizabeth von Arnim War Over Kosovo: Politics and Strategy in a Global Age, eds Andrew Bacevich and Eliot Cohen The Chimes of Midnight, by Robert Shearman
Last books finished Among Others, by Jo Walton The Big Four, by Agatha Christie Mantel Pieces, by Hilary Mantel The Gods of Winter, by James Goss The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo, by Zen Cho Timeless, by Steve Cole The House of Winter, by George Mann
Next books Doctor Who and the Daleks, by David Whitaker Star Eater, by Kerstin Hall Oscar Wilde: A Biography, by Richard Ellmann
@JUICELINE / Why Gen ((O) Teens think your favorite Transformers film is problematically cyberphobic / TR91 @SKINNYDIP / We got a sneak peek at the new G17 human rights reform bill! SPOILERS AHOY / TR86 @DEADPLANET / What the fuck lives at the heart of Australia, and why? This zoologist has answers that may surprise you / TR77
I’m sorry that my other book reviews this week have been somewhat grumpy, and I hope this one makes up for it. I have listened to a lot of Eddie Robson’s audio work (particularly enjoyed The Five Companions and The Jigsaw War), and read a number of his short stories, but this is the first time I have read one of his novels and also the first time that I have read any of his non-Who writing.
I thought it was excellent. Our protagonist, Lydia, is from Halifax (the Yorkshire one), and lives in New York in the very near future as a translator for a diplomat from the delegation of an enigmatic alien race, the Logi, who communicate telepathically to chosen individuals. Her alien liaison is murdered, and she finds herself navigating diplomacy, non-human mind-sets, and the relationship between Yorkshire and New York, all in a society where everyone is online and watching you all the time (and you can fact-check people in mid-conversation). It adds up to something very refreshing. You can get Drunk On All Your Strange New Words here.
This was the SF book that had lingered longest on my unread shelves. Next there is Star Eater, by Kerstin Hall.
Opening scene of third episode (The Forest of Fear):
1. CAVE OF SKULLS (NIGHT).
THE DOCTOR: Oh, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, it’s all my fault. I’m desperately sorry.
SUSAN: Oh, don’t blame yourself, Grandfather.
THE DOCTOR: Look at those. Look at them.
(He is looking at a pile of skulls.)
IAN: Yes. They’re all the same. They’ve been split wide open.
This was the first in a series of ten scripts of Doctor Who TV stories published by Titan Books between 1988 and 1994, and I guess it’s more interesting now as a case of what you could and couldn’t write then about what was already a decades-old Doctor Who story. There are thirteen pages of introduction (in three chunks) about the concept of the script books, the concept of Doctor Who and the writing of the story, all now well-trodden ground, but I guess less available in 1988. To be honest, I think that even completists could skip this in good conscience. But you can get The Tribe of Gum here.
We both bounced into the parlour in a highly abrupt and undignified manner. My mother sat by the open window laughing and fanning herself. Pesca was one of her especial favourites and his wildest eccentricities were always pardonable in her eyes. Poor dear soul! from the first moment when she found out that the little Professor was deeply and gratefully attached to her son, she opened her heart to him unreservedly, and took all his puzzling foreign peculiarities for granted, without so much as attempting to understand any one of them.
I have to say that I found the 646 pages of this a real slog. There’s some good sæva indignatio at the legal status of women in Victorian society, but the plot is pretty implausible and the investigation process, not much less so; the central mystery is not interesting enough to compensate for the blandness of the characters (or the length of the book). Wildly overrated, I fear, but you can get it here. I very much preferred Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith, which is apparently a reflection of The Woman in White for modern times.
This was my top unread book acquired last year, my top book not yet blogged here and my top non-genre book. Next on all three of those lists is Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh.
Slogging through the Eighth Doctor Adventures, I am coming to the realisation that some of them are, well, not very good. Here we have what could have been a masterpiece of overlaid narratives, timelines and tension, with some interesting guest characters and some vivid individual scenes. but it all feels too chaotic and disorganised to be interesting. You can get The Last Resort here (for a price).
This week should have been Togo, but I have decided arbitrarily to swap it and Greece which would have been next week.
See here for methodology, though NB that I am now also using numbers from StoryGraph. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in the current boundaries of Greece.
All of these are ancient Greek legends, or adaptations of them.
When I did this exercise in 2015, The Odyssey was far ahead of the field, so I was really surprised to see that it has now been beaten (on Goodreads and StoryGraph at least) by Madeleine Miller’s The Song of Achilles, which was published in 2012 but apparently got a major boost through BookTok in 2021.
In 2015, Oedipus Rex was second and Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, which is set in the twentieth century, third. More recent adaptations of the ancient myths have clearly been selling well. Stephen Fry’s Mythos was published in 2017 and Jennifer Saint’s Ariadne in 2021 (though Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad came out in 2005).
I disqualified four books which might be considered to have strong Greek content. Circe by Madeline Miller is mostly set on the island of Aiaia, which most people (including I think Miller) locate near Italy. The setting of The Iliad by Homer is mostly today’s Türkiye. None of Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides is set in today’s Greece. And The Republic by Plato describes an ideal state which is definitely not Greece.
Including the StoryGraph numbers brought Margaret Atwood and Edith Hamilton onto the list, and knocked off Sophocles’ Theban cycle considered as a whole and Captain Corelli’s Mandolin.
Women writers have done well on my list this week, but Greek women have not (with the caveat that we don’t know much about Homer). The top Greek woman writer that I found was Sappho, quite a long way down, followed by Margarita Liberaki.
Next up is Togo, then Israel, then back to Europe for Hungary and Austria.
A lazy post since I am at Eastercon, using Jetpack to analyse the top ten hits on this blog in January, February and March. (Actually the top eleven as there is a tie for tenth place.) A lot of them are about the BSFA Awards, which take place this evening.
This is restricted to the posts that I actually published in that period – the top post from my archives, with almost a thousand hits, was Sir Thomas More’s compassionate speech about refugees by William Shakespeare.
I did not get very far with the longer categories in the month between the shortlist announcement on 1 March and tonight’s close of voting. I confess that I was guided by the principle of value for money – the better the ratio of pages to dollars (I get my ebooks from Amazon.com), the more likely I was to read it. The consequence was that I did not read anything like the full ballot in any of these categories.
I list them below in the order of the categories on the ballot paper, which is not the order in the voter booklet (for which many thanks).
I covered Best Audio Fiction and Best Artwork yesterday.
Best Collection
My top vote goes to Uncertain Sons and other stories, by Thomas Ha, a great imaginative collection of twelve mostly fantasy stories about uncertainty and weirdness. The title piece, which ends the book, is the most memorable, with the protagonist carrying around his father’s zombified skull in his backpack for occasional strategic consultations. The second paragraph of the third story (“The Mub”) is:
Somewhere between the black slopes and the longest stretch of the cratered plains, I came across a traveler who I thought might be leaving the city and headed for the nested forests. I greeted him from a distance, just as the road curved around a copse of crooked and dry-skinned pines, but he would not look at me. It was only when we came close to one another that he muttered, “Don’t,” as though throwing the word heavily at my feet, then kept on his way without offering anything else. I’d thought it unkind and almost said something in response.
I also really enjoyed Who Will You Save?, the collection of short stories by Gareth Powell. I enjoyed it more than I expected frankly – 400 pages is quite a lot for a short fiction collection, and many of the stories tie into his other writing, not all of which I am familiar with. But there is a pleasing rejection of formula, or at the vey least some new twists on old stories. Some themes come up several times (teenage love; Bristol) but
The second paragraph of the third story (“Waiting for God Knows”) is:
“It’s an outrage,” Fenrir grumbled over our common channel.
Blood in the Bricks, edited by Neil Williamson, is an anthology of short stories with urban settings heading towards the horror end of the spectrum. The second paragraph of the third story (“Hagstone”, by Tracy Fahey) is:
The yelling is louder. I sigh, fold over the page of the sports section, and get to my feet, grunting out a whoosh of air as I do. Outside, the stark new shapes of industrial units tower over me. The digger is in front of the old half-demolished factory; a rotten tooth in the slick industrial estate. A boy jumps off the digger and runs towards me. Even though the sun beats steadily down, I shiver suddenly; a quick spasm. Goose walking over my grave.
Some of these were very good, including “Hagstone”. But some editorial pruning could have made for a leaner healthier collection; there were too many stories where the protagonist ends up as a human sacrifice to the city’s demons, like The Wicker Man except indoors. You can get Blood in the Bricks here.
I’m afraid that I didn’t get around to the other three nominees, so I will look silly if one of them wins. They are:
The Black Fantastic: 20 Afrofuturist Stories, ed. Andre M. Carrington
Black Friday, by Cheryl S. Nutty
Creative Futures: Beyond and Within, ed. Allen Stroud
(Update: the winner was Blood in the Bricks.)
Best Non-Fiction (Long)
To my surprise, I find that I am voting for Fantasy: A Short History, by Adam Roberts. The second paragraph of the third chapter is long, like most of them:
Two decades later English jurist Henry Sumner Maine, deeply influenced by Carlyle’s writing, published Ancient Law; Its Connection to the Early History of Society, and Its Relation to Modern Ideas (1861). His thesis is that society had shifted from human identity and being-in-the-world as defined by one’s status – one’s place in the social hierarchy, the great chain of being – to our social being and interactions as governed by contracts. In some ways, since contracts (unlike status) can be engaged voluntarily, Sumner sees this as an improvement. But there are losses too, and those losses are what Past and Present is about. Carlyle argues less like a lawyer and more like an artist, and he is certain that what has been lost is reverence, something no contract can bestow: ‘at public hustings, in private drawing-rooms, in church, in market, and wherever else have true reverence, and what indeed is inseparable therefrom, reverence the right man, all is well; have sham-reverence, and what also follows, greet with it the wrong man, then all is ill, and there is nothing’. The contrast Carlyle draws between industrialized irreverential contemporaneity and the vivid life of his imagined medieval world establishes precisely the contrast that the Tolkienian and Lewisian mode of fantasy would later valorize:
Behold therefore, this England of the Year 1200 was no chimerical vacuity or dreamland, peopled with mere vaporous Fantasms, Rymer’s Foedera, and Doctrines of the Constitution, but a green solid place, that grew corn and several other things. The Sun shone on it; the vicissitude of seasons and human fortunes. Cloth was woven and worn; ditches were dug, furrowfields ploughed, and houses built. Day by day all men and cattle rose to labour, and night by night returned home weary to their several lairs. In wondrous Dualism, then as now, lived nations of breathing men; alternating, in all ways, between Light and Dark; between joy and sorrow, between rest and toil, between hope, hope reaching high as Heaven, and fear deep as very Hell.¹
¹Carlyle, Past and Present, 2:1.
This was a really fun and informative read, taking the history of fantasy writing from the very beginning to almost the present day. I am very familiar with the historical structure of the genre, but it was very helpful to see it laid out in such a structured way. Roberts is effusive but also analytical of the writers he admires; he takes no prisoners with the others – on Robert Jordan, for instance:
Manifestly the stylistic inadequacies of these books, their vastness, derivate repetitiveness, do not discourage millions of fans from imaginatively playing in the imaginative theme parks they represent: a wish-fulfilment world more colourful than our own, furnishing an idealized nostalgic past that does not deprive us of present-day bourgeois creature-comforts, parlayed through honest-to-goodness melodramatic emotional intensity.
Often I found myself starting his coverage of one of the series or authors that I have not read thinking “Oh, must try that sometime” and then at the end of Roberts’ analysis thinking “Mmm, maybe not”. There are some annoying typos, and there is almost no coverage of recent writers in languages other than English, but even so I got much more from Fantasy: A Short History than I expected, and it can have my vote in return. You can get it here.
I also really enjoyed Colourfields by Paul Kincaid. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
It is clear that this volume [The Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction, by Mark Bould and Sherry Vint] is intended as a teaching aid, primarily for undergraduates with little or no previous acquaintance with the genre. In this it works well: it is brisk and breezy, throws in enough theory to seem serious without being weighty, and lets much of the argument rest on the numerous booklists that are embedded throughout the text. The booklists constantly direct the reader outside the text, and while no work that appears in a list is allowed any substantive discussion in the text, taken alone the lists do act as a reasonable if far from comprehensive guide to many of the most significant works of the genre. So, as a starting point for someone coming fresh to the study of the genre, you could do far worse. It’s not perfect, there are inevitably omissions, and the fact that any work discussed in the body of the book is excluded from any list leads to problems, one of the more egregious of which I’ll discuss later. The authors do make every effort to avoid gender or racial bias, making a point throughout the work of discussing books by women or non-white authors equally with those by white males. Though there are moments when this seems to prioritise a minor work by a woman over a major work by a man, in the main this can only be celebrated. With this in mind, it is a pity that, in a genre that is becoming increasingly international, they confine their discussion almost entirely to Anglophone authors. While some authors in translation are unavoidable (Verne, Čapek), authors like Lem and the Strugatsky brothers are mentioned only in a passage about Science Fiction Studies and none of their titles is even listed; others fare even less well.
I stand by what I wrote when I read it a few months ago:
A substantial collection of essays by Paul Kincaid, who is one of the few people to have been both Administrator of the Hugo Awards and a judge for the Arthur C. Clarke Award (the other two are David Langford, and me). They are almost all reviews of other critical works, hence the title, with commentary inserted by the author to contextualise and explain a little more. I had read very few of the books described here, so it made me realise how much more there is to read about sf, and will spur me to add some more to my bookshelves
While I particularly enjoyed the pieces on Brian Aldiss and Ursula Le Guin, I’m afraid I am still unconvinced of the added value of the Marxist analysis of Frederic James and Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, or of the literary merits of M. John Harrison; but maybe that proves Kincaid’s larger point, that there can be no single definition of science fiction, which he pushes in a gentlemanly way. I learned a lot from this, as I had expected. You can get Colourfields here.
It’s a classic collection of pieces by one of our great critics, and deserves to be celebrated.
The only other book that I got hold of in this category was That Very Witch: Fear, Feminism and the American Witch Film, by Payton McCarty-Simas. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
During this period, witchcraft in the popular imaginary was a fractured signifier. It suggested both sexual empowerment and sexual enslavement; collectivist naturalism and individualistic consumerism; science and superstition; intellectual control and hedonistic abandon. But how could this character come to be a feminist icon, a misogynist boogeyman, a harbinger of religious decline, a sex symbol, a trend, and a joke all at once? Using a number of films from a wide range of different contexts (from studio blockbusters to auteurist art films to pornography to exploitation movies), Part I will trace the history of the countercultural witch film cycle, looking at this figure across her various contexts to suggest that in a decade haunted by questions of belief—in alternative communities and more equitable futures on the one hand and conservative religious and patriotic ideals on the other—the witchʼs evolution as a symbol of mysterious and arcane power reflects these shifting landscapes, particularly in the Womenʼs Liberation Movement. As Jon Lewis put it in his book, Road Trip to Nowhere,
[t]oday the movies from the counterculture era that continue to matter were in their day aberrations, movies that got made despite industry policy, movies made elsewhere (overseas, in the B-industry, by independent contractors working on some half-baked deal with a studio)—movies nobody with money and clout at the time gave half a chance at success.³
³ Lewis, 2022, 3.
I’m afraid I did not get very far; I am just not personally very interested in witch films, and while the author promises to make the connection with wider issues of society and gender, it depended too much on the bits I didn’t care so much about. I am sure that it is a perfectly fine read for those who care more about witch films than I do. You can get That Very Witch here.
The voter booklet (for which, again, many thanks) includes extracts from the other three finalists, enough to make me feel confident in ranking them as follows:
Fantasy: A Short History, by Adam Roberts
Colourfields, by Paul Kincaid
Dispelling Fantasies: Authors of Colour Re-imagining a Genre, ed. Joy Sanchez-Taylor
Writing the Magic, eds. Dan Coxon and Richard Hirst
That Very Witch: Fear, Feminism and the American Witch Film, by Payton McCarty-Simas
Speculation and the Darwinian Method in British Romance Fiction, 1859-1914, by Kate Holterhoff
In my earlier write-up of the shortlists, I noted that the last of these was owned by precisely zero users of Goodreads, LibraryThing or StoryGraph, and is also by some way the most expensive shortlisted book in any category. The extract provided for BSFA voters shows only the most slender of links to science fiction or fantasy literature, and I really wonder why anyone would have nominated it for a BSFA Award, let alone enough voters to get it on the shortlist.
(Update: the winner was Colourfields.)
Best Novel
My sole vote goes to When There Are Wolves Again, by E.J. Swift. the second paragraph of the third chapter (a long ‘un) is:
After the lockdowns, my parents started using my grandparents for free childcare whenever they could get away with it, and I spent a lot more weekends at the house in Herne Hill. This arrangement suited everyone very well with the exception of Gran, who clearly recognized she was being taken for a ride but felt unable to voice her dissent. Grandad and I remained great pals. I could talk to him about anything, and as I got older I talked more and more, and he’d sit and listen. Truly he had the patience of a saint, for he’d smile and ask questions back, and if I finally ran out of things to say, he would think for a while and then dig out some obscure and fascinating fact, like how the sewers worked. As if I were a jay and he were giving me acorns to stash away. My brain has always been a buzzy place, sometimes an overwhelming place. When I was with Grandad, the buzz quietened. He understood that I needed to get things out, or my thoughts might become too much. When I think of Grandad now, I remember his face, and his gentle voice, but mostly it’s the feeling that’s stayed with me. The feeling of being safe.
This is a great novel about the coming ecological catastrophe and the resilience of society in Britain (though we assume that similar stuff is happening elsewhere), told intimately through the story of two women who barely know each other, with the effect of climate change on them and their families delicately portrayed. There is despair, but there is also hope. I feel it really catches the Zeitgeist, and it gets my vote. You can get When There Are Wolves Again here.
(Update: the winner was indeed When There Are Wolves Again.)
The only other book on the shortlist that I have read is A Granite Silence, by Nina Allan. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
I have always found reassurance in repetition, an aid to thought. Old photographs of Aberdeen docks show a diverse, rambunctious ecosystem teeming with life, a maze of lumber yards and cattle sheds, warehouses and sawmills, a complex, symbiotic machinery geared towards the transport of timber and textiles and livestock, including people. The docks are still busy. Ferries leave for Orkney and Shetland throughout the day. Container ships call at Aberdeen regularly to unload their cargoes. Service vessels bound for the rigs are still based here in the harbour. And the old names are everywhere: Hall, Hood, Duthie and Russell, the great shipbuilding dynasties of Aberdeen’s past embedded in its present, in its street names and parks, carved permanently into the granite from which the town was raised.
It’s an fascinating and well-written book, about the murder of a child in Aberdeen in 1934; Nina Allan takes us in and out of the investigation and weaves different facets of herself into the story, including several breaking-the-fourth-wall moments. I’m giving it five stars on the various book sites.
But I’m not voting for it here, because I don’t think that it qualifies as science fiction or fantasy, and I think that the BSFA Awards should celebrate works of science fiction and fantasy. I know that yesterday I admitted that I am voting for a short story which is about fans of fantasy literature, rather than actually being fantastical itself; but A Granite Silence isn’t even addressing sf or fantasy, it’s a novel about a real life crime with no sfnal subject matter. Congratulations to the author on writing an excellent book, but it does not belong on this shortlist and isn’t getting my vote. Still, you can get A Granite Silence here, and probably should.
For various different reasons I did not read the other three finalists. They are:
Project Hanuman, by Stewart Hotston
The Salt Oracle, by Lorraine Wilson
Edge of Oblivion, by Kirk Weddell
I covered Best Short Fiction, Best Non-Fiction (Short), Best Shorter Fiction and Best Translated Short Fiction yesterday.
Belinda stepped outside the time machine, feeling her pumps scrape against a pavement that her feet did not belong on.
Not that anyone cares other than me, but James Goss has consistently been one of the best Doctor Who prose writers for years, and has never won an award as far as I know.
Once upon a time a long way from Croydon, a child was born, the fifty-fifth child to be born that year in the North Zone in BC-ville. The Nativity Robots decanted her from the amniotic chambers and, with huge smiles upon their chests, duly proclaimed her Sasha 55.
I did not read any of the other three shortlisted books in this category. They are:
Sunrise on the Reaping, by Suzanne Collins
Secrets of the First School, by T. L. Huchu
The Secret of the Sapphire Sentinel, by Jendia Gammon writing as J. Dianne Dotson
I did consider reading Suzanne Collins’ Sunrise on the Reaping, which is far ahead of all the other shortlisted books in any category in terms of public recognition, but it’s 400 more pages and I suspected that there was other stuff on the ballot in other categories that I would enjoy more.
(Update: the winner was Doctor Who: The Robot Revolution.)
Current Mantel Pieces, by Hilary Mantel Among Others, by Jo Walton
Last books finished Uncertain Sons and other stories, by Thomas Ha From Kosovo to Kabul and Beyond: Human Rights and International Intervention, by David Chandler (did not finish) Rebellion on Treasure Island, by Bali Rai Fantasy: A Short History, by Adam Roberts
Next books Timeless, by Steve Cole War Over Kosovo: Politics and Strategy in a Global Age, by Andrew Bacevich The Enchanted April, by Elizabeth von Arnim
Just to record my own BSFA votes this year (and must remember to actually cast my vote in time this time, I foolishly missed the deadline last year). I will do the shorter categories here, the ones where I have considered all of the shortlist works, and then will cover the actual books in another post tomorrow.
I’m not voting in the Best Audio Fiction category. I’m not sufficiently in the habit of listening to audiobooks (other than Doctor Who) to get in the zone for this. One of the finalists is over six hours long.
For Best Art, I nominated just one of the finalists, Nick Wells’ magnificent tesselated covers for the twelve-book Fractal series of novels by Allen Stroud, and I am standing by that as my top preference. It doesn’t come across well in the awards booklet, unfortunately, so I hope that voters take the time to look at the original. None of the others is at all bad, I just happen to really like this work by Nick Wells. I rank the others as follows:
(Update: I am glad to say that the Fractal covers won.)
Best Collection, Best Non-Fiction (Long) and Best Novel can wait until tomorrow, though once again I register my confusion at the ordering of the award categories.
Just one of my nominees for Best Short Fiction made it to the ballot, “The Life and Times of Alavira the Great as Written by Titos Pavlou and Reviewed by Two Lifelong Friends“, by Eugenia Trantafyllou. I don’t think I had read any of the other four nominees during the long-listing phase, but I still rate this one higher. In tomorrow’s post I am going to be complaining about finalists which are insufficiently sfnal; this story is not perhaps sfnal per se, but it’s about the enjoyment of reading in the genre, and fannishness and friendship. It gets my top vote.
“One Step at a Time“, by Rick Danforth, annoyed me with untidy punctuation and an untidy ending.
(Update: the winner was “Godzilla as a Young Man Named Mike”.)
Also, second paragraphs of third sections (or third paragraphs if there didn’t seem to be sections):
Man, this was a bit of a drag. It feels like very little progress was made. The book starts with a flashback where we left off. Alavira and Melitini find out they are not only sisters but also royals! They have to fight each other to the death for the Kingdom of Serenopol somehow? Their parents, the King and the Queen, follow the VERY ancient tradition of the land which says that the only worthy heir to the throne is the one who survives its siblings. It goes all the way back to the creation of Serenopol by a Dog King who survived his other siblings and ascended to the throne. Overall, pretty awesome world-stuff. (Also Dog King? Like an actual dog? I hope we get the lore eventually!)
The bear eyes me askance with its piece of bottle. I think the bear stands for wisdom. I think that’s why I made it. I imagine it telling me to go back to the water and try again. (Third para, doesn’t appear to have sections)
The smells were rich and full, and her mother took long breaths in through her nose, inhaling it all, then gulping seltzer from a tall glass near the sink. Miriam could barely wait for her birthday meal to be served. She hopped around the kitchen, getting in the way and sneaking bits from this or that whenever her mother took a drink.
Me. It was my idea. I worked on the HR systems as part of my support duties. I’d Slack-messaged Jen, who’d mentioned it to Nestor, who’d told Matt to go get a cake and a card from the supermarket while you were out.
Electric had long ago replaced the diesel behemoths of her childhood, but percussive maintenance had stood the test of time. (Third para, doesn’t appear to have sections)
None of the four works I nominated for Best Non-Fiction (Short) made it to the ballot, but I also mentioned three others that had impressed me and two of them did make it. My only reason then for not nominating Paul March-Russell’s review of E.J. Swift’s When There Are Wolves Again was that I had not yet read the book. I have now read the book (more on that tomorrow) and the essay really adds to my enjoyment of one of the classic novels of 2025, so it’s getting my top vote.
“The Legacy of Discworld” by Rick Danforth is enthusiastic but doesn’t say anything especially new.
(Update: the winner was “Spec Fic and the Politics of Identity: Finding the Self in Other”.)
Again, second paragraphs of third sections (or third paragraphs if there didn’t seem to be sections):
One other aspect of the novel [When There Are Wolves Again] also echoes The Citadel, and that is Swift’s cultural context. Of the many dystopias and apocalypses that featured in British writing of the 1930s, Gollancz published its fair share, including Francis Stuart’s Pigeon Irish (1932), Joseph O’Neill’s Land Under England (1935), Andrew Marvell’s Minimum Man (1938), and R. C. Sherriff’s The Hopkins Manuscript (1939). In the same year Cronin’s novel appeared alone, Gollancz also published Katherine Burdekin’s fascist dystopia, Swastika Night (Burdekin wrote it under the pseudonym of Murray Constantine), as well as the first English translation, by Willa and Edwin Muir, of Franz Kafka’s The Trial. Although such novels often presented anti-fascist, pre-apocalyptic warnings, they also amplified the gathering threats of war, genocide, dictatorship, and immiseration. Even the more optimistic works of the period, such as H. G. Wells’s The Shape of Things to Come (1933) and Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker (1937), portrayed war, disease, and famine as drivers for the future course of history. Although a convincing case has been made for the speculative fiction of the 1930s as a political mode that, as Terry Castle puts it in The Apparitional Lesbian (1993), “dismantles the real … in a search for the not-yet-real,” the slew of such texts also contributed to a structure of melancholic feeling best summed up in Louis MacNeice’s long poem Autumn Journal (1939).
In my article ‘The Rise of Black Speculative Fiction’ published in Aurealis #129, I share how, as an African Australian, I grappled with matters of identity—until I fell into writing black speculative fiction, which brought me out of the closet.
The cornerstone of this annual gathering is the Hugo awards ceremony. During the days leading up to the big event, the convention attendees engage in quiet discussions about the nominees. They wish their favourite authors the best of luck. They recommend the finalist books and art to all their friends.
In 2018, drawing partly on the renewed interest in the Franklin Expedition in the wake of the rediscovery of its vessels and partly on contemporary interest in fiction exploring colonialism and the environment, the television company AMC produced a ten-part series based on the novel and largely following its text as outlined above, but differing from it in certain aspects of interpretation, character, and conclusions, particularly regarding the characterisation and fate of the Tuunbaq, Crozier and Silna.
One well-intended curse that has followed many comedic fantasy authors has been to be christened with the moniker “The Next Terry Pratchett.” While intended to help the new author, I feel like this has been a stone around their neck due to heightened expectations.
As with most of the other categories, I found it pretty easy to choose my top spot for Best Shorter Fiction, though I would add that all of the stories here are good. Amal El-Mohtar’s The River Has Roots is a delightful, dark and queer fairy-tale of life, language and love in the liminal spaces. It also has more owners on Goodreads, on LibraryThing and on StoryGraph than all of the other shortlisted books in all other categories combined (apart from Suzanne Collins’ Sunrise on the Reaping) – massively more so on GR and SG.
“Descent“, by Wole Talabi, about an expedition that goes wrong in the African-inspired Sauútiverse.
“The Apologists“, by Tade Thompson, a murder investigation that turns into existential horror for the human race.
“The Art of Time Travel“, by Teika Marija Smith, oddly enough about art and time travel (and loss).
(Update: the winner was “The Apologists”.)
Second paragraphs of third sections / chapters:
When people say that voices run in families, they mean it as inheritance—that something special has been passed down the generations, like the slope of a nose or the set of a jaw. But Esther and Ysabel Hawthorn had voices that ran together like raindrops on a windowpane. Their voices threaded through each other like the warp and weft of fine cloth, and when the sisters harmonized, the air shimmered with it. Folk said that when they sang together, you could feel grammar in the air. If they sang a stormy sky, the day clouded over. If they sang adventure, blood rose to the boil. If they sang a sweet sadness, everything looked a little silver from the corners of the eyes.
And I dream of my mother.
She arrives at an office block in Central London with a shiny brass plate announcing the names of the Coroner’s List pathologists, qualified and approved by His Majesty’s Government. She spots a name, DR ROBERT TALBOT, MBBS, FRCPath.
Footsteps behind her break the quiet, and her focus. She glances back. Catherine walks briskly towards her, beaming and waving a piece of paper. Rossana smiles. For the first time in a while, standing on the deck of a ship and attuning herself to a new environment, part of her feels at home; and though Catherine grew up on a different continent, she feels that the two of them share a bond that bypasses cultural distance. Ragazze della città e del mare, as they say back home; min el-bahr wa-l-medina – women of the comms centres, the two of them, grown between the worlds of humans and whales.
Charles had snorted, said it sounded as if her plan had been taken straight from a B-movie.
We ordinary voters don’t get to vote on Best Translated Short Fiction (and I fully support that), but I would still call your attention to “Still Water” (original title 止水, “Zhǐ shuǐ”) by Zhang Ran (张冉), which I thought was excellent. The second paragraph of its third section is:
You gradually stretch your fingers and forearms, like a young stork spreading its wings against the wind.
(I don’t have access to the original Chinese text.)
More tomorrow, including also the final category, Best Fiction for Younger Readers.
This was the official program book of the exhibition of Wright’s work at the National gallery in London that I went to last month and really enjoyed. (File 770 ran a piece on it too.) The book consists of three parts – a short introduction from National Gallery directors Sir Gabriele Finaldi and Tony Butler OBE; an essay, “Between Darkness and Light”, by Christina Riding; and another essay, “A ‘Peculiar’ Painter of Candlelight”, by Jon King. The second paragraph of the last of these is:
It is likely that Wright’s celebrated candlelight scenes owe much to an early fascination with the principles of illumination and spectacle. Though his childhood is sparsely documented, insights can be derived from notes by his elder brother Richard and the unpublished memoirs of his niece, Hannah. According to Hannah, Wright demonstrated a curious and ‘active mind’ from a young age, spending his free time observing craftsmen at work – such as joiners and marble workers – and recreating what he saw.⁵ In addition to noting skilfully made projects such as a chest of drawers, a gun and a clock without a working mechanism, Hannah recounts Wright’s early fascination with raree boxes. These portable exhibitions presented unusual images illuminated by candlelight. As a boy, Wright not only grasped the mechanics but, Hannah records, he also impressed and embarrassed the showman with his ingenuity:
Having seen a raree show, he considered attentively upon what principal it could be formed; having discovered the manner of placing the glasses, he completed a show about three feet high; he then went to the Showman, and told him he had made a show like his; the man would not believe it at first, but upon inquiring how he had made it, he found it was quite right, & begged he would not tell any one by what means he had effected it.⁶
⁵ Wright 1850, p. 2. ⁶ Ibid., pp. 2-3.
I am more pleased with the balance of the essays in the book than I was with the commentary in the exhibition itself; Riding does write about the scientific content of Wright’s work, and King makes the point that this is also linked to changing concepts of education in the 18th century. Art criticism isn’t generally my bag, but this is very helpful, and also lavishly illustrated for quite a modest price. You can get Wright of Derby here; but also if you can, get to the National Gallery before the exhibition closes (currently schedled for 10 May).
Non-fiction 7 (YTD 19) De gekste plek van België: 111 bizarre locaties en hun bijzondere verhaal, by Jeroen van der Spek Eleanor: A 200-Mile Walk in Search of England’s Lost Queen, by Alice Loxton Wright of Derby: From the Shadows, by Christine Riding and Jon King That Very Witch: Fear, Feminism and the American Witch Film, by Payton McCarty-Simas (did not finish) The Future We Choose, by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac Religion and the Politics of Identity in Kosovo, by Ger Duijzings From Kosovo to Kabul and Beyond: Human Rights and International Intervention, by David Chandler (did not finish)
Non-genre 2 (YTD 13) A Granite Silence, by Nina Allan The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins
Plays 1 (YTD 1) The Tribe of Gum, by Anthony Coburn
SF 10 (YTD 25) Blood in the Bricks, ed. Neil Williamson Drunk on All Your Strange New Words, by Eddie Robson Who Will You Save?, by Gareth Powell A Power Unbound, by Freya Marske (did not finish) “The Paper Menagerie”, by Ken Liu When There Are Wolves Again, by E.J. Swift “The Man Who Bridged the Mist”, by Kij Johnson Cities Are Forests Waiting To Happen, by Cécile Cristofari The River Has Roots, by Amal El-Mohtar Uncertain Sons and other stories, by Thomas Ha
Doctor Who 5 (YTD 20) Firefall, by Beth Axford The Mind Trap, by John Peel The Last Resort, by Paul Leonard Star Flight, by Paul Hayes Rebellion on Treasure Island, by Bali Rai
Comics 2 (YTD 6) Ghost Stories, by George Mann et al Drome, by Jesse Lonergan
~5,400 pages (YTD 20,400) 11/27 (YTD 34/86) by non-male writers (Loxton, Riding, McCarty-Sinas, Figueres, Allan, Marske, Swift, Johnson, Cristofari, El-Mohtar, Axford) 4/27 (YTD 8/86) by writers of colour (Liu, El-Mohtar, Ha, Rai) 3/27 reread (“The Paper Menagerie”, “The Man Who Bridged the Mist”, The Last Resort)
194 books currently tagged unread, down 1 from last month, down 38 from March 2025.
Reading now Among Others, by Jo Walton Fantasy: A Short History, by Adam Roberts
Coming soon (perhaps) The Lost Dimensions 1, by George Mann et al Timeless, by Steve Cole The Chimes of Midnight, by Robert Shearman Doctor Who and the Daleks, by David Whitaker Dr Who and the Daleks, by Alan Smithee The Daleks, by Oliver Wake
Mantel Pieces, by Hilary Mantel War Over Kosovo: Politics and Strategy in a Global Age, by Andrew Bacevich Star Eater, by Kerstin Hall NATO’s Air War for Kosovo: A Strategic and Operational Assessment, by Benjamin S. Lambeth
Enchanted April, by Elizabeth Von Arnim Oscar Wilde: A Biography, by Richard Ellmann Selected Prose and Prose-Poems, by Gabriela Mistral Sourire 58, by Baudouin Deville et al Trouble With Lichen, by John Wyndham Annette Vallon: A Novel of the French Revolution, by James Tiptree Slow Horses, by Mick Herron The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water by Zen Cho Moving Pictures, by Terry Pratchett Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh Red Rabbit, by Alex Grecian TUKI: Fight for Fire, by Jeff Smith Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie
Two more Doctor Who audiobooks to write up, and they are both good ‘uns.
Firefall is a Fifteenth Doctor / Belinda story set in Canada during and after the great Leonid meteor shower of 1833. Needless to say, one of the things that falls is not yer standard meteor, and the small community where the story is set becomes disrupted by the alien presence and also by the threat of change. The story itself is about as you would expect, but it is lifted by some great technical points – there are some very well-crafted passages, and Michelle Asante as the reader does all the accents well. I’m adding Beth Axford to my list of writers to look out for – she also ghost-wrote Carole Ann Ford’s contribution to The Adventures After. You can get Firefall here.
John Peel was already on my list of Who writers to keep an eye out for, and with The Mind Trap he is back in his comfort zone of the Second Doctor era, with the story read by David Troughton. So we are in good hands. It’s a pretty minimalist story set in a deserted space jail; Jamie is removed from the scene for plot simplicity and we end up with the Doctor and Zoe crossing wits with mysterious prisoner Markan and his robot. Peel uses the short allocated time economically and throws in some interesting twists which are also totally consistent with the feeling of the era. If you like the Second Doctor at all, you’ll enjoy this. You can get The Mind Trap here.
See here for methodology, though NB that I am now also using numbers from StoryGraph. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Portugal.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
Title
Author
GR raters
LT owners
SG reviews
Blindness
José Saramago
343,703
14,451
28,534
The Book of Disquiet
Fernando Pessoa
38,290
6,060
3,355
Night Train to Lisbon
Pascal Mercier
28,219
3,368
2,142
Seeing
José Saramago
32,209
3,108
2,341
Baltasar and Blimunda
José Saramago
26449
2,747
2,821
All the Names
José Saramago
24,470
3,240
1,917
Pereira Maintains
Antonio Tabucchi
36,726
2,492
2,770
The Double
José Saramago
25,571
2,720
2,038
The list this week is dominated by a single, Nobel Prize-winning writer, and one of his books far outstrips all competition. It is about life in a city and society where everyone wakes up blind one day, and has been filmed starring Mark Ruffalo and Julianne Moore. The location is rather ambiguous, but I side with those who think it must be in Portugal because of one character’s fondness for chouriço. Seeing is a sequel to Blindness with some characters in common, so I’m taking it as having the same setting.
I disqualified two Saramago books. Death with Interruptions is also set in an anonymous country, but it is explicitly landlocked, which rules Portugal out. And The Gospel According to Jesus Christ is set in the Holy Land, not surprisingly.
The list is all-male, as previously with Russia, South Africa, Colombia (a special case), Spain and perhaps surprisingly Sweden. The top book by a woman that turned up in my searches was The Librarian Spy, by Madeline Martin, but it seems to fail my location criterion, with significant chunks set in France and the USA. I am much more certain of Alentejo Blue, a collection of short stories set in the Alentejo region, by Monica Ali. The top book by a Portuguese woman with a majority of the action set in Portugal is The Return, by Dulce Maria Cardoso, which I disqualified from Angola but happily acknowledge here.
After four European countries in a row, we’ll be skipping back and forth over the next few weeks, with Togo, then Greece, then Israel, then Hungary.
As promised, I am being more diligent about the non-book media that I am consuming. We’ve watched two TV series since I last updated on this line, How To Get To Heaven From Belfast on Netflix and Small Prophets on the BBC.
How To Get To Heaven From Belfast is an eight-part story about three friends who receive news than an estranged fourth friend has died in Donegal, and team up to try and find out what has happened. Here’s a trailer.
The leads are Sinead Keenan, who was also one of the leads in Being Human and was an alien in the two-part Tenth Doctor finale, and Roisin Gallagher and Caoilfhionn Dunne, who were both new to me. Gallagher, playing Saoirse, a TV dramatist in a failing relationship who gets entangled with a young Garda in Donegal, has the best arc and performance of the three. The scripts are by Lisa McGee, creator of Derry Girls, and there’s an actual fanvid showing the actors who appear in both.
Those crossovers include Bronagh Gallagher (35 years on from The Commitments!) doing some first-class villainous glower, and Ardal O’Hanlon turns up playing the same character that he has played since 1995, but that’s presumably a contractual obligation for any Irish TV series these days. It was also fun to see Patrick Kielty playing himself – it brought me back to the cellar of the Empire on Botanic Avenue in Belfast in the mid-90s, when he was the compere of the Comedy Club and was usually funnier than the visiting acts.
I felt that there were some great moments here but that the overall plot didn’t make a lot of sense. Some of the individual lines are hilarious, and there are some great set-piece scenes – the two that linger in my memory are the moment when the three encounter a pilgrimage in County Fermanagh, and the moment when Saoirse unexpectedly ends up talking live to Patrick Kielty on The Late Late Show while zonked to the eyeballs on tranquillisers. But the mystery became both implausible and incomprehensible, or perhaps I was just not concentrating. I was talking to an Irish friend yesterday who said that she had watched the first two episodes and wasn’t planning to watch the rest, and I think that’s fair.
Small Prophets is a different matter. Here’s a trailer:
It is written and directed by Mackenzie Crook, who I remember particularly as the gormless Gareth from The Office, though apparently he was also in the third season of Game of Thrones; and he appears here as the manager of the garden centre employing the protagonist, Michael Sleep, played by Pearce Quigley who was new to me but whose quiet, comedic performance is devastating. Michael’s father is portrayed by Michael Palin (who turns 83 a few weeks from now); his vanished partner’s brother is Paul Kaye, who was Thoros of Myr in Game of Thrones and has also been in Doctor Who, though I particularly remember his spoof celebrity interviewer Dennis Pennis. Apart from Quigley in the lead role, the performance that grabbed me most was Lauren Patel as Michael’s co-worker Kacey – I had previously heard her as the voice of PC Mukherjee in Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (where Paul Kaye played her boss).
Like How To Get To Heaven From Belfast, Small Prophets is very much set in the world of today, and in a particular place, in this case Manchester. The core story is that Michael, whose partner disappeared without trace several years ago, listens to his father’s advice about creating bottled homunculi which will always answer questions truthfully, in order to try and find out what has happened to the missing Clea. That’s basically the plot; the rest is character and incident interacting, with a hilarious ending combining a meteorite and a valuable ornithology book. Most of the characters are single-beat, but sometimes it works just to point them at each other and let them interact. And the six episodes are beautifully directed.
It’s interesting that both of these shows feature their own creators in different ways. Saoirse in How To Get To Heaven From Belfast nibbles away at the fourth wall, and the subplot of her travails with her TV production company while attempting to spin narrative gold out of the straw of daily life cannot be very far from Lisa McGee’s lived experience. Mackenzie Crook, as writer and director of Small Prophets, self-deprecatingly puts himself on screen as the annoying character who gives orders to everyone and gets steadily more annoyed as his instructions are ignored and defied. I guess it fits the age of Tiktok.
Het Nederlandse West 8, Urban Design & Landscape Architecture, tekende voor de voetgangersbrug die een smalle duinenstrook verbindt met de Uitkerkse polders, een eeuwenoud weidelandschap, waar veel vakantiehuisjes en caravans staan. Op het eerste gezicht ziet de brug eruit alsof wind en golftoppen een enorme lading afvalhout langs de vloedlijn hebben gedeponeerd. De omkisting van een overboord geslagen scheepsvracht? De lambrisering van een verwoeste scheepska-juit? Wie zal het zeggen?
The Dutch firm West 8, Urban Design & Landscape Architecture, designed the footbridge that connects a narrow strip of dunes with the Uitkerkse polders, a centuries-old meadow landscape dotted with holiday cottages and caravans. At first glance, the bridge looks as though the wind and wave crests have deposited a huge pile of driftwood along the high-water mark. The hull of a ship’s cargo that has washed ashore? The panelling of a wrecked ship’s hull? Who can say?
I got this for F a few Christmases ago, a guide to 111 “crazy places” in Belgium. I was already familiar with a few of them – the Vlooybergtoren, Baarle, the church in Borgloon that isn’t there, the Atomium, Rédu. We’ve been inspired also to try and find a couple more thanks to the book – the cubes of Herne were a success, but the Post-Imdustrial Pagodas had been destroyed in 2021. Reading the whole book has given me a couple more ideas.
Most of the places mentioned are simply large and odd works of public art, with a few cases of usable architecture and one or two bits of natural landscape. Useful for anyone planning occasional excursions around Belgium. The text is in Dutch, but the photographs need little explanation and the locations are clearly given, with a map at the end.
The author has also published lists of 222 equally crazy places in the Netherlands, and a less ambitious but presumably longer list of 1000 things to do in the Netherlands. I’m glad that he also turned his attention southwards. You can get De gekste plek van België here.
Current Rebellion on Treasure Island, by Bali Rai Among Others, by Jo Walton Uncertain Sons and other stories, by Thomas Ha
Last books finished That Very Witch: Fear, Feminism and the American Witch Film, by Payton McCarty Simas (did not finish) The Future We Choose, by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac Star Flight, by Paul Hayes Cities Are Forests Waiting To Happen, by Cécile Cristofari The River Has Roots, by Amal El-Mohtar Religion and the Politics of Identity in Kosovo, by Ger Duijzings
Next books The Lost Dimension, Book One, by Nick Abadzis et al From Kosovo to Kabul and Beyond: Human Rights and International Intervention, by David Chandler Enchanted April, by Elizabeth von Arnim
Next of my run of Titan Doctor Who comics acquired in 2022 (and I’m actually getting near the end, I expect that I will finish them this year). Ghost Stories is, unusually for this content stream, a direct sequel to a broadcast Doctor Who episode, The Return of Doctor Mysterio, visiting the new family of Grant the ex-superhero, Lucy the journalist and Lucy’s daughter Jennifer several years after the Christmas 2016 episode. This had a promising beginning with the dynamic between superhero and Doctor nicely portrayed, but petered out into a standard quest story with guest characters in the second half; also the art notably fails to make the Doctor look much like Peter Capaldi, never mind the other established characters. For completists. You can get Ghost Stories here.
Second paragraph of third tale (“The Trade that No One Knows”):
When, however, the boy had grown up, he said to his parents, “I am a man now, and I intend to marry, so I wish you to go at once to the king and ask him to give me his daughter for wife.” The astonished parents rebuked him, saying, “What can you be thinking of? We have only this poor hut to shelter us, and hardly bread enough to eat, and we dare not presume to go into the king’s presence, much less can we venture to ask for his daughter to be your wife.”
A collection of fairy tales supposedly collected in Serbia, but actually culled from five collections, one published in 1889 and the others during the first world war. I recognised one or two from other sources (King Midas and his ears), and the themes of course are very ancient; virtuous young men, beautiful young women, family and social dynamics, occasional magic spells and enchanted beasts, long journeys where odd things happen. Nothing that especially jumped out, though if I were still dungeon-mastering there would be some useful material. You can get Serbian Folktales here.
He had at first been amused by the English girl’s interest in this American family, shrewdly diagnosing that it was inspired by interest in one particular member of the group. But now something out of the ordinary about this family party awakened in him the deeper, more impartial interest of the scientist. He sensed that there was something here of definite psychological interest.
This came to the top of my list of books set in Jordan a few weeks back; the first few chapters are set in 1930s Jerusalem, but the scene then moves to Petra, where the actual murder takes place, and then to Amman, where Poirot spends about half of the total page count solving it. The victim is a horrible character who has bullied her entire family into terrified submission; the question is, which of them bumped her off and how? There’s some very well done Christie-style deflection, where they try to cover for each other, though the actual solution to the crime is not really flagged at all to the reader, so I think it counts as one of the less fair whodunnits in her oeuvre. But the family dynamics are very well depicted.
There is a happy flashforward at the end to show all of the survivors living happily ever after. The book was published in 1938, and we are meant to think that 1943 will be the same only a bit better.
I looked into the setting of the King Solomon Hotel in Jerusalem; it’s pretty clear that this is meant to be a fictional version of the King David Hotel (though in fact today there is a King Solomon Hotel on the same street). There is a little local political commentary in that Mahmoud the dragoman (guide/ translator) keeps boring the Western tourists by going on about the Zionists / Jews. (Nice and a little surprising to see anti-Semitism portrayed as a negative character trait for a change.) But in terms of politics, a much more interesting character is Lady Westholme.
Lady Westholme was a very well-known figure in the English political world. When Lord Westholme, a middle-aged, simple-minded peer, whose only interests in life were hunting, shooting and fishing, was returning from a trip to the United States, one of his fellow passengers was a Mrs. Vansittart. Shortly afterwards Mrs. Vansittart became Lady Westholme. The match was often cited as one of the examples of the danger of ocean voyages. The new Lady Westholme lived entirely in tweeds and stout brogues, bred dogs, bullied the villagers and forced her husband pitilessly into public life. It being borne in upon her, however, that politics was not Lord Westholme’s métier in life and never would be, she graciously allowed him to resume his sporting activities and herself stood for Parliament. Being elected with a substantial majority, Lady Westholme threw herself with vigor into political life, being especially active at Question time. Cartoons of her soon began to appear (always a sure sign of success). As a public figure she stood for the old-fashioned values of Family Life, Welfare work amongst Women, and was an ardent supporter of the League of Nations. She had decided views on questions of Agriculture, Housing and Slum Clearance. She was much respected and almost universally disliked! It was highly possible that she would be given an Under Secretaryship when her Party returned to power. At the moment a Liberal Government (owing to a split in the National Government between Labor and Conservatives) was somewhat unexpectedly in power.
You don’t read Agatha Christie for sophisticated political commentary – the notion that the Liberals could have formed a minority government in the 1930s was ludicrous. (In the 1935 election they had lost half their seats and were reduced to 12 MPs.) We are clearly meant to read Lady Westholme as a direct parody of Nancy Astor, who was also American, had an aristocratic husband, was the first woman to take her seat in the House of Commons and was an outspoken Conservative (and anti-Semite and anti-Communist). One can only take those comparisons so far, of course, because…
