Since late 2003, I’ve been recording (almost) every book that I have read. At 200-300 books a year, that’s over 5,000 books that I have written up here. These are the most recent; I also record the books I have read each week and each month. These days each review includes the second paragraph of the third chapter of each book, just for fun; and also a purchase link for Amazon UK. (Yes, I know; but I get no other financial reward for writing all of this.)
This WordPress blog replaced my Livejournal in March 2022. I was able to copy across all of my old Livejournal posts; unfortunately the internal links in old posts will still in general point back to Livejournal, and though I was able to import images, I wasn’t able to import videos, so it’s a little imperfect.
I mentioned under Sudan that I had excluded four books which scored highly on both LT and GR, but appeared to be set in what is now South Sudan: A Long Walk to Water, by Linda Sue Park; They Poured Fire on Us from the Sky, by Benson Deng, Alephonsion Deng, Benjamin Ajak and Judy A. Bernstein; Acts of Faith, by Philip Caputo; and Emma’s War, by Deborah Scroggins. I checked as far as I could, and all four of those seem to indeed be set mainly south of the line.
I note that there is a character in the novel Acts of Faith who is very obviously based on Emma McCune, the subject of the biography Emma’s War. I never met her myself, but I know many people who did, and she clearly left her mark. If she had lived, she would be turning 62 in a few weeks’ time, and she would have been all over the political processes of the last thirty years, probably for better rather than worse.
Five of the other six books are about the terrible experiences of the Lost Boys, child soldiers conscripted into the Sudanese war in the 1990s, who then managed to escape to other countries and rebuild their lives. This week’s winner, A Long Walk to Water, combines such a story with the story of a girl in a tribal village in South Sudan who must keep her family supplied with water; her story on its own is the eighth of the books listed here.
I disqualified loads of books, starting with What is the What by Dave Eggers, another book about one of the Lost Boys, but as far as I can tell mainly set after the protagonist gets out of his home country. Also, some people seem to confuse South Sudan with South Africa when tagging their book collections.
The top book by a South Sudanese woman is Hopeless Kingdom, by Kgshak Akec, but it is mainly about the emigration experience. A near miss in several respects is Ghost Country, by Fatin Abbas, which is set in a fictional version of the disputed Abyei and whose author is from Khartoum.
This is the last African country for a while, and the last African country on the list of the six that I have actually visited myself. We’ll leap across the Atlantic next to Haiti, then back this side for Belgium, then Jordan, then back over again to Haiti’s neighbour the Dominican Republic.
Menschen, gierig nach dem Gewinn von Sekunden, stürzten zu ihm herein und, Stockwerke höher, tiefer wieder hinaus. Keiner achtete seiner. Der eine, die andere erkannte ihn wohl. Aber noch deutete niemand die Tropfen an seinen Schläfen anders als gleiche Gier nach dem Gewinn von Sekunden. Gut, er wollte warten, bis man es besser wußte, bis man ihn packte und aus der Zelle stieß: Was nimmst du uns den Platz weg, Lump, der du Zeit hast? Krieche die Treppen hinunter oder die Feuerleitern …
Persons, greedy to gain a few seconds, stumbled in with him, and stories higher, or lower, out again. Nobody paid the least attention to him. One or two certainly recognised him. But, as yet, nobody interpreted the drops on his temples as being anything but a similar greed for the gain of a few seconds. All right – he would wait until they knew better, until they took him and threw him out of the cell: What are you taking up space for, you fool, if you’ve got so much time? Crawl down the stairs, or the fire escape…
Every year since 2020 I’ve done a round-up blog post detailing what science fiction has been set in the year to come. There is surprisingly little for 2026. Literally the only sf novel that I have found which is entirely set in that year is Metropolis, published in 1925 by Thea von Harbou. Even there, I didn’t find anything in the text of the book that explicitly references the year; but people have been writing that it is set in 2026 since soon after publication, so I am guessing that the original blurb may have said so.
The film and book have the same plot, which is not surprising as von Harbou wrote them both. A future heavily industrialised city depends on the labour of the underclass. Freder, the son and heir of the city’s founder Joh, falls in love with Maria, a women from the depths; meanwhile Rotwang, the city’s chief inventor, creates a robot version of Maria which incites the workers to rebellion. After near-disaster, the robot is destroyed and Freder reconciles his father with the workers.
I may have been unlucky with the translation, but I found the novel rather clunky and not at all subtle; of course it’s firmly rooted in the political ferment of the Weimar Republic, and it’s about von Harbou’s hope that social upheaval could be contained by a grand bargain between workers and rulers, provided that they avoid the snares of populism. This was not of course what actually happened in Germany, and the workers don’t actually seem to get much out of the grand bargain; the rulers are still the rulers at the end of the book. Earnest but not super well executed. You can get it here.
The film has the same plot, but the plot is not the point: under Fritz Lang’s direction, it’s a cinematic masterpiece, even if the version we have is stitched together from the surviving theatrical release and off-cuts found in Argentina. The activation of the robot Maria is the iconic scene, but almost all of it looks brilliant – the vast machinery, the city-scape, the crowd scenes of the workers, the fleeing children, the erotic frenzy of the posh chaps at the night club, the climactic battle on the roof top. The sophistication of the special effects sets a standard that was rarely equalled for decades after. And Birgitte Helm is unforgettable as the two Marias.
I watched it on my iPad in three chunks – during my recent trip to Montenegro – but I would happily pay to see it on a big screen, and I am inclined to seek out some more of von Harbou and Lang’s collaborations.
Second frame of third story (“Gotcha”, adapted by Ray Zone with art by Chuck Roblin):
This is one of a series of seven albums published in 1992-93 by Byron Preiss, where various artists were asked to do illustrated versions of various Bradbury stories. Here there are six adaptations of five stories: “The Aqueduct”, “The Veldt”, “Gotcha”, “Homecoming” and two different versions of “There Will Come Soft Rains”, each with a short introduction by Bradbury himself.
The standout adaptations for me are Timothy Truman‘s “The Veldt” and Wally Wood‘s “There Will Come Soft Rains” (originally published in Weird Fantasy in 1953; the others are all original commissions for this book); but actually Bradbury was such a good story-teller that it’s hard for a competent artist to go wrong with one of his stories, and Bruce Jensen‘s “The Aqueduct”, Chuck Roblin’s “Gotcha” and Steve Leialoha‘s “The Homecoming” are all good.
On the other hand, the other adaptation of “There Will Come Soft Rains is by Lebbeus Woods, best known as an architect, and is remarkable for having illustrations which bear almost no visible relevance to the story. An odd choice, but Byron Preiss, the overall editor, is clearly marching to his own drum. Truman, Woods and Wood are named on the front cover.
Occasionally this involves being physically or verbally abused, but mostly it involves paperwork.
I see a mixed reaction to this, the ninth of the Rivers of London series, but I rather enjoyed it. The title and the chapter headings are references to Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisition sketch, and the plot background for the book includes the historical Spanish Inquisition. There is a mystery involving a strange magical being, and also Peter Grants infamous ex Leslie; there are seven rings that need to be found; there are plenty of cultural references; there is an excursion to Glossop, not far from where I was last month; and there is the imminent birth of Peter and Beverley’s twins. I found it very satisfactory and entertaining. You can get Amongst Our Weapons here.
Current Elidor, by Alan Garner The Infinity Race, by Simon Messingham Our Wonderful Selves, by Roland Pertwee
Last books finished Winning Ugly: NATO’s War to Save Kosovo, by Ivo H. Daalder and Michael E. O’Hanlon Adventures in Space, eds. Patrick Parrinder and Yao Haijun Time Trials Volume 1: The Terror Beneath, by George Mann et al Hallowe’en Party, by Agatha Christie Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, by Agatha Christie Reeds in the Wind, by Grazia Deledda
Next books Doctor Who: The Adventures After Yet More Penguin Science Fiction, ed. Brian Aldiss The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport, by Samit Basu
Thus, the physical brain, though it cannot create such sensory appearances, is a prime factor in their characterization, and, for that reason, an important factor in whatever process it may be that causes them to appear.
This was quite a big hit when originally published (I have the fairly definitive third edition of 1932). Sober-minded aeronautical engineer John William Dunne believed that he had established scientifically that dreams can sometimes be precognitive alerts to things that are going to happen to the dreamer, and he has many Einstein-like diagrams to demonstrate his theory of time travel. Nobody has been able to replicate his experiments independently, and it seems more like a demonstration of the human brain’s ability to find patterns from random stimuli. It’s not very exciting either, but you can get An Experiment with Time here.
This was my top book acquired in 2023. Next on that pile is Leviathan, by A.G. Riddle, one of the Clarke Award backlog.
Before the rite begins, the tribal elders dunk the ants into an herbal brew. Not to agitate them, but to anesthetize them. The agitating part comes later, after the sleeping ants are handwoven into a pair of gloves made from leaves and palm fronds. When the ants wake up, they’re angry and ready to attack whoever is wearing those gloves—a fact the young boys know all too well. During waumat, each boy must put on these gloves and face the pain as their first step to adulthood.
A straightforward book looking at the psychological benefits of and anthropological rationale for religious rites, particularly rites of passage, and arguing, contra the New Atheists, that people who practice a religious faith often end up mentally healthier for it. This is pretty much where my own prejudices are as well, so I found little to argue with.
DeSteno should for completeness have looked a bit more at how and why religious beliefs go wrong. There are plenty of sectarian conflicts around the world where the protagonists themselves believe that religion is a strong factor, whatever the underlying roots may be. And we see the poisonous effect of extreme religious views in the USA today.
This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest on my unread shelf. Next up on that list is Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships, by Robin Dunbar.
Second paragraph of third essay (“Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali”):
Here, then, are some of the episodes in Dali’s life, from his earliest years onward. Which of them are true and which are imaginary hardly matters: the point is that this is the kind of thing that Dali would have liked to do.
I picked this up while at Novacon (in the wonderful Scrivener’s bookshop) and then left it behind in a taxi when I had almost finished it. Luckily the internet is to the rescue, and it wasn’t difficult to fill in the gaps online. I give links below to the online Orwell archive, though I am not sure of the extent to which it has been authorised by the Orwell estate.
It is stunning to be reminded just how good a writer Orwell was. He applies his ethical and moral standards to all sides, and eloquently deconstructs the hypocrisy of the Left as well as the evil of the Right. There are ten essays here and each of them deserves a short note of its own.
“Decline of the English Murder“, the title piece, from 1946, is about the media coverage of real-life murder cases, the public reaction to them, and the extent to which the war had brutalised public discourse.
A detailed account of an execution in a jail in Burma, effectively and efficiently conveying the horror and pointlessness of the situation.
A very vivid, short piece.
“Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali” is an excoriating review of The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, pointing out Dalí’s many moral failings as described by the artist himself. The takeaway line is,
One ought to be able to hold in one’s head simultaneously the two facts that Dalí is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being.
“How the Poor Die” is about Orwell’s experiences in a city hospital in Paris, and the uncaring and unsympathetic approach of the staff. He doesn’t blame France as such, but the nineteenth-century traditions of healthcare.
“Rudyard Kipling” examines Kipling’s creative genius and defends him against T.S. Eliot’s charge of Fascism, while deeply regretting his imperialist apologetics.
For my own part I worshipped Kipling at thirteen, loathed him at seventeen, enjoyed him at twenty-five and now again rather admire him. The one thing that was never possible, if one had read him at all, was to forget him.
“Raffles and Miss Blandish” contrasts the gentleman thief Raffles in the stories published between 1898 and 1909 by E.W. Horning, with James Hadley Chase’s novel No Orchids for Miss Blandish. I must say I was astonished to learn that James Hadley Chase’s literary career had begun so early – his last book was published in 1984. I have not read any of his books, and after reading Orwell’s blistering review of his first one, I don’t feel I need to.
“Charles Dickens“, at 62 pages, is the longest piece in the book, taking up almost a third of its length. Orwell clearly loved Dickens’ writing but was also alert to its flaws: “his greatest success is The Pickwick Papers, which is not a story at all, merely a series of sketches; there is little attempt at development — the characters simply go on and on, behaving like idiots, in a kind of eternity.” He criticises Dickens for his portrayal of working-class and poor characters, and for his conservative attitude to social change, but still finds much to praise.
When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer. I feel this very strongly with Swift, with Defoe, with Fielding, Stendhal, Thackeray, Flaubert, though in several cases I do not know what these people looked like and do not want to know. What one sees is the face that the writer ought to have. Well, in the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens’s photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man of about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry — in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.
“The Art of Donald McGill” looks at the genre of bawdy seaside postcards and finds a lot to like about them. Orwell was a moralist, but he had a sense of humour.
In the past the mood of the comic post card could enter into the central stream of literature, and jokes barely different from McGill’s could casually be uttered between the murders in Shakespeare’s tragedies. That is no longer possible, and a whole category of humour, integral to our literature till 1800 or thereabouts, has dwindled down to these ill-drawn post cards, leading a barely legal existence in cheap stationers’ windows. The corner of the human heart that they speak for might easily manifest itself in worse forms, and I for one should be sorry to see them vanish.
By ‘nationalism’ I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled ‘good’ or ‘bad’. But secondly — and this is much more important — I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests.
He applies the same critical apparatus to English and Celtic nationalism as to German and Japanese, and lumps in both Stalinism and Trotskyism as well. I found it a very thought-provoking commentary on bigotry and prejudice, and the mind-set that leads to them.
Finally, “Why I Write” was again a piece that I had read before. It was good to read it after nine other essays, pulling the whole thing together,
An interesting bit of self-reflection, available here, in which Orwell starts by describing his own artistic growth, and then the impact of politics on his thoughts and words. But he finished with a description which I recognise from some writers who I have known:
All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.
This collection was put together by Penguin in 1965, though the title has also been used for other Penguin collections with different content. You can get this one here.
See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Tunisia.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
Salammbô
Gustave Flaubert
6,550
2,059
Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization
Richard Miles
4,664
938
The Ardent Swarm
Yamen Manai
8,352
315
The Tremor of Forgery
Patricia Highsmith
2,833
622
Benny and Omar
Eoin Colfer
895
301
The African Quest
Lyn Hamilton
475
204
The Italian
Shukrī Mabkhoūt
2,737
26
The Pillar of Salt
Albert Memmi
459
155
Well, there are a couple of names on that list who I did not expect to see. But it’s a fair cop; both Patricia Highsmith and Eoin Colfer have put their protagonists in Tunisia for the whole book.
There is a real schism between LibraryThing and Goodreads here. Normally the ratio between the two is somewhere around ten or twenty GR raters for every LT user. But the books above by non-Tunisian writers score surprisingly well on LT – the ratio varies from 2.3 (The African Quest) to 5.0 (Carthage Must Be Destroyed). And a phenomenon I had previously observed, that Goodreads scores very well among Arabic speakers and LibraryThing very poorly, is dramatically illustrated here: The Italian, by Shukrī Mabkhoūt, has over a hundred times as many raters on GR as owners on LT.
This week’s winner is Salammbô, a historical novel by Gustave Flaubert set around 140 BCE.during one of the wars between Rome and Carthage. It was his next novel after Madame Bovary and was followed by Sentimental Education. It sounds a bit melodramatic but was clearly popular enough at the time, and indeed now.
This week’s Goodreads winner is a 2017 novel, The Ardent Swarm (originally L’Amas ardent), by Yamen Manai, a Tunisian writer based in Paris. It is about a rural bee-keeper who goes to the city looking for answers to what is happening to his hives, and finds revolution in full flow when he gets there. It is only 174 pages and may well be worth a look.
I hesitated a bit about the eligibility of Carthage Must Be Destroyed, by Richard Miles, as it clearly covers the whole Carthaginian Empire, which at its peak covered all of North Africa apart from Egypt and chunks of Spain, Corsica, Sicily and Malta. But I decided in the end that it probably focuses enough on the territory which is now in Tunisia to be eligible.
I disqualified fourteen books for various reasons, too many to list them all. The only one I’m going to call attention to is The Muqaddimah, by the fourteenth-century writer Ibn Khaldūn, full name Abū Zayd ‘Abdu r-Rahman bin Muhammad bin Khaldūn Al-Hadrami, the introduction to his seventeen-volume history of the world, which is pioneering in its approach to historical verification and to sociology.
Next up is South Sudan, the last African country for a while, and also the first country that I have actually visited since the Netherlands back in September. After that will come Haiti, lovely Belgium and then Jordan.
I went to Montenegro last weekend, maybe for the tenth time in my life; I was attending a conference of the European Movement, and indeed moderated the last panel of the day. On Friday evening I was settling into the pre-drinks for the conference dinner when a discreet cough alerted me to the arrival of President Milatović, less formally dressed than I was.
I realise that unfortunately it looks like there is a straw flask coming out of my head, but that’s life.
The first time I went to Montenegro was in January 2002, where I got invited to the Economics Faculty‘s Christmas party (Christmas is in January in Montenegro). The entire international diplomatic community of Podgorica was there, I think all three or four of them. I also attended the first independence day celebration for about ninety years at the presidential palace in July 2006. At last week’s conference, the opening dinner on Thursday was attended by at least a dozen full ambassadors. Times change.
On the Saturday, I had a late-ish departure and decided that it was about time that I visited the ancient capital of Cetinje (pronounced TSET-in-yeh, [t͡sětiɲe]), where the Prince-Bishops ruled during Montenegro’s independence. Unfortunately it turns out that all the museums except one are closed at weekends, so I mostly took pictures of the outsides of buildings and other public art. Next time I’ll try and come on a weekday.
Court Church in Ćipur, founded 1480, rebuilt 1890Cetinje Monastery, founded 1482, rebuilt 1704, also formerly the centre of governmentThe government building built by Prince-Bishop Petar II Petrović-Njegoš in 1838 and named ‘Biljarda’ after his favourite game. Unfortunately not all that photogenic as it is wide and low.The Blue Palace, built in 1884 as a residence for the heir to the throne, now one of the President’s official residences.The 1910 Government House, now the National MuseumThe former French embassy, built 1909-10, now part of the Central National Library. There is a vicious rumour that the architect Paul Guadet actually intended the plan for the French embassy in Cairo and there was a postal confusion, Research indicates that this is not actually true.The old British Embassy, built 1912, now the town music academy. When Montenegro eventually became independent again in 2005, the UK’s initial representative in Podgorica was a local hire, a friend of mine who is now the Governor of the Central Bank.Coincidentally, the only museum that was open on a Saturday was the one run by the Central Bank, the Museum of Currency which records the many denominations that have been used in Montenegro over the millennia. Montenegro now uses the euro.Statues of a woman and a man in traditional costume outside the Ministry of Culture headquarters. I was not able to find the date or artist.1983 monument to Ivan Crnojević, founder of the city (sculptor Anto Gržetić) 2013 monument by Dimitrije Popović, “To the Glory of Njegoš’ Thought”, commemorating Petar II Petrović-Njegoš2022 statue of Princess Xenia Petrović-Njegoš, also by Dimitrije Popović
As you can tell, it was also a rather grey day, and I think Cetinje will reward a longer visit on a weekday when the sun is shining. But as I wove back down the mountains in my taxi back to Podgorica, the views were pretty stunning.
My usual approach to excerpting fails with this book for reasons that I’ll explain, so I’m taking the attitude that, contra the old saying, more is more.
Second paragraph of third chapter of “The Mannerheim Symphony”:
Should I go on with it? Would Sinnikka hate me if she knew I was reading something so far below her ideals? Would she not rather that I was undergoing torture?
Second paragraph of third chapter of “The Impossible Smile”:
Sweat stood out on his forehead, like grease on a bit of dirty vellum. As he spoke, he held a beaker of bitter-tasting liquid to Wyvern’s lips, letting it slop down his chin while he concentrated on what he was saying. With the sense of urgency harrying him, he had not unlocked the bands around Wyvern’s throat and ankles; but instead of standing over him, he now knelt before him.
Second paragraph of third chapter of “Equator”:
Rain pelted down his neck. His light tropical suit would be soaked in no time. A taxi slowly overtook him, splashing his legs.
I picked this up in excitement at Eastercon in 2022, glad to find a Brian Aldiss book that I had not already read – and then realised that in fact I knew it under its other title, Cracken at Critical, and had read and lost a copy, soon after its original 1987 publication.
It is an intriguing book. The main framing narrative has the title “The Mannerheim Symphony”, and the narrator is a famous Finnish composer, in a Hitler-won-the-war universe, who discovers a dead young woman by the roadside and has to negotiate with his suspicious wife and a police detective who is possessed by a reindeer. So far, so weird.
In the dead woman’s belongings, he finds two short science fiction stories apparently written by her father, Jael Cracken, and reads them. The joke is that the two stories are in fact real Brian Aldiss stories from 1958 and 1965, and one of them was originally published under the pseudonym Jael Cracken.
The first, “The Impossible Smile”, has a telepathic protagonist trying to find allies and avoid enemies in a transitional dictatorial regime between England and the Moon. There’s a flavour of Alfred Bester about it, but it also has some very Aldiss twists.
The second, “Equator” (originally published as “Vanguard from Alpha”) has Earth dealing with immigration from humanoid aliens, mainly in a vividly depicted Sumatra. There are more chase scenes and a beautiful alien babe, and a memorable climax in a vast mechanical setting.
A lot of readers think that the whole thing is rubbish. I don’t; it’s a guilty pleasure for me, Aldiss returning to his early work and repurposing it for the needs of two or three decades later. The haunted police detective is a little jarring, but the composer trying to distract himself from his unfaithfulness to his wife by escaping into science fiction… well, let’s just say that Aldiss knew what he was writing about.
And there are some passages that I find very nicely done.
The solar system progressed toward the unassailable summer star, Vega. The Earth-Moon system danced around the sun, host and parasite eternally hand-in-hand. The planet spun on its unimaginable axis. The oceans swilled forever uneasily in their shallow beds. Tides of multifarious life twitched across the continents. On a small island a man sat and hacked at the casing of a coconut.
It was a step which could only have been taken by a Minister exercising Peel’s authority. With the single exception of Corn Law repeal, his ‘mastery’ over his Cabinet was said to be complete; he had ‘got them as obedient and well trained as the crew of a man of war’.¹ His purchase of Indian corn proved the decisive factor in relieving the distress of 1845-46, but the subsequent value to Ireland of Peel’s boldness, independence and strength of mind was unfortunately outweighed by his belief in an economic theory which almost every politician of the day, Whig or Tory, held with religious fervour. ¹ Peel Memoirs, II, p. 173. Parker, Life and Letters of Sir James Graham, 2nd baronet of Netherby, PC., GCB (1907), Vol. I, p. 26. Treasury Minute, December 9, 1845. Correspondence explanatory of the Measures adopted by H.M. Government for the Relief of Distress arising from the failure of the potato crop in Ireland, H.C., 1846 (735), Vol. XXXVII, p. 2. (Corr. Explan.). Greville, [Memoirs,] Vol. V, p. 16.
Like most schoolchildren in Ireland, I was taught about the famine in history classes as one of the fundamental facts of Irish history. The 1841 census found that the population of Ireland was 8.5 million; today, combining both parts, it is just over seven million. The populations of counties Clare, Fermanagh, Longford, Sligo, Tipperary, Mayo and Cavan today are less than half what they were in 1841. The populations of counties Monaghan and Roscommon are less than a third of their 1841 numbers. Leitrim’s population today is 22% of the 1841 figure. It’s a catastrophe whose impact is still very visible. The immediate impact in the 1840s is vividly shown in this map:
Cecil Woodham-Smith’s 1962 book was the first popular history book of the twentieth century to cover the whole period in detail. It came after successful books on the Charge of the Light Brigade and Florence Nightingale, and she later wrote a biography of Queen Victoria. She was from an Irish military family; she claimed to be descended from the Dukes of Leinster, but I have to say that my research does not support this. She was clearly a good story-teller, and Alan Bennet has a couple of funny anecdotes about her.
We were taught at school that the Famine came about as a combination of the natural disaster of a fungal infection, the potato blight, killing the crop on which most Irish people survived, and the unwillingness of the British government to provide relief for the starving population; meanwhile corn which could have fed the hungry was exported and thousands of impoverished tenants were evicted, driving the great wave of Irish emigration to the USA (and to an extent Canada and Australia) which still shapes Irish-American relations today.
A lot of this is rooted in The Great Hunger. But there’s a huge difference between reading the awful, but sanitised, version of history in my schoolbooks forty-five years ago, and reading the primary documentation that Woodham-Smith assembled. The direct accounts of the misery and squalor endured by the population are really tough reading. One cannot defend the authorities in Dublin Castle or in London on the grounds of ignorance. Indeed, the British Prime Minister wrote: “we have made it the most degraded and most miserable country in the world…all the world is crying shame upon us.”
Woodham-Smith is also very enlightening on the second prong of the received historical account, the ideological opposition of the London government to effective aid. Like most governments, of course, Sir Robert Peel and then Lord John Russell were particularly motivated by their need to keep a parliamentary majority, and Russell’s attempts to take a more proactive stance were blocked by others within his coalition. In the end, the buck stops at the top, and also with Charles Trevelyan, who as Assistant Secretary to the Treasury was the single most influential voice on maintaining laissez-faire (what we would today call libertarian) policies, which killed a million people.
I was less familiar with other parts of the story. I had vaguely clocked the fact that more people died of disease than malnutrition; but Woodham-Smith fleshes this out with details of the epidemics that swept through the devastated population, based to a certain extent on the advance of medical knowledge between 1845 and 1962. The worst of all was the effect on emigrants crammed together in unhealthy conditions on the ships going to North America, and then quarantined together when they arrived. On Grosse Isle, just off Quebec, at least 3,000 Irish immigrants are known to have died of various diseases and at least 5,000 are known to be buried. The true figures are obscure, but those numbers are bad enough.
Although the English politicians were more culpable because they were in power, Irish politicians did not cover themselves in glory either, and Woodham-Smith spends a couple of chapters looking at the failure of the Young Ireland movement and the pathetic 1848 rebellion. I admit that it’s difficult to prescribe what politicians could do as society disintegrates around them, but calling on the starving masses to seize arms against the entrenched forces of the largest army in the world probably isn’t it.
Having said all that, the book ends on a weird high note describing the visit of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert to Ireland in 1849, as a kind of coda to the whole story. The royals had a great time, cruising along the coast from Cork to Dublin and then doing official engagements in Dublin and Belfast. Woodham-Smith presents this as a huge success. I guess it was cathartic, but the direct effects of the famine continued until 1852, so the royal visit wasn’t really the end of the story as it is presented here.
Parenthesis: Victoria’s 1849 visit was the first by a British monarch since her uncle, George IV, had turned up in 1821; and only the second since the War of the Three Kingdoms in 1689-90 had seen James II and William III in direct combat at the Battle of the Boyne. Before that, only three English monarchs had set foot in Ireland during their reigns: Richard II in 1394, King john in 1210 and Henry II in 1171.
Current Winning Ugly: NATO’s War to Save Kosovo, by Ivo H. Daalder and Michael E. O’Hanlon Adventures in Space, eds. Patrick Parrinder and Yao Haijun, by Warren Pleece et al Time Trials Volume 1: The Terror Beneath, by Warren Pleece et al
Last books finished Charlotte impératrice, Tome 1: La Princesse et l’Archiduc, by Fabien Nury and Matthieu Bonhomme Vanishing Point, by Michaela Roessner Spa 1906, by Patrick Weber and Olivier Wozniak If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, by Italo Calvino
Next books The Infinity Race, by Simon Messingham Our Wonderful Selves, by Roland Pertwee Reeds in the Wind, by Grazia Deledda
In 1913, Rabindranath Tagore became the first writer of colour to get the Nobel Prize for Literature, “because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West”. It’s unusual for the prize to be awarded on the basis of a single work, but the Academy makes it pretty clear that the basis of its decision was this collection, translated into English by Tagore himself and published in November 1912, only twelve months before the Nobel Prize was awarded.
The collection has a rapturous foreword by W.B. Yeats and clearly caught the 1912-1913 Zeitgeist. Its 103 poems include 53 of the 157 in the original Bengali collection of the same name, and another 50 of Tagore’s other poems, freely translated.
Second paragraph of third poem (English version):
The light of thy music illumines the world. The life breath of thy music runs from sky to sky. The holy stream of thy music breaks through all stony obstacles and rushes on.
Second paragraph of third poem (Bengali version):
পুরানো আবাস ছেড়ে যাই যবে, মনে ভেবে মরি কি জানি কি হবে, নূতনের মাঝে তুমি পুরাতন, সে কথা যে ভুলে যাই। দূরকে করিলে নিকট, বন্ধু, পরকে করিলে ভাই।
When I leave my old home, I wonder what will happen if I die, Among the new, you are old, That is a thing I forget. You bring the distant near, friend, And make the stranger a brother.
My translation combining Google and Deepl.
I was not able to identify either the Bengali source verse of the English text above, or the English translation of the Bengali text given immediately after it.
I was somewhat bemused by the prominence that this collection of poems thrust upon Tagore. They are very strong expressions of devotion to the divine, without giving offence by supporting any one religion over another, and I found them a bit repetitive and not really inspiring. Tagore had a Hindu background, was and is very popular among Muslim Bengalis, and was writing here (well, translating here) for disaffected Christians. Perhaps I just was not in the mood.
Amartya Sen, in an essay about Tagore on the Nobel Prize website, argues convincingly that the intense but short-lived popularity of Gitanjali is not a fair reflection of Tagore’s talents. His reputation has endured in both India and Bangladesh, both of whose national anthems were written by him. Certainly I had previously read his The Home and the World, and enjoyed it much more, and I may continue my exploration.
One must also give Tagore credit as the first person on record as renouncing a knighthood awarded by the British state. He was knighted by George V in the 1915 New Year’s Honours (as were Lord Kitchener and General Haig), but after the Amritsar Massacre in 1919, he wrote to the Governor-General:
The disproportionate severity of the punishments inflicted upon the unfortunate people and the methods of carrying them out, we are convinced, are without parallel in the history of civilised governments…
The time has come when badges of honour make our shame glaring in their incongruous context of humiliation, and I for my part wish to stand, shorn of all special distinctions, by the side of my countrymen.
I wrote of the two TV episodes that this book is based on:
The Legend of Ruby Sunday summoned back lots of old favourites – UNIT, Mel, the recurrent character of Susan Twist, and most of all, Gabriel Woolf – another actor over the age of 90! – as Sutekh. It looked good, sounded good, and had a good twist, but there wasn’t a lot of substance; it was running around for the sake of running around. I hoped this would be put right this weekend.
And I’m afraid it wasn’t. Empire of Death was a real mess. The visuals were superb (as we have come to take for granted, now that we are Disneyfied), and the lead performances were great as usual. I also loved the explicit throwbacks to Pyramids of Mars, one of my favourite Old Who stories.
But the plot was very weak. As soon as people started disintegrating into dust, I knew that they would all be resurrected. Why should Sutekh care about Ruby’s unknown mother? (And indeed why could he not use the available technology to find her?) What was the point of the devastated future world with one inhabitant? And I missed the explanation of the snow, and of various other things.
I do have sympathy for the narrative of finding Ruby’s parents by DNA… one part of my own real life that I have now seen brought into a Doctor Who plot; and it could have been done much worse.
Still, I had been hoping for better.
I ranked them sixth and eighth out of last year’s eight episodes,
As sometimes happens with novelisations, the written word is capable of fixing some of the flaws of the televised story. The sillier special effects are lost, thank heavens, and we do get some more background to Susan Twist and indeed to Ruby. But it remains a fundamentally messy story, privileging spectacle over substance. Not Handcock’s fault, of course: it’s a good novelisation of a disappointing story. You can get Doctor Who: Empire of Death here.
Human formalwear was a deep research hole. Some of this stuff went back four or five hundred years. Avi decided to give Andy a new interest in life and started saving images to his feeds. Could he get a cravat? No. A tie, though? Did he want a tie? Avi stopped and read on some zunimmer hobbyist’s page a brute-force machine translation of what had probably been an article in T-Standard to start with, all about the origin of the necktie. Of fucking course it was a military thing. Station popped up in the corner of his vision with a cheery little message: It looks like you’re researching human history! This is a controversial topic, so would you like to hear from an expert?
This is a short (22 pages) postscript to the Hugo-winning Some Desperate Glory, written for those of us who attended Novacon last month. Emily Tesh writes, “It follows the thread of the parallel-reality engineer Avicenna, who is both a secondary protagonist and a major antagonist in Some Desperate Glory. I have to confess he was always my favourite character, and it was a pleasure to write about him again.” It is a nice little story of redemption, with some cracking good lines. Hopefully it will get published more widely eventually.
See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Bolivia.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
Women Talking
Miriam Toews
66,544
1,745
Marching Powder: A True Story of Friendship, Cocaine, and South America’s Strangest Jail
Rusty Young
30,320
559
Woven in Moonlight
Isabel Ibañez
10,433
668
The Puma Years
Laura Coleman
14,246
305
The Bolivian Diary
Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara
3,074
927
Jungle: A Harrowing True Story of Survival
Yossi Ghinsberg
9,539
297
Into the Jungle
Erica Ferencik
4,161
211
I Am a Taxi
Deborah Ellis
1,414
177
There’s a real theme of jungle here, with a side-helping of capitalist exploitation. But this week’s winner is a 2018 novel about the women of a Christian cult village who discover that they are all being drugged and sexually assaulted in their sleep. The novel was adapted to become a 2022 film, which will have helped its visibility in the markets.
Isabel Ibañez, author of this week’s runner-up, identifies as a Bolivian writer, born in the USA to Bolivian parents. Rodrigo Hasbún was the highest scoring writer actually born in Bolivia; his Affections just missed the cut, Liliana Colanzi’s You Glow in the Dark being a bit further down.
I disqualified seven books. The Lost City of Z, by David Grann, is mainly set in Brazil. The Shock Doctrine, by Naomi Klein, has a global remit. What the River Knows, by Isabel Ibañez again, has a Bolivian protagonist but is set in Egypt. From Here to Eternity, by Caitlin Doughty, has a global scope. Only about a quarter of Purity, by Jonathan Franzen, is set in Bolivia, the rest in Germany and the USA. The Old Patagonian Express, by Paul Theroux, covers the whole region. And Bolívar, by Marie Arana, also covers a wider region.
Back to Africa for the next two weeks, with Tunisia and South Sudan, and then we go elsewhere, with Haiti and then good old Belgium.
Non-fiction 6 (YTD 74) Madame Prosecutor, by Carla del Ponte The Spark that Survived, by Myra Lewis Williams The Great Hunger, by Cecil Woodham-Smith The Decline of the English Murder, and other essays, by George Orwell How God Works: The Science Behind the Benefits of Religion, by David DeSteno An Experiment with Time, by J.W. Dunne
Non-genre 1 (YTD 38) The Good Wife of Bath, by Karen Brooks (did not finish)
Poetry 1 (YTD 4) Gitanjali, by Rabindranath Tagore
SF 7 (YTD 111) Thief of Time, by Terry Pratchett Salvage, by Emily Tesh The Year Before Yesterday, by Brian W. Aldiss Amongst Our Weapons, by Ben Aaronovitch Metropolis, by Thea von Harbou Camp Damascus, by Chuck Tingle Vanishing Point, by Michaela Roessner
Doctor Who 2 (YTD 28) Time Zero, by Justin Richards Doctor Who: Empire of Death, by Scott Handcock
Comics 6 (YTD 35) Sonic Boom, by Robbie Morrison et al The Ray Bradbury Chronicles, Volume 3, by Ray Bradbury et al Scotland, Épisode 1, by Rodolphe, Leo and Marchal Ness: A Story from the Ulster Cycle, by Patrick Brown Charlotte impératrice, Tome 1: La Princesse et l’Archiduc, by Fabien Nury and Matthieu Bonhomme Spa 1906, by Patrick Weber and Olivier Wozniak
4,700 pages (YTD 72,700) 6/23 (YTD 109/293) by non-male writers (del Ponte, Lewis Williams, Woodham-Smith, Tesh, von Harbou, Roessner) 1/23 (YTD 32/293) by non-white writers (Tagore) 2/23 reread (The Year Before Yesterday, Time Zero) 185 books currently tagged unread, down 4 from last month (some acquisitions at Novacon!), down 75 from November 2024.
Reading now If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, by Italo Calvino Winning Ugly: NATO’s War to Save Kosovo, by Ivo H. Daalder and Michael E. O’Hanlon Adventures in Space, eds. Patrick Parrinder and Yao Haijun
Coming soon (perhaps) Time Trials Volume 1: The Terror Beneath, by Warren Pleece et al The Infinity Race, by Simon Messingham Doctor Who: The Adventures After Doctor Who: Mawdryn Undead, by Peter Grimwade Mawdryn Undead, by Kara Dennison
Our Wonderful Selves, by Roland Pertwee Yet More Penguin Science Fiction, ed. Brian Aldiss Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships, by Robin Dunbar Lost In Time, by A G Riddle Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy, by Christopher R. Hill
The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport, by Samit Basu Reeds in the Wind, by Grazia Deledda The Enigma Score, by Sheri S. Tepper The Leviathan, by Rosie Andrews Say Nothing, by Patrick Radden Keefe The Dead Take the A Train, by Richard Kadrey Best American Comics 2011, ed. Alison Bechdel The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi The Fifth Elephant, by Terry Pratchett Stone and Sky, by Ben Aaronovitch Bruxelles 43, by Patrick Weber and Baudouin Deville Red Planet, by Robert A. Heinlein
Second paragraph of third chapter, though I did not get that far:
I was all alone with my present. With my future.
A retelling of the story of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, from her own viewpoint. Historical cliché piled upon historical cliché; antic diction interweaves with the style of a magazine tell-all article. I did not quite make it to the end of the second chapter. You can get The Good Wife of Bath here.
This was the non-genre fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that list is Our Wonderful Selves, a play by Jon Pertwee’s father Roland Pertwee.
Also read, but I’m not going to review it, The Spark That Survived, by Myra Lewis Williams, the second paragraph of whose third chapter is:
As their first child, I’ve heard their story so many times I can recite it in my sleep.
This was the shortest book that I had acquired in 2022 and not yet read. Next on that pile is Yet More Penguin Science Fiction, edited by Brian Aldiss.
I was gratified to learn that so many African states, including some of the world’s poorest countries, in terms of material wealth but certainly not in terms of human pride and determination, had cooperated with the Rwanda tribunal, arresting and transferring to its custody leaders of the genocide. According to an American nongovernmental organization, the Coalition for International Justice, by the end of 2000, Benin had transferred two accused, Burkina Faso one, Cameroon nine, Ivory Coast two, Mali one, Namibia one, South Africa one, Togo two, Tanzania two, and Zambia three. Kenya had transferred thirteen of the accused; in one arrest operation engineered by Louise Arbour, the Kenyan authorities apprehended seven indicted Rwandan leaders on a single day and subsequently transferred them to the tribunal; the Kenyans knew, however, that they could have arrested and transferred several more; one of the fugitives in Nairobi was Félicien Kabuga, a wealthy businessman who allegedly helped nance Hutu militias and plan the genocide. In contrast, at the close of 2000, NATO, the most powerful military force the world has ever known, had been patrolling Bosnia for five years, and, within its borders, eighteen of the Yugoslavia tribunal’s accused war criminals, including Radovan Karadžić, were still roaming free. As I made my rounds of world capitals seeking assistance to secure the arrest of the Yugoslavia tribunal’s fugitives, I recalled the African states’ cooperation. I brought it up during private meetings with Western leaders. At the time it seemed that, thanks to these African countries, the Rwanda tribunal, much more than the Yugoslavia tribunal, stood to rival Nuremberg in its success at bringing surviving members of the top leadership to the dock.
A memoir by the Chief Prosecutor of the war crimes tribunals for both the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, taking the story up to the end of her Yugoslavia work in 2008. It’s quite a personal story, as she takes us through her childhood in Switzerland and her legal career, and admits her fondness for expensive handbags (though these are also a practical tool of the trade). But the nuts and bolts of it are the difficulty of operating the prosecution side of the first big international criminal court since Nuremberg, and the difficulties that del Ponte experienced from all sides.
By her own account, del Ponte must have been a difficult person to work with, though also by her own account and from what I know myself, she was given very difficult working conditions – the promised political and financial support from the Western democracies who had pushed for the war crimes tribunals in the first place turned out to be very inconstant, staffing of the tribunals varied in quality, and co-operation with the post-conflict authorities on the ground began badly and did not always improve. She was the subject of vicious personal abuse in the media of the countries concerned, and although she claims to have a thick skin, it’s difficult to be completely unmoved by that kind of thing.
It is a bit frustrating that the Rwanda narrative ends in 2003 and the ex-Yugoslavia narrative in 2008 when she went to Argentina as the ambassador of Switzerland; it means that while the individual trees of prosecutorial processes are examined at great length, she doesn’t write as much about the forest of international justice and accountability, which would have been interesting.
I myself was engaged with a lot of the policy debates regarding the former Yugoslavia during the noughties, and there are several conversations in the book that I recognise, not because I was present myself, but because I heard about them shortly afterward from people who were. I don’t believe I ever met del Ponte in person, though I became friendly with several of her close colleagues. My then employers, the International Crisis Group, get a couple of mentions, mostly positive; our line then was unqualified support for the war crimes tribunals.
I’m no longer quite as sure. While there were some very important successes, del Ponte herself is upfront about some of the failures: the Rwanda process became victors’ justice, as nobody from President Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front was prosecuted; Slobodan Milošević, conducting his own defence, distracted the court from establishing the facts with his theatrics, and cheated the verdict by refusing to take the medication which would have saved his life.
I would add that the Kosovo prosecutions by the court did not seem as well founded as the others, and more generally del Ponte’s statements about Kosovo sometimes seem to me the wrong side of speculation rather than factual reporting. In fact Kosovo complied much more swiftly with the demands of the tribunal than did any of the other governments involved, but got and gets little credit for that. Former prime minister Ramush Haradinaj has now been acquitted twice, which also surely counts for something. (And never mind the current Thaçi trial, which is under a different structure.)
I also found a couple of puzzling errors. George Robertson, the NATO Secretary-General, is consistently referred to as Lord John Robinson. And when I checked out a reference to one of the Crisis Group reports that I had edited, I found that our report simply referred back to one of the prosecution documents, in other words by citing us, del Ponte was effectively citing herself. Perhaps this just reflects some haste in getting the draft off her desk as she prepared for her next assignment, in Argentina.
In a sense, those were more innocent days, when it was credible to state that those responsible for atrocities during the course of an armed conflict should, could and would be held accountable by the international community. I’ve seen a couple of interesting recent pieces on this. In The Economist, Rosie Blau looks at the difference between today and Nuremberg. On his own blog, my friend and former colleague Andrew Stroehlein looks at the implications for future conflict resolution. He admits that “international justice can seem like a faith-based community. We believe in it, but proof of its existence is rare, and almost miraculous when it happens.” You have to look for that proof pretty carefully these days, especially with the rule of law itself being so visibly demolished in and by the USA.
This was the top unread book in my pile of books about Kosovo acquired in 2022. Next up there is Winning Ugly: NATO’s War to Save Kosovo, by Ivo Daalder.
Current If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, by Italo Calvino Charlotte impératrice, Tome 1: La Princesse et l’Archiduc, by Fabien Nury and Matthieu Bonhomme Vanishing Point, by Michaela Roessner
Last books finished Amongst Our Weapons, by Ben Aaronovitch Metropolis, by Thea von Harbou The Ray Bradbury Chronicles, Volume 3, by Ray Bradbury et al Scotland, Épisode 1, by Rodolphe, Leo and Marchal Camp Damascus, by Chuck Tingle Ness: A Story from the Ulster Cycle, by Patrick Brown
Next books Time Trials Volume 1: The Terror Beneath, by Warren Pleece et al Winning Ugly, by Ivo Daalder Spa 1906, by Drac
Second paragraph of Chapter 51 (which is the third chapter after the prologues; they are numbered going backwards from 53):
The leather cover is scuffed and worn. The binding is slightly loose and several of the pages have pulled almost free. Others are torn or stained or missing entirely.
Going back to the sequence of Doctor Who novels that I read but did not get around to reviewing in 2014-2015, this is the seventieth of the BBC Eighth Doctor series, and also a bit of a turning point in the sequence. The Doctor and faithful companions Fitz and Anji head off in three different directions for what seem at first to be three different adventures, Fitz in 1893 and the others in 2002, but it becomes clear that their stories are intertwined. Some great circumstantial detail, with the image of the TARDIS in a glacier particularly memorable, and we also pick up a good deal about what makes the companions tick. I was a bit confused by the end, though, as it is a while since I read this series and I had forgotten the exact significance of recurring characters Sabbath and Trix. Little mercy is shown to new readers here. But Justin Richards is usually a reliably entertaining writer, and here he was also the overall editor of the series: he gave himself the task of twisting it in a slightly different direction, and succeeded.
The girl, who had been admiring her new hat in the mirror, tweaked the already low neckline of her dress for slightly more exposure, just in case the caller was male, and went and opened the door.
Gradually getting through my stack of Discworld books which I had not written up previously. I think that in fact I had not read this before – although I added it to my LibraryThing catalogue when I set it up in 2005, I also have a record that I got a second-hand copy in 2010, and it did not seem familiar to me.
There are several quite disparate elements to the story. The main narrative concerns one Jeremy Clockson (groan) who is building the perfect clock, which incidentally will bring the world to an end. There’s Susan Sto Helit trying to fix things because her grandfather cannot due to handwavium. There’s a spoof of Chinese kung-fu films with the humble sweeper in the monastery turning out to be the venerable monk with arcane talents. There’s a silly bit with the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse. The most successful bit for me was the portrayal of the Auditors of Time, grim inhuman regulators of the type that Pratchett hated, but who are undone by their interaction with humanity (and the other inhabitants of Discworld). All in all, I thought that balancing these various things sucked up some of the energy that might have otherwise gone into plot and humour. So, not my favourite Pratchett, though not awful either. You can get Thief of Time here.
Next up: The Fifth Elephant, of which I have fond memories.
Second frame of third issue of “Terror of the Cabinet Noir”:
The Doctor: Woo-hoo-ha-ha-ha! / “We are the Darkness! You would do well to fear us!” / Well, sorry to burst that delusional bubble, but we don’t. Julie: We don’t?
Two rather well developed Twelfth Doctor stories here. The first, “Terror of the Cabinet Noir”, is a nicely set up adventure mainly in an alternative history 17th century France, with the historical opera singer and adventuress Julie d’Aubigny as a one-off companion. It’s true to the spirit of The Girl in the Fireplace, though obviously with different characters and a completely different alien threat. An affirming read.
The other story, “Invasion of the Mindmorphs”, has the Doctor going to confront the creators of a comic strip called Time Surgeon with an eerie resemblance to his own adventures. A bit more could have been done with this concept, but it’s a funny enough idea and executed very much as a Capaldi era story.
See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Burundi.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
Small Country
Gaël Faye
28,162
682
Baho!
Roland Rugero
150
37
The True Sources of the Nile
Sarah Stone
101
44
The Night the Angels Came: Miracles Of Protection And Provision In Burundi
Chrissie Chapman
137
19
The Tears of a Man Flow Inward: Growing Up in the Civil War in Burundi
Pacifique Irankunda
171
10
Life after Violence: A People’s Story of Burundi
Peter Uvin
60
22
Burundi: Ethnic Conflict and Genocide
René Lemarchand
30
31
From Bloodshed to Hope in Burundi: Our Embassy Years during Genocide
Robert Krueger
36
19
This week’s winner is by Gaël Faye, who identifies himself as French-Rwandan, though in fact he grew up in Bujumbura, the capital of Burundi, and Small Country reflects his experiences there (though we are warned not to take it as autobiography).
I cannot remember a case where there was such a big gap between the winner and the rest of the field.
Roland Rugero, the author of this week’s runner-up, does identify as Burundian, and Baho! is set in a fictional Burundian village. The top book set in Burundi by a women from Burundi is Weep Not, Refugee, by Marie-Therese Toyi.
I was not sure about the setting of The True Sources of the Nile, by Sarah Stone, but I gave it the benefit of the doubt. I also looked closely at The Chimpanzee Whisperer, by Stany Nyandwi, and in the end decided that probably less than half of it is set in the author’s homeland of Burundi.
I disqualified dozens of books here. There is a huge number of books which have been given the ‘Burundi’ tag on either Goodreads, LibraryThing or both, but have less than 50% (usually much less than 50%) set there.
There is for two slightly different reasons. The first is that there are a lot of books about Africa, or Central Africa, that touch on Burundi but only as a minor element of a bigger picture. The second is that Burundi’s awful conflict of the 1990s tends to get lumped in with the even more awful conflict in Rwanda next door, which usually gets top billing. Even Small Country, this week’s winner, has a Rwandan protagonist.
Also I noted Strength in What Remains, by Tracy Kidder, last week as a book which is more about Burundi than Rwanda. This is true, but it is mainly set in the USA.
Next week we move away from Africa, to Bolivia, and then back again to Tunisia and South Sudan, but they will be the last African countries for a while; in four weeks time we come to Haiti.
Next in my occasional series of incomprehensible accounts of triumph in playing the game of Diplomacy online against AI opponents, this is one where I’m particularly proud that a normally losing strategy, sending a single unit behind enemy lines to pick up the odd supply centre, actually worked in the end. Otherwise I was both lucky and unlucky, with the 18th centre effectively being my recapture of one of my own home bases.
Spring 1901
There really isn’t much flexibility about Germany’s opening moves. You have to move your fleet to Denmark, to keep Russia out of Sweden; you have to move your Berlin army to Kiel, to hopefully take Holland unless England decides to do something weird; and you have to try to move to Burgundy, to prevent a French army coming up against your borders. This does leave your southern flank uncovered, but it’s rare for Italy or Russia to try anything funny, and very improbable that Austria will move to Tyrol or Bohemia.
Other countries surprised me a bit. England’s move north is normal enough; there really are only two possibilities even if the northern variation is less common. France’s move north was more unexpected, welcome in that it would give England something other than me to think about, but unwelcome in that it might work too well. Italy’s move to Piedmont was very unusual.
When Seel and Orien arrived they were dressed splendidly for the occasion. They seemed taller than I remembered, proud and graceful, and treated me like a bride, which I supposed, in a sense, I was. Seel put white lilies in my hair, avoiding my eyes, and offered me a goblet of blue glass. The liquid inside it looked murky and tasted foul. I downed it as quickly as I could. They would take no chances with me; I would be drugged almost senseless.
A lot of people really love this book. I didn’t. The protagonist is adopted into the superhuman, supersexy Wraeththu, who are crushing the inferior homo sapiens (that’s people like you and me) and yet spend a lot of time violently arguing internally about power structures and the sexual pecking order, which are basically the same thing. It’s Storm Constantine’s best known single book, but I don’t think the racial and gender politics work for today. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2022. Next on that pile is Vanishing Point, by Michaela Roessner.
Jim, a pipe in his teeth, leaned back against the oak pew. His eyes shifted from the game and went to Nancy, who, with her chin supported in the crutch of her two hands, was working out her next move.
This was the best selling book of 1925 in the USA, by the largely forgotten Arthur Hamilton Gibbs – it’s his best-known book on both Goodreads and LibraryThing, but has only 11 raters on Goodreads and only 9 owners on LibraryThing. (The Great Gatsby, also published in 1925, has been rated by getting on for six million Goodreads users, and has almost 80,000 owners on LibraryThing, as of present writing.)
It’s a coming of age story about a young Englishwoman, who goes to Paris, discovers herself, discovers love, discovers that men are both tempting and awful, and finds her destiny back in England looking after her disabled father and developing her own Art; then at the end, one of the men turns out not to have been so awful after all.
There are comic yokels / grovelling working class folk, and although the heroine at one point seems ready to break into full feminist independence, the book doesn’t have the courage of its convictions and goes for a safe ending. It is not as funny as it thinks it is, and, like its heroine, is coy rather than sexy.
It is set immediately before the war and during its first half, and perhaps the readers of 1925 liked the story it told about the time before and during the collective loss of innocence. However I can’t really construct a case for rediscovering it as a lost classic. You can get Soundings here, but NB that the text is riddled with electronic scanning errors.
These both won the Hugo and Nebula Awards for work of 2007, awarded in 2008.
The second paragraph of the third section of The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate is:
He was wandering by the Zuweyla Gate, where the sword dancers and snake charmers perform, when an astrologer called to him. “Young man! Do you wish to know the future?”
Back in 2008, I ranked it second on my ballot, behind The Cambist and Lord Iron, by Daniel Abraham, and wrote:
A lovely lovely story of time travel at the time of the Abbasid Caliphate, working up all those human themes of loss and love in a richly imagined fantastic environment that Chiang has done so well before. I expect this will win.
I still think that it is really good, and it has certainly proved to have staying power. It’s a story of time travel paradoxes, predestination and acceptance. I love Borges’ short story “The Other”, in which the writer meets his younger self and finds that they do not understand each other. Chiang riffs on this theme as well, with the extra twist that the older self comes to collude in his younger self’s destiny. I also give it good marks for the subtly different portrayals of Baghdad and Cairo, respectful rather than Orientalist (at least that was my take).
The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate was the only work on both the Hugo and Nebula ballots for Best Novelette that year. The other Hugo finalists were “The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairy Tale of Economics”, by Daniel Abraham; “Dark Integers”, by Greg Egan; “Finisterra”, by David Moles and “Glory”, by Greg Egan. The other Nebula finalists were “Child, Maiden, Mother, Crone”, by Terry Bramlett; “The Children’s Crusade”, by Robin Wayne Bailey; “The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs Of North Park After the Change”, by Kij Johnson; “The Fiddler of Bayou Teche”, by Delia Sherman; “Pol Pot’s Beautiful Daughter (Fantasy)”, by Geoff Ryman; and “Safeguard”, by Nancy Kress.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union starts as follows (explicit surgical details redacted):
Instead, he lights a papiros. After a decade of abstinence, Landsman took up smoking again not quite three years ago. His then-wife was pregnant at the time. It was a much-discussed and in some quarters a long-desired pregnancy—her first but not a planned one. As with many pregnancies that are discussed too long there was a history of ambivalence in the prospective father. At seventeen weeks and a day—the day Landsman bought his first package of Broadways in ten years-they got a bad result. Some but not all of the cells that made up the fetus, code-named Django, had an extra chromosome on the twentieth pair. A mosaicism, it was called. It might cause grave abnormalities. It might have no effect at all. In the available literature, a faithful person could find encouragement, and a faithless one ample reason to despond. Landsman’s view of things-ambivalent, despondent, and with no faith in anything prevailed… Three months later, Landsman and his cigarettes moved out of the house on Tshernovits Island that he and Bina had shared for nearly all the fifteen years of their marriage. It was not that he couldn’t live with the guilt. He just couldn’t live with it and Bina, too.
I ranked it third on my ballot that year, writing:
The setting is an alternate present where a large chunk of Alaska was colonised by Jewish refugees after the Second World War, and the Israelis lost in 1948 – there are other differences too, but those are the major ones. Now, sixty years on from those events, the Alaskan territory is within weeks of reverting to US control and its inhabitants face displacement again.
Chabon’s viewpoint character is a memorably seedy and depressed detective, trying to solve a murder which appears to be linked to chess and a Messianic Jewish sect, and at the same time dealing with his own professional and family dilemmas. The tenuous society of Sitka is well depicted at all its levels. In places it’s terrifically sad. I was a bit dubious about the portrayal of conspiratorial politics at the highest political level, but perhaps that was part of the point.
However, it’s not going at the top of my Hugo list; I don’t think it is sfnal enough. Apart from the ahistorical setting, there is no sfnal content (well, a couple of miracles are hinted at, but I’m not sure that counts). The genre of this novel is detective, not sf; the setting is not much more counterfactual than Agatha Christie’s country houses, or Lindsey Davis’ richly imagined and researched Rome, or Ellis Peters’ medieval Shrewsbury (which also gets the very occasional miracle, but that doesn’t make it fantasy).
Don’t get me wrong: I liked the book enormously. The setting seemed to me a very thought-provoking response to the history of Jews, in America in particular, since 1940, far better than the other attempts I’ve read recently. I’ll probably end up ranking it ahead of the other two nominees which I haven’t yet read and of which I don’t have huge expectations. But, while in a lot of ways it may be the best novel of the three I’ve read so far, it lacks the sensawunda that I got in spades from both Halting State and Brasyl, so loses my vote on that account.
Coming back to it seventeen years later, I was not sure that I liked it as much. It’s difficult to believe the political set-up; where are the people who would have been lobbying in Washington to allow Sitka to remain Jewish? Is political extremism really monopolised by religious extremists? There is an intersection, sure, but it’s rarely the perfect overlay depicted here. There’s a bit of an assumption that the experience of urban American Jews applies to Jews everywhere, and I don’t see that that really tracks. And I must also say that I found it rather a long book. Anyway, you can get The Yiddish Policemen’s Union here.
In the Best Novella categories, three stories were nominated for both Hugo and Nebula: the Nebula-winning “The Fountain of Age”, by Nancy Kress; “Memorare”, by Gene Wolfe; and “Stars Seen Through Stone”, by Lucius Shepard. The other two Hugo finalists were “Recovering Apollo 8”, by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, which I voted for, and “All Seated on the Ground”, a particularly silly story by Connie Willis, which won. The other Nebula finalists were “Awakening”, by Judith Berman; “The Helper and His Hero”, by Matt Hughes; and “Kiosk”, by Bruce Sterling.
There was no overlap in the Short Story categories. The Hugo finalists were “Tideline”, by Elizabeth Bear, which won, and also got my own vote; “Distant Replay”, by Mike Resnick; “Last Contact”, by Stephen Baxter; “A Small Room in Koboldtown”, by Michael Swanwick; and “Who’s Afraid of Wolf 359?”, by Ken MacLeod. The Nebula finalists were “Always”, by Karen Joy Fowler, which won; “Captive Girl”, by Jennifer Pelland; “Pride”, by Mary Turzillo; “The Story of Love”, by Vera Nazarian; “Titanium Mike Saves the Day”, by David D. Levine; and “Unique Chicken Goes In Reverse”, by Andy Duncan.
The Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation Long Form went to Stardust, and for Short Form to Blink. The Nebula for Best Script went to Pan’s Labyrinth.
Next in this sequence is The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi.
Current Amongst Our Weapons, by Ben Aaronovitch Metropolis, by Thea von Harbou
Last books finished The Great Hunger, by Cecil Woodham-Smith The Year Before Yesterday, by Brian W. Aldiss The Decline of the English Murder, and other essays, by George Orwell How God Works: The Science Behind the Benefits of Religion, by David DeSteno An Experiment with Time, by J. W Dunne
Next books Vanishing Point, by Michaela Roessner Camp Damascus, by Chuck Tingle If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, by Italo Calvino
