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.
Apologies for length, but this is an important monograph about an important Doctor Who story.
I first watched the original version of The Daleks back in 2007, from the DVD set of the first three Who stories. I wrote then:
Great fun. I had of course read David Whitaker’s novelisation, roughtly 25 years ago. A few things that sprang to mind:
1) the settings were very convincing – the Dalek city (OK, we know with the eye of hindsight that it was a model shot), the sense that this was a big landscape with forest, swamp and caves.
2) Barbara’s romance with Ganatus – there is surely some fanfic dealing with that somewhere?
3) The devious Doctor, sabotaging the TARDIS deliberately to get a chance to explore the city.
4) The time travellers, despite Barbara’s relations with Ganatus, are all set to just bugger off and leave the Thals to their doom at the end of episode 4.
5) The end of episode 6 is indeed a literal cliff-hanger – with a brutal resolution
6) Terry Nation’s attack on pacifism. A lot more ideological than I remembered from the book.
7) The Daleks at the end talking about the total extermination of the Thals practically raise their plungers in Nazi salutes – sounds silly when I describe it but actually very effective.
8) the one bit that really didn’t work – the fight at the end; the time-travellers and Thals win too easily.
Anyhow, well worth it. I watched with the closed caption commentary, which to be honest was more annoying than helpful on the whole. Though it was interesting that the very day of the filming of the Doctor’s first encounter with the Daleks was 22 November 1963, the day before the first Doctor Who (recorded over a month before) was to be broadcast, and also the day of John F Kennedy’s assassination. (And of the deaths of C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley; but who remembers that?)
When I came back to it in 2009 early in my Great Rewatch, I wrote:
The Daleks really is where Doctor Who gets going. There is a case to be made that the pepperpots never get so interesting again. Certainly they are incomprehensible, blankly hostile, psychopathically destructive, and strangely watchable. The conversion of the Thals from pacifists to fighters has some moral ambiguity – the Tardis crew are motivated by their own need to get away, and there is a certain air of tragedy even in the final victory. (Shame that the actual final fight scene is a bit crap.) And Barbara gets the first Who romance with Ganatus (comprehensively rewritten to Barbara/Ian by David Whitaker for the book).
Coming back to it again, I felt that it holds up really well, especially if you are sensitive to the cramped sets and other constraints of the production. The four main cast are very good, clearly getting into their stride. And I should have previously mentioned the superb incidental music of Tristram Cary. You can get it in this box set.
The colorised and abbreviated version of the story released a few years back (you can get it here) foolishly dumps Cary’s music, misses some of the plot and loses out a bit on pacing, but ends with this lovely montage of the rest of the Hartnell era.
I know the novelisation well, and re-read it for this post. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
I ran towards the sound, the branches of trees cracking and powdering in clouds around me as I forced my way through. I found Barbara with her back pressed up against a tree, the knuckles of one hand pushed hard against her teeth. She was staring away from me into some bushes. I caught the glint of the eyes of some animal or other and stopped dead still.
There was a time when this was literally the only Doctor Who book in existence (under its excellent original 1964 title of Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks); indeed it was the only commercially available representation of any Doctor Who story, in those days long before video-recorders (let alone DVDs). So we have Whitaker taking much greater liberty with Terry Nation’s TV script than almost any other novelisation (John Lucarotti’s treatment of The Massacre differs even more from the story as broadcast, but he was reverting back to his own original script).
And the result is quite possibly the best of the novelisations, judged as a novel. The opening of the story is comprehensively rewritten, Ian being an unemployed research scientist who accidentally encounters Barbara, who has been tutoring the mysterious Susan, and gets involved with the Doctor and his Tardis. So much time is invested – wisely – in setting the scene that we are a third of the way through the book before we reach the equivalent point to the end of the TV story’s first episode (out of seven).
The biggest novelty, for those of us who have read almost any of the subsequent hundreds of Who books, is that the whole story is told in the first person, from Ian’s point of view. (It’s not unknown in later Who literature, but it is very unusual.) This does require a certain amount of narrative juggling, but Whitaker gets away with it better than I remembered from when I first read this, three decades ago.
Today’s generation of fans will squee at the pronounced sexual tension in the Ian/Barbara relationship here – the TV story has Barbara close to flirting with Ganatus, one of the Thals, but he barely gets to look at her on the printed page. Poor Susan rather fades into the background as well after she has done her mercy run to the forest. The characterisation of the Doctor is much more harsh and edgy than Hartnell’s depiction; since Whitaker was the story editor, perhaps this was what he had originally in mind? (A possibility supported by the surviving first cut of the first ever episode.)
And the Daleks themselves are pretty memorable here, though Whitaker seems a bit confused about their size – three feet high at one point, four foot six at another, though the illustrations are of our “normal” sized pepperpots. However, this confusion is compensated for by the glorious description of the mutants within the metal casings, and their glass-enclosed leader. The TV show has never managed such memorable presentations of the creatures inside, though it has occasionally tried. (The versions encountered by the Ninth Doctor come closest.)
Anyway, this is an excellent read, well worth hunting down.
In for a penny, in for a pound, I thought, so I went and also rewatched the Peter Cushing film Dr Who and the Daleks. Last time I saw it, in 2010, I wrote:
As a Doctor Who fan, it is impossible not to judge this film in comparison with the original seven-part Dalek story, so I won’t really try. The positives: it is in colour, which is a huge difference. It looks better (except, oddly enough, the interior of Dr. Who’s Tardis, which just looks like a film set with some machines dotted around it). The plot is tighter – it’s difficult (with one exception, which I’ll get to) to remember what has been cut from the original story to produce a film half its length, and some of the best bits are still there. The music is decent – not as unearthly as in the TV version, but not offensive either.
The huge difference, however, is in the performances and portrayals. Peter Cushing plays elderly slightly comical scientist Dr. Who, who keeps a time machine called ‘Tardis’ in his back garden, shaped like a police box for some reason. He doesn’t have the grumpy gravitas of William Hartnell, but I detect some homage to his portrayal in the approach taken by Sylvester McCoy. Roberta Tovey as his nine-year-old granddaughter Susie is actually rather good, and recasts Carole Anne Ford with perhaps a bit more grit.
When I first saw this on a Saturday morning repeat aged about 11, the surprise was that Ian is played by Roy Castle, who of course I knew as the presenter of the BBC children’s programme Record Breakers. This was actually his second film role – he had also appeared with Peter Cushing in another Max Subotsky film with a doctor in the title (Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors) earlier in 1965. Castle’s Ian starts as a clown but more or less settles into the heroic sidekick to Cushing’s Who by the end, probably the closest of the four main characters to the TV version (though William Russell’s Ian is much brainier).
The most serious cut in the film as compared to the TV original is Barbara, Dr. Who’s other grand-daughter, played by Jennie Linden. She gets almost nothing to do, except that her over-vigorous embrace of Ian sets Tardis going in the first place. (And even that is portrayed as Ian’s clumsiness.) She is practically background scenery, especially when compared to Jacqueline Hill’s history teacher.
Rewatching it in close proximity to the original TV story brought home to me how much better the latter is. Just compare the almost wordless acting of Hartnell and Russell here:
versus Cushing, Castle and Tovey playing the same scene for weak laughs here:
Obverse Books have published a novelisation of the film, ostensibly by “Alan Smithee” but I believe actually by Iain McLaughlin. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
Ian considered himself to be fit and healthy. He had been drilled into good shape during his National Service and he was still active now, playing football twice a week and turning out for the local cricket side during the summer. He also went dancing – hopefully from now on with Barbara – every weekend, but even he was feeling the effects of the journey. He was out of breath and perspiring heavily. His shirt was soaked with sweat and his muscles ached.
It made me realise that the visual comedy of the film is one of its key elements, very difficult to transfer to the printed page! Anyway, you can get it here.
So, on to the latest of the Black Archives, Oliver Wake’s monograph on The Daleks, concentrating on the original TV series but also referring to the Whitaker novelisation and the Cushing film, and to later Dalek and Terry Nation stories. There is a real break of format with previous Black Archives, with no less than eighteen short chapters each addressing a different aspect of the story, and building the overall case (which is surely unassailable anyway) that The Daleks can be seen as the crucial founding text of the show as a whole. A short introduction explains the book’s agenda:
I aim, firstly, to explore the influences and inspirations Nation called upon in devising the story; secondly, to analyse the story’s mixed authorship and the ways in which varied contributors gave it meaning; and thirdly, to examine The Daleks’ world-building as a piece of televisual fantasy fiction.
The first chapter, “Commissioning The Daleks”, recapitulates what we know about how the story came into being – it was written very quickly, which meant that it was ready for production when an early gap needed to be filled.
The second chapter, “The Bomb”, looks at how the story portrays radiation sickness and the neutron bomb.
The third chapter, “A Climate of Fear”, looks at other portrayals of the aftermath of nuclear war in fiction up to the mid-1960s. Its second paragraph is:
Stories of nuclear weapons had been science fiction and consequently were hidden away in niche publications. After the Second World War they began to emerge into the mainstream, in Britain at least; in the more conservative USA they tended to remain hived off in the sci-fi niche¹. Every conceivable scenario of nuclear devastation was played out in literature, much of it ill-informed and scientifically illiterate. ¹ Brians, Paul, Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction, unpaginated online edition, Chapter 1.
The fourth chapter, “The Survivors”, queries the extent to which the story is meant to show the future of Planet Earth humanity.
The fifth chapter, “The Dead Planet”, looks at the Petrified Jungle and also in some detail at the Magnadon (the dead metallic lizard).
The sixth chapter, “Alien Sound”, looks at the brilliant soundscape of the story created by Tristram Cary’s music and Brian Hodgson’s effects. As I noted earlier, this is one point where the Cushing film is seriously deficient.
The seventh chapter, “The Time Machine”, looks at the influence of Wells’ novel and George Pal’s film adaptation on The Daleks.
The eighth chapter, “The Mutants”, looks at what we are told about both Thals and Daleks as mutations, and points out the inconsistencies. (I must say I prefer this approach to desperately trying to retcon everything.)
The ninth chapter, “The Aryan Thals”, points out the problematic of the perfect Thal race being tall and blond, leaning again on The Time Machine.
The tenth chapter, “Pacifism, the Thals and Terry Nation”, goes into Nation’s well-documented political views, which he expressed as pacifist and sometimes socialist. (So Gareth Roberts is completely wrong on this, not surprisingly.) Ian’s argument with the Thals is Nation’s argument with himself.
The eleventh chapter, “Gender and Authority”, looks at the story’s problematic treatment of gender roles among the Thals and the character of Dyoni, and queries how both Thal and Dalek societies are actually governed.
The twelfth chapter, “Martians and Ants”, looks at the influence of The War of the Worlds (both the Wells novel and the 1953 film) and the early John Wyndham story “Wanderers of Time” on The Daleks.
The thirteenth chapter, “The Power (and Irradiation) of the Daleks”, looks at the Daleks’ dependence on static electricity, their life support systems, and their vulnerability to radiation, and then asks, what do they eat?
The fourteenth chapter, “Outer Space Robot People”, makes some interesting points about who the Daleks are shown to be, as opposed to later portrayals.
In their first appearance, the Daleks are scared isolationists. They are survivalists trapped in their fallout shelter, unable to go outside but possessive of the world beyond their city. This jealousy manifests as paranoia and xenophobia when the Doctor’s party and then the Thals come calling.
The sixteenth chapter, “The Direction of the Daleks”, calls attention to the work of Christopher Barry and Richard Martin in bringing the story (and the Daleks) alive.
The seventeenth chapter, “Extermination, Then?” looks at how the Daleks’ catchphrase slipped subtly into the script.
The eighteenth chapter, “Dal to Lek”, looks at the sources for the name Dalek. These include Wyndham’s “Wanderers of Time” and Nation’s general fondness for cycling through similar names. Wake considers and discounts the relevance of the fact that “dalek”/“daleko” means “far away” in the languages once known collectively as Serbo-Croat.
If I may divert for a moment, I am not quite so sure. My relationship with Balkan nationalisms is ambivalent, but there is a haunting Serbian First World War song, “Tamo daleko”, about the exiled remnants of the Serbian army sheltering on Corfu. (As a Serbian military friend once said to me, it’s not so much like Dire Straits’ “So Far Away From Me”, which would be a literal translation of the title, as “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary”, only less jolly.) I do not know if Nation was ever exposed to, say, a Serbian restaurant playing live or recorded folk music, or some other aspect of Serbian culture, but I can imagine him hearing this song somewhere, somehow, and “daleko” sticking in his subconscious memory. It is the heavily emphasised second word of each of the first three verses; even if you don’t speak any Serbian, it is difficult to miss.
A brief conclusion pulls all this together and looks at questions of authorship.
An even briefer note looks at one of the story’s many variant titles, “Beyond the Sun”, and how this might have come to be.
I was a bit worried at first that I wasn’t going to like this Black Archive; Wake’s style starts out a little jerky. But he settles down fairly quickly and delivers a must-read analysis of one of the most important Doctor Who stories. You can get it here.
Well, Switzerland marks the 100th country in the world by population (of 234 on the Worldometer list), so i thought it would be a good moment to look back over the last two years of posting about the best known book in each country.
First of all, of course my methodology is a white, Western measure of the extent to which particular authors and works are recognised in the mainly Anglophone world of LibraryThing, Goodreads and StoryGraph. This doesn’t make my analysis valueless, but it does mean that each of my posts should be regarded as a jumping-off point rather than a definitive answer to the question, “What should I read about this country?”
(I was very amused when a work colleague, planning to go on holiday to Tunisia, told me that he had asked an AI agent what books to read about the country and it recommended my Tunisia page and therefore Flaubert’s Salammbô – I hope that the fictional account of Carthage in the third century BC was useful.)
Second, for developing economies there is therefore a bias towards Western writers who have gone in as white saviours – literally in a couple of cases where there is a strong Christian element to the story. For each country I have therefore tried to also note the top-ranked local authors, and in cases where the list is rather male, the top-rated women authors.
Third, I’m genuinely finding this project fun, especially as we get to countries that I know less and less about – though even in the more familiar European territory, I’m finding new work published since I did a similar analysis for European countries only in 2015.
Of the hundred books so far, there are fifty known to be by men, forty-nine known to be by women, and the Epic of Gilgamesh whose author is unknown.
54 are by authors who (in my judgement) are not from the country that they have written about in this case, but 46 are by local writers.
I count one play (Italy); two graphic novels (Iran and Côte d’Ivoire); 19 science fiction or fantasy; 22 non-fiction; and 56 fiction other than plays, graphic novels, or sff.
See here for methodology, though NB that I’m now also using numbers from Storygraph. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Switzerland.
Title
Author
GR raters
LT owners
SG reviewers
Heidi
Johanna Spyri
212,815
14,145
16,290
The Sanatorium
Sarah Pearse
205,740
2,418
29,120
The Magic Mountain
Thomas Mann
63,457
11,051
4,251
The Other Einstein
Marie Benedict
88,207
1,757
7,882
The Physicists
Friedrich Dürrenmatt
44,556
2,126
5,881
The Enigma of Room 622
Joël Dicker
76,499
1,019
5,884
The Visit
Friedrich Dürrenmatt
39,324
2,078
5,166
The English Assassin
Daniel Silva
45,379
2,413
2,200
When I did this survey less systematically back in 2015, I awarded the prize to Frankenstein; but I have checked, and in fact considerably less than half of the book is set in Switzerland. So I have had to disqualify it here.
I declared Heidi the runner up in 2015, and I declare her the winner this time. In case you don’t know, it’s a wholesome tale of an orphan girl, brought up by her grumpy grandfather, bringing hope and healing. Johanna Spyri, the author, lived in Switzerland all her life. (Incidentally the bridge over the Rhine near Maienfeld, the town where most of Heidi is set, is called the Tardis Bridge. Yes, really.)
The Sanatorium was only published in 2020, so would not have been on my 2015 list, but it has clearly done very well, rivaling Heidi on Goodreads and actually beating her on StoryGraph. It’s a murder mystery set in, er, a sanatorium. The Magic Mountain a classic novel which came third in my 2015 survey, comes third again; it too is set in a sanatorium.
The Other Einstein is about Albert’s first wife, Mileva, and her unhappy life with him in Zürich. She was an ethnic Serb from what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire and is now Vojvodina, and was also a talented scientist to the point that she may deserve credit for some of the work published under Albert’s name.
I am not completely sure about The Physicists, a play about three physicists in, yes, a sanatorium. But it was originally written in German, and the name of the sanatorium, Les Cerisiers, is French, and Dürrenmatt is in general a very Swiss writer, so I think it counts.
The Enigma of Room 622 is a mystery novel by French-speaking Swiss writer Joël Dicker. All his previous books were set in America, but this one is in a somewhat fictionalized Geneva.
The Visit, like The Physicists, is a play by Dürrenmatt which is not explicitly set in Switzerland, but the protagonist’s real name turns out to be Kläri, which is very Swiss.
Again I wasn’t completely sure about The English Assassin, a baroque tale of wartime looting of Jewish property coming home to roost decades later, but I think enough of it happens in and around Zürich to count for my purposes.
Thanks to StoryGraph we gained The Enigma of Room 622, which scored relatively poorly on the less Francophone LibraryThing, and lost Memories, Dreams, Reflections by Carl Jung. Hotel du Lac, by Anita Brookner, was in a very close ninth place both with and without StoryGraph numbers.
I disqualified a lot of other books without needing to think too hard. Only one apart from Frankenstein caused me any head-scratching – Daisy Miller by Henry James. However the action switches to Italy from Switzerland just before the half-way point in the book.
The next four countries are very different from each other – Sierra Leone, followed by Belarus, then Laos and then Turkmenistan.
In case you hadn’t noticed, this year’s Hugo Voter Packet is out, with tremendous efficiency; I had however already located a lot of the finalists online, and wrote up this listing of the stories in advance.
1) My top vote goes to “In My Country”, by Thomas Ha. I thought this was a tremendously creepy depiction of a totalitarian society where thought control and euphemism are heavy and omnipresent. Also on the Nebula ballot.
You didn’t know these things about him when he first moved to your city. You’d talked yourself out of the associate’s degree before high school graduation, pragmatism trumping college dreams, and taken an apprenticeship as an electrician with a program specializing in bot tech. You were progressing well, nearing the end of your training. You liked unravelling tricky problems the best, diagnosing a malfunctioning bot like a doctor might a patient.
We adopt a pair of cats. We name them Shaun and Liz.
4) “Wire Mother” by Isabel J. Kim. What do you do if you are a teenager whose mother has been replaced by an AI? Second paragraph of third section:
Rina’s in her late twenties. Before there was Rina, there was Wren, and before Wren, there was Agatha, all of whom were pretty, strawberry-blonde women who Cassie’s father had dismissed before they turned thirty. On the screens, Cassie’s mom is forever twenty-five. Some digital people age in simulacrum. Others stay the same as when they were created, and AMY was made the moment that Cassie’s father had the funds to make himself a wife
5) “Laser Eyes Ain’t Everything” by Effie Seiberg, about a superhero who is also a wheelchair user. I appreciate the message but I found the prose a bit clunky. Second paragraph of thirdsection:
The union leader, a woman named “Big Dig” with hands like gopher claws, went through the agenda. Most of it was assigning press stuff. But eventually we got to the one real thing on the agenda—the union wanted to defeat Doctor Croc, a green scaly menace who’d been razing buildings, most recently a conference center.
6) “Six People to Revise You” by J.R. Dawson. I didn’t really understand this one, and to the extent that I did, I wasn’t sure if it was sf. Second paragraph of third section:
In anticipation of the 25th anniversary of my bookblogging, which will come in late 2028, I’m reposting my monthly summaries since November 2003 when I started. (I already did this in 2019-2023, but this gives me a chance to consolidate all the posts and links to this WordPress site rather than my old Livejournal.) Everything will be linked under the bookblog nostalgia tag.
The most crucial event of January 2004 was that little U took her first steps, at 13 months.
My first work outing of the year was to the Liberals’ New Year reception in Brussels, after which I note that I had an awful lot of whisky with MEP Graham Watson. I was on a panel with the Bosnian and Croatian foreign ministers as well. (Fraser Cameron sitting between them.) This was shortly after returning from a conference on Moldova in Munich.
We also did a report for the new Independent Monitoring Commission in Northern Ireland, comparing its mission with Balkan equivalents. This was also the month that I started to seriously strategise about getting a job with the new European Commission due to take office at the end of the year. (Spoiler: I didn’t get a job there in the end.)
The Lord of the Rings is of course one of my favourite books ever, but that was a re-read (you can get it here if you still need to). My best new book this month was Claire Tomalin’s Samuel Pepys, which is superb and made me a real Pepys fanboy (and also a bit of a Claire Tomalin fan). You can get it here.
Second paragraph of third story (“The Case of the Discontented Soldier”):
The major took a deep breath and abruptly plunged through the swing door leading to the outer office. A plain young woman looked up from her typewriter and glanced at him inquiringly.
A dozen Agatha Christie stories featuring London – though the main settings of individual stories can wander far beyond the suburbs and into the Home Counties. Includes some of her crazy wannabe political thriller work, notably “The Kidnapped Prime Minster”, and some particularly contrived romances, such as “The Case of the Discontented Soldier” and “The Listerdale Mystery”. But there’s some good classic mystery stuff here too, notably “Witness for the Prosecution”, and “The Case of the Caretaker”. Thanks to whoever at HerperCollins had the idea of finding and assembling all of these. You can get Capital Christie here.
Current Annette Vallon: A Novel of the French Revolution, by James Tipton Sometime Never…, by Justin Richards Inventing the Renaissance, by Ada Palmer The Damnable Question, by George Dangerfield
Last books finished The Lost Dimension Book 1, by Cavan Scott et mult al Crooked House, by Agatha Christie Equinox, by David Towsey The Raven Scholar, by Antonia Hodgson The Lost Dimension Book 2, by Gordon Rennie et mult al Kosovo: The Path to Contested Statehood in the Balkans, by James Ker-Lindsay Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universe, by C.B. Lee
Next books Jubilee, by Robert Shearman British Generals in Blair’s Wars, by Jonathan Bailey Slow Horses, by Mick Herron
I am enjoying working my way through the BBC Doctor Who audiobooks starting from a decade ago. This is a series of four loosely linked stories, two by one of my favourite Who writers (James Goss) and two by one of my least favourite (George Mann). The linking theme is a family called Winter who possess a card that summons the Doctor and the TARDIS, and is passed through the centuries. I may have missed something, but I didn’t think that the overarching theme was actually resolved, which subtracts from the narrative oomph. Also unfortunately the sequence is not related to Goss’ excellent Eleventh Doctor novel The Dead of Winter.
The Gods of Winter by James Goss, read by Claire Higgins (Ohila of Karn), starts with a little girl who has lost her cat and summons the Doctor to find it. We then gradually discover that there is more going on in the human space colony in conflict with the mysterious Golhearn. I don’t think it is a big spoiler to say that the second half of the story takes us several decades forward to a moment when the little girl is now one of her community’s leaders, in dire straits, and the Doctor exerts diplomatic skills to sort it all out. You can get The Gods of Winter here.
The House of Winter, by George Mann, read by David Schofield (Odin) surprised me in that I actually enjoyed it. Th premise is that the Doctor and Clara are stuck in a house with its creepy owner and two creepy servants, and a bunch of vampire moths. There is one classically awful Mann-ish bit of description: “His expression was serene, save for his eyes which were open and staring, peering up at her as if pleading for help” – so, not actually very serene at all. But apart from that it hung together very well. You can get The House of Winter here.
The Sins of Winter, by James Goss, read by Robin Soans (Luvic in The Keeper of Traken and the Chronolock guy in Face the Raven), is the best of these (and the fact that the linking between the four is weak means that you can get this without having to worry about the other three). Shadrak Winter, the High Cardinal of the Cult of the Prime Self, summons the TARDIS to his space cathedral which is infested by the sluglike Sinful, who love feasting on people’s past sins. The Doctor has plenty of these to go on, leaving Clara to save the day. It’s a theme that has been used before and since i Doctor Who, but executed very well here. I see that fan opinion is divided on this one, but I’m on the positive side. You can get The Sins of Winter here.
The Memory of Winter, by George Mann, read by Jemma Redgrave (who is the best reader of all of these) takes the Doctor and Clara to fifteenth-century France for an adventure with Joan of Arc. There is Time Lord knowledge turning up in the wrong place and giving poor Joan the impression of hearing voices. I thought the story was well enough done, but it doesn’t really tie into the historical events around Joan at all and doesn’t resolve the linking mystery of the series. You can get The Memory of Winter here.
In the previous two chapters, we have examined the culprits co-responsible for the strange death of what we used to call the liberal international order.² We have analysed the resentments, aspirations and chicanery of both the Central European populists and Vladimir Putin. But they plainly did not act alone. Indeed, no Poirot-style sleuthing is required to discover that the current President of the United States has been their willing accomplice.³ His motives for turning his back on America’s allies, disavowing multilateral treaties, and trying to wreck the international institutions created by the US after the Second World War are a matter of controversy. But whatever his motives, he has been an eminent confederate in the gang-slaying of the ‘liberal hegemony’ that characterized international politics for three decades after 1989. ² Graham Allison, “The Myth of the Liberal Order, Foreign Affairs (July/August 2018) ³ David Leonhardt, “Trump Tries to Destroy the West”, The New York Times (Io June 2018); Robert Kagan, “Trump Marks the End of America as World’s “Indispensable Nation”, Financial Times (19 November 2016).
I am conscious that my last couple of books reviews here have been less than positive, so I’m very glad to turn that around and give a glowing recommendation to this short explanation of how western liberal democracy got into its current mess. There are three chapters, one on Viktor Orbán and the other Eastern European populists, one on Vladimir Putin and Russia, and one on Donald Trump, with an afterword on China.
The key argument is that “the future was better yesterday”; western liberals failed to grasp the nature of the task of building and preserving democracy and decent societies in the former Socialist world, and indeed at home in the USA, and that populist politicians, by operating smartly within and outside the new rules, were able to capture the imagination of their own publics and gain and consolidate power. Even now that Orbán and PiS are out, and Trump appears to be struggling, the arguments remain valid.
Indeed, I am sure that the authors would agree that the missing part of the book in retrospect is Western Europe, where we actually have a populist (though relatively well behaved) government in Italy, Nigel Farage seems very likely to win the next British election, the Rassemblement National is not quite as close but close enough to worry about in France, and the AfD is on the rise in Germany.
Their conclusion is that in the end, populism does not present long term stable solutions in the way that liberal democracy does; but that liberals remained complacent for too long, and did not pay attention to the internal threats to the democratic system. They speculate – hope, perhaps – that the rise of China, a a more durable alternative system but one which is not very interested in exporting its societal model, may prove a stimulus to liberals to become more creative.
Nine years on, a lot of this remains just as valid, with the second Trump term proving worse than the first. We have a long way to go.
This bubbled to the top of three of my lists simultaneously- the top unread book acquired in 2022, the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves, and the shortest book acquired in 2022 on the unread shelf. Next on the first two of those piles is The Damnable Question, by George Dangerfield; next on the third is Kosovo: The Path To Contested Statehood in the Balkans, by James Ker-Lindsay.
In anticipation of the 25th anniversary of my bookblogging, which will come in late 2028, I’m reposting my monthly summaries since November 2003 when I started. (I already did this in 2019-2023, but this gives me a chance to consolidate all the posts and links to this WordPress site rather than my old Livejournal.) Everything will be linked under the bookblog nostalgia tag.
In December 2003 we celebrated little U’s first birthday, and at work I was dealing with the fallout from the previous month’s events, rushing out a report on Georgia on the first of the month (actually most of it had been writen before the revolution on 25 November, but obviously needed updating) followed by one on the Preševo Valley in Southern Serbia. At the end of the month Serbia had an election.
Yugoslavia’s air defenses were dominated by surface-to-air missile (SAM) batteries equipped with thousands of Soviet-made SAMs, including three SA-2 battalions; 16 SA-3 battalions, each with numerous launchers directed by LOW BLOW fire-control radars; and five SA-6 regiments fielding five batteries each, for a total of 25 SA-6 batteries directed by STRAIGHT FLUSH radars. These radar-guided SAMs were supplemented by around 100 vehicle-mounted SA-9 and several SA-13 infrared SAMs, along with a profusion of man-portable infrared SAMs, some 1,850 antiaircraft artillery (AAA) pieces, and numerous stockpiled reserve weapons and buried communications lines. Backing up these defenses, the Yugoslav air force consisted of 238 combat aircraft, including 15 MiG-29 and 64 MiG-21 fighterinterceptors.¹ Although the Yugoslav IADS employed equipment and technologies that dated as far back as the 1960s, albeit presumably with selected upgrades, its operators knew U.S. tactics well and had practiced air defense drills and honed their operational techniques for more than four decades. They also had the benefit of more equipment and better training than did the Bosnian Serbs in 1995. Finally, they enjoyed the advantage of being protected both by mountainous terrain and by the cover of inclement weather when the air war began.
¹ “AWOS [Air War Over Serbia] Fact Sheet,” Hq USAFE/SA, December 17, 1999. See also The Military Balance, 1998/99, London, International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1998, p. 100.
A RAND study of the Kosova war from the point of view of the air force. Reading the introduction, I rather got the impression that this was a supposedly independent report, funded by the USAF and coincidentally promoting the idea that it would have been so much better to just let the USAF get on with dropping bombs, without any political interference. The background historical analysis chapter was full of flaws as well. When we got onto the weapons porn (“16 SA-3 battalions, each with numerous launchers directed by LOW BLOW fire-control radars; and five SA-6 regiments fielding five batteries each, for a total of 25 SA-6 batteries directed by STRAIGHT FLUSH radars”) I decided I had had enough. You can download it here.
This was my top unread book about Kosova. Next on that pile is Between Serb and Albanian, by Miranda Vickers.
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 Austria.
When I did this exercise in 2015, I declared the winner to be Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return, by Marjane Satrapi. But closer examination reveals that it (just) fails my criteria; the protagonist spends only the first 91 pages of a 187-page book in Vienna. Otherwise it would have been far ahead of the field.
The three sites have again served up three different winners. I had not previously heard of Marlen Haushofer, or her dystopian novel The Wall, in which the protagonist finds herself and her Alpine cabin sealed off from the outside world by an invisible barrier. I see that there was a film in 2012. It is way ahead on StoryGraph, second on Goodreads and not so very far behind on LibraryThing.
Letter from an Unknown Woman is a 68-page novella which wins on Goodreads, is in second place on StoryGraph, but lags on LibraryThing. It is about a years-later tragic resolution of an upstairs-downstairs love affair. For some reason Goodreads logs it under the Turkish translation, Bilinmeyen Bir Kadının Mektubu, which makes me suspect that it is a popular text for students learning German.
Zweig’s autobiography, The World of Yesterday, is ahead on LibraryThing but only fourth on Goodreads and further behind on StoryGraph. It is the only one of these that I have read, and I enjoyed it a lot.
Love Virtually, originally Gut Gegen Nordwind, is an email romance story. As far as I can tell, the setting is not specified, but everyone assumes that the protagonists live in Vienna.
I thought long and hard about Zweig’s Beware of Pity, as mentioned last week. The setting is described as “eine kleine Garnison an der ungarischen Grenze”, a garrison on the Hungarian border, on the main train line from Vienna to Budapest and closer to Vienna. Although the protagonist’s love interest is the daughter of the local Hungarian aristocrat, it is clear that everyone is speaking German (he comments on her Hungarian accent). I reckon that this would be one of the towns that was historically in Hungary and then briefly in the Banate of Leitha before being incorporated into today’s Austrian state of Burgenland.
Dream Story and The Piano Teacher are both explicitly set in Vienna, and A Whole Life is set in the Austrian Alps.
Bringing in the StoryGraph numbers again helped the gender balance; we lost The Third Man, by Graham Greene, and The Radetzky March, by Joseph Roth and gained The Piano Teacher and A Whole Life. I am not sure if The Radetzky March would have qualified geographically anyway.
I disqualified a number of books which had been tagged “austria” on LibraryThing and Goodreads. I already awarded Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and The Trial to the Czech Republic. Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor E. Frankl is mainly set in German concentration camps, some of which are now in Poland. Carmilla, by J. Sheridan Le Fanu, is set in what is now Slovenia. The Only Woman in the Room, by “Marie Benedict” (Heather Terrell) is about Hedy Lamarr, who was born in Vienna but spent most of her life elsewhere. I already mentioned Persepolis 2. The Hare with the Amber Eyes jumps around too. There were many others.
Next up will be Switzerland; then a jump south to Sierra Leone; then back to Europe, for the last time in a while, for Belarus; then way off east for Laos.
Back in 2019-23, I revisited each of the months that I’ve been bookblogging since November 2003, in anticipation of the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging. I’m going to do the same now for the tweenty-fifth anniversary in November 2028, this time spacing the monthly updates at three or four day intervals. Also since my first go started on Livejournal and moved to WordPress only in March 2022 when I abandoned LJ, it means I can tidy up the internal links and have the definitive versions all in one place.
November 2003 was politically momentous – there were elections in Northern Ireland and Croatia, a major political crisis in Moldova, and an election followed by a revolution in Georgia, all of which affected my work, though we were able to publish a report on Mostar. I also attended a conference in Vienna with my American intern B, who now works in IT in Arizona. He left halfway through the month and was replaced by a Croatian journalist, S, who I last heard of back in Zagreb working as a press officer for an international organisation.
At home, we took the kids to a snoezelruimte, which the older two both enjoyed. (B was six and F was four.)
For me (aged 36) and U (eleven months) it was a bit overwhelming.
The one I wrote least about at the time, but that on reflection I think is definitely the best of them, is The Separation, Christopher Priest’s story of dual identites, overlapping histories and alternate timelines for the second world war. I’ll return to it in due course, as it won both the Clarke and BSFA Awards. You can get it here. (I always felt that American Gods was interesting but flawed; you can get it here.)
The book I would not recommend is Ersatz Nation, a poorly written and jumbled narrative.
I’m still not totally sure about the Best Poem category, but I’m going to kick off my Hugo reviewing for this year by revealing my own votes, as follows.
Mission Control, you told me not to be shocked. I’m just an envoy among these meetings. A pleasure just to be invited and all that. And you told me not to sell myself short, I know I am neither peerless nor no less a peer as the others here, but you don’t get it. I… get emotional. When we gather here, we consensus the stars. We draft the laws that carve diamonds fine, we dictate the portent paths, we school and are thus schooled; in a ten-minute parley between panels we broker treaties that move stories through the digit-lines; in a brief passing twixt moving platforms two colleagues will draft new craft guidances for new worlds; in a barcon brokerage tomorrow night two lords will strike delicate business firm; all weekend we will declare truces— sparing doubt without relying on fear, holding sorrow without swelling to hopelessness, saving our blades for the armies of capital growth and the rattle of the badly impersonating clanker swarms and oh God the fascists why are there still fascists but that’s why we have these meetings in the first place. I would risk a rank or more if I could fellowship here forever. Because are we ever still together if we can’t break bread or ice or our own bad habits of not being personable? Aren’t I allowed to dream of more realms being let into our commonwealth?
A witty depiction of a space explorer visiting a Worldcon.
Bitch got stuff done. Lightning hits a bit different now. Still pounds against the clouds, of course. Still kills when it lands too close. But doesn’t pierce the way it once did, or leave half-orphans in its wake. And those temples. You’ve seen them, right — still gleaming over broken fields. And her hands, a sudden gentle touch, slicing through the sharpest pains.
You can spend your days sitting on the rocks, stirring the tidal pools as though they were cauldrons, causing shipwrecks if you want to, granting wishes, stealing the voices of mermaids and seabirds to make yours especially shrill, screeching like a gull, or sonorous, like buoy bells ringing far from shore. You can gather and store the treasures of the waves—bits of glass worn smooth, coral and pearls, gold vessels from Phoenician ships. How rich you will be! And how deeply you will dream, sea witch— as deeply as the dark hidden depths of the sea.
Way back in 2007, I was just getting into the Big Finish audios, and it did not take long until I reached the 29th of their monthly releases, The Chimes of Midnight, starring Paul McGann as the Eighth Doctor and India Fisher as his audio-only companion, Charlotte “Charley” Pollard. I wrote it up as follows:
The Chimes of Midnight is just creepy: the Doctor and Charley trapped in a house where the servants keep on dying horribly – and even more mysteriously coming to life. Clearly some Big Revelation about Charley’s nature is being planned.
With the new novelisation just published, I listened to it again and it deserves its place of one of the consistently top-rated Big Finish audios. The soundscape successfully invokes the cramped servants’ quarters of an Edwardian mansion, with the guest stars utterly convincing in their denial of reality, especially as they start getting bumped off one by one. There is an Irish character, the butler, Shaughnessy, played by Lennox Greaves (who in real life is a Yorkshireman). I ended the story not quite sure what had happened, but certain that I had been entertained.
This story was recorded in January 2001 but released only in February 2002. You can get it here.
It used to be that one could handily check facts about Big Finish audios on Wikipedia, but I was dismayed to discover that Wikipedia has deleted all of its pages covering individual Big Finish plays. I guess that they were judged not to be of general interest in the way that, say, Andorra’s 2007 Eurovision Song Contest entry obviously is. A shame.
Rob Shearman has novelised his two best known Big Finish audios, this and Jubilee, so needless to say I have got hold of them both. The second paragraph of the third chapter of The Chimes of Midnight is:
‘And is this exactly the same as your house back home as well?’ asked the Doctor.
This is a very lucid retelling of the story, offering a lot more depth to some of the characters – particularly Charlotte herself, but also Shaughnessy the bultler – and giving a slightly better idea of what the story is actually about. It’s twenty-five years since Shearman first wrote this, and his style has become comfortable and fluid. The house as portrayed on the page is recognisably the same as in the original play.
I think that readers who aren’t already into the Big Finish Eighth Doctor continuity might be sufficiently intrigued by this to try the other plays in the sequence, though they should be warned that this is something of an outlier. However there is plenty to discover about the Eight / Charley relationship.
Currently reading Equinox, by David Towsey The Raven Scholar, by Antonia Hodgson Annette Vallon: A Novel of the French Revolution, by James Tipton
Finished in the last week The Lost Angel, by George Mann and Cavan Scott Oscar Wilde: A Biography, by Richard Ellmann Selected Prose and Prose-Poems, by Gabriela Mistral The Lost Magic, by Cavan Scott Between Serb and Albanian, by Miranda Vickers The Lost Planet, by George Mann Holy Terrors, by Margaret Owen The Invisible Parade, by Leigh Bardugo and John Picacio Sourire 58, by Patrick Weber and Baudouin Deville The Lost Flame, by George Mann and Cavan Scott Trouble With Lichen, by John Wyndham
April 2026 books
Non-fiction 9 (YTD 28) Fantasy: A Short History, by Adam Roberts Mantel Pieces, by Hilary Mantel War Over Kosovo: Politics and Strategy in a Global Age, eds Andrew Bacevich and Eliot Cohen NATO’s Air War for Kosovo: A Strategic and Operational Assessment, by Benjamin S. Lambeth (did not finish) The Light That Failed: A Reckoning, by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes The Daleks, by Oliver Wake Oscar Wilde: A Biography, by Richard Ellmann Selected Prose and Prose-Poems, by Gabriela Mistral Between Serb and Albanian, by Miranda Vickers
Non-genre 4 (YTD 17) The Big Four, by Agatha Christie The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo, by Zen Cho Enchanted April, by Elizabeth von Arnim Capital Christie, by Agatha Christie
SF 4 (YTD 29) Among Others, by Jo Walton Star Eater, by Kerstin Hall (did not finish) Holy Terrors, by Margaret Owen Trouble With Lichen, by John Wyndham
Doctor Who 12 (YTD 32) The Gods of Winter, by James Goss Timeless, by Steve Cole The House of Winter, by George Mann The Chimes of Midnight, by Robert Shearman The Sins of Winter, by James Goss Doctor Who and the Daleks, by David Whitaker Dr Who and the Daleks, by “Alan Smithee” The Memory of Winter, by George Mann The Lost Angel, by George Mann and Cavan Scott The Lost Magic, by Cavan Scott The Lost Planet, by George Mann The Lost Flame, by George Mann and Cavan Scott
Comics 3 (YTD 9) The Lost Dimension, Book One, by Nick Abadzis, George Mann, Cavan Scott et multi alii The Invisible Parade, by Leigh Bardugo and John Picacio Sourire 58, by Patrick Weber and Baudouin Deville
~6,900 pages (YTD 27,300), counting each of the audiobooks as 100. 12/32 (YTD 46/118) by non-male writers (Mantel, Mistral, Vickers, Christie x 2, Cho, von Arnim, Walton, Hall, Owen, Stott/Melo et al, Bardugo) 2/32 (YTD 10/118) by writers of colour (Cho, Picacio) 5/32 reread (The Big Four, Among Others, Trouble with Lichen, Timeless, Doctor Who and the Daleks) 198 books currently tagged unread, up 4 from last month (Eastercon), down 53 from April 2025.
Coming soon (perhaps)
The Lost Dimension Vol. 2, by Cavan Scott et al Sometime Never…, by Justin Richards Jubilee, by Robert Shearman Time’s Mosaic 9 – Eccleston, Torchwood and Quatermass, by Finn Clark
The Damnable Question, by George Dangerfield Kosovo: the Path to Contested Statehood in the Balkans, by James Ker-Lindsay British Generals in Blair’s Wars, by Jonathan Bailey
Slow Horses, by Mick Herron The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water by Zen Cho Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie H is for Hawk, by Helen Macdonald O the Chimneys, by Nelly Sachs Ces lignes qui tracent mon corps, by Mansoureh Kamari The Best of All Possible Worlds, by Karen Lord Moving Pictures, by Terry Pratchett Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh Red Rabbit, by Alex Grecian TUKI: Fight for Fire, by Jeff Smith Green Twining, by Andrew Cheffings
Second paragraph of third essay (“First War of the Global Era: Kosovo and U.S. Grand Strategy” by James Kurth)
As we will see, all of these claims about the Kosovo War are true, but they are also incomplete. They could therefore be misleading both about the causes of the war and about its implications for future conflicts. To understand these causes and consequences, we will need to examine the war in the context of the grand, or national, strategy of the United States. For the Kosovo War was, inter alia, an outgrowth of a new grand strategy that the United States has developed in the aftermath of the Cold War. Among the Kosovo War’s distinctions, it was the first American war of the global era.
A collection of essays about the Kosova war, published in January 2002. Most of the essays are critical of the way in which the war was conducted from a military doctrine or strategic thinking viewpoint. Most of them also try to look ahead to see what the implications are for future conflicts where the USA may not need to have a strong ground component, though very few of the observations turn out to have been helpful to understand the Afghanistan war, started just before the book was published, or the Iraq war, which started just after.
Less surprisingly perhaps, none of them foresaw a future where the USA first threatened annexation to its allies and then attacked Iran and lost. One feels for analysts trying to make sense of the world we are in and then discovering that the future has arrived and it’s not as expected. But none of these essays made me feel that the US policy community had any much better idea of what is going on in the world than the rest of us. In particular, none of the writers has much knowledge of Kosova itself, which is what I am most interested in.
You can get War over Kosovo here. This was the shortest book acquired in 2022 which was still on my unread shelf. Next on that pile is The Light That Failed, by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes.
Mrs. Arbuthnot and Mrs. Wilkins had not thought of references, and they had not dreamed a rent could be so high. In their minds had floated sums like three guineas a week; or less, seeing that the place was small and old.
I’m of the age where I saw and really enjoyed the 1991 film Enchanted April, based on this book and starring inter alia Miranda Richardson, Josie Lawrence, Michael Kitchen and Jim Broadbent, and when I spotted the novel second hand a few months back I snapped it up. As I had hoped, it’s a warm story about four women who come together on holiday in Italy in 1922, and gradually become friends with each other, with the two who are married also rekindling their relationships with their husbands. It’s not super radical, more a comedy of manners, but I found it very entertaining, mainly for the emotional disentanglements but also for the lyrical descriptions of Italy. You can get The Enchanted April here.
This was my top unread book by a woman. Next up there is H Is for Hawk, by Helen MacDonald.
‘Are you all right?’ Anji felt sick to her stomach. ‘Guy, are you all right?’
Another in the series of Eighth Doctor novels which I read in 2015 and failed to write up at the time. This brings a loose end to the incomprehensible multiple timelines arc that began with Time Zero, and writes Anji, one of my favourite book-only companions, out of the TARDIS, replacing her with the rather two-dimensional Trix. There’s more complex overlapping timeline stuff, and some very un-Doctorly incidents of Eight gratuitously hurting the bad guys. This came out in 2003 a month before BBC Wales announced the coming of New Who, and really shows the dead end into which Who books were being written at the time. (The Big Finish audios and comics were more lively.) Still, you can get Timeless here (at a price).
I was however interested that one of the more significant guest characters is named Guy Adams, also the name of a writer of Who books who started getting published a few years later. Coincidence?
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 Hungary.
As it was when I did this analysis in 2015, the winner is Embers, a book about an aristocratic household adapting itself to the post First World War with grim realism. In fact, all of the books here are novels by Hungarian writers – Kate Seredy was based in the USA for most of her writing career, but lived in Hungary until she was 23. It is interesting to see recent Nobel Prize winner László Krasznahorkai scoring well – I wonder if that would have been the case if I had done this analysis a year ago.
Including the StoryGraph numbers evened out the genders, losing Sandor Marai’s Esther’s Inheritance and bringing on Abigail.
I disqualified a few books which had Hungarian roots but are not set there, including The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer, one of several about Hungarian experience of the Holocaust mainly set outside Hungary, and Flesh by David Szalay, which has clearly been a big hit since its 2024 publication but is set much more in England than in Hungary.
I also thought long and hard about Beware of Pity, by Stefan Zweig, but decided that in the end it is probably set in what is now the northern Burgenland of Austria, in one of the towns which had historically been part of Hungary with a Hungarian landlord but a mostly German-speaking population. More on that next week.
Next up are Austria and Switzerland, then a jump south to Sierra Leone, then back to Europe for Belarus which will be the last European country for a while.
The Hugo final ballot is out, and I understand that as is usual, the Hugo team is working hard to assemble a Voter Packet which will be made available for free to all Hugo voters (WSFS members of this year’s Worldcon). This is obviously a Good Thing, but as a matter of fact you can start your Hugo reading right now; there is no need to wait until the Packet is available.
Below, I give links to works which are available for free online, and Amazon links to other works, skipping individual people and Dramatic Presentations. The Packet, when it is available, is likely to also include samples of work by individuals who are finalists, and if we’re lucky also a Dramatic Presentation or two. But you can get started right now.
Finally, a couple of people have challenged me over linking to Amazon from my various book posts, such as this one. I get no reward at all for writing this blog, apart from £25 in Amazon credits about once a year from people clicking on my affiliate links. If you can point me to an independent bookselling site, preferably in the UK where the largest segment of my readers are based, where I would get similar credits for referred sales, then I’m all ears.
It was a beautiful autumn day–the city glowed in the sunlight and the skies were that truly cloudless blue you never see back home. Sunshine is so precious here, though England is sunnier than I thought it would be, having been told so often about its greyness. I think it is because the greyness is so depressing that it makes the sunshine all the more spectacular.
A nice wee novella from Zen Cho, originally published way back in 2012 and being re-released this summer (I got an ARC from the author). It’s about a young Malaysian Chinese writer who moves to London in 1920 and has an affair with a chap who sounds very like H.G. Wells (indeed it starts with her critically reviewing one of his books, just like Rebecca West did to HGW). But she really has feelings for her Tamil editor; and pretty soon an extra complication looms… Told in diary form by the self-possessed and funny heroine, and well recommended. You can get The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo here, starting in July.
(Note: I will not generally review ARCs, please don’t send them to me if you don’t know me.)
Current Oscar Wilde: A Biography, by Richard Ellmann Holy Terrors, by Margaret Owen Between Serb and Albanian, by Miranda Vickers Selected Prose and Prose-Poems, by Gabriela Mistral
Last books finished Dr Who and the Daleks, by “Alan Smithee” The Light That Failed: A Reckoning, by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes The Memory of Winter, by George Mann The Daleks, by Oliver Wake Capital Christie, by Agatha Christie
Next books Equinox, by David Towsey Sourire 58, by Baudouin Deville et al Trouble With Lichen, by John Wyndham
Second paragraph of third essay (on John Osborne’s memoirs):
A Better Class of Person is written with the tautness and power of a well-organised novel. It is a ferociously sulky, rancorous book, remarkable for its account of a lower-middle-class childhood on the fringes of London, and for its vengeful portrait of a mother who had ‘eyes that missed nothing and understood nothing.
This is a collection of twenty essays by Hilary Mantel from the London Review of Books, published between 1988 and 2019, including her piece comparing the popular cult of the bodies of Anne Boleyn and Kate Middleton which got a lot of coverage at the time.
These are all witty and mostly humane, with my favourites being the pieces that concentrate on her areas of historical expertise, the Tudors and the French Revolution. I thought her pieces on some of the minor Tudor figures, Jane Boleyn, Charles Brandon and Margaret Pole, were particularly strong.
There are also a couple of reflections on more contemporary culture, including the famous “Royal Bodies” essay, but also a grim reflection on the death of James Bulger and a piece about Madonna which says pretty much what you’d expect.
I confess that I had not realised that Mantel wrote much apart from the Thomas Cromwell trilogy, but her messages to the LRB editor reproduced here are full of references to other novels and books that she was writing, including her French Revolution novel A Place of Greater Safety. I’ll start looking our for them.
This was both my top unread book acquired in 2022, and the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on those piles are Star Eater, by Kerstin Hall, and The Light That Failed, by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes.
“Mon ami,” he said, “if you wish you may wait in to put salt on the little bird’s tail, but for me I do not waste my time so.”
Well. I thought this was rubbish when I read it at thirteen, and I still think it’s rubbish now that I am almost 59. Poirot and Hastings become involved in an effort to uncover the “Big Four”, who are secretly running the world, or trying to take it over, or something. They include a stereotypical Chinese oligarch, a stereotypical American squillionaire, a French scientist who is in no way at all based on Marie Curie, and the mysterious fourth man, who is English and a master of disguise. We also have Hercule Poirot’s twin brother Achille, though (SPOILER for a book published 99 years ago) he turns out to be one of Poirot’s disguises.
Apparently this is a fix-up of a dozen individually published stories, and it shows; very episodic, with a corresponding lack of internal continuity. Every adventure sees the Big Four’s implausibly convoluted plans confronting Poirot’s even more implausibly convoluted plans. There is a comedic has-been actress who gets bumped off mercilessly. There is a grand explosion in Switzerland at the end. The basic concept is the same as The Secret Adversary from five years earlier, but not executed as well. Agatha Christie herself called this a “rotten book” and it is difficult to disagree with her. However, you can get The Big Four here.
Here are the Goodreads / LibraryThing / StoryGraph stats for the categories where those numbers are relevant. I do this not to predict winners, but to assess the extent to which each book (of those which have been published individually as standalone volumes) has measurably penetrated the wider market.
The top three are surprisingly close here on GR and LT, with SG spacing them out a little (though still close). I have read two already. I am sorry that When There Are Wolves Again is not on the list.
Best Novella
Title
Author
GR raters
LT owners
SG reviews
The River Has Roots
Amal El-Mohtar
43,140
729
19,142
Automatic Noodle
Annalee Newitz
21,619
563
9,189
What Stalks the Deep
T. Kingfisher
17,779
449
7,326
Murder by Memory
Olivia Waite
12,527
366
4,822
The Summer War
Naomi Novik
11,767
434
3,635
Cinder House
Freya Marske
6,559
192
2,884
I read The River Has Roots for the BSFA Awards and described it as “a delightful, dark and queer fairy-tale of life, language and love in the liminal spaces”; it got my vote, and it’s well ahead on the sites.
Best Graphic Novel or Comic
Title
Author
GR raters
LT owners
SG reviews
Absolute Wonder Woman Vol. 1: The Last Amazon
Thompson / Sherman / de Iulis / Bellaire / Carey
5,405
103
1,192
A Wizard of Earthsea: A Graphic Novel
Le Guin / Fordham
1,598
96
540
The Invisible Parade
Bardugo / Picacio
1,724
60
309
The Power Fantasy Volume 1: The Superpowers
Gillen / Wijngaard / Cowles
1,238
68
375
The Space Cat
Okorafor / Ford
376
45
169
A Girl and Her Fed
Spangler / Presser
A strong leader here, but NB that A Girl and Her Fed is nominated as a webcomic rather than for the printed volumes.
Best Related Work
Title
Author
GR raters
LT owners
SG reviews
Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler
Three of these are not standalone publications. “The Cuddled Little Vice” is a blog post, “Ragnarök vs the Long Night” is a podcast episode and The Hugo Spreadsheet of Doom is a spreadsheet. On top of that I hear some people comment that Inventing the renaissance isn’t really about science fiction or fantasy. It does not speak well of StoryGraph that none of its users have yet logged Colourfields.
Lodestar Award for Best YA Book
Title
Author
GR raters
LT owners
SG reviews
Sunrise on the Reaping
Suzanne Collins
1,160,615
5,016
179,837
Oathbound
Tracy Deonn
30,205
617
13,943
They Bloom at Night
Trang Thanh Tran
5,484
206
2,620
Holy Terrors
Margaret Owen
3,944
129
1,907
Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universe
C.B. Lee
1,683
222
835
Among Ghosts
Rachel Hartman
428
69
157
As with the Andre Norton and BSFA Award lists, Sunrise on the Reaping is far ahead, though not as embarrassingly far as in the other two cases, which makes me feel that the Lodestar list is a better reflection of reader tastes in general. (Among Ghosts, which is the lowest ranked of the Lodestar nominees, is some way ahead of both the second placed books for the Norton and BSFA Awards.)
I’m starting my Hugo reading with Holy Terrors, which costs $4.70 for 561 pages on Kindle at Amazon.com, an astonishingly economical 119 pages to your dollar. By contrast, one of the Best Novella finalists costs $15.12 for 135 Kindle pages, three times the cost of Holy Terrors for less than a quarter of the length (and two of the others are only a little better).
On the other categories:
Congratulations to everyone I know who is on the ballot!
I think that Best Series is showing its age.
I have actually seen three of the BDP Long Form finalists (Andor, KPop Demon Hunters and Superman) and four of the BDP Short Form finalists (Doctor Who, Murderbot and Plur1bus).
I don’t know how anyone can really rate Best Editor Long Form, but participation rates are decent.
The threshold to get onto the ballot for Best Professional Artist was the lowest of any category.
Some of the Semiprozine finalist descriptions are simply Too Long.
I’m glad to see An Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog and Octothorpe, Roseanna Pendlebury, Sara Felix, Richard Mann and España Sheriff in their respective categories.
I look forward to reading the poems and the Astounding Award finalists, and indeed anything else that generous creators and publishers choose to put into the Hugo Packet.
Best of luck to Tammy Coxen and the rest of her team, and well done on getting through this stage of the process.
However bothersome Nanny’s antics were, they were easy to rationalise. Explaining why a blue box had suddenly appeared from the ether was beyond his patience.
Bali Rai is new to the Whoniverse, but an established YA writer from Leicester. This book is one of a sequence bringing the Doctor into classic children’s novels and seeing what heppens, in this case the Eleventh Doctor and Clara dropping into the world of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, where they are joined by River Song and the Paternoster Gang. There’s some admirable unpacking of the slave economy behind the Caribbean trade of the eighteenth century, and we get Jim gender-flipped to Janey, and escaped slaves setting up a free community on the island, but the story is a bit lacking in actual plot (and poor Clara is sidelined for much of it). The Paternoster Gang get some good lines though. You can get Rebellion on Treasure Island here.
This was my top unread book by a writer of colour. Next on that pile is The Order of the New Moon Reflected in Water, by Zen Cho.
Second paragraph of third chapter (though I did not get that far):
The following section considers several explanations forwarded to explain the shift from pursing narrow national interests in foreign policy to focusing on human rights questions in areas where Western states have little economic or geo-strategic interest. It suggests that while international changes have provided the opportunity to present foreign policy in ethical terms, the main dynamic behind ethical foreign policy lies in the domestic sphere and the search for new forms of political legitimacy. Subsequent sections develop this analysis, considering the low costs involved in ethical foreign policy and the selective nature of its application, further suggesting that the lack of clear policy aims in human rights promotion reflects a desire to use foreign policy for domestic purposes rather than any concern with human rights issues per se.
I reviewed one of Chandler’s earlier books for a defunct website back in 1999, and also wrote up an essay collection that he edited more recently, so I knew in advance that I was unlikely to agree with this book (I have the second edition from 2005). He makes the argument that the human rights justification for international interventions is fundamentally wrong-headed, but I would reflect that criticism back at the writer.
I’m not even sure that it’s correct to say that the Afghanistan war (his main reference point other than Kosovo) was framed to the Western public as a human rights-driven intervention. My memory is that the core argument was about security and removing a government that was supporting Al-Qaeda. Twenty years on, especially after the last few weeks, it’s very difficult anyway to make the case that there is a dominant human-rights culture in international military interventions, so one feels that Chandler was attacking a straw man at a particular moment in history when it maybe looked more substantial than it has turned out to be. But it also seems to me that it is a Bad Thing if the concept of intervention to protect human rights has disintegrated.
I was also startled to read a series of statements about the 1999 Kosova conflict on pages 15-16 which are simply objectively wrong. Cherry-picking is a tactic that we are all sometimes tempted to use, but at least make sure that you are picking real cherries rather than fictional ones. I’m not going to waste time here by dissecting statements in a twenty-year-old book that nobody who reads this is going to go and read, but really, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, you are entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts.
This was my top unread book about Kosova of the bundle that I acquired in 2022. Next on that pile is NATO’s Air War for Kosovo, by Benjamin S. Lambeth.
