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.
A lazy post since I am at Eastercon, using Jetpack to analyse the top ten hits on this blog in January, February and March. (Actually the top eleven as there is a tie for tenth place.) A lot of them are about the BSFA Awards, which take place this evening.
This is restricted to the posts that I actually published in that period – the top post from my archives, with almost a thousand hits, was Sir Thomas More’s compassionate speech about refugees by William Shakespeare.
I did not get very far with the longer categories in the month between the shortlist announcement on 1 March and tonight’s close of voting. I confess that I was guided by the principle of value for money – the better the ratio of pages to dollars (I get my ebooks from Amazon.com), the more likely I was to read it. The consequence was that I did not read anything like the full ballot in any of these categories.
I list them below in the order of the categories on the ballot paper, which is not the order in the voter booklet (for which many thanks).
I covered Best Audio Fiction and Best Artwork yesterday.
Best Collection
My top vote goes to Uncertain Sons and other stories, by Thomas Ha, a great imaginative collection of twelve mostly fantasy stories about uncertainty and weirdness. The title piece, which ends the book, is the most memorable, with the protagonist carrying around his father’s zombified skull in his backpack for occasional strategic consultations. The second paragraph of the third story (“The Mub”) is:
Somewhere between the black slopes and the longest stretch of the cratered plains, I came across a traveler who I thought might be leaving the city and headed for the nested forests. I greeted him from a distance, just as the road curved around a copse of crooked and dry-skinned pines, but he would not look at me. It was only when we came close to one another that he muttered, “Don’t,” as though throwing the word heavily at my feet, then kept on his way without offering anything else. I’d thought it unkind and almost said something in response.
I also really enjoyed Who Will You Save?, the collection of short stories by Gareth Powell. I enjoyed it more than I expected frankly – 400 pages is quite a lot for a short fiction collection, and many of the stories tie into his other writing, not all of which I am familiar with. But there is a pleasing rejection of formula, or at the vey least some new twists on old stories. Some themes come up several times (teenage love; Bristol) but
The second paragraph of the third story (“Waiting for God Knows”) is:
“It’s an outrage,” Fenrir grumbled over our common channel.
Blood in the Bricks, edited by Neil Williamson, is an anthology of short stories with urban settings heading towards the horror end of the spectrum. The second paragraph of the third story (“Hagstone”, by Tracy Fahey) is:
The yelling is louder. I sigh, fold over the page of the sports section, and get to my feet, grunting out a whoosh of air as I do. Outside, the stark new shapes of industrial units tower over me. The digger is in front of the old half-demolished factory; a rotten tooth in the slick industrial estate. A boy jumps off the digger and runs towards me. Even though the sun beats steadily down, I shiver suddenly; a quick spasm. Goose walking over my grave.
Some of these were very good, including “Hagstone”. But some editorial pruning could have made for a leaner healthier collection; there were too many stories where the protagonist ends up as a human sacrifice to the city’s demons, like The Wicker Man except indoors. You can get Blood in the Bricks here.
I’m afraid that I didn’t get around to the other three nominees, so I will look silly if one of them wins. They are:
The Black Fantastic: 20 Afrofuturist Stories, ed. Andre M. Carrington
Black Friday, by Cheryl S. Nutty
Creative Futures: Beyond and Within, ed. Allen Stroud
Best Non-Fiction (Long)
To my surprise, I find that I am voting for Fantasy: A Short History, by Adam Roberts. The second paragraph of the third chapter is long, like most of them:
Two decades later English jurist Henry Sumner Maine, deeply influenced by Carlyle’s writing, published Ancient Law; Its Connection to the Early History of Society, and Its Relation to Modern Ideas (1861). His thesis is that society had shifted from human identity and being-in-the-world as defined by one’s status – one’s place in the social hierarchy, the great chain of being – to our social being and interactions as governed by contracts. In some ways, since contracts (unlike status) can be engaged voluntarily, Sumner sees this as an improvement. But there are losses too, and those losses are what Past and Present is about. Carlyle argues less like a lawyer and more like an artist, and he is certain that what has been lost is reverence, something no contract can bestow: ‘at public hustings, in private drawing-rooms, in church, in market, and wherever else have true reverence, and what indeed is inseparable therefrom, reverence the right man, all is well; have sham-reverence, and what also follows, greet with it the wrong man, then all is ill, and there is nothing’. The contrast Carlyle draws between industrialized irreverential contemporaneity and the vivid life of his imagined medieval world establishes precisely the contrast that the Tolkienian and Lewisian mode of fantasy would later valorize:
Behold therefore, this England of the Year 1200 was no chimerical vacuity or dreamland, peopled with mere vaporous Fantasms, Rymer’s Foedera, and Doctrines of the Constitution, but a green solid place, that grew corn and several other things. The Sun shone on it; the vicissitude of seasons and human fortunes. Cloth was woven and worn; ditches were dug, furrowfields ploughed, and houses built. Day by day all men and cattle rose to labour, and night by night returned home weary to their several lairs. In wondrous Dualism, then as now, lived nations of breathing men; alternating, in all ways, between Light and Dark; between joy and sorrow, between rest and toil, between hope, hope reaching high as Heaven, and fear deep as very Hell.¹
¹Carlyle, Past and Present, 2:1.
This was a really fun and informative read, taking the history of fantasy writing from the very beginning to almost the present day. I am very familiar with the historical structure of the genre, but it was very helpful to see it laid out in such a structured way. Roberts is effusive but also analytical of the writers he admires; he takes no prisoners with the others – on Robert Jordan, for instance:
Manifestly the stylistic inadequacies of these books, their vastness, derivate repetitiveness, do not discourage millions of fans from imaginatively playing in the imaginative theme parks they represent: a wish-fulfilment world more colourful than our own, furnishing an idealized nostalgic past that does not deprive us of present-day bourgeois creature-comforts, parlayed through honest-to-goodness melodramatic emotional intensity.
Often I found myself starting his coverage of one of the series or authors that I have not read thinking “Oh, must try that sometime” and then at the end of Roberts’ analysis thinking “Mmm, maybe not”. There are some annoying typos, and there is almost no coverage of recent writers in languages other than English, but even so I got much more from Fantasy: A Short History than I expected, and it can have my vote in return. You can get it here.
I also really enjoyed Colourfields by Paul Kincaid. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
It is clear that this volume [The Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction, by Mark Bould and Sherry Vint] is intended as a teaching aid, primarily for undergraduates with little or no previous acquaintance with the genre. In this it works well: it is brisk and breezy, throws in enough theory to seem serious without being weighty, and lets much of the argument rest on the numerous booklists that are embedded throughout the text. The booklists constantly direct the reader outside the text, and while no work that appears in a list is allowed any substantive discussion in the text, taken alone the lists do act as a reasonable if far from comprehensive guide to many of the most significant works of the genre. So, as a starting point for someone coming fresh to the study of the genre, you could do far worse. It’s not perfect, there are inevitably omissions, and the fact that any work discussed in the body of the book is excluded from any list leads to problems, one of the more egregious of which I’ll discuss later. The authors do make every effort to avoid gender or racial bias, making a point throughout the work of discussing books by women or non-white authors equally with those by white males. Though there are moments when this seems to prioritise a minor work by a woman over a major work by a man, in the main this can only be celebrated. With this in mind, it is a pity that, in a genre that is becoming increasingly international, they confine their discussion almost entirely to Anglophone authors. While some authors in translation are unavoidable (Verne, Čapek), authors like Lem and the Strugatsky brothers are mentioned only in a passage about Science Fiction Studies and none of their titles is even listed; others fare even less well.
I stand by what I wrote when I read it a few months ago:
A substantial collection of essays by Paul Kincaid, who is one of the few people to have been both Administrator of the Hugo Awards and a judge for the Arthur C. Clarke Award (the other two are David Langford, and me). They are almost all reviews of other critical works, hence the title, with commentary inserted by the author to contextualise and explain a little more. I had read very few of the books described here, so it made me realise how much more there is to read about sf, and will spur me to add some more to my bookshelves
While I particularly enjoyed the pieces on Brian Aldiss and Ursula Le Guin, I’m afraid I am still unconvinced of the added value of the Marxist analysis of Frederic James and Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, or of the literary merits of M. John Harrison; but maybe that proves Kincaid’s larger point, that there can be no single definition of science fiction, which he pushes in a gentlemanly way. I learned a lot from this, as I had expected. You can get Colourfields here.
It’s a classic collection of pieces by one of our great critics, and deserves to be celebrated.
The only other book that I got hold of in this category was That Very Witch: Fear, Feminism and the American Witch Film, by Payton McCarty-Simas. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
During this period, witchcraft in the popular imaginary was a fractured signifier. It suggested both sexual empowerment and sexual enslavement; collectivist naturalism and individualistic consumerism; science and superstition; intellectual control and hedonistic abandon. But how could this character come to be a feminist icon, a misogynist boogeyman, a harbinger of religious decline, a sex symbol, a trend, and a joke all at once? Using a number of films from a wide range of different contexts (from studio blockbusters to auteurist art films to pornography to exploitation movies), Part I will trace the history of the countercultural witch film cycle, looking at this figure across her various contexts to suggest that in a decade haunted by questions of belief—in alternative communities and more equitable futures on the one hand and conservative religious and patriotic ideals on the other—the witchʼs evolution as a symbol of mysterious and arcane power reflects these shifting landscapes, particularly in the Womenʼs Liberation Movement. As Jon Lewis put it in his book, Road Trip to Nowhere,
[t]oday the movies from the counterculture era that continue to matter were in their day aberrations, movies that got made despite industry policy, movies made elsewhere (overseas, in the B-industry, by independent contractors working on some half-baked deal with a studio)—movies nobody with money and clout at the time gave half a chance at success.³
³ Lewis, 2022, 3.
I’m afraid I did not get very far; I am just not personally very interested in witch films, and while the author promises to make the connection with wider issues of society and gender, it depended too much on the bits I didn’t care so much about. I am sure that it is a perfectly fine read for those who care more about witch films than I do. You can get That Very Witch here.
The voter booklet (for which, again, many thanks) includes extracts from the other three finalists, enough to make me feel confident in ranking them as follows:
Fantasy: A Short History, by Adam Roberts
Colourfields, by Paul Kincaid
Dispelling Fantasies: Authors of Colour Re-imagining a Genre, ed. Joy Sanchez-Taylor
Writing the Magic, eds. Dan Coxon and Richard Hirst
That Very Witch: Fear, Feminism and the American Witch Film, by Payton McCarty-Simas
Speculation and the Darwinian Method in British Romance Fiction, 1859-1914, by Kate Holterhoff
In my earlier write-up of the shortlists, I noted that the last of these was owned by precisely zero users of Goodreads, LibraryThing or StoryGraph, and is also by some way the most expensive shortlisted book in any category. The extract provided for BSFA voters shows only the most slender of links to science fiction or fantasy literature, and I really wonder why anyone would have nominated it for a BSFA Award, let alone enough voters to get it on the shortlist.
Best Novel
My sole vote goes to When There Are Wolves Again, by E.J. Swift. the second paragraph of the third chapter (a long ‘un) is:
After the lockdowns, my parents started using my grandparents for free childcare whenever they could get away with it, and I spent a lot more weekends at the house in Herne Hill. This arrangement suited everyone very well with the exception of Gran, who clearly recognized she was being taken for a ride but felt unable to voice her dissent. Grandad and I remained great pals. I could talk to him about anything, and as I got older I talked more and more, and he’d sit and listen. Truly he had the patience of a saint, for he’d smile and ask questions back, and if I finally ran out of things to say, he would think for a while and then dig out some obscure and fascinating fact, like how the sewers worked. As if I were a jay and he were giving me acorns to stash away. My brain has always been a buzzy place, sometimes an overwhelming place. When I was with Grandad, the buzz quietened. He understood that I needed to get things out, or my thoughts might become too much. When I think of Grandad now, I remember his face, and his gentle voice, but mostly it’s the feeling that’s stayed with me. The feeling of being safe.
This is a great novel about the coming ecological catastrophe and the resilience of society in Britain (though we assume that similar stuff is happening elsewhere), told intimately through the story of two women who barely know each other, with the effect of climate change on them and their families delicately portrayed. There is despair, but there is also hope. I feel it really catches the Zeitgeist, and it gets my vote. You can get When There Are Wolves Again here.
The only other book on the shortlist that I have read is A Granite Silence, by Nina Allan. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
I have always found reassurance in repetition, an aid to thought. Old photographs of Aberdeen docks show a diverse, rambunctious ecosystem teeming with life, a maze of lumber yards and cattle sheds, warehouses and sawmills, a complex, symbiotic machinery geared towards the transport of timber and textiles and livestock, including people. The docks are still busy. Ferries leave for Orkney and Shetland throughout the day. Container ships call at Aberdeen regularly to unload their cargoes. Service vessels bound for the rigs are still based here in the harbour. And the old names are everywhere: Hall, Hood, Duthie and Russell, the great shipbuilding dynasties of Aberdeen’s past embedded in its present, in its street names and parks, carved permanently into the granite from which the town was raised.
It’s an fascinating and well-written book, about the murder of a child in Aberdeen in 1934; Nina Allan takes us in and out of the investigation and weaves different facets of herself into the story, including several breaking-the-fourth-wall moments. I’m giving it five stars on the various book sites.
But I’m not voting for it here, because I don’t think that it qualifies as science fiction or fantasy, and I think that the BSFA Awards should celebrate works of science fiction and fantasy. I know that yesterday I admitted that I am voting for a short story which is about fans of fantasy literature, rather than actually being fantastical itself; but A Granite Silence isn’t even addressing sf or fantasy, it’s a novel about a real life crime with no sfnal subject matter. Congratulations to the author on writing an excellent book, but it does not belong on this shortlist and isn’t getting my vote. Still, you can get A Granite Silence here, and probably should.
For various different reasons I did not read the other three finalists. They are:
Project Hanuman, by Stewart Hotston
The Salt Oracle, by Lorraine Wilson
Edge of Oblivion, by Kirk Weddell
I covered Best Short Fiction, Best Non-Fiction (Short), Best Shorter Fiction and Best Translated Short Fiction yesterday.
Belinda stepped outside the time machine, feeling her pumps scrape against a pavement that her feet did not belong on.
Not that anyone cares other than me, but James Goss has consistently been one of the best Doctor Who prose writers for years, and has never won an award as far as I know.
Once upon a time a long way from Croydon, a child was born, the fifty-fifth child to be born that year in the North Zone in BC-ville. The Nativity Robots decanted her from the amniotic chambers and, with huge smiles upon their chests, duly proclaimed her Sasha 55.
I did not read any of the other three shortlisted books in this category. They are:
Sunrise on the Reaping, by Suzanne Collins
Secrets of the First School, by T. L. Huchu
The Secret of the Sapphire Sentinel, by Jendia Gammon writing as J. Dianne Dotson
I did consider reading Suzanne Collins’ Sunrise on the Reaping, which is far ahead of all the other shortlisted books in any category in terms of public recognition, but it’s 400 more pages and I suspected that there was other stuff on the ballot in other categories that I would enjoy more.
Current Mantel Pieces, by Hilary Mantel Among Others, by Jo Walton
Last books finished Uncertain Sons and other stories, by Thomas Ha From Kosovo to Kabul and Beyond: Human Rights and International Intervention, by David Chandler (did not finish) Rebellion on Treasure Island, by Bali Rai Fantasy: A Short History, by Adam Roberts
Next books Timeless, by Steve Cole War Over Kosovo: Politics and Strategy in a Global Age, by Andrew Bacevich The Enchanted April, by Elizabeth von Arnim
Just to record my own BSFA votes this year (and must remember to actually cast my vote in time this time, I foolishly missed the deadline last year). I will do the shorter categories here, the ones where I have considered all of the shortlist works, and then will cover the actual books in another post tomorrow.
I’m not voting in the Best Audio Fiction category. I’m not sufficiently in the habit of listening to audiobooks (other than Doctor Who) to get in the zone for this. One of the finalists is over six hours long.
For Best Art, I nominated just one of the finalists, Nick Wells’ magnificent tesselated covers for the twelve-book Fractal series of novels by Allen Stroud, and I am standing by that as my top preference. It doesn’t come across well in the awards booklet, unfortunately, so I hope that voters take the time to look at the original. None of the others is at all bad, I just happen to really like this work by Nick Wells. I rank the others as follows:
Best Collection, Best Non-Fiction (Long) and Best Novel can wait until tomorrow, though once again I register my confusion at the ordering of the award categories.
Just one of my nominees for Best Short Fiction made it to the ballot, “The Life and Times of Alavira the Great as Written by Titos Pavlou and Reviewed by Two Lifelong Friends“, by Eugenia Trantafyllou. I don’t think I had read any of the other four nominees during the long-listing phase, but I still rate this one higher. In tomorrow’s post I am going to be complaining about finalists which are insufficiently sfnal; this story is not perhaps sfnal per se, but it’s about the enjoyment of reading in the genre, and fannishness and friendship. It gets my top vote.
“One Step at a Time“, by Rick Danforth, annoyed me with untidy punctuation and an untidy ending.
Also, second paragraphs of third sections (or third paragraphs if there didn’t seem to be sections):
Man, this was a bit of a drag. It feels like very little progress was made. The book starts with a flashback where we left off. Alavira and Melitini find out they are not only sisters but also royals! They have to fight each other to the death for the Kingdom of Serenopol somehow? Their parents, the King and the Queen, follow the VERY ancient tradition of the land which says that the only worthy heir to the throne is the one who survives its siblings. It goes all the way back to the creation of Serenopol by a Dog King who survived his other siblings and ascended to the throne. Overall, pretty awesome world-stuff. (Also Dog King? Like an actual dog? I hope we get the lore eventually!)
The bear eyes me askance with its piece of bottle. I think the bear stands for wisdom. I think that’s why I made it. I imagine it telling me to go back to the water and try again. (Third para, doesn’t appear to have sections)
The smells were rich and full, and her mother took long breaths in through her nose, inhaling it all, then gulping seltzer from a tall glass near the sink. Miriam could barely wait for her birthday meal to be served. She hopped around the kitchen, getting in the way and sneaking bits from this or that whenever her mother took a drink.
Me. It was my idea. I worked on the HR systems as part of my support duties. I’d Slack-messaged Jen, who’d mentioned it to Nestor, who’d told Matt to go get a cake and a card from the supermarket while you were out.
Electric had long ago replaced the diesel behemoths of her childhood, but percussive maintenance had stood the test of time. (Third para, doesn’t appear to have sections)
None of the four works I nominated for Best Non-Fiction (Short) made it to the ballot, but I also mentioned three others that had impressed me and two of them did make it. My only reason then for not nominating Paul March-Russell’s review of E.J. Swift’s When There Are Wolves Again was that I had not yet read the book. I have now read the book (more on that tomorrow) and the essay really adds to my enjoyment of one of the classic novels of 2025, so it’s getting my top vote.
“The Legacy of Discworld” by Rick Danforth is enthusiastic but doesn’t say anything especially new.
Again, second paragraphs of third sections (or third paragraphs if there didn’t seem to be sections):
One other aspect of the novel [When There Are Wolves Again] also echoes The Citadel, and that is Swift’s cultural context. Of the many dystopias and apocalypses that featured in British writing of the 1930s, Gollancz published its fair share, including Francis Stuart’s Pigeon Irish (1932), Joseph O’Neill’s Land Under England (1935), Andrew Marvell’s Minimum Man (1938), and R. C. Sherriff’s The Hopkins Manuscript (1939). In the same year Cronin’s novel appeared alone, Gollancz also published Katherine Burdekin’s fascist dystopia, Swastika Night (Burdekin wrote it under the pseudonym of Murray Constantine), as well as the first English translation, by Willa and Edwin Muir, of Franz Kafka’s The Trial. Although such novels often presented anti-fascist, pre-apocalyptic warnings, they also amplified the gathering threats of war, genocide, dictatorship, and immiseration. Even the more optimistic works of the period, such as H. G. Wells’s The Shape of Things to Come (1933) and Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker (1937), portrayed war, disease, and famine as drivers for the future course of history. Although a convincing case has been made for the speculative fiction of the 1930s as a political mode that, as Terry Castle puts it in The Apparitional Lesbian (1993), “dismantles the real … in a search for the not-yet-real,” the slew of such texts also contributed to a structure of melancholic feeling best summed up in Louis MacNeice’s long poem Autumn Journal (1939).
In my article ‘The Rise of Black Speculative Fiction’ published in Aurealis #129, I share how, as an African Australian, I grappled with matters of identity—until I fell into writing black speculative fiction, which brought me out of the closet.
The cornerstone of this annual gathering is the Hugo awards ceremony. During the days leading up to the big event, the convention attendees engage in quiet discussions about the nominees. They wish their favourite authors the best of luck. They recommend the finalist books and art to all their friends.
In 2018, drawing partly on the renewed interest in the Franklin Expedition in the wake of the rediscovery of its vessels and partly on contemporary interest in fiction exploring colonialism and the environment, the television company AMC produced a ten-part series based on the novel and largely following its text as outlined above, but differing from it in certain aspects of interpretation, character, and conclusions, particularly regarding the characterisation and fate of the Tuunbaq, Crozier and Silna.
One well-intended curse that has followed many comedic fantasy authors has been to be christened with the moniker “The Next Terry Pratchett.” While intended to help the new author, I feel like this has been a stone around their neck due to heightened expectations.
As with most of the other categories, I found it pretty easy to choose my top spot for Best Shorter Fiction, though I would add that all of the stories here are good. Amal El-Mohtar’s The River Has Roots is a delightful, dark and queer fairy-tale of life, language and love in the liminal spaces. It also has more owners on Goodreads, on LibraryThing and on StoryGraph than all of the other shortlisted books in all other categories combined (apart from Suzanne Collins’ Sunrise on the Reaping) – massively more so on GR and SG.
“Descent“, by Wole Talabi, about an expedition that goes wrong in the African-inspired Sauútiverse.
“The Apologists“, by Tade Thompson, a murder investigation that turns into existential horror for the human race.
“The Art of Time Travel“, by Teika Marija Smith, oddly enough about art and time travel (and loss).
Second paragraphs of third sections / chapters:
When people say that voices run in families, they mean it as inheritance—that something special has been passed down the generations, like the slope of a nose or the set of a jaw. But Esther and Ysabel Hawthorn had voices that ran together like raindrops on a windowpane. Their voices threaded through each other like the warp and weft of fine cloth, and when the sisters harmonized, the air shimmered with it. Folk said that when they sang together, you could feel grammar in the air. If they sang a stormy sky, the day clouded over. If they sang adventure, blood rose to the boil. If they sang a sweet sadness, everything looked a little silver from the corners of the eyes.
And I dream of my mother.
She arrives at an office block in Central London with a shiny brass plate announcing the names of the Coroner’s List pathologists, qualified and approved by His Majesty’s Government. She spots a name, DR ROBERT TALBOT, MBBS, FRCPath.
Footsteps behind her break the quiet, and her focus. She glances back. Catherine walks briskly towards her, beaming and waving a piece of paper. Rossana smiles. For the first time in a while, standing on the deck of a ship and attuning herself to a new environment, part of her feels at home; and though Catherine grew up on a different continent, she feels that the two of them share a bond that bypasses cultural distance. Ragazze della città e del mare, as they say back home; min el-bahr wa-l-medina – women of the comms centres, the two of them, grown between the worlds of humans and whales.
Charles had snorted, said it sounded as if her plan had been taken straight from a B-movie.
We ordinary voters don’t get to vote on Best Translated Short Fiction (and I fully support that), but I would still call your attention to “Still Water” (original title 止水, “Zhǐ shuǐ”) by Zhang Ran (张冉), which I thought was excellent. The second paragraph of its third section is:
You gradually stretch your fingers and forearms, like a young stork spreading its wings against the wind.
(I don’t have access to the original Chinese text.)
More tomorrow, including also the final category, Best Fiction for Younger Readers.
This was the official program book of the exhibition of Wright’s work at the National gallery in London that I went to last month and really enjoyed. (File 770 ran a piece on it too.) The book consists of three parts – a short introduction from National Gallery directors Sir Gabriele Finaldi and Tony Butler OBE; an essay, “Between Darkness and Light”, by Christina Riding; and another essay, “A ‘Peculiar’ Painter of Candlelight”, by Jon King. The second paragraph of the last of these is:
It is likely that Wright’s celebrated candlelight scenes owe much to an early fascination with the principles of illumination and spectacle. Though his childhood is sparsely documented, insights can be derived from notes by his elder brother Richard and the unpublished memoirs of his niece, Hannah. According to Hannah, Wright demonstrated a curious and ‘active mind’ from a young age, spending his free time observing craftsmen at work – such as joiners and marble workers – and recreating what he saw.⁵ In addition to noting skilfully made projects such as a chest of drawers, a gun and a clock without a working mechanism, Hannah recounts Wright’s early fascination with raree boxes. These portable exhibitions presented unusual images illuminated by candlelight. As a boy, Wright not only grasped the mechanics but, Hannah records, he also impressed and embarrassed the showman with his ingenuity:
Having seen a raree show, he considered attentively upon what principal it could be formed; having discovered the manner of placing the glasses, he completed a show about three feet high; he then went to the Showman, and told him he had made a show like his; the man would not believe it at first, but upon inquiring how he had made it, he found it was quite right, & begged he would not tell any one by what means he had effected it.⁶
⁵ Wright 1850, p. 2. ⁶ Ibid., pp. 2-3.
I am more pleased with the balance of the essays in the book than I was with the commentary in the exhibition itself; Riding does write about the scientific content of Wright’s work, and King makes the point that this is also linked to changing concepts of education in the 18th century. Art criticism isn’t generally my bag, but this is very helpful, and also lavishly illustrated for quite a modest price. You can get Wright of Derby here; but also if you can, get to the National Gallery before the exhibition closes (currently schedled for 10 May).
Non-fiction 7 (YTD 19) De gekste plek van België: 111 bizarre locaties en hun bijzondere verhaal, by Jeroen van der Spek Eleanor: A 200-Mile Walk in Search of England’s Lost Queen, by Alice Loxton Wright of Derby: From the Shadows, by Christine Riding and Jon King That Very Witch: Fear, Feminism and the American Witch Film, by Payton McCarty-Simas (did not finish) The Future We Choose, by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac Religion and the Politics of Identity in Kosovo, by Ger Duijzings From Kosovo to Kabul and Beyond: Human Rights and International Intervention, by David Chandler (did not finish)
Non-genre 2 (YTD 13) A Granite Silence, by Nina Allan The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins
Plays 1 (YTD 1) The Tribe of Gum, by Anthony Coburn
SF 10 (YTD 25) Blood in the Bricks, ed. Neil Williamson Drunk on All Your Strange New Words, by Eddie Robson Who Will You Save?, by Gareth Powell A Power Unbound, by Freya Marske (did not finish) “The Paper Menagerie”, by Ken Liu When There Are Wolves Again, by E.J. Swift “The Man Who Bridged the Mist”, by Kij Johnson Cities Are Forests Waiting To Happen, by Cécile Cristofari The River Has Roots, by Amal El-Mohtar Uncertain Sons and other stories, by Thomas Ha
Doctor Who 5 (YTD 20) Firefall, by Beth Axford The Mind Trap, by John Peel The Last Resort, by Paul Leonard Star Flight, by Paul Hayes Rebellion on Treasure Island, by Bali Rai
Comics 2 (YTD 6) Ghost Stories, by George Mann et al Drome, by Jesse Lonergan
~5,400 pages (YTD 20,400) 11/27 (YTD 34/86) by non-male writers (Loxton, Riding, McCarty-Sinas, Figueres, Allan, Marske, Swift, Johnson, Cristofari, El-Mohtar, Axford) 4/27 (YTD 8/86) by writers of colour (Liu, El-Mohtar, Ha, Rai) 3/27 reread (“The Paper Menagerie”, “The Man Who Bridged the Mist”, The Last Resort)
194 books currently tagged unread, down 1 from last month, down 38 from March 2025.
Reading now Among Others, by Jo Walton Fantasy: A Short History, by Adam Roberts
Coming soon (perhaps) The Lost Dimensions 1, by George Mann et al Timeless, by Steve Cole The Chimes of Midnight, by Robert Shearman Doctor Who and the Daleks, by David Whitaker Dr Who and the Daleks, by Alan Smithee The Daleks, by Oliver Wake
Mantel Pieces, by Hilary Mantel War Over Kosovo: Politics and Strategy in a Global Age, by Andrew Bacevich Star Eater, by Kerstin Hall NATO’s Air War for Kosovo: A Strategic and Operational Assessment, by Benjamin S. Lambeth
Enchanted April, by Elizabeth Von Arnim Oscar Wilde: A Biography, by Richard Ellmann Selected Prose and Prose-Poems, by Gabriela Mistral Sourire 58, by Baudouin Deville et al Trouble With Lichen, by John Wyndham Annette Vallon: A Novel of the French Revolution, by James Tiptree Slow Horses, by Mick Herron The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water by Zen Cho Moving Pictures, by Terry Pratchett Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh Red Rabbit, by Alex Grecian TUKI: Fight for Fire, by Jeff Smith Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie
Two more Doctor Who audiobooks to write up, and they are both good ‘uns.
Firefall is a Fifteenth Doctor / Belinda story set in Canada during and after the great Leonid meteor shower of 1833. Needless to say, one of the things that falls is not yer standard meteor, and the small community where the story is set becomes disrupted by the alien presence and also by the threat of change. The story itself is about as you would expect, but it is lifted by some great technical points – there are some very well-crafted passages, and Michelle Asante as the reader does all the accents well. I’m adding Beth Axford to my list of writers to look out for – she also ghost-wrote Carole Ann Ford’s contribution to The Adventures After. You can get Firefall here.
John Peel was already on my list of Who writers to keep an eye out for, and with The Mind Trap he is back in his comfort zone of the Second Doctor era, with the story read by David Troughton. So we are in good hands. It’s a pretty minimalist story set in a deserted space jail; Jamie is removed from the scene for plot simplicity and we end up with the Doctor and Zoe crossing wits with mysterious prisoner Markan and his robot. Peel uses the short allocated time economically and throws in some interesting twists which are also totally consistent with the feeling of the era. If you like the Second Doctor at all, you’ll enjoy this. You can get The Mind Trap here.
See here for methodology, though NB that I am now also using numbers from StoryGraph. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Portugal.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
Title
Author
GR raters
LT owners
SG reviews
Blindness
José Saramago
343,703
14,451
28,534
The Book of Disquiet
Fernando Pessoa
38,290
6,060
3,355
Night Train to Lisbon
Pascal Mercier
28,219
3,368
2,142
Seeing
José Saramago
32,209
3,108
2,341
Baltasar and Blimunda
José Saramago
26449
2,747
2,821
All the Names
José Saramago
24,470
3,240
1,917
Pereira Maintains
Antonio Tabucchi
36,726
2,492
2,770
The Double
José Saramago
25,571
2,720
2,038
The list this week is dominated by a single, Nobel Prize-winning writer, and one of his books far outstrips all competition. It is about life in a city and society where everyone wakes up blind one day, and has been filmed starring Mark Ruffalo and Julianne Moore. The location is rather ambiguous, but I side with those who think it must be in Portugal because of one character’s fondness for chouriço. Seeing is a sequel to Blindness with some characters in common, so I’m taking it as having the same setting.
I disqualified two Saramago books. Death with Interruptions is also set in an anonymous country, but it is explicitly landlocked, which rules Portugal out. And The Gospel According to Jesus Christ is set in the Holy Land, not surprisingly.
The list is all-male, as previously with Russia, South Africa, Colombia (a special case), Spain and perhaps surprisingly Sweden. The top book by a woman that turned up in my searches was The Librarian Spy, by Madeline Martin, but it seems to fail my location criterion, with significant chunks set in France and the USA. I am much more certain of Alentejo Blue, a collection of short stories set in the Alentejo region, by Monica Ali. The top book by a Portuguese woman with a majority of the action set in Portugal is The Return, by Dulce Maria Cardoso, which I disqualified from Angola but happily acknowledge here.
After four European countries in a row, we’ll be skipping back and forth over the next few weeks, with Togo, then Greece, then Israel, then Hungary.
As promised, I am being more diligent about the non-book media that I am consuming. We’ve watched two TV series since I last updated on this line, How To Get To Heaven From Belfast on Netflix and Small Prophets on the BBC.
How To Get To Heaven From Belfast is an eight-part story about three friends who receive news than an estranged fourth friend has died in Donegal, and team up to try and find out what has happened. Here’s a trailer.
The leads are Sinead Keenan, who was also one of the leads in Being Human and was an alien in the two-part Tenth Doctor finale, and Roisin Gallagher and Caoilfhionn Dunne, who were both new to me. Gallagher, playing Saoirse, a TV dramatist in a failing relationship who gets entangled with a young Garda in Donegal, has the best arc and performance of the three. The scripts are by Lisa McGee, creator of Derry Girls, and there’s an actual fanvid showing the actors who appear in both.
Those crossovers include Bronagh Gallagher (35 years on from The Commitments!) doing some first-class villainous glower, and Ardal O’Hanlon turns up playing the same character that he has played since 1995, but that’s presumably a contractual obligation for any Irish TV series these days. It was also fun to see Patrick Kielty playing himself – it brought me back to the cellar of the Empire on Botanic Avenue in Belfast in the mid-90s, when he was the compere of the Comedy Club and was usually funnier than the visiting acts.
I felt that there were some great moments here but that the overall plot didn’t make a lot of sense. Some of the individual lines are hilarious, and there are some great set-piece scenes – the two that linger in my memory are the moment when the three encounter a pilgrimage in County Fermanagh, and the moment when Saoirse unexpectedly ends up talking live to Patrick Kielty on The Late Late Show while zonked to the eyeballs on tranquillisers. But the mystery became both implausible and incomprehensible, or perhaps I was just not concentrating. I was talking to an Irish friend yesterday who said that she had watched the first two episodes and wasn’t planning to watch the rest, and I think that’s fair.
Small Prophets is a different matter. Here’s a trailer:
It is written and directed by Mackenzie Crook, who I remember particularly as the gormless Gareth from The Office, though apparently he was also in the third season of Game of Thrones; and he appears here as the manager of the garden centre employing the protagonist, Michael Sleep, played by Pearce Quigley who was new to me but whose quiet, comedic performance is devastating. Michael’s father is portrayed by Michael Palin (who turns 83 a few weeks from now); his vanished partner’s brother is Paul Kaye, who was Thoros of Myr in Game of Thrones and has also been in Doctor Who, though I particularly remember his spoof celebrity interviewer Dennis Pennis. Apart from Quigley in the lead role, the performance that grabbed me most was Lauren Patel as Michael’s co-worker Kacey – I had previously heard her as the voice of PC Mukherjee in Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (where Paul Kaye played her boss).
Like How To Get To Heaven From Belfast, Small Prophets is very much set in the world of today, and in a particular place, in this case Manchester. The core story is that Michael, whose partner disappeared without trace several years ago, listens to his father’s advice about creating bottled homunculi which will always answer questions truthfully, in order to try and find out what has happened to the missing Clea. That’s basically the plot; the rest is character and incident interacting, with a hilarious ending combining a meteorite and a valuable ornithology book. Most of the characters are single-beat, but sometimes it works just to point them at each other and let them interact. And the six episodes are beautifully directed.
It’s interesting that both of these shows feature their own creators in different ways. Saoirse in How To Get To Heaven From Belfast nibbles away at the fourth wall, and the subplot of her travails with her TV production company while attempting to spin narrative gold out of the straw of daily life cannot be very far from Lisa McGee’s lived experience. Mackenzie Crook, as writer and director of Small Prophets, self-deprecatingly puts himself on screen as the annoying character who gives orders to everyone and gets steadily more annoyed as his instructions are ignored and defied. I guess it fits the age of Tiktok.
Het Nederlandse West 8, Urban Design & Landscape Architecture, tekende voor de voetgangersbrug die een smalle duinenstrook verbindt met de Uitkerkse polders, een eeuwenoud weidelandschap, waar veel vakantiehuisjes en caravans staan. Op het eerste gezicht ziet de brug eruit alsof wind en golftoppen een enorme lading afvalhout langs de vloedlijn hebben gedeponeerd. De omkisting van een overboord geslagen scheepsvracht? De lambrisering van een verwoeste scheepska-juit? Wie zal het zeggen?
The Dutch firm West 8, Urban Design & Landscape Architecture, designed the footbridge that connects a narrow strip of dunes with the Uitkerkse polders, a centuries-old meadow landscape dotted with holiday cottages and caravans. At first glance, the bridge looks as though the wind and wave crests have deposited a huge pile of driftwood along the high-water mark. The hull of a ship’s cargo that has washed ashore? The panelling of a wrecked ship’s hull? Who can say?
I got this for F a few Christmases ago, a guide to 111 “crazy places” in Belgium. I was already familiar with a few of them – the Vlooybergtoren, Baarle, the church in Borgloon that isn’t there, the Atomium, Rédu. We’ve been inspired also to try and find a couple more thanks to the book – the cubes of Herne were a success, but the Post-Imdustrial Pagodas had been destroyed in 2021. Reading the whole book has given me a couple more ideas.
Most of the places mentioned are simply large and odd works of public art, with a few cases of usable architecture and one or two bits of natural landscape. Useful for anyone planning occasional excursions around Belgium. The text is in Dutch, but the photographs need little explanation and the locations are clearly given, with a map at the end.
The author has also published lists of 222 equally crazy places in the Netherlands, and a less ambitious but presumably longer list of 1000 things to do in the Netherlands. I’m glad that he also turned his attention southwards. You can get De gekste plek van België here.
Current Rebellion on Treasure Island, by Bali Rai Among Others, by Jo Walton Uncertain Sons and other stories, by Thomas Ha
Last books finished That Very Witch: Fear, Feminism and the American Witch Film, by Payton McCarty Simas (did not finish) The Future We Choose, by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac Star Flight, by Paul Hayes Cities Are Forests Waiting To Happen, by Cécile Cristofari The River Has Roots, by Amal El-Mohtar Religion and the Politics of Identity in Kosovo, by Ger Duijzings
Next books The Lost Dimension, Book One, by Nick Abadzis et al From Kosovo to Kabul and Beyond: Human Rights and International Intervention, by David Chandler Enchanted April, by Elizabeth von Arnim
Next of my run of Titan Doctor Who comics acquired in 2022 (and I’m actually getting near the end, I expect that I will finish them this year). Ghost Stories is, unusually for this content stream, a direct sequel to a broadcast Doctor Who episode, The Return of Doctor Mysterio, visiting the new family of Grant the ex-superhero, Lucy the journalist and Lucy’s daughter Jennifer several years after the Christmas 2016 episode. This had a promising beginning with the dynamic between superhero and Doctor nicely portrayed, but petered out into a standard quest story with guest characters in the second half; also the art notably fails to make the Doctor look much like Peter Capaldi, never mind the other established characters. For completists. You can get Ghost Stories here.
Second paragraph of third tale (“The Trade that No One Knows”):
When, however, the boy had grown up, he said to his parents, “I am a man now, and I intend to marry, so I wish you to go at once to the king and ask him to give me his daughter for wife.” The astonished parents rebuked him, saying, “What can you be thinking of? We have only this poor hut to shelter us, and hardly bread enough to eat, and we dare not presume to go into the king’s presence, much less can we venture to ask for his daughter to be your wife.”
A collection of fairy tales supposedly collected in Serbia, but actually culled from five collections, one published in 1889 and the others during the first world war. I recognised one or two from other sources (King Midas and his ears), and the themes of course are very ancient; virtuous young men, beautiful young women, family and social dynamics, occasional magic spells and enchanted beasts, long journeys where odd things happen. Nothing that especially jumped out, though if I were still dungeon-mastering there would be some useful material. You can get Serbian Folktales here.
He had at first been amused by the English girl’s interest in this American family, shrewdly diagnosing that it was inspired by interest in one particular member of the group. But now something out of the ordinary about this family party awakened in him the deeper, more impartial interest of the scientist. He sensed that there was something here of definite psychological interest.
This came to the top of my list of books set in Jordan a few weeks back; the first few chapters are set in 1930s Jerusalem, but the scene then moves to Petra, where the actual murder takes place, and then to Amman, where Poirot spends about half of the total page count solving it. The victim is a horrible character who has bullied her entire family into terrified submission; the question is, which of them bumped her off and how? There’s some very well done Christie-style deflection, where they try to cover for each other, though the actual solution to the crime is not really flagged at all to the reader, so I think it counts as one of the less fair whodunnits in her oeuvre. But the family dynamics are very well depicted.
There is a happy flashforward at the end to show all of the survivors living happily ever after. The book was published in 1938, and we are meant to think that 1943 will be the same only a bit better.
I looked into the setting of the King Solomon Hotel in Jerusalem; it’s pretty clear that this is meant to be a fictional version of the King David Hotel (though in fact today there is a King Solomon Hotel on the same street). There is a little local political commentary in that Mahmoud the dragoman (guide/ translator) keeps boring the Western tourists by going on about the Zionists / Jews. (Nice and a little surprising to see anti-Semitism portrayed as a negative character trait for a change.) But in terms of politics, a much more interesting character is Lady Westholme.
Lady Westholme was a very well-known figure in the English political world. When Lord Westholme, a middle-aged, simple-minded peer, whose only interests in life were hunting, shooting and fishing, was returning from a trip to the United States, one of his fellow passengers was a Mrs. Vansittart. Shortly afterwards Mrs. Vansittart became Lady Westholme. The match was often cited as one of the examples of the danger of ocean voyages. The new Lady Westholme lived entirely in tweeds and stout brogues, bred dogs, bullied the villagers and forced her husband pitilessly into public life. It being borne in upon her, however, that politics was not Lord Westholme’s métier in life and never would be, she graciously allowed him to resume his sporting activities and herself stood for Parliament. Being elected with a substantial majority, Lady Westholme threw herself with vigor into political life, being especially active at Question time. Cartoons of her soon began to appear (always a sure sign of success). As a public figure she stood for the old-fashioned values of Family Life, Welfare work amongst Women, and was an ardent supporter of the League of Nations. She had decided views on questions of Agriculture, Housing and Slum Clearance. She was much respected and almost universally disliked! It was highly possible that she would be given an Under Secretaryship when her Party returned to power. At the moment a Liberal Government (owing to a split in the National Government between Labor and Conservatives) was somewhat unexpectedly in power.
You don’t read Agatha Christie for sophisticated political commentary – the notion that the Liberals could have formed a minority government in the 1930s was ludicrous. (In the 1935 election they had lost half their seats and were reduced to 12 MPs.) We are clearly meant to read Lady Westholme as a direct parody of Nancy Astor, who was also American, had an aristocratic husband, was the first woman to take her seat in the House of Commons and was an outspoken Conservative (and anti-Semite and anti-Communist). One can only take those comparisons so far, of course, because…
Second paragraph of chapter on third episode (“Cygnus Alpha”):
“Cygnus Alpha” gives us our third iteration of a totalitarian society (in this case, a theocratic one), demonstrating that, even on the outskirts of civilisation, oppression persists. We have surveillance, both human and divine; we have social control which is as much by the individual as by the state the prisoners are not being held against their will and, when offered freedom by Blake, most choose to stay, simply because it seems the easier option); we have state-sanctioned torture and abuse (and, upon seeing Blake’s condition after torture, Arco blames the victim, telling Blake that he should have stayed out of trouble); we have control using drugs (in the form of Vargas’s Big Lie, that the drugs consumed in the religious ceremonies keep them alive; we have guards who attack Blake in a scene reminiscent of the flashbacks in “The Way Back”. Sexual abuse is not mentioned, but we do have sex as an agent of social control: while Kara is visibly attracted to Gan, her kissing him seems to be as much a way of getting the most powerful man in the new group on her side as anything.
A comprehensive episode-by-episode guide to Blake’s 7, with each season introduced with notes on the overall production context, and clear opinions about which are the best and worst stories. Originally published in 2003, so before Big Finish started to produce audios featuring the surviving members of the original crew (and then their replacements), but an appendix covers the spinoff novels, plays and audios up to that point. I don’t agree with all the judgements – I have a sneaking affection, for instance, for “City at the Edge of the World”, while on the other hand I found the skeevy gender politics of the three episodes by Ben Steed unredeemable. However it’s good to have a chunky reference volume to pore over.
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 Azerbaijan.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
Title
Author
GR raters
LT owners
SG reviewers
Ali and Nino
Kurban Said
9,761
1,033
835
Mobility
Lydia Kiesling
2,326
118
605
Caucasus Days
Banine
1,124
98
193
The Colonel’s Mistake
Dan Mayland
1,755
94
75
Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan through Peace and War
Thomas de Waal
830
127
56
The Orphan Sky
Ella Leya
553
69
137
Stone Dreams: A Novel-Requiem
Akram Aylisli
450
17
117
7 Seconds to Die: A Military Analysis of the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War and the Future of Warfighting
John Antal
300
31
19
Well, it’s a very clear win for one of my favourite books, the mercifully short romance Ali and Nino by the enigmatic Kurban Said. It’s about an Azeri boy and Georgian girl who fall in love in Baku before and during the First World War and Azerbaijan’s first go at independence; global, local and family politics all intersect with a dramatic conclusion. Go get it. It also won when I did this exercise back in 2015.
In his The Orientalist: In Search of a Man Caught Between East and West, Thomas Reiss marshals the evidence that “Kurban Said” was born Lev Nussimbaum, apparently on a train in 1905, and grew up in Baku where his father was a minor oil magnate; his mother invited Stalin round for tea occasionally; when the revolution came they fled to Constantinople, then Paris, and finally Berlin; he died in Italian exile, aged just 37, Ezra Pound’s last-minute efforts to help him being all in vain; and his grave became the butt of a comic anecdote told by John Steinbeck. That summary does not do the story justice.
I’m not completely certain about Mobility, a story about the daughter of US diplomats based in Baku, who grows up to join the oil industry and comes back to Azerbaijan, but I gave it the benefit of the doubt.
Banine was the pen name of the Azeri-born writer Umm-El-Banine Assadoulaeff (whose name is spelt in modern Azeri as Ümmülbanu Əsədullayeva) who lived most of her life in Paris after the fall of independent Azerbaijan. Caucasus Days was first published in French as Jours caucasiens and has also been translated as Days in the Caucasus. It sounds rather autobiographical.
Dan Mayland has written four novels about a former CIA agent doing daring deeds in Azerbaijan and nearby countries. It’s fairly clear that the first of these, The Colonel’s Mistake, is mainly set in Azerbaijan. I disqualified the second, The Leveling, which seems to have large chunks set in Central Asia. The other two didn’t have enough support to qualify.
I am allowing Thomas de Waal’s Black Garden to qualify for the list because if you combine the bits set in Nagorno-Karabakh and the rest of Azerbaijan, you probably have a majority of the page count.
Ella Laya is a jazz musician from Azerbaijan who has built her career in the USA. Her novel The Orphan Sky is about a young woman musician in Azerbaijan during the Cold War.
Stone Dreams / Daş yuxular got its writer Akram Aylisli / Əkrəm Əylisli into a lot of trouble for its sympathetic portrayal of the Armenians expelled from Azerbaijan in the 1989 pogroms.
I don’t know much about 7 Seconds to Die, but the remarkable 2020 war very much deserves close analysis.
I disqualified a number of books which covered the Caucasus as a whole, because generally Azerbaijan will only take up around a third of those if they cover Armenia and Georgia as well. I hesitated a bit more over Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon (but its setting is mostly now in the Russian Federation); The Book of Dede Korkut, which comes very close in that most of the ancient epic stories are set in the Caucasus but in my judgement not quite 50% in today’s Azerbaijan; and the novels of Olga Grjasnowa, who is Azeri but sets most of her action in Germany among the Azeri community there.
Six of the next nine countries on my list are in Europe, but three are not, and we have a balanced run coming up: Portugal, the Togo, then Greece, then Israel.
Tremendously moving interview with Christian Delhasse, the driver of the Metro train that was bombed in the 2016 terrorist attacks in Brussels, ten years ago today. He feels personally responsible; he was physically uninjured, but his life was destroyed.
www.standaard.be/binnenland/c…
As I said then, I am proud of this country, which I now call my own, which finds its way to solutions through peculiar paths, and sometimes combines superficial surliness with a silent determination to just get on with things. I’m also proud of the European project, which is about building and sustaining a vision based on transcending past conflict. I am not interested in hearing the views of those who want to open new conflicts. They are losing. We must win.
In particular, I erred by restricting my coverage to babies born to the spouses of Presidents and Vice-Presidents. I therefore omitted those babies born to women who were not married to the presidential or vice-presidential father of the child.
There are probably several such cases that we don’t know about, but there is one that we definitely do know about. Thomas Jefferson, who was Vice-President from 1797-1801 and then President 1801-1809, was almost certainly the father of the six children born to Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman on his Monticello estate, between 1795 and 1808. Given the DNA evidence and documentary records, it’s basically proved beyond reasonable doubt. Sally Hemings incidentally was probably the much younger half-sister of Jefferson’s wife, Martha Wayles, who had died in 1782.
So the full list of Vice-Presidential and Presidential babies is as follows:
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826, Vice-President 1797-1801) and Sally Hemings (1773-1835)
(William) Beverley Hemings (born 1798 – after 1873) Thenia Hemings (born in 1799 and died in infancy)
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826, President 1801-1809) and Sally Hemings (1773-1835)
All were born on the Monticello estate in Virginia. Madison and Eston Hemings moved to Chilicothe, Ohio, and are known to have living descendants. The later lives of Beverley and Harriet are not known. (Harriet was in fact the second child of that name; Sally Hemings’ first child, who loved only from 1795 to 1797, was also Harriet.)
John C. Calhoun (1782-1850, Vice-President 1825-1832) and Floride Calhoun (1792-1866) – NB Floride’s maiden name was also Calhoun; she and John were cousins.
James Edward Calhoun (1826-1861) William Lowndes Calhoun (1829-1858)
Both were born in North Carolina, the ninth and tenth of the Calhouns’ ten children. James moved to California and is not known to have had children. William stayed in North Carolina, married twice and has living descendants. Both died comparatively young (James at 36 and William at 29).
Hannibal Hamlin (1809-1891, Vice-President 1861-1865) and Ellen Hamlin née Emery (1835-1925)
Frank Hamlin (1862-1922)
Born in Maine, Frank was the sixth and last of Hannibal’s children, and the second and last of Ellen’s. (Hannibal’s first wife Sarah, who died in 1855, was her half-sister.) I have not found any record that he had children.
Schuyler Colfax (1823-1885, Vice-President 1869-1873) and his second wife Ellen née Wade (1836-1911).
The only Vice-Presidential baby born in Washington, DC, Schuyler Colfax III started off in politics, becoming mayor of South Bend, Indiana at only 28, but ended up working for Kodak for most of his career. He has living descendants.
Grover Cleveland (1837-1908, President 1885-89 & 1893-97) and Frances Folsom (1864-1947)
They were the second and third of the Clevelands’ five children (Grover already had a child by a previous relationship). Esther, the only Presidential baby to be born in Washington D.C., was actually born in the White House. One of her daughters was the philosopher Philippa Foot, the co-inventor of the Trolley Problem. Marion was born in the Clevelands’ holiday home on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Her second husband was John Harlan Amen, the chief interrogator at the Nuremberg tribunal. Both have living descendants.
John F. Kennedy (1917-1963, President 1961-63) and his wife Jacqueline née Bouvier (1929-1994)
Patrick Bouvier Kennedy (1963-63), born prematurely at the Otis Air Force Base on Cape Cod, Massachusetts and died two days later.
All being well, the Vances will add to this tally in a couple of months.
My thanks to Tim Roll-Pickering for putting me right.
Sergeant Colon balanced on a shaky ladder at one end of the Brass Bridge, one of the city’s busiest thoroughfares. He clung by one hand to the tall pole with the box on top of it, and with the other he held up a home-made picture book to the slot in the front of the box.
I have very happy memories of first reading this while bouncing around the hills and valleys of North Macedonia in 2001 during the conflict there, which actually made it rather appropriate reading; I wrote then:
it is the story of a multiethnic diplomatic mission to a neighbouring, less developed country from the urban metropolis of Ankh-Morpork. As I met up with my Bulgarian, Romanian and American colleagues in Sofia, then proceeded to Skopje to rendezvous with our Greek, Turkish, Serb, Kosovar and Albanian comrades, before touring [North] Macedonia to find out what the hell was going on there, Pratchett’s satire took on a very hard edge for me. My Albanian colleague devoured the book on the day we travelled to Ohrid, though he confessed to some very understandable confusion about exactly who was a dwarf and who was not. Pratchett manages to give a gravely humorous treatment to some very serious themes.
I’m glad to say that I found it just as entertaining coming back to it a quarter-century later. Some of the puns are groan-worthy; some of the satire lands a bit better than other bits; but the core values of empathy and humanism (very much extending to the inhuman characters) are consistent, and there are some deep ideas about symbolism, community and identity. (Though there’s also a less successful sub-plot about the Watch falling to pieces in Ankh-Morpork while Vimes, Carrot and Angua are away in Uberwald.) Sure, these books are a formula; but it’s a good formula that can cope with varying the ingredients. You can get The Fifth Elephant here.
Current The Future We Choose, by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac
Last books finished Blood in the Bricks, ed. Neil Williamson The Tribe of Gum, by Anthony Coburn Drunk on All Your Strange New Words, by Eddie Robson Who Will You Save?, by Gareth Powell A Power Unbound, by Freya Marske (did not finish) “The Paper Menagerie”, by Ken Liu Drome, by Jesse Lonergan When There Are Wolves Again, by E.J. Swift “The Man Who Bridged the Mist”, by Kij Johnson
Next books From Kosovo to Kabul and Beyond: Human Rights and International Intervention, by David Chandler Among Others, by Jo Walton Rebellion on Treasure Island, by Bali Rai
A couple of recent Big Finish audios set in a slightly divergent First Doctor continuity, with the initial TARDIS team from the TV drama An Adventure in Space and Time – David Bradley as the Doctor, Claudia Grant as Susan Foreman, Jamie Glover as Ian Chesterton and Jemma Powell as Barbara Wright. They have already done several audios from 2017 to 2021, but I had not heard them. These two are very recent, released last September and in January this year, but are being marketed as “Doctor Who Unbound”, as an alternative timeline not constrained by TV continuity (though I didn’t really spot anything in either that would have been constrained).
David Warner is as ever great at channeling William Hartnell as the First Doctor. Jemma Powell and Jamie Glover are OK as Ian and Barbara. I find Claudia Grant a bit squeaky.
Knights of the Round TARDIS sets us up in Oxfrod just before the Battle of Evesham, with Simon de Montfort pitted against the forces of King Henry III for the sake of the future governance of England, and the famous friar, Roger Bacon, offering technological innovation. It won’t take the informed Who fan very long to work out who ‘Bacon’ really is. The cast are all having a good time, but it didn’t really work for me; historical stories run the risk of just doing the events as they happened, by the numbers, and at the end Simon de Montfort is given a very Whiggish briefing on the future constitutional history of England by the Doctor and team. You can get Knights of the Round TARDIS here.
Return to Marinus is a different matter. You can enjoy it without having previously listened to Knights of the Round TARDIS (in fact, that’s what I did myself), but I think you’ll be mystified by it unless you have at least a passing familiarity with the 1964 TV story The Keys of Marinus. I happen to love The Keys of Marinus, and stories of Team TARDIS coming back to societies that they have already irrevocably altered on a previous visit are often fun (witness The Ark). I’m really impressed that Morris has found new riffs on each of the sub-plots within the main story; it ends up being a bit episodic, but that’s not always such a bad thing if that’s what the material requires. The ending puts a truly impressive twist on several of the established plot elements. You can get Return to Marinus here.
I’m looking forward to the third of this trilogy, Battle of the Acid Sea by Simon Guerrier, but it looks like I will have to wait until next year.
This is the next in my series of explorations of winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature who were not white men. Pearl S. Buck, born in 1892, won the award in 1938, making her the third youngest winner after Rudyard Kipling and Sinclair Lewis (just edging out Sigrid Undset). I had already read and enjoyed her best known book, The Good Earth (1936); her short 1948 piece The Big Wave is her second most popular on LibraryThing, and her novel Pavilion of Women second-placed on Goodreads, so since the financial and time costs were not excessive, I read them both.
Both of those books postdate the Nobel award, which was explicitly for “for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces”. The first half of that refers to The Good Earth (1931) and its sequels, Sons (1933) and A House Divided (1935), and the second half to her less well-remembered biographies of her mother and father, respectively The Exile and Fighting Angel, both published in 1936.
One has to be alert to the potential difficulties of a Western author being presented as the world’s expert on Chinese life, and I must say that in her favour, Pearl S. Buck’s Nobel lecture contains almost nothing about her own work, but urges he audience to get acquainted with Chinese literature, particularly The Water Margin, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms and The Dream of the Red Chamber (she mentions Journey to the West as well, but doesn’t put it on the same level, though today it is generally counted as one of the Four Great Novels).
A video of the ceremony survives, with Pearl S. Buck and Enrico Fermi (who is significantly the shorter of the two) receiving their awards from the very tall King Gustav V, who had turned 80 earlier that year.
As I said, The Big Wave is quite a short book for younger readers. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
But each day Jiya was still tired. He did not want to think or to remember—he only wanted to sleep. He woke to eat and then to sleep. And when Kino’s mother saw this she led him to the bedroom, and Jiya sank each time into the soft mattress spread on the floor in the quiet, clean room. He fell asleep almost at once and Kino’s mother covered him and went away.
It’s the story of two friends, Jiya and Kino, who live in a fishing village in Japan. Kino and his family live on the hill; Jiya’s family live by the shore, and along with the rest of their village are wiped out by a tsunami. Jiya, devastated beyond words, is adopted by Kino’s family, and as he grows up, he puts his life back together, declining to be adopted by the local aristocrat and falling in love with Kino’s sister. It’s well-expressed and compact. You can get The Big Wave here. I am pretty sure that I had read it as a child.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of Pavilion of Women is:
“I must choose the woman at once,” she told herself. The household could not be at ease in this waiting. She would therefore today send for the old woman go-between and inquire what young women, country bred, might be suitable. She had already brought to her own memory all others that she knew, but there was not one whom she wanted. All were either too high or too low, the daughters of the rich, who would be proud and troublesome, or so foreign-taught that they might even want her put away. Or they were the daughters of the poor who would be equally proud and troublesome. No, she must find some young woman who had neither too much nor too little, so that she might be free from fear and envy. And it would be better, she reflected, if the young woman were wholly a stranger, and her family strangers, too, and if possible, distant, so that when she came into the house she would take up all her roots and bring them here and strike them down afresh.
Pavilion of Women is a longer book, but not too long. It is about Madame Wu, of a wealthy family, who on her fortieth birthday decides that she will no longer have sex with her husband, procures him a concubine and embarks on her personal voyage of self-discovery, with the help of the foreign priest Father Andrei. It is not just about China, but about the development of women’s rights across the world, and about how Westerners who blunder into an ancient society thinking they have all the answers are doomed to failure, while those who take the time to sit and listen may learn something. But the core of the book is Madame Wu and her relationships with her husband, his other lovers, and their sons and daughters-in-law, at a time of massive social change in China. She is not a completely sympathetic character, but she and her environment are vividly drawn. You can get Pavilion of Women here.
I won’t go out of my way to complete my Pearl S. Buck bibliography, but at the same time I’ll snap up any other books that I happen to spot in passing.
Next in this sequence is the Chilean writer Gabriela Mistral; her work is not easily available in English translation, and I will have to be satisfied with a volume of Selected Prose and Prose-Poems.
The Big Wave was also my top unread book by a woman. Next on that pile is Enchanted April, by Elizabeth vom Arnim.
In this chapter I will seek to address three interlinked themes which underpin the narrative described above. Firstly, I will examine the extent to which decimalisation was seen as diluting a British idea of identity based on exceptionalism; secondly I will discuss how this related to British efforts to join the European Common Market; and finally I will seek to determine the extent to which decimal currency was forced on an unwilling population.
In November 1963, the title character of a BBC science fiction episode called “An Unearthly Child” drew unwelcome attention to herself by thinking that the UK was already using a decimal currency. Of course, at the time there was no plan for decimalisation and the dialogue is meant to reinforce the science fiction credentials of the new show, Doctor Who, rather than to make serious predictions of the future.
The first ever episode of Doctor Who predicts decimalisation.
I had read the last chapter of Andy Cook’s 2020 PhD thesis a couple of years ago, because of the role played by my grandfather in the Irish side of the story, but last month I sat down and read the whole thing. (Well, lay down really; it was bedtime reading for a few days.)
Cook here unpacks the politics behind the British government’s decision to move to a decimal currency in the late 1960s, and the choices that were made at the time. He rejects the right-wing rewriting of history which portrays the process as a plot by European integrationists to dilute British national identity; the consideration of the UK’s European future was a marginal issue (mainly because everyone in the political mainstream assumed that future European integration went without saying).
The two crucial practical factors were, first, that South Africa, Australia and New Zealand had gone ahead with decimalisation in the early to mid 1960s, moving away from the pounds, shillings and pence that they had inherited from the Empire; and second, that the development of business machines for sale internationally made the old system seem even more antiquated. There was no serious push against decimalisation at the time (though the old sixpence, now worth 2½p, was saved from oblivion for a few years).
I was surprised to find that the main controversy was whether the pound should be kept as the main unit, or whether a new currency worth ten shillings should be adopted, as had been done with the South African rand and the Australian and New Zealand dollars. (There was also a very small lobby for keeping the old penny and creating a new unit worth 8 shillings and 4 pence, ie 100 old pence.)
Here the Bank of England mobilised the City of London to lobby strongly for the retention of the pound, for the sake of continuity and international prestige, and James Callaghan, the Chancellor of the Excequer, was easily persuaded. Cook is hilarious about the lack of professional qualifications at the top of the British financial services industry in the 1960s, compensated by full participation in the various Old Boys Networks. The role of the Royal Mint, newly relocated to near Callaghan’s constituency in South Wales, seems also to have been a factor.
Cook also looks briefly, perhaps a bit too briefly, at the South African, Australian and New Zealand cases. The early 1960s British Conservative government had wanted to take any reforms slowly and in step with the major Commonwealth partners (and South Africa); but was then caught out when they went ahead without the UK, motivated by a desire to show independence. India too had decimalised the rupee in 1957 (and Pakistan in 1961), but the British seem to have felt that they had less to learn from countries that were not ruled by white people.
I have written about the Irish side of the story previously. The extra bit of context that I got from reading the rest of the thesis is that the notion of using a unit worth ten-shillings as the basis of a new Irish currency, which was the favoured option until quite late in the day when Jack Lynch and Charles Haughey together decided otherwise, was a reflection of the debates in the UK, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. In the end, the convenience of keeping the Irish currency linked to the UK, given that the two countries were effectively in a currency union, compelled even those (like my grandfather) who had originally backed the ten-shilling system to accept that the best solution was simply to copy the new UK coinage.
You can get the thesis here. I have done a cursory search for Andy Cook’s current co-ordinates on LinkedIn and other networks, but have not found him; I wonder what he is doing now?
Joan and Peter, by H.G. Wells – mostly set in England with excursions elsewhere, but there is a crazy Unionist aunt and the male protagonists visit Dublin to find out What Is Going On.
Apostate, by Forrest Reid – first volume, taking the (now mostly forgotten) writer through childhood in late nineteenth-century Belfast up to the start of his literary career.
Private Road, by Forrest Reid – second volume, recounting a literary life between Northern Ireland and England in the first third of the twentieth century.
My favourites of these are Our Song, by Anna Carey, Prophet Song, by Paul Lynch, The Irish Assassins, by Julie Kavanagh, and Ireland in the Renaissance, eds Thomas Herron and Michael Potterton.
Finally, some Irish biographical blog notes which were not based around books:
As usual, I have looked at the extent to which the works shortlisted for the Nebula Award (and the related Andre Norton Award) this year have gained traction on the most popular book-logging sites, Goodreads, LibraryThing and StoryGraph. To repeat, 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.
Best Novel
Title
Author
GR raters
LT owners
SG reviews
Katabasis
R.F. Kuang
139,466
2,863
45,260
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter
Stephen Graham Jones
47,962
1,067
15,977
Death of the Author
Nnedi Okorafor
20,345
808
7,967
The Incandescent
Emily Tesh
10,745
487
4,984
Sour Cherry
Natalia Theodoridou
3,260
118
1,288
When We Were Real
Daryl Gregory
1,653
103
473
Wearing the Lion
John Wiswell
1,196
88
503
A consistent pattern with a clear leader, and almost exactly the same ranking across the three systems.
The Kindle edition of Sour Cherry is currently going for $1.99 on Amazon.com (where I buy most of my ebooks). It has 306 pages, so that’s 154 pages per dollar – amazing value. (Skipping ahead, the most expensive books listed here by this measure are The Sloneshore Register, at 8.5 pages per dollar, and The River Has Roots, at 8.9.)
Again a consistent pattern with a clear leader, if not quite as far ahead as in Best Novel.
Best Novelette
Not surprisingly, only one of the finalists has been separately published.
Title
Author
GR raters
LT owners
SG reviews
The Name Ziya
Wen-Yi Lee
63
1
35
None of the short stories or poetry on the ballot has been published separately.
Andre Norton Award
Title
Author
GR raters
LT owners
SG reviews
Sunrise on the Reaping
Suzanne Collins
1,122,593
4,739
174,106
Into the Wild Magic
Michelle Knudsen
32
9
5
Wishing Well, Wishing Well
Jubilee Cho
12
5
10
The Tower
David Anaxagoras, narrated by Christopher Gebauer
25
1
4
Gemini Rising
Jonathan Brazee
24
0
0
Goblin Girl
K.A. Mielke
3
0
2
The top book here has a colossal lead, with more Goodreads raters and StoryGraph reviews than all the other books listed in this post, combined. (Also by far the most owners on LibraryThing, but not quite as dominant as in the other two cases.) The other five nominees have only 15 LibraryThing owners between them. If I ran the Nebulas, I would worry that this category is drifting out of step with popular taste.
Finally, Best Comic
Helen of Wyndhorn
Tom King
1,792
52
386
Strange Bedfellows
Ariel Slamet Ries
825
35
580
Fishflies
Jeff Lemire
571
25
131
The Flip Side
Jason Walz
399
24
138
Carmilla Volume 3: The Eternal
Amy Chu
111
8
45
The Stoneshore Register
G. Willow Wilson
111
10
32
Second Shift
Kit Anderson
69
9
39
Mary Shelley’s School for Monsters, Volume 2: The Killing Stone
Jessica Maison
0
0
0
The only category where there is a divergence at the top, with StoryGraph users favoring Strange Bedfellows over Helen of Wyndhorn. Also the only category to feature a finalist that is completely invisible on the book sites.
I have been tracking these statistics every year since 2012, and one of these days I shall sit down and see if any lessons can be learned.
I was cheered yesterday to hear that LACon V, this year’s Worldcon, has received 1293 Hugo nomination votes so far, two weeks before the deadline. This compares to a total of 1338 nominating votes last year, so it’s pretty certain that LACon will have more, and will meet the 1700-1900 level which has been ‘normal’ since 2014.
I have figures from almost every year since 1971, and until 2008 Hugo nomination votes were mostly in the 400-500 range, the peak being 738 in 2003 (median 480, average 473, standard deviation 117). For final ballot votes it’s about twice as much, peaking at 1788 in 1980 (median 899, average 922, standard deviation 324).
Year
Noms
Final
1971
343
732
1972
270
550
1973
350
708
1974
?
930
1975
267
600
1976
486
1595
1977
500
800
1978
540
1246
1979
467
1160
1980
563
1788
1981
454
1247
1982
648
1071
1983
660
1322
1984
513
1467
1985
222
443
1986
568
1267
1987
567
990
1988
418
1178
1989
539
980
1990
291
486
1991
352
1048
1992
498
902
1993
397
841
1994
649
491
1995
477
744
1996
442
939
1997
429
687
1998
471
769
1999
425
438
2000
427
1071
2001
495
1075
2002
626
>885
2003
738
805
2004
>462
1093
2005
546
684
2006
533
>660
2007
409
>471
2008
483
895
Things shifted from 2009, with every year from 2009 to 2016 setting a new record for nominations, and unprecedented numbers of final ballot votes from 2011.
Year
Noms
Final
2009
799
1074
2010
864
1094
2011
1006
2100
2012
1101
1922
2013
1343
1848
2014
1923
3587
2015
2122
5950
2016
4032
3130
I think there are three things going on here.
1) It began with a concerted move to make the Hugos more relevant, after a couple of years in the late ’00s where there were few or no women or writers of colour on the ballot in any category, particularly for written fiction. This campaign was successful. Part of the Puppy propaganda campaign was the lie that Hugo participation had been falling as the awards became more ‘woke’. In fact, participation had risen.
2) If I may say so myself, I think Loncon 3’s 2014 campaign to market the convention and the Hugos was particularly effective. (I was the Division Head for Promotions.) If the Worldcon is committed to making the Hugos a success in terms of PR, great things can be achieved.
3) Most notably in 2015 and 2016 there was the Sad / Rabid Puppies factor, as hundreds joined the 2015 Worldcon to nominate vile rubbish, and thousands then joined (and nominated in 2016) to vote against them. I wrote an awful lot about this at the time, but the classic account is Camestros Felapton’s Debarkle.
The period since then is the period when I was personally involved with the Hugos. The numbers are below. For the sake of transparency, I am noting my presence or absence beside each year, and it is cheering but probably unconnected that the three highest final ballot votes of the last decade were in the three years that I was the Hugo Administrator. It may be more relevant that all three of those Worldcons took place in smaller European countries (Finland, Ireland, Scotland) with a strong local fanbase.
Year
Noms
Final
notes
2017
2464
3319
(I was Administrator)
2018
1813
2828
(I was not involved)
2019
1800
3097
(I was Administrator)
2020
1584
2221
(I was on the team)
2021
1249
2362
(I was on the team, but resigned after noms were counted)
2022
1368
2235
(I was on the team)
2023
1847
1674
(I was not involved)
2024
1720
3436
(I was Administrator; 377 final ballot votes were disqualified)
2025
1338
1962
(I was on the team, but resigned after noms were counted)
Again there are several things going on here.
1) The 2017 nominations number is inflated by post-Puppy nominators who had joined in 2016 to vote against the Puppy slates.
2) The 2020-2022 numbers were depressed by the pandemic. (Hugo participation is a lagging indicator of geopolitics.) We also had software issues in 2020 which meant that the voting window on the final ballot was unusually short, but I don’t think that made a huge difference.
3) The 2023 numbers cannot be trusted, for reasons that have been well aired, though they can probably be taken as a lower bound on the real level of participation. In addition, the final ballot vote will have been depressed because a lot of regular participants worried about data transfers to China.
Even so, to put it in perspective, all of the last nine Worldcons have had higher Hugo nomination numbers than any year before 2013; and all of them except 2023 had higher Hugo final ballot numbers than any year before 2011.
The “new normal” level of nominations these days for a functional Worldcon looks like 1700-1900 voters. The “new normal” level of final ballot votes for a functional Worldcon looks like 2000-3500. By “functional”, I mean a Worldcon where the Promotions Division, or its equivalent, actively helps to promote Hugo participation, and where there is an understanding of the importance of adequate software, provided in good time, for the Hugo voting process.
All that said, I look forward to LACon V proving me wrong and blasting through the existing records. I am not involved this year but I wish the team well.
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 Czech Republic.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
I had expected a lot of confusion with Slovakia here, but in fact most people are pretty clear on whether a book is set in the one country or the other.
This week’s winner is a bit confused and variable in form, which is appropriate enough. Both Goodreads and Storygraph have combined individual printings of The Metamorphosis with collections of Kafka’s short fiction where it is the title story, while LibraryThing tallies every edition and collection separately. However, I did enough lumping of the options on LibraryThing to assure me that the winner there is definitely the same as on the other two systems.
In case you don’t know, the story is about a man who is trasformed overnight into an enormous beetle or cockroach (the German word is “Ungeheuer”, which means “monster”). One could query whether The Metamorphosis is really set in Prague, in that the location is not specified, but it can hardly be anywhere else. (Similarly for the other three Kafka books on the list; they are certainly set in what was then Bohemia rather than anywhere else.)
The runner-up is a novel by Milan Kundera which was made into a famous film starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Juliette Binoche, about a randy doctor and his girlfriend whose lives are up-ended by the Prague Spring of 1968. Another of Kundera’s novels makes the list and several more are bubbling under.
The result when I last measured this, less systematically, in 2015 was much the same.
The effect of including the Storygraph numbers was to lose The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka and gain his Letter to his Father.
The third author on the list, Laini Taylor, is American, and her very successful series of fantasy novels are set in today’s Prague.
The top book by a woman author who is actually from the Czech republic is Hana by Alena Mornštajnová, which scores decently on Goodreads and StoryGraph but very poorly on LibraryThing. Unless you count Madeleine Albright, who was born in Prague and whose autobiographical Prague Winter scores better.
I disqualified several of Milan Kundera’s later novels set in Paris, Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke as the letters were written when he too lived in Paris, Amerika by Franz Kafka which is, oddly enough, set in America, and The Lost Wife by Alyson Richman which is a Holocaust survivor story mostly set elsewhere than the Czech Republic.
Next up are Azerbaijan and Portugal, followed by Togo and then back to Europe again for Greece.
On 28 November 1290, Eleanor of Castile, queen of England, died at the age of roughly 49 in Harby, close to Lincoln. She had been married to Edward I for 36 years, and they had been king and queen for 18 of those years. She was pregnant at least fourteen times, and was survived by five daughters and one son, the future Edward II, who was only six when his mother died.
Her body (well, most of it) was slowly transported to London over twelve days before her funeral at Westminster Abbey on 17 December. Over the next five years, King Edward commissioned monumental crosses to be erected at every town where the funeral procession had stopped for the night. Whether there were eleven or twelve is disputed (see below); what is certain is that only three of the originals now remain, along with a Victorian reconstruction of a fourth that many of you have walked past, probably without realising what it is doing there.
I was at a loose end in London last Sunday, and, inspired by Alice Loxton’s book (again, see below), I decided to rent a car and visit the three remaining original Eleanor crosses. I left the Budget office near Victoria Station at 1045, reached the Northampton cross at 1245, left Northampton (after lunch) at 1415, reached Geddington at 1500, spent twenty to twenty-five minutes there, reached Waltham at about 1720, did not stay long, and had dropped the car back by 1900. So that was more than eight hours on the road, of which about six and a half were driving, for one long stop in Northampton and two short stops at the other two crosses. It was a bit mad, I must admit. But it was worth it.
I started with the cross at Hardingstone near Northampton. It’s easy to get to, as it’s on what is still the main road between London and the town centre. Parking, and then crossing the busy highway, were both exciting experiences. But the cross itself commands its surroundings, and would have dominated the pedestrian, mounted or horse-drawn traveller’s experience of approaching or leaving Northampton in the centuries before the railway or the car. It is about 10 metres tall, but stands on a prominence, somewhat obscured by trees which would not have been there in the 1290s.
My old friend Tommy, who comes from Magherafelt but has been working across the water for many years, happens to live within a stone’s throw of it. We failed to take any selfies together, so you’ll just have to take my word for it that he was there. It’s particularly appropriate to meet an Irish friend at Hardingstone, because according to the royal financial accounts, the sculptures of Eleanor on the Hardingstone cross were created by one William of Ireland between 1292 and 1294. This makes them literally the oldest surviving artworks by any Irish artist whose name is still known today.
Queen Eleanor, regal and unruffled, looks down at passers-by. The northern statue appears least weathered (or perhaps the restoration of the monument in 1713 was more long-lasting here). It’s sobering to think of the Irish sculptor seven centuries ago, pressed to meet a government-imposed deadline, and at the same time trying to preserve a sense of the dead queen’s personality for the ages. And he succeeded.
We went for lunch at the nearby Delapré Abbey (I actually ordered breakfast there, having skipped it earlier due to oversleeping), and I left Tommy to it and proceeded to Geddington Cross, the northernmost of the three survivors, in the middle of a quiet little countryside village. When I was 18, I worked for two months on an archaeology site at Raunds, 20 km away, so it’s a part of the country that I have some vague if increasingly distant experience of.
Geddington is a charming place. If driving to the Cross from the southwest (as I was) you have to brave a ford across the river Ise, the roadbridge being OK for pedestrians but not vehicles. Any objective assessment would rate the Geddington Cross as the best of the three survivors. At 13 metres, it is the tallest of them. It has only three sides, at a triangular junction in the middle of the village, so it is much slimmer than the other two. Eleanor looks sternly down in all three directions. The sculptor here is not known, but is thought to have been local, and unlike the other two crosses the stone was definitely local rather than imported from Normandy. (NB that although the soot and weathering makes Eleanor’s face look a bit skull-like, she’s just in need of a scrub.)
By great good fortune, local guide Kam Caddell was finishing up a tour as I arrived. He pointed out that the cross is rooted in an ancient sacred spring, mounted on pilings that will disintegrate if the water is ever drained. Then he took a few minutes to lead me through the history of Geddington – a major medieval centre of economic and political activity, which however was cut off in the Age of Steam. “If the railway had come to Geddington, we’d be 60,000 people. Instead it went through two tiny little farming villages called Kettering and Corby and everyone forgot this was the center of the Midlands.” You can hear him on this podcast with Alice Loxton, produced by Brigham Young University.
Kam is full of heterodox theories about the Crosses. He doubts that there was ever one at Grantham – the documentation is lacking. He doubts that there is a single original stone left in the cross at Waltham. Most provocatively, he doubts that they ever actually had crosses at the top. The picturesque stump at the top of the Northampton cross is a later addition. There is no room for one atop the Geddington cross. Myself, I kinda wonder why they would have been called “crosses” in that case. But Kam puts his case passionately.
Perhaps it was the long hours of driving, and the light (such as it was) beginning to dwindle, but I was unable to summon much enthusiasm for Waltham Cross, in one of the more godforsaken corners of Essex just outside the M25. Perhaps at a time of week other than Sunday evening, it would not feel like it is sitting at the core of a decaying Home Counties burgh, asserting history despite its neighbours, covered with bird mesh to minimise the amount of poo on the dead queen.
The original statues were also created by a known sculptor, Alexander of Abingdoni. They were moved to Cheshunt Public Library in the 1950s, and are now in the the V&A. The replacements are putting on a stiff upper lip, under the mesh.
Waltham Cross is a depressing place, with St George’s Cross flags drooping from the lamp-posts around the unloved monument to a forgotten foreign royal. I did not stay long.
The last of the Eleanor Crosses was originally erected on a spot now occupied by the equestrian statue of King Charles I on Trafalgar Square – 350 years before King Charles was beheaded, more than half a century before the Battle of Trafalgar after which the square is named. It is still the spot from which distances from and to London are measured. I went and took a couple of photographs on Tuesday (it is not far from my employers’ London office).
Like the other missing crosses, the original was destroyed by anti-monarchist Puritans in the 1640s, 350 years after Eleanor’s death. Unlike the others, the Victorians decided to recreate it in 1864, about 200 metres from where it had originally stood, doing their best to echo the monument originally built near the ċierring, the bend in the river Thames. And they put a railway station beside it. It is blackened with a century and a half of soot now, but if you look for even half a second, you can see the best known work of Thomas Earp – the replica statues of Queen Eleanor in the replica of the old Charing Cross in the station forecourt.
Are the crosses England’s Taj Mahal? Yes and no, I suppose. They are a visible monument constructed at the direct order of the monarch to express his private grief. Many other memorial structures in England are based on the structure of the Eleanor Crosses (though having said that, there are only so many ways to build a tall stone thing). The Albert Memorial, also commemorating a deceased royal consort, was explicitly modelled on the Eleanor Crosses by Gilbert Scott, and boasts a representation of William of Ireland on its frieze, complete with the shadow of the Hardingstone Cross in the background.
Photo taken by me in March last year
We know nothing about William of Ireland except that he was alive and sculpting in the early to mid 1290s. We know more about Eleanor of Castile, and much much more about Edward I (memorably portrayed by Patrick McGoohan in that awful film Braveheart). The crosses were erected on main roads and significant interchanges, so that people would remember Eleanor. People don’t remember her, most of the crosses are lost, and the paths of commerce and politics have diverted to other routes. But 730 years on, an unimaginable length of time, three of the crosses are still there; so I think that as a building project, it counts as a success.
I was inspired to take this journey by reading Eleanor: A 200-Mile Walk in Search of England’s Lost Queen, by Alice Loxton. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
Your body was laid with feet pointing east and head to the west – the idea being that you were looking east towards Jerusalem and, on the event of Jesus’ second resurrection, the Second Coming, you could easily sit up and watch it all unfold. So everyone in the churchyard was ready to sit up, where theyd be facing the same direction, like theatre stalls. No swivelling required. It’s worth keeping this in mind – if you want to make the front row, make sure you’re buried in the east corner of the churchyard. And make sure your plot isn’t near someone who coughs.
Alice Loxton went the whole hog, recapitulating Eleanor’s funeral procession on foot in December 2024, matching the dates of 734 years earlier to her own progress as far as possible, finding the traces of folklore and history at each stop, and documenting the process with photographs which are integrated nicely into the text. The tone is breezy and breathless, but also respectful of the histories through which she is walking. She is a bit more cheerful than me (on the whole she had better weather than I did last weekend, though she is frank about the days when she did not). The reader will cheer for her when, at the end of the journey, she is admitted to the closed chapel in Westminster Abbey where Eleanor now rests. She also reports on a mural about the history of the crosses in Charing Cross tube station – I must look for it next time I am passing and not in a rush. It’s a book that you could comfortably get for someone with at least a vague interest in English history, whether or not they are particularly interested in the thirteenth century. You can get Eleanor: A 200-Mile Walk in Search of England’s Lost Queen here.
I also managed to get hold of Carsten Dilba’s Memoria Reginae: Das Memorialprogramm für Eleonore von Kastilien, a massive scholarly assembling of everything that is known about the Eleanor Crosses and the other funerary art commissioned in Eleanor’s memory by Edward I, and I have dipped into it for my notes above. The second paragraph of the third chapter has 387 words in the original German with another nine footnotes, so I won’t post it (also I have really only read a few pages so I feel it’s cheating to tick it off my list). The list price is €78, but I was able to get it for €7.80 here.
I hope this will inspire you to go and look at the local equivalent to an Eleanor Cross in your own neighbourhood.
To be a writer is in fact a fairly common ambition – in a recent survey by YouGov, sixty per cent of British adults said that they wanted to become an author, and not as a casual dream but as a wish for a career. An equivalent survey in the United States revealed an even higher rating: eighty-one per cent of adults questioned felt they had a book in them, and that they should or would write it. In the USA there are approximately one-and-a-half million people who run or conduct courses in creative writing, providing tuition for more than twenty million students. The success of book groups and writers’ circles also underlines what a persistent aspiration authorship is for many people. Most of them will inevitably not achieve the dream, although in these days of internet publishing and print-on-demand, many more will do so than would have been able to in the past.
This is a book of non-fiction essays by the late great Christopher Priest, mostly (but not only) about the craft of science fiction and writing, with some autobiography thrown in. The publishers kindly sent me an advance copy in the expectation that I would review it here – normally I reject such requests (I get half a dozen or so every year), but in this case I was more than happy to oblige.
There are 16 pieces in 300-plus pages here, but they vary wildly in length. The longest single piece, a reflection on Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of his novel The Prestige, is almost a hundred pages. The shortest, about his life in a flat in Harrow from 1969 to 1985, is only four pages long.
Most readers will hope to get insights about Priest’s own career from this collection, and they will not be disappointed. The early autbiographical pieces are fascinating and add to the work of Paul Kincaid. The very first piece, about an unrequited teenage love, is especially moving; it was apparently the last to be written. He writes a lot about other people’s writing, but he also writes a lot about his own, disarmingly frank about the limitations of his analysis.
I don’t know how to write a book. I don’t even know how to write one of my own books.
The key to his own thinking about sf is probably best expressed in “‘It’ Came From Outer Space: The World of Science Fiction 1926-1976 by Lester Del Rey”, which brutally dissects Del Rey’s choices and commentary in a now forgotten anthology (56 ratings on Goodreads, which is close to nothing for a book almost 50 years old). Priest always wanted science fiction to be ambitious and outward-looking; he writes of Del Rey’s
major fallacy… that the creation of the genre magazines by Hugo Gernsback and his imitators in the 1920s and ’30s was a good thing.
He pushes back against narrow interpretations of the genre in several of the other pieces too (most notably in his 2000 Novacon Guest of honour speech) but this is its crispest expression.
He’s very funny about his own early career, though his remarks about Michael Moorcock are pretty salty, to the extent that Nina Allan notes in the foreword that the two of them reconciled at the end. At his very first science fiction convention, he is upstaged by Terry Pratchett:
To my not entirely impartial eyes, Terry seemed to be getting a disproportionate amount of recognition for a single short story, “The Hades Business”, which had appeared in an anthology, having first been published in his school magazine. Terry was then only fifteen years old; he was short and slight, had a mass of bushy dark hair, and spoke in a rather distinctive treble. I, with my writing light hidden under a bushel, could hardly complain that he was getting more attention as a promising young writer than I was, but even so I felt annoyed with him. I privately resolved to outdo him one day, but never in fact did so …
I wrote last year about Priest’s relationship with Doctor Who. One surprise here was a personal reminiscence of Ian Marter, who played Harry Sullivan, and was a neighbour in the Harrow years:
Marter, whom I found pleasant but distinctly odd, once advised me to wax my car because he said it would help strengthen it in the event of a head-on collision (or, presumably, a tree branch falling on it).
The long piece about the filming of The Prestige is interesting even for those (like me) who have not actually seen the film. Although Priest claimed to be fully stiff-upper-lip about it, he was clearly very emotionally invested in his own story and in what was done to it, and the reader will cheer on his behalf when he is generally pleased (to put it mildly) with the result.
It’s (almost) all worth reading. My one reservation is a 2002 piece supporting the conspiracy theory that Rudolf Hess was secretly replaced by a double. Perhaps it’s useful as an illustration of Priest’s interest in doubles and hidden histories, but I think an editorial note should have been added to say that the duplicate Hess theory, improbable in the first place, was conclusively disproved by DNA testing in 2019. Priest also had odd ideas about 9/11, but luckily doesn’t seem to have committed them to writing, or at least not to writing printed here.
But we’re on much more solid ground with the final piece, his Guest of honour speech from the 2005 Worldcon in Glasgow, where he again restated his theory of the genre:
Long ago, I realised that whenever someone says “Science fiction IS”, or “Science fiction SHOULD BE”, I immediately start thinking of exceptions to that rule. Those exceptions are almost invariably stuff I like precisely because it can’t be pinned down. What we call science fiction as a kind of unified lump should consist of a literature of unexpected ideas, found in individual works, written by individual writers in individual ways. The rest is hackwork.
Even those who don’t know Priest’s work will probably enjoy the insights into the creative process that he gives here. For those of us who did know the man and his writing, it’s an essential volume. You can get The Recollections here (starting next month).
Though the Foreign Service emerges on the stage every so often— Benghazi, Libya, being one of the most recent examples—it is not well known outside Washington, D.C. Nor does the State Department have much continued resonance anywhere in the United States other than certain offices in Washington. “The state department of what?” is a question I would often get in response to my explaining where I worked.
The autobiography of American diplomat Christopher Hill, published in 2014, so before his most recent post as ambassador to Serbia, but covering all of the other points of his career. I don’t know him personally, though we have shaken hands a couple of times. I did enjoy highlighting the names of people who I do know as I read through my electronic copy – a good dozen or so from the Kosova and (North) Macedonia chapters, and a fair number from elsewhere.
Hill’s key posts were, in order, briefly Ambassador to Albania in 1991; assisting Richard Holbrooke in negotiating the Dayton Accords in 1995; Ambassador to what is now North Macedonia, 1996-99; overlapping with special envoy to Kosovo, 1998-99; Ambassador to Poland, 2000-04; Ambassador to South Korea, 2004-05 and then Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, 2005-2009; and Ambassador to Iraq, 2009-10.
I was particularly interested in the Balkan chapters, but to be honest I did not learn much new from these sections, except that Hill’s views of the situation are pretty similar to mine. He moved on from the Balkans in 2000 (eventually returning as ambassador to Serbia in 2022, after this book was published) so the rest of the book is about his more recent career in areas I know much less well, and here I found a lot of fresh material.
His four-year term as Ambassador to Poland occupies only nine pages of the 350 of the main text, but the Korea and Iraq sections are much more substantial. On Korea, he claims credit for rebooting the USA’s image in South Korea and for making glacial but real progress in the denuclearisation talks with North Korea, in both cases by simply applying the classic skills of diplomacy – empathy and tact, with a firm grasp of your own vital interests and of shared goals. At the same time, he was being cut off at the knees by the neocons in Washington, led by Vice-President Cheney, who believed that the negotiations with North Korea were futile and tantamount to surrender, and briefed against him and the process incessantly.
The Iraq chapters are particularly sad. Hill is eloquently silent about the justification for the war in the first place, and does his best to get the USA to accept that the Iraqis should be allowed to get on with determining their own future. Unfortunately the political situation was distorted by factionalised politics in Washington, obsessed with picking favourites and winners, not to mention the unhealthy relationship between the US military and civilian missions on the ground in Baghdad. He preserves particular bile for an unnamed aide to General Ray Odierno; it did not take me long to work out who it was (nobody I knew).
As a whole, the book is defensive of diplomacy as an activity, but not especially of American diplomacy as it has been practiced; there’s a clear line to be drawn between the hard work of doing a job on the ground, and the craziness of the policy formation process in Washington, and Hill clearly has more patience for serious-minded foreigners than for his own country’s crazy politicians. As a serious-minded foreigner myself, I appreciated that.
This was my top unread book about Kosovo (though in fact most of it is about other topics and places). Next on that pile is From Kosovo to Kabul and Beyond, by David Chandler.
PS: I wrote this before the attack on Iran, but have not changed any of it.
