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.
Comments welcome.
Top posts on this blog (most views in the last seven days):
It continues to be Una McCormack week here, and just a reminder that this is because she is the Guest of Honour at this weekend’s Novacon. Back to the Whoniverse again, with two Big Finish plays, one from 2018 and one from 2022.
Red Planets, starring Sylvester McCoy as the Doctor with Bonnie Langford as Mel and Sophie Aldred as Ace, looks at a Britain in 2017 where the Cold War went the other way and people are celebrating the centenary of the October Revolution and the imminent first human landing on Mars; the Berlin Wall was dismantled in 1984 when Western Europe adopted Communism. Meanwhile Ace is in East Berlin in 1961, tangled with a British agent at the jonbar point. It’s quite a complex plot, but well thought through, and the punchline is that the intervention in history comes from quite an unexpected direction.
The main cast, both regulars and guests, are great, but I was not satisfied with the production. I could have done with better cues to indicate which timeline were happen to be in, and there are some oddly long pauses between scenes. It’s also not always clear if the music is diegetic or not. (Though the music by Joe Kraemer is good.) It’s also darker in tone than most Seventh Doctor stories, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. You can get Red Planets here.
F, listening with me in the car, made the point that Doctor Who has hardly ever gone near the real Cold War. He has a point. From the main TV series, the only obvious story is, er, Cold War, set on a Soviet submarine in 1983. In another Capaldi story, Under the Lake / Before the Flood, the military base in was set up to train British soldiers for an invasion of the Soviet in the 1980s, but that’s not hugely relevant to the plot. The worst episode of the Australian K9 series, The Cambridge Spy, is about Soviet intelligence operations in London in 1963. The Russian soldiers in The Curse of Fenric pre-date the Cold War by a few years. (Incidentally, Una McCormack wrote the Black Archive on The Curse of Fenric.)
Someone in the audio commentary makes the sweeping statement that there are few other treatments in any media of what Britain would be like if the Cold War had gone the other way. Actually I can think of some examples, which are both near-future rather than alternate-past because they were written when this appeared an imaginable possibility: Constantine Fizgibbon’s 1960 novel When the Kissing Had to Stop, and the mid-1980s BBC sitcom Comrade Dad. (Nineteen Eighty-Four doesn’t count because Britain is under American rather than Russian domination; The Iron Heel doesn’t count because it pre-dates the Soviet Union.)
The 2022 audio play Torchwood: Infidel Places is also alternate history, of a kind, in that it’s one of a sub-series of Torchwood plays where the main agent for Torchwood during the later Victorian era is, er, Queen Victoria herself, here played by Rowena Cooper. Here she visits Cambridge during the infamous 1897 vote on whether or not women should be allowed to take degrees at the University and finds not only a horrifically misogynist Vice-Chancellor (played by Jon Glover), but also transdimensional demons eating passing academics.
This is the sixth of the seven Torchwood audios featuring Rowena Cooper as Queen Victoria, though the first that I had listened to, and she has clearly got into the stride of it. (She has also made a couple of appearances as Liz Shaw’s mother, Dame Emily Shaw, the Dean of St Matilda’s College, Oxford.) She was 87 when this was recorded, so nine years older than the real Queen Victoria was in 1897, but sounds much more energetic than the real queen would have been. Jade Gordon is also very good as Honora Tapley, the smart young woman who is key to unravelling the mystery. You can get Infidel Places here.
This is alternate history because of course the real Queen Victoria was not in Cambridge fighting transdimensional demons that day – she was in Sheffield opening the new Town Hall as part of her 1897 Diamond Jubilee tour, and, three days before her 78th birthday, was not mobile enough to get out of her carriage in public. However, works of fiction do sometimes include elements that are not true.
It is pretty shocking that Cambridge only allowed women to take degrees in 1948, the last British university to do so, and McCormack rightly displays a bit of sæva indignatio. Between 1904 and 107, Trinity College Dublin famously awarded degrees to hundreds of “steamboat ladies“, women who had passed their Oxbridge exams but could not have that success recognised by their own university.
Big Finish has actually featured the suffragettes (who get a slightly anachronistic mention here; they are normally said to have kicked off in 1903) in two Companion Chronicles, both featuring the First Doctor and Steven Taylor. One of them is Peace in Our Time, also by Una McCormack, which I wrote up earlier this week. The other is The Suffering, by Jacqueline Rayner, which goes in hard on the oppression of the suffragettes by the state.
One more Una McCormack post to go! And one more sleep until Novacon.
In anticipation of the 25th anniversary of my bookblogging, which will come in late 2028, I’m reposting my monthly summaries since November 2003 when I started. (I already did this in 2019-2023, but this gives me a chance to consolidate all the posts and links to this WordPress site rather than my old Livejournal.) Everything will be linked under the bookblog nostalgia tag.
I had one of the strangest days ever at work on 11 December 2008, when I had not one but two presidents of unrecognised states in my office at different times. (They did not and still do not recognise each other, so I had to juggle schedules carefully.) Sadly, neither is in office any more; Mehmet Ali Talat lost his re-election bid in 2010, and Mohamed Abdelaziz died in 2016.
I put a lot of energy into following the fall of the Belgian government the following week. All forgotten now, though coincidentally it has just fallen again. I joined Twitter, and my first Tweet was a link to my review of Terry Pratchett’s Nation.
I was in London in the first week of the month, but otherwise in Belgium. Christmas seems to have been just us, with a bit of a rabbit theme.
I read only 16 books in December, the end of an epic year where my 371 books was a record that still stands.
4,100 pages (total 89,400) 2/16 by women (total 49/371) None by PoC (total 6/371)
Again, I’m going to be nice and single out four good books here:
The Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank, which is my book of the year for 2008; you can get it here.
As You Like It, a Shakespeare play I had not previously encountered; you can get it here.
Nation, by Terry Pratchett: “the perfect world is a journey, not a place”; you can get it here.
The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo, by Joe Sacco, a tremendous evocation of a tragic time and place; you can get it here.
2008 books roundup
The 371 books I read in 2008 remain my record for a single year – boosted by easily digestible Doctor Who novelisations and fairly brief Shakespeare plays. I did a roundup at the time, but am now reformatting to my current system (and reclassifying a few books as well).
Doctor Who: 172 fiction other than comics (47% – biggest of any year); 182 all Doctor Who books (49%; also biggest of any year)
Best of 2008: Two of the First Doctor novelisations, the very first one, Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks, which you can get here, and Donald Cotton’s Doctor Who – The Romans, which you can get here. Best original fiction: All-Consuming Fire, by Andy Lane, in which the Seventh Doctor, Ace and Benny encounter Sherlock Holmes and the Great Old Ones. You can get it here. Best non-fiction: Who Goes There, by Nick Griffiths, exploring the locations of Doctor Who filming around England and Wales; you can get it here. The one you haven’t heard of: Time and Relative, by Kim Newman, a novella set on Earth in 1963 before the Doctor and his granddaughter meet Ian and Barbara. At a cost, you can get it here. The one to avoid: Doctor Who – The Twin Dilemma, a dreadful adaptation of a dreadful story. You can get it here.
Non-fiction: 70 (19%, a tad below average)
Best of 2008: Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl; as mentioned already, you can get it here. Runner-up: The Periodic Table, by Primo Levi; you can get it here. The one you haven’t heard of: Brussels Versus the Beltway: Advocacy in the United States and the European Union, by Christine Mahoney, a great explanation of the world of my work; you can get it here. Worst of 2007: J.R.R.Tolkien: Architect of Middle Earth, by Daniel Grotta, a poor effort. You can get it here.
SF (other than Doctor Who): 53 (14%, lowest of any year – squeezed out by Doctor Who books)
Best of 2008: Alan Garner’s The Owl Service, which I hadn’t read before. You can get it here. Runners-up: Terry Practchett’s Nation, as noted above, which you can get here; and Silverberg’s Hall of Fame anthology, which you can get here. The one you haven’t heard of: The Fifth Interzone Anthology, which you can get here. The one to avoid: Interview with the Vampire, by Anne Rice – the most awful tosh. You can get it here.
Non-genre fiction 24 (6%, probably a record low)
Best of 2008: Vanity Fair, Thackeray’s story of life among the declining gentry of the early nineteenth century. You can get it here.
At the top, it’s difficult to choose between Romeo and Juliet (which you can get here), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (here) and As You Like It (here) as my favourite Shakespeare of the year; also enjoyed the two rather less well known scripts I read, Improbable Frequency (about Schrodinger in Ireland, here) and The Office (here). However I really bounced off both The Taming of the Shrew (here) and Love’s Labour’s Lost (here).
Comics 6 (2%, a record low)
Best of 2008: The Fixer (here), as noted above, and Jessica Jones vol 4 (here). The one you haven’t heard of: Macedonia, written by Harvey Pekar, Heather Roberson, art by Ed Piskor; you can get it here. The one to avoid: Tales of Human Waste, by Warren Ellis; you can get it here.
My book of the year 2008, as noted above, was Anne Frank’s Diary, which I have also written about here and here. If you haven’t yet read it, you should. And as mentioned twice above, you can get it here.
Back in August 2023, I was in London on my way to the Arthur C. Clarke Award ceremony, having been one of the judges that year, and spotted these in Forbidden Planet. We had rewatched Firefly the previous year, and loved it again, so I grabbed the two books; and then ran into the author herself at the ceremony, where she cheerfully signed them.
I confess that I had not actually got around to reading them until now, spurred by the fact that Una is the Guest of Honour at Novacon next weekend, but also they bubbled to the top of my reading lists anyway. One thing to say about both is that at the same time as reading them, I was also attempting to read one of the great classic Western novels set in the general area of Texas in the 1850s, and found the Firefly books so much more entertaining that I abandoned the other one. (More on that in due course.)
Second paragraph of third chapter of Firefly: Carnival:
“Trouble?” said Ava. She wasn’t anticipating trouble. She was heading off to the big city, like she’d always wanted to since Momma and Poppa had died. Free at last! Money in her pocket and all the big wide ‘verse to explore. “I’m a good girl! I ain’t plannin’ on gettin’ into trouble.”
This is set on a planet where the locals are preparing for Carnival, which means hedonistic enjoyment for the rich and hard work for the poor. The Serenity crew get tasked with the delivery of a sensitive cargo, which of course gets stolen from them, as a result of which their client holds Zoe and Shepherd Book hostage against its restitution. The crew also gets entangled with the story of 14-year-old Ava, who has left home to find her fortune in the city. Together they discover much more sinister goings-on, which the alert reader will work out before the characters do (in fairness because the characters are not able to share vital information between each other). We know from TV that human trafficking happens in the Firefly universe, and here we see how deeply it goes. You can get Firefly: Carnival here.
Second paragraph of Firefly: Coup de Grâce:
“Somethin’ the matter, Captain Reynolds?” I said. “Somethin’ you want to say to me?”
Here too there is a young woman at the centre of the story, the daughter of a lawyer who has been assassinated by a local gang. She hires the Serenity crew to get justice for her father, but the local politics turns out to be a lot more complex, with the gang enjoying a certain level of official and corporate protection. We end up exploring both the difficulties of post-conflict social and economic reconstruction, and there is vicious deconstruction of the Boris Johnson government’s “levelling-up” pledges. You can get Firefly: Coup de Grâce here.
Fans of the TV series will be very satisfied with either or both of these books. They both feature very good portrayals of the main cast, and interesting shuffling of the personalities to get pairings where the characters can banter off each other. I slightly get the sense that McCormack’s favourite is Simon Tan, but I may be wrong.
There are seven other Firefly novels, four by James Lovegrove and the others by Tim Lebbon, M.K. England and Rosiee Thor. I have read one book by Tim Lebbon and was on a 2005 Worldcon panel with James Lovegrove; perhaps I need to broaden out my Firefly reading.
Carnival and Coup de Grâce were the two SF books that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile will be Descendant Machine by Gareth Powell, but it will wait until I have finished all the other books I acquired in 2023. Carnival was also the top unread book on my shelves acquired in 2023. Next on that pile is Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle, by Paula Frederiksen.
Two Big Finish Short Trips, both by Una McCormack in advance of her Novacon appearance, both featuring the First Doctor and Steven (the first also with Dodo), both moored in real historical events, both read by Peter Purves. Both are audios, so I won’t attempt to locate the second paragraph of the third section in either case.
This Sporting Life, from 2016, is about the theft of the World Cup thirty years before. Stephen finds himself unexpectedly holding part of the trophy, and the TARDIS crew ends up entangled in a trail of stranded aliens and helpful humans, and the need to get history back onto the right course. The alien intrusion into our history is of course one of the classic Doctor Who plots, but nicely done here, and there are some good character moments for the unsporty Stephen, vs Dodo for whom this is contemporary history. The title of course refers to the 1963 film of the same name starring William Hartnell. You can get This Sporting Life here.
Peace in Our Time, from 2019, is also a story of alien intrusion, but this time it is evil extraterrestrials meddling with the Anglo-German naval arms race by infiltrating the Admiralty just before the launch of HMS Dreadnought in 1906, with the Doctor and Steven trying again to re-route history onto the correct lines. The interesting thing here is that the viewpoint character is Ruby Watkins, a servant in a posh house, who is a channel for McCormack’s observations about class and patriarchy, and ends up (minor spoiler) engaging with the suffragettes. It stretches a bit farther than This Sporting Life, which is not necessarily a bad thing. You can get Peace in Our Time here.
During this brief pause, this hiatus before the whirl of activity that is about to follow, I must take a moment to remind myself how profoundly grateful I am to everyone who has willingly put aside everything to commit themselves to this mission. Above all, I thank the stars for the work done behind the scenes by my new XO, Commander Raffi Musiker. I am aware that through her efforts what should be problems are presented to me as wholly solved. Captain Kirsten Clancy has been liaising with the Romulans, and Raffi is of course a specialist in Romulan affairs. I have the distinct impression that Clancy’s tendency toward micromanagement has been a burden that my XO has also borne on my account, and I am greatly appreciative. This has left me with the time to fully concentrate on staffing, coordinating, and directing the fleet. On Earth, Commander Gbowee has rapidly constructed an organization and processes to respond to our requirements for matériel and staff; she and Lieutenant Kaul are masters of the concise briefing. Messages from Commander Geordi La Forge are proving an interesting read: I sense behind his words some resistance from the yard’s engineers at these new and overwhelming demands that are being placed upon them. I understand too that for many, this will mean setting aside research for many years that may well have been the chief concern. But if any officer can corral them toward a common goal, it is surely Geordi, among the most optimistic, practical, and sincere officers of my acquaintance.
This is the best known book by Una McCormack, according to the three book-logging systems that I consulted. Because Novacon is this weekend, and Una is the Guest of Honour, we’re going to have a run of her novels here this week.
It’s particularly poignant to be writing this so soon after we lost Sir Patrick Stewart. Of course, most of the best lines given to Picard were written by the writers, not him; but there has been a tremendously moving outpouring of affection from those who worked with him, or met him, or just even had a casual encounter with him in the supermarket queue (though I’m not sure that I believe the Huddersfield autograph story). We will not see his like again.
Back in pandemic days, we hugely enjoyed the first series of Picard. This is the prequel, telling the story of how Jean-Luc Picard masterminded the evacuation of the Romulans’ home world on assignment from the Federation. It’s not an action-packed adventure, but a thoughtful exploration of the politics of crisis, with a certain amount of putting narrative pieces in place to explain the setting of Picard.
McCormack folds into this some political parables: the Romulan refugee crisis feeds directly into populism and threats of Brexit-style secession within the Federation; there is a science-denying Romulan nobleman whose refusal to accept the imminent disaster puts his own people in danger. There’s also an interesting depiction of the tensions between secrecy and openness in Romulan society.
But the core of it is the character of Picard, who I think McCormack catches perfectly, and his trajectory from philosophically accepting his duty to losing patience with the Federation, via intermediary stages of indirectly or directly disobeying orders for the greater good. I think even a reader who knew nothing at all about Star Trek would enjoy this. You can get Picard: The Last, Best Hope here.
In anticipation of the 25th anniversary of my bookblogging, which will come in late 2028, I’m reposting my monthly summaries since November 2003 when I started. (I already did this in 2019-2023, but this gives me a chance to consolidate all the posts and links to this WordPress site rather than my old Livejournal.) Everything will be linked under the bookblog nostalgia tag.
By great good chance I happened to be in New York during the first week of November 2008, 18 years ago this month, so I was able to witness at first hand the jubilation around Obama’s first election as President. It’s a nice coincidence for this month to come up now in my schedule of posts as we brace for the results of the mid-terms.
We also had a lovely weekend in Cambridge, marred however by the car breaking down on the Brussels ring road just as we were nearing home at 3.30 am.
Literally the following day, I went on one of my regular visits to Cyprus. I filmed a few streetscape shots of the northern part of Nicosia, with the intention of sharing them with work colleagues, but in the end was not satisfied with either the sound or the picture quality. Still, for posterity, here they are.
With transatlantic and Cyprus travels, I read 32 books in November 2008.
9,200 pages (YTD 85,300) 8/32 by women (YTD 47/355) none by PoC (YTD 355)
I’m going to single out four good ones this month:
Who Goes There (Travels through Strangest Britain, in Search of the Doctor), by Nick Griffiths – a great book about looking for famous Doctor Who locations in England and Wales, while dealing with real life as well. You can get it here.
The Uncommon Reader, by Alan Bennett, a lovely little novella about Queen Elizabeth II suddenly deciding to start reading, and the viciously negative reactions of her advisers to her new habit. You can get it here.
The Science Fiction Hall of Fame: The Greatest Science Fiction Stories of All Time, edited by Robert Silverberg, one of those classic collections, assembling the top sf stories published before 1965 as voted for by the membership of SFWA in the late 1960s. You can get it here.
Alias vol 4: The Secret Origins of Jessica Jones, by Brian Michael Bendis and others; so many pages here where Bendis and the artists achieve statements that couldn’t be made in any other medium – the schooldays flashback, Jessica’s first encounter with other superheroes, and the unspoken parts of her conversations with her friends and lovers. You can get it here.
Novacon is next weekend, with Una McCormack as Guest of Honour. You may not be fully aware of what she has done; writers of tier-in works do not always get the recognition that they deserve. She has published sixteen Star Trek novels, with a seventeenth coming out this month; seven Doctor Who novels, two Firefly novels, two in the shared Weird Space world set up by Eric Green, and a couple of short standalones, as well as more than a dozen short stories. She has also written at least eighteen Big Finish audios, a couple of Blake’s Seven and Star Cops plays and more. She is a critic as well; I list her monograph on a 1989 Doctor Who story below, and she has also edited essay collections on Doctor Who and Lois McMaster Bujold and a collection of meditations from Woman’s Hour.
I give you fair warning that every day of this coming week, this blog is going to feature a review of Una’s work that I have recently read / listened to, culminating with her not yet published Star Trek novel. In the meantime, here is a checklist of her work that I have previously reviewed or mentioned here, followed by the library sites’ ratings of her works as a whole.
“He’s not the Messiah: Undermining Political and Religious Authority in New Doctor Who“, in The Unsilent Library, edited by Simon Bradshaw, Antony Keen and Graham Sleight.
And here is the compete list of her works as far as I can track them on Goodreads, LibraryThing and StoryGraph:
Title
Author
GR raters
LT owners
SG reviews
The Peacemakers
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
not published yet
The Last Best Hope
Star Trek: Picard
4,217
328
759
The Autobiography of Kathryn Janeway
Star Trek: Voyager
2,242
158
538
The Way Through the Woods
Doctor Who
1,302
241
259
The King’s Dragon
Doctor Who
1,144
291
216
Carnival
Firefly
1,604
145
278
Cardassia and Andor
Worlds of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
954
319
136
The Crimson Shadow
Star Trek: The Fall
1,169
185
165
The Never Ending Sacrifice
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
896
216
156
The Way to the Stars
Star Trek: Discovery
983
110
226
Enigma Tales
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
935
113
216
Royal Blood
Doctor Who
821
155
171
Brinkmanship
Star Trek: Typhon Pact
887
150
118
All Flesh is Grass
Doctor Who: Time Lord Victorious
848
85
197
Molten Heart
Doctor Who
589
92
202
The Undefeated
(standalone)
668
78
201
Hollow Men
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
486
218
83
Coup de Grâce
Firefly
939
85
96
The Autobiography of Mr. Spock
Star Trek
604
126
83
Asylum
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
683
60
127
The Missing
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
604
103
82
Wonderlands
Star Trek: Discovery
524
70
110
Second Self
Star Trek: Picard
830
94
22
Caged
Doctor Who
263
26
71
The Baba Yaga (with Eric Brown)
Weird Space
138
50
23
Window on the World
Doctor Who
93
19
27
The Robot Revolution
Doctor Who
73
27
18
Gallifrey: Time War 1
Doctor Who
118
13
20
The Star of the Sea
Weird Space
77
26
15
Partisans
Doctor Who: Gallifrey
90
11
17
Doctor Who: Red Planets
Doctor Who
92
10
16
The Good Life
Doctor Who: Master
79
4
22
The Curse of Fenric
Doctor Who: Black Archive:
33
13
10
Infidel Places
Torchwood
56
4
14
This Sporting Life
Doctor Who
62
3
10
Evolution
Gallifrey
52
3
9
An Eye for Murder
Doctor Who
17
15
4
Peace in Our Time
Doctor Who
47
1
6
Counterstrike
Doctor Who
21
4
5
Impossible Worlds, Impossible Things: Cultural Perspectives on Doctor Who, Torchwood, and the Sarah Jane Adventures (co-edited with Ross Garner and Melissa Beattie)
9
9
3
Ministry of Truth
Blake’s 7
19
19
0
The Shadow of This Red Rock
Star Cops
18
2
6
The Greatest Story Ever Told
(standalone)
11
13
1
Biology and Manners: Essays on the Worlds and Works of Lois McMaster Bujold
4
10
3
Risk Management
Blake’s 7
2
6
4
Troubled Waters
Star Cops
10
3
0
Deliverance
Blake’s 7
8
2
0
Woman’s Hour: Daily Meditat…
1
1
0
Short But Concentrated: an essay symposium on the works of Lois McMaster Bujold (ed with Regina Yung Lee)
0
2
0
Short But Concentrated #2: an essay symposium on the works of Lois McMaster Bujold
I usually start each of these posts with a quick pen-portrait of the country, to reassure confused readers who may not be certain where they are, but this seems unnecessary for Ireland.
See here for the methodology of these posts, though NB that I am now also using numbers from StoryGraph. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in the internationally recognized borders of Ireland (though in fact this did not make a difference).
When I did this exercise in 2015, the runaway winner was Angela’s Ashes on both Goodreads and LibraryThing. Of the other books on the above list, only In the Woods and Dubliners were available then; the other five have all been published since.
The winner is one of three novels by Sally Rooney on the list. Normal People, in case you don’t know, is the story of two young people falling in and out and back in love with each other while students at Trinity College Dublin. I know that some sneer at it, but personally I loved it, and also lapped up the TV series. It wins overall and also on Goodreads and StoryGraph, though was only fifth on LibraryThing.
I haven’t read Rooney’s Conversations with Friends, which is apparently about two young women who become involved with an older (but not the much older) couple; I have read Beautiful World, Where Are You, which is about a novelist and her editor friend and their lovers, and I was not as impressed.
Sally Rooney’s books are not currently on sale in the UK, for reasons expertly unpacked by David Allen Green here. Two Chinese friends separately told me in the last few weeks that her books are becoming popular there, so she can probably take the hit of losing the UK market for the time being.
The Guest List is a murder mystery set on an island off the Irish coast. It sounds very similar to the classic Agatha Christie novel now known as …And Then There Were None.
Angela’s Ashes still wins LibraryThing and is third on Goodreads (though only sixth on StoryGraph). It is a heart-rending tale of grinding poverty in Limerick in the 1920s and 1930s.
In the Woods is the first in the very successful Dublin Murder Squad series of mysteries. It was published in 2007.
Small Things Like These is about the Magdalen laundries, specifically in County Wexford.
Dubliners is probably my favorite book on the list, the classic collection of short stories by James Joyce, every one of them a jewel.
The StoryGraph numbers kicked Joyce’s Ulysses and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man off the list, in favour of Small Things Like These and Beautiful World, Where Are You.
The only book that came close to troubling my geographical criteria was Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe, which is mainly set in Northern Ireland, but it was some way off on the numbers.
I normally list other books on my shelves set in or concerning the country of the week, but there are far too many of them this time.
Next up is New Zealand; then Costa Rica, Kuwait and Panama.
Non-fiction 5 (YTD 71) Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life, by Anna Funder Garden Jungle, by Dave Goulson Lost, Found, Remembered, by Lyra McKee Frontios, by Paul Driscoll 50 Things I Love About Fantagraphics, by Colin Blanchette and Alex Eklund
Non-genre 3 (YTD 40) The Red House Mystery, by A.A. Milne Ruins, by Brian Aldiss Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy (did not finish)
SF 7 (YTD 77) Wench, by Erynne Rivers Picard: The Last, Best Hope, by Una McCormack British Summertime, by Paul Cornell All That We See or Seem, by Ken Liu Enemies of the System, by Brian W. Aldiss Firefly: Carnival, by Una McCormack Firefly: Coup de Grâce, by Una McCormack
Doctor Who 7 (YTD 61) The Cabinet of Light, by Daniel O’Mahony Doctor Who: Death in the Stars: A Melanie Bush Mystery, by Bonnie Langford with Jacqueline Rayner Doctor Who – Frontios, by Christopher H. Bidmead The Flight of The Sun God, by Nev Fountain Paradise Lost, by Darren Jones This Sporting Life, by Una McCormack Peace in Our Time, by Una McCormack
Comics 2 (YTD 29)
Gods and Monsters, book two: Faustine, by Stephen Gallagher and Martin Geraghty I Killed Adolf Hitler, by Jason [John Arne Sæterøy]
~4,500 pages (YTD 67,100) 9/24 (YTD 103/283) by women (Funder, McKee, Rivers, 5x McCormack, Langford/Rayner) 1/24 (YTD 27/283) by writers of colour (Liu) 2 out of 24 reread (Enemies of the System, Doctor Who – Frontios) 248 books currently tagged unread, up 67 from last month and up 59 from October 2025, thanks to a couple of Humble Bundle investments.
Reading now Little Thieves, by Margaret Owen Agatha Christie, by Lucy Worsley Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: The Peacemakers, by Una McCormack
Coming soon (perhaps)
The Dalek Factor, by Simon Clark Doctor Who: The Adventures Before The Daleks’ Master Plan: The Making of a Television Serial, by Alan Stevens
Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle, by Paula Fredriksen The Case for Kosova: Passage to Independence, by Anna Di Lellio
Jingo, by Terry Pratchett “Welcome to your Authentic Indian Experience™”, by Rebecca Roanhorse July’s People, by Nadine Gordimer A Quiet Place, by Seichō Matsumoto Septology, by Jon Fosse Real Tigers, by Mick Herron Les Reines de sang – Tseu Hi, La Dame dragon, by Philippe Nihoul Palestine, by Joe Sacco Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis The Bonfire of the Vanities, by Tom Wolfe Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir Is a River Alive?, by Robert Macfarlane The Song of Achilles, by Madeline Miller
Second stanza of third section (a poem called “Awaiting the Snowflakes”, written when McKee was thirteen):
Away from the harsh realities of fantasy I walked along the shore. The dark, choppy waters Mirroring my thoughts. Thoughts residing at God’s mercy Where I fervently prayed For anything but her missing presence. She was silent Knowing not to bother me Not knowing why.
As I have previously written, I did not know Lyra McKee myself – she was six years old when I left Northern Ireland – but inevitably we had a lot of mutual friends, all of whom seem to remember her fondly. Her murder in 2019, during one of the periods when the Stormont institutions were suspended, was a low point in the Northern Ireland political process, though we have had other low points since then.
I did have a slight concern that in the process of canonising her after her tragic early death, nobody was asking the question of whether she was a good writer. I am completely reassured by this collection of essays (with a few poems); she was indeed a very good writer, eloquently articulating the feelings of young people who could not directly remember the Troubles, but whose lives were shaped by the unhappy history of Northern Ireland.
I am sure that if she had lived to curate this, she would have edited it a bit differently – there are several pieces about the high rate of suicide among young people in Northern Ireland, and other topics are touched on more than once (notably the experience of growing up gay in a traditional society). But even so, it’s a short and powerful book, and a vivid testimony to what violence can take away from us. You can get Lost, Found, Remembered here.
This was the shortest unread book on my shelves acquired in 2023. Next on that pile is The Case for Kosova, by Anna di Lellio.
In anticipation of the 25th anniversary of my bookblogging, which will come in late 2028, I’m reposting my monthly summaries since November 2003 when I started. (I already did this in 2019-2023, but this gives me a chance to consolidate all the posts and links to this WordPress site rather than my old Livejournal.) Everything will be linked under the bookblog nostalgia tag.
I started October 2008, 18 years ago this month, with a day in Paris, and visited The Hague overnight mid-month. For half term we visited my sister in France, to meet very new baby S. F was enchanted; U fascinated, though we had to monitor her interactions quite carefully.
The big political news of the month for me was the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to former president Martti Ahtisaari of Finland, who I had worked with quite a lot in my time with the International Crisis Group. He was one of the most impressive people I ever met. Meanwhile globally the financial crisis gathered pace.
At work, my super-effective American intern D moved on; she is now a foreign service officer with the US State Department. Her replacement was Spanish S.
2) Population growth: Mandy Zuo investigates “Why Guangdong accounts for 1 in 8 of China’s newborns as births fall nationwide” – Guangdong (formerly referred to as Canton) is a big province but has only 9% of the country’s population. Meanwhile the north declines.
3) Jiang Jiang asks, “How Big Can Pro Wrestling Get in China?” Like Jiang, I am not (yet?) a wrestling fan, but the summary of the podcast here is fascinating.
4) Staying with sport, perhaps the most widely reported China story of the week was the blowback faced by superstar footballer Kylian Mbappé when he made an off-the-cuff remark about Mao Zedong, and had to abjectly apologise. Covered everywhere, but here’s the BBC.
5) In contrast to the Guangzhou birth boom, Amy Hawkins reports in the Guardian that young Chinese people are adopting bricks, rather than getting pets or having children.
Current Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy Little Thieves, by Margaret Owen Firefly: Coup de Grâce, by Una McCormack
Last books finished Paradise Lost, by Darren Jones This Sporting Life, by Una McCormack Peace in Our Time, by Una McCormack Firefly: Carnival, by Una McCormack
Next books The Dalek Factor, by Simon Clark Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle, by Paula Fredriksen Jingo, by Terry Pratchett
This is by far the best known book by Milne outside the Winnie-the-Pooh mythos. It’s a locked room murder mystery published in 1922, where the long lost brother of the owner of the Red House turns up mysteriously dead in the library, and the owner himself disappears. For the attentive reader, it’s fairly obvious who the murderer is from the moment it happens, but the full details of the mystery are delightfully worked out by Antony Gillingham, who just happened to be visiting his friend Bill at the Red House and arrived exactly at the moment of the murder. There’s a hilarious and improbable secret passage ending in a croquet box (illustrated on the original front cover, so I don’t think this is a spoiler).
Antony and Bill role-play Holmes and Watson through the (short) book, but I think Milne is hinting that they are more than just friends, in the closeted upper-class way of the time.
Also interesting that there is no reference at all to the war. (We are told in a throwaway remark that Bill learned Morse Code in the Army.)
This is another return to the world of Warriors’ Gate by Steve Gallagher, this time featuring a Tharil princess and an earthling, plonked into contemporary (well, 2020-21) Manchester and dealing with strange alien forces. I thought it did very good continuity service, plus promising to be part of the bigger Gods and Monsters story. You can get Faustine here.
A fun re-telling of the Robin Hood legend as a conflict between ancient powers and twelfth-century modernity and patriarchy, with some good spicy moments in the relationship between Robin and Marian. A first novel by an American author who doesn’t always get the cultural nuances right – Marian’s father’s name is Eamon (I blame Robert Jordan) and the evil Sheriff’s name is, I kid you not, Baldric (I blame Blackadder). But it’s engaging and passionate. You can get Wench here.
In anticipation of the 25th anniversary of my bookblogging, which will come in late 2028, I’m reposting my monthly summaries since November 2003 when I started. (I already did this in 2019-2023, but this gives me a chance to consolidate all the posts and links to this WordPress site rather than my old Livejournal.) Everything will be linked under the bookblog nostalgia tag.
September 2008 was the start of our new lives as Belgian citizens, a mere five months after applying. In other family news, my sister C had her baby daughter S, my youngest relative on that side of the family. I started the month in Slovenia, as noted, and also travelled to Salzburg for another conference. No photos this month, as far as I can see.
My plan to read the whole of Shakespeare’s plays was getting well under way by now. I was combining reading the scripts with listening to the Arkangel Complete Shakespeare, a methodology that I strongly recommend (though I deviated from it in a couple of cases).
As if all this isn’t enough to ensure universal revulsion for these little creatures, there is an old superstition that earwigs favour sneaking into our ears while we sleep, presumably the origin of their name. I imagine that they might well have occasionally sought shelter in old-fashioned wigs too, though it is thought that the ‘wig’ part comes from an old word for ‘wiggle’. Lurid stories whispered in the school playground tell of unfortunate souls who were driven mad by an earwig lodged deep inside their ear, incessantly wriggling and tickling. In more elaborate versions the earwig lays eggs and rears her offspring inside, or even burrows into the brain for a snack. For all of these reasons, earwigs are almost universally loathed and even feared. Little wonder, then, that the Earwig Preservation Trust has yet to be founded.⁸ ⁸ Sadly, should the EPT ever be created, it will be too late for the giant earwig of St Helena, the world’s largest earwig species which came in at a smidge over 8cm long, with a truly whopping set of pincers which made up about one-third of its body length. It lived in deep burrows among nesting seabird colonies on this remote Atlantic island, and the females were said to be devoted mothers. Unfortunately most of the seabirds have been wiped out by invasive rodents, which may also have eaten the earwigs. The last living specimen of this gigantic beast was seen in 1967, fifty years ago as I write. Rest in peace, giant earwig.
Following on from The Silent Earth, another impassioned plea by Dave Goulson for nature, and for insects in particular, this time looking specifically at gardening and agriculture, and what we can do to boost sustainability and biodiversity in our own backyards. As usual there are telling anecdotes about his own engagement, and about individual species which make their own contributions to a healthy natural environment. It’s a delight, and also a comfort for those of us who don’t do a lot of active gardening – letting it grow is actually quite a good thing to do. You can get The Garden Jungle here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2023. Next on that pile is British Summertime, by Paul Cornell.
Slovakia is in Central Europe. It was part of the Hungarian part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until the end of the first world war, then part of Czechoslovakia until 1992. It borders Austria, Czechia, Poland, Ukraine and Hungary. The main language is Slovak, a Slavic language, though there is also a strong Hungarian-speaking minority. It has been democratic since the fall of Communism, though teetering occasionally towards authoritarianism.
I have been to Slovakia maybe half a dozen times, and have a lot of personal connections there. In particular, I am a member of the board of the European Democracy Youth Network whose seat is in the capital, Bratislava. I took photos of public art there in 2024. I also went to see Giselle there in 2019, the only ballet I have ever been to in my life. A close colleague at work (whose spouse is Irish) and a family connection are both from the Hungarian-speaking minority. So it’s a place I feel comfortable talking about.
See here for the methodology of these posts, though NB that I am now also using numbers from StoryGraph. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Slovakia.
Title
Author
GR raters
LT owners
SG reviews
Zoli
Colum McCann
4,312
701
540
Trhlina [The Rift]
Jozef Karika
7,650
14
557
The Piper on the Mountain
Ellis Peters
736
425
51
The Taste of Power
Ladislav Mňačko
2,105
37
202
Katarina
Kathryn Winter
470
528
62
Rivers of Babylon
Peter Pišťanek
826
64
80
Siren of the Waters
Michael Genelin
515
173
44
The Luck of the Weissensteiners
Christoph Fischer
981
83
45
This week’s winner was also the winner when I last did this exercise in 2015. Zoli is about the life of a Roma woman under totalitarianism, both Nazism and Communism. It is the winner only on LibraryThing this week, but that was enough to pull it ahead of the field (second on the other two systems, narrowly so on StoryGraph).
Trhlina has not been translated into English, which perhaps explains its catastrophic LibraryThing rankings; otherwise it is amazingly far ahead on Goodreads and narrowly leading also on StoryGraph. It is a horror novel which has been adapted into a very successful Slovak film, and as far as I can tell has been translated into Czech, Hungarian, Polish and oddly enough Macedonian, but not English, which makes its high rankings on two of the systems even more impressive.
Ellis Peters was a name I did not expect to see here. The Piper on the Mountain is a murder mystery where the victim died mountain-climbing in the Tatras.
The Taste of Power (original Ako chutí moc) is a satirical novel about the Communist system. It doesn’t actually identify the city and country where it is set, but everyone agrees that it’s Bratislava in 1967 Czechoslovakia.
Katarina is a semi-autobiographical novel about a Jewish girl in hiding during the Second World War.
Rivers of Babylon (the title of the original Slovak publication is in English) is a crime novel set in the early 1990s.
Siren of the Waters is the first in a series of novels about detective Jana Matinova by Californian prosecutor Michael Genelin, who died earlier this year aged 90.
The Luck of the Weissensteiners is about a Jewish family in Bratislava in the 1930s. It the first of Fischer’s Three Nations trilogy. (The other two books deal with Austria and Bavaria/Germany.)
Including the StoryGraph numbers did not change the top eight. The top book by a woman writer from Slovakia is This Room is Impossible to Eat / Táto izba sa nedá zjesť, by Nicol Hochholczerová. It very narrowly missed inclusion (thanks again to a poor LibraryThing score),
I did not have many borderline cases. There are a lot of books about survivors or victims of the Holocaust who were from Slovakia, but in general more of the action is set outside the country. I am still not 100% certain about Embers, by Sándor Márai, but the consensus from people who know the region better than I do is that it’s set in Hungary.
Despite my affection for the country, I do not have many books on my own shelves concerning Slovakia. The best known is Patrick Leigh Fermor’s visit to Kövecses (now Štrkovec) at the end of his classic A Time of Gifts. The mid-1990s authoritarian wobble and its resolution are described in a chapter of Reclaiming Democracy: Civil Society and Electoral Change in Central and Eastern Europe, eds. Joerg Forbrig and Pavol Demeš. And Pavol Demeš, who is a friend and was also Slovakia’s foreign minister before independence, kindly gave me a copy of his Slovakia and the United Kingdom: the first 30 years. Here I photographed him sitting behind the page of the book that shows him meeting John Major, when the latter was the British prime minister, more than thirty years before. (Pavol is on the left in the group photo.) It’s the only book I own that satisfies my Slovakia geographic criterion.
Next up will be Ireland, our last European country for a bit, followed by New Zealand, Costa Rica and Kuwait.
In anticipation of the 25th anniversary of my bookblogging, which will come in late 2028, I’m reposting my monthly summaries since November 2003 when I started. (I already did this in 2019-2023, but this gives me a chance to consolidate all the posts and links to this WordPress site rather than my old Livejournal.) Everything will be linked under the bookblog nostalgia tag.
We spent most of August in Loughbrickland as usual, catching the partial solar eclipse on our way over and the total lunar eclipse two weeks later.
F and I visited the Doctor Who exhibition in Earl’s Court on the way over, I looked in on DWCon in Birmingham on the way back, and I finished the month at the Bled Forum in Slovenia.
In world news, this was the month of the South Ossetia war, bringing back sad memories of my visit to Tskhinvali in 2005.
9200 pages (YTD 63,000) 7/34 (YTD 29/274) by women None (YTD 6/274) by PoC NB that P.J.T. Glendening appears to be Peter Joseph Glendening (1926-2023). I have found a photograph of him as a child and he does not appear to be a writer of colour.
Best and worst: the second series of The Office seemed to me somehow more coherent than the first and very nicely done; you can get the scripts here. Proust finishes on a high note; you can get the last volume here. On the other hand, the Bakers’ novelisation of Time and the Rani is awful; if you want, you can get it here.
This is a massive huge long post looking at the impact of the new boundaries on next year’s Northern Ireland Assembly elections. For each seat I have taken the result of the 2022 election and attempted to estimate the number of votes for each party cast within each of the new seats, taking into account demographic and geographical factors to allocate the votes between the areas that are being reassigned between constituencies. This obviously does not take into account the effect of personalities who may run next year under a different party label or in a new area; it is a ‘backcast’, not a forecast.
There are eighteen constituencies, and each elects five Members of the Legislative Assembly, or MLA for short. I have listed them roughly in order of the impact that I think the boundary changes, as such, will have on the results, from the most affected (Strangford) to the least (Upper Bann). This has shaken up the usual listing by geography or alphabet, in I hope a helpfully creative and thought-provoking way.
To cut to the chase: I expect that as a result of the boundary changes, Unionists certainly gain a seat in West Belfast, probably from the non-aligned People Before Profit; and Nationalists are very likely to gain seats in Strangford and Lagan Valley, probably from the non-aligned Alliance Party. Alliance has other difficult defences, in both directions. For all parties, a lot will depend on candidate choice and on how well votes are balanced if there is more than one candidate. That’s normal for an STV election.
This piece is in (I hope) respectful dialogue with Peter Donaghy’s analysis published two weeks ago on Bluesky. He finds that the most likely result predicted by his model would have 39 Nationalists, 37 Unionists and 14 others, which would indeed be seismic. But he sees a couple of likely direct Sinn Féin gains from the DUP that I don’t think are so certain (in East Londonderry and Upper Bann) and is more upbeat about Alliance retaining some of its current seats than I am. I also get the sense that his take on the impact of the boundary changes differs from mine.
For each of the eighteen seats I report: first, my own analysis of the impact of the boundary changes; then Peter’s predicted results, and my reaction to them. As a wise man once said, it is very difficult to make predictions, especially about the future; the one thing I know for certain is that much of my more speculative analysis below will turn out to be wrong.
‘What are you working on?’ she asks. It’s a new, adult question for her.
This is a tremendous biography, and I’m very grateful to S for flagging it up to me. Eileen O’Shaughnessy married Eric Blair, known to history as George Orwell, in 1936; she was 31 and he was about to turn 33. She devoted herself to supporting his writing, though they were both very ill; he had tuberculosis, which would kill him in 1950; she suffered persistent uterine bleeding, and died during an operation for a hysterectomy in 1945, aged 39.
Funder goes through the few surviving records of Eileen herself, which include six letters to her best friend, three to Orwell (including the unfinished one that she left on her bedside table before she died) and a few others. Out of this she spins a dense narrative, most of it sticking clearly to the facts, some fictionalised thought processes of what was going through Eileen’s head, and the occasional flashforward to the present day and the writer’s own family life. As far as I can tell, the fiction is clearly demarcated, which I appreciate – I’ve tried a couple of historical works recently where the line between fact and fiction is irritatingly fudged.
Funder comes to Eileen’s story as a fan of Orwell’s writing, but she shows how you can usefully explore the flaws in the work you love and in creators too. The most significant part of the book is her reconstruction of what was going on in Barcelona. Eileen peeps out of the corners of the writing of Homage to Catalonia; in fact she was the central organiser of the office of John McNair, the Independent Labour Party leader, and at great risk to herself managed Orwell’s escape after he was wounded and the POUM, who he was fighting for, were proscribed.
One vivid example of how she was erased from the story (which she herself typed up for publication) is the vignette of Orwell’s encounter with some stray soldiers: “I remember a couple of men from the International Column sitting in my room at the hotel when I came in tired, hungry, and dirty after a night on guard.” He does not mention the other person in the hotel room, or why she had had to let the soldiers in.
Eileen’s direct influence on Orwell’s work is debatable, because she herself controlled all the surviving records, so we can only surmise. It’s clear that he was utterly dependent on her support. For much of their marriage she was the one with the steady income, and for all of their relationship she organised their household affairs, while he got on with writing that was rarely and barely paid. He was serially unfaithful to her, starting on their honeymoon, and emotionally very neglectful.
When Eileen died in March 1945, Orwell was in Europe on assignment as a war correspondent, and it seems very cruel to me that he was not there for her operation – even if it was not expected to be fatal (though as Funder points out, the warning signs were there), it was none the less a serious procedure. He professed to be devastated, but proposed marriage to several other women before ending up with their friend Sonia Brownell three months before his death.
A fascinating, sad and thought-provoking book, and my renewed thanks to S for flagging it up to me. You can get Wifedom here.
2) Alan Beattie is sceptical in the FT: “The meeting of EU member states last Thursday and Friday made the requisite scary noises towards China over trade, roughly the equivalent of putting a sheet over their heads and going “woo-ooo” on Halloween.”
4) Meanwhile in China itself, the Economist has a somewhat hair-raising preview of the Fifth Plenum meeting of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee next week.
Current Firefly: Carnival, by Una McCormack Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy
Last books finished Doctor Who – Frontios, by Christopher H. Bidmead Picard: The Last, Best Hope, by Una McCormack British Summertime, by Paul Cornell All That We See or Seem, by Ken Liu Enemies of the System, by Brian W. Aldiss Frontios, by Paul Driscoll The Flight of The Sun God, by Nev Fountain 50 Thing I Love About Fantagraphics, by Colin Blanchette and Alex Eklund
Next books Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle, by Paula Fredriksen Little Thieves, by Margaret Owen Jingo, by Terry Pratchett
Later, he watched the dawn through reddened eyes and felt more hopeful. He had a plan for today: he would visit the girl in pink pyjamas and there didn’t seem to be any harm in that. No one had got much sense out of her over the past weeks but maybe they hadn’t been asking her the right questions.
One of the series of Doctor Who novellas published by Telos back in the early Noughties, this is one where the Doctor barely appears; the protagonist is a time-sensitive detective hired by a mysterious woman to find him and also to set the scene for a new series of Time Hunter stories which did not require the expiring BBC licence. It’s OK. It’s quite atmospheric about post-war London, and we readers have some fun watching the protagonist work out what is actually going on. It’s not completely clear which Doctor we are dealing with, though most likely the eighth. A story of its time, perhaps. You can get The Cabinet of Light here.
The whole series was part of this year’s Hugo Packet (and indeed won the award for Best Series), so I will work through those volumes that I have not read. This is the second in the sequence; the premise is that the human federation is able to clone a bad guy, but in the process a new consciousness is inserted onto the clone, who gradually becomes aware that he’s not just an ordinary cloned soldier but has a special relationship to the overall military situation, and also has a connection with the original chap from whom his DNA was obtained.
I thought it was OK. It teeters on the edge of too many coincidences, and of wondering what on earth are the Earth forces doing. It is much more obvious than in the previous book that the humans are not necessarily the good guys. There are moments of intense emotional significance which are well-judged. I still feel that there’s too much similarity of tone between the characters, but I suspect that now that I’m looking for that in each of Scalzi’s books, I am finding it. Anyway, I will go on with the series.
This was my top unread sf book and my top unread book acquired this year. Next on those piles respectively are Little Thieves by Margaret Owen and Palestine by Joe Sacco.
In anticipation of the 25th anniversary of my bookblogging, which will come in late 2028, I’m reposting my monthly summaries since November 2003 when I started. (I already did this in 2019-2023, but this gives me a chance to consolidate all the posts and links to this WordPress site rather than my old Livejournal.) Everything will be linked under the bookblog nostalgia tag.
July 2008 began very painfully. At the very end of June I had a vasectomy, and with somewhat imperfect timing moved office a few days later, thinking I would have recovered over the weekend. No. My testicles were swollen to the size of a tennis ball (felt much bigger) and I could barely walk. My gallant intern D and neighbour J did most of the packing up of the old office, and young F joined in the trip to IKEA and putting furniture together. I should also chronicle that the first external visitor to the office was A, who then worked for AP across the corridor but is now largely freelance and actually interviewed me last week. Here is D, screwdriver at the ready, wishing I would start helping her rather than sitting in the comfy chair taking photos.
More cheerfully, Anne’s brother R married V. I attended the civil ceremony in Etterbeek Town Hall.
And we all attended the religious ceremony in the Église Sainte-Croix (the one off Place Flagey) a week later.
F had his ninth birthday at the end of the month, and two friends came round to meet the star attraction.
I had a day trip to London at the end of the month, and on 1 August we set off for our summer holiday.
6,000 pages (YTD 53,800) 7/34 by women (YTD 22/240) 2/34 by PoC (YTD 6/240) – NB that Glen McCoy was the first non-white writer of Doctor Who.
When I wrote this month up first time round in 2020, I singled out The Periodic Table, by Primo Levi, which you can get here, and Richard Calmady, which you can get here. In retrospect, though, the book that has lingered most warmly in my memory is Farthing, by Jo Walton, which you can get here. Worst of the month, and in the running for worst Doctor Who book ever, was Doctor Who – The Twin Dilemma, which if you really want you can get here.
It was my third day in the job. I was sitting with the rest of the staff around a table in the second-floor boardroom, where I was being briefed ahead of my first meeting with the Northern Advisory Council that afternoon.
Paul Howard is the creator of Ross O’Carroll Kelly, a one-joke satirical column which has run in the Sunday Tribune and Irish Times since 1998 and has turned into a series of novels as well. Here he turns his gaze to Irish reunification, imagining a secret office of the Department for Foreign Affairs which has been planning for the great day since the 1950s.
The former head of the department (who refuses to go away) is an Irish version of Gary Oldman’s Jackson Lamb from Slow Horses; the Northerners are all stereotypes; the Southerners are mostly stereotypes; there’s even a stereotypical Australian academic; there is a late effort to insert an emotional dimension by resurrecting the protagonist’s love life; in general it’s about as good a book as you’d expect. If you like the Ross O’Carroll Kelly stuff, you’ll like this. (I think I’ve made my own position clear.)
At the same time, maybe it’s not such a bad way of gently unpacking some of the issues around reunification for a Southern readership that may not have given it much thought.
Two books that I didn’t finish for different reasons.
Midaq Alley is by Naguib Mahfouz, the next in my series of Nobel Prize winners for Literature who were not white men (a list that has recently increased by one). The second paragraph of its third chapter (in the original Arabic formatting) is:
واحسرتاه كيف تدعين القمل يرعى هذا الشعر الجميل!
“What a pity! Imagine letting lice live in such lovely hair!”
translated by Trevor Le Gassick
I gave it 100 pages, but I was rather repelled by how horrible the characters were and by the toxic masculinity of the authorial voice, so I’m afraid I gave up.
The third chapter of Star Trek and Sacred Ground: Explorations of Star Trek, Religion and American Culture, eds. Jennifer E. Porter and Darcee L. McLaren, is “Classtic Star Trek and the Death of God: A Case Study of ‘Who Mourns for Adonais'” by Robert Asa. Its second paragraph is:
Star Trek certainly was “far out” for the times, both literally and figuratively. Not only did the events of the show take place in outer space, strange creatures appeared who taxed the credulity of the average television viewer. While Americans were anticipating a manned landing on the moon by the end of the decade, only the visionaries dreamed of actually exploring other worlds. Science fiction television and films were largely confined to the B-movie category, known for their bad scripts, bad set, and bad acting. Children and teenagers might be entertained by it, but no one with mental images of the theatrical Buck Rogers or the televised Lost in Space could begin to take science fiction seriously as commentary on anything except the prevalence of mindless bad taste.
Again, I gave this 1999 collection of academic essays 100 pages before coming to the conclusion that I do not really know or care enough about Star Trek, or about popular religion in America, to get much out of it. You can get Star Trek and Sacred Ground here.
This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest on my shelves (an Eastercon 2023 purchase). Next on that pile is Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle, by Paula Fredriksen.
Mauritania is a country in northwest Africa, with an Atlantic coast, bordered on the west and north by Western Sahara, with a short northeastern border with Algeria and a much longer eastern and southern border with Mali, and a shorter southwestern border with Senegal. I keep on wanting to type ‘Mauretania’ with an ‘e’, but strictly that is the Roman-era kingdom and province that covered parts of what are now Morocco and Algeria. In Arabic, the name of the country Mauritania is spelt firmly with a ي, so the letter ‘i’ is appropriate in English.
It became independent from France in 1960, and had a succession of strongman leaders and military coups, combined with defeat in a war against Western Sahara. Things seem to have settled down a bit now, with the current president Mohamed Ould Ghazouani having won elections twice. The territory is mostly desert, but most of the population lives in the tropical south, near the capital Nouakchott.
In 2018 I met a very pleasant elderly gentleman at a breakfast in Brussels, who turned out to be Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi, elected president of Mauritania in 2007 and then overthrown the following year in a military coup (whose leaders included the current president). Cheikh Abdallahi died in November 2020, of heart problems rather than COVID.
See here for the methodology of these posts, though NB that I am now also using numbers from StoryGraph. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Mauritania.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
Title
Author
GR raters
LT owners
SG reviews
The Desert and the Drum
Mbarek Ould Beyrouk
369
49
114
Dangerous Love
Ray Norman
225
33
12
The Actual True Story of Ahmed and Zarga
Mohamedou Ould Slahi
127
13
35
Travels in Mauritania
Peter Hudson
38
21
7
Silent Terror: A Journey into Contemporary African Slavery
Samuel Cotton
29
25
6
Barzakh: The Land In-Between
Moussa Ould Ebnou
28
10
8
Under An African Sky: A journey to the climate frontline
Peter Hudson
19
6
2
Angels of Mauritania and the Curse of the Language
Mohamed Bouya Ould Bamba
13
5
3
Mauritania is pretty obscure from the literary point of view, if not quite at the level of Turkmenistan.
A very clear winner this week. The Desert and the Drum is about a young girl who runs away from her tribe to the city, stealing the sacred drum. Mbarek Ould Beyrouk, a Mauritanian writer himself, had sseveral other novels which scored respectably on Goodreads and LibraryThing, but were unknown to StoryGraph.
Dangerous Love: A True Story of Tragedy, Faith, and Forgiveness in the Muslim World, by Ray Norman, is an autobiographical Christian book about forgiving the men who shot and seriously injured the author and his daughter.
The Actual True Story of Ahmed and Zarga is about a man looking for his camel.
Travels in Mauritania and Under An African Sky are non-fiction about different aspects of travelling in the country.
Silent Terror is an investigation of slavery, as still practiced in parts of Mauritania.
Barzakh: The Land In-Between is science fiction, about a future archaeologist examining the history of Mauritania.
Angels of Mauritania and the Curse of the Language is about a family undergoing crisis in Noakchott.
Including the StoryGraph numbers meant that we gained Angels of Mauritania and lost Barefoot through Mauretania by the anthropologist Odette du Puigaudeau, which seems to be better known than her actual anthropology textbook based on that trip. Thanks to her falling off the end, we have (unusually) an all-male list this week, for the first time since the Republic of Congo.
The one disqualification that I hesitated about was Gassire’s Lute, a West African traditional epic translated into German by Leo Frobenius and from there into English by Alta Jablow, and published in 1971 in an edition illustrated by Hugo-winning artists Leo and Diane Dillon. As far as I could tell, more of it is set in what’s now Mali rather than Mauritania.
Google tells me that the best known women writers from Mauritania are Mubarkah Bent al-Barra (Bat Bint al-Bura), Aïchetou Mint Ahmedou, Mariem Mint Derwich and Salka Mint Sneid. Unfortunately none of their books are logged on any of the three sites I look at here; in fact, I could not even find any for sale on Amazon.fr.
Next up: Slovakia and Ireland, then New Zealand, then Costa Rica.
