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.
Second paragraph of third section (which is the third of three introductions, this one by the editor Glyn Morgan):
The book that you hold in your hands was created as a companion project to the ‘Science Fiction’ exhibition that opened at the Science Museum in London in October 2022. This book is an extension of the themes and topics covered there, but stands alone as a collection of essays and images across five different topics, each exploring different aspects of the global genre of science fiction and its relationship with scientific enquiry, history and culture.
I got this book at the ‘Science Fiction’ exhibition in the Science Museum in London in December 2022. I didn’t bother writing up the exhibition itself at the time – to be honest, I did not find it very exciting at all, but could not work up the energy to be mean about it.
However, this lavishly illustrated book of short essays and interviews is a good souvenir. The interviews are with Stanley Chen / Chen Qiufan, Charlie Jane Anders, Vandana Singh, Tade Thompson and Kim Stanley Robinson. The five individual sections are on machines / robots, space travel, communication and translation, aliens and millennial despair. The essay that I enjoyed most was Rachel Cordasco’s on science fiction in translation, which is not to say that any of the others were bad. The illustrations are relevant and well chosen. I think I got more enjoyment from the content of the book than from the content of the exhibition, and probably spent more time reading it than I did in the Science Museum that day three and a half years ago. Worth looking out for. You can get Science Fiction: Voyage to the Edge of Imagination here.
This was my shortest unread book acquired in 2022, and the non-fiction book that had lingered longest on my shelves. Next on both of those piles was An Emotional Dictionary: Real Words for How You Feel, from Angst to Zwodder, by Susie Dent, but I didn’t finish that and can’t be bothered to write it up; likewise the very last book I acquired in 2022 other than Doctor Who comics, Blood Libel: Anti-Americanism and Genocide in the Kosovo War by Bardhyl Mahmuti.
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.
No Crisis Group papers in April 2006, but I did publish a piece in Interationale Politik in the wake of the failed Dutch and French referenda on the EU’s Constitutional Treaty, advocating the sort of citizen’s assembly, with an element of random selection, that has subsequently been used to great effect in Ireland and which President Macron is now advocating for France and for Europe; I was ahead of my time. You can read it here.
My only trip was to Stockholm, starting on my 39th birthday; as well as attending a conference, I went to the Vasa Museum and the Nobel Prize Museum, both very interesting. We celebrated my birthday at the weekend when I got back, which also was the weekend that the lovely School Reunion episode of Doctor Who was broadcast.
More grimly, one of our neighbours was murdered by her husband, who later took his own life in prison. She had been a stalwart of the annual dorpsfeest, and a bench in the grassy space behind the parochial hall is dedicated to her memory (lovely photo by Ernst Gülcher).
4,900 pages (YTD 15,300) 2/13 by women (YTD 7/42) 1/13 by PoC (YTD 2/42)
The best of these are the two biographies of Alexander Hamilton and Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. They were almost exact contemporaries – they were born two years apart and died two years apart, she soon before her 49th birthday (of natural causes) and he a few months after his (shot dead by the vice-president of the United States).
Neither is mentioned in the other biography, and they would not have ever met (neither ever crossed the Atlantic), but they would have known about each other. John and Abigail Adams certainly knew them both. Abigail was not a fan of either. On 30 September 1785, she wrote of Georgiana,
Amongst the most celebrated of their beauties stands the Duchess of Devonshire, who is masculine in her appearance… [not intended as a positive statement]
and on 28 January 1797, she wrote of Hamilton,
Beware of that spare Cassius, has always occured to me when I have seen that cock sparrow. O I have read his Heart in his wicked Eyes many a time. The very devil is in them. They are lasciviousness itself.
Angelica Schuyler Church (who gets a lot of the good lines in Hamilton the musical) and her husband (a radical English MP) must also surely have known them both on rather better terms – John Church was an ally first of Earl Grey (he of the tea, who was also Georgiana’s lover) and then of Charles
James Fox (who she also strongly supported).
One of Hamilton’s great-granddaughters was a Georgina, but that’s more likely a homage to Washington than Devonshire. (Incidentally it was she who got the famous Emma Lazarus poem, “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses..” inscribed on the Statue of Liberty.) You can get Alexander Hamiton here and Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire here.
None of the other books this month was all that bad but I guess The Moon Pool failed to convince me; you can get it here.
The department secretary/courier glanced back at the envelope he had tossed onto my desk. ‘How would I know?’
I’ve only read one of Karen Lord’s books before, but was inspired to get this after meeting her at Eastercon (we were part of a big group that went out for dinner one evening, and ended up sharing a massive baked camembert between the two of us).
I really enjoyed this. It’s a very humane story of a nearly-human race whose world has been destroyed, and of the government agent whose job it is to settle refugees from the genocide onto a new planet. We end up touring the new planet which itself turns out to be pretty diverse, with different social structures and beliefs in different regions, while the two protagonists sort out their own relationship while observing the other personal dynamics in their team. The book was published in 2013, so just before the refugee crisis really hit, but was very timely for all that. Lord pulls off the trick of vivid alien planetary settings and vivid yet comprehensible almost-human characterisation.
The book came fifth in the 2014 Locus Awards but rather surprisingly didn’t get any other nominations. It was my top unread science fiction book, before the Hugo packet landed; top of that list now is The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi. You can get The Best of All Possible Worlds here.
When I first started to watch The Web Planet in 2007, the DVD was unfortunately still in my laptop when it was stolen by a sneak thief at the Gare du Nord in Brussels. I got another copy eventually and wrote:
I got the DVD of The Web Planet, a First Doctor story from 1965 with Ian, Barbara and Vicki, back in January; and then, after I had read Wood and Miles‘ excoriating description of it, the disc was in my laptop when it got stolen. But I caught up with this one over the weekend as well.
Oh dear.
It’s very brave to try and produce an entire six-part story with no humanoid characters other than the regular cast, and the production teeters on the edge of greatness but, ultimately, falls off and hurtles to its doom. I mean, the Zarbi, with their unearthly whistling, are actually pretty good, so good that you can nearly forget that they are blokes in giant ant costumes. And the disembodied Animus is pretty sinister. But the Venom Grubs are, frankly, pathetic. And the Menoptra, with their bizarre dance movements, and their pitiful Optera relatives, are just ludicrous. I can’t quite believe that this is the only story from the original Season Two (apart from the glorious Dalek Invasion of Earth) available on DVD. Almost any other would make more sense and be a better advertisement for Who as a whole. (I have reservations about The Chase, though it does at least have Daleks and a variety of settings, and I’ve only seen the first episode of The Space Museum so can’t speak to the whole of it, though I must say it really grabbed me.)
Maureen O’Brien is good as Vicki though, perhaps the best I remember her in any of her stories. The others are fine too, especially (as ever) Hartnell.
Coming back to it two years later for my Great Rewatch, I wrote:
When I first watchedThe Web Planet two years ago I really didn’t rate it. In my current rewatch, it is the first story where I have revised my opinion significantly upwards. Unlike the other non-Dalek sfnal stories so far it looks weird rather than crap. I think I appreciate it much more now that I have got my watching brain acclimatised to the mid 1960s, as it were; and perhaps it is easier to take it an episode at a time rather than sitting down to watch all six. The Menoptra and Zarbi (and the Animus) are much more convincing aliens than the Voord or the Sensorites, the sets are excellent and the vaseline on the camera lenses adds to the air of alienness. It is no wonder that this was one of the very first novelisations, or that the first Doctor Who annual had not one but two stories set on Vortis. (The Optera and Venom Grubs are still a bit less convincing, but I was able to rise above that somehow.) We also see a lot more of the inside of the Tardis than ever before. Lots of good character moments for all four regulars, with Barbara saving the day.
Coming back to it, I attempted to binge the whole story in an evening, and I think this was a mistake; I found myself confused and actually a little bored. Yes, the makers of the show achieved miracles on a shoestring, but it’s difficult for today’s viewer to grasp. People who saw it the first time around were generally more impressed, most notably Peter Capaldi:
…those old shows were only made to be watched once, on a flickering monochrome telly that smelled of valves and furniture polish. In that context, they succeeded immeasurably. They were triumphs of imagination. It may surprise you now, but something like The Web Planet lived powerfully and expansively in my head for decades… until the DVDs came along and spoiled the party. But I’m glad to say that the Menoptra eventually flitted back into my dreams, where they belong.
The novel, Doctor Who and the Zarbi, by Bill Strutton, the Australian writer of the original story, was the second Doctor Who novel ever published (after Doctor Who In An Exciting Adventure with the Daleks). The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
“Chesterton, get back! Back!”
I (obviously) read it as a child, and was fascinated. Coming back to it in 2008, I wrote:
Doctor Who and the Zarbi was based on the story now generally called The Web Planet, which crashes and burns spectacularly awfully on screen because today’s viewers cannot take the production values seriously. The book is a bit better, because the printed page and the reader’s imagination, rather than the unforgiving camera, supplies the details of the various non-human races in conflict on the planet Vortis. In principle it makes a good sf story, perhaps the best sf story, in terms of the norms of the genre, from the whole Hartnell era.
The book does suffer from a couple of weaknesses. Most bizarrely, and uniquely, the central character is referred to as “Doctor Who” rather than “the Doctor” throughout, and the Tardis loses the definite article, as if Tardis was just the name of the vessel. Also, in places the book feels uncomfortably like what it is, a TV script cast in different format, and one feels that Strutton is just writing what appeared to the viewer on the screen. Having said that, though, the book is still better than the original TV story.
To call it “the best sf story, in terms of the norms of the genre, from the whole Hartnell era” is a strong statement, and to be honest I think three of the four Hartnell Dalek stories are better contenders. But as a story, it’s at the upper end and the novelisation pulls that out. You can get Doctor Who and the Zarbi here.
The illustrations in the book are really striking.
They are credited to one John Wood, which is also the name of the BBC designer who worked on the TV story. Fannish lore, however, insists that these are two different people, and further that the illustrator John Wood is a mistake for John Woods, one of the illustrators who also worked on the three 1960s Dalek books (The Dalek Book, The Dalek World and The Dalek Outer Space Book). Unfortunately the three or four different artists who worked on the Dalek books are not credited individually, so it is difficult to compare.
I am not convinced by fannish lore. I think Occam’s Razor shaves closer to the possibility that the same artist designed the TV show and illustrated the book. Also, the Vicki in the illustrations is a brunette, whereas Maureen O’Brien at that age was blonde. Surely this indicates that the illustrations could have been based on the original production design, which might have dated from before Maureen O’Brien’s start on the show? The Web Planet was only her third story, and its first episode was her seventh. Also, if John Wood’s name was spelled incorrectly when the book was first published, surely he would have had a chance to correct it before a different publisher brought it out again ten years later?
Anyway. Brigid Cherry, a retired media studies academic who like Peter Capaldi is old enough to have seen the story when it was first broadcast in 1965, has written a redemptive Black Archive monograph on it. I must say that while my favourite Black Archives are those that tell me all the reasons why my favourite stories are so fantastic, I do also like the ones like this where the writer challenges my less positive views and finds reasons that I had not considered to appreciate a story. There are only three chapters, but they are long and it is a chunky read.
A substantial introduction, with the title “So the Legends Say: Receptions of The Web Planet“, looks at views of The Web Planet, contrasting the rather harsh take of modern fans such as me with the much more positive memories of those who saw it at the time, including the author herself, Stephen James Walker and contributors to an online forum. She doesn’t quote Peter Capaldi here, but his comments are fully aligned with her argument.
I’m going to lazily use the author’s summaries of her own chapters. “Chapter one [whose title is “Every Corner of Vortis: Televisuality”] explores the aesthetics of the story in relation to how television was made at the time, and the ways in which the mise-en-scène, art design, camerawork and other stylistic elements were determined by these production processes. In terms of The Web Planet being considered an ambitious, if not over-ambitious, experiment, this chapter also frames early Doctor Who, and this story specifically, as an example of the experimental television being produced at the time.”
“Chapter two [whose title is: “Flying Above thought: Performance”] extends this approach by further considering the performativity of the story, considering it in relation to art or media forms such as puppetry, mime, and avant-garde theatre. These two chapters are necessarily historiography (writing about the past) not in order to definitively answer the question of whether The Web Planet is great children’s TV or a failed experiment – it might be both, of course. Rather, it is an analysis intended to re-examine it from the perspective of TV production history and the history of the wider arts and popular culture of the time. Such historiography… can be both an account of industrial circumstances (in this instance, aspects of production and performance at the BBC in the 1960s) and a social history where the text reflects the national (or global) zeitgeist.”
The second paragraph of the third and final chapter (whose title is: “The Light is Good: Themes”) is:
There are several technological forms contrasted in The Web Planet: the organic technology of the Carsinome; the inorganic crystalline technology used by the Menoptra (the prime example of which is the communication device that Vrestin uses to contact the invasion force in ‘The Zarbi’); the metallic gold collars (again inorganic) used by the Zarbi to ‘morphotise’ victims; and the mysterious energy that powers the TARDIS itself and is shown to repel the Animus and Zarbi (potentially both organic and inorganic since the Doctor’s ship often seems ‘alive’). These various forms of technology are indicative of technological, and thus cultural, development in each of the character groupings in the narrative.
The author’s summary is: “chapter 3 turns to the textual meanings that underpin the story, revealing the ideological meanings and discourses in relation to the 1960s zeitgeist. This also draws on yet another element of historiography discussed by Hilmes, that is consideration of the conditions under which the popular culture text is consumed or experienced.”
The short conclusion, “The Silence of Time: Reappraising The Web Planet”, sums up what has been said, and ends:
Bear in mind that when the Doctor stops Ian from plunging his hand into the acid pool in the opening episode, the lesson to be learnt is to be more cautious before rushing in and take more time to better understand what we are seeing. It is past time to re-appraise The Web Planetin contexts other than an established fan canon born of naiveté or ignorance of television history. It is, then, time to come back to Vortis. As this book has argued, The Web Planet’s innovative approaches demand it is given its deserved status in the canon of British experimental television.
As I hope is clear by now, I found this an entertaining and thought-provoking read, and maybe the next time I pop the DVD in the player I’ll approach the story in a more redemptive frame of mind. You can get the Black Archive here.
Andrew Hilton is more than ninety years old and hasn’t stood at his full height in ten. He was a tower of a man in his prime, two metres tall and built like a boxer. Nearly nobody he ever met was able to look him straight in the eye, at least not and tell him ‘No.’ Illness has gradually eaten away at that over the years. He feels as if he lives at the bottom of a deep bath, with everybody he ever meets looking down at him from slippery, unscalable walls, none of them able to reach down to help him. He’s spent his final months crumpled up in bed like a dying spider, changing to a corpse’s colour ahead of time. It might have been bearable if he’d lost his mind, but he remembers what he used to be: a leader, a powerhouse. He used to be able to alter the course of terrible events for the better, to get justice. He used to protect people.
One of the hotly tipped books this year, a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, this is a great story combining the vibes of A Scanner Darkly and H.P. Lovecraft, and perhaps a nod to the Silents of Matt Smith era Doctor Who, and Charlie Stross’s Laundry. The Antimemetics Division deals with entities which are invading us, taking our memories, our consciousness, our loves and emotions. and leaving nothing. People who have worked at the Division for years turn up and think it is their first day. The protagonist loses all knowledge of her husband. The sense of alienation and loss of trust in reality is tremendously conveyed. You do slightly wonder how the Antimemetics Division itself could withstand the tests of time, given the powerful nature of the opposition. But I enjoyed the ride a lot. You can get There is No Antimemetics Division 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.
March 2006 was a pretty memorable month for me. I had one of the most fun science fiction convention experiences I can remember at P-Con in Dublin, where I moderated four panels, one of which was interrupted by the BBC calling me for a statement on the death of Slobodan Milošević. My brains were eaten by Fluff.
I went on from Dublin (having spoken at a panel with Garret Fitzgerald) to Cyprus, where I presented the first Crisis Group report on the situation there at a packed event in the Ledra Palace Hotel on the Green Line. This was more significant than I had perhaps realised; it was the first time since the referendums of April 2004 that someone had come to the island to tell the Greek Cypriots that they had voted for continued partition. Tempers were still high (actually they still are, many years later) and one Greek Cypriot newspaper accused me of behaving “με αναίδεια χίλιων πιθήκων”, “with the impudence of a thousand monkeys”. But I feel it was one of the more important bits of work we did in my time at Crisis Group, and perhaps more important, I made friends on that trip who I am still in touch with. (The chap in the picture below is not one of them.)
I also presented the report in Athens and Istanbul, my first ever visit to Turkey. The reception was a bit more laid back in both cases.
Anne and I attempted to have a romantic weekend break to Maastricht. It rained. Weirdly enough I went back to that part of the world later in the month for a conference about Kosovo in a chateau very near by (in Château St-Gerlach). And we did a nice little report on the EU and the South Caucasus. Outside Crisis Group, I published a short note on how to proceed with EU integration, proposing the citizens’ dialogues later adopted by President Macron (who may have come up with the idea separately).
Meanwhile back at home, F made a scale model of the solar system in our back yard. Here are the Sun (portrayed by a space hopper), a barely visible Mercury, and more clearly visible Venus, Earth and Mars.
4,200 pages (YTD 10,400) None by women (YTD 5/29) None by PoC (YTD 1/29)
This was a really good month for books as well, despite a certain lack of diversity. The top book of 2006 for me was Lost Lives, the gruelling account of people who died in the Troubles. You can get it (for a price!) here. Others that I particularly enjoyed were The Discontinuity Guide, which you can get here; Easter 1916, which you can get here; and Thud!, which you can get here.
Serbia is at the heart of the Balkans; south of Hungary, north of North Macedonia, east of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, northeast of Montenegro and Kosovo, west of Romania and Bulgaria. It became autonomous from the Ottoman Empire in 1804 and gradually expanded in territory and upgraded in status to the point that it became the spark for the First World War in 1914.
The war was pretty disastrous for Serbia – around 20-25% of its entire population is thought to have died during the 1914-18 period. But after the war it became the centre of the new Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, incorporating large chunks of what had been the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the neighbouring state of Montenegro. Renamed Yugoslavia, this state was broken up during the second world war, but reassembled under the leadership of Marshal Tito, and lasted another 45 years after that.
There is no space to go into detail here about the break-up of Yugoslavia, which involved another three and a half wars (Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo and the ten days of conflict in Slovenia) and also two peaceful separations (Macedonia and Montenegro). By the end, Serbia was back down to almost its 1914 borders with the addition of the Vojvodina north of Belgrade. Slobodan Milošević, who had become the Serbian leader in the late stages of Communism, remained in power until 2001. Since 2014 it has been under the increasingly authoritarian rule of President Aleksandar Vučić and the Serbian Progressive Party.
I have been to Serbia many times, starting in 1998, and have many friends in and from there. My former assistant R from my Bosnia days now lives in Belgrade and has an Instagram travel blog called “Price iz kofera“, “Stories from a Suitcase”. Going back a lot further, my grandfather was given a Serbian military decoration, the Order of the White Eagle, for his part in the unsuccessful defence of the front line in Macedonia in 1915. I always enjoy going back. (Here’s Sirmium.)
Serbian is a Slavic language, mutually intelligible with Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin, not quite as close to Slovenian in one direction and Macedonian and Bulgarian in the other. I am slightly above casual tourist level.
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 Serbia.
Title
Author
GR raters
LT owners
SG reviews
Fatherland – A Family History
Nina Bunjevac
1,700
135
352
The Library
Zoran Živković
3,042
139
158
The Inner Side of the Wind, or The Novel of Hero and Leander
Milorad Pavić
1,461
197
112
With Their Backs to the World: Portraits from Serbia
Åsne Seierstad
1,029
282
92
Miss Ex-Yugoslavia: A Memoir
Sofija Stefanovic
1,177
46
247
At The Lucky Hand
Goran Petrović
2,482
40
130
Götz and Meyer
David Albahari
614
214
91
The Use of Man
Aleksandar Tišma
886
180
49
This was unusually difficult to tally. Many books are tagged “serbia” on LibraryThing and Goodreads even if they are mostly set in Bosnia (or sometimes Kosovo). On the other hand, Serbian writers like Danilo Kiš, Zoran Živković and Milorad Pavić love setting their writing in an anonymous Eastern European location, which sometimes might be Serbia and sometimes might not. Indeed, when I did this analysis in 2015 I awarded the top spot to The Tiger’s Wife by Tea Olbreht, but having read it since then, I don’t think it is sufficiently explicit that the setting is Serbia for it to qualify. I have done my best with the list above.
This week’s winner, Fatherland, by Nina Bunjevac, also the StoryGraph winner, is a graphic novel about a girl whose mother moves the family back home to Serbia from Canada, to get away from the Serbian nationalist father who eventually accidentally blows himself up in Toronto. I have not been able to check in detail but it sounds similar to Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, though maybe not such a classic.
I’m glad to see that this week’s Goodreads winner, The Library, is by the great Serbian magical realist writer Zoran Živković, who I actually met two decades ago. I’m aware that this requires some special pleading, in that the locations of the stories are not specified, but I thin most of the stories can be taken as set in the writer’s home of Belgrade – though admittedly the fourth story of the six is set in Hell and the fifth in a city where there are bookstalls under the Great Bridge, which I don’t think is the case in Belgrade.
The Inner Side of the Wind is a time travel romance set in Belgrade between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries.
With Their Backs to the Wind, this week’s LibraryThing winner, is reportage about life under Milošević.
Miss Ex-Yugoslavia is also non-fiction, about a girl growing up between Serbia and Australia in the 1980s and 1990s. It sounds like more of it is set in Serbia than Australia so I have allowed it on the list.
At The Lucky Hand is more magical realism set in Belgrade.
Götz and Meyer is about a Serbian teacher today obsessed with two SS men committing genocide in and around Belgrade in the second world war.
The Use of Man is about four people from Novi Sad, the capital of the autonomous province of Vojvodina, and their experiences in the second world war.
I excluded Srdja Popović’s Blueprint for Revolution which draws on the real-life lessons of the author’s involvement with the anti-Milošević Otpor movement, because when I checked I found that he had also drawn on a lot of other countries’ experiences of civil resistance.
I also excluded Garden, Ashes by Danilo Kiš, because on a page count it became clear to me that more than half of it is set in Hungary rather than Serbia.
Both Nina Bunjevac and Sofija Stefanovic found their muses by emigrating. The top Serbian woman writer by my metrics who is still in the country is Mirjana Novaković, best known for her Fear and His Servant.
Using the StoryGraph numbers gained us Miss Ex-Yugoslavia at the expense of Hourglass, by Danilo Kiš, who unfortunately ends up unrepresented here as a result.
Serbia is well represented on my own bookshelves, particularly in books which cover the whole former Yugoslavia or the wider Balkans such as Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West, The Balkans by Mark Mazower, The Fall of Yugoslavia by Misha Glenny and Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation by Laura Silber and Allan Little.
F and I went to see Nolan’s The Odyssey yesterday, it being his 27th birthday. The Kinepolis complex in Brussels is one of only three IMAX 70 mm projectors sowing it in continental Europe (the other two are Montpelier and Copenhagen). However it is already booked up for weeks in advance, so we went instead to the IMAX cinema in Hasselt, an hour’s drive northeast of us. I must say having the huge screen was great, and although I had heard that the volume of the soundtrack is very loud, I think that in Hasselt at least it had been adjusted downwards for viewer comfort.
So, what did I think? It’s not long since I read Emily Wilson’s translation of the original, so it was reasonably fresh in my mind, and meant that there were certain set-pieces I was waiting for with interest, to see how they could be done – the Cyclops, Circe, the final showdown on Ithaca, this last also recently done by Claire North. I see some Homeric purists online complaining that this or that plot line or story element was left out. In general I don’t have much sympathy with that; the Homeric texts as we have them are presumably a synthesis from different sources, and I think every story-teller gets to tell it as they want (and some have varied a lot more than Nolan). Which is not to say that the choices made are above criticism, of course.
So I am not too worried about the softening of the protagonist’s character, or that Helen and Clytemnestra are played by the same Black actor (Lupita Nyong’o), or that Telemachus at one point calls Odysseus ‘Dad’, or the lengthy inclusion of the Trojan Horse, or even about the unbeatable robot soldiers. As the Economist reviewer says, ‘We are not arguing about “The Odyssey” when we argue about “The Odyssey”. We are arguing about ourselves.’
Having said that, there were a couple of bits that really didn’t work for me in dramatic terms. The Sirens just had vague shapes on a misty shore, with Matt Damon gurning while tied to the mast – curiously underplayed compared to the rest of the film. And Charlize Theron’s Calypso as the very professional but not very affectionate therapist for Odysseus’ PTSD, rather than the sexy beach nymph of Homer, makes the story rather Californian, as I saw someone somewhere put it.
But in general I liked it. I actually found the plot easier to follow than the original, though my sense is that it stuck fairly closely to Homer’s narrative order. Matt Damon is fine as Nolan’s version of Odysseus, and Tom Holland is fine as Telemachus. I thought Zendaya a bit underused as Athena, but Anne Hathaway is superb as Penelope, the most interesting character in the story. I loved the Cyclops and Circe, though in both cases Nolan tells a slightly different story to Homer. The prolonged fight sequences at the end sees Robert Pattinson’s sleazy Antinous eventually get his comeuppance, and is well enough shot that you barely have time to wonder how Ulysses and Telemachus can possibly defeat 120 suitors. Indeed the whole three hours passed rather quickly.
I imagine that this and Project Hail Mary will be duking it out for next year’s Hugo, and probably for other awards too. I think I’ll give The Odyssey the higher vote.
We had the day off for Belgian National Day on Tuesday, and I went to Gent, to visit the Museum of Fine Arts (MSK) and the City Museum of Contemporary Art (SMAK), which face each other to the south of the city centre (where the Gentse Feesten were also on, but I didn’t check that out).
The Museum of Fine Arts probably isn’t in the top five art museums in Belgium (there are at least two better ones in each of Bruges, Brussels and Antwerp, never mind elsewhere), and it isn’t particularly large, but even a lesser Belgian art museum is on the level of a national gallery in many other countries. I had an enjoyable few hours looking around the collection. Here are my top ten art works, in chronological order.
Saint Jerome in Prayer, by Hieronymous Bosch (late 15th century). The saint has a very small pet lion, and the rocks and plants around him are typically twisted. Hieronymus depicts Hieronymus.
Gerry decided to test at 23andMe, too. She was curious about her own results, and besides, if she matched Alice, that would eliminate some possibilities that Alice needed to consider—that Alice had been adopted or that Jim Collins wasn’t, biologically speaking, Alice’s father. These were contenders for an explanation, even if Gerry told Alice she was insane when Alice suggested their mother could have had an affair.
My attentive reader will have noticed that I have become very fascinated by the addition of DNA analysis to the suite of tools available to the genealogy researcher. I have been fortunate; all of my own direct ancestors appear to be genetically who we thought they were, at least back to the early nineteenth century; and while I have identified a couple of absentee parents for other people, only one of them was still alive (and his daughter decided not to try contacting him).
Libby Copeland takes us to stories of people who found much closer and less pleasant surprises in their DNA, and asks what this means for the American concept of families? And it is a much more American than European thing; I find more relatives on the DNA sites connected to my American grandmother than to my three Irish grandparents combined. There are lines around consent and confidentiality that modern technology is redrawing. The privacy of a brief relationship decades ago is up-ended by the genetic information encoded in the body of the child of that relationship, who has a right to know where they come from too.
If you haven’t yet gone down the rabbit hole of DNA testing, but are considering it, this is an essential read to think through what you might find out. If you have, you’ll find yourself alternating between nods of recognition and jaw-dropping astonishment. I am lost in admiration of CeCe Moore, who has turned the combination of DNA analysis and genealogical research into a new branch of science. My own dabbling has been fascinating but without any huge shocks. Not everyone is so lucky.
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.
As previously noted, I started the month in Skopje, and then returned to Prishtina in Kosovo for more work meetings, extended by a day when fog prevented my flight home from taking off. This was all leading up to publishing another Kosovo report mid-month. I also got quoted in the Guardian by the lovely and much missed Ian Traynor. My other trip of the month was to Vienna, a rather mad affair which included intense chats with the late great Albert Rohan and the late great Martti Ahtisaari.
My negotiations with my future employer were meantime continuing, but I received an unexpected approach from a head-hunter looking for someone to run a new thinktank on longevity issues. I don’t know a lot about the subject, but I kept up the conversation for several weeks until we mutually decided that it just wasn’t my thing. (Much later, I tracked down the person who did get the job; let’s just say that I dodged a bullet.)
At home, we had a lovely ceremony organised by the municipality in which young F attended the ceremonial planting of his special tree. Our village donates or plants a tree for every child turning seven each year; we did not make anything of it for the girls, who would not really appreciate it, but F was certainly interested and engaged.
We went back to the scene in 2013 to see if we could find the same tree, and I’m pretty sure we did.
Another seven years on, we went back again in the early pandemic. – you can see I think that it is the same tree, and the same person who stood by it aged six and thirteen, now twenty.
4,200 pages (YTD 6,200) 4/12 (YTD 5/18) by women (Jenkins, Kemble, Alcott, Benson) 1/12 (YTD 1/18) by PoC (Delany)
The best and worst of these were all non-fiction. The best is Fanny Kemble’s account of slavery from the point of view of someone who married a slave-owner. You can read it for free here. Almost as good is Richard Caplan’s definitive account of the diplomatic response to the break-up of Yugoslavia, which kills a few myths and which you can get here. The worst by far is Rebecca Jenkins’ biography of Fanny Kemble. If you want, you can get it here.
Current The Satan Pit, by Matt Jones Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh
Last books finished The Tomorrow Windows, by Jonathan Morris Lord Edgware Dies, by Agatha Christie Moving Pictures, by Terry Pratchett For and Against a United Ireland, by Fintan O’Toole and Sam McBride The Scent of Blood, by Andrew Lane The Winged Coven, by Paul Magrs Understanding the War in Kosovo, eds Florian Bieber and Židas Daskaloski An Emotional Dictionary: Real Words for How You Feel, from Angst to Zwodder, by Susie Dent (did not finish) Tomorrow Lies in Ambush, by Bob Shaw
Next books
The Satan Pit, by Matt Jones Blood Libel: Anti-Americanism and Genocide in the Kosovo War , by Bardhyl Mahmuti Snow Country, by Yasunari Kawabata
I will never see Lenore Dove again. Never hear her laugh coming from high above me in the branches. Never feel the warmth of her in my arms as we lay on a bed of pine needles, my lips pressed into the hollow of her neck. Never pull a stray goose feather from her hair, or listen to her play her tune box, or press my finger into the crease that forms between her eyebrows when she’s puzzling out a thought. Never see her face brighten at a bag of gumdrops or a full moon or the sound of me whispering, “I love you like all-fire.”
I have been wondering about this book since grinding through the statistics for the YA finalists in the BSFA, Nebula/Andre Norton and now the Hugo/Lodestar, given that it is so far ahead of the field in terms of ownership on all of the platforms. Apparently it was the best-selling book in the USA last year. I wasn’t a massive fan of the Hunger Games trilogy though I could see how it developed a cult following. It took me a while to remember how this story, which is about the past Hunger Games victory of Haymitch Abernathy of District 12, fits into the narrative 24 years before the original novel is set.
Reader, I hugely enjoyed it. Even though we know from the very beginning that everyone else is going to die horribly, the story pushes on with tremendous energy and momentum, and a strong empathy for the children who are being slaughtered by each other in the ritual killing. I guess it’s notable that the technology of Panem doesn’t change much in the 24 years between the two stories, but then again, it’s a repressive place where innovation serves only the interests of state surveillance. I found it an easy, exciting read and I was actually able to remember the plot afterwards. You can get Sunrise on the Reaping here.
With that, it’s time to decide my votes for this year’s Lodestar Award. I think I will go as follows:
Sunrise on the Reaping, by Suzanne Collins
Among Ghosts, by Rachel Hartman
Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universe, by C.B. Lee
Holy Terrors, by Margaret Owen
They Bloom at Night, by Trang Thanh Tran
Oathbound, by Tracy Deonn
I will write up one more category here, the Astounding Award, before the voting deadline.
Second paragraph of third chapter (“Kosovo and Bosnia: Different Products of Yugoslavia’s Disintegration” by Jusuf Fuduli):
These include the ethnicities of the people involved, their proportion of the total population, the status of these entities as federal units in the former Yugoslavia, and the relations between the inhabitants before open conflict erupted. In terms of political definitions, the most pronounced differences between Bosnia and Kosovo are the political statuses afforded to each. While both Bosnia and Kosovo are subject to international oversight and the presence of an international peacekeeping force, the fact is that Bosnia requires an international mission to preserve its status as an independent state. This political status originates in its current form from the peace agreement known as the Dayton Accords signed in 1995 by the interested parties in the Bosnian conflict. Essentially, the peacekeeping mission in Bosnia will be required until the cement mixed at Dayton dries. Kosovo, unlike Bosnia, is not an example of a military solution being implemented to augment a political one. In Kosovo, U.N. Security Council Resolution 1244, which provides the mandate for the international mission recognizes it as an interim solution until a final political settlement is achieved. This is the fundamental difference—Bosnia has a political solution defining its status and thereby guaranteeing the independence declared in 1992 that led to war, while Kosovo is still waiting for a settlement to answer its people’s own conflict ridden drive toward independence.
This is a massive 700-page book of essays on Kosovo from the American military point of view, pulled together by Wentz on behalf of the Pentagon’s Command and Control Research Program (reading between the lines, a Lessons Learned unit) back in 2002, which is a long time ago in Kosovo politics. It’s a real grab-bag of pieces, some from very senior writers, some from analysts who were clearly a bit shaky on the substance; Wentz himself contributes over a third of the book, in the form of a grunt’s-eye view of managing civil-military relations in an occupied but largely friendly territory, which is actually rather charming.
It could have been edited better – for instance, there are two consecutive chapters about NATO communications during the 1999 conflict, one of which persistently spells Jamie Shea’s name wrong, and the other actually by Shea himself, spelt correctly. I felt that there were possibly two different books in here, one on high strategy and one on the nuts and bolts of a medium-term military presence. But even so, there was the occasional moment when I nodded to myself and though, “Oh, so that’s why…”
In particular, it was pleasing to see the later chapters stressing the importance of relationships with civil society and international NGOs, and the various means by which these can be established, improved and maintained. The provision of maps to other international actors is a real boon, and saves lives. Information also needs to flow smoothly to where it is needed (the account of various secure comms systems and the different people allowed to use each one became almost funny in its complexity). So I hope that military planners, not only in the US, get a chance to read this book and learn from it.
(Title translates to “These lines that trace my body”.)
Third page:
…making up a symphony to whose rhythm the trees’ branches dance to. It’s so calming…
This has been a big hit in Francophone comics land this year, and has so far been translated into Dutch and Portuguese; English must surely follow. It’s the autobiographical story of Mansoureh Kamari, who was born in Iran, moved to France in 2011 and graduated from the Gobelins school of art in 2015, and is one of the up and coming screen animators in the French film scene.
Here she tells the story of her childhood in the brutal misogynist repression of the Islamic Republic, of continual sexual harassment, of relatives who were simply executed for their behaviour, of a society where women are under constant pressure. But she frames this in reminiscences from her sideline as a nude model who has agreed to participate in a video documentary; so we have Mansoureh, naked and comfortable in her body at last, reflecting on her upbringing. The nude scenes are intimate but not heavily erotic; the point isn’t to titillate, it’s to express her freedom.
The book is more polemical than the late great Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (vol 1, vol 2), but I guess the situation for women in Iran has got much worse since Satrapi first wrote about it from exile – Kamari would still have been a child then. But it’s not just about grim oppression; it’s telling a story of personal liberation, and ends with some joy. You can get Ces lignes qui tracent mon corps 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.
As previously noted, 2006 started with a full house of visitors and much fun, though B’s behaviour was becoing more and more difficult. I got very excited about the Lib Dem leadership, with Charles Kennedy’s dramatic fall and the nearly successful wonkish challenge by Chris Huhne to veterans Menȝies Campbell and Simon Hughes. At work we published a report on (North) Macedonia, but I was running out of steam… I had a one-day trip to Paris, and actually finished the month in Macedonia, having travelled there from Kosovo on frozen and slippery tracks over the hills after a landslide had knocked out the main road from Prishtina to Skopje; these pictures don’t quite convey just how scary a drive it was.
View down the twisty mountain track (the main road to Macedonia from Kosovo was closed by a landslide so we tried driving over the top of the mountains; stupid idea)Another view down the twisty mountain track
Adelaide, symmetrical as ever, dressed in her simple, perfect pastels, sat down in the chair opposite Janet, pushed a tin of biscuits across the table and smiled. ‘Would you like a biscuit? I’ve got these delightful, simply delightful ginger creams from a local baker. I do like to support local small businesses, don’t you? And I do so like that blouse you’re wearing. So many colours! So daring! You must tell me where you got it from.’ Adelaide adjusted her Alice band. ‘Oh, and, now before I forget, how long have you been having an affair with my husband?’
Another good novelisation of an early New Who story – I doubt that we will ever get the full sequence in novel form, but I appreciate what we have. Lidster has taken the sequence of events in the script and given us a book whose two halves correspond to the two episodes; but he has added a lot of background on the various characters, including the skeevy Oliver Charles (married to Adelaide and flinging with Janet) and also Toshiko Sato, who appears in the very first scene filmed for New Who, in the lab with the dead alien pig. Solid, enjoyable and convincing. You can get Aliens of London here.
Bulgaria is in southeastern Europe, south of Romania, north of Greece, east of Serbia and North Macedonia and west of the Black Sea.
It’s a country that I know relatively well – I first visited for a week at the age of 8 for a family holiday in the Golden Sands beach resort near Varna, and have gone back reasonably frequently since 2000. My many Bulgarian friends and colleagues include half a dozen of its former foreign ministers. (In fact I introduced one of them to his wife.)
Me speaking on Bulgarian TV in February 2020, just before the pandemic. My name is spelt “Никълас Уайт» in Bulgarian Cyrillic, and the caption describes me as “инфлуенсър”, an influencer. On a good day, perhaps.
Bulgaria became de facto independent from the Ottoman Empire in 1878, though the reduction by Western European diplomacy of its originally large assigned territory caused resentment for decades. In 1885 it annexed the neighbouring Ottoman province of Eastern Rumelia, and fought off a punitive attack from Serbia (we’ll hear more about that).
Having defeated the Ottomans in alliance with Serbia and Greece in 1912, Bulgaria then lost to Bulgaria, Greece and Romania in the next war in 1913, and after the first world war lost some more territory and settled down to a period of political instability. Bulgaria allied with Germany during the second world war, and by the end was occupied by the Soviets who installed a Communist government which lasted until 1989.
Since then, power alternated between the ex-Communist Bulgarian Socialist Party and centrist or right-wing alternatives, notably the former king Simeon, who had been forced to abdicate at the age of 9 in 1946 and returned as prime minister from 2001 to 2005, and more recently the GERB party founded by Boyko Borisov, which has been in power for the majority of the time since 2009. In this year’s elections, a new leftish political party founded by former president Rumen Radev won and took power.
The Bulgarian language is a Slavic language, related to Russian, more closely to Serbian and Croatian, and even more closely to Macedonian. If you know the basic Cyrillic alphabet, you can always spot Bulgarian by the fact that it uses the letter ъ as a vowel – the ‘u’ in ‘Bulgaria’, in fact, or the middle letter of the Bulgarian spelling of my own first name; its use as a vowel is unique to Bulgarian – in Russian, ъ does not have a sound but separates hard consonants from soft vowels; in Tajik, ъ is a consonant (the glo’’al stop); and other currently used versions of the Cyrillic alphabet just don’t have it. Also, unlike other Slavic languages (apart from Macedonian), Bulgarian doesn’t do evil things to its nouns, and translates ‘the’ as a suffix.
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 current boundaries of Bulgaria.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
Title
Author
GR raters
LT owners
SG reviews
What Belongs to You
Garth Greenwell
15,898
857
3,443
The Shadow Land
Elizabeth Kostova
16,240
1,128
2,392
Cleanness
Garth Greenwell
10,333
494
2,696
Arms and the Man
George Bernard Shaw
11,475
1,243
924
The Elusive Mrs. Pollifax
Dorothy Gilman
10,092
1066
984
The Physics of Sorrow
Georgi Gospodinov
13,720
415
1,070
Death and the Gardener
Georgi Gospodinov
15,325
158
751
The Balkan Escape
Steve Berry
4,864
247
417
This is the biggest shift I have yet seen from when I did this analysis for Bulgaria back in 2015. Then, the top book by far was Arms and the Man, George Bernard Shaw’s play set during and immediately after the 1885 war, in which the protagonist Bluntschli famously declares, “My rank is the highest known in Switzerland: I’m a free citizen.” It’s still ahead, if not by much, on LibraryThing, but behind on Goodreads and way behind on StoryGraph. Basically a lot of new Bulgarian-set novels, or novels newly available in translation, have appeared in the intervening years.
Garth Greenwell is an American writer who has worked as a teacher in Bulgaria. His two novels here, What Belongs To You, which is the StoryGraph and overall winner this week, and Cleanness are about an American teacher facing the challenges of gay romance with Bulgarians while working there.
Elizabeth Kostova has a Bulgarian surname, but it is her husband’s; she was originally Elizabeth Johnson from Tennessee. I really didn’t much like her runaway hit, The Historian, but The Shadow Land, this week’s Goodreads winner, sounds like it’s much more under control and restricts its setting to Bulgaria.
The Elusive Mrs Pollifax is the third in the series of novels about an unlikely CIA agent (the first two are set in Albania and Turkey). It was the runner-up when I did this analysis in 2015.
With reluctance I had to disqualify Georgi Gospodinov’s International Booker Prize-winning science fiction novel Time Shelter, which would otherwise have been this week’s winner. I actually went to the lengths of buying it and doing a swift page count, but strictly speaking more of it is set in Switzerland than in Bulgaria. On the other hand his next two novels, The Physics of Sorrow and Death and the Gardener, are much more firmly set there. (Maybe the latter more firmly than the former.)
Finally The Balkan Escape is a YA fantasy adventure story, the first in a series (though none of the others seems to be set in Bulgaria). It came third when I counted in 2015.
Regrettably the StoryGraph numbers knocked The Broken Road by Patrick Leigh Fermor off the list. Ivan Vazov’s classic Under the Yoke was next after that (did very well on Goodreads, worse on the other two). Next would have been the top book by a Bulgarian woman writer, Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe, by Kapka Kassabova.
On my own shelves, apart from Arms and the Man, The Broken Road and Under the Yoke, I don’t have a lot of books with Bulgarian content. My grandmother’s boyfriend Alan Bott managed to reunite with the Allies there after escaping Turkish captivity at the end of the First World War. I once had, but seem to have lost, Richard Crampton’s excellent history of the country. I also commend the writing of Bulgarian thinker Ivan Krastev, who I collaborated with a couple of times, more than twenty years ago now, and whose pessimism about the political future comes from a place of love and liberalism.
Next up is Bulgaria’s neighbour Serbia; then the Republic of Congo (Brazzaville), El Salvador and back to Europe for Denmark.
My family lived in Wassenaar in the Netherlands the year I turned 13, in 1979 and 1980. It is 10 km northeast of the Hague, about halfway to Leiden, and these days it is a dormitory town for the larger cities nearby. In international relations, it gives its name to the 1996 Wassenaar Arrangement on arms control. Earlier it was the location of the first of the South Moluccan terrorist attacks of the 1970s, when 33 Ambonese activists occupied the Indonesian ambassador’s residence and held the ambassador and staff hostage (they surrendered peacefully with no casualties).
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.
December 2005 was an unusual month for that time in my life in that I did not travel outside my usual commute – a planned day-trip to France was cancelled at the last moment. The overnights meme says I had spent the night in 21 different places away from home during the year; I seem to have missed Berlin from the list. I certainly visited 17 countries in the course of the year (going by today’s borders – ie counting Montenegro, Serbia and Kosovo separately). We put out a report on Montenegro’s imminent independence referendum. My Armenian intern A left (she later set up her own business) and I head-hunted her Greek replacement K from the internal media team.
At home, we celebrated little U’s third birthday (she got an Etch-a-Sketch) and Anne’s brother and sister both joined us for Christmas, in time for David Tennant’s first full episode of Doctor Who. I seem to have pictures of them and the kids, but none of Anne or me. We had a full house, especially when Anne’s parents and my sister and her husband all turned up.
2,500 pages; 2005 total 46,400 – this number soared once I started commuting by train in 2007 2/11 by women; 2005 total 30/144 (21%) – a standard proportion until I started to make efforts to read more diversely None by PoC; 2005 total 4/144 (3%) – likewise.
Best books of the month for me were The Georgian Feast, which I’m still cooking from and you can get here, and Paul Cornell’s Human Nature, which you can get here in a new edition and of course later became the only original Who novel to be later adapted to television. (Other formats adopted to television: a game book, a comic strip, a couple of short stories, more loosely a couple of Big Finish plays.) Several of these bounced off me, most thoroughly the rather dismal Sevanacide collection, which you can get here.
The rambling sprawl mostly fell into three distinct pieces, moving from southeast to northwest along the side of the bay. At the southeast end was New Town, built by and for the many Iyalets of the Empire, for there they refined and shipped out countless priceless precursors and reagents through the canals. Northwest of that was Old Town, the original home of the Yarrow kings and their folk, though they had left that place long ago. And finally there was the High City, built in the ranges far northwest of that, where the current Yarrow king resided with all of his royal retinue, removed from the bustle of industry that now consumed the land of his ancestors.
I greatly enjoyed The Tainted Cup, the first of this fantasy thriller series, and I greatly enjoyed this as well. Our hero Din and his super abrasive boss Ana are sent to a distant fiefdom which is not yet part of the true empire, and find that deceit and treachery, not to mention magical chemistry on an industrial scale, are all around them. There are some brilliant twists, and it’s all done entirely fairly. You can get A Drop of Corruption here.
That all said, the Hugo deadline is coming up and this is my ranking of the books.
Current Moving Pictures, by Terry Pratchett The Tomorrow Windows, by Jonathan Morris Understanding the War in Kosovo, eds Florian Bieber and Zhidas Daskaloski
Last books finished Sargassa, by Sophie Burnham Doctor Who: The Road to the Thirteenth Doctor, by James Peaty et al The Elysian Blade, by David Bishop The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, by Stephen Graham Jones
Next books The Satan Pit, by Matt Jones An Emotional Dictionary: Real Words for How You Feel, from Angst to Zwodder, by Susie Dent Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh
Nelly Sachs was the joint winner of the 1966 Nobel Prize for Literature, along with the Israeli writer Shmuel Yosef Agnon. Born in Berlin in 1891, she had fled to Sweden in 1840, thanks to the intervention of Selma Lagerlöf just before her death. She made a living in Sweden as a translator to and from German, and started publishing poetry only in 1947.
I got hold of the collection, O, the Chimneys, published in 1967, the year after the Nobel Prize, with the German originals and English translations of varying quality – apart from her verse play, Eli, which is presented entirely in English. I have to say that I was blown away. Her poetry is an unrelenting emotional reaction to the Holocaust – the chimneys of the book’s title are the chimneys of the crematoria of genocide. She cycles between grief, despair, bewilderment, survivor’s guilt, but surprisingly little anger (though it is not completely absent). The play Eli ends with divine revenge, but we know that doesn’t happen in real life. It was an extraordinary reading experience.
Second poem of third section (title is the first line):
Einen Akkord spielen Ebbe und Flut, Jäger und Gejagtes. Mit vielen Händen wird Greifen und Befestigung versucht, Blut ist der Faden.
Finger weisen Aufstellungen, Körperteile werden eingesetzt in sterbende Zeichnungen.
Strategie, Geruch des Leidens –
Glieder auf dem Wege zum Staub und die Gischt der Sehnsucht über den Wassern.
My translation:
Ebb and flow play a single chord, hunter and hunted. Many hands fumble to grasp and seize, blood is the thread.
Fingers point to alignments, body parts are positioned in dying drawings.
Strategy, the smell of suffering –
limbs on their way to dust and the froth of desire on the waters.
I’m going to justify some of my choices here. The original doesn’t have the word “single” in the first line, but I think it’s necessary in translation to catch the emphasis on the object of the sentence, “Einen Akkord”. My “fumble” is a little stronger than “wird versucht”, but “try” and “attempt” sounded clumsy. I felt that “Aufstellungen” and “eingesetzt” are linked, so went for “alignments” and “positioned” rather than the more obvious translations. “Geruch” could have been “stench” or “scent”, but I felt “smell” was neutral enough. My “froth of desire” may be a bit spicier than “die Gischt der Sehnsucht” but I wanted to catch the corporeality. All that said, I am not a professional translator and my German is not what it once was.
This was an unexpectedly impressive discovery in my sequence of Nobel winners who were not white men. Next up is Yasunari Kawabata and his novel Snow Country.
Imperatrix Alinti watched critically, as a bevy of butlers and servants swarmed across the Grand Hall, their arms laden with bolts of silver and gold fabric, banners and poles. She’d grown tired of arguing with her husband about the archaic way in which he’d insisted on decorating the Palace for his birthday celebrations, and had grumpily agreed to ‘maintain a sense of tradition’ about the whole affair.
After a run of Eighth Doctor books that left me rather cold, I’m very glad to say that I came across one that I liked. This actually takes the Doctor’s amnesia and does something interesting with it, including a partial mingling of personalities with Fitz which is quite entertaining; it also does something interesting at last with Trix, who I have hitherto felt was a rather undersketched character; and plonks this into the context of a decaying emperor’s last days, and the palace politics around the succession and the divvying up of resources. One of the best Eighth Doctor books I have read in a while. You can get Halflife here (for a price).
Next in this sequence – actually last in my set of unblogged Eighth Doctor Adventures – is The Tomorrow Windows, by Jonathan Morris.
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.
November 2005 was a heavy month for travel. I started in Montenegro, went from there for Vienna and then on to Kyiv, my first ever visit to Ukraine (I enjoyed visiting the Bulgakov house and the Scythian gold exhibition at the Museum of National Historical Treasures); and then at the end of the month I went to Berlin and from there to New York. We put out reports on the rigged elections in Azerbaijan, and also on EU visa policy in the Balkans. I also found time for an informational interview with my current employers; I thought it went rather well, but it was almost eight and a half years before they got back to me!
Back at home, the local riding school put on a show of small pets including rabbits. One of the rabbits, a Flemish Giant, was very big indeed.
7,200 pages (YTD 43,900) 2/17 by women (YTD 28/133) 1/17 by PoC (YTD 4/133)
Best books of the month were Le Guin’s The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, a welcome reread, which you can get here; and Andrić’s Bosnian Chronicle/Travnik Chronicle/The Days of the Consuls, which you can get here. Massively underwhelmed by Dan Simmons’ Olympos, but you can get it here if you want.
My eyes bounce around the terrain, seeking a hiding place, while my mind debates whether I can hide at all.
I completely bounced off both the first volume and the second volume of this series, and not surprisingly bounced off the third as well. Arthurian legend in today’s North Caroline, breathless first-person-present narrative. You can get Oathbound here.
As I stood in the crumbling parking lot, the hot concrete warming the metal of my feet, I was sure of it: the Earth had great things ahead of it, even still.
I haven’t always go on with Okorafor’s writing, but I really enjoyed this: disabled Nigerian-American writer Zelu goes through tough times but also writes a science fiction novel which becomes a runaway success, despite her helicoptering family. There’s lots here about clashes of cultures, clashes of values, shifting the narrative arc from our world (in the very near future) to Zelu’s world; and love and sex and death. I felt that it all hung together very neatly. I suspect that I’m still voting for The Incandescent, but this will be high up my list. You can get Death of the Author here.
We’re back at the harbor on Wild Things. Tomorrow, Knife Girl will meet us here to refuel the boat. Mom and I don’t have a plan yet. We haven’t spoken much at all, our energies depleted from the wild-ass turn of events. Mom lights incense for Sông, each smoky tendril a prayer. Cleaning Bà Oanh’s glasses, I remember the smile I thought I saw. Perhaps she’d foreseen what was coming and could not stop herself from mocking us, though she’d never been unkind. It’s a bad habit of mine, finding the worst in every situation, but no one has taught me to hope.
It’s about Nhung / Noon, a young Vietnamese-American in Louisiana, whose father and brother have died in mysterious circumstances, and who is compelled by the local thug to go find the sea monster which may be behind the ‘orrible red algae bloom on the water. Lushly written, but a bit too much body horror for my sensitive soul (and yes, I realise that is part of the point). You can get They Bloom at Night here.
It was a warm Mediterranean evening. We all gathered on the lawn of the President’s villa. There were perhaps 300 guests. The mood was festive, everyone shaking hands and embracing. The moment eventually came when the President and his wife walked down the lane to the podium, followed by the top guests: the Prime Minister and his wife, and the President of Serbia, the President of Croatia, the Serbian foreign minister, and various other dignitaries. Given that the country had just seceded from Serbia, and had been at war with Croatia not all that long ago, the presence of the heads of neighbouring states was pretty remarkable.
The referendum had been seven weeks before, on 21 May 2006, followed by a re-delcaration of independence on 3 June; but the Treaty of Berlin, recognizing Montenegro’s first round of independence, was signed on 13 July 1878, and that remained the historical independence day despite its rule from Belgrade after 1918.
The guards played a fanfare, and then a young man began to sing the new/old nation’s anthem, joined in the second verse by a young woman, without any other accompaniment, their voices trembling with emotion. For the first time in nine decades, Montenegro was celebrating its traditional independence day as an independent state. They didn’t drop a beat, or miss a note. It was one of the most electrifying things I have ever witnessed.
The President then made a speech – mercifully brief, in that he was aware that many of his guests don’t have a good grasp of the local language (whatever it may be called). He referred to July 13th as the historical date when Montenegro was recognised by the Great Powers of Europe as an independent state in 1878, but enlarged much more on the other anniversary commemorated, the beginning of the Montenegrin rebellion against fascist occupation in 1941. This was smart politics; the most bitter internal opponents of independence were those who felt particularly loyal to Tito and the Partisan legacy. Having said that, most of us in the audience probably appreciated the brevity more than the content.
There may be official photographs in some government archive on a Podgorica web server; I didn’t take any myself. I did get a lovely first day cover set of stamps, which are my only physical memories of a remarkable evening.
I was an early supporter of Montenegro’s independence in Brussels policy circles after I started working here in 1999, and was variously told that I was crazy, deluded or corrupt. Now Montenegro is at the front of the queue to join the EU, and the European Commission seriously expects that the accession treaty will be wrapped up this calendar year and full membership will take effect some time in 2028. It’s quite an achievement for a small country.
Paraguay is in South America, squeezed between Brazil, Bolivia and Argentina. It became independent from Spain in 1811, but was not recognized by any other countries for over 30 years. The three awful events of Paraguayan history are the War of the Triple Alliance, from 1864-1870, which they lost to Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay; the Chaco War against Bolivia in 1932-35, which they won; and the brutal and isolationist dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner from 1954 to 1989 (Europe was not the only place where revolutions happened that latter year). His right-wing Colorado Party have won every presidential election but one since 1948.
These days Paraguay is best known for the Itaipu Dam on the River Parana, shared with Brazil, the largest hydro-electric dam in the world outside China. The official languages are Guaraní and Spanish, though given Paraguay’s close relationship with Brazil, Portuguese is widely understood and is thought to be the first language of as much as 20% of the population. The main exports are electricity from the dam, bought by Brazil, agricultural products, also bought by Brazil, and Chinese goods, imported into Paraguay and smuggled into Brazil.
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 current boundaries of Paraguay.
Title
Author
GR raters
LT owners
SG reviews
Zama
Antonio di Benedetto
3,961
612
502
The News from Paraguay
Lily Tuck
2,497
756
267
Ada’s Violin: The Story of the Recycled Orchestra of Paraguay
Susan Hood
2,152
545
321
The Drunken Forest
Gerald Durrell
2,117
690
177
I, the Supreme
Augusto Roa Bastos
1,029
660
82
At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig: Travels Through Paraguay
John Gimlette
775
327
78
Forgotten Fatherland: The Search for Elisabeth Nietzsche
Ben Macintyre
834
299
78
Son of Man
Augusto Roa Bastos
764
221
35
This week’s overall winner, Zama, also the Goodreads and StoryGraph winner, is considered one of the great novels of Argentine rather than Paraguayan literature; its protagonist, Don Diego de Zama, is stuck in Paraguay at the end of the eighteenth century, trying to get back to Argentina.
This week’s LibraryThing winner, The News from Paraguay, is one of several books that I found about the glamorous figure of Eliza Lynch (1833-86), from Cork by way of Paris, who at the age of 19 became the girlfriend of Francisco Solano López, the son of the President of Paraguay. When the President died in 1862, Francisco succeeded him, and Eliza was the First Lady of the country (though they never actually married) until Francisco was overthrown and killed in 1870 at the end of the war. She returned to Paris and died there.
Ada’s Violin is about impoverished children forming an orchestra with instruments made from material recycled from the city rubbish dump. It sounds a bit glurgy to be honest but reviews seem positive.
The Drunken Forest is one of Gerald Durrell’s earlier travel books about collecting animals for his zoo, in Argentina and Paraguay in 1954. The process is interrupted by a real-world political intrusion unusual in Durrell’s writing, when the 1954 coup that brought Alfredo Stroessner to power forces him and his wife to go home in a hurry, leaving behind most of the animals.
I, the Supreme is the top book on this list by a Paraguayan author. It is a fictionalized biography of José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia y Velasco, known as Doctor Francia, Paraguay’s first dictator who ruled from 1814-1840. Published in 1974, it was seen as commentary on the Stroessner regime (not least by Stroessner himself) and Roa Bastos was exiled.
At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig is a travel book about Paraguay from 2003.
Forgotten Fatherland traces another European woman who, like Eliza Lynch, had a Paraguayan adventure: Elizabeth Nietzsche, sister of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who set up the colony of Nueva Germania in Paraguay on Aryan and anti-Semitic principles in 1886. It collapsed almost immediately.
Son of Man, Roa Bastos’ second book in this week’s table, chronicles the struggles of the oppressed in Paraguay between 1912 and 1936 through a Biblically inspired magical realist lens.
The book that I hesitated about disqualifying is Novela B by Mónica Bustos, Paraguay’s best known contemporary woman writer, but the summaries of it that I found indicate that it is set across South America in various locations, so I deduce that less than half of it is in Paraguay. In fact none of her books appears to be set in Paraguay as far as I can tell.
The one woman writer who I find on all three systems and whose work does seem to be set in Paraguay is Josefina Plá. Although she was born in Spain, she adopted Paraguayan citizenship.
