A couple of years back, I was concerned that I wasn't reading enough non-sf fiction; and using Librarything, I decided one way of addressing this might be to go through my unread pile, choosing the first non-sf fiction novel as arranged alphabetically by author, for each letter of the alphabet.

Three years on, the experiment has reached its natural end, and my conclusion is that it flagged up some good books that I otherwise might not have got around to as quickly, and also some authors who I will avoid in future. The full list was:

June 2011: Alias Grace, by Margaret Atwood – excellent
August 2011: Old Goriot, by Honore Balzac – interesting
September 2011: The Princess Diaries, by Meg Cabot – awful
November 2011: Moll Flanders, by Daniel Defoe – great
March 2012: The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, by Umberto Eco – intriguing
July 2012: The History of Tom Jones: A Foundling, by Henry Fielding – worth the effort
August 2012: The Public Prosecutor, by Jef Geeraerts – sordid
August 2012: Not a Creature Was Stirring, by Jane Haddam – unexceptional
November 2012: The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James – remarkable
March 2013: The Castle, by Franz Kafka – frustrating
July 2013: Desert, by J. M. G. Le Clezio – illuminating
August 2013: Far North & Other Dark Tales, by Sara Maitland – entertaining
September 2013: Home Truths, by Freya North – much more fun than expected
October 2013: The Far Side Of The World, by Patrick O'Brian – immersive
December 2013: The Truth Commissioner, by David Park – close to home
January 2014: The Saint Zita Society, by Ruth Rendell – closely observed
April 2014: Revelation, by C. J. Sansom – not entirely convincing
May 2014: Dotter of Her Father's Eyes, by Mary M. Talbot and Brian Talbot – beautiful and remarkable
July 2014: Billionaire Boy, by David Walliams – terrible
September 2014: The Memoirs of Hadrian, by Marguerite Yourcenar – thorough and carefully thought out

Now that I have a glut of sf books coming in, I’m revamping my reading lists somewhat, and also dismayed by the still bulging unread shelves. So, among my other lists, I’m segmenting the collection by year of acquisition, and going through them by order of popularity on LibraryThing. This gives the following lists as of now:

2009
Beach Music by Pat Conroy
Rules by Cynthia Lord
Islands In The Stream by Ernest Hemingway

2010
Home, by Marilynne Robinson
The Professor, by Charlotte Bronte
The Egyptian, by Mika Waltari

2011
The Grass is Singing, by Doris May Lessing
I Don’t Know How She Does It, by Allison Pearson
The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, by Nicholas Meyer

2012
Harlequin, by Bernard Cornwell
Naamah’s Kiss, by Jacqueline Carey
Mating, by Norman Rush

2013
Wool, by Hugh Howey
Kushiel’s Justice, by Jacqueline Carey
And Another Thing …, by Eoin Colfer

2014 (so far)
The Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
A Scanner Darkly, by Philip K. Dick
The Redbreast by Jo Nesbo

That somewhat expands the list of lists, but it also rebalances the sf/non-sf equation quite a lot, and – the key goal – broadens my reading day by day to include books that other people have already found entertaining and interesting.

Caveat: Non-fiction does end up a bit isolated, and I need to think about that.

I’d been looking forward to this for quite a long time; a fairly short book, told as Hadrian’s autobiography (in fact, a long letter to Marcus Aurelius), describing his life. I confess that what I basically knew about Hadrian was a) the Wall and b) Gibbon‘s brief description:

Under his reign, as has been already mentioned, the empire flourished in peace and prosperity. He encouraged the arts, reformed the laws, asserted military discipline, and visited all his provinces in person. His vast and active genius was equally suited to the most enlarged views and the minute details of civil policy. But the ruling passions of his soul were curiosity and vanity. As they prevailed, and as they were attracted by different objects, Hadrian was, by turns, an excellent prince, a ridiculous sophist, and a jealous tyrant. The general tenor of his conduct deserved praise for its equity and moderation. Yet in the first days of his reign, he put to death four consular senators, his personal enemies and men who had been judged worthy of empire; and the tediousness of a painful illness rendered him, at last, peevish and cruel. The senate doubted whether they should pronounce him a god or a tyrant; and the honours decreed to his memory were granted to the prayers of the pious Antoninus.

The book ends up being partly a determinedly detailed and scholarly reconstruction of Hadrian’s life, based on the best classical sources (as explained in a decently brief appendix), but partly also a late 1940s reflection on the experiences of conflict and sexuality in the first half of the twentieth century.

It’s very good. It’s not just a blow-by-blow account of events, it’s an attempt to get under the skin of a man who is known only from inscriptions and a few dubiously attributable scraps. Yourcenar finds a credible voice for the aged statesman giving voice to his younger self, and explaining the big decisions that face you as a Roman emperor – the best bits are perhaps the description of putting to bed Trajan’s legacy of conflict with Persia immediately after he assumed power, and the description of Hadrian’s love for the Greek youth Antinous. (His own wife gets barely a mention; Trajan’s widow Plotina is rather more visible.) But the whole thing is worth savouring and digesting. Recommended.

Current
Race Of Scorpions, by Dorothy Dunnett
History 101, by Mags L. Halliday
Rob Roy, by Sir Walter Scott

Last books finished
ο1
Sentimental Education, by Gustave Flaubert
Eternity Weeps, by Jim Mortimore
π1
Memoirs of Hadrian, by Marguerite Yourcenar
De Scepter van Ottakar, by Hergé
ρ1

Next books
La Galère d'Obélix, by Albert Uderzo
Lost At Sea, by Bryan Lee O'Malley
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Time Traveller, by Joanne Harris
 
Books acquired in last week
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Time Traveller, by Joanne Harris
With The Light… vol. 8, by Keiko Tobe
Circe’s Cup, by Clare Carroll

• The Climate Swerve
  
  Public opinion is shifting – in the right direction.
  (tags: climatechange )

• Wrestling with smoke
  
  An anguished Unionist writes.
  (tags: scotland )
• Electrifying poll from traditionally No-friendly firm TNS-BMRB
  
  V good analysis of polls and postal votes.
  (tags: scotland )
• Decapitate Britain, and we kill off the greatest political union ever
  
  Boris says it is a bad idea. That’ll swing it!
  (tags: scotland )

• Talk to me
  
  Brilliant language quiz
  (tags: languages )

Every year, our village holds its Zomerfeest, and apart from a bike race and the organising committee setting up a beer garden behind the parochial hall, artists from the vicinity are encouraged to exhibit in people's homes.

This particular piece grabbed me most strongly: the Fire Dragon and Ice Dragon competing for our world, by Michelle Denecker.

I loved the effort that some had gone to to set up sculptures on display in their gardens. These lovely wooden shapes are by Gerdi Fonk:

And these reshaped scrap metal pieces by local Australian Vincent Ezzy:

Here's a close-up of the rakish chap in the middle:

Finally, I spotted this brilliant interior composition, with ceramics by Bernadette Lefevere, though I guess she did not do the pictures on the wall:

Good weather too, which helps.

Getting to the end of the New Adventures now, though I still have the Bernice Summerfield novels to go. This actually foreshadows them, concentrating very much on Benny and Jason’s disintegrating marriage, with the Doctor and Chris rather in the background; and Liz Shaw is brought back all too briefly. There is some tremendously well-realised and bleak detail with rival expeditions attempting to find Noah’s Ark, and getting into difficulties with competing jurisdictions on Mount Ararat. The book ends with 1997 Earth devastated by alien plague, which is a tough one to carry off if you plan any continuity; of course, if it’s almost the last book in the series, taht’s less of an issue.

• Against Primaries
  
  Argumnt applies only to Westminster-style systems (but is still right).
  (tags: ukpolitics elections )
• Justice in St Louis
  
  New York Times speaks out.
  (tags: uspolitics race )
• Vacuum Cleaner Row Now Beyond Parody
  
  Rise up and defy Brussels by buying up inefficient, expensive-to-run home appliances! That’ll show ’em…
  (tags: eu ukpolitics )
• Enough is Enough is Enough
  
  Gillian Anderson on sexuality, and journalists.
  (tags: media sexandgenderandsexuality )

For reasons that I will eventually make clear, I’m having a run of Famous Novels at the moment, and Flaubert’s second-best-known novel eventually floated to the top of my list. Frankly I was a bit disappointed; it’s the story of a provincial lad who moves to Paris and becomes fascinated with an older woman, but ends up in relationships with several other lovers, often overlapping, until it all disintegrates with more of a whimper than a bang. There are lots of references to contemporary politics, which was pretty exciting in France of the 1840s, and yet it seems little more than wall-paper. I feel that Jane Austen did the emotional dynamics between the sexes better, Proust did the agonised young man better, and Hugo did the politics better. Frédéric really has little to recommend him; fortunately it doesn’t go on too long.

For the first time since the end of 2013, my bookblogging has caught up with books read! Worldcon is truly over.

I’m a bit stunned to note that this is the first Graham Greene novel I have logged here in almost eleven years of bookblogging – and that I don’t appear to have any others on the shelves. (I was underwhelmed by a short story collection in 2006.) I certainly read at least a dozen of them as a teenager and a student, but I must have borrowed them all from libraries, or lost them in subsequent moves.

Somehow I’d never read this one, though it was a set text for some fellow-pupils at my school (can’t remember if it was other classes at O-Level, or more likely those who did English at A-Level). In 1980s Belfast, the story of persecution of the Catholic church and its adherents by the agents of the State had local nuances which were not lost on any of us. Thirty years of scandal later, it’s rather more difficult to see the church in potentially heroic light.

Of course Greene was a Catholic writer writing from an English point of view, and I wonder quite how true to Mexican religious practice his portrayal is – yes, I know that he had gone to Mexico for four months in 1938 to see the situation on the ground for himself, but it’s also pretty clear that he went and returned with a narrative already in his mind. That side of things doesn’t matter much now; Tomás Garrido Canabal, the Tabasco governor whose anti-clericalism Greene reported on, died in 1943, and the Catholic church has become its own worst enemy in Mexico as elsewhere.

Anyway, I think such a reading is far from the intended core of the book. Greene’s real theme is heroism and redemption – an unlikely hero who finds it in himself to do the right thing, having been doing many of the wrong things, written at the outbreak of the Second World War when the Zeitgeist needed unlikely heroes. The unnamed hero has made a real mess of his life, and of other people’s, but finds a moment or two when he can make a difference and rescue his own dignity. That much is a story that can be told in many times and places.

• Scotland’s EU membership
  
  A view from the Brussels bubble.
  (tags: eu ukpolitics scotland )

How many times have we heard Northern Irish accents in Doctor Who? Fewer than you might have expected…

The last Fourth Doctor book on my list! I’ve read all the 45 novelisations (counting The Pescatons and both versions of Shada and The Stones of Blood), 7 annuals, 12 Past Doctor Adventures, 8 Missing Adventures including this one, and a dismal Telos novella. Though that still leaves some of the comics collections.

It’s a fairly standard story, with zombies and a disembodies evil mist, but gives some excellent lines to the Doctor, Romana and K9, as they romp around the English countryside of the 1930s saving the world again. What makes it of interest for New Who fans is that Gareth Roberts used the same time period for the Ten/Donna TV story The Unicorn and the Wasp – it doesn’t lean too heavily on the earlier book, but the background is there if you care to look for it.

• Consumer will get better vacuum cleaners than ever before – European Commission
  
  EU explains new rules.
  (tags: eu ukpolitics )
• BBC News – Vacuum cleaner debate hots up
  
  “Mr Vaccuum Cleaner” in favour of new rules
  (tags: eu ukpolitics )
• Don’t be a sucker – EU vacuum cleaner ruling explained
  
  Consumer website weighs in behind EU rules.
  (tags: eu ukpolitics )
• The EU wants to destroy the one chore I take any pleasure in
  
  Completely bonkers article in @Guardian.
  (tags: eu ukpolitics )

I don't know about you, but I've been seeing a lot of advertising on various websites (I think using Google ads, or whatever it's called) for the Texas-based biochemistry firm Selleckchem.com.

I'm not really an ideal potential client for them; I confess I can't really understand their advertisements.

Though one of them does feature a cute bunny rabbbit.

I wonder what algorithm has decided that I am the sort of person who might ever purchase one of Selleckchem.com's products, let alone face an agonising choice between them and their competitors. Is Google's targeted advertising that poorly targeted? Or is it just that Selleckchem.com have more money than sense and have bought All The Ad Space to try and persuade people to buy their particular brand of inhibitor?

• The super vacuum ban isn’t meddling EU bureaucracy – it’s absolutely vital
  
  @Guardian belatedly catches itself on.
  (tags: eu ukpolitics environment )

Current
A Sentimental Education, by Gustave Flaubert
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Last books finished
The Life of John Buncle, Esq: Containing Various Observations and Reflections, Made in Several Parts of the World, and Many Extraordinary Relations, v. 2 by Thomas Amory
The Waves, by Virginia Woolf
The English Way of Death, by Gareth Roberts
The Power and the Glory, by Graham Greene

Next books
Memoirs of Hadrian, by Marguerite Yourcenar
Race Of Scorpions, by Dorothy Dunnett
Eternity Weeps, by Jim Mortimore

I must say I was very glad to be completely unspoilered for this before I read it.

S

P

O

I

L

E

R

S

It took me a few pages to work out what was going on, but once I did I wondered why nobody else has ever tried the tight-third multiple narrative quite this way. It's a really different, gripping and intimate pattern of story-telling, giving a rounded presence, both inside and out, to each of the six characters. (Susan perhaps getting less of a fair shake.) It blew me away.

It's also obviously a response to Ulysses, where Joyce tried a similar trick, but from fewer points of view and covering a single day. In The Waves, which is about a sixth the length of Ulysses, less is more, and we get decades in the space of 170 pages.

I had always thought of Woolf as a young novelist. But one of the points that struck me from The Waves was its evocation of my own experience of getting a bit older and watching my friends getting old with me, usually at more or less the same rate. So I wasn't completely surprised to find that she was much the same age as I am, in her late forties, when this was published in 1931.

It's one of those books I shall return to again in a few years' time, but I'm very glad that I found it now.

The Life of John Buncle, Esq: Containing Various Observations and Reflections, Made in Several Parts of the World, and Many Extraordinary Relations have kept me occupied for about a month as an insomnia book – with some success. It’s a fore-runner to Tristram Shandy, published three years earlier, with a lot of the same characteristics – rambling anecdotes, vaguely Irish background. Yet there is also quite a tight structure: our hero, John Buncle, keeps falling in love with beautiful and intelligent women, who then all die tragically (in a manner reminiscent of Spın̈al Tap’s drummers) enabling him to move onto the next one. 

With each chapter he delves deep into some aspect of intellectual life – about half the time it’s theology, where Buncle (and presumably his author) have very strong Unitarian views, and one can more or less tell whether a character is good or bad depending on their attachment to the Trinity (“it is a word invented by the doctors, and so far as I can find, was never once thought of by Jesus Christ and his apostles”). But the other half of the time it’s natural science, and the author’s ability to reshape the latest scientific information into readable form is pretty impressive (though a novel is not where we would present such information today). There are particularly good sections on geology (with deep anxiety about the Abyss) and what we would now call the chemical elements. It’s all heavily footnotes (I counted at one point a third level of annotation, footnote to a footnote to a footnote).

Although Buncle starts in Dublin, actually most of the book is spent exploring the wildernesses of Westmorland and to a lesser extent North Yorkshire, with excursions elsewhere (he stays in London with Edmund Curll, who was a real person, and encounters various other real people too). The landscape secriptions are particularly good. I can’t really recommend it as a novel, but it’s a fascinating case of what happened when an eccentric eighteenth-century gentleman sat down one day and decided that he was going to write a story.

• French Ambassador Leaves Bosnia by Bike
  
  Across Europe, diplomatically, on two wheels.
  (tags: france bosnia cycling )

Sheer genius:

This is a hugely important book for me. When I first read it in 1976 (aged 9), it hadn't previously occurred to me that you could write about stories as well as writing stories, and I also had no idea that Doctor Who had started years before I was born. The bits about how a TV programme is made rather bounced off me at the time (which is ironic given the amount of TV work I actually do these days), but the establishment of Who history here, with semi-canonical names given to the pre-Savages stories for the very first time, remains fascinating as a process – and also to observe what is left out (the six episodes of The Wheel in Space, for instance, are brushed off in seven lines).

Now that I have a copy of the first edition from 1972 as well, it's interesting to compare and contrast. I sense that Dicks took a pretty heavy hand in rewriting almost every chapter of Hulke's original text, sometimes from scratch, sometimes (the chapters on the Daleks and "How To Make A Monster") just with a light touch of editorial improvements. Gone is the nonsense about the Doctor's real name being ∂³∑x², let alone the bizarre postscript from the Rev. John D. Beckwith, Chaplain to the Bishop of Edmonton; but in comes plentiful cross-referencing to the Target novelisations, which of course were very new then and had not been around at all in 1972.

There is huge nostalgia value to it anyway, but I also think that for what it is trying to be, it is still a good book, and the foundation of Whovian reference books ever since.

Collection of one-liners supposedly being answers given by kids to exam questions. All mildly funny, you know, things like:

Question: Expand 2 (x + y)
Answer:

2  (x  +  y)
2    (x    +    y)
2      (x      +      y)

and

Not exactly deep, but amusing enough.

Tried this for Sunday lunch; it went down well.

Ingredients:
600 g chicken breasts
200 g lettuce and/or other salad
seeds from half a pomegranate
4 cloves of garlic
100 g walnuts
4 chopped hard boiled eggs
1 level tsp of dried marigold
1 level tsp of dried coriander
half tsp of fenugreek
1 tsp cayenne pepper
salt to taste
7 tbs of oil.

Preparation:
Sprinkle both sides of the chicken breasts with cayenne pepper and salt, and fry in 7 tbs of oil on a medium to high temperature for up to 20 minutes (until crispy), turning halfway through. Keep any juices that are left after frying the chicken.

Chop the lettuce/salad and add to a mixing bowl. Cut and tear the fried chicken into pieces and add to the bowl.

Use a mortar and pestle to crush the garlic and spices. Add the walnuts to the mortar and crush together with the garlic and spices.

Add the crushed nut/garlic/spice mixture to the mixing bowl containing the fried chicken and lettuce. Add the chopped boiled eggs, pomegranate seeds and salt to taste. Mix thoroughly.

Add 3-4 tsp of the juices left over from frying the chicken. Mix thoroughly.

Serve immediately.

Yesterday I did 50% extra quantities – including the whole pomegranate – for six large people and one small, and had enough leftovers for three large people; so I think the above quantities would actually have been enough for our group.

The only novel featuring the War Doctor and the Daleks in the Time War. It’s by George Mann, who is not my favourite stylist; it isn’t quite as bad as I feared, but it’s not terribly impressive either. It includes all the things you would expect of a story about the Daleks and the Time Lords, and that’s not necessarily a good thing. Writing by numbers, really.