November Books

Non-fiction 1 (YTD 45)
TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 5: Tom Baker and the Williams Years, by Philip Sandifer

Tardis Eruditorum

Fiction (non-sf) 4 (YTD 41)
Home, by Marilynne Robinson
Rules, by Cynthia Lord
Beach Music, by Pat Conroy
The Grass is Singing, by Doris May Lessing

Home Rules Beach Music The Grass is Singing

SF (non-Who) 16 (YTD 110)
ι2
κ2 (gave up, won't finish)
λ2
μ2
ν2
ξ2
ο2
π2
ρ2
σ2
τ2
υ2
φ2
χ2
Shades of Milk and Honey, by Mary Robinette Kowal
ψ2

Shades of Milk and Honey

Doctor Who 4 (YTD 56)
Empire of Death, by David Bishop
Lungbarrow, by Marc Platt
Time Zero, by Justin Richards
The Crawling Terror, by Mike Tucker

Empire of Death Lungbarrow Time Zero Crawling Terror

Comics 1 (YTD 18)
Sugar Skull, by Charles Burns

Sugar Skull

~8,500 pages (YTD ~90,100)
8/26 (YTD 75/270) by women (Robinson, Lord, Lessing, ι2, ρ2, χ2, Kowal, ψ2)
0/26 (YTD 16/270) by PoC

Reread: 1/26, Lungbarrow (YTD 10/270)

Reading now:
Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
Ages in Chaos: James Hutton and the Discovery of Deep Time, by Stephen Baxter
ω2
Fear of the Dark, by Trevor Baxendale

Coming soon (perhaps):
The Fat Years, by Chan Koonchung
Elizabeth's Bedfellows, by Anna Whitelock
Earth Girl, by Janet Edwards
The Jonah Kit, by Ian Watson
The True Deceiver, by Tove Jansson
Stopping for a Spell, by Diana Wynne Jones
Kushiel's Justice, by Jacqueline Carey
Tree and Leaf, by J R R Tolkien
Wages of Sin, by Andrew M. Greeley
Getting the Buggers to Behave, by Sue Cowley
Het achterhuis, by Anne Frank
The Balkans, by Misha Glenny
The Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Een geweer in het water, by Hermann
I Don't Know How She Does It, by Allison Pearson
The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon
Transit of Earth
The Painted Man, by Peter V. Brett
The Egyptian, by Mika Waltari
Islands In The Stream, by Ernest Hemingway
The Invisible Gorilla, by Christopher Chabris
The Dying Days, by Lance Parkin
Infinity Race, by Simon Messingham

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Links I found interesting for 28-11-2014

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Wednesday reading

Current
Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
Shades of Milk and Honey, by Mary Robinette Kowal
The Grass is Singing, by Doris Lessing

Last books finished
Lungbarrow, by Marc Platt
σ2
Beach Music, by Pat Conroy
τ2
Time Zero, by Justin Richards
υ2
φ2
The Crawling Terror, by Mike Tucker

Last week's audios
Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, adapted by Jonathan Barnes
The Widow's Assassin (6/Peri), by Nev Fountain
The Bounty of Ceres (1/Steven/Vicki), by Ian Potter
Welcome To Night Vale #1

Next books
Liberal Language, by Graham Watson
The Fat Years, by Chan Koonchung
Fear of the Dark, by Trevor Baxendale

Books acquired in last week
101 Ways To Win An Election, by Edward Maxfield and Mark Pack
Seychelles: The Saga of a Small Nation Navigating the Cross-Currents of a Big World, by Sir James R. Mancham (courteously presented to me and signed by the author, who was the country's first president)

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Links I found interesting for 26-11-2014

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Ireland in the 16th century

As previously mentioned, we went to the Mercator musem a few weeks ago; and I was very intrigues by this 16th century Italian map of Ireland, apparently by the Roman cartographer Lafreri (possibly a Frenchman whose name was Lafréry).

I wonder how many places we can identify?

Lafreri Ireland
This being my home territory, I can make a few guesses.

"HULTONIA" is Ultonia, meaning Ulster.
"Logh Herne" is Lough Erne.
"Banda flu." is the River Bann.

"Donagal" looks at first sight like it is meant to be Donegal town; and it's tempting to identify "Leche" to the south with Laghey, which is however only a short distance from Donegal; and what then of "Afroye"? What of "Tellin" and "Ara" (??Ardara)? And surely "Sligach", just a bit anti-clockwise around the coast from the estuary of the river Erne, is our Sligo, which is also not so far from the estuary of the Erne – but inconveniently south of Donegal rather than north? Indeed, "Tonerella" looks a closer match to Donegal town.

"Norbowrowe" has me baffled, but the "Purgatoriū S. Patricij" is obviously St Patrick's Purgatory on Lough Derg, and "Swylly" and "Foyle" are rivers/inlet loughs rather than towns.

On the lower Bann, I must say I'm stuck to find place names that could be "Band****" of which the last letters are illegible, or indeed "Lampreston" – let alone "Racheres", "Wolwofrith" or the island of "Donselus" (which is roughly, but only very roughly, in the right place for Rathlin).

Then it gets easier – "Knokfergos" is obviously Carrickfergus, "Magynows" is the County Down heartland of the Magennis clan, "Isannium Pr" appears to be the Ards Peninsula, and "Stranford" and "Armach" are fairly obviously Strangford and Armagh.

Lafreri Ireland E

This is pretty easy; continuing down the cast, with little change from the modern spelling, we have Ardglass, Greencastle, Dundalk and Drogheda, with Navan, Trim and Mullingar inland from the last of these. (Dundalk is on the Castletown River, Abhainn Chaisleán Dhún Dealgan in Irish, which doesn't look a lot like Lafreri's "Dongale").

Farther down, I'm not at all sure about "Brúnor", "Greenok" or "Ledepe" but "Holmpadryk insule" are the Skerries off Skerries, onme of which is St Patrick's Island, and the others are obviously enough Lambay, Ireland's Eye and Howth (which was probably a peninsula rather than an island at that point).

Continuing south, we have Dublin itself, Bray Head, Kildare, Leighlin, Wicklow, Arklow, [New] Ross, and – one last puzzle – "Blascarryk".

Lafreri Ireland S

I'm going to confusingly go right to left here, west to east, but it's consistent with going clockwise round the island.

In County Wexford, the town itself escapes notice but I'm pretty sure that "Fodirt" is Fethard. "Suirus" is the mislabelled River Suir, and Kilkenny, Thomastown, Waterford and Dungarvan are pretty clear.

The towns on the real (as opposed to mislabelled) Suir are a bit confused – "Charigeu" must be Carrick-onSuir, "Clemel" Clonmel, "Carrick" actually Cahir, and "Cassel" Cashel.

After the relatively clear nomenclature of the east coast, we are back in the wilds from Cork on. "Balycotyn", anyone? "Enchilford"? I can see at least Baltimore, Cape Clear, Berehaven, Dingle and the Blaskets, but my Munster geography is not all that great. Swinging back north again we have Limerick, Galway and, far inland, Athlone.

Lafreri Ireland W

Finally, the Wild West. (And let's bear in mind that this area is north of Galway and south of Donegal). There are ten place names on this part of the map, and the only one I can identify is the somewhat misplaced Armagh. Can you do any better?

The lesson here, of course, is not to sneer at the heroic efforts of early modern cartographers to put names to places they (and most of their customers) would never visit, but to consider how the perception of Ireland's geography has changed over the centuries. For a 16th-century merchant of Rome, a vague sense of the relative dispositions of Ardglass, Dundalk, Dublin and Dungarvan was much more important than knowing whether Sligo was north of Donegal or vice versa. Today we think we have nice objective measures to tell us where we ought to be. But are we missing some of the human dimension that Lafreri, perhaps unintentionally, captured half a millennium ago?

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Two museums: Mercator and Lascaux

We managed a couple of excursions last weekend and this, to a couple of new arrivals on the Belgian museum scene.

Last weekend we went to the new Mercator museum at Sint-Niklaas near Antwerp, arriving on the day after it had reopened after a complete reconstruction. Gerardus Mercator was actually German, by most modern measures, and why exactly Sint-Niklaas (a town near Antwerp, and nearish to his birthplace, which otherwise boasts the largest market square in Belgium, and perhaps in Europe) had claimed him was not made clear. But the museum itself is a very decent presentation of the history of cartography from ancient times to the present day, concentrating on Mercator who gave us both the famous projection and the word "atlas"; you can play with electronic copies of his sixteenth century maps and admire the sincere craftsmanship that he brought to it. There are lots of gorgeous artefacts, real and replica, and nicely produced video interviews with actors playing Mercator himself and various other contemporaries such as John Dee (msteriously all speaking fluent modern Dutch with mild Flemish accents). Underplayed but present is the importance of cartography in the European colonial effort, just getting going in Mercator's lifetime (1512-1594). The biggest drawback to the museum – and it is fairly significant – is that absolutely everything is in Dutch. However, they had opened literally the previous day, and perhaps they plan to cater for non-nederlandstalig visitors in due course.

Yesterday F and I went to the Cinquantenaire Museum in Brussels, where they have on show the travelling replica of the Lascaux caves, complete with paintings. It's quite a small exhibit, and on the second Saturday after it opened it was pretty crowded, but if one can tune out the other people in the room it is really quite incredible – the artists descended into the caves, in the dark, 17,000 years ago to create amazing art – for what audience? Not for us their descendants of hundreds of generations later. And they were better artists than, frankly, I am; so how did they get that way? I did pathetic watercolour daubs at school, and pencil scribbles on pieces of paper, before giving up on my ability to draw; what on earth were the Upper Palæolithic equivalents? The bison and horses and aurochs and stags are not drafts or journeyman pieces, but finished compositions. There was a whole tradition of visual culture there, of which a few hundred cave paintings are the only surviving evidence. It's as if one tried to work out what was going on the sixties and seventies using only Doctor Who. I left with a lot more questions than I had had going in, and the pious intention of going back some weekday before it closes in March, if I can afford to take an extended lunch break from work. (I confess I didn't actually check whether the audioguide is available in English as wel as French and Dutch, but I'd be quite surprised if it isn't.)

Anyway, both strongly recommended, though perhaps non-speakers of Dutch should wait for the Mercator museum to broaden its outreach a bit.

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November Books 6) Lungbarrow, by Marc Platt

I first read this way way back in the month that David Tennant took over, December 2005; it was only the third original Who book I had read after New Who began, and the only the second of the Seventh Doctor New Adventures – and I think I had seen precisely one Seventh Doctor TV story all the way through, and didn't much like it. Now, almost nine years on, I have seen all of the Seventh Doctor stories at least twice, read all 59 of the preceding New Adventures, and perhaps equally importantly listened to the Big Finish series of Gallifrey audio plays which take the Leela/Romana relationship which starts here – heck, I've even had my picture taken with Sylvester McCoy – and I have a much better sense of Lungbarrow as the capstone to one set of stories, and the foundation of another.

I have warmed to it (rather more than, say, Phil Sandifer). It's still a bit weird – the new information about how Time Lords come into being, by being “woven” on Looms, did not survive into other strands of continuity, and the Doctor’s relatives here (other than Susan) were never seen again. But the book does what it has to do in winding up six years of stories (longer than any TV Doctor’s reign bar Tom B) and tying the TV Movie (retrospectively) into the Virgin story arc.

I said in my previous review that I loved the scenery, and I loved it even more this time, the Doctor’s home of Lungbarrow being pretty obviously Gormenghast on Gallifrey, and the internal struggles between President Romana and the other power centres in the Capitol suitably obscure and yet comprehensible. This time around, I very much appreciated the notion of Leela and Andred lifting the curse on Gallifrey, which obviously was lost on me previously when I had not read Cat’s Cradle: Time’s Crucible, and of course having now followed Chris Cwej through 21 previous books, rather than coming to him completely fresh, I appreciated what Platt did with him much more.

I read the version that was downloadable until 2010 from the BBC website, which has apparently some quite major surgery to the original text and also a decent set of notes by Platt on the process of composition and of where he drew his ideas from. He also has thoughts on Who as a whole, including this lovely tribute to another of its great writers:

Apart from Runcible, Unstoffe, Glitz and Dibber, I love periphery characters like Nellie Gussett and the wonderful denizens of Megropolis 3, Singe and Hackett. [Robert] Holmes was truly great at bringing his locations and characters to life with bizarre language, quirky personal details and references to unseen events, people and places. He could create whole worlds in a couple of sentences and had a gloriously evil sense of humour.

Time permitting I’ll do a longer post on the Virgin New Adventures as a whole, but it may wait until after I have re=read The Dying Days next month.

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Links I found interesting for 23-11-2014

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November Books 5) Rules, by Cynthia Lord

A decent and humane American YA novel about a teenager whose younger brother is autistic; she develops friendships both with the boy in the wheelchair who is a fellow client of her brother’s therapist, and with the new neighbour’s daughter; and the two friendships compete, though as it turns out mostly in her mind. More about growing up than anything, but in a real world where real people are dealing with real disabilities.

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Links I found interesting for 21-11-2014

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November Books 4) Home, by Marilynne Robinson

Seven years ago, I read and enjoyed the first book in the series, of which fortuitously the third has just been published. Home tells the same events, but this time from the point of view of the two adult children of Robert Boughton, the best friend of Gilead‘s narrator John Ames. I confess I didn’t remember enough about Gilead to appreciate exactly which scenes in Home were being retold from another perspective, but in any case I enjoyed the moving characterisation and the clear slow pace of the writing, everything gradually being taken out and laid on the table to see, with a decent twist ending (which possibly was in the earlier book too; if so I had forgotten it). 

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Wednesday reading

This post comes to you from Waterstone’s Piccadilly, where I am being massively entertained by Claire North, Marcus Sedgwick, Adam Roberts and Leila Abu El Hawa.

Current
Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
Beach Music, by Pat Conroy
Lungbarrow, by Marc Platt
σ2

Last books finished
ξ2
ο2
π2
ρ2
Rules, by Cynthia Lord

Next books
Shades of Milk and Honey, by Mary Robinette Kowal
Time Zero, by Justin Richards

Books acquired in last week
None yet, but I am sitting in a big bookshop that doesn’t close for a couple of hours.

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Links I found interesting for 19-11-2014

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The agony of choice

Tomorrow evening I happen to be in London, and I face a difficult choice:

Will I attend Parliament 2115: re-imagining a democracy of the future at Portcullis House, Westminster, featuring Chris Tyler, Mike Carey, Joseph D’Lacey and Mike Fell,

or

will I attend The Post-Apocalyptic Book Club: Dark Societies with Marcus Sedgwick, Claire North and Adam Roberts at Waterstone’s Piccadilly?

(I thought I’d signed up for the BSFA meeting, but turns out that’s on monday when I won’t be in England.)

Are you planing to attend either of these?

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November Books 3) Empire of Death, by David Bishop

Set in the gap between Time Flight and Arc of Infinity, like a half-dozen Big Finish audios with the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa; it’s a bit uneven, with the afterlife / alien invasion theme uneasily echoing with what I was watching on Saturday nights earlier this month at the time I was reading the book, and some very off-target stuff about abortion at the very beginning, but also some excellent characterisation of Nyssa who hasn’t generally been well served in print. Bishop always has original ideas, and in this case about half of them come off.

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November Books 2) Sugar Skull, by Charles Burns

The last of the trilogy of weird graphic story books by Charles Burns which began with X’ed Out and continued with The Hive. I felt it a very satisfactory resolution to the story: I see I hoped after reading the second volume that the punchline would be something sufficiently disturbing to justify the emotional energy we have been asked to invest in the central character, and indeed it is. I was a little disappointed that the pltline involving the real-world characters reading comics slightly fell away, but we got plenty of both the real-world story and its parallel in the world of Doug’s dreams/nightmares. I strongly recommend getting all three together; there’s no need now to delay between each book!

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Links I found interesting for 16-11-2014

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Wednesday reading

Current
Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
Beach Music, by Pat Conroy
ξ2
Lungbarrow, by Marc Platt

Last books finished
Sugar Skull, by Charles Burns
μ2
Empire of Death, by David Bishop
Home, by Marilynne Robinson
ν2

Next books
Rules, by Cynthia Lord
Shades of Milk and Honey, by Mary Robinette Kowal
Time Zero, by Justin Richards

Books acquired in last week
A Slip of the Keyboard: Collected Non-fiction, by Terry Pratchett
Who’s Next?, by Derrick Sherwin
Sugar Skull, by Charles Burns
Chooz, by Santi-Bucquoy

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