See note on methodology

As with Wales, and even more crushingly, there is a very clear winner in this category. Most frequently tagged "Ireland" on both GoodReads and LibraryThing, and owned by more users on both systems than any other book set in Ireland, it won a Pulitzer and dominated the best-seller lists of 1997. It is, for once, a work of non-fiction.

Angela's Ashes, by Frank McCourt.

There are in fact two books even more popular among GoodReads users which have been tagged "Ireland" because of the origin of their authors, but as far as I remember (and I've re-read both fairly recently) no part of Dracula or The Picture of Dorian Grey is set in the writers' homeland.

On Librarything, it's fairly close at the top, though, with the winner just a nose ahead of Ulysses, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners in terms of number of readers.

Those three are a bit further down the list on GoodReads, though with P.S. I Love You by Cecelia Ahern and In the Woods by Tana French in second and third place, and Darkfever by Karen Marie Moning in fifth (after the adaptation of Homer, but ahead of the student memoir and the short stories). Is it worth my checking any of those out?

Bubbling under: Roddy Doyle, Maeve Binchy, Leon Uris (gawd help us),How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill.

Non-fiction: 8
Circe's Cup, by Clare Carroll
The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, by Claire Tomalin
Turner's Taoisigh, by Martin Turner
Een geschiedenis van België voor intelligente kinderen (en hun ouders), by Benno Barnard and Geert van Istendael
Getting the Buggers to Behave, by Sue Cowley
Write It Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults, by Ambrose Bierce
The Longest Afternoon: The 400 Men Who Decided The Battle Of Waterloo, by Brendan Simms
The Flag Dispute: Anatomy of a Protest by Paul Nolan, Dominic Bryan, Clare Dwyer, Katy Hayward, Katy Radford & Peter Shirlow

Fiction (non-sf): 1
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro

SF (non-Who): 15
μ3
ν3
ξ3
ο3
π3
ρ3
σ3 – did not finish
τ3
υ3
φ3
χ3
ψ3
ω3
α4
β4

Doctor Who, etc: 3
The Ultimate Treasure, by Christopher Bulis
The Domino Effect, by David Bishop
Oh No It Isn't!, by Paul Cornell

Comics : 2
Are You My Mother?, by Alison Bechdel
The Blood of Azrael, by Scott Gray, Michael Collins, Adrian Salmon and David A. Roach

~8,500 pages
10/29 by women (Carroll, Tomalin, Cowley, Dwyer/Hayward/Radford, ν3, ψ3, ω3, α4, Bechdel)
1 by PoC (ξ3)

Reread: 0

Reading now:
Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
Watership Down, by Richard Adams
I Don't Know How She Does It, by Allison Pearson

Coming soon (perhaps):
Het Achterhuis, by Anne Frank
Tree and Leaf, by J R R Tolkien
Transit of Earth
The Jonah Kit, by Ian Watson
The Charm of Belgium, by Brian Lunn
The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon
With The Light Vol 8, by Keiko Tobe
A Slip of the Keyboard, by Terry Pratchett
Wages of Sin, by Andrew M. Greeley
Kushiel's Justice, by Jacqueline Carey
Scales of Gold, by Dorothy Dunnett
The Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Stopping for a Spell, by Diana Wynne Jones
Islands In The Stream, by Ernest Hemingway
Mating, by Norman Rush
The Egyptian, by Mika Waltari
The Painted Man/The Warded Man, by Peter V. Brett
The Complete Robot, by Isaac Asimov
The Balkans: Nationalism, War & the Great Powers, 1804-1999, by Misha Glenny
Martial Power and Elizabethan Political Culture: Military Men in England and Ireland, 1558-1594, by Rory Rapple
Een geweer in het water, by Hermann
The seven-per-cent solution; being a reprint from the reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D, by Nicholas Meyer
Warmonger, by Terrance Dicks
Reckless Engineering, by Nick Walters
Dragons' Wrath, by Justin Richards

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  (tags: doctorwho )
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  He is terrified of cycling in Brussels.
  (tags: netherlands belgium )
• Benedict Cumberbatch and the Right Way to Apologize
  
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• Hans the self-loathing Eurocrat
  
  Not actually satire.
  (tags: eu )
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  On the bright side, it could have been Larne.
  (tags: northernireland )

See note on methodology

I confess that I’ve looked at the answers to this question for a lot of European countries by now, preparing a number of these posts. There aren’t many where the top book is as far ahead of the field – on both LibraryThing and Goodreads – as it is in this case. And there are even fewer cases where it’s a book I simply hadn’t heard of. But this is one of them. The most widely owned book by a long way (among both LibraryThing and Goodreads users) which is set in Wales is:

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

Apparently it’s a beautifully illustrated and spooky book for YA readers, published in 2011. It’s also the most frequently tagged “Wales” by Goodreads users, and third on LibraryThing.

The two books most frequently tagged as “Wales” by LibraryThing users are:

The Mabinogion (Librarything)
Here be Dragons by Sharon Kay Penman (Goodreads, second on LibraryThing)

I am of course familiar with the first of these. The second is the opening novel of a historical fiction trilogy, which has clearly done well while passing me by.

Fourth place in LibraryThing tags, and second on Goodreads tags, is the one I would have immediately thought of:

How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn

Bubbling under, Fall of Giants by Ken Follett (second most popular “Wales”-tagged book on Goodreads), The Grey King and Silver on the Tree by Susan Cooper, Among Others by Jo Walton, The Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander – not all of which are entirely or exactly set in Wales.

Sorry, Dylan Thomas. You didn’t quite make it to the top. (Nor did Torchwood.)

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Current
Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy (a chapter a day)
Watership Down, by Richard Adams (a chapter a week)
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, by Alice Munro
I Don’t Know How She Does It, by Allison Pearson
β4

Last books finished
The Longest Afternoon: The 400 Men Who Decided The Battle Of Waterloo, by Brendan Simms
ψ3
The Blood of Azrael, by Scott Gray, Michael Collins, Adrian Salmon and David A. Roach
ω3
α4

Last week’s audios
Welcome to Night Vale eps 58-60
Mistfall, by Andrew Smith

Next books
Het Achterhuis, by Anne Frank
Tree and Leaf, by J R R Tolkien

Books acquired in last week
Martial Power and Elizabethan Political Culture, by Rory Rapple

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  (tags: india )
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• Dog Gone: Forgotten Schemes to Straighten the Thames
  
  Forgotten alternative visions of East London.
  (tags: london maps )
• How the other half studied: Trinity College Dublin in the 1960s
  
  Looks lovely!
  (tags: ireland )

See note on methodology

Thanks to all for a brilliant discussion of well-known books set in England. Now I am moving north…

Scotland is a case where the answers are somewhat confusing.

First off, I will ruthlessly ignore the seven Harry Potter novels, even though Hogwarts is supposedly in Scotland. Apologies to Scottish Potterfans, but I think that for most readers they would fail the test of "If you were asked to name five books set in Scotland, would any of the Harry Potter books have been one of them?"

The most popular book on LibraryThing which is set in Scotland is also the second most popular on GoodReads set in Scotland. It's also one I happen to know quite well. It's not a novel, nor a non-fiction work. It's set 450 years before it was written and bears very little resemblance to the historical events it supposedly describes. But it certainly passes the "think of a story set in Scotland" test. It is:

Macbeth, by William Shakespeare

However, more popular on GoodReads, and almost as popular on LibraryThing – and crucially, by far the most frequently tagged with the keyword "Scotland" on both systems – is a book that I, frankly, had not heard of:

Outlander by Diana Gabaldon

Published in 1991, it is the first of a long and successful series of time-travel romance novels, which were adapted for television in 2014. I welcome views from you as to whether or not I should remedy my ignorance of this work which is so close in popularity to the other work named above.

Trainspotting, Kidnapped and The Wasp Factory (all of which I have read) are some way behind.

Edited to add: I am retrospectively declaring the play rather than the fantasy novel the winner here. The first time round, I neglected to count the various different collections that the play appears in, which will pull it decisively ahead on Goodreads.

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  (tags: ukpolitics )

A note on methodology

I was very interested by this list of the most famous books set in each US state which I saw last week, to the extent of thinking about how I might measure the best known book set in neach European country. As ever in these matters, I have turned to my trusty friends LibraryThing and GoodReads, each of which allows users to record the books that they own and also to tag (LT) or shelve (GR) by key words such as setting. I did a quick response on Twitter using those figures for the four main divisions of the British Isles.

But in fact that only records how often people reading a particular book thoguht to tag it as set in a particular country. They may be wrong about its setting; the book itself may be have a universal appeal that transcends its location. With a little more effort, one can dig into the numbers and find which books that are (sometimes) tagged as being set in a particular country are also the most widely owned among users of both websites.

The results have been interesting. In more than half of all cases that I have looked at so far, LibraryThing and GoodReads users agree on a particular book that has Country X as a setting and is particularly well-known. In a couple of cases – three Shakespeare plays, to take a convenient example – the actual presentation of country X in the work is rather different from the reality; it's as if the author had never been there but just chose to write a story that was set there. In those cases I shall also strive to present an alternative book more firmly grounded in that country's setting than you might get if you were adapting an obscure sixteenth-century novella or historical chronicle for the stage.

I hope you will find the results interesting.

So, what is the best known book set in England?

I'm breaking the rules with my very first post, or course; in general I shall be running through Europe's sovereign states as they are in 2015, but for the UK I shall take each bit separately. (If you are lucky I'll get on to the Isle of Man, Guernsey and Jersey.)

The top seven books by popularity which have been tagged "England" by LibraryThing users and shelvedas "England" by GoodReads users are identical. They are:

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling,
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling,
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling,
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling,
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling,
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling, and
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling.

I have to say that although a lot of readers clearly consider these books to be very English, they are quite deliberately not set in any version of England that we know. The same criticism applies to the eighth book on both systems:

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell.

Of course it is ostensibly set in England, but a future England from the writer's perspective that has not come to pass from the perspective of the reader thirty years after the book was set, and seventy after the book was written. If you were asked to name five books set in England, would this have been one of them?

The book most frequently tagged "England" on Librarything is the same as the book most frequently "shelved" as "England" on GoodReads, and it is ninth in popularity among those books on both systems after those identified above. It is:

Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen.

And this makes perfect sense. If we reframe the question slightly as "name the best known book that people in the wider English-speaking world think of as being set in England", it's obvious that this is a very good candidate and not surprising that the on-line catalogues bear that out.

And anyway, Hogwarts is in Scotland. Which is where we will go next.

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  More re-releases – all of them pretty decent.
  (tags: doctorwho )

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  Not quite “fifty shades”…
  (tags: ukpolitics )

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  Death’s grand-daughter not included.
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  Great fun – hope we see the results!
  (tags: doctorwho )
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  Must buy!
  (tags: doctorwho )

• The Most Famous Book Set in Each State
  
  Working on the European version…
  (tags: usa books )
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  More on the vastly expensive procurement boondoggle.
  (tags: war )

• The Dalek Chronicles (Complete) – an album on Flickr
  
  The first spinoff!
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• Yugoslavia 1961
  
  Colour film of Belgrade in 1961.
  (tags: serbia )

Blogging has been a bit light around here of late – my priority is finishing the books submitted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and I'm now at the stage where, even if I decide in the first hundred pages of a particular novel that I'm not going to push it for the shortlist (let alone the top spot), I usually still want to know how the story ends – it's rare for a book to leave me so unmoved (or annoyed) that I can comfortably forego the resolution. I suspect this is going to lead to some late (or, rather, even later) reading nights as our internal deadlines approach.

Anyway, the tally of books that I am reading, have read, intend to read, and have acquired in the last week is reported below. (Some of the last category was acquired as a result of this event, especially the part of the discussion that starts around 58:48.)

Current
Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy (a chapter a day)
Watership Down, by Richard Adams (a chapter a week)
The Blood of Azrael, by Scott Gray, Michael Collins, Adrian Salmon and David A. Roach
ψ3

Last books finished
τ3
υ3
φ3
Oh No It Isn't!, by Paul Cornell
Een geschiedenis van België voor intelligente kinderen (en hun ouders), by Benno Barnard and Geert van Istendael
Getting the Buggers to Behave, by Sue Cowley
χ3
Write It Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults, by Ambrose Bierce

Last week's audios
Welcome to Night Vale Eps 52-57, also 2 bonus episodes
An Ordinary Life, by Matt Fitton

Next books
Het Achterhuis, by Anne Frank
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, by Alice Munro

Books acquired in last week
The Longest Afternoon: The 400 Men Who Decided The Battle Of Waterloo, by Brendan Simms
Sharpe's Waterloo, by Bernard Cornwell
The Charterhouse of Parma, by Stendhal
Discipline or Corruption, by Constantin Stanislavsky, George Martin, Anna Darl, Karen Cooper, Susan Harris and Jennifer Harris
Rauf Denktaş: A Private Portrait, by Yvonne Çerkez

Anyone fancy Georgian food in London tomorrow night? Thinking of the Iberia – http://iberiarestaurant.co.uk – on Csledonian Road.

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  Excellent analysis from @KadriLiik @ecfr.
  (tags: eu russia )
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  (tags: ukpolitics )
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  More than you might have thought.
  (tags: ireland history usa )
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  Some very interesting tips!
  (tags: careersadvice )

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  Candidates’ statements in full. Exciting stuff.
  (tags: ukpolitics )
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  Fascinating.
  (tags: history russia finland )
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  If only that were true of all of it…
  (tags: doctorwho )

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  Thomas Carothers / @CarnegieEndow assesses the picture.
  (tags: democratization uspolitics )
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  The LOCH. NESS. MONSTER!
  (tags: fossils scotland )
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  But not yet inevitable.
  (tags: climatechange environment )

• Amazon.com: The Man in the High Castle: S1 Ep 1
  
  Why does nobody tell me about these things?
  (tags: sf )

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  I’m a believer!
  (tags: music )
• Lost Beagle2 probe found ‘intact’ on Mars
  
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  (tags: mars )

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  Thorough analysis.
  (tags: ukpolitics waronterror iraq )
• Couple’s house demolished ‘without notice’ to build new road
  
  Good Lord!
  (tags: ireland )
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  Well put.
  (tags: health )

Current
Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
Een geschiedenis van België voor intelligente kinderen (en hun ouders), by Benno Barnard and Geert van Istendael
Getting the Buggers to Behave, by Sue Cowley
τ3

Last books finished
ο3
Turner’s Taoisigh, by Martin Turner
π3
Are You My Mother?, by Alison Bechdel
ρ3
σ3 – did not finish
Domino Effect, by David Bishop

Last week’s audios
Welcome to Night Vale Eps 49B-51

Next books
Het Achterhuis, by Anne Frank
Oh No It Isn’t!, by Paul Cornell

Books acquired in last week
Boerke Bijbel: Het Oude Testament, by Pieter de Poortere

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A kind friend with access to newspaper archives has supplied me with four more clippings, three from the Times and one from the Guardian, about the incident in which British Prime Minister Edward Heath was covered with ink on his arrival to sign Britain's treaty of accession to the European Communities.

In order, from the Times, 24 January 1972 (two days after it happened):

From the Guardian, 1 March:

From the Times, 26 April (my fifth birthday):

And from the Times Diary column, 24 June:

(It is nice to see a reference to Nora Nicholson just after I watched a 1971 episode of Here Come The Double Deckers, "The Helping Hound", in which she plays a leading guest role.)

Anyway.Mr Martin's reported remarks in January seem extremely disingenuous. Having equipped the two women with faked press passes, did he imagine that they were just going to pull the Prime Minister aside in Strasbourg or Brussels, for a quick and friendly chat about Covent Garden, as a result of which he would see the error of his ways? I can't quite see it; in fact, I bet he bought the ink as well.

Google doesn't bring me very far, but does at least take me to three published books.

• Discipline or Corruption, mentioned by the Times columnist, is generally catalogued identifying Stanislavsky as the primary author (somewhat implausibly, given that he had been dead for three decades), and George Martin, Anna Darl, Karen Cooper, Susan Harris, and Jennifer Harris listed as contributors.
• Anna Darl is also the author of a 1969 work published by the Institute for Personal Development, with the resounding title System of Personal Development: Activium [sic] for the Exercise of the Brain and Development of the Mind.
• And in 1964, the Covent Garden Centre Ltd published a pamphlet with the title Covent Garden Centre: An Economic Project in the Public Interest.

One does get a sense of a small group of highly motivated people (or, if you like, a mini-cult) who were fixated on their plan for the redevelopment of Covent Garden as the vector for the future civilisational progress of humanity. Perhaps we should be glad that the ink-throwing incident was the height of their activism. (There is no evidence that I Challenged Ted Heath was ever published.)

I have ordered Discipline or Corruption, which sounds rather intriguing, and will report back. Thanks again to the person who supplied the clippings.

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  (tags: torchwood )

I have no immediate plans to return to electoral politics (full disclosure: Cambridge City Council, 1990North Belfast, 1996). However, I deal on a daily basis with people who are personally very much involved with elections, and occasionally they even ask my advice, so it was useful to return to basics with this handbook – not so much 101 different ways to win, as 101 steps that must be taken by a decently run election campaign, skewed very much to a particular part of the British environment (no massive campaign spending as in the USA, no compulsory voting as there is here; I also miss anything substantial on engaging with minority communities).

But a lot of it is of universal value, not just for election campaigns but for any public policy campaign, and I think the division into five main themes is sound: 1) getting a good message; 2) building a good team; 3) managing resources (money, time, and especially voter data); 4) communicating (leaflets, media, internet); 5) leadership. Some of the points transfer well beyond public affairs to any position of responsibility.

I think what struck me most was the early emphasis on message development. Back when I was a political neophyte in the early 1990s, this wasn't something we were told to worry about very much – the emphasis was on the mechanics of communicating with voters and hoping to get votes as the person best at doing that, and developing a local message beyond fixing the pot-holes looked a wee bit dodgy. But when I got involved with international democracy development in the mid-1990s, it became clear to me just how important message development is. This was (and is) a serious lacuna for all Northern Irish political parties: most of them are unable to give an elevator pitch statement as to why anyone should vote for them (see one recent example).

I commended this book to some Northern Irish activists the other day, and I commend it also not just to people who are themselves campaigning or thinking of campaigning, but anyone who is interested in how politics actually works in real life, as opposed to in the newspapers.

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Baxter is best known for his SF writing, but here he turns his hand to history of science, specifically James Hutton, the Scottish eighteenth-century intellectual who boldly stated that the earth must be much older than the date of 4004 BC given by Archbishop Ussher the previous century.

As an undergraduate at Cambridge, I did the first-year NatSci Geology course which included a field trip to the Isle of Arran, led by the up-and-coming Simon Conway Morris. (I can date it to the last week of March 1987, because I remember hearing the news that Patrick Troughton had died.) It was great fun, clambering over rocks in the daytime, drinking with fellow students in the evening, but it failed to make me into a geologist. (Where I really failed was on palæontology. I cannot tell different types of fossil apart. I have the same problem with types of car.)

On one particular day, I was with a group that did a long coastal walk to Lochranza at the northern end of the island, including not only the spectacular footprints of Arthropleura, the largest land invertebrate of all time, but also Hutton's Unconformity. Here, we were told, Hutton had identified the difference in dip (the angle of the strata) between the Precambrian and Carboniferous rocks, and had realised that a very long time – more than 200 million years by modern reckoning – would have been needed for the Cambrian rocks to be laid down, thrust up on their sides, and then eroded down to the point that the Carboniferous sediments would start to settle on them. We take it for granted now, but the time periods involved are pretty mind-boggling.

We were slightly misled, of course. Hutton's trip to Arran wasn't as decisive for his thinking as a subsequent trip to Jedburgh in the Borders, where the real Hutton's Unconformity is located. Baxter's book also makes clear that Hutton's struggle to get acceptance for his ideas of the true timescale of the history of the earth was in part due to his own inability to express himself clearly, and his lack of time due to his own economic commitments as a failing farmer.

Baxter is very good on the social environment of Hutton's world – the 1745 conflict (when Edinburgh fell to the Jacobites with hardly a shot fired, and loyalist forces were routed at nearby Prestonpans, before the humiliations of Derby and Culloden), and then the slow reconstruction of Scotland as a polity, particularly via the Royal Society of Edinburgh, where Hutton was close to David Hume and Adam Smith. Baxter also observes of the sexual politics of the time – Hutton had at least one illegitimate child, who was provided for but sent to London. I feel he misses a bit the economic impact of Hutton's work – Wikipedia has more about his work on the Forth and Cyde canal than Baxter does.

The whole is as usual in Baxter's calm and lucid style, and if the point is to establish Hutton as a real human being grappling with the Enlightenment as it played out in Scotland, rather than as a heroic scientist deliberately intending to change humanity's view of the age of our planet, he has succeeded.