Five Go On A Strategy Away Day and Five on Brexit Island by Bruno Vincent

Second paragraph of third chapter of Five Go On A Strategy Away Day:

'Yup!' said Dick.

Second paragraph of third chapter of Five on Brexit Island:

'I'm afraid so, Mummy,' said George. 'I'm for leaving Britain, and Julian's for remaining in it. You see, once they caught wind that I'd declared independence, the other three all demanded citizenship – Dick, Anne and Julian – and I gave citizenship to Timmy, of course, without him asking. It seems only fair enough, because they were all residing on the island when I declared independence. And, of course, I can't imagine Kirrin Island without them.[']

These are two one-joke books – different jokes, thankfully. Five Go On A Strategy Away Day is actually better and funnier; the notion of the Famous Five locked in bitter conflict with the Secret Seven over team-building games (there's a particularly brutal chapter where the three siblings and George analyse each other's personalities), and the addled adult version of camping, provisions and map-reading, make for a good chuckle or two. The joke in Five on Brexit Island gets pretty thin pretty quickly, leaving us wondering how many of her European co-workers Anne had been entangled with and exactly what Uncle Quentin and Aunt Fanny had got up to in their youth. George's evil (and non-canonical) cousin Rupert Kirrin makes an appearance in both books, which are lavishly illustrated with some of Eileen Soper's pictures from the original series, given completely unmatching captions. Basically corporate away days are much funnier than Brexit, and this is not surprisingly reflected in the books.

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January books

Non-fiction: 5
Samuel Pepys: Plague, Fire, Revolution, ed. Margarette Lincoln
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World, by David W. Anthony
Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World, by Nicholas Ostler
The Other Islam, by Stephen Schwartz
The Geek Feminist Revolution, by Kameron Hurley

Poetry: 1
Rhyme Stew, by Roald Dahl

Fiction (non-sf): 3
See How Much I Love You, by Luis Leante
Five Go On A Strategy Away Day, by Bruno Vincent
Five on Brexit Island , by Bruno Vincent

sf (non-Who): 11
A Fall of Stardust, by Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess
"Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman, by Harlan Ellison
The Illustrated Man, by Ray Bradbury
The Palace of Dreams, by Ismail Kadare
Every Heart A Doorway, by Seanan McGuire
Penric and the Shaman, by Lois McMaster Bujold
Penric's Mission, by Lois McMaster Bujold
The Colour Of Magic, by Terry Pratchett
The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead
The Humans, by Matt Haig
The Rapture of the Nerds, by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross

Doctor Who, etc: 4
Short Trips: Farewells, ed. Jacqueline Rayner
Doctor Who: The Pirate Planet, by Douglas Adams and James Goss
Rip Tide, by Louise Cooper
The Dead Men Diaries, ed. Paul Cornell

Comics: 3
Jeremiah: Een Geweer in het Water, by Hermann
Monstress Volume 1: Awakening, by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda
V for Vendetta, by Alan Moore and David Lloyd

6,300 pages
8/27 by women (Lincoln, Hurley, McGuire, Bujoldx2, Rayner, Cooper, Liu/Takeda)
2/27 by PoC (Whitehead, Liu/Takeda)

Reread: 2 (The illustrated Man, The Colour of Magic)

Reading now
Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (a chapter a month)
THEN: Science Fiction Fandom in the U.K., 1930-1980, by Rob Hansen
To Lie with Lions, by Dorothy Dunnett
Broken Homes by Ben Aaronovitch

Coming soon (perhaps):
A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
The Habit of Loving by Doris Lessing
The Parrot's Theorem by Denis Guedj
Lavondyss by Robert Holdstock
Argonautica by Valerius Flaccus
The Stormcaller by Tom Lloyd
Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen by Lois McMaster Bujold
Every Step You Take by Maureen O'Brien
The Innocent Man by John Grisham
Saga Volume 6 by Brian K Vaughan
Warriors ed. George R. R. Martin
All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders
Europe In The Sixteenth Century by H. G. Koenigsberger and George L. Mosse
Dune by Frank Herbert
De Mexicaan met twee hoofden by Joann Sfar
De piraten van de Zilveren Kattenklauw by Geronimo Stilton
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
1688: A Global History by John E. Wills
New Europe by Michael Palin
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child by J. K. Rowling
The Angel Maker, by Stefan Brijs
Short Trips: Time Signature ed. Simon Guerrier
Eye of the Tyger by Paul McAuley
The Doomsday Manuscript by Justin Richards

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The Station of the Rue de la Loi, revisited

A few years ago, I did some research into the Gare de la Rue de la Loi / Station Wetstraat, which was the precursor of the current Brussels Schuman railway station. It was opened in May 1865, nine years after the track had been laid between Bruxelles-Nord / Brussel-Noord and the station we now know as Bruxelles-Luxembourg / Brussel-Luxemburg, and closed in 1922. (The Schuman metro station opened in 1966, and the mainline trains stopped there again from 1969.) In the seven years since I last wrote about it, a couple more resources have become available online. One of them is the lovely picture above, showing an ornate wooden station, built in 1879 in advance of the Cinquantenaire celebrations (public domain antique postcard from Wikimedia). The picture was supposedly taken in about 1900 but I personally would place it a bit earlier from the style of clothes and vehicles.

The station was at the corner of Boulevard Charlemagne and the Rue de la Loi. The cart on the left is coming out of Charlemagne, the cart in the middle is turning the corner, and the cart whose rear is visible on the right is trundling up the last bit of the Rue de la Loi before reaching the Rond Point (then called the Rond Point de la Rue de la Loi, due to Robert Schuman not yet being on the scene). The photographer is standing in a spot where today he or she would be instantly mown down by traffic emerging from the tunnel.

The large building to the right of the station is the original Berlaymont convent and school, where the Augustinian nuns had built themselves a new home in 1864, after being displaced by the construction of the Palais de Justice downtown. They were to stay for almost exactly a hundred years until being displaced again in 1963, this time in favour of the new European institutions.

It is a shame that we now have the Hellmouth-like opening to the underworld of Brussels Schuman, in place of the rather charming wooden station of the Rue de la Loi / Wetstraat, but realistically the original wooden structure could never have survived to the present day. It would have been almost exactly where the temporary SNCB/NMBS ticket office was during the station rebuilding which finished last year.

The Brussels Architectural Heritage Inventory website has more information about the history of Boulevard Charlemagne, including this rather nice (if faded) map with North at the left, showing also Rue Saint-Quentin, the eastern end of Rue Charles Martel (then "Rue Nouvelle"), part of Rue Stevin and the end of Rue Joseph II.

If you check the lower right hand corner, it become clear that there were two flights of stairs trailing down to the level of the railway track behind the station, which was entirely on the Berlaymont side of the road – as is also clear from the picture above. The current site of Kitty O'Shea's was owned by a Mr. Massart. (The Greek restaurant across the road was a police station.)

So, as you cross the road in the winter drizzle, running for cover under the 1960's building that has usurped both the location and the name of the Sisters of Berlaymont, spare a thought for the optimists of 137 years ago who came out to the nifty new wooden station as part of their Cinquantenaire excursion. We will be part of someone else's history project too someday.

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Rip Tide, by Louise Cooper

Second paragraph of third section:

The lifeboat crew were subdued by the incident, and thankful that there were no further call-outs that week. The wind dropped and the rain squalls moved on, though it was still cloudy, and by Friday the sea was calm enough for the fishing boats to go out. Steve finished work at four, and at four-thirty he drove to the beach with his scuba equipment, for an appointment with Charlie Johns.

I must admit I had not heard of Louise Cooper before, but it turns out she was a well-known writer specialising in YA fantasy (best known for her Time Master trilogy, appropriately enough for present purposes). She lived in Cornwall, and set this Doctor Who novella there. It’s a very effective story of the Eighth Doctor, on his own, encountering a human brother and sister and an alien brother and sister, who duly get entangled in the problems of shipwreck – the lifeboat motif is rather well done throughout. I am not always a fan of the Telos novellas, but this one worked very well and I’ll keep an eye out for Cooper’s other books.

This is the second last of all the books featuring Doctors from Old Who, in internal sequence, as far as I know. The last is The Eye of the Tyger by Paul J. McAuley. I have a couple more Telos novellas to work through and then will decide on the next part of my project to read every Who book. (The illustration below is of the frontispiece by Fred Gambino.)

Sunday reading

Current
Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (a chapter a month)
The Rapture of the Nerds, by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross
THEN: Science Fiction Fandom in the U.K., 1930-1980, by Rob Hansen
To Lie with Lions, by Dorothy Dunnett

Last books finished
V for Vendetta, by Alan Moore
The Other Islam, by Stephen Schwartz
The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead
The Geek Feminist Revolution, by Kameron Hurley
The Humans, by Matt Haig

Next books
Broken Homes, by Ben Aaronovitch
A Suitable Boy, by Vikram Seth
Short Trips: Time Signature, ed. Simon Guerrier

Books acquired in last week
Politics: Between The Extremes, by Nick Clegg
Eurofiles: A Cartoonist’s View of Europe and the Wider World, by Peter Schrank
Many Grains of Sand: A sourcebook of ideas for changing the world, tried and tested in Catalonia, by Liz Castro
THEN: Science Fiction Fandom in the U.K., 1930-1980, by Rob Hansen
The Help, by Kathryn Stockett
The Famished Road, by Ben Okri

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Doctor Who: The Pirate Planet, by Douglas Adams and James Goss

Second paragraph of third chapter:

To describe the Captain would be to spoil the surprise. It's probably safest to describe his chair, which was very large and dominated the Bridge of the Citadel. From here, the Captain could look out through the vast domed windows, down the mountain, across the city of Zxoxaxax and over the plains of Malchios. The cities were easier to see than they were to spell.

I was in London at the start of the month, and who should I find in Forbidden Planet but James Goss, autographing copies of the very newest Doctor Who book!

As my regular reader knows, I rate James Goss as possibly the best regular writer of prose for Who at present. Here he follows on from the success of his novelisation of City of Death to tackle the missing book from the Key to Time series. And it's great, turning a somewhat problematic and wobbly screen story into a rather well developed narrative, filling background, foreground, and much else. The Doctor/Romana banter remains, cranked up a bit if anything; even K9 gets some good moments, plaintively calling "¿ɹǝʇsɐW" after lading upside down at one point. The Captain, the Queen and Mr Fibuli, who are all of course cartooney characters, none the less get a bit more depth and dimensionality in this treatment, and the Mentiads, renamed Mourners, make a lot more sense on the page than on the screen.

For a bonus we get the original story treatment by Adams, where the nature of the planet and the character of Romana had not yet fully evolved, and his thoughts on the Key to Time (which end with the hand-written word "Mice") – a lot more insight into story development usual. And there are some interesting hints about the true identity of the so-called White Guardian.

The first Doctor Who book published this year – a good start.

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Interesting Links for 28-01-2017

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See How Much I Love You, by Luis Leante

The second paragraph of the third chapter is so long that it's almost a short story in its own right, at more than 500 words both in English and in the original Spanish:

En realidad aquel día no tenía turno de guardia, pero lo cambió con un compañero porque le resultaba muy duro pasar sola en casa una Nochevieja por primera vez en su vida. Fueron numerosas las ocasiones, durante los últimos meses, en que había hecho guardias en fechas que no le correspondían. Sin embargo aquélla, por lo que significaba para algunos la entrada en el nuevo siglo, resultaba algo especial. El Servicio de Urgencias del Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau estaba preparado para afrontar una noche de mucha actividad. Muy pocos albergaban la esperanza de dormir acaso dos o tres horas. Pero hasta las doce de la noche las urgencias que llegaron fueron incluso menos numerosas y graves que las de un día de diario. Aunque sin mucho trabajo que atender, la doctora Cambra iba de un sitio a otro tratando de mantener la mente ocupada. Acudía a la farmacia, rellenaba los huecos de gasa en el armario, se aseguraba de que las botellas de suero coincidieran con las que se habían pedido. Cada vez que entraba en la sala en donde estaba encendido el televisor, agachaba la cabeza y canturreaba por lo bajo para no reconocer su fracaso. Temía derrumbarse delante de sus compañeros en cualquier momento, como aquella vez en que rompió a llorar en mitad de un reconocimiento, mientras la auxiliar la miraba asustada, dudando entre atender a la doctora o a aquella anciana que se ahogaba por la presión de una costilla sobre los pulmones. Ahora, cada vez que escuchaba su nombre por la megafonía del Servicio de Urgencias, acudía enseguida sin pensar en otra cosa que en su trabajo. A veces algún residente o algún interno con muchas entradas en el cabello y nariz aguileña le recordaban a Alberto, todavía su marido. Pero, a diferencia de unos meses atrás, era capaz de sonreír. Llegaba incluso a imaginarlo preparando la cena junto a aquella radióloga de gimnasio y peluquería; él, que nunca había fregado un plato, que jamás había abierto los cajones de la cocina si no era para llevarse el sacacorchos. La última vez le pareció incluso que se había teñido las canas de las patillas y de las sienes. Lo imaginó también haciéndole la danza del vientre a la radióloga, y corriendo detrás de ella alrededor de la mesa del salón, en una de aquellas carreras de jungla que hacía tantos años que no practicaba con ella. Los sentimientos que le provocaba Alberto habían evolucionado de la amargura a la ironía, y de la ironía al sarcasmo. Nunca pudo imaginar que aquella persona que ocupó su vida desde muy joven pudiera parecerle, en apenas diez meses, un ser de trapo, vacío, falso, un auténtico hijo de puta. Le costaba trabajo recordar la cara de su marido cuando lo conoció, o cuando la paseaba por Barcelona en aquel Mercedes blanco, impoluto, brillante, perfecto, como él. Médico de estirpe, cardiólogo joven de carrera meteórica, seductor, inteligente, bello. La doctora Cambra no podía quitarse de la cabeza la imagen del que había sido su marido, durante veinte años, corriendo tras la joven radióloga. Cuando se cruzó en el pasillo con la doctora Carnero, anestesista de guardia, aún llevaba dibujada la sonrisa sarcástica en el rostro. Se miraron con complicidad.

She wasn’t actually supposed to be on duty that day, but she swapped her shift with a colleague because she would have found it very hard to spend New Year’s eve at home on her own for the first time in her life. In the last few months she’d taken extra shifts on numerous occasions. Still, this one was something special, given what the arrival of new century meant for so many people. The Casualty Ward of the Hospital de la Santa Creu i de Sant Pau was prepared for a very busy night. Few staff were hoping to get more than two or three hours’ sleep. But, in fact, before midnight they admitted fewer, less serious cases than on a regular day. Although she didn’t have much to do, Doctor Cambra walked up and down trying to keep herself busy. She would go to the pharmacy, restock the cupboard with gauze, and make sure they had received as many bottles of saline solution as had been ordered. Every time she walked into the staff room where the TV was on, she would hang her head and sing to herself in a mumble to stave off her despair. She was afraid she might break down in front of her colleagues at any moment, like that time she had burst into tears in the middle of an examination, while the nurse looked on in distress, not sure whether he should tend to the doctor or to the elderly woman who couldn’t breathe because a rib was pressing on her lungs. Now, every time Doctor Cambra heard her name through the loudspeakers of the casualty ward, she went wherever she was needed without thinking about anything except her work. At times an intern with a badly receding hairline and an aquiline nose would remind her of Alberto, who was still her husband. But, unlike a few months before, she was able to smile. She could even picture him cooking dinner with that radiologist who was obsessed with the gym and the hairdresser’s; he who had never done the dishes and had never opened a kitchen drawer except to take out a corkscrew. The last time she’d seen him it looked as though he had dyed the grey hairs on his temples and sideburns. She also imagined him belly dancing for the radiologist, and chasing her around a coffee table, in one of the wild cat-and-mouse games that he hadn’t played with her for years. Her feelings for Alberto had changed from sadness to irony, and from irony to sarcasm. She would never have imagined that someone who had been such an important part of her life since her youth would become, in barely ten months, a sort of rag doll, an empty, fake being – a veritable bastard. She found it hard to remember what he looked like when they’d met, at the time when he drove around Barcelona in that white, impeccable, polished, perfect Mercedes of his, it was just like him. A doctor from a family of doctors, a young cardiologist with a brilliant career, he’d been seductive, intelligent, handsome. Now, Doctor Cambra could not rid her mind of the image of her husband of twenty years chasing the young radiologist. When she bumped into Doctor Carnero, the anaesthetist on duty, she was still wearing a sarcastic smile on her face. They looked at each other in complicity.

This novel won Spain's prestigious Alfaguera Prize in 2007; I bought it in 2010 because I was then working with the Frente Polisario for the cause of Western Sahara, and there are not a lot of books set there.

It's a story of interlocking timelines. In 2000, Montse Cambra, a Barcelona doctor whose marriage has broken up, unexpectedly finds a link to the boy who loved her and left her in 1974, as the Franco regime neared its end, We follow their romance early in that crucial year, his fate as a disappearing member of the Spanish Foreign Legion as the year ended and the Moroccans invaded, and her journey from Barcelona a quarter-century later after she finds a clue to his fate in the possessions of an accident victim who dies in her hospital. It's very well done – Barcelona of course is well realised, both in the 1970s and the turn of the century, but so are the different environments of North Africa – the corrupt garrison town at the end of the regime, the refugee camps near Tindouf, the town itself and the desert; and indeed the desperate human relationships between Montse and Santiago in the earlier timeline and between each of them and the people they respectively encounter in the Sahara later on. The twist ending is rather well done. But the point of the book is the scenery as much as the plot; it is (rightly) sympathetic to the plight of the Saharawis, promised self-determination by the International Court of Justice and denied it by Spain, Morocco, and the indifferent great powers, and the interleaving of the plot strands works particularly effectively. Recommended.

This was the non-genre fiction book that had been lingering longest on my unread shelves, since I bought it in 2010. Next on that list is Every Step You Take, by Maureen "Vicki" O'Brien.

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Interesting Links for 27-01-2017

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Northern Ireland Elections Website has been updated

I’ve spent the weekend updating the Northern Ireland Elections Website with the details of last year’s Assembly election. I had thought I might have a bit longer to work on it, but circumstances have changed and the update is needed now – or indeed ten days ago, to be honest, but other issues have kept me from it.

The coming election is going to see at least 18 of the members of Northern Ireland’s Assembly lose their jobs, because each of the 18 constituencies will elect five rather than six MLAs, for a total of 90 rather than 108. We are already seeing dignified withdrawals (most notably from Martin McGuinness). The 18 constituencies are East Belfast, North Belfast, South Belfast, West Belfast, East Antrim, North Antrim, South Antrim, North Down, South Down, Fermanagh and South Tyrone, Foyle, Lagan Valley, East Londonderry, Mid Ulster, Newry and Armagh, Strangford, West Tyrone, and Upper Bann.

Thanks as ever to Conal Kelly who updated the graphs and did some of the heavy lifting elsewhere as well.

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Sunday reading

Current
Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (a chapter a month)
The Other Islam, by Stephen Schwartz
The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead
V for Vendetta, by Alan Moore

Last books finished
Every Heart A Doorway, by Seanan McGuire
See How Much I Love You, by Luis Leante
Doctor Who: The Pirate Planet, by Douglas Adams and James Goss
Penric and the Shaman, by Lois McMaster Bujold
Rip Tide, by Louise Cooper
Penric’s Mission, by Lois McMaster Bujold
The Colour Of Magic, by Terry Pratchett
Monstress Volume 1: Awakening, by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda
The Dead Men Diaries, ed. Paul Cornell

Next books
The Humans, by Matt Haig
The Rapture of the Nerds, by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross
To Lie with Lions, by Dorothy Dunnett

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The Palace of Dreams, by Ismail Kadare

Second paragraph of third chapter:

As he went along the corridor he was assailed by all sorts of doubts and surmises. Could he have made some mistake in his work? Could someone have appeared from the depths of the Empire and come knocking at every door, going from office to office and vizier to vizier, claiming that his valuable dream had been thrown in the wastepaper-basket? Mark-Alem tried to remember the dreams he'd rejected recently, but couldn't recall any of them. Perhaps that wasn't it, though. Perhaps he'd been summoned because of something else. It was nearly always like that: when you were sent for, it was almost invariably for some reason you could never have dreamed of. Was it something to do with breaking the secrecy rule? But he hadn't seen any of his friends since he'd started working here. As he asked his way through the corridors he felt more and more strongly that he'd been in this part of the Palace before. He thought for a while this might be because all the corridors were identical, but when he finally found himself in the room with the brazier, where the square-faced man sat with his eyes glued to the door, he realised it had been the Director-General's office he had knocked on his very first day in the Tabur Sarrail. He'd been so absorbed in his work since then that he'd forgotten it even existed, and even now he had no idea what the square-faced man's job was in the Palace of Dreams. Was he one of the many assistant directors, or the Director-General himself?

This was the novel that got Albania's greatest writer, Ismail Kadare, into trouble with the Communist authorities when it was written and sneakily published in 1980 and 1981. Our protagonist, Mark-Alem of the ancient Quprili family, is recruited to the Palace of Dreams in the capital of the Empire, where feuding bureaucrats together analyse and report on the portents opened up to the Imperial rulers through the dreams of the populace. You don't have to be very smart to see this as a rather clear analogy of the Sigurimi under the Hoxha regime, gathering information neurotically and monitoring the loyalty of the population closely, yet also vulnerable at the top to the whims of the man at the very centre of the state.

The Writers' Plenum which condemned the book showed only that they could not appreciate the talent they had amongst them. As well as being rather like a Kafka story told by an insider, Kadare adopts a lot of Latin American-style magical realism in the story (there is a particularly bizarre and vivid police raid on a dinner party). My linguistic instincts are sharp enough also to spot that there is something going on with the protagonist’s name: Qubrili, we are told, is linked with the word for “bridge”, in modern Turkish “köprü”; but of course the standard Albania word for bridge these days is “urë”, and what it anyway made me think of was the novel by Ivo Andrić of the old Yugoslavia, Na Drini ćuprija, The Bridge on the Drina (the modern word is “most” rather than “ćuprija”). It would be interesting for someone to do an annotated edition of this some time.

Edited to add: I was over-analysing here. The Albanian Köprülü / Qubrili family were indeed a perfectly real powerful political family in the Ottoman empire, so there is no explicit reference by Kadare to Andrić.

This was the most popular book on my shelves acquired in 2010. Next in that ranking is a Dutch translation of an Italian children's book, De piraten van de Zilveren Kattenklauw, supposedly by the heroic mouse protagonist Geronimo Stilton, which has already popped up this month.

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The Illustrated Man, by Ray Bradbury

Second paragraph of third story ("The Other Foot")

In her kitchen Hattie Johnson covered the boiling soup, wiped her fingers on a cloth, and walked carefully to the back porch.

The mid-point of the century was an extraordinary moment of creativity for Ray Bradbury. One of these stories was published in 1947, another in 1948 and the rest in 1949, 1950 and 1951. You can see his genius in applying the writing style of the mainstream to sf tropes – the end of the world, Mars, alien contact. He was ahead of his time as well: the very first story is about parents worrying that their children are spending too much time in virtual reality (first published in the Saturday Evening PostThe Martian Chronicles do, so it makes sense for them to be linked by a narrative of moving tattoos on the ever-flexing skin of the Illustrated Man. And a lot of them are allegories on mid-century America, dressed up as SF tropes, and perhaps a little odd in the pulps where most of them were first published. I did once meet someone who wondered if Ray Bradbury could really be counted as an sf writer because he is so literary in approach. Bradbury hinmself, however, had no doubt.

This was the top sf book recommended by you in my poll at the end of last year. Next on that list is Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen by Lois McMaster Bujold, which I will read but not review online until its fate in this year's Hugos has become clear.

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Rhyme Stew, by Roald Dahl

Second verse of third poem:

I was running the tombola
At our church bazaar today
And doing it with gusto
In my usual jolly way…

…and shortly afterward the narrator gets groped by the vicar, because sexual assault is funny.

A collection of poems by Dahl, ostensibly for children. The longer poems, which are subversions of well-known stories – Dick Whittington, the Tortoise and the Hare, the Emperor's New Clothes, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, Hansel and Gretel and Aladdin – are generally much better than the short ones which seem too often to be doggerel encoding a club-room joke, usually missing the mark of good taste (let alone appeal to the target audience). It is perhaps a product of a different time (though published in 1989 when things were surely already changing).

This was the shortest book on my shelves acquired in 2010. Next in that ranking is a Dutch translation of an Italian children's book, De piraten van de Zilveren Kattenklauw, supposedly by the heroic mouse protagonist Geronimo Stilton.

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Interesting Links for 18-01-2017

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Jeremiah: Een Geweer in het Water, by Hermann

Second frame of third page:

(a bird steals a biscuit from Jeremiah's bag)

I asked a friend some time back which Flemish comic series he would recommend, and without too much hesitation he named Jeremiah, an extended story about the odyssey of Jeremiah and his buddy Kurdy through a post-apocalyptic America. So I got this volume, whose title translates as "The Rifle in the Water" and then lost it for several years, finding it only the other day in a big household cleanup.

I have to say I wasn't hugely impressed. Jeremiah and Kurdy encounter an extended family in the swamps, all of them pretty awful people with a secret to hide (there's a rifle in the water, and more besides). Lots of shooting and conspiring, but it didn't hugely engage me. I should possibly have tried the story from the beginning – or else just skipped it entirely.

This was my top unread non-English comic, and will be followed by another.

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Short Trips: Farewells, edited by Jacqueline Rayner

Second paragraph of third story ("The Bad Guy", by Stephen Fewell):

‘Whenever I think of you,’ she said, ‘I’ll always remember you with fondness —’ She’d been trembling as she took my hand, her rings clustered cold against my fingers.

Another of the Big Finish anthologies, unusually taking the first eight Doctors in chronological sequence with stories about saying goodbye. A strong start and end, with the First Doctor taking Ian and Barbara along Route 66 and the Eighth Doctor re-enacting The Wicker Man with contemporary garden furniture (one for , I think), by Gareth Wigmore and Paul Magrs respectively. The others that grabbed me were an elegiac Fourth Doctor story, “Into the Silent Land” by Steven A. Roman, and a grim Sicth Doctor story by Joe Lidster, “Curtain Call”. In general 2006 seems to have been a good year for the Short trips anthologies, as it was for New Who in general.

Next in sequence of these anthologies is Short Trips: The Centenarian, edited by Ian Farrington, but I read it back in 2010, so I’ll move on to Short Trips: Time Signature, edited by Simon Guerrier.

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