Monthly Archives: November 2018

Hybrid, by Shaun Hutson

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

He crossed to the sink, filled the kettle then plugged it in and waited for it to boil.

This had been on my eventually-getting-round-to list for ages, on the basis that it came up as a possible addition to the list of sff novels set in Ireland. To be honest it barely qualifies. There are two plotlines, set several years apart; in one, a writer in 2002 finds that he is writing a novel without any memory of actually writing it, in what feel to him like alcoholic blackouts; the other plotline is the story of the novel, a thriller set around Good Friday Agreement times, in which a dissident British agent hints down a dissident Republican. I thought the violence was gratuitous and the politics pretty inaccurate, and the supernatural linkage between th two narratives not really accounted for; apart from that, it was quite well written! You can get it here.

This was the sfnal book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2010 Edition, ed. Rich Horton.

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Twelve Angels Weeping, by Dave Rudden

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Second paragraph of third story (“Celestial Intervention – A Gallifreyan Affair”) with illiustration by Alexis Snell:

The boy comes through my door like he has a grudge against it, smoke-eyed and pale, with a predator’s smile. There’s a ratty old chair in the corner of my office that I save for special occasions, like employment or sleep, and he falls into it with a boneless, theatrical slump, fingering the diamonds in his ear.

Newly published collection of vaguely Christmassy stories set in the Whoniverse, by Irish YA author Dave Rudden (who I confess I hadn’t heard of before). Single-author collections like this are unusual for Doctor Who, especially by an author who hasn’t previously written for the franchise, but I think this is really successful – only eight of the twelve stories actually have the Doctor in them, and often as a background figure while the real action is happening to other people. Rudden pastiches various genres more or less successfully, but also displays a fierce loyalty to Who’s own mythology. The standout story for me was “The Red-Eyed League”, featuring Vastra and Jenny encountering a Sea Devil, a direct clash between Old and New Who. But for my own purposes I also need to point out the second last story, “The Rhino of Twenty Three Strand Street”, set in Ringsend in 1966, and therefore only the second Doctor Who short story ever where the action takes place in Ireland. (The first few paragraphs of the last story, “Anything You Can Do”, are set in Belfast, but with no local colour.) There isn’t a duff story in the lot, though, and it would do well as a Christmas gift for younger (or indeed older) fans. You can get it here.

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Monday reading

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Current
The Prisoner and The Fugitive, by Marcel Proust
Hardwired, by Walter Jon Williams
Burr, by Gore Vidal

Last books finished
Hamlet, by William Shakespeare

Next books
52 Ways of Looking at a Poem, by Ruth Padel
The Stone Book Quartet, by Alan Garner
And the Mountains Echoed, by Khaled Hosseini

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The first world war centenary

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It seems strangely appropriate that I should be in Belgrade today. After all, the first world war started here; the first shots of the war were fired by an Austrian river monitor ship against the city’s defences. (Of course this was a consequence of the Sarajevo assassination a month before.)

But there is a family link also. My grandfather, who was born in 1880 and fought throughout the first world war in the 6th Royal Dublin Fusliers, part of the 10th (Irish) Division, fought in the Battle of Kosturino in December 1915, for which he was awarded the Order of the White Eagle, Fourth Class, by the King of Serbia. We still have it somewhere. His own government awarded him the DSO in January 1918. A few months before coming to the Macedonia front, he was wounded at Suvla Bay during the Gallipoli campaign. He stayed in Macedonia throughout 1916 (and was mentioned in dispatches both for Kosturino and for the capture of Yeniköy, now Provatas, in October). In 1917 he transferred to Palestine, and I have the text of a letter he wrote to an old friend in January 1918. I never met him; he dropped dead at Mass in Rostrevor in 1949, standing beside his 20-year-old son, my father.

My grandfather was one of nine brothers (and there were five sisters as well). Five of the nine had already died before 1914; the other three all served, George in the Royal Army Medical Corps, Thomas in the Royal Garrison Artillery and Maurice in the Royal Artillery. Maurice was gassed, but lived until the 1970s. George died less than a year after the war ended. We know very little of Thomas, who also died relatively young.

On my American side, my grandmother’s brother Lyman C. Hibbard was active in the American Ambulance Field Service in France in 1915 and 1916, and then joined the U.S. Field Artillery, fighting at Verdun, for which he was awarded the Croix de Guerre by the French.

I don’t think there are any particular lessons to be drawn, except that we are fortunate to live in an age when the horros of total war are unlikely to be visited on Europe again.

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Bohemian Rhapsody: nostalgia and accents

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I saw Bohemian Rhapsody earlier in the week, the new biopic of Freddy Mercury and Queen. I really enjoyed it. (So did the two priests who saw it with me. Long story.) Not having had particular expectations, I found myself awash with nostalgia, and there seemed to be something in my eye pretty constantly for the last twenty minutes, which has the cast more or less re-enacting Queen’s performance at Live Aid in July 1985. Dear heavens, half the people I work with weren’t even born then. I went and had a look at the archive footage, and it’s striking how well the event is portrayed on the large screen.

I was struck by the number of Northern Irish accents in the film. The Bad Boyfriend, Paul Prender, actually was from Belfast and is played with convincing Northern twang by Dublin-born Allen Leech. The Good Boyfriend, Jim Hutton, was from Carlow in real life, but is played by Aaron McCusker, born in Portadown and brought up in Armagh, with his native accent. On top of that, Dubliner Aiden Gillen plays a Scot (John Reid, Queen’s second manager) but his accent roams around both sides of the North Channel. So that’s two and a half voices with Ulster intonation, which is two and a half more than the average feature film not actually set there.

And speaking of accents, Rami Malek (from Los Angeles) does a super job of catching Freddy Mercury’s distinctive voice both speaking and singing. If anything he slightly underplays the poshness that the real Freddy Mercury affected – watch this pre-Live Aid interview to see what I mean:

I couldn’t help but think of two other great adaptations of Queen. First, the Superbowl performance of We Will Rock You, advertising Pepsi through Beyoncé, Pink and Britney Spears:

And the best of David Armand’s mimes (apart from “Torn”), his interpretation of Don’t Stop Me Now through interpretative dance:

The critics have panned the film, and then in some cases admitted that people are going to see it anyway. Of course it has its flaws – a lot of the cliches were done at least as well thirty-five years ago by Spın̈al Tap, the year before Live Aid, and some of the scenes sit a bit clunkily. But those of you who actally are old enough to remember Live Aid will probably enjoy it a lot, and even those of you who weren’t may find you too have something in your eye at the end.

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  • Sat, 10:45: For millions of Europeans, the war did not end in 1918 https://t.co/2STzvOG1A7 With good quote from my friend Markus Meckel.

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The Vampire’s Curse, by Mags Halliday, Kelly Hale and Philip Purser-Hallard

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Second paragraph of third chapter of “The Badblood Diaries”, by Mags L. Halliday:

Yes, I know, I know. She’ll see all of this once we get back home. By then I’m sure we’ll have become fast friends who will laugh over such foolish first impressions and recount them at each other’s weddings or some such. I hope.

Second paragraph of third-ish (depending how you count) chapter of “Possum Kingdom”, by Kelly Hale:

He could just make out the sea, a flash of white and gold in the setting sun. And stretching towards it was now a landscape made of flesh, bone, and blood; an undulating, noisy mass of young beating hearts and awkward shuffling feet that had sprung up virtually overnight, overflowing the streets, the bogs, and fields beyond. These were the child crusaders led by another of God’s chosen: the shepherd Stephan of Cloyes in the Orléanais. According to the inn’s proprietress, Dame Merveaux, the people of the Orléanais were prone to fits and visions: ‘They see the face of Christ in every horse dropping and puddle of water. It’s the mountain air, young sir. Goes straight to the head. Likely the reason they have so much trouble with the walking dead, I suspect. Indecent the numbers of people won’t stay buried in the Orléanais.’

Second chapter of third part of “Predating the Predators”, by Philip Purser-Hallard:

She was a friendly, motherly person, and the first Lavellan I have met. Not having investigated her species before I arrived on Murigen, I had been expecting a biology akin to that of Earth’s amphibia, but the Lavellans I have observed since my arrival are covered with sleek black or russet fur. They look more like otters or beavers than frogs or salamanders, though far more closely adapted to their waterborne lifestyle.

A set of three novellas featuring Bernice Summerfield and vampires (she has met them before). The first of these was fairly standard stuff (archaeology expedition suffers mysterious deaths; who is the vampire?) but the other two I thought were excellent. The second story features a time-travelling quest through pocket universes and the history of vampirism, and the third has an aging Benny attending an academic conference where things start going horribly wrong. Two out of three ain’t bad (and it’s not that the first is awful, just not as original as the other two). You can get it here.

Next in this series: Secret Histories, ed. Mark Clapham

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Retour sur Aldébaran, Épisode 1, by Leo

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Second frame of third page.


Kim: No, Amos, I’d prefer to jump right in [in French, “to jump right into the bath”]. Come on!
Lynn: Are we having a bath, Mum? I bathed this morning!
Amos: It’s just an expression, Lynn…

I was delighted to discover that Leo has started a new story cycle in Les Mondes d’Aldébaran, the comics series which has been going for two decades. The French don’t do things by halves; here’s the official trailer.

The storyline is that Kim, heroine of the previous series, has returned home to become the key interlocutor between the humans of Aldebaran and the alien Tsalterians (one of whom is father to her child Lynn); and has also become a celebrity, dealing with some very unwelcome attention. The Tsalterians invite her to help them assess a peculiar huge hovering cube, which turns out to be a portal to yet more lushly forested worlds, where both human and inhuman dangers await. (And there’s a bit of freshness to the lush forests, because Leo has handed over the colours to Florence Spitéri rather than do it himself.) Meanwhile Kim has two new allies, an Earth couple who are trapped in perpetual youth. All good stuff and set-up for another few albums. You can get it here.

This was my top unread non-English comic. The only one I have left now is Lambik, by Marc Legendre. Time to stock up, particularly perhaps on Survivants, the Aldebaran series I haven’t read yet.

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Earth Girl, by Janet Edwards

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Maeth and Ross were doing different courses, but would be on the same campus in Europe Central. Issette, Cathan and Keon would be together on a campus in Europe South. The other tour of us would be heading off alone. I’d always known I would be, of course, since Pre-history Foundation classes spent the year working at some of the major dig sites.

This is a rather good YA novel, which I picked up as a freebie at Loncon and have only now got to. In the future, humanity has discovered how to travel across and between planets using “portals”; a small minority cannot use them for genetic reasons and are doomed to stay on Earth, stigmatised as “apes”. Jarra, our heroine, joins a mixed group of young people on a study mission to dig up the remains of New York (abandoned when technology meant that cities became obsolete). She proves herself to herself and also to her classmates. It’s fun but also serious; obviously Jarra’s stigma is one that doesn’t apply in our world, but perhaps that makes it easier to apply the parallels. She is perhaps a little too talented and lucky, but this is a novel after all. I’ll look out for the sequels. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2014. Next is Perilous Dreams, by Andre Norton.

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Words of Radiance, by Brandon Sanderson

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

In her cabin, Shallan read by the glow of a goblet of spheres, wearing her nightgown. Her cramped chamber lacked a true porthole and had just a thin slit of a window running across the top of the outside wall. The only sound she could hear was the water lapping against the hull. Tonight, the ship did not have a port in which to shelter.

Second in the trilogy of Very Long Books by Brandon Sanderson, following on from The Way of Kings which I read earlier in the year. Our three viewpoint characters, after long journeys for two of them, end up together in a factionalised court facing existential threats from mysterious fantasy entities. Shallan is the best of the three, but the two chaps both have interesting enough character arcs as they deal with conspiracy and constant threat. Both the society and the rules of the magical world are mapped out convincingly through the protagonists’ learnings. I still felt it was way too long (at 89 chapters and 1087 pages), but if you have the patience, it’s a good read. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired so far this year, and my top unread sff book. Next on those piles respectively are And the Mountains Echoed, by Khaled Hossaini, and Grimm Tales, by Philip Pullman.

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Monday reading

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Current
The Prisoner and The Fugitive, by Marcel Proust
Hardwired, by Walter Jon Williams
Burr, by Gore Vidal

Last books finished
The Vampire’s Curse, by Mags Halliday, Kelly Hale and Philip Purser-Hallard
Doctor Who: Twelve Angels Weeping: Twelve Stories of the Villains from Doctor Who, by Dave Rudden
Hybrid, by Shaun Hutson
Baptism in Blood, by Jane Haddam

Next books
52 Ways of Looking at a Poem, by Ruth Padel
The Stone Book Quartet, by Alan Garner
And the Mountains Echoed, by Khaled Hosseini

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Behind the Sofa: Celebrity Memories of Doctor Who, ed. Steve Berry

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Second paragraph of third section (Tony Lee’s reminiscences):

You see, all my childhood I wanted to be a Time Lord. I wanted to travel in time and space and fight Daleks and the Master and do all that cool stuff I saw the Doctor doing every week. Doctor Who was much better than Star Trek, or Star Wars — an argument that caused much dissension in the playground — but I didn’t care. Unfortunately, as I grew up, my formative teenage years had no Doctor. He was on hiatus or, dare I say it — cancelled. But I never gave up. Even after the McGann wilderness years I soldiered on in time writing for TV, radio, comics — and waiting for the chance when I could write the Doctor’s stories for real.

This was a fundraiser for Alzheimer’s Research UK, complied in 2012 and updated in 2013, which does what it says on the tin – 100 celebrities with one or two pages each about their own ealiest memories of Doctor Who, with an introduction by Terry Pratchett (who is much politer about Doctor Who than I remember him being in person). I think the standout for me is Anneke Wills’ reaction to one of her old episodes being found, not quite what was requested but very moving in terms of recovering lost memories, which is the hope behind the compilation of the book. But it’s all very nice, and I think non-Whovians might enjoy it too.You can get it here.

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The Cloud Roads, by Martha Wells

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Moon suspected that Stone could have easily made twice the distance, but he seemed content to glide along at Moon’s fastest pace. Moon was just glad Stone didn’t press to go faster; he was used to spending most of the day as a groundling, and it had been more than half a turn since he had stayed in his other form so long, or flown this far at one time. By afternoon, his back ached as if he had been hauling rocks all day. At least it distracted him from thinking about the Cordans. Every thought of Ilane was like poking an open wound, but he hoped Selis was all right, that she had found a home or at least someone to live with whom she could tolerate.

I wasn't totally impressed by the Books of the Raksura as a Hugo Best Series candidate, ranking it fifth on my ballot, and indeed the voters were only a little more impressed than me, ranking it fourth. This first novel in the series is a Bildungsroman, setting us up for more adventures, of a chap who grows up as a shapechanger in a society where people are frightened of shapechangers; and then becomes part of the shapechanging elite into which he was born and from which he was then removed as a young child. This does mean that we get plenty of justification for exposition of the worldbuilding; but I wasn't really convinced by the psychological dynamics of our hero's hourney, or by the social economics of the Raksura world. I am not going to rush to the other books. But if you want to try it, you can get it here.

This was, believe it or not, my top unread book by a woman. After a re-audit of my bookshelves, it turns out that Delta of Venus by Anaïs Nin is next on that list.

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The Widow’s Curse, ed. Tom Spilsbury

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Second frame of third story ("The First", by Dan McDaid and Martin Geraghty, in which the Tenth Doctor and Martha Jones encounter Shackleton's polar expedition):

This is a collection of Tenth Doctor comics, mostly from Doctor Who Magazine (a couple from the Storybooks), four written by Jonathan Morris, three by Rob Davis, and one each by Dan McDaid and Ian Edgington; with art in three cases by Martin Geraghty, two by Rob Davis, and one each by Mike Collins, John Ross, Roger Langridge and Adrian Salmon. Of the nine stories, the two standouts for me were the title story, The Widow's Curse, by Davis and Geraghty, a creepy Caribbean story that brings back the Sycorax; and The Time of My Life, by Morris and Davis, a rather lovely farewell to Donna as a companion. I'll also note  The Immortal Emperor by Morris and Davis, which I was a bit dubious about previously and remain dubious about; and Death to the Doctor, by Morris and Langridge, which features a bunch of second-rate adversaries getting together to exact revenge, including the vaguely Irish Questor who was defeated by the First Doctor, Stephen and Dodo, I think the only explicitly Irish character in Whovian comics continuity. The only way is up.

You can get this collection here.

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Fifteen Years of Book Blogging

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I resolved to start blogging every book I read in November 2003. It’s proved to be a really good discipline; I recommend to all of you to at least keep a record somewhere of the books you have read, and if possible notes of what you thought of them. I have archived all of my reviews, on this blog and elsewhere, on LibraryThing and Goodreads. LibraryThing has only a small fraction of Goodreads’ users, but I still like the interface a lot more. If you are reading this and are on either, feel free to add me (though do say who you are).

This was my first bookblogging post, a rather brief impression of two Neil Gaiman works. Since then I have read about 3,860 books, an average of 257 per year or 21 per month. This peaked in 2008 (371) and 2009 (348), when I had a new job with a long commute and lots of work travel as well. More recently my annual total dropped to 221 in 2016, when I was very distracted by real-world politics, and rose only slightly last year to 243, thanks to the distractions of the Hugo awards. In the first ten months of this year I’ve already read almost as many books as in the whole of last year (236). I still have a long commute, slightly less business travel (though still quite a lot), but have allowed myself to be overfed by the information firehose of social media of late.

My personal top book for each (calendar) year that I’ve been reviewing is as follows (with links to my end-of-year round-ups once I started them):

2003 (2 months): The Separation, by Christopher Priest.
2004: The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien (reread).
– Best new read: Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, by Claire Tomalin
2005: The Island at the Centre of the World, by Russell Shorto
2006: Lost Lives: The stories of the men, women and children who died as a result of the Northern Ireland troubles, by David McKittrick, Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeney, Chris Thornton and David McVea
2007: Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel
2008: The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition, by Anne Frank (reread)
– Best new read: Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero, by William Makepeace Thackeray
2009: Hamlet, by William Shakespeare (had seen it on stage previously)
– Best new read: Persepolis 2: the Story of a Return, by Marjane Satrapi (first volume just pipped by Samuel Pepys in 2004)
2010: The Bloody Sunday Report, by Lord Savile et al.
2011: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbon (started in 2009!)
2012: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Brontë
2013: A Room of One’s Own, by Virginia Woolf
2014: Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell
2015: collectively, the Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist, in particular the winner, Station Eleven, by Emily St John Mandel. However I did not actually blog about these, being one of the judges at the time.
– Best book I actually blogged about: The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft by Claire Tomalin
2016: Alice in Sunderland, by Bryan Talbot
2017: Common People: The History of an English Family, by Alison Light
2018 so far: Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift (reread)
– Best new read so far: Weapons of Mass Diplomacy, by Abel Lanzac and Christophe Blain

(I am struck by how few sff books I have put on the above list, and how many non-fiction books.)

I count almost 2000 authors in those 3800 books (there are about 60 rereads). The author I have read most books by in that period is veteran Doctor Who writer, Terrance Dicks, with 80 (if I count correctly). Tied for second place, at 40 each, are another Doctor Who writer, Justin Richards, and some guy called William Shakespeare. The woman who I’ve read most books by is Lois McMaster Bujold (19), followed by another Doctor Who writer, Jacqueline Rayner (17). My two top non-white writers are both authors of particular series of graphic novels that I enjoyed, Keiko Tobe (8) and Bryan Lee O’Malley (7).

It’s been fun. I am not sure how much longer I will continue to use Livejournal, which is showing all the signs of creeping decay, but whatever happens I hope to continue bookblogging in one form or another.

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