Non-genre 7 (YTD 32) The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins La piège aux maris, by Madame Rattazzi (née Marie-Lætitia Bonaparte-Wyse) Les débuts de la forgeronne, by Madame Rattazzi (née Marie-Lætitia Bonaparte-Wyse) The Good Earth, by Pearl S. Buck The Harvey Girls, by Samuel Hopkins Adams Marriage, by H.G. Wells Creed Country, by Jenny Overton
SF 5 (YTD 81) The Peshawar Lancers, by S.M. Stirling Lost Objects, by Marian Womack Forever Peace, by Joe Haldeman What Might Have Been: The Story of a Social War, by Ernest Bramah Drowned Ammet, by Diana Wynne Jones
Doctor Who 2 (YTD 30) Synthespians™, by Craig Hinton Doctor Who: Rogue, by Kate Herron and Briony Redman
Comics 4 (YTD 32) The Ripper, by Tony Lee The Nikopol Trilogy: A Bedlam of Immortals, by Enki Bilal The Nikopol Trilogy: The Woman Trap, by Enki Bilal The Nikopol Trilogy: Cold Equator, by Enki Bilal
6,400 pages (YTD 64,300) 8/26 (YTD 110/262) by non-male writers (Riehl, van der Zee, Rattazzi, Buck, Overton, Womack, Wynne Jones, Herron/Redman) None (YTD 26/262) by a non-white writer, for second month running – rather poor of me 5/26 rereads (The Moonstone, Forever Peace, Creed Country, Synthespians™, The Nikopol Trilogy: A Bedlam of Immortals) 259 books currently tagged unread, down 8 from last month, down 79 from November 2023.
Reading now Caleb Williams, or Things as They Are, by William Godwin (group read) The Hollow Places, by T. Kingfisher The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, eds Yu Chen & Regina Kanyu Wang The Word for World is Forest, by Ursula K. Le Guin Authors of their Lives, by David A. Gerber
Coming soon (perhaps) When Worlds Collide, by Tony Lee et al Palace of the Red Sun, by Christopher Bulis Eden Rebellion, by Abi Falaise The Aztecs, by Doris V Sutherland Collected Plays and Teleplays, by Flann O’Brien The Sea Lady, by H.G. Wells The Peacock Cloak, by Chris Beckett The Passionate Friends, by H.G. Wells M Leuven Collectie Schilderijen, by Lorne Campbell The Light We Carry: Overcoming In Uncertain Times, by Michelle Obama Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories, ed. Ellen Datlow Freshwater, by Akwaeke Emezi Bellatrix, Tome 1, by Leo The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong How I Learned to Understand the World, by Hans Rosling The Crown of Dalemark, by Diana Wynne Jones Lies Sleeping, by Ben Aaronovitch Once and Future, vol 5: The Wasteland, by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora and Tamra Bonvillain Men at Arms, by Terry Pratchett Of the Imitation of Christ, by Thomas a Kempis “The Ultimate Earth”, by Jack Williamson The Mysterious Island, by Jules Verne Vagabonds!, by Eloghosa Osunde
One of the Peshawar Club’s discreet manservants had slipped the calling card under the door. As King read, he fended off the soft rounded warmth that pressed to his back, and the hands that reached teasingly around his body and tried to undo the bath towel wrapped about his waist.
Warning: this is a long piece, and a lot of it is pedantic whining.
This is the last of the science fiction novels that I found set in 2025 (and published before 2005), though I have a graphic novel coming up still. It’s also the longest of them, and the one in which 2025 has diverged the most from our own history. In this timeline, Europe and North America were devastated by meteorites in 1878, and the British Empire has resettled in India, with the royal family adopting a syncretic version of Anglicanism and Hinduism (Islam is a religion of the provinces and fringes) and ruling a polity anchored by South Africa at one end and Australia at the other. They are on friendly terms with France/Algeria, where the Napoleonic dynasty has resumed power, and threatened by the Russians, who have become devil-worshippers and cannibals based in Central Asia. China and Japan have united and are distantly threatening. Technology has developed to roughly steampunk level rather than anything more sophisticated.
Our heroes, a happy band of protagonists including the heirs to both the British and French empires (the latter is meant to be a surprise but it’s signalled pretty much from the start), with a diverse crew of warriors and a magically talented Russian defector, are battling to prevent the Russians taking over which would obviously be a Bad Thing. Starts with a fridging, then lots of steampunky combat and action, finishing with several perilous passages on an airship over Afghanistan, in the spirit of Kipling and Flashman. It’s an alternate world where the ruling classes happily bicker about who gets to rule, and where men are real men and allow women to be intellectuals too if they want. The obvious three couples all get together at the end. (Also, the Peshawar Lancers of the title are barely in the story at all.)
It’s all meant to be great fun, but several things really annoyed me about this novel. Stirling is determined to show off to us how much research he has done; but a little learning can be a dangerous thing. In Chapter 2, we have the following passage:
The younger man whispered to his companion in Bengali: “How can we trust this cow-murdering winebibber, my teacher? Even for a Muslim and outcaste, he is vile.”
The older man flicked a look at Ignatieff’s face to make sure he hadn’t understood—Bengali and Hindi were closely related—and the Okhrana agent beamed uncomprehending friendship.
He spoke both languages perfectly, of course.
Bengali and Hindi are not closely related. They are from different branches of the Indo-Aryan language group, Hindi from the Central subgroup and Bengali from the Eastern. In these enlightened days, you can actually ask an online translation engine to give you Bengali and Hindi versions of the phrase “How can we trust this cow-murdering winebibber, my teacher? Even for a Muslim and outcaste, he is vile.” The results are completely different:
Bengali
Hindi
আমরা কিভাবে এই গো-হত্যাকারী ওয়াইনবিবারকে বিশ্বাস করব, আমার শিক্ষক? এমনকি একজন মুসলিম ও বহিরাগতদের জন্যও সে জঘন্য।
इस गौ-हत्यारे शराबी पर हम कैसे भरोसा कर सकते हैं, मेरे गुरु? एक मुसलमान और बहिष्कृत व्यक्ति के लिए भी वह नीच है।
Is gau-hatyaare sharaabee par ham kaise bharosa kar sakate hain, mere guru? Ek musalamaan aur bahishkrt vyakti ke lie bhee vah neech hai.
There is some similarity between the words for “cow-killer”, “gō-hatyākārī” in Bengali and “gau-hatyaare” in Hindi, and also between the words for “Muslim”, “musalima” in Bengali and “musalamaan” in Hindi, which perhaps is an indication that you shouldn’t mutter insults in a language that you’re not sure your interlocutor doesn’t understand. But otherwise, you’re probably safe using Bengali in Srinagar, the capital of Kashmir, which is where this scene is set.
Stirling may have got confused between Bengali and Urdu, the languages of the former East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and West Pakistan (now just Pakistan) respectively. Urdu is very similar to Hindi, to the point that ‘closely related’ may not convey the relationship strongly enough. However his fictional Angrezi Raj seems to have lost most of its Urdu speakers.
And these languages are not obscure – Hindi and Bengali have the fourth and fifth most native speakers in the world, after Mandarin Chinese, Spanish and English. I can’t imagine anyone writing, for instance, “The older man flicked a look at Sanchez’s face to make sure he hadn’t understood—Spanish and English are closely related.”
One can make the excuse for Stirling that online translation services were not available when he was writing the book. But encyclopedias certainly were, and you will find no encyclopedia that gives you reason to think that Bengali and Hindi are mutually intelligible. It’s fairly clear that he did not offer the draft for review to anyone with actual first-hand knowledge of Indian languages.
On another point, my eyebrows rose sharply in Chapter 23, when “Cassandra started wolfing down a fiery chicken Marsala”. No she didn’t. Marsala sauce, with an ‘r’, is made with the sweet wine of the same name and is not ‘fiery’. Masala, with no ‘r’, is a general term for an Indian spice mix, but usually not an especially hot one. If it is hot, its name is usually qualified with a particular set of ingredients, a ‘vindaloo masala‘ for instance.
And another thing: it’s a pet peeve of mine with other writers too, but the treatment of Russian is very inconsistent. Пожалуйста, “please”, is given as “pajalsta”, and Спасибо, “thank you” as “spacebo”; if I were being phonetic, I’d use “pazhal’sta” and “spasiba” to convey how they are actually pronounced by real Russian speakers, but usually in English writers use the standard transliterations, “pozhaluysta” and “spasibo”, even though they are a bit misleading. Yet at other points Stirling does use the standard transliteration, for example in Chapter 10 where we have the exchange “Govorite-li vy po-russki?” / “Da, govoryu. Kto vy takoy?” – “Do you speak Russian?” / “Yes, I do. And who are you?” If we were being phonetic, the first two vowels in говорите and говорю sound much more like short ‘a’ than short ‘o’, and the exchange is rather stilted anyway – “Vy govorite po-russki?” / “Da, a vy kto?” would be much more idiomatic. Though we are told it is the “High Formal mode” of Russian, for what that’s worth.
Incidentally the Russian-speaker is wearing a burqua rather than a burqa, and the military caste of India are the Kyashtria rather than the Kshatriya. Again, anyone who actually knows anything about Asian cultures will pick these up immediately.
These things do matter. If you are writing about other cultures, especially if you are writing in English about formerly colonised cultures in an alternate history where they have stayed colonised, it is important to show respect by getting at least basic language and cookery facts right.
Sorry to whine. Other readers, better informed on India than I am, have commented on other mistakes in the book, but those were the ones that jumped out at me.
I know that this book is beloved by many readers, but I’m afraid that I am not among them. You can get it here.
Second paragraph of third chapter (a long ‘un, again):
The Normans were at this time the foremost race in Christendom. Their courage and ruthlessness had made them conspicuous among the rovers from Scandinavia who ravaged Western Europe. Their sails had been the terror of both coasts of the Channel, long before they conquered and settled in Gaul. But – unlike the previous Scandinavian warriors – the Normans were not content to remain seafarers. They became landsmen. And in land warfare, they cast aside the weapons of their forefathers and learnt to handle the weapons of their newly-won land with greater prowess than they had ever been handled before. They had archers with bows carrying death at a distance; they had cavalry clad in mail armour, and armed with long lances and glittering kite-shaped shields. In the province of Normandy they founded a mighty state, which gradually extended its influence over the neighbouring provinces of Brittany and Maine. And, without laying aside that dauntless valour which terrorized every land from the Elbe to the Pyrences, the Normans rapidly acquired all, and more than all, the knowledge and refinement which they found in the country where they settled. They established internal order. They adopted the French tongue, in which Latin was the main element, and raised it to a dignity and importance which it has never lost. French literature became the glory of the civilized world. They embraced Christianity and adopted the feudal doctrines of France which they worked into some sort of a system. They adopted their own form of architecture, the romanesque. They were chivalrous, these Normans; indeed, with them began the age of chivalry. Unlike other Germanic peoples, they renounced brutish intemperance; their polite luxury presented a striking contrast to the coarse voracity and drunkenness of their Saxon and Danish neighbours. The Norman baron displayed his magnificence, not in huge piles of food and hogsheads of strong drink, but in large and stately edifices, rich armour, gallant horses, choice falcons, well-ordered tournaments, and wines chosen for their flavour rather than for their intoxicating power. They were dignified in their bearing and well-spoken. They were born orators as well as born lawyers, just as they were born soldiers. For before all else they were soldiers. Their conquests extended to Southern Italy and Sicily on the one hand, and to the British Isles on the other.
I have been trying to find out about the author of this book. Thanks to the genealogy websites, I have determined that his full name was Brian Boteler Fitzgerald, that he lived from 21 January 1908 to 20 July 1977, that he was the son of Lord Henry Gordon FitzGerald (1863–1955) and Inez Charlotte Grace Casberd-Boteler (1871-1967) and the grandson of the 4th Duke of Leinster, and that he married Elizabeth Dorotea Maud Brocklebank Fleetwood-Hesketh (1914-1992) on 28 July 1936 when he was 28 and she 22. I don’t find any record that they had children. In addition to this book, published in 1951, he published four other Irish history books in 1949, 1950, 1952 and 1954, and a few more edited volumes of letters later in the 1950s, all relating to the Fitzgerald family, so a rather concentrated period of writing activity in the middle of his adult life. I have no record of anything else that he did at any other time in his career. He was born, married and died in London, but clearly wore his Irish heritage proudly.
This book is the work of a very enthusiastic and energetic romantic, dedicated to proving the proposition that the Fitzgeralds are the key factor in Irish history for more than four centuries. It’s actually a proposition that most would agree with, but by focussing on one family’s history, you can lose sight of what else is going on. In particular I’d have liked to get an understanding of the relationship between the Fitzgerald lands and the Pale/Butler territory on the one hand, and the more Irish districts on the other.
It’s also misleading to suggest that the Fitzgeralds’ rule of Ireland was the basic pattern of Irish government consistently from 1189 to 1603. It was perhaps the default, but there was no automaticity and the right of English kings to intervene was clearly accepted by all concerned. The peak of the Kildare Fitzgeralds’ power comes at the very end of the period, when Henry VII is forced to accept their continued rule in Ireland after Bosworth Field because he has no alternative; but the collapse of that power in the 1530s came very swiftly, which suggests that it did not have such deep foundations after all.
I was surprised to learn that the Fitzgerald family trace their origins to the Gherardini family of Tuscany, based in Florence from 1100, whose most famous member is probably Lisa del Giocondo, to use her married name (though that is not how she is best known). This link seemed really fanciful to me, but the book has documentary evidence from both sides indicating that the Gherardini accepted that the connection was there. To me it’s fairly clear that the mythology of the family begins with Gerald of Wales, who was the son of one of the daughters of Gerald FitzWalter, the best documented originator of the dynasty, and I don’t quite see the timelines adding up.
Still, it’s full of details about the entire period of Irish history from 1170 to 1603, and although it’s partisan, it wears its heart on its jacket and is rather endearing. You can get it here.
This was the very last of the books that I acquired in 2018 which I managed to clear from the unread shelves, ten months after I did the same for the last of my 2017 acquisitions. The full list so far, since I started tallying this way eight years ago, is:
There are 26 books on my unread shelves which I acquired in 2019, and 11 of them are by H.G. Wells, so there’s going to be a fair bit of minor Wellsiana coming up. I’m starting with:
The Roommate of Anne Frank, by Nanda van der Zee (shortest)
Lost Objects, by Marian Womack (sf that has lingered longest unread and isn’t by Wells)
What Might Have Been: The Story of a Social War, by Ernest Bramah (top book on LibraryThing which isn’t by Wells)
Marriage, by H. G. Wells (top book on LibraryThing which is by Wells)
Authors of Their Lives: The Personal Correspondence of British Immigrants to North America in the Nineteenth Century, by David A. Gerber (non-fiction that has lingered longest unread)
Collected Plays and Teleplays, by Flann O’Brien (non-genre fiction that has lingered longest unread and isn’t by Wells)
Second paragraph of third chapter (a long’un, about a list of the havens of Ireland; this paragraph alone has many more words than the document it is describing):
The list’s comprehensiveness is impressive, considering that it was likely drawn up in the early Tudor period, a time when knowledge in England of Ireland’s geography, most especially of the west and north-west, was limited. In the commonplace book of Christopher Cusack, sheriff of Meath – a copy of which survives from the early sixteenth century but which contains disparate material which is probably much older – there is a geographic description of the island of Ireland in which its most southerly and northerly points are aligned against St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall and Dumfries in Scotland, respectively. Here, it was inaccurately stated that Ireland was larger than England: ‘Irland should be mor then Ingland by iiixx miles’ its author concluded.2 Later, in 1543 Sir Anthony St Leger, lord deputy of Ireland, offered Henry VIII a detailed description of Ireland’s havens – ‘The more parte of the notable havons of Ireland’; but he named only thirty-seven, and was quick to point out those havens which lay within (or near) the Irishry and which were, in effect, beyond royal control.3 It was only in Elizabeth’s reign, as Tudor rule extended throughout the island, that a greater awareness of such geographical detail was achieved in governing circles, and mainly through the increasing use of maps.4 This is evident, for example, in the well-known, and richly detailed, maps of Ireland drawn in the 1560s by Laurence Nowell and John Goghe.5 When these are compared with the crude ‘Cotton’ map of Ireland drawn in the 1520s – this drawing represents the earliest known attempt under the Tudors to map the island – and a later Italian map of Ireland from 1565 – in which Dublin and its hinterland are plotted too far south, and Sligo is depicted as lying north-east of Donegal – the new-found superiority of English knowledge of Ireland’s geography and topography becomes immediately apparent.6 Of course the act of listing havens, and ultimately plotting them on maps, did not conjure these locations into being. For centuries Englishmen and Irishmen had relied on local knowledge to move about the country, by land and by sea, without a reliance on lists of places or maps. Lists of places, such as that included in the Hatfield Compendium and on maps, were not intended to replace local knowledge. Rather they represent an effort to impart some of this local knowledge to those unfamiliar with Ireland, so allowing them to measure and to visualize that which they could not see first-hand. 2 TCD MS 594, fo. 36. The description in Cusack’s commonplace book is nearly identical to the undated and anonymous ‘Geographical account of Ireland’, which was placed in the year 1514 in the State Papers of Henry VIII: TNA, SP 60/1/5, fo. 7 (see also below, p. 138). 3 Havens of Ireland, 6 Apr. I543, TNA, SP 60/11/2(1), fo. 15. St Leger provided a brief description of each haven: ‘Dublyn, a badde haven. Wicklowe, but a crecke’. 4 William Smyth, Map-making, landscapes and memory: a geography of colonial and early modern Ireland, c.1530-1750 (Cork, 2006), ch. 1. 5 ‘General description of England and Ireland’, c. 1564, BL, Additional MS 62540, fos 3v-4r; ‘Hibernia: insula non procul ab Anglia vulgare Hirlandia vocata” , 1567, TNA, MPF 1/68. 6 The well-known ‘Cotton’ map is reproduced in Smyth, Map-making, landscapes and memory, pp 40-1. Bolognino Zaltieri’s 1565 map of Ireland, published in Venice, is a copy of Sebastiano de Re’s 1558 map of Ireland. The former is reproduced in S.G. Ellis, ‘The Tudor borderlands, 1485-1603’ in John Morrill (ed.), The Oxford illustrated history of Tudor and Stuart Britain (Oxford, 1996), pp 66-7. See also the Elizabethan effort to set out the depths of some of the harbours in Munster: the depths, anchorages etc., of the harbours of Ireland, 21 Apr. 1567, BL, Cotton MSS, Titus B XII, fo. 482.
Coming at the Tudor period, and Ireland specifically, with the tools of the historian rather than the literature scholar, this is a deep analysis of a 15-folio manuscript preserved in Hatfield House, by two of the top writers on the period. The manuscript includes eight short documents, all about different aspects of Ireland in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries; the most substantial are a potted history at the beginning and a set of Ordinances for Ireland at the end, though it’s not clear if these last were ever put into effect.
The Hatfield Compendium was clearly written for a newly appointed Tudor official with a senior role in the government of Ireland, and the authors spend a large part of the book examining the very poor state of knowledge of Irish affairs in England throughout the Tudor period. The overthrown Yorkists had had much better links than their Lancastrian predecessors or Tudor successors – not mentioned here, but Richard of York, before he gave battle in vain, was the chief governor of Ireland for over a decade and launched the 1460 campaign to retake England from there.
Henry VII came to throne only vaguely aware of his nearby realm, and devoted significant effort and personnel (though not a lot of money) to getting a grip on it. Maginn and Ellis are able to trace the information in the Hatfield Compendium both backward and forward, looking at how it was created to satisfy the needs of the king and his senior advisers for data about a rather unknown place.
The book then traces the story through the ending of the Fitzgerald dominance and the beginning of surrender and regrant, and the definition of the kingship of Ireland (rather than lordship as it had been since Henry II), through the policies of successive underfunded chief governors appointed by Henry VIII.
Taking a step back, it strikes me that when the English court thought of Ireland, they really meant the Pale and a few outposts under government control (loosely defined), and the areas under the control of the greater magnates, the Butlers and Fitzgeralds; about half of the island, under the control of the Irish clans, just didn’t feature in calculations except as a source of trouble and potential fodder for land grabs. It’s a normal enough paradigm for this sort of conflict between a well-armed but under-informed military and a hostile and well-dug-in population; one thinks of Israel v the West Bank and Gaza, but there are plenty of other parallels.
Quite a short book, but with a lot of good stuff in it. You can get it here.
Second paragraph of third essay (“The Tudor Court: Dust and Desire”, by Thomas Betteridge):
This discussion is in two parts. The first section will examine a number of mid-Henrician responses to the court, including Wyatt’s courtly lyrics, while the second part will look in detail at the work of Skelton. This chapter will argue that the Henrician court paradoxically exists in its purest state in the work of Skelton before this court starts to emerge as a coherent institution during the 1520s and ’30s. In Magnyfycenceand The Bowge of Courte, Skelton creates a Henrician court before the avant la lettre [sic], a spectral court that haunted the real thing, not as a hidden secret but as dust, detritus, as a material reminder of the court’s consistent failure to achieve its fantasy of itself.²
² Slavoj Žižek comments that “object petit a is the reminder that can never be sublated [aufgehoben] in the moment of symbolization. So not only is this reminder not an ‘inner’ object irreducible to external materiality— it is precisely the irreducible trace of externality in the very midst of ‘internality,’ its condition of impossibility (a foreign body preventing the subject’s full constitution) which is simultaneously its condition of possibility. The ‘materiality’ of this reminder is that of the trauma which resists symbolization.” Slavoj Žižek, “Class Struggle or Postmodernism? Yes, please!” in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek (New York: Verso, 2000), 90-135, 117, emphasis in the original.
A collection of essays on how the court actually functioned under the Tudor monarchs, apparently papers from a conference in 2004. The two editors and the other six contributors are all English literature scholars, and I must say I find it interesting that I’m getting quite a lot of value from the literature end of analysis of the Tudor period. The first three essays are about Henry VIII and humanism as deployed at court; the other five are about Elizabeth I, and the standout for me was Peter Sillitoe’s piece on the royal progresses, both their limitations and their achievements in terms of projecting royal power. But there is lots of other good stuff to chew on. No mention of Ireland though. You can get it here (for a price).
Current Drowned Ammet, by Diana Wynne Jones Caleb Williams, or Things as They Are, by William Godwin (group read) Marriage, by H.G. Wells The Hollow Places, by T. Kingfisher
Last books finished The Good Earth, by Pearl S. Buck Yanks Behind the Lines: How the Commission for Relief in Belgium Saved Millions from Starvation During World War I, by Jeffrey B. Miller Doctor Who: Rogue, by Kate Herron and Briony Redman What Might Have Been: The Story of a Social War, by Ernest Bramah Ascension of the Cybermen & The Timeless Children, by Ryan Bradley The Nikopol Trilogy: A Bedlam of Immortals, by Enki Bilal The Harvey Girls, by Samuel Hopkins Adams The Nikopol Trilogy: The Woman Trap, by Enki Bilal The Deep State of Europe: Welcome to Hell, by Basil Coronakis The Nikopol Trilogy: Cold Equator, by Enki Bilal
Next books When Worlds Collide, by Tony Lee et al Authors of their Lives, by David Gerber The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, eds Yu Chen & Regina Kanyu Wang
Ah. Actually this is rather difficult. The book is broken up into four sections, one of which is further subdivided:
Prologue (6 pages)
The Story: First Period (170 pages)
The Story: Second Period (249 pages split into eight Narratives)
Epilogue (6 pages split into three parts)
Each of these sections and narratives is in turn split up into many sub-sections. But I don’t usually count prologues, so I’ll take the second paragraph of the third sub-section of “The Story: First Period” as my sample text for the book. It is, appropriately enough:
Penelope’s notion is that I should set down what happened, regularly day by day, beginning with the day when we got the news that Franklin Blake was expected on a visit to the house. When you come to fix your memory with a date in this way, it is wonderful what your memory will pick up for you upon that compulsion. The only difficulty is to fetch out the dates, in the first place. This Penelope offers to do for me by looking into her own diary, which she was taught to keep when she was at school, and which she has gone on keeping ever since. In answer to an improvement on this notion, devised by myself, namely, that she should tell the story instead of me, out of her own diary, Penelope observes, with a fierce look and a red face, that her journal is for her own private eye, and that no living creature shall ever know what is in it but herself. When I inquire what this means, Penelope says, “Fiddlesticks!” I say, Sweethearts.
I had read this a very long time ago: one of the very first mystery novels in English, about the disappearance of a mystical jewel, with train timetables. drug addicts, religious fanatics (both Christian and non-Christian), peculiar medical conditions and suicidal love. Our copy is an ex-library edition which Anne acquired many years ago, with an enthusiastic introduction by no less than Dorothy L. Sayers.
What makes the book so memorable is that the story is told from many different points of view, and the first two are both very vivid – the old family servant, who believes that all wisdom can be found in Robinson Crusoe, and the crazy Christian relative, who annoys all the other characters. There is then a fine momentum which carries you through to the end.
It’s not without its flaws. The actual solution to the mystery resembles one of Agatha Christie’s more implausible schemes. The dead maidservant is a surprisingly good writer for someone of her background. Also, given that the jewel was stolen from the Indians by the British in the first place, it might have been better to save all the trouble by just giving it back to them early on; but then I guess you would have no story. Still, I was entertained, and you can get it here.
This was the book on my shelves with the most LT owners that I have not previously reviewed online. (Apart from children’s books, and books by Terry Pratchett.) Next on that pile, on a rather different note, is The Imitation of Christ, by Thomas à Kempis.
See here for methodology; I am excluding books unless at least 50% of them is actually set in Uganda, and I had real trouble deciding with some of these, so it’s a list of ten rather than the usual eight.
I should say also that I am a little fascinated by Uganda because my father taught history at Makerere University in Kampala from 1959 to 1961, and I went there myself in 2010 and found the corridor where his old office would have been. (When he left, his successor was Bethwell Ogot, who is still alive.)
Title
Author
GR raters
LT owners
Kisses from Katie
Katie Davis Majors
33,774
1,253
In a Free State
V.S. Naipaul
5,111
1,140
The Last King of Scotland
Giles Foden
4,196
949
A Girl Is a Body of Water
Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi
7,723
418
All Our Names
Dinaw Mengestu
4,827
472
Daring to Hope: Finding God’s Goodness in the Broken and the Beautiful
Katie Davis Majors
6,371
265
Kintu
Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi
4,121
397
The Queen of Katwe: A Story of Life, Chess, and One Extraordinary Girl’s Dream of Becoming a Grandmaster
Tim Crothers
3,052
287
Beatrice’s Goat
Page McBrier
722
1,188
We Are All Birds of Uganda
Hafsa Zayyan
5,665
112
So, I am not sure about In A Free State, by V.S. Naipaul, because the original publication with that title is a collection of shorter pieces, the longest of which is also called “In A Free State”, is set in Uganda (not named but clearly intended) and has also been published as a standalone. I suspect that the shorter piece is less than half of the original collection (with is otherwise set elsewhere) and I suspect that most of the owners of a book with that title own the collection rather than the standalone, but I am sufficiently unsure to include it above with this caveat.
Both All Our Names, by Dinaw Mengistu, and We Are All Birds of Uganda, by Hafsa Zayyan, are split between Uganda and another country (the UK and the USA respectively) and I have not been able to detect if the Ugandan content is more or less than 50% of the book in either case. So again, I’ve included them on the above list with this caveat.
Unfortunately the top spot for books set in Uganda, on both Goodreads and LibraryThing, still goes to a literal white saviour narrative. It’s a long way ahead on Goodreads, and also leads if by a much narrower margin on LibraryThing. At least Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, who is actually Ugandan, gets two books on the list.
Books excluded without hesitation: We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, by Philip Gourevitch (set in Rwanda); The Shadow of the Sun, by Ryszard Kapuściński (set in Ethiopia); At Home in the World: Reflections on Belonging While Wandering the Globe, by Tsh Oxenreider (set in many countries); Aftershocks, by Nadia Owusu (set in many countries); This Is How We Do It: One Day in the Lives of Seven Kids from around the World, by Matt LaMothe (set in many countries); Walking the Nile, by Levison Wood (set in many countries) and A History of Burning, Janika Oza (centred on Uganda but my sense is that less than half of the book is actually set there).
I should have mentioned before that I saw Jodie Whittaker live on stage three weeks ago in London, performing the title role in The Duchess, an adaptation of Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, in the Trafalgar Theatre. Tickets were surprisingly inexpensive, and in fact I was ushered (ushed?) to a better seat on arrival as the evening had not sold out. (By comparison, tickets for David Tennant playing Macbeth the same night were going for literally ten times as much.)
I was not familiar with The Duchess of Malfi, except that I knew it was the source for a the titles of novels by P.D. James and Stephen Fry. So I can’t comment on whether or not the Trafalgar Theatre production improved on the original. It was a play of two halves; the first part setting up the widowed Duchess falling in love with her steward, and concealing this from her jealous brothers, with various conspiratorial subplots; and the second part in which almost everyone gets horribly murdered.
I felt that the cast were having a lot more fun in the second half, where they were getting killed and doing the killing, or both in a couple of cases; the first half had a lot of declaiming. There is a lot of serious material there about gender and power, but the graphic violence (and the virulent graphics) rather overwhelmed my intellectual appreciation of the play’s themes.
Jodie Whittaker dominated the scenes that she was in – and he character is one of the first to be murdered horribly, but then haunts the stage in a lingering afterlife. There was a glorious moment when one of the other cast members dried on the word ‘lycanthropy’ – Jodie W just said it to her, and they carried on with the scene; I bet the other actor was mortified in the dressing room afterwards, but these things happen.
None of the other cast had names that I recognised, though I see one of them (Joel Fry) was in Game of Thrones. The two that stood out to me were Elizabeth Ayodele as Julia, who is bonking most of the men, and Hannah Visocchi, who silently provided most of the music on a variety of stringed instruments. Having said that, Jude Owusu as Bosola was almost the only character who actually has an arc, and performed it well.
Second paragraph of third document (a letter from Pope Alexander III to Irish bishops):
Inde est utique quod nos ex vestris litteris intelligentes quod per potentiam karissimi in Christo filii nostri H[einrici] illustris Anglorum regis qui divina inspiratione compunctus coadunatis viribus suis gentem illam barbaram, incultam et divine legis ignaram suo dominio subiugavit, ea que in terra vestra tam illicite committuntur, cooperante domino, incipiunt iam desistere gudio gavisi sumus et ei qui iamdicto regi tantam victoriam contulit et triumphum inmensas gratiarum actiones exsolvimus, prece supplici postulantes ut per vigilanciam et sollicitudinem ipsius regis vestro cooperante studio gens illa indisciplinata et indomita cultum divine legis et religionem Chritiane fidei per omnia et in omnibus imitetur et vos ac ceteri ecclesiastici viri honore et tranquillitate debita gaudeatis.
Hence it is that – understanding from your letters that our dear son in Christ, Henry, illustrious King of England, stirred by divine inspiration and with his united forces, has subjected to his dominion that people, a barbarous one uncivilized and ignorant of the Divine law, and that those evils which were unlawfully practised in your land are now, with God’s help, already beginning to diminish – We are overjoyed and have offered our grateful prayers to Him who has granted to the said King so great a victory and triumph, humbly beseeching that by the vigilance and care of the same King that most undisciplined and untamed nation may in and by all things persevere in devotion to the practice of the Christian faith, and that you and your ecclesiastical brethren may rejoice in all due honour and tranquillity.
NB that Curtis and McDowell give only the English translation; I found the Latin original here.
I was rather glad to find that this book was given by my grandmother to my grandfather, as a present for his 64th birthday. (It’s his handwriting, I think, not hers.)
Published by Methuen in 1943, the previous year, it’s exactly what it says on the cover, an assemblage of important Irish historical documents from Laudabiliter to the 1921 Treaty and its immediate aftermath. It includes some classic texts that I would had never thought of seeking out for myself – the Statutes of Kilkenny and Poynings’ Law, for instance.
Inevitably the Anglo-Irish relationship is covered much more closely than any other topic, and it is hardly surprising that the well-documented Dublin Castle / London perspective provides a lot of material. But there are a couple of moments where the Irish nationalist voice is heard too – we get Hugh O’Neill’s declared war aims from 1599, and less than half a century later the agenda of the Confederation of Kilkenny in 1642.
This book was printed in 1943, and I see a copy of the 1977 reprint going for £46 on Amazon right now; otherwise I don’t think you’ll get it easily anywhere. This was my top unread book acquired in 2018; next (and last) on that list is The Geraldines. An Experiment In Irish Government 1169-1601, by Brian Fitzgerald.
Die weiten Wälder, von Wiesen unterbrochen, bieten Tausenden genußreiche Gelegenheit, sich zu ergehen und dem Ballspiel, Cricket oder Lawn tennis zu huldigen, wozu die Erfordernisse reichlich vorhanden sind. Es ist ein Aussichtsthurm hier und in einer Stunde etwa kann man auf herrlichen Wegen den Hermannskogel erreichen, auf welchem auch ein uralter Thurm steht, dessen Entstehungsgeschichte der Castellan erzählt. Wir legitimirten uns in der Wirthschaft auf dem Kahlenberge mit der Anweisung des Tullner Beamten und wurden mit allem versorgt. Wir ließen Zwirner telephonisch benachrichtigen, daß wir gleich nach dem Mittagstisch nach Payerbach fahren wollten, um die herrliche Nacht auf dem Schneeberg zu verbringen. Man versah uns, als wir aufbrachen, mit einer Tasche, in der wir die nöthigsten Reiseerfordernisse und Mundvorrath mitnahmen, und wurden ersucht, Tasche und Reiserequisiten in Tulln abzugeben, von wo sie wieder gelegentlich zurückgebracht würden.
The wide forests, dotted with meadows, offer thousands of enjoyable opportunities to relax and to play ball games, cricket or lawn tennis, for which the equipment is readily available. There is a lookout tower here and in about an hour you can reach the Hermannskogel by following some magnificent paths. There is also an ancient tower on top of the Hermannskogel, whose Castellan will tell you the story of its origin. We checked in at the inn on the Kahlenberge with the approval of the official from Tulln, and were provided with everything. We had Zwirner notified by telephone that we wanted to leave for Payerbach right after lunch to spend the night on the Schneeberg. When we left, we were given a bag in which we took the most essential travel supplies and provisions, and we were asked to hand in the bag and travel documents in Tulln, from where they would be returned in due course.
Translation by me
I wrote about this 1893 novel when doing my write-up of 2020 as portrayed in science fiction, but thanks to a DeepL subscription, I have only now got around to actually reading it. I wrote previously, having skimmed the German text:
Here Julian West from Looking Backward and a friend from another utopian novel of the time visit a future Austria, which has successfully maintained the Hapsburg monarchy and aristocracy andat the same time adopted most of the socialism of Bellamy’s novel. Austria is part of a European Union (that phrase isn’t quite used) which stretches from the Atlantic to the Urals, but does not include England.
It is quite a short book – 200 large print pages in the most recent edition – with typically ponderous nineteenth-century German sentences with long subordinate clauses which even DeepL struggles with. The premise is that by 2020, Austria – and when we say Austria, we mean the entirety of the Hapsburg Empire as it was in 1893 – has long been a Communist utopia under a constitutional monarchy, thanks to the wise reforms enacted by Franz Josef II and his heir Franz Ferdinand when he in turn came to the throne. (In reality, Franz Ferdinand was a petulant bigot who loved killing animals, and if he had ever come to the throne he is unlikely to have ruled in an enlightened manner.) Everything is tightly regulated by the authorities and everyone loves this because society has been made perfect. Money has been abolished, and so has smoking.
Most modern reviewers remark on the future arrangement of European politics in the book, which is actually dealt with rather rapidly, in two as-you-know-Bob moments of exposition, the first in Chapter 7:
Austria no longer has an army, as a disarmament treaty has long existed in Europe; but it maintains a very important naval defence force. [NB that this is the Austria which controls Trieste and Rijeka.] All the Continental states, which in the east are fully protected by Russia in return for subsidies and seconded personnel, have agreed on a coastal defence alliance and maintain not only coastal fortifications but also a strong navy, partly to protect themselves against England, which has been driven out of all seas and islands from Gibraltar to the Red Sea, and partly to protect themselves against the predatory states in Argentina and China, from where piracy is shamelessly practised.
A more extended description in Chapter 13 explains that the European Union (as I said before, not quite given that name) depends on regional security as well as internal disarmament:
Turkish rule had been completely abolished and Russia had taken over Asia Minor and Arabia, Italy Egypt, France the area from Egypt to the western border of Algiers, Spain the entire west of northern Africa. The peoples of the Balkan states had formed four independent Christian empires under the sovereignty of the Emperor of Austria, who was also in command of the navy and coastal defence.
…We consider that there is no danger of the Union breaking up, as the German Confederation once did, and provision has also been made to ensure that Union law can develop in line with the times. We hope that England will soon be compelled [gezwungen] to join the Union, and for the still distant future we may well assume that the whole of Asia will be won over to the collective principle, and then Europe, Asia and Africa, which in reality form only one continent, will be united into a single confederation of states.
A lot to unpack here, perhaps more than these few paragraphs are actually worth, but I’ll just note that there is no reference to Islam anywhere in the book.
The other thing that surprised me was the book’s take on women and sex. The population has been kept under control and dispersed around the countryside – Vienna has only 3,500 inhabitants – and reproduction is controlled by the sinister and all-powerful Women’s Curia, a body which includes all women over the age of 18. Only a few women are allowed to have babies, for good old eugenic reasons. Women who give birth to illegitimate children, ie without permission of the Curia, are either forced to permanently wear a garment of shame covering their face and body, or graciously allowed to emigrate to Africa. (Nothing is said about the consequences for the fathers.) The Women’s Curia legislates and enforces all of this, and it is portrayed as a Good Thing.
I’m scratching my head to think of another sf novel, or even another novel, where pregnancy is treated quite so neurotically. Brave New World, perhaps; but in that case there are (almost) no pregnancies at all, human reproduction having been mechanised.
Having said that, it’s clear that there is a lot of sex happening in Neupauer’s future Austria, and his protagonist Julian West has several close encounters and one definite score with the lovely Giulietta. Nothing is said about how the large amount of sex doesn’t then lead to large numbers of babies, but perhaps we are meant to read between the lines of the unspoken activities of the Women’s Curia. The book ends with a long letter from Giulietta to Julian, in which what isn’t discussed is perhaps more interesting than what is.
Second paragraph of third chapter (with embedded quote):
In his comments on the Ruddymane episode Upton cites the View where Spenser, in his inventory of Irish customs supposedly inherited from the Scythians, refers to Irish war-cries: ” … at theire ioyninge of Battell they likewise Call vppon theire Captaines name or the worde of his Auncestours As they vnder Oneale crye Landargabo, that is the bloddie hande which is Oneles badge” (Spenser 1949, 103). Although Upton is right to make this connection with the Red Hand of Ulster his interpretation of the episode is unconvincing:
This wicked witch had slain the parents of young Ruddymane, the bloody-handed babe: —plainly alluding, I think, to the rebellion of the Oneals, whose badge was the bloody-hand, and who had all drank so deep of the charm and venom of Acrasia that their blood was infected with secret filth. [emphasis as original] (Upton 1987a, 378)
Given that the episode is about the seduction of “The gentlest knight … the good Sir Mordant” (2.1.49.8-9) it is strange that Upton should think it is the Native Irish O’Neills who have been infected. If Upton’s reading of the allegory is correct then we might ask what group or individual Acrasia is meant to represent and who or what has infected the blood of the O’Neills.
Just to warn you that there are a number of Irish history books working their way through my bookblog at the moment, as the tail-end of my 2018 purchases and some recent academic acquisitions come together.
This is a book-of-a-PhD-thesis, a genre that I’m sympathetic to; it takes the Faerie Queene as its core, and looks also at other writing by Spenser and his contemporaries, teasing out particularly what is said about women and gender identity, and how this relates to Spenser’s understanding of Ireland and the Irish. Spoiler: Spenser was not very convinced of the good points of either women or the Irish. There’s also a particularly good chapter on Spenser’s take on the wild Irish landscape. Substantial stuff which I’m not really equipped to judge more thoroughly. You can get it here.
Current The Good Earth, by Pearl S Buck What Might Have Been: The Story of a Social War, by Ernest Bramah Yanks Behind the Lines: How the Commission for Relief in Belgium Saved Millions from Starvation During World War I, by Jeffrey B. Miller
Last books finished Forever Peace, by Joe Haldeman Science Fiction and Anticipation: Utopias, Dystopias and Time Travel, ed. Bernard Montoneri Les débuts de la forgeronne, by Madame Rattazzi (née Marie-Lætitia Bonaparte-Wyse) Synthespians™, by Craig Hinton
Next books Doctor Who: Rogue, by Kate Herron and Briony Redman Marriage, by H.G. Wells Drowned Ammet, by Diana Wynne Jones
Set in 2025, this comic from 2003 brings Knight-Wing aka Clark Wayne, the grandson of Superman and Batman, and his daughters Lois and Lara, aka Supergirl Red and Supergirl Blue, into conflict with Lex Luthor, who is now a disembodied brain who escapes from their mother on the third page of the story. There’s a rather confusing conflict with aliens and deity-like creatures and at the end of it Lex Luthor sets off a bomb that destroys all technology. (Though this is not really made clear until the next installment.)
Luthor’s bomb tips this one into the apocalyptic category of stories set in 2025, but until then the world seems rather pleasantly technologically advanced, with skyscrapers and flying cars etc.
I also found the advertisements for games in the comic really fascinating – EverQuest (which is still going), War of the Monsters and Black & Bruised (this last including vouchers for in-game purchases). There are also advertisements in favour of drinking milk and against using marijuana.
Look, this is a list of records which are banned here… You should be able to find them easily in France, especially the first three, Duke Ellington, Django Reinhardt and Benny Goodman.
Gani Jakupi kindly gave me a copy of this graphic novel as well as his Kosovo book when we met earlier this year. It is not available in English, unfortunately, though it has been translated from the original French into Dutch, Spanish and Catalan. It was co-written by Jakupi, who lives in Barcelona, and Denis Lapière, who is Belgian; the three artists are all Catalan, and Pellejero, who was born in 1950, has been exorcising the ghosts of the Franco regime for much of his career. Here’s a Youtube trailer for it:
Barcelona, âme noire (Barcelona, dark soul) tells the story of the rise and fall of Carlos, son of a grocer, whose mother dies in a bomb attack on their shop in (we guess) the immediate aftermath of the Civil War; he grows up to be a smuggler, crime boss, and lover of many women. The story apparently was originally intended to be a six-volume series and got cut back to 144 pages, and there is a bit of a sense of compression towards the end. But the art conveys a lot, and one gets a real sense of Barcelona as a seething centre of crime and subversion under the oppression of the Falange. The sexual politics is perhaps a bit traditional, but perhaps that also represents the times we are looking at. You can get it here in the original French.
See here for methodology. I am excluding books not actually set in the current borders of Sudan, which is tricky, given that they changed quite recently.
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
Who Fears Death
Nnedi Okorafor
26,857
2,272
Season of Migration to the North
Tayeb Salih
30,302
1,746
The Triumph of the Sun
Wilbur Smith
6,327
971
Slave: My True Story
Mende Nazer
10,063
525
The Red Pencil
Andrea Davis Pinkney
7,156
699
The Translator: A Tribesman’s Memoir of Darfur
Daoud Hari
5,140
763
The Wedding of Zein and Other Stories
Tayeb Salih
3,789
271
Lyrics Alley
Leila Aboulela
1,503
197
I had to exclude a lot of books here; when LibraryThing and Goodreads users deply the ‘sudan’ tag, they don’t always check to see whether it’s a book mainly set in what’s now South Sudan, and of course it’s also used for books about Sudanese people affected by the conflict but who fled to other countries (usually the USA). I disqualified the following books set in the south: A Long Walk to Water, by Linda Sue Park; They Poured Fire on Us from the Sky, by Benson Deng; Acts of Faith, by Philip Caputo; and Emma’s War, by Deborah Scroggins.
I also disqualified the following for being less than 50% set in Sudan: What Is the What, by Dave Eggers; The Looming Tower, by Lawrence Wright; Home of the Brave, by Katherine Applegate; The White Nile, by Alan Moorehead; Running for My Life, by Lopez Lomong; Minaret, by Leila Aboulela; The Translator, by Leila Aboulela; The Blue Nile, by Alan Moorehead; and The Good Braider, by Terry Farish.
But the list I ended up with is gratifyingly strong, with Nnedi Okorafor’s early hit Who Fears Death (clearly set in an alternative Sudan) topping the LibraryThing list, and one of two books by the great Sudanese writer Tayeb Saleh topping the Goodreads list. I’m ashamed to say that I have not yet read any of them.
I have been trying to go through the science fiction set in 2025 in chronological order of publication / release, but somehow missed this 1986 film and have circled back to it.
This is definitely one of those films that is in the so-bad-it’s-good category. Only the first ten minutes is actually set in 2025, which is (as has depressingly often been the case on screen and page) a devastated post-apocalyptic wilderness. Then the guy who looks like he is going to be the protagonist grabs the Spear of Longinus, which pierced the body of the crucified Christ, and is zoinked back to the present day (ie 1986) where he is fatally wounded, and with his dying breath charges a young couple, played by Robert Patrick and Linda Carol, with the quest of uniting the spearhead with its hidden, long-sundered shaft, and therefore (by a mechanism that is never made clear) preventing the end of civilisation.
Robert Patrick is pretty wooden in Terminator 2, which was made five years later, and he’s pretty wooden here. But his co-star Linda Carol, supposedly still a teenager at the time and with only the lead role in Reform School Girls under her belt, steals the show with action and commitment; she gets a lot of the combat scenes despite wearing an impractical dress, and also gets most of the (few) good lines, as the two of them battle Nazis, martial artists, midgets and finally Amazon warriors to fulfil their quest. (Actually in fairness the midgets turn out to be on their side.) Everything has been thrown in here, quite unapologetically. You can’t quite decide whether to give it 3 out of 10 for effect, or 9 out of 10 for effort.
How am I feeling? Moist. Moist in the tear ducts and gonads, swelled up like a lungfish that’s been buried in the sand through a long desiccated summer till the day the sky breaks apart and the world goes wet again. The smell of coffee is taking me back—I don’t drink it myself anymore, too expensive and it raises hell with my stomach—and I feel myself slipping so far into the past I’m in danger of disappearing without making a ripple. She’s snoring. I can hear it—no delicate insuck and outhale, but a real venting of the airways, a noise as true in its way as anything Lily could work up. The rain slaps its broad hand on the roof, something that wasn’t tied down by somebody somewhere hits the wall just above the window, the world shudders, Andrea sleeps. It’s a moment.
A novel from 2000, this is another environmental crisis dystopia, set in two timelines; 1989 through to the mid 1990s, when it all goes wrong, and 2025-26, when our protagonist starts to pick up the emotional pieces again (though the world is still catastrophically damaged). I found it very well done – the protagonist’s ex-wife comes back to him in the first 2025 section, and the history of their relationship, and the fate of his daughter from a previous marriage, all play out against the damage being done to the natural world by humanity, both directly through logging and indirectly through climate change. A lot of my 2025 novels have been very depressing, and this is too, but I Iike it the most of any of them.
The dead frog on the cover was rather disturbing to see every time I opened the book on Kindle though.
I met Gani Jakupi at, of all things, a mutual friend’s standup comedy gig in Brussels a few months ago, and he kindly gave me two of his books; he is a comics writer based between Paris and Barcelona, and this was originally published in French as Retour au Kosovo. It’s a tremendous first person account of being in exile and seeing your home country on the news, not knowing if family are surviving; and then going back after the war is over to see what remains, and what can be reconstructed. It was published in 2014, but obviously has contemporary resonances at the human level with the Gaza war, even if there are significant differences in the geopolitics.
Jakupi’s take is humane and sane; he finds space for his traumatised relatives (several of his cousins were killed in a massacre) but also for the surviving Serbs; he has a wary approach to the internationals and to Kosovo’s new leaders. Jorge González has produced a tremendous artistic accompaniment to Jakupi’s script, with pastels conveying the shades of uncertainty in the situation, and some slippage into darker areas. Jakupi himself is a recognisable protagonist on every page, and I was pretty sure that I recognised a couple of other people who I know personally in the story.
This is one of the most remarkable graphic stories I have read this year. The French original is available here, but I don’t know how the average punter could get hold of the English translation; it was commissioned and published by the ProArte Institute in Kosovo, but that doesn’t even seem to have a website.
Most of the Watch got buried there. Policemen, after a few years, found it hard enough to believe in people, let alone anyone they couldn’t see.
I thought that I read all of Discworld, but I was wrong; this was published in November 2002, and I started tracking my reading quite carefully around then and began actual book blogging a year later, so I think I’d have noted it – and more crucially, I don’t remember encountering any of the plot points before.
Samuel Vimes, the head of the Watch, is yanked back through time to the early part of his career while pursuing a criminal, and finds himself roped into leading the earlier version of the Watch at a moment of civic unrest. He successfully engineers a de-escalation of the conflict, resulting in the elevation of Lord Vetinari to leadership of the city, and returns to his home timeline in the nick of time to help Sybil deliver their child.
There are some tremendously effective moments here. At the beginning we see the Watch, and several others, commemorating the moment by gathering in the graveyard of the Small Gods, but we readers are not told what this is all about until it becomes clear to us througout the book. The scene sets an emotional tone for what follows, very effectively.
The clash between security forces and peaceful (if politically radical) protesters has a lot of precedents. Pratchett would have known the Amritsar Massacre scene from Gandhi, but writing in 2002, he would also have known of the two films about Bloody Sunday that came out earlier that year. The discussion of barricades is also a callback to Les Miserables – Victor Hugo spends an entire chapter on the subject. Most of all, of course, he gives his fictional clash the same name as the famous 1936 confrontation between fascists and anti-fascists in London, the Battle of Cable Street. You are left in no doubt about what side Terry Pratchett was on.
I’m surprised that it took me so long to get to this, but very glad that I did in the end. You can get it here.
Current Forever Peace, by Joe Haldeman Science Fiction and Anticipation: Utopias, Dystopias and Time Travel, ed. Bernard Montoneri
Last books finished La piège aux maris, by Madame Rattazzi (née Marie-Lætitia Bonaparte-Wyse) The Tudor Discovery of Ireland, by Christopher Maginn and Steven G. Ellis The Geraldines: An Experiment In Irish Government 1169-1601, by Brian Fitzgerald The Peshawar Lancers, by S.M. Stirling The Roommate of Anne Frank, by Nanda van der Zee Lost Objects, by Marian Womack The Ripper, by Tony Lee
Next books Synthespians™, by Craig Hinton What Might Have Been: The Story of a Social War, by Ernest Bramah The Good Earth, by Pearl S Buck
Second paragraph of third document (‘A Letter from Sir John Davies, Knight, Attorney-General of Ireland, to Robert Earl of Salisbury, touching the state of Monaghan Fermanagh and Cavan, wherein is a discourse concerning the corbes and irenahs of Ireland’):
After the end of the last term my Lord Deputy took a resolution to visit three counties in Ulster, namely, Monaghan, Fermanagh, and Cavan, which, being the most unsettled and unreformed pasts of that province, did most of all need his Lordship’s visitation at that time.
This is rather an interesting collection. The foreword gives the reader the following instructions:
first, read the last chapter
then read the second chapter as far as page 330
then read the first chapter
then read the rest of the book from page 330 to the end of the second last chapter
and finish with the appendices if you like.
I don’t think I’ve ever before seen a non-fiction book suggesting that you read the chapters out of order. (Of course, it’s standard for Choose Your Own Adventure type books, but they are not usually non-fiction.)
It’s a collection of Irish historical documents from late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, really from 1596 to 1610. The documents themselves are printed in chronological order of composition, but Edward Morley, the editor, was right to suggest that you should start with Fynes Morison’s description of Ireland, then go to John Davies’ potted history of Ireland under British rule (which was what tipped me off to the existence of the Duke of Ireland), then go to Spenser’s View of the State of Ireland with that background fresh in your mind, and then read the remaining 80 pages of material from John Davies (and 15 pages of appendices).
The centrepiece of the book really is Spenser’s View of the State of Ireland, the first chapter in composition order. It’s well written and brutal, and argues that the English just need to destroy Irish possessions and traditions until the Irish become tractable; the beatings will continue until morale improves. He did not live to see this put into practice by Mountjoy at the end of the Nine Years’ War, but he would certainly have approved. One senses Motley, as editor, putting this and the other pieces on the pacification of Ireland forward as a contribution to the Whig theory of Irish history, that enlightened rule from London was the inevitable and desirable end point.
Still, important primary material which I’m glad I have handy. You can get POD copies in various places.
My eye was caught by one of the observations by John Davies, that in the new settlement, the judges “do now every half-year, like good planets in their several spheres or circles, carry the light and influence of justice round about the kingdom”. It’s a really interesting astronomical metaphor. One can speculate about the likelihood (or not) of an Irish administrator in 1612 knowing about the Copernican system; Kepler’s Astronomia Nova was published in 1609, and one can imagine that even if copies were not available, it would have been the talk of educated circles in Dublin, especially around the new university.
This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest on my shelves. Next on that pile is Irish Historical Documents, 1172-1922, eds. Edmund Curtis & R.B. McDowell.
This was a period of astonishing disparities in wealth and living. A typical workman’s daily wage in the 1380s was 4d, giving an annual income of around £5 (100s), assuming he could find work at least 300 days a year; a gallon of good ale cost just over a penny, as did two chickens or two dozen eggs. In London a goose was supposed to cost 6d, but sharp-eyed salesmen often asked seven or eight. A year’s tuition at Oxford University in 1374 cost 26s 8d, though lodgings there were significantly pricier at 104s a year (when annual rent for a cottage might be 5s, or 20s for a craftsman’s house), and the student would need 40s for his clothing. Meanwhile a merchant’s house in London (such as the one in which Geoffrey Chaucer was born) might be rented for two or three pounds a year, which was about what it would cost to send your son to a monastery school. Higher up the social scale, the numbers lose purchase. A knight’s two horses, without which he couldn’t function as a knight, would cost him about £10. His armour could total nearer £20. In 1397 Thomas, Duke of Gloucester owned armour worth £103. If a man were attendant at court he would need a fashionable gown, in silk or fur: it would certainly cost £10, and he could easily spend £50. The life annuity granted to Chaucer in 1367 (paid until 1388), of £13 6s 8d, would make him wealthy in the city of London, yet would barely support him at all at court. But as a courtier he was the recipient of largesse – robes, livery, gifts – and appointments to administrative offices from which, it was understood, he would profit. In 1389 Richard II made Chaucer Clerk of the King’s Works in London; in 1393 he presented him with £10 as a gift for good service, and in 1394 awarded him an annuity of £20.⁴ ⁴ Christopher Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social change in England c.1200–1520 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 215 (daily wage), p. 58 (ale), p. 208 (annual rent), p. 75 (monastery school), p. 76 (armour and horses), p. 77 (duke’s armour); A. V. B. Norman and Don Pottinger, English Weapons & Warfare, 449–1660 (London: Arms and Armour Press, 1979), p. 78 (chickens and eggs); A. R. Myers, London in the Age of Chaucer (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972), p. 198 (geese), p. 186 (Oxford), p. 53 (fashionable gowns); Douglas Gray, ‘Chaucer, Geoffrey (c.1340–1400)’, ODNB.
I was inspired to get this by my detour into the history of the Duke of Ireland a few weeks back, and also by my good friend Conrad’s reviews of the Penguin Monarchs series, of which this is one. It’s a very short and digestible book, which doesn’t waste time on chronology but just jumps straight into the question of what went wrong with Richard’s reign, assuming that the reader is familiar with the basics.
There are four chapters, each dealing with an area of kingship as practiced by Richard. In her prologue, Ashe makes the point that the court is not one of those four, because it was carried by the king wherever he went. The four areas are Parliament, the battlefield, the City of London (where Richard hand-picked his namesake Richard Whittington as Mayor), and the shrines connecting the King with God.
The overall thesis is that Richard was driven by a concept of kingship where he was divinely appointed to lead, and did not need to keep people like the other magnates and the citizens of London on board with anything that he did. He felt this very deeply and it informs the Wilton Diptych, which is a personal statement of his religious beliefs which we can only dimly understand. Of course, it was not sustainable; he made too many enemies and was overthrown and (probably) killed.
It is worth reflecting that British constitutional history was a close run thing. If Richard had been even slightly more politically adept, or luckier, he could have assembled a coalition of favourite lords combined with urban stakeholders to support his personal rule without institutional safeguards, provided that there was something in it for them; and that could have proved a lasting political settlement. He was in fact lucky in how the Peasants’ Revolt played out, and that the Lords Appellant in the late 1380s also pushed their cause too far and allowed him to regain control for another decade.
As it was, the fact that Parliament successfully overthrew him one and a half times (counting 1388 as well as 1399) consolidated the English constitutional theory of Parliament as a sovereign institution which constrained the monarch, to the point of deciding who the monarch could be. Richard was clearly not interested in constitutional theory. If he had been, he might have lasted longer.
One point that I wished the book had spent more time on: Richard’s reign was a really good time for the arts in England. This is the age of Piers Plowman, Chaucer, Wycliff, Gower and the Pearl poet; and as mentioned the Wilton Diptych and the funeral monument in Westminster Abbey that Richard built for his first wife and where he was eventually laid to rest. I don’t think you would find a similar flowering of the arts in England for a century or two either before or after. Richard himself doesn’t deserve a lot of credit for this, but it’s worth noting.
There is a page on Richard’s temporarily successful campaign in Ireland in 1394, and half a page on his unsuccessful return in 1399. These were the only visits to Ireland by a reigning English monarch between King John in 1210 and William III in 1690.
See here for methodology; to the best of my ability, I am excluding books not actually set in the current Republic of Korea, as noted below.
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
The Vegetarian
Han Kang
184,841
3,735
The Island of Sea Women
Lisa See
133,653
1,768
A Single Shard
Linda Sue Park
41,101
5,149
82년생 김지영 / Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982
Cho Nam-Joo
159,227
1,193
Almond
Sohn Won-Pyung
132,757
547
Please Look After Mom
Shin Kyung-Sook
43,760
1,577
If I Had Your Face
Frances Cha
54,291
738
The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War
David Halberstam
8,945
1873
Shamefully, I have not read any of these, though it is nice to see this year’s Nobel Prize winner for Literature topping the list.
I had to disqualify the top two books tagged as Korea on LibraryThing and Goodreads; they were Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, which is mainly set in Japan, and Crying in H Mart, by Michelle Zauner, mainly set in the USA. Further down the table, The Name Jar, by Yangsook Choi, is also set in the USA.
I have made an exceptional judgement call with Halberstam’s The Coldest Winter and I’m going to be listing it under both South Korea and North Korea, as I think both sides share evenly in the narrative.
The consensus from sources seems to be that the next four countries are Sudan, Uganda, Spain and Algeria, so I’ll take them in that order.
This is another in my run of rather forgettable films with a 2025 setting – at least, the start and end and several bits in the middle are set in 2025, though you’ll have picked up from the title that there is a lot of time travel in it. Here’s a trailer.
This is very skippable. Jason Scott Lee, best known for playing Bruce Lee in Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, is a time agent trying to prevent a rival time agent from changing history by, among other things, killing Hitler in 1940. (What would be so bad about that?) The plot is confused, the acting uninspired and the fight scenes done better elsewhere. Not especially recommended.
That wasn’t the first time that had happened, Gottfried’s grandmother told her. People often misjudged her grandson as slow and stupid. His cruel classmates christened him with a nickname that made her flush with rage: Gottfried the Fool. She knew that they were wrong about him, because he was so clever and earnest when his teachers called on him in class. But she had to admit that she, too, was often confused by his behavior.
A big thick prize-winning book by the late Steve Silberman, looking in detail at the history and practice of autism and neurodiversity, and how American society (and by extension, Western society) is coming to terms with making accommodations for people who, as he puts it, ʎlʇuǝɹǝɟɟᴉp ʞuᴉɥʇ.
There were a couple of chapters that really grabbed my attention. One was a section about Hugo Gernsback, who set up science fiction fandom as a safe space for people to be geeks and nerds, and whose own behaviour is recognisably on the spectrum now – for instance, his invention, the Isolator, allows you to concentrate on the text you are reading without sensory distraction and even has its own air supply.
The other striking chapter is very much less fun, looking at the early twentieth-century eugenics movement and at the Nazi policy of killing neurodiverse children. The psychiatrists responsible for these murders survived into successful post-war careers in Austria. It is pretty stomach-churning.
The story of the struggle for autism is generally pretty tough, though it has a hopeful end. I can see both sides; in the initial grief and confusion after B’s diagnosis back in 2000, I too was desperate to find a way that she could be ‘cured’, and I know of other parents in a similar situation who spent vast amounts of time, money and emotional labour on snake oil solutions for their children.
I fairly quickly came around to acceptance that our family was following our own path, and that society needs to adapt to our children’s needs more than the other way round. It’s a tough path all the same, and I felt many moments of solidarity with the people whose lives are discussed in Neurotribes; though the book doesn’t include much on those who are as cognitively disabled as our daughters.
The book also concentrates very much on the US policy landscape with only brief looks at what is going on in other counties (and nothing at all about Belgium). But I found it helpful in understanding my own thinking in any case. You can get it here.
This was my top unread non-fiction book. Next on that pile is The Light We Carry, by Michelle Obama.
For convenience, here is a reading list of other books I have read about autism:
We rewatched Midnight last night. I wrote previously that I couldn’t understand why this story didn’t get a Hugo nomination this year; I am still baffled.
I think it’s the best episode of the season, and certainly the best ever written by Russell T Davies. The sources are good sources – The Edge of Destruction, also written at the last minute by Old Who’s first script editor, putting the Tardis crew in a single set for 50 minutes; also I think Arthur C. Clarke’s A Fall of Moondust, where a group of tourists is trapped on the Moon, though without the sinister alien presence. (The eye of faith may detect inspiration also from Delta and the Bannermen, or The Leisure Hive, but personally I don’t.) Davies takes this and puts his own particular interpretation onto the situation, and for once his writing remains tight up to the last moment.
He’s helped by a couple of stellar performances – Lesley Sharp as Sky and the unnamed baddie, and Rakie Ayola as the hostess in particular; also from the past we have David Troughton as the Professor, and from the future Colin Morgan as Jethro. The scenes with Lesley Sharp first echoing, then synching with, then anticipating the other cast members’ lines are just incredible. (The only irritating moment is Rose’s brief appearance, which is difficult to reconcile with what we later find out she’s been doing – the similar moment in The Poison Sky is at least set in the present day.)
Quite apart from the creepiness of the basic concept, it’s a story where the Doctor’s normal cockiness and air of mystery, which normally seem to get authority figures magically co-operating with him, work against him; and his fellow passengers end up baying for his blood. It’s notable that they are not, particularly, authority figures; and the one who is nominally in charge, the Hostess, ends up being the one who saves them all. And the specific point where the Doctor’s credibility breaks down completely is when he tries to urge compassion, which rather more often works to shame other characters into cooperating. It’s a great subversion and stretching of the show’s usual assumptions.
After two stories where we’ve had the Doctor’s own intimate relations (his daughter and River Song) on screen, here we have the Doctor observing and interacting with several other family dynamics – Biff, Val and Jethro; the Professor and Dee Dee; Sky and her absent ex; perhaps also the Hostess and the crew. (Indeed, it might have been better if this had been shown between The Doctor’s Daughter and Silence in the Library, as was originally planned.)
Midnight was Russell T Davies’ nineteenth story for Who, which puts him ahead of the 18 stories written entirely or partly by Robert Holmes. [We are far past that now.] Andy Murray suggests (in his piece in Time and Relative Dissertations in Space) that we can see the frustrated attempts of the tall, fair-haired Chancellor Goth to hunt down and destroy the Doctor as the tall, fair-haired Holmes working through his own frustration with the central character of the show. Note that in this story the Doctor loses his authority over the other passengers and even his voice, and that he is actually killed off at the beginning of the next story; am I going too far in detecting a subconscious desire to get rid of him on the part of the executive producer and chief writer? (Not that there is the same physical resemblance between RTD and the villain of either story.)
Two further pieces of trivia from the BBC via Wikipedia: it is the first story since Genesis of the Daleks where the Tardis does not appear, and the only Who story where the villain is never named.
(Robert Holmes’ 18 stories: The Krotons, The Space Pirates, Spearhead from Space, Terror of the Autons, Carnival of Monsters, The Time Warrior, The Deadly Assassin, The Talons of Weng-Chiang, The Sun Makers, The Ribos Operation, The Power of Kroll, The Caves of Androzani, The Two Doctors, and The Mysterious Planet plus also The Ark In Space, The Brain of Morbius, Pyramids of Mars and the first episode of The Ultimate Foe. Of course, in screen time he is still well ahead of RTD, since all but one of the above were at least the equivalent of four 25-minute episodes.)
I also just rewatched 73 Yards, another of RTD’s best scripts, but I still think that Midnight has yet to be surpassed among his stories. (Though my favourite New Who story remains Blink.) Since then we’ve seen a couple of the actors elsewhere – Rakie Ayola, the hostess here, was Persephone in Kaos, and Ayesha Antoine, who is David Troughton’s sidekick Dee Dee here, has been Bernice Summerfield’s companion Ruth in the Big Finish audio series, and was also a lead in the DALEKS! webcast by James Goss.
Philip Purser-Hallard’s Black Archive is businesslike and looks at the reasons for the story’s success (including off the screen, live on stage). The first chapter, ‘A Failure of the Entertainment System’, recounts the very brief history of how the story was written, drawing comparisons with The Edge of Destruction, and touches on how it subverts the generally heroic and successful portrayal of the Doctor.
The second chapter, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, and Variations’, looks at each of the guest characters in the story, exploring what they are telling us about their society and about the Doctor. Purser-Hallard draws a comparison with RTD’s more recent drama Years and Years, which also has a very tight ensemble of central characters 9and which I also enjoyed very much).
The third chapter’s title is ‘He Started It, With His Stories’. Its second paragraph, with footnotes, is:
Moffat and his interviewer, Christel Dee, were considering the themes, concerns and narrative techniques that Doctor Who shares with its folkloric precursors, rather than its more superficial aesthetic trappings. The latter, being primarily futuristic and scientific, contrast with the magical otherworlds of traditional fairy stories, and the imagined pasts, whether agrarian or courtly, from which their protagonists hail². Marina Warner’s history of fairytale, Once Upon a Time (2014), speaks of these stories being constructed from ‘building blocks includ[ing] certain kinds of characters (stepmothers and princesses, elves and giants) and certain recurrent motifs (keys, apples, mirrors, rings and toads),’ and while most of these items may be found in specific Doctor Who stories, they are hardly emblematic of the series as a whole³. However, her identification of fairy tales as consisting of ‘combinations and recombinations of familiar plots and characters, devices and images’ describes Doctor Who’s overall approach just as well⁴. ² Given Doctor Who’s eclectic nature, individual stories may be identified as exceptions, but the overall point holds. ³ They can, however, be indicative of more fantasy-inflected stories: for instance, The Keeper of Traken (1981) includes a stepmother and a ring; Kinda (1982) features both apples and mirrors; and a mirror and a frog, if not a toad, appear in It Takes You Away (2018). ⁴ Warner, Marina, Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale, ppxx-xxi.
This chapter considers the (multiple) fairy tale and mythic roots of Midnight, with a look also at Arthur Miller’s The Crucible.
The fourth chapter, ‘Not a Goblin or a Monster’, looks at invisible evil in the context of Davies’ other work (Years and Years again, and The Second Coming) and also Steven Moffat’s story Listen.
The fifth chapter, ‘The Cleverest Voice in the Room’, looks at the less heroic aspects of the Doctor as a character and notes that some of the most popular Who stories actually show the central character in a less than positive light. Again, other RTD work is mentioned; I noted particularly A Very English Scandal., but Purser-Hallard also looks at how the Fourteenth Doctor stories form a coda to the Tenth Doctor era.
An appendix, ‘What’s the Next Stage?’, looks at three theatrical productions of Midnight, which out of the whole 61 years of the show’s history is surely the story best suited for a stage production.
So, a thought-provoking monograph on a great Who story; and when you unpick the reasons for why it is so great, the greatness is still there. You can (probably) get it here.
The conversion of England was thus effected by the landing of St Augustine in Thanet and other places, which resulted in the country being overrun by a Wave of Saints. Among these were St Ive, St Pancra, the great St Bernard (originator of the clerical collar), St Bee, St Ebb, St Neot (who invented whisky), St Kit and St Kin, and the Venomous Bead (author of The Rosary).
A cheerful return to an old favourite: the spoof version of English history, cantering through two thousand years with a series of unlikely and yet very probable misreadings. There’s not much more to be said; some of the humour has dated, but a lot of it remains very funny.
He also invented a game called “Bluff King Hal” which he invited his ministers to play with him. The players were blindfolded and knelt down with their heads on a block of wood; they then guessed who the King would marry next
I am particularly alert for Irish references, such as:
The Scots (originally Irish, but by now Scotch) were at this time inhabiting Ireland, having driven the Irish (Picts) out of Scotland; while the Picts (originally Scots) were now Irish (living in brackets) and vice versa. It is essential to keep these distinctions clearly in mind (and verce visa).
[King John] had begun badly as a Bad Prince, having attempted to answer the Irish Question by pulling the beards of the aged Irish chiefs, which was a Bad Thing and the wrong answer. N.B. The Irish Question at this time consisted of: (1) Some Norman Barons, who lived in a Pail (near Dublin), (2) The natives and Irish Chieftains, who were beyond the Pail, living in bogs, beards, etc.
Henry VII was very good at answering the Irish Question, and made a Law called Poyning’s Law by which the Irish could have a Parliament of their own, but the English were to pass all the Acts in it. This was obviously a very Good Thing.
[James I] also tried to straighten out the memorable confusion about the Picts, who, as will be remembered, were originally Irish living in Scotland, and the Scots, originally Picts living in Ireland. James tried to make things tidier by putting the Scots in Ulsters and planting them in Ireland, but the plan failed because the Picts had been lost sight of during the Dark Ages and were now nowhere to be found.
Meanwhile the Orange increased its popularity and showed themselves to be a very strong King by its ingenious answer to the Irish Question; this consisted in the Battle of the Boyne and a very strong treaty which followed it, stating (a) that all the Irish Roman Catholics who liked could be transported to France, (b) that all the rest who liked could be put to the sword, (c) that Northern Ireland should be planted with Blood-Orangemen. These Blood-Orangemen are still there; they are, of course, all descendants of Nell Glyn and are extremely fierce and industrial and so loyal that they are always ready to start a loyal rebellion to the Glory of God and the Orange. All of which shows that the Orange was a Good Thing, as well as being a good King. After the Treaty the Irish who remained were made to go and live in a bog and think of a New Question.
Gladstone .. spent his declining years trying to guess the answer to the Irish Question; unfortunately, whenever he was getting warm, the Irish secretly changed the Question…
It’s a firmly liberal approach: satirising the total lack of knowledge and misunderstanding of the neighbouring island by England’s rulers, and admitting that Irish policy failed for centuries. The same approach is not really shown to other places formerly part of the Empire.
Second volume in the story of the loving and kinky relationship between Alison and Lisa, this one mainly punctuated by flashbacks to Alison’s previous experiences with best friend and former lover Alan. Again, very tastefully done. You can get it here.
Current The Peshawar Lancers, by S.M. Stirling The Geraldines: An Experiment In Irish Government 1169-1601, by Brian Fitzgerald Forever Peace, by Joe Haldeman The Tudor Discover of Ireland, by Christopher Maginn and Steven G. Ellis
Last books finished The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins Tudor Court Culture, eds. Thomas Betteridge & Anna Riehl
Next books The Ripper, by Tony Lee The Roommate of Anne Frank, by Nanda van der Zee The Good Earth, by Pearl S Buck
