My books of 2024

Posted on 31 December 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

I read 287 books this year, the ninth highest of the twenty-one years that I have been keeping count, and 70,000 pages, which is thirteenth highest of the twenty-one. My reading pace has accelerated in the last few years, though this year it was braked a bit by being the Hugo administrator. (Not as much as in 2017 or 2019, though; I guess I’m getting used to it.)

121 (42%) of those books were by non-male writers, which is the third highest number and second highest percentage (only just – 42.16% this year, 42.17% last year, 41.89% in 2021).

30 (10%) were by non-white writers, which is the fifth highest of the twenty-one years in both cases.

Science fiction and fantasy

89 (31%) of these books were science fiction or fantasy, not counting Doctor Who books which I tally separately. This is the lowest number since 2019 (the last time that I was Hugo administrator) and the lowest percentage since 2017 (the first time that I was Hugo administrator).

Top SF book of the year:
My favourite sf novel in general this year was The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, by Shannon Chakraborty, a Hugo finalist about a pirate queen in a fantasy medieval Indian Ocean. I always say that the Indian Ocean is a corridor, not a barrier. (Not reviewed; get it here.)

Welcome rereads:
My absolute favourite Terry Pratchett novel is Small Gods which combines his typically well-aimed shafts of wit and satire with an actual growth narrative for the two main characters. (Review; get it here.)
Ursula Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest retains the passion of its attack on colonial wars of conquest, and seemed a particularly timely reread. (Review; get it here.)

Honorable mentions:
I had not previously read Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower, which is actually set in 2024 and 2025, also has a dire political situation with an extreme right-wing candidate getting elected president of the USA, but ends with a glimmer of hope. (Review; get it here.)
Some Desperate Glory, by Emily Tesh, is a great thoughtful anti-fascist novel, which won the Hugo to much acclaim. (Not reviewed; get it here.)
Among the other award finalists, I particularly liked Liberty’s Daughter by Naomi Kritzer, a full-spirited critique of libertarianism. (Not reviewed; get it here.)

The one you haven’t heard of:
Lost Objects, by Marian Womack, a collection of short stories many of which examine human reactions to environmental catastrophe. She has another collection coming out soon. (Review; get it here.)

The one to avoid:
What Might Have Been: The Story of a Social War, by Ernest Bramah. Conservative wet dream written in 1907, about the overthrow of Socialism in England in 1918. (Review; get it here)

Non-fiction

I read 86 (30%) non-fiction books, the same number as last year, equal third highest number and fourth highest percentage of the years I have recorded. As I go through the backlog of books acquired in previous years, it’s often the non-fiction that has sifted to the bottom of the pile; also I’m tallying the Black Archives and other Whovian lore here.

Top non-fiction book of the year:
The best non-fiction book I read this year was A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture, by Samuel Hynes, which looks in impressive and fascinating detail at the impact of the conflict on all branches of the arts in Britain, and vice versa. (Review; get it here.)

Welcome rereads:
Hiroshima, by John Hersey, the searing account of the consequences of the first atomic bombing of a civilian population. (Review; get it here)
1066 and All That, by W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman: Perhaps not strictly non-fiction, but presented as a hilarious reading. (Review; get it here)

Honorable mentions:
I’m being a bit self-indulgent with three honorable mentions in this category, but I read a lot of good non-fiction this year.
Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and How to Think Smarter About People Who Think Differently, by Steve Silberman, a really good compilation of what is known about autism and how and when we knew it. (Review; get it here)
Take Courage: Anne Brontë and the Art of Life, by Samantha Ellis, which Bronte experts regard with some suspicion; I found it really charming. (Review; get it here)
Fatal Path: British Government and Irish Revolution 1910-1922, by Ronan Fanning, which examines the process of Irish independence from the Westminster policy point of view. (Review; get it here)

The one you haven’t heard of:
I got a lot out of the post-colonial critiques of science fiction and fantasy from the collection Ex Marginalia: Essays from the Edges of Speculative Fiction, edited by Chinelo Onwualu. Nigeria is especially well covered, but the scope is global. (Review; get it here.)

The one to avoid:
Ten Years to Save the West, by Liz Truss. This is a not very good book written by a person who was completely unsuited to the job which she had so ruthlessly pursued. (Review; get it here.)

Doctor Who

Only 34 (12%) Doctor Who fiction books this year, which is a little below the average; but 65 (23%) Doctor Who books of all kinds, which is almost bang on the average, tenth out of 21 in both counts.

Top Doctor Who book of the year:
Simon Guerrier’s masterful biography, David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television, tells us about the life of one of the original show-running team in 1963, who wrote several of the best-remembered stories but died at only 51. (Review; get it here.)

Top Black Archive of the year:
It’s difficult to choose here, and I’ll give shout-outs also to Lewis Baston on The Sun Makers, Ian Z. Potter on The Myth Makers, Simon Guerrier on The Edge of Destruction and Philip Purser-Hallard on Midnight. In the end I vote for Dale Smith’s analysis of the flawed classic Talons of Weng Chiang, which confronts the problematic racism of the story head-on. (Review; get it here.)

Top novelisation of the year:
Doctor Who: Rogue, by Kate Herron and Briony Redman (the original TV writers), gives lots of new context to the TV story, which I already liked a lot anyway. Probably the best Fifteenth Doctor book of any kind so far. (Review; get it here.)

Top other novel of the year:
Warmonger, by Terrance Dicks – I had read this before, but failed to blog it. A really interesting reimagining of the Fifth Doctor / Peri relationship, drawing perhaps on Terrance Dicks’ own experience with the military. (Review; get it here.)

Top short fiction of the year:
In a very attractive set of six novellas published last year by Puffin, the outstanding contribution is The Angel of Redemption, by Nikita Gill – told from the point of view of a Weeping Angel, in verse. (Review; get it here.)

Best Doctor Who comic of the year:
I’ve had a good run of mostly Eleventh Doctor comics, and especially liked the most recently read, When Worlds Collide, by Tony Lee et al, which has an Ancient Britain story and then a doppelganger theme park thread. (Review; get it here.)

The ones you haven’t heard of:
Two lovely volumes reminiscing about the Blackpool exhibition – I read the first last year, but I think I should treat them as a pair. (Reviews here and here; get them for free here and here.)

What to avoid:
I won’t single out any particular Doctor Who book that I read this year as being worse than the others; there were a few disappointments, but nothing as bad as in the other sections of this post.

Comics

36 comics and picture books is the third highest of my annual tallies, though 13% is only the sixth highest percentage. (I’m counting in Ara Güler’s Istanbul, which is pretty visual.)

Top comic of the year:
Shubeik Lubeik, published as Your Wish is My Command in the UK, by Deena Mohamed; an alternative contemporary Egypt, where wishes are natural resources to be exploited. On the Hugo ballot; didn’t win. (Not reviewed; get it here.)

Welcome reread:
L’Affaire Tournesol / The Calculus Affair, by Hergé; one of the great Tintin albums, with action in Switzerland and the Balkans and also the first appearance of the annoying Séraphin Lampion / Jolyon Wagg. (Review; get it here in English and here in French.)

Honorable mentions:
Barnstormers: A Ballad of Love and Murder, by Tula Lotay and Scott Snyder, about two crazy kids flying across America in 1923 (review; get it here)
Monica, by Daniel Clowes, a much more serious tale of lost parents and shattered identity (review; get it here)

The one you haven’t heard of:
Return to Kosovo / Retour au Kosovo, by Gani Jakupi with great art by Jorge González, an even-handed exploration of a traumatised society. The English version is very difficult to get hold of, but the French original was published by mainstream firm Dupuis. (Review; get it here in French.)

The one to avoid:
Bea Wolf, by Zach Weinersmith and Boulet, a pointless tale of little girls and boys re-enacting Beowulf. Also an unsuccessful Hugo finalist. (Not reviewed; get it here.)

Non-genre

I had the sense during the year that I was reading more non-genre fiction than usual, but in fact the total number at 35 is spot on the median, and the percentage at 12% is a little lower.

Top non-genre fiction of the year:
The Cazalet Saga – see below.

Honorable mention:
Yellowface, by R.F. Kuang, short, grim, gruesome, funny and vicious about the reception and appropriation of Chinese culture in the US. (Review; get it here.)

Welcome re-read:
Tristram Shandy, by Laurence Sterne; It’s rambling, self-indulgent, full of references to things I know nothing about; and at the same time I love it. (Review; get it here.)

The one you haven’t heard of:
Creed Country, by Jenny Overton. Two teenagers do local history research in a corner of south-eastern England in the late 1960s. Their friendship, and their relationship with the past of their neighbourhood, are both beautifully drawn. (Review; get it here.)

The one to avoid:
The worst book of any kind that I read all year was Pook at College, by Peter Pook, a dull, sexist tale of the only male student at a teacher training college. No link for buying this, but here’s my review.

Plays and poetry

I read a total of eight of these, which is more than usual.

Top poetry or play of the year:
The best poetry I read all year was Emily Wilson’s thought-provoking translation of The Odyssey, by Homer, bringing a new and broader perspective to an exceptionally well-known work. (Review; get it here.)

Honorable mention:
The Cure at Troy, a verse playscript by Seamus Heaney, about engaging with and overcoming conflict and the past. (Review; get it here.)

Top book of 2024

My top book of the year is actually five books, of which I read two in 2023 and three this year: the Cazalet Saga, by Elizabeth Jane Howard, a gripping tale of an extended English family in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, as the previous certainty of inherited wealth slips away in the tide of social and political change: superb stuff and strongly recommended.

The Light Years (review; get it here)
Marking Time (review; get it here)
Confusion (review; get it here)
Casting Off (review; get it here)
All Change (review; get it here)

Previous Books of the Year:

2003 (2 months): The Separation, by Christopher Priest (review; get it here)
2004: (reread) The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien (review; get it here)
– Best new read: Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, by Claire Tomalin (review; get it here)
2005: The Island at the Centre of the World, by Russell Shorto (review; get it here)
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 (review; get it here)
2007: Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, by Alison Bechdel (review; get it here)
2008: (reread) The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition, by Anne Frank (review; get it here)
– Best new read: Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero, by William Makepeace Thackeray (review; get it here)
2009: (had seen it on stage previously) Hamlet, by William Shakespeare (review; get it here)
– Best new read: Persepolis 2: the Story of a Return, by Marjane Satrapi (first volume just pipped by Samuel Pepys in 2004) (review; get it here)
2010: The Bloody Sunday Report, by Lord Savile et al. (review of vol I; get it here)
2011: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbon (started in 2009!) (review; get it here)
2012: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Brontë (review; get it here)
2013: A Room of One’s Own, by Virginia Woolf (review; get it here)
2014: Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell (review; get it here)
2015: collectively, the Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist, in particular the winner, Station Eleven, by Emily St John Mandel (review; get it here).
– Best book I actually blogged about in 2015: The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, by Claire Tomalin (review; get it here)
2016: Alice in Sunderland, by Bryan Talbot (review; get it here)
2017: Common People: The History of an English Family, by Alison Light (review; get it here)
2018: Factfulness, by Hans Rosling (review; get it here)
2019: Girl, Woman, Other, by Bernardine Evaristo (review; get it here)
2020: From A Clear Blue Sky: Surviving the Mountbatten Bomb, by Timothy Knatchbull (review; get it here)
2021: Carrying the Fire, by Michael Collins (review; get it here)
2022: The Sun is Open, by Gail McConnell (review; get it here)
2023: Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman (review; get it here)

Tuesday and December books

Posted on 31 December 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

Last books finished

The Sea Lady, by H.G. Wells
Freshwater, by Akwaeke Emezi
Bellatrix, Épisode 1, by Leo
La mexicaine, by Madame Rattazzi (née Marie-Lætitia Bonaparte-Wyse)
Bellatrix, Épisode 2, by Leo
In Ascension, by Martin MacInnes
The Peacock Cloak, by Chris Beckett
Bicheville ou le Chemin du Paradis, by Madame Rattazzi (née Marie-Lætitia Bonaparte-Wyse)

December Reading

Non-fiction 5 (2024 total 86)
Authors of their Lives, by David Gerber
The Light We Carry: Overcoming In Uncertain Times, by Michelle Obama
Hollow Places, by Christopher Hadley
How To Stay Sane In An Age Of Division, by Elif Shafak
The Aztecs, by Doris V. Sutherland

Non-genre 3 (2024 total 35)
The Nightwatch Winter, by Jenny Overton
La mexicaine, by Madame Rattazzi (née Marie-Lætitia Bonaparte-Wyse)
Bicheville ou le Chemin du Paradis, by Madame Rattazzi (née Marie-Lætitia Bonaparte-Wyse)

Plays 1 (2024 total 3)
Collected Plays and Teleplays, by Flann O’Brien

SF 8 (2024 total 89)
The Word for World is Forest, by Ursula K. Le Guin
Aelita, by Alexei Tolstoy
The Hollow Places, by T. Kingfisher
The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, eds Yu Chen & Regina Kanyu Wang
The Sea Lady, by H.G. Wells
Freshwater, by Akwaeke Emezi
In Ascension, by Martin MacInnes
The Peacock Cloak, by Chris Beckett

Doctor Who 4 (2024 total 34)
The Force of Death (audiobook), by Andrew Lane
Palace of the Red Sun, by Christopher Bulis
Eden Rebellion, by Abi Falaise
Doctor Who: The Aztecs, by John Lucarotti

Comics 4 (2024 total 36)
When Worlds Collide, by Tony Lee et al
Sunstone, vol 3, by Stepan Sejić
Bellatrix, Épisode 1, by Leo
Bellatrix, Épisode 2, by Leo

5,700 pages (2024 total 70,000)
11/25 (2024 total 121/287) by non-male writers (Obama, Shafak, Sutherland, Overton, Rattazzi x2, Le Guin, ‘Kingfisher’, Yu/Yang, Emezi, Falaise)
4/25 (2024 total 30/287) by non-white writers (Obama, Yu/Yang, Emezi, Falaise)
3/25 rereads (The Word for World is Forest, Palace of the Red Sun, Doctor Who: The Aztecs)

261 books currently tagged unread, up 2 from last month, down 51 from December 2023.

Reading now
Caleb Williams, or Things as They Are, by William Godwin (group read)
Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories, ed. Ellen Datlow
The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy
A Kind of Spark, by Elle McNicoll
The Passionate Friends, by H.G. Wells

Coming soon (perhaps)
Doctor Who annual 2025
The Hypothetical Gentleman, by Andy Diggle
Killing Ground, by Steve Lyons
Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead, by Dale Smith
Fifty Years On, by Malachi O’Doherty
The Soul of a Bishop, by H.G. Wells
A Brilliant Void, by Jack Fennell
Burned, by Sam McBride
The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman, by H.G. Wells
I Who Have Never Known Men, by Jacqueline Harpman
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong
The Crown of Dalemark, by Diana Wynne Jones
Vagabonds!, by Eloghosa Osunde
Sorrowland, by Rivers Solomon
“The Ultimate Earth”, by Jack Williamson
Once and Future, vol 5: The Wasteland, by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora and Tamra Bonvillain
How I Learned to Understand the World, by Hans Rosling
De bondgenoten, by Brecht Evens
Of the Imitation of Christ, by Thomas a Kempis
Men at Arms, by Terry Pratchett
Lies Sleeping, by Ben Aaronovitch
A History of the Bible: The Book and Its Faiths, by Dr John Barton (2020)
The Mysterious Island, by Jules Verne
The James Tiptree Award Anthology 2, ed. Karen Joy Fowler
Nine Lives, by William Dalrymple
Ithaca, by Claire North

Palace of the Red Sun, by Christopher Bulis

Posted on 30 December 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Judd sat behind an imposing antique desk of heavy wood. It helped conceal the fact, not obvious when he was wearing battle armour, that although he had a fine physique, he was slightly under average height. He was wearing a formal suit loosened a little at the collar. On the desk before him several neat stacks of reports were arranged about a multi-function keypad. To one side was a monitor screen, angled so that Dynes’ cameras would get an oblique view of moving columns of text and changing images, without revealing any detail. On the bulkhead behind Judd lighting panels glowed brightly while the rest of the office was rather dimly lit. Even though there was no natural day or night onboard a spacecraft, it implied that the hour was late.

This is the last in my run of Sixth Doctor re-reads, and I guess typical rather than brilliant. The Doctor and Peri land on a garden planet where not all is as it seems; most of the apparent humans are holograms, an interplanetary dictator is on his way to take over, the robots are revolting, there’s a comedy journalist recording everything and a hidden princess. Entertaining enough, but not at the top of my list. You can get it here.

The best known books set in each country: Bangladesh revisited

Posted on 29 December 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

When I first did this list in June, the writer of the leading book actually set in Bangladesh was on bail following a politically motivated conviction for labor law violations, and facing a six month prison sentence. Now, at the age of 84, he is literally running the country as Chief Advisor to the Government (Chief Adviser is the Bangladeshi term for the leader of a civilian government that has not come to power through elections).

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty	Muhammad Yunus	10,230	1,303
The Newlyweds	Nell Freudenberger	9,430	567
A Golden Age	Tahmima Anam	5,561	718
The Love & Lies of Rukhsana Ali	Sabina Khan	9,034	399
Lajja: Shame	Taslima Nasrin	5,452	421
Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism	Muhammad Yunus	3,180	602
Rickshaw Girl	Mitali Perkins	1,934	804
The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide	Gary J. Bass	2,384	322

Much more so than any other country I have looked at, the literature that Goodreads and LibraryThing users identify with Bangladesh is largely about the emigrant experience, or about the Indian side of the Bengali-speaking zone. I have never had to exclude so many books to reach a total of eight that are actually set in the country I am considering, and even then I am not completely sure about three of the eight. I’m giving The Newlyweds and The Love & Lies of Rukhsana Ali passes because it sounds like a bit more than half of them are actually set in Bangladesh, though both have substantial chunks set in America; and The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide, by Gary K. Bass, describes the American government involvement with the Liberation War, but I’m giving it a pass because it is at least about Bangladesh.

I excluded no less than thirteen books which had been frequently given the tag “Bangladesh” by Goodreads and LibraryThing users. White Teeth, by Zadie Smith, Brick Lane and Love Marriage, by Monica Ali, and Bitter Sweets, by Roopa Farooki, are all set in London. Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie, is mainly set in India, though with a memorable section in Bangladesh. The Hungry Tide, by Amitav Ghosh, is set in the Sundarban islands, but mainly on the Indian side. The Henna Wars and Hani and Ishu’s Guide to Fake Dating, by Adiba Jaigirdar, are both set in Dublin. The Shadow Lines, by Amitav Ghosh again, is about the consequences of the creation of Bangladesh, but mainly told from Calcutta and London. Himalaya, by Michael Palin, looks at all of South Asia. In the Light of What We Know, by Zia Haider Rahman, is set in many different countries. The Startup Wife, by Tahmima Anam, and Ask Me No Questions, by Marina Budhos, are set in the USA.

I should say that these all sound like excellent books, and I’ll keep an eye out for them.

(Sorry not to see Sultana’s Dream scoring well; surprised not to see Tagore, but I guess he is not in the bestseller category.)

This exercise has also exposed some huge differences between LibraryThing and Goodreads, where a couple of authors have massively more fans on GR than on LT. (I’m giving the titles of the published English translations, rather than the English translations of the Bengali titles, if you see what I mean.) I’ve had this with a couple of other indigenous authors in other countries, but I don’t recall any previous case where visibility on Goodreads was around 200 times the LibraryThing score.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
জোছনা ও জননীর গল্প / Liberation	Humayun Ahmed	4,476	17
নন্দিত নরকে / In Blissful Hell	Humayun Ahmed	3,799	20
একাত্তরের দিনগুলি / Of Blood and Fire	Jahanara Imam	2,823	13

If these three books had LT owners in the same ratio to GR raters as most of the others, they would easily have made it into my top eight. জোছনা ও জননীর গল্প / Liberation and একাত্তরের দিনগুলি / Of Blood and Fire are both set during the Liberation War. নন্দিত নরকে / In Blissful Hell was written in 1970, so the war hadn’t happened yet; it is described in one review as a work of magical realism.

Next up: return to the Philippines.

Authors of their Lives: The Personal Correspondence of British Immigrants to North America in the Nineteenth Century, by David Gerber

Posted on 28 December 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Immigrants and those they left behind in their homelands formed a transnational culture of emigration, which, though defined ultimately by relationships that had existed in the homeland, united new and old worlds in the singular transnational space of the letter. The concept of culture is used in this context to suggest the mutually and continuously constructed ideas, attitudes, and feelings that united emigrants and those with whom they kept in contact in Britain. These aspects of culture were not fixed and formalized, but instead operated in a wide conceptual space where meanings that assist in making sense of the world were sought and formed, and served to guide behavior.¹ At the heart of this culture in the nineteenth century was personal correspondence, which was neither in the homeland nor the new world, but rather on paper and “in the mail,” and overcame temporal and physical boundaries. International migrants began to participate in this culture before leaving for their destinations. To the extent that they had read or heard the letters of other international migrants read, and been party to the excitement that surrounded the arrival of letters from distant places, they had already entered into thinking about the meanings of the exchange of international mail with those who were thousands of miles away and likely never to be seen again, and who were only known year after year through their writings.

¹ My understanding of culture is guided by the work of Clifford Geertz: Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), and Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983).

Way way back in the 1990s, I helped David Gerber out with some logistics around a research trip he was making to Belfast, it being more difficult to arrange such things from Buffalo, NY, than it is now. Some of that research (I guess) went into this book, published in 2006 and sent to us for Christmas 2018. I’m afraid that I have only now got around to reading it. David is now 80 – wishing him well.

This book makes the argument that while historians have a tendency to use letters from migrants to give colour to accounts of the societies that they have moved to, we should not forget that the migrants themselves were people, negotiating family relationships between continents, dealing with unprecedented situations in a new home, working through the economic troughs and peaks that the country they have moved to inflected on them. The first 60% sets up a general theoretical framework and common themes, and then the last four chapters look at four migrants in particular to show how their correspondence with relatives back home played out in real time.

There were two standout chapters for me. Chapter 4, the shortest chapter in the main text of the book, simply looks at the impact of the introduction of state postal services. In the earlier period, letter-writers had to rely on less formal methods of sending letters, and the recipient paid, which had a big impact on how often you might write, or to whom. The introduction of postage stamps in the 1840s (first in the UK, but rapidly followed elsewhere) revolutionised communication. It’s a fascinating case where it was not a change in technology, but a reform to the economic model for delivery of a service, that drastically changed how we maintain contact with people.

And the first of Gerber’s four case studies is the most poignant: Thomas Spencer Niblock, son of a clergyman, born in Hitchin in 1820, emigrated to Australia in 1844 soon after his father’s death; but it did not work out, and he returned to England the next year, with his newly acquired Australian wife Matilda and their baby Joseph. Four years later, he left for Canada, and the surviving correspondence records his increasingly miserable attempts to make a go of farming in London, Ontario, begging his brother and sister in England for more money.

Finally his brother seems to have told him that they could not support him any more, and Niblock and his family went back to Australia in 1852 to try his luck in the goldfields. When, astonishingly, that didn’t work out, they decided to move along the coast to Sydney; and on 15 May 1853 their ship was wrecked on Tullaberga Island near Cape Howe due to a navigational error. Most of the crew survived, but most of the passengers were drowned, including the whole Niblock family (they may also have had another baby by then – the records are not clear).

It’s intense and heavily rooted in academe, so perhaps not for the casual reader, but just reading it inspired me to go back to Jenny Overton’s Creed Country, and also to look into the fates of my own relatives who were lost at sea (one of whom, like the Niblocks, seems to have drowned in the Bass Strait in the 1850s), so I found it very thought-provoking. You can get it here.

This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is M Leuven Collectie Schilderijen, by Lorne Campbell.

The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, eds Yu Chen & Regina Kanyu Wang

Posted on 27 December 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third story (“What Does the Fox Say?”, by Xia Jia; unlike most of the stories in the anthology, the original is in English not Chinese):

You type this sentence word by word, and wait.

This is a collection of seventeen stories by female and non-binary Chinese writers, and five essays about translation and writing, recommended to me by Regina Kanyu Wang, one of the editors; it was a good recommendation. My favourite of the fiction is the title story, by Wang Nuonuo, translated by Rebecca F. Kuang, which looks at divine intervention in the seasonal cycle. There’s also a great riff on Douglas Adams intersecting with Ming China, “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe: Tai-Chi Mashed Taro”, by Anna Wu, translated by Carmen Yiling Yan.

I learned something from each of the non-fiction pieces, and the most interesting was the second last, “Net Novels and the “She Era”: How Internet Novels opened the door for Female Readers and Writers in China”, by Xueting Christine Ni, looking at how the digital era has eroded traditional publishing barriers in one particular case; it’s not difficult to see how this can apply to other fields of information as well.

All good stuff, and you can get it here.

This was at the top of my pile of unread books by non-white authors. Next on that stack is The Light We Carry: Overcoming In Uncertain Times, by Michelle Obama.

When Worlds Collide, by Tony Lee et al

Posted on 26 December 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second frame of third part:

Doctor: I really won’t **agree** with you! Too stringy! And I’ll keep **repeating**! Come on, come on! Why did I let Amy keep the **sonic screwdriver –**

Again, this unites a one-shot story with a three-parter, both by Tony Lee. We start with the Tardis going astray on its way to the 1966 World Cup final (though I think that Amy, being Scottish, might have had mixed feelings about that), and getting mixed up with a conflict between Anglo-Saxons and Vikings on the future site of Wembley stadium, which maybe fails to interrogate the full historical detail, especially as regards gender; Matt Smith of course in real life was captain of the youth team of Leicester City, before a back injury ended his football career and forced him into acting. The art is by the always reliable Mark Buckingham.

The rest of the book takes the Tardis crew to a world where they encounter various parallel versions of themselves, a trope that always appeals to me, and it turns out to be all part of a Truman Show-like entertainment; and there are Nazi Sontarans tied up with it all. Enjoyable writing and art by Matthew Dow Smith (as opposed to any other person with a similar name involved with Doctor Who). You can get it here.

Tuesday reading

Posted on 24 December 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

Last of these updates for the year (next week will cover the next 7 days, the whole month of December and the whole of 2024).

Current
Caleb Williams, or Things as They Are, by William Godwin (group read)
In Ascension, by Martin MacInnes
Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories, ed. Ellen Datlow
Freshwater, by Akwaeke Emezi
The Sea Lady, by H.G. Wells

Last books finished
The Aztecs, by Doris V. Sutherland
Collected Plays and Teleplays, by Flann O’Brien
The Nightwatch Winter, by Jenny Overton

Next books
The Peacock Cloak, by Chris Beckett
Bellatrix, Tome 1, by Leo
The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy

The Hollow Places, by T. Kingfisher

Posted on 23 December 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

When we closed up at six, he’d say, “Good job today, Carrot. Don’t know what I did without you.” Then he would go home and I would go next door to the coffee shop and leech on the Wi-Fi. If I could think of something fun to say, I’d update the museum’s social media. I had grandiose visions of overhauling the web page and doing more with it than the occasional blog post about the history of Feejee Mermaids, but I hadn’t quite gotten there yet. And you had to be careful when you posted pictures of skulls and taxidermy because there were always people who wanted to tell you that this made you a murderer and the moral equivalent of Ed Gein. My internet armor had been built up in the fanfic battlegrounds and was thus impenetrable, but Uncle Earl was a gentle soul, and I was afraid that someone might hurt his feelings.

One of Ursula Vernon’s books that I had somehow missed, this is about a young woman, recovering from divorce, looking after her uncle’s Wonder Museum and then discovering, together with the gay barista next door, that through a hole in the museum’s wall they have access to numerous other dimensions where Bad Things happen and other Bad Things live and they need to keep our world safe. It’s funny and scary, and the characters are very believably delineated. Another good one. You can get it here.

The Word for World is Forest, by Ursula K. Le Guin

Posted on 22 December 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter (not at all representative of the book, whose paragraphs are generally very long):

What had he failed to see?

A reread of course, but a timely and sobering story from more than half a century ago. It has been widely interpreted, both at the time and since, as a reaction to and fictionalisation of the Vietnam War; but in fact the circumstances are much closer to the wars waged against indigenous people in Africa, Asia and the Americas, with the explicit agendas of the destruction and replacement of the original population – a pattern from seventeenth-century Ireland to today’s Gaza. There’s not much grey here – even the humans who try for better relations with the Creechie natives of the planet are fatally compromised by their participation in the project of conquest and domination.

Le Guin was familiar with the conquest and oppression of Native Americans, and the attempted counter-resistance by the earth soldiers is reminiscent of Rhodesia’s UDI in 1965. The part that perhaps does speak to Vietnam is the impact of new information technology, just as media coverage in the 1960s had an effect on the dynamic of support for the war in America. Reporting on atrocity was not new – it goes back at least to Bartolomé de las Casas – but there is a good point about the impact on a conflict when long-suppressed truth starts to leak out.

Anyway, a brief, tough, important read. You can get it here.

This was both my top unread book by a woman, and my top unread science fiction book. Next on those piles are The Light We Carry, by Michelle Obama, and I Who Have Never Known Men, by Jacqueline Harpman.

The best known books set in each country: Brazil revisited

Posted on 22 December 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

See here for methodology. Back when I started this project, I was simply recording the top eight books tagged as being in each country by users of on Goodreads and LibraryThing, and then recording which didn’t really qualify. I have switched now to a system where I disqualify the relevant books before constructing my league table, but that still leaves four countries from before I changed the system where I have recorded fewer than five books actually set in that country: Brazil, Bangladesh, the Philippines and Ethiopia. So to make redress, I’m revisiting these earlier posts with an updated table.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
State of Wonder	Ann Patchett	193,493	6,374
The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon	David Grann	101,244	5,139
The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey	Candice Millard	70,908	3,669
The Seven Sisters	Lucinda Riley	152,628	1,360
Pedagogy of the Oppressed	Paulo Freire	36,064	4,436
The Hour of the Star	Clarice Lispector	40,261	2,202
The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas	Machado de Assis	33,496	2,582
My Sweet-Orange Tree	José Mauro de Vasconcelos	73,341	1,013

As noted in my previous entry, I am disqualifying a bunch of Paolo Coelho books: The Alchemist is set in Spain and Egypt, Veronika Decides to Die in Slovenia, Eleven Minutes in Switzerland, and both By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept and The Devil and Miss Prym are set in France. (Judging by The Alchemist, the only one I have read, none of them can be very good either.) Also John Grisham’s The Testament seems to be more than 50% set in America from an unscientific survey.

As also previously noted, nine of the eleven (long) chapters of Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder are set in Brazil. It’s a novel about a miracle cure found in the rain forest. The Lost City of Z is also about a quest in the rain forest, this time the non-fictional search for the lost British explorer Henry Fawcett. The River of Doubt is also about a journey through the rain forest. A bit of a theme here…

I did not disqualify any others than those mentioned before. The next six books on the table all seemed to be reasonably set in Brazil. The one edge case is Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which is a teacher training textbook, but it very explicitly draws on his experience of teaching in Brazil so I’m inclined to let it through. Freire is the top Brazilian writer on the list; the top novel by a Brazilian is nineteenth century classic The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas aka Epitaph of a Small Winner by Machado de Assis.

Next in reparation: Bangladesh.

Aelita, Queen of Mars

Posted on 21 December 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

I have been meaning to get around to watching the 1924 Soviet-era science fiction film Aelita, Queen of Mars, after being alerted to it by an exhibition at the Pompidou Centre in 2021, and realising that the centenary year was about to run out, I found it online (various versions are available to watch for free) and sat through it. Here’s a trailer which is launching a new score as well (which I didn’t hear):

I thought it was tremendous. The bits set on Mars apparently established the aesthetic for making things look futuristic for decades after; though I winced at the title character’s “Press your lips against mine, as you do on Earth!” There’s a real vision of another world, even if (spoiler for a film that is literally a century old) it turns out that it was all a dream. The scenes of revolution against the oppressive rulers of Mars are also well done.

But I found the scenes set in the Soviet Union in 1924 almost equally interesting. In the remote radio station where the signal from Mars is first picked up, there is a Bactrian camel chewing the cud in the background, like you have in radio stations. In St Petersburg, there are black marketeers and counter-revolutionaries, and a love triangle, and the lead actor plays two characters who meet up with each other (on split screen) several times. Characters comment on how hard life is in Russia with the ongoing war and the lack of supplies – in a film made in the first year of Stalin’s rule, that went on public release in many countries. It’s a fascinating window into a world when things seemed on the verge of fundamental change.

You can easily find it online with the search engine of your choice.

I thought I had better read the book as well, by Alexei Tolstoy, a relative of the more famous writer. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

За воротами до набережной Ждановки лежал пустырь. За рекой неясными очертаниями стояли деревья Петровского острова. За ними догорал и не мог догореть печальный закат. Длинные тучи, тронутые по краям его светом, будто острова, лежали в зеленых водах неба. Над ними зеленело небо. Несколько звезд зажглось на нем. Было тихо на старой Земле.

Beyond the gate, an empty lot stretched all the way to the bank of the Zhdanovka. On the other side of the river loomed the blurred outlines of trees on Petrovsky Island, tinged by the melancholy sunset. Wisps of clouds, touched by the sun’s glow, were scattered like islands in the expanse of greenish sky, studded with a few twinkling stars. All was quiet on old Mother Earth.

Translation may be by Constantin von Hoffmeister who wrote the prologue to my edition

Unlike the film, the book concentrates on the Martian voyage which is very definitely real, and the hero and his sidekick explore a lot more of the Martian surface, meeting various parts of the social structure and encountering new dangers. It’s better than the average English-language pulp planetary romance of the day, but not a lot better; and it does fill out one’s appreciation for the film, which is much superior. You can get it here.

The Force of Death, by Andrew Lane

Posted on 20 December 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

I have only just become aware of the Doctor Who Audiobook Originals range from the BBC, which looks very promising – I had listened previously to the First World War trilogy released in 2018 but hadn’t realised that they were part of an ongoing series, which I’ll have to work into my schedule somehow. This one caught my interest because it is set in Ireland – specifically in Galway in the 1890s. I winced at a couple of errors – Dún Laoghaire was Kingstown until 1920, and there is no County Connemara – but it’s a well enough done alien zombie menace story, apparently the fourth to feature the Eighth Doctor and companion James MacFarlane. And Dan Starkey, who is really tremendously versatile as an actor, does a great job of reading the text and bringing the characters to life. You can get it here.

Creed Country, by Jenny Overton

Posted on 19 December 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

“I have not any idea,” her mother said, jabbing at a potato. “Sarah, come in or go out, but either way shut that door.”

This is about two teenagers doing local history research in a corner of south-eastern England in the late 1960s. That may not hook you immediately, but it was a book that had a big impression on me when I was a kid. The two protagonists are Stephen the vicar’s son and an only child, and Sarah, in the middle of a large Catholic family, recently arrived from the North.

Stephen has been quietly transcribing the correspondence of the historical local landlords, whose sixteenth-century forebears were riven by family and religious tensions, and also enduring his parents’ efforts to inflict a social life on him; his friendship with Sarah goes through peaks and quite painful troughs, as they find the physical legacy of the Creed family in the countryside around them.

Some may find the supposed historical documents being recounted at length a bit too much (see spoilery review in Kirkus); I loved them as a younger reader, and I love them now, and perhaps it inspired me a bit in my own long-past historical research and my current project of putting my grandmother’s memoirs online here. But it’s also a good record of the fragility of friendship, as a teenager or at any other time of one’s life.

I also appreciated again the vivid and efficient portrayal of Stephen and Sarah’s very different families. Sometimes you can say a lot with a little; when an ancient tombstone is uncovered, and it turns out to be that of one of the key figures in the sixteenth-century part of the story, the chapter ends with “She [Sarah] looked at Stephen, and then quickly looked away again.”

Jenny Overton, the author, was a children’s books editor for most of her career and published a handful of novels, of which the best known is The Thirteen Days of Christmas, aimed at a younger age bracket than this but available with Shirley Hughes illustrations. There is a sequel to Creed Country, which I think concentrates on Sarah’s younger siblings, and I’ll report on it in due course.

You can get Creed Country here.

Drowned Ammet, by Diana Wynne Jones

Posted on 18 December 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

“It’s the way things are in this town,” Milda explained. “There’s hundreds of poor women willing to work their fingers into blisters. And the rich people have to have their curtains ready on time.”

I had not previously read this novel, the second in both publication and internal chronology order of DWJ’s Dalemark Quartet. It’s really very good. We’re in the time before Cart and Cwidder when the tyrannical and brutal earls of the South are fomenting social discontent and revolutionary action. As is usual with this writer, she tells the story of a fermenting society with magical underpinnings through three children, one of them the abandoned son of a radical activitst and the other two being grandchildren of the ruling Earl; they end up together in a quest narrative on a small boat escaping from the South to the North, where tangled personal politics and primal mythical forces await them.

A key part of the book is the role played by the demigods Old Ammet and Libby Beer, who start as historical figures in a poorly understood but faithfully executed annual ceremony, and end as enforcers of order and social justice when correctly invoked. A lot of Diana Wynne Jones’ books involve a journey to achieve enlightenment by the protagonists, and I think it’s really well realised here.

I’m going on to re-read The Crown of Dalemark, to see if I get more out of it after reading the previous three books, but I think Drowned Ammet stands very well on its own. You can get it here.

Tuesday reading

Posted on 17 December 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

Current
Caleb Williams, or Things as They Are, by William Godwin (group read)
Collected Plays and Teleplays, by Flann O’Brien
In Ascension, by Martin MacInnes
Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories, ed. Ellen Datlow

Last books finished
The Light We Carry: Overcoming In Uncertain Times, by Michelle Obama
Hollow Places, by Christopher Hadley
How To Stay Sane In An Age Of Division, by Elif Shafak
Eden Rebellion, by Abi Falaise
Doctor Who: The Aztecs, by John Lucarotti

Next books
The Aztecs, by Doris V. Sutherland
The Sea Lady, by H.G. Wells
Freshwater, by Akwaeke Emezi

Marriage, by H.G. Wells

Posted on 17 December 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

For example, there can be no denying there was one Marjorie in the bundle who was immensely set up by the fact that she was engaged, and going to be at no very remote date mistress of a London house. She was profoundly Plessingtonian, and quite the vulgarest of the lot. The new status she had attained and the possibly beautiful house and the probably successful dinner-parties and the arrangements and the importance of such a life was the substance of this creature’s thought. She designed some queenly dresses. This was the Marjorie most in evidence when it came to talking with her mother and Daphne. I am afraid she patronized Daphne, and ignored the fact that Daphne, who had begun with a resolute magnanimity, was becoming annoyed and resentful.

Now that I’m concentrating on clearing the shelves of unread books acquired in 2019, there’s going to be a lot of lesser-known H.G. Wells over the next couple of months. This is one of them. A young physicist marries a younger woman, and they undergo stresses and strains in their relationship (and have four children) before going off together to darkest Labrador to rebuild their relationship and their lives.

I really liked most of it. I thought the portrayal of two young people who make a lifetime commitment before either of them is really ready for it was very well done, to the point that it was difficult for me to read in some places. The intersection of the academic career, capitalism and family life speaks directly to my own experience, although in our case we found a different solution to a somewhat different situation.

If you can swallow the premise of them going off to Labrador to find themselves while leaving their young children behind in England, the descriptive parts of those sections are also very good. In 1967, Ian Calder, a dentist who was married to a cousin of mine, and his friend Peter Bromley died when their canoe capsized as they explored the Back River in the Northwest Territories; Bromley’s teenaged son survived, but the two older men’s bodies were never found. I must say that Wells’ portrayal of the Labradorean desolation resonated for me with my cousin’s account of the unsuccessful search for her husband’s body.

(Incidentally Wells does not use the word ‘Canada’ even once in this book; Labrador and Newfoundland did not become part of Canada until 1949, 37 years after Marriage was published, so he did not consider his protagonists to be having a Canadian adventure as such.)

What does spoil the book for me is that, stuck in Labrador, his protagonists (especially the bloke, when immobilized after an accident) start going on and on at tedious length to each other about philosophy and politics. Wells’ views on women in society are less enlightened than he obviously thought they were. I think Wells had perhaps reached the point where he thought his readers expected this kind of thing, and perhaps they actually did, but it’s a bit of a yawnfest for us 112 years later. So not quite top marks, which otherwise the depiction of the protagonists’ emotional development in England and their travails in Labrador would have deserved.

You can get it here.

This was my top unread book by H.G. Wells. Next on that pile (also next in publication order) is The Passionate Friends.

The Deep State of Europe: Welcome to Hell, by Basil Coronakis

Posted on 16 December 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

The Peloponnesian War was the first real world war in human history. It lasted 29 years and was fought on three continents, Europe, Africa and Asia, involving the biggest part of the then-known western world. The war was fought between two city-states, Athens and Sparta (Lacedaemon) and it was also the first civil war in history. All combatant parties were speaking Greek.

I knew Basil Coronakis from his work as founder of the eccentric Brussels newspaper New Europe, no longer what it once was; Basil himself died in 2021 at the age of 82, but he had given me this book in 2016, soon after publication. Unfortunately I then mislaid it, and only recently found it (literally) at the back of an inaccessible shelf.

Rather like Basil himself, the book eloquently and discursively describes what he thinks is wrong with the EU. Like a lot of us, he did not see Brexit coming, and this book published two months before the referendum assumes that the UK / France / Germany axis will continue to run the EU in perpetuity. He reckoned that the EU was deeply damaged by the Eastern enlargements of 2004 and after, but does not really explain why.

He goes into quite intense detail on some of the cases of maladministration and outright corruption that he uncovered as a journalist. His central point, that EU officials enjoy the comforts of a privileged lifestyle where their decisions affect hundreds of millions, and could perhaps be more helpful to those who question it, surely goes without saying.

I’m not as thoroughly convinced as Basil was that the EU is fatally wounded or unreformable, but I’ve come across enough troubling cases in my own work to feel that he had a good point about continued vigilance. I feel that this would be a useful read for supporters of the European project, to see the criticisms of a former insider and check against their own gut feelings. The second (2017) edition has no doubt been improved; you can get it here.

The Harvey Girls, by Samuel Hopkins Adams; and the Judy Garland film

Posted on 15 December 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

I decided to bite the bullet and read this, because I am thoroughly ear-wormed by Judy Garland’s hit from the film-of-the-book, “On the Atcheson, Topeka and the Santa Fe”:

The film is based on a novel by Samuel Hopkins Adams, published a few years earlier in 1942, and like the film set in the 1890s. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

“Your employment card shows experience,” he remarked with an effect of slight incredulity.

I found it terribly charming. The three central characters are young women who go out to Arizona from the Midwest and the East to work in one of the Harvey House chain of restaurants in the fictional town of Sandrock. This was a chain where the waitresses were relentlessly chaperoned and had to sign contracts for six months or a year, basically bargaining away their freedom for a steady income and the chance to meet lots of potential men in a safe environment.

The tone of the book is affectionately satirical. I think if I had been in a more grumpy mood when I read it, I would have found that annoying, but I wasn’t and I didn’t. The girls have to deal with the standard clichés of prospectors, ranchers, sex workers, the evil judge, an English aristocrat who has somehow got lost, and their own upbringings and expectations; one of them has been brought up in an evangelical cult and is Breaking Free.

“I wonder what it would be like to be a carnal snare,” she said to herself, and instantly suppressed the frightening and tempting hypothesis.

It’s a violent book – about a third of the named characters have been killed off by the end, and the threat of coercion lurks ominously in the background. But it’s also a rather cheerful interpretation of the Western legend, by a man but from the women’s point of view. There is a lovely postscript when the survivors get together fifty years later, in the present day (ie the 1940s), making the point to contemporary readers that the Wild West was well within living memory.

Of course the Western genre is thoroughly racist. I think I spotted precisely one black character, and there is a Chinese laundryman in Sandrock (though we are told in the epilogue that his grandchildren have totally assimilated). Native Americans are portrayed only as potential rapists. But it’s also a genre about women’s empowerment, as I have noted before.

The book is available on the Internet Archive, now that that is working again; if you want a hard copy for a huge price you can get it here (please do; I get commission). I had previously come across the author as the writer of the short story that was adapted into the excellent early Oscar winner It Happened One Night, starring Cary Grant and Claudette Colbert, and will keep an eye out for more of his work as it becomes available.

Of course, having read the book I really had to watch the film as well. One thing that struck me immediately is that although the YouTube-friendly cut of “On the Atcheson, Topeka and the Santa Fe” starts with Judy Garland emerging from the train that brings her to Sandrock, in fact there is a whole five minutes of song before that, started off by the one credited black actor in the movie, Ben Carter who plays John Henry, the barman in the Alhambra. (Sadly, he died aged 39 later that year.) Here is the whole thing for your delectation and delight – and it is delightful. Judy Garland did her first two and a half minutes here in a single take.

The girl from the crazy evangelist cult in the book is just another one of the girls in the film (played by Cyd Charisse, in her first speaking role) and that nobody actually dies (unlike in the sanguinary novel). Also Angela Lansbury is the lead among the bad girls across the road (and I think the only one who gets any lines), and Ray Bolger, reunited with Judy Garland from The Wizard of Oz, does a great turn as the blacksmith who doesn’t actually like horses.

Virginia O’Brien got written out during filming because her pregnancy was impossible to conceal (and she gets one of the good songs as well just before she disappears). Of course the whole thing is firmly wedded to the white colonialist narrative of the American West – a little more so than the book if anything. the Native Americans in the film are silent and passive, there is the one black character and no Asians.

But at the same time, at a moment historically when women were being squeezed back out of the American workforce, this is a story about women carving out their own space in American history and fighting back against men who try and put them in their place. The end of the film sees the ‘respectable’ Harvey girls reconcile with the sex workers across the road to defeat male violence and promote true love. There’s a lot going on here.

1946 was a tremendous year in film. I really liked the Oscar winner, The Best Years of Our Lives, but that year also saw It’s A Wonderful Life and The Big Sleep, neither of which I have seen but both of which are generally rated as more memorable. The Harvey Girls was a pleasant winter’s evening diversion, and I recommend it.

The best known books set in each country: Iraq

Posted on 15 December 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

See here for methodology. I am excluding books not actually set in the current borders of Iraq, but there was only one of these this time.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners
The Epic of Gilgamesh	(Anonymous)	109,102	10,282
American Sniper	Chris Kyle	135,061	3,557
Murder in Mesopotamia	Agatha Christie	62,876	4,129
They Came to Baghdad	Agatha Christie	22,814	2,852
The Yellow Birds	Kevin Powers	26,163	1,880
Pride of Baghdad	Brian K. Vaughan	25,132	1,704
Redeployment	Phil Klay	24,641	1,510
Generation Kill	Evan Wright	19,330	1,626

Well, I was worried that this list would be completely dominated by war porn, telling the story of people who know Iraq only through having been been sent there in a brutal and illegal invasion, but in fact I am delighted that a real indigenous epic, possibly the earliest known work in the sff genre, wins this week; also amusing to have two Agatha Christies in the top four.

I disqualified Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, by Ben Fountain, because although it is about the recent Iraq war, it is mostly set in Texas, as is the film.

The top book on my list by an Iraqi writer is Frankenstein in Baghdad, by Ahmed Saadawi, which sounds rather good. (Gilgamesh was probably written by a local, but millennia before the concept of ‘Iraqi’ had any meaning.)

Next up: Argentina, Afghanistan and Yemen. (Yep, despite everything, Yemen has a bigger population than Canada or Poland.)

Set in 2025 #14: The Nikopol Trilogy, by Enki Bilal

Posted on 14 December 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second frame of third page of vol 1, A Bedlam of Immortals:

Second and third frames of third page of vol 2, The Woman Trap:

Second frame of third page of vol 3, Cold Equator:

I first read the first part of this in my survey of SF set in 2023. I wrote then:

Published as La Foire aux immortels in 1980, this is set in a near-future Paris which is basically independent, France having collapsed as a state, and run by the fascist mayor Choublanc (Bunglieri in my translation) who is now facing re-election. The suburbs are decaying and run by local gangs. Everyone reads their own preferred news bulletins and information is therefore politically fragmented – an accurate anticipation in some ways.

Less accurately (probably – but who knows?), a giant floating pyramid inhabited by the gods of ancient Egypt has materialised over central Paris, and won’t go away unless supplied with fuel. Meanwhile Alcide Nikopol, a former astronaut who has spent thirty years frozen in suspended animation in orbit, returns to the city. His leg breaks off but is repaired in a rush job by the Horus, who allies with him against his fellow deities to shake up the politics of Paris in 2023.

It’s political and passionate, and fits in with the other lefty French-language 1980s comics which I read a few years back, Les Chroniques du Fin du Siècle by Santi-Bucquoy (Autonomes, Mourir à Creys-Malville, Chooz). It’s less ideological, but similar in the sense of the corruption and decay of the ruling classes, and the need for revolutionary action to bring about a better state of affairs. And the art is riveting.

Though also worth noting that the ice hockey team from Bratislava all speak Russian and their uniforms carry the initials ЧССР – not only did Czechoslovakia stay together in this version of 2023, it was also apparently annexed by the Soviet Union, which is still going strong. Bilal’s mother was Czech, so he knows perfectly well that Russian is not spoken much in Bratislava, nor is the Cyrillic alphabet used much there. (There would have been more of it in 1980 than now, but that’s not saying a lot.)

The second part is set in 2025, but I found reading it that the third part is set in 2034. So it’s only The Woman Trap (La Femme Piège) that concerns my 2025 project. It introduces the iconic character of Jill Bioskop, who is much more interesting than either Nikopol or his son (who looks conveniently identical to him). The art is great but the plot kinda weird, as Jill encounters various men, including the god Horus and the two Nikopols, and finds a fax machine that sends her reports back in time to 1993. (It’s difficult to judge whether a time-bending fax machine is less or more realistic than a fax machine that actually still works in 2024.)

The third part, Cold Equator (Froid Équateur), rather lost me; it’s mostly set in an African city under the rules of the sinister KKDZO, Nikopol gets into a tremendously violent chess-boxing match, and a new woman character, Yéléna the geneticist, forms a rather unexplained connection with Jill. This seems to be all about Stuff Happening with not much clue as to why. Maybe I was just tired.

Anyway you can get the three in English translation in a single volume here.

Set in 2025:
Television: The Outer Limits: The Duplicate Man (1964)
Film: Endgame (Bronx lotta finale) (1983); Future Hunters (1986); Futuresport (1998); Timecop 2: The Berlin Decision (2003)
Novels: 334 (1972); Titan (1979); The Running Man (1982); The Lake at the End of the World (1988); Tom Clancy’s Net Force Explorers: Virtual Vandals (1998); A Friend of the Earth (2000); The Peshawar Lancers (2002)
Comics: The Nikopol Trilogy: The Woman Trap (1986); Superman & Batman: Generations III #2: Doomsday Minus One (2003)

2024 overnight meme

Posted on 14 December 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

List the places where you spent a night away from home in 2024; indicate non-consecutive stays with an asterisk. This is the twentieth successive year that I have made this list. I’m not expecting any further trips this year.

* Dublin Airport, Ireland (ie hotel at the airport, I wasn’t sleeping on the concourse)
Prague, Czechia
* Glasgow, Scotland
* Los Angeles, USA
Telford, England
Bratislava, Slovakia
Belfast, Northern Ireland
Sheffield, England
Antwerp, Belgium
* Ferry between France and Ireland, and back
Loughbrickland, Northern Ireland
Washington DC, USA
* London, England
Ljubljana, Slovenia
Bled, Slovenia
Zgornji Brnik, Slovenia
Hythe, England
Paris, France
Prishtina, Kosovo
Tbilisi, Georgia

That’s 20 places, same as last year. (Counting the two overnight ferries on the same route, but not the two overnight plane flights.) It’s bang on the historical median since I started counting in 2005. (High – first two years in my current job, 2015 and 2016; low – the plague years of 2020 and 2021.)

Those 20 places were in 12 different countries, as opposed to last year’s 9. (No new countries this year, as compared to two last year.) I also changed planes in Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Türkiye, and had a day trip to Luxembourg, so that’s a total of 18 countries, beaten by only three of the fifteen years where I have tracked that number too.

Year	Overnights	Countries visited
2024	20	18
2023	20	12
2022	15	14
2021	7	5
2020	8	11
2019	23	14
2018	23	20
2017	20	15
2016	29	23
2015	28	21
2014	15	15
2013	17	11
2012	16	14
2011	11
2010	25
2009	14
2008	17	16
2007	24	17
2006	25
2005	21

Thanks to not going to Asia, this year’s map fits more easily onto a page than last year’s:

Ascension of the Cybermen & The Timeless Children, by Ryan Bradley

Posted on 13 December 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

When I first watched the two-part ending of the second Jodie Whittaker season, I wrote:

I was tremendously excited by one aspect of the first episode – no single minute of TV Doctor Who had ever previously been set in Ireland, as I have previously written. Of course, with the revelation of the second part, it turns out that there is still no moment of Doctor Who set in the “real” Ireland, is the one that exists in the same universe as the Doctor and the Tardis rather than just being in the Doctor’s imagination. Again, as someone who saw The Brain of Morbius first time round, I’m not unhappy with the disruption of what a lot of people thought was established continuity.

Rewatching it, I felt that there was a bit too much telling and not enough action. If the real point of the story is the true nature of the Doctor, why are we worrying about the Cybermen? (Except that they are obviously a Bad Thing.) But again, I enjoyed the Irish sections in the first episode, and the revelation of the Doctor’s origins in the second.

Ryan Bradley’s Black Archive on the story is longer than usual, but has only three chapters, plus an introduction and conclusion, so that’s a bit of a variation on the usual format. In the introduction, ‘Everything You Know is About to Change’, he sets out his stall: he believes that Chibnall’s agenda as show-runner always was to have the Doctor experience the ‘ego-death’ of psychedelia, and that the story considered here draws heavily on the story of the (real-life) CIA’sa MK-Ultra brianwashing project. These are strong claims.

But in the first chapter, ‘The Harp That Once’, he diverts from those issues to one that is very close to my own heart: the question of how Doctor Who treats Ireland, and especially how Ireland is treated in this episode. I have written myself (at length here in 2018, abbreviated and updated here in 2019 a few months before Ascension of the Cybermen was broadcast) about Ireland in the show. Before getting into Bradley’s analysis, I’ll recapitulate my own: I believe that TV Who doesn’t go to Ireland for much the same reason as it doesn’t go to the Holocaust, or to other historical atrocities: these are topics too controversial for a family show.

Chibnall did nibble at the edges here, with Rosa and Demons of the Punjab, but I would argue that these are different cases – Rosa Parks’ heroism is not remotely controversial these days, and the worst aspects of the 1947 Partition are somewhat sanitised by telling it as the story of one rural family, rather than the urban massacres. It’s also worth noting that Chibnall never returned to that semi-historical format after his first season: The Haunting of Villa Diodati is not presented as historical fact, let alone Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror or War of the Sontarans.

There are more, but still not many, references to Ireland in spinoff novels and comics, and they are generally unsatisfactory – note especially the First Doctor era villain Questor.

Audio is a different matter. There are no less than six Big Finish plays and a BBC Audio Original which are entirely set in Ireland. These go to places where I don’t think TV Who could go – Cromwell’s atrocities; the Famine. Of course, for audio it’s very easy to portray an Irish setting by simply hiring actors with the right accent; TV has to try much harder with the locations (and even here, the relevant bits of Ascension of the Cybermen are filmed in Wales, but indicated as Ireland by diddly-dee music).

Ryan Bradley, like me, is from Northern Ireland, and in this first chapter he explores the conception of Ireland in British culture and in Doctor Who. He points out that Ashad the semi-Cyberman is actually played by a Northern Irish actor, Patrick O’Kane, and draws a parallel between Ashad’s half-transformed nature and Ulster Unionism, or indeed Northern Ireland itself, constructed political concepts which have outlived their original purpose. Ko Sharmus in this story is also played by an Ulsterman, Ian McElhinney.

He goes on to look at some of the previous mentions of Ireland in Old Who, including the Gallifrey joke, and makes the point (which I had missed) that in Terrance Dicks’ novelisation of Terror of the Autons, Harry Towb’s Northern Irish character McDermott is transformed into a ‘stocky Northcountryman’. He misses a few other examples: Casey in Talons of Weng-Chiang, the less obvious case of Clark in The Sea Devils, and the fairly major characters of McGillop in Day of the Doctor, Morgan Blue in Into the Dalek and Angstrom in The Ghost Monument. (I’ll forgive him Bel in Flux, as it post-dates 2020.)

He looks at the linkage between Frankenstein and Ireland, including Tenniel’s 1882 cartoon depicting Parnell as Frankenstein and the Fenians as the monster. Here he misses an important point – Chapter 21 of Mary Shelley’s novel (plus the end of Chapter 20 and the start of Chapter 22) are actually set in Ireland, as Frankenstein gets shipwrecked on the west coast and imprisoned by the local authorities.

He then looks at law enforcement, especially the dubious aspects of the history of the Garda Síochána in Ireland (more briefly also the RUC), and at Chibnall’s previous depictions of (British) law enforcement in Broadchurch and Born and Bred. To my surprise my great-great-uncle is mentioned – not one of my Irish family connections (and my great-great-grandfather James Stewart actually was an Irish policeman), but the former US Attorney-General, George W. Wickersham, who chaired the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement in 1929-31. His report is mainly remembered as giving the Hoover administration a ladder to climb down from Prohibition, but it made many interesting findings on police brutality and corruption as well.

But, perhaps because of his concentration on the Gardaí (and to a much lesser extent the RUC), Bradley misses what is surely the most spectacular portrayal of Irish law enforcement in science fiction and fantasy: Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, which also features human beings turning into machines. (Well, bicycles anyway.) The Third Policeman himself is clearly in the old RIC rather than a Garda, and the novel is set firmly in the Irish Midlands rather than on the coast, but I’d have thought it worth a mention.

[Edited to add: The author himself got in touch to tell me that references to Frankenstein and The Third Policeman were cut from his draft for reasons of space.]

Having said all that, the chapter is very rich in detail and references, and while there are some things that I would have liked to see included, there are others that were new to me, and I found it all very thought-provoking. I don’t think I have ever before written 800 words on a single chapter of a Black Archive (or indeed of any other book).

The second chapter, ‘Any Idiot Can Make Themselves Into a Robot’, starts by looking at Ashad in the context of Bradley’s overall themes of loss of self and hybridization, and briefly notes poor old Lisa in the Torchwood episode Cyberwoman, before moving on to absorption of personalities in Chibnall’s other work, with reference also to Robert Graves and to the First Doctor story The Savages.

The third chapter, ‘Half Sick of Shadows’, looks at what we learn here about the Doctor. Its second paragraph is:

The story has been critiqued for being a ‘scroll through a newly updated Wikipedia page’, but it essentially creates new sections on that page with entirely blank or fragmented entries under them³. Paradoxically, we know more and, perhaps more significantly, less about the Doctor than we previously knew. Their home planet, their species, the number and order of their lives, are all unknown now. Whether audiences should know more or less about the Doctor’s apparent home and past has long been a subject of spirited debate⁴. In one of the most quietly important moments in Ascension of the Cybermen, the Doctor tells Ravio, ‘Don’t need your life story’. While this appears as an oddly self-aware jab at the ill-served side characters of both this story and the Chibnall era as a whole, it anticipates the central issue that the Doctor wrestles with before deciding – both here and at the end of Flux – that she doesn’t need to know everything about her own life story either.
³ Moreland, Alex, ‘Doctor Who Review: The Timeless Children’.
⁴ See Howe, David J, and Stephen James Walker, Doctor Who: The Television Companion, pp313-14.

I’ll be honest, this one lost me a bit in discussion of the Buddhist concept of anattā, Timothy Leary, Aldous Huxley, Chibnall’s previous work (again) and She-Ra, among others, but it succeeded in convincing me that the story as a whole is semiotically much thicker than perhaps I first appreciated. (Which maybe makes up for it not being better television.)

A brief conclusion argues that the story is “worth ruminating on”, and I think the book as a whole makes that argument well, though I also think Bradley goes on about the CIA’s MK-Ultra programme at unnecessary length. You can get it here.

Next up: The Aztecs, by Doris V Sutherland.

What Might Have Been: The Story of a Social War, by Ernest Bramah

Posted on 12 December 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

‘Don’t ask me, sir,’ replied the harassed man, who had just extricated himself with difficulty from the embrace of a Bessarabian refugee who wanted 237 AA 15 r 3 b Street. ‘All I know is that this is D Street that we’re in—and I believe it, straight. If I was you, I should make a cast up by the Marble Arch.’ He had once upon a time been in the old City police force and still retained traces of a courteous bearing.

I had read a collection of Bramah’s Kai Lung stories in 2015, spotted this going for sale at Eastercon in 2019, and bought it as a potentially interesting future history. It’s pretty horrible actually. Written in 1907, it is set in 1918 after a Socialist government has come to power in the UK (and Ireland has Home Rule); the lefties turn out to be disastrous at actually governing (for certain values of ‘disastrous’) and the forces of conservatism mount a successful campaign of civil disobedience to overthrow the democratically elected ministry, rather as the Unionists did in Northern Ireland in 1974. The book ends with the happy reform of the franchise to restrict it to men with more than £10 to their name, with the extra provision that if you are rich you get more than one vote; this is considered to be a Very Good Thing. Meanwhile in Ireland,

The Parliament sitting at College Green deemed the moment opportune for issuing a Declaration of Independence and proclaiming a republic. Three years before, all Irishmen had been withdrawn from the British army and navy on the receipt of Dublin’s firmly-worded note to the effect that since the granting of extended Home Rule, Irishmen came within the sphere of the Foreign Enlistment Act. These men formed the nucleus of a very useful army with which Ireland thought it would be practicable to hold out in the interior until foreign intervention came to its aid. Possibly England thought so too, for Mr Strummery’s Ministry contented itself with issuing what its members described as a firm and dignified protest. Closely examined, it was discoverable that the dignified portion was a lengthy recapitulation of ancient history; the firm portion a record of Dublin’s demands since Home Rule had been conceded, while the essential part of the communication informed the new republic that its actions were not what his Majesty’s Ministers had expected of it, and that they would certainly reserve the right of taking the matter in hand at some future time more suitable to themselves.

Irish independence is of course portrayed as a Bad Thing.

The pace of the book is energetic, but the politics so repulsive that I cannot really recommend it. If you still want to, you can get it here.

This was both my top unread book acquired in 2019 and the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on both lists is The Peacock Cloak, by Chris Beckett, which I am certain I will enjoy a lot more.

Doctor Who: Rogue, by Kate Herron and Briony Redman

Posted on 11 December 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

When I first wrote up this year’s Doctor Who episodes, I wrote:

And the fourth in a good run of four episodes was Rogue, in which it turns out that aliens in the Doctor Who universe are also fans of Bridgerton. This had particularly good emoting from Ncuti Gatwa, suddenly taken by feelings for Jonathan Groff’s Rogue, but also had Millie Gibson playing Ruby pretending to be an alien pretending to be Ruby, and getting away with it. The contrast between spaceship and 1813 was well done.

Jonathan Groff of course was the very first King George in Hamilton, and so his voice was the first heard by the audience. I felt that (unlike Jinkx Monsoon) he avoided chewing the scenery here. And I also cheered for Indira Varma, the Duchess here, but previously seen by me in Game of Thrones and the first season of Torchwood.

Re-watching before reading the novelisation, I felt again that as an episode it hangs together very well, even if the imminent peril seems to slightly come out of nowhere (which, let’s face it, is hardly unusual in Doctor Who). Millie Gibson is really spectacularly good. There is, however, one costume that doesn’t really do it for me.

The novelisation is by the writers of the TV episode, Kate Herron and Briony Redman. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

It had been a good night, all in all, but none of it could have prepared Ruby Sunday for a party like this. This was the kind of party she’d dreamed of.

As well as the efficient and effective transfer of script to page, we get lots more back story about Rogue himself and the lover who he lost on a previous mission, and a little more on the Chuldur. Rogue’s ship is named as the Yossarian, perhaps as a nod to Catch-22, though I note also that there is a London band with that name. The book has a lot of humorous flashes as well, reminiscent of Douglas Adams but not trying too hard to be him. This is the best Fifteenth Doctor book so far. You can get it here.

Tuesday reading

Posted on 10 December 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

Current
Caleb Williams, or Things as They Are, by William Godwin (group read)
Hollow Places, by Christopher Hadley
The Light We Carry: Overcoming In Uncertain Times, by Michelle Obama
Collected Plays and Teleplays, by Flann O’Brien

Last books finished
The Hollow Places, by T. Kingfisher
When Worlds Collide, by Tony Lee et al
The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, eds Yu Chen & Regina Kanyu Wang
Authors of their Lives, by David Gerber
Palace of the Red Sun, by Christopher Bulis
Sunstone, vol 3, by Stepan Sejić

Next books
Eden Rebellion, by Abi Falaise
The Sea Lady, by H.G. Wells
Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories, ed. Ellen Datlow

Yanks Behind the Lines: How the Commission for Relief in Belgium Saved Millions from Starvation During World War I, by Jeffrey B. Miller

Posted on 10 December 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

According to historian Branden Little, approximately 120 American relief committees were operating in 1914, including organizations such as “Father De Ville’s Milk Fund for Belgian Babies; the Children of Flanders Rescue Committee… King Albert’s Civilian Hospital Fund… the Belgian Relief Fund; the Belgian Relief Committee; and the Commission for Relief in Belgium.”

A few months ago I was showing off the delights of Leuven a friend who has recently moved to Brussels, and challenged her to guess which American president has a square named after him in the city. If you don’t already know, I confidently predicted, you won’t get it in your first ten guesses. I was right. The story of how future president Herbert Hoover co-ordinated the delivery of food to occupied Belgium during the First World War is not well known outside this country, and indeed is a fading memory even here.

This book is a brief but detailed history of the effort an amazing triumph of non-governmental diplomacy and organisation, with food bought in the UK and distributed to the Belgians (and northern French) living under occupation. Hoover had to fight turf wars with other American do-gooders, and establish clear demarcation with the Belgian relief committee about how the distribution was to managed; but those issues pale into insignificance in comparison with the need to get the British and Germans to allow the effort to proceed in the first place despite being locked in vicious war.

The Germans come out as the bad guys, no matter how you look at it. When the Commission for Relief in Belgium complained to the military governor that German soldiers were mistreating their staff, he refused to believe them and sent one of his own men to observe the situation on the ground. The undercover German soldier was beaten up, arrested and jailed by his own comrades who refused to believe his story.

A small team of young Americans, mostly young men, supervised the relief operation on the ground. The recruitment process was basically any Rhodes scholar, or other upper-class white male American student in western Europe, who spoke decent French (as most well-educated Westerners did in those days). That obviously meant that the ‘delegates’, as they were known, were mostly from the northeastern white elite, especially since they were paid a very meagre stipend on top of expenses so that those from a less wealthy background could not afford to do it.

But it reminded me of the OSCE and other international staff who I knew in Bosnia when I was working there immediately after the war of the 1990s, people who were recruited as much for availability as for expertise, whose main role was really to demonstrate the continuing commitment of the international community to the country. It’s not such an awful thing. Going back to the First World War, my grandmother’s elder brother, Lyman C. Hibbard, volunteered not in Belgium but with the ambulances of the American Field Service in France, and was awarded the Croix du Guerre for it.

The author himself is the grandson of one of the American delegates and the Belgian industrialist‘s daughter who he fell in love with, but he doesn’t let that colour the story, which relies on the copious documentation in English. He has laudably put a lot of his source material online for wider use. However, I see only two books in French and two in Dutch out of eighty in the bibliography.

One other point that is not mentioned: the captains of Belgian industry who were able to marshal local resources as part of the effort had made most of their money from exploiting the Congo.

Anyway, it’s a short and digestible book about a quietly heroic moment of history, which is not well enough known. You can get it here.

The Belfast connection to the Great Tbilisi Bank Raid of 1907

Posted on 10 December 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

This is Erivansky Square in the city which was then known as Tiflis, photographed in the 1870s.

And this is Freedom Square in Tbilisi, Georgia, photographed by me this afternoon.

I’m pleased that I was able to stand in almost the same place as the photographer from 150 years ago – note the City Assembly building on the left, and the mountain crags visible down Giorgi Lionidze Street – but the photographer of the 1870s had the advantage of height, maybe on a platform or from the window of a now-vanished building.

On 26 June 1907, this square was the scene of a massive act of Bolshevik terrorism, organized by Stalin and Lenin and executed by Stalin’s Armenian mate known as Kamo. 241,000 roubles were stolen, and dozens of people killed and injured in a bomb and gun attack on the stagecoach transporting money from the main post office to the bank headquarters. The banknotes’ serial numbers were all recorded, so it turned out to be impossible to cash them in Russian banks, and when the Bolsheviks tried cashing them in other European cities in January 1908, they were all detected and most of them were arrested.

Maxim Litvinov, a future Soviet foreign minister, was one of those arrested in January 1908, and expelled from France where he had been living. The French however ruled that the crime was political and refused Russia’s extradition request. Litvinov went instead to stay with his sister, Rifka Levinson, who lived at 15 Clifton Park Avenue in North Belfast. He hung around Belfast for two morose years, smoking cigars, climbing Cave Hill and occasionally teaching Russian at the Berlitz language school. It is rumored that he also worked as a traveling salesman for his brother-in-law’s clothes business, covering the whole of Ireland,

He then moved to England ,where he stayed until 1918, ending his time as the diplomatic representative of the revolutionary government and addressing that year’s Labour Party Conference; he also married Ivy Low in 1916. Back in Moscow, he rose through the ranks, serving as foreign minister of the Soviet Union from 1930 to 1939 and then ambassador to the USA from 1941 to 1943. I doubt that he ever went back to Belfast.

Freedom Square is exciting again these days – it is the centre of the current wave of anti-government demonstrations. But more on that in a future post.

The Good Earth, by Pearl S Buck

Posted on 9 December 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

“No woman?” he asked in consternation. He was beginning now to be accustomed to these conversations with her in which her part was little more than a movement of head or hand, or at most an occasional word dropped unwillingly from her wide mouth. He had even come to feel no lack in such conversing. “But it will be odd with only two men in the house!” he continued. “My mother had a woman from the village. I know nothing of these affairs. Is there none in the great house, no old slave with whom you were friends, who could come?”

The best-selling novel of the early 1930s, telling the story of Wang Lung, a Chinese farmer who goes from poverty to wealth, his two wives, his evil uncle, and his various children, one of whom is disabled and requires full-time care (as did one of the author’s own children). I am sure that there are many errors of detail, but its heart is very much in the right place, confronting its American and European readers with a vast and ancient culture where the foreigners are probably the bad guys, and where power is shifting rapidly away from the old rulers. I found it gripping and efficiently written. You can get it here.

It would be interesting to know how it is regarded in China, if at all. Its Chinese Wikipedia entry has just a dry plot summary. (Japanese Wikipedia discusses the possibility that it was written as anti-Japanese propaganda.)

The book itself won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932, and Pearl S. Buck won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938 on the back of this and its two sequels. It bubbled to the top of three of my lists simultaneously – top book acquired so far this year, top unread book by a woman and top non-sf fiction. Next on those piles are The Mysterious Island, by Jules Verne (though I may not get all the way through it, it sounds rather dull); The Word for World is Forest, by Ursula K. Le Guin; and On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong.