Non-fiction 8 The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy Paddy Machiavelli: How to Get Ahead in Irish Politics, by John Drennan Silence in the Library / The Forest of the Dead, by Dale Smith Fifty Years On: The Troubles and the Struggle for Change in Northern Ireland, by Malachi O’Doherty The Atlas of Unusual Borders: Discover intriguing boundaries, territories and geographical curiosities, by Zoran Nikolić Burned: The Inside Story of the ‘Cash-for-Ash’ Scandal and Northern Ireland’s Secretive New Elite, by Sam McBride The Atlas of Unusual Languages: An exploration of language, people and geography, by Zoran Nikolić How I Learned to Understand the World: A Memoir, by Hans Rosling
Non-genre 5 A Kind of Spark, by Elle McNicoll The Passionate Friends, by H.G. Wells On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong The Soul of a Bishop, by H.G. Wells The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman, by H.G. Wells
SF 10 Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories, ed. Ellen Datlow Orbital, by Samantha Harvey I Who Have Never Known Men, by Jacqueline Harpman The Song, by Erinn L. Kemper Vagabonds!, by Eloghosa Osunde The Ultimate Earth, by Jack Williamson Navigational Entanglements, by Aliette de Bodard Sorrowland, by Rivers Solomon The Lights Go Out in Lychford, by Paul Cornell Ithaca, by Claire North
Doctor Who 4 Doctor Who annual 2025, by Paul Lang Killing Ground, by Steve Lyons On Ghost Beach, by Neil Bushnell (audiobook) Sting of the Sasquatch, by Darren Jones (audiobook)
Comics 2 The Hypothetical Gentleman, by Andy Diggle, Mark Buckingham, Brandon Seifert and Philip Bond Once and Future, vol 5: The Wasteland, by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora and Tamra Bonvillain
7,200 pages 10/29 by non-male writers (McNicoll, Datlow, Harvey, Harpmann, Kemper, Osunde, de Bodard, Solomon, North, Bonvillain) 4/29 by non-white writers (Vuong, Osunde, de Bodard, Solomon) 2/29 rereads (The Ultimate Earth, Killing Ground) 247 books currently tagged unread, down 14 from last month, down 58 from January 2024.
Reading now Caleb Williams, or Things as They Are, by William Godwin (group read, almost finished!) De bondgenoten, by Brecht Evens Light From Uncommon Stars, by Ryka Aoki
Coming soon (perhaps) The Eye of Ashaya, by Andy Diggle et al Mission: Impractical, by David A. McIntee Doctor Who: TARDIS Type Forty Instruction Manual, by Richard Atkinson Under the Lake / Before the Flood, by Kevin Decker and Ryan Parrey A Brilliant Void, by Jack Fennell Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump, by H. G. Wells Braver, Greener, Fairer: Memos to the EU Leadership 2019-2024, ed. Maria Demertzis The Secret Places of the Heart, by H. G. Wells Silver in the Wood, by Emily Tesh Eight Cousins, by Louisa May Alcott DallerGut Dream Department Store: The Dream You Ordered is Sold Out, by Miye Lee Of the Imitation of Christ, by Thomas à 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 The Mysterious Island, by Jules Verne Nine Lives, by William Dalrymple “Hell is the Absence of God”, by Ted Chiang City of Last Chances, by Adrian Tchaikovsky Footnotes in Gaza, by Joe Sacco The Burgundians: A Vanished Empire, by Bart van Loo All American Boys, An Insider’s Look at the U.S. Space Program, by Walter Cunningham Ancient Paths, by Graham Robb Métal Hurlant Vol. 1: Le Futur c’est déjà demain, by Mathieu Bablet et al
She had been in Madden’s Bar in Belfast and had turned to a man she thought was me and said hello.
I was lucky enough to be in Northern Ireland on the day that this book was launched, attended, bought it and got it signed. I know the author if not very well; I guess we have been on each other’s radar for a long time.
It’s about the fifty years in Northern Ireland, more specifically Belfast, from 1969 to 2019, of which the first thirty were consumed with the Troubles and the next twenty with the new post-peace process society as it develops. It’s a big book – almost 400 pages – and covers not only the politics of violence, and the constitutional question, but also the more fundamental shifts to what was a very conservative society in the 1960s: women’s rights, gay rights, language rights.
It’s a very personal tale, explaining better than I’ve seen from anywhere else how very much the outbreak of violence in the late 1960s was a bolt from the blue, unanticipated by anyone including the perpetrators, and how the prelapsarian geography of Belfast got reshaped by sectarian brutality. As well as recounting his own memories, O’Doherty interviews a lot of current players with different views than his own, including on the diehard Loyalist side, and gives them space to articulate their perspective.
I was inwardly amused that the people in the book who I do know personally are concentrated in the feminism / gay rights chapters rather than the more political chapters. Though on reflection perhaps this does point to a gap in the perspectives presented; I miss any mention of integrated education, mixed marriages, or the growth of the vote for non-aligned political parties. Less exciting perhaps, but not unimportant.
I see some reviewers complaining that if you don’t already know much about Northern Ireland, the wealth of information and number of personalities make it difficult to follow. I’m not in the at-risk category of not knowing enough about Northern Ireland, and I very much enjoyed it, and even learned a few things from it. You can get it here.
This was (shamefully) the non-fiction book that had lingered longest on my unread pile. Next up there is Braver, Greener, Fairer: Memos to the EU Leadership 2019-2024, ed. Maria Demertzis.
Current Caleb Williams, or Things as They Are, by William Godwin (group read, almost finished!) Ithaca, by Claire North De bondgenoten, by Brecht Evens The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman, by H.G. Wells Light From Uncommon Stars, by Ryka Aoki
Last books finished Once and Future, vol 5: The Wasteland, by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora and Tamra Bonvillain Burned: The Inside Story of the ‘Cash-for-Ash’ Scandal and Northern Ireland’s Secretive New Elite, by Sam McBride The Atlas of Unusual Languages: An exploration of language, people and geography, by Zoran Nikolić How I Learned to Understand the World: A Memoir, by Hans Rosling The Lights Go Out in Lychford, by Paul Cornell
Next books The Eye of Ashaya, by Andy Diggle et al A Brilliant Void, ed. Jack Fennell Of the Imitation of Christ, by Thomas à Kempis
The 2009 Hugos were the only year of the seven from 2006 to 2012 where a Doctor Who episode failed to win, comprehensively thrashed by Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, though with Turn Left coming third. (Sorry that the final ballot stats on the right are cramped, but you can click to embiggen.)
When I first write about this TV story in 2009, I said:
Unlike a lot of people I wasn’t overwhelmed by Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead. On re-watching, I enjoyed it more, but still feel it is weaker than Moffat’s previous New Who stories. Perhaps I am being unfair, and I guess that expecting another Blink is not reasonable. I must admit that as sf, its concept works very well – the intersecting levels of reality, the time-traveller who meets a lover from his own future; and as drama it is pretty effective, with Alex Kingston and Catherine Tate particularly strong, and the utterly horrible creepiness of the ghosting data chips (“Who turned out the lights?”, etc).
My two problems with it are both to do with River Song’s story. To get the easier one out of the way, her ending is not a particularly happy one; she is still dead, and gets to spend an ersatz afterlife in the computer’s memory with her crew rather than with the man she loves. (If you work or have ever worked in a team with other people, just consider for a moment whether you would prefer to spend eternity with them or with your lover.) The script didn’t quite do justice to the tragedy of River’s story for me.
My other problem is that while the story works as sf and (apart from the above niggle) as drama I’m not so sure it works as Doctor Who. Back in 2006 I enjoyed The Girl in the Fireplace, but rated it below School Reunion, because one of my sources of enjoyment in Who is its dealing with its own mythology, and another is the relationship that we as viewers build up with the regular characters, and TGitF did not deliver much on the second and nothing on the first of these. Now, where at least TGitF had a decent start and closure to the Doctor’s love story, with Renette’s death ending their relationship, SitL/FotD cheats us because we are asked to care very deeply about the Doctor/River dynamic, without getting the payoff of it becoming a regular plot theme. (No televised return to explore River’s past relationship with the Doctor seems likely now, and anyway it would hardly get satisfactory treatment in the time we have left.) So while this episode may well get strong support from Hugo voters who are not regular Who watchers, I was and am surprised by the favour it has found among fans.
It’s rare that I come back to a review and admit that I was completely wrong, but as it turned out, I was completely wrong. River Song went on to be a fixture of the Eleventh Doctor’s era, her origins were a major plot line for Series 6, and she has made the occasional appearance since then (plus a well-received set of Big Finish spinoff audio plays). Looked at now, the story is a clever pitch-rolling for the future arc of the show. An important data point is that it was written precisely at the moment that Stephen Moffat was deciding whether or not to be the new show-runner.
And I mentioned it in my first paragraph, but did not give enough credit to the story’s success as drama. The ghosting data chips are truly horrible and awful and compelling, and Donna’s alternative history rather moving (capped with Lee’s inability to get her attention at the last moment). Midnight is still my favourite episode of a good season, but Silence in the Library / The Forest of the Dead succeeds better than I allowed at the time.
Dale Smith’s Black Archive on the story ranges far and wide across Stephen Moffat’s œuvre, not only in Doctor Who but in Press Gang, Coupling, etc, to explore where the themes of the story come from. The first chapter, “An Irrational Fear of the Dark”, considers Moffat’s vision for Doctor Who as fairy tale, not at all in a negative way.
The second chapter, “Please Tell Me You Know Who I Am”, looks at the origin and subsequent life of River Song, and at Moffat’s attitude to time-travel and continuity.
The third chapter, “Nothing More Than Virtual Reality”, looks at the philosophical and biological basis of identity, and death. Its second paragraph is:
The idea that real life is a simulation is one with a long history, from 1 Corinthians 13:123, via Descartes’ evil demon4, to the more SF idea of the brain in a vat, fed false images of the world it is living in5, like Morbius if Solon had been of a more philosophical bent. It’s an extension of any number of conspiracy theories that provide comfort by putting somebody secretly in charge of the apparently arbitrary randomness and cruelty of real life, only better because it is unprovable: whoever runs the simulation has complete control over our ability to perceive that we are simulations, and so anything that might seem to disprove the idea can simply be re-assimilated as proof of the opposite. It is the perfect teapot in space6, an idea maintained by faith alone and with so little impact on day-to-day life as to be completely useless. But in Silence / Forest, it is uncomplicatedly positive: a chance to cheat death and live for as long as there is a Lux family willing to ensure the real-world hardware doesn’t go down. 3 ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly’, The Bible, King James translation. 4 Descartes, René, ‘Meditations on First Philosophy’. 5 Putnam, Hilary, ‘Reason, Truth and History’. 6 Russell, Bertrand, ‘Is There a God? [1952]’, In Slater, John G. (ed.), The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, Vol. 11, pp 542-548.
The fourth chapter, “It Can’t Be the Books, Can It?” looks at books and archives, with a diversion into classification systems, and the power of the written word.
The fifth, final, and longest chapter, “Brilliant and Unloved”, looks at how Stephen Moffat writes women, how he writes men’s relationships with women, and how this all adds up to the writing of River Song.
This is an unusual Black Archive in that it ranges far beyond the story in question to look at the work of the story’s writer. But Stephen Moffat is one of the two most significant writers of New Who (I’ll not choose here between him and RTD as to who is #1 and who is #2), and so it’s definitely worth the excursion into the bigger picture. It does mean that the book isn’t as much about the actual story in question as most of the Black Archives are, but there is no harm in variety. You can get it here.
A woman, not yet thirty, clutches her daughter on the shoulder of a dirt road in a beautiful country where two men, M-16s in their hands, step up to her. She is at a checkpoint, a gate made of concertina and weaponized permission. Behind her, the fields have begun to catch. A braid of smoke through a page-blank sky. One man has black hair, the other a yellow mustache like a scar of sunlight. Stench of gasoline coming off their fatigues. The rifles sway as they walk up to her, their metal bolts winking in afternoon sun.
I came across this when compiling my list of the best known books set in Vietnam; it wasn’t clear to me from online commentary if it satisfied my criterion of more than 50% of it being set in the country. Now that I’ve read it, I can tell you that it doesn’t; the majority of the book is set in Hartford, Connecticut, with a fair bit of back-story in Vietnam and a bit in New York at the end.
It’s quite a tough read. The protagonist is growing up queer and Asian in a very white and straight town. His mother endured unspeakable traumas in Vietnam and passes these on to him to a certain extent. The language is lyrical and convincing but the content rather gruelling. You can get it here.
This was my top unread non-genre fiction book. Next on that pile is Eight Cousins, by Louisa May Alcott, the best-known book published in 1875.
There’s a whole run of original Doctor Who audiobooks which I have only recently discovered. (List on Tardis.wikia, as there doesn’t seem to be an official listing page.) I had listened to several of them without realising it, but now that I have a full list I can go through them systematically.
I am starting, of course, at the end, with two recently produced stories of the Fifteenth Doctor and Ruby. On Ghost Beach, by Neil Bushnell and read by Susan Twist, takes the two of them to the County Durham coastline in 1958 where they get tangled up with a ghost story and deal with intruders from another dimension. It’s nicely done, though Susan Twist makes the Doctor more Scottish than Ncuti Gatwa actually sounds. You can get it here.
Sting of the Sasquatch, by Darren Jones, read by Genesis Lynea, did not satisfy me as much. The TARDIS lands in contemporary Washington State, where we encounter a park ranger and Bigfoot hunter. Inevitably the Sasquatch turn out to be aliens on their own mission, dealing with rather yukky parasitic telepathic worms. I think the story is basically fine, but Genesis Lynea (who played Sutekh’s Harbinger in The Legend of Ruby Sunday) took some time to get into her stride in the reading, starting off rather flat and oddly paced; it’s quite a different skill from stage acting. So it’s less warmly recommended, I’m afraid. You can get it here.
This week’s winner is not at all surprising. The Kite Runner‘s 3.3 million Goodreads raters beats any book I have looked at so far in this sequence, apart from Angels and Demons by Dan Brown (Italy), and the top books set in the UK and USA. On LibraryThing, its 54,000 owners beat all books other than Romeo and Juliet (also Italy), and again, the top books set in the UK and USA. It really is quite a phenomenon.
As noted, I excluded two books: Greg Mortensen’s Three Cups of Tea, which qualified previously under Pakistan, and Laurence Wright’s The Looming Tower, which covers many places besides Afghanistan.
I’m relieved that there are only two US military stories on the list, and one of those (by Jon Krakauer) is distinctly dissident. But one feels that, were it not for Khaled Hossaini, the literature available to Goodreads and LibraryThing users would almost exclusively portray Afghanistan as a place where white people go and do things which may or may not involve dead locals. Flashman was not much further down the list.
Next is Yemen, which I am surprised to learn has a bigger population than Canada or Poland.
There is, however, much to learn yet if Paddy Mac is to succeed in the tricky task of acquiring the sort of profile that can help carry him to the Taoiseach’s office. One critical thing our Aspirant Prince must embrace is the role of art in high politics. Before Paddy Machiavelli gets nervous, we are referring to art as in the learning of a profession, rather than writing poetry or painting or suchlike. He can, of course, go a long way in Irish politics without treating it as a form of art. Talent (rarely), hard work (occasionally), or the sort of hard neck more common in a timeshare salesman may bring Paddy Mac as far as the cabinet table. But, unless he brings some form of artistry to his public discourse, when it comes to the great prize, he will be like a pony trying to jump an eight-foot fence and win the Puissance.
Some kind person, I know not who, sent me this just before Christmas, correctly guessing that I would enjoy it a lot. I’m sorry to say that I wasn’t familiar with Drennan as a journalist; he came to prominence only after I had left Irish politics, and he mostly wrote for the Sunday Independent which I rarely read. I think I have been missing out; his witty takedown of the entire Irish political system and its leaders over the years is also passionate and well-observed. It’s easy to be cynical, and to accuse others of being cynical; but I don’t think that is the point of this book, which is holding up a mirror to the Irish political process and describing it in painful detail. Here, for instance, near the end, Drennan reflects on the preference of Irish voters for older leaders in typical style:
…in Irish politics, with rare exceptions, youth will not have its fling. The U.K. and America may have a tradition of youthful leaders, such as Thatcher, Blair, Obama, Clinton and Cameron. We, however, prefer our leaders to resemble the elderly habitues of a bishops conference. That FG soberside, Liam Cosgrave, even when he was young, was not youthful: Garret was a national grand-uncle; Jack Lynch came draped in the sepia of de Valera’s Ireland; whilst Albert, though lively, was a child of the showband era ruling a country nudging the envelope of the Celtic Tiger. Lemass might have been in a hurry, but he was an old man. Haughey too was past his best by the time he secured power, though that might have been a good thing. Mr Bruton, though youngish in years, was a figure who gave the impression of a man who would have been more at home within the Irish Parliamentary Party. Bertie Ahern was seen to be a man who belonged to a youthful age, but he too was a creature who resided intellectually in the age of putting posters of de Valera up by gaslight. As for Enda, he is a child of flaming turf sods and Liam Cosgrave.
The book was published in 2014, in the middle of Enda Kenny’s unexpected / long-awaited (delete as applicable) term as Taoiseach, so Drennan failed to take into account the ascension of Leo Varadkar (Taoiseach at 38) or Simon Harris (Taoiseach at 37). But despite that, it’s a good summary of the popular wisdom about each of the leaders of the last fifty years, based on anecdote and experience. I have encountered a small number of the many people who he talks about (only briefly in most cases, though I was friendly with John Bruton), and felt in every case that he is writing about the people who I met.
I fear this is not a book for people who don’t know or care much about Irish politics, and it also won’t satisfy anyone who is hungering for political change; it’s about the internal workings of the old parties, Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, and to a lesser extent how they manage their coalition partners in office. But personally I tend to feel that a swing back to the default state of dominance by the older parties is more likely than not; so this may turn out to be as useful a guidebook to the future as to the past. You can get it here.
The worry and the lack of sleep were making him nauseous. Madrox didn‘t help. He had summoned Taggart to a cell and made him witness to a brutal interrogation. The victim was the man in whose care the shattered rebel leader had been placed a decade and a half ago, to live out his days as an example to dissidents. Madrox had bullied him, bribed him and punched him, but his opponent had kept an obstinate silence. When finally he removed his blaster from its holster, Taggart felt like attacking him, disarming him, killing him. But he didn‘t.
Second last in my run of re-reading Sixth Doctor novels which I failed to blog in 2015. It features Grant Markham, a books-only companion, who the Doctor takes back to his home planet which is under attack from horrible metal creatures. It is a gritty tale of Cybermen; people who want to be like Cybermen; and people trying to fight Cybermen by becoming worse than Cybermen. Some chilling moments, and thought-provoking considerations of what it is that the Cybermen actually want and mean. You can get it here.
Next up: Mission: Impractical, by the much-missed David A. McIntee.
I recently discovered the lovely Bruciel website, which allows you not only to compare and contrast aerial photos of Brussels from decades ago to the present day, but also to look at historic streetscapes from the archive of photographs. There’s lots to explore, but my attention was particularly caught by a pair of buildings on opposite corners of the intersection where my office stands, between Rue de la Science / Wetenschapsstraat and Rue Montoyer / Montoyerstraat. These two photos are undated but both have Rue Montoyer on the right and Rue de la Science on the left.
Bruciel’s aerial photograph from the 1930s clarifies the layout, and the two blue tags mark the places from which the two photographs were taken. The buildings are those on the upper right (northeastern) and lower left (southwestern) corners of the junction.
Both buildings appear to be two-storey residential houses, in both cases with access via the gardens further along Rue de la Science. They are architecturally quite similar but far from identical – the house on the northeastern corner is significantly bigger than its southwestern counterpart, but also lacks a direct opening onto the street – presumably people went either through the garden or through the side entry. The southwestern house has a big door onto Rue Montoyer, and the garden entrance looks less formal. I note that both buildings sport large flagpoles.
northeastern cornersouthwestern corner
The definition is not good enough to read the street signs on the two houses, but I’m pretty sure that the northeastern one has “RUE MONTOYER / MONTOYERSTR” and the southwestern “RUE / MONTOYER / STRAAT”.
The Bruciel archive’s next photos are from 1944, and the northeastern building is still there and I think that the southwestern one is too, but it’s a bit indistinct.
By 1953, however, both had been replaced by office blocks, like most of the rest of the district. The southwestern corner is now the LUCIA building at Rue de la Science 4, and the northeastern corner, Rue Montoyer 34, used to be occupied by DG JUST of the European Commission, but is currently being renovated for more office space. The only old building left at the intersection is the Armenian Embassy at Rue Montoyer 28.
Moi, je n’avais jamais rien entendu de semblable, mais les femmes se figèrent aussitôt car elles avaient reconnu la sirène d’alerte. C’était une clameur énorme qui montait interminablement en arrachant les oreilles. Je fus saisie de stupeur et je crois que, pour la première fois depuis que je l’avais acquis, je perdis le décompte du temps. Les femmes qui étaient assises se levèrent d’un bond, celles qui étaient à la grille pour prendre la nourriture reculèrent. Le gardien lâcha son trousseau en le laissant dans la serrure et se retourna vers les autres. Ils se regardèrent un instant puis, d’un même mouvement, prirent leur élan et coururent vers la grande porte, poussèrent les bat-tants devant eux en les ouvrant tout à fait, ce qui n’avait jamais eu lieu, et sortirent.
I’d never heard anything like it, but the women froze, because they’d recognised the sirens. It was an ear-piercingly loud, continuous wail. I was dumbstruck and I think I lost track for the first time since I’d acquired the ability to count time. The women who were seated leapt up, those who were at the bars collecting the food, recoiled. The guard let go of the bunch of keys, leaving them in the lock and turned to face the others. They looked at one another briefly, and then they all rushed towards the main exit, flinging the double doors wide open – something they’d never done before – and ran out.
translation by Ros Schwartz
Our unnamed protagonist has spent her entire life locked up with with thirty-nine adult women in a cage in an underground bunker. The first third of the short, punchy book sets that up in some detail. And then, suddenly, it all changes. The guards disappear and the women manage to escape – but to where? Are they on Earth? Is there any chance of rescue? Is there anyone else left alive at all? It’s not a very happy book, but it is gripping, and you can get it here.
I’m astonished that I had never heard of this before. Jacqueline Harpman, a Belgian psychiatrist, also wrote Orlanda, a gender-switching fantasy which I enjoyed last year. Unfortunately those are her only two books which have been translated into English. Her others include La Dormition des amants, which is set in the Spanish court in an alternative sixteenth century; and Mes Œdipe, a retelling of the Oedipus myth. Sadly I don’t think my French is quite up to attempting them.
This was my top unread book by a woman. Next on that pile is Silver in the Wood by Emily Tesh, which I have actually read before but I’m going to take it together with its sequel.
More Ninth Doctor audio plays from Big Finish, this time a trilogy with a very good beginning and end and a weaker middle. Here is a promotional video, not so much a trailer as a teaser with Frank Skinner doing a voiceover.
The Colour of Terror by Lizzie Hopley
This has the Ninth Doctor meeting Frank Skinner and Susan Penhaligon in a charity shop somewhere in England, where the colour red is taking on sinister and awful characteristics. It’s very well done, with a top guest cast, including also Laura Rollins and Dinita Gohil as a couple who get caught up in the situation. Coming back to Frank Skinner though – he’s obviously loving every minute of it, and it’s a joy to hear.
The Blooming Menace, by James Kettle, is the one that doesn’t quite hit the mark; it’s set around a young fogeys’ club out of P.G. Wodehouse, with carnivorous plants. The star guest here for me was Milanka Brooks, playing a chap who isn’t actually a chap.
But we’re back on track again with the finale, Red Darkness by Roy Gill. To get to the best bit first: it brings back the Vashta Nerada from Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead. You might have thought that such a visual monster might not work well on audio, but with good scripting and acting it is a real hit. The Doctor comes to the rescue of a doomed colony with the help of partially sighted Callen (played by Adam Martyn) and his talking dog (played by Karki Bhambra).
The strengths of the first and third of these more than make up for the weakness in the middle, and I recommend the set. You can get it here.
Current Caleb Williams, or Things as They Are, by William Godwin (group read) Once and Future, vol 5: The Wasteland, by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora and Tamra Bonvillain Burned, by Sam McBride
Last books finished The Song, by Erinn L. Kemper The Atlas of Unusual Borders,by Zoran Nikolić The Soul of a Bishop, by H.G. Wells Vagabonds!, by Eloghosa Osunde The Ultimate Earth, by Jack Williamson Navigational Entanglements, by Aliette de Bodard Sorrowland, by Rivers Solomon
Next books The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman, by H.G. Wells How I Learned to Understand the World, by Hans Rosling The James Tiptree Award Anthology 2, eds. Karen Joy Fowler, Pat Murphy, Debbie Notkin and Jeffrey D. Smith.
For today a crew of four is on its way to the moon and has just surpassed the space station’s shallow orbiting distance of two hundred and fifty miles above the planet. The lunar astronauts are catapulted past them in a five-billion-dollar blaze of suited-booted glory.
This book surprised a lot of us by winning the Booker Prize. It’s a short, intimate, realistic account of a day in the lives of six astronauts on the International Space Station. I almost hesitate to classify it as science fiction, since it’s a description of people in today’s world dealing with today’s technology. But there is also a fictional lunar mission happening in the background, which perhaps pushes it over the edge into sff.
I liked it a lot; quietly humorous, good observation of human nature in a very peculiar environment, sensible treatment of Russian language phrases (unlike some), reflection on What It All Means, also capturing the sensawunda of just having a semi-permanent human outpost in outer space. I’m still surprised that it won the Booker Prize, but I am familiar enough with how juried awards operate that I can see how it could happen.
Two completely different stories in a single album here, both featuring the Eleventh Doctor with Amy and Rory, both pretty firmly tied into the sequence of events in the TV series.
(And by the way, congratulations to Karen Gillan on the recent birth of her daughter Clementine!)
“The Hypothetical Gentleman”, by Andy Diggle with excellent art by Mark Buckingham, starts with a somewhat disconnected section fighting Nazis in London in 1936, and then takes the team to 1851 and a time-stealing monster. I found the pacing of squeezing two stories into the space for one a bit odd, but the 1851 bit of the story worked perfectly well as Doctor Who.
The second half, “The Doctor and the Nurse”, is written by Brandon Seifert with art by Philip Bond. I didn’t warm to Bond’s art which seemed to me cartoonish and not really looking like the characters. The story is a comedy about the Doctor and Rory having some guy time together, while Amy finds herself dealing solo with the Silents infiltrating the TARDIS. Comedy Who can go horribly wrong, but this one sticks the landing.
Second paragraph of third story (“Whimper Beg”, by Lee Thomas):
They’d spent hours in this space, drinking good whisky and talking about work, their families, fishing, and politics. He’d been introduced to two state senators in this room, both of whom had promptly received a check from Scotty, and both of whom he still supported to this day.
This was one of the books in the 2020 Hugo packet, but I have only now got around to reading it. There are thirty stories here, two of them over a century old (by Ford Madox Ford and F. Marion Crawford) and the rest newly commissioned for this anthology. They are all somewhat spooky, as you would expect from the title, but there are a lot of inventive variations on the standard themes. There was just one story I didn’t like, by an author who I also dislike personally, but it is short. The rest are all great.
I must admit I was looking at the 800-page PDF with some trepidation, and it did take me almost three weeks to read; but I really enjoyed this collection, and found myself positively looking forward to returning to it each time. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book book acquired in 2020. Next on that pile is The James Tiptree Award anthology 2, edited by Karen Joy Fowler, Pat Murphy, Debbie Notkin and Jeffrey D. Smith.
When did it all begin? We have an exact date for the start of the Viking Age in Britain: June 8, 793. On that day, Viking pirates who had probably set out from Norway attacked and pillaged a Christian monastery on the island of Lindisfarne off the English coast. They drowned some of the monks in the sea and took others into slavery before disappearing with the monastery’s treasures on their longboats. During the same decade, the Vikings/ Normans, who would eventually give their name to the province of Normandy, appeared near the shores of France. The Viking Age had begun.
I got this soon after the war started, almost three years ago now, but have only just got around to reading it. It’s an important explanation of the story of Ukraine, starting from Kievan Rus and going through the various semi-autonomous realms of the Middle Ages, through the centuries of Russian rule, and then independence up to 2014.
Some interesting nuggets: the daughters of the eleventh century Grand Prince of Kiev, Yaroslav the Wise, and his Swedish wife, married the kings of Hungary, Norway and France, and one of his sons married the daughter of the Byzantine Emperor. I see that there is also a theory that another daughter married an English Saxon prince and was the mother of Edgar Ætheling and Saint Margaret of Scotland, though Plokhii doesn’t mention it.
It was by no means historically inevitable that Ukraine would spend much of its history under Russian rule. Connections northwestward, to Poland, Lithuania and what’s now Belarus, were always strong, and there were always links with Constantinople and to a lesser extent Vienna as well. The Cossack states of the early modern period and the national revivals of the nineteenth century demonstrate that Ukraine is not just something invented in the twentieth century.
Speaking of which, the twentieth century history of Ukraine is pretty awful, and also pretty closely linked to Russia. After losing the 1917-1921 war of independence, Ukraine was incorporated into the USSR, and was economically very important with its concentrations of both agriculture and industry. Khrushchev made his political career there; Brezhnev was born there; Konstantin Chernenko, who briefly ruled the USSR near the end, was born to a Ukrainian exile family.
But Stalin executed almost all of the senior political and intellectual leadership, and then the Holodomor, the great famine, killed millions more. Stepan Bandera, the far right political figure who Russians love to hate, was never in fact very successful, but the Soviets had good reason to worry about Ukraine’s loyalty (and assassinated the exiled Bandera in Munich in 1959 by spraying him with cyanide).
And when both Ukraine’s Communist leadership, and the Ukrainian people when consulted at the ballot box, refused the offers of a new relationship made by Moscow in 1990-91, the result was the disintegration of the USSR as a whole. In the 1991 independence referendum, there was more than a 50% vote in favour in both Crimea and Sevastopol, and more than 80% in Donetsk and Luhansk; those were the four least pro-independence oblasts.
I said many years ago that all European borders are tidemarks in the ebb and flow of empires, and this is particularly so in the case of Ukraine. But that doesn’t make Ukraine a fictional concept, or Ukrainian a fictional language, or Ukrainians a fictional people, as the tankies would have you believe. Ukraine deserves external support to maintain and restore its integrity as a state, and this book is a good introduction to its history. You can get it here.
This was both my top unread non-fiction book, and my top unread book acquired in 2022. Next on those piles respectively are Nine Lives, by William Dalrymple, and Ithaca, by Claire North.
See here for methodology. I am back to running through countries in population order, after diverting to right past wrongs for the last four weeks. I generally exclude books not actually set in the specific country, this time Argentina, but I’ve bent that a bit here.
To my dismay, I have nonetheless excluded all of the Jorge Luis Borges short story collections, Ficciones, Labyrinths, the Collected Fiction and The Aleph and Other Stories, because a lot less than 50% of each of them is not clearly set in Argentina, and around half of each of them are in fact clearly set elsewhere.
The majority of Hopscotch, by Julio Cortázar, is set in Paris although there’s a substantial chunk in Argentina at the end. And The Invention of Morel, by Adolfo Bioy Casares, is set on a fictional island which is clearly distinguished from Argentina. Most of these were far far ahead of the rest on LibraryThing, apart from The Invention of Morel (though even that has 2,654 LibraryThing owners).
My winning novel, Tender Is the Flesh, has as many raters on Goodreads as the next four put together but is only second on LibraryThing. It is not explicitly set in Argentina, but none of its many reviewers seem to think that it is set anywhere else, so I am allowing it the top spot. I note with great interest that another Argentinian woman writer, Mariana Enriquez, also shows a big imbalance between the two website, with around fifty times more raters on Goodreads than owners on LibraryThing. (The normal ratio is more like 20:1.) The two Enriquez books that I have not read also appear to be short story collections, but unlike Borges most of them appear to be set in Argentina.
Next up are Afghanistan and Yemen. I don’t think Afghanistan is going to surprise me.
It took me a couple of weeks to acquire the newly colorised version of The War Games, the longest surviving Old Who series and the last of the black and white era, which was released just before Christmas by the BBC. I am of course a purist who believes that you should, if you can, watch the four hours of the original story. But in these busy times, who has four hours to sit down to a show made in 1969? So I guess I welcome the fact that it has been made accessible to viewers with less time and patience. Here’s a trailer.
It’s very pleasing, I must admit. I certainly had a jolt of excitement when I saw the first real splashes of colour on screen. There’s no denying that the human eye is naturally attracted to chromatic variation; it represents immense effort by the colourists, and it has paid off.
I’m a little more hesitant about the editing. Sure, cutting four hours down to 90 minutes is going to be a challenge, even if there are several extraneous escape-and-recapture sequences which were ripe for trimming. There is a little jerkiness in continuity as a result, which could perhaps have been smoothed over with a caption or a voiceover – thinking particularly of Vilar who comes out of nowhere.
But the ending is where the editors have added rather than taken away. We get nods to New Who at a crucial moment in the trial scene, and the two extra minutes inserted between the last seconds of the last black-and-white Doctor Who episode, and the first canonical appearance of the Third Doctor, are a delight – originally developed by a fan on YouTube, who the BBC then brought into the project. Beautifully done.
(Also the line “Too fat!” has been removed, but that’s a good thing.)
I’m not going to do an overall analysis of Joy to the World, but here were some things that struck me.
I can’t recall watching anything on screen or stage that addressed the pandemic so directly. It’s not just the explicit “those awful people and their wine fridges, and their dancing, and their parties” line; the Doctor’s isolation for a year in the hotel, sitting chastely distanced from Anita, is a very obvious callback to 2020. In-universe of course, the Doctor could perfectly well have gone to visit with Ruby, or UNIT, or his other self and Donna’s family, since he knows he has a year but doesn’t have to be on the spot. But that’s not the story that Stephen Moffat chose to tell. (I’ve read a couple of pandemic-referencing novels – Ali Smith in particular.)
Speaking of Anita, although Nicola Coughlan was the top billed guest star as Joy, it was Steph de Whalley who nailed it as the lonely hotel receptionist. She is 37 and has not previously had a major role in her career. Hopefully that will change now.
Speaking of other members of the cast, I had seen Joel Fry, who played Trev, on stage as Jodie Whittaker’s secret husband in The Duchess last year.
Nicola Coughlan is the first Northern Irish actor to get top billing in a Doctor Who episode. (Edited to add: she is from Galway.) (Edited again: Er, after Dervla Kirwan.)
I winced a bit at the Bethlehem scene at the end. But does this mean that the whole New Testament is now an annex of the Whoniverse? Or just the gospels of Matthew and Luke?
Annexing another continuity, in case you didn’t know, Silvia Trench (the wopman on the Orient Express) is also James Bond’s London girlfriend in the first two films, Dr. No and From Russia with Love.
The usual Moffat problem: nobody ever stays dead.
But in general, I enjoyed it – the good bits definitely outweighing the misfires.
And of course the first Doctor Who content to drop over the Christmas break was the Christmas Prom, introduced by Catherine Tate. Lots of joyous energy in the hall and among the performers; audience clearly appreciating the scary monsters walking among them. The whole thing is online here:
Almost wholly I think I was dreaming of public service in those days. The Harbury tradition pointed steadfastly towards the state, and all my world was bare of allurements to any other type of ambition. Success in art or literature did not appeal to us, and a Harbury boy would as soon think of being a great tinker as a great philosopher. Science we called “stinks”; our three science masters were ex officio ridiculous and the practical laboratory a refuge for oddities. But a good half of our fathers at least were peers or members of parliament, and our sense of politics was close and keen. History, and particularly history as it came up through the eighteenth century to our own times, supplied us with a gallery of intimate models, our great uncles and grandfathers and ancestors at large figured abundantly in the story and furnished the pattern to which we cut our anticipations of life. It was a season of Imperialism, the picturesque Imperialism of the earlier Kipling phase, and we were all of us enthusiasts for the Empire. It was the empire of the White Man’s Burthen in those days; the sordid anti-climax of the Tariff Reform Movement was still some years ahead of us. It was easier for us at Harbury to believe then than it has become since, in our own racial and national and class supremacy. We were the Anglo–Saxons, the elect of the earth, leading the world in social organization, in science and economic method. In India and the east more particularly we were the apostles of even-handed justice, relentless veracity, personal cleanliness, and modern efficiency. In a spirit of adventurous benevolence we were spreading those blessings over a reluctant and occasionally recalcitrant world of people for the most part “colored.” Our success in this had aroused the bitter envy and rivalry of various continental nations, and particularly of France, Russia, and Germany. But France had been diverted to North Africa, Russia to Eastern Asia, and Germany was already the most considered antagonist in our path towards an empire over the world.
As I continue to march across the lesser-known terrain of Wells’ fiction, I meet Stephen Stratton and Lady Mary Christian, who have a love affair immediately before and after she marries someone else; eventually Mary’s husband Justin finds out and they part, leaving Stephen free to marry the much less stressful Rachel, while he carries on his important work of Changing The World; after a few years Mary and Stephen strike up a deeply friendly but chaste correspondence; and then the novel ends in unexpected and somewhat jarring disaster.
I liked a lot of this, in particular the idea that your former lover can actually become a good friend who does not threaten your current relationship, a rather positive model for transcending one’s emotional history; so I felt rather betrayed by the tragic ending, which seemed to suggest that Wells himself didn’t actually think this is really possible in real life. Wells probably had a lot more experience of trying this sort of balancing act than most people, so I guess that he was writing about what he knew. I note that of the two film adaptations, one (1922) keeps the tragedy and one (1949) does not.
There’s also a brief section set in Ireland, where Stephen goes in search of Mary at one point, which I think is maybe the first time I have seen any serious mention of Ireland in Wells’ writings. It rains dismally throughout that one short chapter. Stephen spends more time, more vividly described, in South Africa during the Boer War.
A subplot is Stephen’s plan to create a single World Government, apparently the first time that Wells set this idea out so clearly. I was a bit bored by the lengthy discourses on political theory and society, though interested that Wells mainly puts these in Mary’s mouth rather than Stephen’s.
One of my big complaints about the Chibnall era was that the Doctor Who Annuals were very thin indeed, with only weakly regurgitated plot summaries of recent episode and a few rather pathetic puzzles. This must have been set from the top, because although the credited author of the 2025 Annual, Paul Lang, is the same as for the last few, there seems to be a new energy to this side of things.
Yes, we have each episode retold briefly in hard copy; but it’s more of a sideways look, with the story told from a different angle than on TV, and the Fourteenth Doctor stories are interspersed among the first few Fifteenth Doctor stories. We also have a print adaptation (by veteran Steve Cole) of the Comic Relief skit with Davros. And even the puzzles seem to have a new level of sophistication.
I don’t seem to have read the 2023 or 2024 Annuals; I had better put that right.
Everyone is waiting outside of the classroom to go in, so I decide to approach Jenna. We’ve been friends since nursery, and she’s even stayed over at my house. But I haven’t seen her at all over the summer and she has spent every minute of term so far with Emily.
11-year-old Addie is autistic. She goes to the normal school in her Scottish village. She finds it challenging but in general she can cope. She has the support of her parents, and one of her older twin sisters is autistic too.
Addie’s former best friend abandons her, and her new teacher thinks autistic children should be in special education. Meanwhile she has become very interested in the persecution of witches in the Middle Ages, and starts to campaign for a permanent memorial in the village.
It’s not difficult to draw the parallel between the things that were said about the witches in the Middle Ages, and the things that are said about autistic people today. Addie is a smart kid, and she makes the connection immediately.
This is a short book with a lot of heart, told with conviction from Addie’s point of view. It has been made into a TV series which has had two seasons so far. I would recommend it, not only for neurodivergent younger readers, but perhaps even more so for any adults who may have difficulty understanding the world that autistic people live in.
Current Caleb Williams, or Things as They Are, by William Godwin (group read) The Soul of a Bishop, by H.G. Wells Sorrowland, by Rivers Solomon Vagabonds!, by Eloghosa Osunde The Atlas of Unusual Borders,by Zoran Nikolic
Last books finished Paddy Machiavelli: How to Get Ahead in Irish Politics, by John Drennan Killing Ground, by Steve Lyons On Ghost Beach, by Neil Bushnell (audiobook) Sting of the Sasquatch, by Darren Jones (audiobook) Silence in the Library / The Forest of the Dead, by Dale Smith On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong Fifty Years On, by Malachi O’Doherty
Next books A Brilliant Void, by Jack Fennell “The Ultimate Earth”, by Jack Williamson Once and Future, vol 5: The Wasteland, by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora and Tamra Bonvillain
When we went to the KMSKA in Antwerp last June, my attention was caught by a striking lady in the hall commemorating the museum’s donors, represented by a portrait and a bust:
This is Marie-Lætitia Bonaparte-Wyse (1831-1902), whose mother was Letizia Bonaparte, daughter of Napoleon Bonaparte’s brother Lucien, and whose legal father was Sir Thomas Wyse of Waterford, member of parliament for Tipperary, though it is generally accepted that her biological father was Studholme John Hodgson, an officer of the 19th Regiment of Foot.
She was educated in Paris and at the age of 17 married Frédéric Joseph de Solms, so was known as ‘La Princesse de Solmes’ for the next few years. He abandoned her; she was expelled from the Second Empire (ruled by her mother’s first cousin Napoleon III) on somewhat obscure grounds in 1852 – aged only 21!
She ran a famous literary salon in Aix-les-Bains, which was then in Savoy rather than France; after 1860, when Aix was annexed by France in return for recognising the reunification of Italy, she reconciled with the French authorities. In 1863 she married her second husband, Count Urbano Rattazzi, who had just finished the first of his two terms as prime minister of the newly unified Italian kingdom.
When he in turn died in 1873, she married a Spanish politician, Don Luis de Rute y Ginez. Whether in Italy, France or Spain she brought writers, artists and politicians together in her salons. She lived until 1901, and has many living descendants through her daughter by her second marriage, the Villanova-Rattazzi family who are based in Spain.
French Wikipedia lists over 30 books and half a dozen plays by her. I found two really vivid pen-portraits of her which are worth reading. Frederic Loliee describes her early career in a chapter of his “Women of the Second Empire” (1907) and Francis Grierson tells of her role as a literary and political hostess in “Parisian Portraits” (1914). Grierson concludes, “With the death of Madame Bonaparte-Rattazzi the last star in the romantic galaxy of the nineteenth century disappeared.” This may be exaggeration, but it’s a good summary.
I bet you had never heard of her before reading this blog post. I hadn’t, before last June.
I thought I might try out her writing for myself, though it’s worth noting that it’s not really her writing that she is remembered for. Her most substantial fiction is a series of four novels published in 1866-67 as by “Madame Rattazzi”, overlapping with her husband’s second term as Italian prime minister.
The titles are (in internal chronology): Le piège aux maris (The Husband Trap), Les débuts de la forgeronne (How the Blacksmith’s Wife Began), La Mexicaine (The Mexican Woman) and Bicheville, ou le chemin du paradis (Bicheville, or the Path to Paradise). You can get them all in French for free here, here, here and here.
I can manage a well-written bande-dessinee in French, but I am not up to reading an entire novel; fortunately I have a DeepL subscription and used it to get a comprehensible English text. (Happy to share that with you, if you ask nicely.)
So. On the one hand, it’s a big sweeping story of several lower-middle-class families in contemporary Paris, and the efforts of well-meaning mothers to get their daughters safely married (something that the author knew about rather well) along with petty crime and mysterious inheritances. The social commentary ranges from cold observation to occasional anger.
Paris and the French countryside are well described and you know what each of the characters is doing and why. The depiction of posh society in a foreign city (the “Bicheville” of the last volume) supposedly was too close to the bone for readers in Florence, then the Italian capital, and is said to have played a part in ending Count Rattazzi’s second term as prime minister, though I felt it clearly drew more on her experience in Aix a decade earlier.
At the same time I felt it was a bit rambling. The sheer number of significant characters made it rather difficult to keep track. Some of them are known by different names in different chapters. The sections set in Algeria in the last two books are very thin on descriptive detail (noticeably so in contrast to the sections in France or Bicheville), and the fourth book ends rather hastily. So I can’t completely recommend it to the casual reader. But I’m glad I gave it a try.
Bicheville, ou le chemin du paradis was the last book that I finished in the calendar year 2024.
Second paragraph of third chapter of La piege aux maris:
Une gare, c’est le temple de l’action. — A la porte, des files de voitures qu’on décharge; à l’intérieur, des colis qu’on roule sur des voilures à bras; des facteurs, des portefaix, des voyageurs groupés ou solitaires, allant affairés, çà et là, ou fumant paisiblement; des soldats avec leurs fusils, des chasseurs avec leurs chiens, des nourrices avec leurs marmots, des citadins et des paysans, des gentlemen et des commis; — des bruits de roues et des coups de sifflets, des voix distinctes et des murmures confus. Et, par-dessus tout, cette horloge inflexible, dont on ne saurait arrêter l’aiguille, dont l’heure tinte comme un glas fatal Au conducteur de la diligence, on disait: Attendez un peu. Prenez un verre de vin; trinquez avec nous. — Le chef de train est invisible. Il est là-bas, de l’autre côté, soldat esclave de sa consigne, être de raison qui donne le signal du départ, comme la pendule sonne l’heure. Dans la cour de la diligence, il n’y avait que les parents et les amis de ceux qui parlaient; ici, les indifférents pullulent On n’ose pas se faire, devant eux, les recommandations enfantines et touchantes; on n’ose pas se dire qu’on s’aime; on n’ose pas pleurer; — on s’embrasse devant des badauds qui rient!
A station is the temple of action. At the gate, lines of carriages are being unloaded; inside, parcels are being rolled on canopies; postmen, porters, travellers grouped together or alone, bustling here and there or smoking peacefully; soldiers with their rifles, hunters with their dogs, nurses with their babies, townsfolk and peasants, gentlemen and clerks; – the sound of wheels and whistles, distinct voices and confused murmurs. And, above all, that inflexible clock, whose hand could not be stopped, whose hour tinkled like a fatal knell The driver of the coach was told: Wait a little. Have a glass of wine; toast with us. – The conductor is invisible. He is over there, on the other side, a soldier enslaved by his orders, a being of reason who gives the signal for departure as the clock strikes the hour. In the coach yard, there were only the relatives and friends of those who were speaking; here, the indifferent swarmed. You didn’t dare make childish and touching recommendations to each other in front of them; you didn’t dare say that you loved each other; you didn’t dare cry; – you kissed each other in front of laughing onlookers!
Second paragraph of third chapter of Les débuts de la forgeronne:
– Continuez, madame, quelles sont vos intentions… ?
“Go on, madam, what are your intentions…?”
Second paragraph of third chapter of La Mexicaine:
– Prenons un verre d’absinthe, se dit Fanfan, ça me donnera du toupet !
“Let’s have a glass of absinthe”, Fanfan said to himself. “That’ll give me some spirit!”
Second paragraph of third chapter of Bicheville, ou le chemin du paradis:
« Quand je serai la femme de Pierre, nous ne verrons que des amis connus de nous depuis longtemps… Les deux hommes qui paraissaient les plus distingués et les plus recherchés dans le singulier monde que j’ai traversé pendant ces six derniers mois, sont deux infâmes et deux misérables ; que sont donc les autres ? Ce monde où l’on rencontre des Othon du Triquet et des gens comme ces deux êtres dont le nom ne salira pas les pages où se trouve celui de mon bien-aimé, ce monde-là est-il bien le vrai monde ? En ce cas fuyons loin de lui… Pauvre mère ! Reviens à ta vie paisible ; tu vieilliras entourée de la tendresse de tes enfants, je ne serai ni vicomtesse de contrebande peut-être, ni baronne d’aventure peut-être encore, mais j’aurai un intérieur où je ne trouverai que des visages francs et loyaux, et je pourrai sans crainte toucher toutes les mains qui m’entoureront, car s’il s’en trouve quelques-unes noircies par le travail, il ne s’en trouvera aucune souillée par l’infamie. Voilà une grande phrase que mon mari trouvera prétentieuse ; – qu’il soit tranquille, mon bon Pierre… quand il sera près de moi, je n’écrirai plus avec tant de peine ce que je pense, je le lui dirai à lui toujours, et il me semble qu’alors les mots viendront tout seuls ! C’est égal, c’est un bien singulier monde ! »
‘When I become Pierre’s wife, we will see only friends we have known for a long time… The two men who seemed the most distinguished and the most sought-after in the strange world I have passed through these last six months are two infamous and two wretched people; what are the others? Is this world, where we meet Othon du Triquet and people like these two whose names will not stain the pages where my beloved’s are, the real world? In that case let us flee from it… Poor mother! Come back to your peaceful life; you will grow old surrounded by the tenderness of your children, I will not be a viscountess of smuggling perhaps, nor a baroness of adventure perhaps, but I will have a home where I will find only honest and loyal faces, and I will be able without fear to touch all the hands that surround me, because if there are some blackened by work, there will be none stained by infamy. That’s a big sentence that my husband will find pretentious, but don’t worry, my good Pierre… when he’s near me, I won’t take so much trouble to write down what I’m thinking, I’ll always say it to him, and it seems to me that then the words will come all by themselves! All the same, it’s a very strange world!
Second paragraph of third story (“Johnny’s New Job”):
Wednesday, the case was officially declared by the government to be an instance of Welfare Knew And Did Nothing (within the meaning of the Summary Judgement Act) so of course everyone kept their ears open and sure enough pretty soon the thrilling voice of the Public Accuser came booming out of the factory Screens, demanding on behalf of everyone there that culprits be identified for him to Name.
A second collection of short stories by Chris Beckett, whose fiction I have enjoyed over the years, collecting stories published between 2008 and 2012. I had previously read one of them, “Poppyfields”, which is included as an afterpiece to his fix-up novel Marcher. They’re all decent enough, mostly rooted in East Anglia; the one that surprised me, mostly in a good way, was “Our Land” which is a what-if story transposing the Israel-Palestine conflict onto England. There are several pairs of stories linked by their setting in distinct futures, and I was a bit annoyed that these are not paired up in the internal structure of the collection. It’s not as mind-blowing as Beckett’s previous collection, The Turing Test, but it will certainly do. You can get it here.
This was my top book acquired in 2019, and the SF book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on those piles respectively are Burned, by Sam McBride, and A Brilliant Void, by Jack Fennell.
Ordinarily I couldn’t see any of this. Only through careful and deliberate study could I witness what had been in front of me all along. And so I did this, at home and at school. I remember this as a great period of visibility, the world bursting into appearance. The air was thick with teeming life, just as the oceans and the rivers were. A spoonful of seawater or a pinch of soil between your fingers held billions of living things. We were blind to this out of necessity, because if we saw what was really there we would never move. It was around us, between us, on the edge of us and inside us. It coated our bodies and we released waves of it when we breathed and spoke. It was in every skin cell and in the eyelashes that fluttered when we dreamed. It adapted to every aspect of our behaviour; if animals were shaded out, and microorganisms illuminated, then our ghosts would be clear in these bright peripheries. My favourite species were those that lay dormant in husk form before reanimating, such as the rotifers discovered in Arctic ice-sheets after 24,000 lifeless years. Able to withstand almost any force, they seemed to challenge the distinction between life and death, annihilating the concept of straight and linear time to suggest something more circular and repetitious instead.
Won last year’s Arthur C. Clarke Award, beating the Hugo-winning Some Desperate Glory and several others that I haven’t read yet. There are lots of interesting things here: protagonist is a marine biologist from an abusive family background, gets sent on a very mysterious mission to an Atlantic Ocean trench, and then on an even more mysterious space mission to the outer solar system; and then something even more mysterious happens, and we end the book trying to work out what it is. But everything is linked back and forth between the different phases of the plot, the protagonist is interesting and intriguing, and the non-human forces (I hesitate to even say ‘alien’) subtly realised.
In his acceptance speech at the Clarke ceremony, MacInnes paid tribute to Christopher Priest and said that he had learned a lot from their brief friendship. The book is not one that Chris would have ever written, but I did get the feeling that he would have enjoyed looking over MacInnes’ shoulder and giving him an approving pat on the back.
Man: Where’s the other rider? Is it your husband? Kim: Who are you anyway?
Second frame of third page of Épisode 2:
Manon: Oh, shit!
The first two in what we are promised will be a four part story from the Brazilian-French comics writer Leo, following on from the previous 26 albums in the Aldebaran cycle since 1994. Kim, who has been the central character for most of the stories, is sent with her friend and colleague Manon to investigate the backward world of Bellatrix, where a misogynist conservative faction seems likely to win the elections and remove women’s rights.
Meanwhile their support mission in orbit, supported by the alien Avarants who have requested the Bellatrix intervention, runs into problems of its own when another alien race, the Arctarods, turns up.
As ever, gorgeously drawn; the political point is a lot more cogent than in some of Leo’s previous work; both of the first two albums end on cliff-hangers, which suggests that a decent amount of thought has gone into the plotting. Even minor characters get some credible presence here as well. I love that the lead Avarant has decided to call himself Seamus.
First Avarant: This is the human, Manon Servoz. Second Avarant: Come and sit with us, Manon. My name is Seamus.
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 due to not being set in that country.
I have switched now to a system where I disqualify the relevant books before constructing my league table. This is particularly important for Ethiopia, where on my first pass I only found two of the top eight books actually set there – and I was wrong about one of them! So the below table is comprehensively revised from the first round; the only thing that hasn’t changed, in fact, is the book at the top of the list.
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
Cutting for Stone
Abraham Verghese
404,368
9,853
The Shadow King
Maaza Mengiste
14,188
769
The Emperor: Downfall of An Autocrat
Ryszard Kapuściński
8,590
1,095
The Quest
Nelson DeMille
10,305
713
The Sign and the Seal
Graham Hancock
2,767
1,038
Beneath the Lion’s Gaze
Maaza Mengiste
3,429
467
There Is No Me Without You
Melissa Fay Greene
3,404
426
Black Dove White Raven
Elizabeth Wein
3,095
381
I’m glad that Ethiopian writer Maaza Mengiste does get two entries on the list. I’m surprised (though perhaps I shouldn’t be) to see Elizabeth Wein, who I had a great dinner with in Glasgow in 2005, in eighth place.
I disqualified no less than twelve books to get to Elizabeth Wein, and there are a couple on the list that I’m still not sure of. As I noted previously, What is the What, by Dave Eggers, is about South Sudan. The Covenant of Water, by Abraham Verghese, is set in India. Infidel, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, is about Somalia. A Long Walk to Water, by Linda Sue Park, is also about South Sudan. Say You’re One of Them, by Uwem Akpan, is a short story collection of which only one story is set in Ethiopia.
The Shadow of the Sun, by Ryszard Kapuściński, which I incorrectly included in my table last time, covers a number of African countries including Ethiopia. Yes, Chef, by Marcus Samuelsson, is mainly set in Sweden. The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, by Dinaw Mengestu, is set in the USA. Sweetness in the Belly, by Camilla Gibb, is set in several countries. All Our Names, again by Dinaw Mengestu, is set partly in the USA and partly in Uganda as well as in Ethiopia. How to Read the Air, yet again by Dinaw Mengestu, is set in the USA. And Refugee Boy, by Benjamin Zephaniah, is set in Eritrea and the UK as well as Ethiopia.
I made a couple of judgement calls. The Sign and the Seal looks like it is total rubbish, but it is nonetheless about the concealment of the Ark of the Covenant in Ethiopia, so I ruled it in. On the other hand, to my surprise, very few Goodreads or LibraryThing users think that Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop is about Ethiopia, although I always had that impression. So I ruled it out, on the basis of popular perception.
Our brothersisters have always possessed the cruelty that is our birthright. They stacked their bitterness like a year’s harvest; they bound it all together with anger, long memories, and petty ways. The Ada had not died, the oath had not been fulfilled, and we had not come home. They could not make us return because they were too far away, but they could do other things in the name of claiming our head. There is a method to this. First, harvest the heart and weaken the neck. Make the human mother leave. This, they knew, is how you break a child.
I am getting to the end of my project of reading all of the Tiptree/Otherwise, BSFA and Clarke Award winners. This won the 2019 Otherwise Award, the first time it had that name, beating six other novels, two shorter pieces and a series of books. I have read two of the others, The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal and The Deep by Rivers Solomon; of the three I liked Freshwater the most.
It’s the story of a Nigerian who moves back and forth to the United States, but who also contains several different personalities: the Ada, who is the named protagonist; Asụghara, whose impulses are destructive; Yshwa, a rather distracted Jesus; and Saint Vincent, who carries masculine traits. This could easily have become very self-indulgent, but in fact the narrative twists and turns and doesn’t lose track of trying to tell a story, despite the multiplicity of the protagonist’s nature. I found it an excellent read. You can get it here.
As usual, I’ve crunched the Goodreads / LibraryThing numbers on the books published 50, 100 and 150 years ago. It’s surprising what has stayed within the popular Zeitgeist and what has not. I’m looking at the top 20 books from 1975, the top 15 from 1925 and the top 10 from 1875.
I’m not doing the 25-year points, 2000, 1950 and 1900, in such great detail, partly because this post is already quite long enough, and also because 2000 is still too recent. Since you asked, however, the top book from 2000 on GR and LT is Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, by J. K. Rowling; the top book from 1950 is The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, by C. S. Lewis; and the top book from 1900 is The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum. There’s a blog post waiting to be written about that synchonicity. (For 1850, it’s The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne.)
1975
LT
GR
1
’Salem’s Lot, by Stephen King
610,770
17,066
2
Tuck Everlasting, by Natalie Babbitt
282,720
16,040
3
Shōgun, by James Clavell
196,270
8,355
4
Ramona the Brave, by Beverly Cleary
57,466
8,217
5
Crocodile on the Sandbank, by Elizabeth Peters
76,338
4,698
6
Ragtime, by E.L. Doctorow
44,818
6,405
7
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, by Michel Foucault
34,389
6,949
8
The Grey King, by Susan Cooper
39,532
6,024
9
Factotum, by Charles Bukowski
72,351
3,291
10
Forever…, by Judy Blume
64,293
3,416
11
Curtain (Poirot’s Last Case), by Agatha Christie
46,542
4,645
12
Where Are the Children?, by Mary Higgins Clark
58,247
2,123
13
A Color of His Own, by Leo Lionni
21,919
5,594
14
The Eagle Has Landed, by Jack Higgins
57,766
2,005
15
The Autumn of the Patriarch, by Gabriel García Márquez
The best-selling book of 1975 in 1975 was Ragtime, by E.L. Doctorow. I am surprised by how few of these I have read. I don’t think I had even heard of Tuck Everlasting, which seems to be a very popular American kids’ fantasy novel. Apart from the two where I have linked reviews above, I have read only Curtain and The Eagle Has Landed of the books on the list.
The 1976 Hugo and 1975 Nebula for Best Novel both went to The Forever War, which however was published in 1974. The other Hugo finalists that I have read from that year are Doorways in the Sand, by Roger Zelazny, published in Analog in 1975, and The Computer Connection by Alfred Bester and The Stochastic Man by Robert Silverberg. The very long Nebula shortlist included all of those, and also Dhalgren, by Samuel R. Delany, Missing Man, by Katherine MacLean, The Female Man, by Joanna Russ, and a bunch of others which I either haven’t read or which weren’t published in 1975, including Doctorow’s Ragtime.
I have a lot of affection for several of those, and I think my favourite is The Wind’s Twelve Quarters.
Note that although ’Salem’s Lot is only just at the top of the LibraryThing numbers, it’s way ahead on Goodreads, a distinction similarly enjoyed by The Philosophy of Andy Warhol and to an extent by The Eagle has Landed and Where are the Children?. On the other hand, children’s book A Color of His Own, along with The Periodic Table and Discipline and Punishment score relatively much higher on LibraryThing.
I’ve done a bit better here, and indeed Gatsby knocks all other contenders in this post out of the park. I think I have probably also read Carry on, Jeeves, and possibly also The Secret of Chimneys though it doesn’t feature either Poirot or Miss Marple.
Of the above, only Arrowsmith was also popular in 1925, according to the Publishers Weekly list. The best-selling book of 1925 in 1925 was Soundings, by A. Hamilton Gibbs, reviewed here, which has sunk without a trace (10 raters on Goodreads, 9 owners on LibraryThing).
The other 1925 books that I am sure I have read are The Flight of the Heron, by D.K. Broster and The Fugitive aka The Sweet Cheat Gone, by Marcel Proust. I may have also read Doctor Dolittle’s Zoo, by Hugh Lofting.
I’m with the consensus here: The Great Gatsby is my favourite of those I have read. (Turns out that Fitzgerald was a distant cousin of mine.) It is far in the lead on LibraryThing and stratospherically so on Goodreads. The only other book with anything like such a strong Goodreads lean is 24 Hours in the Life of a Woman. On the other hand, Manhattan Transfer, The Everlasting Man and Arrowsmith are relatively strong on LibraryThing.
I haven’t read The School at the Chalet, the first of the Chalet School series of books by Elinor Brent-Dyer; to my surprise, both it and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, by Anita Loos, fail to make the cut.
1875
1
Eight Cousins, by Louisa May Alcott
38,544
4,817
2
The Way We Live Now, by Anthony Trollope
13,646
2,959
3
The Adolescent, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
9,755
1,793
4
The Crime of Father Amaro, by Eça de Queirós
7,159
814
5
Senhora, by Jose de Alencar
6,211
462
6
The Law and the Lady, by Wilkie Collins
3,251
778
7
Memoirs, by William Tecumseh Sherman
2,145
1,048
8
The Sin of Father Mouret, by Emile Zola
2,108
514
9
Science and Health: with Key to the Scriptures, by Mary Baker Eddy
712
1,277
10
The Wise Woman aka The Lost Princess, by George MacDonald
1,480
494
This required a fair bit of digging, possibly more than the exercise was really worth. I have read at least one book published in every year from 1876 to 2024 inclusive, but I don’t seem to have read anything at all published in 1875. Anna Karenina started publication in that year, but did not finish until three years later, and most people would count it for 1878. Eight Cousins is a less well known story in the Little Women universe, but still better known than any of the other 1875 books.
Senhora, the novel by Brazilian writer José de Alenca, is relatively stronger on Goodreads, which has pockets of enthusiasm in certain languages and literatures. Science and Health: with Key to the Scriptures is very unusual in having more owners on LibraryThing than raters on Goodreads.
1825
Going further back, 1825 is also pretty slim. Among a dim bunch, William Hazlitt’s Spirit of the Age seems to do best. I’ll just also note Charles Maturin’s last published story, Leixlip Castle, which is set a century earlier at a time when the castle was owned by my Whyte ancestors, though Maturin doesn’t seem to have known that.
I think I’ll give ’Salem’s Lot and Eight Cousins a go. I’m glad that the 770-page The Way We Live Now didn’t win my 1875 table. (Also I see that I also counted it last year, as publication began in 1874.)