Current
The Mysterious Island, by Jules Verne
The Undying Fire, by H.G. Wells
A History of the Bible: The Book and Its Faiths, by John Barton
Last books finished
The Dramatic Works of Denis Johnston, vol 3: Radio and Television Plays
A Christmas Carol, by Jaime Beckwith and Leslie Grace McMurtry
A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens
Bealby, by H.G. Wells
Track Changes, by Abigail Nussbaum
Next books
Peter and Joan, by H.G. Wells
The Vegetarian, by Kang Han
Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese
Second paragraph of third section:
He became aware of what seemed to be thoughts in his head. They went something like this:
The second of the City Watch subsequence in the Discworld series. As I work through the Pratchett novels in order of popularity, I suspect that I’m going to find that I’ve already read all the really good ones, and although Men at Arms is funny and passionate, the two most overt bits of satire somewhat miss the mark, or perhaps have aged less well since 1993 than some of PTerry’s other work.
His spoofing of affirmative action surely came from a place of love and respect, but it lands rather awkwardly in a 2025 where the US government is stripping away DEI policies to the cheers of conservative forces at home and abroad. (Also, stupid people are not always automatically funny.)
And the idea that society faces utter collapse if fire-arms are to be allowed to exist at all, well, yes, one can see the point and the target, but it’s a bit heavy-handed; it’s effectively finger-wagging at the Americans for allowing their country to get so screwed up by the supposed Second Amendment rights. Sure, that’s not all it is; there’s also a bit of the loss of innocence of embracing any new technology, though later Discworld books are more enthusiastic about the embracing.
Anyway, still a good read, if not quite as superlative as some of the others in the series. You can get it here.
Next up: Feet of Clay.
The Colour of Magic | The Light Fantastic | Equal Rites | Mort | Sourcery | Wyrd Sisters | Pyramids | Guards! Guards! | Eric | Moving Pictures | Reaper Man | Witches Abroad | Small Gods | Lords and Ladies | Men at Arms | Soul Music | Interesting Times | Maskerade | Feet of Clay | Hogfather | Jingo | The Last Continent | Carpe Jugulum | The Fifth Elephant | The Truth | Thief of Time | The Last Hero | The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents | Night Watch | The Wee Free Men | Monstrous Regiment | A Hat Full of Sky | Going Postal | Thud! | Wintersmith | Making Money | Unseen Academicals | I Shall Wear Midnight | Snuff | Raising Steam | The Shepherd’s Crown
Lá fhéile Pádraig sona dhaoibh!
Fiction
Helen Waddell
Northern Ireland
Modern Ireland
Eighteenth century Ireland
Sixteenth and seventeenth century Ireland
My favourites of these are the two autobiographical books about Belfast, Belfast: The Story of a City and its People, by Feargal Cochrane (which you can get here) and Fifty Years On, by Malachi O’Doherty (which you can get here). A Brilliant Void, edited by Jack Fennell, is very interesting on an underexplored part of Irish culture (and you can get it here).
See here for methodology. My rule is to exclude books of which less than 50%, as far as I can tell, is actually set in the target country, but for Ukraine this is trickier than in some cases, so I may have made a couple of wrong calls here.
| Title | Author | Goodreads raters | LibraryThing owners |
| Everything is Illuminated | Jonathan Safran Foer | 181,991 | 14,539 |
| The Mitten | Jan Brett | 93,416 | 10,761 |
| The Diamond Eye | Kate Quinn | 170,157 | 1,425 |
| Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster | Adam Higginbotham | 57,625 | 2,324 |
| Death and the Penguin | Andrey Kurkov | 20,056 | 2,116 |
| The Last Green Valley | Mark T. Sullivan | 65,498 | 431 |
| The Fixer | Bernard Malamud | 11,675 | 2,374 |
| The White Guard | Mikhail Bulgakov | 15,452 | 1,528 |
Shamefully, I have not read any of these. When I looked at this less systematically back in 2015, I got the same answer, Everything is Illuminated way out in front, followed by Jan Brett’s version of The Mitten.
I excluded The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov, which is definitely set in Russia; Dead Souls, by Nikolai Gogol, which is generally understood to be set in Russia; A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, by Marina Lewycka, which is set in England; Voices from Chernobyl, by Svetlana Alexievich, which is about the impact of Chernobyl in Belarus; and Bloodlands, by Timothy Snyder, which as far as I can tell concentrates on Poland.
I’m not 100% sure about The Last Green Valley, which is about Volksdeutsche fleeing Ukraine at the end of the Second World War, but it seems from online sources that it takes them a long time to get out, so I’ve counted it in.
The top Ukrainian writers on the list are Andrey Kurkov and Mikhail Bulgakov.
The Diamond Eye and The Last Green Valley both have strikingly impressive Goodreads ratings compared to their LibraryThing standing. Usually books have around ten times more readers on GR than LT, give or take; these two score over a hundred times higher on GR. My interpretation is that they (successfully) marketed themselves to Goodreads users.
Coming next: Uzbekistan, Malaysia, Mozambique and Ghana.
India | China | USA | Indonesia | Pakistan | Nigeria | Brazil (revised) | Bangladesh (revised) | Russia | Mexico | Japan | Philippines (revised) | Ethiopia (revised) | Egypt | DR Congo | Vietnam | Iran | Türkiye | Germany | France | Thailand | UK | Tanzania | South Africa | Italy | Myanmar | Kenya | Colombia | South Korea | Sudan | Uganda | Spain | Algeria | Iraq | Argentina | Afghanistan | Yemen | Canada | Poland | Morocco | Angola | Ukraine
Second paragraph of third chapter:
But Clarke was also a famous visionary linked with developments in space exploration, and he explored the role and potentials of technology. He has been one of our guides to the grand adventure of space exploration, one who could write a story and one with wit, but also one who could bring clarity to the explication of complicated scientific issues.
I skimmed this book when writing up Childhood’s End and then came back to it a couple of days later. It has three parts: 1) an analytical introduction, including short profiles of Lewis and Clarke and a preface by Clarke himself; 2) the actual correspondence between Lewis and Clarke, which consists of fifteen letters over the years between 1936 and 1954, some of them very short; and 3) stories and essays by the two writers, three by Lewis and eight by Clarke. The publication history is rather droll, but Miller isn’t a terribly deep analyst and he makes a number of obvious mistakes in reading Lewis’s handwriting; also the first of the stories included, “Ministering Angels” by Lewis, is just repulsive (a sex worker and a feminist go to Mars). The primary non-fiction material is welcome, but the rest a bit superfluous.
I don’t think I have written here before about my love of the 2013 film Good Vibrations, starring Richard Dormer as Terri Hooley, and pre-Doctor Who Jodie Whittaker as his first wife Ruth Carr (in reality a significant cultural figure in her own right, who is only in the film as the protagonist’s love interest). The film is the story of how one idealistic man kept music, especially punk, alive in the worst years of the Troubles, and finally made it big with The Undertones’ classic Teenage Kicks. In case you need to get a taste of it, here’s the trailer:
I confess part of the sentimental attachment for me is that I went to see a special showing of the film in mid-2014 at the Northern Ireland representation in Brussels, with Andy Carling, a good friend who sadly died a few years later. We both cried at the crucial scene where The Undertones turn up in the studio to record their hit, and my eyes well up every time I think of it.
Hooleygan: Music, Mayhem, Good Vibrations is the ghost-written autobiography of Terri Hooley on which the film is very loosely based. The second paragraph of the third chapter:
One by one, all the weird and wonderful clubs that I had loved when I was a teenager began to disappear. As people retreated into their own areas there was little need for the Fiesta Ballroom, the Plaza or Betty Staff’s and they soon closed. Belfast became a ghost town.
As a Belfast kid in the 1970s and 1980s, I was not into the contemporary music scene at all; the City of Belfast Youth Orchestra was more my gig. But I do remember the cut-out of Elvis outside the Good Vibrations music shop on Great Victoria Street, and the cool kids at school were into Stiff Little Fingers. Otherwise I was surprised by the lack of crossover between my own lived Belfast experience and Terri Hooley’s world of gigs, girls, business and bankruptcy. I was well aware that I was not one of the cool kids, and this book confirms it.
The book is gorgeously illustrated, with many black-and-white photos, posters, ticket stubs, record sleeves and other souvenirs from the era. It’s an important reminder that history is not just words on paper, but images and sounds as well, if you can gather them for your archive. And it’s also a reminder that while the grim politics and violence were playing out in front of the world’s cameras, there was something much more joyous happening behind the scenes.
As for the text… well, it’s obviously been organised by Richard Sullivan as co-writer, but you do get the sense of a man sitting down in the bar next to you and spilling his life story, good, bad and ugly. Hooley’s passion for music is admirable and the driving force of his life; he has been unlucky in business and not always lucky in love. Some of his life decisions have been, er, wiser than others. The book gives a raw picture of him and his time and place. You can get it here (at a price).
Five years behind everyone else, we recently watched the Netflix The Queen’s Gambit, starring Anya Taylor-Joy as fictional 1960s chess prodigy Beth Harmon, and hugely enjoyed it.
It’s not just the superb performances of Anya Taylor-Joy and the rest of the cast (including Thomas Brodie-Sangster, briefly on Doctor Who on TV and less briefly on Game of Thrones); it’s the amazing use of interior sets in Berlin, and exteriors there and in Toronto, to look like a dozen major cities worldwide, from Mexico to Moscow. One really felt a (totally confected) sense of time and place.
I know that everyone else watched it during the first lockdown, and you were all quite right to do so.
Back in 2005 I read a book by Walter Tevis whose protagonist has extraordinary talents but descends into addiction, particularly to alcohol, and which was then adapted very successfully for the screen: The Man Who Fell to Earth, remembered mainly for the film version starring David Bowie. At this distance I don’t remember much about it, except that it’s pretty depressing, as the alien hero ends up as a crushed victim of cruel humanity.
The Queen’s Gambit is more optimistic. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
“Yes, ma’am.” Beth was seated in the straight-backed chair in front of Mrs. Deardorff’s desk. Fergussen had come and taken her from study hall. It was eleven in the morning. She had not been in this office for over three years.
It would have been very easy to slip into the rabbit hole of chess jargon and make it substitute for telling a story, but Tevis manages to make the chess serve the plot, and we’re in no doubt that it’s a story about a person rather than a game. Here’s a list of differences between the novel and the TV show, of which I think the most important is that Beth in the novel is not as pretty as Anya Taylor-Joy – young Beth sees herself as ugly, though Jolene tells her when they reunite that “You ain’t ugly anymore anyhow.” That of course is one of the demands of the screen format – you have to cast attractive stars and make them look pretty, unlike on the printed page. (Also in the book, Beth doesn’t get seduced by a sexy woman in Paris, she just gets outplayed by Borgov; but that makes for less exciting television.)
Otherwise I was rather impressed by how the series stayed true to the narrative arc of the book, and enjoyed the book as much as I did the show, which was a lot. You can get it here.
One of my personal minor historical fixations is the famous round-robin tournament in April 1979 where the unrated Garry Kasparov, who turned 16 during the event, won against 15 international grand masters including former world champion Tigran Petrosian. (The USSR had sent Kasparov by mistake, under the impression that it was a youth tournament.) The event was held in Banja Luka, then in Yugoslavia, where I later lived for fifteen months in 1997-98, and I have always wondered exactly where the venue was. Here’s an interview with Kasparov, showing a nice picture of him playing Petrosian, but without enough clues to show which building it is in. It could possibly be the Banski Dvor, which was the major cultural venue at the time.
Current
The Dramatic Works of Denis Johnston, vol 3: Radio and Television Plays
A Christmas Carol, by Jaime Beckwith and Leslie Grace McMurtry
Track Changes, by Abigail Nussbaum
Last books finished
Oh No It Isn’t!, by Paul Cornell
The Friend Zone Experiment, by Zen Cho
Heavenly Tyrant, by Xiran Jay Zhao (did not finish)
The Child of Time, by Jonathan Morris et al
Lies Sleeping, by Ben Aaronovitch
Next books
Bealby, by H.G. Wells
A History of the Bible: The Book and Its Faiths, by Dr John Barton
The Mysterious Island, by Jules Verne
Second paragraph of third chapter:
| 24시간 열려 있는 가게의 특성상 모든 직원은 정해진 시간에 교대 형식으로 근무하고 있었다. 그 때문에 일찍 들어가 봐야 할 일도 없었다. 페니는 좀 더 햇살 아래서 여유를 만끽하기로 했다. 거리의 중심에서 위용을 뽐내고 있는 5층짜리 목조 건물. ‘꿈 백화점’. 역시 놀면서 바라보는 가게의 모습이 훨씬 더 근사했다. | All employees at the DallerGut Dream Department Store have their shifts carefully assigned to them so the store can be run twenty-four seven unless they sell out of dreams. There is no point in coming in early. Penny decides to enjoy the sun outside. She looks up at the five-storey building towering over the centre of the city. The DallerGut Dream Department Store. The sight of it is indeed a marvel to behold when not at work. But her rest doesn’t last long. |
I got this for Anne a couple of Christmases ago, but I don’t think it is terribly deep; it’s a whimsical set of stories about people working in a department store that happens to sell dreams, and Santa Claus is one of the characters. I can see how some people might get very invested in it, but it wasn’t for me. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book by a non-white author. Next on that pile is another (and I suspect better) book by a Korean author, The Vegetarian by Han Kang.
In C.S. Lewis’s earliest surviving letter to Joy Davidman Gresham, dated 22 December 1953, he wrote:
Dear Joy–
As far as I can remember you were non-committal about Childhood’s End: I suppose you were afraid that you might raise my expectations too high and lead to disappointment. If that was your aim, it has succeeded, for I came to it expecting nothing in particular and have been thoroughly bowled over. It is quite out of range of the common space-and-time writers…
[three paragraphs of substantial analysis follow]
And now, what do you think? Do you agree that it is AN ABSOLUTE CORKER?
…It is a strange comment on our age that such a book lies hid in a hideous paper-backed edition, wholly unnoticed by the cognoscenti, while any ‘realistic’ drivel about some neurotic in a London flat–something that needs no real invention at all, something that any educated man could write if he chose, may get seriously reviewed and mentioned in serious books–as if it really mattered. I wonder how long this tyranny will last? Twenty years ago I felt no doubt that I should live to see it all break up and great literature return: but here I am, losing teeth and hair, and still no break in the clouds.
One of many interesting things about this is that Joy actually knew Arthur C. Clarke, and other London science fiction writers such as Sam “John Christopher” Youd, long before she knew C.S. Lewis; her previous husband, William Lindsay Gresham, knew Martin Gardner, Frederik Pohl and Robert A. Heinlein, and Joy herself was a regular attender of the science fiction meetups at the White Horse Tavern which is how she knew Clarke.
She showed Lewis’s letter to Clarke, and (needless to say) he was thrilled, and fired off an enthusiastic reply. An exchange of views between Lewis and Clarke began, though there was no real meeting of minds. Clarke himself wrote in a preface to the published correspondence:
As far as I can recall, Lewis and I met only once. The encounter took place at Oxford in the well-known pub, the Eastgate. I was accompanied by my fellow Interplanetarian, Val Cleaver, and Lewis brought along a friend whose name I didn’t catch. Needless to say, neither side converted the other, and we refused to abandon our diabolical schemes of interplanetary conquest. But a fine time was had by all, and when, some hours later, we emerged a little unsteadily from the Eastgate, Dr. Lewis’s parting words were: “I’m sure you’re very wicked people—but how dull it would be if everyone was good.”
C.S. Lewis’s friend? It was another Oxford don, one J.R.R. Tolkien, who I met again some years later at a lunch in London. My only recollection of that occasion is Tolkien pointing to his diminutive publisher and whispering to me: “Now you see where I got the idea of the Hobbits?”
Perhaps one reason why our correspondence was virtually non-existent in later years was that I was in indirect touch with Lewis all the time through Joy Gresham. Every week we London science fiction writers, editors and publishers met in the White Horse tavern—the scarcely disguised background of my Tales of the White Hart. It was Joy who sent Lewis Childhood’s End—I don’t know whether she did it on her own volition, but can well believe I did a certain amount of arm-twisting.
I was very fond of Joy, one of the most charming and intelligent people I’ve ever known. Her ultimate marriage to C.S. Lewis was a great surprise to everyone. Its tragic outcome has been dramatized in the play, Shadowlands, and was described by Lewis himself in A Grief Observed, which I have never had the heart to read.
(I’ve now also read the correspondence between them, and will write that up in a couple of days.)
As well as seeing the TV play Shadowlands when it was first broadcast in 1985, I actually saw it on stage in London in 1990, with Nigel Hawthorne as C.S. Lewis, Jane Lapotaire as Joy and Geoffrey Toone as Lewis’ brother Warren. I can still count the number of West End shows I have been to on the fingers of both hands, and this was definitely in the top three.
Childhood’s End was Clarke’s fifth novel, after Against the Fall of Night, Prelude to Space, The Sands of Mars and Islands in the Sky. It’s in a completely different league to the others, and indeed to most science fiction of the day; and it’s impossible that Joy could not have recognised this. So it’s entirely plausible that Lewis’s guess was right, and she did deliberately underplay her enthusiasm for Childhood’s End to him, partly out of concern that he might not like it and partly in hope that he would be pleasantly surprised when he did.
It is an interesting coincidence that within a couple of years of each other, both Arthur C. Clarke and C.S. Lewis married much younger American women. While thinking about what I was going to write here, I looked a bit more into Clarke’s own brief marriage to Marilyn Torgeson née Mayfield, which almost precisely coincided with the finalisation and publication of Childhood’s End in 1953 – the first edition is dedicated “To Marilyn, who let me read the proofs on our honeymoon.” (You will probably not find this in your edition of the book.)
The received wisdom is that when they met in March 1953, Marilyn was 22, divorced and had a son by her previous marriage. However, the data I have gleaned on Ancestry.com suggests a more complex backstory, as follows:
Clarke’s authorised biographies say that Marilyn had one previous marriage and a child at the time that they met, but in fact, as far as I can tell, she had been married twice. I note that her son was born eleven months after Edwin was recorded in the census as ‘separated’, though it’s also clear that Edwin exercised paternal rights and treated Philip as his child. It’s not really anyone else’s business, of course.
So, coming back to Childhood’s End for myself, I had read it a couple of times previously but needed to be reminded of it. (I’m a bit ashamed to realise that the last time I name-checked Clarke’s best books in a blog post here, I forgot about it.) It was a happy return.
To get one thing out of the way, here’s the second paragraph of the third chapter:
This was another of those restless nights when his brain went on turning like a machine whose governor had failed. He knew better than to woo sleep any further, and reluctantly climbed out of bed. Throwing on his dressing gown, he strolled out on to the roof garden of his modest flat. There was not one of his direct subordinates who did not possess much more luxurious quarters, but this place was ample for Stormgren’s needs. He had reached the position where neither personal possessions nor official ceremony could add anything to his stature.
Many of Clarke’s books explore, with some fascination, the world of metaphysics and the spirit, and I think Childhood’s End sets the tone for that exploration. It’s a book that is ahead of its time, sowing the seeds for the hippy era a decade in the future, with the whole of humanity being prepared by for a massive shift of consciousness, into transcendence – but overseen by the alien Overlords who force the people of Earth to give up childish things like war and religion. It feeds directly into the climax of 2001. Yes, it’s a clunky 1950s story in form and style, but not in content.
It’s also got the closest examination of human relationships that I can think of in any of Clarke’s works. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the women (or indeed the men) are particularly memorable, but the book shows a sympathy for emotional and family life that is unusual both for sf of that time and for Clarke’s work as a whole. We know that he did not meet Marilyn until the book was almost finished, but I surmise that he was emotionally ready for a committed relationship, and she happened to be in the right place at the right time. (Though unfortunately they turned out to be the wrong people for each other.)
So, this was the top book on my shelves which I had not already reviewed online. Appropriately enough, the next is Voyage to Venus, by C.S. Lewis.
See here for methodology. I am excluding books of which less than 50%, as far as I can tell, is actually set in Angola.
| Title | Author | Goodreads raters | LibraryThing owners |
| A General Theory of Oblivion | José Eduardo Agualusa | 8,003 | 475 |
| Nzingha: Warrior Queen of Matamba, Angola, Africa, 1595 | Patricia C. McKissack | 3,641 | 988 |
| Another Day of Life | Ryszard Kapuściński | 5,650 | 581 |
| The Book of Chameleons | José Eduardo Agualusa | 4,820 | 513 |
| The Land at the End of the World | António Lobo Antunes | 3,076 | 450 |
| Mayombe | Pepetela | 2,393 | 134 |
| Transparent City | Ondjaki | 1,398 | 113 |
| The Society of Reluctant Dreamers | José Eduardo Agualusa | 1,316 | 116 |
The top books for Angola are the least well known of any country so far that I have covered. Bangladesh is in the same ball-park, but clearly ahead of Angola. Three of the books on my list, including the winner, are by José Eduardo Agualusa, who sounds like a very interesting writer.
I disqualified only three books. The Last Train to Zona Verde, by Paul Theroux, is set in South Afrtica and Namibia as well as Angola, and reaches Angola a few pages after the half-way point, so just misses my 50% criterion. O Filho de Mil Homens, by Valter hugo mãe (which doesn’t seem to have been translated into English; note the author’s unorthodox capitalisation) appears to be set entirely in Portugal, though the author is originally from Angola. The Return, by Dulce Maria Cardoso, is about the experience of the Portuguese settlers who evacuated in 1975, so most of it is in Portugal, though Angola flavours the whole book.
Coming next: Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Malaysia and Mozambique.
India | China | USA | Indonesia | Pakistan | Nigeria | Brazil (revised) | Bangladesh (revised) | Russia | Mexico | Japan | Philippines (revised) | Ethiopia (revised) | Egypt | DR Congo | Vietnam | Iran | Türkiye | Germany | France | Thailand | UK | Tanzania | South Africa | Italy | Myanmar | Kenya | Colombia | South Korea | Sudan | Uganda | Spain | Algeria | Iraq | Argentina | Afghanistan | Yemen | Canada | Poland | Morocco | Angola | Ukraine
A two-hour Big Finish audio from 2013, featuring William Russell as Ian (and also playing the Doctor) and Carole Ann Ford as Susan, set during the original first season of Who. Also brings in Jemma Powell as Barbara, but doesn’t give her much to do. Unfortunately it’s not all that good; a helping-the-rebellion plot which is spread too thin, no particularly memorable lines or unusual soundscapes. Big Finish usually much better than this, alas. You can get it here.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
Both men were considerably reassured when at last they set eyes on each other again. Indeed each was surprised to find something almost agreeable in the appearance of the other. Dr. Martineau at once perceived that the fierceness of Sir Richmond was nothing more than the fierceness of an overwrought man, and Sir Richmond realized at a glance that the curiosity of Dr. Martineau’s bearing had in it nothing personal or base; it was just the fine alertness of the scientific mind.
I’m trawling through the bottom end of H.G. Wells’ novels, and this one is not particularly good. The protagonist (rather obviously Wells himself) goes on a road trip with his psychiatrist to try and sort out his feelings about his wife (Jane Wells) and his lover (Rebecca West), and while exploring the West of England he meets a charming American (Margaret Sanger) with whom he eventually starts an affair. The book is rather short but seemed to go on for ever. In some of his other novels, Wells captures emotion and love rather well, but not here. The ending is particularly weak. Adam Roberts thinks much the same as me (for once) but at much greater length.
There are some rather good descriptions of Avebury, Stonehenge and other tourist attractions, which are among the book’s redeeming features, and the protagonist has a very silly Fawlty moment of beating up his car after it has broken down. But you can really skip this. Otherwise, get it here.
This was top of my rapidly dwindling pile of books by H.G. Wells. Next up there is The Research Magnificent, which I do not promise to read through to the end – it has almost 800 pages and is probably as bad as this one.
Living in Paris in the spring of 1925, my grandmother, Dorothy Hibbard, went to stay in the French countryside with her artist friend Jan Juta and his sister, Réné Hansard (born Henrietta Irene Louise Juta).
Rene invited me to go to stay at her little Provencale farm, Lou Miracle, at Mougins. Alan Bott was also there, an English writer who was helping Rene with some of her writing – at least that’s what I wrote to Papa. Alan had been in the R.A.F. and had been shot down in Palestine and made prisoner by the Turks; he wrote a book about it, Eastern Flights, which I still have, though only in a paper-back. At Rene’s I walked a lot while the others were working, and I did some work myself, though not much, I think. I also fell more or less in love with Alan.
By her account, she and Alan Bott saw a lot of each other, in Paris and in England, over the next year and a half, until they had a furious row when she wouldn’t wait for him while he was interviewing Rudyard Kipling, probably in September 1926. Less than a year later, she met and married my grandfather. Insert your own alternative history of my family here…
Alan Bott (1893-1952) is best remembered these days as the founder of Pan Books, the main paperback publishing rival to Penguin, and the first to publish James Bond, Modesty Blaise, and a bit later (long after he had died) The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. He married Josephine Blumenfeld in 1930, and they had three children, the youngest of whom died in 2018.
However, he was also a British airman ace in the First World War, and shot down three German aircraft in France in September 1916 and then two more in the Sinai in April 1918, before being shot down and captured by Ottoman forces later that month. His book Eastern Nights – and Flights: A Record of Oriental Adventure is a record of his captivity and ultimate escape. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
“For a walk. I was upset by the air raid. My head has been very bad since the smash, and sometimes I don’t know what I’m doing. But I’m better now, and I give my word of honour that I will stay quietly in bed. Only say nothing to the Turks.”
It’s a thrilling tale, as Bott along with other Allied prisoners is transported from Palestine, to Damascus, to a dreadful prisoner-of-war camp in Afion-kara-Hissar in Anatolia, to Constantinople where, after some time faking mental illness, he escapes on a Ukrainian steamer to Odessa, and makes his way from there to Varna in Bulgaria, finally arriving at Thessalonica just as the Armistice is declared. The cultural history of the First World War, in the UK anyway, tends to concentrate on the Western Front, and it’s a useful reminder that there was a lot more going on elsewhere.
It’s also a healthy reminder that transport around that region, even in the late days of the war, was in some ways much easier in 1918 than it would be today. Bott’s observations on the cultural differences among the various cultures through which he travels are somewhat bigoted (there’s a horrible anti-Semitic passage about the Jews of Odessa) but still vivid and interesting. His favourite city is Damascus, which chimes with what I have heard from other Syria experts.
The whole book is online at Project Gutenberg, and you’ll read it very quickly, if you want. I do note that although my grandmother says that she had a copy, she doesn’t say whether or not she had actually read it.
Second paragraph of third story (“A Man of the People”:
His name was Mattinyehedarheddyuragamuruskets Havzhiva. The word havzhiva means “ringed pebble,” a small stone with a quartz inclusion running through it that shows as a stripe round it. The people of Stse are particular about stones and names. Boys of the Sky, the Other Sky, and the Static Interference lineages are traditionally given the names of stones or desirable manly qualities such as courage, patience, and grace. The Yehedarhed family were traditionalists, strong on family and lineage. “If you know who your people are, you know who you are,” said Havzhiva’s father, Granite. A kind, quiet man who took his paternal responsibility seriously, he spoke often in sayings.
I don’t think I had previously heard of this Ursula Le Guin collection, first published as Four Ways to Forgiveness in 1995, and then republished in 2017, with a fifth story added. I found it tremendous stuff. It’s set on a twin planet system, whose inhabitants are divided into slaves (“assets”) and owners, but whose unjust and evil social structures are being shaken to the roots by their integration into the Ekumen, her future universe of planetary civilisations (including Earth) linked by common ancestry.
Le Guin was of course fascinated by revolution and social justice, and those themes are prominent in most of these stories and present in all. But she uses the narrative format to paint a very convincing picture of the twin societies and the problems of adaptation, and the reactions of extremists on both sides. You don’t have to look vey far or very hard to see which parts of our own contemporary world she may have had in mind, but the worlds of Werel and Teowe are their own places too.
Two of the five stories in particular stood out for me. The second one, “Forgiveness Day”, has an Ekumen ambassador finding herself caught up in revolutionary violence and being unpredictably changed as a result. The fourth, “A Woman’s Liberation”, follows the life story of a woman slave who is freed, but finds it difficult to keep her freedom. The five stories are linked by a common setting and shared characters, but they don’t follow sequentially from each other; this doesn’t always work for me, but it did here.
Anyway, I’m glad to have discovered an excellent book by a favourite author which I didn’t previously know about. You can get it here.
Current
The Friend Zone Experiment, by Zen Cho
Oh No It Isn’t!, by Paul Cornell
Lies Sleeping, by Ben Aaronovitch
The Dramatic Works of Denis Johnston, vol 3: Radio and Television Plays
Last books finished
From Narnia to a Space Odyssey: Stories, Letters, and Commentary By and About C.S. Lewis and Arthur C. Clarke, ed. Ryder W. Miller
The Tainted Cup, by Robert Jackson Bennett
Men at Arms, by Terry Pratchett
The Research Magnificent, by H.G. Wells
Sky Jacks!, by Andy Diggle, Eddie Robson and Andy Kuhn
The Butcher of the Forest, by Premee Mohamed
Next books
The Child of Time, by Jonathan Morris et al
Bealby, by H.G. Wells
A History of the Bible: The Book and Its Faiths, by Dr John Barton
“Hell is the Absence of God” won both the 2002 Hugo and the 2002 Nebula for Best Novelette.
Second paragraph of third section:
What people assumed about Neil had in fact happened to Janice. When Janice’s mother was eight months pregnant with her, she lost control of the car she was driving and collided with a telephone pole during a sudden hailstorm, fists of ice dropping out of a clear blue sky and littering the road like a spill of giant ball bearings. She was sitting in her car, shaken but unhurt, when she saw a knot of silver flames—later identified as the angel Bardiel—float across the sky. The sight petrified her, but not so much that she didn’t notice the peculiar settling sensation in her womb. A subsequent ultrasound revealed that the unborn Janice Reilly no longer had legs; flipperlike feet grew directly from her hip sockets.
Back in 2006, I wrote of this story:
“Hell Is the Absence of God” is a story set in a world very like ours, but where there is no doubt about whether angels, Heaven and Hell are all real. This does raise an interesting question as to whether it can be counted as fantasy or science fiction; Chiang himself is clear that he sees the work as fantasy, but as Jeremy Smith and Niall Harrison [dead link] have argued, apart from the supernatural premise, the world he has created is a pretty mechanistic one, with angels behaving like natural forces (what an earlier age termed “acts of God”); there is no means of mediating with them. (There is, however, a possibility of interaction directly with God, which must surely undermine the classification of the story as science fiction rather than fantasy.)
But the story is not about God or angels. It is about what it is like to be human in this world, and in particular on the nature of devotion and religion when faith is no longer an issue. Only those who love God can go to Heaven; Hell, however, is not a place of torment, but simply somewhere “not physically worse than the mortal plane”, occasionally visible below our own world, characterised by (as we are told in the story’s title) the absence of God.
This is not a story about Christianity, not even about evangelical Christianity, though a lot of people have made that mistake (including me when I first read it, and the writer of the blurb for one of the collections it has been published in). Explicitly, Christ is not mentioned anywhere in the text. Implicitly, faith as such has been taken out of the equation by the empirical and undeniable proofs of God’s existence. There are no unbelievers in Chiang’s world. There are, however, people who are not religious.
Some readers didn’t get this crucial point, including John C. Wright on the Amazon site, who calls it “trite antichristian propaganda” and William December Starr on usenet [dead link], who described is as “just yet another “God’s a jerk” story, big deal”. (Elf Sternberg has repeatedly praised it for much the same reasons, suggesting that Chiang is telling exactly the same story here as C.S. Lewis in The Great Divorce, but from a different perspective.) I find it rather interesting that those readers who react to the story as thin anti-Christian propaganda tend to also describe themselves as non-believers. I haven’t yet found a Christian writer who had the same reaction, though it will be interesting to see what Mirtika Schulz’s group [dead link] makes of it when they get there. (Kathy Wang [dead link] actually thought it a pro-Christian, proselytising story at first, though realised her mistake on further reading.) My suspicion is that for most believers, and for some non-believers (and perhaps for anyone who is interested in exploring the spectrum of opinion between Richard Dawkins and Billy Graham, rather than pledging their allegiance to one side or the other), Chiang’s thought-experiment is in fact an interesting one.
It is made more interesting by the style of narrative – tight third-person, but with no direct speech at all. It gives the story some of the qualities of a documentary: it is as if the camera focusses on each person individually, and then moves on. There are three main characters: Neil Fisk, introduced in the first sentence, whose wife is killed by an angelic visitation and whose quest to become devoted to God in order to join her in heaven is the core of the plot; Janice Reilly, disabled and then cured, whose career as a motivational speaker is bound up with Neil’s quest; and Ethan Mead, whose quest for meaning in the world is perhaps meant to be closest to the experience of the reader. Through the characters, Chiang also explores grief [dead link] and disability [dead link], both of which are of course key elements in the eternal question of why a loving God allows bad things to happen in the world. Again, Chiang is not trying to answer this question himself, but he is exploring how people do answer it, in a world where “God doesn’t exist” is not an option. He is also by his own account, if to a very small extent, exploring the role of God.
Chiang has in fact written up the roots of this story, in an afterword in his Stories of Your Life and Others collection. He mentions briefly Gregory Widen’s film, The Prophecy, and the work of modern mystic Annie Dillard, but then goes on to devote two paragraphs (out of four in the short piece) to the Book of Job.
For me, one of the unsatisfying things about the Book of Job is that, in the end, God rewards Job. Leave aside the question of whether new children can compensate for the loss of his original ones. Why does God restore Job’s fortunes at all? Why the happy ending? One of the basic message of the book is that virtue isn’t always rewarded; bad things happen to good people. Job ultimately accepts this, demonstrating virtue, and is subsequently rewarded. Doesn’t this undercut the message?
It seems to me that the Book of Job lacks the courage of its convictions. If the author were really committed to the idea that virtue isn’t always rewarded, shouldn’t the book have ended with Job still bereft of everything?
The Book of Job is one of the most interesting and puzzling parts of the Bible (and, according to one reference work I consulted, the one book whose text is most corrupt). Job, an upright and honest man, is inflicted with tremendous suffering by Satan as part of a wager with God (Satan betting that suffering will make Job turn against God). Much poetry ensues, Job’s friends attempting to persuade him that his suffering is just punishment for something, Job himself asserts his own righteousness, and then God Himself appears in a whirlwind; Job is overwhelmed by the divine presence, and the book ends as Chiang describes it.
Apologists for the Book of Job can of course mutter that the original text may well have concluded without this disappointing and inconsistent happy ending. The prose narrative of verses 7-17 of the last chapter has the feel of being by a different hand to most of the rest of the book (perhaps the two introductory chapters are from the same source or a similar one). But Chiang is right. The text we have is the one we have, not what one might wish it to be, and the ending is inconsistent. His choice of ending for his story – where Neil Fisk is, as we would see it, unfairly damned by God, is a direct response to the climax of the Biblical story, where Job is, as Chiang sees it, unfairly saved.
In a different year, one could imagine that the Hugo and/or Nebula might have gone either to a traditional hard sf story like Allen Steele’s tale of the one man who wakes up on a starship where everyone else is asleep in cold storage, or to Charles Stross’ vibrant vision of the the founder of a post-Singularity, post-human dynasty. I think it would have had a good chance of winning anyway – I tipped it for the Hugo myself, and scoffed at those who felt it was unworthy of the Nebula. But (I owe this point to Glenn Gillette [dead link]) in the months after September 2001, Chiang’s tale of humans trying to come to terms with tragedy and disaster happened to hit the Zeitgeist in a way that (I hope) he never anticipated, and this must have made a difference with the voters of both SFWA and Worldcon.
Nineteen years on, I agree with myself and I don’t have much to add. I think the story remains a really good thought experiment, emotionally charged yet sparsely written, with perhaps some understated rage at an irrationally cruel world and its creator.
One point I should have made is that the angels, who are impersonal forces of disruption and often destruction, are given names by the human onlookers to their passage, even though there is no hint that they actually have any personalities or intelligence, exactly as we give names to hurricanes. It raises the question, to what extent do we really know anything, let alone control it, by giving it a name?
I have it in the collection Stories of your Life and Others, which you can get here (also for sale under the variant title Arrival). Back in the days of FictionWise, you could get it separately, but that’s long gone now.
Other novelettes on final ballot for both Hugo and Nebula: “The Days Between”, by Allen Steele and “Lobsters”, by Charles Stross.
Other novelettes on final ballot for Hugo: “Undone”, by James Patrick Kelly and “The Return of Spring”, by Shane Tourtellotte.
Other novelettes on final ballot for Nebula: “The Pagodas of Ciboure”, by M. Shayne Bell; “The Ferryman’s Wife”, by Richard Bowes; and “Madonna of the Maquiladora”, by Gregory Frost.
Other winners of 2002 Hugos: American Gods, by Neil Gaiman (best novel); “Fast Times at Fairmont High”, by Vernor Vinge (best novella); “The Dog Said Bow-Wow” by Michael Swanwick (best short story); The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (dramatic presentation).
Other winners of 2002 Nebulas: American Gods, by Neil Gaiman (best novel); “Bronte’s Egg”, by Richard Chwedyk (best novella); “Creature”, by Carol Emshwiller (best short story); The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (dramatic presentation).
Normally I’m reviewing joint Hugo and Nebula winners from the same year together, but I don’t feel like revisiting American Gods right now. For the same reason, I’m going to skip Coraline, which won both the 2003 Hugo and the 2003 Nebula for Best Novella, and will go on to Paladin of Souls, by Lois McMaster Bujold, for my next write-up in this sequence.
Second paragraph of third section:
My “before the war” is in those photographs. Photographs in front of the tree to celebrate the last prewar New Year, photographs with favourite toys, photographs from kindergarten…
When I went back to Bosnia in 2019, my very last stop was the War Childhood Museum, which had been recommended by a couple of people. This book is essentially a collection of very short reminiscences gathered via Twitter (back in the olden days) from people who were children during the siege of Sarajevo, answering the question ‘Šta je za tebe djetinjstvo u ratu?’ – ‘What was war childhood for you?’ This is topped by the author’s own story of his childhood in the besieged city, and tailed by some photographs of toys and other artefacts donated to the museum, and the story of how the museum was set up.
It’s grim stuff. You can fit a lot of pathos into 140 characters, and there must be more than two thousand tweets archived here. Some of the children’s experiences are very Bosnia-specific – for instance, the horrible tinned meat supplied as humanitarian aid, some of which was rumoured to be left over from the Vietnam War twenty years earlier.
But a lot of it is universal for children in conflict zones – the violent deaths of siblings, schoolfriends and parents; the shortage of entertainment and safe places to play; the rarity of sweets, candy and chocolate; the smells.
At the time I bought the book, conflict was raging in Syria; since then we’ve had Ukraine and Gaza, not to mention the less reported wars in Africa. Whatever view one may have of the politics behind these situations, it’s important to be reminded of the real human horror of living under fire and constant threat of death, and that ordinary people cannot and must not be blamed when their home becomes a war zone.
A sobering read. You can get it here.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
The sun was shining, and Rose opened her window to let in the soft May air fresh from the sea. As she leaned over her little balcony, watching an early bird get the worm, and wondering how she should like Uncle Alec, she saw a man leap the garden wall and come whistling up the path. At first she thought it was some trespasser, but a second look showed her that it was her uncle returning from an early dip into the sea. She had hardly dared to look at him the night before, because whenever she tried to do so she always found a pair of keen blue eyes looking at her. Now she could take a good stare at him as he lingered along, looking about him as if glad to see the old place again.
This turned out to be the best known book published in 1875 among today’s readers, by a long way, with Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now some way behind in second place and then The Adolescent / Подросток by Dostoevsky (well ahead of the rest of the field).
I tried Little Women almost twenty years ago, and didn’t really get on with it; I found Eight Cousins even less to my taste. Orphaned Rose is sent to live with her great-aunts (one of whom is amusingly morbid) and her uncle near Boston; she finds herself thrown in with seven boy cousins all of roughly her age (thirteen) and below.
It’s all wholesome stuff. Rose is nice to the servant girl. When one of the cousins is seriously ill, she gets the others to be nice to him. Her uncle discourages her from ambitions of actually studying medicine at college, but gives her just enough (unspecified) information about human anatomy to be useful.
There are no doubt important things being said here about the status of girls and women in 1870s Massachusetts, and people who are more interested in that than I am will find the book more interesting than I did, and can get it here.
Louisa May Alcott probably knew my great-great-grandfather, William Charlton Hibbard, who was fifteen years older and lived in the same suburb of Boston. Both were definitely directly influenced by the radical Unitarian minister, Theodore Parker, who was the pastor of Hibbard’s local church in West Roxbury from 1837 until he resigned in 1846 and set up his own congregation with the help of Amos Bronson Alcott, Louisa’s father.
This was my top unread book by a woman, and my top unread non-genre fiction book. Next on those piles respectively are The Vegetarian, by Han Kang, and Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese.
See here for methodology. I am excluding books of which less than 50%, as far as I can tell, is actually set in Morocco. (It doesn’t help that Morocco is illegally occupying the country immediately to its south.)
| Title | Author | Goodreads raters | LibraryThing owners |
| The Sheltering Sky | Paul Bowles | 29,499 | 4,508 |
| The Time in Between | María Dueñas | 47,894 | 1,992 |
| Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail | Malika Oufkir | 24,265 | 2,103 |
| Destination Unknown | Agatha Christie | 16,297 | 2,394 |
| Tangerine | Christine Mangan | 33,388 | 935 |
| Who Is Maud Dixon? | Alexandra Andrews | 39,137 | 651 |
| Garment of Shadows | Laurie R. King | 10,259 | 1,039 |
| This Blinding Absence of Light | Tahar Ben Jelloun | 13,106 | 569 |
It’s interesting that the only two books on the list by Moroccan writers (Stolen Lives and This Blinding Absence of Light) are about being imprisoned in the same jail at the same time, though one is autobiography and the other fiction.
There are several of these that I’m not completely certain about, either because (eg The Sheltering Sky) it’s not 100% clear that the North African setting is Morocco, or because (eg The Time In Between) it’s not 100% clear to me that the Moroccan setting amounts to more than half of the book, but in those cases and a couple of others, I gave the one on the list the benefit of the doubt.
I excluded the top four books which came up in my calculations, and another two lower down. Top was Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, where it’s not clear that the desert setting is in Morocco; then Less by Andrew Sean Greer, which is about a man who goes around the world and visits Morocco; then Chanson Douce / The Perfect Nanny / Lullaby, by Leïla Slimani, set in Paris; then King of the Wind: The Story of the Godolphin Arabian, by Marguerite Henry, which is about a horse that actually (as far as I can see) spends most of its life outside Morocco.
The other two books that I disqualified ranked between Who Is Maud Dixon? and Garment of Shadows, both by Leïla Lamani (as opposed to Laila Slimani): The Other Americans and The Moor’s Account, both of which are set in the Americas.
Coming next: Angola, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Malaysia.
India | China | USA | Indonesia | Pakistan | Nigeria | Brazil (revised) | Bangladesh (revised) | Russia | Mexico | Japan | Philippines (revised) | Ethiopia (revised) | Egypt | DR Congo | Vietnam | Iran | Türkiye | Germany | France | Thailand | UK | Tanzania | South Africa | Italy | Myanmar | Kenya | Colombia | South Korea | Sudan | Uganda | Spain | Algeria | Iraq | Argentina | Afghanistan | Yemen | Canada | Poland | Morocco | Angola | Ukraine
I spent today at Picocon, held at Imperial College London, H.G. Wells’ alma mater, so it’s not inappropriate to be writing up one of his novels tody. Unfortunately it’s not one of his science fiction novels; even more unfortunately, it’s not one of his good ones either.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
“‘We begin,’” he said, “‘in a minor key. The impetus of the Romantic movement we declare is exhausted; the Race Mind, not only of the English-speaking peoples but of the whole world, has come upon a period of lethargy. The Giants of the Victorian age ——’”
It had to happen sooner or later; as I work my way through Wells’ less well known works, I knew there would be at least one which is rubbish, and this is rubbish. (Adam Roberts found it much more interesting, but also argues that to really understand it you need to have also read a different book by a different writer published in 1877.)
Boon is presented as material assembled by fictional writer Reginald Bliss from the papers of recently deceased and equally fictional writer George Boon, reflecting on the literary personalities of the time. A lot of it is a sustained, brutal and not very funny attack on Henry James, which I would probably find more interesting if I cared more about Henry James than I do. It is illustrated by childish cartoons drawn by Wells.
Its only redeeming feature is that it is very short, so I did finish it despite being very unimpressed by the first half. But you can skip it. If you really want to, you can get it here.
This was the shortest unread book on my shelves acquired in 2019. Next on that pile is Hooleygan: Music, Mayhem, Good Vibrations, by Terri Hooley and Richard Sullivan.
