Monthly Archives: July 2025

19 July books

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Non-fiction
The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts, by Maxine Hong Kingston (2009)
The Cuckoo’s Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage, by Cliff Stoll (2016)
The Darwin Awards, by Wendy Northcutt (2022)
The Popes and Sixty Years of European Integration (2023)
Frontiers of the Roman Empire: The Lower German Limes, by David J. Breeze (2024)

Non-genre
Ulysses, by James Joyce (2015)

SF
The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, by C.S. Lewis (2011)
An Unkindness of Ghosts, by Rivers Solomon (2018)
Heroine Complex, by Sarah Kuhn (2018)
The Bear and the Nightingale, by Katherine Arden (2018)
TOR: Assassin Hunter, by Billy Bob Buttons (2020)
Guy Erma and the Son of Empire, by Sally Ann Melia (2022)
The Immortality Thief, by Taran Hunt (2023)

Doctor Who
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, by Christopher Bulis (2007) [First Doctor, spinoff novel]
City at World’s End, by Christopher Bulis (2007) [First Doctor, spinoff novel]
The Plotters, by Gareth Roberts (2009) [First Doctor, spinoff novel]

Comics
The Iron Legion, by Pat Mills et al (2007) [Doctor Who: Fourth Doctor]
Amazing, Fantastic, Incredible: A Marvelous Memoir, by Stan Lee, Peter David and Colleen Doran (2019)

The best
It’s a bit of a cliche, but I really do like (most of) Ulysses, and it does reward return visits. (Review; get it here)

Honorable mentions
The Immortality Thief is a story of a race against time with unlikely allies in an abandoned space structure inhabited by horrible creatures. I didn’t think it put a foot wrong.(Review; get it here)

The one you haven’t heard of
I picked up a short trilingual book on the Frontiers of the Roman Empire: The Lower German Limes at a reception last year, and found it unexpectedly absorbing and fascinating, comparing the Rhine frontier with Hadrian’s Wall and other Roman boundaries. (Review; get it for free here)

The ones to avoid
I’m going to be mean today, because three of these books got two stars or less out of five in my personal ratings.
TOR: Assassin Hunter – historically illiterate, clunky writing. (Review; get it here)
The Plotters – really historically illiterate; I expect better from Doctor Who novels. (Review; get it here, at a price)
Guy Erma and the Son of Empire – leaden, unreadable prose. (Review; get it here)

The Road: A Story of Romans and Ways to the Past, by Christopher Hadley

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

If the buried won’t help us, perhaps the invisible can prove the way. Where the road has lost all substance we must call upon the boundaries of the land it travels through, because ‘a genuine ancient long-distance road is nearly always a parish boundary at least in places,’ claimed Margary.

Having greatly enjoyed Hadley’s Hollow Places, I was eager to catch up with this story of a single Roman road in Hertfordshire and Essex, running 22 km between the small towns of Braughing and Great Chesterford, and coded RR21b by the great Ivan Margary.

The book has roughly one page for each 70 metres of the actual road (depending whether or not you count the notes). For most of its length, the road has simply disappeared to the unaided eye, though cropmarks do show its presence as a straight line between two points. It appears to have cut directly across hills and valleys.

Hadley meditates on the effect of the road, and on its meaning, and speculates about how long it would have taken to construct – and also to destroy; he reckons that locals simply removed most of the stones from which it was made for building. This is a fairly quiet bit of English countryside, and possibly was at its busiest in Roman times.

The emphasis is on the Roman Empire, and how it affected Britain; and on tracing the records of RR21b in maps and elsewhere; and also on the fauna and flora that currently inhabit the fields through which it runs. It’s a great meditation on history and the countryside. With 340 pages (including notes and acknowledgements) that’s about one page for every 65 metres of the road. The illustrations are lovely, though I wish they had been labelled on each page rather than referenced in the endnotes. You can get The Road here.

18 July books

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Non-fiction
Dalek I Loved You, by Nick Griffiths (2009) [Doctor Who]
How to Make School Make Sense, by Clare Lawrence (2009)
A Fortunate Life: The Autobiography of Paddy Ashdown (2010)
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Vols I & II, by Edward Gibbon (2010)
The Bloody Sunday Report, Volume V (2010)

Non-genre
Chronicle in Stone, by Ismail Kadarë (2009)
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Anne Shaffer and Annie Bar (2011)

SF
City of Illusions, by Ursula Le Guin (2007)
Discount Armageddon, by Seanan Maguire (2018)
Stories of the Raksura: The Dead City + The Dark Earth Below, by Martha Wells (2018)
A Natural History of Dragons, by Maire Brennan (2018)
Introduction to the Stormlight Archive for Hugo Voters, by Brandon Sanderson (2018)
City of Stairs, by Richard Jackson Bennett (2018)
In the Serpent’s Wake, by Rachel Hartman (2023)
Mercury Rising, by R.W.W. Greene (2023)

Doctor Who
Doctor Who – The Twin Dilemma, by Eric Saward (2008) [Sixth Doctor, novelisation]
Doctor Who – Attack of the Cybermen, by Eric Saward (2008) [Sixth Doctor, novelisation]
Verdigris, by Paul Magrs (2009) [Third Doctor, spinoff novel]
State of Change, by Christopher Bulis (2011) [Sixth Doctor, spinoff novel]
The Dalek Book, by David Whitaker and Terry Nation (2011) [Dalek spinoff collection, one story features Susan]
Short Trips: A Christmas Treasury, ed. Paul Cornell (2016) [First to Eighth Doctor, short stories]

Comics
Buddha, Volume 1: Kapilavastu, by Osamu Tezuka (2006)
Fables vol 5: The Mean Seasons, by Bill Willingham (2009)
Black Hole, by Charles Burns (2010)
The Malignant Truth, by Si Spurrier et al (2024)[Doctor Who: Eleventh Doctor]

The best
Unusually I have not given any of the above five stars out of five on LibraryThing. I have given three of them 4.5 out of five, and of those three I think marginally ahead is City of Stairs, the first in the fantasy Divine Cities trilogy by Robert Jackson Bennett. It was famously crowded off the Hugo ballot by the Sad Puppies; I found the worldbuilding and plotting excellent. (Review; get it here.)

Honorable mentions
In the Serpent’s Wake is the second of Rachel Hartman’s equally excellent Tess of the Road novels, about a polar expedition in a fantasy world. (Review; get it here.)
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is a heart-warming story of wartime occupation int he Channel Islands. (Review; get it here.)

The one you haven’t heard of
The Dalek Book, dating from 1964, is possibly the very first Doctor Who spinoff publication, and reflects a very creditable creative effort from the creatures’ creators. (Review; get it here if you are lucky.)

The one to avoid
The Twin Dilemma, Colin Baker’s debut, is by far my least favourite Doctor Who story of the 1963-89 TV era, and its novelisation is equally my least favourite Doctor Who book of all time. (Review; get it here.)

The Impossible Contract, by K.A. Doore

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

She sat in the window of her room, legs tucked to her chest and hand dangling. Beyond, the sky was a cloudless blue, any mugginess lingering from the storms too thin to be felt, the air quickly returning to its usual stink of hot stones and sand. The gnats had all but disappeared with the rain, but a few still insisted on buzzing by her ear. She swatted at them in vain.

Sequel to The Perfect Assassin, and also acquired as part of the 2020 Hugo packet; I had forgotten reading the first book, but enjoyed this a lot all the same – woman assassin, in love with a healer, both get tangled up in magical skullduggery at the hands of the ruler, vividly realised trek across the desert (the whole thing is set in an Arabian style fantasy world), lots of exciting combat and magical action. These secondary worlds do not always grab me, but this one was fun. You can get The Impossible Contract here.

This was the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next up is The Revenant Express, by George Mann.

17 July books

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Non-fiction
Terre des Hommes, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (2011)
Fanny Kemble and the lovely land, by Constance Wright (2016)

SF
River of Gods, by Ian McDonald (2004)
The Door into Summer, by Robert A. Heinlein (2004)
Earth is Room Enough, by Isaac Asimov (2007)
Newry Bridge, or Ireland in 1887 (2018)
Tooth and Claw, by Jo Walton (2020)
The Chosen Twelve, by James Breakwell (2023)
Godkiller, by Hannah Kaner (2024)

Doctor Who
Doctor Who – Warriors of the Deep, by Terrance Dicks (2008) [Fifth Doctor, novelisation]
Doctor Who – The Awakening, by Eric Pringle (2008) [Fifth Doctor, novelisation]
Doctor Who – Frontios, by Christopher H. Bidmead (2008) [Fifth Doctor, novelisation]
Doctor Who – Resurrection of the Daleks, by Paul Scoones (2008) [Fifth Doctor, novelisation]
Doctor Who – Planet of Fire, by Peter Grimwade (2008) [Fifth Doctor, novelisation]
Moon Blink, by Sadie Miller (2019) [Lethbridge-Stewart]

The best
My favourite of these is Ian McDonald’s great Indian novel River of Gods, which in these days of AI seems more and more relevant. (Review; get it here.)

Honourable mention
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry explores the challenges of flying in North Africa in Terre des Hommes, whose lyric description of the desert almost makes up for the colonialism. (Review; get it here.)

The one you haven’t heard of
I’m fascinated by the nineteenth-century actor, writer and campaigner Fanny Kemble; Constance Wright’s book looks at her relationships with America, with her American husband; and with abolitionism. (Review; get it here.)

The one to avoid
The Chosen Twelve is an awkward rehash of The Hunger Games. (Review; get it here)

Wednesday reading

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Current
The Iliad, by Homer, tr. Emily Wilson
Spirits Abroad, by Zen Cho

Last books finished
Little Wars and Floor Games, by H.G. Wells
Year’s Best Aotearoa New Zealand Science Fiction and Fantasy: Volume I, ed Marie Hodgkinson
Down, by Laurence Miles
Around the World in 80 Games, by Marcus du Sautoy
Tides of the Titans, by Thoraiya Dyer
Spectral Scream, by Hannah Fergesen

Next books
Exterminate/Regenerate: The Story of Doctor Who, by by John Higgs
Ventiforms, by Sean Monaghan
The Master, by Louise Cooper

Panter, by Brecht Evens

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Second frame of third chapter:

Kristientje lives with her father and her cat. But her cat gets sick and dies (on page 4, so this is not a spoiler) and Kristientje retreats to her room. The magical Panther appears and starts to cheer her up with tales of Pantherland, where he claims to be the crown prince, and where everything is fun and perfect. Panther alienates Kristientje from her other toys and her father; Kristientje’s stuffed dog Bonzo disappears (we assume, eaten by Panther) and then gets reincarnated in dubious form, along with a bunch of disreputable visitors from Pantherland, including the appalling Mr. Trashcan. It’s quite a dark journey, told as ever in Evens’ super expressive watercolours. I wasn’t quite sure about the last book of his that I read, but this one is impressive stuff. You can get the Dutch original here and the English translation here.

This was my top unread non-English-language comic. Next on that pile is Histoire de Jérusalem, by Vincent Lemire and Christophe Gaultier.

16 July books

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Not so many today.

Non-fiction
The Rules of Management, by Richard Templar (2005) 
The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici, by Christopher Hibbert (2005) 
The Belgian House of Representatives: From Revolution to Federalism, by Derek Blyth, Alistair MacLean, and Rory Watson (2006)

SF
Keepers of the Peace, by Keith Brooke (2005) 
The Hallowed Hunt, by Lois McMaster Bujold (2005) 
Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro (2006)
A Feast For Crows, by George R.R. Martin (2011) 
Dracula, by Bram Stoker (2012)

Comics 
The Complete Maus, by Art Spiegelman (2004)

The best
Art Spiegelman’s Maus is a classic invocation of the Holocaust with the humans involved portrayed as anthropomorphic animals. Of many memorable literary treatments of the genocide, this is one of the greatest. (Review; get it here.)

Honourable mentions
Four heavyweight sff classics here, each of which is well worth revisiting – or trying for the first time if you haven’t.
The Hallowed Hunt (review; get it here) and A Feast for Crows (review; get it here) are both worthy installments in well-known fantasy series.
Dracula (review; get it here) and Never Let Me Go (review; get it here) are both stories of bodysnatching with perhaps more thematic similarities than you might have thought.

The one you haven’t heard of
The one to avoid
None of these is sufficiently good-yet-obscure or sufficiently awful to be worth drawing attention to.

The Burgundians: A Vanished Empire, by Bart van Loo

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

De slaapkamer stond vol met flesjes, schalen en kolfjes met planten-aftreksels, azijn, kamferolie en andere middeltjes om de pijn van de aan-staande moeder te verzachten. Hoewel de toortsen, die een parfum van hars verspreidden, de toch al pittige mei-temperaturen helemaal de hoogte in joegen, mocht volgens de traditie geen raam opengezet worden om frisse lucht toe te laten vooraleer de kersverse mama ter kerke was gegaan. De babyuitzet omvatte twee wiegen, eentje op houten wielen voor effectief gebruik en een andere, uiterst luxueus en verfijnd, om mee te pronken. De hertog wilde groots uitpakken met zijn eerstge-borene. Voedster Guyote, die het gewicht van haar kolossale borsten torste, at de klok rond, terwijl Margaretha van Vlaanderen zuchtend het ultieme moment afwachtte.The bedroom was filled with bottles, scales and flasks containing infusions, vinegar, camphor oil and other potions to alleviate the pain of the mother-to-be. Torches had been lit to release a resin perfume, and although this considerably increased the already high May temperatures, custom prevented anyone from opening the windows to let in some fresh air before the new mother had been churched. The layette consisted of two cradles, one on wooden wheels for actual use and the other, extremely luxurious and refined, for showing off. The duke didn’t want to cut any corners with his firstborn. Wet nurse Guyote, who suffered under the burden of her colossal breasts, ate round the clock, while Margaret of Flanders sighed and waited for the ultimate moment.
English translation by Emily Forest-Flier

I read this in the original Dutch in 2019, and wrote then:

This is a big huge book by a Flemish writer about the history of Burgundy in the time when it included the territory from Switzerland to Friesland and everywhere in between, most notably almost all of what is currently in Belgium. The downfall of Burgundy is treated in a couple of fiction books that I have read – Dorothy Dunnett has the Battle of Nancy in one of the later Niccolo books, and it’s a central parallel timeline theme of Mary Gentle’s Ash. But I confess I knew very little about it.

This first few chapters look at the emergence of Burgundy as an entity from the confusion of post-Roman Europe, but the meat of the book is an account of the century or so from 1369, when Philip the Bold married Margaret of Flanders and united the territories from Dijon to the North Sea, to the Battle of Nancy in 1477 in which Charles the Bold (Philip’s great-grandson) was killed and Burgundy’s pretensions came to an end. It’s full of incidental detail, the assassination of John the Fearless, Joan of Arc, the Feast of the Pheasant; Van Loo also takes us through the great art of the day and the politics behind it – the big names here are Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden.

If the Burgundians had had better luck, the kingdom might have survived as a single territory to the present day. The presence of so many great cities in the territory meant that there was an early tradition of civic engagement and government. The variety of languages spoken meant that innovative policies about linguistic governance needed to be worked out sooner rather than later. Revolts tended to end with settlements involving greater rights for citizens rather than repression (though not always). The argument is made that some of the foundations of the modern state were laid in medieval Burgundy.

I must say that for me I found the overlapping sovereignties of the period rather reminiscent of today’s situation in Belgium. My home is less than 5km from the linguistic frontier, which was only drawn in 1962 and became a provincial boundary only in 1995 when Brabant was divided. But at the same time we are only 10km from Tourinnes-le-Grosse, which was an exclave of the Prince-bishopric of Liège within the Duchy of Flanders for many years. The attempt to govern Belgium as a unitary state from 1830 to 1962 was the real historical anomaly.

Even after Nancy, it wasn’t all over; Charles the Bold’s daughter Margaret was of age and ruled well for five years until her death after a hunting accident in 1482, aged 25. Perhaps that is the real turning point. (And perhaps it’s telling that historical narrative, including this one, tend to concentrate on the disaster of Nancy without reflecting that Margaret inherited most of her father’s territories intact and the disintegration happened after her death, not his.)

A recently arrived diplomat told me a couple of days ago that he had been recommended this book as a good entry into the history of this part of the world. I think my advice would be to wait until there is an English translation. It’s very good, but at 519 pages of detailed yet also idiomatic Dutch, it’s a tough slog for the non-native speaker. You can get it here.

I was sufficiently interested to get hold of the English translation when it came out, and to reread it for more nuggets. The Burgundians came very close to establishing an independent state as a buffer between France and Germany, and the map we have of Europe today is the result of dynastic accident and battlefield circumstance, with nothing inevitable about it. Van Loo is also very good on the extent to which the art of van Eyck and van der Weyden was exploited by the Burgundian rulers in the process of statecraft.

A point that I had missed was that the independence of the Burgundian and Netherlands courts from the jurisdiction of the Parlement de Paris became a key issue in the evolving constitutional settlement. Judicial competition is nothing new, of course, but I had not realised that it was an issue even in the High Middle Ages.

Anyway, you can get the English translation of The Burgundians here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2021 and my top unread non-fiction book. Next on the first of those piles is A Tall Man in a Low Land, by Harry Pearson; next on the other would have been Ancient Paths, by Graham Robb, but it turned out to be rubbish so instead it’s The Bone Woman, by Clea Koff.

15 July books

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Non-fiction
Hitchhiker: A Biography of Douglas Adams, by M.J. Simpson (2006)
Café Europa: Life after Communism, by Slavenka Drakulić (2006)
The Cruise of the R.Y.S. Eva, by Arthur Kavanagh (2008)
The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir, by John Bolton (2020)
The Combined Election: an analysis of the combined Parliamentary and District Council elections in Northern Ireland on 7th June 2001, by the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (2024)

Non-genre
The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho (2006)
Eleven on Top, by Janet Evanovich (2006)
The Successor, by Ismail Kadarë (2007)

Poetry
Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman (2012)

SF
What Ifs?™ of American History, edited by Robert Cowley (2007)
“Goat Song”, by Poul Anderson (2019)
The Monster’s Wife, by Kate Horsley (2021)

The best
He’s an awful man, writing about another awful man, but I really enjoyed The Room Where It Happened, where John Bolton tells us about working with Donald Trump. (Review; get it here.)

Honorable mention
The Successor is one of those intense Eastern European novels; even if you know nothing about Albania and its politics, you’ll find it creepy and lingering. (Review; get it here.)

The one you haven’t heard of
Also in that part of the world but a century earlier, Arthur MacMurrough Kavanagh MP set off on his yacht to tour the Ionian Islands in The Cruise of the R.Y.S. Eva; all the more interesting because he had no arms or legs. (Review; get it here.)

The one to avoid
I’m sorry, folks, but most of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is self-indulgent rubbish. (Review; get it here.)

Under the Pendulum Sun, by Jeannette Ng

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

The rich scent of hare and juniper stew drew my attention back to the meal itself, reminding me how hungry I was. It was still steaming and the copper jug that held it was almost scalding to touch. A heap of breaded asparagus fenced in lightly charred mushrooms. Half a loaf of crusty bread sat in a basket. I sniffed at a small jug to discover it was full of blood, presumably hare, to go with the stew. Usually, though, it was stirred in before serving rather than after.

We got an extract of this to read in the 2018 Hugo packet, and I was not super impressed:

An interesting parallel history – what if Victorians had discovered a gateway to a fairyland, and sent missionaries? First few chapters are an interesting setup, though it seems a bit narrow in scope – how come only English missionaries are interested in exploring? Loses points for consistently misquoting John 1:1.

But reading the whole book, it makes an awful lot more sense. This is a story about nineteenth century Britain attempting to colonise Arcadia (ie Fairyland) through the Church, and the identity of the colonisers and what is really going on in a culture which the Empire is trying to control; it’s also rooted in British faery lore, and nineteenth century classic fiction. The descriptions of people and places are very arresting, and the message subtle but clear. Recommended, and I regret not getting to it sooner. You can get Under the Pendulum Sun here.

14 July books

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Non-fiction
A Narrative About War And Freedom: Dialog with the commander Ramush Haradinaj, by Bardh Hamzaj (2004)
George and Sam, by Charlotte Moore (2007)
The Discovery of the Germ, by John Waller (2007)
The Lost Heart of Asia, by Colin Thubron (2009)
The Imprint of Place: Maine Printmaking 1800-2005, by David P. Becker (2011)
Shakespeare’s Handwriting: A Study, by Edward Maunde Thompson (2013)
Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World, by Verlyn Flieger (2015)

Non-genre
Wilt in Nowhere, by Tom Sharpe (2007)
Dead Souls, by Nikolai Gogol (2013)

SF
The Sharing Knife: Legacy, by Lois McMaster Bujold (2007)
Harpist in the Wind, by Patricia A. McKillip (2007)
The Jagged Orbit, by John Brunner (2013)
The Lives of Tao, by Wesley Chu (2014)
Harrow The Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir (2021)
Black Sun, by Rebecca Roanhorse (2021)
Network Effect, by Martha Wells (2021)
The Relentless Moon, by Mary Robinette Kowal (2021)
Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke (2021)
The City We Became, by N.K. Jemisin (2021)
The Stars Undying, by Emery Robin (2023)

Doctor Who
Doctor Who – the Caves of Androzani, by Terrance Dicks (2007)
Doctor Who and the Deadly Assassin, by Terrance Dicks (2007)
Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders, by Terrance Dicks (2007)
Doctor Who and the Leisure Hive, by David Fisher (2007)
Everyone Says Hello, by Dan Abnett (2010)
Harvest of Time, by Alastair Reynolds (2013)

Comics
Arena of Fear, by Nick Abadzis et al (2023)

The best
As a parent of autistic children myself, I found George and Sam by Charlotte Moore very helpful reading. Her sons are much more able than my daughters, but there is a lot of common understanding. (Review of first edition; get the second edition here.)

Honorable mentions
My favourite Hugo finalist of 2021 was N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became, where the boroughs of New York – and other urban places – become personified. (Review of 2021 Hugo finalists; get it here.)
Legacy starts with one of the best sex scenes Lois McMaster Bujold has ever written, and gets even better from there. (Review; get it here.)

The one you haven’t heard of
And I’m really sure you haven’t heard of it: I was given The Imprint of Place: Maine Printmaking 1800-2005 as a freebie from a conference that I spoke at in Maine in 2007, didn’t read it until 2012, but loved the art when I did read it. (Review; get it here)

The one to avoid
I found Wilt in Nowhere abandoned in an airport lounge, and took it for my own library. I wish I’d left it in the airport. (Review; get it here.)

Murderbot

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I was one of the three people in fandom who bounced off All Systems Red, the first of the Murderbot stories. I ranked it last in my 2018 Hugo ballot, even though it clearly caught the Zeitgeist and won Hugo, Nebula and Locus.

But we loved the Apple TV series which has been released over the last few weeks. Alexander Skarsgård is great as the Murderbot, and sparks very attractively with the hapless humans who it is guarding, led by Noma Dumezweni as Mensah; meanwhile the show-within-a-show of Sanctuary Moon, starring John Cho as Captain Hossein, is beautifully realilsed. A great run of ten episodes, and I may go back now and read the stories with more sympathetic eyes.

The best known books set in each country: Burkina Faso

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See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Burkina Faso.

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

TitleAuthorGoodreads
raters		LibraryThing
owners
American SpyLauren Wilkinson30,165907
The Water PrincessSusan Verde3,2691,113
Of Water and the Spirit: Ritual, Magic, and Initiation in the Life of an African ShamanMalidoma Patrice Somé1,733382
The Weight of Sand: My 450 Days Held Hostage in the SaharaEdith Blais440948
Women’s Liberation and the African Freedom StruggleThomas Sankara1,725101
Ritual: Power, Healing and CommunityMalidoma Patrice Somé548174
The Red BicycleJude Isabella429165
Thomas Sankara Speaks: The Burkina Faso Revolution, 1983-87Thomas Sankara498131

This was surprisingly easy to compile. The figure of the short-lived 1980s president of Burkina Faso, Thomas Sankara, looms over the country’s cultural footprint; two of his political texts are on this list, and the protagonist of this week’s winning novel fictionally seduces him while colluding in his overthrow. We also have two children’s books, two anthropological studies, and a real life hostage drama.

I disqualified only three books this week. I don’t know why anyone tagged Flowers from the Storm, by Laura Kinsale, as being relevant to Burkina Faso; it seems to be set in England and Wales. (Possibly the person using the tag acquired or read their copy of the book while travelling there.) Two other books cover Burkina Faso along with other African countries: Empire of Cotton: A Global History, by Sven Beckert, and White Malice: The CIA and the Covert Recolonization of Africa, by Susan Williams.

Coming next: Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Malawi and Zambia.

Asia: India | China | Indonesia | Pakistan | Bangladesh (revised) | Russia | Japan | Philippines (revised) | Vietnam | Iran | Türkiye | Thailand | Myanmar | South Korea | Iraq | Afghanistan | Yemen | Uzbekistan | Malaysia | Saudi Arabia | Nepal | North Korea | Syria | Sri Lanka | Taiwan | Kazakhstan | Cambodia | Jordan | UAE
Americas: USA | Brazil (revised) | Mexico | Colombia | Argentina | Canada | Peru | Venezuela | Guatemala | Ecuador | Bolivia | Haiti | Dominican Republic
Africa: Nigeria | Ethiopia (revised) | Egypt | DR Congo | Tanzania | South Africa | Kenya | Sudan | Uganda | Algeria | Morocco | Angola | Mozambique | Ghana | Madagascar | Côte d’Ivoire | Cameroon | Niger | Mali | Burkina Faso | Malawi | Zambia | Chad | Somalia | Senegal | Zimbabwe | Guinea | Benin | Rwanda | Burundi | Tunisia | South Sudan
Europe: Russia | Türkiye | Germany | France | UK | Italy | Spain | Poland | Ukraine | Romania | Netherlands | Belgium
Oceania: Australia

13 July books

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Non-fiction
The Bloody Sunday Report, Volume IV (2010)
A Room of One’s Own, by Virginia Woolf (2013)
The 4-Hour Workweek, by Timothy Ferriss (2016)

Non-genre
The Complete Stories of Zora Neale Hurston (2013)
The Luminaries, by Eleanor Catton (2015)
The Cider House Rules, by John Irving (2023)

SF
The Compleat Enchanter – The Magical Misadventures of Harold Shea, by L Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt (2006)
PEACE, by Gene Wolfe (2008)
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert A. Heinlein (2009)
Nexus, by Ramez Naam (2014)
HWJN, by Ibraheem Abbas (2017)
Full Immersion, by Gemma Amor (2023)

Doctor Who
The Glamour Chase, by Gary Russell (2011)

Comics
Weapons of Mass Diplomacy, by Abel Lanzac and Christophe Blain (2018)
Die, Volume 1: Fantasy Heartbreaker, by Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans, letters by Clayton Cowles (2020)
LaGuardia, written by Nnedi Okorafor, art by Tana Ford, colours by James Devlin (2020)
Monstress, Volume 4: The Chosen, written by Marjorie Liu, art by Sana Takeda (2020)
Mooncakes, by Wendy Xu and Suzanne Walker, letters by Joamette Gil (2020)
Paper Girls, Vols 1-6, written by Brian K. Vaughan, drawn by Cliff Chiang, colours by Matt Wilson, letters by Jared K. Fletcher (2020)
The Wicked + The Divine, Vols 1-9, by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie, colours by Matt Wilson, letters by Clayton Cowles (2020)

The best
Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own is passionate, witty and essential, and I wish I had read it twenty-five years earlier. (Review; get it here)

Honorable mentions
The Cider House Rules is a lot longer, but also very much worth reading for a humane take on abortion, and much else, in mid-twentieth-century rural Maine. (Review; get it here)
The Complete Stories of Zora Neale Hurston includes many jewels by the great writer herself, and also a moving epilogue about finding her grave. (Review; get it here)

The one you haven’t heard of
Arthur Vlaminck is plucked from his almost-completed PhD to become speech-writer for the French Foreign Minister. Grim and well-observed hilarity ensues in Weapons of Mass Diplomacy. (Review; get it here)

My favourite of my own reviews from this day

Reading “The Compleat Enchanter“,
when I came to the fourth section,
(set in Finland’s Kalevala)
somehow I began to wonder:
Can one write LiveJournal entries
in iambic tetrameter?
(Yes, I know that last word’s bogus
and perhaps that gives the answer.)

(Review; get it here)

The one to avoid
Full Immersion, by Gemma Amor, attempts to turn intense personal psychiatric experience into a novel and doesn’t succeed. (Review; get it here.)

WSFS Business Meeting, online

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The second session of the 2025 WSFS Business Meeting starts in 24 hours’ time, at 9 am PST, and will discuss (in Executive Session) the report of the Investigation Committee into the 2023 Hugos, of which I was a member, and various other rules changes and proposed new constitutional amendments. The first session was held on 3 July. You can find File 770‘s write-up here. I think it was a success. You can watch it here.

I spoke three times, at 1:19:50, 1:41:30 and 2:26:35; the vote went my way on the first two items that I spoke on, and the third, which I opposed, was referred to a committee, which is not a bad hit rate. (At least by my standards.)

I felt that it gained a great deal by being online and asynchronous with the convention. The most obvious gain was in numbers – 160 or so participants were present, which is more than normally show up for the in-person business meeting at WorldCon. The crucial vote on whether the meeting itself was in order and quorate under the rules was passed by 102 to 46. That was the highest participation in a vote all evening; the lowest was on C2 where 114 voted (though all other votes had over 120 participants).

By contrast, in Glasgow the two elections held at the 2024 Business Meeting attracted 89 and 88 votes, and the four counted votes ranged from 55 to 88 participants. In Chicago in 2022, the election for the Mark Protection Committee attracted 90 votes, and the serpentine counts ranged from 55 to 91. The highest counted vote in Chengdu in 2023 was 32, and the second highest 21, though my personal impression was that there were a lot more people than that in the room (despite complaints about its location). So the 3 July session had a lot more participants than the two previous Business Meetings combined.

One of the arguments that was made in favour of the online meeting was that it would boost participation from those who are unable to attend the in-person meetings due to other commitments, notably, running the actual convention. I think on pure numbers, the online Business Meeting proved its case on 3 July. I am not so sure if we brought in new speakers; there were indeed some new voices, but there were plenty of old ones (including my own), and in particular I’d like to hear more from the actual Worldcon runners. Perhaps tomorrow’s agenda will be more fruitful in that regard.

(The highest number of counted votes at a Business Meeting that I can quickly find was the vote to introduce E Pluribus Hugo in 2015, in the urgency of the Puppy crisis, where there were 186 in favour and 62 against, a total of 248 and a margin of exactly three to one. I hope we won’t see such dire circumstances again. Of course in many cases, votes at an in-person meeting are decided by a show of hands, and the fact that we take a 30-60 second interval to count votes in the on-line meeting does slow things down; but it also ensures that everyone’s vote is counted.)

The online aspect doesn’t take out all of the tedium – we really did not need to spend 25 minutes debating which bits of C.2 needed to be passed, and the fact that the meeting’s lowest participation vote came at the end of that is probably significant, but the great thing about watching in front of your computer is that you can go and get yourself a drink or a snack while waiting for that bit to be over.

There is much discussion about the way forward. Some object that this year’s meeting is not being held according to the rules, though that argument is surely over now, especially since future Business Meetings will presumably accept the decisions made this year. A nightmare proposal is that there could be a hybrid meeting. I am firmly opposed to that; I think you either have to go one way or the other. Counting votes cast both virtually and in person, and managing debate between online and in-person participants, will be brutal. We’ll see what happens in the remaining three on-line meetings this year, but I’m hopeful that the fully virtual process will successfully prove that it can (and perhaps even should) be done this way in future.

Meanwhile my own personal guide to the agenda remains available for consultation here:

12 July books

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Non-fiction
The Periodic Table, by Primo Levi (2008)

Non-genre
The Virgin in the Garden, by A.S. Byatt (2024)

SF
So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Visions of the Future, eds Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan (2009)
Your Code Name is Jonah, by Edward Packard (2018)
Atlantis Fallen, by C.E. Murphy (2023)
The Circus Infinite, by Khan Wong (2023)

Doctor Who
Timewyrm: Exodus, by Terrance Dicks (2006)
Doctor Who and the Visitation, by Eric Saward (2008)
Doctor Who – Arc of Infinity, by Terrance Dicks (2008)
Doctor Who – Snakedance, by Terrance Dicks (2008)
Doctor Who – Mawdryn Undead, by Peter Grimwade (2008)
Doctor Who – Terminus, by John Lydecker / Steve Gallagher (2008)
Doctor Who – Enlightenment, by Barbara Clegg (2008)
Doctor Who – The King’s Demons, by Terence Dudley (2008)
Doctor Who – The Five Doctors, by Terrance Dicks (2008)
Downtime, by Marc Platt (2009)

Comics
The Unwritten Vol. 6: Tommy Taylor and the War of Words, by Mike Carey (2016)
Marzi: A memoir, by Marzena Sowa (2017)

The Best
Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table is a humane and inspiring meditation on humanity through the lens of chemical elements. (Review; get it here.)

Honorable mentions
The anthology So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Visions of the Future brings forward a number of important voices to the spectrum of sf writing. (Review; get it here.)
A lot of people seem to disdain the first of A.S. Byatt’s Federica novels, The Virgin in the Garden, but I was fascinated and amused by it. (Review; get it here.)

The one you haven’t heard of
C.E. Murphy has not (yet) had the recognition that she deserves in terms of winning awards, yet she consistently churns out good to excellent fantasy (and occasionally sf). You could do worse than start with her Atlantis Fallen. (Review; get it here).

The one to avoid
Terence Dudley’s novelisation of his own Doctor Who story, The King’s Demons, is very disappointing. (Review; get it here.)

“The Faery Handbag”, by Kelly Link

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Third paragraph (it has no sections):

One time we were looking through kid’s t-shirts and we found a Muppets t-shirt that had belonged to Natalie in third grade. We knew it belonged to her, because it still had her name inside, where her mother had written it in permanent marker, when Natalie went to summer camp. Jake bought it back for her, because he was the only one who had money that weekend. He was the only one who had a job.

This was the subject of the very last of my first set of reviews of joint winners of the Hugos and Nebulas in the written fiction categories, published in January 2008 before I completely ran out of steam for that project. I wrote then:

I didn’t vote for it. Indeed, I put it last of the five nominees in the novelette category for the Hugos, where I had a vote as a Worldcon member; not because I didn’t like it, but because I liked the other stories on the ballot even more. The result was the closest of the four fiction categories, and voters found it difficult to choose for the lower places – second place decided by a single vote, joint win for third place. I don’t begrudge the result; all five nominees were very good, and I see that by the time the Nebulas came around I had changed my views and put it top (though three of the other four stories of course were different). Well, what was it Emerson said about consistency?

In fairness to myself, I think it’s a story that grows on you. On first reading I found it very entertaining but didn’t think it was especially deep; part of my increase in affection for it came about as a result of reading the whole Magic for Beginners collection of Kelly Link’s stories and developing a taste for her particular style of magical realism, urban fantasy, underlaid with darker tones. ‘The Faery Handbag’ is a story told by Genevieve, a young woman living near Boston whose grandmother came with her handbag from far-off Baldeziwurlekistan; the handbag may or may not contain a fierce canine guardian, Grandmother Zofia’s home village, Genevieve’s grandfather Rustam and her boyfriend Jake. But Genevieve has lost the handbag (this is not a spoiler as she tells us so on the second page). And that’s about it.

Part of my initial under-appreciation of the story may be my own background, as a native of Northern Ireland who has worked on the various different countries of Eastern Europe for the last eleven years. Perhaps from an American perspective, Baldeziwurlekistan is an amusing mix of those funny European countries over there, combining Celtic, Germanic, Slavic and classical elements in its mythology. For me, the lack of precision in the geography of Baldeziwurlekistan was a problem; I need to know where things are on the map, and Link’s story is about taking them off the map. I also found myself a bit frustrated by the narrator’s ambiguity about her own reliability, though other reviewers felt this was part of the story’s charm.

Having said that, I agree with everyone who loves Link’s descriptive writing here, from the account of looking through second-hand clothes in the first paragraph to the poignancy of Zofia’s death at the end; and the way we learn about the narrator’s frame of mind from the way she describes the events around her is tremendously subtle and effective. Indeed, as Abigail Nussbaum points out, it’s a bit more approachable than some of Link’s other stories, which may (again) be part of the reason I didn’t quite take to it immediately. But I’ve found it rather a difficult story to grasp sufficiently to write about, which is part of the reason this series of reviews has been on hiatus for seventeen months.

(And of course I never returned to that sequence, instead rebooting the joint Hugo and Nebula winners in chronological order starting in 2017.)

Rereading the story now, I found that it has grown on me again – in particular I loved the resonance between grandmother Zofia and grandfather Rustam, and present-day Genevieve and boyfriend Jake. And perhaps I have got more used to American humour in the last two decades, but I found the story funnier than my recollection. Definitely worth revisiting. “The Faery Handbag” is available on Link’s website for free.

“The Faery Handbag” won the Hugo for Best Novelette in Glasgow in 2005, the first ceremony that I attended. Best Novel went to Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke; Best Novella to “The Concrete Jungle”, by Charles Stross; and Best Short Story to “Travels with My Cats”, by Mike Resnick.

These were the days of the crazy Nebula nominations system, so it won the 2005 Nebula for Best Novelette in 2006 (for a 2004 publication). Best Novel went to Camouflage, by Joe Haldeman; Best Novella to “Magic for Beginners”, also by Kelly Link; and Best Short Story to “I Live With You”, by Carol Emshwiller (who turned 85 the month before the ceremony).

Of the other Best Novelette finalists, “The People of Sand and Slag” by Paolo Bacigalupi was on the ballot with “The Faery Handbag” both times, and “The Voluntary State” by Christopher Rowe was on the same Hugo ballot and the previous year’s Nebula ballot.

Next in this sequence: “Two Hearts”, by Peter S. Beagle.

I don’t know where this illustration comes from, but it’s cute.

11 July books

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Non-fiction
The Megalith Builders of Western Europe, by Glyn Daniel (2007)
Asteroids: A History, by Curtis Peebles (2007)
The Nobel Prizes, by Burton Feldman (2007)
Queen Elizabeth I, by J.E. Neale (2009)
In Xanadu, by William Dalrymple (2017)
The Complete Ice Age, ed. Brian M. Fagan (2018)
After the War: How to Keep Europe Safe, by Paul Taylor (2023)
The Myth Makers, by Ian Z. Potter (2024)

Non-genre
Once in a Blue Moon, by Magnus Mills (2007)
Three To See the King, by Magnus Mills (2007)
Faith, by Joanna Trollope (2007)
Far From the Madding Crowd, by Thomas Hardy (2009)

Scripts
Antigone, by Sophocles (2012)
Oedipus the Tyrant , by Sophocles (2012)
Oedipus at Colonus, by Sophocles (2012)

SF
Newton’s Wake, by Ken MacLeod (2004)
The Human Abstract, by George Mann (2004)
Cartomancy, by Mary Gentle (2004)
The Magicians, by Lev Grossman (2011)
Catfishing on CatNet, by Naomi Kritzer (2020)
Deeplight, by Frances Hardinge (2020)
Dragon Pearl, by Yoon Ha Lee (2020)
Minor Mage, by T. Kingfisher (2020)
Riverland, by Fran Wilde (2020)
The Wicked King, by Holly Black (2020)
Bluebird, by Ciel Pierlot (2023)

Doctor Who, etc
Martha in the Mirror, by Justin Richards (2010)

The best, also the one you haven’t heard of
I’m going to give top billing to the book on this list that I read most recently, Ian Potter’s survey of the history behind the 1965 Doctor Who story The Myth Makers, which goes in depth into the personal stories of two of the key people behind the camera, as well as the usual analysis of what the story is actually about. (Review; get it here.)

Honourable mentions
Two of the books on the 2020 Lodestar Award ballot (reviewed here) struck me as especially impressive: Naomi Kritzer’s Catfishing on CatNet (which won; get it here) and Frances Hardinge’s Deeplight (get it here).
William Dalrymple’s In Xanadu, an account of his student-era retracing of the route of Marco Polo from Palestine to China, is an old favourite. (Review; get it here.)

The one you haven’t heard of
The Myth Makers, as described above.

The one to avoid
George Mann’s The Human Abstract was one of a number of books I reviewed for the old Infinity Plus website; it was by far the worst of them. (Infinity Plus review; get it here.)

The Ancient Paths, by Graham Robb

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

After two hundred years of scholarship, the Gaulish language is better known today than it was at the end of the Roman empire. The literal sense of the word ‘Mediolanum’ is now well established. The Gaulish dictionary compiled by Xavier Delamarre defines it as ‘a term of sacred geography: ‘a holy centre… perhaps a central point of reference on the vertical axis of the three worlds – upper, middle and lower’. For students of the Celts, this is familiar ground. In Celtic mythology, ‘middle’ was a three-dimensional term. It referred not only to the earth that lies between the upper and the lower worlds, but also to the intersection of lines based on the cardinal points. According to Celtic legend, Ireland was divided in the first century AD into four kingdoms, each of which gave a part of itself to form a fifth, central kingdom called Mide (or Meath), signifying ‘middle’. This is the cruciform pattern that can be seen on the ceremonial Celtic bronze spoons which began to appear all over Europe in about 800 c. It usually takes the form of two perpendicular lines with a circle at the centre. The so-called Celtic cross of the early Christian Church is probably a direct descendant of those designs.

I was intrigued by this book which offered to unfold the Celtic geographies of Europe, but unfortunately it is all crank stuff, written by someone who spent too long thinking deep thoughts while on long bike trips and then staring into the Internet, and not enough time talking to actual experts or reading up on the scholarship. You can get it here, but I wouldn’t bother.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2022, and would also have been next in line as my top unread non-fiction book if I had finished The Burgundians first, but I didn’t. Next on those piles respectively are The Master, by Louise Cooper, and The Bone Woman, by Clea Koff.

10 July books

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Non-fiction
The Bloody Sunday Report, volume III (2010)
Sculptor’s Daughter, by Tove Jansson (2015)
Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind, by Yuval Noah Harari (2017)
The King of Almayne: a 13th century Englishman in Europe, by T.W.E. Roche (2022)

Non-genre
The Great Fortune, by Olivia Manning (2005)
The Spoilt City, by Olivia Manning (2005)
Friends and Heroes, by Olivia Manning (2005)
Skinny Dip, by Carl Hiassen (2005)
The Decameron, by Giovanni Boccaccio (2011)
Glimmer of Hope, Glimmer of Flame, by Ag Apolloni (2024)

SF
The Postscripts BSFA Sampler, ed. Peter Crowther and Nick Gevers (2012)
Peter & Max, by Bill Willingham (2015)
Robot Visions, by Isaac Asimov (2018)
The Golden Fleece aka Hercules, My Shipmate, by Robert Graves (2020)
Land of Terror, by Edgar Rice Burroughs (2020)
Shadow Over Mars aka The Nemesis from Terra, by Leigh Brackett (2020)
Sirius: A Fantasy of Love and Discord, by Olaf Stapledon (2020)
The Wind on the Moon, by Eric Linklater (2020)
The Winged Man, by A.E. van Vogt and E. Mayne Hull (2020)
The Memory Librarian, ed. Janelle Monáe (2023)
Ion Curtain, by Anya Ow (2023)

Doctor Who, etc
In The Shadows, by Joseph Lidster (2010)

The best, and also the one you haven’t heard of
The King of Almayne: A 13th Century Englishman in Europe is a fantastic biography of the English prince who almost became Holy Roman Emperor and died 750 years ago. Unless you’ve been subjected to one of my previous rants about Richard of Cornwall, brother of Henry III, you may not have heard of him. A remarkable individual in a remarkable time. (Review; get it here)

Honorable mentions
The Decameron – classic stories of grim Renaissance life, including a surprise reference to County Down. (Review; get it here)
Skinny Dip, by Carl Hiaasen – one of his many bizarre tales of the alternative reality that is Florida. (Review; get it here.)
Sirius, by Olaf Stapledon – Long before Diana Wynne Jones, a dog with extrahuman powers in today’s world… (Review; get it here)

The one you haven’t heard of
See above. (The King of Almayne)

The one to avoid
Land of Terror, by Edgar Rice Burroughs is racist rubbish. (Review; get it here)


Wednesday reading

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Current
Down, by Laurence Miles
Year’s Best Aotearoa New Zealand Science Fiction and Fantasy: Volume I, ed Marie Hodgkinson
Around the World in 80 Games, by Marcus du Sautoy

Last books finished
Fractures, by Robbie Morrison et al
Beautiful Star, by Yukio Mishima
The Revenant Express, by George Mann (did not finish)
Raven Heart, by Murphy Lawless
A Small Semblance of Home, by Paul Phipps
The Coming Wave: AI, Power and Our Future, by Mustafa Suleyman 

Next books
Spectral Scream, by Hannah Fergesen
Tides of the Titans, by Thoraiya Dyer
The Iliad, by Homer, tr. Emily Wilson

1913: The Year Before the Storm, by Florian Illies

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Second paragraph of March chapter in original German:

Meier-Graefes Haus in Nikolassee atmete französischen Chic, hatte Eleganz und eine gewisse Behäbigkeit, es war perfekt zugeschnitten auf den gerade 50Jahre alt gewordenen Meier-Graefe und seine Ehefrau (ein paar Jahre später übrigens wurde dann der Architekt Epstein post mortem sein Schwiegervater, weil Meier-Graefe in dritter Ehe dessen Tochter Annemarie heiratete, aber das verwirrt jetzt nur). Hier, im Kirchweg 28. »draußen auf dem Lande«, wie Meier-Graefe in Briefen an den Maler Edvard Munch sein Haus lokalisierte, entstand 1913 ein zentrales Werk der Kunstgeschichtsschreibung: »Die Entwicklungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst«, die ab 1914 erscheinen sollte.Meier-Graefe’s house in Nikolassee exuded French chic, had elegance and an air of cosiness, it was perfectly tailored to Meier-Graefe, who had just turned 50, and his wife (a few years later, by the way, the architect Epstein became his father-in-law posthumously, because Meier-Graefe married his daughter Annemarie in his third marriage, but that’s just confusing). Here, at Kirchweg 28, ‘out in the country’, as Meier-Graefe described his house in letters to the painter Edvard Munch, a central work of art historiography was written in 1913: ‘The History of the Development of Modern Art’, which was to be published from 1914.
My translation because this section is missing from the English version that I bought.

I picked this up cheap in a Leuven bookshop a couple of weeks ago, partly out of interest in contrasting it with a similar book by my friend Charles Emmerson. Both of them look at the world in 1913 through contemporary records, with the benefit of hindsight and knowing what was around the corner.

Florian Illies’ book looks mainly at the German and Austrian empires, from Kiel to Trieste, with occasional excursions to Britain, France, Italy and America. It’s a fascinating delineation of the links between politics, science and the arts. Stalin and Hitler are both known to have enjoyed strolling in the gardens of the Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna that January, and may have tipped their hats to each other as they passed. Franz Kafka had an on-and-off relationship with Felice Bauer. Thomas Mann was coming to terms with his own sexuality. James Joyce was teaching and writing in Trieste. Rilke was loving and writing. Freud and Jung were treating people. The Futurists were starting. Proust self-published Du côté de chez Swann. I had never heard of Der Tunnel, in which a tunnel is built connecting America and Europe. The Mona Lisa, stolen in 1911, was found in Italy in December. There were school shootings in Bremen and Württemberg. Oskar Kokoschka and Alma Mahler launched into their passionate affair, commemorated in Kokoschka’s art.

I found a lot of new names here, particularly literary women who had previously escaped me – Lou Andreas-Salomé, Else Lasker-Schüler, Coco Chanel. There are lots of elements all adding up to a thought-provoking portrait of a time and several places, from an angle I don’t know as well as I thought I did.

I was dismayed to discover that my translation has been cut by around 20% – the German original has 324 pages, my English version only 267. There is no hint of any abridgement anywhere in my copy. That’s frankly deceptive on the part of the English language publisher.

You can get it here.

9 July books

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Non-fiction
The Age of Fallibility: Consequences of the War on Terror, by George Soros (2006)
A History of Modern Sudan, by Robert O. Collins (2009)
The Root Causes of Sudan’s Civil Wars, by Douglas H. Johnson 2009)
Emma’s War: Love, Betrayal and Death in the Sudan, by Deborah Scroggins (2009)
Becoming Superman: My Journey from Poverty to Hollywood, by J. Michael Straczynski (2020)
Joanna Russ, by Gwyneth Jones (2020)
The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick, by Mallory O’Meara (2020)
The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein, by Farah Mendlesohn (2020)

Non-genre
Intimacy aka The Wall, by Jean-Paul Sartre (2022)

SF
Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury (2006)
Malpertuis, by Jean Ray (2009)

Comics
The Day I Swapped My Dad For 2 Goldfish, by Neil Gaiman (2011)

This is a good day, with the above having an average of 4.3 stars out of five on my LibraryThing catalogue, and only one book with less than four. Still, there is one standout.

The best
Really you cannot beat the short bleak vision of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. (Review; get it here.)

Honorable mentions
Two of the 2020 Best Related Work Hugo finalists (reviewed here) were particularly outstanding, Mallory O’Meara’s biography of Milicent Patrick (get it here) and Farah Mendlesohn’s study of Robert A. Heinlein (get it here).
To that I would also add Emma’s War, which still reverberates across her adopted country (South Sudan) today. (Review; get it here.)

The ones you haven’t heard of
I know that Sudan is a minority interest, but the two histories by Robert Collins (get it here) and Douglas Johnson (get it here) have different strengths and deserve to be better known. (Both reviewed with Emma’s War, above.)

The ones to avoid
None. I didn’t get on with Gwyneth Jones on Joanna Russ, but it’s far from awful. (Review; get it here.)

Would She Be Gone, by Melanie Harding-Shaw

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Second paragraph of third section:

“Detective Wright, you are cleared to continue your operation. Re-establish contact and proceed as planned,” Palmer said.

A short bleak dystopian satire set in a world where literature is under state control, and the apparatus of government security forces is used to stop people from encountering dangerous ideas, striking through their families. Hits quite hard. You can get it here.

This was the shortest unread book that I had acquired in 2020. Next on that pile is Raven Heart, by “Murphy Lawless”.

8 July books

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Non-fiction
The Desert Fathers: Sayings of the Early Christian Monks, translated and with an Introduction by Benedicta Ward (2007)
The Desert Fathers: Translations from the Latin with an Introduction by Helen Waddell (2007)
The Faerie Queene: a selection of critical essays, edited by Peter Bayley (2011)
The Johnstown Flood, by David McCullough (2021)

Non-genre
The Mermaids Singing, by Lisa Carey (2012)
The Commissioner, by Stanley Johnson (2016)

SF
The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, attributed to Luo Guanzhong (2015)
The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov (2020)
The Monk, by Matthew Lewis (2022)

Doctor Who
Doctor Who: Planet of the Ood, by Keith Temple (2024)

The Best
The Johnstown Flood – magisterial account by the great David McCullough in his younger days of a man-made disaster that wiped out a town in Pennsylvania in 1889; one of the victims was the uncle of my as-yet-unborn grandmother. A book of both its times, ie 1889 and 1968. (Review; get it here)

Honorable mentions:
The Desert Fathers, Waddell translation – the thoughts of the saints who isolated themselves in the desert are by definition a bit dry, but Helen Waddell invests them with humour and sympathy. (Review; get it here)
The Master and Margarita – one of the great Russian fantasy novels of that creative period soon after the Revolution. (Review; get it here)

The one you haven’t heard of
Even though it was made into a film starring John Hurt, the original novel, The Commissioner, by Stanley Johnson (father of Boris) is not that well known (only 11 owners on LibraryThing, 10 ratings on Goodreads). A tale of Brussels skullduggery in more innocent times. (Review; get it here)

The ones to avoid
I’m leaving this category clear again; none of the above is awful. I didn’t gel with Three Kingdoms, but that’s on me at least as much as the writer and translator. There are enough ghosts and sorcery for it to qualify as sf above. (Review; get it here)

Castrovalva, by Andrew Orton (and Christopher H. Bidmead); and some reflections on Escher

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I was again glued to the TV in January 1982 as Peter Davison took on the role of the Fifth Doctor in Castrovalva, and I really enjoyed the look and feel of the story, even if the plot was a little confusing. I was fourteen. When I came back to it in 2007, I wrote:

This was the first Peter Davison story and is one of the better ones, but a bit atypical in that the Doctor spends much of the time trying to reconstruct his own personality. Lots of lovely nods to earlier Doctors, most of which were rather lost on me in 1981. The companions are still rather feeling their way, with Nyssa being the clever one who explains everything, coming across as rather cold despite her warm and fuzzy fairy costume, while Tegan gets to be the one who everything has to be explained to. Adric seems to have rather enjoyed being tied up by the Master… The plot doesn’t really make a lot of sense, but the depictions of two magical places – Castrovalva itself and the Tardis interior – are both rather wonderful, and the music and general sense of goodwill makes it still good viewing.

Continue reading →

7 July books

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Non-fiction
The Economist Style Guide (2006)
Young Elizabeth, by Alison Plowden (2012)
Danger to Elizabeth, by Alison Plowden (2012)
Marriage with My Kingdom: The Courtships of Queen Elizabeth I, by Alison Plowden (2012)
Elizabeth Regina, by Alison Plowden (2012)
The Bible: The Biography, by Karen Armstrong (2012)
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, by Harriet Ann Jacobs (2012)
The Russian Phoenix, by Francis House (2012)
TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 3: Jon Pertwee, by Philip Sandifer (2013)
Boys in Zinc, by Svetlana Alexievich (2021)

Non-genre
The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco (2013)
Dark Horse, by Fletcher Knebel (2016)
Gigi, and The Cat, by Colette (2019)

SF
The Stories of Hans Christian Andersen, translated and edited by Jeffrey Frank and Diana Crone Frank (2007)
Danny the Champion of the World, by Roald Dahl (2013)
True History, by Lucian of Samosata (2015)
Dreaming in Smoke, by Tricia Sullivan (2020)
The Extremes, by Christopher Priest (2020)
Aurora: Beyond Equality, eds Vonda N. McIntyre and Susan Anderson (2023)
The Splendid City by Karen Heuler (2023)

Doctor Who
Doctor Who Annual 1986 (2011)
Risk Assessment, by James Goss (2012)

Comics
Rose de Paris, by Gilles Schlesser and Eric Puech (2018)
Junker: een Pruisische blues, by Simon Spruyt (2022)

The Best
Today’s pick is a political novel from the early 1970s which I bet you have never heard of: Dark Horse, by Fletcher Knebel. Due to the Republican candidate’s death shortly before the 1976 election, an obscure politician from New Jersey – “a corridor of swampy weather and toadstool habitations that called itself a state” – is elevated to political superstar status, and tries to use it for good. There are no TV debates. There is a sub-plot with a sex tape of which there is only one copy. It’s just great. (Review; get it here.)

Honorable Mentions
I’m in a forgiving mood today, so you can have four:
The Name of the Rose – the fascinating medieval novel by Umberto Eco. (Review; long footnote; get it here.)
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl – gruelling first-person account of the real effects of the “peculiar institution”. (Review; get it here.)
Boys in Zinc – the human impact of the post-Soviet wars on ordinary Russian soldiers and their ordinary families. Helped win the writer a Nobel prize. (Review; get it here.)
Risk Assessment – one of James Goss’s many excellent contributions to the Whoniverse, this time concerning Torchwood. (Review; get it here)

The one you haven’t heard of
Aurora: Beyond Equality – a useful representation of both how far sf had come in 1976 and how much farther there still was to go. (Review; get it here.)

The ones to avoid
I’m leaving this category blank today; I like some of the above more than others, but none is actually awful.

The Prince of Secrets, by A.J. Lancaster

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

<Stop that,> she told the land firmly, pushing its attention away from Wyn. <You’re fond of him, remember? I know his secrecy is trying, sometimes, but this reaction is quite out of proportion to the offense. He’s our friend.> Friend wasn’t quite the right label anymore, but she hadn’t found a new one yet that didn’t sound either silly or premature.

Another from the 2020 Hugo packet, a second installment of a series set in a secondary world which simply failed to draw me in. The fact that I was reading Jeannette Ng’s (much better) Under the Pendulum Sun at the same time didn’t do it any favours. I stopped around page 100. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2020. Next on that pile is The Revenant Express, by George Mann, which I’m approaching with some trepidation as I haven’t always found his writing to my taste.

The best known books set in each country: Mali

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See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Mali.

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

TitleAuthorGoodreads
raters		LibraryThing
owners
SaharaClive Cussler60,0054,040
The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu and Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious ManuscriptsJoshua Hammer 12,0951,721
Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali(anonymous)2,889748
Monique and the Mango Rains: Two Years With a Midwife in MaliKris Holloway 4,958399
SeguMaryse Condé 1,973641
The Black PagesNnedi Okorafor 4,21590
I Lost My Tooth In AfricaPenda Diakité 517629
The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu: The Quest for This Storied City and the Race to Save its TreasuresCharlie English 1,010252

After a couple of countries which were harder work, I was glad that Mali turned out to be fairly straightforward – the city of Timbuktu gives it a certain brand recognition. I wasn’t completely sure about this week’s winner at first, a typically convoluted Cussler tale which climaxes with an absurd revelation about the fate of Abraham Lincoln, but a speedy page count revealed that it does indeed appear to be more than 50% set in Mali, so it qualifies. Glad to see the traditional Malian epic Sundiata doing well also.

I did disqualify ten books. With a particularly heavy heart, I ruled out Scales of Gold by Dorothy Dunnett, because although more than half of it is set in West Africa, I think less than half is set in what’s now Mali. Tremendous book though.

Similarly, I was not quite sure about Masquerade, by O.O. Sangoyomi, but I think that more than half of it is set in the fictional city of Ṣàngótẹ̀ and I’m pretty sure that’s meant to be in what’s now Nigeria. The Bitter Side of Sweet, by Tara Sullivan, is set in Côte d’Ivoire. The Book of Negroes, by Lawrence Hill, is set in Canada. Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law, by Haben Girma, is set in the USA and the protagonist is Eritrean by origin, so I don’t know why people connect it with Mali. The Green Road, by Anne Enright, is mostly set in Ireland.

The Shadow of the Sun, by Ryszard Kapuściński, Leo Africanus, by Amin Maalouf, Sahara, by Michael Palin and China’s Second Continent, by Howard W. French, all cover numerous countries, with much less than half of each book set in Mali.

Coming next: Burkina Faso, Sri Lanka, Taiwan and Malawi.

Asia: India | China | Indonesia | Pakistan | Bangladesh (revised) | Russia | Japan | Philippines (revised) | Vietnam | Iran | Türkiye | Thailand | Myanmar | South Korea | Iraq | Afghanistan | Yemen | Uzbekistan | Malaysia | Saudi Arabia | Nepal | North Korea | Syria | Sri Lanka | Taiwan | Kazakhstan | Cambodia | Jordan | UAE
Americas: USA | Brazil (revised) | Mexico | Colombia | Argentina | Canada | Peru | Venezuela | Guatemala | Ecuador | Bolivia | Haiti | Dominican Republic
Africa: Nigeria | Ethiopia (revised) | Egypt | DR Congo | Tanzania | South Africa | Kenya | Sudan | Uganda | Algeria | Morocco | Angola | Mozambique | Ghana | Madagascar | Côte d’Ivoire | Cameroon | Niger | Mali | Burkina Faso | Malawi | Zambia | Chad | Somalia | Senegal | Zimbabwe | Guinea | Benin | Rwanda | Burundi | Tunisia | South Sudan
Europe: Russia | Türkiye | Germany | France | UK | Italy | Spain | Poland | Ukraine | Romania | Netherlands | Belgium
Oceania: Australia