See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Bolivia.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
Women Talking
Miriam Toews
66,544
1,745
Marching Powder: A True Story of Friendship, Cocaine, and South America’s Strangest Jail
Rusty Young
30,320
559
Woven in Moonlight
Isabel Ibañez
10,433
668
The Puma Years
Laura Coleman
14,246
305
The Bolivian Diary
Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara
3,074
927
Jungle: A Harrowing True Story of Survival
Yossi Ghinsberg
9,539
297
Into the Jungle
Erica Ferencik
4,161
211
I Am a Taxi
Deborah Ellis
1,414
177
There’s a real theme of jungle here, with a side-helping of capitalist exploitation. But this week’s winner is a 2018 novel about the women of a Christian cult village who discover that they are all being drugged and sexually assaulted in their sleep. The novel was adapted to become a 2022 film, which will have helped its visibility in the markets.
Isabel Ibañez, author of this week’s runner-up, identifies as a Bolivian writer, born in the USA to Bolivian parents. Rodrigo Hasbún was the highest scoring writer actually born in Bolivia; his Affections just missed the cut, Liliana Colanzi’s You Glow in the Dark being a bit further down.
I disqualified seven books. The Lost City of Z, by David Grann, is mainly set in Brazil. The Shock Doctrine, by Naomi Klein, has a global remit. What the River Knows, by Isabel Ibañez again, has a Bolivian protagonist but is set in Egypt. From Here to Eternity, by Caitlin Doughty, has a global scope. Only about a quarter of Purity, by Jonathan Franzen, is set in Bolivia, the rest in Germany and the USA. The Old Patagonian Express, by Paul Theroux, covers the whole region. And Bolívar, by Marie Arana, also covers a wider region.
Back to Africa for the next two weeks, with Tunisia and South Sudan, and then we go elsewhere, with Haiti and then good old Belgium.
Non-fiction 6 (YTD 74) Madame Prosecutor, by Carla del Ponte The Spark that Survived, by Myra Lewis Williams The Great Hunger, by Cecil Woodham-Smith The Decline of the English Murder, and other essays, by George Orwell How God Works: The Science Behind the Benefits of Religion, by David DeSteno An Experiment with Time, by J.W. Dunne
Non-genre 1 (YTD 38) The Good Wife of Bath, by Karen Brooks (did not finish)
Poetry 1 (YTD 4) Gitanjali, by Rabindranath Tagore
SF 7 (YTD 111) Thief of Time, by Terry Pratchett Salvage, by Emily Tesh The Year Before Yesterday, by Brian W. Aldiss Amongst Our Weapons, by Ben Aaronovitch Metropolis, by Thea von Harbou Camp Damascus, by Chuck Tingle Vanishing Point, by Michaela Roessner
Doctor Who 2 (YTD 28) Time Zero, by Justin Richards Doctor Who: Empire of Death, by Scott Handcock
Comics 6 (YTD 35) Sonic Boom, by Robbie Morrison et al The Ray Bradbury Chronicles, Volume 3, by Ray Bradbury et al Scotland, Épisode 1, by Rodolphe, Leo and Marchal Ness: A Story from the Ulster Cycle, by Patrick Brown Charlotte impératrice, Tome 1: La Princesse et l’Archiduc, by Fabien Nury and Matthieu Bonhomme Spa 1906, by Patrick Weber and Olivier Wozniak
4,700 pages (YTD 72,700) 6/23 (YTD 109/293) by non-male writers (del Ponte, Lewis Williams, Woodham-Smith, Tesh, von Harbou, Roessner) 1/23 (YTD 32/293) by non-white writers (Tagore) 2/23 reread (The Year Before Yesterday, Time Zero) 185 books currently tagged unread, down 4 from last month (some acquisitions at Novacon!), down 75 from November 2024.
Reading now If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, by Italo Calvino Winning Ugly: NATO’s War to Save Kosovo, by Ivo H. Daalder and Michael E. O’Hanlon Adventures in Space, eds. Patrick Parrinder and Yao Haijun
Coming soon (perhaps) Time Trials Volume 1: The Terror Beneath, by Warren Pleece et al The Infinity Race, by Simon Messingham Doctor Who: The Adventures After Doctor Who: Mawdryn Undead, by Peter Grimwade Mawdryn Undead, by Kara Dennison
Our Wonderful Selves, by Roland Pertwee Yet More Penguin Science Fiction, ed. Brian Aldiss Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships, by Robin Dunbar Lost In Time, by A G Riddle Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy, by Christopher R. Hill
The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport, by Samit Basu Reeds in the Wind, by Grazia Deledda The Enigma Score, by Sheri S. Tepper The Leviathan, by Rosie Andrews Say Nothing, by Patrick Radden Keefe The Dead Take the A Train, by Richard Kadrey Best American Comics 2011, ed. Alison Bechdel The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi The Fifth Elephant, by Terry Pratchett Stone and Sky, by Ben Aaronovitch Bruxelles 43, by Patrick Weber and Baudouin Deville Red Planet, by Robert A. Heinlein
Second paragraph of third chapter, though I did not get that far:
I was all alone with my present. With my future.
A retelling of the story of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, from her own viewpoint. Historical cliché piled upon historical cliché; antic diction interweaves with the style of a magazine tell-all article. I did not quite make it to the end of the second chapter. You can get The Good Wife of Bath here.
This was the non-genre fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that list is Our Wonderful Selves, a play by Jon Pertwee’s father Roland Pertwee.
Also read, but I’m not going to review it, The Spark That Survived, by Myra Lewis Williams, the second paragraph of whose third chapter is:
As their first child, I’ve heard their story so many times I can recite it in my sleep.
This was the shortest book that I had acquired in 2022 and not yet read. Next on that pile is Yet More Penguin Science Fiction, edited by Brian Aldiss.
I was gratified to learn that so many African states, including some of the world’s poorest countries, in terms of material wealth but certainly not in terms of human pride and determination, had cooperated with the Rwanda tribunal, arresting and transferring to its custody leaders of the genocide. According to an American nongovernmental organization, the Coalition for International Justice, by the end of 2000, Benin had transferred two accused, Burkina Faso one, Cameroon nine, Ivory Coast two, Mali one, Namibia one, South Africa one, Togo two, Tanzania two, and Zambia three. Kenya had transferred thirteen of the accused; in one arrest operation engineered by Louise Arbour, the Kenyan authorities apprehended seven indicted Rwandan leaders on a single day and subsequently transferred them to the tribunal; the Kenyans knew, however, that they could have arrested and transferred several more; one of the fugitives in Nairobi was Félicien Kabuga, a wealthy businessman who allegedly helped nance Hutu militias and plan the genocide. In contrast, at the close of 2000, NATO, the most powerful military force the world has ever known, had been patrolling Bosnia for five years, and, within its borders, eighteen of the Yugoslavia tribunal’s accused war criminals, including Radovan Karadžić, were still roaming free. As I made my rounds of world capitals seeking assistance to secure the arrest of the Yugoslavia tribunal’s fugitives, I recalled the African states’ cooperation. I brought it up during private meetings with Western leaders. At the time it seemed that, thanks to these African countries, the Rwanda tribunal, much more than the Yugoslavia tribunal, stood to rival Nuremberg in its success at bringing surviving members of the top leadership to the dock.
A memoir by the Chief Prosecutor of the war crimes tribunals for both the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, taking the story up to the end of her Yugoslavia work in 2008. It’s quite a personal story, as she takes us through her childhood in Switzerland and her legal career, and admits her fondness for expensive handbags (though these are also a practical tool of the trade). But the nuts and bolts of it are the difficulty of operating the prosecution side of the first big international criminal court since Nuremberg, and the difficulties that del Ponte experienced from all sides.
By her own account, del Ponte must have been a difficult person to work with, though also by her own account and from what I know myself, she was given very difficult working conditions – the promised political and financial support from the Western democracies who had pushed for the war crimes tribunals in the first place turned out to be very inconstant, staffing of the tribunals varied in quality, and co-operation with the post-conflict authorities on the ground began badly and did not always improve. She was the subject of vicious personal abuse in the media of the countries concerned, and although she claims to have a thick skin, it’s difficult to be completely unmoved by that kind of thing.
It is a bit frustrating that the Rwanda narrative ends in 2003 and the ex-Yugoslavia narrative in 2008 when she went to Argentina as the ambassador of Switzerland; it means that while the individual trees of prosecutorial processes are examined at great length, she doesn’t write as much about the forest of international justice and accountability, which would have been interesting.
I myself was engaged with a lot of the policy debates regarding the former Yugoslavia during the noughties, and there are several conversations in the book that I recognise, not because I was present myself, but because I heard about them shortly afterward from people who were. I don’t believe I ever met del Ponte in person, though I became friendly with several of her close colleagues. My then employers, the International Crisis Group, get a couple of mentions, mostly positive; our line then was unqualified support for the war crimes tribunals.
I’m no longer quite as sure. While there were some very important successes, del Ponte herself is upfront about some of the failures: the Rwanda process became victors’ justice, as nobody from President Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front was prosecuted; Slobodan Milošević, conducting his own defence, distracted the court from establishing the facts with his theatrics, and cheated the verdict by refusing to take the medication which would have saved his life.
I would add that the Kosovo prosecutions by the court did not seem as well founded as the others, and more generally del Ponte’s statements about Kosovo sometimes seem to me the wrong side of speculation rather than factual reporting. In fact Kosovo complied much more swiftly with the demands of the tribunal than did any of the other governments involved, but got and gets little credit for that. Former prime minister Ramush Haradinaj has now been acquitted twice, which also surely counts for something. (And never mind the current Thaçi trial, which is under a different structure.)
I also found a couple of puzzling errors. George Robertson, the NATO Secretary-General, is consistently referred to as Lord John Robinson. And when I checked out a reference to one of the Crisis Group reports that I had edited, I found that our report simply referred back to one of the prosecution documents, in other words by citing us, del Ponte was effectively citing herself. Perhaps this just reflects some haste in getting the draft off her desk as she prepared for her next assignment, in Argentina.
In a sense, those were more innocent days, when it was credible to state that those responsible for atrocities during the course of an armed conflict should, could and would be held accountable by the international community. I’ve seen a couple of interesting recent pieces on this. In The Economist, Rosie Blau looks at the difference between today and Nuremberg. On his own blog, my friend and former colleague Andrew Stroehlein looks at the implications for future conflict resolution. He admits that “international justice can seem like a faith-based community. We believe in it, but proof of its existence is rare, and almost miraculous when it happens.” You have to look for that proof pretty carefully these days, especially with the rule of law itself being so visibly demolished in and by the USA.
This was the top unread book in my pile of books about Kosovo acquired in 2022. Next up there is Winning Ugly: NATO’s War to Save Kosovo, by Ivo Daalder.
Current If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, by Italo Calvino Charlotte impératrice, Tome 1: La Princesse et l’Archiduc, by Fabien Nury and Matthieu Bonhomme Vanishing Point, by Michaela Roessner
Last books finished Amongst Our Weapons, by Ben Aaronovitch Metropolis, by Thea von Harbou The Ray Bradbury Chronicles, Volume 3, by Ray Bradbury et al Scotland, Épisode 1, by Rodolphe, Leo and Marchal Camp Damascus, by Chuck Tingle Ness: A Story from the Ulster Cycle, by Patrick Brown
Next books Time Trials Volume 1: The Terror Beneath, by Warren Pleece et al Winning Ugly, by Ivo Daalder Spa 1906, by Drac
Second paragraph of Chapter 51 (which is the third chapter after the prologues; they are numbered going backwards from 53):
The leather cover is scuffed and worn. The binding is slightly loose and several of the pages have pulled almost free. Others are torn or stained or missing entirely.
Going back to the sequence of Doctor Who novels that I read but did not get around to reviewing in 2014-2015, this is the seventieth of the BBC Eighth Doctor series, and also a bit of a turning point in the sequence. The Doctor and faithful companions Fitz and Anji head off in three different directions for what seem at first to be three different adventures, Fitz in 1893 and the others in 2002, but it becomes clear that their stories are intertwined. Some great circumstantial detail, with the image of the TARDIS in a glacier particularly memorable, and we also pick up a good deal about what makes the companions tick. I was a bit confused by the end, though, as it is a while since I read this series and I had forgotten the exact significance of recurring characters Sabbath and Trix. Little mercy is shown to new readers here. But Justin Richards is usually a reliably entertaining writer, and here he was also the overall editor of the series: he gave himself the task of twisting it in a slightly different direction, and succeeded.
The girl, who had been admiring her new hat in the mirror, tweaked the already low neckline of her dress for slightly more exposure, just in case the caller was male, and went and opened the door.
Gradually getting through my stack of Discworld books which I had not written up previously. I think that in fact I had not read this before – although I added it to my LibraryThing catalogue when I set it up in 2005, I also have a record that I got a second-hand copy in 2010, and it did not seem familiar to me.
There are several quite disparate elements to the story. The main narrative concerns one Jeremy Clockson (groan) who is building the perfect clock, which incidentally will bring the world to an end. There’s Susan Sto Helit trying to fix things because her grandfather cannot due to handwavium. There’s a spoof of Chinese kung-fu films with the humble sweeper in the monastery turning out to be the venerable monk with arcane talents. There’s a silly bit with the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse. The most successful bit for me was the portrayal of the Auditors of Time, grim inhuman regulators of the type that Pratchett hated, but who are undone by their interaction with humanity (and the other inhabitants of Discworld). All in all, I thought that balancing these various things sucked up some of the energy that might have otherwise gone into plot and humour. So, not my favourite Pratchett, though not awful either. You can get Thief of Time here.
Next up: The Fifth Elephant, of which I have fond memories.
Second frame of third issue of “Terror of the Cabinet Noir”:
The Doctor: Woo-hoo-ha-ha-ha! / “We are the Darkness! You would do well to fear us!” / Well, sorry to burst that delusional bubble, but we don’t. Julie: We don’t?
Two rather well developed Twelfth Doctor stories here. The first, “Terror of the Cabinet Noir”, is a nicely set up adventure mainly in an alternative history 17th century France, with the historical opera singer and adventuress Julie d’Aubigny as a one-off companion. It’s true to the spirit of The Girl in the Fireplace, though obviously with different characters and a completely different alien threat. An affirming read.
The other story, “Invasion of the Mindmorphs”, has the Doctor going to confront the creators of a comic strip called Time Surgeon with an eerie resemblance to his own adventures. A bit more could have been done with this concept, but it’s a funny enough idea and executed very much as a Capaldi era story.
See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Burundi.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
Small Country
Gaël Faye
28,162
682
Baho!
Roland Rugero
150
37
The True Sources of the Nile
Sarah Stone
101
44
The Night the Angels Came: Miracles Of Protection And Provision In Burundi
Chrissie Chapman
137
19
The Tears of a Man Flow Inward: Growing Up in the Civil War in Burundi
Pacifique Irankunda
171
10
Life after Violence: A People’s Story of Burundi
Peter Uvin
60
22
Burundi: Ethnic Conflict and Genocide
René Lemarchand
30
31
From Bloodshed to Hope in Burundi: Our Embassy Years during Genocide
Robert Krueger
36
19
This week’s winner is by Gaël Faye, who identifies himself as French-Rwandan, though in fact he grew up in Bujumbura, the capital of Burundi, and Small Country reflects his experiences there (though we are warned not to take it as autobiography).
I cannot remember a case where there was such a big gap between the winner and the rest of the field.
Roland Rugero, the author of this week’s runner-up, does identify as Burundian, and Baho! is set in a fictional Burundian village. The top book set in Burundi by a women from Burundi is Weep Not, Refugee, by Marie-Therese Toyi.
I was not sure about the setting of The True Sources of the Nile, by Sarah Stone, but I gave it the benefit of the doubt. I also looked closely at The Chimpanzee Whisperer, by Stany Nyandwi, and in the end decided that probably less than half of it is set in the author’s homeland of Burundi.
I disqualified dozens of books here. There is a huge number of books which have been given the ‘Burundi’ tag on either Goodreads, LibraryThing or both, but have less than 50% (usually much less than 50%) set there.
There is for two slightly different reasons. The first is that there are a lot of books about Africa, or Central Africa, that touch on Burundi but only as a minor element of a bigger picture. The second is that Burundi’s awful conflict of the 1990s tends to get lumped in with the even more awful conflict in Rwanda next door, which usually gets top billing. Even Small Country, this week’s winner, has a Rwandan protagonist.
Also I noted Strength in What Remains, by Tracy Kidder, last week as a book which is more about Burundi than Rwanda. This is true, but it is mainly set in the USA.
Next week we move away from Africa, to Bolivia, and then back again to Tunisia and South Sudan, but they will be the last African countries for a while; in four weeks time we come to Haiti.
Next in my occasional series of incomprehensible accounts of triumph in playing the game of Diplomacy online against AI opponents, this is one where I’m particularly proud that a normally losing strategy, sending a single unit behind enemy lines to pick up the odd supply centre, actually worked in the end. Otherwise I was both lucky and unlucky, with the 18th centre effectively being my recapture of one of my own home bases.
Spring 1901
There really isn’t much flexibility about Germany’s opening moves. You have to move your fleet to Denmark, to keep Russia out of Sweden; you have to move your Berlin army to Kiel, to hopefully take Holland unless England decides to do something weird; and you have to try to move to Burgundy, to prevent a French army coming up against your borders. This does leave your southern flank uncovered, but it’s rare for Italy or Russia to try anything funny, and very improbable that Austria will move to Tyrol or Bohemia.
Other countries surprised me a bit. England’s move north is normal enough; there really are only two possibilities even if the northern variation is less common. France’s move north was more unexpected, welcome in that it would give England something other than me to think about, but unwelcome in that it might work too well. Italy’s move to Piedmont was very unusual.
When Seel and Orien arrived they were dressed splendidly for the occasion. They seemed taller than I remembered, proud and graceful, and treated me like a bride, which I supposed, in a sense, I was. Seel put white lilies in my hair, avoiding my eyes, and offered me a goblet of blue glass. The liquid inside it looked murky and tasted foul. I downed it as quickly as I could. They would take no chances with me; I would be drugged almost senseless.
A lot of people really love this book. I didn’t. The protagonist is adopted into the superhuman, supersexy Wraeththu, who are crushing the inferior homo sapiens (that’s people like you and me) and yet spend a lot of time violently arguing internally about power structures and the sexual pecking order, which are basically the same thing. It’s Storm Constantine’s best known single book, but I don’t think the racial and gender politics work for today. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2022. Next on that pile is Vanishing Point, by Michaela Roessner.
Jim, a pipe in his teeth, leaned back against the oak pew. His eyes shifted from the game and went to Nancy, who, with her chin supported in the crutch of her two hands, was working out her next move.
This was the best selling book of 1925 in the USA, by the largely forgotten Arthur Hamilton Gibbs – it’s his best-known book on both Goodreads and LibraryThing, but has only 11 raters on Goodreads and only 9 owners on LibraryThing. (The Great Gatsby, also published in 1925, has been rated by getting on for six million Goodreads users, and has almost 80,000 owners on LibraryThing, as of present writing.)
It’s a coming of age story about a young Englishwoman, who goes to Paris, discovers herself, discovers love, discovers that men are both tempting and awful, and finds her destiny back in England looking after her disabled father and developing her own Art; then at the end, one of the men turns out not to have been so awful after all.
There are comic yokels / grovelling working class folk, and although the heroine at one point seems ready to break into full feminist independence, the book doesn’t have the courage of its convictions and goes for a safe ending. It is not as funny as it thinks it is, and, like its heroine, is coy rather than sexy.
It is set immediately before the war and during its first half, and perhaps the readers of 1925 liked the story it told about the time before and during the collective loss of innocence. However I can’t really construct a case for rediscovering it as a lost classic. You can get Soundings here, but NB that the text is riddled with electronic scanning errors.
These both won the Hugo and Nebula Awards for work of 2007, awarded in 2008.
The second paragraph of the third section of The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate is:
He was wandering by the Zuweyla Gate, where the sword dancers and snake charmers perform, when an astrologer called to him. “Young man! Do you wish to know the future?”
Back in 2008, I ranked it second on my ballot, behind The Cambist and Lord Iron, by Daniel Abraham, and wrote:
A lovely lovely story of time travel at the time of the Abbasid Caliphate, working up all those human themes of loss and love in a richly imagined fantastic environment that Chiang has done so well before. I expect this will win.
I still think that it is really good, and it has certainly proved to have staying power. It’s a story of time travel paradoxes, predestination and acceptance. I love Borges’ short story “The Other”, in which the writer meets his younger self and finds that they do not understand each other. Chiang riffs on this theme as well, with the extra twist that the older self comes to collude in his younger self’s destiny. I also give it good marks for the subtly different portrayals of Baghdad and Cairo, respectful rather than Orientalist (at least that was my take).
The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate was the only work on both the Hugo and Nebula ballots for Best Novelette that year. The other Hugo finalists were “The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairy Tale of Economics”, by Daniel Abraham; “Dark Integers”, by Greg Egan; “Finisterra”, by David Moles and “Glory”, by Greg Egan. The other Nebula finalists were “Child, Maiden, Mother, Crone”, by Terry Bramlett; “The Children’s Crusade”, by Robin Wayne Bailey; “The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs Of North Park After the Change”, by Kij Johnson; “The Fiddler of Bayou Teche”, by Delia Sherman; “Pol Pot’s Beautiful Daughter (Fantasy)”, by Geoff Ryman; and “Safeguard”, by Nancy Kress.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union starts as follows (explicit surgical details redacted):
Instead, he lights a papiros. After a decade of abstinence, Landsman took up smoking again not quite three years ago. His then-wife was pregnant at the time. It was a much-discussed and in some quarters a long-desired pregnancy—her first but not a planned one. As with many pregnancies that are discussed too long there was a history of ambivalence in the prospective father. At seventeen weeks and a day—the day Landsman bought his first package of Broadways in ten years-they got a bad result. Some but not all of the cells that made up the fetus, code-named Django, had an extra chromosome on the twentieth pair. A mosaicism, it was called. It might cause grave abnormalities. It might have no effect at all. In the available literature, a faithful person could find encouragement, and a faithless one ample reason to despond. Landsman’s view of things-ambivalent, despondent, and with no faith in anything prevailed… Three months later, Landsman and his cigarettes moved out of the house on Tshernovits Island that he and Bina had shared for nearly all the fifteen years of their marriage. It was not that he couldn’t live with the guilt. He just couldn’t live with it and Bina, too.
I ranked it third on my ballot that year, writing:
The setting is an alternate present where a large chunk of Alaska was colonised by Jewish refugees after the Second World War, and the Israelis lost in 1948 – there are other differences too, but those are the major ones. Now, sixty years on from those events, the Alaskan territory is within weeks of reverting to US control and its inhabitants face displacement again.
Chabon’s viewpoint character is a memorably seedy and depressed detective, trying to solve a murder which appears to be linked to chess and a Messianic Jewish sect, and at the same time dealing with his own professional and family dilemmas. The tenuous society of Sitka is well depicted at all its levels. In places it’s terrifically sad. I was a bit dubious about the portrayal of conspiratorial politics at the highest political level, but perhaps that was part of the point.
However, it’s not going at the top of my Hugo list; I don’t think it is sfnal enough. Apart from the ahistorical setting, there is no sfnal content (well, a couple of miracles are hinted at, but I’m not sure that counts). The genre of this novel is detective, not sf; the setting is not much more counterfactual than Agatha Christie’s country houses, or Lindsey Davis’ richly imagined and researched Rome, or Ellis Peters’ medieval Shrewsbury (which also gets the very occasional miracle, but that doesn’t make it fantasy).
Don’t get me wrong: I liked the book enormously. The setting seemed to me a very thought-provoking response to the history of Jews, in America in particular, since 1940, far better than the other attempts I’ve read recently. I’ll probably end up ranking it ahead of the other two nominees which I haven’t yet read and of which I don’t have huge expectations. But, while in a lot of ways it may be the best novel of the three I’ve read so far, it lacks the sensawunda that I got in spades from both Halting State and Brasyl, so loses my vote on that account.
Coming back to it seventeen years later, I was not sure that I liked it as much. It’s difficult to believe the political set-up; where are the people who would have been lobbying in Washington to allow Sitka to remain Jewish? Is political extremism really monopolised by religious extremists? There is an intersection, sure, but it’s rarely the perfect overlay depicted here. There’s a bit of an assumption that the experience of urban American Jews applies to Jews everywhere, and I don’t see that that really tracks. And I must also say that I found it rather a long book. Anyway, you can get The Yiddish Policemen’s Union here.
In the Best Novella categories, three stories were nominated for both Hugo and Nebula: the Nebula-winning “The Fountain of Age”, by Nancy Kress; “Memorare”, by Gene Wolfe; and “Stars Seen Through Stone”, by Lucius Shepard. The other two Hugo finalists were “Recovering Apollo 8”, by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, which I voted for, and “All Seated on the Ground”, a particularly silly story by Connie Willis, which won. The other Nebula finalists were “Awakening”, by Judith Berman; “The Helper and His Hero”, by Matt Hughes; and “Kiosk”, by Bruce Sterling.
There was no overlap in the Short Story categories. The Hugo finalists were “Tideline”, by Elizabeth Bear, which won, and also got my own vote; “Distant Replay”, by Mike Resnick; “Last Contact”, by Stephen Baxter; “A Small Room in Koboldtown”, by Michael Swanwick; and “Who’s Afraid of Wolf 359?”, by Ken MacLeod. The Nebula finalists were “Always”, by Karen Joy Fowler, which won; “Captive Girl”, by Jennifer Pelland; “Pride”, by Mary Turzillo; “The Story of Love”, by Vera Nazarian; “Titanium Mike Saves the Day”, by David D. Levine; and “Unique Chicken Goes In Reverse”, by Andy Duncan.
The Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation Long Form went to Stardust, and for Short Form to Blink. The Nebula for Best Script went to Pan’s Labyrinth.
Next in this sequence is The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi.
Current Amongst Our Weapons, by Ben Aaronovitch Metropolis, by Thea von Harbou
Last books finished The Great Hunger, by Cecil Woodham-Smith The Year Before Yesterday, by Brian W. Aldiss The Decline of the English Murder, and other essays, by George Orwell How God Works: The Science Behind the Benefits of Religion, by David DeSteno An Experiment with Time, by J. W Dunne
Next books Vanishing Point, by Michaela Roessner Camp Damascus, by Chuck Tingle If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, by Italo Calvino
Every season of the year wagons came through the streets and picked up bodies of derelicts. Late at night old ladies in babushkas came to the morgue looking for their husbands and sons. The corpses lay on tables of galvanized iron. From the bottom of each table a drainpipe extended to the floor. Around the rim of the table was a culvert. And into the culvert ran the water sprayed constantly over each body from an overhead faucet. The faces of the dead were upturned into the streams of water that poured over them like the irrepressible mechanism in death of their own tears.
This was the best-selling book of 1975 in America, though Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot has proven to have more staying power. It’s set in the period from 1902 to 1915, mostly in New Rochelle, New York, and concerns a white family (referred to as Father, Mother, Mother’s Younger Brother, Grandfather, and ‘the little boy’) and their relationship with a young black woman, her pianist boyfriend and their baby, and also a older Jewish man and his young daughter; but also all of these interweave with many famous people of the time, notably Harry Houdini, Emma Goldman, Booker T. Washington and the intriguing socialite Evelyn Nesbit, who I hadn’t previously heard of and who sent me scurrying to Wikipedia to see how much of her story as told here was true (answer: most of it).
I really enjoyed this. I thought that the spirit of the age was convincingly portrayed, and the motivations of the characters always crystal clear and consistent. There is a gripping subplot about a racist fire chief who harasses the pianist, and the pianist’s revenge. The people seem like real people and the places real places. You can get Ragtime here.
I was surprised to see, however, that Ragtime was on the (very long ballot) for that year’s Nebula Award for Best Novel. I wouldn’t classify it as speculative fiction, not even as alternative history – the world is supposed to be our world, and historical events all take place as we know them to have taken place. But there were nineteen books on the ballot that year, so perhaps it was a quirk of the rules combined with some imaginative nominating. The winner of both Hugo and Nebula that year was The Forever War, with the other Nebula nominees including The Female Man, The Computer Connection, Invisible Cities, Dhalgren, (The) Missing Man, The Stochastic Man and my personal favourite Doorways in the Sand.
“But Cudjo know his father takee him to de compound of his father. I didn’t see him after he died. Dey bury him right away so no enemy come look down in his face and do his spirit harm. Dey bury him in de house. Dey dig up de clay floor and bury him. We say in de Affica soil, ‘We live wid you while you alive, how come we cain live wid you after you die?’ So, you know dey bury a man in his house.[”]
I came across this while looking up books which are set in the present-day country of Benin; it was written in 1927 and 1928 by the great Zora Neale Hurston, but published only in 2018, ninety years after it was written and more than half a century after she died. It’s an account of her interviews with Cudjoe Lewis, born Oluale Kossola, who was one of the last Africans to be captured, enslaved, and sold into the American South. About a third of the book describes his childhood and life in Africa. As a teenager, he was captured by the ruler of a neighbouring territory in 1860, and sold to an American slaver who brought him along with more than a hundred others to Mobile, Alabama.
Importing slaves had supposedly been illegal since 1808, but one could politely describe the enforcement of the ban as rather patchy. (My distant cousin Joseph Whyte was one of the crew of a Royal Navy ship which intercepted several American slave ships off the African coast in 1857; after being too successful, his ship was sent to Australia, but it disappeared with all hands somewhere along the way.)
Kossola / Lewis’s slavery lasted only five years, as the South lost the Civil War and all slaves were freed. He and some of the other ex-slaves tried to raise enough money to return to Africa, but the odds were stacked against them, and in the end they formed a new community south of Mobile called Africatown (or Plateau). He married and had six children, all of whom he outlived. (He would have been in his late 80s when Hurston interviewed him.) One of his sons was shot dead by a sheriff’s deputy; nothing new there. He himself was severely injured in a railway accident in 1902; he sued the train company and won compensation, but the award was overturned on appeal.
There are questions about how much of the text is Hurston’s and how much by local Mobile writer Emma Langdon Roche, but there are no questions about the effective immediacy of the first-person account of slavery and its aftermath. Apparently one of the reasons that the book was not published in Hurston’s lifetime is that she reports Kossola/Lewis’s words in his own dialect; for me that adds to the impact. I was startled to discover that 40 seconds of footage of him survives at the start of this short film compiling Hurston’s fieldwork:
A really interesting and moving book. You can get Barracoon here. My edition has extensive footnotes, and a foreword and afterword by Alice Walker.
See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Rwanda.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families
Philip Gourevitch
36,385
3,747
Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust
Immaculée Ilibagiza
47,158
2,003
Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda
Roméo Dallaire
13,713
1,823
Gorillas in the Mist
Dian Fossey
21,128
1,146
Baking Cakes in Kigali
Gaile Parkin
6,881
806
An Ordinary Man: An Autobiography
Paul Rusesabagina
6,762
788
Running the Rift
Naomi Benaron
7,210
598
A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali
Gil Courtemanche
4,522
770
As with some other countries, there is one dominant historical event in Rwanda: the genocide of 1994. Six of the above eight books are directly about it, the top two being non-fiction accounts: Philip Gourevitch’s prize-winning account, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, and Immaculée Ilibagiza’s first person story of how her faith helped to get her through those dreadful days, Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust.
Immaculée Ilibagiza is the top Rwandan writer on the list; Paul Rusesabagina is also Rwandan, though his autobiography was ghost-written by Tom Zoellner. The top fiction book set in Rwanda by a Rwandan writer is Our Lady of the Nile, by Scholastique Mukasonga.
It is easy to forget that other things have happened in Rwanda, but in fact it was also the location of Dian Fossey’s work, recounted in her own Gorillas in the Mist, later adapted as a film starring Sigourney Weaver. I should also add that Baking Cakes in Kigali by Gaile Parkin looks at the country having moved on, with the genocide in the background but receding.
I disqualified eight books this week. Collapse, by Jared M. Diamond, and A Problem from Hell, by Samantha Power, take Rwanda as a case study in their wider arguments. Say You’re One of Them (fiction), by Uwem Akpan, and The Shadow of the Sun (non-fiction), by Ryszard Kapuściński, look at Africa more broadly including sections set in Rwanda. The Girl Who Smiled Beads, by Clemantine Wamariya, and Pagan Babies, by Elmore Leonard (an author who I did not expect to be mentioning in this context), have substantial chunks of the narrative set in Rwanda but they seem to amount to less than half of each book. And finally, Strength in What Remains, by Tracy Kidder, and Small Country, by Gaël Faye, are about Burundi rather than Rwanda.
Speaking of Burundi, it’s up next, followed by a step away from Africa to Bolivia, and then back again to Tunisia and South Sudan.
Back in the summer, Lewis Baston wrote a fascinating geeky piece about which Westminster constituencies in the UK have voted for the winning party in the most elections. Both Dartford and South Derbyshire / Belper voted Labour in 1964 and 1966, Tory in 1970, Labour in both 1974 elections, Tory in 1979, 1983, 1987 and 1992, Labour in 1997, 2001 and 2005, Tory in 2010, 2015, 2017 and 2019 and Labour in 2024. However, both of them voted Labour in 1959 when the Conservatives won, so the chain stops in 1964. If you allow a couple of lapses from an otherwise perfect record, Buckingham (now Buckingham and Bletchley) has voted for the winning party every time since 1868, except in 1929 and the two 1974 elections.
He then goes on to consider Scotland and Wales separately, and to define the bellwethers in each case as those where the winner in a particular seat matched the party which won the most seats in Scotland or Wales. Labour has always won in Wales since 1922, and there are six constituencies which have consistently voted Labour since then (three of which voted for the Coalition in 1918). In Scotland, if you allow both Labour and Conservative seats in 1951 when the two parties tied, Central Ayrshire has voted for the Scottish winner since it was created in 1950.
Baston leaves out Northern Ireland, because there is no seat that elected both a Sinn Fein MP in 2024 and a DUP MP in 2019. But if we apply a bit more generosity (a la Buckingham and Bletchley), we can get a bit more texture.
For Northern Ireland, we have to start in 1922, both because that’s when it became a separate entity and because the six counties had had a lot more MPs before then, so it’s more difficult to assess what the successor constituencies are. From 1922 there were six single-seat territorial constituencies (plus the Queen’s University of Belfast), and also three two-seat constituencies, which after 1950 were split into six single seats (and the QUB seat was abolished). Five new seats were added to the map in 1987 for a total of seventeen, and an eighteenth was added in 1997.
The Ulster Unionist Party won the most seats in Northern Ireland at every Westminster election from Partition to 2001 (we can be generous and count in all the other MPs elected on the UUUC ticket in the two 1974 elections, but it doesn’t make much difference in the end). The DUP then won the most seats in 2005, 2010, 2015, 2017 and 2019, and Sinn Fein won the most in 2024, so we are looking for seats that voted most often for the winners in recent elections.
Up until 2019, three of the seats created in 1983 had an unblemished record of going with the biggest party in Northern Ireland: East Antrim, Lagan Valley and Upper Bann, which all switched from UUP to DUP in 2005. If you allow Lagan Valley and East Antrim as partial successors to the old South Antrim seat (and to the previous County Antrim two-seater), and Upper Bann as a partial successor to the old Armagh seat, the record goes for almost a century from 1922 to 2019.
East Londonderry (considered as a successor to the old County Londonderry) and South Antrim itself (considered as a successor to the old South Antrim and the previous County Antrim) missed only one election in those 97 years (East Londonderry won by Gregory Campbell of the DUP in 2001, South Antrim by Danny Kinahan of the UUP in 2015). Strangford also missed only 2001 since its creation in 1983, but its predecessor seats were a bit more variable.
However, that’s no good for the present day, because none of those seats were won by Sinn Fein in 2024. Most of the current Sinn Fein seats have been held by Sinn Fein or the SDLP for decades, so none of them are potential bellwethers either. Of today’s SF seats, the one that is closest to a bellwether constituency is North Belfast, which has gone with the largest party at each Westminster election since 1922 with three exceptions: 1979 when Johnny McQuade won it for the DUP, 2001 when Nigel Dodds took it also for the DUP, ahead of the 2005 surge, and 2019 when John Finucane of Sinn Fein defeated Nigel Dodds. It looks pretty safely in the Sinn Fein group for the time being.
There is also an anti-bellwether seat, which has never voted for the Northern Ireland-wide largest party since its creation. That seat is Foyle, which has been held by the SDLP from 1983 to the present day, with the exception of the 2017 election when it was taken by Sinn Fein. North Down has only once voted for the province-wide winner since 1983, and that was in 2001 when Lady Sylvia Hermon first won it for the UUP. She was still UUP in 2005, but all the other UUP seats were lost.
(I wonder if there are also similar anti-bellwether seats for the UK as a whole, or for England, Scotland and Wales?)
I had a quick look to see if one could make the same calculation for Assembly constituencies, to identify which has a representation which is proportionally the most similar to the Assembly as a whole. It’s very difficult to assess that. Right now, the answer would probably be North Belfast again. In 2022 it elected two members from the two biggest parties (the DUP and Sinn Fein) and one from the third biggest (Alliance), and similarly in 2019 (when the third largest party overall, and the fifth North Belfast MLA, were SDLP). In 2017, when there were six seats per constituency, North Belfast again came closest to the make-up of the Assembly but did not quite match it, with three DUP MLAs, two SF and one SDLP (whereas the UUP had the third largest number of seats at that election). This probably demonstrates that the concept of a bellwether seat cannot really be adapted to a proportional multi-party election.
And I’m not going to attempt to apply the concept to the Dáil. That’s for stronger-minded psephologists than me.
Adam’s father Cyrus was something of a devil—had always been wild—drove a two-wheeled cart too fast, and managed to make his wooden leg seem jaunty and desirable. He had enjoyed his military career, what there was of it. Being wild by nature, he had liked his brief period of training and the drinking and gambling and whoring that went with it. Then he marched south with a group of replacements, and he enjoyed that too—seeing the country and stealing chickens and chasing rebel girls up into the haystacks. The gray, despairing weariness of protracted maneuvers and combat did not touch him. The first time he saw the enemy was at eight o’clock one spring morning, and at eight-thirty he was hit in the right leg by a heavy slug that mashed and splintered the bones beyond repair. Even then he was lucky, for the rebels retreated and the field surgeons moved up immediately. Cyrus Trask did have his five minutes of horror while they cut the shreds away and sawed the bone off square and burned the open flesh. The toothmarks in the bullet proved that. And there was considerable pain while the wound healed under the unusually septic conditions in the hospitals of that day. But Cyrus had vitality and swagger. While he was carving his beechwood leg and hobbling about on a crutch, he contracted a particularly virulent dose of the clap from a Negro girl who whistled at him from under a pile of lumber and charged him ten cents. When he had his new leg, and painfully knew his condition, he hobbled about for days, looking for the girl. He told his bunkmates what he was going to do when he found her. He planned to cut off her ears and her nose with his pocketknife and get his money back. Carving on his wooden leg, he showed his friends how he would cut her. “When I finish her she’ll be a funny-looking bitch,” he said. “I’ll make her so a drunk Indian won’t take out after her.” His light of love must have sensed his intentions, for he never found her. By the time Cyrus was released from the hospital and the army, his gonorrhea was dried up. When he got home to Connecticut there remained only enough of it for his wife.
First of the books that I acquired this summer from the old family home in Dublin, and what a start. It’s a grand generational story of Adam Trask, who moves from Connecticut to the Salinas Valley in California with his pregnant wife Cathy. After she gives birth to twins (it is implied that at least one of them is fathered by Adam’s brother), she shoots Adam in the shoulder and leaves, settling down discreetly to work at and then own the brothel in the next town over. The two boys, Aron and Caleb, grow up, and we move with deliberate and measured pace to a grand conclusion which I won’t spoil. The book was apparently Steinbeck’s favourite of his own writing and must have helped him get the Nobel Prize for Literature ten years after it was published.
There’s also a very interesting character from Northern Ireland in the first part of the book, Sam Hamilton, based on Steinbeck’s own grandfather from Ballykelly, which is about 25 km from the home of my own ancestors in Aghadowey (where my distant cousins still farm the land and live in the house built by my 4x great-grandfather). The Irish Times summarises Steinbeck’s description of his own visit to Ballykelly in 1952 and you can read the original here. That must have been after he wrote the Hamilton parts of East of Eden though, as he says he went to Ireland in the summer and the book was published in September. It’s rare enough to find Northern Ireland intruding in classic literature, and his depiction of Sam Hamilton, his wife Liz and their many children is intense and sympathetic, even though the main thrust of the novel is the story of the Trasks. (Steinbeck even puts himself as a child into the novel, as a casual onlooker.)
There’s also the intriguing character of Lee, who starts as a Chinese servant in the Trasks’ house, but ends up as a family member, shifting from pidgin to standard American English and supplying Biblical exegesis and philosophy when it is needed; there’s a particularly effective moment of Marcus Aurelius at the end. The women fare less well; Cathy / Kate is meant to be the villain, and I found her just a bit too evil at a couple of key moments, and Aron’s girlfriend Abra was just a bit too virtuous to be real. Still, Steinbeck was trying, I think.
This was my top unread top non-genre book, my top unread book acquired this year and the top unreviewed book in my LibraryThing catalogue. Next on all three piles is The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins.
War here [Kosovo], of course, did not arrive without warning. It rarely, if ever, does. There were the tell-tale signs. Spikes in nationalistic rhetoric, defiant and threatening in tone, vowing to avenge the humiliation wrought upon their people and prevent further degradation. There was palpable tension and uncertainty, with mounting casualties amongst civilians and police as a game of cat and mouse ensued between the insurgency and security forces; the latter contriving even tougher curtailments of liberty and ultimately life. Regular army exercises meant the call to arms arrived long before the postman delivered the formal conscription notice. Decaying weapons were distributed and fraying uniforms procured. There always seemed to be a deficit of ammunition, at least for those inexperienced in handling weapons. Checkpoints were erected through the usual rudimentary means and identification cards closely scrutinised. There were mass arrests and confessions of terrorist activity forced under duress.
This was sent to me by the author in 2022, but I have only just got around to reading it; and I really regret having left it so long. It’s a well constructed set of anthropological observations about history and society in Northern Kosovo, which remains mainly inhabited by Serbs and under the strong influence of Serbia. But rather than look at the big picture, Bancroft zooms in on particular localities, and particular situations, to colour in the blurry spaces on the map. Kosovo is a complex country, and its history is contested, but in the end its people – including the people of Northern Kosovo – just want to live in peace and prosperity. You can practically smell the macchiato in the cafes.
I was particularly startled to read of the involvement of Sir Alfred Chester Beatty in the exploitation of the Trepča mines from 1927. I associate him mainly with the spectacular manuscript collection which now resides in Dublin Castle; but of course this collection was assembled as the fruits of exploiting mineral resources in many other countries, and Kosovo was not one of his bigger areas of operation. So it was an unexpected connection between Ireland and Mitrovica.
I suspect I’ll be featuring this in my list of Books You Haven’t Heard Of at the end of the year. Meanwhile, you can get Dragon’s Teeth here.
Current The Great Hunger, by Cecil Woodham-Smith The Year Before Yesterday, by Brian W. Aldiss
Last books finished Time Zero, by Justin Richards Madame Prosecutor, by Carla del Ponte The Good Wife of Bath, by Karen Brooks (did not finish) The Spark that Survived, by Myra Lewis Williams Salvage, by Emily Tesh Doctor Who: Empire of Death, by Scott Handcock Gitanjali, by Rabindranath Tagore
Next books How God Works: The Science Behind the Benefits of Religion, by David DeSteno Amongst Our Weapons, by Ben Aaronovitch An Experiment with Time, by J. W Dunne
Its lamps lit very little. The colourless sheen of the arching, segmented stems, that looked more like plastic than wood or anything living. The faint flurries of the feeding fans or gills or whatever their function actually was. The limited range of the lamps the drone could mount barely cut through the sheer gloom, the curdled soup of what passed for air on Shroud. All was in shades of brown-grey, light and dark. Nothing had invested the energy into manufacturing pigments, because why put on an art show if nobody can see the pictures? Light and dark, and some yellowish tones, like old bone or diseased teeth or mustard gas. The brown of mud or excrement.
Adrian Tchaikovsky keeps doing it; this is yet another gripping story of the encounter between human explorers and a new form of alien life. The human protagonists trek across the hostile surface of a dangerous moon, and we also get viewpoint snippets from the perspective of the globe-spanning alien entity itself, as the two sides gradually come to understand more of each other, and the humans’ masterplan of converting Shroud into a hob of exploitation becomes less and less realistic. It’s really vivid, and Tchaivkovsky plays fair with the reader, with a coherent and credibly built world. Good stuff. You can get Shroud here.
I participated in a great Brian Aldiss centenary panel at Novacon last weekend, with Caroline Mullan, Mark Plummer and Alan Stroud. There was a fair bit of “what did he do” and “what was he trying to do” but we had a fair bit of “what Aldiss should people read” as well, to which the answer is “Helliconia”. A request for a show of hands from anyone who actually understood Report on Probability A produced a sea of people looking around without putting their hands up.
Here we have one of his less celebrated mid-period novels. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
Directly I faced the Master, I felt some of those emotions—call them empathic if you will—which I have referred to as being unsusceptible to scientific method. Directly he spoke, I knew that in him, as in his creatures, aggression and fear were mixed. God gave me understanding.
Not one of the great Aldiss works, I’m afraid. Published in 1981, set during a global war in 1996, the narrator, who is the US Undersecretary of State, crashes on a Pacific island where the sinister Dr Dart, himself an embittered thalidomide victim, has been carrying on the tradition of H.G. Wells’ Dr Moreau by combining animal and humans through experimentation. Various other human exiles also live on the island.
It’s not so much a sequel to the original Wells novel, more an update to the present-ish day. There are a lot of traps about disability, race and gender to fall into here, and I’m sorry to say that Aldiss falls into pretty much all of them. I’m generally a huge Aldiss fan, but I would hesitate to recommend this even to completists.
I got the American edition, whose title is An Island Called Moreau; the original UK title, in homage to George Bernard Shaw, was Moreau’s Other Island. You can get it here.
This was the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is another short Aldiss novel, The Year Before Yesterday.
See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Benin.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
The Viceroy of Ouidah
Bruce Chatwin
1,409
768
It Takes a Village
Jane Cowen-Fletcher
153
948
Instruments of Darkness
Robert Wilson
490
257
A Darkening Stain
Robert Wilson
275
112
Amazons of Black Sparta: The Women Warriors of Dahomey
Stanley B. Alpern
123
69
The Dahomean
Frank Yerby
109
55
Spirit Rising: My Life, My Music
Angelique Kidjo
156
21
The Hand of Iman
Ryad Assani-Razaki
119
15
This week’s winner, The Viceroy of Ouidah, is a 1980 novel about a European slave trader who builds a life for himself in West Africa; it was filmed by Werner Herzog as Cobra Verde, starring Klaus Kinski.
This week’s LibraryThing winner, It Takes a Village, has been overshadowed by the book of the same title published two years later by Hillary Clinton. It is a 1994 children’s book about living in a village in Benin and being looked after by the neighbours.
Of the listed authors, Angelique Kidjo is from Benin; I am not quite sure how much of her autobiography is set there, but I’m giving it the benefit of the doubt. Ryad Assani-Razaki is also from Benin, and my sources seem to agree that The Hand of Iman (original French title just Iman) is set there.
I disqualified a lot of books. Some are about the Benin Bronzes, which however originated in the historical Kingdom of Benin, in what is now Nigeria.
There are also a lot of books about slavery with the ‘benin’ tag in both systems; these however tend to concentrate on the protagonists’ lives after they left West Africa. It’s not at all certain that Olaudah Equiano, the most celebrated example, was even from what’s now Benin (though personally I’m pretty sure he was from West Africa). It seems more likely for Cudjoe Lewis / Oluale Kossola.
The protagonist of the Bruce Medway thrillers by Robert Wilson lives in Benin. I was sufficiently sure of Instruments of Darkness and A Darkening Stain to list them above; I wasn’t quite so sure of the third novel in the series, Blood is Dirt.
Coming next: Rwanda, Burundi, a step away from Africa to Bolivia and a step back again to Tunisia.
Buxton, I am in you, attending Novacon which is just as much fun as I hoped.
But yesterday I hired a car and did a tour of three ancient sites in northern Derbyshire. Derbyshire as a whole has more ancient stone circles than the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg combined (they have none). I reckoned I could take in a few of them and still return the rental car in time for the Novacon opening ceremony.
There is a great website, named Pecsaetan for some reason, dedicated to the ancient sites in and around Derbyshire. It covers a lot more than stone circles, so there is plenty left to look at on future visits. The Peak District seems to have retained a lot of its heritage. I suspect that it is very beautiful as well, but unfortunately the weather yesterday was too foggy to tell.
Arbor Low (and Gib Hill)
I started with probably the best of them, also conveniently the closest to Buxton: the henge and stone circle of Arbor Low, 16 km southeast of the town along the A515. You are supposed to pay a pound into the honesty box for the farmer whose land it sits on. It is described by local enthusiasts as ‘the Stonehenge of the North’; I was a little sceptical, as the photographs that I had seen showed most of the stones as lying horizontal.
But before you even get to the stones, you encounter the vast ramparts of the henge which encloses the stone circle. In ancient times it must have been three metres high and the ditch must have been about the same depth. It would have looked amazing.
And though the stones are now recumbent, they are big, most of them two metres long. They are limestone which apparently explains why they have fallen, due to erosion. Within the circle is a central set of three or four stones which could have been an altar of some kind. Other visitors had left offerings of nuts and acorns on the largest of them.
But the amazing thing about yesterday was the mist sitting over this ancient site. There was a real Barrow-Downs feel about it.
Nearby is a much smaller barrow-mound called Gib Hill. You cannot see much anyway, and you can see even less in the mist, but it is a Stone Age tomb, with a Bronze Age tomb on top, built a thousand years later, but still many thousands of years ago.
Doll Tor (and the Andle Stone)
This was the most difficult to find of the three sites. It is about 11 km due east of Arbor Low, on Stanton Moor, accessible from a lay-by on a small road perhaps 2 km south of Stanton-in-Peak and 1 km north of Birchover. I should note that Stanton-in-Peak appeared to be infested with pheasants. That’s pheasants with a ‘h’.
Luckily Pecsaetan gives explicit and good directions to Doll Tor, which worked even in thick fog when you cannot see to the end of the field you are in. When you get to the Doll Tor circle in a wooded glade, it’s a delightful surprise, almost faery-like. None of the stones is more than a metre in height, but the shape of the circle is clear, and there is a cairn attached to the northern side of the circle.
Again, other visitors have left offerings at the site, including a lot of coins on a flat stone at the edge of the circle.
The fact that it sits in a valley meant that the fog was not as heavy as with the more elevated sites, but it still felt isolated – I think it was the one most distant from other human activity of the three. Magical, but a very different kind of magic from Arbor Low.
On the way across the fields to Doll Tor is the Andle Stone, thought to be a natural boulder (and a big one) but augmented by human activity.
There is an inscription on the other side of it commemorating the Duke of Wellington and local boy William Thornhill.
There are several more stone circles and other monuments nearby on Stanton Moor, and you could easily spend a half day just exploring them. But the fog was a bit treacherous and it seemed better to press on.
I should note that Doll Tor and the Andle Stone are on private land, and there is no public right of access to them.
Barbrook 1 and 2
About 20 km north of Doll Tor and Stanton Moor are the monuments known as Barbrook 1 and 2, on Big Moor. The road takes you past the very well signposted Chatsworth House, home of the Dukes of Devonshire. This site is the easiest to find of the three, though perhaps for that reason it was less atmospheric – lots of dogwalkers, and the audible roar of traffic.
You park at a layby on the A621, four or five km north of where it starts, and there is a clear path to Barbrook 1 and a less clear path to Barbrook 2. Barbrook 1, 500 metres from the road, is a straightforward stone circle with one big stone about a metre high and a small bank around it.
Barbrook 2, 200 metres away, is different. It is a ring cairn, which has been reconstructed to give a best guess at its original appearance. It looks like a sheepfold except that it is sunk into the ground. It’s quite different from any other monument in Derbyshire.
There are many smaller ancient cairns on Big Moor, and you pass maybe ten or twelve on this route.
There is also a Barbrook 3, but it is apparently difficult to locate and not that impressive when you do find it. And lunch at The Grouse Inn in Longshaw was calling.
This would have been fantastic in better weather, but even in yesterday’s fog the Arbor Low and Doll Tor circles were pretty amazing to visit. And there are still plenty more Derbyshire stone circles to explore.
The Papyrus and the Pet Shop Boys
It is a little known fact that the oldest surviving fragment of the New Testament, a papyrus dating from the mid second century, is held by the John Rylands Library in Manchester. When I first visited in 2021, it was in storage, so I anxiously called ahead this time to make sure that I could see it after I landed on Thursday. The person who answered the phone a week ago assured me that it would be on display, but either they were wrong or plans changed, because when I pitched up on Thursday afternoon, P52 was in storage again. You can get a fridge magnet of it though.
However, there was also a temporary display on LGBTQ+ culture, which delightfully had the original manuscript of the Pet Shop Boys’ hit West End Girls and the original typescript of It’s A Sin.
You never know what you are going to find. The John Rylands Library is free to visit, and even without P52, there is plenty there.
(Incidentally, WordPress refuses to publish the lovely Gothic P used by New Testament scholars to designate papyri. Every time I tried to include it in an update to this entry, it refused to upload.)
I first watched The Mysterious Planet in 2007. I wrote then:
The Mysterious Planet was Robert Holmes’ swan-song, from 1986. He wrote some of the best stories of the original Doctor Who run; this is not one of them. It’s the first segment of the infamous Trial of a Time Lord season, with the action of the main narrative (the Doctor and Peri land on a mysterious planet and must prevent the local bad guys from taking over the universe; also confusingly it may or may not be a far future Earth) frequently interrupted by flashforwards to a courtroom where the Doctor is on trial, the main story being presented as evidence for the prosecution.
The trial sub-plot simply does not work. There appears to be no due procedure that makes any sense; the evidence presented by the Valeyard (at least as far as this story goes) doesn’t do much to prove the case (as even the Inquisitor admits). If you simply tune out these deeply embarrassing bits, you are left with a fairly standard story: a couple of decent performances from guest actors, and a couple of very cardboard-looking robots.
When I came back to it in 2011, for my Great Rewatch, I wrote:
I started watching the Trial of a Time Lord season in a rather foul mood. But in fact, rather to my surprise, I found myself warming to The Mysterious Planet – in relative terms, of course; it’s definitely in the lower third of Robert Holmes’ stories, and has a number of plot elements recycled from his previous scripts when he did them better. But there is a sense that the show might be finding its feet again: back to the 25-minute format, and also embedding the season in a narrative arc (which was successful last time it was tried) in which the Time Lords are up to no good; the basics are actually there, and I think it is the production values that let it down as much as anything. (Though I should admit that the plot is also a bit confusing and over-filled.) The Mysterious Planet is a little dull but it’s not actively bad, unlike most of the previous season.
Rewatching it again, I remain more negative than positive, though I liked some of the Holmesian characterisation. The ridiculous trial set-up remains very poor.
Holmes’ life ended sadly early. He died aged only 60 in 1986, half-way through writing the final story of that year’s Doctor Who season. This was the much contested Trial of a Time Lord arc, for which Holmes had contributed the first four episodes and was due to write the final two (but died before starting the last one). A higher-up at the BBC had sent round a brutal deconstruction of the flaws of the first four episodes (generally now referred to as The Mysterious Planet), which clearly deeply wounded Holmes and possibly even contributed to his illness and death. In a career of a quarter of a century, nobody before had been quite so brutal about his writing. It’s painful reading, and the one positive thing I will say is that the account here raises Eric Saward’s reputation in my view, as he attempted (but failed) to shield Holmes and also keep the show on the road. But between the lines it’s clear that Holmes no longer had what he had once had had. Between 1982 and his death in 1986, literally the only non-Who scripts he sold were three episodes of Bergerac and five for a short-lived drama series set in a Citizens Advice Bureau. Brutal though it is, the BBC higher-up’s criticism of The Mysterious Planet is mostly pretty well-founded.
Molesworth is defensive of The Mysterious Planet‘s virtues, but I’m afraid I am with the BBC hierarchy; it’s a turkey.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of Terrance Dicks’ novelisation is:
This is, however, not one of Dicks’ greatest efforts. I’ve noted before how the Dicks/Holmes combination is only rarely successful on the printed page, and this, the last of the sequence, is fairly typical, a faithful recounting of what the viewer sees on the screen without much added. There are some mystifying slips, Peri’s full name being given as “Perpegillian”, for instance. It also fails (as did the original TV version) to establish the Time Lord trial setting convincingly (let alone fit it into continuity).
Nothing to add to that, on re-reading.
So I turned with interest to the latest Black Archive, released last month, by Jez Strickley. Sometimes the Black Archives about Doctor Who stories I did not like much achieve a bit of redemption for me by calling attention to aspects that I had not considered before, and sometimes they at least woo me with the author’s enthusiasm. Which would it be?
I’m sorry to say that of the 79 Black Archives that I have read so far, this was the least penetrable. Strickley has written it as an exploration of his pet concepts, topophilia and topophobia, through the lens of the story, but using many other sources as well. I found it dense and uninteresting, and I gave up after the first chapter. The second paragraph of the third chapter will give you some idea, though I did not get that far.
The life of daleswoman Hannah Hauxwell may be a rare example of Heidegger’s concept of dwelling in practice. Born in 1926, Hauxwell lived most of her life at Low Birk Hatt, a farm in Baldersdale in the North Pennines. In the early 1970s, her life became the subject of a television documentary. Until then, and for a time thereafter, Hauxwell lived frugally on the produce of her farming, managing without electricity and running water. Yet, despite these privations, her love of her home and the nearby Hunder Beck, whose ‘waters sing a song to me’, was unwavering. Reflecting on her life in that remote and, in winter at least, unforgiving setting, she once observed that ‘I know this place will always be loyal to me […] It’s mine […] and always will be […] even when I’m no longer here.’⁴ Hauxwell’s turn of phrase, described by one critic as ‘Wordsworthian’, acknowledges a conception of place which goes beyond the purely material and approaches a bond that may be Heideggerian in nature⁵. ⁴ Hauxwell, Hannah, and Cockcroft, Barry, Seasons of My Life: The Story of a Solitary Daleswoman, p10. ⁵ Hauxwell and Cockcroft, Seasons of My Life, p186.
You see what I mean? Heideggerian, eh?
An unprecedented miss for me in this generally hugely enjoyable series. I believe that the next will be on The Enemy of the World, by Robert Fairclough, who has previously written about The Prisoner; I have higher expectations.
I listened and contained myself with difficulty. Most of these women were rich. The whole wide beautiful world was theirs to wander in and they deliberately stayed in dirty dull London and talked about milkmen and servants! I think now, looking back, that I was perhaps a shade intolerant. But they were stupid – stupid even at their chosen job: most of them kept the most extraordinarily inadequate and muddled housekeeping accounts.
I came across this when researching my list of books set in Zimbabwe, and was sufficiently intrigued by an Agatha Christie book with an African setting to search it out. It didn’t make my list in the end, as less than a third of it is set in what was then Southern Rhodesia, the other settings being London, a ship on the Atlantic, and South Africa. And I don’t think it is classic Christie, but I enjoyed the diversion.
The protagonist, Anne Beddingfeld, is the daughter of a famous archaeologist / anthropologist, her father dies in the first chapter, leaving her free to have adventures on a budget. She gets involved with investigating two mysterious deaths in London; the trail takes her to Africa for mortal peril and romance. Agatha Christie had visited South Africa in 1922, during a political crisis, and clearly she observed and noted her surroundings. There’s some great description and characterisation, especially of the heroine – apparently Agatha Christie’s own preferred title for the book was Anna the Adventuress.
Of course, the whole book is permeated with casual racism – it almost goes without saying, but it must still be said. The plot is utterly bonkers, with a sudden-yet-inevitable betrayal at the end and an unreliable secondary narrator. It’s much closer to the thriller genre than to Christie’s home turf of determined detection. But it was only her fourth novel (after The Mysterious Affair at Styles, The Secret Adversary and The Murder on the Links) and she was entitled to a bit of experimentation. An interesting variation from a familiar writer. You can get The Man in the Brown Suit here.
Current Time Zero, by Justin Richards, by Justin Richards Madame Prosecutor, by Carla del Ponte The Great Hunger, by Cecil Woodham-Smith
Last books finished The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, by Michael Chabon Soundings, by A. Hamilton Gibbs The Enchantments of Flesh and Spirit, by Storm Constantine Sonic Boom, by Robbie Morrison et al Thief of Time, by Terry Pratchett
Next books Doctor Who: Empire of Death, by Scott Handcock The Good Wife of Bath, by Karen Brooks Gitanjali, by Rabindranath Tagore
Even while screaming, part of the Doctor’s mind analysed the problem. They were falling towards something, which most likely meant they were dropping towards a planetary surface. Based on the rate of their descent, he made a guess at the strength of the planet’s mavity. Then he ran that information through a complicated calculation involving the number of seconds they had been in freefall and came up with an estimate that they had so far fallen 30,000 feet.
The Well was my favourite of this year’s Doctor Who stories. I wrote of it:
Midnight is (still) my favourite Russell T. Davis episode, and I must admit I was delighted when The Well turned out to be a sequel, with a real base-under-siege plot and a really scary monster. We had more mind-blowing stuff to come this season, but this was the scariest episode by far.
I was a bit surprised by the news that Gareth Powell had been assigned the job of writing the novelisation – I don’t think he has published any other tie-in literature, instead developing his own complex universes. But it makes perfect sense – Powell’s writing is definitely on the more advanced side of military SF, and The Well is the most military Doctor Who story for years; the Doctor and Belinda even change into military uniform, before the horror part of the story gets going.
And of course it’s a good piece of work. A lot of the appeal of the episode was visual, which can be difficult to translate onto the printed page, but Powell actually uses this for freedom to explore the rather small world of the Well and its visitors a bit more. The story is broken up by brief bios of the military characters, fleshing them out a bit more than we got on screen. The tension of the plot is effectively maintained. I felt pretty satisfied. You can get Doctor Who: The Well here.
Immediately after the war, a commission for transforming the KLA was set up, including representatives of KFOR, UNMIK, the KLA, and the FARK. The commission met approximately 40 times in order to determine the details of transforming the KLA. Three variants were discussed: the transformation of the KLA a) into a National Guard with 14,000 men; b) into a territorial defense with an active reserve, modeled on the old Yugoslavian pattern; and c) a combination of a) and b). KFOR and UNMIK rejected the Kosovar ideas since it was feared they could be a precedent for independence. As a result, the KPC model was actually dictated by the protectorate powers. The ambiguity with regard to the future role of the KPC was accepted by both sides. It is no coincidence that the Albanian name of the organization—Trupat Mbrojtese te Kosoves (TMK)—can also be translated as Kosovo Defense Corps. The question of why KFOR accepted the creation of a thinly veiled KLA successor organization remains open. Some possible answers include the emotional attachment NATO officers felt for the professionalism of their KLA counterparts (German General Reinhardt has, on occasion, noted that KLA commander Hashim Thaci was “like a son” to him). The hope that the KPC might play a useful ‘proxy’ role in combating violent acts by Yugoslav or Kosovo Serb forces may have played a role too. According to a statement repeatedly heard by the authors in Kosovo in early 2001, KFOR was simply interested in retaining some degree of control over the more radical firebrands within the KLA structures—“better in the KPC and under control, than in the hills and on the loose”.
As I work through my books acquired in 2022, there will be quite a few about Kosovo, because I stocked up on the subject in that year for a project that ultimately did not come to pass. This is a very brief start, an analytical paper from the Bonn Institute for Conflict Studies, dating from 2001, so only two years after the end of the conflict and before the debate about Kosovo’s future status shifted decisively in favour of independence.
It does what it says in the title, though the historical part has now been much more comprehensively covered by James Pettifer in The Kosova Liberation Army, and the present to near future part has been completely overtaken by events, starting with the 2001 conflict in North Macedonia which broke out only a few weeks after this paper was published. However it does bust a few myths about the origins and structure of the KLA, which was important to the overall narrative at the time.
In retrospect, the weird thing is that people in the international community were so neuralgic about the future security arrangements of the Kosovo government, independent or not. In my last year at the International Crisis Group (2006), we published a paper advocating a model which was pretty close to the eventual Kosovo Security Force which was founded in 2009. The skies have not fallen.
