My books of 2025

Posted on 31 December 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

I read 314 books this year, the fourth highest of the twenty-two years that I have been keeping count, and 77,700 pages, which is ninth highest of the twenty-two. That’s about average for my current circumstances.

118 (38%) of those books were by non-male writers, which is the fourth highest number and sixth highest percentage in my records.

44 (11%) were by non-white writers, which is the fourth highest number and fifth highest percentage of the twenty-two years.

My top author of the year was H.G. Wells; as I worked through his less well-known fiction, and a couple of others as well, I read ten of his books.

SF

I read 120 sf books this year, the sixth highest number and tenth highest percentage in my records.

Best of the year
Emily Tesh’s second full novel, The Incandescent, is a brutal look at what a magic school would really be like in today’s England. (Review; get it here.)
I Who Have Never Known Men, by the Belgian writer Jacqueline Harpman, got rediscovered by a lot of people this year, including me. It’s a great creepy post-apocalyptic feminist story. (Review; get it here.)

Welcome rereads
A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens. (Review; get it here.)
Childhood’s End, by Arthur C. Clarke. (Review; get it here.)
The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate, by Ted Chiang. (Review; get it here, at a price.)

Honourable mentions
Three collections of short fiction by women.
Five Ways to Forgiveness, by Ursula Le Guin, has five stories linked by a common setting and shared characters, about revolution and social justice on a twin planet system. (Review; get it here.)
Spirits Abroad, by Zen Cho, is a set of excellent short stories reflecting Malay Chinese culture, some set in Malaysia, some in Britain, some elsewhere, all great. (Review; get it here.)
And back to the classics with The Birds and other stories, by Daphne Du Maurier, six very spooky stories by the author of Rebecca, the title story also made into a Hitchcock film. (Review; get it here.)

The one to avoid
In The Undying Fire, H.G. Wells attempted to rewrite the Book of Job for an English audience in 1919. For the love of God, why? (Review; get it here)

The one you haven’t heard of
As I worked through the 2020 Hugo packet, five years on, one book particularly jumped out: Dark Winds Over Wellington, a collection of short stories by T.L. Wood, set in New Zealand’s capital. A great read. (Review; get it here)

Non-fiction

I read 79 non-fiction books (25%) this year, the fifth highest number and eighth highest percentage of the twenty-two years that I have counted.

A lot of this non-fiction was very good – I went a bit overboard, actually, and I’ve given five stars out of five to 22 non-fiction books on LibraryThing. So whittling these down to a few was quite a tough choice. In the end, I think my top recommendation goes to:

Best of the year
Free: Coming of Age at the End of History, by Lea Ypi, is an Albanian autobiography. Albania has changed a lot in Lea Ypi’s lifetime, and indeed it is changing rapidly now, as I saw when I was there only a month ago. It’s a fascinating story of social control followed by disintegration of old dogmas. (Review; get it here.)

Honourable mentions
Of many good books about history, especially Irish history, I think the best was The Partition: Ireland Divided, 1885-1925, by Charles Townshend, which looks at how the division of the island became inevitable. (Review; get it here.)
It’s an old collection, and you can get all of the contents for free online, but I hugely enjoyed Decline of the English Murder, and other essays, by George Orwell, published by Penguin in 1965. (Review; get it here.)

Two to avoid
The Ancient Paths, by Graham Robb, attempts to unfold Celtic history and prehistory but descends into boring conspiracy theory. (Review; get it here)
Improbable History, ed. Michael Dobson, is a collection of historical essays celebrating “the weird, the obscure and the strangely important”. I tried the first three and they were very dull. (Review; get it here)

The one you haven’t heard of
Ireland in the Renaissance, 1540-1660, eds. Thomas Herron and Michael Potterton, is a jewel of a book: sixteen substantial essays with lovely plates and illustrations, and none of them is a dud, which is really unusual for any book with separately commissioned pieces by that many authors. All of them address the proposition that there are many interesting things to say about Ireland and the Renaissance. (Review; get it here)

Doctor Who

Almost all the other numbers for this year are above my average, but the stats for Doctor Who books are on the lower side; this is simply because I have read almost all of them, and am now mainly just keeping up with new publications, with a little retrospection. My total for all Doctor Who books this year is 57 (18%), the sixteenth highest number and nineteenth highest percentage of all years. For Doctor Who fiction, excluding comics, the number is 31 (10%), the eleventh highest number (thus slightly above the median) and sixteenth highest percentage.

Best of the year
Andrew Orton’s Black Archive analysis of the first Peter Davison story, Castrovalva, takes all the things that intrigued me about it and digs deeper, taking my appreciation to a new level. The best this year of a (mostly) excellent series. (Review; get it here.)

Honourable mentions
BBC spin-off merchandise: The TARDIS Type 40 Instruction Manual, by Richard Atkinson and Mike Tucker, is a real delight from 2018. (Review; get it here.)
Novelisations: As I had hoped, Doctor Who: Lux, by James Goss, takes the televised story and gives it new depth and warmth. Excellent stuff. (Review; get it here.)
Other non-fiction: Exterminate/Regenerate: The Story of Doctor Who, by John Higgs, is a nice chunky book about the history of Doctor Who, from 1963 to 2024, Doctor by Doctor, in the wider political context. (Review; get it here.)

The one to avoid
In general I am very supportive of the Black Archive series; however the volume on The Mysterious Planet, by Jez Strickley, is a rare but definite miss, filled with incomprehensible jargon. (Review; get it here)

The one you haven’t heard of
I have been very much enjoying Cutaway Comics’ return to classic Doctor Who stories, exploring both the before and after of the plots; the best for my money is Inferno, by Gary Russell and John Ridgway, looking at how the parallel universe got to be like that. (Review; get it here)

Non-genre

I read 43 (14%) non-genre fiction books this year, which is the seventh highest number, but only the thirteenth highest percentage.

Best of the year
Margaret Atwood’s short story collection, Old Babes in the Wood, is full of jewels, and is my top recommendation from a crowded field. (Review; get it here.)

Honourable mentions
Not So Quiet…, by Helen Zenna Smith, is the story of a nurse’s experiences in the first world war, one of the most visceral portrayals of trench warfare that I have read, with also reflections on gender and class. (Review; get it here.)
I can’t decide which of Zen Cho’s contemporary romances to choose, so have both of them, brilliant, funny and moving stories of love between young Asians in today’s London: The Friend Zone Experiment (review; get it here) and Behind Frenemy Lines (review; get it here).

The one to avoid
Glorious Exploits, by Ferdia Lennon, has Ancient Greeks in Sicily being brutal to each other while talking with Irish accents, and that seems to be the point. I gave up. (Review; get it here)

The one you may not have heard of
I loved Our Song, a Dublin-set romance novel by Anna Carey, but it has less than ten owners on LibraryThing so I feel it ought to be better known. It’s doing better on Goodreads, with over 500 ratings as of this writing. (Review; get it here)

Comics

Including Doctor Who comics, I read 36 (11%) comics and graphic novels this year. That’s the same number as last year, equal third highest in my records, and the eighth highest percentage.

Best of the year
One old, one new here.
Alison Bechdel is still on form, with her loosely autobiographical Spent taking a humorous look at life on a goat refuge in rural New England, as the tentacles of fame and social media influencing insert themselves into her world. (Review; get it here.)
I had not previously read Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza, based on research in 2002 and 2003 on the 1956 massacres of hundreds of unarmed civilians in Gaza by Israeli forces. It is a vivid portrayal of life and death in the Strip both at the start of this century and in the middle of the last. (Review; get it here.)

Honourable mentions
Two of this year’s Hugo finalists particularly appealed to me. (Review.) The winner, Star Trek Lower Decks – Warp Your Own Way, by Ryan North and Chris Fenoglio, preserves the parent TV show’s humour and adds a cheeky breach of the usual format for graphic choose-your-own-adventure books. (Get it here.) And The Deep Dark, by Molly Scott Ostertag, is a queer coming-of-age story with a monster in the basement. (Get it here.)

The one to avoid
Charlotte impératrice, Tome 1: La Princesse et l’Archiduc, by Fabien Nury and Matthieu Bonhomme, takes a rather minor figure from nineteenth-century history and fails to make her very interesting, while also distorting the historical record. (Review; get it here)

The one you haven’t heard of
In Who Killed Nessie?, Paul Cornell and Rachael Wood, both of them creators whose other works I have enjoyed, come together to solve a murder at a convention for mythical creatures. Great fun. (Review; get it here)

Plays and Poetry

I read four works of poetry (counting an anthology which was more poetry than anything else). I strongly recommend Emily Wilson’s translation of The Iliad. (Review; get it here), Also a shout out for Oliver Langmead’s sf novel in verse form, Calypso.(Review; get it here.)

I read one book of scripts this year, The Dramatic Works of Denis Johnston, vol 3: Radio and Television Plays which includes two theatre plays omitted from the two previous volumes. Some of them are good, some have aged less well. (Review; get it here.)

Top book of 2025

I found this a terribly difficult choice. In the end I’m going for Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza, with its reflections on violence, history, experience and truth. Examining events in 1956, researched in 2002-03, published in 2009, it remains horribly relevant today. Strongly recommended. (Review; get it here.)

Previous Books of the Year:

2003 (2 months): The Separation, by Christopher Priest (review; get it here)
2004: (reread) The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien (review; get it here)
– Best new read: Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, by Claire Tomalin (review; get it here)
2005: The Island at the Centre of the World, by Russell Shorto (review; get it here)
2006: Lost Lives: The stories of the men, women and children who died as a result of the Northern Ireland troubles, by David McKittrick, Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeney, Chris Thornton and David McVea (review; get it here)
2007: Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, by Alison Bechdel (review; get it here)
2008: (reread) The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition, by Anne Frank (review; get it here)
– Best new read: Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero, by William Makepeace Thackeray (review; get it here)
2009: (had seen it on stage previously) Hamlet, by William Shakespeare (review; get it here)
– Best new read: Persepolis 2: the Story of a Return, by Marjane Satrapi (first volume just pipped by Samuel Pepys in 2004) (review; get it here)
2010: The Bloody Sunday Report, by Lord Savile et al. (review of vol I; get it here)
2011: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbon (started in 2009!) (review; get it here)
2012: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Brontë (review; get it here)
2013: A Room of One’s Own, by Virginia Woolf (review; get it here)
2014: Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell (review; get it here)
2015: collectively, the Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist, in particular the winner, Station Eleven, by Emily St John Mandel (review; get it here).
– Best book I actually blogged about in 2015: The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, by Claire Tomalin (review; get it here)
2016: Alice in Sunderland, by Bryan Talbot (review; get it here)
2017: Common People: The History of an English Family, by Alison Light (review; get it here)
2018: Factfulness, by Hans Rosling (review; get it here)
2019: Girl, Woman, Other, by Bernardine Evaristo (review; get it here)
2020: From A Clear Blue Sky: Surviving the Mountbatten Bomb, by Timothy Knatchbull (review; get it here)
2021: Carrying the Fire, by Michael Collins (review; get it here)
2022: The Sun is Open, by Gail McConnell (review; get it here)
2023: Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman (review; get it here)
2024: The Cazalet Saga, by Elizabeth Jane Howard (reviews; get them here)

Wednesday and December 2025 Books

Posted on 31 December 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

My last weekly roundup of this year; the next one will be on Thursday 8 January.

Also my last monthly roundup of 2025. Analytical post to follow.

Last books finished
Five Little Pigs, by Agatha Christie
Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, by Laura Spinney

December reading

Non-fiction 3 (Year total 79)
Winning Ugly: NATO’s War to Save Kosovo, by Ivo H. Daalder and Michael E. O’Hanlon
Mawdryn Undead, by Kara Dennison
Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, by Laura Spinney

Non-genre 5 (Year total 43)
Hallowe’en Party, by Agatha Christie
Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, by Agatha Christie
Reeds in the Wind, by Grazia Deledda
Our Wonderful Selves, by Roland Pertwee
Five Little Pigs, by Agatha Christie

SF 9 (Year total 120)
If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, by Italo Calvino
Adventures in Space, eds. Patrick Parrinder and Yao Haijun
The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport, by Samit Basu (did not finish)
Elidor, by Alan Garner
A Wrinkle in the Skin, by John Christopher
The Enigma Score, by Sheri S. Tepper
Yet More Penguin Science Fiction, ed. Brian Aldiss
The Moon of Gomrath, by Alan Garner
The Leviathan, by Rosie Andrews (did not finish)

Doctor Who 3 (Year total 31)
The Infinity Race, by Simon Messingham
Doctor Who: The Adventures After, by Carole Ann Ford et al
Doctor Who: Mawdryn Undead, by Peter Grimwade

Comics 1 (Year total 36)
The Terror Beneath, by George Mann et al

5,000 pages (2025 total 77,700)
9/21 (2025 total 118/314) by non-male writers (Dennison, Spinney, Christie x 3, Deledda, Tepper, Andrews, Ford)
2/21 (2024 total 34/314) by non-white writers (Obama, Yu/Yang, Emezi, Falaise)
9 or 10/21 rereads (maybe Hallowe’en Party, definitely Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, Five Little Pigs, Elidor, A Wrinkle in the Skin, The Enigma Score, Yet More Penguin Science Fiction, The Moon of Gomrath, The Infinity Race, Doctor Who: Mawdryn Undead)

193 books currently tagged unread, up 8 from last month, down 68 from December 2024.

Reading now

This Way Up: When Maps Go Wrong (And Why It Matters), by Mark Cooper-Jones and Jay Foreman
Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships, by Robin Dunbar
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, by Patrick Radden Keefe
Best American Comics 2011, ed. Alison Bechdel

Coming soon (perhaps)

Time Trials: The Wolves of Winter, by Richard Dinnick et al
Domino Effect, by David Bishop
Ghost Stories, ed. George Mann
Renaissance- en barokarchitectuur in België, by Rutger J. Thijs
The Forgotten and the Fantastical: Modern Fables and Ancient Tales: No. 2, ed. Taika Bellamy
Utterly Dark and the Face of the Deep, by Philip Reeve
Lost In Time, by A.G. Riddle
Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy, by Christopher R. Hill
River Mumma, by Zalika Reid-Benta
Kristin Lavransdatter: The Wreath, by Sigrid Undset
Looking Glass Sound, by Catriona Ward
Bruxelles 43, by Patrick Weber and Baudouin Deville
Red Planet, by Robert A. Heinlein
The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi
The Dead Take the A Train, by Richard Kadrey
Stone and Sky, by Ben Aaronovitch
Killing Thatcher: The IRA, the Manhunt and the Long War on the Crown, by Rory Carroll
The Fifth Elephant, by Terry Pratchett
The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins
Drome, by Jesse Lonergan
Oscar Wilde: A Biography, by Richard Ellmann

2025: the overnights meme

Posted on 31 December 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

I normally post this much earlier in December – my last trip was at the end of last month – but just forgot.

List the places where you spent a night away from home in 2025; indicate non-consecutive stays with an asterisk. This is the twenty-first successive year that I have made this list.

Leiden NL
Los Angeles USA
* London UK
* Beijing (Chaoyang, east of the centre) China
Beijing (Shijinshan, west of the centre), also China (counting separately as it’s 30 km from Chaoyang)
Bramley, Surrey, UK
Belfast, Norn Iron
* Loughbrickland, Norn Iron
Steendam, Groningen province, NL
Dunkirk harbour, France
Cherbourg-Dublin ferry
Rosslare-Dunkirk ferry
Chengdu, China
Paris, France
Buxton, Derbyshire, England
Podgorica, Montenegro

That’s 16 places, on the low side for the years since I have been counting (since 2005). I’m counting the overnight ferries separately, since they were different routes. I am not counting overnight flights to and from China, and back from California.

Those 16 places are in six countries (counting NI as UK), and I also travelled through Albania to reach Montenegro, so my country total for the year is seven, the second lowest since I have been tallying (which I did not do consistently before 2012).

Year	Overnights	Countries visited
2025	16	7
2024	20	18
2023	20	12
2022	15	14
2021	7	5
2020	8	11
2019	23	14
2018	23	20
2017	20	15
2016	29	23
2015	28	21
2014	15	15
2013	17	11
2012	16	14
2011	11
2010	25
2009	14
2008	17	16
2007	24	17
2006	25
2005	21

To finish with, have a groovy embedded Google map:

Elidor, by Alan Garner

Posted on 30 December 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

For a while the road passed charred stumps of buildings, and field rank with nettle. Dust, or ash, kicked up under Roland’s feet, muffling his walk and coating his body so aridly that his skin rasped. Flies whined round him, and crawled in his hair, and tried to settle on his lips. The sky was dull, yet there was a brittleness in the light that hurt. It was no longer wonder that led him, but dislike of being alone.

A recently reacquired Alan Garner novel, this one an intensely imagined story of four siblings who are drawn into the mythic struggle of the parallel world of Elidor from their home in early 1960s Manchester. Garner is very good at painting emotional landscapes with few words, and his realisation of Manchester and the surrounding territories in our world and in Elidor are very vivid. Glad to return to this one. You can get Elidor here.

Surprisingly perhaps, a Bechdel pass even though one of the brothers, Roland, is the viewpoint character; his sister Helen and their mother (whose name is I think given only as “Mrs Watson”) have a couple of exchanges which are not about men.

The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport, by Samit Basu

Posted on 30 December 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Bador and Lina are practiced loiterers: no one would suspect them of any untoward thoughts as they gaze innocently at Tiger Palace, with its immaculate white- brick walls and ever- sparkling rotating dome, at the historical hologram displays of Tiger Central heroes lighting up one by one on Jomidar’s Square, at the government tower complexes on the square’s east side with their sculpted vertical gardens, and the ever- shifting array of Tiger drones doing combat maneuvers in the sky.

One of the remaining books from the 2024 Hugo packet. There’s a nice innovation in that the viewpoint character is a drone-bot, but otherwise I’m afraid I didn’t have the patience for yet another secondary world and dropped it after fifty pages. You can get The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport here.

This was my top unread book by a writer of colour. Next on that pile is The Proposal, by Bae Myung-hoon.

Reeds in the Wind, by Grazia Deledda

Posted on 29 December 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Donna Ester fece fare il pane apposta, un pane bianco e sottile come ostia, quale si fa solo per le feste, e di nascosto dalle sorelle comprò anche un cestino di biscotti. Dopo tutto era un ospite, che arrivava, e l’ospitalità è sacra. Donna Ruth a sua volta sognava ogni notte l’arrivo del nipote, e ogni giorno verso le tre, ora dell’arrivo della diligenza, spiava dal portone. Ma l’ora passava e tutto restava immoto intorno.

Ester made bread just for the occasion, white and thin as a holy wafer, the kind usually made only for festivities. She also secretly bought a basket of cookies. After all, a guest was coming and hospitality is sacred. Every night Ruth dreamed about their nephew’s arrival, and every day around three, the hour the coach came, she would spy from the doorway. But the hour went by and everything was quiet.

Grazia Deledda won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1926, the second woman to get it after Selma Lagerlöf, and the second Italian after Giosuè Carducci (who I must admit I have not otherwise heard of). The citation was “for her idealistically inspired writings which with plastic clarity picture the life on her native island and with depth and sympathy deal with human problems in general”. She had been nominated almost every year since 1914 by the former Swedish ambassador to Italy, Carl Bildt, whose great-great-great-nephew of the same name served as prime minister and then foreign minister of Sweden.

Reeds in the Wind / Canne al vento, is her best known book, and it’s noticeable that her Nobel nominations started as soon as it was published in 1912. I have to say it’s not very cheerful. It’s about a declining noble family in Sardinia, and the tension between the two surviving sisters, the son of the sister who fled to the mainland years before, and the old retainer who is the guardian of the dark family secret that is eventually revealed.

It reminded me of The Leopard, but the Deledda’s Pintor family are more decayed and less up themselves than di Lampedusa’s Salina family. There are some nice landscape moments, but otherwise I was not overwhelmed by it. You can get Reeds in the Wind here.

I know it’s a small sample, but two out of two European winners of early Nobel Prizes for Literature that I have sampled so far have gone in for rural drama. Next up in this project is Kristin Lavransdottir, by Sigrid Undset, which I fear is going to be more of the same.

My top Bluesky posts, according to https://www.blueskypulse.io/

Posted on 29 December 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

I have been whining about the lack of analytical tools to measure how well my Bluesky posts are performing – this was one of the nice things about Twitter in the old days. But now I have actually found the lovely https://www.blueskypulse.io/ site which does everything I want, namely recording likes, reposts, replies, and quotes. From it I learn that my best performing post ever, with by far the most likes and reposts, is this sadly meaningless and now out of date statistic:

Continue reading →

The best known books set in each country: Belgium

Posted on 28 December 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Ending the year with my adopted home country. For those of you who are new to this, I’m going through every country in the world, trying to identify the best known books set there (or at least more than half set there).

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
Villette	Charlotte Brontë	80,023	9,720
The Lady and the Unicorn	Tracy Chevalier	47,371	5,018
The Secret of the Unicorn	Hergé	18,003	2,252
The Seven Crystal Balls	Hergé	15,121	1,970
The Warm Hands of Ghosts	Katherine Arden	29,935	934
The Castafiore Emerald	Hergé	12,026	1,982
Hygiene and the Assassin	Amélie Nothomb	18,793	1,239
The Misfortunates	Dimitri Verhulst	15,232	989

(Note a couple of unicorns in there.)

There are a couple of these which aren’t explicitly set in Belgium, but I am allowing them for reasons that I will explain. This week’s winner, Villette, is set in the eponymous fictional city, capital of the small fictional country of Labassecour. But there can be no doubt in the minds of any informed reader that Villette is Brussels and Labassecour is Belgium. The protagonist comes to the city to teach in a girls’ school and has an unhappy romantic adventure; this is drawn from Charlotte Brontë’s own experience in the 1840s. In her first novel The Professor, published only after her death, she is more explicit about the setting and more lyrical:

Belgium! name unromantic and unpoetic, yet name that whenever uttered has in my ear a sound, in my heart an echo, such as no other assemblage of syllables, however sweet or classic, can produce. Belgium! I repeat the word, now as I sit alone near midnight.

The other book on the list where a bit of special pleading may be required is Amélie Nothomb’s first novel, Hygiene and the Assassin, in which a dying writer gives obnoxious interviews to journalists in his apartment. Most readers assume that the apartment is in Paris, but no explicit Parisian cue is given. On the other hand, I note the following passage (on page 37 of the English translation):

Il y a des publicités à n’en plus finir, surtout des publicités alimentaires. Je zappe de manière à me constituer la séquence publicitaire la plus longue du monde: avec les seize chaînes européennes, il est tout à fait possible, en zappant intelligemment d’avoir une demi-heure de réclames sans interruption. C’est un merveilleux opéra multilingue: le shampooing hollandais, les biscuits italiens, la lessive biologique allemande, le beurre français, etc. Je me régale.

There are endless amounts of commercials, primarily about food. I channel surf in order to put together the longest sequence of commercials on earth: with the sixteen European channels, it is perfectly feasible, if you surf intelligently, to get a full half-hour of uninterrupted commercials. It’s a marvelous multilingual opera: Dutch shampoo, Italian cookies, German organic washing powder, French butter, and so on. What a treat.

(Note that “to channel surf” in French is “zapper”.)

Now, I ask you, if you were a French person in France, would you identify French butter as such, in that way, fourth in a list of products from other countries? To adapt a line from Friends, in France they just call it ‘butter’. I think that the protagonist’s apartment is in Europe but not in France, and given Nothomb’s Belgian roots, it’s more likely to be in Belgium than anywhere else. Dutch shampoo is less likely to be found in Geneva or Lausanne; and we are told that the protagonist speaks no language other than French, which means that he cannot be from Luxembourg, where all schoolchildren are fluent in at least three languages before they leave elementary school.

I disqualified a lot of books this time. Top of the list were Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell, and Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackeray, both of which have memorable passages set in Belgium but for much less than 50% of the book. I scratched my head for some time about I Who Have Never Known Men, by Jacqueline Harpman, but decided in the end that the blasted and desolate landscape in which her protagonist finds herself doesn’t really fit a Belgian setting, even post-apocalypse. King Leopold’s Ghost, by Adam Hochschild, was on my DR Congo list last year, because it is about Congo and what Belgians did there. I disqualified two of Amélie Nothomb’s other books, Fear and Loathing and The Character of Rain, because they are set in Japan. And Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memories of Hadrian has no connection with Belgium, apart from the birthplace of its author.

On top of that, I disqualified seventeen of the twenty classic Tintin books by Hergé because they are not set in Belgium. But The Secret of the Unicorn and The Seven Crystal Balls are; they are both first parts of two-part stories, where our hero and friends prepare at home for the adventures concluded respectively in Red Rackham’s Treasure (set at sea) and Prisoners of the Sun (set in Peru); and also The Castafiore Emerald, with all its eccentricities, is definitely set not just in Belgium but in Captain Haddock’s home, Marlinspike Manor.

When I did this calculation in 2015, I got much the same answer, though I’m also just going to note that The Warm Hands of Ghosts, by Katherine Arden, is scoring very well, especially on Goodreads, for a book that was only published last year.

Coming in 2026: Jordan, the Dominican Republic, the United Arab Emirates and Honduras.

The restoration of St Nicholas – kerk in Perk

Posted on 28 December 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Four years ago I went to the Church of St Nicholas in Perk, part of the municipality of Steenokkerzeel, just north of Zaventem Airport. I was just recovering from COVID, and was concentrating on the stucco ceiling, one of the dozen surviving works of the seventeenth century master stuccador Jan Christiaan Hansche, which I was obsessed by at the time. I was informed then that the church and the scupltures were due to be restored in the near future, and made a mental note to return some day. Today was the day.

The core of the church is possibly twelfth century, and a choir (behind the altar) was added in the fourteenth century. The red brick aisles on the sides were added in the nineteenth century, so you have to imagine a thinner, more externally austere building for most of its history.

(I’m glad to say that in 2023 the Belgian popular history journal Monumenten en Landschappen published a very good article (in Dutch) about the church and Hansche, by Jan Caluwaerts, Valerie Herremans, and Jan Verbeke, from which I have raided some of the information in this post.)

The church was refurbished in the late 1660s by the Brussels lawyer and writer Frederick van Martselaer (1594-1670), who would have been well into his eighties by then. He commissioned Jan Christiaan Hansche, who was at the height of his career, to decorate the interior. (Hansche’s earliest known work is dated 1653, and his latest 1684. Three of his surviving ceilings date from the 1650s, three, including the one in Perk, were started in the 1660s, four, and another three that have ben destroyed, are dated in the 1670s and one in the 1680s.)

Often Hansche signed his name to his work; he didn’t in this case (or if he did, it has been lost) but luckily his invoice for ninety days of work by him and three assistants to do the job has been preserved, so we know it was him (as if the characteristic style wasn’t enough).

Before we get to the ceiling, here are the decorations around the arches leading from the nave to the transepts and the choir.

The two transepts, which you can only see end-on here, are decorated with garlands and bunches of grapes, which turn up a lot in Hansche’s work (see for instance the saints in Antwerp). The central one however is a bit spookier – a winged child’s face, and claws at the bottom. Apparently these are linked with the symbolism of angels.

My 2021 picture of the nave is better than the one I took today, so here’s the view towards the altar from the church door, with particular attention to the ceiling panels.

There are six of them, though unfortunately one is hidden by the organ (even more hidden now than on my previous visit). But the others have been cleaned up nicely. The stars are the two central panels, depicting the church’s original patron, the Blessed Virgin, and its current patron, St Nicholas. In both of them the subjects are leaning out of the ceiling, holding an object that protrudes into our space, whose shadows you can see on the ceiling. The recent cleanup has made the fine details much clearer.

Both of these panels are framed between the arms of Frederick van Marselaer and his wife Margareta de Baronaige (1590-1646), who had died thirty years before but through whom van Marselaer had inherited the church. (The lozenges on the left are his, the bars on the right are hers.)

The evangelists have also been improved by the restoration.

(St John unfortunately is hidden by the church organ.)

They are framed by more abstract designs than St Nicholas and the Blessed Virgin.

I took the time also to look at a couple of the other artworks in the church. In the north transept, there is a painting of Jesus being presented by his mother to St Dominic by David Teniers the Younger (1610-1690). who I admit I had not really heard of before, but he was artistic royalty – his first wife was a daughter of Jan Bruegel the Elder, and Rubens was a witness at his wedding. The painting is right next to the tomb of Teniers’ second wife, and the implication is that he must be somewhere in the neighbourhood too. I love the dog wandering around in the church on the right.

In the south transept there’s a sixteenth century painting of the Holy Family, unattrributed unfortunately. I had to photograph it from the side to avoid glare from the lights.

For those who are based in Brussels and want to sample some exciting stucco and other baroque art. which you can see for free between 0930 and 1015 on a Sunday morning, the church at Perk is an easy drive from the city centre. You come off the E40 at Sterrebeek and keep going north, through the tunnel under the airport runway, and it’s 7.5 km north of the motorway exit.

Hallowe’en Party, by Agatha Christie

Posted on 27 December 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

“He had a nasty cold,” said Hercule Poirot, “and no doubt, in spite of the remedies that I have handy here, he would probably have given it to me. It is better that he should not come. Tout de meme,” he added, with a sigh, “it will mean that now I shall pass a dull evening.”

A late Agatha Christie novel, set in a dormitory village in the 1960s. The young people are awful, with long hair and drugs, and the moral fundament of society has been undermined by the abolition of the death penalty (this is mentioned several times). Meanwhile a ten-year-old girl is drowned in a tub at a Hallowe’en party, and Poirot is called in to solve the mystery. Bear in mind that Poirot was already an old man in The Mysterious Affair at Styles, written fifty years earlier. But his moustaches endure.

The murderer’s identity is established by a massive clue which we are given at quite an early stage, and at first I felt that this made it a fair puzzle. but having said that, the hapless police had access to the same information, and could surely have put the pieces together a bit more quickly; and the connection of the crime to other recent murders and disappearances leads us to an improbably convoluted plot, with secret identities a plenty.

As well as casting aspersion on the moral decay of the 1960s, there’s quite a lyrical passage describing the Italian sunken garden on Ilnacullin island in Bantry Bay. It obviously inspired one of the strands of the overall plot.

A book that is interesting for reasons the author may not have considered. You can get Hallowe’en Party here.

Time Trials: The Terror Beneath, by George Mann, James Peaty et al

Posted on 26 December 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second frame of third issue of first story (“Beneath the Waves”):

Compilation of two Titan Twelfth Doctor stories, a four-parter and a one-shot. “Beneath the Waves” by George Mann was an unexpected hit for me, in that I normally bounce off Mann’s writing, but this is a competently done tale of creepy alien seaweed monsters in an English town, with Hattie the future rock star pulled back into the Doctor’s adventures from the previous volume. “The Boy With The Displaced Smile”, by James Peaty, has an alien incursion into a Western American town, another standard enough story, competently done.

You can get The Terror Beneath here.

Next in this sequence: Time Trials: The Wolves of Winter, by Richard Dinnick et al.

Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, by Agatha Christie

Posted on 25 December 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

There was no beauty in her careless, haggard face, but it had distinction. Her voice was charming.

For the day that’s in it, Happy Christmas everyone! And let me take you back to 1938, where Hercule Poirot is called in by the local police to solve the spectacular murder of a patriarch whose children, both acknowledged and unacknowledged, are all conveniently clustered around the crime scene, as the Christmas season unfolds around them.

Agatha Christie’s characterisation isn’t always her strong point, but she has some memorable bit players here – the insecure oldest son who is now an MP, the black sheep who has returned to the fold, the daughters-in-law, the Spanish granddaughter escaping the Civil War.

The actual solution to the crime bends the usual rules a bit, in a way that Christie also used elsewhere, but vital clues are given to the attentive reader from quite an early stage, so it’s fair enough. If you need something to take you out of your own holiday environment, you can get Hercule Poirot’s Christmas here.

Wednesday reading

Posted on 24 December 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Current
This Way Up, by Mark Cooper-Jones and Jay Foreman
Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships, by Robin Dunbar
Say Nothing, by Patrick Radden Keefe
Best American Comics 2011, ed. Alison Bechdel

Last books finished
The Enigma Score, by Sheri S. Tepper
Yet More Penguin Science Fiction, ed. Brian Aldiss
The Moon of Gomrath, by Alan Garner
Doctor Who: Mawdryn Undead, by Peter Grimwade
Mawdryn Undead, by Kara Dennison
The Leviathan, by Rosie Andrews (did not finish)

Next books
Lost In Time, by A G Riddle
The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins
The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi

Adventures in Space, eds. Patrick Parrinder and Yao Haijun

Posted on 24 December 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third story (“On the Ship”, by Leah Cypess):

It was as if they knew childhood was all we would ever have.

A collection of thirteen stories by authors writing in Chinese and English, published simultaneously in China and the USA in 2023. I knew three of them already because they had got onto the 2024 Hugo ballot, which I administered, but it was interesting to see them in context.

It’s actually quite an old-fashioned collection – most of the stories are about people on spaceships or on alien planets getting into trouble, which of course a lot of SF is still about, but few of these stories really touch on anything else. “Answerless Journey”, by Han Song, one of the Hugo finalists, takes this in an interesting direction by de-humanising its space travellers (if indeed they are human, which is – deliberately? – not clear). The thirteen stories range in length from 65 pages (“Shine”, by Chen Zijun) to 13 (“The Darkness of Mirror Planet”, by Zhao Haihong), most on the shorter side. Still, it’s an interesting step in intercultural communication.

You can get Adventures in Space here.

Winning Ugly: NATO’s War to Save Kosovo, by Ivo H. Daalder and Michael E. O’Hanlon

Posted on 23 December 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Surveying the sight, Ambassador William Walker, a seasoned American diplomat who had witnessed his share of atrocities while serving in Central America and who now headed the KVM, described what he had seen: [gory details redacted]

A good full-throated defence of the NATO conflict with Serbia over Kosovo in 1999, written shortly after the event, and coinciding largely with my own views: the conflict was a deliberate, unforced choice by Slobodan Milošević, and western policy rather floundered into NATO participation, but once a ground invasion was seriously being discussed, the Serbian leadership folded and the conflict ended with NATO and the UN, and of course the Kosovars, taking control.

It was written so soon after the conflict that a lot of important later developments are missing because they had not happened yet: the 2001 Macedonia conflict, the 2004 Kosovo riots, the 2006-08 independence process. This last, the future status of Kosovo, is the one point that the authors are a bit mealy-mouthed about, as the Western policy community had not quite got to the stage of comprehending that it was only going in one direction. (I am glad to have been part of the debate pushing that comprehension.)

But otherwise, the authors deal efficiently with a number of counter scenarios as to how the conflict could have been averted; the fact is that the USA and the rest of the western alliance had limited scope for affecting events, and while that limited scope was not always exploited to the full, in particular in the early phase of the NATO bombing campaign, this was not the big problem; the big problem was Milošević and his policies.

You can get Winning Ugly here.

This was my top unread book about Kosovo acquired in 2022. Next on that pile is Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy, by Christopher R. Hill.

If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, by Italo Calvino

Posted on 22 December 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of Chapter Three (which is not the third chapter):

Il romanzo che stai leggendo vorrebbe presentarti un mondo corposo, denso, minuzioso. Immerso nella lettura, muovi macchinalmente il tagliacarte nello spessore del volume: a leggere non sei ancora alla fine del primo capitolo, ma a tagliare sei già molto avanti. Ed ecco che, nel momento in cui la tua attenzione è più sospesa, volti il foglio a metà d’una frase decisiva e ti trovi davanti due pagine bianche.

The novel you are reading wants to present to you a corporeal world, thick, detailed. Immersed in your reading, you move the paper knife mechanically in the depth of the volume: your reading has not yet reached the end of the first chapter, but your cutting has already gone far ahead. And there, at the moment when your attention is gripped by the suspense, in the middle of a decisive sentence, you turn the page and find yourself facing two blank sheets.

I had never attempted this previously, but it was one of the books I liberated from Ireland during the summer. It’s a surreal narrative where the sequentially numbered chapters, told in the second person, tell the story of investigating a fictional country and language which have disappeared, interspersed with the opening passages of a dozen fictional novels that tie into the narrative. I think it required more concentration and attention than I was able to give it during my commute and other travels, but at least it was fairly short. You can get If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, by Italo Calvino here.

This was my top unread sf book; next on that pile is Red Planet, by Robert A. Heinlein.

The best known books set in each country: Haiti

Posted on 21 December 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
Island Beneath the Sea	Isabel Allende	46,230	2,717
Breath, Eyes, Memory	Edwidge Danticat	31,110	3,114
The Comedians	Graham Greene	10,038	2,893
An Untamed State	Roxane Gay	19,695	1,053
Libertie	Kaitlyn Greenidge	15,751	857
Krik? Krak!	Edwidge Danticat	9,653	1,326
The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution	C.L.R. James	7,433	1,676
The Kingdom of This World	Alejo Carpentier	8,185	1,355

Quite a close result at the top, with Isabelle Allende’s tale of slavery in Saint-Domingue in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Island Beneath the Sea, sufficiently in the lead on Goodreads to beat Edwidge Danticat’s best known novel, the coming of age story Breath, Eyes, Memory, which however had the lead on LibraryThing. I was not quite sure about Breath, Eyes, Memory, part of which is set in New York, but as far as I could tell the majority of it is on Danticat’s native island. Danticat has two books on this week’s list; Krik? Krak! is a short story collection.

I disqualified five books. Mountains Beyond Mountains, by Tracy Kidder, is a biography of the doctor Paul Farmer, who worked also in Peru and Rwanda. Deadeye Dick, by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., is told in flashback from the narrator’s later life in Haiti, but the setting of the majority of it is the USA. The Black Count, by Tom Reiss, is about the father of Alexandre Dumas, who was born in Saint-Domingue but moved to Paris as a teenager. American Street, by Ibi Zoboi, is about the immigrant experience in the USA. And The Farming of Bones, by Edwidge Danticat again, is set across the border in the Dominican Republic.

This was one of the easier countries to rank – on the whole, users of LibraryThing and Goodreads are in agreement about which books are relevant to Haiti.

I’ll end the year next week with my adopted home country, Belgium, and will start 2026 with Jordan; followed by Haiti’s neighbour, the Dominican Republic, and then the United Arab Emirates.

Spa 1906, by Patrick Weber and Olivier Wozniak

Posted on 20 December 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second frame of third page:

This is the middle volume of a planned trilogy about early twentieth century Belgian detective Hendrikus Ansor, who Solves Crime. In this case he is brought in by Princess Clémentine (I wasn’t sure if she was a real historical person, but she was) to investigate mysterious deaths – apparently suicides – in the eastern resort town of Spa, which has given its name to an entire way of life.

Ansor obviously owes something to a later fictional Belgian detective, not least his magnificent moustache, but he’s a well-rounded if not always likeable character here, and the classical buildings of Spa and the royals and other celebrities are lovingly depicted by artist Olivier Wozniak. The mood of the book depicts a Belgium morally corroded by the reign of Leopold II rather well. I found the plot a bit convoluted, but I suppose that’s normal enough for a detective novel. It’s a nice one to have on the shelf. You can get Spa 1906 here.

Vanishing Point, by Michaela Roessner

Posted on 19 December 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

The kitchen crew filled plates with scrambled eggs, scones, and fresh fruit for Renzie and Tuck. They seated themselves in the stark unadorned room that served as the dining commons.

Michaela Roessner won the John W. Campbell Award (as it then was) in 1990 on the strength of her first novel, Walkabout Woman; Vanishing Point was her second novel of four. She was actually first well known as an artist who produced quite a lot of SF illustrations in the first half of the 1980s. She doesn’t seem to have published any new fiction since 2011. I picked this up at Eastercon in 2022 in order to try a new woman writer.

I’m conscious that my last few reviews on here have been somewhat negative, so I’m, glad to say that I thought Vanishing Point was rather good. It is set in California, thirty years after the mysterious vanishing of ninety per cent of the human race. A small community of researchers based in the Winchester House (or something very like it) is trying to work out what actually happened. A woman scientist from farther east joins them after a dangerous trek across country. They are beset by fanatics who think that the Vanishing was the Christian fundamentalist Rapture. Everyone is suffering post-traumatic disorientation and survivors’ guilt. It’s all very nicely and credibly put together. I see a couple of reviewers complaining that the science doesn’t make sense, but really, it’s all handwavium anyway, isn’t it?

You can get Vanishing Point here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2022. Next on that pile is Elfland, by Freda Warrington.

Charlotte impératrice, Tome 1: La Princesse et l’Archiduc, by Fabien Nury and Matthieu Bonhomme

Posted on 18 December 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second frame of third page:

King Leopold: You have to do it, all the same.

This is another bande dessinée that I acquired at the Brussels comics festival, the first of five volumes about the life of Princess Charlotte of Belgium, later Empress of Mexico. This volume takes us from the death of Charlotte’s mother in 1850 to her installation in Mexico in 1864, from the age of 10 to the age of 24, including the first years of her marriage at the age of 17 to the Archduke Maximilian, younger brother of the Austrian emperor Franz Joseph I.

Monarchy has many flaws, and not least is its impact on the actual royals, who are shown here as trapped in a gilded cage of privilege. Maximilian is a womaniser who is sterile because of venereal disease. Napoleon III is a sleazebag. Charlotte is rather obviously a Princess Di figure in this story, though history suggests that she was more assertive. The characterisation is a little stiff but you always know who is who.

Speaking of history, the story here has some serious omissions. It is implied that Maximilian’s term as viceroy of northern Italy was ended by the Battle of Solferino in 1859, which kicked the Hapsburgs out of Lombardy and Venice, but in fact he had been sacked by his brother two months earlier for being too liberal. Also historically Maximilian spent an awful lot of time pursuing his personal interests in Brazil, leaving Charlotte stranded on Madeira, and that simply isn’t mentioned here.

I don’t think I’ll bother with the rest; Charlotte is a tragic historical figure, but in the end her story is marginal to the real sweep of history, and while it’s OK not to let the facts get in the way of a good story, it’s important not to get too far away from them if you’re telling a historical tale. If you want, you can get Charlotte impératrice, Tome 1 here.

Wednesday reading

Posted on 17 December 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Current
The Moon of Gomrath, by Alan Garner
The Enigma Score, by Sheri S. Tepper
Yet More Penguin Science Fiction, ed. Brian Aldiss

Last books finished
The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport, by Samit Basu (did not finish)
Elidor, by Alan Garner
The Infinity Race, by Simon Messingham
A Wrinkle in the Skin, by John Christopher
Our Wonderful Selves, by Roland Pertwee
Doctor Who: The Adventures After, by Carole Ann Ford et al

Next books
Doctor Who: Mawdryn Undead, by Peter Grimwade
Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships, by Robin Dunbar
The Leviathan, by Rosie Andrews

Ness: A Story from the Ulster Cycle, by Patrick Brown

Posted on 17 December 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second frame of third page:

This is an adaptation of the story of Ness from the Ulster Cycle, ending with the birth of the future king Conchobar Mac Nessa. I picked this up at Eastercon, supporting an Irish creator of whom I hadn’t previously been aware, and of course I am always interested in treatments of Irish mythology.

The concept here is interesting enough – always up for a spunky girl warrior, who takes revenge on the bad guys when her royal father is unable to mete out as justice. But I’m afraid I wasn’t a fan of the art – red monochrome sketching, where I found some of the characters difficult to distinguish and a few more colours would have helped me to follow the plot a bit more. Apparently there is also a sequel covering the Cattle Raid of Cooley, the much more famous part of the Ulster Cycle. If I see it in passing I’ll probably get it.

You may be able to get Ness here.

Camp Damascus, by Chuck Tingle

Posted on 16 December 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

“Yes, I know . . . well, it’s not an exact science . . .” the familiar voice explains, anxious but assured. “There’s variation in every breed . . . yes, I know. Understood.”

I am familiar with Chuck Tingle’s short fiction, but this novel is a step in a different direction; Rose, our protagonist, lives in a Christian cult somewhere around Montana, but is neurodiverse and gay, and also infested with satanic flies. Camp Damascus, run by her church, is a gay conversion camp which is secretly being run for the benefit of demons.

The book’s heart is in the right place, but the execution isn’t quite there. Gay conversion camps are of course evil, but in the real world they are not actually demonic, and I would rather have the religious zealots exposed for their vicious lack of compassion and failure of empathy than just make fun of them for worshipping the wrong supernatural being. And Rose’s emotional journey zigzags a bit, with the One Who Got Away emerging rather late in the plot. Work in progress, I feel. You can get Camp Damascus here.

Scotland, Épisode 1, by Rodolphe, Leo and Marchal

Posted on 15 December 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second and third frames of third page.

Kathy: Are you leaving?
Driver: I’m taking a client to Kilwood

I have hugely enjoyed the Aldebaran cycle of bandes dessinées by Leo (Luiz Eduardo de Oliveira) and thought this might be worth a try. The story is by Leo and Rodolphe (Rodolphe Daniel Jacquette) and art by Bertrand Marchal. I had not realised that it’s actually the start of a fourth series of albums about the adventures of Kathy Austin, a British secret agent at the end of the 1940s; previously she has visited Kenya, Namibia and the Amazon.

Here she goes to Scotland to visit the house that she has inherited from her aunt, only to discover that it has been badly damaged by a fire and that her aunt’s suspicious death has not been investigated properly; incidentally there are Soviet agents and alien artifacts hanging around too.

It would be very easy for a (mostly) French creative team to slip into stereotypes here, and I’m glad to say that they have avoided it at least with regard to the humans of Scotland, with a reasonably sensitive depiction of rural and small-town folks dealing with Kathy’s return from years away. The landscapes are beautifully done, with Kathy brooding in front of a loch on the cover. The first four of the five in this series are out, and I’ll work through them. You can get Scotland, Épisode 1 here.

The best known books set in each country: South Sudan

Posted on 14 December 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
A Long Walk to Water	Linda Sue Park	101,897	4,876
They Poured Fire on Us from the Sky: The True Story of Three Lost Boys from Sudan	Benson Deng, Alephonsion Deng, Benjamin Ajak and Judy A. Bernstein	10,305	817
Acts of Faith	Philip Caputo	1,865	626
Emma’s War	Deborah Scroggins	2,103	303
War Child: A Child Soldier’s Story	Emmanuel Jal	2,158	218
War Brothers: The Graphic Novel	Sharon E. McKay	1,596	168
Songs of a War Boy	Deng Thiak Adut	1,686	72
Nya’s Long Walk: A Step at a Time	Linda Sue Park	568	136

I mentioned under Sudan that I had excluded four books which scored highly on both LT and GR, but appeared to be set in what is now South Sudan: A Long Walk to Water, by Linda Sue Park; They Poured Fire on Us from the Sky, by Benson Deng, Alephonsion Deng, Benjamin Ajak and Judy A. Bernstein; Acts of Faith, by Philip Caputo; and Emma’s War, by Deborah Scroggins. I checked as far as I could, and all four of those seem to indeed be set mainly south of the line.

I note that there is a character in the novel Acts of Faith who is very obviously based on Emma McCune, the subject of the biography Emma’s War. I never met her myself, but I know many people who did, and she clearly left her mark. If she had lived, she would be turning 62 in a few weeks’ time, and she would have been all over the political processes of the last thirty years, probably for better rather than worse.

Five of the other six books are about the terrible experiences of the Lost Boys, child soldiers conscripted into the Sudanese war in the 1990s, who then managed to escape to other countries and rebuild their lives. This week’s winner, A Long Walk to Water, combines such a story with the story of a girl in a tribal village in South Sudan who must keep her family supplied with water; her story on its own is the eighth of the books listed here.

I disqualified loads of books, starting with What is the What by Dave Eggers, another book about one of the Lost Boys, but as far as I can tell mainly set after the protagonist gets out of his home country. Also, some people seem to confuse South Sudan with South Africa when tagging their book collections.

The top book by a South Sudanese woman is Hopeless Kingdom, by Kgshak Akec, but it is mainly about the emigration experience. A near miss in several respects is Ghost Country, by Fatin Abbas, which is set in a fictional version of the disputed Abyei and whose author is from Khartoum.

This is the last African country for a while, and the last African country on the list of the six that I have actually visited myself. We’ll leap across the Atlantic next to Haiti, then back this side for Belgium, then Jordan, then back over again to Haiti’s neighbour the Dominican Republic.

Metropolis, by Thea von Harbou and film by Fritz Lang

Posted on 13 December 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter of novel:

Menschen, gierig nach dem Gewinn von Sekunden, stürzten zu ihm herein und, Stockwerke höher, tiefer wieder hinaus. Keiner achtete seiner. Der eine, die andere erkannte ihn wohl. Aber noch deutete niemand die Tropfen an seinen Schläfen anders als gleiche Gier nach dem Gewinn von Sekunden. Gut, er wollte warten, bis man es besser wußte, bis man ihn packte und aus der Zelle stieß: Was nimmst du uns den Platz weg, Lump, der du Zeit hast? Krieche die Treppen hinunter oder die Feuerleitern …

Persons, greedy to gain a few seconds, stumbled in with him, and stories higher, or lower, out again. Nobody paid the least attention to him. One or two certainly recognised him. But, as yet, nobody interpreted the drops on his temples as being anything but a similar greed for the gain of a few seconds. All right – he would wait until they knew better, until they took him and threw him out of the cell: What are you taking up space for, you fool, if you’ve got so much time? Crawl down the stairs, or the fire escape…

Every year since 2020 I’ve done a round-up blog post detailing what science fiction has been set in the year to come. There is surprisingly little for 2026. Literally the only sf novel that I have found which is entirely set in that year is Metropolis, published in 1925 by Thea von Harbou. Even there, I didn’t find anything in the text of the book that explicitly references the year; but people have been writing that it is set in 2026 since soon after publication, so I am guessing that the original blurb may have said so.

The film and book have the same plot, which is not surprising as von Harbou wrote them both. A future heavily industrialised city depends on the labour of the underclass. Freder, the son and heir of the city’s founder Joh, falls in love with Maria, a women from the depths; meanwhile Rotwang, the city’s chief inventor, creates a robot version of Maria which incites the workers to rebellion. After near-disaster, the robot is destroyed and Freder reconciles his father with the workers.

I may have been unlucky with the translation, but I found the novel rather clunky and not at all subtle; of course it’s firmly rooted in the political ferment of the Weimar Republic, and it’s about von Harbou’s hope that social upheaval could be contained by a grand bargain between workers and rulers, provided that they avoid the snares of populism. This was not of course what actually happened in Germany, and the workers don’t actually seem to get much out of the grand bargain; the rulers are still the rulers at the end of the book. Earnest but not super well executed. You can get it here.

The film has the same plot, but the plot is not the point: under Fritz Lang’s direction, it’s a cinematic masterpiece, even if the version we have is stitched together from the surviving theatrical release and off-cuts found in Argentina. The activation of the robot Maria is the iconic scene, but almost all of it looks brilliant – the vast machinery, the city-scape, the crowd scenes of the workers, the fleeing children, the erotic frenzy of the posh chaps at the night club, the climactic battle on the roof top. The sophistication of the special effects sets a standard that was rarely equalled for decades after. And Birgitte Helm is unforgettable as the two Marias.

I watched it on my iPad in three chunks – during my recent trip to Montenegro – but I would happily pay to see it on a big screen, and I am inclined to seek out some more of von Harbou and Lang’s collaborations.

The Ray Bradbury Chronicles, Volume 3, by Ray Bradbury et al

Posted on 12 December 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second frame of third story (“Gotcha”, adapted by Ray Zone with art by Chuck Roblin):

This is one of a series of seven albums published in 1992-93 by Byron Preiss, where various artists were asked to do illustrated versions of various Bradbury stories. Here there are six adaptations of five stories: “The Aqueduct”, “The Veldt”, “Gotcha”, “Homecoming” and two different versions of “There Will Come Soft Rains”, each with a short introduction by Bradbury himself.

The standout adaptations for me are Timothy Truman‘s “The Veldt” and Wally Wood‘s “There Will Come Soft Rains” (originally published in Weird Fantasy in 1953; the others are all original commissions for this book); but actually Bradbury was such a good story-teller that it’s hard for a competent artist to go wrong with one of his stories, and Bruce Jensen‘s “The Aqueduct”, Chuck Roblin’s “Gotcha” and Steve Leialoha‘s “The Homecoming” are all good.

On the other hand, the other adaptation of “There Will Come Soft Rains is by Lebbeus Woods, best known as an architect, and is remarkable for having illustrations which bear almost no visible relevance to the story. An odd choice, but Byron Preiss, the overall editor, is clearly marching to his own drum. Truman, Woods and Wood are named on the front cover.

You can get The Ray Bradbury Chronicles, volume 3 here.

Amongst Our Weapons, by Ben Aaronovitch

Posted on 11 December 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Occasionally this involves being physically or verbally abused, but mostly it involves paperwork.

I see a mixed reaction to this, the ninth of the Rivers of London series, but I rather enjoyed it. The title and the chapter headings are references to Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisition sketch, and the plot background for the book includes the historical Spanish Inquisition. There is a mystery involving a strange magical being, and also Peter Grants infamous ex Leslie; there are seven rings that need to be found; there are plenty of cultural references; there is an excursion to Glossop, not far from where I was last month; and there is the imminent birth of Peter and Beverley’s twins. I found it very satisfactory and entertaining. You can get Amongst Our Weapons here.

Only one book left in this series, Sky and Stone.

Wednesday reading

Posted on 10 December 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Current
Elidor, by Alan Garner
The Infinity Race, by Simon Messingham
Our Wonderful Selves, by Roland Pertwee

Last books finished
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
Time Trials Volume 1: The Terror Beneath, by George Mann et al
Hallowe’en Party, by Agatha Christie
Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, by Agatha Christie
Reeds in the Wind, by Grazia Deledda

Next books
Doctor Who: The Adventures After
Yet More Penguin Science Fiction, ed. Brian Aldiss
The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport, by Samit Basu