More Ninth Doctor audio plays from Big Finish, this time a trilogy with a very good beginning and end and a weaker middle. Here is a promotional video, not so much a trailer as a teaser with Frank Skinner doing a voiceover.
The Colour of Terror by Lizzie Hopley
This has the Ninth Doctor meeting Frank Skinner and Susan Penhaligon in a charity shop somewhere in England, where the colour red is taking on sinister and awful characteristics. It’s very well done, with a top guest cast, including also Laura Rollins and Dinita Gohil as a couple who get caught up in the situation. Coming back to Frank Skinner though – he’s obviously loving every minute of it, and it’s a joy to hear.
The Blooming Menace, by James Kettle, is the one that doesn’t quite hit the mark; it’s set around a young fogeys’ club out of P.G. Wodehouse, with carnivorous plants. The star guest here for me was Milanka Brooks, playing a chap who isn’t actually a chap.
But we’re back on track again with the finale, Red Darkness by Roy Gill. To get to the best bit first: it brings back the Vashta Nerada from Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead. You might have thought that such a visual monster might not work well on audio, but with good scripting and acting it is a real hit. The Doctor comes to the rescue of a doomed colony with the help of partially sighted Callen (played by Adam Martyn) and his talking dog (played by Karki Bhambra).
The strengths of the first and third of these more than make up for the weakness in the middle, and I recommend the set. You can get it here.
Current Caleb Williams, or Things as They Are, by William Godwin (group read) Once and Future, vol 5: The Wasteland, by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora and Tamra Bonvillain Burned, by Sam McBride
Last books finished The Song, by Erinn L. Kemper The Atlas of Unusual Borders,by Zoran Nikolić The Soul of a Bishop, by H.G. Wells Vagabonds!, by Eloghosa Osunde The Ultimate Earth, by Jack Williamson Navigational Entanglements, by Aliette de Bodard Sorrowland, by Rivers Solomon
Next books The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman, by H.G. Wells How I Learned to Understand the World, by Hans Rosling The James Tiptree Award Anthology 2, eds. Karen Joy Fowler, Pat Murphy, Debbie Notkin and Jeffrey D. Smith.
For today a crew of four is on its way to the moon and has just surpassed the space station’s shallow orbiting distance of two hundred and fifty miles above the planet. The lunar astronauts are catapulted past them in a five-billion-dollar blaze of suited-booted glory.
This book surprised a lot of us by winning the Booker Prize. It’s a short, intimate, realistic account of a day in the lives of six astronauts on the International Space Station. I almost hesitate to classify it as science fiction, since it’s a description of people in today’s world dealing with today’s technology. But there is also a fictional lunar mission happening in the background, which perhaps pushes it over the edge into sff.
I liked it a lot; quietly humorous, good observation of human nature in a very peculiar environment, sensible treatment of Russian language phrases (unlike some), reflection on What It All Means, also capturing the sensawunda of just having a semi-permanent human outpost in outer space. I’m still surprised that it won the Booker Prize, but I am familiar enough with how juried awards operate that I can see how it could happen.
Two completely different stories in a single album here, both featuring the Eleventh Doctor with Amy and Rory, both pretty firmly tied into the sequence of events in the TV series.
(And by the way, congratulations to Karen Gillan on the recent birth of her daughter Clementine!)
“The Hypothetical Gentleman”, by Andy Diggle with excellent art by Mark Buckingham, starts with a somewhat disconnected section fighting Nazis in London in 1936, and then takes the team to 1851 and a time-stealing monster. I found the pacing of squeezing two stories into the space for one a bit odd, but the 1851 bit of the story worked perfectly well as Doctor Who.
The second half, “The Doctor and the Nurse”, is written by Brandon Seifert with art by Philip Bond. I didn’t warm to Bond’s art which seemed to me cartoonish and not really looking like the characters. The story is a comedy about the Doctor and Rory having some guy time together, while Amy finds herself dealing solo with the Silents infiltrating the TARDIS. Comedy Who can go horribly wrong, but this one sticks the landing.
Second paragraph of third story (“Whimper Beg”, by Lee Thomas):
They’d spent hours in this space, drinking good whisky and talking about work, their families, fishing, and politics. He’d been introduced to two state senators in this room, both of whom had promptly received a check from Scotty, and both of whom he still supported to this day.
This was one of the books in the 2020 Hugo packet, but I have only now got around to reading it. There are thirty stories here, two of them over a century old (by Ford Madox Ford and F. Marion Crawford) and the rest newly commissioned for this anthology. They are all somewhat spooky, as you would expect from the title, but there are a lot of inventive variations on the standard themes. There was just one story I didn’t like, by an author who I also dislike personally, but it is short. The rest are all great.
I must admit I was looking at the 800-page PDF with some trepidation, and it did take me almost three weeks to read; but I really enjoyed this collection, and found myself positively looking forward to returning to it each time. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book book acquired in 2020. Next on that pile is The James Tiptree Award anthology 2, edited by Karen Joy Fowler, Pat Murphy, Debbie Notkin and Jeffrey D. Smith.
When did it all begin? We have an exact date for the start of the Viking Age in Britain: June 8, 793. On that day, Viking pirates who had probably set out from Norway attacked and pillaged a Christian monastery on the island of Lindisfarne off the English coast. They drowned some of the monks in the sea and took others into slavery before disappearing with the monastery’s treasures on their longboats. During the same decade, the Vikings/ Normans, who would eventually give their name to the province of Normandy, appeared near the shores of France. The Viking Age had begun.
I got this soon after the war started, almost three years ago now, but have only just got around to reading it. It’s an important explanation of the story of Ukraine, starting from Kievan Rus and going through the various semi-autonomous realms of the Middle Ages, through the centuries of Russian rule, and then independence up to 2014.
Some interesting nuggets: the daughters of the eleventh century Grand Prince of Kiev, Yaroslav the Wise, and his Swedish wife, married the kings of Hungary, Norway and France, and one of his sons married the daughter of the Byzantine Emperor. I see that there is also a theory that another daughter married an English Saxon prince and was the mother of Edgar Ætheling and Saint Margaret of Scotland, though Plokhii doesn’t mention it.
It was by no means historically inevitable that Ukraine would spend much of its history under Russian rule. Connections northwestward, to Poland, Lithuania and what’s now Belarus, were always strong, and there were always links with Constantinople and to a lesser extent Vienna as well. The Cossack states of the early modern period and the national revivals of the nineteenth century demonstrate that Ukraine is not just something invented in the twentieth century.
Speaking of which, the twentieth century history of Ukraine is pretty awful, and also pretty closely linked to Russia. After losing the 1917-1921 war of independence, Ukraine was incorporated into the USSR, and was economically very important with its concentrations of both agriculture and industry. Khrushchev made his political career there; Brezhnev was born there; Konstantin Chernenko, who briefly ruled the USSR near the end, was born to a Ukrainian exile family.
But Stalin executed almost all of the senior political and intellectual leadership, and then the Holodomor, the great famine, killed millions more. Stepan Bandera, the far right political figure who Russians love to hate, was never in fact very successful, but the Soviets had good reason to worry about Ukraine’s loyalty (and assassinated the exiled Bandera in Munich in 1959 by spraying him with cyanide).
And when both Ukraine’s Communist leadership, and the Ukrainian people when consulted at the ballot box, refused the offers of a new relationship made by Moscow in 1990-91, the result was the disintegration of the USSR as a whole. In the 1991 independence referendum, there was more than a 50% vote in favour in both Crimea and Sevastopol, and more than 80% in Donetsk and Luhansk; those were the four least pro-independence oblasts.
I said many years ago that all European borders are tidemarks in the ebb and flow of empires, and this is particularly so in the case of Ukraine. But that doesn’t make Ukraine a fictional concept, or Ukrainian a fictional language, or Ukrainians a fictional people, as the tankies would have you believe. Ukraine deserves external support to maintain and restore its integrity as a state, and this book is a good introduction to its history. You can get it here.
This was both my top unread non-fiction book, and my top unread book acquired in 2022. Next on those piles respectively are Nine Lives, by William Dalrymple, and Ithaca, by Claire North.
See here for methodology. I am back to running through countries in population order, after diverting to right past wrongs for the last four weeks. I generally exclude books not actually set in the specific country, this time Argentina, but I’ve bent that a bit here.
To my dismay, I have nonetheless excluded all of the Jorge Luis Borges short story collections, Ficciones, Labyrinths, the Collected Fiction and The Aleph and Other Stories, because a lot less than 50% of each of them is not clearly set in Argentina, and around half of each of them are in fact clearly set elsewhere.
The majority of Hopscotch, by Julio Cortázar, is set in Paris although there’s a substantial chunk in Argentina at the end. And The Invention of Morel, by Adolfo Bioy Casares, is set on a fictional island which is clearly distinguished from Argentina. Most of these were far far ahead of the rest on LibraryThing, apart from The Invention of Morel (though even that has 2,654 LibraryThing owners).
My winning novel, Tender Is the Flesh, has as many raters on Goodreads as the next four put together but is only second on LibraryThing. It is not explicitly set in Argentina, but none of its many reviewers seem to think that it is set anywhere else, so I am allowing it the top spot. I note with great interest that another Argentinian woman writer, Mariana Enriquez, also shows a big imbalance between the two website, with around fifty times more raters on Goodreads than owners on LibraryThing. (The normal ratio is more like 20:1.) The two Enriquez books that I have not read also appear to be short story collections, but unlike Borges most of them appear to be set in Argentina.
Next up are Afghanistan and Yemen. I don’t think Afghanistan is going to surprise me.
It took me a couple of weeks to acquire the newly colorised version of The War Games, the longest surviving Old Who series and the last of the black and white era, which was released just before Christmas by the BBC. I am of course a purist who believes that you should, if you can, watch the four hours of the original story. But in these busy times, who has four hours to sit down to a show made in 1969? So I guess I welcome the fact that it has been made accessible to viewers with less time and patience. Here’s a trailer.
It’s very pleasing, I must admit. I certainly had a jolt of excitement when I saw the first real splashes of colour on screen. There’s no denying that the human eye is naturally attracted to chromatic variation; it represents immense effort by the colourists, and it has paid off.
I’m a little more hesitant about the editing. Sure, cutting four hours down to 90 minutes is going to be a challenge, even if there are several extraneous escape-and-recapture sequences which were ripe for trimming. There is a little jerkiness in continuity as a result, which could perhaps have been smoothed over with a caption or a voiceover – thinking particularly of Vilar who comes out of nowhere.
But the ending is where the editors have added rather than taken away. We get nods to New Who at a crucial moment in the trial scene, and the two extra minutes inserted between the last seconds of the last black-and-white Doctor Who episode, and the first canonical appearance of the Third Doctor, are a delight – originally developed by a fan on YouTube, who the BBC then brought into the project. Beautifully done.
(Also the line “Too fat!” has been removed, but that’s a good thing.)
I’m not going to do an overall analysis of Joy to the World, but here were some things that struck me.
I can’t recall watching anything on screen or stage that addressed the pandemic so directly. It’s not just the explicit “those awful people and their wine fridges, and their dancing, and their parties” line; the Doctor’s isolation for a year in the hotel, sitting chastely distanced from Anita, is a very obvious callback to 2020. In-universe of course, the Doctor could perfectly well have gone to visit with Ruby, or UNIT, or his other self and Donna’s family, since he knows he has a year but doesn’t have to be on the spot. But that’s not the story that Stephen Moffat chose to tell. (I’ve read a couple of pandemic-referencing novels – Ali Smith in particular.)
Speaking of Anita, although Nicola Coughlan was the top billed guest star as Joy, it was Steph de Whalley who nailed it as the lonely hotel receptionist. She is 37 and has not previously had a major role in her career. Hopefully that will change now.
Speaking of other members of the cast, I had seen Joel Fry, who played Trev, on stage as Jodie Whittaker’s secret husband in The Duchess last year.
Nicola Coughlan is the first Northern Irish actor to get top billing in a Doctor Who episode. (Edited to add: she is from Galway.) (Edited again: Er, after Dervla Kirwan.)
I winced a bit at the Bethlehem scene at the end. But does this mean that the whole New Testament is now an annex of the Whoniverse? Or just the gospels of Matthew and Luke?
Annexing another continuity, in case you didn’t know, Silvia Trench (the wopman on the Orient Express) is also James Bond’s London girlfriend in the first two films, Dr. No and From Russia with Love.
The usual Moffat problem: nobody ever stays dead.
But in general, I enjoyed it – the good bits definitely outweighing the misfires.
And of course the first Doctor Who content to drop over the Christmas break was the Christmas Prom, introduced by Catherine Tate. Lots of joyous energy in the hall and among the performers; audience clearly appreciating the scary monsters walking among them. The whole thing is online here:
Almost wholly I think I was dreaming of public service in those days. The Harbury tradition pointed steadfastly towards the state, and all my world was bare of allurements to any other type of ambition. Success in art or literature did not appeal to us, and a Harbury boy would as soon think of being a great tinker as a great philosopher. Science we called “stinks”; our three science masters were ex officio ridiculous and the practical laboratory a refuge for oddities. But a good half of our fathers at least were peers or members of parliament, and our sense of politics was close and keen. History, and particularly history as it came up through the eighteenth century to our own times, supplied us with a gallery of intimate models, our great uncles and grandfathers and ancestors at large figured abundantly in the story and furnished the pattern to which we cut our anticipations of life. It was a season of Imperialism, the picturesque Imperialism of the earlier Kipling phase, and we were all of us enthusiasts for the Empire. It was the empire of the White Man’s Burthen in those days; the sordid anti-climax of the Tariff Reform Movement was still some years ahead of us. It was easier for us at Harbury to believe then than it has become since, in our own racial and national and class supremacy. We were the Anglo–Saxons, the elect of the earth, leading the world in social organization, in science and economic method. In India and the east more particularly we were the apostles of even-handed justice, relentless veracity, personal cleanliness, and modern efficiency. In a spirit of adventurous benevolence we were spreading those blessings over a reluctant and occasionally recalcitrant world of people for the most part “colored.” Our success in this had aroused the bitter envy and rivalry of various continental nations, and particularly of France, Russia, and Germany. But France had been diverted to North Africa, Russia to Eastern Asia, and Germany was already the most considered antagonist in our path towards an empire over the world.
As I continue to march across the lesser-known terrain of Wells’ fiction, I meet Stephen Stratton and Lady Mary Christian, who have a love affair immediately before and after she marries someone else; eventually Mary’s husband Justin finds out and they part, leaving Stephen free to marry the much less stressful Rachel, while he carries on his important work of Changing The World; after a few years Mary and Stephen strike up a deeply friendly but chaste correspondence; and then the novel ends in unexpected and somewhat jarring disaster.
I liked a lot of this, in particular the idea that your former lover can actually become a good friend who does not threaten your current relationship, a rather positive model for transcending one’s emotional history; so I felt rather betrayed by the tragic ending, which seemed to suggest that Wells himself didn’t actually think this is really possible in real life. Wells probably had a lot more experience of trying this sort of balancing act than most people, so I guess that he was writing about what he knew. I note that of the two film adaptations, one (1922) keeps the tragedy and one (1949) does not.
There’s also a brief section set in Ireland, where Stephen goes in search of Mary at one point, which I think is maybe the first time I have seen any serious mention of Ireland in Wells’ writings. It rains dismally throughout that one short chapter. Stephen spends more time, more vividly described, in South Africa during the Boer War.
A subplot is Stephen’s plan to create a single World Government, apparently the first time that Wells set this idea out so clearly. I was a bit bored by the lengthy discourses on political theory and society, though interested that Wells mainly puts these in Mary’s mouth rather than Stephen’s.
One of my big complaints about the Chibnall era was that the Doctor Who Annuals were very thin indeed, with only weakly regurgitated plot summaries of recent episode and a few rather pathetic puzzles. This must have been set from the top, because although the credited author of the 2025 Annual, Paul Lang, is the same as for the last few, there seems to be a new energy to this side of things.
Yes, we have each episode retold briefly in hard copy; but it’s more of a sideways look, with the story told from a different angle than on TV, and the Fourteenth Doctor stories are interspersed among the first few Fifteenth Doctor stories. We also have a print adaptation (by veteran Steve Cole) of the Comic Relief skit with Davros. And even the puzzles seem to have a new level of sophistication.
I don’t seem to have read the 2023 or 2024 Annuals; I had better put that right.
Everyone is waiting outside of the classroom to go in, so I decide to approach Jenna. We’ve been friends since nursery, and she’s even stayed over at my house. But I haven’t seen her at all over the summer and she has spent every minute of term so far with Emily.
11-year-old Addie is autistic. She goes to the normal school in her Scottish village. She finds it challenging but in general she can cope. She has the support of her parents, and one of her older twin sisters is autistic too.
Addie’s former best friend abandons her, and her new teacher thinks autistic children should be in special education. Meanwhile she has become very interested in the persecution of witches in the Middle Ages, and starts to campaign for a permanent memorial in the village.
It’s not difficult to draw the parallel between the things that were said about the witches in the Middle Ages, and the things that are said about autistic people today. Addie is a smart kid, and she makes the connection immediately.
This is a short book with a lot of heart, told with conviction from Addie’s point of view. It has been made into a TV series which has had two seasons so far. I would recommend it, not only for neurodivergent younger readers, but perhaps even more so for any adults who may have difficulty understanding the world that autistic people live in.
Current Caleb Williams, or Things as They Are, by William Godwin (group read) The Soul of a Bishop, by H.G. Wells Sorrowland, by Rivers Solomon Vagabonds!, by Eloghosa Osunde The Atlas of Unusual Borders,by Zoran Nikolic
Last books finished Paddy Machiavelli: How to Get Ahead in Irish Politics, by John Drennan Killing Ground, by Steve Lyons On Ghost Beach, by Neil Bushnell (audiobook) Sting of the Sasquatch, by Darren Jones (audiobook) Silence in the Library / The Forest of the Dead, by Dale Smith On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong Fifty Years On, by Malachi O’Doherty
Next books A Brilliant Void, by Jack Fennell “The Ultimate Earth”, by Jack Williamson Once and Future, vol 5: The Wasteland, by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora and Tamra Bonvillain
When we went to the KMSKA in Antwerp last June, my attention was caught by a striking lady in the hall commemorating the museum’s donors, represented by a portrait and a bust:
This is Marie-Lætitia Bonaparte-Wyse (1831-1902), whose mother was Letizia Bonaparte, daughter of Napoleon Bonaparte’s brother Lucien, and whose legal father was Sir Thomas Wyse of Waterford, member of parliament for Tipperary, though it is generally accepted that her biological father was Studholme John Hodgson, an officer of the 19th Regiment of Foot.
She was educated in Paris and at the age of 17 married Frédéric Joseph de Solms, so was known as ‘La Princesse de Solmes’ for the next few years. He abandoned her; she was expelled from the Second Empire (ruled by her mother’s first cousin Napoleon III) on somewhat obscure grounds in 1852 – aged only 21!
She ran a famous literary salon in Aix-les-Bains, which was then in Savoy rather than France; after 1860, when Aix was annexed by France in return for recognising the reunification of Italy, she reconciled with the French authorities. In 1863 she married her second husband, Count Urbano Rattazzi, who had just finished the first of his two terms as prime minister of the newly unified Italian kingdom.
When he in turn died in 1873, she married a Spanish politician, Don Luis de Rute y Ginez. Whether in Italy, France or Spain she brought writers, artists and politicians together in her salons. She lived until 1901, and has many living descendants through her daughter by her second marriage, the Villanova-Rattazzi family who are based in Spain.
French Wikipedia lists over 30 books and half a dozen plays by her. I found two really vivid pen-portraits of her which are worth reading. Frederic Loliee describes her early career in a chapter of his “Women of the Second Empire” (1907) and Francis Grierson tells of her role as a literary and political hostess in “Parisian Portraits” (1914). Grierson concludes, “With the death of Madame Bonaparte-Rattazzi the last star in the romantic galaxy of the nineteenth century disappeared.” This may be exaggeration, but it’s a good summary.
I bet you had never heard of her before reading this blog post. I hadn’t, before last June.
I thought I might try out her writing for myself, though it’s worth noting that it’s not really her writing that she is remembered for. Her most substantial fiction is a series of four novels published in 1866-67 as by “Madame Rattazzi”, overlapping with her husband’s second term as Italian prime minister.
The titles are (in internal chronology): Le piège aux maris (The Husband Trap), Les débuts de la forgeronne (How the Blacksmith’s Wife Began), La Mexicaine (The Mexican Woman) and Bicheville, ou le chemin du paradis (Bicheville, or the Path to Paradise). You can get them all in French for free here, here, here and here.
I can manage a well-written bande-dessinee in French, but I am not up to reading an entire novel; fortunately I have a DeepL subscription and used it to get a comprehensible English text. (Happy to share that with you, if you ask nicely.)
So. On the one hand, it’s a big sweeping story of several lower-middle-class families in contemporary Paris, and the efforts of well-meaning mothers to get their daughters safely married (something that the author knew about rather well) along with petty crime and mysterious inheritances. The social commentary ranges from cold observation to occasional anger.
Paris and the French countryside are well described and you know what each of the characters is doing and why. The depiction of posh society in a foreign city (the “Bicheville” of the last volume) supposedly was too close to the bone for readers in Florence, then the Italian capital, and is said to have played a part in ending Count Rattazzi’s second term as prime minister, though I felt it clearly drew more on her experience in Aix a decade earlier.
At the same time I felt it was a bit rambling. The sheer number of significant characters made it rather difficult to keep track. Some of them are known by different names in different chapters. The sections set in Algeria in the last two books are very thin on descriptive detail (noticeably so in contrast to the sections in France or Bicheville), and the fourth book ends rather hastily. So I can’t completely recommend it to the casual reader. But I’m glad I gave it a try.
Bicheville, ou le chemin du paradis was the last book that I finished in the calendar year 2024.
Second paragraph of third chapter of La piege aux maris:
Une gare, c’est le temple de l’action. — A la porte, des files de voitures qu’on décharge; à l’intérieur, des colis qu’on roule sur des voilures à bras; des facteurs, des portefaix, des voyageurs groupés ou solitaires, allant affairés, çà et là, ou fumant paisiblement; des soldats avec leurs fusils, des chasseurs avec leurs chiens, des nourrices avec leurs marmots, des citadins et des paysans, des gentlemen et des commis; — des bruits de roues et des coups de sifflets, des voix distinctes et des murmures confus. Et, par-dessus tout, cette horloge inflexible, dont on ne saurait arrêter l’aiguille, dont l’heure tinte comme un glas fatal Au conducteur de la diligence, on disait: Attendez un peu. Prenez un verre de vin; trinquez avec nous. — Le chef de train est invisible. Il est là-bas, de l’autre côté, soldat esclave de sa consigne, être de raison qui donne le signal du départ, comme la pendule sonne l’heure. Dans la cour de la diligence, il n’y avait que les parents et les amis de ceux qui parlaient; ici, les indifférents pullulent On n’ose pas se faire, devant eux, les recommandations enfantines et touchantes; on n’ose pas se dire qu’on s’aime; on n’ose pas pleurer; — on s’embrasse devant des badauds qui rient!
A station is the temple of action. At the gate, lines of carriages are being unloaded; inside, parcels are being rolled on canopies; postmen, porters, travellers grouped together or alone, bustling here and there or smoking peacefully; soldiers with their rifles, hunters with their dogs, nurses with their babies, townsfolk and peasants, gentlemen and clerks; – the sound of wheels and whistles, distinct voices and confused murmurs. And, above all, that inflexible clock, whose hand could not be stopped, whose hour tinkled like a fatal knell The driver of the coach was told: Wait a little. Have a glass of wine; toast with us. – The conductor is invisible. He is over there, on the other side, a soldier enslaved by his orders, a being of reason who gives the signal for departure as the clock strikes the hour. In the coach yard, there were only the relatives and friends of those who were speaking; here, the indifferent swarmed. You didn’t dare make childish and touching recommendations to each other in front of them; you didn’t dare say that you loved each other; you didn’t dare cry; – you kissed each other in front of laughing onlookers!
Second paragraph of third chapter of Les débuts de la forgeronne:
– Continuez, madame, quelles sont vos intentions… ?
“Go on, madam, what are your intentions…?”
Second paragraph of third chapter of La Mexicaine:
– Prenons un verre d’absinthe, se dit Fanfan, ça me donnera du toupet !
“Let’s have a glass of absinthe”, Fanfan said to himself. “That’ll give me some spirit!”
Second paragraph of third chapter of Bicheville, ou le chemin du paradis:
« Quand je serai la femme de Pierre, nous ne verrons que des amis connus de nous depuis longtemps… Les deux hommes qui paraissaient les plus distingués et les plus recherchés dans le singulier monde que j’ai traversé pendant ces six derniers mois, sont deux infâmes et deux misérables ; que sont donc les autres ? Ce monde où l’on rencontre des Othon du Triquet et des gens comme ces deux êtres dont le nom ne salira pas les pages où se trouve celui de mon bien-aimé, ce monde-là est-il bien le vrai monde ? En ce cas fuyons loin de lui… Pauvre mère ! Reviens à ta vie paisible ; tu vieilliras entourée de la tendresse de tes enfants, je ne serai ni vicomtesse de contrebande peut-être, ni baronne d’aventure peut-être encore, mais j’aurai un intérieur où je ne trouverai que des visages francs et loyaux, et je pourrai sans crainte toucher toutes les mains qui m’entoureront, car s’il s’en trouve quelques-unes noircies par le travail, il ne s’en trouvera aucune souillée par l’infamie. Voilà une grande phrase que mon mari trouvera prétentieuse ; – qu’il soit tranquille, mon bon Pierre… quand il sera près de moi, je n’écrirai plus avec tant de peine ce que je pense, je le lui dirai à lui toujours, et il me semble qu’alors les mots viendront tout seuls ! C’est égal, c’est un bien singulier monde ! »
‘When I become Pierre’s wife, we will see only friends we have known for a long time… The two men who seemed the most distinguished and the most sought-after in the strange world I have passed through these last six months are two infamous and two wretched people; what are the others? Is this world, where we meet Othon du Triquet and people like these two whose names will not stain the pages where my beloved’s are, the real world? In that case let us flee from it… Poor mother! Come back to your peaceful life; you will grow old surrounded by the tenderness of your children, I will not be a viscountess of smuggling perhaps, nor a baroness of adventure perhaps, but I will have a home where I will find only honest and loyal faces, and I will be able without fear to touch all the hands that surround me, because if there are some blackened by work, there will be none stained by infamy. That’s a big sentence that my husband will find pretentious, but don’t worry, my good Pierre… when he’s near me, I won’t take so much trouble to write down what I’m thinking, I’ll always say it to him, and it seems to me that then the words will come all by themselves! All the same, it’s a very strange world!
Second paragraph of third story (“Johnny’s New Job”):
Wednesday, the case was officially declared by the government to be an instance of Welfare Knew And Did Nothing (within the meaning of the Summary Judgement Act) so of course everyone kept their ears open and sure enough pretty soon the thrilling voice of the Public Accuser came booming out of the factory Screens, demanding on behalf of everyone there that culprits be identified for him to Name.
A second collection of short stories by Chris Beckett, whose fiction I have enjoyed over the years, collecting stories published between 2008 and 2012. I had previously read one of them, “Poppyfields”, which is included as an afterpiece to his fix-up novel Marcher. They’re all decent enough, mostly rooted in East Anglia; the one that surprised me, mostly in a good way, was “Our Land” which is a what-if story transposing the Israel-Palestine conflict onto England. There are several pairs of stories linked by their setting in distinct futures, and I was a bit annoyed that these are not paired up in the internal structure of the collection. It’s not as mind-blowing as Beckett’s previous collection, The Turing Test, but it will certainly do. You can get it here.
This was my top book acquired in 2019, and the SF book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on those piles respectively are Burned, by Sam McBride, and A Brilliant Void, by Jack Fennell.
Ordinarily I couldn’t see any of this. Only through careful and deliberate study could I witness what had been in front of me all along. And so I did this, at home and at school. I remember this as a great period of visibility, the world bursting into appearance. The air was thick with teeming life, just as the oceans and the rivers were. A spoonful of seawater or a pinch of soil between your fingers held billions of living things. We were blind to this out of necessity, because if we saw what was really there we would never move. It was around us, between us, on the edge of us and inside us. It coated our bodies and we released waves of it when we breathed and spoke. It was in every skin cell and in the eyelashes that fluttered when we dreamed. It adapted to every aspect of our behaviour; if animals were shaded out, and microorganisms illuminated, then our ghosts would be clear in these bright peripheries. My favourite species were those that lay dormant in husk form before reanimating, such as the rotifers discovered in Arctic ice-sheets after 24,000 lifeless years. Able to withstand almost any force, they seemed to challenge the distinction between life and death, annihilating the concept of straight and linear time to suggest something more circular and repetitious instead.
Won last year’s Arthur C. Clarke Award, beating the Hugo-winning Some Desperate Glory and several others that I haven’t read yet. There are lots of interesting things here: protagonist is a marine biologist from an abusive family background, gets sent on a very mysterious mission to an Atlantic Ocean trench, and then on an even more mysterious space mission to the outer solar system; and then something even more mysterious happens, and we end the book trying to work out what it is. But everything is linked back and forth between the different phases of the plot, the protagonist is interesting and intriguing, and the non-human forces (I hesitate to even say ‘alien’) subtly realised.
In his acceptance speech at the Clarke ceremony, MacInnes paid tribute to Christopher Priest and said that he had learned a lot from their brief friendship. The book is not one that Chris would have ever written, but I did get the feeling that he would have enjoyed looking over MacInnes’ shoulder and giving him an approving pat on the back.
Man: Where’s the other rider? Is it your husband? Kim: Who are you anyway?
Second frame of third page of Épisode 2:
Manon: Oh, shit!
The first two in what we are promised will be a four part story from the Brazilian-French comics writer Leo, following on from the previous 26 albums in the Aldebaran cycle since 1994. Kim, who has been the central character for most of the stories, is sent with her friend and colleague Manon to investigate the backward world of Bellatrix, where a misogynist conservative faction seems likely to win the elections and remove women’s rights.
Meanwhile their support mission in orbit, supported by the alien Avarants who have requested the Bellatrix intervention, runs into problems of its own when another alien race, the Arctarods, turns up.
As ever, gorgeously drawn; the political point is a lot more cogent than in some of Leo’s previous work; both of the first two albums end on cliff-hangers, which suggests that a decent amount of thought has gone into the plotting. Even minor characters get some credible presence here as well. I love that the lead Avarant has decided to call himself Seamus.
First Avarant: This is the human, Manon Servoz. Second Avarant: Come and sit with us, Manon. My name is Seamus.
See here for methodology. Back when I started this project, I was simply recording the top eight books tagged as being in each country by users of on Goodreads and LibraryThing, and then recording which didn’t really qualify due to not being set in that country.
I have switched now to a system where I disqualify the relevant books before constructing my league table. This is particularly important for Ethiopia, where on my first pass I only found two of the top eight books actually set there – and I was wrong about one of them! So the below table is comprehensively revised from the first round; the only thing that hasn’t changed, in fact, is the book at the top of the list.
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
Cutting for Stone
Abraham Verghese
404,368
9,853
The Shadow King
Maaza Mengiste
14,188
769
The Emperor: Downfall of An Autocrat
Ryszard Kapuściński
8,590
1,095
The Quest
Nelson DeMille
10,305
713
The Sign and the Seal
Graham Hancock
2,767
1,038
Beneath the Lion’s Gaze
Maaza Mengiste
3,429
467
There Is No Me Without You
Melissa Fay Greene
3,404
426
Black Dove White Raven
Elizabeth Wein
3,095
381
I’m glad that Ethiopian writer Maaza Mengiste does get two entries on the list. I’m surprised (though perhaps I shouldn’t be) to see Elizabeth Wein, who I had a great dinner with in Glasgow in 2005, in eighth place.
I disqualified no less than twelve books to get to Elizabeth Wein, and there are a couple on the list that I’m still not sure of. As I noted previously, What is the What, by Dave Eggers, is about South Sudan. The Covenant of Water, by Abraham Verghese, is set in India. Infidel, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, is about Somalia. A Long Walk to Water, by Linda Sue Park, is also about South Sudan. Say You’re One of Them, by Uwem Akpan, is a short story collection of which only one story is set in Ethiopia.
The Shadow of the Sun, by Ryszard Kapuściński, which I incorrectly included in my table last time, covers a number of African countries including Ethiopia. Yes, Chef, by Marcus Samuelsson, is mainly set in Sweden. The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, by Dinaw Mengestu, is set in the USA. Sweetness in the Belly, by Camilla Gibb, is set in several countries. All Our Names, again by Dinaw Mengestu, is set partly in the USA and partly in Uganda as well as in Ethiopia. How to Read the Air, yet again by Dinaw Mengestu, is set in the USA. And Refugee Boy, by Benjamin Zephaniah, is set in Eritrea and the UK as well as Ethiopia.
I made a couple of judgement calls. The Sign and the Seal looks like it is total rubbish, but it is nonetheless about the concealment of the Ark of the Covenant in Ethiopia, so I ruled it in. On the other hand, to my surprise, very few Goodreads or LibraryThing users think that Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop is about Ethiopia, although I always had that impression. So I ruled it out, on the basis of popular perception.
Our brothersisters have always possessed the cruelty that is our birthright. They stacked their bitterness like a year’s harvest; they bound it all together with anger, long memories, and petty ways. The Ada had not died, the oath had not been fulfilled, and we had not come home. They could not make us return because they were too far away, but they could do other things in the name of claiming our head. There is a method to this. First, harvest the heart and weaken the neck. Make the human mother leave. This, they knew, is how you break a child.
I am getting to the end of my project of reading all of the Tiptree/Otherwise, BSFA and Clarke Award winners. This won the 2019 Otherwise Award, the first time it had that name, beating six other novels, two shorter pieces and a series of books. I have read two of the others, The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal and The Deep by Rivers Solomon; of the three I liked Freshwater the most.
It’s the story of a Nigerian who moves back and forth to the United States, but who also contains several different personalities: the Ada, who is the named protagonist; Asụghara, whose impulses are destructive; Yshwa, a rather distracted Jesus; and Saint Vincent, who carries masculine traits. This could easily have become very self-indulgent, but in fact the narrative twists and turns and doesn’t lose track of trying to tell a story, despite the multiplicity of the protagonist’s nature. I found it an excellent read. You can get it here.
As usual, I’ve crunched the Goodreads / LibraryThing numbers on the books published 50, 100 and 150 years ago. It’s surprising what has stayed within the popular Zeitgeist and what has not. I’m looking at the top 20 books from 1975, the top 15 from 1925 and the top 10 from 1875.
I’m not doing the 25-year points, 2000, 1950 and 1900, in such great detail, partly because this post is already quite long enough, and also because 2000 is still too recent. Since you asked, however, the top book from 2000 on GR and LT is Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, by J. K. Rowling; the top book from 1950 is The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, by C. S. Lewis; and the top book from 1900 is The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum. There’s a blog post waiting to be written about that synchonicity. (For 1850, it’s The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne.)
1975
LT
GR
1
’Salem’s Lot, by Stephen King
610,770
17,066
2
Tuck Everlasting, by Natalie Babbitt
282,720
16,040
3
Shōgun, by James Clavell
196,270
8,355
4
Ramona the Brave, by Beverly Cleary
57,466
8,217
5
Crocodile on the Sandbank, by Elizabeth Peters
76,338
4,698
6
Ragtime, by E.L. Doctorow
44,818
6,405
7
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, by Michel Foucault
34,389
6,949
8
The Grey King, by Susan Cooper
39,532
6,024
9
Factotum, by Charles Bukowski
72,351
3,291
10
Forever…, by Judy Blume
64,293
3,416
11
Curtain (Poirot’s Last Case), by Agatha Christie
46,542
4,645
12
Where Are the Children?, by Mary Higgins Clark
58,247
2,123
13
A Color of His Own, by Leo Lionni
21,919
5,594
14
The Eagle Has Landed, by Jack Higgins
57,766
2,005
15
The Autumn of the Patriarch, by Gabriel García Márquez
The best-selling book of 1975 in 1975 was Ragtime, by E.L. Doctorow. I am surprised by how few of these I have read. I don’t think I had even heard of Tuck Everlasting, which seems to be a very popular American kids’ fantasy novel. Apart from the two where I have linked reviews above, I have read only Curtain and The Eagle Has Landed of the books on the list.
The 1976 Hugo and 1975 Nebula for Best Novel both went to The Forever War, which however was published in 1974. The other Hugo finalists that I have read from that year are Doorways in the Sand, by Roger Zelazny, published in Analog in 1975, and The Computer Connection by Alfred Bester and The Stochastic Man by Robert Silverberg. The very long Nebula shortlist included all of those, and also Dhalgren, by Samuel R. Delany, Missing Man, by Katherine MacLean, The Female Man, by Joanna Russ, and a bunch of others which I either haven’t read or which weren’t published in 1975, including Doctorow’s Ragtime.
I have a lot of affection for several of those, and I think my favourite is The Wind’s Twelve Quarters.
Note that although ’Salem’s Lot is only just at the top of the LibraryThing numbers, it’s way ahead on Goodreads, a distinction similarly enjoyed by The Philosophy of Andy Warhol and to an extent by The Eagle has Landed and Where are the Children?. On the other hand, children’s book A Color of His Own, along with The Periodic Table and Discipline and Punishment score relatively much higher on LibraryThing.
I’ve done a bit better here, and indeed Gatsby knocks all other contenders in this post out of the park. I think I have probably also read Carry on, Jeeves, and possibly also The Secret of Chimneys though it doesn’t feature either Poirot or Miss Marple.
Of the above, only Arrowsmith was also popular in 1925, according to the Publishers Weekly list. The best-selling book of 1925 in 1925 was Soundings, by A. Hamilton Gibbs, reviewed here, which has sunk without a trace (10 raters on Goodreads, 9 owners on LibraryThing).
The other 1925 books that I am sure I have read are The Flight of the Heron, by D.K. Broster and The Fugitive aka The Sweet Cheat Gone, by Marcel Proust. I may have also read Doctor Dolittle’s Zoo, by Hugh Lofting.
I’m with the consensus here: The Great Gatsby is my favourite of those I have read. (Turns out that Fitzgerald was a distant cousin of mine.) It is far in the lead on LibraryThing and stratospherically so on Goodreads. The only other book with anything like such a strong Goodreads lean is 24 Hours in the Life of a Woman. On the other hand, Manhattan Transfer, The Everlasting Man and Arrowsmith are relatively strong on LibraryThing.
I haven’t read The School at the Chalet, the first of the Chalet School series of books by Elinor Brent-Dyer; to my surprise, both it and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, by Anita Loos, fail to make the cut.
1875
1
Eight Cousins, by Louisa May Alcott
38,544
4,817
2
The Way We Live Now, by Anthony Trollope
13,646
2,959
3
The Adolescent, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
9,755
1,793
4
The Crime of Father Amaro, by Eça de Queirós
7,159
814
5
Senhora, by Jose de Alencar
6,211
462
6
The Law and the Lady, by Wilkie Collins
3,251
778
7
Memoirs, by William Tecumseh Sherman
2,145
1,048
8
The Sin of Father Mouret, by Emile Zola
2,108
514
9
Science and Health: with Key to the Scriptures, by Mary Baker Eddy
712
1,277
10
The Wise Woman aka The Lost Princess, by George MacDonald
1,480
494
This required a fair bit of digging, possibly more than the exercise was really worth. I have read at least one book published in every year from 1876 to 2024 inclusive, but I don’t seem to have read anything at all published in 1875. Anna Karenina started publication in that year, but did not finish until three years later, and most people would count it for 1878. Eight Cousins is a less well known story in the Little Women universe, but still better known than any of the other 1875 books.
Senhora, the novel by Brazilian writer José de Alenca, is relatively stronger on Goodreads, which has pockets of enthusiasm in certain languages and literatures. Science and Health: with Key to the Scriptures is very unusual in having more owners on LibraryThing than raters on Goodreads.
1825
Going further back, 1825 is also pretty slim. Among a dim bunch, William Hazlitt’s Spirit of the Age seems to do best. I’ll just also note Charles Maturin’s last published story, Leixlip Castle, which is set a century earlier at a time when the castle was owned by my Whyte ancestors, though Maturin doesn’t seem to have known that.
I think I’ll give ’Salem’s Lot and Eight Cousins a go. I’m glad that the 770-page The Way We Live Now didn’t win my 1875 table. (Also I see that I also counted it last year, as publication began in 1874.)
Finally the rising journalist went and sounded the people on the two chief Folkestone papers and found the thing had just got to them. They were inclined to pretend they hadn’t heard of it, after the fashion of local papers when confronted by the abnormal, but the atmosphere of enterprise that surrounded the rising journalist woke them up. He perceived he had done so and that he had no time to lose. So while they engaged in inventing representatives to enquire, he went off and telephoned to the Daily Gunfire and the New Paper. When they answered he was positive and earnest. He staked his reputation — the reputation of a rising journalist!
A short satirical piece by Wells from 1902. His first twenty books were published between 1895 and 1912, and this was the only one that I had not yet read. A mermaid washes ashore between Folkestone and Hythe (weirdly enough, I spent two nights at Hythe last November), and the local Liberal candidate falls in love with her. There is much comedy of manners (though the book is only 100 pages long). You can get it here.
I suspect that Wells was reflecting on his own experience of his love life interfering with his political activities. Several of his earlier books (most notably The New Machiavelli) include elections, but it wasn’t until 1922 and 1923 that he put himself forward (for the London University constituency; he came third out of three candidates both times).
This was the shortest unread book that I acquired in 2019. Next on that pile is The Soul of a Bishop, also by Wells.
“Vero!” Simon shouted. “Vero!” He struggled helplessly in the gorse; stamped down for a foothold but found nothing; sank waist-deep in furze. The quaking earth shifted again, like coals settling in the fire, and sank slowly into the hill-side, sucking in a great wad of gorse. Stones and clods and hummocks of grass slid into the darkness. Simon saw the earth opening under him and flung out his right arm, seeking frantically for a handhold. Martin’s hand gripped his, tightened and held; Monica’s fingers clutched his wrist.
A sequel to the lovely Creed Country by the same author, following the adventures of Sarah’s (many) younger siblings and their friends as they explore the countryside around them in the snow, get to know a mysterious old lady, and produce a medieval Mystery Play in an old church. To be honest, the plot is a bit diffuse with an abundance of characters to follow, but they do each have a distinct voice and it portrays a more innocent time (the cusp of the 1970s) in rural Surrey (a concept that barely exists these days). You can get it here.
I also want to shout out the cover art by Elizabeth Grant, which I find striking and evocative.
She illustrated a lot of children’s books in the early 1970s – in my mind she is inseparable from the Puffins.
This 1977 painting of “A Bunker on an American Golf Course”, at Knightshayes Court in Devon, looks like it might be by her too.
I wish I could find out more about her, but there seem to be at least four living artists also named Elizabeth Grant, so it’s impossible to dig through the data.
Current Caleb Williams, or Things as They Are, by William Godwin (group read) Paddy Machiavelli: How to Get Ahead in Irish Politics, by John Drennan Killing Ground, by Steve Lyons Fifty Years On, by Malachi O’Doherty
Last books finished A Kind of Spark, by Elle McNicoll Doctor Who annual 2025, by Paul Lang The Passionate Friends, by H.G. Wells The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories, ed. Ellen Datlow The Hypothetical Gentleman, by Andy Diggle, Mark Buckingham, Brandon Seifert and Philip Bond Orbital, by Samantha Harvey I Who Have Never Known Men, by Jacqueline Harpman
Next books Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead, by Dale Smith The Soul of a Bishop, by H.G. Wells On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong
I’ve been really bad at tracking my Big Finish listening here, and one of my minor New Year’s resolutions is to do that a bit better. I actually listened to this trilogy mainly while doing Christmas shopping, and perhaps I was in a good mood, but I notice that I liked it more than a few of the other reviews I have glanced at. They all feature Christopher Eccleston as the Ninth Doctor, with no common companion across the three plays (though two Eighth Doctor companions pop up in the third). Here’s a trailer:
The first of these The Seas of Titan by Liz Myles, is a Sea Devils story with a difference in that it’s set on Titan, not Earth. It hits much the same beats as most other Silurian / Sea Devils stories, with the wrinkle that both humans and Sea Devils have been abandoned by the rest of their race who have moved on (or stayeed put). I really liked the change of setting and the consequent difference of pace.
BF tend to include a historical story in every trilogy, and this time it’s Lay Down Your Arms, by Lisa McMullin, set in a late Habsburg spa resort where aliens are infiltrating the convalescents. Some of the virtual architecture was a bit unbelievable (“bonkers”, as another reviewer put it), but Kate Sissons as Betha Kinzky, the companion of the hour, is tremendous with Eccleston, and there is a great sting in the tail as we discover what she did with the rest of her life. (I at least had heard of her, under her married name.)
But my breath was taken away by Flatpack, by John Dorney, the third of the trilogy. The Doctor arrives in a mysterious self-assembly furniture superstore, and encounters Liv Chenka (Nicola Walker) and Tania Bell (Rebecca Root), who featured as companions of the Eighth Doctor in the extensive (perhaps overextended) saga Stranded which I listened to last year (and never got around to writing up). It becomes clear, as the entertaining script develops, that the secret controllers of the furniture store are up to no good – but I totally missed the clues as to who they actually turn out to be, a tremendous plot twist which I don’t think I’ve seen before in any Doctor Who story.
The first Big Finish stories with the Ninth Doctor were a little uneasy, as if the star and the production team were still sizing each other up. But now they seem to have properly got into their stride, and I highly recommend getting this here.
Opening of the third play (the long version of Thirst):
The curtain goes up on the bar. It is after hours. Light from a distant street-lamp shines faintly on the window The bar is lit (very badly.) by two candles which are set on the counter, one of them stuck in a bottle. The publican, MR. C., who is suitably fat and prosperous in appearance, is leaning over the centre of the counter talking to PETER, who is sitting on a stool side-face to the audience. JEM, who is in the nature of a hanger-on, is away in a gloomy corner where he can barely be discerned. Both customers are drinking pints; the publican has a small whiskey. The curtain has gone up in the middle of a conversation between PETER and the publican.
MR. C.: (Dramatically.) And do you know why? (There is a pause.) Do you know why? PETER: Begor, Mr Coulahan, I couldn’t tell you. MR. C.: (Loudly.) Because he’s no good, that’s why. He’s no bloody good!
(He finishes his drink in one gulp, turns to the shelves for the whiskey bottle and noisily fills himself another. As the talk proceeds he is occupied with pulling two further stouts to fill up the customers’ glasses PETER smokes and bends his head reflectively. JEM is silent save for drinking noises. He shows his face for a moment in the gloom by lighting a cigarette.)
This is a collection of seven stage plays and seven TV plays by Flann O’Brien / Myles na gCopaleen, some of which were performed in his lifetime and some of which were not. I bought it in the run-up to the 2019 Dublin Worldcon, partly to see if Faustus Kelly, the first of the plays, was worthy of a Retro Hugo nomination, and partly to prep for a panel on Flann O’Brien that I knew I’d be doing at the convention. But I had not previously sat down and read it from cover to cover.
Some of these pieces are very slight, but some are very interesting. The 1943 play Faustus Kelly brings the Devil to the Irish Midlands to interfere in local politics. He finds it so awful that he returns to Hell. It’s interesting that the politician protagonist is depicted very clearly as living with a woman who he is not married to – and the local political activists take it in their stride. This is fifty years before Bertie Ahern became Taoiseach.
Rhapsody in Stephen’s Green is adaptation of The Insect Play by Karel Čapek (best known as the inventor of the word ‘robot’ in his play R.U.R.) and his brother Josef. Like Faustus Kelly, it was performed at the Gate Theatre in 1943. Where the Čapeks’ first scene features butterflies as mindless and vain literary salon types, writing poetry to each other, O’Brien makes the characters here bees representing the posh Anglo-Irish elite, engaged in idle self-destruction. The two other scenes are less changed. In the second scene, the Čapeks’ dung-beetles are solid middle-class citizens saving for retirement; O’Brien makes Mr Beetle specifically a Dublin civil servant. And the militarist, proudly engineering ants in the last scene are Ulster ants in O’Brien’s adaptation. The satire is mean and doesn’t always land right for the twenty-first century reader, but it must have been a great production.
The other one that struck me was The Dead Spit of Kelly, about a taxidermist’s assistant who murders his boss and then disguises himself in his boss’s skin, with surreal consequences. It was shown on RTE in 1962. A film version starring Colin Morgan and Jason Isaacs was announce in 2021 but does not seem to have got off the drawing board.
The rest are shorter pieces, and some of them are rather slight (there’s a dire skit about an airplane trip from Dublin to London with an annoying English passenger). But I am glad to have read them. You can get it here.
This was the unread book that had lasted longest in my non-genre pile (though all three of the pieces that I mention above actually have strong fantasy elements). Next on that pile is, er, Black Mountain by Gerry Adams. But I acquired it only in 2021, so I’m pausing that cycle for now until I have cleared the remainder of my 2019 and 2020 books. (I have read all of the non-genre books that I acquired in 2020, finishing with Summer by Ali Smith.)
When I first watched this 1964 story in 2006, I wrote:
This was the last of the First Doctor stories that I felt I must Get Hold Of. I think you have to allow for the fact that it is mid-1960s drama to take into account the rather slow pacing. I liked it all the same; a real attempt to get into the spirit of the historical period, with some difficult dilemmas for the time-travellers – Barbara determined to abolish human sacrifice, but ultimately fails; and the Doctor has someone fall in love with him for the first time (but not, of course the last) in his on-screen adventures. Cameca’s helping them to escape in the end, even though she knows she will never see them again, was as touching as Barbara’s acceptance of her inability to change history. A minor gem, I would say.
When I came back to it for my Great Rewatch in 2009, I wrote:
The Aztecs is very good, but doesn’t quite rise to greatness. There are some great bits – Barbara struggling with the consequences of her divinity, the Doctor’s romance with Cameca, the Doctor and Barbara arguing about changing history. (It should be added that Lucarotti did some good female characters – Barbara is at her best here, and don’t forget Cameca, Ping-Cho and Anne Chaplet.) But I find Tlotoxl a little too pantomimey as a villain, and Ian just biffs Aztecs about, and gets condemned to death again, while Carole Ann Ford is on holiday. Everyone does it with great conviction, and you barely notice that it’s all done in a hot studio with a painted backdrop. And we end with another cliff-hanger into the next story, though our heroes have had enough time to change clothes.
This time around, a little wiser to the constraints of 1960s television, I am amazed at how well the director and cast managed to convey a grand sweeping city and civilization in four cramped studio sets. Also Margot van der Burgh is very impressive as Cameca, a mostly quiet but crucial role. You can get it here.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of the novelisation is:
The Aztecs they passed on the way to the barracks bowed respectfully to Tlotoxl, but Ian sensed they were afraid of the High Priest.
I was disappointed by Lucarotti’s novelisation of The Massacre, which stuck much more closely to his original script than the show as broadcast. Here again he has added bits and pieces which presumably were in his original concept, and I was again disappointed, but for a different reason: the narration is strangely flat, and you really miss the performances of the actors breathing life into Lucarotti’s lines back in 1964. One cannot help but feel that the production team on the whole did Lucarotti a favour by editing his material. Also he has a really annoying habit of mixing indirect speech with direct speech, which reads like a desperate attempt to make a novel out of a TV script.
Reading the book again very soon after rewatching the story, there are a few important differences included to smoothe out the plot; but I stand by my complaint about the jerky switches from indirect to direct speech. You can get it here.
Doris V. Sutherland’s Black Archive on the story has four chapters, a substantial conclusion and an interesting appendix. The first chapter, ‘Building the Pyramid’, looks at The Aztecs in the context of the 1960s historical stories of Doctor Who, as a showcase for Jacqueline Hill as Barbara, and as a reflection on the effects of time travel, pointing out how new all of this was for Doctor Who at the time.
The second chapter, ‘Not One Line? The Historical Accuracy of The Aztecs’ goes in detail, perhaps a bit too much detail, on whether or not the story is a good description of the real Aztec culture. Though there are a couple of good observations, eg “it is hard to miss the awkward results of the script’s reluctance to mention the Aztec deities by name. It appears that such monikers as Quetzalcoatl and Huitzilopochtli were deemed insufficiently pronounceable for a production in which retakes were to be avoided for budget reasons.”
The third and longest chapter, ‘Narratives of Conquest’, looks at where the ideas for the story really came from. Its second paragraph is:
The Doctor Who Discontinuity Guide by Paul Cornell, Martin Day and Keith Topping lists, as an influence on the serial, The Royal Hunt of the Sun², a play by Peter Shaffer that depicted Francisco Pizarro’s conquest of the Incas and was performed in the same year as The Aztecs³. However, the dates here do not quite match up: as Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood point out, the play was originally performed in mid-February, while Lucarotti has stated that he first discussed the possibility of an Aztec-themed story during the filming of Marco Polo, which wrapped up on 17 February⁴. [Comment: actually that looks to me like a very good match-up of the dates!] ² Cornell, Day and Topping, Discontinuity Guide, loc 370. ³ And was adapted into a movie in 1969, starring Robert Shaw and Christopher Plummer. ⁴ Miles, Lawrence and Tat Wood, About Time: The Unauthorized Guide to Doctor Who, 1963-1966, Seasons 1 to 3, p70.
Sutherland considers the 1947 film Captain from Castile and G.A. Henty before swinging again into the question of historical detail, examining very closely the extent of human sacrifice among the Aztecs and, crucially, whether or not it made much difference to the brutality of the Spanish conquest, concluding that it didn’t. I somewhat parted company with the writer here; I think that it doesn’t matter all that much that the story is not based on perfect historical knowledge.
The fourth chapter, ‘What Does The Aztecs Have to Say?’, starts by recounting critical opinion of the story but then swings back into the question of colonialism, pointing out that the barbarism of Spanish colonialism, as perceived in English culture, is a really crucial element of understanding what was going on. How very different, perhaps we are meant to think, to enlightened British colonialism! I think there is actually a bit more that could have been looked at here, in terms of 1960s British perceptions of the Franco regime. Her ultimate judgement is that the message of The Aztecs on colonialism is confused, rather than definitively pro or anti.
I have to take issue with the final section of Chapter 4, which states that “Only with the first Chibnall / Whittaker season, which aired in 2018, did the series hire its first non-white writers.” Glen McCoy, who wrote the 1985 story Timelash, is Anglo-Indian – I have checked this with him personally.
The conclusion makes the point that The Aztecs is quite different from most Doctor Who stories, while still being similar enough to be recognisable and sound enough to remain watchable decades later.
An appendix looks at the differences in the novelisation, flagging up in particular a more overtly Christian agenda, and then briefly looks at Child of the Sun God, an episode of the Andersons’ Joe 90 also written by Lucarotti with striking similarities (a lost Amazonian tribe is striking down world statesmen; Joe 90 must infiltrate them, pass himself off as a white god and save the day), but which is much less memorable.
I confess to not being completely satisfied with this particular Black Archive. Researching the factual basis of a particular story takes us quickly to the point where the commentator can show off the superiority of their knowledge to the original writer. I preferred the discussions of ideology and of Lucarotti’s use of his sources, whatever they were. But you can get it here.
‘Hmm …’ the Doctor mused as his eyes passed over the houses surrounding him. ‘Why have a plant pot without any plants?’
A Fifteenth Doctor book which is yet another story of rebels against the system, with world-building so complex that I am afraid I got lost in it, and loads of characters who barely have time to establish themselves before the book ends (or they get killed). Yes, it’s an important anti-colonial narrative; yes, there are a lot of Doctor Who stories that have this theme; but most of them are better executed. Heart in the right place, perhaps needed twice as much space (or substantial editing). You can get it here.
See here for methodology. Back when I started this project, I was simply recording the top eight books tagged as being in each country by users of on Goodreads and LibraryThing, and then recording which didn’t really qualify. I have switched now to a system where I disqualify the relevant books before constructing my league table, so I’m going back to the Philippines with an updated table.
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
Ghost Soldiers
Hampton Sides
37,671
2,839
Trash
Andy Mulligan
14,321
1,080
Patron Saints of Nothing
Randy Ribay
18,192
667
In the Presence of my Enemies
Gracia Burnham
7,873
1,365
The Tesseract
Alex Garland
6,891
1,259
Noli Me Tángere
José Rizal
8,268
724
We Band of Angels
Elizabeth M. Norman
4,555
567
El Filibusterismo
José Rizal
6,288
376
I disqualified eight books, which is a lot, though not as many as with Bangladesh last week. A lot of GR and LT users use the “philippines” tag for books that are about Filipino migrants to the USA or elsewhere, or about the Second World War in the Pacific, or about US colonial policy more generally.
Specifically, the top book most often tagged “Philippines” on both Goodreads and LibraryThing is Neal Stephenson’s epic Cryptonomicon. I am of course disqualifying it as considerably less than half of the 900+ pages are set in the country. Arsenic and Adobo, by Mia P. Manansala, and The Farm, by Joanne Ramos, are set in the USA. American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880-1964, by William Manchester, covers the man’s entire career. How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, by Daniel Immerwahr, includes the Philippines as the most egregious case of US colonialism.
Avenue of Mysteries, by John Irving, takes its protagonist to the Philippines, though for less than half of the book. The same appears to be true for the protagonists of Falling Together, by Marisa de los Santos. Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen, by Jose Antonio Vargas, is precisely about the immigrant experience in the USA. The Imperial Cruise, by James Bradley, is set on the SS Manchuria in 1905, and while it did visit the Philippines, that was just one of the stops.
So, of those I have allowed onto the list, three are about Americans being held prisoner in the Philippines, including the overall winner, Ghost Soldiers (the other two are In the Presence of my Enemies and We Band of Angels). Trash isn’t explicitly set in Manila, but everyone assumes that it is. Patron Saints of Nothing starts in the USA but I get the impression that more than half of it is set in the Philippines. The Tesseract is very definitely set in today’s Manila, and Noli Me Tángere and El Filibusterismo are nineteenth century classics of Filipino literature.
Next in this sequence I will revisit Ethiopia, and then back to my regular sequence with Argentina.
The truth is, there are plenty of negative sentiments all around and within us – anger, fear, discontent, distrust, sadness, suspicion, constant self-doubt … but perhaps more than anything, an ongoing apprehension. An existential angst. All these emotions are very much part of our lives now. Even digital spaces have become primarily emotional spaces.The posts that go viral or the videos that are watched most widely are freighted with emotions. What is equally significant is how this creates a tendency, a habit of mind, that perpetuates itself through space and time. In a study conducted by the Institute for Social Research scholars have found that ‘when exposed to less positive news, people posted less positive comments and more negative ones. When exposed to less negative posts, the opposite pattern occurred.’* * ‘Anger, Fear and Echo Chambers: The Emotional Basis for Online Behavior’, D. Wollebaek, R. Karlsen, K. Steen-Johnsen, B. Enjolras (April 2019) [NB – I see online versions of the book where the chapter division is very different to my printed edition.]
A short book, written in the wake of the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement, arguing for optimism and effort despite the depressing state of the world. I read it a couple of weeks ago, in the course of having a long and decompressing bath after I got back from a trip to Georgia, and it really helped my mood.
Shafak briefly and compellingly discusses the problems of anxiety and anger, the need and duty to tell ourselves and each other better stories, the importance of empathy and compassion, and the power of conscious optimism. It is peppered with personal anecdotes and observations, but not to the point that these distract from the core message. She also weaves in a few powerful quotations from others, including Martin Luther King’s “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” A short text that gave me a lot to think about. You can get it here.
Though familiar themes crop up everywhere, ancient tithing customs were particular to each parish. Today they read like magic potions: toad under cold stone, days and nights has forty-one, could well be the vicar’s due at Lammastide. As well as the joy of otherness and unfamiliar words to justify time spent with tithe records, they are also especially instructive for anyone chasing old stories. They challenge us to unravel them, to reveal lost ways of making sense of the world and to shed light on the long-forgotten machinations of the stock characters of village life: impecunious parsons, resentful husbandmen and bombastic squires.
A tremendously charming book about one obscure local legend in Hertfordshire, the story of Piers Shonks who slew a dragon hiding under an ancient yew tree in Brent Pelham, near Stansted Airport. Hadley goes into impressive detail about the origin of the legend, the meanings of dragons and yew trees, and Shonks’ unusual burial in the wall of the local church, and then into the limited but significant documentation of the life of a fourteenth-century Piers Shonks who lived in the right place.
The evidence doesn’t all point the same way, let alone hang together, but the point is not the truth or otherwise of the dragon myth, it’s the story of exploring the myth and seeing where that takes you; and it’s a great trip through the archives and lore of England, Hertfordshire in particular. You can get it here.
I learned about this not from Ron but from his wife, Matrice.
A follow-up to her earlier autobiography, this is much more of a self-help book drawing on lessons learned from Michelle Obama’s family, her friends, her career and her experience of being First Lady for eight years. Most of us can relate to all but the last of these. It’s a very affirming message of self-help, self-confidence and compassion, which rather restores one’s faith in humanity. I am not in the audience that the book is primarily aimed at, but I found a lot to like and admire here, and it actually succeeded in cheering me up a bit about the state of the world. You can get it here.
An interesting thought from a parallel universe: a POLITICO journalist interviewing two senior Trump campaign managers last month asked if they had investigated popular support for alternative candidates to President Biden, other than Vice-President Harris, to see what would happen if he were replaced on the ballot.
Trump adviser: Yeah, we tested them all. POLITICO: Who was the strongest? Trump adviser: Strangely enough, Michelle Obama.
This was the top book on my unread pile that was non-fiction, by a woman, and acquired in 2023. Next on those stacks respectively are The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy; I Who Have Never Known Men, by Jacqueline Harpman; and A History of the Bible, by John Barton.
