Author Archives: fromtheheartofeurope

Dark Winds Over Wellington: Chilling Tales of the Weird & the Strange, by TL Wood

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Second paragraph of third story (“Last Chapter”):

Jebediah Cole came mostly from a place of fiction; imagination touched by the hand of experience, and peppered with a dash of wistful desire. A pastiche of the many strange and dodgy people Maurice once had the misfortune to know. An ex-armed-forces, ex-law-enforcement, leather-faced, battle-worn bounty hunter; he was a solid, deliberate, hulk of a man. Despite his rough edges, arrogance, and sexist attitude — and the fact that he was really little more than a walking cliché —his readers seemed to find the bloke endearing. His fans clamoured to hear more.

I’ve been zooming through my stash of New Zealand fantasy books acquired in 2020 with some disappointment at the rather unoriginal generic secondary world settings, but this one made me sit up and pay attention: these are almost all tales of fantastic intrusion, where the normal world of Wellington, which is realized in rich detail, becomes the unwilling host of something or some things more weird and awful. Most of the stories are very short (thirteen of them in 180 pages), so each basically represents one idea developed as far as it will go. There are a few recurrent themes – manipulative older men, ex-boyfriends named Joshua – but overall I was impressed by the number of different twists that Wood was able to put on a basic structure. Rather a delight. You can get Dark Winds Over Wellington here.

(Posting this early so that New Zealanders will see it.)

This was the shortest unread book of those I had acquired in 2020. Next on that pile, indeed on all three of my 2020 piles, is Ringlet and the Day the Oceans Stopped, by Felicity Williams.

Exterminate/Regenerate: The Story of Doctor Who, by John Higgs

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Second paragraph of Chapter 3:

Michael [Troughton], however, was to see very little of his father as he grew up. While he was still a baby, Patrick set up a second home in south London, near Kew, with his girlfriend Ethel ‘Bunny’ Nuens. Patrick and Bunny would go on to have three children together, but Patrick and his wife Margaret never announced a separation. The couple kept up the pretence that they still had a normal marriage. Patrick’s long absences from the family home were explained away as his having to work away from home, due to the nature of the acting profession. When Patrick’s mother died twenty-four years later, in 1979, she was still unaware of the separation. Patrick and his original family had kept up the façade by visiting her every Christmas Day and pretending that nothing had happened. She never knew she had three more grandchildren.

This is a nice chunky book about the history of Doctor Who, from 1963 to 2024, by the author of the book about Watling Street which I enjoyed a few years ago. It takes an interesting approach: a chapter per Doctor (two for the First and Fourth Doctors), looking very much at the story behind the scenes, why particular decisions were made, why particular people were hired and fired, and treating the sixty years of the show as a whole, single phenomenon to be explained as a whole.

A lot of the material was familiar (indeed the Second Doctor chapter seemed very familiar to me, though others seemed more original). I wished also that a bit more space had been given to the spinoff series (sadly neither The Curse of Fatal Death nor The Scream of the Shalka is mentioned), and to the comics, books and audios (and indeed games); although the TV series is by definition the core, there’s a lot more Whoniverse out there.

(Also, it is not entirely Higgs’ fault, but I cannot completely forgive him for inspiring me to seek out Jon Pertwee’s two scenes in the 1977 sex comedy Adventures of a Private Eye. I urge you not to look for them. Some things are better left in well-deserved obscurity.)

However, Higgs brings a lot of good stuff here. His analysis of how the show got created in the first place in 1962-63 is one of the best of the many that I have read, bringing in some new facts and circumstantial material. I think he is also right to split the First and Fourth Doctor eras; the case for treating Four/Hinchcliffe distinctly from Four/Williams+JNT is fairy obvious, but I have long felt that there’s a similar case for One/Lambert and One/Wiles+Lloyd, and Higgs just does it effortlessly.

It also feels to me like it’s fairly rare to take the holistic approach and treat Old Who just the same as New Who (and the Movie). Even within Old Who, we tend to treat the so-called black-and-white era separately from the color era. But in principle, there’s no reason not to apply the same analytical approach to all of it, and Higgs demonstrates that such an approach can be successful.

A particular sub theme that I will have to think about is Higgs’ insistence that some key stories should be seen as direct reflections of what was happening in the production history of the show at the time. So, the two trials of the Doctor in The War Games and in Season 23 reflect the pressures of potential cancellation of the entire show (as does The Greatest Show in the Galaxy). This only gets you so far, but it does get you a certain distance.

In the end, Higgs is entitled to write the book he wanted to write, which is not completely the book I wanted to read, but is certainly close enough to it to make this very worthwhile. It’s only just out, folks, so you may not have seen much hype around it – well worth getting, and I will nominate it for the BSFA Non-Fiction award next year. You can get Exterminate/Regenerate here.

Three New Zealand fantasies: We All Fall, by Helen Vivienne Fletcher; Tyrelia, by S.R. Manssen; Dragon Rift, by Eileen Mueller 

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Three more of the books that I had not got around to from the 2020 Sir Julius Vogel packet. One OK, two less so.

Second paragraph of third chapter of We All Fall:

Luca was there, waiting for me after not being able to talk last night. He grinned as he saw me, and I smiled, happy to have the distraction.

I thought this was OK. A short, effective story about a girl growing up in a circus family, getting to grips with disability, same-sex love and the paranormal stuff that seems to be happening around her. You can get We All Fall here.

Second paragraph of third chapter of Tyrelia:

The Golden City was the capital of Medar and home to the Master. It was a conical mountain surrounded entirely by a moat and a tall, gleaming white wall. The only way in was via the drawbridge to the single gateway. The dwellings within the city were perched one above the other on the steep hillside, like decorations on an elaborate cake. Narrow roads wound their way between them. All the houses were whitewashed, with terracotta tiled roofs, and many had pots of brightly coloured geraniums hanging from the windowsills. The Master’s mansion, shrouded in cloud, crowned the city. It was said that it was covered in glittering gold.

This on the other hand failed to engage me and I put it down after fifty pages. The fourteen-year-old heroine is sent on a quest by rather nonchalant elders, and finds herself in a land of plenty which is obviously going to turn out as something more sinister. Possibly didn’t help that it’s the second book in a trilogy where I have not read the first. You can get Tyrelia here.

Second paragraph of third chapter of Dragon Rift:

Ezaara was lost for words. Her mind spun. Roberto was captive. Surely Zens would kill him.

This is the third volume in a series of six, and I don’t think the other five would have helped convince me; it’s a world which is a knock-off of Pern with a few imports from Middle Earth, and lost me rather with the super-effective magical healing ointments. I just about managed fifty pages, but no more. You can get Dragon Rift here.

These three had all bubbled to the top of my rapidly dwindling stacks of books acquired in 2020. We All Fall was the shortest unread book acquired in that year, Tyrelia was the SF book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves and Dragon Rift was the most popular unread book acquired in 2020. The next shortest is Dark Winds Over Wellington, by TL Wood; the next on the other two piles is Ringlet and the Day the Oceans Stopped, by Felicity Williams.

Private Road, by Forrest Reid

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

It was towards the end of my business career that The Kingdom of Twilight appeared, and an early result was that I learned of the existence in Belfast of a very minor echo of the Dublin literary and dramatic movement. The Ulster Literary Theatre had been founded, and had produced two plays-The Reformers, by David Parkhill, and Brian of Banba, by Bulmer Hobson. The experiment was written up in the columns of The Whig by [J.W.] Good, and in another paper, The Evening Telegraph, by Rathcol (W. B. Reynolds). Moreover, in imitation of Yeats’s magazine Samhain, a literary quarterly called Ulad had been Started, under the joint editorship of Reynolds and Parkhill, and it was from the former that I received a note asking me to call upon him.

This is the second volume of Belfast-born writer Forrest Reid’s autobiography, published in 1940, fourteen years after Apostate, the first volume. I did not find Private Road as interesting; a lot of it is about the back-story behind each of Reid’s novels (more than a dozen at that stage), and as I haven’t read any of them, I did not learn much. There are however some interesting chapters about his education, at Inst and then at Christ’s, Cambridge, and about the rather small circle of literary enthusiasts in Belfast in the early 1900s; and there’s also a rather moving chapter about his love for his dogs and cats (in that order).

Reid does not seem to have had a long-term romantic partner, though it’s fairly clear what was going on with his series of male house-mates; there are a few women in the narrative (and I’m glad to see that he stayed in touch with his nurse Emma) but it’s mostly a story of men talking to men. Or not talking – an early dramatic moment is his friendship with Henry James, cut short when James apparently was mortally offended by Reid’s dedication to him of his very gay second novel, The Garden God.

I think that if I were going to make a serious effort to get into Reid’s fiction, and the circles he moved in, this would be a really interesting book, and I wonder if someone enterprising might produce an annotated version; but unlike with Apostate, I am not particularly interested in taking that on myself.

You can get Private Road here.

Wednesday reading

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Current
Colourfields, by Paul Kincaid
Voyage to Venus, by C.S. Lewis
The Bone Woman: A Forensic Anthropologist’s Search for Truth in the Mass Graves of Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo, by Clea Koff

Last books finished
Deadfall, by Gary Russell
Light in My Blood, by Jean Gilbert & William Dresden
The Incandescent, by Emily Tesh
Doctor Who: The Robot Revolution, by Una McCormack
The Crawling Wood, by Casey Lucas (did not finish)
The Iliad, by Homer, tr. Emily Wilson
The Devil’s Chord, by Dale Smith

Next books
The Dream House, by Lee Berridge
Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett
False Value, by Ben Aaronovitch

From a Shadow Grave, by Andi C. Buchanan

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

In the future, there are many stories of those who go back. Those who go back to find a better time, and those who go back to change their own time. They go back to kill or to save, or for one to achieve the other. These stories centre on particular points in history, feature moral dilemmas and unintended consequences.

Brief but efficiently chilling story of a 1930s murder victim in Wellington, New Zealand, who comes back in three different alternative supernatural ways. One of the Sir Julius Vogel packet from 2020, which contains my dwindling pile of unread books acquired that year. You can get From a Shadow Grave here.

Spirits Abroad, by Zen Cho

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Second paragraph of third story (“The Fish Bowl”):

She did not have strong feelings about Puan Lai, but she liked the house. Between the entrance and living room there was an expanse of cool, white marble floor that would have been a hallway in a normal house. Puan Lai had dug out a hole in the floor and filled it with water. The pond was rectangular, like a swimming pool, but the water was green, swarming with koi and goldfish.

This is a tremendous collection of short stories by Zen Cho, including “If At First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again” which won the Hugo in 2019 (one of my years). They are all in the fantasy vein with some of them slipping towards horror. They all feature Malaysian culture, especially Malaysian Chinese culture, which is a particular point of interest for me as I get on with editing my grandmother’s memoirs of her time living and loving in Penang. Some are set in Malaysia, some in England, some elsewhere entirely. The ones I liked most were “House of Aunts”, a story of an undead teenager and her older (much older) relatives; “Prudence and the Dragon”, about an unlikely love story; and the Hugo-winning “If At First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again”, another unlikely love story. But they are all excellent. You can get Spirits Abroad here.

Ventiforms, by Sean Monaghan, and The Blacksmith, by Barbara Howe

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Two more stories from the New Zealand pile, which I’ll deal with quickly.

Second sentence of third section of Ventiforms:

Pilot’s seat was a misnomer, really. Tailé just sat. Surprise flew herself. There was a bit of shaking, but Tailé was still able to eat her wrap as they descended. It was good, the eggplant tasted fresh, and the sauce was divine. She complimented the ship on it.

Very short piece about a mother looking for her lost son, and some memorably unusual aliens. Decent world-building for the length. You can get Ventiforms here.

Was my shortest unread book acquired in 2020 (and turned out to be even shorter than I thought). Next on that pile is We All Fall by Helen Vivienne Fletcher.

Second paragraph of third chapter of The Blacksmith:

“Ah, hell, Granny, what’d I do now?”

Third in a fantasy trilogy. I found it very clunky; a world with placenames partly borrowed from Britain and partly made up, with apparently normal Christianity and magic coexisting, and leaden exposition. You can get The Blacksmith here.

Was the SF book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is Tyrelia, by S R Manssen.

Spectral Scream, by Hannah Fergesen

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

And it just … kept … going. A howl of deep, horrible agony, a soul-shredding pain.

A Fifteenth Doctor novel set during his travels with Belinda, probably between Lux and The Interstellar Song Contest, with the Doctor and Belinda exploring a world where a dying sentient spaceship’s screams are disrupting the mental state of everyone withing range, most notably the descendants of the original crew who live in Sevateem-like conditions. It’s a fairly standard plot, but what I like is that we get a lot more characterisation of Belinda than we did onscreen; one of the things I didn’t like about the most recent season was that we didn’t really get to know her, and Fergesen has done well by her in this story. Not a book for non-Whovians, but a pleasing extra for fans, especially younger fans. You can get Spectral Scream here.

The best known books set in each country: Chad

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

TitleAuthorGoodreads
raters		LibraryThing
owners
The Roots of HeavenRomain Gary2,653526
Rain SchoolJames Rumford 803472
Told by Starlight in ChadJoseph Brahim Seid16036
African Rice HeartEmily Star Wilkens 7210
To Catch a Dictator: The Pursuit and Trial of Hissène HabréReed Brody5510
The Trial of Hissène Habré: How the People of Chad Brought a Tyrant to JusticeCeleste Hicks186
France’s Wars in Chad: Military Intervention and Decolonization in AfricaNathaniel K. Powell75
The Plagues of FriendshipSem Miantoloum Beasnael44

This was unusually tough. Several users of both Goodreads and LibraryThing have used the “chad” tag for a lot of their books which have absolutely nothing to do with the country, and it must therefore refer to something else. Several political analyses had a handful of owners on LibraryThing, but none on Goodreads. This is the first time that I’ve had to go down to single figures on either system. I’m not going to list the disqualified books because there are too many of them and most of them are completely irrelevant.

Today’s winner was famously adapted into a 1958 film starring Errol Flynn, and it sounds interesting enough to track down. Two Chadian writers appear in today’s list. As well as the non-fiction, there’s also a high-scoring children’s book and a missionary testimony. But I think that all in all, Chad is the most literarily obscure country I have yet covered. I am sure that there will be more.

Next up: Kazakhstan, Chile, Somalia and Senegal.

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

Tides of the Titans, by Thoraiya Dyer

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

He arrived at the clockmaker’s tree shortly after dawn.

As will be apparent, I’m working through the material given to us as part of the Hugo and Sir Julius Vogel voter packets as I reach the end of my stack of (mostly electronic) books acquired in 2020. This popped up as part of the Hugo submission of Diana Pho for Best Editor, Long Form, along with nine other books, and I think it’s the last of them.

This started off really well; a fantasy secondary world (which doesn’t always float my boat) where the protagonist, a young magical warrior who is also the queen’s secret lover, starts to find out more about how it all functions. It’s the third book in a trilogy, which often means a harsh did-not-finish for me, but it worked well at first – I believe that the three books have different protagonists, so the plots are not too intertwined.

And then in the last quarter or so, it simply lost me. We shifted to a confusing landscape with confusing characters, where we found out confusing things about our unreliable protagonist. It was disappointing after what I felt was a strong start. Maybe I lost energy and it’s on me. Anyway, you can get Tides of the Titans here.

This was both my top unread book acquired in 2020, and the sf book that had lingered longest on my shelves. Next on those piles are From a Shadow Grave, by Andi Buchanan, and The Blacksmith, by Barbara Howe.

Around the World in 80 Games, by Marcus du Sautoy

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

But India is also home to some of the most iconic games of all time. If the Middle East gave us one of the best racing games, then India is the birthplace of one of the greatest war games that humans have in-vented: the game of chess.

An outline of 80 classic games from the mathematical point of view, framed as a voyage around the world to explore the games of each continent and subcontinent. Unfortunately this framing turns out to be a bit problematic, as he sort of has to ignore the actual geography and the history of colonialism to make his points, whatever they are. There’s a weird five page chunk near the end about women writing games. The bit about Azad seems oddly familiar to me from elsewhere. There’s some very interesting material here, but I think it could have been much better organised, and the researchers whose work he has, er, depended on could have been given more credit. Still, you can get Around the World in 80 Games here.

Down, by Lawrence Miles

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

‘Ssseize him!’ snarled Dr Harbinger, but the robots had already released the dauntless Binky Sharperton, and were e‘en now closing on Harbinger‘s escaped nemesis. The first of the diabolical automata raised the electrical tendril to which its miniaturized chronon ray was mounted, but even steel was no match for Mr Misnomer‘s legendary right hook. The leather gauntlet pounded the brute machine‘s trisilicate face, and sparks flew from its antennae as it blew a fuse.⁵
⁵ Passages like this one demonstrate a wilful ignorance of basic cybernetics theory. Oobert Valdeburg (see Bibliography) claims this suggests a dearth of Public Domain robotics data in the 2530s, a theory which is provably untrue. More likely, it indicates a mistrust of technology typical of puritanical ‘back-to-basics’ cultures. Ironic, then, that almost all of Mr Misnomer‘s adventures were written by autolit engines. Note also how electronic menaces such as the Nemesis Doomsday Engine and Dr Harbinger‘s Megalomanopticon are always fitted with built-in self-destruct mechanisms, against all sense and reason.

I thought this was a rather good entry in the Bernice Summerfield spinoff series of books. Benny appears on a hollow world, encumbered with two junior archaeologists, and encounters various archetypes (dinosaurs, cavemen, useless Nazis (the best kind)) and threatening situations. Perhaps a little more going on than I had braincells to process at the time. But it all seemed to make sense. You can get Down here.

Next in this sequence is Deadfall, by Gary Russell.

Little Wars and Floor Games, by H.G. Wells

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Second paragraph of Little Wars:

(1) The Country must be arranged by one player, who, failing any other agreement, shall be selected by the toss of a coin.

Second paragraph of third chapter of Floor Games:

We always have twin cities, or at the utmost stage of coalescence a city with two wards, Red End and Blue End; we mark the boundaries very carefully, and our citizens have so much local patriotism (Mr. Chesterton will learn with pleasure) that they stray but rarely over that thin little streak of white that bounds their municipal allegiance. Sometimes we have an election for mayor; it is like a census but very abusive, and Red always wins. Only citizens with two legs and at least one arm and capable of standing up may vote, and voters may poll on horseback; boy scouts and women and children do not vote, though there is a vigorous agitation to remove these disabilities. Zulus and foreign-looking persons, such as East Indian cavalry and American Indians, are also disfranchised. So are riderless horses and camels; but the elephant has never attempted to vote on any occasion, and does not seem to desire the privilege. It influences public opinion quite sufficiently as it is by nodding its head.

Two very short non-fiction pieces by H.G. Wells, one about a very specific set-up for wargaming with model soldiers (infantry, cavalry and artillery) and one about a rather richer fantasy society built up by him with his sons. These are both very engaging, and Little Wars in particular is at the root of much else. Full of imperialist fervour and outright racism of course, and Wells was far from an outlier in his time and place.

A kind friend got me the reprint of both pieces as a 64-page double by Shilka Publishing, which you can get for a few quid here, but sadly lacks the illustrations which are referred to throughout the text. This is a loss for Floor Games in particular, where Wells’ own sketches really enliven it – the second paragraph of the third chapter was originally published looking like this:

You can find Little Wars here and Floor Games here on Project Gutenberg.

Wednesday reading

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Current
The Iliad, by Homer, tr. Emily Wilson
Deadfall, by Gary Russell
Light in My Blood, by Jean Gilbert & William Dresden
The Incandescent, by Emily Tesh

Last books finished
Ringlet and the Day the Oceans Stopped, by Felicity Williams (did not finish)
Hyperion, by Robbie Morrison et al
Who Killed Nessie?, by Paul Cornell and Rachael Smith

Next books
Doctor Who: The Robot Revolution, by Una McCormack
Into the Mire: The Collected Works, by Casey Lucas
Voyage to Venus, by C.S. Lewis

Year’s Best Aotearoa New Zealand Science Fiction and Fantasy: Volume I, ed Marie Hodgkinson

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Second paragraph of third story (“The Garden”, by Isabelle McNeur):

Adams left a wife and a kid behind. I don’t know how he did it. I had enough trouble leaving my dog. For the first time in my life I had been glad my parents had already passed.

Collection of stories by Aotearoa New Zealand writers, all of which had previously been published elsewhere. I guess it was in the Sir Julius Vogel packet for 2020 as it won the award for Best Collection that year. A lot of the stories are post-apocalyptic; a lot of them are about how we lose contact with nature. Probably the two best are “Logistics”, by A.J. Fitzwater, which was on the 2018 Tiptree long-list, and “The Glassblower’s Peace”, by James Rowland, which had me looking up Venetian history. You can get Year’s Best Aotearoa New Zealand Science Fiction and Fantasy: Volume I here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2020. Next on that pile is Tides of the Titans, by Thoraiya Dyer.

The Coming Wave: AI, Power and Our Future, by Mustafa Suleyman

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Technology exists in a complex, dynamic system (the real world), where second-, third-, and nth-order consequences ripple out unpredictably. What on paper looks flawless can behave differently out in the wild, especially when copied and further adapted downstream. What people actually do with your invention, however well intentioned, can never be guaranteed. Thomas Edison invented the phonograph so people could record their thoughts for posterity and to help the blind. He was horrified when most people just wanted to play music. Alfred Nobel intended his explosives to be used only in mining and railway construction.

A book about the transformative potential of AI, which I’m afraid I thought went on a bit about how amazing and societally transcending it is going to be, without really getting much into the detail of what that will look like. The final chapter goes into potential regulatory protections, and I found it rather conservative although clearer. You can get The Coming Wave here.

Really the most important thing about the AI revolution is that China is so far ahead of the rest of us that it may well decisively tilt the global economy to their advantage, especially now that the USA is no longer interested in international co-operation and has declared war on its own smart people.

This was my top unread book by a non-white writer. Next on that pile is The Principle of Moments, by Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson.

A Small Semblance of Home, by Paul Phipps

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(No paragraphs as it is an audio)

Short, sweet story read by Carole Ann Ford, with the First Doctor working through his relationship with Barbara. Phipps says it is set at the very end of The Edge of Destruction. I groaned a little at the punchline which I found a bit corny, but otherwise it is nicely done. You can get A Small Semblance of Home here.

The best known books set in each country: Malawi

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

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and HopeWilliam Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer31,8422,808
The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (for younger readers)William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer11,2051,722
The Lower RiverPaul Theroux2,957375
GalimotoKaren Lynn Williams332880
The Heaven ShopDeborah Ellis1,233234
Laugh with the MoonShana Burg1,148170
Venture to the InteriorLaurens van der Post296331
Jungle LoversPaul Theroux210110

This week’s winner, and second place, go to the inventor William Kamkwamba whose memoir in its original form is far ahead of its own YA version, which in turn is way ahead of everything else. Apparently it is set reading in a number of American educational institutions, which must help the numbers.

Apart from Kamkwamba, whose story is co-written with an American journalist, there is no Malawian writer in the above list. The top Malawian writer that I found is the poet Upile Chisala, but I’m afraid I disqualified her top book, soft magic, because it seems to be more about the diaspora experience, though I may be incorrect. Her other books, nectar and a fire like you seem to have more Malawian content but were just pipped by Paul Theroux’s Jungle Lovers.

Speaking of which, I had forgotten that American author Paul Theroux has a personal connection with Malawi. One of his sons was in the same year as me at the same Cambridge college. We did not know each other at all well – I think the one time we particularly interacted was just after our graduation, when I found myself moving into a college room that he was hastily vacating.

I disqualified eleven books for being clearly less than 50% set in Malawi. I have noted soft magic above; the others are Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood, by Alexandra Fuller; Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town, by Paul Theroux (again); The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After, by Clemantine Wamariya; Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, by Alexandra Fuller; Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley & Livingstone, by Martin Dugard; Long Way Down, by Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman; In a Strange Room, by Damon Galgu; Thin Air: A Ghost Story, by Michelle Paver (which seems to be set entirely in the Himalayas); My Other Life, by Paul Theroux (yet again); and The Ukimwi Road: From Kenya to Zimbabwe, by Dervla Murphy.

Coming next: Zambia next door, then Chad, Kazakhstan and Chile.

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

Raven Heart, by “Murphy Lawless” (C.E. Murphy)

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

All of that, and she had absolutely no idea what anybody said through the whole process. She could just barely answer a question if it was put to her, and if she looked at Richard Yale she couldn’t even do that. Once the words left her lips, she had no idea what she’d said, and had to trust that even stupefied, she wouldn’t betray her or the town’s best interests.

Novella by Catie Murphy, who is known to some of you, under her Murphy Lawless pseudonym. It’s a story of capitalism clashing with culture in today’s Alaska; you know what’s going to happen as soon as you look at the front cover, but the ride is immense fun and the sex scenes very good without being gruesomely explicit. You can get Raven Heart here.

This was the shortest unread book on my shelves acquired in 2020. Next on that pile is Ventiforms, by Sean Monaghan.

The Revenant Express, by George Mann

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

All those years hearing talk of hellfire and brimstone on a Sunday morning, the vicar preaching that a life of sin and misdemeanour would lead to condemnation and torment in the next life—at no point had the young Clarence imagined the waking Hell he might first be forced to endure as a working adult. None of it had prepared him for this.

I wasn’t expecting to like this much, and I didn’t. Steampunk and zombies, neither of which are my favourite things, along with Mann’s usual leaden prose and historical inaccuracies. Did not finish. You can get The Revenant Express here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2020, and the sf book that had lain longest unread on my bookshelves. Next on those piles are Year’s Best Aotearoa New Zealand Science Fiction and Fantasy: Volume I, ed. Marie Hodgkinson, and Tides of the Titans, by Thoraiya Dyer.

July 2025 books

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Non-fiction 8 (YTD 44)
The Making of Martin Luther, by Richard Rex
F**k Work, Let’s Play: Do What You Love and Get Paid for It, by John Williams
The Coming Wave: AI, Power and Our Future, by Mustafa Suleyman 
Little Wars and Floor Games, by H.G. Wells
Around the World in 80 Games, by Marcus du Sautoy
Apostate, by Forrest Reid
Private Road, by Forrest Reid
Exterminate/Regenerate: The Story of Doctor Who, by John Higgs

Non-genre 1 (YTD 22)
Inspector French and Sir John Magill’s Last Journey, by Freeman Wills Crofts

SF 15 (YTD 79)
Beautiful Star, by Yukio Mishima
The Revenant Express, by George Mann (did not finish)
Raven Heart, by Murphy Lawless
Year’s Best Aotearoa New Zealand Science Fiction and Fantasy: Volume I, ed Marie Hodgkinson
Tides of the Titans, by Thoraiya Dyer
Ventiforms, by Sean Monaghan
The Blacksmith, by Barbara Howe (did not finish)
From a Shadow Grave, by Andi C. Buchanan
Spirits Abroad, by Zen Cho
We All Fall, by Helen Vivienne Fletcher
Tyrelia, by S R Manssen (did not finish)
Dragon Rift, by Eileen Mueller (did not finish)
Dark Winds Over Wellington: Chilling Tales of the Weird & the Strange, by TL Wood
The Master, by Louise Cooper
House of Odysseus, by Claire North

Doctor Who 3 (YTD 19)
A Small Semblance of Home, by Paul Phipps
Down, by Laurence Miles
Spectral Scream, by Hannah Fergesen

Comics 1 (YTD 19)
Fractures, by Robbie Morrison et al

6,000 pages (YTD 46,800)
13/28 (YTD 77/177) by non-male writers (“Lawless”, Hodgkinson, Dyer, Howe, Buchanan, Cho, Fletcher, Manssen, Mueller, Wood, Cooper, North, Fergesen)
3/28 (YTD 25/177) by non-white writers (Suleyman, Mishima, Cho)
1/28 reread (Down)
207 books currently tagged unread, down 17 from last month, down 92 from July 2024.

Reading now
The Iliad, by Homer, tr. Emily Wilson

Coming soon (perhaps)
Hyperion, by Robbie Morrison et al
Deadfall, by Gary Russell
Doctor Who: The Robot Revolution, by Una McCormack
The Devil’s Chord, by Dale Smith 
Ringlet and the Day the Oceans Stopped, by Felicity Williams
Light in My Blood, by Jean Gilbert
Into the Mire: The Collected Works, by Casey Lucas
Voyage to Venus, by C.S. Lewis 
The Bone Woman: A Forensic Anthropologist’s Search for Truth in the Mass Graves of Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo, by Clea Koff 
Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett 
False Value, by Ben Aaronovitch 
Three Eight One, by Aliya Whiteley 
The Women Could Fly, by Megan Giddings 
The Principle of Moments, by Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson
Prophet Song, by Paul Lynch 
‘Salem’s Lot, by Stephen King 
Final Cut, by Charles Burns 
“Two Hearts”, by Peter S. Beagle 
Histoire de Jérusalem, by Vincent Lemire 
A Tall Man In A Low Land: Some Time Among the Belgians, by Harry Pearson 
Old Babes in the Wood, by Margaret Atwood

31 July books, and July 2004-2024 roundup

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Well, it’s been interesting for me to look back on my years of bookblogging by date, but I don’t think it’s been interesting to many other people, so I’m drawing this series of posts to a close as of today.

Non-fiction
The Story of Alice, by Mavis Batey (2004)
The Bloody Sunday Report, Vol VIII (2010)

Non-genre
The Man With Two Left Feet, and Other Stories, by P.G. Wodehouse (2006)

SF
A Dance with Dragons, by George R.R. Martin (2011)
Gráinne, by Keith Roberts (2016)
“Slow Sculpture”, by Theodore Sturgeon (2018)
How High We Go in the Dark, by Sequoia Nagamatsu (2023)

Doctor Who
Doctor Who – Vengeance on Varos, by Philip Martin (2008)
Doctor Who – The Mark of the Rani, by Pip and Jane Baker (2008)
Doctor Who – The Two Doctors, by Robert Holmes (2008)
Doctor Who – Timelash, by Glen McCoy (2008)
Doctor Who – Revelation of the Daleks, by Jon Preddle (2008)
Doctor Who – The Mysterious Planet, by Terrance Dicks (2008)
Doctor Who – Mindwarp, by Philip Martin (2008)
Doctor Who – Terror of the Vervoids, by Pip and Jane Baker (2008)
Doctor Who – The Ultimate Foe, by Pip and Jane Baker (2008)

The best
Out of a rather thin crop today – since I started end-of-the-month blogging, I’ve posted fewer reviews on days like this – the best is definitely GRRM’s fifth volume, A Dance with Dragons. (Review; get it here)

Honorable mention
Sadly, Robert Holmes wrote only one Doctor Who novel, The Two Doctors, but it’s one of the best ones. (Review; get it here)

The one you haven’t heard of
For a BSFA winner (in 1987), Keith Roberts’ Gráinne is undeservedly obscure. (Review; get it here)

The one to avoid
The Ultimate Foe – a bad telling of a bad story. (Review; get it here)

July books summary, 2004-2024

And that’s all, folks. Now that it’s all over, I count that I have linked reviews to 535 books: 178 science fiction and fantasy (excluding Doctor Who), 122 non-fiction, 99 Doctor Who fiction (excluding comics), 71 non-sff fiction, 48 comics and 17 plays and poetry.

My choices for best of each day, however, have not been evenly distributed: 10 each for non-fiction and sff (8% and 6% respectively), 8 for non-genre (11%), 2 plays and poetry (one of each, 12%) and one comic (2%), but no Doctor Who fiction.

Doctor Who

I actually did give a top spot on 11 July to a non-fiction book about Doctor Who, Ian Potter’s Black Archive on The Myth Makers. (Review; get it here.)

I gave honorable mentions to the following Doctor Who fiction books:
The Brilliant Book 2011 (1 July)
Loving the Alien (5 July)
Risk Assessment (7 July)
The Algebra of Ice (23 July)
Doctor Who: The Visual Dictionary, Dorling Kindersley version (24 July)
Dead of Winter (28 July)
Doctor Who: The Two Doctors (31 July, er, today)

James Goss wrote two of the above, and my favourite is his Eleventh Doctor novel, Dead of Winter. (Review; get it here)

Comics

The only comic that I gave the top spot to, over the 31 days, was Art Spiegelman’s Maus, on 16 July, but it is the best of them. (Review; get it here.)

Plays and Poetry

The only script that got the top spot was Hamilton, on 22 July, but I stand by that – it’s superb. (Review; get it here)
The only poetry that I flagged as best of the date was Maria Dahvana Headley’s translation of Beowulf, on 4 July. (Review; get it here.)

Non-genre fiction

I gave top spots to:
John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (1 July)
Ian Rankin’s Dead Souls (3 July)
Dark Horse, by Fletcher Knebel (7 July)
Ulysses, by James Joyce (19 July)
Middlemarch, by George Eliot (23 July)
The Way by Swann’s, aka Swann’s Way, by Marcel Proust (24 July)
The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway (26 July)
Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith (27 July)

Most of the above are classics, but there may be a couple that surprise you. My favourite by far is Middlemarch. (Review; get it here)

Science fiction and fantasy

I gave top spots to:
Farthing, by Jo Walton (6 July)
Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (9 July)
Ian McDonald’s River of Gods (17 July)
City of Stairs, by Robert Jackson Bennett (18 July)
Appliance, by J.O. Morgan (21 July)
Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly (25 July)
Joint win for A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher and A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik (28 July)
The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien (29 July)
The Female Man, by Joanna Russ (30 July)
GRRM’s A Dance with Dragons. (31 July, today)

Of the above, The Hobbit will always have a special place in my heart.  (Review; get it here) Of the books I had not previously read, I guess I would choose The Female Man. (Review; get it here)

Non-fiction

The non-fiction books that I awarded the top spot to were:
Jayne Olorunda’s Legacy: A story of racism and the Northern Ireland Troubles (2 July)
Carrying the Fire, by Michael Collins (5 July)
The Johnstown Flood, by David McCullough (8 July)
The King of Almayne: A 13th Century Englishman in Europe, by T.W.E. Roche (10 July)
Ian Potter’s The Myth Makers, as mentioned earlier (11 July)
Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table (12 July)
Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (13 July)
George and Sam by Charlotte Moore (14 July)
The Room Where It Happened, by John Bolton (15 July)
Tom Shippey’s J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (20 July)

All of the above are very good, and my favourite is Michael Collins’ Carrying the Fire, about his career as an Apollo astronaut. (Review; get it here)

Finally, a quick look at the worst books that I have reviewed on any day in July. None of them were comics; one was poetry (6% of that category); five non-fiction (4%); five non-genre fiction (7%); six Doctor Who books (five novels and an annual, 6%); and, coming as I do from a place of love for the genre, 17 science fiction and fantasy novels (10%), two of them by M. John Harrison.

This adds up to 34, over the 31 days of July, because I gave myself some latitude; on several days I did not put anything in this category, and on several days I put two or three. I think the one I most regret even touching, never mind opening, is Tom Sharp’s awful Wilt in Nowhere. (Review; get it here.)

To finish on a more positive note: please do consider looking at the more obscure of the above, which I guess include Dark Horse, by Fletcher Knebel (review; get it here); Appliance, by J.O. Morgan (review; get it here); and Jayne Olorunda’s Legacy: A story of racism and the Northern Ireland Troubles (review; get it here). If you appreciate my taste in general, you’ll probably appreciate these.

Beautiful Star, by Yukio Mishima

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Second paragraph of third chapter (English translation by Stephen Dodd only, I wasn’t able to get at the Japanese original):

This was Akiko’s first ever solo trip. Her mother and father had both voiced their opposition, appalled by their young daughter’s reckless behaviour. They were anxious for her wellbeing and desperate to stop her. Akiko was incensed by her parents’ concerns and misgivings, which were so human.

Until recently, the only thing that I knew about Yukio Mishima was his dramatic death in 1970, committing seppuku while attempting to incite a military coup to restore imperial rule in Japan; a very unattractive incident which disinclined me to find out any more.

However a friend persuaded me to give his 1962 novel Beautiful Star a try. It is indeed very interesting; an ordinary suburban family of four come to the realisation that they are all in fact aliens from other planets, and that it is their mission to save the Earth from nuclear war. Bearing in mind that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were only as distant then as the first Obama election and the Beijing Olympics are now, you can see why this would have weighed heavily on both writer and reader.

We readers are left to decide for ourselves whether the protagonists are correct or deluded in their belief in their own extra-terrestrial origins. On the one hand, they tap into a network of other extra-terrestrial believers in Japan, and they observe (or think that they observe) UFOs responding to them. On the other, they seem to remain subject to very human physical constraints such as pregnancy and cancer. The point of the book, perhaps, is to make us look at ourselves as if we are outsiders (Mishima writes himself into the background, as a guest speaker), and for the non-Japanese reader this is enhanced by the cultural differences to our own experiences.

The fact that the protagonists have possibly deluded beliefs that they alone can fundamentally alter society is a chilling foreshadowing of the author’s own fate. I just don’t know enough about his personal history to be confident that we can read much into that. For what it’s worth, this was apparently his favourite of his own (many) books. You can get Beautiful Star here.

30 July books

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Non-fiction
A History of India, by John Keay (2008)
Doctor Who: The Writer’s Tale, by Russell T Davies and Benjamin Cook (2009)
The Essence of Christianity, by Ludwig Feuerbach (2014)
The Journals of Lewis and Clark, 1804-1806 (2014)

Non-genre
Henderson the Rain King, by Saul Bellow (2006)
Billionaire Boy, by David Walliams (2014)

Poetry
The Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri (2009)

SF
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, by Douglas Adams (2006)
The Female Man, by Joanna Russ (2007)

Doctor Who
Doctor Who: Aliens and Enemies, by Justin Richards (2011)

Comics
The Countdown Annual 1972 (2012)

Not many today.

The best
The Female Man is justly famous. (Review; get it here)

Honorable mentions
The Writer’s Tale is a brilliant insight into how Russell T. Davies approached his writing of Doctor Who. (Review; get it here)
We’re a little distant from The Divine Comedy, but it retains its power. (Review; get it here)

The one you haven’t heard of
The Countdown Annual 1972 is a charming snapshot of an earlier age. (Review; get it here)

The ones to avoid
I could not finish (review) either The Essence of Christianity (get it here) or The Journals of Lewis and Clark (get them here).
But even worse is David Walliams’ repulsive Billionaire Boy. (Review; get it here)

Wednesday reading

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Current
The Iliad, by Homer, tr. Emily Wilson

Last books finished
Tyrelia, by S R Manssen (did not finish)
Dragon Rift, by Eileen Mueller (did not finish)
Exterminate/Regenerate: The Story of Doctor Who, by John Higgs
Dark Winds Over Wellington: Chilling Tales of the Weird & the Strange, by TL Wood
The Master, by Louise Cooper
House of Odysseus, by Claire North
Inspector French and Sir John Magill’s Last Journey, by Freeman Wills Crofts

Next books
Hyperion, by Robbie Morrison et al
Ringlet and the Day the Oceans Stopped, by Felicity Williams
Voyage to Venus, by C.S. Lewis

Fractures, by Robbie Morrison et al

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Second frame of third story (“The Body Electric”):

Two hours earlier…
Clara: When you mumbled something about where we were going, Doctor, I thought you were taking me for dessert.
Doctor: No time for consonant-based puns, Clara.
Doctor: These are the quartz wastes of Asmoray.

Another collection of three Titan Comics stories featuring the Twelfth Doctor and Clara. The first is about a bereaved family trying to reunite across timelines but finding that nasty timey-wimey creatures want to get involved. The second has Sammy Davis Junior, Dean Martin and friends thwarting alien invasion in 1960s Las Vegas. The third has Clara reflecting on her own role as she helps ward off another alien threat to an exploitative human colony, and perhaps goes in the wrong direction. All decent enough. You can get Fractures here.

Next in this sequence: Hyperion, by Robbie Morrison et al.

29 July books

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Non-fiction
Broadstairs: Heydays and Nowadays, by Nick Evans (2012)
Ireland Under the Tudors, by Richard Bagwell (2014)

Non-genre
The History of Richard Calmady, by “Lucas Malet” [Mary St Leger Kingsley Harrison] (2008)
A House for Mr Biswas, by V.S. Naipaul (2008)
The Pickwick Papers, by Charles Dickens (2013)
The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, by Maggie O’Farrell (2014)

SF
Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley (2007)
The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien (2009)
Rogue Queen, by L. Sprague de Camp (2014)

Doctor Who
Beast of Fang Rock, by Andy Frankham-Allan (2016) [Lethbridge-Stewart novel]
Adorable Illusion, by Gary Russell (2019) [Bernice Summerfield novel]
The Waters of Mars, by Phil Ford (2024) [Tenth Doctor, novelisation]

Best
Not gonna make any excuses; The Hobbit is my favorite of all of the above. Not perhaps substantial enough for three epic films though… (Review; get it here)

Honorable mentions
Brave New World is justifiably a classic of science fiction. (Review; get it here)
The Vanishing of Esme Lennox is a brilliant short book about hidden Scottish family history. (Review; get it here)

The one you haven’t heard of
The History of Sir Richard Calmady is a great novel about a privileged man, born with only vestigial legs. Published in 1901, it is frank about sex, disability and religion. An overlooked and neglected classic. (Review; get it here)

The one to avoid
Rogue Queen was hailed as breaking taboos on sexual themes in sf when it was published in 1951, but to today’s ready it is dull and off-target. (Review; get it here)

Apostate, by Forrest Reid

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

A brother and a sister shared to some extent the day nursery with me, but they were my seniors by several years, and hardly counted in my scheme of things. Of far more immediate interest was the personality of a sagacious old tabby, who would stroll into the nursery and lie on the floor in the sun, and was good-natured enough to purr when I used her as a pillow. I was aware that she timed these visits, and that if she did not find me alone (by which I mean alone with Emma) she would not stay. Not that she was, so far as I recall, a particularly affectionate animal. Cats are never sentimental; they treat you exactly as you treat them; and it was simply that she had marked me down, with unerring instinct, as ” safe “—a person who could be trusted to amuse the kittens while one dozed and dreamed.

I was vaguely aware of the Northern Irish writer Forrest Reid. This is the first volume of his autobiography, published in 1926, covering his boyhood up to the point of his first real love affair. He was born in 1875, and his father died when he was six (and his beloved nurse Emma returned to England around the same time, which seems to have left a larger gap in his life), with Forrest as the youngest of half a dozen surviving children. His education was very patchy, starting with a late stint at Miss Hardy’s preparatory school and then a few years at Inst, which was not exactly an intellectual powerhouse at that stage. Meanwhile he played with the neighbourhood kids, who seem to have been generally pretty nasty.

As with H.G. Wells, who was born nine years earlier, a slow recovery from serious childhood illness got Reid into reading serious (and also frivolous) literature. Then a friendship with John Park, the Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at Queen’s University, brought him into contact with the deeper currents of philosophy. This meant that he was completely unsuited to the office job in a tea merchant that his family eventually found for him. He was also quietly opposed to a lot of the norms of the conservative Belfast Protestant society of his roots. Clergymen (including his uncle) are figures of fun in the book, and as soon as Reid had been confirmed he announced that he was not attending church any more, and didn’t – hence his embrace of apostasy in the book’s title.

What I particularly loved about this book was the intimate and detailed account of the geography of Mount Charles, the Belfast street where he grew up, and the surrounding bits of University Street, Botanic Avenue, etc, in the 1880s when these were all relatively new buildings and all inhabited by families (or unmarried professors), as opposed to the mix of student accommodation and university-related offices on Mount Charles now and for most of my lifetime. I always find it appealing when a book has a strong sense of place, and even more so when it’s a place I have known since my own childhood, but roughly a century earlier. (There are also excursions to an uncle’s vicarage at Ballinderry, which is less well known to me.)

Modern map from the PRONI Historical Maps viewer.

Chapter VI is a detailed description of 1880s Belfast which I reproduce here (apart from the references to popular literature of the day):

My waking world, also, was gradually expanding, though it still remained the very small world of a provincial town—a rather hard, unromantic town too—devoted exclusively to money-making; yet a town, for all that, somehow likeable, and surrounded by as beautiful a country as one could desire. The Belfast of my childhood [the 1880s] differed considerably from the Belfast of today [1926]. It was, I think, spiritually closer to that surrounding country. Then, as now, perhaps, it was not particularly well educated, it possessed no cultured and no leisured class (the sons of even the wealthiest families leaving school at fifteen or sixteen to enter their fathers’ offices); but it did not, as I remember it at any rate, bear nearly so marked a resemblance to the larger English manufacturing towns. 

The change I seem to see has, of course, brought it closer to its own ideal. For some not very intelligible reason, a hankering after things English—even what is believed to be an English accent—and a distrust of things Irish, have always characterised the more well-to-do citizens of Belfast. But in the days of my childhood this was not so apparent, while the whole town was more homely, more unpretentious. A breath of rusticity still sweetened its air; the few horse trams, their destinations indicated by the colour of their curtains, did little to disturb the quiet of the streets; the Malone Road was still an almost rural walk; Molly Ward’s cottage, not a vulcanite factory, guarded the approach to the river; and there were no brick works, no mill chimneys, no King’s Bridge to make ugly blots on the green landscape of the Lagan Valley. The town itself, as I have said, was more attractive, with plenty of open spaces, to which the names of certain districts—the Plains, the Bog Meadows—bear witness. Queen’s University was not a mere mass of unrelated, shapeless buildings; the Technical Institute did not sprawl in unsightly fashion across half the grounds of my old school. Gone is the Linen Hall, that was once the very heart of the town in its hours of ease. A brand new City Hall, all marble staircases and inlaid floors, garnished with statues and portraits of Lord Mayors and town councillors, and fronted with wooden benches on which rows of our less successful citizens doze and scratch the languid hours away, flaunts its expensive dullness where that old mellow ivy-creepered building once stood, with its low, arched entrance, its line of trees that shut out the town bustle and dust. The Linen Hall Library, transported to another building, still exists, but, as with the city, expansion has robbed it of its individuality. The old Linen Hall Library, with the sparrows flying in and out of the ivy all day long, fluttering and squabbling, was a charming place. It was very like a club. Its membership was comparatively small; its tone was old-fashioned; it belonged to the era of the two-and three-volume novel; it had about it an atmosphere of quiet and leisure. […]

In the Linen Hall Library, curled up in a low deep window seat, I would sit gazing out between the trees and right up Donegall Place, which on summer afternoons was a fashionable promenade, where one was almost sure to meet everybody one knew. […] And here, one summer afternoon, just outside the tall iron gates, I beheld my first celebrity. Not that I knew him to be celebrated, but I could see for myself his appearance was remarkable. I had been taught that it was rude to stare, but on this occasion, though I was with my mother, I could not help staring, and even feeling I was intended to do so. He was, my mother told me, a Mr. Oscar Wilde; and she added, by way of explanation I suppose, that he was aesthetic, like Bunthorne, in Patience.

Oscar Wilde famously visited Belfast in January 1884. It is interesting that Reid’s mother contextualised him for eight-year-old Forrest by referencing the 1881 Gilbert and Sullivan opera which satirised him.

The City Hall feels so solid and iconic to us today that one easily forgets that it is less than 120 years old, and my great-grandmother, who was born in 1887 and lived until I was 18, would have seen it being built when she was a teenager visiting from her Lower Bann home, and would have known the White Linen Hall which preceded it. And I had not realised (though I should have) that the Linen Hall Library was based in the old Linen Hall before being forced to move across the road; I was one of its governors in the mid 1990s.

I’d love to find a few weeks somehow to produce an annotated version of this book, chasing down the literary and personal references. Reid died in 1947, so his works are out of copyright now. If anyone would like to join forces on such a project, let me know. In the meantime, you can get Apostate here.

28 July books

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Non-fiction
The Making and Remaking of the Good Friday Agreement, by Paul Bew (2019)

Non-genre
Paid and Loving Eyes, by Jonathan Gash (2012)
Last Term at Malory Towers, by Enid Blyton (2012)
Tales from the Secret Annexe, by Anne Frank (2016)
Nant Olchfa, by Amy Dillwyn (2023)

SF
The Lady of the Shroud, by Bram Stoker (2006)
The Lost Road, by J.R.R. Tolkien (2011)
Kushiel’s Mercy, by Jacqueline Carey (2015)
The Secret History of Science Fiction, eds. James Patrick Kelly & John Kessel (2016)
Legendborn, by Tracy Deonn (2021)
Cemetery Boys, by Aiden Thomas (2021)
Raybearer, by Jordan Ifueko (2021)
Elatsoe, by Darcie Little Badger (2021)
A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking, by “T. Kingfisher” [Ursula Vernon] (2021)
A Deadly Education, by Naomi Novik (2021)
To Paradise, by Hanya Yanagihara (2023)

Doctor Who
Hidden, by Stephen Savile (2009) [Torchwood, spinoff novel]
Doctor Who Annual 1973 (2010) [Third Doctor, annual]
The Highest Science, by Gareth Roberts (2010) [Seventh Doctor, spinoff novel]
Dead of Winter, by James Goss (2011) [Eleventh Doctor, spinoff novel]

The best
I’m going to give a one-off joint win here, to two 2021 Lodestar finalists (reviewed here), A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking (get it here) and A Deadly Education (get it here).

Honorable mentions
I have a lot of four-star ratings for the above. the two I’m going to pick out are:
Kushiel’s Mercy, by Jacqueline Carey, is one of the superb erotic fantasy series, and probably the only one I’ll cover in this series of write-ups. (Review, get it here)
Dead of Winter, by James Goss, is a splendidly creepy Eleventh Doctor / Amy / Rory story. (Review; get it here)

The one you haven’t heard of
The Making and Remaking of the Good Friday Agreement is a collection of Paul Bew’s writings on Northern Ireland in the early 2000s. Lucid and informative. (Review; get it here)

The one to avoid
Legendborn, by Tracy Deonn, seemed to me to be trying to say important things about race and class by importing Welsh and British legends to North Carolina, and I could not get over the cognitive dissonance. (Review; get it here.)