Exhalation, by Ted Chiang

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Second paragraph of third story ("What's Expected of Us"):

By now you've probably seen a Predictor; millions of them have been sold by the time you're reading this. For those who haven't seen one, it's a small device, like a remote for opening your car door. Its only features are a button and a big green LED. The light flashes if you press the button. Specifically, the light flashes one second before you press the button.

Ted Chiang has published very few short stories, but they are all good and most of them have won awards. This is a collection of his more recent work. Some of these I remembered very vividly indeed – "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate", "The Lifecycle of Software Objects" and "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling". I had completely forgotten the title story, but I loved it when it was a Hugo finalist and I loved it again this time. There are two brand new stories here as well, "Omphalos" in which Young Earth cosmology is true, and "Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom" which opens communications with parallel Many-Worlds universes. All tremendously good stuff, getting my 2020 reading off to a good start. You can get it here.

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BSFA 2019 Best Art: my nominations

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Always conscious that my own tastes are not everyone's, I had a look at the 27 works which are on the long list for this year's BSFA Award. I must say that the quality of the art is in almost all cases fantastic. It's interesting to note that there are two exbibitions on the long list, one "A New Life in the Village" by Cedric Mizero, which I have to admit I did not feel had many sfnal aspects, and United Visual Artists' "Other Spaces", which ran at The Store X on the Strand in London last year. I am not voting for either, but it's good to have exhibitions in the mix.

One artist gets three works on the long-list (unless you count "Unknown", who also has three). Julia Lloyd's three book covers are very diverse from each other, and certainly I would not have guessed that the same had was behind them all. Again, I'm not voting for any of these but I did like them:

After due consideration, I am casting one of my four votes for "Exile's Letter", a graphic story by the Mill and Jones, which is about construction, destruction and renewal. Having an actual graphic story in this category may be pushing the boundaries, but I found it refreshingly different.

Two of my other three choices are alternate covers for the same book, Deeplight by Frances Hardinge. Left is the cover for the US edition by Aitch and Rachel Vale, right is Vincent Chong's for the UK edition.

And my last choice is Andreas Rocha's wistful lansdcape cover for Jaine Fenn's Broken Shadow.

But go look at them all, and make your own choices.

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In the Heat of the Night: film (1967) and novel (1965)

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In the Heat of the Night won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1967, and picked up another four: Best Actor (Rod Steiger as police chief Gillespie), Best Film Editing, Best Sound Mixing and Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium. It lost Best Director to The Graduate, and also lost Best Sound Effects to The Dirty Dozen.

The other Best Picture nominees were Bonnie and Clyde, Doctor Dolittle, The Graduate and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (which of course also starred Sydney Poitier). The only one I have seen (I think) is The Graduate. In IMDB ratings of all 1967 films, In the Heat of the Night ranks 7th on one system and 14th on the other. Six films beat it in both systems: The Jungle Book, The Graduate, Cool Hand Luke, The Dirty Dozen, Bonnie and Clyde and You Only Live Twice. Apart from The Graduate, I have also seen The Jungle Book and You Only Live Twice. From 1967, I have also seen the first Casino Royale, Half a Sixpence, Who’s Minding the Mint and the Joseph Strick Ulysses. I am a bit mystified by IMDB’s love for The Jungle Book, which I remember as average Disney with implicit racism which surely would not pass muster today. On the other hand, I have good if vague memories of The Graduate and You Only Live Twice, and the first Casino Royale is at least fun. Here’s a trailer for In The Heat of the Night.

This is the first murder mystery to win the Oscar for Best Picture. (Unless you count Hamlet.) The twist is that the murder takes place in a bigoted Southern town, and a black detective from Philadephia who happens to be passing is brought in to solve the crime. I have to say that I did not especially warm to it. I watched it first on Eurostar after three tiring days in London, and then tried it again flying home after a tiring weekend in Glasgow, so my energy was not at its highest, but I must record that it failed to really grab me, and I’m putting it a touch below the halfway mark of my rankings, ahead of On the Waterfront (which also features Rod Steiger) but behind Grand Hotel.

We have one returnee from a previous Oscar-winning film – Rod Steiger, who was nominated as Best Supporting Actor in On The Waterfront, where he pays Marlon Brando’s older brother (despite being younger), and won the Best Actor award this year for his performance as Gillespie, the police chief.

I normally run through the aspects of these films in order, from the things I liked least to the things I liked most. In this case, the basic problem is that a successful detective story requires you to have distinct characters who are interesting enough that you care who is the actual murderer. I did not reach that point here, in either of my two viewings. This is a film about white men with harsh accents yelling at each other, and occasionally being thrown into jail, or taking a break from yelling at each other to yell at the black guy. The plot is fairly simple, but I actually found it difficult to follow. Though I was impressed by the cutting-edge tech used to record the murderer’s evental confession.

There are odd bits of cinematography that jolted me out of willing suspension of disbelief. Here’s one – a murder suspect is attempting to flee across state lines from Mississippi to Arkansas. What’s wrong with this picture? The sun is on the right, and Arkansas is west of Mississippi, so that means the sun is firmly in the north. (Not to mention the fact that the nearest bridges to the real Sparta, Mississippi, are two and a half hours’ drive away, so the police chief is well outside his jurisdiction.)

It’s a film that doesn’t have a lot of space for women either; the three female characters are the Grieving Widow (Lee Grant), the Town Slut (Quentin Dean) and, a little more interesting, the Town Abortionist (Beah Richards), but none of them gets an awful lot to do; the Grieving Widow does at least insist that the black guy should be kept on the case. Of course, that’s still three more speaking female characters than in Lawrence of Arabia (the film, that is; the original book, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, has several well-characterised female camels).

On the other hand, you do have to admit that this is the first Oscar-winning film since Gone With the Wind to tackle race, and the first at all to be on the right side of the issue. This is largely (though not entirely – see above re Beah Richards, and there are others as well) carried by the superb performance of Sydney Poitier, as Virgil Tibbs, the Californian detective who is dragged unwillingly into a tacky murder committed by tacky people in a tacky town, and builds an uneasy and unsatisfactory relationship with the police chief.

He has the single best line of the film:

Gillespie: “Virgil”? That’s a funny name for a nigger boy to come from Philadelphia. What do they call you up there?
Tibbs: They call me MISTER TIBBS!

And he gets another iconic scene (watch to the end), where incidentally the butler is played by Jester Hairston, writer of the Christmas carol “Mary’s Boy Child”:

Even so, I confess I am not totally satisfied with the film’s take on race. Steiger’s Oscar for Best Actor kind of sums it up; the story ends up being about the white guy on a journey to become comfortable with his own racism, rather than about the black guy who has to deal with these bigots day in and day out. I suspect I might find Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner, made the same year with the same lead actor, more satisfactory.

I can’t finish without saluting Ray Charles’ title song.

And so we reach another decade, with my rankings of the last ten films (in red below) among the forty Oscar winners so far as follows – not a bad decade, with half of the most recent ten in my top third overall, and seven of them in my top half. But there were some disappointments, and In the Heat of the Night was one of them.

40) The Great Ziegfeld (Oscar for 1936)
39) Cimarron (1930/31)
38) Cavalcade (1932/33)
37) Wings (1927/28)
36) Broadway Melody (1928/29)
35) All The King’s Men (1949)
34) Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)
33) The Greatest Show on Earth (1952)
32) Tom Jones (1963)
31) Gone With the Wind (1939)
30) Gentleman’s Agreement (1947)
29) Going My Way (1944)
28) My Fair Lady (1964)
27) How Green Was My Valley (1941)
26) Mrs Miniver (1942)
25) On The Waterfront (1954)
24) In the Heat of the Night (1967)
23) Grand Hotel (1931/32)
22) The Life of Emile Zola (1937)
21) Marty (1955)		20) Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
19) Gigi (1958)
18) It Happened One Night (1934)
17) You Can’t Take It With You (1938)
16) The Lost Weekend (1945)
15) Hamlet (1948)
14) From Here To Eternity (1953)
13) Around The World In Eighty Days (1956)
12) Ben-Hur (1959)
11) The Apartment (1960)
10) All About Eve (1950)
9) The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
8) West Side Story (1961)
7) A Man for all Seasons (1966)
6) The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
5) All Quiet on the Western Front (1929/30)
4) Rebecca (1940)
3) An American in Paris (1951)
2) The Sound of Music (1965)
1) Casablanca (1943)

As I usually try and do, I got and read the book that the film was based on, In the Heat of the Night by John Ball. Here’s the second paragraph of the third chapter:

Until Gillespie arrived in town, Sam Wood had been rated a big man, but Gillespie’s towering size automatically demoted Sam Wood to near normal stature. The new chief was only three years his senior—too young, Sam thought, for his job, even in a city as small as Wells. Furthermore Gillespie came from Texas, a state for which Sam felt no fraternal affection. But most of all Sam resented, consciously, Gillespie’s hard, inconsiderate, and demanding manner. Sam arrived at the conclusion that he felt no liking for the Negro [Tibbs], only rich satisfaction in seeing Gillespie apparently confounded. Before he could think any further, Gillespie was looking at him.

As is so often the case, almost everything about the book is better. Our setting is in South Carolina rather than Mississippi; Tibbs is from California, not Philadelphia; the murder victim is not a local industrialist, but an Italian conductor brought in to run a music festival to make the crappy little bigoted town a more popular place, with a supporting cast of sympathisers including an attractive daughter. Also, we get more inside the heads of the protagonists, and it’s the junior police office Sam Wood who Tibbs develops the relationship with, rather than his boss as in the film. Here is a didactic but well-written exchange between them:

Sam thought carefully for a minute before he asked his next question. “Virgil, I’m going to ask you something you aren’t going to like. But I want to know. How did they [the LAPD] happen to take you? No, that isn’t what I mean. I want to ask you point-blank how come a colored man got all those advantages. Now if you want to get mad, go ahead.”
Tibbs countered with a question of his own. “You’ve always lived in the South, haven’t you?”
“I’ve never been further than Atlanta,” Sam acknowledged.
“Then it may be hard for you to believe, but there are places in this country where a colored man, to use your words for it, is simply a human being like everybody else. Not everybody feels that way, but enough do so that at home I can go weeks at a time without anybody reminding me that I’m a Negro. Here I can’t go fifteen minutes. If you went somewhere where people despised you because of your southern accent, and all you were doing was speaking naturally and the best way that you could, you might have a very slight idea of what it is to be constantly cursed for something that isn’t your fault and shouldn’t make any difference anyhow.”
Sam shook his head. “Some guys down here would kill you for saying a thing like that,” he cautioned.
“You made my point,” Tibbs replied.

It’ss the first of six novels and four short stories, and I think I will keep an eye out for the rest. You can get it here.

Incidentally, this is my first blogpost about a book that I read in 2020. More to come.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

1920s: Wings (1927-28) | The Broadway Melody (1928-29)
1930s: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-30) | Cimarron (1930-31) | Grand Hotel (1931-32) | Cavalcade (1932-33) | It Happened One Night (1934) | Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, and books) | The Great Ziegfeld (1936) | The Life of Emile Zola (1937) | You Can’t Take It with You (1938) | Gone with the Wind (1939, and book)
1940s: Rebecca (1940) | How Green Was My Valley (1941) | Mrs. Miniver (1942) | Casablanca (1943) | Going My Way (1944) | The Lost Weekend (1945) | The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) | Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) | Hamlet (1948) | All the King’s Men (1949)
1950s: All About Eve (1950) | An American in Paris (1951) | The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) | From Here to Eternity (1953) | On The Waterfront (1954, and book) | Marty (1955) | Around the World in 80 Days (1956) | The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) | Gigi (1958) | Ben-Hur (1959)
1960s: The Apartment (1960) | West Side Story (1961) | Lawrence of Arabia (1962) | Tom Jones (1963) | My Fair Lady (1964) | The Sound of Music (1965) | A Man for All Seasons (1966) | In the Heat of the Night (1967) | Oliver! (1968) | Midnight Cowboy (1969)
1970s: Patton (1970) | The French Connection (1971) | The Godfather (1972) | The Sting (1973) | The Godfather, Part II (1974) | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) | Rocky (1976) | Annie Hall (1977) | The Deer Hunter (1978) | Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
1980s: Ordinary People (1980) | Chariots of Fire (1981) | Gandhi (1982) | Terms of Endearment (1983) | Amadeus (1984) | Out of Africa (1985) | Platoon (1986) | The Last Emperor (1987) | Rain Man (1988) | Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
1990s: Dances With Wolves (1990) | The Silence of the Lambs (1991) | Unforgiven (1992) | Schindler’s List (1993) | Forrest Gump (1994) | Braveheart (1995) | The English Patient (1996) | Titanic (1997) | Shakespeare in Love (1998) | American Beauty (1999)
21st century: Gladiator (2000) | A Beautiful Mind (2001) | Chicago (2002) | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) | Million Dollar Baby (2004, and book) | Crash (2005) | The Departed (2006) | No Country for Old Men (2007) | Slumdog Millionaire (2008) | The Hurt Locker (2009)
2010s: The King’s Speech (2010) | The Artist (2011) | Argo (2012) | 12 Years a Slave (2013) | Birdman (2014) | Spotlight (2015) | Moonlight (2016) | The Shape of Water (2017) | Green Book (2018) | Parasite (2019)
2020s: Nomadland (2020) | CODA (2021) | Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) | Oppenheimer (2023)

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October 2004 books

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I started the month in Portugal, and also went to Washington, New York, Utah, Boston, and London. At work, we published a report on Armenia. (Anne and I celebrated our 11th wedding anniversary, but I was in Portugal on the day itself.) Somewhere in the internets there is video of me giving evidence to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee in London on 26 October, but you'll have to settle for the minutes, here and here. Misha Glenny and I emerged from Westminster to see the sad news that John Peel had died. Here I am speaking at Brigham Young University on 13 October. I had more hair then.

The saddest news of the month was the loss of my former assistant from Bosnia days, Danijela. I was able to visit her resting place last year.

My October 2004 reading (lots of daytime flying meant I got through more books than was usual at that time of my life):

Non-fiction 8 (YTD 40)
Non-genre 1 (YTD 12)
SF 11 (YTD 68)
Comics 2 (YTD 6)
In The Shadow Of No Towers, by Art Spiegelman

6,800 pages (YTD 43,200)
2/21 by women (YTD 31/130)
None by PoC (YTD 2/130)

Best book of the month: the Locus Awards anthology pulls together a lot of superlative short stories, some of which I already knew but almost all of which I really liked. You can get it here. Also Making Sense of the Troubles is dated but thorough; you can get it here. However, you can skip Destiny's Shield, third in an alternative timeline series about Belisarius fighting an alien invasion; the hero never loses a battle or an argument and it gets boring fast. If you want, you can get it here.


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I Love the Bones of You: My Father And The Making Of Me, by Christopher Eccleston

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

The first thing I committed to memory wasn’t the lines of a play, it was the names of the Busby Babes. There was a drawer in my mum and dad’s bedroom and whenever I got the chance I’d go rooting. I’d find sets of false teeth, ties, photos, watches, United programmes, leather lighters from the ’70s, all sorts. It was fascinating. Boredom was our ally back then — we had nothing else to do so exploring the house was an inevitability.

This was the last book I finished in 2019, and the best of the Doctor Who biographies and autobiographies that I read last year (the others were by or about John Leeson, Mary Tamm (v1, v2), Robert Holmes, Matthew Waterhouse, Peter Davison and Andrew Cartmel). There’s actually not all that much in it about Eccleston’s performance as the Ninth Doctor. He devotes a short chapter to it, praising Russell T. Davies, Steven Moffatt, Euros Lyn and Billie Piper, and I guess letting his silence speak for the rest. He bookends that chapter with the experience of watching his own stories with his own young children, fifteen years on, which I found a very effective device to tell what the show now means to him. I’m looking forward to seeing him at Gallfrey One next month.

The guts of the book are about Eccleston’s own somewhat tortured soul, and its roots in the life experience of his father, a factory worker whose talents were suffocated by the class-ridden social structures of mid-twentieth century Salford. He goes into moving detail about his own experiences of mental illness and particularly anorexia; it’s tough but fascinating to read. He is disarmingly frank about his own failures and successes as an actor; always of course in the context of a profession which is rigged in favour of thin people with posh accents – he forced himself to become thin but could never be posh. Another moving passage describes his relationship with Trevor Hicks, who he portrayed in Hillsborough; the two became friends to the point that Eccleston was Hicks’ best man at his wedding. But the most gut-wrenching sections are the passages about his father’s gradual descent into dementia, and the consequent slow death of normal family life. The timing of the various incidents is a bit confusing – few dates are given, and we jump around quite a lot in the thirty years of his career; but reading between the lines it looks like his father’s sharpest decline coincided with the 2004-05 filming of Doctor Who.

This is not a fluffy book, but it’s a very thoughtful one, angry in places and always passionate. You can get it here.

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Wednesday reading

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Current
Unsheltered, by Barbara Kingsolver
The Raven Tower, by Ann Leckie
Selangor, by Gerry Barton

Last books finished
Roots and Wings: Ten Lessons of Motherhood that Helped Me Create and Run a Company, by Margery Kraus
The Last Days of New Paris, by China Mieville
Miss Shumway Waves a Wand, by James Hadley Chase
In the Heat of the Night, by Jon Ball
Distaff: A Science Fiction Anthology by Female Authors, eds. Rosie Oliver & Sam Primeau
Sirius, by Olaf Stapledon
Backstop Land, by Glenn Patterson

Next books
The Idea of Justice, by Amartya Sen
The Critique of Pure Reason, by Immanuel Kant

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The Rule of the Land: Walking Ireland’s Border, by Garrett Carr

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Or perhaps that's old news, they became a couple months ago. They are not in a pub. They are at her kitchen table eating dinner with her parents. There is polite intergenerational conversation. They all agree that reinstating border controls will be bad for business. He has just gotten a job with a wholesale supplier, delivering animal feed to farms both sides of the border. Her mother asks about this, she approves. It's all quite pleasant but there are sideways glances between the young couple. She lives with her parents and he lives with his, this is limiting, as you can imagine. Their toes tap soundlessly inside their shoes.

As Brexit looms at the end of this month, this book looks at what life is actually like along the Irish border, the author walking and camping (and occasionally canoeing) along the entire disputed length of it. He goes from south-east to north-west, so starting with the bits I know best and taking me into less well charted territory; it's a lovely series of vignettes of the realities of the land, and the brutal history that goes along with it. There is a particularly memorable sequence in the middle that segues from Barry McGuigan as hero to Sean Quinn as villain. The section on the cave networks which are literally undermining the border between Cavan and Fermanagh is also pretty memorable. A good book to give to anyone who doesn't really understand the Ireland/Brexit relationship, and isn't all that interested in the politics. You can get it here.

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Dragonworld, by Byron Preiss (did not finish)

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Amsel came out of the house, carrying a barrelful of scraps to be buried in his garden patch for mulch. He sat down on a weathered wooden bench and took a deep breath, watching it frost in the early-spring air. It was his habit to listen to the flowing water and the singing birds for a short time in the morning. Amsel was a small man, small and wiry, with a great explosion of white hair under a floppy hat, and a face that could claim any age from thirty to fifty. He was dressed in loose-fitting green and brown clothes, covered with pockets. In the pockets were all manner of things: a thong-bound parchment notebook, a quill pen which carried its own ink supply (Amsel’s own invention), a lodestone, a small hammer (for chipping off interesting rock specimens), a small net of tanselweb (for capturing interesting insect specimens), and a pair of spectacles (also Amsel’s invention). He believed in preparing for any eventuality.

I got a third of the way through this and decided I didn't care any more. It's a fantasy novel about various human kingdoms under threat from dragons and from each other, but it failed to excite me and so I'me leaving it be. If you want, you can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2016. Next on that pile is Hex by Thomas Olde Heuvelt.

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Doctor Who: The Target Storybook, ed. Steve Cole

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Second paragraph of third story ("Save Yourself", by Terrance Dicks):

The Doctor felt tired, as if he'd been waiting here a lifetime.

I loved this. It's a collection of Doctor Who short stories, edited by Steve Cole with contributions from Joy Wilkinson, Simon Guerrier, the much-missed Terrance Dicks, Matthew Sweet, Susie Day, Matthew "Adric" Waterhouse, Colin "Sixth Doctor" Baker, Mike Tucker, Cole himself, George Mann, Una McCormack, Jacqueline Rayner, Beverly Sanford and Vinay Patel. It's a bit invidious to single out individual stories, but I will anyway: Terrance Dicks last controibution to the Whoniverse expands the concept of Series 6B, with the Second Doctor on mission for the Time Lords; Susie Day looks at the Fourth Doctor and Romana punting; Una McCormack looks at the back story of Clive from the TV episode Roseyou can get it here.

There was a bit of a kerfuffle about this book before it came out. One particular veteran Who writer had been invited to contribute, but his story was not published because at least one of the other contributors objected to his views on trans rights, and threatened to withdraw her own story if his was included. More power to her; in her place I would also have objected to this particular writer's views on Islam. And good for the publisher for making the right choice when confronted with a dilemma of principles.

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September 2004 books

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Back at work, I continued lobbying for a Commission cabinet position until it became obvious that this was not my year. (I have not seriously tried again since.) I had another op-ed on Macedonia as the political situation there took another twist. I travelled to Moldova, Belfast and ended the month in Portugal, with a day trip to the Hague. A writer whose books I don't especially like rather sweetly got in touch and offered to send me some more so that I could make a more informed judgement; I accepted. And we celebrated little U's christening (Guy Van Haver, the local priest, retired in 2008 and sadly died last year).

My September 2004 reading:

Non-fiction: 2 (YTD 32)
Judgement Day: The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic, by Christopher Stephen
The 9/11 Commission Report

SF: 8 (YTD 57)
The Warrior's Bond, by Juliet McKenna
The Tale of the Next Great War, ed. I.F. Clarke
Star Trek: Enterprise – The First Adventure, by Vonda N. McIntyre
Monstrous Regiment, by Terry Pratchett
To The Nines, by Janet Evanovich
The Gods Themselves, by Isaac Asimov
Downbelow Station, by C.J. Cherryh
Brother Berserker, by Fred Saberhagen

Comics: 2 (YTD 4)
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, Marjane Satrapi
The Sandman: Endless Nights, by Neil Gaiman

4,300 pages (YTD 36,400)
5/12 by women (YTD 29/108)
1/12 by PoC (YTD 2/108)

The best of these were Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, the first half of Marjane Satrapi's memoir of growing up in Iran, a milestone in comics which you can get here9/11 Commission Report, which notably fails to make any connection between the September 2001 attacks and Iraq – you can get it here.

My dislike of The Gods Themselves is well recordedTo The Nines – I had enjoyed several earlier books in the series but this one put me off the rest. You can get them here and here.


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The Widows of Malabar Hill, by Sujata Massey

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

"Splendid!" Perveen clapped. Alice was just the remedy she needed for her dark mood.

First in a series of mystery novels set in 1920s Bombay, featuring a Parsi woman lawyer as the protagonist. I wasn't hugely impressed. The actual murder doesn't happen until almost half way into the book, and I was thoroughly unconvinced by both the investigation and the resolution. Our heroine is able to triumph partly due to rather improbable violations of procedure by the police. There's also an intrusive backstory about her brief marriage to a chap from Calcutta. (And at the end we are told that the murderer is being let off with a pretty light sentence, which is incomprehensible.)

The author has clearly done her research into Bombay of the period, and wears it very heavily. There's an awful lot of Hind-splaining to the reader – the phrase "as you know, Perveen" comes perilously close to being used more than once, and Mistry seems to be unaware that Urdu and Hindi are so close to each other than some linguists consider them the same language (and the divergence between them was even less in the 1920s than it is now).

So I finished it, but don't recommend it particularly. If you want to, you can get it here.

This was my top unread book by a writer of colour. Probably will go for The Idea of Justice, by Amartya Sen, next, but there are alternatives to hand as well.

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  • Thu, 22:52: RT @plantingforbees: Stormont: Draft powersharing agreement tabled to restore devolved government in Northern Ireland | UK News | Sky News…
  • Fri, 06:54: RT @SophieLong01: Not even thirty days between Tory majority and a deal at Stormont. Lesson to be learnt.
  • Fri, 08:13: RT @PhilipPullman: Of course Meghan Markle is attacked by the British press because she’s black, and of course Prince Harry is right to def…
  • Fri, 08:35: RT @mickfealty: Good to see @DUPleader selling this deal. We need to put this culture war to bed, and the best unionism can do is stop taki…
  • Fri, 10:45: RT @afranciswrites: I want to address the false narrative that authors refused to work with Suzan Tisdale only because they feared backlash…
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Two Being Human novels: Chasers, by Mark Michalowski and Bad Blood, by James Goss

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Second paragraph of third chapter of Chasers:

She realised she was fiddling with her neck. 'Calm down, Mitchell,' she said.

Second paragraph of third chapter of Bad Blood (actually labelled chapter 41):

'Good to see I'm not the only one chuffing away like a chimney,' said Denise, smiling. 'I approve.'

It's actually seven years since I read the first of the three Being Human novels, all by stalwarts of the Doctor Who writing scene, but it was nice to return to them.

Chasers picks up the storyline from the previous book about George (the werewolf) being asked by lesbian friends to father their baby. There is also a creepy chap who befriends Mitchell (the vampire) for ulterior motives. It's decently done but not spectacular. You can get it here.

I had higher hopes of Bad Blood, as James Goss is one of my favourite writers, and it did not disappoint. Annie (the ghost) is visited by an old friend who doesn't know that she is dead, and the three housemates are sucked into a bizarrely sinister bingo night. Tightly written and very vivid, as I have come to expect from Goss. You can get it here.

Bad Blood was the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves, and Chasers was my top unread book acquired in 2012. Next on those piles respectively are Demon in Leuven, by Guido Eekhaut, and A Popular History of Ireland, by Thomas D'Arcy McGee.

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Wednesday reading

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First weekly roundup post of the year.

Current
Roots and Wings: Ten Lessons of Motherhood that Helped Me Create and Run a Company, by Margery Kraus
Miss Shumway Waves a Wand, by James Hadley Chase

Last books finished
Auguria, Tome 1: Ecce signum, by Peter Nuyten
Exhalation, by Ted Chiang
Seraphina, by Rachel Hartman
Auguria, Tome 2: Gaeso dux, by Peter Nuyten
Auguria, Tome 3: Fatum, by Peter Nuyten
Land of Terror, by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Demon in Leuven, by Guido Eekhaut
Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain, by Charlotte Higgins
As Time Goes By, by Joshua Hale Fialkov and Matthew Dow Smith
“Home is the Hangman”, by Roger Zelazny

Next books
The Last Days of New Paris, by China Mieville
The Idea of Justice, by Amartya Sen

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BSFA Long List – Goodreads/LibraryThing stats

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The BSFA Long List is out. Here are the 46 Best Novel nominees, ranked by the product of their number of owners on Goodreads and LibraryThing.

Goodreads LibraryThing
owners av rating owners av rating
The Testaments, by Margaret Atwood 367,235 4.23 1,433 4.14
The Ten Thousand Doors of January, by Alix E Harrow 107,406 4.16 416 4.21
Gideon the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir 57,334 4.27 378 4.29
The Raven Tower, by Ann Leckie 41,565 3.99 518 4.03
Children of Ruin, by Adrian Tchaikovsky 24,419 4.11 172 3.94
The Old Drift, by Namwali Serpell 21,329 3.76 169 3.68
The Future of Another Timeline, by Annalee Newitz 21,024 3.84 154 3.94
The Light Brigade, by Kameron Hurley 13,664 4.02 161 3.81
The Heavens, by Sandra Newman 10,758 3.43 139 3.20
The True Queen, by Zen Cho 6,614 3.93 147 3.88
Gun Island, by Amitav Ghosh 7,895 3.73 74 3.88
Do You Dream of Terra-Two?, by Temi Oh 6,231 3.66 68 3.36
The Secret Chapter, by Genevieve Cogman 7,097 4.30 48 4.50
Infinite Detail, by Tim Maughan 3,994 3.80 73 4.21
The Rosewater Insurrection, by Tade Thompson 3,520 4.07 69 3.81
A Song for a New Day, by Sarah Pinsker 4,293 4.16 55 4.50
Salvation Lost, by Peter F Hamilton 4,959 4.38 47 3.92
Atlas Alone, by Emma Newman 3,356 4.08 59 4.21
The Divers’ Game, by Jesse Ball 4,696 3.58 39 3.65
Deeplight, by Frances Hardinge 4,376 4.33 39 4.25
Cage of Souls, by Adrian Tchaikovsky 4,369 4.17 36 4.19
Zed, by Joanna Kavenna 5,792 3.41 24 4.00
David Mogo, Godhunter, by Suyi Davies Okungbowa 2,340 3.58 50 3.30
The Rosewater Redemption, by Tade Thompson 1,775 4.12 33 4.25
Fleet of Knives, by Gareth L Powell 1,508 4.02 38 4.00
The Migration, by Helen Marshall 1,755 3.53 32 2.83
Cygnet, by Season Butler 1,998 3.57 24 3.67
No Way, by SJ Morden 1,126 4.08 22 4.00
Zero Bomb, by MT Hill 711 3.21 18 3.00
The House of Sundering Flames, by Aliette de Bodard 630 4.11 18 3.90
Beneath the World, A Sea, by Chris Beckett 536 3.65 20 3.13
The Return of the Incredible Exploding Man, by Dave Hutchinson 364 3.84 19 4.50
Snakeskins, by Tim Major 532 3.66 12 3.50
Shadows of the Short Days, by Alexander Dan Vilhjálmsson 512 3.72 11 –
Always North, by Vicki Jarrett 523 3.80 3 –
The Green Man’s Foe, by Juliet E McKenna 136 4.42 9 –
Star Path, by W. Michael Gear and Kathleen O’Neal Gear 257 4.33 4 –
Lost Property, by Laura Beatty 174 3.00 4 –
Stormtide, by Den Patrick 331 4.02 1 –
In The Slip, by FD Lee 32 4.00 3 –
Stillicide, by Cynan Jones 8 4.00 12 3.25
Rise, by Kim Lakin-Smith 19 3.67 4 –
Celebrity Werewolf, by Andrew Wallace 13 4.67 4 –
The Best of Us, by Karen Traviss 395 4.45 – –
Big Red, by Damien Larkin 53 4.56 – –
The Community, by Joe Hakim 7 3.33 – –

I've bolded the top quartile of each column. Only two books get four our of four – The Ten Thousand Doors of January and Gideon the Ninth.

Weird that no LibraryThing users at all have so far picked up Karen Traviss's The Best of Us. Its Goodreads owners seem to like it.

Just for comparison, last year's winner was 16th out of 45 on the corresponding ranking of the 2018 long list27th place of 48, and the 2016 winner 26th out of 34, So this tabel is of limited predictive value.

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August 2004 books

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I spent most of August 2004 on holiday, but this was also the moment that I set my long-laid plans to join the cabinet of one of the new members of the European Commission in motion. (Those plans failed.) I also set up and publicised my Interactive Language Quiz, based on the instructions from a McDonald's toy. While on holiday we published reports on Macedonia and Georgia, and I had an op-ed on the Macedonian local government reform plans (rather a good one, if I say so myself). Once I got back to work, my new intern, K, a Slovenian, arrived. The month ended with me doing an RTÉ interview on the tenth anniversary of the IRA ceasefire with Albert Reynolds and John Hume – sadly, Hume was already showing his illness. (I saw him in person in Brussels a few days later in early September and drew the same conclusion.)

Cute picture: young F, recently turned 5, trying his hand at archery.

I took advantage of the holiday to read 18 books.

Non-fiction: 4 (YTD 30)
The Political Animal, by Jeremy Paxman
The Revolution of America, by Guillaume Thomas François Raynal
Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, by Niall Ferguson
Mother Tongue, by Bill Bryson

Non-genre: 4 (YTD 11)
The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Don Quixote (part 1), by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
The Accusers, by Lindsey Davies
Scandal Takes a Holiday, by Lindsey Davies

Scripts: 1 (YTD 1)
Hard To Swallow, by John Dowie, illustrated by Hunt Emerson

Poetry: 1 (YTD 1)
Lucky Dip, by Ruth Ainsworth

SF: 8 (YTD 49)
The Year of Our War, by Steph Swainston
Felaheen, by John Courtenay Grimwood
Beyond Infinity, by Gregory Benford
After the King: Stories in Honour of J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. Martin H. Greenberg and Jane Yolen
Way Station, by Clifford D. Simak
The Demolished Man, by Alfred P. Bester
Year's Best SF 21, ed. Gardner Dozois
The Dream Millennium, by James White

5,200 pages (YTD 32,100)
5/18 by women (YTD 24/96)
none by PoC (YTD 1/96)

Links above to my reviews, two of three links below to Amazon.

Lots of good books this month, but I'm picking out two quirky ones that stick in my mind: the Abbé Raynal's penetrating analysis of the newly founded United States, which you can get for free here, and Jon Courtenay Grimwood's Felaheen, which you can get here. Least favourite book of the month: tremendously disappointed by Lindsay Davis' The Accusers