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Tuesday reading

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Current
The Calculating Stars, by Mary Robinette Kowal
The TARDIS Handbook, by Steve Tribe
Feersum Endjinn, by Iain M Banks

Last books finished
The Cruel Prince, by Holly Black
A Sunless Sea by Anne Perry
Dark Lord of Derkholm, by Diana Wynne Jones
The Good Doctor, by Juno Dawson
Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing, by Ursula K. Le Guin with David Naimon
Animate Europe Plus, by David Shaw, Marta Okrasko, Juliana Penkova, Bruno Cordoba and Paul Rietzl

Next books
The Ginger Man, by J. P. Donleavy
Bland Ambition, by Steve Tally

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The Day She Saved the Doctor, by Jacqueline Rayner, Jenny T. Colgan, Susan Calman, Dorothy Koomson

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Second paragraph of third story (“Clara and the Maze of Cui Palta”, by Susan Calman):

Clara sighed heavily, turned to face him, placed her hands very deliberately on her hips and spoke in a tone that warned of impending annoyance. ‘What? Why do you keep staring at me? Have I grown a horn from the middle of my forehead?’

Four pretty good stories, two by established Who writers Jacqueline Rayner and Jenny T. Colgan (Colgan of course much better known for her other writing) and two by established writers who are new to the Whoniverse (Susan Calman and Dorothy Koomson), each featuring a companion (Sarah Jane, Rose, Clara, Bill) who makes a crucial difference to the plot. My favourite was the Twelve-and-Bill story, “Bill and the Three Jackets” by Dorothy Koomson, which had a neat bit of identity-swapping and body horror tying into Bill’s own back story; I’ll look out for more of her work. You can get them all here.

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De Terugkeer van de Wespendief (The Return of the Honey Buzzard), by Aimée de Jongh

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Third page:


Second frame: "For God's sake, Laura!"
Third frame: "Why won't you listen to me?"

This won the Prix St-Michel for Best Dutch-language Album of 2015, and I hunted it down to broaden my knowledge. (Actually I've found it rather difficult to track down other winners, apart from Amoras vol 1 and De Maagd en de Neger.)

It's the story of Simon, a failing bookseller who witnesses a woman committing suicide on the train line in the Biesbosch near his storage cabin. The experience brings back his memories of the death of a childhood friend who had been bullied at school; he also gets entangled with a young student who is researching magical realism, while his wife Laura continues to press him to close the family store for good. The art is nicely done and well observed; the plot doesn't quite deliver, but it is an interesting journey. You can get the original here and the English translation here.

This was my top unread non-English language comic. Next on that list is De Amusement, by Brecht Evens.

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On the Waterfront, by Malcolm Johnson

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Whole truckloads of cargo disappear from the piers without a trace. Hijackers take their toll from shipments en route to and from the piers. Casual pilferage by individual thieves, awaiting only opportunity, sends the loss totals higher, but this form of theft is negligible compared with the highly organized stealing by the gangs. And here again the key to the business is thorough control of the union labor by the mobsters in power on the piers. They dictate the hiring of union members and see to it that the “right men” get the important jobs. The right men in most instances are members of the mob, usually ex-convicts.

Of all the material I’ve looked at which was adapted to Oscar-winning movies, this is the most altered in the adaptation. It’s not that surprising, really; the original material was a series of factual newspaper articles in the New York Sun in 1947 and 1948 about organised crime and the dock industry. In itself it is interesting enough. It’s a classic example of investigative journalism which does not hesitate to name names (though presumably some names are left out); it’s not a broad survey of social conditions on the docks, it’s a very specific investigation of how the shipping industry was being extorted by the leadership of the International Longshoremen’s Union, and the difficulties faced by the authorities in chasing them down. The cost of this extortion was, of course, passed on to the consumer, and the profits went directly to the union leadership, who forced the workers to compete for their small cut of the available labour.

The film of course must tell its own narrative, but I found it striking how little of the wider political context made it to the screen. Johnson’s journalism makes it clear how many of the criminal bosses got their start in the days of Prohibition (less distant in 1948 than Bill Clinton’s presidency is now), and the extent to which they were able to control local police forces. There is a particularly memorable chapter where leading mobster John Dunn got some mid-ranking army officers to intercede for him with the Parole Commission to insist on his early release from jail in 1943, only for Mayor LaGuardia to alert Henry Stimson, the Secretary of War, who put a stop to it. (It’s not in Johnson’s book, but it came out many years later that Dunn and his mobster colleagues had in fact been paid informants of the Office of Naval Intelligence, which was obviously interested in anything political going on in such a sensitive economic chokepoint.)

I also found it striking that Hoboken, where the film is so memorably set, was not the centre of the main action of the ILA up and down the West Side of Manhattan – though the Jersey side certainly doesn’t go unmentioned. From the film you would almost think that the docks were restricted to Hudson County. The book makes it clear what a big deal the docks were (and still are); New York Harbour was then the world’s busiest port, seeing about a quarter of all imports into the USA. (Nowadays it’s not even in the top 20 worldwide, and beaten by both South Louisiana and Houston in the USA, but there’s still a lot going on.)

Anyway, this is all something of a historical curiosity. The power of the ILA was broken in 1953, before the film came out, by the creation of the Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor, which has inevitably developed its own problems with corruption; New Jersey is attempting to extricate itself from it (though has not yet succeeded). Father Corridan, the model for Father Barry in the film, gets a lot of the good lines. The actual union members themselves who successfully went on strike against their own leadership don’t get quite so much coverage, which is perhaps rather telling.

Anyway, mainly of interest to people who want a microstudy of a particular moment of American crime and labour hitory, or to aspiring film buffs like myself. You can get it here.

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 Eighty 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)

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Troll Bridge, by Neil Gaiman and Colleen Doran

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Third page:

I've read at least two collections that include this story (Angels and Visitations and Smoke and Mirrors) but it hadn't particularly lingered in my memory. Now it definitely will, as Colleen Doran's intense and detailed illustrations bring it to life – a brief tale about growing up and how it's not all it's cracked up to be, combined with a monster under the bridge. (Ah, but who is really the monster?) She successfully catches the narrator as a boy, a teenager and a grown man, with the changes of time to the physical and personal landscape around him. It's a grim story rather than a happy one, and Colleen Doran makes it all the more vivid. You can get it here.

This was my top unread English-language comic. Next on that pile is Will Supervillains Be on the Final?: Liberty Vocational Volume 1, by Naomi Novik and Yishan Li.

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Tuesday and April Books

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Books finished in the last week
Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth, ed. Catherine McIlwaine
The Weather on Versimmon, by Matthew Griffiths
Alarums and Excursions: Improvising Politics on the European Stage, by Luuk van Middelaar

April Books

Non-fiction: 7 (YTD 14)
Publishing and the Science Fiction Canon: The Case of Scientific Romance, by Adam Roberts
Dungeons & Dragons Art & Arcana: A Visual History, by Michael Witwer, Kyle Newman, Jon Peterson and Sam Witwer
On the Waterfront, by Malcolm Johnson
The Botany of Desire, by Michael Pollan
Doctor Who Episode Guide, by Mark Campbell
Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth, ed. Catherine McIlwaine
Alarums and Excursions: Improvising Politics on the European Stage, by Luuk van Middelaar

Fiction (non-sf): 2 (YTD 9)
A Little Life, by Hanya Yanagihara
Daniel Deronda, by George Eliot

sf (non-Who): 7 (YTD 22)
Time Was, by Ian McDonald
The Land of Somewhere Safe, by Hal Duncan
Embers of War, by Gareth Powell
Phosphorus, by Liz Williams
Exit Strategy, by Martha Wells
Spinning Silver, by Naomi Novik
Dread Nation, by Justina Ireland

Doctor Who, etc: 3 (YTD 7)
Combat Magicks, by Steve Cole
The Day She Saved the Doctor, by Jacqueline Rayner, Jenny T. Colgan, Susan Calman and Dorothy Koomson
The Weather on Versimmon, by Matthew Griffiths

Comics 3 (YTD 5)
On A Sunbeam, by Tillie Walden
Troll Bridge, by Neil Gaiman and Colleen Doran
De Terugkeer van de Wespendief, by Aimée de Jongh

6,700 pages (YTD 17,700)
11/22 (YTD 23/58) by non-male writers (McIlwaine, Yanagihara, “Eliot”, Williams, Wells, Novik, Ireland, Rayner et al, Walden, Doran, de Jongh)
3/22 (YTD 7/58) by PoC (Yanagihara, Ireland, Koomson)
0 rereads (YTD 2/58)

Reading now
Dark Lord of Derkholm, by Diana Wynne Jones
A Sunless Sea by Anne Perry
The Cruel Prince, by Holly Black
The Good Doctor, by Juno Dawson

Coming soon (perhaps):
Feersum Endjinn, by Iain M Banks
The Ginger Man, by J. P. Donleavy
Bland Ambition, by Steve Tally
Nebula Awards Showcase 2011, ed. Kevin J. Anderson
Sovereign by R.M. Meluch
Will Supervillains Be On The Final?, by Naomi Novik, art by Yishan Li
Five Women Who Loved Love, by Ihara Saikaku
The Paying Guests, by Sarah Waters
In Another Light, by Andrew Greig
Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney, by Dennis O'Driscoll
Becoming, by Michelle Obama
“Goat Song”, by Poul Anderson
The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Graham
1913: The World before the Great War, by Charles Emmerson
The Making and Remaking of the Good Friday Agreement, by Paul Bew
Better Than Sex, by Hunter S. Thompson
Het Amusement, by Brecht Evens
Grimm Tales, by Philip Pullman
The Ghosts of Heaven, by Marcus Sedgwick
The Slender-fingered Cats of Bubastis, by Xanna Eve Chown

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Daniel Deronda, by George Eliot

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

But this blessed persistence in which affection can take root had been wanting in Gwendolen’s life. It was only a year before her recall from Leubronn that Offendene had been chosen as her mamma’s home, simply for its nearness to Pennicote Rectory, and that Mrs. Davilow, Gwendolen, and her four half-sisters (the governess and the maid following in another vehicle) had been driven along the avenue for the first time, on a late October afternoon when the rooks were crawing loudly above them, and the yellow elm-leaves were whirling.

Way back in the summer of 2002 we visited a friend who was living at Chilworth Manor near Guildford. The BBC were filming the TV version of Daniel Deronda there – Chilworth Manor was playing the part of Offendene – but it was the weekend so nobody from the film crewwas there. While we weren't looking, five-year-old B opened and played with the BBC's cans of paint, and had great fun. It was a memorable afternoon…

Anyway, I was inspired to get this, not by an embarrassing afternoon in Surrey in 2002, but by reading F.R. Leavis' The Great Tradition many years later, in which Leavis says that half of Daniel Deronda is really good, however it's not the half with Daniel Deronda but the other half, about the novel's heroine Gwendolen. To be honest I disagree. I thought that both stories were pretty good. Gwendolen, like several other George Eliot characters, marries the wrong man for reason that seem to her right at the time (and that the reader can clearly understand) but which are obviously doomed to failure. It's a story told well, but I actually found the Middlemarch version more compelling. (I guess because Dorothea is a nicer person than Gwendolen.) Meanwhile Daniel Deronda finds himself on a quest for his own roots, and ends up as an early Zionist having started the book unaware that he was even Jewish. I found that absolutely fascinating; Zionism in the 1870s was obviously a very different phenomenon from its later permutations. Deronda's awakening does depend on a coulpe of lucky coincidences, but great stories are often told about unlikely events. I'll give a shout out for the three mothers in the books as well – Deronda's mother, who makes a late but spectacular appearance; Gwendolen's mother, who is smarter than her children realise; and Mrs Glasher, the mother of Gwendolen's husband's children, who we see from several different perspectives. (Mrs Glasher is also Irish, though this is stated only once and obliquely.) Both halves of it are a great book, if a long one. You can get it here.

This was both the top unread non-sf fiction book on my pile and the top unread book by a woman. The next on both counts is The Paying Guests, by Sarah Waters.

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A Little Life, by Hanya Yanagihara

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

So they didn’t mind JB deciding for them, not in this case. They figured they could accommodate twenty-five people comfortably, or forty uncomfortably. “So make it forty,” said JB, promptly, as they’d known he would, but later, back at their apartment, they wrote up a list of just twenty, and only their and Malcolm’s friends, knowing that JB would invite more people than were allotted him, extending invitations to friends and friends of friends and not-even friends and colleagues and bartenders and shop clerks, until the place grew so dense with bodies that they could open all the windows to the night air and still not dispel the fog of heat and smoke that would inevitably accumulate.

I was in Croatia a few years ago and was given such a strong recommendation for this novel that I bought it on Kindle on the spot; however it took a while before I actually got around to reading it. It's a tough read but a very good one. It starts off as the story of four friends sharing a New York apartment, JB, Malcolm, Willem and Jude; but then it zooms in on Jude, who has overcome a horrible childhood of sexual and physical abuse to become a top lawyer – who still self-harms and will never really get better. Jude's frustration with his own limitations often cuts him off from his friends and those who love him; the whole scenario is delicately and sympathetically observed. At some length – the book is over 700 pages, all meticulously judged. I was interested to see Gillian Anderson recommending it too, so if you don't believe me, believe her. Strongly recommended. You can get it here.

This was both the top unread book on my pile by a writer of colour, and my top unread book acquired in 2016. Next respectively on those lists are Five Women Who Loved Love, by Ihara Saikaku, and Better Than Sex, by Hunter S. Thompson.

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Combat Magicks, by Steve Cole

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

"What's the panic?" asked Ryan. "Who's Attila the Hun?"

The two best episodes of last year's Doctor Who series were the two historical settings which are up for the Hugo this year; here, Steve Cole takes the Tardis crew to a less well known historical moment, the conflict between Attila the Hun and the Roman general Flavius Ætius which culminated in the Battle of the Catalaunian Fields in 451, near what is now Troyes in France. As it turns out, there are aliens involved as well as human factions; the Tardis crew get split up four ways – to facilitate the plot of course, but it also gives Cole a chance to show off his grasp of detail in the setting and the characterisation. Cole is one of the most prolific Who writers, and I felt he was well on form. You can get the book here.

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Faustus Kelly, by Flann O’Brien

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Opening of Act III:

Four weeks later.
The scene is the same save that the room is in a far more advanced state of disorder with posters, stationery, banners, flags and all manner of electioneering paraphernalia. A clock shows that it is about nine in the evening. The curtains are drawn.
MARGARET is sitting disconsolately alone on the sofa, which is facing the audience towards the left of the stage. KELLY is listening on the phone, bending over a small table towards the right. There is complete silence for a few seconds after the curtain goes up.
KELLY: What? What?
(MARGARET sighs and passes her hand wearily across her brow.)
KELLY: (Eagerly.) Yes. Yes, yes! Good, good. Excellent. Yes? (He pauses to listen.)
MARGARET: What does he say?
KELLY: (Holding up his hand to silence her.) Are you sure of that? WHAT? (He listens.) Good! Ring me up later. I SAID RING ME UP LATER! Goodbye!
(He bangs down the phone and turns to MARGARET, gleefully rubbing his hands.)
KELLY: Margaret, Margaret, I’m nearly home and dried. I’m nearly home and dried! (He flops down on the sofa beside her and takes her hand.) I’m nearly home, Margaret.
MARGARET: (Dejectedly.) That’s good news.

I read this as potential education for this year's Retro Hugo Awards; since it ran for 11 performances in the Abbey Theatre, it would have been eligible in one of the Best Dramatic Presentation categories, but it was not at all clear which one. In the end I concluded that it would have been well over 90 minutes in length; the pagecount is somewhat more than Noel Coward's Cavalcade, which was cut from a three-hour stage script to make a film almost two hours in length, and about two thirds that of Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird which was four and a half hours long when first performed. So I reckon Faustus Kelly would take the guts of three hours to perform. However, Hugo voters did not support it in sufficient strength to make tjhis a live issue.

I'm a huge Flann O'Brien fan, but this is not his best work. There are two jokes: the chairman of the local council, Kelly, sells his soul to the Devil, who in turn finds that the ins and outs of local Irish politics are too much for him. And there is the realtionship between Kelly and Margaret, who is clearly his girlfriend, but whose very Anglicised brother retorns from England to fight the election against him. There are a lot of good turns of phrase, but fans will have come across all the best bits elsewhere.

Apparently he was deeply upset by the play's commercial failure, which of course came soon after all the unsold copies of At Swim-Two-Birds were destroyed in a London air-raid and The Third Policeman was rejected by Longmans. Later in 1943, he carried out the most gruelling assignment of his professional career, the inquiry into the Cavan Orphanage fire which took place only a short time after Faustus Kelly closed. Another play also failed in 1943 (Rhapsody in Stephen's Green, an adaptation of the Insect Play by Josef and Karel Čapek). He was fired from the civil service in 1953 and did not publish another book until 1961, by which time the end was in sight.

Anyway, I read this as part of the Plays and Teleplays collection, which you can get here.

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Present Danger, ed. Eddie Robson

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Second paragraph of third story (“Six Impossible Things”, by Simon Guerrier):

He lay on the cool, hard floor, waiting for someone to make the obvious gag that their luck would have to change sometime. But no-one spoke and he couldn’t hear them breathing. Just across from where he lay, something stank of burning flesh and plastic.

A collection of Bernice Summerfield short stories, set in the middle of Season 11 of the Big Finish audio adventures, which I don’t seem to have written up and can’t now remember much about. The two audio stories that bracket the collection are both by Eddie Robson, who provides the framing narrative as well for Present Danger.

The premise is that the galaxy is under attack from the time-travelling Deindum, and the book fills the space between the appearance of the alien aggressors at the end of Resurrecting the Past and the fightback in Escaping the Future. Since I had missed out on the context, the stories and collection did not work all that well for me, though there are some nice flashes – the cave museum in Kate Orman’s “Don’t Do Something, Just Sit There”, and Braxiatel’s use of time travel and recorded history in Lance Parkin’s “Winging It”. But really I need to catch up on the Bernice Summerfield audio thread a bit more systematically.

You can get this collection here. Next up is The Weather on Versimmon, a novel by Matthew Griffiths, set during the Road Trip stories which I do remember listening to.

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Tuesday reading

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Current
Dark Lord of Derkholm, by Diana Wynne Jones
A Sunless Sea by Anne Perry

Last books finished
The Botany of Desire, by Michael Pollan
Spinning Silver, by Naomi Novik
The Day She Saved the Doctor, by Jacqueline Rayner, Jenny T. Colgan, Susan Calman and Dorothy Koomson
Dread Nation, by Justine Ireland
Doctor Who Episode Guide, by Mark Campbell

Next books
Feersum Endjinn, by Iain M Banks
The Ginger Man, by J. P. Donleavy

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The Capital, by Robert Menasse

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Es sollte tatsächlich der Tag werden, an dem er Abschied nehmen musste. Er dachte, es wäre der Bauch. Sein großer Blähbauch drückte gegen seine Lunge und presste sie zusammen, so empfand er es und er meinte, dass das der Grund für seine Atemnot wäre, die immer wieder wie ein Seufzen klang. The day would surely come when he would have to take his leave. He thought it would be his stomach. His large potbelly was pressing against his lungs, forcing them together. That was what it felt like and he supposed it was the reason for his breathlessness, which sounded again and again like a sigh.

This novel by an Austrian writer took German-speaking Brussels by storm last year, and hasn't quite had the same impact on English-speaking Brussels (or French-speaking Brussels) since it came out in translation earlier this year. It's a multi-stranded story of Commission officials, Brussels people and visitors, with a mixture of sardonic humour and grim observation of the miseries of the human condition. The central plotline concerns an initiative to commemorate the anniversary of the European Union in Auschwitz, the people who promote it and the poeople who kill it off; this is combined with a peculiar subplot about a runaway pig. A lot of the bureaucratic personalities are well observed, and there are some great set-pieces – the cyclists ganging together on the morning run, the think-tank conference, the graveyard.

Menasse is of course a controversialist, and has taken flak for inventing quotes from Walter Hallstein, the first President of the European Commission. To a certain extent I think that you are entitled to put things in novels that are not actually true, but he has apparently also included them in supposedly non-fictional texts, which is less praiseworthy. The pig-trading strand of the book is based on a total misinterpretation of EU agricultural trade rules. Much more trivially, the book is set after the 2016 Brexit referendum, but has the European Policy Centre still at its former location in the Residence Palace, rather than Rue de Trône where it’s been since 2015.

I think it appeals more to the German/Austrian sense of humour, and at the end I was slightly wondering what the point was. But there are few enough novels looking at European Brussels in anything more than cliche, so it's welcome from that point of view. You can get it here.

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My tweets

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