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Duolingo – how it worked out

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A bit over a year ago I blogged about my experiences with Duolingo, the language-learning app. At that point I had been trying it only with Irish and Dutch; the system gives you sentences to translate and other exercises, some of which are rather amusing.

Dutch

The Dutch course in particular displays a bit of a fixation.

     
It would occasionally also lapse into conteporary post-Brexit politics:
And tautology:
And surrealism.
 
Though on Valentine's Day, it was a bit more relevant.

Irish

Meanwhile on the day of the Assembly election in March, the Irish course, whether by accident or design, had several relevant exercises:

   
At other times it had geographical/linguistic observations:
But also the occasional existential sigh:
 

Russian

On top of Irish and Dutch, I also picked up the Russian course as well. It has a distinct twist towards not only the surreal but even the fantasic.

           
Which of course leads to the only question that matters (formal Вы on the left, informal Ты on the right):
 
There is also a certain amount of contamination from the Dutch course to the Russian and Irish courses:
 

Well, it was all good fun – and I did the French and German courses too – but after about a year of it I realised that I had very definitely stalled, and Duolingo had got me to particular levels in all five languages – which in the case of French, Dutch and German was not a lot ahead of where I already was – and would get me no further. In particular, although I got to the stage where I had actually finished the Irish course, with all 60-odd exercises gratifyingly completed, my Irish remains in terrible shape. My basic vocabulary is somewhat improved, but my instinct for the grammar is still pretty poor, and I remain baffled by eclipsis and lenition. I think my Russian benefited a bit more from the experiment than my Irish did – the course is more substantial. (I also completed the French and German courses, which were a lot less surreal; my Dutch is still better than either, though Duolingo did not seem to think so.)

So I've gone back to reading on the train, and listening to Doctor Who audios as I walk from home to station and station to work, and so far this year I have finished reading 14 books and it's only January 13th. So you'll see more bookblogging this year, and no more Duolingo screenshots.

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Who Killed Kennedy, by James Stevens and David Bishop

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

The nation seemed to stand still during the special broadcasts, as the Recovery 7 craft was sent into space to link up with Mars Probe 7. City streets were virtually empty and cinemas complained of a massive drop in attendances. They blamed the Mars Probe crisis – why should people go to the cinema to see simulated drama when the real thing was being beamed directly into their homes 24 hours a day? The event turned presenter John Wakefield into a television star overnight as his intelligent and thoughtful commentary gave simple explanations to the complex manoeuvrings going on behind the scenes.

When I first read this in 2007, I wrote:

An unusual spinoff novel this: investigative journalist James Stevens (fictional, though listed on the cover as a co-author) decides to write up The Truth about UNIT and the mysterious set of individuals going by the code name of “The Doctor”. He ends up playing a very “Rosencrantz and Guidenstern are dead” role, as the man on the far end of the Brigadier’s yelling at journalists in seasons 7 and 8; and Bishop explores what the TV adventures would have looked like from the outside point of view – how the authorities would have covered it all up. Dodo comes into the picture because the very first Doctor Who story set in the “present day”, The War Machines, sees her brainwashed and written out of the series by being sent to the countryside to recuperate. Who Killed Kennedy? picks up her tragic story from several years later. Bishop describes her as “a late addition to the cast of the [book] and was originally only going to appear in [one] chapter, passing on information to Stevens. But once she appeared on the page Dodo wanted to stick around. It’s a strange experience when a character takes charge of their own destiny while you’re writing and Dodo was the first time this had happened to me.” Certainly the relationship between Dodo and the narrator is a core element of the story, in a way that (as the author admits in his on-line notes) the actual assassination of JFK, which is after all the title, is not. Some would probably accuse this novel of too much “fanwank”, ie obsessive references to continuity with the TV series, but I think that would be unfair; Bishop is actually doing something very different here, telling familiar stories from a different angle, and I think it largely works.

His commentary and notes for the online publication of the book seemed to me more engaging than any others I have read. I wonder if this is because Bishop, a native Kiwi, was writing for the New Zealand Doctor Who Fan Club, rather than for the BBC

I would add that although the actual Kennedy assassination itself is rather detached from the plot, Bishop successfully applies the same narrator-as-observer approach to it as he did to the 1970s in Doctor Who canon.

Bishop has now rewritten the last chapter (still available on the New Zealand Doctor Who fan Club website) to give the book a different (and happier) ending, bringing in the Twelfth Doctor to enable the dénouement. I agree with him that it works better now.

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Lincoln in the Bardo, by George Saunders

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Second snippet from third chapter:

A clear sightline could not be obtained for the crush; one moved dazed through a veritable bazaar of scents, colognes, perfumes, fans, hairpieces, hats, grimacing faces, mouths held open in sudden shrieks, whether joyful or terrified it was difficult to say.

In “All This Did I See: Memories of a Terrible Time,” by Mrs. Margaret Garrett.

This has already won the 2017 Man Booker Prize, and ought to make a few of this year’s sf lists as well. It’s set in 1862, in the immediate aftermath of the death of President Lincoln’s 11-year-old son, with the main thrust of the narrative being reflections from the ghosts of others who are buried nearby – most of them in denial about their own deaths, sure that they are merely sick – interleavened with quotes from historical sources, some genuine, some invented (the latter includes “All This Did I See: Memories of a Terrible Time,” by Mrs. Margaret Garrett). I thought it was really well done; often stories about the afterlife end up being twee or incoherent, but Saunders has set up a weird situation and exploited it well, mainly for emotional impact but also with some reflections on race and social class, and on the enigmatic character of President Lincoln. There are some points where he misses the right words for the 1860’s, but one has to make allowances. Get it here.

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Three Fifth Doctor audios: Moonflesh, Tomb Ship and Masquerade

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As part of my gradual catching up with Big Finish audios, these are three main sequence releases from 2014, all starring Peter Davison as the Fifth Doctor, Sarah Sutton as Nyssa, and Francesca Hunt (India Fisher's half-sister) as temporary companion Hannah Bartholomew.


The first of these, Moonflesh by Mark Morris was the last BF audio I wrote up before I got out of that habit. I wrote then:

Oh dear. There are some nice ideas in this Fifth Doctor / Nyssa audio; a country-house story in the same style as Black Orchid and The Unicorn and the Wasp, an alien which turns out to be a bit different from what we might have expected. But the guest characters are total cliches, including in particular Silver Crow, a mystical Native American played by a white English actor – that’s the worst, though the doomed lesbian is pretty facepalming as well. The cast give it their best, but this should have been looked at more carefully before it was made.

I liked it a bit more on second listening, but I don’t think it’s a brilliant start to the arc. I will say that the cast give it a decent push – Tim Bentinck (more recently a monk in TV story Extremis / The Pyramid at the End of the World, here proudly on the front cover), Hugh Fraser and indeed Francesca Hunt, whose character turns out not to be doomed after all. Just to add one important detail – set in 1911.


Tomb Ship, by Gordon Rennie and Emma Beeby, has one brilliant idea and one brilliant guest performance, and that makes it the best of these three. (I think it would work as a standalone too, as Hannah only appears rather late in the day.) It’s the old storyline of explorers daring to tamper with a curséd tomb, except that the tomb is a pyramid in deep space (soundscape very well done), and the explorers have their own horrifying secret which only gradually becomes apparent. There is perhaps not quite enough plot for four episodes, but Eve Karpf is a real delight as the matriarch in control of the tomb raiders.


Masquerade, by Stephen Cole, starts off in a French château in 1770 and ends up somewhere else entirely. So does Hannah Bartholomew, who leaves the Tardis crew at the end in such a way that she’s unlikely to return. There’s a lot of good ideas here, with I felt slightly flawed execution – the awful threat didn’t quite come across as sufficiently dreadful, and the linkage between 1770 and What Was Really Going On didn’t quite work for me. Still, I may not have been paying enough attention, and the whole thing rounds off the trilogy suitably.

I felt that none of the three plays really stretched Davison or Sutton very much – they are both really good when pushed, but in all three cases they were more or less slotted into their usual roles here, apart from the first episode of Masquerade.

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L’Équation Africaine, by Yasmina Khadra [Mohammed Moulessehoul]

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

La première nuit, j’ai fait un rêve : j’étais sur un arbre en train de couper une branche avec une scie. En bas, ma mère jouait avec un medecine-ball orange. Ce n’était qu’une petite fille aux cheveux d’or, mais dans le rêve, c’était ma mère. Elle courait après le ballon en fredonnant une ritournelle. Soudain, elle s’est arrêtée de taper dans le ballon. Il y a eu un silence bizarre. Ma mère avait du sang qui gouttait sur sa tête, sur ses épaules nues, à ses pieds. Elle a levé les yeux sur l’arbre, et elle a blêmi : Kurt, a-t-elle hurlé, qu’est-ce que tu fais ?… J’ai porté mon attention sur ce que j’étais en train de faire, et je me suis aperçu que ce n’était pas la branche que je sciais, mais mon bras… Une douleur fulgurante m’a réveillé : mes chaînes s’étaient enfoncées dans mes poignets à les cisailler. On the first night, I had a dream: I was on a tree cutting a branch with a saw. Below, my mother was playing with an orange medicine ball. She was only a little girl with golden hair, but in the dream she was my mother. She was running after the ball and humming a tune. Suddenly she stopped hitting the ball. There was a strange silence. Blood was gushing from the top of my mother’s head, over her bare shoulders, and down to her feet. She looked up at the tree and turned white. Kurt, she cried, what are you doing? … I shifted my attention to what I was doing, and realised it wasn’t the branch I was sawing off, but my arm … A sudden pain woke me; my chains were digging so hard into my wrists, they’d almost cut them.

The lovely Helen gave me this as a Christmas present in the original French, and I have to admit that I enjoyed the first section a lot but realised my language skills were not up to it, and retreated to an English translation. It’s the story of a German doctor, dismayed by his wife’s suicide, who sets off on a long sail journey with a friend; they are kidnapped by pirates and he ends up, after numerous rather horrible adventures, in a refugee camp in Darfur, where eventually he is rescued; but he finds that he cannot find peace in Frankfurt, and returns to Africa.

There are a couple of whopping big problems with it that require some suspension of disbelief. The pirates who capture the narrator and his friend are surprisingly eloquent for a bunch of militia. (One of them turns out to be a published poet, but the others are not.) The path from the Gulf of Aden to Darfur is politically implausible and geographically weak – there is no mention of the River Nile, which flows firmly across any conceivable route and is rather hard to miss. While Darfur is not exactly lush, it’s not as desertified as portrayed here either. The parts of the book in Frankfurt seem a bit more grounded in local knowledge.

Of course, “Khadra” (in real life Mohammed Moulessehoul, using his wife’s name as a pseudonym) is Algerian, and I suspect that some of the scenes of violence and indeed of refugee camps are more closely drawn from experience and knowledge of his home country rather than places further to the east or south. And certainly I’ve met militia leaders with literary pretensions, and even white Frenchmen who have adopted African-ness as a new identity like the character Bruno. So if you can swallow the implausibilities it’s an interesting narrative.

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Monday reading

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It’s a new year, so a new day of the week.

Current
An Old Captivity, by Nevil Shute
Quoth the Raven, by Jane Haddam

Last books finished
It Can't Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis
L’Équation Africaine, by Yasmina Khadra
Who Killed Kennedy: The Shocking Secret Linking a Time Lord and a President, by “James Stevens” [David Bishop]
Lincoln in the Bardo, by George Saunders
The Fall of Hyperion, by Dan Simmons
Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, by Jane Hirshfield
Orlando, by Virginia Woolf
"Gonna Roll the Bones" by Fritz Leiber
The Talons of Weng-Chiang, script by Robert Holmes
Ys de Legende: v 1 Verraad, by Jean-Luc Istin and Dejan Nenadov

Next books
The Story of General Dann and Mara’s Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog, by Doris Lessing
Providence, Act 1, by Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows
The Tree of Life, by Mark Michalowski

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It Can’t Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

But Isaiah College has come up in the world today – excepting educationally- for in 1931 it held the Dartmouth football team down to 64 to 36.

My first book of 2018 – a near future history of a far-right takeover in the USA in the mid-1930s, which of course seems all too relevant today. Buzz Windrip, a populist governor who is clearly related to the real-life Huey Long, displaces Franklin Roosevelt as the Democratic candidate in 1936 and wins the election on a platform of guaranteeing every man a basic income, unless they are black in which case they get a maximum income, and basically making America great again. Within days of his inauguration, he removes Congress and the Supreme Court and rules supreme. Like Hitler, Windrip co-opts partners on the way up and casually tosses them aside once he has got there. Meanwhile, repression of anyone who resists or criticises the regime becomes the state’s most visible interaction with its citizens. The only thing missing is genocide, though the treatment of black Americans comes close. The hero is Vermont liberal journalist Doremus Jessup, whose family and lover feel the brunt of the new regime at first hand; he endures a hellish time in a prison camp before escaping and joining the resistance as the regime crumbles.

Obviously one looks for parallels to the current US situation. It’s not as bad as Lewis’s world. Most notably, there is no militia out there employing violence to further the president’s agenda. Congress and the Supreme Court may be pretty awful, but they are not under White House control either. Windrip’s master of propaganda, Lee Sarason, becomes Secretary of State and then displaces him completely, whereas Steve Bannon has now been relegated to the outer darkness. Basically the Trump administration is nothing like as competent as the Windrip administration – also of course nothing like as popular; Windrip wins the election handsomely whereas Trump lost the popular vote.

I read Main Street more than a decade ago and really enjoyed it; this was excellent also. Get it here.

This was the most popular book I acquired in 2017. Next on that list is The Island Of Doctor Moreau, by H.G. Wells.

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BSFA long list: Goodreads/LibraryThing stats

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The BSFA Award long lists are out!

This is the third year of the three-stage process, similar to the one which was rejected (as I hoped it would be) by WSFS for the Hugos at last year’s Worldcon. It works better for the BSFA. First, because there are far fewer categories – only four, compared to 18 for last year’s Hugos (and 19 for this year’s) – which makes the demands on voters much less. Second, it is only a matter of voting positively for stuff you like rather than for or against particular candidates. I think there are still problems – a glance at the table below will demonstrate that some works can get on the ballot despite being near-invisible to the wider public – but it spices up the process considerably.

The table below shows the 48 novels on the BSFA long-list, ranked by their combined Goodreads and Librarything ownerships. I have listed the number of owners on each system, and the average rating by those who have rated them; and I have bolded the top quartile in each column (ie the top twelve, except for the last column where there are a number of null returns and it’s only the top ten).

This doesn’t have tremendous predictive power about the outcome of the BSFA voting. Last year’s long list had 34 novels; the finalists ranked 9th, 23rd, 26th, 28th and 29th on my equivalent table. In 2016 the finalists were 19th, 22nd, 27th, 41st and 44th out of 57 (my table was less complete but ranked on the same system).

Still, it’s a guide of sorts to which books have been getting buzz, and might therefore figure on other final ballots this year.

Goodreads LibraryThing
owners av rating owners av rating
Andy Weir – Artemis 167277 3.73 651 3.59
Katherine Arden – The Bear and the Nightingale 125245 4.14 763 4.16
Mohsin Hamid – Exit West 116349 3.82 792 3.95
Omar El Akkad – American War 56496 3.87 460 3.87
John Scalzi – The Collapsing Empire 39852 4.1 438 3.89
Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland – The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. 32443 3.93 414 3.66
Mark Lawrence – Red Sister 54808 4.31 162 4.14
Kim Stanley Robinson – New York 2140 18919 3.61 306 3.72
Ann Leckie – Provenance 17527 3.9 223 3.97
Mur Lafferty – Six Wakes 16578 3.86 221 3.96
Daryl Gregory – Spoonbenders 20641 4 144 3.93
Kameron Hurley – The Stars Are Legion 15591 3.72 162 3.52
Peter V Brett – The Core 24240 4.23 88 4
Nicholas Eames – Kings of the Wyld 17792 4.4 97 3.83
Jaroslav Kalfař – Spaceman of Bohemia 7824 3.89 97 4.15
Ada Palmer – Seven Surrenders 6067 4.2 117 4.14
Yoon Ha Lee – Raven Stratagem 5709 4.23 120 4.2
Frances Hardinge – A Skinful of Shadows 6802 4.17 74 4.23
Lisa Carey – The Stolen Child 3910 3.62 124 3.94
Benjamin Percy – The Dark Net 4282 3.29 69 3.31
C Robert Cargill – Sea of Rust 4063 4.12 65 4.37
Jeff Noon – A Man of Shadows 3274 3.52 49 3.64
Nick Harkaway – Gnomon 2967 3.96 43 4.4
Paul Cornell – Chalk 1834 3.69 36 3.96
Ada Palmer – The Will to Battle 2121 4.48 31 3
Jonathan L Howard – After the End of the World 2131 4.14 24 3.92
Nina Allan – The Rift 1455 3.38 24 2.9
Jen Williams – The Ninth Rain 1963 4.31 17 4
Nicola Barker – H(A)PPY 802 3.5 32 2.5
Chris Brookmyre – Places in the Darkness 1339 3.85 19 3
Paul McAuley – Austral 840 3.57 23 4
Ian McDonald – Luna: Wolf Moon 264 3.99 67 3.63
Adam Roberts – The Real-Town Murders 757 3.73 17 3.38
Adam Christopher – Killing is My Business 806 3.73 15 5
Anne Charnock – Dreams Before the Start of Time 747 3.55 14 3.75
Adrian Tchaikovsky – Dogs of War 491 4.33 8 4.5
Peter McLean – Damnation 440 4.13 8 3.25
Tricia Sullivan – Sweet Dreams 391 3.89 7 –
Chris Beckett – America City 200 3.92 8 3.5
Gavin Smith – The Bastard Legion [The Hangman’s Daughter] 317 3.62 5 5
Ian R Macleod – Red Snow 658 4.4 2 –
Philip Miller – All the Galaxies 211 3.33 6 2
Justina Robson – The Switch 214 3.67 5 –
Andrew Bannister – Iron Gods 52 3.65 1 –
Anthony Laken – One Cog Turning 60 4.4 0 –
Karen Traviss – Black Run 23 3.7 0 –
Allen Stroud – The Forever Man 7 5 0 –
Kenneth Steven – 2020 4 4 0 –

As usual I have read none of these yet. I note that Red Sister, by Mark Lawrence, is the only book to finish in the top quartile of all four columns. (Katherine Arden’s The Bear and the Nightingale only just missed doing the same.)

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The Power, by Naomi Alderman

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Tunde is twenty-one, just out of that period of his life where everything seemed the wrong size, too long or too short, pointing in the wrong direction, unwieldy. Enuma is four years younger but more of a woman than he is a man, demure but not ignorant. Not too shy, either, not in the way she walks or the quick smile that darts across her face when she understands a joke a moment before everyone else. She’s visiting Lagos from Ibadan; she’s the cousin of a friend of a boy Tunde knows from his photojournalism class at college. There’s been a gang of them hanging out together over the summer. Tunde spotted her the first day she arrived; her secret smile and her jokes that he didn’t at first realize were jokes. And the curve of her hip, and the way she fills her T-shirts, yes. It’s been quite a thing to arrange to be alone together with Enuma. Tunde’s nothing if not determined.

I spotted Naomi Alderman when she wrote a particularly good Doctor Who book a few years ago; here she has taken The Handmaid’s Tale and #MeToo and turned them around, to create a world in the very near future where women have developed the ability to strike down their enemies with bolts of electricity. It’s well imagined, with the intersection of new media, religion, politics, and culture well integrated. She lost me a bit with a section in Moldova late in the book which doesn’t really bear much resemblance to the Moldovan landscape in real life. but otherwise I really enjoyed the tight writing and the challenge of a world like ours but with one fundamental change. Worth getting.

This was the last book I read in 2017! Thank you all for following.

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The Story of English in 100 Words, by David Crystal

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Second paragraph of third entry (“And”):

Why get so excited over a ‘little word’ like and? In most wordbooks, it’s the ‘content words’ that attract all the attention – the words that have an easily statable meaning, like elephant and caravan and roe. The books tend not to explore the ‘grammatical words’ – those linking the units of content to make up sentences, such as in, the and and. That’s a pity, because these ‘little words’ have played a crucial role in the development of English. Apart from anything else, they’re the most frequently occurring words, so they’re in our eyes and ears all the time. In our eyes? The four commonest written words in modern English are the, of, and and a. In our ears? The four commonest spoken words are the, I, you and and. In Old English, and is there from the very beginning, and when it appears it’s often abbreviated.

I’ve had slightly bad luck with books about words recently, but this is excellent – a guide to the history of the English language, illustrated by 100 words, some common, some less so, some with new meanings acquired over the centuries (eg Doctor Who brought new meaning to the word matrix in 1977). The first recorded English word is “roe”, carved as ᚱᚨᛇᚺᚨᚾ onto a 5th-century deer bone in Norfolk. (Hah, another alphabet for me to test.) Crystal looks at all kinds of influences and varieties of English; the chapters on “dilly-dally” and “doobry” are particularly enlightening. Well worth getting for its insights into language in general and English in particular.

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The Master trilogy from Big Finish

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One of my vague ambitions for the year ahead is to get back into Big Finish again. There are a load of Big Finish audios which I did listen to a few years back, and never got around to writing up here; I haven't gone into it systematically, but I'll listen again to all those I haven't yet posted about.


Back in 2016, Big Finish had a plot line with two different Masters, a year before the BBC brought Michelle Gomez and John Simm together on TV. The first of the three, And You Will Obey Me by Alan Barnes, has Peter Davison's Fifth Doctor involved with Geoffrey Beevers' decaying Master from Traken, at a contemporary English auction of antiques where a grandfather clock, mysteriously escaping the fate of its late owner Mr Masterson, is the object of attention from all, including giant alien dragonflies and a task force of Russians. It's really well done, and Davison is if anything slightly overshadowed by the guest cast.


The second of the trilogy, Vampire of the Mind by Justin Richards, introduces Alex McQueen as a future Master. I knew him as the bad guy's sidekick from Kröd Mändoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire, but apparently he has more recently been an MP in Peaky Blinders (which I haven't seen). He's very good, and so is Kate Kennedy as one-shot companion Heather Threadstone (she was just out of BBC Wales' A Midummer Night's Dream). The setting again in contemporary England; now we are in a disused castle, once a prison and now home to the sinister Dominus Institute (get it?) which of course is central to the new Master's plans. Colin Baker is up to his usual high audio performance standards here as well, and I think I liked this best of the three.


Alas, I felt that the sequence over-reached itself with the closing installment, The Two Masters by John Dorney, where I got thoroughly confused by the plot twists and turns involving body-swapping between the Beevers master, the McQueen Master, and Sylvester McCoy’s Doctor, as well as gaps in time and the end of the universe. Lauren Crace, who apparently was in East Enders for a couple of years, is good as another one-off companion, and the repartee between the two Masters (and to a lesser extent the Doctor) very much redeems the piece and made it worth listening to for me. (I should add that fannish reaction in general seems to have been much more positive than mine.) Also if you’ve listened to the first two you’ll want to hear how the stories end.

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Brave New Worlds, ed. John Joseph Adams

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Second paragraph of third story (“Ten with a Flag”, by Joseph Paul Haines):

It only took him a couple of seconds to connect to the traffic web. Johnnie didn’t like being out of control, it was one of the things I’d found endearing in him; quaint even. This time though, he didn’t even double check the connection. The steering wheel folded and collapsed into the dash, and he turned to face me. “What does that mean, exactly?” he asked.

This was circulated by John Joseph Adams in 2012 as part of that year’s Hugo voter packet in support of his case for the Best Professional Editor, Short Form category. There are some stories missing from this version which were in the print version – “Billennium” by J.G. Ballard, “The Pedestrian” by Ray Bradbury, “The Minority Report” by Philip K. Dick, “Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut – though everything else seems to be there, including “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” by Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Funeral” by Kate Wilhelm and “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said The Ticktockman” by Harlan Ellison. There are also three original stories, one of which came second in that year’s Hugos (though to be honest I ranked it in last place).

I was struck by just how many of the stories focussed on future dystopian interference with reproductive or sexual rights. Of course, it’s not absent from the classic dystopian novels – state regulation of sex is a key element of Zamyatin’s We, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Huxley’s Brave New World – but for them it is one of several elements combining to create oppression. By contrast, my rough tally is that more than half of the stories in Brave New Worlds take it as a central theme.

They are all pretty good and some of them are very good stories. There is a short comic by Neil Gaiman and Bryan Talbot, “From Homogenous To Honey”, about the infamous anti-LGBT Clause 28 introduced by the Conservative government in 1988. Geoff Ryman’s “Oh Happy Day!” looks at a particularly grim dystopia where the gender boot is on the other foot. “Civilisation” by Vylar Kaftan takes the choose-your-own-adventure format and applies it to dystopias. Generally a good collection.

As for my own vote in 2011, I’m afraid I left the Best Professional Editor, Short Form category blank; I didn’t feel I had enough information to make a considered judgement. But, well, I got around to reading this in the end.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2012. Next on that list is The Story of General Dann and Mara’s Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog, by Doris Lessing.

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The World of Yesterday, by Stefan Zweig

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Denn man dachte anders über die Dinge vor dreißig und vierzig Jahren als in unserer heutigen Welt. Vielleicht auf keinem Gebiete des öffentlichen Lebens hat sich durch eine Reihe von Faktoren – die Emanzipation der Frau, die Freudsche Psychoanalyse, den sportlichen Körperkult, die Verselbständigung der Jugend – innerhalb eines einzigen Menschenalters eine so totale Verwandlung vollzogen wie in den Beziehungen der Geschlechter zueinander. Versucht man den Unterschied der bürgerlichen Moral des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, die im wesentlichen eine victorianische war, gegenüber den heute gültigen, freieren und unbefangeneren Anschauungen zu formulieren, so kommt man der Sachlage vielleicht am nächsten, wenn man sagt, daß jene Epoche dem Problem der Sexualität aus dem Gefühl der inneren Unsicherheit ängstlich auswich. Frühere, noch ehrlich religiöse Zeitalter, insbesondere die streng puritanischen, hatten es sich leichter gemacht. Durchdrungen von der redlichen Überzeugung, daß sinnliches Verlangen der Stachel des Teufels sei und körperliche Lust Unzucht und Sünde, hatten die Autoritäten des Mittelalters das Problem gerade angegangen und mit schroffem Verbot und – besonders im calvinistischen Genf – mit grausamen Strafen ihre harte Moral durchgezwungen. Unser Jahrhundert dagegen, als eine tolerante, längst nicht mehr teufelsgläubige und kaum mehr gottgläubige Epoche brachte nicht mehr den Mut auf zu einem solchen radikalen Anathema, aber es empfand die Sexualität als ein anarchisches und darum störendes Element, das sich nicht in ihre Ethik eingliedern ließ, und das man nicht am lichten Tage schalten lassen dürfe, weil jede Form einer freien, einer außerehelichen Liebe dem bürgerlichen ›Anstand‹ widersprach. In diesem Zwiespalt erfand nun jene Zeit ein sonderbares Kompromiß. Sie beschränkte ihre Moral darauf, dem jungen Menschen zwar nicht zu verbieten, seine vita sexualis auszuüben, aber sie forderte, daß er diese peinliche Angelegenheit in irgendeiner unauffälligen Weise erledigte. War die Sexualität schon nicht aus der Welt zu schaffen, so sollte sie wenigstens innerhalb ihrer Welt der Sitte nicht sichtbar sein. Es wurde also die stillschweigende Vereinbarung getroffen, den ganzen ärgerlichen Komplex weder in der Schule, noch in der Familie, noch in der Öffentlichkeit zu erörtern und alles zu unterdrücken, was an sein Vorhandensein erinnern könnte.The fact is that thirty or forty years ago, thinking on such subjects was not what it is in the world of today. Perhaps there has never been such a total transformation in any area of public life within a single human generation as here, in the relationship between the sexes, and it was brought about by a whole series of factors—the emancipation of women, Freudian psychoanalysis, cultivation of physical fitness through sport, the way in which the young have claimed independence. If we try to pin down the difference between the bourgeois morality of the nineteenth century, which was essentially Victorian, and the more liberal uninhibited attitudes of the present, we come closest, perhaps, to the heart of the matter by saying that in the nineteenth century the question of sexuality was anxiously avoided because of a sense of inner insecurity. Previous eras which were still openly religious, in particular the strict puritanical period, had an easier time of it. Imbued by a genuine conviction that the demands of the flesh were the Devil’s work, and physical desire was sinful and licentious, the authorities of the Middle Ages tackled the problem with a stern ban on most sexual activity, and enforced their harsh morality, especially in Calvinist Geneva, by exacting cruel punishments. Our own century, however, a tolerant epoch that long ago stopped believing in the Devil and hardly believed in God any more, could not quite summon up the courage for such outright condemnation, but viewed sexuality as an anarchic and therefore disruptive force, something that could not be fitted into its ethical system and must not move into the light of day, because any form of extramarital free love offended bourgeois ‘decency’. A curious compromise was found to resolve this dilemma. While not actually forbidding a young man to engage in sexual activity, morality confined itself to insisting that he must deal with that embarrassing business by hushing it up. Perhaps sexuality could not be eradicated from the polite world, but at least it should not be visible. By tacit agreement, therefore, the whole difficult complex of problems was not to be mentioned in public, at school, or at home, and everything that could remind anyone of its existence was to be suppressed.

This had been strongly recommended to me (thanks, Thomas!) and it was a good call. It is the memoir of Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, about the artistic and writing circles where he grew up, and the impact on European civilisation of the First World War and the rise of Hitler. The overall tone is of course an arc from enthusiasm to depression; shortly after the book was sent to the publishers in 1942, Zweig and his wife, exiled from their home and with no prospect of return, killed themselves. The tone shifts noticeably from ruefulness to despair as the chapters roll on.

But to be more positive: Zweig wasn’t quite a stratospheric writer, but he was a huge fan of those who were, and a lot of the best passages of the book are essentially fannish anecdotes of encounters with writers and other artists who he admired. There’s a lovely early moment, for instance, when he is visiting Brussels and is present in the studio of sculptor Charles van der Stappen as he finishes off his bust of writer Émile Verhaeren, who Zweig deeply admired. It is a striking piece of art.

Other points that fascinated me:

  • Zweig’s friendship with Theodor Herzl, and the impetus given to Herzl’s thoughts on Zionism by the Dreyfus case – Herzl was actually present when Dreifuss was stripped of his rank and uniform.
  • the unsuccessful attempt by the new Austrian emperor to turn on the Germans and negotiate a separate peace with the Allies in 1917.
  • Richard Strauss challenging the Nazi regime by producing an opera written by Zweig.
  • Zweig’s friendships with Rilke and Rolland, neither of them writers I know much about but both sound very interesting.

Zweig embodies the concept of being a citizen of Europe, particularly once his homeland has turned on him. Of course that is not fashionable in some quarters today. Reading The World of Yesterday is a reminder of where we came from, and what was lost along the way. Well worth getting.

NB that the translation is by Anthea Bell, known to me in my childhood as the translator of the Asterix books.

This was both my top unread book acquired in 2016, and my top unread non-fiction book. Next in those piles are Woman on the Edge of Time, by Marge Piercy, and So, Anyway…, by John Cleese.

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My books of 2017, including a poll

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I read 238 books this year, more than last year and about the same as in 2013 and 2007, otherwise lower than usual (full numbers: 212 in 2016, 290 in 2015, 291 in 2014, 237 in 2013, 259 in 2012, 301 in 2011, 278 in 2010, 342 in 2009, 374 in 2008, 235 in 2007, 207 in 2006, 137 in 2005). Running the Hugos has that kind of effect. March, when nominations closed, was a particularly slow month with only 5. I did manage 29 in May, and 27 in January, June and July. (I've also padded the total a bit by expanding three trilogies, each of which I read in a single volume but have counted here as three books.)

Page count for the year: 60,500 – slightly surprised to see another historic low (62,300 in 2016; 80,100 in 2015; 97,100 in 2014; 67,000 in 2013; 77,800 in 2012; 88,200 in 2011)
Books by women in 2017: 64/238, 27% – slight decrease from high of last two years (65 [31%] in 2016, 86 [30%] in 2015, 81 [28%] in 2014, 71 [30%] in 2013, 65 [25%] in 2012, 22% in 2011, 23% in 2010, 20% in 2009, 12% in 2008)
Books by PoC in 2017: 17/238, 7% – same percentage as last two years (14 [7%] in 2016, 20 [7%] in 2015, 11 [5%] in 2014, 12 [5%] in 2013, 5% in 2011, 9% in 2010, 5% in 2009, 2% in 2008)

Most books by a single author: Colin Brake and Leo, both with 5 (previous winners: Christopher Marlowe in 2016, Justin Richards in 2015 and 2014, Agatha Christie in 2013, Jonathan Gash in 2012, Arthur Conan Doyle in 2011, Ian Rankin in 2010, William Shakespeare in 2009 and 2008, Terrance Dicks in 2007, Ian Marter in 2006, Charles Stross in 2005).

Non-fiction

 2017  2016  2015  2014  2013  2012  2011  2010  2009
57 37 47 48 46 53 69 66 88
24% 17% 16% 16% 19% 20% 23% 24% 26%

This is my highest non-fiction total since 2011, and my highest percentage for non-fiction since I started tallying categories separately in 2009. I think this was partly birthday presents, which were biased towards non-fiction; partly that non-fiction books have been moving to the top of my various piles; and partly a genuine shift ion my own reading tastes.

Best non-fiction read in 2017: Common People: The History of an English Family, by Alison Light (review) – lovely micro-history of four lines of ancestry in the recent history of England.

Runner-up: Thinking Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman (review)- great insight into how we think the way we do, and why we are wrong in what we think about it.

The one you might not heard of, if you're not in the Dublin or Brussels bubbles: Brexit and Ireland: The Dangers, the Opportunities, and the Inside Story of the Irish Response, by Tony Connelly (review) – essential reading on both the behind the scenes diplomacy and the stakes for the country most affected by Brexit.

Welcome reread: In Xanadu (review)

The one to skip: 1434: The Year a Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance, by Gavin Menzies (review) – such a bad rewriting of history that I wondered what its purpose really was.

Non-sfnal fiction

 2017  2016  2015  2014  2013  2012  2011  2010  2009
26 28 42 41 44 48 48 50 57
11% 13% 14% 14% 19% 19% 16% 18% 18%

The opposite here with a historic low for non-sf fiction reading, mainly I think because I have read almost all all the well-known books of that kind on my shelves, which are still heaving with unread sf and non-fiction.

Best non-sff fiction read in 2016: A Suitable Boy, by Vikram Seth (review) – brilliant huge story of India just after independence.

Runner-up: Children are Civilians Too, by Heinrich Böll (review) – gripping short stories from Germany of about the same period.

The one you might not heard of: Five Go On A Strategy Away Day, by Bruno Vincent (review) – quite a funny parody of the grownup Famous Five in competition with the Secret Seven.

Welcome reread: Robinson Crusoe (review).

The one to skip: The Angel Maker, by Stefan Brijs (review) – really horrible story set on the Belgian frontier with Germany.

Non-Whovian sff

 2017  2016  2015  2014  2013  2012  2011  2010  2009
68 80 130 124 65 62 78 73 78
29% 38% 45% 43% 27% 24% 26% 26% 23%

Back to the levels of pre-2014. (I was a Clarke Award judge in 2014-15, and then deliberately cast my sf reading net wider in 2016 as part of the anti-Puppy campaign.)

Best non-Who sff read in 2016: All The Birds In The Sky, by Charlie Jane Anders (review with other Hugo novels) – by a long way my top choice for the Hugos, a magical contemporary Bildungsroman.

Runner-up: The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead (review with other non-Hugo novels)) – fascinating steampunk alternate history of slavery in America.

The one you might not heard of: The Deepest Sea, by Charles Barnitz (review) – much better than usual Celtic fantasy, marred however by a dodgy map.

Welcome rereads: The Illustrated Man (review), The Colour of Magic (review), Dune (review).

The one to skip: The Red Leaguers, by Shan F. Bullock (review) – Irish war of independence in 1904 goes wrong, flawed and unpleasant protagonist.

Doctor Who (and spinoff) fiction

 2017  2016  2015  2014  2013  2012  2011  2010  2009
51 39 43 59 72 75 80 71 70
21% 18% 15% 20% 30% 29% 27% 26% 19%

Picking up a bit from the dip of the last couple of years. Problem is, I've now read almost all of the main series of Doctor Who books, and what remains is dribs and drabs.

Best Who book read in 2016: The Pirate Planet, by Douglas Adams and James Goss (review) – Goss has ironed off the corners and made this a much smoother story, as usual a delight to read, and also includes bonus material on how Adams developed the plot.

Runner-up: Rip Tide, by Louise Cooper (review) – one of the good Telos novellas, taking the Eighth Doctor to a seaside resort to investigate mysterious goings on.

Worth flagging up for Whovians: Based On The Popular TV Serial, by Paul Smith (review) – a guide to the Target novelisations.

The ones you won't have heard of: The three novels based on short-lived spin-off Class (review), by Guy Adams, A.K. Benedict and especially (again) James Goss.

Comics

 2017  2016  2015  2014  2013  2012  2011  2010  2009
29 27 18 19 30 21 27 18 28
12% 13% 6% 7% 13% 8% 9% 6% 8%

Much the same as last year, or indeed 2013.

Best graphic story read in 2016: Antarès, by Leo – excellent futuristic yarn. I read it in the original French but it has been translated into English (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

Runner-up: The Vision vol 1: Little Worse Than A Man, by Tom King and Gabriel Hernandez Walta (review)- I (somewhat reluctantly) really liked this story of an inhuman family trying to fit in.

Welcome reread: Watchmen (review).

The one you won't have heard of: Re-#AnimateEurope: International Comics Competition 2017, ed. Hans H.Stein, by Jordana Globerman, Stefan "Schlorian" Haller, Štepánka Jislová, Noëlle Kröger, Magdalena Kaszuba, Davide Pascutti and Paul Rietzl (review) – nicely applying the medium of the graphic novel to the problems of Europe today.

Plays

There were only five of these. The only one I'd really really like to see on the stage, having seen the film that was based on it, is Cavalcade, by Noël Coward (review including also the Oscar-winning film).

Poetry

Just two. Catullus is better than Roald Dahl.

I wondered whether to put the Argonautica here, but on reflection, Valerius Flaccus here is telling an sf story more than trying to fit ideas into a particular verse form; so both translations are tallied separately under SF above (review).

Now your turn. How much has your reading overlapped with mine this year? People with Facebook, Twitter, Dreamwidth and maybe even Google accounts should also be able to participate. The books are listed in order of LibraryThing popularity, apart from the last category.

(NB that I'm not doing an end-of-year poll of my unread books this year. The increasing desolation of Livejournal just makes it much less fun, and my current reading list system is delivering me plenty of quirky reading choices, which was the original goal.)

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Sunday and December reading wrap-up

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Sunday reading

Current
The Fall of Hyperion, by Dan Simmons
It Can't Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis
L’Équation Africaine, by Yasmina Khadra

Last books finished
A History of the Future: Prophets of Progress from H.G. Wells to Isaac Asimov, by Peter J. Bowler
Zola and his time; the history of his martial career in letters: With an account of his circle of friends, his remarkable enemies, cyclopean labors, public campaigns, trials and ultimate glorification by Matthew Josephson
Democracy and its Deficits: The path towards becoming European-style democracies in Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine, by Ghia Nodia with Denis Cenușă and Mikhail Minakov
The Power, by Naomi Alderman
The Story of English in 100 Words, by David Crystal

December books

Non-fiction: 8 (2017 total 57)
Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons: Notes on Science Fiction and Culture in the Year of Angry Dogs, by Philip Sandifer
The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses, by Kevin Birmingham
Alexander the Corrector: The Tormented Genius Whose Cruden's Concordance Unwrote the Bible by Julia Keay
The World of Yesterday, by Stefan Zweig
A History of the Future: Prophets of Progress from H.G. Wells to Isaac Asimov, by Peter J. Bowler
Zola and his time; the history of his martial career in letters: With an account of his circle of friends, his remarkable enemies, cyclopean labors, public campaigns, trials and ultimate glorification by Matthew Josephson
Democracy and its Deficits: The path towards becoming European-style democracies in Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine, by Ghia Nodia with Denis Cenușă and Mikhail Minakov
The Story of English in 100 Words, by David Crystal

Fiction (non-sf): 3 (2017 total 26)
The Lies Of Fair Ladies, by Jonathan Gash
Men Against The Sea, by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall
Pitcairn’s Island, by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall
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sf (non-Who): 3 (2017 total 68)
Everfair, by Nisi Shawl
Brave New Worlds: Dystopian Stories, ed. John Joseph Adams
The Power, by Naomi Alderman

Doctor Who, etc: 3 (2017 total 51)
Re: Collections, ed. Xanna Eve Chown
Fear Itself, by Nick Wallace
A Life in Pieces, by Dave Stone, Paul Sutton & Joseph Lidster

Comics 5 (2017 total 29)
Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
Aliénor: La Légende Noire, vol 3, by Arnaud Delalande and Simona Mogavino, art by Carlos Gomez
Het genootschap van Socrates by Yves Leclercq and Stéphanie Heurteau
The Autumnlands, Vol. 1: Tooth and Claw, by Kurt Busiek and Benjamin Dewey
Aliénor: La Légende Noire, vol 4, by Arnaud Delalande and Simona Mogavino, art by Carlos Gomez

6,900 pages (2017 total 60,500)
7/22 (2017 total 64/238) by women (Keay, Shawl, Alderman, Mogavino x 2, Heurteau)
1/22 (2017 total 17/238) by PoC (Shawl)
Reread: 1 (2017 total 13): Watchmen

Reading now

L'equation africaine, by Yasmina Khadra
It Can't Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis
The Fall of Hyperion, by Dan Simmons

Coming soon (perhaps):
Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, by Jane Hirshfield
"Gonna Roll the Bones" by Fritz Leiber
Quoth the Raven, by Jane Haddam
Looking For JJ, by Anne Cassidy
Ys de Legende: v 1 Verraad, by Jean-Luc Istin and Dejan Nenadov
The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog, by Doris Lessing
Providence, Act 1, by Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows
Daystar and Shadow, by James B. Johnson
The Island Of Doctor Moreau, by H. G. Wells
Woman on the Edge of Time, by Marge Piercy
He, She and It, by Marge Piercy
Tangle Of Fates, by Leslie Ann Moore
The Universe Between, by Alan E Nourse
Toast, by Charles Stross
Planesrunner by Ian McDonald
Seventeen Equations that Changed the World, by Ian Stewart
Gulliver's Travels, by Jonathan Swift
So, Anyway…, by John Cleese
Julian, by Gore Vidal
The Tree of Life, by Mark Michalowski

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