Current
Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese
Paladin of Souls, by Lois McMaster Bujold
It Came from Outer Space, by Tony Lee et al.
Alien Clay, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
A Short History of Brexit, by Kevin O’Rourke
Last books finished
Ganny Knits a Spaceship, by David Gerrold
How Many Miles to Babylon, by Jennifer Johnston
Next books
Dragon’s Wrath, by Justin Richards
All American Boys, An Insider’s Look at the U.S. Space Program, by Walter Cunningham
Nine Lives, by William Dalrymple
Second paragraph of third chapter:
It has long been traditional to group together certain books in the Bible under the heading ‘wisdom’: Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Job, and in the Apocrypha, Sirach or the Wisdom of Jesus son of Sira (also known as Ecclesiasticus) and the Wisdom of Solomon.¹ All these books contain many short sayings or aphorisms, summing up the fruits of experience or giving explicit advice on how to behave. Many seem to reflect life in a village or small community, and draw ‘morals’ from activities such as farming:
The field of the poor may yield much food,
but it is swept away through injustice.
(Proverbs 13:23)Like vinegar to the teeth, and smoke to the eyes,
so are the lazy to their employers.
(Proverbs 10:26)The righteous know the needs of their animals,
but the mercy of the wicked is cruel.
Those who till their land will have plenty of food,
but those who follow worthless pursuits have no sense.
(Proverbs 12:10-11)Many of these proverbs are paralleled in other cultures, and could be seen as part of a popular understanding of the world, like our own ‘Too many cooks spoil the broth’ or ‘Look before you leap’.
¹ Excellent guides to biblical wisdom literature are J.L. Crenshaw, Old Testament Wisdom: An Introduction (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, third edition 2010), and Katharine J. Dell, Get wisdom, Get Insight: An Introduction to Israel’s Wisdom Literature (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2000).
A really fascinating, detailed book about the sacred text of Christianity and Judaism, starting at the very beginning with the compilation of the older parts of the Old Testament, and finishing with the most recent translations for today’s audience. Too much information to synthesis crispily, but it puts lots of things together that I had not really thought about, for instance:
I think even non-Christians will find quite a lot of interesting stuff in this account of one of the world’s most important literary artefacts. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2023 which is not by Ben Aaronovitch. Next in that list is Free: Coming of Age at the End of History, by Lea Ypi.
Next in the sequence of First Doctor audios, this gives Peter Purves licence to do his famous and excellent William Hartnell impression, along with Maureen O’Brien as Vicki, in a pure historical story which takes place in Florence in 1514. Main characters are Giuliano de’ Medici, ruler of Florence; his brother Pope Leo X; and Niccolo Macchiavelli. There’s also a comic guard and a token Renaissance woman. It’s actually great fun, and my only complaint is that they all pronounce ‘Giuliano’ with a hard ‘g’ – it’s Julie-anno, folks, not Gully-anno. You can get it here.
2025 Hugos: Goodreads / Librarything stats | Novel | Novella | Novelette | Short Story | Graphic Story or Comic | Related Work | Dramatic Presentation, Long and Short | Fancast | Poem | Lodestar | Astounding
As I have done for many years, here are the statistics for the finalists for this year’s Hugo Award categories (and the Lodestar Award) where the finalists are on Goodreads and LibraryThing. As I have said before, this shows how well a book has permeated the general market, but that is not the same as appealing to the Hugo electorate.
| Best Novel | GR | LT | |||
| The Ministry of Time | Kaliane Bradley | 124,781 | 3.60 | 1,737 | 3.71 |
| The Tainted Cup | Robert Jackson Bennett | 37,491 | 4.31 | 916 | 4.37 |
| A Sorceress Comes to Call | T. Kingfisher | 31,087 | 4.09 | 903 | 4.16 |
| Service Model | Adrian Tchaikovsky | 10,488 | 4.04 | 316 | 3.87 |
| Someone You Can Build a Nest In | John Wiswell | 9,557 | 3.99 | 324 | 3.94 |
| Alien Clay | Adrian Tchaikovsky | 8,551 | 4.03 | 280 | 3.88 |
A clear lead for The Ministry of Time in market penetration, though The Tainted Cup has the most enthusiastic readers.
| Best Novella | GR | LT | |||
| What Feasts at Night | T. Kingfisher | 28,342 | 3.81 | 381 | 3.87 |
| The Butcher of the Forest | Premee Mohamed | 5,895 | 3.89 | 216 | 3.77 |
| The Brides of High Hill | Nghi Vo | 4,436 | 4.15 | 200 | 4.10 |
| The Tusks of Extinction | Ray Nayler | 4,808 | 3.82 | 183 | 3.83 |
| The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain | Sofia Samatar | 1,811 | 3.83 | 123 | 3.76 |
| Navigational Entanglements | Aliette de Bodard | 542 | 3.90 | 68 | 3.68 |
Similarly, a clear lead for What Feasts at Night in market penetration, though The Brides of High Hill has the most enthusiastic readers.
| Best Graphic Story or Comic | GR | LT | |||
| My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Book 2 | Emil Ferris | 3,126 | 4.24 | 245 | 3.96 |
| The Deep Dark | Molly Knox Ostertag | 4,429 | 4.34 | 131 | 4.36 |
| We Called Them Giants | Gillen, Hans & Cowles | 1,180 | 3.58 | 49 | 3.46 |
| Monstress, vol. 9: The Possessed | Liu & Takeda | 723 | 4.31 | 69 | 3.85 |
| Star Trek: Lower Decks: Warp Your Own Way | North & Fenoglio | 297 | 4.59 | 46 | 4.42 |
| The Hunger and the Dusk: Vol 1 | Wilson & Wildgoose | 700 | 4.17 | 16 | 3.90 |
Much closer between the top two here, while Warp Your Own Way has the best reader ratings of any book in this post.
| Lodestar Award for Best YA Book | GR | LT | |||
| Heavenly Tyrant | Xiran Jay Zhao | 7,402 | 3.92 | 430 | 4.03 |
| So Let Them Burn | Kamilah Cole | 6,052 | 3.84 | 245 | 3.94 |
| The Maid and the Crocodile | Jordan Ifueko | 2,176 | 4.40 | 84 | 3.93 |
| Sheine Lende | Darcie Little Badger | 993 | 4.26 | 88 | 4.38 |
| Moonstorm | Yoon Ha Lee | 364 | 3.52 | 63 | 3.50 |
| The Feast Makers | H.A. Clarke | 371 | 4.40 | 20 | 4.38 |
A solid ownership lead for Heavenly Tyrant; The Feast Makers has the fewest readers, but they are enthusiastic!
I usually add Best Related Work here too, but only two of this year’s finalists are logged on GR/LT.
See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Mozambique.
| Title | Author | Goodreads raters | LibraryThing owners |
| A Girl Named Disaster | Nancy Farmer | 5,117 | 1,735 |
| A Time to Die | Wilbur Smith | 6,220 | 807 |
| Sleepwalking Land | Mia Couto | 5,775 | 466 |
| A Treacherous Paradise | Henning Mankell | 3,533 | 562 |
| Chronicler of the Winds | Henning Mankell | 2,775 | 708 |
| Confession of the Lioness | Mia Couto | 3,533 | 266 |
| The Tuner of Silences | Mia Couto | 2,615 | 213 |
| Secrets in the Fire | Henning Mankell | 2,060 | 253 |
This week’s winner is a Newbery-awarded novel about a girl trying to flee from Mozambique to Zimbabwe; as far as I can tell it takes more than half of the book for her to get across the border, so it qualifies.
I had no idea that Swedish writer Henning Mankell has a close personal link with Mozambique and lived there off and on for many years. I also had not heard of the great Mozambican writer Mia (short for Emilio) Couto, which is definitely my bad.
I disqualified a lot of books which are just generally set in southern Africa, or more specifically in a different country entirely. At the top was Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood by Alexandra Fuller, set in Zimbabwe, followed by The Man from Beijing by Henning Mankell, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town by Paul Theroux, The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After, by Clemantine Wamariya, Half a Life, by V.S. Naipaul, Kennedy’s Brain by Henning Mankell again, Scribbling the Cat by Alexandra Fuller again and A Beautiful Place to Die by Malla Nunn.
As we go down the list, I am increasingly finding that GR and LT users are tagging them into books which have little or nothing to do with the country in question. I may have to adapt my methodology in response.
Next up: Ghana, Peru, Saudi Arabia and Madagascar.
Asia: India | China | Indonesia | Pakistan | Bangladesh (revised) | Russia | Japan | Philippines (revised) | Vietnam | Iran | Türkiye | Thailand | Myanmar | South Korea | Iraq | Afghanistan | Yemen | Uzbekistan | Malaysia | Saudi Arabia | Nepal | North Korea | Syria | Sri Lanka | Taiwan | Kazakhstan | Cambodia | Jordan | UAE | Tajikistan | Israel
Americas: USA | Brazil (revised) | Mexico | Colombia | Argentina | Canada | Peru | Venezuela | Guatemala | Ecuador | Bolivia | Haiti | Dominican Republic | Honduras | Cuba
Africa: Nigeria | Ethiopia (revised) | Egypt | DR Congo | Tanzania | South Africa | Kenya | Sudan | Uganda | Algeria | Morocco | Angola | Mozambique | Ghana | Madagascar | Côte d’Ivoire | Cameroon | Niger | Mali | Burkina Faso | Malawi | Zambia | Chad | Somalia | Senegal | Zimbabwe | Guinea | Benin | Rwanda | Burundi | Tunisia | South Sudan | Togo
Europe: Russia | Türkiye | Germany | France | UK | Italy | Spain | Poland | Ukraine | Romania | Netherlands | Belgium | Sweden | Czechia | Azerbaijan | Portugal | Greece | Hungary
Oceania: Australia | Papua New Guinea
Second paragraph of third chapter:
The host was Sir Eliphaz Burrows, the patentee and manufacturer of those Temanite building blocks which have not only revolutionized the construction of army hutments, but put the whole problem of industrial and rural housing upon an altogether new footing; his guests were Mr. William Dad, formerly the maker of the celebrated Dad and Showhite car de luxe, and now one of the chief contractors for aeroplanes in England; and Mr. Joseph Farr, the head of the technical section of Woldingstanton School. Both the former gentlemen were governors of that foundation and now immensely rich, and Sir Eliphaz had once been a pupil of the father of Mr. Huss and had played a large part in the appointment of the latter to Woldingstanton. He was a slender old man, with an avid vulturine head poised on a long red neck, and he had an abundance of parti-coloured hair, red and white, springing from a circle round the crown of his head, from his eyebrows, his face generally, and the backs of his hands. He wore a blue soft shirt with a turn-down collar within a roomy blue serge suit, and that and something about his large loose black tie suggested scholarship and refinement. His manners were elaborately courteous. Mr. Dad was a compacter, keener type, warily alert in his bearing, an industrial fox-terrier from the Midlands, silver-haired and dressed in ordinary morning dress except for a tan vest with a bright brown ribbon border. Mr. Farr was big in a grey flannel Norfolk suit; he had a large, round, white, shiny, clean-shaven face and uneasy hands, and it was apparent that he carried pocket-books and suchlike luggage in his breast pocket.
H.G. Wells attempts to rewrite the Book of Job for a 1919 audience. For the love of God, why???
Again, Adam Roberts liked it more than I did.
One more to go! Roll on Joan and Peter.
So, I went to Beijing again at the end of last month, my second time in China after visiting Beijing and Chengdu for Chengdu Worldcon in 2023. I was an invited speaker at the 9th China Science Fiction Convention, itself part of the 2025 ZGC Forum, a joint project of the various layers of government in the Beijing region and the China Association for Science and Technology. It was an industry and politics event, showcasing the various economic successes of investment in science fiction (books, films, games), though there was also a substantial presence from the leading Chinese writers, and plenty of student fan groups had stalls in the exhibition area.
My invitation arose out of a conversation I had had at Glasgow 2024, A Worldcon For Our Futures, with Gong Weimi, Deputy Director of the Beijing Science and Technology Commission, who was exploring paths of creative structured cooperation between Worldcon and the Beijing Zhongguancun Science Fiction Industry Innovation Center, which is (as far as I could tell) a joint project of the Beijing Regional Government and the China Association for Science and Technology. The fact that there is no permanent Worldcon secretariat makes this more difficult for the industry-oriented Chinese establishment.
The outcome of the conversation was invitations to speak at the conference for me (as Hugo administrator last year and this) and Esther MacCallum-Stewart (as Chair of Glasgow 2024). Other foreign guests included Francesco Verso, who has spent years celebrating Chinese SF in Italian and English; Disney storyboarder Grant Dalton Jr; and Vladimir Norov, the former foreign minister of Uzbekistan, subsequently Secretary-General of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. We were very well looked after by Icy Xiaohan Chen, who I had met in Glasgow with Mr Gong, and her colleagues Caroline Yueqi Zhang and Lydia Xia Qian. (I am following the convention that if people have Western names, I use Western name-personal name-surname, but if they don’t, I use surname-personal name; the ladies I just mentioned are Chen Xiaohan, Zhang Yueqi and Qian Xia to their friends.)
We were given a tour of the ZGC Science Fiction Industry Innovation Centre, where I tried out a VR helmet and found myself in outer space, then on a spaceship, then on the surface of the moon.
Proprietary AI morphed my face into Chinese legend:
Back at the conference there were the inevitable dancing robots.
I talked to aspiring writers and student groups, and I may have committed television.
Some impressive cosplay as well.
We were also hosted for various meals by a number of organisations. The Future Affairs Administration organised a fantastic Sichuan hotpot for us with the Chinese Doctor Who fans led by Yan Ru. Wang Jinkiang and Liu Cixin on behalf of the Beijing Yuanyu Science Fiction and Future Technology Research Institute hosted us for a Mongolian hotpot. And the China Science Fiction Research Centre and the China Research Institute for Science Popualarisation jointly hosted us for a Cantonese spread with Stanley Qiufan Chen. I must say that I came away with a much greater appreciation of the variety of regional cooking within China – on my first two evenings, I had two very different work-related meals both featuring Yunnan cuisine.
I gave my own keynote speech to the conference as well of course, citing Mary Shelley, Jules Verne and Lao She.
Games being such a major part of it all, Esther was in her element (and spoke twice to my once):
The conference was held in a former industrial park in Shijingshan District, repurposed to host the 2022 Winter Olympics, so the architecture was a bit unusual.
This modern architecture is overlooked by the Gongbei Pavilion on top of the Shijinshan Mountain, a recent reconstruction on an ancient religious site.
One of the things I particularly came to appreciate is just how huge and varied China is. Beijing is in fact only the third biggest city in China. Shanghai is the second biggest, and Chongqing has the most inhabitants of any city in the world. How many of us could find Chongqing on a map? I met colleagues and fans from all over – from Hainan in the far south to Xinjiang in the northwest, and everywhere in between. Many of them had studied in North America or Europe, and come home to deploy their knowledge profitably. China knows more about us than we know about China.
To address the elephant in the room, I got a sense that for the Beijing folks, the mistakes made by Chengdu Worldcon are an embarrassment and they want to move forward (and incidentally reinforce Beijing’s centrality). I was grimly amused that two people separately recommended R.F. Kuang’s Babel to me; it is very popular in China, and when I replied that it had been banned from the 2023 Hugos, they shook their heads in disbelief.
In discussions with my professional contacts more generally, given that I was the man from Brussels, it will not surprise anyone that the topic of tariffs on electric vehicles came up a lot. I even got to drive one out in E-Town, the BAIC Stelato X9, which is capable of parking itself after you get out.
The Internet of Things is real in China. WeChat / Weixin is the go-to app for everything, and you need to have installed it and Alipay (and linked both to your payment system) before you go. The DeDe car-sharing app is a kind of super Uber – even out at the Great Wall it was possible to get a ride back to Beijing in three minutes. One taxi driver puzzled me as I got in by saying, in firmly interrogatory tones, “wǔ wǔ yāo sì?” I looked blank, so he held up five fingers twice, then one, then four – of course, the last four digits of my phone number, to confirm that I was the right client. (Taxis incidentally are very cheap, but the traffic in Beijing is awful – it took two hours to get from the conference centre on the western side of the city to the Sichuan hotpot on the east.) Shopkeepers and service staff would speak into their translation apps and show the message that they wanted to convey in English. It can be useful to save frequently used phrases as an image.
I did three tourist expeditions. First, the Dongye Temple, a Daoist shrine within walking distance of my employers’ Beijing office, founded in 1319, gutted during the revolutionary period, restored in 2002. The courtyards are full of memorial steles.
The original gateway is now on the other side of the main road.
The joy of the temple is 76 small rooms, of which maybe half a dozen are clearly favoured by regular worshippers. Each small room contains a dozen statues representing a part of the Daoist otherworld, some of them more attractive than others.
Some of the individual statues are quite striking.
It’s a little dilapidated, but clearly still has a faithful following. I noted also a tree with ribbons tied to it, not so different from what you might find in rural Ireland.
The next day, I went to the Tiantan, the Temple of Heaven, one of the landmarks of Beijing. It’s a massive religious complex to the south of the Forbidden City, which I had visited in 2023. This is where the Emperor made the annual sacrifice for the continuing good of the kingdom. This is also where, sickeningly, the Eight-Nation Alliance led by the British and French based their occupying military forces during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, building a railway station on the sacred ground. They didn’t teach you about that in school, did they?
At the sacred stone which is the Heart of Heaven, there was a queue of tourists waiting to stand on it; about half of them prayed when it was their turn, and about half posed for photos.
As with the Forbidden City, many people (almost all young women as far as I could tell) had chosen to dress up in traditional costume and pose for photographs.
Posing is definitely a thing.
And I also went out to the Great Wall, the largest man-made structure in existence. To get the 80 km up to Badaling is only €20 by DeDe, an hour from Shijinshan, and the same back again. Once you get to the base, there is a cable car ride up to the top. (Alternatively, you can hike up or down if you like, but I’m 57.)
It’s crowded, and the path along the top of the wall itself is steep, and there’s no explanation of what’s going on or what happened; but it’s a spectacular structure and a spectacular view. I don’t feel that I need to go back, but I’m very glad that I went.
Anyway, it was a fantastic trip, with good fellowship. Many thanks to Mr Gong and the Beijing Science and Technology Commission, and to my work colleagues, for looking after me for this extraordinary week and a bit. (Arrived 23 March; left, 1 April.)
A Christmas Carol was the first Doctor Who Christmas special produced and written by Steven Moffat and starring Matt Smith. It has Amy and Rory trapped on a doomed spaceship, which for handwavium reasons only the Scrooge-like Kazan Sardick (Michael Gambon) can save. The Doctor goes into Sardick’s past to make him into a nicer person through the love of the beautiful Abigail (Katherine Jenkins). Unfortunately for more handwavium reasons this means that Sardick no longer has the power to save the doomed spaceship, but luckily Abigail’s voice resonates at just the right frequency, so she saves the day (it is implied that she then dies of some fatal but not very debilitating illness). The music is good.
I ranked it fourth out of five votes in that year’s Hugo Awards, noting:
Don’t get me wrong – this was a lovely episode of Doctor Who and just right for Christmas evening. But as a work of SF, I think the other nominees are better.
Rewatching it, I felt the same; it’s a remake of Dickens in Doctor Who terms with light comedic relief from Rory and Amy, the story line is a little too clever and also a little too simple (often the case with Steven Moffat), and it’s perfect fare for a day when you’re not expecting anything too demanding on the brain cells. It did inspire one of the more remarkable cosplays that I saw at Gallifrey One in 2013:
Jaime Beckwith and Leslie Grace McMurtry have taken the interesting tack of looking at the TV episode in the context of Charles Dickens, asserting firmly that it “remains the only explicit adaptation of another text in the Doctor Who back catalogue.” I disagree with that – I think that The Androids of Tara is even more closely aligned with The Prisoner of Zenda – but I can see their point.
A short introduction looks at Christmas specials in Davies and Moffat era Doctor Who.
The first chapter, “A Traditional English Christmas With Sharks”, considers the history of Christmas in Britain, the previous adaptations of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, and its importance in British popular culture.
The second chapter, “A Blot of Mustard, a Crumb of Cheese”, looks at Steven Moffat’s gift for transforming apparently normal situations into fairy tales.
The third chapter, “Time and Relative Child-centrism”, looks at children as focal narrative figures in Moffat’s Doctor Who. Its second paragraph is:
Had it always been thus? Could British audiences expect throughout the 20th and 21st centuries to encounter Dickens (and ACC [A Christmas Carol]) in late December? Certainly, on British television December was seen as a good time to air adaptations of Dickens’ works. On the BBC, adaptations of ACC aired on Christmas Day 1950, Christmas Eve 1977 and a few days before Christmas in 2019. The 1999 TV series of David Copperfield debuted on Christmas Day, and the 1976 episode of A Ghost Story for Christmas was an adaptation of the short story ‘The Signalman’ (1866). The Pickwick Papers (1952), David Copperfield (1974) and Great Expectations (2011) all first aired in December. In 2007, Dickens was central to the battle for the Christmas season ratings, with the BBC broadcasting a five-part adaptation of Oliver Twist in the week leading up to Christmas, and ITV airing a feature-length adaptation of The Old Curiosity Shop on Boxing Day (with production design by Michael Pickwoad, of whom more in Chapter 4).
The fourth and longest chapter, “The Pickwoad Papers”, looks in great and pleasing detail at the superb design of the story.
The fifth chapter, “What Right Have You To Be Merry?”, looks at the Doctor’s habit of interference in human timelines.
A brief conclusion, “Everything’s Got To End Some Time”, summarises the above.
I still feel that the actual story is not particularly memorable, but Beckwith and McMurtry gave me some pause for thought about where it came from. You can get their Black Archive here.
I only recently watched The Muppet Christmas Carol for the first time, which sticks surprisingly closely to the original text, but as a result of that experience combined with reading the Black Archive monograph, I was inspired to go back and read Dickens once again, probably for the first time since I was a child. The second paragraph of the third ‘Stave’ of the short book is:
Gentlemen of the free-and-easy sort, who plume themselves on being acquainted with a move or two, and being usually equal to the time of day, express the wide range of their capacity for adventure by observing that they are good for anything from pitch-and-toss to manslaughter; between which opposite extremes, no doubt, there lies a tolerably wide and comprehensive range of subjects. Without venturing for Scrooge quite as hardily as this, I don’t mind calling on you to believe that he was ready for a good broad field of strange appearances, and that nothing between a baby and a rhinoceros would have astonished him very much.
It’s tremendous, even when you know what is going to happen; Dickens sometimes succumbed to mawkish sentimentality, but here he largely keeps himself restrained and lets the story tell itself. I found I had something in my eye as I got to the end, and you will too. God bless Us, Every One!
Second paragraph of third chapter:
Amidst the ivy was a fuss of birds.
I am nearing the end of my H.G. Wells marathon and I can see why this book is not very well known. Bealby is a comic lad because he is working class and has ideas above his station, which is as a servant in a posh house. There are shenanigans involving the Lord Chancellor and a holiday caravan which I did not find very funny. At least it is short. Adam Roberts liked it more than I did.
Next up (and penultimate) in my Wells-a-thon: The Undying Fire.
You can read a lot on an 11-hour daytime intercontinental flight (also spent about six hours in slow-moving taxis last Thursday).
Current
Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese
Paladin of Souls, by Lois McMaster Bujold
Ganny Knits a Spaceship, by David Gerrold
Last books finished
A Sorceress Comes to Call, by T. Kingfisher
The Practice, the Horizon and the Chain, by Sofia Samatar
We Called Them Giants, by Kieron Gillen et al
Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right, by Jordan S. Carroll
A History of the Bible: The Book and Its Faiths, by John Barton
The Vegetarian, by Kang Han
Joan and Peter, by H.G. Wells
The Mysterious Island, by Jules Verne
Sheine Lende, by Darcie Little Badger
The Vetting, by Michael Cassutt
The Birds, and other stories, by Daphne du Maurier
Next books
Dead Man’s Hand, by Tony Lee et al
A Short History of Brexit, by Kevin O’Rourke
Nine Lives, by William Dalrymple
Second frame of third story (“The Golden Ones”):
This is a compilation of comic strip stories from Doctor Who Magazine during the Eleventh Doctor era, all by Jonathan Morris; I had not appreciated it at the time, but they actually have a cleverly worked out arc (about, er, the Child of Time) which culminates at the end, shortly after we meet the killer Brontë sisters.
Having been working through the IDW Doctor Who comics dating to the same era, it’s interesting to feel a very different dynamic to the DWM strips, which have much shorter episodes and also had to respond to the TV show in real time – there are some very informative endnotes from Morris and the artists about the creative process.
Also I particularly like the story with C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.
Rather a jewel. You can get it here.
Non-fiction 4 (YTD 18)
A Christmas Carol, by Jaime Beckwith and Leslie Grace McMurtry
Track Changes, by Abigail Nussbaum
Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right, by Jordan S. Carroll
A History of the Bible: The Book and Its Faiths, by John Barton
Non-genre 3 (YTD 13)
The Research Magnificent, by H.G. Wells
The Friend Zone Experiment, by Zen Cho
Bealby, by H.G. Wells
Plays 1 (YTD 1)
The Dramatic Works of Denis Johnston, vol 3: Radio and Television Plays
Poetry 1 (YTD 1)
Calypso, by Oliver K. Langmead
SF 8 (YTD 28)
Men at Arms, by Terry Pratchett
The Butcher of the Forest, by Premee Mohamed
Heavenly Tyrant, by Xiran Jay Zhao (did not finish)
Lies Sleeping, by Ben Aaronovitch
A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens
The Undying Fire, by H.G. Wells
A Sorceress Comes to Call, by T. Kingfisher
The Practice, the Horizon and the Chain, by Sofia Samatar
Doctor Who 1 (YTD 7)
Oh No It Isn’t!, by Paul Cornell
Comics 4 (YTD 8)
Sky Jacks!, by Andy Diggle, Eddie Robson and Andy Kuhn
The Child of Time, by Jonathan Morris, Dan McDaid, Mike Collins, Roger Langridge and Rob Davis
Star Trek: Lower Decks – Warp Your Own Way, by Ryan North and Chris Fenoglio
We Called Them Giants, by Kieron Gillen, Stephanie Hans and Clayton Cowell
6,400 pages (YTD 19,400)
8/22 (YTD 26/76) by non-male writers (McMurtry, Nussbaum, Cho, Mohamed, Zhao, “Kingfisher”, Samatar, Hans)
4/22 (YTD 11/76) by non-white writers (Cho, Mohamed, Zhao, Samatar)
3/22 rereads (Men At Arms, A Christmas Carol, Oh No It Isn’t!)
232 books currently tagged unread, down 1 from last month, down 99 from March 2024.
Reading now
The Mysterious Island, by Jules Verne
Joan and Peter, by H.G. Wells
Sheine Lende, by Darcie Little Badger
Coming soon (perhaps)
Dead Man’s Hand, by Tony Lee et al
Dragon’s Wrath, by Justin Richards
Heroes and Monsters Collection, by Justin Richards et al
Doctor Who: Silver Nemesis, by Kevin Clarke
Silver Nemesis, by James Cooray Smith
The Vetting, by Michael Cassutt
Ganny Knits a Spaceship, by David Gerrold
A Short History of Brexit, by Kevin O’Rourke
All American Boys, An Insider’s Look at the U.S. Space Program, by Walter Cunningham
The Vegetarian, by Kang Han
Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese
Paladin of Souls, by Lois McMaster Bujold
Nine Lives, by William Dalrymple
City of Last Chances, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Footnotes in Gaza, by Joe Sacco
Free: Coming of Age at the End of History, by Lea Ypi
The Burgundians: A Vanished Empire, by Bart van Loo
Ancient Paths, by Graham Robb
Métal Hurlant Vol. 1: Le Futur c’est déjà demain, by Mathieu Bablet et al
Voyage to Venus, by C.S. Lewis
Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett
False Value, by Ben Aaronovitch
Prophet Song, by Paul Lynch
Elder Race, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Malaysia.
| Title | Author | Goodreads raters | LibraryThing owners |
| The Night Tiger | Yangsze Choo | 63,990 | 1,437 |
| The Ghost Bride | Yangsze Choo | 35,794 | 1,708 |
| The Garden of Evening Mists | Tan Twan Eng | 28,145 | 1,730 |
| The Gift of Rain | Tan Twan Eng | 17,211 | 1,215 |
| Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World | Tom Wright and Bradley Hope | 36,267 | 547 |
| The House of Doors | Tan Twan Eng | 18,160 | 539 |
| The Storm We Made | Vanessa Chan | 19,635 | 354 |
| Black Water Sister | Zen Cho | 10,481 | 647 |
I have not actually been to Malaysia, but it is where my father was born, so I was interested to see where this analysis brought me. In fact there are an unusually high number of Malaysian writers on the list – better yet, three of them are fantasy novels, including this week’s winner, The Night Tiger. And I am very glad to see Zen Cho make an appearance.
I disqualified nine books, all for the usual reason but all in different ways. In some of these cases I guess that GR and LT users are using the tag ‘malaysia’ because of the origin of the author rather than the setting of the book, in others it must simply be geographical confusion. Crazy Rich Asians, by Kevin Kwan, is mostly set in Singapore. The island in Lord Jim, by Joseph Conrad, is clearly in what’s now Indonesia (as discussed). Daughter of the Moon Goddess, by Sue Lynn Tan, is set in a fantasy China. A Town Like Alice, by Nevil Shute, has many memorable sections in Malaysia, but in the end it is about Australia. The Glass Palace, by Amitav Ghosh, is set all over the region. Nothing But Blackened Teeth, by Cassandra Khaw, is set in Japan. Old Filth, by Jane Gardam, is set in England and India more than Malaysia. What My Bones Know, by Stephanie Foo, is set in the USA. And Sorcerer to the Crown, again by Zen Cho, is set in a fantasy UK.
Next up: Mozambique, Ghana, Peru and Saudi Arabia.
Asia: India | China | Indonesia | Pakistan | Bangladesh (revised) | Russia | Japan | Philippines (revised) | Vietnam | Iran | Türkiye | Thailand | Myanmar | South Korea | Iraq | Afghanistan | Yemen | Uzbekistan | Malaysia | Saudi Arabia | Nepal | North Korea | Syria | Sri Lanka | Taiwan | Kazakhstan | Cambodia | Jordan | UAE | Tajikistan | Israel
Americas: USA | Brazil (revised) | Mexico | Colombia | Argentina | Canada | Peru | Venezuela | Guatemala | Ecuador | Bolivia | Haiti | Dominican Republic | Honduras | Cuba
Africa: Nigeria | Ethiopia (revised) | Egypt | DR Congo | Tanzania | South Africa | Kenya | Sudan | Uganda | Algeria | Morocco | Angola | Mozambique | Ghana | Madagascar | Côte d’Ivoire | Cameroon | Niger | Mali | Burkina Faso | Malawi | Zambia | Chad | Somalia | Senegal | Zimbabwe | Guinea | Benin | Rwanda | Burundi | Tunisia | South Sudan | Togo
Europe: Russia | Türkiye | Germany | France | UK | Italy | Spain | Poland | Ukraine | Romania | Netherlands | Belgium | Sweden | Czechia | Azerbaijan | Portugal | Greece | Hungary
Oceania: Australia | Papua New Guinea
Opening of third play (“Great Parliamentarians: Lord Palmerston”):
ANNOUNCER. ‘Great Parliamentarians’. We now present as the next in this series, a radio biography of Lord Palmerston, written and produced by Denis Johnston. (Fade in music) The scene opens in the Balkans where a British resident will tell of a dramatic incident in which he took part.
(Peak music and then fade out.)
BRIDGEMAN. We called it Wallachia in those days. But now it has some new fangled title and a king of its own no less! (He laughs to himself) One evening – I think it was in 1849 – I was standing outside my warehouse looking across the brown swirling waters of the Danube at a boat crossing over from the further shore. Close by me, my little step-daughter was playing on the rough wooden pier that juts out into the stream and always seemed to me to be on the point of being swept away by the current.
(Fade in distant drumming.)
BRIDGEMAN. Eliza, come away from there!
CHILD (aged about 12). Papa, Hëren sie die Trummele?
BRIDGEMAN. Speak English, my child. Do you wish to forget your native tongue?
CHILD. I hear drums, Papa.
BRIDGEMAN. It is the Turks over the river in Widin.
(Linguistic note: “Hëren sie die Trummele?” is pretty bad German. “Hören Sie die Trommeln?” would be grammatically correct, but a child speaking to her father would be much more likely to say “Hörst du die Trommeln?”)
Denis Johnston (1901-1984) has gone out of fashion now; the only play of his that I have seen on stage was “Strange Occurrence on Ireland’s Eye” in the early 1990s. His daughter Jennifer, who died only last month, had much more staying power with the Zeitgeist.
This book is the third of three volumes of his collected plays, devoted to his work for radio and television. It includes a biographical note and some fascinating essays about the early days of TV drama, when the producer could see only one other camera besides the one that was actively recording (or indeed broadcasting) and the art of cutting between shots was unknown. On a related point, it was not at all obvious that reporters doing outside broadcast should simply hold a microphone and speak into it – much fruitless effort went into managing booms in windy conditions, and in other inhospitable situations.
As well as the essays on TV drama, there are seven radio plays here, five TV plays and two theatre scripts that escaped the previous volumes. I got the book ages ago because my great-grandfather, James Stewart, is credited as one of the bit players in the very first of the radio plays, “Lillibulero”, an account of the siege of Derry in 1688-89, broadcast in 1938. One of the actors brought over from England to narrate the story was 19-year-old Jon Pertwee, his first broadcast job. It’s dramatic stuff; I managed to get hold of a recording and it carries itself well, 87 years on. Unfortunately I am not sure which of the voices is my great-grandfather’s. (Jon Pertwee, even at 19, is unmissable.)
It’s the best of the radio plays. The others are a farce about working in radio drama which I have to hope was funnier on air than it is on the page; a biography of Lord Palmerston which can’t quite decide if it is being funny; a play about the German high command in the first world war which tries to be funny about an awful subject; another funny historical about Lady Blessington where it’s clear that Micheál Mac Liammóir stole the show as her camp lover the Comte d’Orsay; a rather mean-spirited portrait of the novelist Amanda McKittrick Ros, who had only recently died; and a dramatisation of Frank O’Connor’s short story “In The Train” which prompted me to go and re-read the original text, which is better.
The TV plays are more satisfying. There’s a strong start with The Parnell Commission, which succeeds in being didactic and dramatic at the same time; a biographical play about Jonathan Swift; a skit set in the early Irish Free State; a satirical take on the IRA’s 1950s Border Campaign; and an effective story about an 1871 murder in County Tyrone.
The two theatre scripts in an appendix are Blind Man’s Bluff, a comedic adaptation of Die Blinde Gottin (The Blind Goddess) by Ernst Toller, which actually has the same punchline as “Strange Occurrence on Ireland’s Eye”, and a four page skit called Riders to the Sidhe, whose title pretty much says it all.
It’s very much work of its time – even the plays set in the nineteenth century have a slightly tired mid twentieth century feel about them. It’s also pretty long, at 516 pages. But I was glad to work through it. You can get it here.
This was the very last unread book that I had acquired in 2019 which is not by H.G. Wells. Next on the Wells list is Bealby.
I slightly regretted my decision to get into the Big Finish First Doctor stories when the last one I tried turned out to be rather a dud. But this is much better, a story of the Doctor, Ian, Barbara, Vicki and Jospa landing on a very alien planet with vividly realised aliens, and also the question of just how many people are in the Tardis crew. It’s a concept that was also visited in the Buffy episode Superstar and the Torchwood episode Adam (and the Torchwood novel Border Princes), but I think we have a new twist here – rather than having a strange new character intruding on our heroes’ regular setup, we have both a strange new character and a strange new world, and this being a Big Finish audio which was released more than fifty years after the TV stories with which it is in continuity sequence, we listeners don’t quite know what to make of it at first. On top of that, as I said, the aliens are very alien and well depicted; and it’s William Russell’s second last audio performance, as both Ian and the Doctor, recorded shortly before his 90th birthday. James Joyce (no relation) is suitably suave as the extra companion Jospa, and Kate Byers as the lead alien. You can get it here.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
‘We didn’t find a phone,’ I said, although it was true I hadn’t thought of that.
Tremendously executed climax to the arc of stories about occult London police detective Peter Grant, and his adversary the Faceless Man, with loving detail to the history and geography of London and the river spirits who sometimes ally with us mortals. The frustrations of working in the fictional bureaucracy of the magical side of the Met is also well imagined. I wasn’t so wowed by the previous book in the sequence but definitely enjoyed this. Two more to go (at least, two more that I have left over from a previous Hugo packet). You can get it here.
Current
The Mysterious Island, by Jules Verne
A History of the Bible: The Book and Its Faiths, by John Barton
Joan and Peter, by H.G. Wells
A Sorceress Comes to Call, by T. Kingfisher
Last books finished
Star Trek: Lower Decks – Warp Your Own Way, by Ryan North et al
The Undying Fire, by H.G. Wells
Calypso, by Oliver K. Langmead
Next books
Dead Man’s Hand, by Tony Lee et al
The Vetting, by Michael Cassutt
The Vegetarian, by Kang Han
Second paragraph of third chapter:
Professor Bernice Surprise Summerfield woke up, stretched, and sang a single pure note. The stretch had brought on the singing. It was all because of the look of the day. Sunlight was dappling through leaves above her. Birds were cheeping. The air smelt of a summer morning.
The first of the Bernice Summerfield spinoff novels, adapted to become the first Big Finish audio. Bernice, settling into her new job as a professor of archæology, finds herself sucked into a world where she and her colleagues are transformed into pantomime characters, and facing down the alien Grel. (Facts! Good facts!) It’s actually rather well done – the concept risks being either too twee or too clever for its own good, but Paul Cornell bends the rules of narrative here just enough to get away with it. You can get it here.
The audio adaptation – from 27 years ago, good heavens! – is particularly memorable for Nicholas Courtney’s performance as Wolsey, Bernice’s cat, though everyone is good including Alastair Lock as the Grel. I listened to it just after re-reading the book, so can’t really tell how well it stands on its own. You can still get it here.
On my first encounter with the Grel of the Whoniverse (which was actually in the Sixth Doctor audio The Doomwood Conspiracy), I confusedly assumed that they were the same as the Grell, a D&D creature that I remember from White Dwarf #27 back in 1981 (actually invented by Ian Livingstone in WD #12, two years earlier). But the D&D Grell, with two ‘l’s, are disembodied hovering brains with a beak and barbed tentacles, while the DW Grel, with one ‘l’, are humanoids with squid-like faces. You’re welcome.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
He hadn’t come for Alicia’s company, any more than he’d come for the exhibition itself. The name Dior meant as little to him as, he supposed, Shostakovich or Britten would to someone who didn’t care about classical music.
I know Zen of course both as a friend (I believe that we are the only Eastercon Guests of Honour with parents born in Malaysia) and for her intriguing fantasy novels and shorter fiction; I believe that this is her first venture into contemporary romance, a genre which is sometimes taken less seriously than it should be.
Renee Goh gets dumped by her pop star boyfriend on page 6, and bumps unexpectedly into her ex Ket Siong on page 26, and despite Renee’s experimental attempts to keep Ket Siong in the Friend Zone, we basically know where they will have got to by the end on page 341. I really enjoyed the ride; human beings are complex creatures, capable of misunderstanding their own best interests and getting confused about the signals they receive from others, and it’s entertaining (occasionally painful) to read.
As well as being a good empowering love story, with the dynastic intricacies of the Malaysian business community’s presence in London as backdrop, there is a grim subplot involving a massive political corruption scandal and human rights abuse, which peripherally touches both our lovers and also the Bad Boy rival for Renee’s affections. Renee manages to triumph here too, thanks to her ability to think outside the box, though it has an impact on her relations with her own family.
I am interested that the last Asian romance novel I read, Those Pricey Thakur Girls, also had a really grim political subplot underlying the girl-meets-boy main current. I don’t know how common this is for romance novels.
Anyway, this is a good one, and you can get it here.
Earlier posts this week because I am travelling in Asia.
See here for methodology. This has been an unusual case, the first time (but probably not not the last) that I have closed the list at five, rather than my usual eight, because I have disqualified ten books for being less than 50% set in the target country and I don’t have time or energy to keep going.
| Title | Author | Goodreads raters | LibraryThing owners |
| Cancer Ward | Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn | 17,294 | 3,750 |
| Samarkand | Amin Maalouf | 30,077 | 1,533 |
| Moon Over Samarkand | Muḥammad al-Mansī Qandīl | 13,933 | 33 |
| The Baburnama: Memoirs of Babur, Prince and Emperor | Zahir ud-Din Muhammad Babur | 746 | 476 |
| Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia | Tom Bissell | 707 | 239 |
The winner is one of the great Soviet-era novels, and I wonder to what extent the Tashkent setting comes through.
I confess that I am not 100% certain about Amin Maalouf’s Samarkand, but what I’ve seen online gives me a reasonable case to include it.
The usual ratios between Goodreads and LibraryThing users barely apply here. Moon Over Samarkand, a great Arabic novel which is partly set in Egypt but mostly (as far as I can tell) in Samarkand, has more than 400 times as many readers on GR as on LT.
On the other hand, the Memoirs of Babur, founder of the Mughal dynasty, have more than 60% as many LT readers as GR readers, which I think is a record. It doesn’t actually include all that much about his conquest of India, and concentrates on his early career in the future Uzbekistan.
There are many many books about Central Asia, but Chasing the Sea seems to be unusually Uzbekistan-heavy for that sub-genre.
The books I disqualified, in order, were:
Next up: Malaysia, Mozambique, Ghana and Peru.
Asia: India | China | Indonesia | Pakistan | Bangladesh (revised) | Russia | Japan | Philippines (revised) | Vietnam | Iran | Türkiye | Thailand | Myanmar | South Korea | Iraq | Afghanistan | Yemen | Uzbekistan | Malaysia | Saudi Arabia | Nepal | North Korea | Syria | Sri Lanka | Taiwan | Kazakhstan | Cambodia | Jordan | UAE | Tajikistan | Israel
Americas: USA | Brazil (revised) | Mexico | Colombia | Argentina | Canada | Peru | Venezuela | Guatemala | Ecuador | Bolivia | Haiti | Dominican Republic | Honduras | Cuba
Africa: Nigeria | Ethiopia (revised) | Egypt | DR Congo | Tanzania | South Africa | Kenya | Sudan | Uganda | Algeria | Morocco | Angola | Mozambique | Ghana | Madagascar | Côte d’Ivoire | Cameroon | Niger | Mali | Burkina Faso | Malawi | Zambia | Chad | Somalia | Senegal | Zimbabwe | Guinea | Benin | Rwanda | Burundi | Tunisia | South Sudan | Togo
Europe: Russia | Türkiye | Germany | France | UK | Italy | Spain | Poland | Ukraine | Romania | Netherlands | Belgium | Sweden | Czechia | Azerbaijan | Portugal | Greece | Hungary
Oceania: Australia | Papua New Guinea
It’s shortlist time again! Just to remind you, the GR and LT stats are a guide to how well a book has permeated the general market, but may not have much congruence with the respective voter bases of the two awards.
Nebula Awards
| Best Novel | GR | LT | |||
| A Sorceress Comes to Call | T. Kingfisher | 29,824 | 4.09 | 862 | 4.15 |
| The Book of Love | Kelly Link | 7,699 | 3.49 | 416 | 3.73 |
| Someone You Can Build a Nest In | John Wiswell | 9,182 | 3.99 | 306 | 3.94 |
| Rakesfall | Vajra Chandrasekera | 713 | 3.40 | 103 | 3.44 |
| Asunder | Kerstin Hall | 969 | 4.21 | 66 | 4.08 |
| Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory | Yaroslav Barsukov | 106 | 4.40 | 11 | 4.67 |
T. Kingfisher way ahead of the rest here, with John Wiswell second on Goodreads but Kelly Link second on LibraryThing. Yaroslav Barsukov’s readers are less numerous, but very enthusiastic.
| Best Novella | GR | LT | ||||
| The Butcher of the Forest | Premee Mohamed | 5,756 | 3.89 | 206 | 3.8 | |
| The Tusks of Extinction | Ray Nayler | 4,710 | 3.82 | 175 | 3.82 | |
| The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain | Sofia Samatar | 1,737 | 3.83 | 117 | 3.75 | |
| Lost Ark Dreaming | Suyi Davies Okungbowa | 1,070 | 3.67 | 72 | 4.04 | |
| Countess | Suzan Palumbo | 404 | 3.63 | 38 | 2.83 | |
| The Dragonfly Gambit | A.D. Sui | 161 | 4.27 | 14 | 3.63 | |
Quite close between the top two here.
| Andre Norton Award | GR | LT | ||||
| Moonstorm | Yoon Ha Lee | 358 | 3.54 | 61 | 3.63 | |
| Puzzleheart | Jenn Reese | 380 | 3.73 | 20 | 4.5 | |
| Benny Ramírez and the Nearly Departed | José Pablo Iriarte | 119 | 4.53 | 12 | 4 | |
| Braided | Leah Cypess | 62 | 4.21 | 4 | 4 | |
| Daydreamer | Rob Cameron | 40 | 4.30 | 5 | – | |
| The Young Necromancer’s Guide to Ghosts | Vanessa Ricci-Thode | 10 | 4.00 | 3 | 4 | |
Jenn Reese leads on Goodreads, but Yoon Ha Lee is quite far ahead on LibraryThing, with none of these being super hits on either system.
BSFA Awards
| Shorter Fiction | GR | LT | ||||
| Saturation Point | Adrian Tchaikovsky | 1,719 | 3.85 | 45 | 3.5 | |
| Navigational Entanglements | Aliette de Bodard | 527 | 3.91 | 66 | 3.68 | |
| Charlie Says | Neil Williamson | 29 | 4.41 | 3 | 4 | |
| What Happened at the Pony Club | Fiona Moore | – | – | – | – | |
Aliette de Bodard ahead on LT, but Adrian Tchaikovsky further ahead on GR.
| Novel | GR | LT | ||||
| Alien Clay | Adrian Tchaikovsky | 8,048 | 4.03 | 267 | 3.89 | |
| Calypso | Oliver K Langmead | 479 | 3.61 | 48 | 3.64 | |
| Three Eight One | Aliya Whiteley | 231 | 3.36 | 32 | 3.5 | |
| Rabbit in the Moon | Fiona Moore | 6 | 4.17 | 5 | – | |
Clear leader here.
| Fiction for Younger Readers | GR | LT | ||||
| Somewhere Beyond the Sea | T J Klune | 108,171 | 4.19 | 1,019 | 4.21 | |
| Doctor Who: Caged | Una McCormack | 174 | 3.58 | 16 | 3.5 | |
| Benny Ramirez and the Nearly Departed | Jose Pablo Iriarte | 119 | 4.53 | 12 | 4 | |
| Rebel Dawn | Ann Sei Lin | 59 | 4.19 | 2 | – | |
Somewhere Beyond the Sea has far more Goodreads raters, and also more LibraryThing owners, than any other book on either set of shortlists. In fact I think it may have more GR fans than every other book in this post added together.
| Collections | GR | LT | ||||
| Convergence Problems | Wole Talabi | 227 | 4.11 | 29 | 4 | |
| Nova Scotia Vol 2 | Neil Williamson and Andrew Wilson | 7 | 4.29 | 6 | – | |
| Schrodinger’s Wife (And Other Possiblities) | Pippa Goldschmidt | 11 | 4.36 | 3 | – | |
| Fight Like a Girl 2 | Roz Clarke and Joanne Hall | 10 | 4.6 | – | – | |
| Human Resources | Fiona Moore | 1 | 5 | 4 | – | |
| Punks4Palestine: An Anthology of Hopeful SciFi for an Uncertain Future | Jasen Bacon | – | – | – | – | |
Only one of these has had much impact in the GR / LT market.
| Long Non-Fiction | GR | LT | ||||
| Track Changes | Abigail Nussbaum | 8 | 4.5 | 7 | – | |
| Spec Fic for Newbies Vol 2 | Tiffani Angus and Val Nolan | 6 | 4.5 | 4 | 4 | |
| The Book Blinders | John Clute | 3 | 4 | 3 | – | |
| Keith Roberts’s Pavane: A Critical Companion | Paul Kincaid | – | – | – | – | |
| JG Ballard’s Crash: A Critical Companion | Paul March Russell | – | – | – | – | |
I suspect that there were more BSFA members voting for some of these than there are people logging them on either GR or LT.
Second frame of third part:
Clara (in her first appearance in comics) falls through what appears to be a black hole, into a pocket universe where there are lots of stranded airmen and the like, and eventually the Doctor as well. The big reveal of What Is Really Going On is well done. The art seemed to me not to capture the Doctor and Clara terribly well, but is fine on the big sweeeps of scenery.
There’s also a short story about alien mind control through getting everyone on earth to wear an electronic fez, but they are rescued by Eleven, Amy and Rory, which is dire as you would expect.
You can get it here.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
White had not read the book of Tobit for many years, and what he was really thinking of was not that ancient story at all, but Botticelli’s picture, that picture of the sunlit morning of life. When you say ” Tobias” that is what most intelligent people will recall. Perhaps you will remember how gaily and confidently the young man strides along with the armoured angel by his side. Absurdly enough, Benham and his dream of high aristocracy reminded White of that. . . .
Not far to go in my foolish effort to read all of Wells’ fiction. This one is generally awful. (Adam Roberts didn’t like it much either.) Benham, the protagonist, decides to make his life goal the ‘Research Magnificent’ on how to live a noble and aristocratic life; he does this from a position of immense wealth and privilege; he marries a teenager and it doesn’t work out; and he gets killed in a political riot in South Africa. There are many many tedious speeches about politics and personal vision.
There are however one or two good lines. When Benham meets his first lover:
There was in particular Mrs. Skelmersdale, a very pretty little widow with hazel eyes, black hair, a mobile mouth, and a pathetic history, who talked of old music to him and took him to a Dolmetsch concert in Clifford’s Inn, and expanded that common interest to a general participation in his indefinite outlook. She advised him about his probable politics — everybody did that — but when he broke through his usual reserve and suggested views of his own, she was extraordinarily sympathetic. She was so sympathetic and in such a caressing way that she created a temporary belief in her understanding, and it was quite imperceptibly that he was drawn into the discussion of modern ethical problems. She herself was a rather stimulating instance of modern ethical problems. She told him something of her own story, and then their common topics narrowed down very abruptly. He found he could help her in several ways.
I don’t think I have seen much innuendo from Wells, but that did make me chuckle.
A bit later, the protagonist and his young bride go on a disastrous honeymoon in the Balkans, taking in various places which I know from a century or so later. One passage here puzzled me. The couple are stuck in Monastir (now Bitola) in (North) Macedonia, and Benham has fallen ill with measles. After they find a doctor,
The Benhams went as soon as possible down to Smyrna and thence by way of Uskub tortuously back to Italy.
I was really puzzled by this. Uskub is now Skopje, and these days to get there from Bitola you go by the highland road through Prilep before joining the main Vardar Valley route at Gradsko or Veles; it’s 173 km according to Google. This would take you nowhere near the Aegean port of Smyrna, which is now Izmir in Turkey, 1000 km by road from either Bitola or Skopje.
I raised this question on social media, and a couple of people pointed out that ‘Smyrna’ here is obviously a mistake for ‘Salonica’, ie Thessaloniki in Greece. Back in the day, the old Via Egnatia would have taken you easily there from Bitola, and the railway back up north to Skopje had been built in 1873. Full credit to the several people who tried to convince me of a plausible route from Bitola to Izmir to Skopje, but I don’t think that’s what Wells meant.
Just a few more books acquired in 2019 to go now. The next by Wells is Bealby, but before that I have volume 3 of the Collected Dramatic Works of Denis Johnston.
I’m leaving X/Twitter. The reasons for this include that it is an increasingly unpleasant user experience, as the algorithm serves up rage-bait and viciously nasty responses; that my posts are not getting the traction that they used to, and Bluesky is much better from that point of view; and that I don’t want to add further value to a platform that is helping its owner to become richer and more powerful especially considering the purposes for which that power is being used.
I have disabled auto-tweeting of blog posts from here; I have deleted a few future Tweets that I had queued up in Buffer. I will still check in occasionally, but not daily.
Be seeing you on Bluesky, LinkedIn, Facebook (for the time being) and here. It was fun! Until it wasn’t.
Current
The Mysterious Island, by Jules Verne
The Undying Fire, by H.G. Wells
A History of the Bible: The Book and Its Faiths, by John Barton
Last books finished
The Dramatic Works of Denis Johnston, vol 3: Radio and Television Plays
A Christmas Carol, by Jaime Beckwith and Leslie Grace McMurtry
A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens
Bealby, by H.G. Wells
Track Changes, by Abigail Nussbaum
Next books
Peter and Joan, by H.G. Wells
The Vegetarian, by Kang Han
Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese
Second paragraph of third section:
He became aware of what seemed to be thoughts in his head. They went something like this:
The second of the City Watch subsequence in the Discworld series. As I work through the Pratchett novels in order of popularity, I suspect that I’m going to find that I’ve already read all the really good ones, and although Men at Arms is funny and passionate, the two most overt bits of satire somewhat miss the mark, or perhaps have aged less well since 1993 than some of PTerry’s other work.
His spoofing of affirmative action surely came from a place of love and respect, but it lands rather awkwardly in a 2025 where the US government is stripping away DEI policies to the cheers of conservative forces at home and abroad. (Also, stupid people are not always automatically funny.)
And the idea that society faces utter collapse if fire-arms are to be allowed to exist at all, well, yes, one can see the point and the target, but it’s a bit heavy-handed; it’s effectively finger-wagging at the Americans for allowing their country to get so screwed up by the supposed Second Amendment rights. Sure, that’s not all it is; there’s also a bit of the loss of innocence of embracing any new technology, though later Discworld books are more enthusiastic about the embracing.
Anyway, still a good read, if not quite as superlative as some of the others in the series. You can get it here.
Next up: Feet of Clay.
The Colour of Magic | The Light Fantastic | Equal Rites | Mort | Sourcery | Wyrd Sisters | Pyramids | Guards! Guards! | Eric | Moving Pictures | Reaper Man | Witches Abroad | Small Gods | Lords and Ladies | Men at Arms | Soul Music | Interesting Times | Maskerade | Feet of Clay | Hogfather | Jingo | The Last Continent | Carpe Jugulum | The Fifth Elephant | The Truth | Thief of Time | The Last Hero | The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents | Night Watch | The Wee Free Men | Monstrous Regiment | A Hat Full of Sky | Going Postal | Thud! | Wintersmith | Making Money | Unseen Academicals | I Shall Wear Midnight | Snuff | Raising Steam | The Shepherd’s Crown
Lá fhéile Pádraig sona dhaoibh!
Fiction
Helen Waddell
Northern Ireland
Modern Ireland
Eighteenth century Ireland
Sixteenth and seventeenth century Ireland
My favourites of these are the two autobiographical books about Belfast, Belfast: The Story of a City and its People, by Feargal Cochrane (which you can get here) and Fifty Years On, by Malachi O’Doherty (which you can get here). A Brilliant Void, edited by Jack Fennell, is very interesting on an underexplored part of Irish culture (and you can get it here).
See here for methodology. My rule is to exclude books of which less than 50%, as far as I can tell, is actually set in the target country, but for Ukraine this is trickier than in some cases, so I may have made a couple of wrong calls here.
| Title | Author | Goodreads raters | LibraryThing owners |
| Everything is Illuminated | Jonathan Safran Foer | 181,991 | 14,539 |
| The Mitten | Jan Brett | 93,416 | 10,761 |
| The Diamond Eye | Kate Quinn | 170,157 | 1,425 |
| Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster | Adam Higginbotham | 57,625 | 2,324 |
| Death and the Penguin | Andrey Kurkov | 20,056 | 2,116 |
| The Last Green Valley | Mark T. Sullivan | 65,498 | 431 |
| The Fixer | Bernard Malamud | 11,675 | 2,374 |
| The White Guard | Mikhail Bulgakov | 15,452 | 1,528 |
Shamefully, I have not read any of these. When I looked at this less systematically back in 2015, I got the same answer, Everything is Illuminated way out in front, followed by Jan Brett’s version of The Mitten.
I excluded The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov, which is definitely set in Russia; Dead Souls, by Nikolai Gogol, which is generally understood to be set in Russia; A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, by Marina Lewycka, which is set in England; Voices from Chernobyl, by Svetlana Alexievich, which is about the impact of Chernobyl in Belarus; and Bloodlands, by Timothy Snyder, which as far as I can tell concentrates on Poland.
I’m not 100% sure about The Last Green Valley, which is about Volksdeutsche fleeing Ukraine at the end of the Second World War, but it seems from online sources that it takes them a long time to get out, so I’ve counted it in.
The top Ukrainian writers on the list are Andrey Kurkov and Mikhail Bulgakov.
The Diamond Eye and The Last Green Valley both have strikingly impressive Goodreads ratings compared to their LibraryThing standing. Usually books have around ten times more readers on GR than LT, give or take; these two score over a hundred times higher on GR. My interpretation is that they (successfully) marketed themselves to Goodreads users.
Coming next: Uzbekistan, Malaysia, Mozambique and Ghana.
Asia: India | China | Indonesia | Pakistan | Bangladesh (revised) | Russia | Japan | Philippines (revised) | Vietnam | Iran | Türkiye | Thailand | Myanmar | South Korea | Iraq | Afghanistan | Yemen | Uzbekistan | Malaysia | Saudi Arabia | Nepal | North Korea | Syria | Sri Lanka | Taiwan | Kazakhstan | Cambodia | Jordan | UAE | Tajikistan | Israel
Americas: USA | Brazil (revised) | Mexico | Colombia | Argentina | Canada | Peru | Venezuela | Guatemala | Ecuador | Bolivia | Haiti | Dominican Republic | Honduras | Cuba
Africa: Nigeria | Ethiopia (revised) | Egypt | DR Congo | Tanzania | South Africa | Kenya | Sudan | Uganda | Algeria | Morocco | Angola | Mozambique | Ghana | Madagascar | Côte d’Ivoire | Cameroon | Niger | Mali | Burkina Faso | Malawi | Zambia | Chad | Somalia | Senegal | Zimbabwe | Guinea | Benin | Rwanda | Burundi | Tunisia | South Sudan | Togo
Europe: Russia | Türkiye | Germany | France | UK | Italy | Spain | Poland | Ukraine | Romania | Netherlands | Belgium | Sweden | Czechia | Azerbaijan | Portugal | Greece | Hungary
Oceania: Australia | Papua New Guinea
Second paragraph of third chapter:
But Clarke was also a famous visionary linked with developments in space exploration, and he explored the role and potentials of technology. He has been one of our guides to the grand adventure of space exploration, one who could write a story and one with wit, but also one who could bring clarity to the explication of complicated scientific issues.
I skimmed this book when writing up Childhood’s End and then came back to it a couple of days later. It has three parts: 1) an analytical introduction, including short profiles of Lewis and Clarke and a preface by Clarke himself; 2) the actual correspondence between Lewis and Clarke, which consists of fifteen letters over the years between 1936 and 1954, some of them very short; and 3) stories and essays by the two writers, three by Lewis and eight by Clarke. The publication history is rather droll, but Miller isn’t a terribly deep analyst and he makes a number of obvious mistakes in reading Lewis’s handwriting; also the first of the stories included, “Ministering Angels” by Lewis, is just repulsive (a sex worker and a feminist go to Mars). The primary non-fiction material is welcome, but the rest a bit superfluous.
I don’t think I have written here before about my love of the 2013 film Good Vibrations, starring Richard Dormer as Terri Hooley, and pre-Doctor Who Jodie Whittaker as his first wife Ruth Carr (in reality a significant cultural figure in her own right, who is only in the film as the protagonist’s love interest). The film is the story of how one idealistic man kept music, especially punk, alive in the worst years of the Troubles, and finally made it big with The Undertones’ classic Teenage Kicks. In case you need to get a taste of it, here’s the trailer:
I confess part of the sentimental attachment for me is that I went to see a special showing of the film in mid-2014 at the Northern Ireland representation in Brussels, with Andy Carling, a good friend who sadly died a few years later. We both cried at the crucial scene where The Undertones turn up in the studio to record their hit, and my eyes well up every time I think of it.
Hooleygan: Music, Mayhem, Good Vibrations is the ghost-written autobiography of Terri Hooley on which the film is very loosely based. The second paragraph of the third chapter:
One by one, all the weird and wonderful clubs that I had loved when I was a teenager began to disappear. As people retreated into their own areas there was little need for the Fiesta Ballroom, the Plaza or Betty Staff’s and they soon closed. Belfast became a ghost town.
As a Belfast kid in the 1970s and 1980s, I was not into the contemporary music scene at all; the City of Belfast Youth Orchestra was more my gig. But I do remember the cut-out of Elvis outside the Good Vibrations music shop on Great Victoria Street, and the cool kids at school were into Stiff Little Fingers. Otherwise I was surprised by the lack of crossover between my own lived Belfast experience and Terri Hooley’s world of gigs, girls, business and bankruptcy. I was well aware that I was not one of the cool kids, and this book confirms it.
The book is gorgeously illustrated, with many black-and-white photos, posters, ticket stubs, record sleeves and other souvenirs from the era. It’s an important reminder that history is not just words on paper, but images and sounds as well, if you can gather them for your archive. And it’s also a reminder that while the grim politics and violence were playing out in front of the world’s cameras, there was something much more joyous happening behind the scenes.
As for the text… well, it’s obviously been organised by Richard Sullivan as co-writer, but you do get the sense of a man sitting down in the bar next to you and spilling his life story, good, bad and ugly. Hooley’s passion for music is admirable and the driving force of his life; he has been unlucky in business and not always lucky in love. Some of his life decisions have been, er, wiser than others. The book gives a raw picture of him and his time and place. You can get it here (at a price).
