It took me a couple of weeks to acquire the newly colorised version of The War Games, the longest surviving Old Who series and the last of the black and white era, which was released just before Christmas by the BBC. I am of course a purist who believes that you should, if you can, watch the four hours of the original story. But in these busy times, who has four hours to sit down to a show made in 1969? So I guess I welcome the fact that it has been made accessible to viewers with less time and patience. Here’s a trailer.
It’s very pleasing, I must admit. I certainly had a jolt of excitement when I saw the first real splashes of colour on screen. There’s no denying that the human eye is naturally attracted to chromatic variation; it represents immense effort by the colourists, and it has paid off.
I’m a little more hesitant about the editing. Sure, cutting four hours down to 90 minutes is going to be a challenge, even if there are several extraneous escape-and-recapture sequences which were ripe for trimming. There is a little jerkiness in continuity as a result, which could perhaps have been smoothed over with a caption or a voiceover – thinking particularly of Vilar who comes out of nowhere.
But the ending is where the editors have added rather than taken away. We get nods to New Who at a crucial moment in the trial scene, and the two extra minutes inserted between the last seconds of the last black-and-white Doctor Who episode, and the first canonical appearance of the Third Doctor, are a delight – originally developed by a fan on YouTube, who the BBC then brought into the project. Beautifully done.
(Also the line “Too fat!” has been removed, but that’s a good thing.)
I’m not going to do an overall analysis of Joy to the World, but here were some things that struck me.
I can’t recall watching anything on screen or stage that addressed the pandemic so directly. It’s not just the explicit “those awful people and their wine fridges, and their dancing, and their parties” line; the Doctor’s isolation for a year in the hotel, sitting chastely distanced from Anita, is a very obvious callback to 2020. In-universe of course, the Doctor could perfectly well have gone to visit with Ruby, or UNIT, or his other self and Donna’s family, since he knows he has a year but doesn’t have to be on the spot. But that’s not the story that Stephen Moffat chose to tell. (I’ve read a couple of pandemic-referencing novels – Ali Smith in particular.)
Speaking of Anita, although Nicola Coughlan was the top billed guest star as Joy, it was Steph de Whalley who nailed it as the lonely hotel receptionist. She is 37 and has not previously had a major role in her career. Hopefully that will change now.
Speaking of other members of the cast, I had seen Joel Fry, who played Trev, on stage as Jodie Whittaker’s secret husband in The Duchess last year.
Nicola Coughlan is the first Northern Irish actor to get top billing in a Doctor Who episode. (Edited to add: she is from Galway.) (Edited again: Er, after Dervla Kirwan.)
I winced a bit at the Bethlehem scene at the end. But does this mean that the whole New Testament is now an annex of the Whoniverse? Or just the gospels of Matthew and Luke?
Annexing another continuity, in case you didn’t know, Silvia Trench (the wopman on the Orient Express) is also James Bond’s London girlfriend in the first two films, Dr. No and From Russia with Love.
The usual Moffat problem: nobody ever stays dead.
But in general, I enjoyed it – the good bits definitely outweighing the misfires.
And of course the first Doctor Who content to drop over the Christmas break was the Christmas Prom, introduced by Catherine Tate. Lots of joyous energy in the hall and among the performers; audience clearly appreciating the scary monsters walking among them. The whole thing is online here:
Almost wholly I think I was dreaming of public service in those days. The Harbury tradition pointed steadfastly towards the state, and all my world was bare of allurements to any other type of ambition. Success in art or literature did not appeal to us, and a Harbury boy would as soon think of being a great tinker as a great philosopher. Science we called “stinks”; our three science masters were ex officio ridiculous and the practical laboratory a refuge for oddities. But a good half of our fathers at least were peers or members of parliament, and our sense of politics was close and keen. History, and particularly history as it came up through the eighteenth century to our own times, supplied us with a gallery of intimate models, our great uncles and grandfathers and ancestors at large figured abundantly in the story and furnished the pattern to which we cut our anticipations of life. It was a season of Imperialism, the picturesque Imperialism of the earlier Kipling phase, and we were all of us enthusiasts for the Empire. It was the empire of the White Man’s Burthen in those days; the sordid anti-climax of the Tariff Reform Movement was still some years ahead of us. It was easier for us at Harbury to believe then than it has become since, in our own racial and national and class supremacy. We were the Anglo–Saxons, the elect of the earth, leading the world in social organization, in science and economic method. In India and the east more particularly we were the apostles of even-handed justice, relentless veracity, personal cleanliness, and modern efficiency. In a spirit of adventurous benevolence we were spreading those blessings over a reluctant and occasionally recalcitrant world of people for the most part “colored.” Our success in this had aroused the bitter envy and rivalry of various continental nations, and particularly of France, Russia, and Germany. But France had been diverted to North Africa, Russia to Eastern Asia, and Germany was already the most considered antagonist in our path towards an empire over the world.
As I continue to march across the lesser-known terrain of Wells’ fiction, I meet Stephen Stratton and Lady Mary Christian, who have a love affair immediately before and after she marries someone else; eventually Mary’s husband Justin finds out and they part, leaving Stephen free to marry the much less stressful Rachel, while he carries on his important work of Changing The World; after a few years Mary and Stephen strike up a deeply friendly but chaste correspondence; and then the novel ends in unexpected and somewhat jarring disaster.
I liked a lot of this, in particular the idea that your former lover can actually become a good friend who does not threaten your current relationship, a rather positive model for transcending one’s emotional history; so I felt rather betrayed by the tragic ending, which seemed to suggest that Wells himself didn’t actually think this is really possible in real life. Wells probably had a lot more experience of trying this sort of balancing act than most people, so I guess that he was writing about what he knew. I note that of the two film adaptations, one (1922) keeps the tragedy and one (1949) does not.
There’s also a brief section set in Ireland, where Stephen goes in search of Mary at one point, which I think is maybe the first time I have seen any serious mention of Ireland in Wells’ writings. It rains dismally throughout that one short chapter. Stephen spends more time, more vividly described, in South Africa during the Boer War.
A subplot is Stephen’s plan to create a single World Government, apparently the first time that Wells set this idea out so clearly. I was a bit bored by the lengthy discourses on political theory and society, though interested that Wells mainly puts these in Mary’s mouth rather than Stephen’s.
One of my big complaints about the Chibnall era was that the Doctor Who Annuals were very thin indeed, with only weakly regurgitated plot summaries of recent episode and a few rather pathetic puzzles. This must have been set from the top, because although the credited author of the 2025 Annual, Paul Lang, is the same as for the last few, there seems to be a new energy to this side of things.
Yes, we have each episode retold briefly in hard copy; but it’s more of a sideways look, with the story told from a different angle than on TV, and the Fourteenth Doctor stories are interspersed among the first few Fifteenth Doctor stories. We also have a print adaptation (by veteran Steve Cole) of the Comic Relief skit with Davros. And even the puzzles seem to have a new level of sophistication.
I don’t seem to have read the 2023 or 2024 Annuals; I had better put that right.
Everyone is waiting outside of the classroom to go in, so I decide to approach Jenna. We’ve been friends since nursery, and she’s even stayed over at my house. But I haven’t seen her at all over the summer and she has spent every minute of term so far with Emily.
11-year-old Addie is autistic. She goes to the normal school in her Scottish village. She finds it challenging but in general she can cope. She has the support of her parents, and one of her older twin sisters is autistic too.
Addie’s former best friend abandons her, and her new teacher thinks autistic children should be in special education. Meanwhile she has become very interested in the persecution of witches in the Middle Ages, and starts to campaign for a permanent memorial in the village.
It’s not difficult to draw the parallel between the things that were said about the witches in the Middle Ages, and the things that are said about autistic people today. Addie is a smart kid, and she makes the connection immediately.
This is a short book with a lot of heart, told with conviction from Addie’s point of view. It has been made into a TV series which has had two seasons so far. I would recommend it, not only for neurodivergent younger readers, but perhaps even more so for any adults who may have difficulty understanding the world that autistic people live in.
Current Caleb Williams, or Things as They Are, by William Godwin (group read) The Soul of a Bishop, by H.G. Wells Sorrowland, by Rivers Solomon Vagabonds!, by Eloghosa Osunde The Atlas of Unusual Borders,by Zoran Nikolic
Last books finished Paddy Machiavelli: How to Get Ahead in Irish Politics, by John Drennan Killing Ground, by Steve Lyons On Ghost Beach, by Neil Bushnell (audiobook) Sting of the Sasquatch, by Darren Jones (audiobook) Silence in the Library / The Forest of the Dead, by Dale Smith On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong Fifty Years On, by Malachi O’Doherty
Next books A Brilliant Void, by Jack Fennell “The Ultimate Earth”, by Jack Williamson Once and Future, vol 5: The Wasteland, by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora and Tamra Bonvillain
When we went to the KMSKA in Antwerp last June, my attention was caught by a striking lady in the hall commemorating the museum’s donors, represented by a portrait and a bust:
This is Marie-Lætitia Bonaparte-Wyse (1831-1902), whose mother was Letizia Bonaparte, daughter of Napoleon Bonaparte’s brother Lucien, and whose legal father was Sir Thomas Wyse of Waterford, member of parliament for Tipperary, though it is generally accepted that her biological father was Studholme John Hodgson, an officer of the 19th Regiment of Foot.
She was educated in Paris and at the age of 17 married Frédéric Joseph de Solms, so was known as ‘La Princesse de Solmes’ for the next few years. He abandoned her; she was expelled from the Second Empire (ruled by her mother’s first cousin Napoleon III) on somewhat obscure grounds in 1852 – aged only 21!
She ran a famous literary salon in Aix-les-Bains, which was then in Savoy rather than France; after 1860, when Aix was annexed by France in return for recognising the reunification of Italy, she reconciled with the French authorities. In 1863 she married her second husband, Count Urbano Rattazzi, who had just finished the first of his two terms as prime minister of the newly unified Italian kingdom.
When he in turn died in 1873, she married a Spanish politician, Don Luis de Rute y Ginez. Whether in Italy, France or Spain she brought writers, artists and politicians together in her salons. She lived until 1901, and has many living descendants through her daughter by her second marriage, the Villanova-Rattazzi family who are based in Spain.
French Wikipedia lists over 30 books and half a dozen plays by her. I found two really vivid pen-portraits of her which are worth reading. Frederic Loliee describes her early career in a chapter of his “Women of the Second Empire” (1907) and Francis Grierson tells of her role as a literary and political hostess in “Parisian Portraits” (1914). Grierson concludes, “With the death of Madame Bonaparte-Rattazzi the last star in the romantic galaxy of the nineteenth century disappeared.” This may be exaggeration, but it’s a good summary.
I bet you had never heard of her before reading this blog post. I hadn’t, before last June.
I thought I might try out her writing for myself, though it’s worth noting that it’s not really her writing that she is remembered for. Her most substantial fiction is a series of four novels published in 1866-67 as by “Madame Rattazzi”, overlapping with her husband’s second term as Italian prime minister.
The titles are (in internal chronology): Le piège aux maris (The Husband Trap), Les débuts de la forgeronne (How the Blacksmith’s Wife Began), La Mexicaine (The Mexican Woman) and Bicheville, ou le chemin du paradis (Bicheville, or the Path to Paradise). You can get them all in French for free here, here, here and here.
I can manage a well-written bande-dessinee in French, but I am not up to reading an entire novel; fortunately I have a DeepL subscription and used it to get a comprehensible English text. (Happy to share that with you, if you ask nicely.)
So. On the one hand, it’s a big sweeping story of several lower-middle-class families in contemporary Paris, and the efforts of well-meaning mothers to get their daughters safely married (something that the author knew about rather well) along with petty crime and mysterious inheritances. The social commentary ranges from cold observation to occasional anger.
Paris and the French countryside are well described and you know what each of the characters is doing and why. The depiction of posh society in a foreign city (the “Bicheville” of the last volume) supposedly was too close to the bone for readers in Florence, then the Italian capital, and is said to have played a part in ending Count Rattazzi’s second term as prime minister, though I felt it clearly drew more on her experience in Aix a decade earlier.
At the same time I felt it was a bit rambling. The sheer number of significant characters made it rather difficult to keep track. Some of them are known by different names in different chapters. The sections set in Algeria in the last two books are very thin on descriptive detail (noticeably so in contrast to the sections in France or Bicheville), and the fourth book ends rather hastily. So I can’t completely recommend it to the casual reader. But I’m glad I gave it a try.
Bicheville, ou le chemin du paradis was the last book that I finished in the calendar year 2024.
Second paragraph of third chapter of La piege aux maris:
Une gare, c’est le temple de l’action. — A la porte, des files de voitures qu’on décharge; à l’intérieur, des colis qu’on roule sur des voilures à bras; des facteurs, des portefaix, des voyageurs groupés ou solitaires, allant affairés, çà et là, ou fumant paisiblement; des soldats avec leurs fusils, des chasseurs avec leurs chiens, des nourrices avec leurs marmots, des citadins et des paysans, des gentlemen et des commis; — des bruits de roues et des coups de sifflets, des voix distinctes et des murmures confus. Et, par-dessus tout, cette horloge inflexible, dont on ne saurait arrêter l’aiguille, dont l’heure tinte comme un glas fatal Au conducteur de la diligence, on disait: Attendez un peu. Prenez un verre de vin; trinquez avec nous. — Le chef de train est invisible. Il est là-bas, de l’autre côté, soldat esclave de sa consigne, être de raison qui donne le signal du départ, comme la pendule sonne l’heure. Dans la cour de la diligence, il n’y avait que les parents et les amis de ceux qui parlaient; ici, les indifférents pullulent On n’ose pas se faire, devant eux, les recommandations enfantines et touchantes; on n’ose pas se dire qu’on s’aime; on n’ose pas pleurer; — on s’embrasse devant des badauds qui rient!
A station is the temple of action. At the gate, lines of carriages are being unloaded; inside, parcels are being rolled on canopies; postmen, porters, travellers grouped together or alone, bustling here and there or smoking peacefully; soldiers with their rifles, hunters with their dogs, nurses with their babies, townsfolk and peasants, gentlemen and clerks; – the sound of wheels and whistles, distinct voices and confused murmurs. And, above all, that inflexible clock, whose hand could not be stopped, whose hour tinkled like a fatal knell The driver of the coach was told: Wait a little. Have a glass of wine; toast with us. – The conductor is invisible. He is over there, on the other side, a soldier enslaved by his orders, a being of reason who gives the signal for departure as the clock strikes the hour. In the coach yard, there were only the relatives and friends of those who were speaking; here, the indifferent swarmed. You didn’t dare make childish and touching recommendations to each other in front of them; you didn’t dare say that you loved each other; you didn’t dare cry; – you kissed each other in front of laughing onlookers!
Second paragraph of third chapter of Les débuts de la forgeronne:
– Continuez, madame, quelles sont vos intentions… ?
“Go on, madam, what are your intentions…?”
Second paragraph of third chapter of La Mexicaine:
– Prenons un verre d’absinthe, se dit Fanfan, ça me donnera du toupet !
“Let’s have a glass of absinthe”, Fanfan said to himself. “That’ll give me some spirit!”
Second paragraph of third chapter of Bicheville, ou le chemin du paradis:
« Quand je serai la femme de Pierre, nous ne verrons que des amis connus de nous depuis longtemps… Les deux hommes qui paraissaient les plus distingués et les plus recherchés dans le singulier monde que j’ai traversé pendant ces six derniers mois, sont deux infâmes et deux misérables ; que sont donc les autres ? Ce monde où l’on rencontre des Othon du Triquet et des gens comme ces deux êtres dont le nom ne salira pas les pages où se trouve celui de mon bien-aimé, ce monde-là est-il bien le vrai monde ? En ce cas fuyons loin de lui… Pauvre mère ! Reviens à ta vie paisible ; tu vieilliras entourée de la tendresse de tes enfants, je ne serai ni vicomtesse de contrebande peut-être, ni baronne d’aventure peut-être encore, mais j’aurai un intérieur où je ne trouverai que des visages francs et loyaux, et je pourrai sans crainte toucher toutes les mains qui m’entoureront, car s’il s’en trouve quelques-unes noircies par le travail, il ne s’en trouvera aucune souillée par l’infamie. Voilà une grande phrase que mon mari trouvera prétentieuse ; – qu’il soit tranquille, mon bon Pierre… quand il sera près de moi, je n’écrirai plus avec tant de peine ce que je pense, je le lui dirai à lui toujours, et il me semble qu’alors les mots viendront tout seuls ! C’est égal, c’est un bien singulier monde ! »
‘When I become Pierre’s wife, we will see only friends we have known for a long time… The two men who seemed the most distinguished and the most sought-after in the strange world I have passed through these last six months are two infamous and two wretched people; what are the others? Is this world, where we meet Othon du Triquet and people like these two whose names will not stain the pages where my beloved’s are, the real world? In that case let us flee from it… Poor mother! Come back to your peaceful life; you will grow old surrounded by the tenderness of your children, I will not be a viscountess of smuggling perhaps, nor a baroness of adventure perhaps, but I will have a home where I will find only honest and loyal faces, and I will be able without fear to touch all the hands that surround me, because if there are some blackened by work, there will be none stained by infamy. That’s a big sentence that my husband will find pretentious, but don’t worry, my good Pierre… when he’s near me, I won’t take so much trouble to write down what I’m thinking, I’ll always say it to him, and it seems to me that then the words will come all by themselves! All the same, it’s a very strange world!
Second paragraph of third story (“Johnny’s New Job”):
Wednesday, the case was officially declared by the government to be an instance of Welfare Knew And Did Nothing (within the meaning of the Summary Judgement Act) so of course everyone kept their ears open and sure enough pretty soon the thrilling voice of the Public Accuser came booming out of the factory Screens, demanding on behalf of everyone there that culprits be identified for him to Name.
A second collection of short stories by Chris Beckett, whose fiction I have enjoyed over the years, collecting stories published between 2008 and 2012. I had previously read one of them, “Poppyfields”, which is included as an afterpiece to his fix-up novel Marcher. They’re all decent enough, mostly rooted in East Anglia; the one that surprised me, mostly in a good way, was “Our Land” which is a what-if story transposing the Israel-Palestine conflict onto England. There are several pairs of stories linked by their setting in distinct futures, and I was a bit annoyed that these are not paired up in the internal structure of the collection. It’s not as mind-blowing as Beckett’s previous collection, The Turing Test, but it will certainly do. You can get it here.
This was my top book acquired in 2019, and the SF book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on those piles respectively are Burned, by Sam McBride, and A Brilliant Void, by Jack Fennell.
Ordinarily I couldn’t see any of this. Only through careful and deliberate study could I witness what had been in front of me all along. And so I did this, at home and at school. I remember this as a great period of visibility, the world bursting into appearance. The air was thick with teeming life, just as the oceans and the rivers were. A spoonful of seawater or a pinch of soil between your fingers held billions of living things. We were blind to this out of necessity, because if we saw what was really there we would never move. It was around us, between us, on the edge of us and inside us. It coated our bodies and we released waves of it when we breathed and spoke. It was in every skin cell and in the eyelashes that fluttered when we dreamed. It adapted to every aspect of our behaviour; if animals were shaded out, and microorganisms illuminated, then our ghosts would be clear in these bright peripheries. My favourite species were those that lay dormant in husk form before reanimating, such as the rotifers discovered in Arctic ice-sheets after 24,000 lifeless years. Able to withstand almost any force, they seemed to challenge the distinction between life and death, annihilating the concept of straight and linear time to suggest something more circular and repetitious instead.
Won last year’s Arthur C. Clarke Award, beating the Hugo-winning Some Desperate Glory and several others that I haven’t read yet. There are lots of interesting things here: protagonist is a marine biologist from an abusive family background, gets sent on a very mysterious mission to an Atlantic Ocean trench, and then on an even more mysterious space mission to the outer solar system; and then something even more mysterious happens, and we end the book trying to work out what it is. But everything is linked back and forth between the different phases of the plot, the protagonist is interesting and intriguing, and the non-human forces (I hesitate to even say ‘alien’) subtly realised.
In his acceptance speech at the Clarke ceremony, MacInnes paid tribute to Christopher Priest and said that he had learned a lot from their brief friendship. The book is not one that Chris would have ever written, but I did get the feeling that he would have enjoyed looking over MacInnes’ shoulder and giving him an approving pat on the back.
Man: Where’s the other rider? Is it your husband? Kim: Who are you anyway?
Second frame of third page of Épisode 2:
Manon: Oh, shit!
The first two in what we are promised will be a four part story from the Brazilian-French comics writer Leo, following on from the previous 26 albums in the Aldebaran cycle since 1994. Kim, who has been the central character for most of the stories, is sent with her friend and colleague Manon to investigate the backward world of Bellatrix, where a misogynist conservative faction seems likely to win the elections and remove women’s rights.
Meanwhile their support mission in orbit, supported by the alien Avarants who have requested the Bellatrix intervention, runs into problems of its own when another alien race, the Arctarods, turns up.
As ever, gorgeously drawn; the political point is a lot more cogent than in some of Leo’s previous work; both of the first two albums end on cliff-hangers, which suggests that a decent amount of thought has gone into the plotting. Even minor characters get some credible presence here as well. I love that the lead Avarant has decided to call himself Seamus.
First Avarant: This is the human, Manon Servoz. Second Avarant: Come and sit with us, Manon. My name is Seamus.
See here for methodology. Back when I started this project, I was simply recording the top eight books tagged as being in each country by users of on Goodreads and LibraryThing, and then recording which didn’t really qualify due to not being set in that country.
I have switched now to a system where I disqualify the relevant books before constructing my league table. This is particularly important for Ethiopia, where on my first pass I only found two of the top eight books actually set there – and I was wrong about one of them! So the below table is comprehensively revised from the first round; the only thing that hasn’t changed, in fact, is the book at the top of the list.
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
Cutting for Stone
Abraham Verghese
404,368
9,853
The Shadow King
Maaza Mengiste
14,188
769
The Emperor: Downfall of An Autocrat
Ryszard Kapuściński
8,590
1,095
The Quest
Nelson DeMille
10,305
713
The Sign and the Seal
Graham Hancock
2,767
1,038
Beneath the Lion’s Gaze
Maaza Mengiste
3,429
467
There Is No Me Without You
Melissa Fay Greene
3,404
426
Black Dove White Raven
Elizabeth Wein
3,095
381
I’m glad that Ethiopian writer Maaza Mengiste does get two entries on the list. I’m surprised (though perhaps I shouldn’t be) to see Elizabeth Wein, who I had a great dinner with in Glasgow in 2005, in eighth place.
I disqualified no less than twelve books to get to Elizabeth Wein, and there are a couple on the list that I’m still not sure of. As I noted previously, What is the What, by Dave Eggers, is about South Sudan. The Covenant of Water, by Abraham Verghese, is set in India. Infidel, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, is about Somalia. A Long Walk to Water, by Linda Sue Park, is also about South Sudan. Say You’re One of Them, by Uwem Akpan, is a short story collection of which only one story is set in Ethiopia.
The Shadow of the Sun, by Ryszard Kapuściński, which I incorrectly included in my table last time, covers a number of African countries including Ethiopia. Yes, Chef, by Marcus Samuelsson, is mainly set in Sweden. The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, by Dinaw Mengestu, is set in the USA. Sweetness in the Belly, by Camilla Gibb, is set in several countries. All Our Names, again by Dinaw Mengestu, is set partly in the USA and partly in Uganda as well as in Ethiopia. How to Read the Air, yet again by Dinaw Mengestu, is set in the USA. And Refugee Boy, by Benjamin Zephaniah, is set in Eritrea and the UK as well as Ethiopia.
I made a couple of judgement calls. The Sign and the Seal looks like it is total rubbish, but it is nonetheless about the concealment of the Ark of the Covenant in Ethiopia, so I ruled it in. On the other hand, to my surprise, very few Goodreads or LibraryThing users think that Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop is about Ethiopia, although I always had that impression. So I ruled it out, on the basis of popular perception.
Our brothersisters have always possessed the cruelty that is our birthright. They stacked their bitterness like a year’s harvest; they bound it all together with anger, long memories, and petty ways. The Ada had not died, the oath had not been fulfilled, and we had not come home. They could not make us return because they were too far away, but they could do other things in the name of claiming our head. There is a method to this. First, harvest the heart and weaken the neck. Make the human mother leave. This, they knew, is how you break a child.
I am getting to the end of my project of reading all of the Tiptree/Otherwise, BSFA and Clarke Award winners. This won the 2019 Otherwise Award, the first time it had that name, beating six other novels, two shorter pieces and a series of books. I have read two of the others, The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal and The Deep by Rivers Solomon; of the three I liked Freshwater the most.
It’s the story of a Nigerian who moves back and forth to the United States, but who also contains several different personalities: the Ada, who is the named protagonist; Asụghara, whose impulses are destructive; Yshwa, a rather distracted Jesus; and Saint Vincent, who carries masculine traits. This could easily have become very self-indulgent, but in fact the narrative twists and turns and doesn’t lose track of trying to tell a story, despite the multiplicity of the protagonist’s nature. I found it an excellent read. You can get it here.
As usual, I’ve crunched the Goodreads / LibraryThing numbers on the books published 50, 100 and 150 years ago. It’s surprising what has stayed within the popular Zeitgeist and what has not. I’m looking at the top 20 books from 1975, the top 15 from 1925 and the top 10 from 1875.
I’m not doing the 25-year points, 2000, 1950 and 1900, in such great detail, partly because this post is already quite long enough, and also because 2000 is still too recent. Since you asked, however, the top book from 2000 on GR and LT is Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, by J. K. Rowling; the top book from 1950 is The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, by C. S. Lewis; and the top book from 1900 is The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum. There’s a blog post waiting to be written about that synchonicity. (For 1850, it’s The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne.)
1975
LT
GR
1
’Salem’s Lot, by Stephen King
610,770
17,066
2
Tuck Everlasting, by Natalie Babbitt
282,720
16,040
3
Shōgun, by James Clavell
196,270
8,355
4
Ramona the Brave, by Beverly Cleary
57,466
8,217
5
Crocodile on the Sandbank, by Elizabeth Peters
76,338
4,698
6
Ragtime, by E.L. Doctorow
44,818
6,405
7
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, by Michel Foucault
34,389
6,949
8
The Grey King, by Susan Cooper
39,532
6,024
9
Factotum, by Charles Bukowski
72,351
3,291
10
Forever…, by Judy Blume
64,293
3,416
11
Curtain (Poirot’s Last Case), by Agatha Christie
46,542
4,645
12
Where Are the Children?, by Mary Higgins Clark
58,247
2,123
13
A Color of His Own, by Leo Lionni
21,919
5,594
14
The Eagle Has Landed, by Jack Higgins
57,766
2,005
15
The Autumn of the Patriarch, by Gabriel García Márquez
The best-selling book of 1975 in 1975 was Ragtime, by E.L. Doctorow. I am surprised by how few of these I have read. I don’t think I had even heard of Tuck Everlasting, which seems to be a very popular American kids’ fantasy novel. Apart from the two where I have linked reviews above, I have read only Curtain and The Eagle Has Landed of the books on the list.
The 1976 Hugo and 1975 Nebula for Best Novel both went to The Forever War, which however was published in 1974. The other Hugo finalists that I have read from that year are Doorways in the Sand, by Roger Zelazny, published in Analog in 1975, and The Computer Connection by Alfred Bester and The Stochastic Man by Robert Silverberg. The very long Nebula shortlist included all of those, and also Dhalgren, by Samuel R. Delany, Missing Man, by Katherine MacLean, The Female Man, by Joanna Russ, and a bunch of others which I either haven’t read or which weren’t published in 1975, including Doctorow’s Ragtime.
I have a lot of affection for several of those, and I think my favourite is The Wind’s Twelve Quarters.
Note that although ’Salem’s Lot is only just at the top of the LibraryThing numbers, it’s way ahead on Goodreads, a distinction similarly enjoyed by The Philosophy of Andy Warhol and to an extent by The Eagle has Landed and Where are the Children?. On the other hand, children’s book A Color of His Own, along with The Periodic Table and Discipline and Punishment score relatively much higher on LibraryThing.
I’ve done a bit better here, and indeed Gatsby knocks all other contenders in this post out of the park. I think I have probably also read Carry on, Jeeves, and possibly also The Secret of Chimneys though it doesn’t feature either Poirot or Miss Marple.
Of the above, only Arrowsmith was also popular in 1925, according to the Publishers Weekly list. The best-selling book of 1925 in 1925 was Soundings, by A. Hamilton Gibbs, reviewed here, which has sunk without a trace (10 raters on Goodreads, 9 owners on LibraryThing).
The other 1925 books that I am sure I have read are The Flight of the Heron, by D.K. Broster and The Fugitive aka The Sweet Cheat Gone, by Marcel Proust. I may have also read Doctor Dolittle’s Zoo, by Hugh Lofting.
I’m with the consensus here: The Great Gatsby is my favourite of those I have read. (Turns out that Fitzgerald was a distant cousin of mine.) It is far in the lead on LibraryThing and stratospherically so on Goodreads. The only other book with anything like such a strong Goodreads lean is 24 Hours in the Life of a Woman. On the other hand, Manhattan Transfer, The Everlasting Man and Arrowsmith are relatively strong on LibraryThing.
I haven’t read The School at the Chalet, the first of the Chalet School series of books by Elinor Brent-Dyer; to my surprise, both it and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, by Anita Loos, fail to make the cut.
1875
1
Eight Cousins, by Louisa May Alcott
38,544
4,817
2
The Way We Live Now, by Anthony Trollope
13,646
2,959
3
The Adolescent, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
9,755
1,793
4
The Crime of Father Amaro, by Eça de Queirós
7,159
814
5
Senhora, by Jose de Alencar
6,211
462
6
The Law and the Lady, by Wilkie Collins
3,251
778
7
Memoirs, by William Tecumseh Sherman
2,145
1,048
8
The Sin of Father Mouret, by Emile Zola
2,108
514
9
Science and Health: with Key to the Scriptures, by Mary Baker Eddy
712
1,277
10
The Wise Woman aka The Lost Princess, by George MacDonald
1,480
494
This required a fair bit of digging, possibly more than the exercise was really worth. I have read at least one book published in every year from 1876 to 2024 inclusive, but I don’t seem to have read anything at all published in 1875. Anna Karenina started publication in that year, but did not finish until three years later, and most people would count it for 1878. Eight Cousins is a less well known story in the Little Women universe, but still better known than any of the other 1875 books.
Senhora, the novel by Brazilian writer José de Alenca, is relatively stronger on Goodreads, which has pockets of enthusiasm in certain languages and literatures. Science and Health: with Key to the Scriptures is very unusual in having more owners on LibraryThing than raters on Goodreads.
1825
Going further back, 1825 is also pretty slim. Among a dim bunch, William Hazlitt’s Spirit of the Age seems to do best. I’ll just also note Charles Maturin’s last published story, Leixlip Castle, which is set a century earlier at a time when the castle was owned by my Whyte ancestors, though Maturin doesn’t seem to have known that.
I think I’ll give ’Salem’s Lot and Eight Cousins a go. I’m glad that the 770-page The Way We Live Now didn’t win my 1875 table. (Also I see that I also counted it last year, as publication began in 1874.)
Finally the rising journalist went and sounded the people on the two chief Folkestone papers and found the thing had just got to them. They were inclined to pretend they hadn’t heard of it, after the fashion of local papers when confronted by the abnormal, but the atmosphere of enterprise that surrounded the rising journalist woke them up. He perceived he had done so and that he had no time to lose. So while they engaged in inventing representatives to enquire, he went off and telephoned to the Daily Gunfire and the New Paper. When they answered he was positive and earnest. He staked his reputation — the reputation of a rising journalist!
A short satirical piece by Wells from 1902. His first twenty books were published between 1895 and 1912, and this was the only one that I had not yet read. A mermaid washes ashore between Folkestone and Hythe (weirdly enough, I spent two nights at Hythe last November), and the local Liberal candidate falls in love with her. There is much comedy of manners (though the book is only 100 pages long). You can get it here.
I suspect that Wells was reflecting on his own experience of his love life interfering with his political activities. Several of his earlier books (most notably The New Machiavelli) include elections, but it wasn’t until 1922 and 1923 that he put himself forward (for the London University constituency; he came third out of three candidates both times).
This was the shortest unread book that I acquired in 2019. Next on that pile is The Soul of a Bishop, also by Wells.
“Vero!” Simon shouted. “Vero!” He struggled helplessly in the gorse; stamped down for a foothold but found nothing; sank waist-deep in furze. The quaking earth shifted again, like coals settling in the fire, and sank slowly into the hill-side, sucking in a great wad of gorse. Stones and clods and hummocks of grass slid into the darkness. Simon saw the earth opening under him and flung out his right arm, seeking frantically for a handhold. Martin’s hand gripped his, tightened and held; Monica’s fingers clutched his wrist.
A sequel to the lovely Creed Country by the same author, following the adventures of Sarah’s (many) younger siblings and their friends as they explore the countryside around them in the snow, get to know a mysterious old lady, and produce a medieval Mystery Play in an old church. To be honest, the plot is a bit diffuse with an abundance of characters to follow, but they do each have a distinct voice and it portrays a more innocent time (the cusp of the 1970s) in rural Surrey (a concept that barely exists these days). You can get it here.
I also want to shout out the cover art by Elizabeth Grant, which I find striking and evocative.
She illustrated a lot of children’s books in the early 1970s – in my mind she is inseparable from the Puffins.
This 1977 painting of “A Bunker on an American Golf Course”, at Knightshayes Court in Devon, looks like it might be by her too.
I wish I could find out more about her, but there seem to be at least four living artists also named Elizabeth Grant, so it’s impossible to dig through the data.
Current Caleb Williams, or Things as They Are, by William Godwin (group read) Paddy Machiavelli: How to Get Ahead in Irish Politics, by John Drennan Killing Ground, by Steve Lyons Fifty Years On, by Malachi O’Doherty
Last books finished A Kind of Spark, by Elle McNicoll Doctor Who annual 2025, by Paul Lang The Passionate Friends, by H.G. Wells The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories, ed. Ellen Datlow The Hypothetical Gentleman, by Andy Diggle, Mark Buckingham, Brandon Seifert and Philip Bond Orbital, by Samantha Harvey I Who Have Never Known Men, by Jacqueline Harpman
Next books Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead, by Dale Smith The Soul of a Bishop, by H.G. Wells On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong
I’ve been really bad at tracking my Big Finish listening here, and one of my minor New Year’s resolutions is to do that a bit better. I actually listened to this trilogy mainly while doing Christmas shopping, and perhaps I was in a good mood, but I notice that I liked it more than a few of the other reviews I have glanced at. They all feature Christopher Eccleston as the Ninth Doctor, with no common companion across the three plays (though two Eighth Doctor companions pop up in the third). Here’s a trailer:
The first of these The Seas of Titan by Liz Myles, is a Sea Devils story with a difference in that it’s set on Titan, not Earth. It hits much the same beats as most other Silurian / Sea Devils stories, with the wrinkle that both humans and Sea Devils have been abandoned by the rest of their race who have moved on (or stayeed put). I really liked the change of setting and the consequent difference of pace.
BF tend to include a historical story in every trilogy, and this time it’s Lay Down Your Arms, by Lisa McMullin, set in a late Habsburg spa resort where aliens are infiltrating the convalescents. Some of the virtual architecture was a bit unbelievable (“bonkers”, as another reviewer put it), but Kate Sissons as Betha Kinzky, the companion of the hour, is tremendous with Eccleston, and there is a great sting in the tail as we discover what she did with the rest of her life. (I at least had heard of her, under her married name.)
But my breath was taken away by Flatpack, by John Dorney, the third of the trilogy. The Doctor arrives in a mysterious self-assembly furniture superstore, and encounters Liv Chenka (Nicola Walker) and Tania Bell (Rebecca Root), who featured as companions of the Eighth Doctor in the extensive (perhaps overextended) saga Stranded which I listened to last year (and never got around to writing up). It becomes clear, as the entertaining script develops, that the secret controllers of the furniture store are up to no good – but I totally missed the clues as to who they actually turn out to be, a tremendous plot twist which I don’t think I’ve seen before in any Doctor Who story.
The first Big Finish stories with the Ninth Doctor were a little uneasy, as if the star and the production team were still sizing each other up. But now they seem to have properly got into their stride, and I highly recommend getting this here.
Opening of the third play (the long version of Thirst):
The curtain goes up on the bar. It is after hours. Light from a distant street-lamp shines faintly on the window The bar is lit (very badly.) by two candles which are set on the counter, one of them stuck in a bottle. The publican, MR. C., who is suitably fat and prosperous in appearance, is leaning over the centre of the counter talking to PETER, who is sitting on a stool side-face to the audience. JEM, who is in the nature of a hanger-on, is away in a gloomy corner where he can barely be discerned. Both customers are drinking pints; the publican has a small whiskey. The curtain has gone up in the middle of a conversation between PETER and the publican.
MR. C.: (Dramatically.) And do you know why? (There is a pause.) Do you know why? PETER: Begor, Mr Coulahan, I couldn’t tell you. MR. C.: (Loudly.) Because he’s no good, that’s why. He’s no bloody good!
(He finishes his drink in one gulp, turns to the shelves for the whiskey bottle and noisily fills himself another. As the talk proceeds he is occupied with pulling two further stouts to fill up the customers’ glasses PETER smokes and bends his head reflectively. JEM is silent save for drinking noises. He shows his face for a moment in the gloom by lighting a cigarette.)
This is a collection of seven stage plays and seven TV plays by Flann O’Brien / Myles na gCopaleen, some of which were performed in his lifetime and some of which were not. I bought it in the run-up to the 2019 Dublin Worldcon, partly to see if Faustus Kelly, the first of the plays, was worthy of a Retro Hugo nomination, and partly to prep for a panel on Flann O’Brien that I knew I’d be doing at the convention. But I had not previously sat down and read it from cover to cover.
Some of these pieces are very slight, but some are very interesting. The 1943 play Faustus Kelly brings the Devil to the Irish Midlands to interfere in local politics. He finds it so awful that he returns to Hell. It’s interesting that the politician protagonist is depicted very clearly as living with a woman who he is not married to – and the local political activists take it in their stride. This is fifty years before Bertie Ahern became Taoiseach.
Rhapsody in Stephen’s Green is adaptation of The Insect Play by Karel Čapek (best known as the inventor of the word ‘robot’ in his play R.U.R.) and his brother Josef. Like Faustus Kelly, it was performed at the Gate Theatre in 1943. Where the Čapeks’ first scene features butterflies as mindless and vain literary salon types, writing poetry to each other, O’Brien makes the characters here bees representing the posh Anglo-Irish elite, engaged in idle self-destruction. The two other scenes are less changed. In the second scene, the Čapeks’ dung-beetles are solid middle-class citizens saving for retirement; O’Brien makes Mr Beetle specifically a Dublin civil servant. And the militarist, proudly engineering ants in the last scene are Ulster ants in O’Brien’s adaptation. The satire is mean and doesn’t always land right for the twenty-first century reader, but it must have been a great production.
The other one that struck me was The Dead Spit of Kelly, about a taxidermist’s assistant who murders his boss and then disguises himself in his boss’s skin, with surreal consequences. It was shown on RTE in 1962. A film version starring Colin Morgan and Jason Isaacs was announce in 2021 but does not seem to have got off the drawing board.
The rest are shorter pieces, and some of them are rather slight (there’s a dire skit about an airplane trip from Dublin to London with an annoying English passenger). But I am glad to have read them. You can get it here.
This was the unread book that had lasted longest in my non-genre pile (though all three of the pieces that I mention above actually have strong fantasy elements). Next on that pile is, er, Black Mountain by Gerry Adams. But I acquired it only in 2021, so I’m pausing that cycle for now until I have cleared the remainder of my 2019 and 2020 books. (I have read all of the non-genre books that I acquired in 2020, finishing with Summer by Ali Smith.)
When I first watched this 1964 story in 2006, I wrote:
This was the last of the First Doctor stories that I felt I must Get Hold Of. I think you have to allow for the fact that it is mid-1960s drama to take into account the rather slow pacing. I liked it all the same; a real attempt to get into the spirit of the historical period, with some difficult dilemmas for the time-travellers – Barbara determined to abolish human sacrifice, but ultimately fails; and the Doctor has someone fall in love with him for the first time (but not, of course the last) in his on-screen adventures. Cameca’s helping them to escape in the end, even though she knows she will never see them again, was as touching as Barbara’s acceptance of her inability to change history. A minor gem, I would say.
When I came back to it for my Great Rewatch in 2009, I wrote:
The Aztecs is very good, but doesn’t quite rise to greatness. There are some great bits – Barbara struggling with the consequences of her divinity, the Doctor’s romance with Cameca, the Doctor and Barbara arguing about changing history. (It should be added that Lucarotti did some good female characters – Barbara is at her best here, and don’t forget Cameca, Ping-Cho and Anne Chaplet.) But I find Tlotoxl a little too pantomimey as a villain, and Ian just biffs Aztecs about, and gets condemned to death again, while Carole Ann Ford is on holiday. Everyone does it with great conviction, and you barely notice that it’s all done in a hot studio with a painted backdrop. And we end with another cliff-hanger into the next story, though our heroes have had enough time to change clothes.
This time around, a little wiser to the constraints of 1960s television, I am amazed at how well the director and cast managed to convey a grand sweeping city and civilization in four cramped studio sets. Also Margot van der Burgh is very impressive as Cameca, a mostly quiet but crucial role. You can get it here.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of the novelisation is:
The Aztecs they passed on the way to the barracks bowed respectfully to Tlotoxl, but Ian sensed they were afraid of the High Priest.
I was disappointed by Lucarotti’s novelisation of The Massacre, which stuck much more closely to his original script than the show as broadcast. Here again he has added bits and pieces which presumably were in his original concept, and I was again disappointed, but for a different reason: the narration is strangely flat, and you really miss the performances of the actors breathing life into Lucarotti’s lines back in 1964. One cannot help but feel that the production team on the whole did Lucarotti a favour by editing his material. Also he has a really annoying habit of mixing indirect speech with direct speech, which reads like a desperate attempt to make a novel out of a TV script.
Reading the book again very soon after rewatching the story, there are a few important differences included to smoothe out the plot; but I stand by my complaint about the jerky switches from indirect to direct speech. You can get it here.
Doris V. Sutherland’s Black Archive on the story has four chapters, a substantial conclusion and an interesting appendix. The first chapter, ‘Building the Pyramid’, looks at The Aztecs in the context of the 1960s historical stories of Doctor Who, as a showcase for Jacqueline Hill as Barbara, and as a reflection on the effects of time travel, pointing out how new all of this was for Doctor Who at the time.
The second chapter, ‘Not One Line? The Historical Accuracy of The Aztecs’ goes in detail, perhaps a bit too much detail, on whether or not the story is a good description of the real Aztec culture. Though there are a couple of good observations, eg “it is hard to miss the awkward results of the script’s reluctance to mention the Aztec deities by name. It appears that such monikers as Quetzalcoatl and Huitzilopochtli were deemed insufficiently pronounceable for a production in which retakes were to be avoided for budget reasons.”
The third and longest chapter, ‘Narratives of Conquest’, looks at where the ideas for the story really came from. Its second paragraph is:
The Doctor Who Discontinuity Guide by Paul Cornell, Martin Day and Keith Topping lists, as an influence on the serial, The Royal Hunt of the Sun², a play by Peter Shaffer that depicted Francisco Pizarro’s conquest of the Incas and was performed in the same year as The Aztecs³. However, the dates here do not quite match up: as Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood point out, the play was originally performed in mid-February, while Lucarotti has stated that he first discussed the possibility of an Aztec-themed story during the filming of Marco Polo, which wrapped up on 17 February⁴. [Comment: actually that looks to me like a very good match-up of the dates!] ² Cornell, Day and Topping, Discontinuity Guide, loc 370. ³ And was adapted into a movie in 1969, starring Robert Shaw and Christopher Plummer. ⁴ Miles, Lawrence and Tat Wood, About Time: The Unauthorized Guide to Doctor Who, 1963-1966, Seasons 1 to 3, p70.
Sutherland considers the 1947 film Captain from Castile and G.A. Henty before swinging again into the question of historical detail, examining very closely the extent of human sacrifice among the Aztecs and, crucially, whether or not it made much difference to the brutality of the Spanish conquest, concluding that it didn’t. I somewhat parted company with the writer here; I think that it doesn’t matter all that much that the story is not based on perfect historical knowledge.
The fourth chapter, ‘What Does The Aztecs Have to Say?’, starts by recounting critical opinion of the story but then swings back into the question of colonialism, pointing out that the barbarism of Spanish colonialism, as perceived in English culture, is a really crucial element of understanding what was going on. How very different, perhaps we are meant to think, to enlightened British colonialism! I think there is actually a bit more that could have been looked at here, in terms of 1960s British perceptions of the Franco regime. Her ultimate judgement is that the message of The Aztecs on colonialism is confused, rather than definitively pro or anti.
I have to take issue with the final section of Chapter 4, which states that “Only with the first Chibnall / Whittaker season, which aired in 2018, did the series hire its first non-white writers.” Glen McCoy, who wrote the 1985 story Timelash, is Anglo-Indian – I have checked this with him personally.
The conclusion makes the point that The Aztecs is quite different from most Doctor Who stories, while still being similar enough to be recognisable and sound enough to remain watchable decades later.
An appendix looks at the differences in the novelisation, flagging up in particular a more overtly Christian agenda, and then briefly looks at Child of the Sun God, an episode of the Andersons’ Joe 90 also written by Lucarotti with striking similarities (a lost Amazonian tribe is striking down world statesmen; Joe 90 must infiltrate them, pass himself off as a white god and save the day), but which is much less memorable.
I confess to not being completely satisfied with this particular Black Archive. Researching the factual basis of a particular story takes us quickly to the point where the commentator can show off the superiority of their knowledge to the original writer. I preferred the discussions of ideology and of Lucarotti’s use of his sources, whatever they were. But you can get it here.
‘Hmm …’ the Doctor mused as his eyes passed over the houses surrounding him. ‘Why have a plant pot without any plants?’
A Fifteenth Doctor book which is yet another story of rebels against the system, with world-building so complex that I am afraid I got lost in it, and loads of characters who barely have time to establish themselves before the book ends (or they get killed). Yes, it’s an important anti-colonial narrative; yes, there are a lot of Doctor Who stories that have this theme; but most of them are better executed. Heart in the right place, perhaps needed twice as much space (or substantial editing). You can get it here.
See here for methodology. Back when I started this project, I was simply recording the top eight books tagged as being in each country by users of on Goodreads and LibraryThing, and then recording which didn’t really qualify. I have switched now to a system where I disqualify the relevant books before constructing my league table, so I’m going back to the Philippines with an updated table.
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
Ghost Soldiers
Hampton Sides
37,671
2,839
Trash
Andy Mulligan
14,321
1,080
Patron Saints of Nothing
Randy Ribay
18,192
667
In the Presence of my Enemies
Gracia Burnham
7,873
1,365
The Tesseract
Alex Garland
6,891
1,259
Noli Me Tángere
José Rizal
8,268
724
We Band of Angels
Elizabeth M. Norman
4,555
567
El Filibusterismo
José Rizal
6,288
376
I disqualified eight books, which is a lot, though not as many as with Bangladesh last week. A lot of GR and LT users use the “philippines” tag for books that are about Filipino migrants to the USA or elsewhere, or about the Second World War in the Pacific, or about US colonial policy more generally.
Specifically, the top book most often tagged “Philippines” on both Goodreads and LibraryThing is Neal Stephenson’s epic Cryptonomicon. I am of course disqualifying it as considerably less than half of the 900+ pages are set in the country. Arsenic and Adobo, by Mia P. Manansala, and The Farm, by Joanne Ramos, are set in the USA. American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880-1964, by William Manchester, covers the man’s entire career. How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, by Daniel Immerwahr, includes the Philippines as the most egregious case of US colonialism.
Avenue of Mysteries, by John Irving, takes its protagonist to the Philippines, though for less than half of the book. The same appears to be true for the protagonists of Falling Together, by Marisa de los Santos. Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen, by Jose Antonio Vargas, is precisely about the immigrant experience in the USA. The Imperial Cruise, by James Bradley, is set on the SS Manchuria in 1905, and while it did visit the Philippines, that was just one of the stops.
So, of those I have allowed onto the list, three are about Americans being held prisoner in the Philippines, including the overall winner, Ghost Soldiers (the other two are In the Presence of my Enemies and We Band of Angels). Trash isn’t explicitly set in Manila, but everyone assumes that it is. Patron Saints of Nothing starts in the USA but I get the impression that more than half of it is set in the Philippines. The Tesseract is very definitely set in today’s Manila, and Noli Me Tángere and El Filibusterismo are nineteenth century classics of Filipino literature.
Next in this sequence I will revisit Ethiopia, and then back to my regular sequence with Argentina.
The truth is, there are plenty of negative sentiments all around and within us – anger, fear, discontent, distrust, sadness, suspicion, constant self-doubt … but perhaps more than anything, an ongoing apprehension. An existential angst. All these emotions are very much part of our lives now. Even digital spaces have become primarily emotional spaces.The posts that go viral or the videos that are watched most widely are freighted with emotions. What is equally significant is how this creates a tendency, a habit of mind, that perpetuates itself through space and time. In a study conducted by the Institute for Social Research scholars have found that ‘when exposed to less positive news, people posted less positive comments and more negative ones. When exposed to less negative posts, the opposite pattern occurred.’* * ‘Anger, Fear and Echo Chambers: The Emotional Basis for Online Behavior’, D. Wollebaek, R. Karlsen, K. Steen-Johnsen, B. Enjolras (April 2019) [NB – I see online versions of the book where the chapter division is very different to my printed edition.]
A short book, written in the wake of the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement, arguing for optimism and effort despite the depressing state of the world. I read it a couple of weeks ago, in the course of having a long and decompressing bath after I got back from a trip to Georgia, and it really helped my mood.
Shafak briefly and compellingly discusses the problems of anxiety and anger, the need and duty to tell ourselves and each other better stories, the importance of empathy and compassion, and the power of conscious optimism. It is peppered with personal anecdotes and observations, but not to the point that these distract from the core message. She also weaves in a few powerful quotations from others, including Martin Luther King’s “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” A short text that gave me a lot to think about. You can get it here.
Though familiar themes crop up everywhere, ancient tithing customs were particular to each parish. Today they read like magic potions: toad under cold stone, days and nights has forty-one, could well be the vicar’s due at Lammastide. As well as the joy of otherness and unfamiliar words to justify time spent with tithe records, they are also especially instructive for anyone chasing old stories. They challenge us to unravel them, to reveal lost ways of making sense of the world and to shed light on the long-forgotten machinations of the stock characters of village life: impecunious parsons, resentful husbandmen and bombastic squires.
A tremendously charming book about one obscure local legend in Hertfordshire, the story of Piers Shonks who slew a dragon hiding under an ancient yew tree in Brent Pelham, near Stansted Airport. Hadley goes into impressive detail about the origin of the legend, the meanings of dragons and yew trees, and Shonks’ unusual burial in the wall of the local church, and then into the limited but significant documentation of the life of a fourteenth-century Piers Shonks who lived in the right place.
The evidence doesn’t all point the same way, let alone hang together, but the point is not the truth or otherwise of the dragon myth, it’s the story of exploring the myth and seeing where that takes you; and it’s a great trip through the archives and lore of England, Hertfordshire in particular. You can get it here.
I learned about this not from Ron but from his wife, Matrice.
A follow-up to her earlier autobiography, this is much more of a self-help book drawing on lessons learned from Michelle Obama’s family, her friends, her career and her experience of being First Lady for eight years. Most of us can relate to all but the last of these. It’s a very affirming message of self-help, self-confidence and compassion, which rather restores one’s faith in humanity. I am not in the audience that the book is primarily aimed at, but I found a lot to like and admire here, and it actually succeeded in cheering me up a bit about the state of the world. You can get it here.
An interesting thought from a parallel universe: a POLITICO journalist interviewing two senior Trump campaign managers last month asked if they had investigated popular support for alternative candidates to President Biden, other than Vice-President Harris, to see what would happen if he were replaced on the ballot.
Trump adviser: Yeah, we tested them all. POLITICO: Who was the strongest? Trump adviser: Strangely enough, Michelle Obama.
This was the top book on my unread pile that was non-fiction, by a woman, and acquired in 2023. Next on those stacks respectively are The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy; I Who Have Never Known Men, by Jacqueline Harpman; and A History of the Bible, by John Barton.
This is the sixth time that I have compiled a list of science fiction’s predictions for the year ahead. I cover TV, films, books, comics and games set in 2025, but I only look at those that are more than twenty years old – so for instance this year I am skipping Vernor Vinge’s award-winning 2006 novel Rainbow’s End. That still leaves plenty to choose from.
Dystopia I: environmental catastrophe
I’m sorry to say that quite a lot of the science fiction set in 2025 has a dystopian theme, though few are quite as bleak as the 1986 filmFuture Hunters, starring Robert Patrick and Linda Carroll. Here’s its opening scene:
The film only spends about twenty minutes in the future before timewarping back to 1986, where the protagonists must find the Spear of Destiny by defeating its Amazon warrior guards in alliance with a tribe of midgets. This apparently will avert the ecological disaster that would otherwise destroy society.
It’s a common theme. (Ecological disaster, that is.) T. Coraghessan Boyle’s 2000 novel A Friend of the Earth, which features a disturbing dead frog on the cover, alternates timelines between the early 1990s when things started to go wrong, and 2025 when the protagonist starts to put his life back together (though it is too late to avoid environmental catastrophe).
Caroline MacDonald’s 1992 YA novel, The Lake at the End of the World, ends with two groups of devastated survivors of the climate apocalypse coming together to ring in the new year of 2025.
And of course in Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, part of which is set in 2025, environmental catastrophe is piled on top of political catastrophe and societal breakdown.
Dystopia II: violent sport
Not all of the 2025 dystopias involve environmental catastrophe. Violent games are another recurrent theme. Most famously, in the best known book set in 2025 that I can identify, the protagonist of Stephen King’s 1982 novel The Running Man is given 30 days to escape a televised manhunt, screened as a distraction from the horrible dystopian reality of American society. (The 1987 film with Arnold Schwarzenegger is set a few years earlier.)
Televised violent sport is also central to two films set in 2025. The 1983 film Endgame (Bronx lotta finale), starring Al Cliver and Laura Gemser, sees our protagonists in televised combat through the streets of a devastated future New York, before escaping to the nearby desert for a final showdown the bad guys.
And in the 1988 film Futuresport, starring Dean Cain, Vanessa Williams, and Wesley Snipes, the American protagonists of the massively popular game known as, er, Futuresport, play a high-stakes match against their Asian opponents, with the sovereignty of Hawaii as the prize.
And while we’re on the theme of fictional violent games, in the three actual video games that I have found which are set in 2025 you have to shoot your way out of trouble.
In the 1994 Impossible Mission 2025 for the Amiga (remake of a 1984 Commodore 64 game, Impossible Mission, which wasn’t set in any particular year), you also have to put together the pieces of a puzzle to defeat the evil scientist and his robots.
In the 2000 Japanese game for Dreamcast, Undercover AD2025 Kei, you play a policewoman avenging her husband on the criminals who killed him.
And in the 2005 multi-platform game F.E.A.R. First Encounter Assault Recon, you play a special operative with lots of shooty bangy things, called in to deal with a psychic mutant capable of wreaking havoc on society.
Dystopia III: 334
Sometimes a dystopia is a dystopia because life in general is just shit. This is the case for the wide range of characters in Thomas M. Disch’s 334, who sprawl across the years between 2021 and 2026, with one and a half of the six stories in the book explicitly set in 2025 and the whole book set in and around 334 East 11th Street in New York. Economic collapse and state intrusion have made reproductive rights a key issue in Disch’s future, with some protagonists desperate to conceive and others desperate to avoid the consequences.
Outer space and reproduction
The three stories set in 2025 that feature space exploration also both feature reproduction as a sub-theme. The alien Megasoid which escapes its zoo in the 1964 Outer Limits episode, The Duplicate Man, wishes only to swamp the planet earth with its offspring. (Though the main theme of the episode is the creation of a duplicate of the protagonist to hunt it down.)
And, soon after arriving in a huge artificial structure in orbit around Saturn, the female protagonists of John Varley’s 1979 novel Titandiscover that they are all pregnant. (And the main theme of the book is the quest for the alien intelligence responsible.)
Hatching and despatching is also a core theme of the short 2005 Japanese film, Negadon: The Monster from Mars – Negadon itself is brought to Earth as an egg, from which the monster then emerges; meanwhile the scientist who tracks it down is coming to terms with the fact that his daughter died when his killer robot malfunctioned.
How we get to dystopia
Skip to the next section if you don’t want to be spoilered for a comic published in 2003.
In Superman & Batman Generations 3: The 21st Century!: Century 21: Doomsday Minus One, by John Byrne, the high-tech 2025 of most of the story is devastated on the last page by an anti-technology bomb detonated by Lex Luthor, which reduces society to pre-industrial life.
Kids save the day
A couple more high-tech future series feature bright and talented kids who defeat the bad guys. The teens who constitute Tom Clancy’s Net Force Explorers, in a series of eighteen books published between 1998 and 2002 (none of which was written by Tom Clancy), use their cyber skills to Fight Crime.
And the thirty-eight episodes of 2005 TV series Power Rangers S.P.D. see yet another new set of Power Rangers defending Earth against Emperor Gruumm and his Troobian Empire.
Timey-wimey
I end this survey with three quite different gonzo takes on 2025. In the 2003 film Timecop 2: The Berlin Decision, Jason Scott Lee as the protagonist must try and prevent the villain, played by Thomas Ian Griffith, from going back to 1940 and killing Hitler. (What would be so bad about that?)
In S.M. Stirling’s error-strewn 2002 novel The Peshawar Lancers, the world is still recovering from the devastating meteor impacts of the 1870s which destroyed Europe, and our gallant British heroes with their plucky Indian allies fight off the devil-worshipping Russians.
And from 1986, La Femme piège (The Woman Trap), the middle volume of Enki Bilal’s Nikopol Trilogy, features a time-warping fax machine, ancient Egyptian gods, a sercret space mission, mind-altering drugs and sex and violence in Paris and Berlin. What more could you want for 2025?
I read 287 books this year, the ninth highest of the twenty-one years that I have been keeping count, and 70,000 pages, which is thirteenth highest of the twenty-one. My reading pace has accelerated in the last few years, though this year it was braked a bit by being the Hugo administrator. (Not as much as in 2017 or 2019, though; I guess I’m getting used to it.)
121 (42%) of those books were by non-male writers, which is the third highest number and second highest percentage (only just – 42.16% this year, 42.17% last year, 41.89% in 2021).
30 (10%) were by non-white writers, which is the fifth highest of the twenty-one years in both cases.
Science fiction and fantasy
89 (31%) of these books were science fiction or fantasy, not counting Doctor Who books which I tally separately. This is the lowest number since 2019 (the last time that I was Hugo administrator) and the lowest percentage since 2017 (the first time that I was Hugo administrator).
Top SF book of the year: My favourite sf novel in general this year was The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, by Shannon Chakraborty, a Hugo finalist about a pirate queen in a fantasy medieval Indian Ocean. I always say that the Indian Ocean is a corridor, not a barrier. (Not reviewed; get it here.)
Welcome rereads: My absolute favourite Terry Pratchett novel is Small Gods which combines his typically well-aimed shafts of wit and satire with an actual growth narrative for the two main characters. (Review; get it here.) Ursula Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest retains the passion of its attack on colonial wars of conquest, and seemed a particularly timely reread. (Review; get it here.)
Honorable mentions: I had not previously read Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower, which is actually set in 2024 and 2025, also has a dire political situation with an extreme right-wing candidate getting elected president of the USA, but ends with a glimmer of hope. (Review; get it here.) Some Desperate Glory, by Emily Tesh, is a great thoughtful anti-fascist novel, which won the Hugo to much acclaim. (Not reviewed; get it here.) Among the other award finalists, I particularly liked Liberty’s Daughter by Naomi Kritzer, a full-spirited critique of libertarianism. (Not reviewed; get it here.)
The one you haven’t heard of: Lost Objects, by Marian Womack, a collection of short stories many of which examine human reactions to environmental catastrophe. She has another collection coming out soon. (Review; get it here.)
The one to avoid: What Might Have Been: The Story of a Social War, by Ernest Bramah. Conservative wet dream written in 1907, about the overthrow of Socialism in England in 1918. (Review; get it here)
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Non-fiction
I read 86 (30%) non-fiction books, the same number as last year, equal third highest number and fourth highest percentage of the years I have recorded. As I go through the backlog of books acquired in previous years, it’s often the non-fiction that has sifted to the bottom of the pile; also I’m tallying the Black Archives and other Whovian lore here.
Top non-fiction book of the year: The best non-fiction book I read this year was A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture, by Samuel Hynes, which looks in impressive and fascinating detail at the impact of the conflict on all branches of the arts in Britain, and vice versa. (Review; get it here.)
Welcome rereads: Hiroshima, by John Hersey, the searing account of the consequences of the first atomic bombing of a civilian population. (Review; get it here) 1066 and All That, by W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman: Perhaps not strictly non-fiction, but presented as a hilarious reading. (Review; get it here)
Honorable mentions: I’m being a bit self-indulgent with three honorable mentions in this category, but I read a lot of good non-fiction this year. Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and How to Think Smarter About People Who Think Differently, by Steve Silberman, a really good compilation of what is known about autism and how and when we knew it. (Review; get it here) Take Courage: Anne Brontë and the Art of Life, by Samantha Ellis, which Bronte experts regard with some suspicion; I found it really charming. (Review; get it here) Fatal Path: British Government and Irish Revolution 1910-1922, by Ronan Fanning, which examines the process of Irish independence from the Westminster policy point of view. (Review; get it here)
The one you haven’t heard of: I got a lot out of the post-colonial critiques of science fiction and fantasy from the collection Ex Marginalia: Essays from the Edges of Speculative Fiction, edited by Chinelo Onwualu. Nigeria is especially well covered, but the scope is global. (Review; get it here.)
The one to avoid: Ten Years to Save the West, by Liz Truss. This is a not very good book written by a person who was completely unsuited to the job which she had so ruthlessly pursued. (Review; get it here.)
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Doctor Who
Only 34 (12%) Doctor Who fiction books this year, which is a little below the average; but 65 (23%) Doctor Who books of all kinds, which is almost bang on the average, tenth out of 21 in both counts.
Top Doctor Who book of the year: Simon Guerrier’s masterful biography, David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television, tells us about the life of one of the original show-running team in 1963, who wrote several of the best-remembered stories but died at only 51. (Review; get it here.)
Top novelisation of the year: Doctor Who: Rogue, by Kate Herron and Briony Redman (the original TV writers), gives lots of new context to the TV story, which I already liked a lot anyway. Probably the best Fifteenth Doctor book of any kind so far. (Review; get it here.)
Top other novel of the year: Warmonger, by Terrance Dicks – I had read this before, but failed to blog it. A really interesting reimagining of the Fifth Doctor / Peri relationship, drawing perhaps on Terrance Dicks’ own experience with the military. (Review; get it here.)
Top short fiction of the year: In a very attractive set of six novellas published last year by Puffin, the outstanding contribution is The Angel of Redemption, by Nikita Gill – told from the point of view of a Weeping Angel, in verse. (Review; get it here.)
Best Doctor Who comic of the year: I’ve had a good run of mostly Eleventh Doctor comics, and especially liked the most recently read, When Worlds Collide, by Tony Lee et al, which has an Ancient Britain story and then a doppelganger theme park thread. (Review; get it here.)
The ones you haven’t heard of: Two lovely volumes reminiscing about the Blackpool exhibition – I read the first last year, but I think I should treat them as a pair. (Reviews here and here; get them for free here and here.)
What to avoid: I won’t single out any particular Doctor Who book that I read this year as being worse than the others; there were a few disappointments, but nothing as bad as in the other sections of this post.
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Comics
36 comics and picture books is the third highest of my annual tallies, though 13% is only the sixth highest percentage. (I’m counting in Ara Güler’s Istanbul, which is pretty visual.)
Top comic of the year: Shubeik Lubeik, published as Your Wish is My Command in the UK, by Deena Mohamed; an alternative contemporary Egypt, where wishes are natural resources to be exploited. On the Hugo ballot; didn’t win. (Not reviewed; get it here.)
Welcome reread: L’Affaire Tournesol / The Calculus Affair, by Hergé; one of the great Tintin albums, with action in Switzerland and the Balkans and also the first appearance of the annoying Séraphin Lampion / Jolyon Wagg. (Review; get it here in English and here in French.)
Honorable mentions: Barnstormers: A Ballad of Love and Murder, by Tula Lotay and Scott Snyder, about two crazy kids flying across America in 1923 (review; get it here) Monica, by Daniel Clowes, a much more serious tale of lost parents and shattered identity (review; get it here)
The one you haven’t heard of: Return to Kosovo / Retour au Kosovo, by Gani Jakupi with great art by Jorge González, an even-handed exploration of a traumatised society. The English version is very difficult to get hold of, but the French original was published by mainstream firm Dupuis. (Review; get it here in French.)
The one to avoid: Bea Wolf, by Zach Weinersmith and Boulet, a pointless tale of little girls and boys re-enacting Beowulf. Also an unsuccessful Hugo finalist. (Not reviewed; get it here.)
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Non-genre
I had the sense during the year that I was reading more non-genre fiction than usual, but in fact the total number at 35 is spot on the median, and the percentage at 12% is a little lower.
Top non-genre fiction of the year: The Cazalet Saga – see below.
Honorable mention: Yellowface, by R.F. Kuang, short, grim, gruesome, funny and vicious about the reception and appropriation of Chinese culture in the US. (Review; get it here.)
Welcome re-read: Tristram Shandy, by Laurence Sterne; It’s rambling, self-indulgent, full of references to things I know nothing about; and at the same time I love it. (Review; get it here.)
The one you haven’t heard of: Creed Country, by Jenny Overton. Two teenagers do local history research in a corner of south-eastern England in the late 1960s. Their friendship, and their relationship with the past of their neighbourhood, are both beautifully drawn. (Review; get it here.)
The one to avoid: The worst book of any kind that I read all year was Pook at College, by Peter Pook, a dull, sexist tale of the only male student at a teacher training college. No link for buying this, but here’s my review.
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Plays and poetry
I read a total of eight of these, which is more than usual.
Top poetry or play of the year: The best poetry I read all year was Emily Wilson’s thought-provoking translation of The Odyssey, by Homer, bringing a new and broader perspective to an exceptionally well-known work. (Review; get it here.)
Honorable mention: The Cure at Troy, a verse playscript by Seamus Heaney, about engaging with and overcoming conflict and the past. (Review; get it here.)
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Top book of 2024
My top book of the year is actually five books, of which I read two in 2023 and three this year: the Cazalet Saga, by Elizabeth Jane Howard, a gripping tale of an extended English family in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, as the previous certainty of inherited wealth slips away in the tide of social and political change: superb stuff and strongly recommended.
2003 (2 months): The Separation, by Christopher Priest (review; get it here) 2004: (reread) The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien (review; get it here) – Best new read: Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, by Claire Tomalin (review; get it here) 2005: The Island at the Centre of the World, by Russell Shorto (review; get it here) 2006: Lost Lives: The stories of the men, women and children who died as a result of the Northern Ireland troubles, by David McKittrick, Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeney, Chris Thornton and David McVea (review; get it here) 2007: Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, by Alison Bechdel (review; get it here) 2008: (reread) The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition, by Anne Frank (review; get it here) – Best new read: Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero, by William Makepeace Thackeray (review; get it here) 2009: (had seen it on stage previously) Hamlet, by William Shakespeare (review; get it here) – Best new read: Persepolis 2: the Story of a Return, by Marjane Satrapi (first volume just pipped by Samuel Pepys in 2004) (review; get it here) 2010: The Bloody Sunday Report, by Lord Savile et al. (review of vol I; get it here) 2011: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbon (started in 2009!) (review; get it here) 2012: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Brontë (review; get it here) 2013: A Room of One’s Own, by Virginia Woolf (review; get it here) 2014: Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell (review; get it here) 2015: collectively, the Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist, in particular the winner, Station Eleven, by Emily St John Mandel (review; get it here). – Best book I actually blogged about in 2015: The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, by Claire Tomalin (review; get it here) 2016: Alice in Sunderland, by Bryan Talbot (review; get it here) 2017: Common People: The History of an English Family, by Alison Light (review; get it here) 2018: Factfulness, by Hans Rosling (review; get it here) 2019: Girl, Woman, Other, by Bernardine Evaristo (review; get it here) 2020: From A Clear Blue Sky: Surviving the Mountbatten Bomb, by Timothy Knatchbull (review; get it here) 2021: Carrying the Fire, by Michael Collins (review; get it here) 2022: The Sun is Open, by Gail McConnell (review; get it here) 2023: Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman (review; get it here)
The Sea Lady, by H.G. Wells Freshwater, by Akwaeke Emezi Bellatrix, Épisode 1, by Leo La mexicaine, by Madame Rattazzi (née Marie-Lætitia Bonaparte-Wyse) Bellatrix, Épisode 2, by Leo In Ascension, by Martin MacInnes The Peacock Cloak, by Chris Beckett Bicheville ou le Chemin du Paradis, by Madame Rattazzi (née Marie-Lætitia Bonaparte-Wyse)
December Reading
Non-fiction 5 (2024 total 86) Authors of their Lives, by David Gerber The Light We Carry: Overcoming In Uncertain Times, by Michelle Obama Hollow Places, by Christopher Hadley How To Stay Sane In An Age Of Division, by Elif Shafak The Aztecs, by Doris V. Sutherland
Non-genre 3 (2024 total35) The Nightwatch Winter, by Jenny Overton La mexicaine, by Madame Rattazzi (née Marie-Lætitia Bonaparte-Wyse) Bicheville ou le Chemin du Paradis, by Madame Rattazzi (née Marie-Lætitia Bonaparte-Wyse)
Plays 1 (2024 total3) Collected Plays and Teleplays, by Flann O’Brien
SF 8 (2024 total 89) The Word for World is Forest, by Ursula K. Le Guin Aelita, by Alexei Tolstoy The Hollow Places, by T. Kingfisher The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, eds Yu Chen & Regina Kanyu Wang The Sea Lady, by H.G. Wells Freshwater, by Akwaeke Emezi In Ascension, by Martin MacInnes The Peacock Cloak, by Chris Beckett
Doctor Who 4 (2024 total34) The Force of Death (audiobook), by Andrew Lane Palace of the Red Sun, by Christopher Bulis Eden Rebellion, by Abi Falaise Doctor Who: The Aztecs, by John Lucarotti
Comics 4 (2024 total36) When Worlds Collide, by Tony Lee et al Sunstone, vol 3, by Stepan Sejić Bellatrix, Épisode 1, by Leo Bellatrix, Épisode 2, by Leo
5,700 pages (2024 total 70,000) 11/25 (2024 total 121/287) by non-male writers (Obama, Shafak, Sutherland, Overton, Rattazzi x2, Le Guin, ‘Kingfisher’, Yu/Yang, Emezi, Falaise) 4/25 (2024 total 30/287) by non-white writers (Obama, Yu/Yang, Emezi, Falaise) 3/25 rereads (The Word for World is Forest, Palace of the Red Sun, Doctor Who: The Aztecs)
261 books currently tagged unread, up 2 from last month, down 51 from December 2023.
Reading now Caleb Williams, or Things as They Are, by William Godwin (group read) Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories, ed. Ellen Datlow The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy A Kind of Spark, by Elle McNicoll The Passionate Friends, by H.G. Wells
Coming soon (perhaps) Doctor Who annual 2025 The Hypothetical Gentleman, by Andy Diggle Killing Ground, by Steve Lyons Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead, by Dale Smith Fifty Years On, by Malachi O’Doherty The Soul of a Bishop, by H.G. Wells A Brilliant Void, by Jack Fennell Burned, by Sam McBride The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman, by H.G. Wells I Who Have Never Known Men, by Jacqueline Harpman On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong The Crown of Dalemark, by Diana Wynne Jones Vagabonds!, by Eloghosa Osunde Sorrowland, by Rivers Solomon “The Ultimate Earth”, by Jack Williamson Once and Future, vol 5: The Wasteland, by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora and Tamra Bonvillain How I Learned to Understand the World, by Hans Rosling De bondgenoten, by Brecht Evens Of the Imitation of Christ, by Thomas a Kempis Men at Arms, by Terry Pratchett Lies Sleeping, by Ben Aaronovitch A History of the Bible: The Book and Its Faiths, by Dr John Barton (2020) The Mysterious Island, by Jules Verne The James Tiptree Award Anthology 2, ed. Karen Joy Fowler Nine Lives, by William Dalrymple Ithaca, by Claire North
Judd sat behind an imposing antique desk of heavy wood. It helped conceal the fact, not obvious when he was wearing battle armour, that although he had a fine physique, he was slightly under average height. He was wearing a formal suit loosened a little at the collar. On the desk before him several neat stacks of reports were arranged about a multi-function keypad. To one side was a monitor screen, angled so that Dynes’ cameras would get an oblique view of moving columns of text and changing images, without revealing any detail. On the bulkhead behind Judd lighting panels glowed brightly while the rest of the office was rather dimly lit. Even though there was no natural day or night onboard a spacecraft, it implied that the hour was late.
This is the last in my run of Sixth Doctor re-reads, and I guess typical rather than brilliant. The Doctor and Peri land on a garden planet where not all is as it seems; most of the apparent humans are holograms, an interplanetary dictator is on his way to take over, the robots are revolting, there’s a comedy journalist recording everything and a hidden princess. Entertaining enough, but not at the top of my list. You can get it here.
See here for methodology. Back when I started this project, I was simply recording the top eight books tagged as being in each country by users of on Goodreads and LibraryThing, and then recording which didn’t really qualify. I have switched now to a system where I disqualify the relevant books before constructing my league table, so I’m going back to Bangladesh with an updated table.
When I first did this list in June, the writer of the leading book actually set in Bangladesh was on bail following a politically motivated conviction for labor law violations, and facing a six month prison sentence. Now, at the age of 84, he is literally running the country as Chief Advisor to the Government (Chief Adviser is the Bangladeshi term for the leader of a civilian government that has not come to power through elections).
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty
Muhammad Yunus
10,230
1,303
The Newlyweds
Nell Freudenberger
9,430
567
A Golden Age
Tahmima Anam
5,561
718
The Love & Lies of Rukhsana Ali
Sabina Khan
9,034
399
Lajja: Shame
Taslima Nasrin
5,452
421
Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism
Muhammad Yunus
3,180
602
Rickshaw Girl
Mitali Perkins
1,934
804
The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide
Gary J. Bass
2,384
322
Much more so than any other country I have looked at, the literature that Goodreads and LibraryThing users identify with Bangladesh is largely about the emigrant experience, or about the Indian side of the Bengali-speaking zone. I have never had to exclude so many books to reach a total of eight that are actually set in the country I am considering, and even then I am not completely sure about three of the eight. I’m giving The Newlyweds and The Love & Lies of Rukhsana Ali passes because it sounds like a bit more than half of them are actually set in Bangladesh, though both have substantial chunks set in America; and The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide, by Gary K. Bass, describes the American government involvement with the Liberation War, but I’m giving it a pass because it is at least about Bangladesh.
I excluded no less than thirteen books which had been frequently given the tag “Bangladesh” by Goodreads and LibraryThing users. White Teeth, by Zadie Smith, Brick Lane and Love Marriage, by Monica Ali, and Bitter Sweets, by Roopa Farooki, are all set in London. Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie, is mainly set in India, though with a memorable section in Bangladesh. The Hungry Tide, by Amitav Ghosh, is set in the Sundarban islands, but mainly on the Indian side. The Henna Wars and Hani and Ishu’s Guide to Fake Dating, by Adiba Jaigirdar, are both set in Dublin. The Shadow Lines, by Amitav Ghosh again, is about the consequences of the creation of Bangladesh, but mainly told from Calcutta and London. Himalaya, by Michael Palin, looks at all of South Asia. In the Light of What We Know, by Zia Haider Rahman, is set in many different countries. The Startup Wife, by Tahmima Anam, and Ask Me No Questions, by Marina Budhos, are set in the USA.
I should say that these all sound like excellent books, and I’ll keep an eye out for them.
(Sorry not to see Sultana’s Dream scoring well; surprised not to see Tagore, but I guess he is not in the bestseller category.)
This exercise has also exposed some huge differences between LibraryThing and Goodreads, where a couple of authors have massively more fans on GR than on LT. (I’m giving the titles of the published English translations, rather than the English translations of the Bengali titles, if you see what I mean.) I’ve had this with a couple of other indigenous authors in other countries, but I don’t recall any previous case where visibility on Goodreads was around 200 times the LibraryThing score.
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
জোছনা ও জননীর গল্প / Liberation
Humayun Ahmed
4,476
17
নন্দিত নরকে / In Blissful Hell
Humayun Ahmed
3,799
20
একাত্তরের দিনগুলি / Of Blood and Fire
Jahanara Imam
2,823
13
If these three books had LT owners in the same ratio to GR raters as most of the others, they would easily have made it into my top eight. জোছনা ও জননীর গল্প / Liberation and একাত্তরের দিনগুলি / Of Blood and Fire are both set during the Liberation War. নন্দিত নরকে / In Blissful Hell was written in 1970, so the war hadn’t happened yet; it is described in one review as a work of magical realism.
Immigrants and those they left behind in their homelands formed a transnational culture of emigration, which, though defined ultimately by relationships that had existed in the homeland, united new and old worlds in the singular transnational space of the letter. The concept of culture is used in this context to suggest the mutually and continuously constructed ideas, attitudes, and feelings that united emigrants and those with whom they kept in contact in Britain. These aspects of culture were not fixed and formalized, but instead operated in a wide conceptual space where meanings that assist in making sense of the world were sought and formed, and served to guide behavior.¹ At the heart of this culture in the nineteenth century was personal correspondence, which was neither in the homeland nor the new world, but rather on paper and “in the mail,” and overcame temporal and physical boundaries. International migrants began to participate in this culture before leaving for their destinations. To the extent that they had read or heard the letters of other international migrants read, and been party to the excitement that surrounded the arrival of letters from distant places, they had already entered into thinking about the meanings of the exchange of international mail with those who were thousands of miles away and likely never to be seen again, and who were only known year after year through their writings.
¹ My understanding of culture is guided by the work of Clifford Geertz: Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), and Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983).
Way way back in the 1990s, I helped David Gerber out with some logistics around a research trip he was making to Belfast, it being more difficult to arrange such things from Buffalo, NY, than it is now. Some of that research (I guess) went into this book, published in 2006 and sent to us for Christmas 2018. I’m afraid that I have only now got around to reading it. David is now 80 – wishing him well.
This book makes the argument that while historians have a tendency to use letters from migrants to give colour to accounts of the societies that they have moved to, we should not forget that the migrants themselves were people, negotiating family relationships between continents, dealing with unprecedented situations in a new home, working through the economic troughs and peaks that the country they have moved to inflected on them. The first 60% sets up a general theoretical framework and common themes, and then the last four chapters look at four migrants in particular to show how their correspondence with relatives back home played out in real time.
There were two standout chapters for me. Chapter 4, the shortest chapter in the main text of the book, simply looks at the impact of the introduction of state postal services. In the earlier period, letter-writers had to rely on less formal methods of sending letters, and the recipient paid, which had a big impact on how often you might write, or to whom. The introduction of postage stamps in the 1840s (first in the UK, but rapidly followed elsewhere) revolutionised communication. It’s a fascinating case where it was not a change in technology, but a reform to the economic model for delivery of a service, that drastically changed how we maintain contact with people.
And the first of Gerber’s four case studies is the most poignant: Thomas Spencer Niblock, son of a clergyman, born in Hitchin in 1820, emigrated to Australia in 1844 soon after his father’s death; but it did not work out, and he returned to England the next year, with his newly acquired Australian wife Matilda and their baby Joseph. Four years later, he left for Canada, and the surviving correspondence records his increasingly miserable attempts to make a go of farming in London, Ontario, begging his brother and sister in England for more money.
Finally his brother seems to have told him that they could not support him any more, and Niblock and his family went back to Australia in 1852 to try his luck in the goldfields. When, astonishingly, that didn’t work out, they decided to move along the coast to Sydney; and on 15 May 1853 their ship was wrecked on Tullaberga Island near Cape Howe due to a navigational error. Most of the crew survived, but most of the passengers were drowned, including the whole Niblock family (they may also have had another baby by then – the records are not clear).
It’s intense and heavily rooted in academe, so perhaps not for the casual reader, but just reading it inspired me to go back to Jenny Overton’s Creed Country, and also to look into the fates of my own relatives who were lost at sea (one of whom, like the Niblocks, seems to have drowned in the Bass Strait in the 1850s), so I found it very thought-provoking. You can get it here.
This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is M Leuven Collectie Schilderijen, by Lorne Campbell.
Second paragraph of third story (“What Does the Fox Say?”, by Xia Jia; unlike most of the stories in the anthology, the original is in English not Chinese):
You type this sentence word by word, and wait.
This is a collection of seventeen stories by female and non-binary Chinese writers, and five essays about translation and writing, recommended to me by Regina Kanyu Wang, one of the editors; it was a good recommendation. My favourite of the fiction is the title story, by Wang Nuonuo, translated by Rebecca F. Kuang, which looks at divine intervention in the seasonal cycle. There’s also a great riff on Douglas Adams intersecting with Ming China, “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe: Tai-Chi Mashed Taro”, by Anna Wu, translated by Carmen Yiling Yan.
I learned something from each of the non-fiction pieces, and the most interesting was the second last, “Net Novels and the “She Era”: How Internet Novels opened the door for Female Readers and Writers in China”, by Xueting Christine Ni, looking at how the digital era has eroded traditional publishing barriers in one particular case; it’s not difficult to see how this can apply to other fields of information as well.
This was at the top of my pile of unread books by non-white authors. Next on that stack is The Light We Carry: Overcoming In Uncertain Times, by Michelle Obama.
