I should have mentioned before that I saw Jodie Whittaker live on stage three weeks ago in London, performing the title role in The Duchess, an adaptation of Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, in the Trafalgar Theatre. Tickets were surprisingly inexpensive, and in fact I was ushered (ushed?) to a better seat on arrival as the evening had not sold out. (By comparison, tickets for David Tennant playing Macbeth the same night were going for literally ten times as much.)
I was not familiar with The Duchess of Malfi, except that I knew it was the source for a the titles of novels by P.D. James and Stephen Fry. So I can’t comment on whether or not the Trafalgar Theatre production improved on the original. It was a play of two halves; the first part setting up the widowed Duchess falling in love with her steward, and concealing this from her jealous brothers, with various conspiratorial subplots; and the second part in which almost everyone gets horribly murdered.
I felt that the cast were having a lot more fun in the second half, where they were getting killed and doing the killing, or both in a couple of cases; the first half had a lot of declaiming. There is a lot of serious material there about gender and power, but the graphic violence (and the virulent graphics) rather overwhelmed my intellectual appreciation of the play’s themes.
Jodie Whittaker dominated the scenes that she was in – and he character is one of the first to be murdered horribly, but then haunts the stage in a lingering afterlife. There was a glorious moment when one of the other cast members dried on the word ‘lycanthropy’ – Jodie W just said it to her, and they carried on with the scene; I bet the other actor was mortified in the dressing room afterwards, but these things happen.
None of the other cast had names that I recognised, though I see one of them (Joel Fry) was in Game of Thrones. The two that stood out to me were Elizabeth Ayodele as Julia, who is bonking most of the men, and Hannah Visocchi, who silently provided most of the music on a variety of stringed instruments. Having said that, Jude Owusu as Bosola was almost the only character who actually has an arc, and performed it well.
Second paragraph of third document (a letter from Pope Alexander III to Irish bishops):
Inde est utique quod nos ex vestris litteris intelligentes quod per potentiam karissimi in Christo filii nostri H[einrici] illustris Anglorum regis qui divina inspiratione compunctus coadunatis viribus suis gentem illam barbaram, incultam et divine legis ignaram suo dominio subiugavit, ea que in terra vestra tam illicite committuntur, cooperante domino, incipiunt iam desistere gudio gavisi sumus et ei qui iamdicto regi tantam victoriam contulit et triumphum inmensas gratiarum actiones exsolvimus, prece supplici postulantes ut per vigilanciam et sollicitudinem ipsius regis vestro cooperante studio gens illa indisciplinata et indomita cultum divine legis et religionem Chritiane fidei per omnia et in omnibus imitetur et vos ac ceteri ecclesiastici viri honore et tranquillitate debita gaudeatis.
Hence it is that – understanding from your letters that our dear son in Christ, Henry, illustrious King of England, stirred by divine inspiration and with his united forces, has subjected to his dominion that people, a barbarous one uncivilized and ignorant of the Divine law, and that those evils which were unlawfully practised in your land are now, with God’s help, already beginning to diminish – We are overjoyed and have offered our grateful prayers to Him who has granted to the said King so great a victory and triumph, humbly beseeching that by the vigilance and care of the same King that most undisciplined and untamed nation may in and by all things persevere in devotion to the practice of the Christian faith, and that you and your ecclesiastical brethren may rejoice in all due honour and tranquillity.
NB that Curtis and McDowell give only the English translation; I found the Latin original here.
I was rather glad to find that this book was given by my grandmother to my grandfather, as a present for his 64th birthday. (It’s his handwriting, I think, not hers.)
Published by Methuen in 1943, the previous year, it’s exactly what it says on the cover, an assemblage of important Irish historical documents from Laudabiliter to the 1921 Treaty and its immediate aftermath. It includes some classic texts that I would had never thought of seeking out for myself – the Statutes of Kilkenny and Poynings’ Law, for instance.
Inevitably the Anglo-Irish relationship is covered much more closely than any other topic, and it is hardly surprising that the well-documented Dublin Castle / London perspective provides a lot of material. But there are a couple of moments where the Irish nationalist voice is heard too – we get Hugh O’Neill’s declared war aims from 1599, and less than half a century later the agenda of the Confederation of Kilkenny in 1642.
This book was printed in 1943, and I see a copy of the 1977 reprint going for £46 on Amazon right now; otherwise I don’t think you’ll get it easily anywhere. This was my top unread book acquired in 2018; next (and last) on that list is The Geraldines. An Experiment In Irish Government 1169-1601, by Brian Fitzgerald.
Die weiten Wälder, von Wiesen unterbrochen, bieten Tausenden genußreiche Gelegenheit, sich zu ergehen und dem Ballspiel, Cricket oder Lawn tennis zu huldigen, wozu die Erfordernisse reichlich vorhanden sind. Es ist ein Aussichtsthurm hier und in einer Stunde etwa kann man auf herrlichen Wegen den Hermannskogel erreichen, auf welchem auch ein uralter Thurm steht, dessen Entstehungsgeschichte der Castellan erzählt. Wir legitimirten uns in der Wirthschaft auf dem Kahlenberge mit der Anweisung des Tullner Beamten und wurden mit allem versorgt. Wir ließen Zwirner telephonisch benachrichtigen, daß wir gleich nach dem Mittagstisch nach Payerbach fahren wollten, um die herrliche Nacht auf dem Schneeberg zu verbringen. Man versah uns, als wir aufbrachen, mit einer Tasche, in der wir die nöthigsten Reiseerfordernisse und Mundvorrath mitnahmen, und wurden ersucht, Tasche und Reiserequisiten in Tulln abzugeben, von wo sie wieder gelegentlich zurückgebracht würden.
The wide forests, dotted with meadows, offer thousands of enjoyable opportunities to relax and to play ball games, cricket or lawn tennis, for which the equipment is readily available. There is a lookout tower here and in about an hour you can reach the Hermannskogel by following some magnificent paths. There is also an ancient tower on top of the Hermannskogel, whose Castellan will tell you the story of its origin. We checked in at the inn on the Kahlenberge with the approval of the official from Tulln, and were provided with everything. We had Zwirner notified by telephone that we wanted to leave for Payerbach right after lunch to spend the night on the Schneeberg. When we left, we were given a bag in which we took the most essential travel supplies and provisions, and we were asked to hand in the bag and travel documents in Tulln, from where they would be returned in due course.
Translation by me
I wrote about this 1893 novel when doing my write-up of 2020 as portrayed in science fiction, but thanks to a DeepL subscription, I have only now got around to actually reading it. I wrote previously, having skimmed the German text:
Here Julian West from Looking Backward and a friend from another utopian novel of the time visit a future Austria, which has successfully maintained the Hapsburg monarchy and aristocracy andat the same time adopted most of the socialism of Bellamy’s novel. Austria is part of a European Union (that phrase isn’t quite used) which stretches from the Atlantic to the Urals, but does not include England.
It is quite a short book – 200 large print pages in the most recent edition – with typically ponderous nineteenth-century German sentences with long subordinate clauses which even DeepL struggles with. The premise is that by 2020, Austria – and when we say Austria, we mean the entirety of the Hapsburg Empire as it was in 1893 – has long been a Communist utopia under a constitutional monarchy, thanks to the wise reforms enacted by Franz Josef II and his heir Franz Ferdinand when he in turn came to the throne. (In reality, Franz Ferdinand was a petulant bigot who loved killing animals, and if he had ever come to the throne he is unlikely to have ruled in an enlightened manner.) Everything is tightly regulated by the authorities and everyone loves this because society has been made perfect. Money has been abolished, and so has smoking.
Most modern reviewers remark on the future arrangement of European politics in the book, which is actually dealt with rather rapidly, in two as-you-know-Bob moments of exposition, the first in Chapter 7:
Austria no longer has an army, as a disarmament treaty has long existed in Europe; but it maintains a very important naval defence force. [NB that this is the Austria which controls Trieste and Rijeka.] All the Continental states, which in the east are fully protected by Russia in return for subsidies and seconded personnel, have agreed on a coastal defence alliance and maintain not only coastal fortifications but also a strong navy, partly to protect themselves against England, which has been driven out of all seas and islands from Gibraltar to the Red Sea, and partly to protect themselves against the predatory states in Argentina and China, from where piracy is shamelessly practised.
A more extended description in Chapter 13 explains that the European Union (as I said before, not quite given that name) depends on regional security as well as internal disarmament:
Turkish rule had been completely abolished and Russia had taken over Asia Minor and Arabia, Italy Egypt, France the area from Egypt to the western border of Algiers, Spain the entire west of northern Africa. The peoples of the Balkan states had formed four independent Christian empires under the sovereignty of the Emperor of Austria, who was also in command of the navy and coastal defence.
…We consider that there is no danger of the Union breaking up, as the German Confederation once did, and provision has also been made to ensure that Union law can develop in line with the times. We hope that England will soon be compelled [gezwungen] to join the Union, and for the still distant future we may well assume that the whole of Asia will be won over to the collective principle, and then Europe, Asia and Africa, which in reality form only one continent, will be united into a single confederation of states.
A lot to unpack here, perhaps more than these few paragraphs are actually worth, but I’ll just note that there is no reference to Islam anywhere in the book.
The other thing that surprised me was the book’s take on women and sex. The population has been kept under control and dispersed around the countryside – Vienna has only 3,500 inhabitants – and reproduction is controlled by the sinister and all-powerful Women’s Curia, a body which includes all women over the age of 18. Only a few women are allowed to have babies, for good old eugenic reasons. Women who give birth to illegitimate children, ie without permission of the Curia, are either forced to permanently wear a garment of shame covering their face and body, or graciously allowed to emigrate to Africa. (Nothing is said about the consequences for the fathers.) The Women’s Curia legislates and enforces all of this, and it is portrayed as a Good Thing.
I’m scratching my head to think of another sf novel, or even another novel, where pregnancy is treated quite so neurotically. Brave New World, perhaps; but in that case there are (almost) no pregnancies at all, human reproduction having been mechanised.
Having said that, it’s clear that there is a lot of sex happening in Neupauer’s future Austria, and his protagonist Julian West has several close encounters and one definite score with the lovely Giulietta. Nothing is said about how the large amount of sex doesn’t then lead to large numbers of babies, but perhaps we are meant to read between the lines of the unspoken activities of the Women’s Curia. The book ends with a long letter from Giulietta to Julian, in which what isn’t discussed is perhaps more interesting than what is.
Second paragraph of third chapter (with embedded quote):
In his comments on the Ruddymane episode Upton cites the View where Spenser, in his inventory of Irish customs supposedly inherited from the Scythians, refers to Irish war-cries: ” … at theire ioyninge of Battell they likewise Call vppon theire Captaines name or the worde of his Auncestours As they vnder Oneale crye Landargabo, that is the bloddie hande which is Oneles badge” (Spenser 1949, 103). Although Upton is right to make this connection with the Red Hand of Ulster his interpretation of the episode is unconvincing:
This wicked witch had slain the parents of young Ruddymane, the bloody-handed babe: —plainly alluding, I think, to the rebellion of the Oneals, whose badge was the bloody-hand, and who had all drank so deep of the charm and venom of Acrasia that their blood was infected with secret filth. [emphasis as original] (Upton 1987a, 378)
Given that the episode is about the seduction of “The gentlest knight … the good Sir Mordant” (2.1.49.8-9) it is strange that Upton should think it is the Native Irish O’Neills who have been infected. If Upton’s reading of the allegory is correct then we might ask what group or individual Acrasia is meant to represent and who or what has infected the blood of the O’Neills.
Just to warn you that there are a number of Irish history books working their way through my bookblog at the moment, as the tail-end of my 2018 purchases and some recent academic acquisitions come together.
This is a book-of-a-PhD-thesis, a genre that I’m sympathetic to; it takes the Faerie Queene as its core, and looks also at other writing by Spenser and his contemporaries, teasing out particularly what is said about women and gender identity, and how this relates to Spenser’s understanding of Ireland and the Irish. Spoiler: Spenser was not very convinced of the good points of either women or the Irish. There’s also a particularly good chapter on Spenser’s take on the wild Irish landscape. Substantial stuff which I’m not really equipped to judge more thoroughly. You can get it here.
Current The Good Earth, by Pearl S Buck What Might Have Been: The Story of a Social War, by Ernest Bramah Yanks Behind the Lines: How the Commission for Relief in Belgium Saved Millions from Starvation During World War I, by Jeffrey B. Miller
Last books finished Forever Peace, by Joe Haldeman Science Fiction and Anticipation: Utopias, Dystopias and Time Travel, ed. Bernard Montoneri Les débuts de la forgeronne, by Madame Rattazzi (née Marie-Lætitia Bonaparte-Wyse) Synthespians™, by Craig Hinton
Next books Doctor Who: Rogue, by Kate Herron and Briony Redman Marriage, by H.G. Wells Drowned Ammet, by Diana Wynne Jones
Set in 2025, this comic from 2003 brings Knight-Wing aka Clark Wayne, the grandson of Superman and Batman, and his daughters Lois and Lara, aka Supergirl Red and Supergirl Blue, into conflict with Lex Luthor, who is now a disembodied brain who escapes from their mother on the third page of the story. There’s a rather confusing conflict with aliens and deity-like creatures and at the end of it Lex Luthor sets off a bomb that destroys all technology. (Though this is not really made clear until the next installment.)
Luthor’s bomb tips this one into the apocalyptic category of stories set in 2025, but until then the world seems rather pleasantly technologically advanced, with skyscrapers and flying cars etc.
I also found the advertisements for games in the comic really fascinating – EverQuest (which is still going), War of the Monsters and Black & Bruised (this last including vouchers for in-game purchases). There are also advertisements in favour of drinking milk and against using marijuana.
Look, this is a list of records which are banned here… You should be able to find them easily in France, especially the first three, Duke Ellington, Django Reinhardt and Benny Goodman.
Gani Jakupi kindly gave me a copy of this graphic novel as well as his Kosovo book when we met earlier this year. It is not available in English, unfortunately, though it has been translated from the original French into Dutch, Spanish and Catalan. It was co-written by Jakupi, who lives in Barcelona, and Denis Lapière, who is Belgian; the three artists are all Catalan, and Pellejero, who was born in 1950, has been exorcising the ghosts of the Franco regime for much of his career. Here’s a Youtube trailer for it:
Barcelona, âme noire (Barcelona, dark soul) tells the story of the rise and fall of Carlos, son of a grocer, whose mother dies in a bomb attack on their shop in (we guess) the immediate aftermath of the Civil War; he grows up to be a smuggler, crime boss, and lover of many women. The story apparently was originally intended to be a six-volume series and got cut back to 144 pages, and there is a bit of a sense of compression towards the end. But the art conveys a lot, and one gets a real sense of Barcelona as a seething centre of crime and subversion under the oppression of the Falange. The sexual politics is perhaps a bit traditional, but perhaps that also represents the times we are looking at. You can get it here in the original French.
See here for methodology. I am excluding books not actually set in the current borders of Sudan, which is tricky, given that they changed quite recently.
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
Who Fears Death
Nnedi Okorafor
26,857
2,272
Season of Migration to the North
Tayeb Salih
30,302
1,746
The Triumph of the Sun
Wilbur Smith
6,327
971
Slave: My True Story
Mende Nazer
10,063
525
The Red Pencil
Andrea Davis Pinkney
7,156
699
The Translator: A Tribesman’s Memoir of Darfur
Daoud Hari
5,140
763
The Wedding of Zein and Other Stories
Tayeb Salih
3,789
271
Lyrics Alley
Leila Aboulela
1,503
197
I had to exclude a lot of books here; when LibraryThing and Goodreads users deploy the ‘sudan’ tag, they don’t always check to see whether it’s a book mainly set in what’s now South Sudan, and of course it’s also used for books about Sudanese people affected by the conflict but who fled to other countries (usually the USA). I disqualified the following books set in the south: A Long Walk to Water, by Linda Sue Park; They Poured Fire on Us from the Sky, by Benson Deng; Acts of Faith, by Philip Caputo; and Emma’s War, by Deborah Scroggins.
I also disqualified the following for being less than 50% set in Sudan: What Is the What, by Dave Eggers; The Looming Tower, by Lawrence Wright; Home of the Brave, by Katherine Applegate; The White Nile, by Alan Moorehead; Running for My Life, by Lopez Lomong; Minaret, by Leila Aboulela; The Translator, by Leila Aboulela; The Blue Nile, by Alan Moorehead; and The Good Braider, by Terry Farish.
But the list I ended up with is gratifyingly strong, with Nnedi Okorafor’s early hit Who Fears Death (clearly set in an alternative Sudan) topping the LibraryThing list, and one of two books by the great Sudanese writer Tayeb Saleh topping the Goodreads list. I’m ashamed to say that I have not yet read any of them.
I have been trying to go through the science fiction set in 2025 in chronological order of publication / release, but somehow missed this 1986 film and have circled back to it.
This is definitely one of those films that is in the so-bad-it’s-good category. Only the first ten minutes is actually set in 2025, which is (as has depressingly often been the case on screen and page) a devastated post-apocalyptic wilderness. Then the guy who looks like he is going to be the protagonist grabs the Spear of Longinus, which pierced the body of the crucified Christ, and is zoinked back to the present day (ie 1986) where he is fatally wounded, and with his dying breath charges a young couple, played by Robert Patrick and Linda Carol, with the quest of uniting the spearhead with its hidden, long-sundered shaft, and therefore (by a mechanism that is never made clear) preventing the end of civilisation.
Robert Patrick is pretty wooden in Terminator 2, which was made five years later, and he’s pretty wooden here. But his co-star Linda Carol, supposedly still a teenager at the time and with only the lead role in Reform School Girls under her belt, steals the show with action and commitment; she gets a lot of the combat scenes despite wearing an impractical dress, and also gets most of the (few) good lines, as the two of them battle Nazis, martial artists, midgets and finally Amazon warriors to fulfil their quest. (Actually in fairness the midgets turn out to be on their side.) Everything has been thrown in here, quite unapologetically. You can’t quite decide whether to give it 3 out of 10 for effect, or 9 out of 10 for effort.
How am I feeling? Moist. Moist in the tear ducts and gonads, swelled up like a lungfish that’s been buried in the sand through a long desiccated summer till the day the sky breaks apart and the world goes wet again. The smell of coffee is taking me back—I don’t drink it myself anymore, too expensive and it raises hell with my stomach—and I feel myself slipping so far into the past I’m in danger of disappearing without making a ripple. She’s snoring. I can hear it—no delicate insuck and outhale, but a real venting of the airways, a noise as true in its way as anything Lily could work up. The rain slaps its broad hand on the roof, something that wasn’t tied down by somebody somewhere hits the wall just above the window, the world shudders, Andrea sleeps. It’s a moment.
A novel from 2000, this is another environmental crisis dystopia, set in two timelines; 1989 through to the mid 1990s, when it all goes wrong, and 2025-26, when our protagonist starts to pick up the emotional pieces again (though the world is still catastrophically damaged). I found it very well done – the protagonist’s ex-wife comes back to him in the first 2025 section, and the history of their relationship, and the fate of his daughter from a previous marriage, all play out against the damage being done to the natural world by humanity, both directly through logging and indirectly through climate change. A lot of my 2025 novels have been very depressing, and this is too, but I Iike it the most of any of them.
The dead frog on the cover was rather disturbing to see every time I opened the book on Kindle though.
I met Gani Jakupi at, of all things, a mutual friend’s standup comedy gig in Brussels a few months ago, and he kindly gave me two of his books; he is a comics writer based between Paris and Barcelona, and this was originally published in French as Retour au Kosovo. It’s a tremendous first person account of being in exile and seeing your home country on the news, not knowing if family are surviving; and then going back after the war is over to see what remains, and what can be reconstructed. It was published in 2014, but obviously has contemporary resonances at the human level with the Gaza war, even if there are significant differences in the geopolitics.
Jakupi’s take is humane and sane; he finds space for his traumatised relatives (several of his cousins were killed in a massacre) but also for the surviving Serbs; he has a wary approach to the internationals and to Kosovo’s new leaders. Jorge González has produced a tremendous artistic accompaniment to Jakupi’s script, with pastels conveying the shades of uncertainty in the situation, and some slippage into darker areas. Jakupi himself is a recognisable protagonist on every page, and I was pretty sure that I recognised a couple of other people who I know personally in the story.
This is one of the most remarkable graphic stories I have read this year. The French original is available here, but I don’t know how the average punter could get hold of the English translation; it was commissioned and published by the ProArte Institute in Kosovo, but that doesn’t even seem to have a website.
Most of the Watch got buried there. Policemen, after a few years, found it hard enough to believe in people, let alone anyone they couldn’t see.
I thought that I read all of Discworld, but I was wrong; this was published in November 2002, and I started tracking my reading quite carefully around then and began actual book blogging a year later, so I think I’d have noted it – and more crucially, I don’t remember encountering any of the plot points before.
Samuel Vimes, the head of the Watch, is yanked back through time to the early part of his career while pursuing a criminal, and finds himself roped into leading the earlier version of the Watch at a moment of civic unrest. He successfully engineers a de-escalation of the conflict, resulting in the elevation of Lord Vetinari to leadership of the city, and returns to his home timeline in the nick of time to help Sybil deliver their child.
There are some tremendously effective moments here. At the beginning we see the Watch, and several others, commemorating the moment by gathering in the graveyard of the Small Gods, but we readers are not told what this is all about until it becomes clear to us througout the book. The scene sets an emotional tone for what follows, very effectively.
The clash between security forces and peaceful (if politically radical) protesters has a lot of precedents. Pratchett would have known the Amritsar Massacre scene from Gandhi, but writing in 2002, he would also have known of the two films about Bloody Sunday that came out earlier that year. The discussion of barricades is also a callback to Les Miserables – Victor Hugo spends an entire chapter on the subject. Most of all, of course, he gives his fictional clash the same name as the famous 1936 confrontation between fascists and anti-fascists in London, the Battle of Cable Street. You are left in no doubt about what side Terry Pratchett was on.
I’m surprised that it took me so long to get to this, but very glad that I did in the end. You can get it here.
Current Forever Peace, by Joe Haldeman Science Fiction and Anticipation: Utopias, Dystopias and Time Travel, ed. Bernard Montoneri
Last books finished La piège aux maris, by Madame Rattazzi (née Marie-Lætitia Bonaparte-Wyse) The Tudor Discovery of Ireland, by Christopher Maginn and Steven G. Ellis The Geraldines: An Experiment In Irish Government 1169-1601, by Brian Fitzgerald The Peshawar Lancers, by S.M. Stirling The Roommate of Anne Frank, by Nanda van der Zee Lost Objects, by Marian Womack The Ripper, by Tony Lee
Next books Synthespians™, by Craig Hinton What Might Have Been: The Story of a Social War, by Ernest Bramah The Good Earth, by Pearl S Buck
Second paragraph of third document (‘A Letter from Sir John Davies, Knight, Attorney-General of Ireland, to Robert Earl of Salisbury, touching the state of Monaghan Fermanagh and Cavan, wherein is a discourse concerning the corbes and irenahs of Ireland’):
After the end of the last term my Lord Deputy took a resolution to visit three counties in Ulster, namely, Monaghan, Fermanagh, and Cavan, which, being the most unsettled and unreformed pasts of that province, did most of all need his Lordship’s visitation at that time.
This is rather an interesting collection. The foreword gives the reader the following instructions:
first, read the last chapter
then read the second chapter as far as page 330
then read the first chapter
then read the rest of the book from page 330 to the end of the second last chapter
and finish with the appendices if you like.
I don’t think I’ve ever before seen a non-fiction book suggesting that you read the chapters out of order. (Of course, it’s standard for Choose Your Own Adventure type books, but they are not usually non-fiction.)
It’s a collection of Irish historical documents from late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, really from 1596 to 1610. The documents themselves are printed in chronological order of composition, but Edward Morley, the editor, was right to suggest that you should start with Fynes Morison’s description of Ireland, then go to John Davies’ potted history of Ireland under British rule (which was what tipped me off to the existence of the Duke of Ireland), then go to Spenser’s View of the State of Ireland with that background fresh in your mind, and then read the remaining 80 pages of material from John Davies (and 15 pages of appendices).
The centrepiece of the book really is Spenser’s View of the State of Ireland, the first chapter in composition order. It’s well written and brutal, and argues that the English just need to destroy Irish possessions and traditions until the Irish become tractable; the beatings will continue until morale improves. He did not live to see this put into practice by Mountjoy at the end of the Nine Years’ War, but he would certainly have approved. One senses Motley, as editor, putting this and the other pieces on the pacification of Ireland forward as a contribution to the Whig theory of Irish history, that enlightened rule from London was the inevitable and desirable end point.
Still, important primary material which I’m glad I have handy. You can get POD copies in various places.
My eye was caught by one of the observations by John Davies, that in the new settlement, the judges “do now every half-year, like good planets in their several spheres or circles, carry the light and influence of justice round about the kingdom”. It’s a really interesting astronomical metaphor. One can speculate about the likelihood (or not) of an Irish administrator in 1612 knowing about the Copernican system; Kepler’s Astronomia Nova was published in 1609, and one can imagine that even if copies were not available, it would have been the talk of educated circles in Dublin, especially around the new university.
This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest on my shelves. Next on that pile is Irish Historical Documents, 1172-1922, eds. Edmund Curtis & R.B. McDowell.
This was a period of astonishing disparities in wealth and living. A typical workman’s daily wage in the 1380s was 4d, giving an annual income of around £5 (100s), assuming he could find work at least 300 days a year; a gallon of good ale cost just over a penny, as did two chickens or two dozen eggs. In London a goose was supposed to cost 6d, but sharp-eyed salesmen often asked seven or eight. A year’s tuition at Oxford University in 1374 cost 26s 8d, though lodgings there were significantly pricier at 104s a year (when annual rent for a cottage might be 5s, or 20s for a craftsman’s house), and the student would need 40s for his clothing. Meanwhile a merchant’s house in London (such as the one in which Geoffrey Chaucer was born) might be rented for two or three pounds a year, which was about what it would cost to send your son to a monastery school. Higher up the social scale, the numbers lose purchase. A knight’s two horses, without which he couldn’t function as a knight, would cost him about £10. His armour could total nearer £20. In 1397 Thomas, Duke of Gloucester owned armour worth £103. If a man were attendant at court he would need a fashionable gown, in silk or fur: it would certainly cost £10, and he could easily spend £50. The life annuity granted to Chaucer in 1367 (paid until 1388), of £13 6s 8d, would make him wealthy in the city of London, yet would barely support him at all at court. But as a courtier he was the recipient of largesse – robes, livery, gifts – and appointments to administrative offices from which, it was understood, he would profit. In 1389 Richard II made Chaucer Clerk of the King’s Works in London; in 1393 he presented him with £10 as a gift for good service, and in 1394 awarded him an annuity of £20.⁴ ⁴ Christopher Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social change in England c.1200–1520 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 215 (daily wage), p. 58 (ale), p. 208 (annual rent), p. 75 (monastery school), p. 76 (armour and horses), p. 77 (duke’s armour); A. V. B. Norman and Don Pottinger, English Weapons & Warfare, 449–1660 (London: Arms and Armour Press, 1979), p. 78 (chickens and eggs); A. R. Myers, London in the Age of Chaucer (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972), p. 198 (geese), p. 186 (Oxford), p. 53 (fashionable gowns); Douglas Gray, ‘Chaucer, Geoffrey (c.1340–1400)’, ODNB.
I was inspired to get this by my detour into the history of the Duke of Ireland a few weeks back, and also by my good friend Conrad’s reviews of the Penguin Monarchs series, of which this is one. It’s a very short and digestible book, which doesn’t waste time on chronology but just jumps straight into the question of what went wrong with Richard’s reign, assuming that the reader is familiar with the basics.
There are four chapters, each dealing with an area of kingship as practiced by Richard. In her prologue, Ashe makes the point that the court is not one of those four, because it was carried by the king wherever he went. The four areas are Parliament, the battlefield, the City of London (where Richard hand-picked his namesake Richard Whittington as Mayor), and the shrines connecting the King with God.
The overall thesis is that Richard was driven by a concept of kingship where he was divinely appointed to lead, and did not need to keep people like the other magnates and the citizens of London on board with anything that he did. He felt this very deeply and it informs the Wilton Diptych, which is a personal statement of his religious beliefs which we can only dimly understand. Of course, it was not sustainable; he made too many enemies and was overthrown and (probably) killed.
It is worth reflecting that British constitutional history was a close run thing. If Richard had been even slightly more politically adept, or luckier, he could have assembled a coalition of favourite lords combined with urban stakeholders to support his personal rule without institutional safeguards, provided that there was something in it for them; and that could have proved a lasting political settlement. He was in fact lucky in how the Peasants’ Revolt played out, and that the Lords Appellant in the late 1380s also pushed their cause too far and allowed him to regain control for another decade.
As it was, the fact that Parliament successfully overthrew him one and a half times (counting 1388 as well as 1399) consolidated the English constitutional theory of Parliament as a sovereign institution which constrained the monarch, to the point of deciding who the monarch could be. Richard was clearly not interested in constitutional theory. If he had been, he might have lasted longer.
One point that I wished the book had spent more time on: Richard’s reign was a really good time for the arts in England. This is the age of Piers Plowman, Chaucer, Wycliff, Gower and the Pearl poet; and as mentioned the Wilton Diptych and the funeral monument in Westminster Abbey that Richard built for his first wife and where he was eventually laid to rest. I don’t think you would find a similar flowering of the arts in England for a century or two either before or after. Richard himself doesn’t deserve a lot of credit for this, but it’s worth noting.
There is a page on Richard’s temporarily successful campaign in Ireland in 1394, and half a page on his unsuccessful return in 1399. These were the only visits to Ireland by a reigning English monarch between King John in 1210 and William III in 1690.
See here for methodology; to the best of my ability, I am excluding books not actually set in the current Republic of Korea, as noted below.
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
The Vegetarian
Han Kang
184,841
3,735
The Island of Sea Women
Lisa See
133,653
1,768
A Single Shard
Linda Sue Park
41,101
5,149
82년생 김지영 / Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982
Cho Nam-Joo
159,227
1,193
Almond
Sohn Won-Pyung
132,757
547
Please Look After Mom
Shin Kyung-Sook
43,760
1,577
If I Had Your Face
Frances Cha
54,291
738
The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War
David Halberstam
8,945
1873
Shamefully, I have not read any of these, though it is nice to see this year’s Nobel Prize winner for Literature topping the list.
I had to disqualify the top two books tagged as Korea on LibraryThing and Goodreads; they were Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, which is mainly set in Japan, and Crying in H Mart, by Michelle Zauner, mainly set in the USA. Further down the table, The Name Jar, by Yangsook Choi, is also set in the USA.
I have made an exceptional judgement call with Halberstam’s The Coldest Winter and I’m going to be listing it under both South Korea and North Korea, as I think both sides share evenly in the narrative.
The consensus from sources seems to be that the next four countries are Sudan, Uganda, Spain and Algeria, so I’ll take them in that order.
This is another in my run of rather forgettable films with a 2025 setting – at least, the start and end and several bits in the middle are set in 2025, though you’ll have picked up from the title that there is a lot of time travel in it. Here’s a trailer.
This is very skippable. Jason Scott Lee, best known for playing Bruce Lee in Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, is a time agent trying to prevent a rival time agent from changing history by, among other things, killing Hitler in 1940. (What would be so bad about that?) The plot is confused, the acting uninspired and the fight scenes done better elsewhere. Not especially recommended.
That wasn’t the first time that had happened, Gottfried’s grandmother told her. People often misjudged her grandson as slow and stupid. His cruel classmates christened him with a nickname that made her flush with rage: Gottfried the Fool. She knew that they were wrong about him, because he was so clever and earnest when his teachers called on him in class. But she had to admit that she, too, was often confused by his behavior.
A big thick prize-winning book by the late Steve Silberman, looking in detail at the history and practice of autism and neurodiversity, and how American society (and by extension, Western society) is coming to terms with making accommodations for people who, as he puts it, ʎlʇuǝɹǝɟɟᴉp ʞuᴉɥʇ.
There were a couple of chapters that really grabbed my attention. One was a section about Hugo Gernsback, who set up science fiction fandom as a safe space for people to be geeks and nerds, and whose own behaviour is recognisably on the spectrum now – for instance, his invention, the Isolator, allows you to concentrate on the text you are reading without sensory distraction and even has its own air supply.
The other striking chapter is very much less fun, looking at the early twentieth-century eugenics movement and at the Nazi policy of killing neurodiverse children. The psychiatrists responsible for these murders survived into successful post-war careers in Austria. It is pretty stomach-churning.
The story of the struggle for autism is generally pretty tough, though it has a hopeful end. I can see both sides; in the initial grief and confusion after B’s diagnosis back in 2000, I too was desperate to find a way that she could be ‘cured’, and I know of other parents in a similar situation who spent vast amounts of time, money and emotional labour on snake oil solutions for their children.
I fairly quickly came around to acceptance that our family was following our own path, and that society needs to adapt to our children’s needs more than the other way round. It’s a tough path all the same, and I felt many moments of solidarity with the people whose lives are discussed in Neurotribes; though the book doesn’t include much on those who are as cognitively disabled as our daughters.
The book also concentrates very much on the US policy landscape with only brief looks at what is going on in other counties (and nothing at all about Belgium). But I found it helpful in understanding my own thinking in any case. You can get it here.
This was my top unread non-fiction book. Next on that pile is The Light We Carry, by Michelle Obama.
For convenience, here is a reading list of other books I have read about autism:
We rewatched Midnight last night. I wrote previously that I couldn’t understand why this story didn’t get a Hugo nomination this year; I am still baffled.
I think it’s the best episode of the season, and certainly the best ever written by Russell T Davies. The sources are good sources – The Edge of Destruction, also written at the last minute by Old Who’s first script editor, putting the Tardis crew in a single set for 50 minutes; also I think Arthur C. Clarke’s A Fall of Moondust, where a group of tourists is trapped on the Moon, though without the sinister alien presence. (The eye of faith may detect inspiration also from Delta and the Bannermen, or The Leisure Hive, but personally I don’t.) Davies takes this and puts his own particular interpretation onto the situation, and for once his writing remains tight up to the last moment.
He’s helped by a couple of stellar performances – Lesley Sharp as Sky and the unnamed baddie, and Rakie Ayola as the hostess in particular; also from the past we have David Troughton as the Professor, and from the future Colin Morgan as Jethro. The scenes with Lesley Sharp first echoing, then synching with, then anticipating the other cast members’ lines are just incredible. (The only irritating moment is Rose’s brief appearance, which is difficult to reconcile with what we later find out she’s been doing – the similar moment in The Poison Sky is at least set in the present day.)
Quite apart from the creepiness of the basic concept, it’s a story where the Doctor’s normal cockiness and air of mystery, which normally seem to get authority figures magically co-operating with him, work against him; and his fellow passengers end up baying for his blood. It’s notable that they are not, particularly, authority figures; and the one who is nominally in charge, the Hostess, ends up being the one who saves them all. And the specific point where the Doctor’s credibility breaks down completely is when he tries to urge compassion, which rather more often works to shame other characters into cooperating. It’s a great subversion and stretching of the show’s usual assumptions.
After two stories where we’ve had the Doctor’s own intimate relations (his daughter and River Song) on screen, here we have the Doctor observing and interacting with several other family dynamics – Biff, Val and Jethro; the Professor and Dee Dee; Sky and her absent ex; perhaps also the Hostess and the crew. (Indeed, it might have been better if this had been shown between The Doctor’s Daughter and Silence in the Library, as was originally planned.)
Midnight was Russell T Davies’ nineteenth story for Who, which puts him ahead of the 18 stories written entirely or partly by Robert Holmes. [We are far past that now.] Andy Murray suggests (in his piece in Time and Relative Dissertations in Space) that we can see the frustrated attempts of the tall, fair-haired Chancellor Goth to hunt down and destroy the Doctor as the tall, fair-haired Holmes working through his own frustration with the central character of the show. Note that in this story the Doctor loses his authority over the other passengers and even his voice, and that he is actually killed off at the beginning of the next story; am I going too far in detecting a subconscious desire to get rid of him on the part of the executive producer and chief writer? (Not that there is the same physical resemblance between RTD and the villain of either story.)
Two further pieces of trivia from the BBC via Wikipedia: it is the first story since Genesis of the Daleks where the Tardis does not appear, and the only Who story where the villain is never named.
(Robert Holmes’ 18 stories: The Krotons, The Space Pirates, Spearhead from Space, Terror of the Autons, Carnival of Monsters, The Time Warrior, The Deadly Assassin, The Talons of Weng-Chiang, The Sun Makers, The Ribos Operation, The Power of Kroll, The Caves of Androzani, The Two Doctors, and The Mysterious Planet plus also The Ark In Space, The Brain of Morbius, Pyramids of Mars and the first episode of The Ultimate Foe. Of course, in screen time he is still well ahead of RTD, since all but one of the above were at least the equivalent of four 25-minute episodes.)
I also just rewatched 73 Yards, another of RTD’s best scripts, but I still think that Midnight has yet to be surpassed among his stories. (Though my favourite New Who story remains Blink.) Since then we’ve seen a couple of the actors elsewhere – Rakie Ayola, the hostess here, was Persephone in Kaos, and Ayesha Antoine, who is David Troughton’s sidekick Dee Dee here, has been Bernice Summerfield’s companion Ruth in the Big Finish audio series, and was also a lead in the DALEKS! webcast by James Goss.
Philip Purser-Hallard’s Black Archive is businesslike and looks at the reasons for the story’s success (including off the screen, live on stage). The first chapter, ‘A Failure of the Entertainment System’, recounts the very brief history of how the story was written, drawing comparisons with The Edge of Destruction, and touches on how it subverts the generally heroic and successful portrayal of the Doctor.
The second chapter, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, and Variations’, looks at each of the guest characters in the story, exploring what they are telling us about their society and about the Doctor. Purser-Hallard draws a comparison with RTD’s more recent drama Years and Years, which also has a very tight ensemble of central characters (and which I also enjoyed very much).
The third chapter’s title is ‘He Started It, With His Stories’. Its second paragraph, with footnotes, is:
Moffat and his interviewer, Christel Dee, were considering the themes, concerns and narrative techniques that Doctor Who shares with its folkloric precursors, rather than its more superficial aesthetic trappings. The latter, being primarily futuristic and scientific, contrast with the magical otherworlds of traditional fairy stories, and the imagined pasts, whether agrarian or courtly, from which their protagonists hail². Marina Warner’s history of fairytale, Once Upon a Time (2014), speaks of these stories being constructed from ‘building blocks includ[ing] certain kinds of characters (stepmothers and princesses, elves and giants) and certain recurrent motifs (keys, apples, mirrors, rings and toads),’ and while most of these items may be found in specific Doctor Who stories, they are hardly emblematic of the series as a whole³. However, her identification of fairy tales as consisting of ‘combinations and recombinations of familiar plots and characters, devices and images’ describes Doctor Who’s overall approach just as well⁴. ² Given Doctor Who’s eclectic nature, individual stories may be identified as exceptions, but the overall point holds. ³ They can, however, be indicative of more fantasy-inflected stories: for instance, The Keeper of Traken (1981) includes a stepmother and a ring; Kinda (1982) features both apples and mirrors; and a mirror and a frog, if not a toad, appear in It Takes You Away (2018). ⁴ Warner, Marina, Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale, ppxx-xxi.
This chapter considers the (multiple) fairy tale and mythic roots of Midnight, with a look also at Arthur Miller’s The Crucible.
The fourth chapter, ‘Not a Goblin or a Monster’, looks at invisible evil in the context of Davies’ other work (Years and Years again, and The Second Coming) and also Steven Moffat’s story Listen.
The fifth chapter, ‘The Cleverest Voice in the Room’, looks at the less heroic aspects of the Doctor as a character and notes that some of the most popular Who stories actually show the central character in a less than positive light. Again, other RTD work is mentioned; I noted particularly A Very English Scandal., but Purser-Hallard also looks at how the Fourteenth Doctor stories form a coda to the Tenth Doctor era.
An appendix, ‘What’s the Next Stage?’, looks at three theatrical productions of Midnight, which out of the whole 61 years of the show’s history is surely the story best suited for a stage production.
So, a thought-provoking monograph on a great Who story; and when you unpick the reasons for why it is so great, the greatness is still there. You can (probably) get it here.
The conversion of England was thus effected by the landing of St Augustine in Thanet and other places, which resulted in the country being overrun by a Wave of Saints. Among these were St Ive, St Pancra, the great St Bernard (originator of the clerical collar), St Bee, St Ebb, St Neot (who invented whisky), St Kit and St Kin, and the Venomous Bead (author of The Rosary).
A cheerful return to an old favourite: the spoof version of English history, cantering through two thousand years with a series of unlikely and yet very probable misreadings. There’s not much more to be said; some of the humour has dated, but a lot of it remains very funny.
He also invented a game called “Bluff King Hal” which he invited his ministers to play with him. The players were blindfolded and knelt down with their heads on a block of wood; they then guessed who the King would marry next
I am particularly alert for Irish references, such as:
The Scots (originally Irish, but by now Scotch) were at this time inhabiting Ireland, having driven the Irish (Picts) out of Scotland; while the Picts (originally Scots) were now Irish (living in brackets) and vice versa. It is essential to keep these distinctions clearly in mind (and verce visa).
[King John] had begun badly as a Bad Prince, having attempted to answer the Irish Question by pulling the beards of the aged Irish chiefs, which was a Bad Thing and the wrong answer. N.B. The Irish Question at this time consisted of: (1) Some Norman Barons, who lived in a Pail (near Dublin), (2) The natives and Irish Chieftains, who were beyond the Pail, living in bogs, beards, etc.
Henry VII was very good at answering the Irish Question, and made a Law called Poyning’s Law by which the Irish could have a Parliament of their own, but the English were to pass all the Acts in it. This was obviously a very Good Thing.
[James I] also tried to straighten out the memorable confusion about the Picts, who, as will be remembered, were originally Irish living in Scotland, and the Scots, originally Picts living in Ireland. James tried to make things tidier by putting the Scots in Ulsters and planting them in Ireland, but the plan failed because the Picts had been lost sight of during the Dark Ages and were now nowhere to be found.
Meanwhile the Orange increased its popularity and showed themselves to be a very strong King by its ingenious answer to the Irish Question; this consisted in the Battle of the Boyne and a very strong treaty which followed it, stating (a) that all the Irish Roman Catholics who liked could be transported to France, (b) that all the rest who liked could be put to the sword, (c) that Northern Ireland should be planted with Blood-Orangemen. These Blood-Orangemen are still there; they are, of course, all descendants of Nell Glyn and are extremely fierce and industrial and so loyal that they are always ready to start a loyal rebellion to the Glory of God and the Orange. All of which shows that the Orange was a Good Thing, as well as being a good King. After the Treaty the Irish who remained were made to go and live in a bog and think of a New Question.
Gladstone .. spent his declining years trying to guess the answer to the Irish Question; unfortunately, whenever he was getting warm, the Irish secretly changed the Question…
It’s a firmly liberal approach: satirising the total lack of knowledge and misunderstanding of the neighbouring island by England’s rulers, and admitting that Irish policy failed for centuries. The same approach is not really shown to other places formerly part of the Empire.
Second volume in the story of the loving and kinky relationship between Alison and Lisa, this one mainly punctuated by flashbacks to Alison’s previous experiences with best friend and former lover Alan. Again, very tastefully done. You can get it here.
Current The Peshawar Lancers, by S.M. Stirling The Geraldines: An Experiment In Irish Government 1169-1601, by Brian Fitzgerald Forever Peace, by Joe Haldeman The Tudor Discover of Ireland, by Christopher Maginn and Steven G. Ellis
Last books finished The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins Tudor Court Culture, eds. Thomas Betteridge & Anna Riehl
Next books The Ripper, by Tony Lee The Roommate of Anne Frank, by Nanda van der Zee The Good Earth, by Pearl S Buck
I wrote of the TV story that this book is based on:
I was in Glasgow planning the Worldcon for the showing of 73 Yards, and a bunch of us clustered together to watch it in someone’s room. This too was tremendous, a Doctor-lite episode that called on Gibson (who turned 20 last week) to portray her character aging through the decades, with one of those timey-wimey plots that can actually go awry rather easily but in this case didn’t.
This time the old school actor who I cheered for was Siân Phillips, who was of course Livia in I, CLAVDIVS, almost half a century ago, but has done some more recent Big Finish work as well. She too is in her nineties but clearly in her element as the sinister old woman in the pub.
Watching it again, one is stunned especially by Millie Gibson as the aging Ruby. Apparently these were the first scenes that she filmed for the show.
Second paragraph of third chapter of the novelisation:
For an hour, it seemed her expedition would never end. Step after countless step, her feet were cold and damp, icy snowflakes soaked into her collar, and her ragged breath formed misty clouds in front of her face.
I am slightly surprised that this is Scott Handcock’s first Doctor Who novel, possibly his first book-length work at all; he has been writing, directing and producing for Big Finish since 2006. 73 Yards was one of my favourites of this year’s stories anyway, and Handcock has done it justice, focussing necessarily on Ruby’s story (since the Doctor is hardly in it) but also giving some neat extra bits – back-stories for the people in the Welsh pub, a scene with Ace, the ultimate fate of UNIT revealed. Very enjoyable. You can get it here.
Just to add, as I commented on social media soon after the story was shown, that the fictional Robin ap Gwilliam looks eerily like the real prime minister of Georgia.
Irakli Kobakhidze, prime minister of the Repulic of Georgia; and Aneurin Barnard, who played the fictional prime minister Roger ap Gwilliam, in last weekend’s Doctor Who episode, “73 Yards”.
Er, well, that’s a bit one-sided, isn’t it!!!!! It is the first time that I have seen such complete dominance of the literary portrayal of a country by a single author. At least he’s actually Colombian.
As already mentioned, no books disqualified (one could raise an eyebrow at for instance The Autumn of the Patriarch where it’s not 100% clear that the setting is Colombia, but really we know that it is).
The next five books in my ranking are also by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The next after that is Infinite Country, by Patricia Engel. The top book on the list by a Colombian woman is Fruit of the Drunken Tree, by Ingrid Rojas Contreras.
But they are all a long way behind. Well done, GGM.
I had a lovely time yesterday at Port Lympne in Kent, the hotel and nature reserve which was founded by John Aspinall. I don’t have a well-informed view on the ethics of keeping wild animals on a different continent, but I did get a real thrill from being up close and personal with real giraffe, different species of rhinoceros, Bactrian camels and a more distant zebra.
Who are *you* looking at?
I also saw a lion and a capybara, but did not get good shots of them; and lots and lots and lots of different types of deer.
Inside the hotel, there is some spectacular art, with the jewel being the room whose entire walls are dominated by a massive mural by Arthur Spencer Roberts. It’s difficult for photographs to do it justice, but I tried.
The whole day, of course, was a celebration for a friend and former colleague, who has found the man for the rest of her life. It was a great day and I wish them many happy years together.
As usual, a disturbing comic book from Clowes, this time looking at the life of a woman called Monica, trying to discover the truth about her origins after her mother abandoned her as a child. The images are vivid and the stories deliberately a bit obscure, so that you have to concentrate on getting the links. I thought it was great, if anything a bit more accessible than some of Clowes’ other work. Recommended. You can get it here.
This was my top unread comic in English. Next on that pile is volume 5 of Once and Future.
SF 4 (YTD 76) The Hanging Tree, by Ben Aaronovitch Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett A Friend of the Earth, by T.C. Boyle Austria in the Year 2020, by Josef von Neupauer
Comics 6 (YTD 28) The Sapling: Branches, by Alex Paknadel et al Monica, by Daniel Clowes Sunstone, vol 2, by Stjepan Sejić Return to Kosovo, by Gani Jakupi and Jorge González Barcelona, âme noire, by Ruben Pellejero, Eduard Torrents, Martín Pardo, Denis Lapière, Gani Jakupi Superman & Batman Generations 3: The 21st Century!, by John Byrne
5,700 pages (YTD 57,900) 4/22 (YTD 102/236) by non-male writers (Uglow, Jagger, Ashe, Fitzpatrick) None (YTD 26/236) by a non-white writer 3/22 rereads (1066 and All That, Night Watch I think, Burning Heart)
267 books currently tagged unread, down 15 from last month, down 77 from October 2023.
Reading now The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins The Peshawar Lancers, by S.M. Stirling Tudor Court Culture, eds. Thomas Betteridge & Anna Riehl The Geraldines: An Experiment In Irish Government 1169-1601, by Brian Fitzgerald
Coming soon (perhaps) The Ripper, by Tony Lee Synthespians™, by Craig Hinton Doctor Who: Rogue, by Kate Herron and Briony Redman Ascension of the Cybermen & The Timeless Children, by Ryan Bradley The Roommate of Anne Frank, by Nanda van der Zee Lost Objects, by Marian Womack What Might Have Been: The Story of a Social War, by Ernest Bramah Marriage, by H.G. Wells Authors of their Lives, by David Gerber Collected Plays and Teleplays, by Flann O’Brien Forever Peace, by Joe Haldeman The Good Earth, by Pearl S Buck Drowned Ammet, by Diana Wynne Jones The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, eds Yu Chen & Regina Kanyu Wang The Word for World is Forest, by Ursula K. Le Guin The Light We Carry: Overcoming In Uncertain Times, by Michelle Obama Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories, ed. Ellen Datlow Freshwater, by Akwaeke Emezi Bellatrix, Tome 1, by Leo The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy How I Learned to Understand the World, by Hans Rosling Lies Sleeping, by Ben Aaronovitch Once and Future, vol 5: The Wasteland, by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora and Tamra Bonvillain Men at Arms, by Terry Pratchett
‘There’s some evidence that Christina Chorley might have been a practitioner,’ I said and explained Dr Walid and Vaughan’s fibrings, which led to Stephanopoulos asking the same questions I had. So I shared the same lack of answers that Dr Walid and Vaughan had given me – this is known in the police as intelligence focusing. First you identify what you don’t know. The next step is to go and find some likely sod and question them until they give you some answers. In the old days we weren’t that bothered whether the answers had anything to do with the facts, but these days we’re much more picky.
Sixth in the Rivers of London sequence, which I have generally enjoyed a lot. The drug-related death of a teenager turns out to involve the daughter of the goddess of the river Tyburn (the river which waters the roots of the original Hanging Tree) and Peter Grant and colleagues are brought in to sort things out. Also the Americans; also the Faceless Man, antagonist in a couple of earlier books. It ends with a grand magical shoot-out in a luxury apartment block. I quite enjoyed it, but got a bit of a middle-book vibe, as if the pieces are being put in place for something more to come. You can get it here.
I am a bit surprised to see that readers on both LibraryThing and Goodreads rate this higher than the previous book, Foxglove Summer; I’d have put them the other way round. Users of both systems agree in ranking the next in sequence, Lies Sleeping, top; so I have that to look forward to.
Current The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins The Peshawar Lancers, by S.M. Stirling Tudor Court Culture, eds. Thomas Betteridge & Anna Riehl The Geraldines. An Experiment In Irish Government 1169-1601, by Brian Fitzgerald
Last books finished A Friend of the Earth, by T.C. Boyle Barcelona, âme noire, by Ruben Pellejero, Eduard Torrents, Martín Pardo, Denis Lapière, Gani Jakupi Superman & Batman Generations 3: The 21st Century!, by John Byrne Irish Demons, by Joan Fitzpatrick Irish Historical Documents, 1172-1922, ed. Edmund Curtis & R.B. McDowell Austria in the Year 2020, by Josef von Neupauer
Next books The Ripper, by Tony Lee The Roommate of Anne Frank, by Nanda van der Zee Forever Peace, by Joe Haldeman
