- My girls meet Peter Capaldi (little Dalek)
I defy you not to cry after reading this.
- A true story
Emma Newman and being a fan.
- Immigration shouldn’t have a monetary value – it should be one law for all
Are you rich enough for the UK to keep your family together?
- What the Internet looks like: The undersea cables wiring the ends of the Earth
Fascinating.
February Books 10) Empire of the Sun, by J.G. Ballard
This is a tremendous novel, based of course on real life, about the experiences of a boy surviving Shanghai during the Japanese occupation if the Second World War. It’s brutal and awful, yet the protagonist’s innocence gives the whole narrative a vivid foundation, slightly distanced from the awful world of the adults, yet focused on important details like how many maggots you can eat to remain healthy. The descriptions are vivid and visceral, and the human interactions in desperate circumstances all too plausible.
Long, long ago, I saw the Spielberg film of the book (and have almost completely forgotten it), and much more recently I read the author’s autobiography which covers much of the same ground (with the important difference that he actually spent his period of internment with his parents rather than separated from them). I seem to have been reading a fair bit about Shanghai recently, including the first good Tintin book, set a few years earlier. Must try and go there some time.
Trial of the Valeyard, by Alan Barnes and Mike Maddox
Way way behind with book- and audio-blogging. A quieter week or two ahead, I hope, so I may be able to catch up.
As I’ve said before, I’m really not a huge fan of the Trial of a Time Lord season of classic Who; but as I’ve said on Manother occasion recently, Big Finish have proved capable of mining the rubble for jewels, and this is an excellent coda to the season, 27 years on: Colin Baker, Michael Jayston and Lynda Bellingham are renited as the Sixth Doctor, the Valeyard and the Prosecutor for a trial drama that picks up the rather tangled threads of Time Lord lore and the Valeyard’s own intricate relationshp with the Doctor, and weaves them into something new. My favourite moment was quite near the beginning, when the Doctor, initially somewhat disinclined to act as the Valeyard’s defence counsel in a rigged trial, becomes sufficiently outraged by the Time Lords’ conduct of proceedings to take on the challenge. In general, there are three seasoned performers here, particularly Jayston, who slip back into their previous parts with a real injection of adrenalin. Much better than I expected, even with the more than reliable Alan Barnes as co-author.
February books
Double Down, by Mark Halperin and John Heileman
Jane Austen, by Claire Tomalin
Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels, by Damien Broderick and Paul di Filippo
The Kindness of Strangers, by Kate Adie
The Unfolding Of Language, by Guy Deutscher
Fiction (non-sf) 2 (YTD 6)
Empire of the Sun, by J.G. Ballard
The Snowman, by Jo Nesbø
SF (non-Who) 6 (YTD 12)
Crowe’s Requiem, by Mike McCormack
God’s War, by Kameron Hurley
The Shining, by Stephen King
Evening’s Empires, by Paul McAuley
Ack-Ack Macaque, by Gareth L. Powell
The Adjacent, by Christopher Priest
Doctor Who 6 (YTD 11)
Speed of Flight, by Paul Leonard
GodEngine, by Craig Hinton
The Adventuress of Henrietta Street, by Lawrence Miles
The Forever Trap, by Dan Abnett
Into the Nowhere, by Jenny Colgan
Keeping Up With the Joneses, by Nick Harkaway
Comics 0 (YTD 2)
6,300 pages (YTD 12,800)
4/19 (YTD 13/40) by women (Tomalin, Adie, Hurley, Colgan)
0/19 (YTD 1/40) by PoC
Reread: 0 (YTD 0)
Reading now:
Dominion, by C. J. Sansom
Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie
The Other Hand, by Chris Cleave
Coming soon (perhaps):
The Amber Spyglass, by Philip Pullman
The Legend of Sigurd & Gudrun, by J.R.R. Tolkien
Essays on Time-based Linguistic Analysis, by Charles-James N. Bailey
Brick Lane, by Monica Ali
Best Served Cold, by Joe Abercrombie
Buddenbrooks, by Thomas Mann
Any Given Doomsday, by Lori Handeland
Inverted World, by Christopher Priest
Revelation, by C. J. Sansom
Anglicizing the Government of Ireland, by Jon G. Crawford
Assassin’s Quest, by Robin Hobb
Rupert Bear Annual: No. 72
Deathless, by Catherynne M. Valente
The Ocean at the End of the Lane, by Neil Gaiman
Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell
Cyberabad Days, by Ian McDonald
Need for Certainty, by Robert Towler
Goodbye To Berlin, by Christopher Isherwood
The Road to Middle-Earth, by Tom Shippey
Doctor Who – Paradise of Death, by Barry Letts
[Doctor Who] Christmas on a Rational Planet, by Lawrence Miles
[Doctor Who] Mad Dogs and Englishmen, by Paul Magrs
Links I found interesting for 28-02-2014
- Сьогоднішнє – Національний склад Сімферополя + району у 2001 р
Russians and Tatars in Crimea.
- Statue of Hungarian war leader forces Jews to live in the dark shadow of history
The return of Admiral Horthy.
- Merkel in London: a case study in political tweeting
The social media view. (I was on the fringes of this event myself, but have nothing to report.)
- Why is the coalition making a public spectacle of picking on the poor? | Lola Okolosie | Comment is free | theguardian.com
Charging people to fight unjust decisions!
Links I found interesting for 27-02-2014
- The audacious rescue plan that might have saved space shuttle Columbia
Extraordinary.
- Lovecraft’s hand-written Mountains of Madness sketch
“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”
- The $20 Million Case for Morocco
The Kingdom’s costly Washington outreach.
Nebula short list: GoodReads/LibraryThing stats
The last time there were eight novels on the final ballot was in 2001, when the award was won by The Quantum Rose (Of which I am not a fan).
| Goodreads | Librarything | |||
| number | average | number | average | |
| The Ocean at the End of the Lane, by Neil Gaiman | 102461 | 4.02 | 2992 | 4.15 |
| The Golem and the Jinni, by Helene Wecker | 14539 | 4.16 | 856 | 4.25 |
| We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, by Karen Joy Fowler | 6793 | 3.84 | 385 | 3.93 |
| Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie | 2114 | 4.01 | 317 | 4.10 |
| Hild, by Nicola Griffith | 1161 | 3.86 | 206 | 4.19 |
| A Stranger in Olondria, by Sofia Samatar | 92 | 4.17 | 62 | 3.75 |
| Fire with Fire, by Charles E. Gannon | 79 | 4.22 | 21 | 3.75 |
| The Red: First Light, by Linda Nagata | 46 | 4.07 | 15 | 4.00 |
For once, the two sites rank all the books in the same order, though with a significant variation in the relative sizes of the steps between them.
Wednesday reading
Current
Dominion, by C.J. Sansom
Ancillary Justice, by Anne Leckie
The Other Hand (aka Little Bee), by Chris Cleave
The Big Finish Companion v1, by Richard Dinnick
Last books finished
The Adjacent, by Christopher Priest
The Unfolding Of Language, by Guy Deutscher
Last week's audios
The Brood of Erys, by Andrew Smith
Current: The Sleeping City, by Ian Potter
Next books
The Amber Spyglass, by Philip Pullman
Sigrid and Gudrun, by J.R.R. Tolkien
Doctor Who – The Paradise of Death, by Barry Letts
Books acquired in last week
Divorcing Jack, by Bateman (2011)
The Prisoner of Brenda, by (Colin) Bateman
How To Train Your Dragon: The Day of the Dreader, by Cressida Cowell
[Doctor Who] Search for the Doctor, by Dave Martin
[Doctor Who] Crisis in Space, by Michael Holt
[Doctor Who] The Garden of Evil, by David Martin
[Doctor Who] Mission to Venus, by William Emms
[Doctor Who] Invasion of the Ormazoids, by Philip Martin
[Doctor Who] Race Against Time. by Pip and Jane Baker
Links I found interesting for 26-02-2014
- As Scotland Mulls Independence, A Stupid London Plays It Dirty
Forbes Magazine on London’s overreach.
- A moving account of an adoptee identifying his birth mother…
…and finding that she had recently died.
- Atos crisis: Fit-to-work checks shelved amid government contractor firm shambles
So, it seems the system collapsed over a month ago!
- Could you launch a rocket by striking golf balls in the opposite direction?
Er, no.
- My Night in Solitary
Colorado’s prison director writes.
- maintaining non-parenting interests
Kate’s coping strategies.
Links I found interesting for 25-02-2014
- Samuel Anderson joins Who series 8
- Why Apple’s Huge Security Flaw Is So Scary
*gulp*
- 26 things found in Yanukovych’s compound that make him look even worse
Abandoned in place.
- Romania and Bulgaria fail to invade UK
Quelle surprise.
- Goodbye to All That – Why I Left the Academic Life
Been there, done that.
- What the West Must Do for Ukraine
Ulrich Speck is right: a clear EU membership offer is needed.
Links I found interesting for 24-02-2014
- The Islands of Chaldea by Diana Wynne Jones and Ursula Jones
DWJ’s posthumous novel.
- Haunting Photos of the Abandoned 1984 Winter Olympics Facilities
30 years on…
- 25 Things You Didn’t Know About Belgium
I did know one or two of these…
- 15 More Things You Didn’t Know About Belgium
Likewise.
February Books 9) Evening’s Empires, by Paul McAuley
Second of the BSFA nominees for me; I loved the way it started, with an asteroid escape similar to that of Adam Roberts’ Jack Glass last year (though with less sex and violence); it’s apparently the fourth of a series, but I didn’t feel I’d lost out by missing the first three. Our protagonist, having escaped the destruction of his family, preserving the severed head of a scientist with various secrets preserved in its brain, treks across the outer solar system, finding allies, betrayal, lost relatives, and precious secrets. It’s an excellent hard sf / space opera tale – we don’t get so many of those these days – and each section of the book is named after an sf classic of the past – Childhood’s End, “Marooned off Vesta”, The Caves of Steel, Pirates of the Asteroids, “The Cold Equations” and Downward to the Earth. I’d have liked perhaps a little more insight into our central character, but it is a front-runner for my ballot (two down, three to go).
Luna Romana, by Matt Fitton
The third of the Companion Chronicle plays featuring Terry Molloy as lost Time Lord Quadrigger Stoyn, this time with two Romanas – Lalla Ward once again reprising her TV role, and Juliet Landau, who we remember well as Drusilla from Buffy and Angel, playing not only the future incarnation of Romana from last year’s Gallifrey VI series, but also retelling a Key to Time diversion to Ancient Rome which presumably was first envisaged for the late Mary Tamm.
My classicist!Whovian friends should take note: the Roman sections of the play feature a pretty close engagement with the playwright Plautus, and Terry Molloy doing a fantastic job of doing several different versions of the unfortunate Stoyn who have all got sucked into the theatre. I always enjoy Lalla Ward too, but I found the Juliet Landau bits of the script more interesting, and the tribute to Mary Tamm’s performance very moving.
Links I found interesting for 23-02-2014
- Mystery Voynich manuscript gets preliminary alphabet
Very interesting!!!!
- The full Voynich Manuscript paper
(62 pages, 2.6 MB, PDF)
- Doctor Who Minisode – Rain Gods (by Neil Gaiman)
Featuring Matt Smith and Alex Kingston.
- Doctor Who – Clara and the Tardis minisode
With Jenna Coleman.
- Doctor Who – The Inforarium minisode
With Matt Smith and AN Other.
February Books 8) The Shining, by Stephen King
I’ve only read two other Stephen King books, Hearts in Atlantis, which I very much enjoyed, and The Stand, which though deeply flawed is King’s most popular book on LibraryThing (interestingly, The Shining is far ahead on GoodReads). I was, however, familiar with MAD Magazine’s parody of the movie version of The Shining, published in March 1981 when I was 13, and still landing some excellent blows – “You have to remember that he committed some AWFUL CRIMES… like murder… and over-acting!”
Anyway, the novel is a bit long but really very good. I thought it was much more disciplined than The Stand, and perhaps the focus on a single instance of evil and horror, rather than nation-wide catastrophe, helps to keep the writing firmly engaged. There are a lot of things that don’t quite get explained – was there really a body in the bath? did the hedge sculptures really come to life? – but that maybe misses the point; in an environment like the haunted hotel, what does “really” really mean?
The three main adult characters – Jack and Wendy Torrance, and Dick Hallorann – are a particular joy in this book. the story of the Torrances’ marriage, Jack’s disintegration, and his attempts to pick himself up, destroyed by the environment of the hotel, are done with a certain compassion which I can’t really remember from, say, Lovecraft (I confess I haven’t read a lot of horror but I suspect this is a general critique). The one point that niggled at me a bit was whether we are meant to think that the awful events would have happened with or without young Danny’s psychic abilities; I guess the fact that Hallorann didn’t trigger the dark forces in the same way leads us to the conclusion that it’s Jack’s personality which is the precipitating factor, and Danny’s “shining” allows for a more vivid account but is actually incidental to the unfolding of the story.
Anyway, a classic that well deserves its reputation.
February Books 7) GodEngine, by Craig Hinton
A really enjoyable Seventh Doctor story, as the Doctor, Chris and Ros appear on twenty-second century Mars in the midst of the Dalek Invasion of Earth, with the politics of Ice Warrior appropriation of left-behind Osirian technology putting all at risk. Simply excellent stuff, missing only Bernice Summerfield for whom this is the world of her expertise.
Links I found interesting for 22-02-2014
- Testing firm Atos wants to quit £500 million government contract EARLY
Even @ATOS doesn’t believe in its own tests any more.
- Georgia: Trying to Contain Drivers’ Inner Mad Max
Locating the brake pedal!
- The Hitlers of Maryland
(Not related.)
- Survey points to major shift in opposition to gay marriage
Northern Ireland turning a corner.
Links I found interesting for 21-02-2014
- Sherlock and the European catastrophe
@HugoBrady looks ahead to 2017. @CER_London
- Global warming: Old Arctic ice is melting away.
*gulp*
Wednesday reading
Current
Dominion, by C.J. Sansom
The Adjacent, by Christopher Priest
The Big Finish Companion v1, by Richard Dinnick
Last books finished
Empire of the Sun, by J.G. Ballard
[Doctor Who] The Adventuress of Henrietta Street, by Lawrence Miles
[Doctor Who] The Forever Trap, by Dan Abnett
[Doctor Who] Into the Nowhere, by Jenny Colgan
[Doctor Who] Keeping Up With the Joneses, by Nick Harkaway
Ack-Ack Macaque, by Gareth L. Powell
The Snowman, by Jo Nesbø
The Kindness of Strangers, by Kate Adie
Next books
The Unfolding Of Language, by Guy Deutscher
The Amber Spyglass, by Philip Pullman
Ancillary Justice, by Anne Leckie
Links I found interesting for 19-02-2014
- Suzanne Vega’s lyrical New York
In case you wondered where Tom’s Diner was.
- “Don’t Buy Shirts in Herat”: the Lost World of the Hippie Trail
Alas, I am about eight years too young for this.
- Billionaire Wilbur Ross Declares ‘The 1 Percent Is Being Picked On’
Diddums.
Links I found interesting for 18-02-2014
- Vivienne Faull: a pioneer tipped to be the first female bishop
Go, Viv, go!
- In Kansas, Right Joins Left to Halt Bill on Gays
Hooray!
- The Wakhan Valley and Eastern Pamir
Peter in Central Asia.
Links I found interesting for 17-02-2014
- Mary Beard · The Public Voice of Women
μῦθος δ’ ἄνδρεσσι μελήσει / πᾶσι, μάλιστα δ’ ἐμοί: τοῦ γὰρ κράτος ἔστ’ ἐνὶ οἴκῳ.
- York man refused benefits due to new immigration rules
Punishing migration – fighting the poor rather than povertry!
- The Rebirth of Seriously Good Georgian Wines
Can’t hit Belgium soon enough!
- Climate change is here now and it could lead to global conflict
Stern: “the risks are even bigger than I realised”.
Links I found interesting for 15-02-2014
- Peter Schmies’s Vocabulary Test
I got 182/200. What about you?
- Five frontrunners to be the Church of England’s first female bishop
Go, Viv, go!!!
- The map of Ganymede
Cool!
- Global warming ‘pause’ due to unusual trade winds in Pacific ocean
Must all come out eventually…
- What the hell, Kansas?
An attempt to legalise homophobia.
- Kansas Senate likely to reject bill denying services to gay couples
Good.
The Dying Light, by Nick Wallace
Next in the series of Big Finish audios featuring Quadrigger Stoyn, accidentally removed from Gallifrey with the Tardis by the First Doctor and here encountering the Second Doctor and Zoe. Unfortunately a story that didn’t quite fulfill its promise – it’s almost all Frazer Hines as Jamie v Terry Molloy as Stoyn, with Wendy Padbury as Zoe being allowed a few lines here and there; also I would have liked a bit more to be made of Stoyn’s threat to reveal the Doctor to the Time Lords, since the story is set just before The War Games when the Doctor actually did reveal himself. But the central performances are delightful.
February Books 6) Jane Austen, by Claire Tomalin
My cold/flu bug was more or less under control for most of this week, but this morning I couldn’t get out of bed – or rather, I tried and then subsided back into it again, emerging briefly in the early evening for some scrambled egg. I generally enjoy food, and look forward to eating some again some time soon.
To a happier subject: the excellent Claire Tomalin’s excellent biography of Jane Austen. My point of comparison was her previous biography of Samuel Pepys, which is I think a slightly better book because its subject had a more interesting and better chronicled life. But Tomalin has achieved wonders here with the slender material available, a writer who barely left southern England in her 41 years, most of whose correspondence was destroyed, and whose legacy is a set of six and a half novels which have caught the imagination of the English-speaking world.
Austen’s family background had two points of particular interest for me. One is that her brother (like her uncle) had severe learning disabilities. There were ways of dealing with this two hundred years ago: a separate house was found for him in the village, and a local couple were paid (from the ever uncertain family funds) to look after him. It’s one of those aspects of family life that I guess I am personally quite sensitive about. We’re awfully lucky to live in a country with a real welfare state, where our own girls have easy and cheap access to the care that they need and we cannot possibly provide. It’s worth being reminded that these issues are not new to our time.
The second point is the modest Austen family’s connection with high politics. In particular, the Austens were closely connected with Warren Hastings. Jane’s favourite cousin, Eliza (who later married her brother and literary agent, Henry) was supposedly Warren Hasting’s biological daughter, and certainly his god-daughter; Hastings’ only son, George, actually died in the care of the then newly-married Austen parents in 1764 (eleven years before she was born). Looking west rather than east (and not quite as far), Jane’s one serious teenage crush ended up (long after her death) as Lord Chief Justice of Ireland. It was quite a small world, conscious of status and potential scandal.
One really regrets that Austen did not live longer or travel more while she lived. She achieved wonders from a very constrained existence. On the day of my grandmother’s funeral in 1979 we visited Chawton, which is convenient to Brookwood (my grandmother is one of the quarter-million resting there). I was only 12 at the time, and had barely heard of Jane Austen (weird to note that Sense and Sensibility was not published in paperback until after I was born) but I remember being struck by the ordinariness of the place; how could somewhere so small generate literature so well-known? Yet it happened; and from the scant traces that remain, Tomalin has written another very good book.
Top unread non-fiction:
Peleponnesian War | Innocents Abroad | Terre des Hommes | The Hero with a Thousand Faces | Race of a Lifetime / Game Change | Proust and the Squid | The Tipping Point | Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl | Elementary Forms of Religious Life | Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man | History of Christianity | History of the World in 100 Objects | A Room of One’s Own | Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? | The Last Mughal | Reading the Oxford English Dictionary | Jane Austen | Homage to Catalonia | The Road to Middle Earth | Essence of Christianity | The Strangest Man
Links I found interesting for 14-02-2014
- Currency Reflections: The Legal Issues
My old friend Christine Bell enters the debate.
- New Kid on the Block
The European Endowment for Democracy
- 5 ‘Doctor Who’ companions who left for love
From Susan to Amy.
February Books 5) Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels, by Damien Broderick and Paul di Filippo
I bought this at Philcon in 2012, really because it was there; I’m not sure that it quite worked for me. For each book, the co-authors give a blurb of two pages or so explaining why it is good and why it is important in the trajectory both of the individual author and of the genre. But one thing I missed was snark: I’d much rather that they had included twenty bad books – or twenty books which they were prepared to admit were bad books – to make it clear that the praise they were lavishing was deserved in other cases. (This is why I’m fundamentally unsympathetic to the occasional efforts to set up sites that will only write positive reviews – you just can’t trust them if they won’t tell you what they don’t like.)
I was also not convinced that individual novels are the right building blocks to construct a chronology of a quarter century of the genre. Quite apart from the facts that many of the choices are individually questionable, and single volumes may fairly not represent longer series (Bujold, Banks, etc), sf also includes short stories and other media. Sure, it’s valid to look only at novels; but it’s also a huge constraint.
Anyway, I’ve read 49 of the 101 entries (in bold below, actually 52 of the 105 books listed). Which have you read? Which should I read (please tell me in comments?
February Books 4) Speed of Flight, by Paul Leonard
It’s fairly obvious by now that I am not a huge Third Doctor fan, and still less a fan of the character Mike Yates. Yet here we have something rather good: just before The Green Death, the Doctor takes Jo on an excursion to a low-gravity planet where several richly realised cultures, which practice bodily resurrection in the most literal of senses, compete for control of their environment. I see that Speed of Flight has not picked up rave reviews in general, but I thought the world-building here was really something a bit special, both physically and anthropologically. It’s still a bit odd to plonk the wooden, conventional Yates into an alien environment, but if that’s the least impressive part of the book you’re doing OK by me.
Links I found interesting for 13-02-2014
- Parliament to sanction nine MEPs over Azeri mission
Good.
- New connected car standards put Europe into top gear
Safer roads are coming.
- Europe map quiz
Not too difficult!
Wednesday reading
Current
The Snowman, by Jo Nesbø
Empire of the Sun, by J.G. Ballard
[Doctor Who] The Adventuress of Henrietta Street, by Lawrence Miles
[Doctor Who] The Forever Trap, by Dan Abnett
The Big Finish Companion v1, by Richard Dinnick
Last books finished
God’s War, by Kameron Hurley
Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels, by Damien Broderick and Paul di Filippo
[Doctor Who] GodEngine, by Craig Hinton
The Shining, by Stephen King
Evening’s Empires, by Paul McAuley
Last week’s audios
Luna Romana (Romana/4)
Trial of the Valeyard (6/Valeyard)
Next books
Dominion, by C.J. Sansom
The Kindness of Strangers, by Kate Adie
Ack-Ack Macaque, by Gareth L Powell
[Doctor Who] Into the Nowhere, by Jenny Colgan
Books acquired in last week
[Doctor Who] Keeping up with the Joneses, by Nick Harkaway