• The eleven tests of cake
  
  @major_clanger explains.
  (tags: )

The second paragraph from Chapter 3:

Sometimes the work was hard; the implements had been designed for human beings and not for animals, and it was a great drawback that no animal was able to use any tool that involved standing on his hind legs. But the pigs were so clever that they could think of a way round every difficulty. As for the horses, they knew every inch of the field, and in fact understood the business of mowing and raking far better than Jones and his men had ever done. The pigs did not actually work, but directed and supervised the others. With their superior knowledge it was natural that they should assume the leadership. Boxer and Clover would harness themselves to the cutter or the horse-rake (no bits or reins were needed in these days, of course) and tramp steadily round and round the field with a pig walking behind and calling out "Gee up, comrade!" or "Whoa back, comrade!" as the case might be. And every animal down to the humblest worked at turning the hay and gathering it. Even the ducks and hens toiled to and fro all day in the sun, carrying tiny wisps of hay in their beaks. In the end they finished the harvest in two days' less time than it had usually taken Jones and his men. Moreover, it was the biggest harvest that the farm had ever seen. There was no wastage whatever; the hens and ducks with their sharp eyes had gathered up the very last stalk. And not an animal on the farm had stolen so much as a mouthful.

What is there to say about Animal Farm that hasn't already been said? I read it first as a teenager, back when the Soviet Union still existed; it still packs just as powerful an impact now, with the awful fate of Boxer the horse a superb emotional climax of betrayal. As in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the most shocking passages are the perversion of truth and history by Squealer (we've all met people like him), where the writer's ability to convey to the reader precisely the opposite of what the words on paper ostensibly mean is on top form.

What struck me most on this reading is Orwell's deep sympathy for the ideals of equality and community. His scorn is not directed at socialism as such, but at the Soviet leaders for perverting it to their own profit, to the point where in the final confrontation between pig and man, "it was impossible to say which was which". The awful thing is that he offers no solution; the animals have been duped and betrayed, and are now worse off than they were. (Did he write any books with happy endings?)

And I wonder what happened to the cat?

Latest in a series of occasional surveys:

Belgian: 16 (36%)
German: 10 (23%)
Italian: 6 (14%)
French: 5 (11%)
Dutch: 3 (7%)
Austrian: 2 (5%)
Spanish: 2 (5%)

(the last time that I set foot in a euro zone country outside Belgium was Germany, in November.)

Current
Essays on Time-based Linguistic Analysis, by Charles-James N. Bailey
[Doctor Who] Mad Dogs and Englishmen, by Paul Magrs

Last books finished
Animal Farm, by George Orwell
The Assassination of the Prime Minister: John Bellingham and the Murder of Spencer Perceval, by David Hanrahan
[Doctor Who] Christmas on a Rational Planet, by Lawrence Miles
Sigurd and Gudrún, by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Big Finish Companion v1, by Richard Dinnick
The Amber Spyglass, by Philip Pullman

Last week’s audios
[Doctor Who] The Sleeping City, by Ian Potter
[Blake’s 7] The Turing Test, by Simon Guerrier
[Blake’s 7] Solitary, by Nigel Fairs
Current: [Blake’s 7] Counterfeit, by Peter Anghelides

Next books
Brick Lane, by Monica Ali
Best Served Cold, by Joe Abercrombie
[Doctor Who] Tales of Trenzalore, by Justin Richards, George Mann, Paul Finch and Mark Morris

Books acquired in last week
[Doctor Who] Salt of the Earth, by Trudi Canavan
The Redbreast, by Jo Nesbø
The Assassination of the Prime Minister: John Bellingham and the Murder of Spencer Perceval, by David Hanrahan
The Last Man, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Family Britain, 1951-1957, by David Kynaston
Spin, by Nina Allan
Unearthed, eds. John J. Johnston and Jared Shurin

The second paragraph from Chapter 3:

They [Sarah and her sister Irene] went to the Gaumont in Leicester Square to see the new Marilyn Monroe comedy from America. Before the big feature the B film was the usual frothy German musical, and between the films they had to sit through one of the government-commissioned Pathe newsreels. The lights always came up then, to discourage Resistance supporters from booing if any Nazi leaders came on. First came a report of a European eugenics conference in Berlin: Marie Stopes talking with German doctors in a pillared hall. The next item was a vision of a snow-covered landscape, an old woman swathed in ragged clothes weeping and shouting in Russian outside the smoking ruins of a hut, a German soldier in helmet and greatcoat trying to comfort her. Bob Danvers-Walker’s voice turned stern: ‘In Russia, the war against communism continues. Soviet terrorists continue to commit fearful atrocities not just against Germans but against their own people. Outside Kazan a cowardly group of so-called partisans, skulking safely in the forests, fire a Katyusha rocket into a village whose inhabitants had dared to sell German soldiers some food.’ The camera panned outwards, from the ruined hut to the smashed and broken village. ‘Some Russians have chosen to forget what Germany rescued them from: the secret police and forced labour of Stalin’s regime; the millions dumped in Arctic concentration camps.’ There followed familiar grainy footage of one of the camps discovered by the Germans in 1942, skeletal figures lying in deep snow, barbed wire and watchtowers. Sarah looked away from the horrible scenes. The newsreader’s voice deepened: ‘Never doubt Europe’s eventual victory over this evil Asian doctrine. Germany beat Stalin and it will beat his successors.’ As a reminder, there followed the famous shots of Stalin after his capture when Moscow was taken in October 1941: a little man with a thick moustache, pockmarked, grey hair dishevelled, scowling at the ground while his arms were held by laughing German soldiers. Later he had been hanged publicly in Red Square. Next there was footage of the new, giant German Tiger 4 tanks with their eighteen-foot guns smashing through a birch forest on a hunt for partisans, knocking over young trees like match-sticks while helicopters clattered overhead. Then came the launch of a V3 rocket, the camera following the huge pointed cylinder with its tail of fire as it rose into the sky on its way to the far side of the Urals. Optimistic martial music played. Then the newsreel switched to an item on Beaverbrook opening a shiny new television factory in the Midlands, before the lights finally dimmed again and the main feature opened with a clash of music and a bright wash of Technicolor.

As this paragraph makes clear, this is rather an impressive version of the “Hitler Wins” sub-sub-genre of stories: quite a well-imagined defeated England in 1952, with Lord Beaverbrook leading a collaborationist government with Enoch Powell and Oswald Mosley, Adlai Stevenson about to take over from the two-term Taft jr across the water, and Hitler on his deathbed. The actual plot concerns some resistance fighters and other activists (led the elderly Churchill in hiding and uncomfortably allied with the Communists) who get caught up in the struggle to prevent a nuclear weapons secret, which has been accidentally obtained by a mad scientist in Birmingham, from falling into Nazi hands. The details are meticulously realised, but the actual McGuffin didn’t really convince me, and the ending was a bit too pat as well. Still, interesting to see an author with Sansom’s profile dabbling in alternate history.

The second paragraph from Chapter 3:

In your country, if you are not scared enough already, you can go to watch a horror film. Afterward you can go out of the cinema into the night and for a little while there is horror in everything. Perhaps there are murderers lying in wait for you at home. You think this because there is a light on in your house that you are certain you did not leave on. And when you remove your makeup in the mirror last thing, you see a strange look in your own eyes. It is not you. For one hour you are haunted, and you do not trust anybody, and then the feeling fades away. Horror in your country is something you take a dose of to remind yourself that you are not suffering from it.

Interesting to read this at the same time as Dominion by C.J. Sansom; both novels feature Englishwomen in rocky marriages whose young sons are called Charlie; in both cases their world is upset before the start of the story by a death caused by falling.

Another audio with Colin Baker’s Sixth Doctor and Lisa Greenwood as feisty young companion Flip. This has two very effective concepts – the eponymous Brood, who call themselves the Drachee, horrible malevolent childlike aliens; and the woman who has amnesia, engineered so that she does not know the role she plays in the history of the planet Erys (which itself turns out to have some unexpected secrets). Smith of course wrote Adric’s debut Full Circle back in the day, and has done a couple more Big Finish stories since; I think this is the best of them.

I found it pretty easy to rank the nominees this year, in this order:

1. Ancillary Justice, by Anne Leckie
2. Evening’s Empires, by Paul J. McAuley
3. Ack-Ack Macaque, by Gareth L. Powell
4. God’s War, by Kameron Hurley
5. The Adjacent, by Christopher Priest

They were all very good, mind you, and I may well nominate them all for the Hugo.

41 82 205 902 2,009 5,002 10,004 20,008

I love reading about linguistics – it’s one of those intellectual paths not taken for me, but as long as I can remember I’ve been fascinated by the relationships between words and especially words and grammar in different languages. Here, Deutscher runs through the basics about where we think languages have come from and how words and sentences are constructed – though even there there is some new information for me, I had not realised the importance of the 1927 discovery of Hittite with respect to Saussure’s 1878 theory of Indo-European pharyngeals – and then turns his attention to how grammar changes over time.

Deutscher’s approach to linguistic change was all new to me and quite fascinating. It is a given that people writing about their own language at every point of recorded history bemoan the fact that in modern days it’s not spoken or written as well as it used to be; also linguistic reconstructions of extinct languages always seem to generate the impression that they were better ordered and more complex than their descendants today. Yet we also see new linguistic structures developing at the same time – he looks for instance at the future tense in French, at the use of “gonna” and “got” in English, and in considerable depth at the historical development of tense markers in Semitic verbs – mainly Arabic, but also Hebrew which has changed a lot in only the last century. In the end he makes a very good case that there is basically an equilibrium between language speakers unconsciously eroding old grammatical structures out of sheer laziness, but then being compelled to invent new elements to cover nuances of meaning that are needed – and these new elements emerge only gradually, so that “going to” shifts quite imperceptibly from only indicating movement to becoming an equivalent marker for “shall/will”.

This was voted top of the non-fiction section of my 2014 unread books poll by you guys. Good call.

The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula Le Guin
Four How to Train Your Dragon books, by Cressida Cowell
Three Hugo nomiees for Best novella
Blackout, by “Mira Grant”
Magic of the Angels, by Jacqueline Rayner
Catching Fire, by Suzanne Collins
EarthWorld, by Jacqueline Rayner
Something Borrowed, by Richelle Mead
The Ripple Effect, by Malorie Blackman
Mockingjay, by Suzanne Collins
Far North, by Sara Maitland
The Crown of Dalemark, by Diana Wynne Jones
Royal Assassin, by Robin Hobb
The Queen’s Bastard, by C.E. Murphy
The Year of Intelligent Tigers, by Kate Orman
Returning My Sister’s Face, by Eugie Foster
Mortal Clay, Stone Heart, by Eugie Foster
SLEEPY, by Kate Orman
Long Time Dead, by Sarah Pinborough
Two unpublished novels
Patternmaster, by Octavia Butler
City of the Dead, by Lloyd Rose
Walk to the End of the World and Motherlines, by Suzy McKee Charnas
Grimm Reality, by Simon Bucher-Jones and Kelly Hale
The Death Pit, by A.L. Kennedy
God’s War, by Kameron Hurley
Into the Nowhere, by Jenny T. Colgan
Ancillary Justice, by Anne Leckie

(Combining the themes of International Women’s Day today and World Book Day yesterday.)

Another of this year’s series of Doctor Who ebooks by well-known authors – this time one of the surprisingly numerous alumni of Clare College who have gone into the sff field (China Miéville, Marcel Theroux, Rebecca Levene, going a bit further back Peter Ackroyd). It’s an extended story largely consisting of Tenth Doctor stream of consciousness, the Tardis having hit a Time Mine left over from the war and come to rest in, or possibly on, a Welsh village where everyone is called Jones except for Lady Christina de Souza. Not quite as good as the sum of its parts, but there is a lovely reference to Iain Banks near the end.

• Riek Machar and the prophet’s rod
  
  The return of the sacred dang in 2009.
  (tags: southsudan religion )
• Interactive Map: Four Ways to Look at Carbon Footprints
  
  14 nations and Europe account for 80% of greenhouse gas emissions.
  (tags: climatechange )

This is a gratifyingly entertaining book, starting with a chapter on student visits to Germany and Sweden in the late 1960s, and then going through Adie’s career as a BBC journalist who ended up specialising in conflict zones. The chapters on 1970s Northern Ireland and wartime Bosnia rang very true to me; the chapter on Libya was horrifying, especially given what has happened since; the chapter on Tian-an-Men Square moved me to tears. Adie has an eye for the telling detail in he writing as well as in her broadcast reportage.

I did wonder a bit about the ideology of reporting. Adie claims firmly to aspire to be partly a conduit conveying what is happening on the ground to the viewer, and also a first emotional responder as it were, giving the viewers her own reaction. Yet that’s a little to modest; her emotional response inevitably shapes the viewer’s response, it’s not that they have a range of different options to choose from; and the stories that she finds, or is allowed to find, shape the popular narrative for the events that she is describing. I would have liked a little reflection on the role of the journalist as creator rather than mere reporter.

But basically the sheer thrill and horror of experiencing these events, be it desperate attempts to find anything reportable in the Durham countryside or flight through the back streets of Beijing under live fire, makes for a very readable book.

A short Who ebook, based around two arresting concepts: a world of living skeletons, and the bloke in the control room behind it all, with the Eleventh Doctor and Clara arriving unexpectedly and trying to sort things out. Rather beautifully written. It’s sad that there won’t be a lot of Eleven/Clara books – the only other one so far is Shroud of Sorrow, by Tommy Donbavand.

• Here’s The Best Advice From A Single Guy Who Spent A Year Interviewing Couples
  
  Analysing love.
  (tags: lifehacking )
• How ‘Midnight Rider’ Victim Sarah Jones Lost Her Life
  
  The camera assistant killed by a train.
  (tags: films deaths )
• Where Did the Marshall Islands Just Go?
  
  The tide is rising ever higher.
  (tags: climatechange )
• Secret tunnel in Carrickfergus Castle
  
  I think we all have times when we want one.
  (tags: northernireland archaeology )
• Three Men in a Boat and Soggy Ophelia
  
  Conrad’s historical reconstruction makes sense.
  (tags: sexandgenderandsexuality books )

At work:

At home (1): non-fiction

At home (2): fiction (not sf):

At home (3): science fiction:

At home (4): Doctor Who books and comics:

At home (5): random books in the spare room:

At home (6): the unread books shelf:

A police procedural, somewhere between Inspector Rebus and Lisbeth Salander (which is only appropriate given the Norwegian setting); a very vivid evocation of ordinary people in a small, cold country trying to grapple with extraordinary and awful things. I hadn’t realised that this was the fourth novel in a series, so in fact the protagonist, Harry Hole, comes with some baggage from previous books which here comes back to bite him. The killer is horribly violent, and the plot has plenty of twists, though none of them feels unfair to the reader. As good as I had hoped.

This is the last of the Tenth Doctor era audiobooks that I’ve got to (though only the second produced), and it’s good to finish on a high note. Catherine Tate is the narrator, beautifully carrying off Donna and also the Tennant Doctor, in a plot that beings rather like the later TV story The God Complex, with a bunch of characters from different places yanked together unexpectedly in one big building, but takes off in quite a different direction, both funny and serious, with some very neat ideas (the spamming AI at the beginning is just the start). Dead Air is still my favourite Tenth Doctor audiobook, but this comes a close second.

• A rail postcard from Liège
  
  When Belgian and German trains don’t communicate. @NBMS @SNCF @DB_bahn
  (tags: travel )
• 25 Tips For Speaking To Other Humans On The Internet
  
  Sane and sensible.
  (tags: Internet )
• Greg’s Cable Map
  
  An even better map of the internet cables (thanks, @K_dPage !)
  (tags: internet maps )
• Marshall Islands says climate change behind floods
  
  1050 homeless in Majuro.
  (tags: climatechange )
• Storms and how they start
  
  Neil Gaiman on recent events
  (tags: sf )

A remarkable Eighth Doctor adventure, rather horrible and misjudged in some places, striking and memorable in others; set in 1783; the Doctor gets married to a Tantric courtesan, slightly foreshadowing River Song; there are dubious scenes with Caribbean zombies and other cult practices; the Master makes a cryptic appearance; the whole thing is told in the tone of an excited but somewhat baffled historical researcher; Phil Sandifer’s parodic review is a better and quicker read.

Current
Sigrid and Gudrun, by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Amber Spyglass, by Philip Pullman
[Doctor Who] Christmas on a Rational Planet, by Lawrence Miles
The Big Finish Companion v1, by Richard Dinnick

Last books finished
Ancillary Justice, by Anne Leckie
The Other Hand, by Chris Cleave
Dominion, by C.J. Sansom
Doctor Who – The Paradise of Death, by Barry Letts

Last week’s audios
Current: The Sleeping City, by Ian Potter

Next books
Brick Lane, by Monica Ali
Essays on Time-based Linguistic Analysis, by Charles-James N. Bailey
[Doctor Who] Mad Dogs and Englishmen, by Paul Magrs

Books acquired in last week
1913, by Charles Emmerson
Doctor Who: The Eleventh Hour, ed. Andrew O’Day
Behind the Sofa, ed. Steve Berry

• My girls meet Peter Capaldi (little Dalek)
  
  I defy you not to cry after reading this.
  (tags: doctorwho autism )
• A true story
  
  Emma Newman and being a fan.
  (tags: sf )
• 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?
  (tags: ukpolitics migration )
• What the Internet looks like: The undersea cables wiring the ends of the Earth
  
  Fascinating.
  (tags: Internet maps )

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.

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.

Non-fiction 5 (YTD 9)
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