Second paragraph of third chapter:
Ricky didn’t like doctors, and he didn’t like going to the doctor’s. So today was special because even though he wasn’t coughing up goo, or sweating out vodka, or breathing like a busted whoopee cushion, Ricky was going to the doctor of his own accord, like he enjoyed going to the doctor.
By a well-known TV writer. Funny but ultimately implausible even on its own terms. The future tech works just well enough to drive the plot. You can get it here.
I’m in the last stages of finishing the pile of books that I acquired in 2016 (er, seven years ago) and ran into a couple that I just cannot finish.
Drawing Boundaries, eds John C. Courtney, Peter MacKinnon and David E. Smith
This is a collection of essays about the drawing of election boundaries in Canada, with particular reference to Saskatchewan.
This is one of a number of books that I got in late 2016 in preparation for a presentation on drawing constituency boundaries. To my immense frustration, I can’t find several of them now and am left with this and one other. And unfortunately this is awfully technical about Canadian specificities, which were not sufficiently relevant to my life for me to make it worth persevering with. So I have put it aside. If you want, you can get it here.
This was both the shortest unread book that I had acquired in 2016, and the non-fiction book that had been longest on my unread shelf and that I could still find. Next on both of those piles is Representatives of the People?: Parliamentarians and Constituents in Modern Democracies, edited by Vernon Bogdanor.
There Will be War X, edited by Jerry Pournelle
The third chapter is “The 4GW Counterforce”, by William S. Lind and Lt Col Gregory A. Thiele, USMC, and its second paragraph is:
The distinction between regular or line infantry and light infantry goes back to ancient Greece. At that time, the regular infantry was the phalanx, a linear formation that based its power on mass and shock. Their tactics consisted of evolutions performed by the phalanx as a whole, in which each warrior adhered to carefully executed drills.
This was one of the infamous Puppy submissions for the Hugo ballot in 2016, a collection of essays building on a previously successful series from the 1980s. I read the first four pieces and then gave up because there was really too much racism (and also the obsessions of the alt right in 2016 turn out not to be what actually happened in 2022). If you want, you can get it here, but please don’t feel you have to.
This was the most popular unread book that I had acquired in 2016, and the sf book that had lingered longest on my unread shelves. But I’ve now found my double copy of Collision Course, by Robert Silverberg / Nemesis from Terra, by Leigh Brackett which now goes onto both of those piles, probably as the last or second last book in my 2016 pile.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
Servants had brought blocks of ice out of the cellar and placed them in cubbies all around the room. A windmill on top of the house drove fans behind the cubbies, filling his room with cool breezes that kept the scorching summer heat at bay.
Fourth book in a fantasy series of which I have not read the first three; over a thousand pages in length; I did not get far. You can get it here.
This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 2023. Every six-ish days, I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.
I started the month in Chicago, where the Chicago River was reverse-engineered in the 19th century to flow out of Lake Michigan rather than into it. (Lake Michigan is roughly twice the surface area of Belgium.)
I was there of course for the 2022 Worldcon, at which I was once again part of the Hugo team.
The major point of drama surrounded the Hugo Awards Study Committee, which had been founded on my proposal in 2017, but which had unfortunately become dominated by a small self-appointed clique in 2021 and 2022 to the point that I successfully called for it to be abolished at the Chicago WSFS Business Meeting. This had been brewing for months, culminating when the people running the committee submitted constitutional amendments to the Business Meeting in the committee’s name, despite a previous consensus that they would not. There seemed to be no desire for course correction on the part of those concerned, and they certainly failed to persuade the Business Meeting to let them have another go. A shame; I had thought it was a good idea in principle, but it turned out not to work in practice.
The next week, Liz Truss became Prime Minister, and Queen Elizabeth II died.
The week after that, Anne graduated summa cum laude from her theology degree in Leuven.
We then went to a reunion in Clare College Cambridge, where we had met and married thirty years and more ago.
On the day of the Queen’s funeral, I went on my own quest to find my grandmother’s grave:
That evening I met up with three old friends from grammar school in Belfast who all now work in London.
I ended the month in England again, at a Glasgow 2024 Worldcon planning meeting; photos in the October update.
I read twenty books that month. When I first posted this list I disguised the Arthur C. Clarke Award submissions with Greek letters; the shortlist is now out and the winner will be announced next week, so there is no longer any need to be coy about what books I read when.
Non-fiction 6 (YTD 76)
Political Animals, by Bev Laing
Matt Smith: The Biography, by Emily Herbert
Doctor Who (1996), by Paul Driscoll
The Dæmons, by Matt Barber
Richard of Cornwall: The English King of Germany, by Darren Baker
Argo: How the Cia and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History, by Antonio J. Mendez and Matt Baglio
Non-genre 1 (YTD 14)
Mr Britling Sees It Through, by H.G. Wells
SF 8 (YTD 77)
The Traders’ War, by Charles Stross
Brasyl, by Ian McDonald
Jocasta, by Brian Aldiss
Black Man, by Richard Morgan
Braking Day, by Adam Oyebanji
The Fish, by Joanne Stubbs
Speaker for the Dead, by Orson Scott Card
Poster Girl, by Veronica Roth
Doctor Who 3 (YTD 26)
Fear of the Web, by Alyson Leeds
Doctor Who – The Movie, by Gary Russell
Doctor Who and the Dæmons, by Barry Letts
Comics 1 (YTD 14)
A Matter of Life and Death, by George Mann, Emma Vieceli and Hi Fi
5,700 pages (YTD 55,500)
6/19 (YTD 84/211) by non-male writers (Laing, Herbert, Stubbs, Roth, Leeds, Vieceli)
2/19 (YTD 27/211) by a non-white writer (Mendez, Oyebanji)
Mr Britling Sees It Through was a real revelation for me, hugely enjoyed it. You can get it here.
The new biography of Richard of Cornwall was very disappointing, but you can get it here.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
Sasha! What the hell!
Started quite well, a novel about people in an extended family living their lives increasingly online, but I did not feel it stuck the landing, and rather lost the run of itself before the end. You can get it here.
I’ve been building up to this for months: the definitive guide to the three-dimensional ceilings created by a German artist in the Low Countries.
The one destroyed by the Belgians last century, in Leuven at the Priory of the Vale of St Martin:
The one that’s just about still there, in the chapel at Schoonhoven Castle near Aarschot:
The one in a country church near Namur, in Franc-Waret:
The one that’s easy to find, in the Church of the Sablon in Brussels:
The one that may not be by Hansche, at the Law Library in Gent:
The one near the airport, at the Church of St Nicholas in Perk:
The one in the inn destroyed in WW2, in Kleve:
The one in the townhouse destroyed in WW2, in Wesel:
The one that’s been in storage for over a century, in Gent:
The one where four out of nine panels survive, off the Brussels ring road:
The one with Jason and Medea, at Horst Castle:
The one with legendary Jesuits, at the Church of Charles Borromeo in Antwerp:
The one that’s now private, in Gent:
The one that’s painted in colour, at Modave Castle:
The best of the lot: the library and refectory ceilings at the Park Abbey, near Leuven.
Enjoy!
Current
Autism Spectrum Disorders Through the Lifespan, by Digby Tantam
The Man Who Died Twice, by Richard Osman
Osmo Unknown and the Eightpenny Woods, by Catherynne M. Valente
Doctor Who – The Stones of Blood, by David Fisher
Last books finished
Bloodmarked, by Tracy Deonn (did not finish)
Collision Course, by Robert Silverberg / Nemesis from Terra, by Leigh Brackett
Love and Mr Lewisham, by H.G. Wells
Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak, by Charlie Jane Anders
Doctor Who: The Zygon Invasion, by Peter Harness
Gifted Amateurs and Other Essays, by David Bratman
Doctor Who and the Stones of Blood, by Terrance Dicks
Nettle and Bone, by “T. Kingfisher”
Next books
The Stones of Blood, by Katrin Thier
A Rumor of Angels, by Dale Bailey
Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver
Found in my old file in my parental home:
This was my list of books read over the summer of 1976, when I was nine. If I had been using my current classification system then, I would have categorised them thus:
Non-fiction (1)
Blue Peter Special Assignment, by Dorothy Smith and Edward Barnes. There were several books in this sequence, and I think we had the one about Hong Kong and Malta – I recall an emotional moment for Val Singleton on the deck of the scrapped Queen Elizabeth in Kowloon Harbour, and also that was the summer we had our family holiday in Malta.
Non-genre (9)
The Lonely Island, by R.M. Ballantyne. A rollicking good story for young adult readers about the settlement of the Bounty mutineers on Pitcairn Island. So convincing that for many years if I came across a historical detail that clashed with Ballantyne’s account, I would disbelieve it.
The Mystery of the Green Ghost, by “A. Hitchcock” [actually Robert Arthur]. This is not one of the Three Investigators books that has particularly stuck in my memory, and poring through online reviews has not refreshed my recollection. I do recall a scene with a skeleton wearing a pearl necklace.
The Wheel on the School, by Meindert DeJong. I vaguely remember that this is about kids getting storks to nest in a Dutch village. I remember thinking at the time that the dialogue sounded too American rather than Dutch.
The Adventurous Four, by Enid Blyton. I don’t remember this at all. Apparently three siblings and a local lad get shipwrecked on a Scottish island which is being used for enemy operations. Ring any bells?
Bevis, by Richard Jeffries. Great story of a boy exploring his local countryside, imposing his own mythology on it. Not brilliant on class and gender, as I recall. The one book on this list that I’d really like to reread.
Whizz for Atomms, by Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle. Third of the Molesworth books; I suspect the humour was already dated in 1976. Though maybe not all of it: “‘Reality,’ sa molesworth 2, ‘is so unspeakably sordid it make me shudder’.”
A Boy Called Spoons, by Herbert Heckmann. I remember nothing at all about this. Classic German children’s story about a boy with big ears trying to make friends.
One of our Dinosaurs is Missing, by John Harvey. This I do remember well, and reread it only a few years ago. A rather flat novelisation of the film which doubles down on the racial stereotypes.
Beyond the Wild World’s End, by Meta Mayne Reid. Author was married to Helen Waddell’s second cousin. About a boy who runs way from his stepmother to find his mother’s family on the far side of Ireland. I don’t remember much about it.
SF (5)
The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien. This may have even been the second time I read it, aged nine; I have a memory that I first read it the previous autumn or winter. A firm favourite. (And I enjoyed the films too.)
The Second Jungle Book, by Rudyard Kipling. For some reason I read this years before I read the original Jungle Book; the sequel is not quite as memorable in general, but the story that has stuck in my mind for almost forty years is “The Miracle of Purun Bagat”, about an Indian official in the Raj who turns his back on the world and seeks enlightenment in nature.
Wilkin’s Tooth, by Diana Wynne Jones. I have a memory that I first came across this on Jackanory, but I don’t find any record that it was ever a featured novel there. The first of her great kids’ urban fantasy books, with our protagonists getting involved with magic, racial dynamics and the local witch.
Earthfasts, by William Mayne. I enjoyed this story a lot, a time-slip tale between contemporary Scotland and the Jacobite rising. There is a particularly gruesome school assembly scene. I was very dismayed by the author’s conviction for sex crimes in 2004.
The Tree that Sat Down, by Beverley Nichols. Even at nine I felt this was a bit cutesy. Talking animals interacting with the human world, knowing that catastrophe will come. I was surprised to discover that the author was an Englishman – I had assumed it was an American woman!
Comics (5)
Take it Easy, Charlie Brown, by Charles M. Schulz. I don’t remember any of this specifically, but I loved all of Schulz’ work as a kid and I still find it comforting now. Back in 2018 I was lucky enough to go to both the Santa Rosa museum and an exhibition about his work in London.
Asterix the Legionary, by Goscinny and Uderzo. Asterix and Obelix get drafted.
Asterix and the Big Fight, by Goscinny and Uderzo. I don’t remember anything about this one.
Asterix at the Olympic Games, by Goscinny and Uderzo. I do remember this as nicely observed satire.
Asterix the Gladiator, by Goscinny and Uderzo. Asterix and Obelix go to Rome to rescue the bard, who has been kidnapped by Cæsar.
4350 pages, 4/20 by women; none by writers of colour.
I loved The Deadly Assassin when it was first broadcast in 1977, and I love it still. When I rewatched it in 2007, immediately after my first watch of The Mind Robber, I wrote:
As for The Deadly Assassin: I was really a bit worried about watching it this time round; could it possibly be as good as I remembered it being from when I was nine years old, over thirty years ago? But yes, yes it is. Tom Baker is at the top of his form, combining humour, moral outrage, and determination to do the right thing by his home planet and people, even if they seem at times equally determined to do the wrong thing by him. And Robert Holmes’ superb script has so many memorable moments – here’s an early one, spoken by the exasperated official trying to pin the Doctor down who comes closest to filling the companion role. There’s a great Doctor/Tardis love moment as well.
Yet there are a couple of oddities. One, which is nothing to do with the series as originally presented, is that it has been preserved only as a 90-minute movie, which is rather annoying for those of us purists who like the old cliffhangers. [No longer the case, thank heavens.] Another, which is very bizarre indeed, is that there are no women visible anywhere in the Gallifrey of The Deadly Assassin. (Helen Blatch plays the disembodied voice of the Time Lords’ computer system.) This is of course the only story featuring the Doctor with no companion (unless one counts The Runaway Bride), but it really does seem peculiar. One could probably do a short list of stories featuring only male guest stars (?The Moonbase?) but I think this must be the only one with no women on the screen at all.
The interesting linkage with The Mind Robber is that for much of the story the Doctor enters a constructed, invented world, in which he has to battle an artifical reality and try and impose his own will on it. There is an interesting compare-and-contrast between the Second Doctor urging Jamie and Zoe to deny the existence of the unicorn charging at them, and the Fourth Doctor denying the fact that he has been wounded in the leg – same theme but pointing to the very different ways the series as a whole was going in 1968 and 1976. Like the Land of Fiction, the world inside the Matrix of the Time Lords turns out to be under the control of a cosmic villain called the Master – and this time it is that Master, reappearing for the first time since 1973, but horribly altered; with an audacious plan to seize control of the universe by tapping the very power of the Time Lords themselves. (The reality-altering theme is nicely echoed in the final episode by Cardinal Borusa’s attempt to impose his own version of historical reality on recent events.)
As I hinted at above, The Deadly Assassin has Bernard Horsfall returning – this time not as Gulliver (left), but as Chancellor Goth of the Time Lords (right). (I believe he is a Thal officer in Planet of the Daleks too, but haven’t seen that yet.) Horsfall also appeared in the last episode of The War Games in 1969 (middle), pronouncing sentence of exile and regeneration on the Doctor. If we are meant to read the two characters as the same person – though they have very different haircuts – then The Deadly Assassin represents the Fourth Doctor not only overcoming the Third Doctor’s unfinished business with his arch-enemy, but also reversing the Second Doctor’s defeat by the Time Lords in general (and by this one in particular).
Rewatching it in 2010, I wrote:
I always loved The [companionless] Deadly Assassin, and rewatching it made me realise once again how brilliant it is. It is as if Sarah Jane Smith’s departure liberated Robert Holmes from the constraints of the show’s previous history, to go back to the Doctor’s own origins and rewrite them completely. We’ve been gradually moving towards Gallifrey as not so much a place of magical, ineffable power, as we saw in The War Games, but as the fading bureaucracy glimpsed in Colony in Space and The Three Doctors, subject to the political corruption that could give rise to a Morbius. Now it all comes together. I suspect that my own professional fascination with politics may be partly rooted in watching this at the age of nine; the reality that the most powerful people are none the less fallible individuals, operating to their own private agendas as much as to public perceptions, is well portrayed here.
There are so many delights in this: the nightmarish world of the Matrix, the Engin/Spandrell [Pravda/Chitty] double act, Runcible the Fatuous, the final battle amidst crumbling architecture (so dismally copied by the TV Movie). It seems almost churlish to mention two flaws. First off, the re-introduction of the Master worked much better for me at the age of nine, when I barely remembered his existence in the Pertwee era, than it does in sequence – apart from anything else the Time Lords have forgotten him now, having specifically warned the Doctor about him in Terror of the Autons; and of course nobody, not even Peter Pratt who was a great performer, can match Roger Delgado as the arch-enemy. [Since 2010 we’ve seen strong competition from Michelle Gomez and Sacha Dhawan.] Secondly, as my mother remarked when I was nine, there appear to be no Time Ladies among the Time Lords. Now, there are other Who stories without woman among the guest cast – Warriors’ Gate, The Power of Kroll, The Pyramids of Mars, Planet of Evil, Revenge of the Cybermen, The Mutants, The Abominable Snowmen, The Moonbase, The Smugglers and The Rescue – but this is the only one with no visible speaking female character at all (the voice of the Matrix is played by Helen Blatch. It’s a sad lacuna in what is otherwise one of the greatest stories.
When the whole thing was streamed on Twitch in January 2019, I happened to be stuck at a loose end in London and watched it again, live-tweeting as it rolled.
Needless to say I watched it again for this post, and needless to say I enjoyed it again. You can get it here. Nothing much to add to what I have already extensively written. But I was intrigued to learn that the following slide was dropped from the end titles:
We thank the High Court of Time Lords and the Keeper of the Records, Gallifrey, for their help and co-operation.
Who are “we”?
Diverting to another book entirely, I am intrigued by Richard Molesworth’s suggestion, in his biography of Robert Holmes, that the writer at this point was getting irritated with Doctor Who, and that the tall blond Chancellor Goth stalking the hero through the swamp in hope of wiping him out could be seen as wish fulfillment by the author, who was also tall and blond, and had fought in the swamps of Burma / Myanmar during the second world war.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of Terrance Dicks’ novelisation is:
Three figures appeared out of the gathering darkness. Castellan Spandrell and Chancellor Goth walked side by side, Hildred following respectfully behind them.
When I reread it in 2007, I noted very briefly that it’s an average Terrance Dicks treatment of one of Robert Holmes’ best scripts, and there’s nothing much to add to that now. NB that “Hildred” in the book is “Hilred” on screen. You can get it here.
Andrew Orton’s Black Archive on the story is very meaty, with seven chapters and three appendices. Up front: I liked it a lot for shedding new light on a story I already love.
“Chapter 1: The Gothic Assassin” is the longest of the chapters, setting out Orton’s agenda. It leads with a consideration of the Gothic in Doctor Who of the Hinchcliffe/Holmes period in general, and of course in The Deadly Assassin in particular. There’s a whacking great indicator in the name of the main Time Lord villain. Even the opening rollover caption echoes the faux manuscript theme in Gothic literature.
“Chaper 2: The Noir Assassin” looks not only at the visible noir influence in the story but also as American and British political scandals: Watergate, Jeremy Thorpe, Harold Wilson’s resignation honours (announced the day the first episode was shown).
“Chapter 3: The Wartime Assassin” looks at the influence of the Second World War and the Cold War on British TV of the era in general, and on Doctor Who and this story in particular. Orton makes the point that the first twenty years of Doctor Who were dominated by the memory of conflict, Holmes in particular with his Burmese experience (it has been previously noted that he has a fondness for swamp planets with bubbling explosive gas). The second paragraph is:
The Second World War cast a massive pall over the first 20 years of Doctor Who, as it did over most of British culture. The Leisure Hive (1980) and Terminus (1983) were the series’ final real dalliances with War imagery, through their use of background radiation as a threat. Up until this point, the War permeated the series. Almost all of Doctor Who’s writers had lived through it (Douglas Adams was the first writer who hadn’t lived through at least a part of the War, although Chris Boucher was only born in 1943 and Graham Williams was born after VE Day but before VJ Day), and its influence informed and is present throughout the series’ first couple of decades. This tended to be shown in two strands: that of the totalitarian regime against which a resistance is formed, and that of the atomic bomb and the dangers of nuclear fallout.
“Chapter 4: The Symbolic Assassin” looks at the way in which the Time Lords mirror British society, especially parliament, and at the symbolism of the Matrix.
“Chapter 5: The Observant Assassin” reflects on the significance of the Panopticon and the Eye of Harmony; what are the Time Lords actually observing?
“Chapter 6: The Linguistic Assassin” looks at Robert Holmes’ inventive use of language throughout his Doctor Who career.
“Chapter 7: The Dangerous Assassin” points out that the story comes more or less at the half-way point of Old Who, and reflects that Holmes’ attempt to myth-bust the Time Lords resulted in yet more mythology.
“Appendix 1: Engines” reports briefly on the whereabouts of the four railway engines seen in Episode 3, all of which are still intact.
“Appendix 2: How Might the Eye of Harmony Actually Work?” unsuccessfully attempts to bring scientific rigour to a technobabble plot twist.
“Appendix 3: Observer Theory” looks at why it is that the Doctor (generally) has his adventures in order. Of course, we know the real reason, but it’s fun to try and put it in fictionally coherent terms.
In summary, Robert Holmes is the greatest Old Who writer, The Deadly Assassin is his greatest story, and this book is a great book because it provides further evidence for those uncontroversial opinions. You may be able to get it here.
Next, The Awakening.
The Black Archives
1st Doctor: The Daleks (82) | The Edge of Destruction (67) | Marco Polo (18) | The Aztecs (71) | The Dalek Invasion of Earth (30) | The Romans (32) | The Myth Makers (65) | The Massacre (2) | The Ark (81)
2nd Doctor: The Underwater Menace (40) | The Evil of the Daleks (11) | The Mind Robber (7)
3rd Doctor: Doctor Who and the Silurians (39) | The Ambassadors of Death (3) | The Dæmons (26) | Carnival of Monsters (16) | The Time Warrior (24) | Invasion of the Dinosaurs (55)
4th Doctor: Pyramids of Mars (12) | The Hand of Fear (53) | The Deadly Assassin (45) | The Face of Evil (27) | The Robots of Death (43) | Talons of Weng-Chiang (58) | Horror of Fang Rock (33) | Image of the Fendahl (5) | The Sun Makers (60) | The Stones of Blood (47) | Full Circle (15) | Warriors’ Gate (31) | Logopolis (76)
5th Doctor: Castrovalva (77) | Kinda (62) | Black Orchid (8) | Earthshock (51) | Mawdryn Undead (80) | The Awakening (46)
6th Doctor: Vengeance on Varos (41) | Timelash (35) | The Mysterious Planet (79) | The Ultimate Foe (14)
7th Doctor: Paradise Towers (61) | The Happiness Patrol (68) | Silver Nemesis (75) | The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (66) | Battlefield (34) | The Curse of Fenric (23) | Ghost Light (6)
8th Doctor: The Movie (25) | The Night of the Doctor (49)
Other Doctor: Scream of the Shalka (10)
9th Doctor: Rose (1) | Dalek (54)
10th Doctor: The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit (17) | Love & Monsters (28) | Human Nature / The Family of Blood (13) | The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords (38) | Silence in the Library / The Forest of the Dead (72) | Midnight (69)
11th Doctor: The Eleventh Hour (19) | Vincent and the Doctor (57) | The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang (44) | A Christmas Carol (74) | The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon (29) | The God Complex (9) | The Rings of Akhaten (42) | Day of the Doctor (50)
12th Doctor: Listen (36) | Kill the Moon (59) | Under the Lake / Before the Flood (73) | The Girl Who Died (64) | Dark Water / Death in Heaven (4) | Face the Raven (20) | Heaven Sent (21) | Hell Bent (22)
13th Doctor: Arachnids in the UK (48) | Kerblam! (37) | The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos (52) | The Haunting of Villa Diodati (56) | Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children (70) | Flux (63)
15th Doctor: The Devil’s Chord (78)
Second paragraph of third chapter:
The offices he passed were bursting with poised statues and intricate pieces of useless electronic equipment, and even the stacks of blank paper were of top quality — a creamy white watermarked with this month’s Tremptor logo. Simone kept his chin high, doing his best to pretend he was not in awe of the people he passed.
I thought the protagonist was really unpleasant and selfish, even after his moment of personal transformation, and didn’t feel that the satire quite came off. Lyrical description but rather harping on a single note until very near the end. You can get it here.
Two Hugo finalists in the Best Graphic Story or Comic category.
Second frame of third part of Saga, Vol 10:
After the brutal end to volume 9, and the subsequent three-year pause in publication, I wondered how the authors would manage to pick it up. I need not have worried; time has passed for the main characters as well, and we see a lot of the story from the viewpoint of Hazel, the little girl whose parents have been at the centre of Saga up to now. Lots here about smuggling, blended families, evil galactic plots and so on. Ends yet again on a cliff-hanger. I’ll give this a high vote, but not sure how it would appeal to those who have not read the previous nine volumes. (Six of which were Hugo finalists, the first winning in 2013.) You can get it here.
Second frame of third chapter of Once & Future Vol 4: Monarchies in the UK:
I had actually read this last year, because I have been enjoying this series so much: King Arthur comes back as an undead demon revenant, and our hero, his grandmother and his girlfriend are desperately mobilising a small group of allies across the real and unreal realms. Cracking humour, great characterisation; maybe a bit less tied into the underlying mythos than previous volumes, maybe that’s not a bad thing. Will also get a high vote from me. You can get it here.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
To make a good trade, a carrier needs not to care about transgress-ing time. A carrier needs to slip her way into the barter. To use objects and signs in unorthodox ways.
Time-travelling meditation on the Statue of Liberty. More fantasy than sf, and more importantly it doesn’t quite stick the landing. You can get it here.
The Princess Bride came out as the top book of 1973 among Goodreads and LibraryThing readers, by quite a convincing margin. This is no doubt due not so much to its popularity in 1973 as to the success of the 1987 film. It is only two and a half years since I last read The Princess Bride, whereas it had been decades since I read A Wind in the Door and Breakfast of Champions, so I did not read it again for this exercise.
The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
Queen Bella was shaped like a gumdrop. And colored like a raspberry. She was easily the most beloved person in the kingdom, and had been married to the King long before he began mumbling. Prince Humperdinck was but a child then, and since the only stepmothers he knew were the evil ones from stories, he always called Bella that or “E. S.” for short.
The first time I reviewed it, in 2012, I wrote:
Well, this is very entertaining! While The Princess Brideis at its core a rollicking fairy tale that does nothing at all to challenge racial or sexual stereotypes, what saves it is the witty and occasionally self-mocking tone of the text, the framing narrative of an author reclaiming a story he loved in childhood for his grandson, and also the sub-plot about the process of editing down and publishing a story written by another person in another time for another audience. I’m also impressed by the ambiguity of the ending (I understand that the film doesn’t dare to replicate that). So, despite its flaws, some of which are acknowledged in the text, strongly recommended.
In 2021, comparing it with the 1987 film, I wrote:
[T]his time around I read the 25th anniversary edition, which goes even further into the joke of the film and book being edited versions of an original Florinian novel and the difficulties of adaptation and location filming, and moving about his memories of Andre the Giant, but also frankly doubles down on the sexism of the first edition. Goldman is also disturbingly emotional about the meaning of it all for him. It’s fair to say that it’s quite a step from his other films (the only one I have seen is, again, All the President’s Men). So I’m not sure I can recommend it as whole-heartedly now. Maybe I’m just in a grumpy mood.
I think I was in a grumpy mood. It’s a decent enough skewering of fantasy tropes, if not as adventurous as the author perhaps thought. Anyway, you can get it here.
Looking at it now in the context of Vonnegut and L’Engle, it’s striking that the three books are all somewhere along the speculative fiction spectrum, and that they are all rather nostalgic – The Princess Bride overtly so, Breakfast of Champions and A Wind in the Door both reminiscent of the early 60s or late 50s rather than the mid 70s. I guess that in the aftermath of Vietnam and the oil crisis, people were reaching for old comforts.
I think I will repeat this exercise for future years. Just to note that the top books of 1873 could be Anna Karenina (first part first published that year) or Around the World in Eighty Days (first book publication that year). For 1823, the poem “The Night Before Christmas” is far ahead of the field.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
Little Kago himself died long before the planet did. He was attempting to lecture on the evils of the automobile in a bar in Detroit. But he was so tiny that nobody paid any attention to him. He lay down to rest for a moment, and a drunk automobile worker mistook him for a kitchen match. He killed Kago by trying to strike him repeatedly on the underside of the bar.
Breakfast of Champions is firmly in third place in the ranking of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels on both LibraryThing and Goodreads, and firmly in second place among the books of 1973 on both systems. Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle are his top and second novels, and I think that is fair; both are much better books. (Indeed I find The Sirens of Titan, which is fourth on both lists, more to my taste.)
The book is about a science fiction writer, Kilgore Trout, on his way to a literary convention in a town which may or may not be Vonnegut’s original home, Indianapolis, and his violent encounter with a deranged local automobile dealer. The author himself features as an anonymous first-person viewpoint minor character, though one with godlike powers over the other characters.
It’s a frustarting book, because it combines some very incisive social commentary with some very regrettable tics; the body measurements of female characters and penis sizes of male characters are all cited, and the n-word is freely thrown around to an extent that was surely already unacceptable in 1973. Vonnegut illustrates it with hs own drawing, which are frankly childish. There are some serious messages lurking there, and some good questions asked about what it is we really expect from fictional narratives, but the book as a whole is just self-indulgent. You can get it here.
I noted a couple of weeks ago the historical background of Phoebe Hurty, aka Glaadys Sutton, aka Jane Jordan, to whom this book is dedicated. Vonnegut remained true to his Indianapolis roots.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
“Do not be afraid,” he repeated. “He won’t hurt you.”
This is the second in the sequence of five novels by Madeleine L’Engle about Meg Murry, of which the first and by far the best known is A Wrinkle in Time. (An odd coincidence: my grandmother’s married name was Margaret Murray.) Here Meg is teamed up with a cherubim and her brother Charles’s struggling head-teacher to learn lessons and fight mystic battles among the mitochondria of Charles’ failing body. To be honest, it’s less humane and less magical than the previous book, and there are several longish chapters of Meg lost in the void, without physical form, communicating through dialogue with unseen allies and enemies, Proust could (just about) get away with taking fifty pages to walk up a flight of stairs, but L’Engle doesn’t quite pull it off. Still, it’s an encouraging, positive, imaginative book, and I think the yung readers of 1973 would have been glad to have a sequel, even if it wasn’t quite up to the mark. You can get it here.
In fact while A Wind in the Door is a strong third-placed of the 1973 books on LibraryThing (well ahead of Gravity’s Rainbow), it’s only fourth on Goodreads, well behind Rendezvous with Rama (which however scores much worse on LT). You can get it here.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
Lisa gazed out of a window on the second floor of the office block.
Just poorly written. You can get it here.
The top book of 1923 on Librarything and Goodreads, by a very long way, is The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran. The third chapter, in full, with the original illustration, is as follows:
Children
And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said,
Speak to us of Children.And he said:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not
even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent
forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the Archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as he loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is
stable.
I was vaguely aware of this as (I thought) woo-woo spirituality. I was pleased to discover that it is better than that; in particular I thought it rather good on love and personal relationships, and I can see why people who are uncomfortable with any specific religious tradition like to use it for rites of passage, especially weddings.
It’s interesting that all three of the top 1923 books address death as a fundamental part of what they are doing, though I’ll admit that The Prophet is some distance from Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. The second last chapter is explicitly “On Death”, and in the last chapter the Prophet himself bids farewell to the priestess and departs from the city departs in a heavily laden metaphor.
Gibran is not so sound on social and political issues, where the message of the book is to try and find the serenity to accept the things you cannot change, without much thought to finding the courage to change the things you can, or the wisdom to know the difference. You can’t have everything, I suppose.
But it’s short, and digestible, and nicely illustrated by the author, and you can get it here.
Continuing with my analysis of the best-remembered novels of 1923, we get to Whose Body? by Dorothy L. Sayers. NB that this review includes MASSIVE SPOILERS for a detective novel published a hundred years ago.
Whose Body? was Dorothy L. Sayers’ first novel, and therefore also the first of the eleven Lord Peter Wimsey novels published in her lifetime. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
“That’s a wonderful instrument,” said Parker.
Whose Body? is a better book than The Murder on the Links. Christie’s Poirot (and the other French characters) are already slipping into caricature; Sayers is engaging in wicked social observation of her own people. The characters are more memorable; I was smiling in recognition of particular lines that I first read thirty-five years ago. It established Wimsey as a realistic, complicated man, who likes to pretend that he is much stupider than he really is.
A naked body is discovered in the bath of a respectable London architect; meanwhile a well-known Jewish financier has gone missing. (A deleted line would have made it clear that the body int he bath is not Jewish.) The central mystery is very complicated, but not quite as unbelievably so as in Agatha Christie, and the clues are scattered through the text to the point that the careful reader will have an inkling of the answer at the same time as Wimsey works it all out. The common thread turns out to be…
MASSIVE SPOILERS
…a distinguished surgeon who killed the financier after decades of resentment about his marriage, and swapped his body for one from the teaching hospital which he runs. He explains himself in a detailed written confession at the end.
Again, the recent war looms behind everything. Wimsey has an awful attack of shell shock just as he works out the answer to the mystery:
Mr. Bunter, sleeping the sleep of the true and faithful servant, was aroused in the small hours by a hoarse whisper, “Bunter!”
“Yes, my lord,” said Bunter, sitting up and switching on the light.
“Put that light out, damn you!” said the voice. “Listen—over there—listen—can’t you hear it?”
“It’s nothing, my lord,” said Mr. Bunter, hastily getting out of bed and catching hold of his master; “it’s all right, you get to bed quick and I’ll fetch you a drop of bromide. Why, you’re all shivering—you’ve been sitting up too late.”
“Hush! no, no—it’s the water,” said Lord Peter with chattering teeth; “it’s up to their waists down there, poor devils. But listen! can’t you hear it? Tap, tap, tap—they’re mining us—but I don’t know where—I can’t hear—I can’t. Listen, you! There it is again—we must find it—we must stop it…. Listen! Oh, my God! I can’t hear—I can’t hear anything for the noise of the guns. Can’t they stop the guns?”
“Oh, dear!” said Mr. Bunter to himself. “No, no—it’s all right, Major—don’t you worry.”
Sayers’ England is still picking itself up after catastrophe, more tangibly so than Christie’s France. Notable that The Murder on the Links and Whose Body? share a particular plot twist: in both stories, there is an unsuccessful attempt to substitute the body of a vagrant for the actual murder victim. It suggests rather grimly that in 1923, there was no shortage of anonymous vagrants dying in England and northern France who could be called in post-mortem to support the nefarious plans of aspiring criminals.
Sayer also surprised me by introducing a theological discussion between Wimsey and his police detective friend Parker.
Lord Peter spent the afternoon in a vain hunt for Mr. Parker. He ran him down eventually after dinner in Great Ormond Street.
Parker was sitting in an elderly but affectionate armchair, with his feet on the mantelpiece, relaxing his mind with a modern commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians. He received Lord Peter with quiet pleasure, though without rapturous enthusiasm, and mixed him a whisky-and-soda. Peter took up the book his friend had laid down and glanced over the pages.
“All these men work with a bias in their minds, one way or other,” he said; “they find what they are looking for.”
“Oh, they do,” agreed the detective; “but one learns to discount that almost automatically, you know. When I was at college, I was all on the other side—Conybeare and Robertson and Drews and those people, you know, till I found they were all so busy looking for a burglar whom nobody had ever seen, that they couldn’t recognise the footprints of the household, so to speak. Then I spent two years learning to be cautious.”
“Hum,” said Lord Peter, “theology must be good exercise for the brain then, for you’re easily the most cautious devil I know. But I say, do go on reading—it’s a shame for me to come and root you up in your off-time like this.”
I have attempted in vain to locate a credible British commentary on Galatians published in the early 1920s, though there are a couple of American candidates. Sayers of course was well known for her theological writing, but it’s startling to see that in the hands of a policeman character. It is a good set-up for the exposure of the amoral character of the villain.
Anyway, it’s a great start to a good run of Wimsey stories. You can get it here.
As reported on Sunday, the three top books published in 1923 as measured by ownership on LibraryThing and Goodreads, a barometer of their staying power (in the English-speaking world in particular), are The Murder on the Links by Agatha Christie, Whose Body? by Dorothy L. Sayers and The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran. I had not read The Murder on the Links or The Prophet before, and decided to do a triple reading with a welcome return to Whose Body?.
NB that this reviews below includes MASSIVE SPOILERS for a mystery novel published a hundred years ago.
The Murder on the Links was Agatha Christie’s third novel (of 66) and second Poirot novel (of 33). It’s just outside her top ten books on both LibraryThing and Goodreads. The second paragraph of the third chapter, gloriously, is:
“What is that you say? Murdered? When? How?”
Poirot, an elderly retired Belgian detective, and the narrator, the young Captain Hastings, are invited to France by Paul Renauld, a Canadian millionaire who has earned his fortune in Chile and Argentina, and writes that he is in fear of his life. They arrive in France to find that he has just been murdered. The case involves many beautiful women and Renauld’s son. It turns out, after much complex investigation and many false leads, that…
MASSIVE SPOILERS
…Renauld had planned to fake his own murder, but one of the beautiful women decided to kill him anyway. She conveniently dies before being arrested; another of the beautiful women marries Renauld’s son, and another marries Captain Hastings and takes him to Argentina.
The war looms over this book, as over the other two which I will come to. In the very first chapter, Hastings introduces himself to the reader by way of conversation with the girl he has just met (and will marry at the end of the story):
We passed through Amiens. The name awakened many memories. My companion seemed to have an intuitive knowledge of what was in my mind.
“Thinking of the War?”
I nodded.
“You were through it, I suppose?”
“Pretty well. I was wounded once, and after the Somme they invalided me out altogether. I had a half fledged Army job for a bit. I’m a sort of private secretary now to an M. P.”
“My! That’s brainy!”
“No, it isn’t. There’s really awfully little to do. Usually a couple of hours every day sees me through. It’s dull work too.”
All of the dialogue in the book is reported in English, though with a distinctly French idiom to let us know when Christie’s characters are speaking French. It is taken for granted that Hastings, like all properly educated people in 1923, is completely fluent and comfortable in French. No difficulties of linguistic comprehension are reported.
The murder plot is intricate beyond belief, but Christie carries it off by having Poirot show off his talent to the sympathetic Hastings and the unsympathetic official detective from Paris. One feels at the end that the elaborate set-up was just about worth the payoff, and it is a more confident and comfortable book than The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Christie’s first novel, which also featured Poirot. You can get it here.
Agatha Christie:
The Mysterious Affair at Styles | The Secret Adversary | The Murder on the Links | The Man in the Brown Suit | The Murder of Roger Ackroyd | The Big Four | The Mystery of the Blue Train | The Murder at the Vicarage | Murder on the Orient Express | The A.B.C. Murders | Murder in Mesopotamia | Cards on the Table | Death on the Nile | Appointment With Death | Hercule Poirot’s Christmas | And Then There Were None | Evil Under the Sun | The Body in the Library | Five Little Pigs | Crooked House | A Murder Is Announced | 4.50 from Paddington | Hallowe’en Party
Second paragraph of third chapter:
After leaving Howard’s, she decided to text instead of call Louis, waiting to have the conversation later when he was his full embodied self. But after she texted him with a short update her phone rang straightaway. She was just getting balanced on her bike and had to put the kickstand down again, then remembered to unplug the headphones when she heard his voice so close in her ears.
Interesting exploration of green lifestyle and consciousness-altering pharmaceuticals. I do love Berlin as a city and it’s nice to see something set there. You can get it here.
This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 2023. Every six-ish days, I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.
A decent amount of travel this month, with ten days in Northern Ireland including a family gathering.
I also had a work trip to Belgrade, and finished the month at Worldcon in Chicago having spent a few days first at my brother’s near Boston where I did some further research:
A lot of Worldcon-related drama happened in August, but I’ll save recounting it to my September write-up.
I read 25 books that month:
Non-fiction 8 (YTD 70)
Lenin the Dictator, by Victor Sebestyen
Manifesto, by Bernardine Evaristo
The Life of Col. Samuel M. Wickersham, ed. Edward Wickersham Hoffman
The Curse of Fenric, by Una McCormack
The Time Warrior, by Matthew Kilburn
That Damn’d Thing Called “Honour”: Duelling in Ireland, 1570-1860, by James Kelly
The Kosovo Indictment, by Michael O’Reilly
Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, by Svetlana Alexievich
Non-genre 2 (YTD 13)
Alaska Sampler 2014: Ten Authors from the Great Land, eds Deb Vanasse and David Marusek
The Light Years, by Elizabeth Jane Howard
SF 9 (YTD 69)
Swordheart, by T. Kingfisher
The Initiate, by Louise Cooper
Sprawl, ed. Cat Sparks
The Massacre of Mankind, by Stephen Baxter
Roger Zelazny’s Chaos and Amber, by John Betancourt
The Harp and the Blade, by John Myers Myers
“Tangents”, by Greg Bear
The Light Fantastic, by Terry Pratchett
The Carhullan Army, by Sarah Hall
Doctor Who 5 (YTD 23)
Dalek Combat Training Manual, by Richard Atkinson and Mike Tucker
The Lost Skin, by Andy Frankham-Allen
Scary Monsters, by Simon A. Forward
Doctor Who: The Curse of Fenric, by Ian Briggs
Doctor Who and the Time Warrior, by Terrance Dicks
Comics 1 (YTD 13)
Doctor Who: The Seventh Doctor: Operation Volcano, by Ben Aaronovitch and Andrew Cartmel
6,100 pages (YTD 49,800)
9/25 (YTD 78/192) by non-male writers (Evaristo, McCormack, Alexievich, Vanasse, Howard, “Kingfisher”, Cooper, Sparks, Hall)
1/25 (YTD 25/192) by a non-white writer (Evaristo)
I enjoyed revisiting The Light Fantastic, which you can get here, and reading Bernardine Evaristo’s Manifesto, which you can get here, T. Kingfisher’s Swordheart, which you can get here, and the Dalek Combat Manual, which you can get here. I’ll draw a veil over those I liked less.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
Mercy had landed, curls of smoke around her but no fire, yet. Harp quick-released his harness, saw his new, reluctant buddy copy. ‘All set, Ludwiz?’
MilSF rubbish. You can get it here.
This is our first proper family holiday in Northern Ireland post-pandemic and post-Brexit. In the past, we had usually driven to the West Midlands via the Channel Tunnel on the first day of travel, and then through Wales to Holyhead to get the fast ferry to Dublin and then on up on the second day. But that was in part to pick up my mother-in-law, who is not coming this year; so we decided to try the brand new ferry that goes directly from Dunkirk to Rosslare, not touching England or Wales.
The cost for four of us, including a cabin, is about the same as the Eurotunnel and Irish Sea crossings combined, plus you get four square meals en route. It takes precisely 24 hours (or at least, that is the schedule). Of course, to that you add travel to Dunkirk at one end, and from Rosslare to Co Down at the other, 2.5 and 3 hours respectively on a good day; plus you have to check in 2-3 hours before departure, so total travel time ends up not dissimilar to the landbridge route (but total *driving* time considerably less).
The journey was not without snags. Having left home in very good time at 3.15, we had to turn around and start again when a quick passport count revealed that we were one short. Traffic in Belgium on the direct route from Brussels to the coast was so bad that Waze (my navigation app of choice) sent us to Dunkirk via Antwerp. Rather than arriving on the dot of 6pm for a 9pm sailing, we reached Dunkirk at ten to seven; though it was clear that we would not have been turned away even if we had missed the supposed 7pm deadline by a bit.
The ferry was Lithuanian. The crew communicated with each other in Lithuanian, all of the shipboard signs were in Lithuanian with most (but not all) translated into English, the safety notices were in Lithuanian, Swedish, English and French, and passenger announcements were in Lithuanian, English, Russian and German (not French, even though we departed from France). I had more exposure to Lithuanian on the trip than ever before in my life. Lithuania is the only EU member state that I have never been to.
Most of the travellers on our sailing were freight trucks. I counted only three other family cars besides ours, and a couple of camper vans. The truckers hung out together in the bar (which was open 24/7), no reserved space for them as there is on some ferries (but if almost all your passengers are truckers anyway, there’s no need). The TV in the bar showed films badly dubbed into Russian, switching to Sky News as we neared our destination. Several passengers had brought pets, mostly dogs though there were a couple of cats.
There was not a lot to do on board – and we were offline as maritime internet is very expensive. I finished and tarted several books. We got chatting to the owner of a Donegal-based haulage firm who was ending a work trip to Germany and the Netherlands. He said it was the worst boat he had ever been on, with no facilities apart from space to eat, drink and sleep. But we felt we had little cause for complaint; our cabin was small but functional and we knew what we had signed up for.
We were very unlucky with the weather. Storm Antonis blew right across our path on the Saturday and I personally was very queasy. Judging from the unpleasant evidence that the crew had to clear off the carpets, others had had it worse. I was just about OK for breakfast and lunch, but when dinner was first served at 5pm the storm seemed to me still at full blast and I just could not get out of bed. (The rest of the family are better sailors than me.) Very fortunately, soon after 6pm we got out of the storm and into a region of calm which lasted for the rest of the trip. I was suddenly back to 100%, just a few minutes after I had felt on the edge of the abyss. I was still in time for dinner and requested (and got) a double helping of lasagna.
The storm meant that we arrived in Rosslare at 9.30 pm rather than the originally scheduled 8pm, a 25½ hour sailing instead of 24. We go to County Down in just over three hours from the southeastern corner of County Wexford; I can well remember the days when that journey would have taken five or six. To my surprise, Waze directed us to turn off the N11 at Enniscorthy and head for the M9 across country via Bunclody and Ballon, neither of which seemed excessively busy on a Saturday night in August. Apparently the N11 has massive roadworks in County Wicklow.
Anyway, we got here just after 1 am on Sunday morning, a total journey time of just under 35 hours, of which less than 7 were spent driving. The landbridge route would generally have been the same length of time overall – leave home at 8am, arrive around 6pm the next day – but with far more time behind the wheel. And in fact, we were just unlucky with the weather. I am positively looking forward to the return trip.
Boosted by 24 hours on a boat with little else to do…
Current
Collision Course, by Robert Silverberg / Nemesis from Terra, by Leigh Brackett
Gifted Amateurs and Other Essays, by David Bratman
Love and Mr Lewisham, by H.G. Wells
Last books finished
The Golden Enclaves, by Naomi Novik
Sins of the Father, by Nick Abadzis et al
Akata Woman, by Nnedi Okorafor
Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, by Tom King, Bilquis Evely and Matheus Lopes
A Wind in the Door, by Madeleine L’Engle
Representatives of the People?: Parliamentarians and Constituents in Modern Democracies, ed. Vernon Bogdanor
The Outcast, by Louise Cooper
Falling to Earth, by Al Worden
The Shadow Man, by Sharon Bidwell
Next books
Doctor Who: The Zygon Invasion, by Peter Harness
Autism Spectrum Disorders Through the Life Span, by Digby Tantam
The Man Who Died Twice, by Richard Osman
Which of this year’s books will be remembered in 50 or 100 years’ time? I won’t be around to keep count, but it’s a question that we can ask of the books of 50 and 100 years ago. So, I have crunched the numbers for the books of 1923 and 1973, as tracked by ownership on LibraryThing and the number of people who have rated them on Goodreads. Obviously there’s an English-language bias there, but I’m pleasantly surprised that a number of translated novels make both lists.
For 1923, The Prophet by Lebanese-American writer Kahlil Gibran is way out in front. I’ve read it and the next two on the list and will report back on them in the next couple of days. I am familiar at least with most of the others, and have read another four or five, but they all look interesting. There are works of poetry and a play here; neither genre appears on the 1973 list. None of these appears in the Publisher’s Weekly lists of best-selling books in the USA for any year in the 1920s.
| Title | Author | GR ratings | LT readers | Genre | Language |
| The Prophet | Kahlil Gibran | 285,637 | 13,524 | poetry / philosophy | English |
| The Murder on the Links | Agatha Christie | 84,057 | 4,181 | fiction (detective) | English |
| Whose Body? | Dorothy L. Sayers | 53,897 | 4,732 | fiction (detective) | English |
| Emily of New Moon | L.M. Montgomery | 48,741 | 3,888 | fiction (children) | English |
| Zeno’s Conscience / La coscienza di Zeno | Italo Svevo | 24,462 | 3,425 | fiction | Italian |
| The Inimitable Jeeves | P.G. Wodehouse | 25,937 | 3,221 | fiction (humour) | English |
| Bambi | Felix Salten | 35,470 | 2,348 | fiction (children) | German |
| Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening | Robert Frost | 10,446 | 2,334 | poetry | English |
| Leave It to Psmith | P.G. Wodehouse | 10,835 | 2,118 | fiction (humour) | English |
| Saint Joan | George Bernard Shaw | 8,999 | 2,208 | stage | English |
| Cane | Jean Toomer | 10,201 | 1,806 | fiction (African American) | English |
| A Lost Lady | Willa Cather | 6,622 | 1,537 | fiction | English |
| The Fatal Eggs / Роковые яйца | Mikhail Bulgakov | 10,010 | 723 | fiction (science fiction / satire) | Russian |
| St Francis of Assisi | G.K. Chesterton | 4,284 | 1,583 | biography | English |
| The Devil in the Flesh / Le Diable au corps | Raymond Radiguet | 5,963 | 1,052 | fiction | French |
| Sonnets to Orpheus / Die Sonette an Orpheus | Rainer Maria Rilke | 3,409 | 1,021 | poetry | German |
| Antic Hay | Aldous Huxley | 2,213 | 1,266 | fiction (humour) | English |
| The Lurking Fear | H.P. Lovecraft | 2,201 | 972 | fiction (horror) | English |
| The Dark Frigate | Charles Boardman Hawes | 2,364 | 702 | fiction (children) | English |
| My Universities / Мои университеты | Maxim Gorky | 2,455 | 298 | autobiography | Russian |
I have read more than half of the 1973 list, and reread the second and third after crunching these numbers (reviews to come). There’s a distinct shift towards more popular literature, with more than a third of the list being fantasy or sf including The Princess Bride, top book by a long way, possibly due to having been later made into a hit fantasy film. Breakfast of Champions and The Hollow Hills both feature in the Publisher’s Weekly list for 1973, and both topped the New York Times Best Sellers list at different points that year.
| Title | Author | GR ratings | LT readers | Genre | Language |
| The Princess Bride | William Goldman | 876,632 | 24,080 | fiction (fantasy) | English |
| Breakfast of Champions | Kurt Vonnegut Jr. | 252,249 | 15,739 | fiction (satire, possibly sf/fantasy) | English |
| A Wind in the Door | Madeleine L’Engle | 125,473 | 12,097 | fiction (children, sf) | English |
| Gravity’s Rainbow | Thomas Pynchon | 42,455 | 10,403 | fiction | English |
| Rendezvous with Rama | Arthur C. Clarke | 158,937 | 9,660 | fiction (sf) | English |
| The Dark Is Rising | Susan Cooper | 54,681 | 8,088 | fiction (children, fantasy) | English |
| Knowing God | J.I. Packer | 55,725 | 8,069 | religion | English |
| Sula | Toni Morrison | 88,287 | 7,260 | fiction (African American) | English |
| Time Enough for Love | Robert A. Heinlein | 34,891 | 5,403 | fiction (sf) | English |
| The Gulag Archipelago / Архипелаг ГУЛАГ | Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn | 28,572 | 4,918 | history / reportage | Russian |
| How to Eat Fried Worms | Thomas Rockwell | 47,178 | 4,516 | fiction (children) | English |
| The Hollow Hills | Mary Stewart | 21,829 | 4,025 | fiction (fantasy) | English |
| Momo | Michael Ende | 74,409 | 3,789 | fiction (children, fantasy) | German |
| Crash | J.G. Ballard | 24,530 | 3,387 | fiction | English |
| Fear of Flying | Erica Jong | 21,026 | 3,364 | fiction | English |
| Rubyfruit Jungle | Rita Mae Brown | 40,058 | 3,111 | fiction | English |
| Summer of My German Soldier | Bette Greene | 16,884 | 2,893 | fiction (children) | English |
| Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 | Hunter S. Thompson | 22,055 | 2,858 | reportage | English |
| Child of God | Cormac McCarthy | 41,844 | 2,852 | fiction | English |
| Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities | Flora Rheta Schreiber | 88,919 | 2,799 | psychology | English |
So, a bit of compare and contrast:
I might keep up this analysis for the next few years, and see what titles it throws up.
I’m on a boat all day today, and setting this to post as I cruise sedately from France to Ireland, avoiding England and Wales entirely. I’ll write that up when I get a chance.
Earlier in the summer I watched the thirteen 25-minute episodes of the 1987 series Knights of God, an ITV children’s TV production about a near-future dystopian Britain (specifically, set in 2020), where a theocratic military regime has taken over and Wales has become the core of the limited resistance. Apparently the copyright rests with Disney, who have shown no interest in commercially releasing it, but at time of writing all 13 episodes can be found on both Youtube and Archive.org. For us genre TV fans, it’s especially notable for the resistance leaders being played by Gareth “Roj Blake” Thomas and Patrick “Second Doctor” Troughton.
The story was actually made in 1985, and by the time it was shown in 1987 two of the leading actors had died – Patrick Troughton and Nigel Stock, who is one of the leading bad guys, the titular Knights of God. The story revolves around young Gervase Edwards, a rebel who gets brainwashed by the Knights and instructed to kill the one person who can unite the country against them. It turns out (massive spoiler for a TV show from 36 years ago) that this person is in fact young Gervase himself, who is the rightful King. He overcomes his conditioning, the Knights are overthrown and the constitutional monarchy restored.
The two young actors in the lead roles are OK but somewhat overshadowed by the big names in the rest of the cast. Neither of them became a household name. George Winter, who plays Gervase, has switched careers and became an artist. Claire Parker, who plays his girlfriend Julia, is still an actor and wellness consultant. There is a decent dynamic between them. Her haircut is so 80s that you could probably identify the month it was filmed in 1985 with sufficient specialist knowledge. (Picture from the cover of the novelisation.)
But the pairing you really watch is the two lead bad guys, John Woodvine (memorable in Doctor Who as the Marshal of Atrios in The Armageddon Factor; he turned 94 last month) and Julian Fellowes (most famous now for writing Gosford Park and Downton Abbey, but also now a real-life Conservative member of the House of Lords) as Prior Mordrin and Brother Hugo. They move from being collaborators to becoming bitter enemies in a very credible story arc. (Nigel Stock is #3 in the hierarchy, Brother Simon, and enables them both at different times.)
Lots of other familiar faces from 1970s and 1980s television, especially Welsh actors, pop up from time to time. The most visible woman actor, apart from Claire Parker, is Shirley Stelfox who plays Gareth Thomas’s character’s wife (and Gervase’s supposed mother, until the truth comes out).
There are a lot of hidden father/child relationships. We start with the apparent one between Gervase and Roj Blake Gareth Thomas’s character, though that turns out to be fake. Two others become apparent in the course of the series, in one of which the actors concerned have only a nine year age different in real life. (Jocelyn Jee Esien, who played Clyde Langer’s mother in one of the Sarah Jane Adventures, is only eight years older than the youthful-looking Daniel Anthony.)
The whole thing was done on a relatively low budget – a few key sets and locations which we return to again and again, and a lot of money must have been blown on the two helicopters which feature frequently. But for what it is, I think it is very well done; I found the episodes flying by, and each cliff-hanger coming as a surprise. The directors were Andrew Morgan and Michael Kerrigan, both of whom also directed Doctor Who stories in the 1980s. If you have thirteen half-hour sized slots to fill in the coming days, you could make worse choices than watching this.
There’s also a novel by screenplay writer Richard Cooper (who also wrote Codename Icarus); the second paragraph of the third chapter is:
In the room, he saw the knight, who should have been standing to attention, slumped in a chair, head bowed in sleep. He slammed the door behind him and the man awoke, head jerking up, eyes slowly focusing and then, when he saw Mordrin, filling with fear. He got to his feet, rifle clattering to the floor. Mordrin, impassive, looked at it.
It’s great stuff, actually; only 204 pages for 13 episodes (and thus over 300 minutes of screentime) but packing in more interesting details – Ireland (as a whole) has become one of the states of the USA and is shipping in arms to the rebels; we get a lot more detail on the military situation and, crucially, on the Mordrin / Hugo relationship (rather less on the Gervase / Julia relationship, but that’s a case where less may be more). It is a perfectly adequate substitute for experiencing the original series.
I shouldn’t think this will ever be released commercially – the right moment to sell dystopian fiction set in the year 2020 may have passed, especially given what actually happened that year – but it was well worth tracking down.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
“I became fascinated with the Daleks at an early age. I remember in the early 1980s, being quite disturbed by children’s television programmes such as Jigsaw and Chockablock — things that were supposed to be fun, completely freaked me out, while things that were designed to be terrifying — like the Daleks — enthralled me.[“]
I remember going to the Doctor Who exhibition in Blackpool in 1977, when I would have been ten; it was a subterranean chamber full of Doctor Who monsters, and I bought the new novelisation of The Dalek Invasion of Earth, the very first Doctor Who book that I bought for myself. My memories of exactly what was on display are dim.
Not so for the contributors to Blackpool Remembered, a lovely full-colour commemoration of the exhibition which ran from 1974 to 1984. There’s a loving recreation of the exhibition space, which was updated each year to bring in more recent monsters – and these were genuine BBC props, with only a couple of Daleks specially made for Blackpool. There are extensive memories by fans who kept more careful notes and photographs than I did, including a couple who have gone on to become bigger names in the Whoniverse, such as Steve Cole and Matt Fitton. It’s a great example of how to reconstruct a purely physical and temporary display space after almost four decades.
There is a great interview with Julie Jones, the Doctor Who production office staffer who masterminded the whole thing; but disappointingly, we don’t get much from the female fan perspective. Lots of mums and sisters and a few girlfriends appear in the photographs; I don’t think we hear directly from any of them. I guess that reflects the resources available to the editor, but it’s an unfortunate gap. (Also everyone seems to be white.)
Still, it’s a lovely production which you can download for free from here.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
The old man wheezes and shifts on his pillows, bathed in soft exhaust. A chorus of machines hums and whirs around him, pumping fluid through the crude fabric of tubes weaving in and out of his skin. When he lowers a stained handkerchief from his bluish mouth to speak, a foul odor escapes. “Just throw him in the furnace and be done with it.”
Hugely unpleasant characters and depressing setting. Gave up after fifty pages. You can get it here.
Second paragraph of third story, not counting intro and a poem (“Miss Carstairs and the Merman”, by Delia Sherman):
In that house, Miss Carstairs sat by the uncurtained window of her study, peering through a long telescope. Her square hands steady upon the barrel, she watched the lightning dazzle on the water and the wind-blown sand and rain scour her garden. She saw a capsized dinghy scud past her beach in kinetoscopic bursts, and a gull beaten across the dunes. She saw a long, dark, seal-sleek figure cast upon the rocky beach, flounder for a moment in the retreating surf, and then lie still.
Lots of good stories in this collection, with a number of different takes on the mythology of mermaids and the closely related selkies. I think my favourite story was the rather gruesome “Mermaid of the Concrete Jungle”, by Caitlin R. Kiernan, closely followed by “Somewhere Beneath Those Waves Was Her Home”, by Sarah Monette, but none of these were clunkers and I recommend the whole collection. You may be able to get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2016. Next on that dwindling pile is There Will Be War Volume X, edited by Jerry Pournelle.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
They’ve fought their oppressor for over a century, but things are different now. They started winning. Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, the Mau Mau movement in Kenya, and, of course, the Algerian war. Their fight was the longest, the bloodiest, but no one counts bodies on the winning side. They prevailed, and they inspired a whole fucking continent.
This was the book that threw me completely due to a scene set in Cambridge in 1844, in which the protagonist is looking out for Venus to appear over Memorial Court. She would have a long wait because Memorial Court was not built until 1926! She and John Couch Adams then spot Mars over King’s College Chapel. There was in fact no evening in 1844 when Mars was visible in the east and Venus in the west. Also John Couch Adams is referred to as an undergraduate, though he got his BA in 1843. You can get it here.
Incidentally when I went to Cambridge in April this year, I did see Mercury and Venus over Memorial Court.
Of course, you can’t see the buildings for the trees.
