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.
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.
Checking back, I realised that a few months ago I skipped directly from September 2021 to November 2021 in this sequence, so here’s the post I should have made on 9 June!
It’s an especially silly omission because we had a really fun post-pandemic trip to The Hague for our wedding anniversary, starting with a rijsttafel and doing various cultural things. (While poor F was isolating with our household’s first COVID-19 diagnosis.)
As soon as we got back I had a London trip where I also visited Eltham Palace:
And the site of Parnell’s love affair with Catherine O’Shea:
I was still keeping up my ten-day plague posts.
At the end of the month my sister and her daughter visited, just in time for a significant birthday.
I read 31 books that month.
Non-fiction 8 (YTD 38)
John Quincy Adams: American Visionary, by Fred Kaplan
Groetjes uit Vlaanderen, by Mohamed Ouaamari
The Ambassadors of Death, by L.M. Myles
Dark Water / Death in Heaven, by Philip Purser-Hallard
Free Speeches, by Denis Kitchen, Nadine Strossen, Dave Sim, Neil Gaiman and Frank Miller
The Ryans of Inch and Their World: A Catholic Gentry Family from Dispossession to Integration, c.1650-1831, by Richard John Fitzpatrick (PhD thesis)
Those About to Die, by Daniel P. Mannix
Discipline or Corruption, by Konstantin Stanislavsky
Non-genre 2 (YTD 24)
The Wych Elm, by Tana French
Time Must Have a Stop, by Aldous Huxley
Scripts 1 (YTD 4)
Day of the Dead, by Neil Gaiman
SF 15 (YTD 109)
Quicksilver, by Neal Stephenson
“Fire Watch”, by Connie Willis
Little Free Library, by Naomi Kritzer
The Empire of Time, by David Wingrove – did not finish
Crashland, by Sean Williams – did not finish
City of Miracles, by Robert Jackson Bennett
Silver in the Wood, by Emily Tesh
The Space Between Worlds, by Micaiah Johnson
Splinters and the Impolite President, by William Whyte
Axiom’s End, by Lindsay Ellis
Splinters and the Wolves of Winter, by William Whyte
Shadowboxer, by Tricia Sullivan
The Vanished Birds, by Simon Jimenez
The Unspoken Name, by A.K. Larkwood
Blake’s 7 Annual 1982, eds Grahame Robertson and Carole Ramsay![41wcwtI+eNL[1].jpg](https://i0.wp.com/fromtheheartofeurope.eu/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/2758535_300.jpg?resize=163%2C250&ssl=1)
Doctor Who 5 (YTD 18, 24 inc comics and non-fiction)
Prime Imperative, by Julianne Todd
The Xmas Files, ed. Shaun Russell
Mind of Stone, by Iain McLaughlin
The Crimson Horror, by Mark Gatiss
Doctor Who: The Ambassadors of Death, by Terrance Dicks
7,600 pages (YTD 60,600)
13/31 (YTD 99/231) by non-male writers (Myles, Strossen, Darl/Cooper/Harris/Harris, French, Willis, Kritzer, Tesh, Johnson, Ellis, Sullivan, Larkwood, Ramsay, Todd)
3/31 (YTD 37/231) by PoC (Ouaamari, Johnson, Jimenez)
Two particularly good books this month (and several that weren’t, but let’s focus on the positive).
Back to the normal sequence next week.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
Melquiades claimed the mere thought such a thing might be possible was sacrilege: holiness could not reside in a flower or a drop of rain. Offerings to spirits were the devil’s work.
I thought this was really interesting, a reframing of H.G. Wells in the context of the historical Maya resistance to Mexican rule in the Yucatan. There was a twist three quarters of the way through that I should have seen coming, but didn’t. Hugo finalist. You can get it here.
These were the two winners of the James Tiptree Jr Award, now the Otherwise Award, in 2013 for works of 2012. The award is for works of science fiction or fantasy that expand or explore one’s understanding of gender.
Ancient, Ancient, uniquely for the Tiptree Award, is a collection of stories by a single author, Kiini Ibura Salaam, The second paragraph of the third story, “MalKai’s Last Seduction”, is:
The buzzing that had settled in Cori’s ears over the past couple of days was MalKai coming to get him. When the first “zzzzzz” licked his ear drums, Cori had swatted at the air around his newly-pierced ear lobes. A meddlesome mosquito—he imagined—hovering near. He made repeated attempts to shoo it away, but his arms soon grew tired. His shoulder ached from throwing his biceps into repeated attack arcs. His fist grew bored of finding no tender little bug crushed in its grasp. Eventually he shrugged his shoulders and rescinded the attack.
I hugely enjoyed this, a sexy and angry collection of short pieces, the longest and perhaps most effective being the last, “Pod Rendezvous”, which has a richly and economically depicted alien society. You can get it here.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of The Drowning Girl, by Caitlin R. Kieran, is:
Dr. Ogilvy suspects that my fondness of dates may be an expression of arithmomania. And, in fairness to her, I should add that during my teens and early twenties, when my insanity included a great many symptoms attributable to obsessive-compulsive disorder, I had dozens upon dozens of elaborate counting rituals. I could not get through a day without keeping careful track of all my footsteps, or the number of times I chewed and swallowed. Often, it was necessary for me to dress and undress some precise number of times (the number was usually, but not always, thirty) before leaving the house. In order to take a shower, I would have to turn the water on and off seventeen times, step in and out of the tub or shower stall seventeen times, pick up the soap and put it down again seventeen times. And so forth. I did my best to keep these rituals a secret, and I was deeply, privately ashamed of them. I can’t say why, why I was ashamed, but I was afraid, and I lived in constant dread that Aunt Elaine or someone else would discover them. For that matter, if I had been asked at the time to explain why I found them necessary, I would’ve been hard-pressed to come up with an answer. I could only have said that I was convinced that unless I did these things, something truly horrible would happen.
It is a queer time-travel ghost story set in Rhode Island (which I plan to visit in September). There’s some vivid reflexive stuff with the protagonist intervening in and rewriting the narrative. Mental illness and gender identity dance through the pages; it’s an intense but rewarding experience. you can get it here.
Unusually, one novel was on the final ballot for the Clarke, BSFA and Tiptree Awards and failed to win any of them; this was 2312, by Kim Stanley Robinson. There were five other novels and a short story on the Tiptree honor list, but I have not read any of them.
Dark Eden by Chris Beckett, which won the Clarke Award, was also on the BSFA ballot; Intrusion, by Ken MacLeod, was also on both ballots. The BSFA winner was Jack Glass by Adam Roberts, and the other BSFA finalist was Empty Space: A Haunting, by M. John Harrison. I voted for Dark Eden. I have not rea the other three on the Clarke shortlist: Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway, The Dog Stars by Peter Heller and Nod by Adrian Barnes. That year The Drowning Girl was also on the Nebula ballot, but the Nebula itself went to 2312, and the Hugo to John Scalzi’s Redshirts; I did not rank either very high.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
I first realized this at Dr. Rothman’s. Two years after my little brother died, but left us no body to confirm the fact and mourn, my mother told me I was going to the doctor’s. I prepared myself for the rituals of the pediatrician’s office: my knees tensed for the rubber hammer, that miracle of reflex; my nostrils anticipated an antiseptic tang, my tongue the compensatory lollipop. But as soon as we arrived—”a new doctor,” my father muttered as he parked—and we got out of the car, it was clear to me that this was no clinic.
The core of the story is parallel timelines where one of the leading characters did or didn’t die, which is often taken as sf, and some reflection on identity that wanders close to Philip K. Dick territory. This turns into commentary on grief, and on the problems of the contemporary US. Not sure that it totally hung together at the end. You can get it here.
Non-fiction 9 (YTD 48)
Amy Dillwyn, by David Painting
After the War: How to Keep Europe Safe, by Paul Taylor
The Popes and Sixty Years of European Integration
How to End Russia’s War on Ukraine, by Timothy Ash et al
Blackpool Remembered, by John Collier
Drawing Boundaries, eds John C. Courtney, Peter MacKinnon and David E. Smith (did not finish)
The Deadly Assassin, by Andrew Orton
The Awakening, by David Evans-Powell
One Bible, Many Voices: Different Approaches to Biblical Studies, by S.E. Gillingham
Non-genre 7 (YTD 14)
The Cider House Rules, by John Irving
A Burglary, or, Unconscious Influence, by Amy Dillwyn
Jill, by Amy Dillwyn
Jill and Jack, by Amy Dillwyn
Nant Olchfa, by Amy Dillwyn
The Murder on the Links, by Agatha Christie
Whose Body?, by Dorothy L. Sayers
Poetry 1 (YTD 4)
The Prophet, by Khalil Gibran
SF 12 (YTD 122)
The Memory Librarian, ed. Janelle Monáe
Atlantis Fallen, by C.E. Murphy
In the Serpent’s Wake, by Rachel Hartman
Ancient, Ancient, by Kiini Ibura Salaam
Mermaids and Other Mysteries of the Deep, ed. Paula Guran
The Drowning Girl, by Caitlin R. Kiernan
Legends & Lattes, by Travis Baldree
Tofu Brains: Life on Zeeta 21, by Lars Koch
There Will Be War Volume X, ed. Jerry Pournelle (did not finish)
Breakfast of Champions, by Kurt Vonnegut
Knights of God, by Richard Cooper
The Golden Enclaves, by Naomi Novik
Doctor Who 2 (YTD 21)
Doctor Who and the Deadly Assassin, by Terrance Dicks
Doctor Who – The Awakening, by Eric Pringle
Comics 4 (YTD 14)
Arena of Fear, by Nick Abadzis et al
Saga, Vol. 10, by Fiona Staples and Brian K. Vaughan
Partitions irlandaises, by Vincent Baily and Kris
Once & Future Vol 4: Monarchies in the UK, by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora and Tamara Bonvillain
8,200 pages (YTD 54,900)
17/35 (YTD 94/225) by non-male writers (Gillingham, Dillwyn x 4, Christie, Sayers, Monáe, Murphy, Hartman, Salaam, Guran, Kiernan, Novik, illustrators of Arena of Fear, Staples, Bonvillain)
2/35 (YTD 30/225) by a non-white writer (Gibran, Salaam)
5 rereads (Whose Body?, Breakfast of Champions, Doctor Who and the Deadly Assassin, Doctor Who – The Awakening, Once & Future Vol 4: Monarchies in the UK)
360 books currently tagged unread – up 41 from last month, as I reintegrated the Clarke submissions that I want to get back to, and made some other updates.
Reading now
Representatives of the People?: Parliamentarians and Constituents in Modern Democracies, ed. Vernon Bogdanor
The Outcast, by Louise Cooper
Falling to Earth, by Al Worden
Coming soon (perhaps)
Sins of the Father, by Nick Abadzis et al.
Doctor Who: The Zygon Invasion, by Peter Harness
The Shadowman, by Sharon Bidwell
Doctor Who and the Stones of Blood, by Terrance Dicks
Doctor Who: Stones of Blood, by David Fisher
The Stones of Blood, by Katrin Thier
Arachnids in the UK, by Sam Maleski
Autism Spectrum Disorders Through the Life Span, by Digby Tantam
Collision Course, by Robert Silverberg / Nemesis from Terra, by Leigh Brackett
Love and Mr Lewisham, by H.G. Wells
The Man Who Died Twice, by Richard Osman
Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver
“Beggars in Spain”, by Nancy Kress
The Cartographers, by Peng Shepherd
The Return of Eva Perón with the Killings in Trinidad, by V. S. Naipaul
DALEKS, ed. Marcus Hearn
Rupetta, by N.A. Sulway
Living with the Gods, by Neil MacGregor
What Not: A Prophetic Comedy, by Rose Macaulay
A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, by Adam Rutherford
Wyrd Sisters, by Terry Pratchett
Dawn of the New Everything: A Journey Through Virtual Reality, by Jaron Lanier
Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System, by Nick Montfort
Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka
Jaren van de olifant, by Willy Linthout
The Various Lives of Keats and Chapman: Including the Brother, by Flann O’Brien
Second paragraph of third chapter:
“The kids you babysat during the memorial tested positive,” my mother said through an intercom next to my bed. “Their parents swore they’d been tested. We thought they were safe. I’m so sorry, Jun.”
It is a book for our time, looking at worldwide plague and its consequences, in the form of a closely linked sequence of short stories. I felt that most of the stories were very good, but a couple missed the mark, including, crucially and catastrophically, the ending. You can get it here.
Current
The Golden Enclaves, by Naomi Novik
Representatives of the People?: Parliamentarians and Constituents in Modern Democracies, ed. Vernon Bogdanor
The Outcast, by Louise Cooper
Falling to Earth, by Al Worden
Last books finished
The Prophet, by Khalil Gibran
Tofu Brains: Life on Zeeta 21, by Lars Koch
There Will Be War Volume X, ed. Jerry Pournelle (did not finish)
Doctor Who – The Awakening, by Eric Pringle
Once & Future Vol 4: Monarchies in the UK, by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora and Tamara Bonvillain
The Awakening, by David Evans-Powell
One Bible, Many Voices: Different Approaches to Biblical Studies, by S.E. Gillingham
Breakfast of Champions, by Kurt Vonnegut
Knights of God, by Richard Cooper
Next books
Sins of the Father, by Nick Abadzis et al
Autism Spectrum Disorders Through the Life Span,by Digby Tantam
Love and Mr Lewisham, by H.G. Wells
I picked up Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions again after many years, and was struck by the dedication:
IN MEMORY OF PHOEBE HURTY,
who comforted me in Indianapolis—during the Great Depression.
When he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold. —JOB
The introduction to the book expands on this a bit:
The person to whom this book is dedicated, Phoebe Hurty, is no longer among the living, as they say. She was an Indianapolis widow when I met her late in the Great Depression. I was sixteen or so. She was about forty.
She was rich, but she had gone to work every weekday of her adult life, so she went on doing that. She wrote a sane and funny advice-to-the-lovelorn column for the Indianapolis Times, a good paper which is now defunct.
Defunct.
She wrote ads for the William H. Block Company, a department store which still flourishes in a building my father designed. She wrote this ad for an end-of-the-summer sale on straw hats: “For prices like this, you can run them through your horse and put them on your roses.”
Phoebe Hurty hired me to write copy for ads about teenage clothes. I had to wear the clothes I praised. That was part of the job. And I became friends with her two sons, who were my age. I was over at their house all the time.
She would talk bawdily to me and her sons, and to our girlfriends when we brought them around. She was funny. She was liberating. She taught us to be impolite in conversation not only about sexual matters, but about American history and famous heroes, about the distribution of wealth, about school, about everything.
I now make my living by being impolite. I am clumsy at it. I keep trying to imitate the impoliteness which was so graceful in Phoebe Hurty. I think now that grace was easier for her than it is for me because of the mood of the Great Depression. She believed what so many Americans believed then: that the nation would be happy and just and rational when prosperity came.
I never hear that word anymore: Prosperity. It used to be a synonym for Paradise. And Phoebe Hurty was able to believe that the impoliteness she recommended would give shape to an American paradise.
Now her sort of impoliteness is fashionable. But nobody believes anymore in a new American paradise. I sure miss Phoebe Hurty.
Well, I thought, what can I find out about Phoebe Hurty, using the resources of Ancestry.com?
At first the trail was somewhat confusing. The 1940 city directory for Indianapolis has the following entries under Hurty:
Two years later, the 1942 directory has this:
So it looks like Phoebe was the wife of Gilbert, who died some time between 1940 and 1942, and that he was president of the Hurty-Peck favouring extracts company; and her mother-in-law Ethel also died between 1940 and 1942. Meanwhile there is a Gladys S. Hurty who works for the William H. Block Company as a copywriter, but seems to live at the same address as Gilbert and Phoebe.
This doesn’t quite match Vonnegut’s account. He has Phoebe, not Gladys, as the copywriter at Block’s. (Also he implies that she was already a widow when they first met when he was about sixteen; but he was born in 1922, and Gilbert was definitely still alive in 1938.) A bit more digging and I found documentary evidence for the following timeline:
There is only one reference to a Phoebe Hurty in official records anywhere that I could find: it is cited as the name of Robert Craig Jr’s mother, on his 2009 death certificate.
So, it begins to look as if Gladys and Phoebe Hurty were the same person, but were listed separately in the Indianapolis city directory in the different roles of Block copywriter and Gilbert’s wife. I got confirmation of this from her obituary in the Indianapolis News of 29 May 1956:
Gladys Hurty, former news writer, is dead
Gladys (Phoebe) Sutton Hurty, 61 [actually 64], former writer, had always been keenly interested in literature. She was attending a class on great books at Butler University last night when she suffered a stroke. She died on arrival at Methodist Hospital. Her home was in Golden Hill.
Born in Texas, Mrs. Hurty had lived in Indianapolis more than 50 years. She was the widow of Gilbert J. Hurty, former owner of Hurty Peck dealers in extracts.
For a number of years Mrs. Hurty wrote articles for The [Indianapolis] News’ editorial page under the name of Phoebe Craig. Also for a time she wrote a column in the [Indianapolis] Times under the pseudonym of Jane Jordan. For 20 years Mrs. Hurty had been an advertising executive at Block’s.
Her work there included writing copy for men’s clothing ads. Mrs. Hurty was planning to retire at Block’s June 30 and take a European tour. She was a member of the Woodstock Club, Great Books Club and the Contemporary Club.
Services will be at 3 p.m. Thursday in Flanner Buchanan Fall Creek Mortuary, with burial in Crown Hill Cemetery. Survivors are two sons by a former marriage, Robert L. Craig, Indianapolis, and David F. Craig, New Orleans; a brother, John A. Sutton, Indianapolis, and six grandchildren. Funeral: Home, with burial in Crown Hill.
It’s sad that she died so suddenly, just a month before she would have retired.
Dan Wakefield, who knew Kurt Vonnegut from their childhoods in Indianapolis (but is ten years younger), did a little more digging for his biography, Kurt Vonnegut: The Making of a Writer, told in the second person, present tense.
One of the mothers who reads the Echo [a high school newspaper] is Phoebe Hurty, an advertising copywriter for the William H. Block Company, one of the big downtown department stores. She likes what you write and sees that you write often; she hires you to write advertising copy for the Echo about the clothes that Block’s Department Store sells to teenagers. The deal is that you wear the clothes that you write about to school, and you pose as a model in ads that the store makes for its teenage clothes.
Phoebe Hurty becomes your mentor. Her legal name is Gladys Sutton Craig Hurty, but she doesn’t see herself as a Gladys, so she picked out a name she thinks suits her better: Phoebe. She uses another name for the advice column she writes for the Indianapolis Times: Jane Jordan. Her advice is to the point and practical.
A girl writes to tell “Jane Jordan” that she likes a boy who was respectful and nice, but on her last date with him, he’d been drinking and said if she really cared about him, she’d “surrender.” Here is “Jane Jordan’s” advice: “I think I would ignore the incident. If he behaves properly when he is sober, enjoy his company, and avoid him when he drinks.”
In an interview in the Indianapolis Times, Phoebe tells about her philosophy for raising her two sons to become independent.
“When they were very little, the garage was their playhouse,” she says, and one cold day they started a fire to keep warm. Phoebe came home from work to find the street clogged with fire trucks. The fire the boys had made to keep warm had nearly burned down the garage. Phoebe says her son Bobby “gave me one agonized look and said, ‘Mother, I will eat turnips.’ I saw that he wanted to be punished to relieve his sense of guilt and that in his opinion, nothing could be worse than turnips. So we had turnips for dinner and nothing more was said. We’ve never had a fire since.”
You get to be friends with Phoebe and her sons Robert, who is a year older than you, and David, who is a year younger, and you hang out at their house all the time.
Phoebe Hurty talks bawdily to you and her sons and to your girlfriends when you bring them around. She’s funny. She’s liberating. She teaches you and her sons to be impolite in conversation, not only about sexual matters, but also about American history and famous heroes, about the distribution of wealth, about everything.
So I’m pretty satisfied that I’ve filled out Vonnegut’s brief reference to Phoebe Hurty, born Gladys Sutton, for a few years Mrs Craig, and Jane Jordan in her advice columns. There’s one more log to add to the fire, though. The Indianapolis State Library has digitised several dozen editions of Block’s Booster, the in-house magazine for the employees of William H. Block and Company, and Phoebe Hurty is mentioned several times (as Phoebe, not Gladys). Notably, in the May 1948 issue, there is a two-page photo spread on the store’s advertising department, and one of the pictures features an indistinct Phoebe. (I’ve shifted the caption from its original position in the article, for clarity.)
That’s her on the right, the month before her 57th birthday. It’s a shame that the photographer didn’t catch her as well as her colleagues, but I’m grateful for what we have; and anyway Vonnegut’s pen-portrait is much more descriptive than any image could be.
CODA won the 2021 Best Picture Oscar, and two others: Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor (Troy Kotsur as Ruby’s father), in fact a clean sweep as those were the only three categories in which it was nominated. Dune won six Oscars that year, and the Hugo, and the Ray Bradbury Award. Apart from CODA and Dune I have seen two of the there nominees for Best Picture, Belfast and Don’t Look Up; I have not seen Drive My Car, King Richard, Licorice Pizza, Nightmare Alley, The Power of the Dog or the remake of West Side Story.
Apart from this, I have also seen the other four Hugo finalists, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (which I voted for myself), Encanto, Space Sweepers and The Green Knight. I think the only other film I had seen was The Dig, about Sutton Hoo. Sticking my neck out, I liked CODA better than any of them. IMDB users rank it 23rd of 2021’s films on one list and 35th on the other, which is rather low. Dune and Spiderman: No Way Home top the two lists.
Here’s a trailer:
There’s one actor who has been in Doctor Who, and one who was in a previous Oscar winner. The Doctor Who crossover is rather spectacular: it’s Emilia Jones, who plays CODA’s protagonist Ruby, and was also the child singer Merry in the 2013 Eleventh Doctor story The Rings of Akhaten.
The Oscar crossover actor is the rather less prominent Armen Garo, seen here on the left in CODA as Gio Salgado, the guy who runs the fish auction:
Fifteen years before, he was the unnamed First Providence Gangster in The Departed, on the right here with Leonardo DiCaprio on the left:
The film is about Ruby, the child of deaf adults (hence the title, CODA), who can hear, unlike her parents and older brother, who communicate with her through American Sign Language. They run a fishing boat out of Gloucester, Massachusetts, which as it happened I visited with my family in 2005. Times are hard for the family and the fishing industry, and a new music teacher discovers that Ruby has an impressive talent for singing. She navigates her parents’ utter incomprehension, her feelings for the cute boy in the choir, her best friend’s romance with her brother and her own self-esteem in order to get to an audition for a top music school in Boston.
It’s beautifully filmed with the northeast Massachusetts sea, town, school and countryside all vividly depicted. (There are some great scenes with Ruby and the Cute Boy swimming together at an isolated lake.) The acting is absolutely top notch. I loved Marlee Matlin as pollster Joey Lucas in The West Wing (she was in at least one episode in every season, from 2000 to 2006) and I loved her here as Ruby’s mother. As mentioned previously, Troy Kotsur got an Oscar for playing her father.
And I have to be honest, the basic story of disability as a part of life that people live with and get on with, but also the effects that it has on a family, hit home very hard for me. The climax where Ruby sings Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” (in the video above) had me in tears. The last Oscar-winner that did that to me, I think, was The Sound of Music, though Terms of Endearment and The King’s Speech came close. That doesn’t necessarily make it a great film objectively, but it does shoot it right to the top of my personal table, and I’m ranking it at 7th place out of 94, just below Schindler’s List and ahead of Rebecca,
This is the first Oscar winner specifically made as a remake of an existing film – though Marty was based on a previously broadcast teleplay, and My Fair Lady stands on the shoulders of the 1938 Pygmalion, tracking it shot for shot in some scenes. CODA is based on the 2014 Franco-Belgian film La Famille Bélier, which I also sat down and watched. Here’s a trailer.
It’s almost exactly the same story as CODA, with some changes which don’t affect the thrust of the plot. The Bélier family have a farm rather than a fishing boat. The deaf brother is younger rather than older than the protagonist. The music college is in Paris, not Boston. The dad decides to run for mayor rather than to challenge the vested interests of fishing. (I remember reading somewhere, a couple of decades ago, that out of every sixty adult French men, one on average then held a locally elected municipal office of some kind. That’s probably shifted a bit with population growth and better gender equality, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s still in that ball park.)
We still have the protagonist forced to take on an adult role for her family’s business; we still have the cute boy singer in the choir, and the best friend’s romance with the deaf brother; we still have the hilarious scene in the doctor’s office, and the parents having loud sex while the protagonist’s friend is in the house; we still have the eccentric music teacher who spots the young girl’s talent; we still have the dramatic fade-out of the sound-track during the school concert so that we can appreciate the experience of the deaf parents; we still have the dramatic dénouement of the audition. It’s not a shot-for-shot remake, but it’s very much the same story, told somewhat differently.
La Famille Bélier is funnier than CODA, and it’s also sexier (the songs are much more explicit and there’s a totally hilarious scene involving a condom). The music is also, frankly, better. Here, the music teacher is obsessed with the work of singer-songwriter Michel Sardou, and makes the choir and the protagonist sing nothing else. This gives the soundtrack a musical unity that the American remake lacks, and makes the whole thing much more earwormy. In particular, Paula’s final song at her audition, Sardou’s “Je vole”, made me cry even more than Ruby’s “Both Sides Now” in the American version. It’s a song about suicide, but the film turns it into a hymn to emancipation. Stunning stuff from 17-year-old Louanne, whose real life was not without complications; her father had died the previous year, and her mother died while the film was being made.
| Mes chers parents, je pars Je vous aime mais je pars Vous n’aurez plus d’enfant Ce soir Je ne m’enfuis pas je vole Comprenez bien, je vole Sans fumée, sans alcool Je vole, je vole | My dear parents, I’m leaving I love you but I’m leaving You won’t have any children any more This evening I am not running away, I’m flying Understand, I’m flying No tobacco, no alcohol I’m flying, I’m flying |
| Elle m’observait hier Soucieuse, troublée, ma mère Comme si elle le sentait En fait elle se doutait, entendait J’ai dit que j’étais bien Tout à fait l’air serein Elle a fait comme de rien Et mon père démuni a souri Ne pas se retourner S’éloigner un peu plus Il y a gare une autre gare Et enfin l’Atlantique | My mother was watching me yesterday Anxious, troubled As if she felt it In fact she suspected, heard me say That I was fine Looking quite serene She acted like nothing And my poor father smiled Don’t look back move away a bit more There is another station And finally the Atlantic |
| Mes chers parents, je pars Je vous aime mais je pars Vous n’aurez plus d’enfant Ce soir Je ne m’enfuis pas je vole Comprenez bien, je vole Sans fumée, sans alcool Je vole, je vole | My dear parents, I’m leaving I love you but I’m leaving You won’t have any children any more This evening I am not running away, I’m flying Understand, I’m flying No tobacco, no alcohol I’m flying, I’m flying |
| J’me demande sur ma route Si mes parents se doutent Que mes larmes ont coulé Mes promesses et l’envie d’avancer Seulement croire en ma vie Tout ce qui m’est promis Pourquoi, où et comment Dans ce train qui s’éloigne Chaque instant | I wonder on my way If my parents suspect That my tears have flowed My promises and the desire to move forward Just believe in my life All that’s promised to me Why, where and how In this train that is moving away Every moment |
| C’est bizarre cette cage Qui me bloque la poitrine Je ne peux plus respirer Ça m’empêche de chanter | It’s very weird, this cage Blocking my chest Stopping my breath Keeping me from singing |
| Mes chers parents, je pars Je vous aime mais je pars Vous n’aurez plus d’enfant Ce soir Je ne m’enfuis pas je vole Comprenez bien, je vole Sans fumée, sans alcool Je vole, je vole | My dear parents, I’m leaving I love you but I’m leaving You won’t have any children any more This evening I am not running away, I’m flying Understand, I’m flying No tobacco, no alcohol I’m flying, I’m flying |
| La la la la la la La la la la la la La la la la la la Je vole, je vole | La la la la la la La la la la la la La la la la la la I’m flying, I’m flying |
I loved La Famille Bélier, but CODA does score over it in a couple of important respects. The more important issue is that the supporting actors in CODA are genuinely deaf, whereas the French parents are played by hearing actors (the brother is genuinely deaf in both films). This is just really important for honest representation. We’ve come a long way from the second Oscar-winner, The Broadway Melody, where there was a character with a comic disability. (It’s currently at the very bottom of my league table of Oscar winners.) But we still need to give people their own voices.
The other point is that CODA is more politically on point. La Famille Bélier has a patronising mayor ultimately getting his just deserts at the hands of the voters, with Paula’s father as the agent of his downfall. CODA has the grim reality of late-stage capitalism dragging down the entire town and its industry, and the efforts of Ruby’s family to reverse the tide while also overcoming their own challenges. It’s played for real, rather than for laughs, and I think helps give it the edge as the better of the two films.
Only one Oscar-winner left: Everything Everywhere All At Once, which is also up for the Hugo this year.
Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture
1920s: Wings (1927-28) | The Broadway Melody (1928-29)
1930s: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-30) | Cimarron (1930-31) | Grand Hotel (1931-32) | Cavalcade (1932-33) | It Happened One Night (1934) | Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, and books) | The Great Ziegfeld (1936) | The Life of Emile Zola (1937) | You Can’t Take It with You (1938) | Gone with the Wind (1939, and book)
1940s: Rebecca (1940) | How Green Was My Valley (1941) | Mrs. Miniver (1942) | Casablanca (1943) | Going My Way (1944) | The Lost Weekend (1945) | The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) | Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) | Hamlet (1948) | All the King’s Men (1949)
1950s: All About Eve (1950) | An American in Paris (1951) | The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) | From Here to Eternity (1953) | On The Waterfront (1954, and book) | Marty (1955) | Around the World in 80 Days (1956) | The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) | Gigi (1958) | Ben-Hur (1959)
1960s: The Apartment (1960) | West Side Story (1961) | Lawrence of Arabia (1962) | Tom Jones (1963) | My Fair Lady (1964) | The Sound of Music (1965) | A Man for All Seasons (1966) | In the Heat of the Night (1967) | Oliver! (1968) | Midnight Cowboy (1969)
1970s: Patton (1970) | The French Connection (1971) | The Godfather (1972) | The Sting (1973) | The Godfather, Part II (1974) | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) | Rocky (1976) | Annie Hall (1977) | The Deer Hunter (1978) | Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
1980s: Ordinary People (1980) | Chariots of Fire (1981) | Gandhi (1982) | Terms of Endearment (1983) | Amadeus (1984) | Out of Africa (1985) | Platoon (1986) | The Last Emperor (1987) | Rain Man (1988) | Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
1990s: Dances With Wolves (1990) | The Silence of the Lambs (1991) | Unforgiven (1992) | Schindler’s List (1993) | Forrest Gump (1994) | Braveheart (1995) | The English Patient (1996) | Titanic (1997) | Shakespeare in Love (1998) | American Beauty (1999)
21st century: Gladiator (2000) | A Beautiful Mind (2001) | Chicago (2002) | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) | Million Dollar Baby (2004, and book) | Crash (2005) | The Departed (2006) | No Country for Old Men (2007) | Slumdog Millionaire (2008) | The Hurt Locker (2009)
2010s: The King’s Speech (2010) | The Artist (2011) | Argo (2012) | 12 Years a Slave (2013) | Birdman (2014) | Spotlight (2015) | Moonlight (2016) | The Shape of Water (2017) | Green Book (2018) | Parasite (2019)
2020s: Nomadland (2020) | CODA (2021) | Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) | Oppenheimer (2023)
Amy Dillwyn’s last novel for adults, Nant Olchfa, was published in The Red Dragon: The National Magazine of Wales in 1886 and 1887. I covered 1887 in my previous post; 1886 also saw the publication of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy and The Bostonians by Henry James. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
There was a story that one day when Reginald was a lad at school he, for the first time, heard the saying, chacun pour soi. Not catching it quite correctly, he was presently heard repeating thoughtfully to himself: “chacun pour moi. That’s a ripping good motto to take! The worst of it is that perhaps some of the other fellows won’t see it. They are so beastly selfish.”
This is the shortest of Dillwyn’s novels, I think, and it’s a straightforward though rather dark family melodrama. Reginald will inherit the Nant Olchfa estate if his cousins David and Gladys die, or if he marries Gladys who has just got engaged to someone else. At David’s 21st birthday party, Reginald kills him and makes it look like an accident, and then sows sufficient discord between Gladys (another of Dillwyn’s teenage girls) and her fiancée to get them to break up. Reginald then pursues a path of carnage to try and get his way, and eventually meets his just doom horribly while trying to escape through a steel foundry. It’s not very deep but it is a rollicking good read, with lots of circumstantial detail of the Welsh countryside.
Nant Olchfa has never been reprinted since it appeared in nine successive issues of the Red Dragon magazine. However I have downloaded all of the component parts and stuck them together, and you can access the 151-page file here. It’s 18 MB I’m afraid. Some day I may run the whole thing through OCR and see if I can get it into a more convenient form.
I have not been able to get hold of Maggie Steele’s Diary, Amy Dillwyn’s last novel, published in 1892, though I have found a detailed review in The Spectator. (Since you asked, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle was also published in 1892.) It sounds like it was another upper-class family melodrama, with the interesting twist that Dillwyn kills off her protagonist in the end. (Though this is often the case with novels which are told in diary form.) I see that copyright libraries all have it, but I’m nowehere near any of them.
Amy Dillwyn’s novel-writing career lasted only from 1880 to 1892, though she lived for another four decades. In 1892, her father died while campaigning for his tenth term as MP for Swansea, and the house where she had lived all her life passed to cousins; all she got was the foundry for the zinc-lead alloy spelter that he father had founded. It turned out that the spelter works was deeply in debt, and Dillwyn devoted herself to turning it around and then running it as a profitable concern, eventually selling it to Metallgesellschaft AG. This must have absorbed all of her energy. She never had a full-time romantic partner, though her passionate friendships seem to have continued; as the years went on she got active in politics and civic life, and died six months after her ninetieth birthday. A fascinating figure, who we can still get to know through her writing.
Second paragraph of third chapter (a long ‘un):
All three siblings attended this luncheon, and David’s favorite moment was not the expressions on the children’s faces when they were greeted with the sight of their feast but, rather, the one they assumed when they stepped into the bank’s lobby. He understood their awe, for he never failed to experience it as well: the vast floor of silvery marble, polished to a shining finish; the Ionic columns, hewn from the same stone; the grand rotunda ceiling, inlaid with a gleaming mosaic pattern; the three murals that occupied the length of three whole walls, painted so high that one was all but forced into a supplicative posture to properly see them the first depicting his great-great-great-grandfather, Ezra, the war hero, distinguishing himself in the battle for independence from Britain; the second, his great-great-grandfather, Edmund, marching northward with some of his fellow Utopians from Virginia to New York to found what would become known as the Free States; the third, his great-grandfather, Hiram, whom he had never known, founding Bingham Brothers and being elected mayor of New York. In the background of all the panels, rendered in browns and grays, were moments from his family’s and country’s history alike: the Siege of Yorktown, where Ezra had fought, his wife and young sons at home in Charlottesville; Edmund marrying his husband, Mark, and the first wars with the Colonies, which the Free States would win, but at great human and financial cost; Hiram and his two brothers, David and John, as young men, unaware that of the three of them, only Hiram, the youngest, would live into his forties, and that only he would produce an heir—his son, Nathaniel, David’s grandfather. At the bottom of each panel was a mounted marble plaque carved with a single word—Civility; Humility; Humanity—which, along with the phrase on the bank’s crest, was the Bingham family’s motto. The fourth panel, the one over the grand front doors, which opened onto Wall Street, was empty, a smooth blank expanse, and it was here that David’s grandfather’s accomplishments would one day be recorded: how he had grown Bingham Brothers into the wealthiest financial institution in not only the Free States but also America; how, until he had helped America fund its fight in the War of Rebellion and secured his country’s autonomy, he had successfully protected the Free States’ existence against every attempt to dismantle it and dissolve the rights of its citizenry; how he paid for the resettlement of free Negroes who had entered the Free States, helping them establish new lives for themselves in the North or the West, as well as escapees from the Colonies. True, Bingham Brothers was no longer the only or, some might argue, the most powerful institution in the Free States, especially with the recent flourishing of the arriviste Jewish banks that had begun to establish themselves in the city, but it was, all would agree, still the most influential, the most prestigious, the most renowned. Unlike the newcomers, David’s grandfather liked to say, Bingham did not confuse ambition for greed, or cleverness for wiliness—its responsibility was as much to the States themselves as to the people it served. “The Great Mister Bingham)” the journals called Nathaniel, occasionally mockingly, as when he attempted to initiate one of his more ambitious projects—such as his proposal, a decade ago, to advance universal suffrage throughout America as well—but mostly sincerely, for David’s grandfather was, indisputably, a great man, someone whose deeds and visage deserved to be painted on plaster, the artist swinging perilously on a rope-and-wood seat high above the stone floor, trying not to look down as he stroked his brush, glossy with paint, over the surface.
Three sections, set in an alternative 1893 and 1993 and a future 2093 based on the previous two. Passionate on sexuality and the history of Hawaii. Last part was less convincing for me. You can get it here.
