The spiritual progress of William Charlton Hibbard

Posted on by

Sarah and William Hibbard

My great-great-grandfather, William Charlton Hibbard, lived from 1814 to 1880. He was born in Littleton, New Hampshire, the oldest of six, and grew up between there and Waterford, just across the border in Vermont. In 1849 he married Sarah Ann Smith (1815-1891), from Dover at the other end of New Hampshire; they spent most of their lives in Boston (William had moved there in 1837 to pursue a career in engineering), and had five children. I'm preparing some deeper research into the lives of the Hibbard family, but some really interesting stuff has come up about William Charlton Hibbard's religion, which I'm summarising here.

William's father (and my 3x great-grandfather), Lyman Hibbard (1783-1865), is variously described as a lumberman and a mechanic in official documents. But the only time he is mentioned in the three-volume History of Littleton, published in 1905, is in the context of the Congregational Church, Littleton's first place of worship:

In this period [between 1803 and 1820] also Lyman Hibbard was one of the most active and intelligent members [of the Congregational Church]. It was his fortune soon afterward to be the first member of the church to be arraigned at its bar, and to suffer the penalty of excommunication. His offence was heresy, the particular form of which the record does not state, but it would doubtless be covered by the term "agnostic," which [T.H.] Huxley applies to all sorts of doubters.

Lyman's father, my 4xgreat-grandfather David Hibbard, was deacon of the Congregational Church in nearby Concord, Vermont, so expelling his son must have been a pretty big deal. But the dating of this incident is frustratingly inexact. We know that Lyman was born in 1783, and married Rebecca Charlton in 1813. Her father is also noted as being one of the pillars of the Congregational Church in Littleton, so the balance of probabilities is that Lyman was excommunicated some time after the marriage rather than before, in other words around the time William was born in 1814 or when he was very young.

Three decades later, it's interesting to note that William and Sarah married in a civil ceremony in New York in 1849, the officiant being a local alderman. Civil weddings were of course far from unknown in the USA at that time. But of eighteen weddings recorded in that week's The Literary American, theirs is one of only two non-religious ceremonies, held instead in the Irving House Hotel on Broadway. I can't find any strong connection for either side of the family with New York City; I wonder if this was a mid-nineteenth century "destination wedding" for the New Englanders, Broadway being 1849's Las Vegas or Antigua?

There is another fascinating hint to William's beliefs in an official document, the transcript of an 1853 patent infringement court case between inventor Ross Winans and the Eastern Railroad Company, where he appeared as an expert witness for Winans (who claimed intellectual property rights over the design of passenger railroad carriages). The official transcript runs to several pages of technical inquiry about Hibbard's qualifications and links to the parties, and then turns startlingly theological. William had declined to take a religious oath at the start of his deposition, and the Eastern Railroad's lawyers pounced on him:

“Do you believe in the existence of a God, who will reward the good deeds and punish the evil deeds done in the body, in a future state of existence?” “Do you believe in the existence of a Supreme Being; and that he will reward and punish you according to your deserts?”

William refused to answer either of these questions.

The reference to the 1852 Howe vs Bradford trial is also intriguing. This was a notorious case where the inventor Walter Hunt had clearly been the first person to develop a sewing-machine, in the 1830s, but had never developed the idea as a business proposition; twenty years on, Elias Howe and Isaac Singer were locked in a series of law suits to claim patent rights, one of which went to full jury trial. Hunt himself was a disastrous witness; he had more or less forgotten about his own invention, and had a tendency to tell people about his unorthodox views about God. I cannot find a reference to the judge saying, as William Hibbard reports, that Hunt was "not bound to answer" questions about his religious views; on the other hand, it was widely reported in the news that the judge actually refused to allow Hunt to testify, because he was an atheist – here, for instance, is a representative article from a local newspaper in Virginia, the Staunton Spectator (21 July 1852):

Walter Hunt and William Hibbard may well not have used the word "atheist" to define their own beliefs, but it was an easy label for their opponents to put on them.

Likewise, their relatives. My grandmother was born in 1899, almost twenty years after William had died, but she seems to have downloaded as much as she could from her own father, who was William's second son, and later from her stepmother. My grandmother notes that William

was an atheist, and left to himself he would have preferred his children to have no religious instruction at all, but my step-mother told me that Papa told her that his mother – though I doubt if she had any strong religious belief herself – said that the children must be brought up like the other children in West Roxbury, near Boston, where they lived, and she saw to it that they attended the Unitarian church there.

My grandmother's note may sound like her own grandmother sending off the kids to a nice respectable Sunday school, but that is not quite what was happening. The Unitarian church in West Roxbury is now named in honour of Theodore Parker, the firebrand minister who was based there from 1837 (the year that William Hibbard arrived in Boston) to 1846. The church congregation was very progressive, firmly opposed to slavery and supporting social reforms, and members included Louisa May Alcott, William Lloyd Garrison, Julia Ward Howe, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. (It is intriguing that there is no explicit mention of Sarah attending the church herself, but maybe I am over-interpreting.)

The only obituary that I have found of William is in a place that greatly surprised me: Banner of Light, a weekly newspaper for Spiritualists. Its 5 June 1880 issue sadly notes:

Mr. William C. Hibbard, of West Roxbury, joined the procession of the homeward bound on the 28th ult [i.e. May]. Mr. H. was a parishioner of Theodore Parker, and had his attention directed to the subject of Spiritualism many years since by Prof. Mapes. In connection with that gentleman he made a very thorough scientific investigation and analysis of its phenomena, and became convinced of its truth, as every one invariably does who follows with an equal degree of honesty and determination a similar line of inquiry. He was intimately associated with the pioneers and early workers in social reforms; and zealously opposed all oppression and bigotry, whether introduced under a cloak of sanctity or otherwise. He claimed individual sovereignty for himself and all others; hence he cared nothing for what folks thought or said, pursuing the even tenor of his way, conscious of his own integrity and regardless of unfriendly criticism.

His conceptions of a Supreme Power were very far in advance of those commonly accepted. He despised all shams in men and dogmas in religion. He did not estimate the value of man by the quality of his clothes, or consider the amount of money he possessed as an indication of what he was worth. He thought nothing of preaching but very much of practicing. With such views and feelings he could have but little sympathy with the thoughts and purposes of the majority. He was, consequently, during his later years, what the world would term “much shut up in himself” but which really was a living of the life and an association with the intelligences of another world while held by his body to this. He had learned much, but no one more than he felt that he had much to learn. He has gone and taken his treasures with him.

One can read quite a lot between the lines there, but maybe that's for another time.

It's worth remembering that in mid-nineteenth century America, spiritualism was regarded as totally scientifically robust by its proponents, and that they in turn tended to be politically progressive, with for instance Harriet Beecher Stowe writing a pro-Spiritualist pamphlet as well as Uncle Tom's Cabin. For a man like my great-great-grandfather, an engineer brought up without a particular church tradition and perhaps with a distrust of organised religion, the proofs of an afterlife offered by Spiritualism, "scientifically" proven but unshackled by doctrine, may have been rather compelling. My own encounters with Spiritualism have not been convincing – at the age of 18 I attended a service in Northamptonshire where rather standard English hymns were interspersed with a tired medium passing ambiguous messages to the congregation from the voices in her head. But everyone must find their own way.

The Banner of Light obituary also confirms the connection with Theodore Parker of the West Roxbury Unitarian church. Although Parker had left his formal leadership role some years before the Hibbard children were born, he continued to circulate in that community (and anyway William had probably got to know him soon after they both moved to Boston in 1837). There's a bit of a conflict here between the progressive politics of Parker and the awful views of Ross Winans, who tried to get Maryland to join the Confederacy in 1861; but that was some years after the 1853 court case where William Hibbard had testified in his favour.

It may also be worth noting that William and Sarah's first child, Mary, died before her third birthday, in 1852. They were of course not the only parents ever to suffer that kind of tragedy, but it must have affected them deeply, and it is the sort of experience that can lead to a reassessment of one's views about the afterlife. Their other four children all survived to adulthood and three have living descendants, including me; the fourth lives on in biology. William and Sarah have two living great-grandchildren, a brother and sister in their eighties who still live in New England, the only branch of the family that has consistently stayed in the region for the last 170 years; and it's pleasing to report that they were brought up as Unitarians, in the family tradition.

My tweets

Posted on by

Saturday reading

Posted on by

Current
Roger Zelazny, by F. Brett Cox

Last books finished
Howl’s Moving Castle, by Diana Wynne Jones
Indigo, by Clemens J. Setz
The [Unofficial] Dr Who Annual [1964], by David May
The War in the Air, by H. G. Wells

Next books
Scherven, by Erik De Graaf
The Postmistress, by Sarah Blake

690 days of plague

Posted on by

Here we still are, twenty-three months in. But I think (and I know I’ve said this before) the end is in sight. The peak for infections in Belgium seems to have been passed about the time of my last ten-day update; hopitalisations, ICU numbers and deaths are still rising, but I think the first two at least are likely to peak next week. Even the most Eeyore-ish of Belgian health experts thinkswe’ll be able to relax the restrictions soon.

Apparently our 80% teleworking mandate is stronger than anywhere else in Europe art the moment – no more than one day a week in the office, and the office should not have more than 20% of personnel present – and I must admit it’s really getting to me. There’s nothing to beat in-person contact with colleagues and friends; when you try and get someone’s attention on Zoom, you’ve already lost the spontaneity of popping down the corridor or spotting someone at the coffee machine. And in general I’ve been a passive supporter of lockdown measures, but I did wonder if the latest tranche has actually made much difference.

Myself, I noted in the last ten-day entry that I’d had a persistent sore throat; it lingered with me for more than a week, and I needed a full day and two afternoons in bed to really get rid of it. Woke yesterday feeling much more like myself, which is a relief. I do wonder if the “Long COVID” effects made it more difficult for me to shake the bug. I kept neurotically taking home COVID tests every couple of days, and they kept consistently coming up negative.

In other health news, I had a full specialist check-up of my heart on the Friday before last. When I went to hospital in November, the doctors thought they might have spotted something in the EKG, and given that my father and both my grandfathers died of sudden heart attacks in their sixties, and I turn 55 this year, my instinct is to be cautious. The final phase of this was to wear a heart monitor for 24 hours, hooked up to my torso by half a dozen taped-on sensors that made me feel like the Emperor Dalek.

That was jolly uncomfortable and I found it almost impossible to sleep with it on. When the moment came at 5pm on the Saturday that I could take it off, I was actually driving home from Antwerp with Anne, but I pulled over, stripped to the waist, pulled off all the sensors and had a damn good scratch, no doubt to the consternation of passers-by. Anyway the verdict is that apart from mild hypertension there’s nothing wrong with my heart, which is a relief, but I’ll get in the habit of annual check-ups given my family history.

I’m going to keep up these posts at least until we reach the end of restrictions in Belgium, which I suspect means I’ll do another three or four. See you next time.

Neither Unionist nor Nationalist: The 10th (Irish) Division in the Great War by Stephen Sandford

Posted on by

Second paragraph of third chapter:

On the eve of the First World War the officer strength of the British regular army was approximately 12,738 with a further 2,557 attached to the Special Reserve and 3,202 in the Reserve of Officers. Of a further 9,563 officers of the Territorial Force, only 1,090 had agreed to serve overseas in the event of war.2 While on the surface this may appear sufficient for an army that was 10,932 men (6%) under its peacetime establishment, it was totally inadequate for one that was to expand by over a million men in the first four months of the war.3 At full strength an infantry battalion required 30 officers, although in peacetime — except for units stationed in India — this was rarely achieved. An infantry battalion was commanded by a Lieutenant-Colonel with a Major as second in command who, together with the machine gun officer, adjutant, quartermaster and a medical officer attached to the battalion from the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC), made up the battalion headquarters. A further six officers were attached to each of the battalion's four rifle companies, one of whom would double as battalion transport officer. It was usual practice for a battalion on active service to leave one of its officers at the regimental depot to bring out its 'first line' reinforcements to replace casualties. An infantry battalion would therefore usually go to the front with 29 regimental officers and a medical officer.4
2 Statistics of the military effort of the British Empire, pp 234-5; the annual return of the Territorial Force for the year 1913, [Cd 72541, H.C. 1914, lii, 5 and 125.
3 Parl. Deb. Fifth Ser., 63, 25 May 1914, col. 37; Statistics of the military effort of the British empire, p. 364.
4 Ronald Clifford, 'What is a battalion?' in Stand to! no. 30 (Winter 1990), pp 17-19; 22.

My grandfather fought in the First World War with the 6th battallion of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, and indeed ended the war as its commanding officer; the 6th Dubs were part of the 10th (Irish) Division, which mainly fought in the east – Gallipoli, Macedonia and Palestine. This book is full of detail about the nature of the Division, which unlike the 16th (Irish) and 36th (Ulster) Divisions was not aligned with either Nationalism or Unionism. I found it a bit hard to get through. There are lots and lots of statistics about the background of the soldiers, especially the officers, and the comparative disciplinary record; the actual fighting occupies only 22 pages, less than 10% of the book; only two maps are reproduced, and they are not much help in trying to understand the narrative. There is a rather poor chapter analysing military leadership as demonstrated in the Division's own leaders, and a better one on the lessons learned, or not learned, about military tactics in the course of the campaign. I couldn't really recommend it to anyone who isn't a First World War completist. But it did point me to the diary of Noel Drury, who would have known my grandfather well; it is apparently being published in April, edited by an old friend of mine, so I look forward to getting it – sometimes the primary sources are a better read than the later analysis.

This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is The Twinkling of an Eye, by Brian Aldiss, of which I have higher hopes.

My tweets

Posted on by

January 2015 books

Posted on by

This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging which will fall in 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.

Two trips to London and one to Bulgaria this month. This was also the month that Ulster University appointed me to a Visiting Professorship, which I still hold. And Croatia elected a new president.

This was also the month that I was inspired to start my series of posts on the best known books set in each European country, according to Goodreads and LibraryThing, starting with England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland.

I read 29 books that month. Few of them got blogged at the time, because of various reasons.

Non-fiction: 7
Circe's Cup, by Clare Carroll
The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, by Claire Tomalin
Een geschiedenis van België voor intelligente kinderen (en hun ouders), by Benno Barnard and Geert van Istendael
Getting the Buggers to Behave, by Sue Cowley
Write It Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults, by Ambrose Bierce
The Longest Afternoon: The 400 Men Who Decided The Battle Of Waterloo, by Brendan Simms
The Flag Dispute: Anatomy of a Protest by Paul Nolan, Dominic Bryan, Clare Dwyer, Katy Hayward, Katy Radford & Peter Shirlow

Circe's Cup Mary Wollstonecraft Turner's Taoisigh geschiedenis van België Getting the Buggers to Behave Write It Right Longest Afternoon Flag Dispute

Fiction (non-sf): 1
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

SF (non-Who): 15 (all Clarke submissions)
Afterparty, by Daryl Gregory
Ancillary Sword, by Ann Leckie
Meatspace, by Nikesh Shukla
The Rhesus Chart, by Charles Stross
God's Dog, by Diego Marani
Cibola Burn, by James S.A. Corey
Fontoon, by John Schoneboom – did not finish
Bowl of Heaven, by Gregory Benford and Larry Niven
Sand, by Hugh Howey
Black Moon, by Kenneth Calhoun
TimeStorm, by Steve Harrison
Infidel, by Kameron Hurley
The Country of Ice Cream Star, by Sandra Newman
Future Perfect, by Katrina Mountfort
Tigerman, by Nick Harkaway

Doctor Who, etc: 3
The Ultimate Treasure, by Christopher Bulis
The Domino Effect, by David Bishop
Oh No It Isn't!, by Paul Cornell

The Ultimate TreasureThe Domino Effect

Comics and cartoons: 3
Turner's Taoisigh, by Martin Turner
Are You My Mother?, by Alison Bechdel
The Blood of Azrael, by Scott Gray, Michael Collins, Adrian Salmon and David A. Roach

Are You My Mother Blood of Azrael

~8,500 pages
10/29 by women (Carroll, Tomalin, Cowley, Dwyer/Hayward/Radford, Leckie, Hurley, Newman, Mountfort, Bechdel)
1/29 by PoC (Shukla)

Best book this month, and eventually the best book of the year other than the Clarke Award list, was Claire Tomalin's The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, which you can get here, closely follwoed by Ann Leckie's Ancillary Sword, which you can get here, and Alice Munro's Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, which you can get here.

A couple of turkeys from the Clarke submissions, though, Diego Marani's God's Dog, which you can get here, and John Schoneboom's Fontoon, which you can get here.

The Doctor – His Lives and Times, by James Goss and Steve Tribe

Posted on by

Second paragraph of Third Doctor section (presented as the Brigadier’s memoirs):

Memory is odd (says he, writing his memoirs) but in some ways my recollections of my years with UNIT’s infuriating scientific adviser are sharper than my time in Peru, or even my recent visit in the Black Archive with Sarah Jane Smith (of whom, more anon, I’ll bet).

One of the glossy volumes produced by the BBC in the run-up to the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who – and isn’t it weird that we’ll get to the 60th anniversary next year? This is really very nice indeed. For each Doctor, we get an account of the TV stories written from the perspective of one or more of the characters – Susan, Ian Chesterton, the Brigadier, occasionally the Doctor himself – combined with a collage of other mocked-up material, of which one of my favourites is this Salamander election poster:

Each chapter then includes a box on the lead actor, and an assembly of quotes about the making of the show from those who were involved. There are also a few short commentaries on individual stories by guest commentators, most of whom have strong connections with the show, the exception being Sir Tim Berners-Lee on The War Machines. As my regular reader knows, I rate James Goss very highly as one of the best Who writers, and this really doesn’t disappoint. It’s the sort of thing that could, perhaps, be easily updated to include the next ten years and two Doctors for 2023; and would it be too much to hope that such an update could also include Torchwood, the Sarah Jane Adventures and Class?

You can get it here (really cheaply).

My tweets

Posted on by
  • Tue, 12:56: I missed this sad news from last month. Thank you @dfarrell_ucd for a lovely tribute. https://t.co/BVJQWQFBoF
  • Tue, 13:39: RT @John_Cotter: I got up from my desk at 11:00 and had a tea. Could I have done this if the UK were still in the EU? Yes. But would I have…
  • Tue, 15:02: RT @nwbrux: A Soldier in Time: The Nicholas Courtney Memoirs The life of an actor is sketched in sufficient detail that I would give this…
  • Tue, 15:24: RT @nwbrux: Oxford Take Off In Russian An unexpected pitfall in Russian is that the spelling is not always phonetic. Sure, compared to Eng…
  • Tue, 15:45: RT @BrusselsTimes: “The peak of the fifth wave was reached a few days ago. The number of daily infections is no longer increasing,” Van Ran…
  • Tue, 15:46: RT @nwbrux: The Go-Between, by L.P. Hartley Hartley has some acute observations about the way adults treat children, and each other. The c…
  • Tue, 16:05: From Lantau to Ealing: Hong Kong’s homesick exiles in Britain greet the Year of the Tiger https://t.co/yftoz5UCGq Good piece.
  • Tue, 16:08: RT @nwbrux: A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller jr The rise and renewed fall of civilisation after a nuclear war. Explores faith…
  • Tue, 16:30: RT @nwbrux: The Rabbi’s Cat vol 2, by Joann Sfar Sfar says in his introduction to the second album that he was trying to write about racis…
  • Tue, 16:52: RT @nwbrux: The Colour Of Magic, by Terry Pratchett There are various schools of thought about where to start reading the Discworld books.…

The Wandering Scholars, by Helen Waddell

Posted on by

Second paragraph of third chapter (a long one, spread across two pages, which is why the footnote numbers are repeated):

It is true that thanks to the dangers and squalors of the [tenth] century, invasion, rebellion and faction, there is no longer, at any rate in France and England, an educated society. One misses the voluminous correspondence of the ninth century, of Alcuin and his Venerable Fowl, of Hrabanus Maurus, of Servatus Lupus, hoarding manuscripts like a magpie and clamouring like Petrarch for more. There is scholarship, but it is not present diffusedly. Bruno, young brother of Otto the Great and Archbishop of Cologne, does his best to maintain a school of the humanities there, and summoned to it an Irish bishop from Trier to teach Greek; there are colonies of Greek and Irish monks at Toul and at Verdun.1 From Toul, indeed, or rather from a monastery prison in Toul, comes the odd little tale of the calf that ran away, and his adventures with the wolf and the hedgehog and the lion and the otter—the first rough draft of the Roman de Renard. The writer of it says frankly that he himself had misspent his youth nor plied his book, and the calf is his vagrant self, and that is why the metre is so clumsy.2 At Glastonbury, Dunstan was brought up by Irish scholars (William of Malmesbury pauses to reflect on their continuing reputation in music and geometry, though their Latinity—he writes in the twelfth century—is no longer so pure as it was).3 Begging letters addressed to his successor from Liege prove that the fire still burns there. One clerk with humility and confusion of metaphor pleads that as an unworthy pup he had licked up sufficient crumbs from under the bishop's table (Notker of Liege was a sound scholar) to qualify him to enter the English apiary as an obedient bee;1 and another, about a journey and a loan of money and a borrowed horse, bears out the Vicar of Wakefield's experience that the conjunction of a scholar and a horse is not always fortunate.2 The light never quite goes out; though Gerbert in quest of it flickers across Europe like a will-o'-the-wisp.
1 Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship, i. 503, 505.
2 Ecbasis Captivi (Grimm and Schmcller, Lateinische Gedichte des X and XI Jahrhunderts).
3 Vita S. Dunstani, i. 4 (Stubbs, Memorials of St. Dunstan, pp. 256-7).
1 Vita S. Dunstani, i. 4 (Stubbs, Memorials of St Dunstan, p. 387).
2 Ib. p. 390.

This was the book that made the reputation of Helen Waddell, the medievalist from my own corner of County Down. It's a study of the lyrical tradition of poetry in the Middle Ages in Europe, tracing influences across geographies and cultures. I found the writing very dense; written very chattily as if these were all people whose reputations we already knew, with minimal context and footnotes mostly to works available only in well-equipped university libraries. I'm really surprised that it did so well on publication in 1927; perhaps the readers of the 1920s were more au fait with early medieval literature than I am.

Still there are some fascinating details in there. It's always interesting to be reminded of the career of Gerbert of Aurillac, which is crying out for an accessible biographical treatment, either factual or fictional. The same goes for the murky story of the Viking Siegfried (or Sifrid, as Waddell calls him). There's the mysterious figure of the Archpoet. And more locally it's interesting to see Liège popping up as an important centre of culture.

She supplies a lot of translations of the lyrics, to which she brings her own good ear for a phrase; here's the Archpoet's Estuans Interius, as set to music by Carl Orff in the Carmina Burana a few years later, with the original text (which fairly bounces along) and Helen's translation.

Estuans interius
ira vehementi
in amaritudine
loquor mee menti:
factus de materia,
cinis elementi
similis sum folio,
de quo ludunt venti.

Cum sit enim proprium
viro sapienti
supra petram ponere
sedem fundamenti,
stultus ego comparor
fluvio labenti,
sub eodem tramite
nunquam permanenti.

Feror ego veluti
sine nauta navis,
ut per vias aeris
vaga fertur avis;
non me tenent vincula,
non me tenet clavis,
quero mihi similes
et adiungor pravis.

Mihi cordis gravitas
res videtur gravis;
iocis est amabilis
dulciorque favis;
quicquid Venus imperat,
labor est suavis,
que nunquam in cordibus
habitat ignavis.

Via lata gradior
more iuventutis
inplicor et vitiis
immemor virtutis,
voluptatis avidus
magis quam salutis,
mortuus in anima
curam gero cutis.

 Seething over inwardly
   With fierce indignation,
In my bitterness of soul,
   Hear my declaration.
I am of one element,
   Levity my matter,
Like enough a withered leaf
   For the winds to scatter.

Since it is the property
   Of the sapient
To sit firm upon a rock,
   It is evident
That I am a fool, since I
   Am a flowing river,
Never under the same sky,
   Transient for ever.

Hither, thither, masterless
   Ship upon the sea,
Wandering through the ways of air,
   Go the birds like me.
Bound am I by ne'er a bond,
   Prisoner to no key,
Questing go I for my kind,
   Find depravity.

Never yet could I endure
   Soberness and sadness,
Jests I love and sweeter than
   Honey find I gladness.
Whatsoever Venus bids
   Is a joy excelling,
Never in an evil heart
   Did she make her dwelling.

Down the broad way do I go,
   Young and unregretting,
Wrap me in my vices up,
   Virtue all forgetting,
Greedier for all delight
   Than heaven to enter in:
Since the soul is in me dead,
   Better save the skin.

I'm glad I have read this at last, and I'll put some of Helen Waddell's other works on my reading list now. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2018. Next on that pile is 84k by Claire North.

My tweets

Posted on by
  • Mon, 12:06: RT @cyprusmail: Supreme Court overturns conviction in British woman’s rape trial (video) https://t.co/wpmplm3vpF
  • Mon, 15:00: RT @nwbrux: Starter for Ten, by David Nicholls Told with such gusto, such humour, such toe-curling excruciating accuracy, that I actually…
  • Mon, 15:45: RT @nwbrux: The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, by Samuel Johnson We are clearly meant to read the African characters as disaffe…
  • Mon, 16:20: RT @davidallengreen: Copy of the Sue Gray updated report: https://t.co/YqQuObQloL Two key findings – in any sensible political system, a P…
  • Mon, 16:30: RT @nwbrux: Holy Disorders, by Edmund Crispin The book is not quite successful at keeping a consistency of tone (also Crispin, like his ma…
  • Mon, 17:11: RT @JamesCrisp6: Apparently Brexit benefits include, “greater opportunities for the cruise industry by allowing people to get married at se…
  • Mon, 17:45: RT @nwbrux: Juba Arabic/English Dictionary, by Ian Smith & Morris T. Ama The verb azibu: Human azib-o lehaadi huwa worii le-oman sir. The…
  • Mon, 18:00: RT @nwbrux: Five Go On A Strategy Away Day & Five on Brexit Island, by Bruno Vincent These are two one-joke books – different jokes, thank…
  • Mon, 18:32: January Books https://t.co/TjoM1qeG82
  • Mon, 20:48: the new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed — Ask a Manager https://t.co/Y0WVZQUfgm

  • Tue, 10:45: RT @JoelTaylorhack: A reminder, Allegra Stratton, who doesn’t appear to have attended in any capacity any illegal govt party, is the only p…

January Books

Posted on by

28 – good start to the year.

Non-fiction 11
A Radical Romance, by Alison Light
Where Was the Room Where It Happened?: The Unofficial Hamilton – An American Musical Location Guide by BdotBarr [Bryan Barreras]
Calvin, by F. Bruce Gordon
Twice a Stranger: How Mass Expulsion Forged Modern Greece and Turkey, by Bruce Clark
The Wandering Scholars, by Helen Waddell
The Doctor – his Life and Times, by James Goss and Steve Tribe
Neither Unionist nor Nationalist: The 10th (Irish) Division in the Great War by Stephen Sandford
The God Complex, by Paul Driscoll
Why I Write, by George Orwell
Scream of the Shalka, by Jon Arnold
The Complete Debarkle, by Camestros Felapton

Non-genre 6
Animal Dreams, by Barbara Kingsolver
The Gift of Rain, by Tan Twan Eng
Embers, by Sándor Márai
Million Dollar Baby, by F.X. Toole
Breasts and Eggs, by Mieko Kawakami
High Fidelity, by Nick Hornby

SF 7
Peter Davison's Book of Alien Monsters
Peter Davison's Book of Alien Planets
The Three Body Problem, by Cixin Liu
“Bloodchild”, by Octavia E. Butler
“Press Enter ◼️”, by John Varley
The Dark Forest, by Cixin Liu
Neuromancer, by William Gibson

Doctor Who 3
Of the City of the Saved…, by Philip Purser-Hallard (did not finish)
The Daughters of Earth, by Sarah Groenewegen
Scream of the Shalka, by Paul Cornell

Comics 1
Carbone & Silicium, by Mathieu Bablet

7,300 pages, average length 260 pages.
Median LT ownership 120 (The Doctor – his Life and Times/Scream of the Shalka)
6/28 by women (Light, Waddell, Kingsolver, Kawakami, Butler, Groenwegen)
6/28 by PoC (Barreras, Tan, Kawakami, Liu x2, Butler)

317 books currently tagged "unread"

Coming soon (perhaps)
Scherven, by Erik De Graaf
The Postmistress, by Sarah Blake
After Atlas, by Emma Newman
Duran Duran: The Book by Neil Gaiman
84K, by Claire North
The Twinkling of an Eye, by Brian Aldiss
Lost in Translation, by Ella Frances Sanders
The Space Machine, by Christopher Priest
Nine Lives, by Aimen Dean
Air, by Geoff Ryman
Hergé, Son of Tintin, by Benoît Peeters
Pigs Might Fly: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd, by Mark Blake
Tower, by Nigel Jones
Flicker, by Theodore Roszak
Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card
Mort, by Terry Pratchett
A Modern Utopia, by H. G. Wells
Valley of Lights, by Steve Gallagher
Hive Monkey, by Gareth L. Powell

My tweets

Posted on by

Embers, by Sándor Márai

Posted on by

Second paragraph of third chapter (a long one, broken in two for the English translation):

Most, mikor túlesett már az első meglepetésen, egyszerre elfáradt. Az ember egy életen át készül valamire. Először megsértődik. Aztán bosszút akar. Aztán vár. Már régen várt. Már nem is tudta, mikor alakult át a sértődés és a bosszúvágy várakozássá. Az időben minden megmarad, de olyan színtelen lesz, mint azok a nagyon régi fényképek, melyeket még fémlemezre rögzítettek. A fény, az idő lemossa a lemezről a vonások éles és jellegzetes árnyalatait. Forgatni kell a képet, s a világítás bizonyos fénytörése szükséges hozzá, hogy a vak fémlemezen megismerjük azt, kinek arcvonásait egyszer magába szívta a tükörlap. Így halványodik el az időben minden emberi emlék. De egy napon fény hull valahonnan, s akkor megint látunk egy arcot. A tábornok őrzött egy fiókban ilyen régi fényképeket. Apja arcképét. Az apa testőrszázadosi egyenruhát viselt ezen a képen. Haja bodros-fürtös volt, mint egy leányé. Vállairól fehér testőrköpeny esett alá; a köpenyt gyűrűs kezével összefogta mellén. És oldalt hajtotta fejét, büszkén és sértődötten. Soha nem említette, hol sértették meg és miért. Mikor hazajött Bécsből, vadászni kezdett. Mindennap vadászott, minden évszakban; ha nem akadt vad, vagy tilalmi idő köszöntött be, a rókákra és a varjakra vadászott. Mintha meg akarna ölni valakit, s folytonosan erre a bosszúra készül. A tábornok anyja, a grófnő, kitiltotta a kastélyból a vadászokat, igen, eltiltott és eltávolított mindent, ami a vadászatra emlékeztet, a fegyvereket és a lőszertartó táskákat, a régi nyilakat, a kitömött madár- és szarvasfejeket, az agancsokat. Akkor építette a testőr a vadászlakot. Ott aztán együtt volt minden: a kandalló előtt nagy medvebőrök terültek el, s a falak mentén fehér gyapjúposztós, barna keretes falitáblákon lógtak a fegyverek. A belga, az osztrák puskák. Az angol kések és az orosz golyós fegyverek. Minden vadra. És a vadászlak közelében tartották a kutyákat, a népes falkát, a kopókat és vizslákat, s a solymász is itt lakott a három, sapkás sólyommal. A tábornok apja itt élt, a vadászházban. A kastélybeliek csak az étkezések órájában látták. A kastélyban halvány színekkel borították a falakat, világoskék, világoszöld, halványpiros francia selyemtapétákkal, melyeket arannyal csíkoztak a Párizs környéki szövőgyárakban. A grófnő személyesen válogatta minden évben a tapétákat és bútorokat a francia gyárakban és üzletekben, minden ősszel, mikor családi látogatásra hazájába utazott. Ezt az utazást nem mulasztotta el soha. Joga volt hozzá, kikötötte a házassági szerződésben ezt a jogát, mikor feleségül ment az idegen testőrhöz. Now that the first surprise had passed, he suddenly felt tired. One spends a lifetime preparing for something. First one suffers the wound. Then one plans revenge. And waits. He had been waiting a long time now. He no longer knew when it was that the wound had become a thirst for revenge, and the thirsting had turned to waiting. Time preserves everything, but as it does so, it fades things to the colorlessness of ancient photographs fixed on metal plates. Light and time erase the contours and distinctive shading of the faces. One has to angle the image this way and that until it catches the light in a particular way and one can make out the person whose features have been absorbed into the blank surface of the plate. It is the same with our memories. But then one day light strikes from a certain angle and one recaptures a face again. The General had a drawer of old photographs like that. The one of his father. Dressed in the uniform of a captain of the guards, with his hair in thick curls, like a girl. Around his shoulders, a white guard’s cape, which he held together against his chest with one hand, rings flashing. His head tilted to one side with an air of offended pride. He had never spoken of where and how he had been offended. When he returned from Vienna, he went hunting. Day after day, hunt after hunt, no matter what the time of year; if it was neither the season for red deer nor other game, he hunted foxes and crows.
     As if he were set on killing someone and was keeping himself ready at any moment to take his revenge. The Countess, the General’s mother, would not have the huntsmen in the castle, she banned and banished anything and everything associated with hunting—weapons, cartridge pouches, old arrows, stuffed birds and stags’ heads, antlers. That was when the Captain of the Guards had the hunting lodge built. It became the place for everything: great bearskins in front of the fireplace, panels framed in brown wood and draped in white felt on the walls to display weapons. Belgian and Austrian guns. English knives, Russian bullet holders. Something for every type of game. The kennels were nearby, the entire pack and the tracking dogs and the Vizslas and the falconer lived there with his three hooded falcons. Here in the hunting lodge was where the General’s father spent his time. The inhabitants of the castle saw him only at mealtimes. The castle interiors were all in pastels, the walls hung with coverings of pale blue, pale green, and soft rose striped with gold, from workshops near Paris. Every year the Countess herself would select papers and furniture from French manufacturers and shops, when she went to visit her family. She never failed to make this journey, which was guaranteed to her in her marriage contract when she accepted the hand of the foreign Officer of the Guards.

When I did my survey of books set in various European countries a few years back, this appeared to be the top book set in Hungary, at least in terms of ownership on LibraryThing and Goodreads. I was a bit dubious in that it's set in the castle belonging to a noble Hungarian family, and most such castles were in the territory lost by Hungary after the first world war – and also, Márai himself was from Košice which is now in Slovakia. But in fact I'm going to give it the benefit of the doubt; Márai's relatives were the Órszag family, who did have a couple of castles which ended up on the right side of the lines drawn at the Grand Trianon.

It's quite a short book, but very dense. The central character has lost everything that he held dear; his wife died long ago, and he lost her long before that anyway; his oldest friend comes to visit, and they thrash out the details of a painful past after a long separation. It's very end-of-empire ish. I though it was well enough observed, but I don't especially sympathise with imperial nostalgia, so not hugely inclined to seek out Márai's other work. You can get it here.

The stucco ceilings of Jan-Christian Hansche, part 6: the Charles Borromeo sacristy in Antwerp

Posted on by

Well, I’ve been able to change the colours of a couple of dots on my map:

I have to start by reporting a dead end, unfortunately. The Inventaris Onroerend Erfgoed had led me to believe that there might be a Hansche ceiling actually in our commune, over in Blanden. After diligent research I was able to get in touch with the owners, who however denied that there is any work by Hansche on the premises. So I’ll have to take no for an answer.

Persistence was also required for the northernmost surviving work by Hansche, on the ceiling of the sacristy of the church of St Charles Borromeo in Antwerp. The sacristy is not open to the public, but I got special permission from the man in charge, D, so Anne and I went up to Antwerp yesterday. Here are Anne and D in the sacristy itself.

The sacristy ceiling is the earliest and perhaps least developed of Hansche’s surviving work, but even so it did not disappoint. Here are two panoramas of the eastern and western panels, unfortunately missing out the middle as the floor was blocked by tables, south at the top, north at the bottom (sorry, I was not paying attention to the compass directions).

The church is a Jesuit church, and the most interesting figure on the ceiling is the Jesuit martyr St Paul Miki, at the northern end of the room, carrying with him the instruments of his martyrdom (and maybe a palm frond, indicating Japan???). The sidebar of his cross protrudes into our space.

Right beside him, one of the poles for carrying what looks like the Ark of the Covenant also sticks out into our space.

On his other side is what looks to me like a cat asleep on a drum. Anne thinks it’s obviously a sheep/lamb. I would love to know what the symbolism is here.

Most of the other ceiling panels seem to be Jesuits doing Jesuity things, three of them threatened by heavenly lightning, none quite as dramatic as the unfortunate Paul Miki.



The central monograms are beautifully worked – I don’t think I’ve seen this as much in Hansche’s later work.


Finally, as far as the ceiling goes, the two southern corner pieces depict food and drink.

But I also want to show you the ornate mouldings on the north and south walls, split in each case by a painting in the middle.


We are lucky to have this early Hansche work. The roof of most of the church was destroyed by a fire after the church was struck by lightning in 1718, and 39 ceiling pieces by Peiter Paul Rubens were lost in the blaze; but the sacristy was spared. Two of Rubens’ altarpieces still survive at ground level. It’s no exaggeration to say that he and Hansch between them put the “rock” into Baroque here.

The church as a whole is a Baroque dream:

The carved wooden side panels are also rather glorious. I will only give a couple of examples to whet your appetite. Here’s St Francis Xavier, doing Good Works.

And I’m amused and intrigued by the sassy hip-swinging androgynous supporting figures:

If you happen to be in Antwerp, it’s well worth dropping in.

I’ve managed to book a visit to the law library at Gent University on Saturday morning next weekend, to see more Hansche stucco; you are welcome to join me.

My tweets

Posted on by

Saturday reading

Posted on by

Current
Indigo, by Clemens J. Setz

Last books finished
The Dark Forest, by Cixin Liu
Scream of the Shalka, by Paul Cornell
Scream of the Shalka, by Jon Arnold
Neuromancer, by William Gibson
The Complete Debarkle, by Camestros Felapton
Million Dollar Baby, by F.X. Toole
Breasts and Eggs, by Mieko Kawakami
High Fidelity, by Nick Hornby

Next books
Scherven, by Erik De Graaf
The War in the Air, by H. G. Wells

Serenity

Posted on by

Serenity won the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form, in 2006 and also the 2005 Nebula for Best Script. There was only one other finalist for the Nebula, the Battlstar Galactica episodes "Act of Contrition"/"You Can't Go Home Again"; the Hugo field was more crowded; but Serenity was well ahead at nominations and needed only one round of transfers to win the award.

I think I have seen all of the other finalists, but the fact that I'm not completely sure about any of them except Batman Begins suggests that the voters got it right. Serenity ranks a modest 20th and 24th on the two IMDB ratings systems, behind several of its rivals for the Hugo.

Colin Patrick Lynch is credited as one of the Black Room soldiers here, and was also in a bit part in Terminator 2: Judgement Day. I haven't found a decent shot of him in either role. Apart from him, none of the cast had previously appeared in Oscar, Hugo or Nebula winning films, or in Doctor Who.

I remember actually going to the cinema with Anne to see this when it came out, a rare event for us, and we loved it even though a couple of beloved characters are callously killed off. Part of the context, of course, is that Buffy, Angel and Firefly were very popular among Hugo voters (and in our household), yet two Firefly episodes bizarrely lost out to Gollum's acceptance speech for the 2004 Hugo. I think it's a genuinely good film, true to the spirit of the TV series, at the same time not too impenetrable to the newcomer. And the script really crackles.

Mal: Jayne, how many weapons you plan on bringing? You only got the two arms.
Jayne: I just get excitable as to choice- like to have my options open.
Mal: I don't plan on any shooting taking place during this job.
Jayne: Well, what you plan and what takes place ain't ever exactly been similar.
Mal: No grenades.
[Jayne groans]
Mal: No grenades!

Kaylee: Everything's shiny, Cap'n. Not to fret.
Mal: You told me those entry couplings would hold for another week!
Kaylee: That was six months ago, Cap'n.

Shepherd Book: I wasn't born a shepherd, Mal.
Mal: You have to tell me about that sometime.
Shepherd Book: [pause] No, I don't.

Kaylee: Goin' on a year now I ain't had nothin' twixt my nethers weren't run on batteries!
Mal: Oh, God! I can't *know* that!
Jayne: I could stand to hear a little more.

It’s not an ambitious film, just providing closure for the series, a bit of adventure against the oppressive state, some good action and credible effects. And it ticks all of those boxes. And wow, Summer Glau!

It’s a shame that Joss Whedon turns out to be a deeply problematic individual, but I think we’re still allowed to enjoy some of the stuff he produced.

Next up is Howl’s Moving Castle, which won the following year’s Nebula.

My tweets

Posted on by

December 2014 books and 2014 books roundup

Posted on by

This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging which will fall in 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.

In December 2014 I had two work trips to London, one of which was combined with a visit to Albania. We finished the month by visiting my cousins who had just moved to Luxembourg. F and one of the younger cousins re-enacted a photo that had been taken some years before.

I also wrote up my thoughts on Richard III's mitochondrial DNA.

I read 21 books that month.

Non-fiction 3 (YTD 48)
Ages in Chaos: James Hutton and the Discovery of Deep Time, by Stephen Baxter
Elizabeth's Bedfellows: An Intimate History of the Queen's Court, by Anna Whitelock
101 Ways to Win an Election, by Mark Pack and Edward Maxfield

Fiction (non-sf) 0 (YTD 41)

SF (non-Who) 14 (YTD 124)
Red Rising, by Pierce Brown
Ultima, by Stephen Baxter
A Man Lies Dreaming, Lavie Tidhar
The Fat Years, by Chan Koonchung
The People in the Trees, Hanya Yanagihira
The Forever Watch, Daniel Ramirez
Vicious, by V.E. Schwab (did not finish)
Lagoon, by Nnedi Okorafor
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, by Claire North
The Three, by Sarah Lotz
I Will Fear No Evil, by Robert A. Heinlein (did not finish)
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, by Karen Joy Fowler
The Burning Dark, by Adam Christopher
The Book of Strange New Things, by Michel Faber

Doctor Who 3 (YTD 59)
Fear of the Dark, by Trevor Baxendale
The Dying Days, by Lance Parkin
Infinity Race, by Simon Messingham

Comics 1 (YTD 19)
Sterrenrood, by "Willy Vandersteen" [Peter De Gucht]

~7,000 pages (2014 total ~97,100)
6/21 (2014 total 81/291) by women (Yanagihira, Schwab, Okorafor, North, Lotz, Fowler)
3/21 (2014 total 19/291) by PoC (Chan, Yanagihira, Okorafor)

The best of these was the near-future Chinese sf novel The Fat Years, by Chan Koonchung, which you can get here, followed by Claire North's debut The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, another book that ended up on the Clarke shortlist, which you can get here.

On the other hand, I totally bounced off my attempted reread of I Will Fear No Evil, by Robert A. Heinlein, which you can get here, and also was very unimpressed with Vicious, by V.E. Schwab, which you can get here.

2014 Books Roundup

Total books: 291 – fifth highest of the 18 years I have been keeping track, though the next six years were lower (2021 was up again).

Total page count: ~97,100 – second highest of the 18 years I have been counting (2009 was the highest).

Diversity:
81 (28%) by women – higher than any previous year, lower percentage than most subsequent years.
19 (6%) by PoC – more than any previous year except 2010, lower percentage than than any subsequent year.

Most books by a single author:
Justin Richards (4), and Jeff VanderMeer (also 4, if we count the trilogy separately).

Non-Whovian sff

2020/ 2019/ 2018/ 2017/ 2016/ 2015/ 2014/ 2013/ 2012/ 2011/ 2010/ 2009/ 2008/ 2007/ 2006/ 2005/ 2004/
114 77 108 68 80 130 124 64 62 78 73 78 54 75 68 79 76
43% 33% 41% 29% 38% 45% 43% 25% 24% 26% 26% 23% 15% 32% 33% 55% 51%

Second highest total and fourth highest percentage ever. (For convenience, this total includes a couple of Clarke submissions that I don't really think are sf.)

Top SF books of the year:
The Fat Years, by Chan Koonchung (reviewget it here) – a gret near-future novel about China
Station Eleven, by Emily St John Mandel (get it here) – will say more next year

Honourable mentions:
The Ocean At The End of the Lane, by Neil Gaiman (reviewget it here)
Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie (reviewget it here)

Enjoyed rereading:
Animal Farm, by George Orwell (reviewget it here)
The Sword in the Stone, by T.H. White (reviewget it here)
Inverted World, by Christopher Priest (reviewget it here)

The one you haven't heard of:
The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing-World, by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (reviewget it here).

The one to avoid:
Into the Fire, by Peter Liney (get it here).

Doctor Who fiction

Novels, collections of shorter fiction, etc excluding comics
2021/ 2020/ 2019/ 2018/ 2017/ 2016/ 2015/ 2014/ 2013/ 2012/ 2011/ 2010/ 2009/ 2008/ 2007/ 2006/ 2005/ 2004/
30 18 32 32 51 39 43 59 72 75 80 71 70 179 27 28 5 1
10% 7% 14% 12% 21% 18% 15% 20% 30% 29% 27% 26% 19% 48% 11% 14% 3% 1%
All Who books including comics and non-fiction
2021/ 2020/ 2019/ 2018/ 2017/ 2016/ 2015/ 2014/ 2013/ 2012/ 2011/ 2010/ 2009/ 2008/ 2007/ 2006/ 2005/ 2004/
40 25 43 42 55 42 54 68 81 75 87 78 80 180 49 32 5 1
14% 9% 18% 16% 23% 20% 19% 23% 34% 29% 29% 28% 23% 49% 21% 15% 3% 1%

Seventh highest total and percentage of the years I have been tallying, for both sets of stats.

Top Doctor Who books of the year:
Adventures with the Wife in Space: Living With Doctor Who, by Neil Perryman (reviewget it here) – lovely story of Doctor Who and a marriage
About Time: The Unauthorised Guide to Doctor Who, 2005-2006, by Tat Wood (reviewget it here) – in-depth analysis of the first two years of New Who

Honourable mentions:
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Time Traveller, by Joanne Harris (reviewget it here)
The Girl Who Loved Doctor Who, by Paul Cornell (reviewget it here)
Damaged Goods, by Russell T. Davis (reviewyou can get an audio adaptation here)

Enjoyed rereading:
The Making of Doctor Who, by Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke (reviewget it here)

The one you haven't heard of:
The Cybermen Monster File, by Gavin Collinson and Joseph Lidster (reviewget it here)

The one to avoid:
Mission to Venus, by William Emms (reviewget it here)

Non-fiction

2021/ 2020/ 2019/ 2018/ 2017/ 2016/ 2015/ 2014/ 2013/ 2012/ 2011/ 2010/ 2009/ 2008/ 2007/ 2006/ 2005/ 2004/
53 50 49 50 57 37 47 48 46 53 69 66 88 70 78 70 42 42
18% 19% 21% 19% 24% 17% 16% 16% 19% 20% 23% 24% 26% 19% 33% 34% 29% 28%

Joint lowest percentage for any year that I've been keeping track, though five other years had lower absolute numbers.

Top non-fiction book of the year:
Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell (reviewget it here)

Honourable mention to:
Other People's Countries: A Journey into Memory, by Patrick McGuinness (reviewget it here)

The one you haven't heard of:
Legacy: A story of racism and the Northern Ireland Troubles by Jayne Olorunda (reviewget it here)

The one to avoid:
Napoleon Bonaparte for Little Historians, by Bou Bounoider-Olivi  (reviewget it here)

Non-sfnal fiction

2021/ 2020/ 2019/ 2018/ 2017/ 2016/ 2015/ 2014/ 2013/ 2012/ 2011/ 2010/ 2009/ 2008/ 2007/ 2006/ 2005/ 2004/
30 40 45 36 26 28 42 41 44 48 48 50 57 24 33 35 9 19
10% 15% 19% 14% 11% 13% 14% 14% 19% 19% 16% 18% 18% 6% 14% 17% 6% 13%

Ninth out of eighteen years percentage-wise; eighth highest raw number.

Top non-genre fiction of the year:
The Waves, by Virginia Woolf (review with spoilersget it here) – really grabbed me with its unusual narrative structure

Honourable mentions:
The Power and the Glory, by Graham Greene (reviewget it here)

Enjoyed rereading:
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain (reviewget it here)

The one you haven't heard of:
Battle for Bittora, by Anuja Chauhan (reviewget it here)

The one to avoid:
Vernon God Little, by D.B.C. Pierre (reviewget it here)

Comics

2021/ 2020/ 2019/ 2018/ 2017/ 2016/ 2015/ 2014/ 2013/ 2012/ 2011/ 2010/ 2009/ 2008/ 2007/ 2006/ 2005/ 2004/
48 45 31 28 29 27 18 19 30 21 27 18 28 6 20 6 8 8
16% 17% 13% 11% 12% 13% 6% 7% 13% 8% 9% 6% 8% 2% 8% 3% 6% 5%

Twelfth highest tally and percentage.

Top comic of the year:
Dotter of Her Father's Eyes, by Mary M. Talbot and Bryan Talbot (reviewget it here) – combines autobiography with the story of James Joyce's daughter Lucretia

Honourable mention:
Sugar Skull, by Charles Burns (reviewget it here)

The one you haven't heard of:
Brussel in beeldekes: Manneken Pis en andere sjarels, ed. Marc Verhaegen (reviewThe one to avoid:


Worst book of the year: with some competition from others in the same series, the 1986 Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Doctor Who story by William Emms, Mission to Venus, is so poor that I would gently suggest to even the most dedicated Who completist than they can safely give it a miss.

My Book of the Year

Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell (reviewget it here) – fantastic reportage, made particularly thrilling as I walked the very streets that Orwell had written about, eight decades before

Other Books of the Year:

2003 (2 months): The Separation, by Christopher Priest.
2004: The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien (reread).
– Best new read: Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, by Claire Tomalin
2005: The Island at the Centre of the World, by Russell Shorto
2006: Lost Lives: The stories of the men, women and children who died as a result of the Northern Ireland troubles, by David McKittrick, Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeney, Chris Thornton and David McVea
2007: Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel
2008: The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition, by Anne Frank (reread)
– Best new read: Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero, by William Makepeace Thackeray
2009: Hamlet, by William Shakespeare (had seen it on stage previously)
– Best new read: Persepolis 2: the Story of a Return, by Marjane Satrapi (first volume just pipped by Samuel Pepys in 2004)
2010: The Bloody Sunday Report, by Lord Savile et al.
2011: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbon (started in 2009!)
2012: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Brontë
2013: A Room of One's Own, by Virginia Woolf
2014: See above
2015: collectively, the Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist, in particular the winner, Station Eleven, by Emily St John Mandel. However I did not actually blog about these, being one of the judges at the time.
– Best book I actually blogged about: The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, by Claire Tomalin
2016: Alice in Sunderland, by Bryan Talbot
2017: Common People: The History of an English Family, by Alison Light
2018: Factfulness, by Hans Rosling
2019: Girl, Woman, Other, by Bernardine Evaristo
2020: From A Clear Blue Sky: Surviving the Mountbatten Bomb, by Timothy Knatchbull

My tweets

Posted on by

I am 20,000 days old today

Posted on by

Yes, really. I sat down and did the calculation a couple of weeks ago, being vaguely aware that it was around now. And fifty-four years (fourteen of them leap years), nine months and one day takes you from 26 April 1967 to 27 January 2022. In better times, I would have planned an unbirthday party for the evening; but local conditions don’t quite allow for it at the moment. So instead, I’ve looked back through my life at thousand day intervals.

1000 days: Tuesday 20 January 1970
I was two and three quarters, living in Belfast. The Troubles were going through a deceptive lull – the first violent deaths of the year in Northern Ireland would not be until June. The Biafrans had just lost the Nigerian civil war. The first commercial Boeing 747 took off the next day.
(Between episodes 3 and 4 of Spearhead from Space.)

2000 days: Monday 16 October 1972
I was five and a half, attending primary school. The Troubles were in full flow with four people killed by the British Army that day, two IRA, two Loyalists, and Maze prison inmates starting a fire which caused serious damage. Congressman Hale Boggs died in a plane crash in Alaska (at least that’s what we think; the wreckage was never found). The first episode of Emmerdale was broadcast.

3000 days: Sunday 13 July 1975
I was eight and a quarter. I remember being at my grandparents’ in Dublin later that week, watching the Apollo-Soyuz mission; possibly we were already there on the 13th, avoiding the Twelfth. Two people were killed in the Troubles that day, a Catholic teenager shot by the Army and a loyalist killed in in an internal feud. The Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) process was nearing an end, with the Helsinki Accords signed on 1 August.

4000 days: Saturday 8 April 1978
I was nearly eleven, in my last year at St Anne’s primary school. The IRA kidnapped and shot a Catholic man from Twinbrook that day; his body was not found until 2014. Star Wars had just won six Oscars, to four for Annie Hall. Monty Python and the Holy Grail was released the following day.

5000 days: Friday 2 January 1981
Weirdly enough, I remember actually working out that I was 5000 days old on that day. I was thirteen, still enjoying the Christmas holidays, in the third form at Rathmore Grammar School. We were in the lull between the two hunger strikes; the IRA killed a Castlewellan man the previous day. Jimmy Carter was preparing to hand over to Ronald Reagan. Greece had just joined the EEC.
(episode 1 of Warrior’s Gate was broadcast the next day)

6000 days: Thursday 29 September 1983
I was sixteen, in Lower Sixth at Rathmore, with a long-distance girlfriend in England. The previous weekend 38 prisoners escaped from the Maze Prison, the biggest prison break in UK or Irish history. Neil Kinnock was about to be elected leader of the UK Labour Party.

7000 days: Wednesday 25 June 1986
I was nineteen, working on an archaeology site near Heilbronn in Germany, still with the same long-distance girlfriend. That evening West Germany beat France and Argentina beat Belgium in the World Cup semi-finals (Argentina won the final on Sunday). I actually remember that we had a barbecue at work the next day, lots of roast meat and beer.

8000 days: Tuesday 21 March 1989
I was 21, single, preparing nervously for finals at Cambridge, and had just been elected Deputy President of the students union for the following year. The previous day, the IRA killed two policemen in south Armagh. Serbia was about to revoke Kosovo’s autonomy, as Communism crumbled across eastern Europe.

9000 days: Monday 16 December 1991
I was 24, living in Belfast again and working as a researcher on the project that became my PhD, long-distancing with Anne, my future wife. The following day a Belfast bar manager was killed by a leading INLA man who had been thrown out of his bar. The Soviet Union was formally dissolved on Christmas Day (though functionally it had collapsed months before).

10000 days: Sunday 11 September 1994
I was 27, had been married to Anne for almost a year, in the middle of my PhD; I actually had a 10000-day party that evening, having done the calculations in advance. We were in ceasefire time, with the IRA having announced theirs two weeks before, and the Loyalists preparing for theirs a month later. I was already active in the Alliance Party as the grandly titled Director of Elections.

11000 days: Saturday 7 June 1997
I was 30, working in Bosnia, nervously ready for the arrival of B a couple of weeks later – I think we already knew by the 7th that Anne (who had stayed in Belfast) would have a Caesarian on the 19th. The Irish general election was the previous day, with Bertie Ahern placed to start his eleven-year term as Taoiseach. The IRA ceasefire was reinstated the following month.

12000 days: Friday 3 March 2000
I was 32, working at the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels; we were still getting to grips with B’s disability, and F was a happy seven months old. I think this was actually the weekend that I went to Hungary to meet with the Serbian opposition. My first visit to Kosovo was later that month. The Northern Ireland Assembly had been suspended again. George W. Bush and Al Gore clinched their respective presidential nominations the following Tuesday.

13000 days: Thursday 28 November 2002
I was 35, working for the International Crisis Group, expecting U’s arrival a few weeks later. We had just published a report on [North] Macedonia and NATO. Back in Northern Ireland, the Assembly had been suspended after Stormontgate the previous month, and did not come back for years.

14000 days: Wednesday 24 August 2005
I was 38, still working for the International Crisis Group, briefly at home between our holiday in Northern Ireland (including the 2005 Glasgow Worldcon) and a particularly fun trip to [North] Macedonia which started the following day. The USA was about to be hit by Hurricane Katrina. As part of the ongoing Northern Ireland choreography, the IRA had declared a permanent end to its campaign the previous month (which had also seen the 7/7 bombings in London).

15000 days: Tuesday 20 May 2008
I was 41, working with Independent Diplomat, just back from a trip to Montenegro and Albania, and reading lots of Doctor Who books. B had moved out a few months before, and into the place where she now lives the previous month. Bertie Ahern had just stepped down as Taoiseach, followed by Brian Cowen, and Ian Paisley was about to step down as First Minister of Northern Ireland. Boris Johnson had just been elected Mayor of London.
(Between The Unicorn and the Wasp and Silence in the Library)

16000 days: Monday 14 February 2011
I was 43, still working with Independent Diplomat, probably took the evening to celebrate Valentine’s Day with Anne. In Ireland, voters were preparing to give Fianna Fail a massive kicking, and across the Arab world governments were toppling.

17000 days: Sunday 10 November 2013
I was 46, at Novacon in Nottingham with F, having a damn good time. Still working with Independent Diplomat but actively looking. Preparing for the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who two weeks later…

18000 days: Saturday 6 August 2016
I was 49, on holiday in Northern Ireland from my work at APCO Worldwide, where I had been working for almost two years. I have a note that I went to Tyrella Beach and Downpatrick that day. The Rio Olympics were about to start.

19000 days: Friday 3 May 2019
It was the week after my 52nd birthday, and I spent all day in the BBC TV studio in Belfast commenting on the results of the previous day’s local council elections.

20000 days: Thursday 27 January 2022
Here we are in the plague times. I’ve had a bit of a cold all week, so didn’t have energy for much more celebration than writing this – and as you can tell, I ran out of steam towards the end!

Anyway, if I make it to the second month after my 82nd birthday, you’re all welcome to help me celebrate 30,000 days on 14 June 2049.

The Gift of Rain, by Tan Twan Eng

Posted on by

Second paragraph of third chapter:

I was the youngest child of one of the oldest families in Penang. My great-grandfather, Graham Hutton, had been a clerk in the East India Company before sailing out to the East Indies to make his fortune in 1780. He had sailed around the Spice Islands trading in pepper and spices, and came to befriend Captain Francis Light who was searching for a suitable port. He found it on an island in the Straits of Malacca, on the north-western side of the Malay Peninsula and within comfortable reach of India. The island was sparsely inhabited, thick with trees, humped with rolling hills and surrounded by long white stretches of beach. The local Malays named it after the tall areca palm trees — pinang — which grew abundantly on it.

I've always been fascinated by Penang, where my father was born in 1928 but I have never been. This was the first novel by Tan, whose second novel The Garden of Evening Mists I enjoyed a few years back. The narrator, son of a marriage between an Englishman and a Chinese woman, finds himself playing a key role in the Japanese administration of occupied Penang during the second world war, and many years later encounters the lover of his Japanese best friend and tells her his story. The cityscape is vividly realised, as are the interaction of cultures and the brutality of the Japanese regime. It gets a bit sanguinary towards the end, but this was true of that period of history in reality. I felt the prose was not as smooth as in the later book; one can feel that this is a first novel. However, well worth reading to deepen my own appreciation of my father's birthplace. You can get it here.

680 days of plague: Erlend, and pig bronchus

Posted on by

A bit gloomier today than I had hoped to be. The numbers in Belgium continue to soar – more than 3% of the country’s population had a positive diagnosis last week – and there is no immediate prospect of further relaxations of the restrictions. I had been considering a work trip to the UK next week, but I’ve decided to postpone that for the time being. (Three weeks from tomorrow I’ll be heading off to the USA. I hope.)

I’ve also had a nagging sore throat since the weekend. Not bad enough to stop me working, but irritating all the same, and I worked from home today instead of from the office in Brussels as I had planned. My home COVID tests keep coming up negative, which is something at least.

And yesterday came the sad news that Erlend Watson had left us. Most people outside the Liberal Democrats will never have heard of him, but he was a well-known personality in the party, always proud of his Orkney origins and a bit larger than life. It’s years since we had met in person, but as with so many acquaintances of times past, we had re-engaged more recently on Facebook. He did not recover properly from a double lung transplant last year, and announced on December 26 that he probably had between three and six months left; in fact he did not even get a full month. We will remember him. This was his last tweet:

Is this the worst British government since Caligula? Difficult to go much further on record. The one who lost the Dogger Bank or the one during the Permian extinction? @mrjamesob

— Erlend Watson ️ (@erlendwatson) December 21, 2021

And speaking of lungs… After my visit to hospital when I had COVID in November, the Belgian medical system stored all of the tests and reports for me to look at when I felt like it. It took a while for me to feel like it, but I did have a look last week, and was a bit puzzled by a reference to “pig bronchus”, which I had never heard of. It turns out that I have not one but two connections from my windpipe to my right lung, the extra one being an offshoot from the windpipe a couple of cm above the point where it divides between left and right. This is a mutation found in, as sources rather imprecisely put it, between 0.1% and 5% of people. It’s not in any way dangerous; I got through 54 years of life without it being an issue, and most people would never know if they have it. I would post the actual scan of my torso here, but the extra bronchus is only barely visible on it, even if you know what you are looking for.

Tomorrow it will be 20,000 days since I was born. No party planned, but if I make it to six weeks past my 82nd birthday, you’re all welcome on 14 June 2049 to celebrate 30,000 days of me.

My tweets

Posted on by

Twice a Stranger: How Mass Expulsion Forged Modern Greece And Turkey, by Bruce Clark

Posted on by

Second paragraph of third chapter:

My sister was caught when the war ended. The Turkish army came to the place where we were. In the ensuing battle my sister, a young girl, was captured. A baker from Kayak took her and adopted her. He raised her as though she were really his child.

Quite a short book (270 pages) about a big big topic: the forced exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey in 1923, following on the Treaty of Lausanne which officially ended the First World War, but also put a full stop to the Greco-Turkish war of 1919-22 and notoriously stipulated that Muslims living in Greece (except Eastern Thrace) and Orthodox Christians living in Turkey (except Istanbul) would be transferred to the other country. This meant 1.2 million Christians and 400,000 Muslims, many (possibly most) of whom did not speak Greek or Turkish respectively as their first language, if at all, suddenly became citizens in lands where their ancestors had never lived; historic communities were unmixed, cultures were wiped out, and unspoken traumas endured.

Bruce Clark wrote this book at the beginning of the century when a fair number of eyewitnesses were still alive, if elderly, and prepared to talk about what had happened to them eighty years before; I shouldn't think there are many left now. So he combined historiography of the early Greek state, late Ottoman Empire and nascent Turkish Republic with powerful first-person accounts. These eyewitness stories are not only of violence and expulsion. A surprising number of his interlocutors were happy to talk about the happy times before the conflict, when villagers all lived together without fussing too much about whether they went to the mosque or the church, or indeed indivudal acts of humanity by neighbours as the situation accelerated. This nostalgia had survived eight decades of indoctrination by the Greek and Turkish states.

One fascinating (and sad) aspect is that in fact the Christians and Muslims who were displaced were a lot more diverse than the cultures into which they were then ruthlessly assimilated. I was already familiar with the Bektashi sect of Islam, which flourished in what is now Greek Macedonia and is now basically restricted to the Albanian-speaking world. I wasn't previously aware of their neighbours the Valaades, or of the crypto-Christians of Anatolia, populations whose identity depended on the mixed cultures of their environments.

All of this is set against the high politics of the negotiations between Venizelos and Kemal (not yet Atatürk), who were both very much in favour of unmixing their respective populations, but both also faced significant internal opposition – both were nominally democracies with elected parliaments, but we should always remember that even autocratic states can have vigorous internal politics. (The subtitle of the book uses the word "forged", which of course means both making and faking.) There were significant interventions in managing the displaced populations from external players as well, notably in Greece which was very dependent on external aid from the British government and from American individuals such as Henry Morgenthau.

It did make me wonder about an alternate timeline where Greece actually won the 1919-22 war. I don't think the territorial gains on the Aegean coast could have been sustainable in the long term, given Turkey's much greater population and advantage of strategic depth. The new Turkish state (Kemalism would not have survived) would have aligned firmly with the Axis in the second world war, rather than the neutrality of our timeline, and would surely have taken back all or most of the territory, with a second huge wave of human displacement.

Clark doesn't especially look at other cases of forced mass population movement – he mentions Cyprus in passing (tragic indeed, if on a smaller scale) but one could add the Partition of India, which was an order of magnitude bigger on the human scale, or the Balkans in the 1990s, or indeed the place where both Clark and I come from which saw thousands forced from their homes in 1969. It's enough to look in detail at this one particular situation. He does however assess the outcome as a success for both the Greek and Turkish states, considered in their own selfish and brutal terms; a success gained at the cost of vast human misery.

(Also, Japan participated in the Allied military occupation of Constantinople/Istanbul! I had no idea!)

A great book, very readable I think even for those who are less familiar with the history and geography of the subject. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2015. The next might be The Best of Tor 2015, but it's rather long and I may skip it.