Current
The Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Garden, by Catherynne M. Valente
Victories Greater than Death, by Charlie Jane Anders
Make Your Brain Work, by Amy Brann
Last books finished
Guy Erma and the Son of Empire, by Sally Ann Melia (did not finish)
The Darwin Awards, by Wendy Northcutt
A Short History of Kosovo, by Noel Malcolm
Stability Operations in Kosovo 1999-2000: A Case Study, by Jason Fritz
Next books
Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie
Lenin the Dictator, by Victor Sebestyen
Second paragraph of “Erostratus”/”Erostrate”, third story in my edition (it has been published under two different titles, so I give both above):
| On a seventh floor balcony: that’s where I should have spent my whole life. You have to prop up moral superiorities with material symbols or else they’ll tumble. But exactly what is my superiority over men? Superiority of position, nothing more: I have placed myself above the human within me and I study it. That’s why I always liked the towers of Notre-Dame, the platforms of the Eiffel Tower, the Sacré-Coeur, my seventh floor on the Rue Delambre. These are excellent symbols. | Au balcon d’un sixième : c’est là que j’aurais du passer toute ma vie. Il faut étayer les supériorités morales par des symboles matériels, sans quoi elles retombent. Or, précisément, quelle est ma supériorité sur les hommes ? Une supériorité de position, rien d’autre : je me suis placé au-dessus de l’humain qui est en moi et que je contemple. Voilà pourquoi j’aimais les tours de Notre-Dame, les plates-formes de la tour Eiffel, le Sacré-cœur, mon sixième de la rue Delambre. Ce sont d’excellents symboles. |
A collection of five short stories by the famous philosopher, two of which, the first and the last, are really good; “The Wall” is the story of a man condemned to death in the Spanish Civil War awaiting his execution, and “Childhood of a Leader” is the story of an authoritarian politician’s rise to power and abandonment of his emotional connections. I was not as overwhelmed by the others; “Intimacy” is a rather dull story about sex, and portrayal of a serial killer in “Erostratus” is not really in tune with today’s Zeitgeist. But the two good ones are very good. You can get it here.
This was my top book acquired last year and my top non-genre fiction book. Next on those piles respectively are Death of a Naturalist, by Seamus Heaney, and The Light Years, by Elizabeth Jane Howard.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
They arrived at the Hotel de las Cisternas. The Marquis immediately conducted him to his apartment, and began to express his satisfaction at finding him at Madrid. Lorenzo interrupted him.
Another of the books that I was reading with a group of Facebook friends, at the rate of a chapter a week. It’s one of the original Gothic novels, published in 1796, full of English hand-wringing about the evils of Catholicism and the power of the Church in Spain, and the stereotypical corruption of the monastic system. It’s full of glorious nonsense; at one point, a character declares that she can only be saved from poisoning if the Monk of the title will have sex with her, which is a rather romantic view of the interaction between poisoning symptoms and libido. The book slips further and further from the real world into horror and at the end the Monk has a decisive interaction with Lucifer himself. Fun stuff, and you can see its roots in much later horror. You can get it here.
Second frame of third chapter:
Won the Vandersteen prize in 2015, for best Dutch-language comic of the year. It’s a moody Bildungsroman about a young noble in declining Prussia; his father is a war hero but has only one leg, his mother has been ill for years, the servants are leaving, the castle is falling down, and his older brother is just mean. I thought the art was evocative and well executed, and the way in which the faces of everyone other than the protagonists is blurred out is a nice focussing gimmick, but there didn’t really seem to be much happening in terms of plot. 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 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.
Unusually, no trip to London this month; but I compensated with an epic trip to Albania in which I discovered the bunker museum in Tirana:
and also the fortress at Durres.
I was there for a conference on a topic where I am not really an expert.
At the end of the month I was in Belfast for the early Assembly election.
Hugo nominations were taking up a lot of my reading time, but I still read 12 books that month.
Non-fiction: 2 (YTD 7)
THEN: Science Fiction Fandom in the U.K., 1930-1980, by Rob Hansen
Based On The Popular TV Serial, by Paul Smith
Fiction (non-sf): 1 (YTD 4)
To Lie with Lions, by Dorothy Dunnett
sf (non-Who): 6 (YTD 17)
Broken Homes, by Ben Aaronovitch
The Raven and the Reindeer, by T. Kingfisher [Ursula Vernon]
The Wild Robot, by Peter Brown (did not finish)
Azanian Bridges, by Nick Wood
The Fell Walker’s Guide To Eternity by Andy Carling
Occupy Me, by Tricia Sullivan
Doctor Who, etc: 3 (YTD 7)
Short Trips: Time Signature, ed. Simon Guerrier
The Eye of the Tyger, by Paul McAuley
Bernice Summerfield and the Doomsday Manuscript, by Justin Richards
Comics: 1 (YTD 4)
My Daily Life Comics by Renée Rienties
2,800 pages (TYD 9,100)
4/13 (YTD 12/40) by women (Dunnett, Kingfisher/Vernon, Sullivan, Rienties)
0/13 (YTD 2/40) by PoC
The best of these was The Raven and the Reindeer, which you can get here, and I also very much enjoyed To Lie With Lions, which you can get here, though I don’t think it would be a good starting point for Dunnett’s Niccolo series; the worst was The Wild Robot, which you can get here.
Latest in the Black Archive sequence of monographs on Doctor Who stories, the first of a trilogy with the next two. I don’t seem to have written much about Face the Raven before, though I included it in my starters’ list of New Who five years ago. I actually saw the set for the story when I visited the Cardiff studio in 2015, and though I did not take pictures, I very much liked it. The producers did too, and kept it around for a bit longer than had been planned. This of course was many months before the episode was broadcast, and one of the marvels of TV is that what is actually quite a small and constrained space can be made to look much more expansive on screen, as if, to coin a phrase, it is bigger on the inside than the outside.
Rewatching it now, I felt that it somewhat pulls its punches. I had completely forgotten who Rigsy is, which slightly blunts the drama. For the high stakes of the story, I didn’t really think that Capaldi and Coleman quite rose to the emotions of the occasion. Stephen Moffat has a habit of killing off his main characters and then resurrecting them again, and that expectation also slightly deterred me from investing much in the drama (and indeed Clara comes back again two episodes later).
Having said that, I’m definitely not one of the Clara-haters who were so prevalent in the fandom at one point. I really like Jenna Coleman as an actress, the character was intriguing and had more of a real arc than most Who companions old or new, and the way that she is brought down by her own hubris, in a small alley off the real world, does work for me. And I’m also a fan of Maisie Williams, whose character Ashildr gets a good outing here. (But I’ve never had my picture taken with her.)
S.J. Groenewegen is a friend of mine anyway, and I’ve enjoyed her Who fiction. Here she brings a close analytical lens to the story, pulling up all kinds of things that I had not really thought of; the Black Archive at its best produces books that you like more than their subject episodes. This has a short introduction and four long chapters.
The first chapter looks in depth at the character of Clara. Groenewegen starts by pointing out that Clara was basically invented to satisfy the needs of the 50th anniversary in 2013, and Coleman actually appeared and got killed off twice before becoming established as Clara Oswald, twenty-first century schoolteacher. She looks at the role of companions and how this worked out in this particular case. Sometimes fans invest more in the emotional dynamics of a show than is really there, but I was convinced by the argument here.
The second chapter looks at Ashildr and Rigsy as returning characters, and reflects on how the show interrogates time and change, and the Doctor being held accountable for his actions. There’s a brief but fascinating exploration of the Ashildr/Clara relationship.
The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
Vivian Sobchack observed that contemporary American science fiction and horror movies also rely on making the familiar unusual1. The motif of Earth as home being ruptured by the alien is a common one in Doctor Who, especially during the late 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, one of the most effective Doctor Who scenes is the sight of dummies coming to life and bursting from their shop windows to terrorise the passers-by during Spearhead from Space (1970). As Jon Arnold observes, ‘They are the most logical choice from a gallery of Doctor Who’s gallery of monsters’ to bring back in Rose (2005) because they are ‘a place of domesticity suddenly rendered shockingly alien’2.
1 Sobchack, Vivian, ‘Child/Alien/Father: Patriarchal Crisis and Generic Exchange’ in Penley, Constance, Elizabeth Lyon, Lynn Spigel and Janet Bergstrom, eds, Close Encounters: Film, Feminism and Science Fiction. p16.
2 Arnold, Jon, The Black Archive #1: Rose, p30.
The chapter looks at geography, London and refuge, and the way in which Doctor Who interacts with the real universe (there is a real London; there was a real refugee crisis at the time the story was made). Lots of other writers are invoked, in particular Paul Cornell and Ben Aaronovitch.
The final chapter looks briefly at the symbolism of ravens, reminding us that they actually have something of a history in Doctor Who, and in more depth at the subject of death, which I think Face the Raven handles rather better than Dark Water / Death in Heaven.
It’s a rare case where I wished I had read the book first before rewatching the story; I would have got a bit more out of the latter. You can get it here.
The Black Archives
1st Doctor: The Daleks (82) | The Edge of Destruction (67) | Marco Polo (18) | The Aztecs (71) | The Dalek Invasion of Earth (30) | The Romans (32) | The Web Planet (83) | The Myth Makers (65) | The Massacre (2) | The Ark (81)
2nd Doctor: The Underwater Menace (40) | The Evil of the Daleks (11) | The Mind Robber (7) | The Invasion (84)
3rd Doctor: Doctor Who and the Silurians (39) | The Ambassadors of Death (3) | The Dæmons (26) | Carnival of Monsters (16) | The Time Warrior (24) | Invasion of the Dinosaurs (55)
4th Doctor: Pyramids of Mars (12) | The Hand of Fear (53) | The Deadly Assassin (45) | The Face of Evil (27) | The Robots of Death (43) | Talons of Weng-Chiang (58) | Horror of Fang Rock (33) | Image of the Fendahl (5) | The Sun Makers (60) | The Stones of Blood (47) | Full Circle (15) | Warriors’ Gate (31) | Logopolis (76)
5th Doctor: Castrovalva (77) | Kinda (62) | Black Orchid (8) | Earthshock (51) | Mawdryn Undead (80) | The Awakening (46)
6th Doctor: Vengeance on Varos (41) | Timelash (35) | The Mysterious Planet (79) | The Ultimate Foe (14)
7th Doctor: Paradise Towers (61) | The Happiness Patrol (68) | Silver Nemesis (75) | The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (66) | Battlefield (34) | The Curse of Fenric (23) | Ghost Light (6)
8th Doctor: The Movie (25) | The Night of the Doctor (49)
Other Doctor: Scream of the Shalka (10)
9th Doctor: Rose (1) | Dalek (54)
10th Doctor: The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit (17) | Love & Monsters (28) | Human Nature / The Family of Blood (13) | The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords (38) | Silence in the Library / The Forest of the Dead (72) | Midnight (69)
11th Doctor: The Eleventh Hour (19) | Vincent and the Doctor (57) | The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang (44) | A Christmas Carol (74) | The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon (29) | The God Complex (9) | The Rings of Akhaten (42) | Day of the Doctor (50)
12th Doctor: Listen (36) | Kill the Moon (59) | Under the Lake / Before the Flood (73) | The Girl Who Died (64) | Dark Water / Death in Heaven (4) | Face the Raven (20) | Heaven Sent (21) | Hell Bent (22)
13th Doctor: Arachnids in the UK (48) | Kerblam! (37) | The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos (52) | The Haunting of Villa Diodati (56) | Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children (70) | Flux (63)
15th Doctor: The Devil’s Chord (78)
As before, just noting without specifying my preferences that I have read them all, including one ancillary volume in the Hugo Packet and a subsequent volume in another series.
Die, vol.3: The Great Game, by Kieron Gillen, Stephanie Hans and Clayton Cowles. Second frame of third part:
DIE, vol. 4: Bleed, by Kieron Gillen, Stephanie Hans and Clayton Cowles. Second frame of third part:
Far Sector, by N.K. Jemisin and Jamal Campbell. Second frame of third part:
Lore Olympus, vol. 1, by Rachel Smythe. Second frame of third part (from original webcomic):
Monstress, vol. 6: The Vow, by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda. Second frame of third part:
Once & Future, vol. 3: The Parliament of Magpies, by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora and Tamra Bonvillain. Second frame of third part:
Once & Future, vol. 4: Monarchies in the UK, by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora and Tamra Bonvillain. Second frame of third part:
Strange Adventures, by Tom King, Mitch Gerads and Evan “Doc” Shaner. Second frame of third part:
Second paragraph of third chapter:
Now the BBC and CNN have a direct competitor and a news organisation clearly without a Western bias. It is available to viewers in most countries – though not in the US and Canada, where it is blocked by strong pro-Israel lobbies. Ironically, Al-Jazeera is one of the most popular networks in Israel and regularly features speeches from Israeli government officials – a first in the Arab media.
Originally published in 2004, revised in 2010, this small book from New Internationalist already seems very dated. It’s a look at the dominance of a few players in the global media market, in both news and entertainment, and the efforts of others to cut through to the wider audience (and vice versa). I learned a few snippets about the political economy of telenovelas, but not much else. The writer seemed to be more interested in banging the traditional lefty drum than in looking at the extent to which digitised information has empowered the spreading of fake news and propaganda. It’s incomplete, and not all that interesting. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book and also my shortest unread book acquired in 2015 (someone must have given it to me, I don’t think I would have bought it for myself). Next on those piles are Guy Erma and the Son of Empire, by Sally Ann Melia, and Alaska Sampler 2014, edited by Deb Vanasse and David Marusek.
Current
The Darwin Awards, by Wendy Northcutt
The Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Garden, by Catherynne M. Valente
A Short History of Kosovo, by Noel Malcolm
Guy Erma and the Son of Empire, by Sally Ann Melia
Last books finished
Q&A, by Vikas Swarup
Killdozer!, by Theodore Sturgeon
Next books
Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie
Make Your Brain Work, by Amy Brann
Next in the sequence of Black Archive books about individual Doctor Who stories, this time it’s the first Eleventh Doctor story and the first of Steven Moffat’s era as show-runner.
When The Eleventh Hour was first broadcast in 2010, I wrote:
I think Doctor Who is in good hands. This is one of the stronger debut stories for a new Doctor – up there with Rose and An Unearthly Child. We enjoyed every minute of the hour.
Matt Smith does it with humour and total conviction, and Karen Gillan shows promise too (though hopefully will get a bit more to do in future episodes). You can understand that each of them clicked with Moffat and Wenger as rapidly as we are told they did. Amy’s character starts with reason to be annoyed as well as fascinated by the Doctor, but is herself keeping some secrets from him and presumably from us too.
The actual plot did have a lot of elements from Moffat’s previous Who stories – but these were good stories first time round, and we went in a slightly new direction here: for instance, the Doctor’s visitation of Madame de Pompadour was him dipping into her story, whereas his visit to Amy got her into therapy (which, and this may have been a subtle point, may not be such a bad thing for a child who has lost her parents). Though I hope Moffat’s future stories are a bit more experimental.
Lots of little pleasing points. The montage of the previous Doctors – a great way of establishing 46 years of continuity for new viewers. The Tardis swimming pool (for the first time in New Who, it’s more than just the control room) and new interior (which is nicely syncretic, though children will need to be told what a typewriter is). The final shot of Amy’s fannish drawings of the Doctor and the Tardis, and her wedding dress.
I’m not blown away by the new version of the theme music, but I will get used to it.
I have rewatched it a couple of times since – on a transatlantic flight, I found it in the entertainment system and turned to it as familiar and comforting fare; and also of course it was one of Emily Cook’s lockdown rewatches (a phenomenon that I have not yet seen written up properly).
Going back to it for this review, yet again I thought it was very good, and definitely up there with the 1963 and 2005 debut episodes as one of the strongest starts for a new Doctor and production team. It’s funny and scary, and renewed my affection for Eleven, Amy and Rory as characters. (I recently rewatched The God Complex, in which the Doctor kicks them off the Tardis; they are better served in their debut.) Those who wonder if the Eleventh Doctor or indeed the Moffat era is for them would be well served by starting here (as we did in real life).
This is Jon Arnold’s third book for the Black Archive series, the other two also being reboots, one successful (Rose) and one unsuccessful (Scream of the Shalka). This is another good one; he goes well beyond the story to look at its importance in the overall sequence of Who as a show. The chapters are:
His career is one of the more remarkable of any British television writer: bar one episode of Stay Lucky (1989-93), three of Dawn French vehicle Murder Most Horrid and Doctor Who, Moffat’s work has entirely been on shows he has created or fully authored. Moffat’s initial break was the result of an exceptional stroke of luck. His father, Bill Moffat, was the headmaster of Thorn Primary School. When it was used for the production of an episode of Highway (1983-93), he mentioned to the producers that he had an idea for a series about a school newspaper. He had no interest in a career as a scriptwriter and sold the idea on condition that his son write a sample script. It is worth noting at this point that this was not in any way nepotistic: if the scripts had not been good enough then the production team could have declined them. If they were good then they would have a writer on board at a relatively low cost:
‘She (Sandra C Hastie, Press Gang’s producer) sort of sighed and said “Oh god I’ll read it once, I’m not paying for it obviously but I’ll read one script from him and then I’ll get a proper writer.” So, I sent in a script and she loved it. And with that kind of incredible sort of madness-cum-genius of the woman, says I immodestly, she just decided that I’d write the whole series. Out of nowhere[…]
Another decent addition to the sequence. You can get it here.
The Black Archives
1st Doctor: The Daleks (82) | The Edge of Destruction (67) | Marco Polo (18) | The Aztecs (71) | The Dalek Invasion of Earth (30) | The Romans (32) | The Web Planet (83) | The Myth Makers (65) | The Massacre (2) | The Ark (81)
2nd Doctor: The Underwater Menace (40) | The Evil of the Daleks (11) | The Mind Robber (7) | The Invasion (84)
3rd Doctor: Doctor Who and the Silurians (39) | The Ambassadors of Death (3) | The Dæmons (26) | Carnival of Monsters (16) | The Time Warrior (24) | Invasion of the Dinosaurs (55)
4th Doctor: Pyramids of Mars (12) | The Hand of Fear (53) | The Deadly Assassin (45) | The Face of Evil (27) | The Robots of Death (43) | Talons of Weng-Chiang (58) | Horror of Fang Rock (33) | Image of the Fendahl (5) | The Sun Makers (60) | The Stones of Blood (47) | Full Circle (15) | Warriors’ Gate (31) | Logopolis (76)
5th Doctor: Castrovalva (77) | Kinda (62) | Black Orchid (8) | Earthshock (51) | Mawdryn Undead (80) | The Awakening (46)
6th Doctor: Vengeance on Varos (41) | Timelash (35) | The Mysterious Planet (79) | The Ultimate Foe (14)
7th Doctor: Paradise Towers (61) | The Happiness Patrol (68) | Silver Nemesis (75) | The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (66) | Battlefield (34) | The Curse of Fenric (23) | Ghost Light (6)
8th Doctor: The Movie (25) | The Night of the Doctor (49)
Other Doctor: Scream of the Shalka (10)
9th Doctor: Rose (1) | Dalek (54)
10th Doctor: The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit (17) | Love & Monsters (28) | Human Nature / The Family of Blood (13) | The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords (38) | Silence in the Library / The Forest of the Dead (72) | Midnight (69)
11th Doctor: The Eleventh Hour (19) | Vincent and the Doctor (57) | The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang (44) | A Christmas Carol (74) | The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon (29) | The God Complex (9) | The Rings of Akhaten (42) | Day of the Doctor (50)
12th Doctor: Listen (36) | Kill the Moon (59) | Under the Lake / Before the Flood (73) | The Girl Who Died (64) | Dark Water / Death in Heaven (4) | Face the Raven (20) | Heaven Sent (21) | Hell Bent (22)
13th Doctor: Arachnids in the UK (48) | Kerblam! (37) | The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos (52) | The Haunting of Villa Diodati (56) | Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children (70) | Flux (63)
15th Doctor: The Devil’s Chord (78)
Two more from my swiftly dwindling pile of unread books acquired in 2015.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of The Happier Dead, by Ivo Stourton, is:
“Did the kids get off to school alright?”
Dystopian detective story of a not too distant future England where a rich minority have access to immortality treatments. Our policeman protagonist is called in to investigate a murder; it becomes clear that the mystery is intimately tied in with the whole political structure of society, which is anyway crumbling into riot and disorder, and he fights through to discover what is really going on. Interesting enough. You can get it here.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of Queen of the States, by Josephine Saxton, is:
She lay there thinking that she went in and out of states of consciousness as often as other people went through doors. This was not what she had intended for today … or yesterday? Time here was meaningless, she did not sense it passing. She had intended to drive away on an adventure, feeling her freedom, tesing herself out instead of existing in the judgement of others, who said she was unfit to manage her own life. She sat up, and the room had no corners. Everything had gone. Oh dear, a delusion.
This is on a different level, a finalist in 1987 for both the Clarke and BSFA Awards (beaten by The Handmaid’s Tale and The Ragged Astronauts). The protagonist travels between a failing marriage in today’s England and an alien society on another planet via a psychiatric ward. I thought it was funny as well as reflective. You can get it here.
The Happier Dead was the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves; next on that pile is Guy Erma and the Son of Empire, by Sally Ann Melia. Queen of the States was my top unread book acquired in 2015; next on that pile was The No-Nonsense Guide to Global Media, by Peter Steven, which I have in fact read in the meantime.
Non-fiction 9 (YTD 54)
Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction, 1950 to 1985, eds. Andrew Nette and Iain McIntyre
The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century, by Amia Srinivasan
True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee, by Abraham Riesman
Directed by Douglas Camfield, by Michael Seely
Being Seen: One Deafblind Woman’s Fight to End Ableism, by Elsa Sjunneson
The Eleventh Hour, by Jon Arnold
Face the Raven, by Sarah Groenewegen
No-Nonsense Guide to Global Media, by Peter Steven
The King of Almayne: a 13th century Englishman in Europe, by T.W.E. Roche
Non-genre 2 (YTD 11)
Intimacy, by Jean Paul Sartre
Q&A, by Vikas Swarup
SF 7 (YTD 50)
Half Life, by Shelley Jackson
The Happier Dead, by Ivo Stourton
Queen of the States, by Josephine Saxton
End of the World Blues, by Jon Courtenay Grimwood
The Monk, by Matthew Lewis
Nova Swing, by M. John Harrison
Killdozer!, by Theodore Sturgeon
Doctor Who 1 (YTD 16)
The HAVOC Files, Volume 4, ed. Shaun Russell
Comics 9 (YTD 12)
Monstress, Volume 6: The Vow, by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda
Far Sector, by N.K. Jemisin and Jamal Campbell
Lore Olympus, by Rachael Smythe
Die, vol.3: The Great Game, by Kieron Gillen, Stephanie Hans and Clayton Cowles
Die, vol 4: Bleed, by Kieron Gillen, Stephanie Hans and Clayton Cowles
Once & Future, vol. 3: The Parliament of Magpies, by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora and Tamra Bonvillain
Once & Future, vol. 4: Monarchies in the UK, by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora and Tamra Bon-villain
Junker: een Pruisische blues, by Simon Spruyt
Strange Adventures, by Tom King, Mitch Gerads and Evan “Doc” Shane
7,100 pages (YTD 38,600), median 257 (YTD 254)
median LT ownership 45; YTD 63.5
12/28 (YTD 58/147) by non-male writers (Srinavasan, Sjunneson, Groenewegen, Jackson, Saxton, Liu/Takeda, Jemisin, Smythe, 2x Hans, 2x Bonvillain)
4/28 (YTD 20/147) by non-white writers (Srinavasan, Swarup, Liu/Takeda, Jemisin)
316 books currently tagged “unread”, 13 less than last month
Reading now
The Darwin Awards, by Wendy Northcutt
The Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Garden, by Catherynne M. Valente
A Short History of Kosovo, by Noel Malcolm
Coming soon (perhaps)
Guy Erma and the Son of Empire, by Sally Ann Melia
Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie
Make Your Brain Work, by Amy Brann
Lenin the Dictator, by Victor Sebestyen
Fugitive Telemetry, by Martha Wells
The Massacre of Mankind, by Stephen Baxter
Manifesto, by Bernardine Evaristo
Alaska Sampler 2014, ed. Deb Vanasse and David Marusek
Roger Zelazny’s Chaos and Amber, by John Betancourt
The Light Years, by Elizabeth Jane Howard
The Harp and the Blade, by John Myers Myers
The Revolution Trade, by Charles Stross
The Light Fantastic, by Terry Pratchett
“Tangents”, by Greg Bear
Mr Britling Sees it Through, by H. G. Wells
Voorbij de grenzen van de ernst, by Kamagurka
Death of a Naturalist, by Seamus Heaney
The Clockwise War, by Scott Gray
Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, by Svetlana Alexievich
The Lost Child of Lychford, by Paul Cornell
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.
The year started with my first experience of opening Hugo voting – always a white-knuckle experience, even though I’ve done it four times since. My first trip of the year was to London where I went to a lovely Moomin exhibition in the South Bank Centre, along with my newest relative and her parents.
Back home in Northern Ireland, the Executive collapsed and new Assembly elections were called after less than a year.
I read 27 books that month.
Non-fiction: 5
Samuel Pepys: Plague, Fire, Revolution, ed. Margarette Lincoln
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World, by David W. Anthony
Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World, by Nicholas Ostler
The Other Islam, by Stephen Schwartz
The Geek Feminist Revolution, by Kameron Hurley
Poetry: 1
Rhyme Stew, by Roald Dahl
Fiction (non-sf): 3
See How Much I Love You, by Luis Leante
Five Go On A Strategy Away Day, by Bruno Vincent
Five on Brexit Island , by Bruno Vincent
sf (non-Who): 11
A Fall of Stardust, by Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess
“Repent, Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman, by Harlan Ellison
The Illustrated Man, by Ray Bradbury
The Palace of Dreams, by Ismail Kadare
Every Heart A Doorway, by Seanan McGuire
Penric and the Shaman, by Lois McMaster Bujold
Penric’s Mission, by Lois McMaster Bujold
The Colour Of Magic, by Terry Pratchett
The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead
The Humans, by Matt Haig
The Rapture of the Nerds, by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross
Doctor Who, etc: 4
Short Trips: Farewells, ed. Jacqueline Rayner
Doctor Who: The Pirate Planet, by Douglas Adams and James Goss
Rip Tide, by Louise Cooper
The Dead Men Diaries, ed. Paul Cornell
Comics: 3
Jeremiah: Een Geweer in het Water, by Hermann
Monstress Volume 1: Awakening, by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda
V for Vendetta, by Alan Moore and David Lloyd
6,300 pages
8/27 by women (Lincoln, Hurley, McGuire, Bujoldx2, Rayner, Cooper, Liu/Takeda)
2/27 by PoC (Whitehead, Liu/Takeda)
The best of these was The Underground Railroad, now a TV series which I have not seen; you can get it here. The worst was my sample of long-running Flemish post-apocalyptic comic series Jeremiah.
I got up at stupid o’clock this morning to look at the array of planets in the morning sky just before dawn. For the last few days, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn have been visible all in a row, in that order, around 4 am, and some lucky observers may have been able to catch Mercury in front of the queue a few days ago. (We couldn’t – the weather was bad here over the weekend and Mercury was probably too low on the Belgian horizon anyway.) Street lighting around here is generally bad, but I went to the top of the tower of the Torenvalk park to try and rise above it.
Today’s phone cameras teeter on the edge of being able to do astrophotography with no extra equipment. In this picture I manage to capture Jupiter at the top right, and if you look closely you can see Mars about a third of the way over, just above the two streetlights. Venus was just above the cloud on the left, clear and bright to the naked eye, but drowned out by the dawn in the photograph.
But this was actually the second photo I took. First time round, I forgot to switch off the flash; with the unexpected result that illuminating the railing in front of me dampened the effect of the dawn and made Venus visible in the photo after all. Jupiter is still there, but this time it’s Mars that disappears into the background.
Saturn was way too far over to the right / south to fit onto the field of view, and using the panorama mode on the phone camera to try and capture all four planets just gave me a long black rectangle.
But I felt a bit of solidarity with the Babylonians tracking the movements of Ishtar, Nergal, Marduk and Nunurta four thousand years ago.
Second paragraph of third story (“United in Blood”, by Mark Jones):
Lethbridge-Stewart approached the bar and held out a hand to his old friend. ‘Bill Cunningham! It’s good to see you too,’ he said, as he grasped the other’s hand in a firm handshake. ‘It’s been too many years. One of your finest malts would go down a treat on a night like this.’
I’m consistently impressed by the quality of the Candy Jar Books series of stories featuring Brigadier Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart, mostly in the narrative window between his first encounter with the Doctor in The Web of Fear and their reunion in The Invasion, though this anthology has a couple from the later TV continuity. These are all good; I guess the standouts for me were “All the King’s Men” by Alyson Leeds and “The Two Brigadiers” by Jonathan Macho, two authors who were both new to me (at least under those names). If you’re not already invested in the Brigadier continuity this won’t mean much to you, but if you are it’s a good addition. You can get it here.
Slumdog Millionaire won the Oscar for Best Picture of 2008 and seven others, Best Director (Danny Boyle), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Best Original Score and Best Sound Editing. The other films up for Best Picture were The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon, Milk and The Reader, none of which I have seen. The Hugo and Nebula that year both went to WALL-E.
Slumdog Millionaire is 4th on one IMDB ranking but only 26th on the other, with The Dark Knight, WALL-E and Iron Man ahead of it on both lists. Along with Hellboy II: The Golden Army, those were the Hugo nominees and I saw them all. Weirdly enough I watched Mamma Mia! for the first time also last weekend; apart from the, the only other 2008 film I have seen is The Duchess, based on half a chapter of Amanda Foreman’s book.
For the second time in a row (after No Country for Old Men), I found no credited actors in common with other Oscar-winning films, Hugo or Nebula winners, or Doctor Who; perhaps a bit less surprising in this case, as almost all of the cast are from India and have made their careers there, and the kids in the flashback scenes have in general not become actors now that they have grown up.
It’s a film about a boy from the slums who wins the Indian equivalent of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? because his life experiences happen to mesh with the questions. As the film starts, he is arrested just before the final question is asked on suspicion of cheating, and explains his knowledge to a sceptical policeman, once they have finished torturing him, providing a series of flashbacks which tell the story of his life.
So, to start with the bits I didn’t like, as usual. I did not like the torture scenes. What can I say. I am squeamish. It’s weirdly out of tone with the rest of the film. They’re in the book as well, but there is a lot more violence in the original novel, so it’s less dissonant, and also you don’t have to watch it on paper.
It’s probably the least white film to have won an Oscar so far in my watching, but it’s very male. There is one female lead character, Latika, played as an adult by Freida Pinto. Again, the book is better on this – it memorably features a faded actress, a washed-up princess, a sex worker with a heart of gold, and crucially the framing narrative has the protagonist telling his story to a woman lawyer rather than a male police inspector.
It reduces Indian society to 1) the struggle of the poor and 2) the dynamic between the protagonist’s Muslim origins versus the forces of nationalism and/or the state, as specifically experienced in Mumbai. That’s an important story of course, but once again the book has a lot more diversity – it is set in New Delhi and Agra as well as Mumbai, and we encounter Indian Christianity, Sikhs, and quite a lot of stupid white people.
And I must say I twitched when the credits flashed up and there was only one Indian name (Loveleen Tandan) among a host of Brits in the senior production team. Somehow this mattered less for Gandhi, which was as much as anything about the relationship between India and the outside world, especially Britain. Slumdog Millionaire purports to be an Indian story about Indian people, but it isn’t.
Having said all that, I did generally enjoy the film. To be grim about it, the interrogation of poverty and social division is a crucial driver of the narrative, and is firm and not subtle. The story starts with the protagonist’s mother being killed in sectarian riots, and life in the slums is vividly depicted.
To be more positive, Dev Patel is great as Jamal, and all of the cast basically glow. I liked the comfortable bilingualism of the script (thanks to Loveleen Tandan apparently). I love quiz shows. I also love the interweaving of narratives where the past unexpectedly informs the present. It’s nice that a crucial plot point depends on The Three Musketeers, a novel which I like more than it really deserves. It looks fantastic and colourful in all the right ways. There is a happy ending. And the music is good.
I’m putting it just above the halfway point in my ranking of Oscar-winners, below It Happened One Night and above Gigi.
Next on my Oscar list is The Hurt Locker, which I have managed to maintain utter ignorance of since it came out (also in 2007, but it won a 2008 Oscar).
As noted above, I read the original book, Q&A, by Vikas Swarup. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
I don’t read the Maharashtra Times. In fact, I don’t read any newspaper. But I occasionally pilfer a copy from Mr Barve’s rubbish bin. It is useful for stoking the fire in the kitchen, and sometimes, when I have nothing else to do, I flip through its pages as a time pass before they are reduced to ash.
Some repetition below because I’ll be posting this section of the blog post independently to Goodreads and LibraryThing, in due course.
The central concept is the same as the film: a boy from the slums who wins a quiz show because his life experiences happen to mesh with the questions. The book is more violent. It has more sex and more female characters – as noted above, it has a faded actress, a washed-up princess, a sex worker with a heart of gold, and crucially the framing narrative has the protagonist telling his story to a woman lawyer rather than a male police inspector.
It’s also a broader look at India and its interactions with the outside world. The protagonist, Ram Mohammed Thomas, can pass as Muslim or Hindu, or indeed Christian; there’s a memorable chapter where he works for an Australian diplomat (the author is himself an Indian diplomat) and another where he makes a living taking tourists around the Taj Mahal. He also looks at the darker side of Bollywood, and of war heroes.
And at the very end there are a couple of pleasing plot twists, which I might have found rather contrived if the rest of the book had not put me in a generally good mood. You can get it here.
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)
Current
Killdozer!, by Theodore Sturgeon
Q&A, by Vikas Swarup
The Darwin Awards, by Wendy Northcutt
The Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Garden, by Catherynne M. Valente
Last books finished
Intimacy, by Jean Paul Sartre
The King of Almayne: a 13th century Englishman in Europe, by T.W.E. Roche
Nova Swing, by M. John Harrison
Strange Adventures, by Tom King, Mitch Gerads and Evan “Doc” Shaner
Next books
Guy Erma and the Son of Empire, by Sally Ann Melia
Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie
The glory of DNA research is that there is always a new discovery around the corner, and sometimes these discoveries raise new questions as well as answering old ones.
Among my DNA connections, there are a fair number who are descended from a Benjamin Cleveland (1783-1853) and his wife Lydia Cooper (1787-1872). According to the written records, I am distantly related to Benjamin Cleveland; he is my 5th cousin 5 times removed (5C5R in the jargon), meaning that he and my 3x great-grandmother shared a set of 4x great-grandparents. At that distance, we should not really share any DNA; but a number of his descendants pop up on my connection lists.
(I had hoped to find a connection between him and President Grover Cleveland, but they appear to be from different families. The closest I personally can get to the top of the Executive Branch is from a different branch of ancestors, Sophia Chew Nicklin, who was married to George Mifflin Dallas, Vice-President under James Polk from 1845 to 1849.)
Going back to Benjamin and Lydia, their biographies are a bit mysterious. Benjamin was born in Massachusetts, but some sources say this was in Suffolk County, which includes Boston, and others put his birthplace further west, in Hardwick in the centre of the state. It is unclear if Lydia was from Richmond NY, Rhode Island or New Jersey, which is really rather vague. The official family biography has them marrying in December 1804 in upstate New York, but is ambiguous about whether this was in Richmond or 130 km away in Oswego. Benjamin was 21; Lydia was 17, and gave birth to their first child nine months later. They moved from New York to Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and finally Middleton, Wisconsin, where he died in 1853 or 1854; she died almost two decades later, in 1872, in Iowa. They had eleven children, most of whom survived to adulthood, and at least four of whom have living descendants.
When I started to look into the Cleveland connections in more detail, the numbers seemed very strange. Between the various websites – Ancestry.com, MyHeritage.com and 23andMe.com – I found no less than 25 people who shared some of my DNA and are descended from Benjamin and Lydia: two great-great-grandchildren, ten 3x great-grandchildren, another ten 4x great-grandchildren, two 5x great-grandchildren and a 6x great-grandson. Here’s a chart showing their lines of descent and giving the DNA overlap in each case in centimorgans (cM), the standard unit of comparison. (Your whole genome has a bit under 7,000 cM.)
If the records are right, and Benjamin was my fifth cousin five times removes, then my DNA overlap with all of these people should be so small as to be invisible. In fact, one of Benjamin and Lydia’s 3x great-grandchildren (the row from RC to LC on the chart) had an overlap of 47 cM with me, which would be typical of a half third cousin or third cousin once removed, and most of the others are in the fourth cousin / half fourth cousin / fourth cousin once removed territory. This suggests that the connection is a lot closer than the records suggest.
(Just to refresh you: a third cousin is someone you share two great-great-grandparents with. A half third cousin is someone you share one great-great-grandparent with. A third cousin once removed is someone who shares two great-great-grandparents with one of your parents, or vice versa. For fourth cousins, apply the above but with 3x great-grandparents.)
So, in summary, we know for a fact that I am related to those 25 descendants of Benjamin Cleveland and Lydia Cooper, which suggests that either Benjamin or Lydia is a relative of mine. One other point that came up in my research is that several of the 25 also have DNA connections to relatives who are definitely descended from my great-great-grandparents William Charlton Hibbard (1814-1880) and Sarah Ann Smith (1815-1891).
So, purely hypothetically, I crunched the numbers on the basis that one of Benjamin Cleveland or Lydia Cooper was in fact secretly the parent of one of William Charlton Hibbard and Sarah Ann Smith. This would mean that I share a single 3x great-grandparent with Benjamin and Lydia’s 3x great-grandchildren, and they are my half fourth cousins. According to the DNAPainter site, this would give me on average an overlap of 27 cM with their generation, 37 cM with their parents, 23 cM with their children, 20 cM with their grandchildren and 18 cM with their great-grandchildren. We can plot this hypothetical DNA relationship against the actual numbers, and we get the following result:
So, this hypothesis is worth investigating further. We can eliminate one possibility quickly. Quite apart from the fact that it is much more difficult to conceal maternity than paternity, Lydia Cleveland née Cooper gave birth in Unadilla in upstate New York in May 1814 and had another child in January 1816, probably also in Unadilla. She is therefore unlikely to have been the mother of either William Charlton Hibbard, born in Littleton in northern New Hampshire in September 1814, or Sarah Ann Smith, born in Dover at the other end of New Hampshire in April 1815.
That leaves that possibility that one of them was the child of Benjamin Cleveland. To eliminate another possibility quickly, it seems unlikely that William Charlton Hibbard was his son. I have vague but ultimately convincing DNA links between myself and more distant members of the Hibbard family, reinforcing the official account of William Charlton Hibbard’s ancestry. Also Littleton, NH, is well over 400 km from Unadilla, NY, a heck of a long way to go.
Sarah Ann Smith is a different matter. I wrote earlier this month about the difficulty of pinning down her mother’s biography. Her father, supposedly a John Smith, has almost completely vanished from the historical record. I have not identified any DNA connection between me and anyone else related to John Smith, though I have been able to do so for all of my other 3x great-grandfathers on the American side.
Dover, where Sarah Ann Smith was born, is 40 km from the border with Massachusetts, Benjamin Cleveland’s native state. On top of that, there is evidence linking her mother, Sarah Locke, to western Massachusetts, where Benjamin may have been born – and if he wasn’t born there, he was born in Boston, which is much closer to Dover. It’s not conclusive, but for me it’s convincing.
Other explanations are possible, of course. But it’s quite difficult to find another that fits the genetic evidence anything like as well. If Benjamin Cleveland was not Sarah Ann Smith’s biological father, but I am connected to him by some other route, we will have to insert at least another two generations into the hypothetical model, which makes the DNA numbers much more of a stretch.
So I’m going to change my family tree now and identify Benjamin Cleveland as Sarah Smith’s biological father, and my 3x great-grandfather. It’s the first time I’ve had this in my direct line of descent, though I’ve had several cases in collateral branches, some of which I have written about here and here. At this distance in time, we can have no idea of the circumstances that brought two youngish folks together in New England in the summer of 1814, with Sarah Ann Smith arriving nine months later.
A few other notes that came up in the research:
Edited to add: Having set Benjamin Cleveland as my 3x great-grandfather on Ancestry, the system immediately found another dozen users connected to him by genealogy and to me by DNA. I now have AncestryDNA connections with more of his descendants than with all my other 3x great-grandparents, combined. It’s pretty convincing!
Second paragraph of third chapter:
In the hours between murdering three men in his apartment and driving to Alpha Phi, Rodger went to Starbucks, ordered coffee, and uploaded a video, “Elliot Rodger’s Retribution,” to his YouTube channel. He also emailed a 107,000-word memoir-manifesto, “My Twisted World: The Story of Elliot Rodger,” to a group of people including his parents and his therapist. Together these two documents detail the massacre to come and Rodger’s motivations. “All I ever wanted was to fit in and live a happy life,” he explains at the beginning of “My Twisted World,” “but I was cast out and rejected, forced to endure an existence of loneliness and insignificance, all because the females of the human species were incapable of seeing the value in me.”
I can’t remember where I picked up this recommendation, but it is very good. It’s a collection of feminist essays on society in general and the legal system in particular, addressing the following topics:
These are punchy and difficult issues, and it’s often difficult reading. Srinivasan has more questions than answers, and they are generally very good questions to which I don’t have even the beginnings of an answer. Her fundamental points are that it is completely inadequate to reach for the legal system to deal with issues of gender justice, when what is needed is a complete revolution in society; and also that a lot of the proposed and implemented legal solutions demonstrably make things worse.
Of course the essays are largely directed to the situation in the United States, where as we’ve seen in recent years the “law enforcement” system is completely out of control. But we are far from perfect in Europe, and much of what Srinivasan writes can be directly applied to any society. It’s really worth reading, especially in the light of this morning’s news. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book by a non-white writer. Next on that pile is Manifesto, by Bernardine Evaristo.
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.
I started the month with a trip to SMOFCon in Chicago (flying out via Stockholm and back via Copenhagen), in the wake of which I saw the stage show of Hamilton, and then before Christmas went to Belfast and Frankfurt, with a side order of Strasbourg for the final European Parliament plenary of the year. My boss bought us all festive T-shirts.
F and I finished the year by visiting the Tintin exhibition at Trainworld.
2016 was and I think remains my record year for travelling, overnighting in 29 places away from home, in 22 different countries.
Books read this month:
Non-fiction: 4 (2016 total 37/212, 17%)
Alexander the Great: The Hunt for a New Past, by Paul Cartledge
Tolstoy, by Henri Troyat
Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships, by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethà
What Makes This Book So Great: Re-Reading the Classics of Fantasy and SF, by Jo Walton
Fiction (non-sf): 2 (2016 total 28/212, 13%)
The Listener, by Tove Jansson
The Case of the Missing Books, by Ian Sansom
sf (non-Who): 6 (2016 total 80/212, 38%)
Kings of the North, by Cecelia Holland
AfroSF: Science Fiction by African Writers, ed. Ivor Hartmann
Angels & Visitations: A Miscellany, by Neil Gaiman
The Star Rover, by Jack London
Last Exit to Babylon – Volume 4: The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny
Christmas Days, by Jeanette Winterson
Doctor Who, etc: 3 (2016 total 39/212, 18%)
Short Trips: The History of Christmas, ed. Simon Guerrier
Bullet Time, by David A. McIntee
Twilight of the Gods, by Mark Clapham and John de Burgh Miller
Comics: 4 (2016 total 27/212, 13%)
Apostata, Bundel I, by Ken Broeders
Apostata, Bundel II, by Ken Broeders
Apostata, Bundel III, by Ken Broeders
Brain Fetish, by Kinga Korska
Page count for December: 6200 (2016 total 62,300)
Books by women in December: 6/19 (Jethà, Walton, Jansson, Holland, Winterson, Korska), 2016 total 65/212
Books by PoC in December: 2/19 (Cacilda Jethà, the AfroSF anthology), total 14/212
Top book of the month: Christmas Days, by Jeanette Winterson; get it here
Worst book of the month: The Case of the Missing Books, by Ian Sansom; get it here
Total books: 212, the lowest since 2009, surpassed every year since.
Total page count: ~62,300, fifth lowest of the years I have been counting, lower than any year since except 2017.
Diversity:
65 (31%) by women, the highest % to date, though exceeded several times since.
14 (7%) by PoC, exceeded most years since.
Most books by a single author: Christopher Marlowe (previous winners: Justin Richards in 2015 and 2014, Agatha Christie in 2013, Jonathan Gash in 2012, Arthur Conan Doyle in 2011, Ian Rankin in 2010, William Shakespeare in 2009 and 2008, Terrance Dicks in 2007, Ian Marter in 2006, Charles Stross in 2005)
Best non-Who sff read in 2016: Cuckoo Song, by Frances Hardinge – creepy doppleganger story set in England just after the first world war; get it here.
Runner-up: Wylding Hall, by Elizabeth Hand – I never wrote this up properly, but it’s an excellent fantasy/horror story, again set in England; get it here.
Welcome re-reads: Watership Down, by Richard Adams – get it here; the Alice books by Lewis Carroll – get them here.
The one you might not heard of: Time Bangers #1: One Does Not Simply Walk Into Tudor, by Luna Teague and Ivery Kirk – OK, this is not exactly great art, but the authors clearly had a lot of fun writing it; get it here.
The one to avoid: Nethereal, by Brian Niemeier; get it here.
Best Who book read in 2016: The Legends of Ashildr, by James Goss, David Llewellyn, Jenny T. Colgan & Justin Richards – all good stories, some really good; get it here.
Runner-up: The Mike Tucker (and Robert Perry) Seventh Doctor/Ace novels, Illegal Alien, Prime Time and Loving the Alien – great examples of respect for continuity and also bringing more; get them here, here and here.
Worth flagging up for Whovians: Drama and Delight: The Life of Verity Lambert, by Richard Marson – excellent biography of the show’s first producer; get it here.
The one to avoid: Heritage, by Dale Smith; get it here.
Best non-fiction read in 2016: Between the world and me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates -tremendous (and short) polemic about racism and violence in the United States; get it here.
Runner-up: SPQR, by Mary Beard – great account of the history of Rome; get it here.
The one you might not heard of: Baptism of Fire: The Birth of the Modern British Fantastic in World War I, ed. Janet Brennan Croft – fascinating essays on at the influence of the global conflict on the origins of the fantasy genre; get it here.
The one to really avoid: SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police, by Vox Day.
Best non-sff fiction read in 2016: Alice Munro’s short story collections, The Love of a Good Woman, Selected Stories, and The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose – all fantastic vignettes of Canada; get them here, here and here.
Runner-up: Nemesis, by Philip Roth – the effects of polio on middle-class America in the 1950s; get it here.
Welcome rereads: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce – get it here; Walking on Glass, by Iain Banks – get it here; The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas – get it here.
The one you might not heard of: Dark Horse, by Fletcher Knebel – the Republican candidate dies just before the Presidential election; his swiftly conscripted replacement is an obscure New Jersey politician who starts shaking the political system; get it here.
The one to avoid: The Case of the Missing Books, by Ian Sansom; get it here
Best graphic story read in 2016: Alice in Sunderland, by Bryan Talbot – brilliant exploration of the town and its links to literature in general and Alice in particular; get it here.
Runner-up: The Sandman: Overture, by Neil Gaiman, J.H. Williams III, Dave Stewart, Todd Klein – very satisfying prequel/sequel to the classic story, which won the Hugo; get it here.
The one you might not have heard of: Toch Een Geluk, by Barbara Stok – fun Dutch comics writer, sadly not translated into English yet; get it here.
The one to avoid: Chooz, by Santi-Bucquoy.
One is slightly comparing chalk and cheese here. I was lucky enough to see Hamilton in Chicago this month, but had also read the Hamiltome which has loads of information and is a must-have for any fan; get it here.
However I also read the complete Christopher Marlowe, and particularly enjoyed Edward II and The Jew of Malta; get it here.
To be found on the Best Related Work ballot for the Hugo Awards.
Alice in Sunderland, by Bryan Talbot
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: Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell
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: See above
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
2021: Carrying the Fire, by Michael Collins.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
They worked on the seventh floor of Lime Grove, assigned to different film editors. This was the same building where Alfred Hitchcock made The Thirty Nine Steps twenty years before when it was the Gaumont British Picture studios. Perhaps it was a portent for the future of the film industry when the BBC had bought tip and converted the studios in 1949. Situated in Shepherd’s bush, the building was on a cramped and enclosed site and the only way to expand was up. Lime Grove Studios became a multi-levelled rabbit warren of a building, easy to get lost in and was not much loved by those inside. Try as they might, the people who worked here in the 1950s find it very hard to describe the place as magical. Further down the road at Wood Lane, something magical had been postponed.
A couple of years ago, I read a biography of Robert Holmes, the greatest of Old Who’s writers; this book looks at the life of Douglas Camfield, one of the greatest of the Old Who directors (the top three must be him, David Maloney and Christopher Barry – and Camfield directed more episodes than either of the other two).
I found it a really fascinating read. Seely has hunted down as much information as he can about every single TV episode that Camfield ever directed. He knows his audience, so he has concentrated particularly on Doctor Who – the stories we now know as An Unearthly Child, Marco Polo, The Crusade, The Time Meddler, and most of all The Daleks’ Master Plan; and also The Web of Fear, The Invasion, Inferno, Terror of the Zygons and The Seeds of Doom. Those alone would be a fantastic legacy.
But Seely is very good at taking us into the world of the director, to the point that you can almost smell the static electricity in the studio gallery and the manure on location. Not every BBC director was as meticulous or professional as him; at the same time, he seems to have been genuinely charming, always bringing his guitar to finish the evening singing with those of the cast and crew that wanted to. (Though he also had his musical blind spots, and repeatedly refused to hire Dudley Simpson for incidental music.)
Camfield had a loyalty to a certain group of guest actors who tended to pop up in many of his productions, but in general they were good. This included his wife, Sheila Dunn, who got a small part in the Dalek’s Master Plan and a larger part in Inferno; though I remember her best as the daughter of Kessler, in the sequel to Secret Army, which had nothing to do with Camfield. Incidentally Bernard Hepton, the star of Secret Army, started his career as a director before turning to acting and was a peer of Camfield’s on the BBC training courses.
He did his best to move away from being typecast as a police and science fiction serial specialist, but did not quite success. He directed Duel, one of the great Blake’s 7 episodes, and the first episode of Shoestring and two others. His only close co-operation with the great Robert Holmes was not Doctor Who but the 1981 series The Nightmare Man, based on the novel Child of Vodyanoi by David Wiltshire; I have fond if scary memories of it forty years on, and would love to get hold of a copy.
Camfield’s health was always a problem, and he had to be taken off the Doctor Who story Inferno after a couple of episodes when he suffered a heart attack. Another heart attack killed him at the age of 52 in 1984. Unlike Robert Holmes, who had sadly run out of steam when he died a couple of years later, one feels that Camfield was still innovating and finding new things to do, though he would have refused to return to Doctor Who. We must be grateful for what we have. This is a good book, with occasional rough edges. You can get it here.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
Something else began too — what shall we call it? Personality? Drama? Individuality? Character, with all its flaws and failings, fashions and passions, schemes and dreams. Meaning began, you might say. The seeding of Gaia gave us meaning, a germination of thought into shape. Seminal semantic semiology from the semen of the sky. I will leave such speculation to those better qualified, but it was nevertheless a great moment. In the creation of and conjoining with Ouranos, her son and now her husband, Gaia unwound the ribbon of life that runs all the way to human history and our own very selves, yours and mine.
A run-through of Classical myths and legends by Stephen Fry, leaning on Ovid a lot, of course, but drawing in other writers too – apparently the first of three volumes, the other two dealing with heroes in general and the Trojan War in particular. It’s breezy and sometimes even funny, and Fry doesn’t gloss over the awkward castrations and incest. I found it especially helpful in locating the legends referred to by Jan Christian Hansche in his non-religious sculptures. You can get it here.
This was my top unread sf book. Next on that pile is Fugitive Telemetry, by Martha Wells.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
Now in the first place, a state so vast and complex as this world Utopia, and with so migratory a people, will need some handy symbol to check the distribution of services and commodities. Almost certainly they will need to have money. They will have money, and it is not inconceivable that, for all his sorrowful thoughts, our botanist, with his trained observation, his habit of looking at little things upon the ground, would be the one to see and pick up the coin that has fallen from some wayfarer’s pocket. (This, in our first hour or so before we reach the inn in the Urseren Thal.) You figure us upon the high Gotthard road, heads together over the little disk that contrives to tell us so much of this strange world.
I have to admit that I had not really heard of this Wells novel before. Of course, like the original Utopia, the fictional framework is not the point; the books is about the ideal way to run a society, and what it might look like if you were to be transported to that society while on holiday in Switzerland, to discover that everyone you know on Earth has a parallel equivalent in the Utopia, except that of course they are happier.
Utopia is preserved by a caste of self-dubbed samurai who are devoted to keeping society fair. Wells is clear about the evils of racism, and the importance of equality for women; somewhat less convincing on a utopian vision of marriage, and downright weird on animals (no meat-eating, but no household pets either). To be honest, I did not find the ideas awfully interesting, though Beveridge claimed that they had inspired his vision of the welfare state.
The bit that did grab me was where the narrator meets his equivalent on Utopia. Jorge Luis Borges’ story “The Other” has fascinated me for many years – it’s the one where he meets his younger self, but discovers that in fact they don’t have much to say to each other. The interaction between the narrator and his double in A Modern Utopia is similarly awkward. Basically, we need other people for mental stimulation – our own thought processes are not different enough to be interesting.
Anyway, not my favourite Wells novel, but you can get it here. Next up is Mr Britling Sees It Through.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
‘I know. She can undo it all, from the start. He won’t want to leave her.’
When I first read this in December 2001, I wrote:
Ender’s Game is a vivid and disturbing book. The most vivid part is its portrayal of the casual violence of childhood and the isolation of the gifted child. Much great sf literature appeals to readers who themselves were (or indeed are) gifted children, whose experience of childhood friendship was limited and whose attempts to strike out physically were often unsuccessful and almost always duly punished. (Card himself, in a lengthy introduction to the second, 1991 edition of the novel, spends more time on this topic than on any other.) The twist in Ender’s story is, first, that when he attacks other children physically, he is more or less rewarded rather than punished by the military elite who control his life; but second, it really doesn’t make him feel any better. Most child-genius-turned superhero stories at least let their hero feel good about what they have done at some point; Ender is denied even that luxury.
The most disturbing part is the military’s manipulation of Ender. On one level, given the universal perception that humanity is under threat of utter destruction, the use of Ender’s genius for winning battles, for, er, winning battles would have been portrayed as right and necessary by a lesser author. However, it becomes apparent that the manipulation of Ender began before his birth, and continues right up to the last chapter of the book. He has been genetically engineered to hold a middle point between the violence and manipulation of his brother and the empathy and compassion of his loving sister. (A weak area of the book is the rather extreme characterisation of the siblings, combined with the fact that their parents appear to be rather dull and yet produced not one but three genius offspring.) As a six-year-old Ender is taken to an asteroid along with other precocious children, in order to be taught how to fight and kill. In a series of war-games (described in somewhat excessive detail) of ever-increasing sophistication, where the odds have been stacked ever more against him, he finally passes what he thinks is the final exam – only to discover that (as the astute reader will have already suspected) in fact the last few battles have not been simulations, and he has utterly destroyed the alien threat.
Ender’s response to this revelation lifts the book beyond a well-told war story (à la Starship Troopers or The Forever War) and into a novel of redemption. He repents his genocide of an entire alien species, brought about essentially by a mistake in communications, and, in a hastily told last chapter which actually covers years of narrative time, resolves to atone for his crime on behalf of all humanity by telling the story of the aliens. Michael R. Collings has reflected on the parallels between Ender and Jesus Christ, and while he is wrong on some of the details he is clearly right on the big picture. (Unlike, I would add, the reviewer who became obsessed with the parallels between Ender Wiggin and Adolf Hitler – shades of Dave Barry’s suggestion that Moby Dick actually represents the Republic of Ireland – all the more so since I actually once read a Lit Crit paper attempting to prove the latter.)
One has to suspend one’s disbelief slightly to believe that not only Ender but his entire crew of prepubescent commanders are sophisticated enough to win a war. I don’t know what the statistics are correlating the brilliance of military commanders with their age, but I would be surprised if there is any real reason to think that children could be super-competent in this field. Similarly, the ease with which Peter and Valentine, Ender’s siblings, capture the political high ground through their skillful debating techniques, is simply not credible even within the parameters of the book. I look back on stuff I wrote when I am half my present age – I am now 34 – and cringe with embarrassment. (One such item, about Turkish opening strategy in the game of Diplomacy, is much more widespread than it deserves to be on the Web.) The gift of political argument matures slowly. My other big problem with the book is the portentous, mythic tone of the narrative, but there’s not much Card can do about that; it’s his natural voice, I think, and suits books like the Alvin Maker series perfectly, but sometimes irritated me here.
There are some great bits in Ender’s Game: the “fantasy game” which turns out to be a link with the alien minds, the difficulty of fighting in free fall, the character of Mazer Rackham, the delicate political situation of Earth, the way in which Peter and Valentine rapidly become experts simply through writing about stuff on bulletin boards under pseudonyms. The best single moment for me is when Ender is set up with his team of squadron leaders in the penultimate chapter, and discovers that they are all his friends from the earlier chapters of the book. There is a sense that all the collective suffering was worth something. I can understand why Card returned to that setting for the most recent of the sequels.
I still agree with most of that, but this time around, the things I didn’t like about the book annoyed me much more. Watching adults fighting desperately in Ukraine, as we have ben since February, it seems really tasteless to suggest that children might somehow do the job better. At the same time, watching how online political discussion has worked out in practice, the notion that people with good ideas and deep philosophical insights might consequently emerge as powerful political figures seems hilariously naïve. It’s also notable that almost all (though not quite all) of Ender’s classmates are white boys – this for a force that is supposed to represent the whole of humanity. It’s a quick read at least. You can get it here.
Ender’s Game won both the Hugo and Nebula for Best Novel presented in 1986 for works of 1985. The novel version of Blood Music, by Greg Bear, and The Postman, by David Brin, were on both ballots. Also on the Hugo ballot were Cuckoo’s Egg, by C. J. Cherryh and Footfall, by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle; I have read the latter but would not vote for it. Also on the Nebula ballot were Dinner at Deviant’s Palace, by Tim Powers, and Helliconia Winter, by Brian Aldiss, both of which I have read; and The Remaking of Sigmund Freud, by Barry N. Malzberg, and Schismatrix, by Bruce Sterling, which I haven’t. I think I’d have voted for Blood Music.
The other three fiction awards were split. The Hugo for Best Novella went to “24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai”, by Roger Zelazny, and the Nebula to “Sailing to Byzantium”, by Robert Silverberg. Each was on both ballots, as were “Green Mars”, by Kim Stanley Robinson, and “The Only Neat Thing to Do”, by James Tiptree, Jr.
The Hugo for Best Novelette went to “Paladin of the Lost Hour”, by Harlan Ellison, and the Nebula to “Portraits of His Children”, by George R. R. Martin. Again, both were on both ballots, as were “Dogfight”, by Michael Swanwick & William Gibson; “The Fringe”, by Orson Scott Card; and “A Gift from the GrayLanders”, by Michael Bishop.
The Hugo for Best Short Story went to “Fermi and Frost”, by Frederik Pohl, and the Nebula to “Out of All Them Bright Stars”, by Nancy Kress. This time neither story was on the other ballot, but three stories were on both: “Flying Saucer Rock & Roll”, by Howard Waldrop, “Hong’s Bluff”, by William F. Wu, and “Snow”, by John Crowley.
There was no dramatic Nebula that year, but the Hugo went to Back to the Future.
Onwards to the following year’s joint winners, Greg Bear’s “Tangents” and Speaker for the Dead, the sequel to Ender’s Game.
Second paragraph of third section (as you know, Bob, very few of Pratchett’s Discworld novels are divided into chapters):
Mort was interested in lots of things. Why people’s teeth fitted together so neatly, for example. He’d given that one a lot of thought. Then there was the puzzle of why the sun came out during the day, instead of at night when the light would come in useful. He knew the standard explanation, which somehow didn’t seem satisfying.
When the BBC did its Big Read in 2003, this was the first of five Terry Pratchett novels to make the top 100 books beloved by the BBC-watching public. (The others were, in order, Good Omens – co-written by Neil Gaiman of course – Guards! Guards!, Night Watch and the one that started it all, The Colour of Magic.) I’ve got to it now as the top book on my shelves not yet reviewed on line; in fact the next few on that pile are all by Pratchett, so I’m going to split the pile in two, PTerry and non-PTerry; the next books on each pile respectively are The Light Fantastic, and Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie.
It’s years since I last read this. It hasn’t lost its charm. Pratchett’s Death is one of his most memorable characters, from his first appearance in The Colour of Magic:
“I said I hope it is a good party,” said Galder, loudly.
AT THE MOMENT IT IS, said Death levelly. I THINK IT MIGHT GO DOWNHILL VERY QUICKLY AT MIDNIGHT.
“Why?”
THAT’S WHEN THEY THINK I’LL BE TAKING MY MASK OFF.
to the end:
This was the fourth Discworld novel, after the original duology and Equal Rites, and Dave Langford’s comment at the time was “Pratchett has sussed the combination of hilarity with a tortuous plot, and the rest of us would-be humorists hate him for it.” I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a masterpiece, but a lot of the elements that make for a good Pratchett book – indeed for a good book in general – converge here.
You’ve read it too, so I won’t go on at length. It is as funny as I remembered. I was pleasantly surprised on re-reading by the breadth and depth of references to classic (and Classical) literature. The main driver of the Sto Lat subplot, the rewriting of history and destiny, is actually more of a science fiction trope, rarely found in fantasy (and the description of it is fairly sfnal). And Death’s slogan resonates still for me, 35 years on.
THERE’S NO JUSTICE. THERE’S JUST ME.
You can get it here, if you don’t already have it. My copy is the first Corgi paperback from 1987, with the Josh Kirby cover.
The Colour of Magic | The Light Fantastic | Equal Rites | Mort | Sourcery | Wyrd Sisters | Pyramids | Guards! Guards! | Eric | Moving Pictures | Reaper Man | Witches Abroad | Small Gods | Lords and Ladies | Men at Arms | Soul Music | Interesting Times | Maskerade | Feet of Clay | Hogfather | Jingo | The Last Continent | Carpe Jugulum | The Fifth Elephant | The Truth | Thief of Time | The Last Hero | The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents | Night Watch | The Wee Free Men | Monstrous Regiment | A Hat Full of Sky | Going Postal | Thud! | Wintersmith | Making Money | Unseen Academicals | I Shall Wear Midnight | Snuff | Raising Steam | The Shepherd’s Crown
Current
Nova Swing, by M. John Harrison
Killdozer!, by Theodore Sturgeon
Strange Adventures, by Tom King, Mitch Gerads and Evan “Doc” Shaner
Intimacy, by Jean Paul Sartre
Last books finished
The Eleventh Hour, by Jon Arnold
Lore Olympus, by Rachael Smythe
Face the Raven, by Sarah Groenewegen
No-Nonsense Guide to Global Media, by Peter Steven
Die, vol.3: The Great Game, by Kieron Gillen, Stephanie Hans and Clayton Cowles
End of the World Blues, by Jon Courtenay Grimwood
Die, vol 4: Bleed, by Kieron Gillen, Stephanie Hans and Clayton Cowles
Once & Future, vol. 3: The Parliament of Magpies, by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora and Tamra Bonvillain
Once & Future, vol. 4: Monarchies in the UK,by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora and Tamra Bonvillain
Junker: een Pruisische blues, by Simon Spruyt
The Monk, by Matthew Lewis
Next books
The Darwin Awards, by Wendy Northcutt
Guy Erma and the Son of Empire, by Sally Ann Melia
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.
I started the month at a work conference in darkest Kent, and on the day of the US election I was in Dublin, again for work, and spent the night in London for the sake of a rather brief TV interview. The next weekend it was off to Helsinki for my first Worldcon 75 meeting as Hugo Administrator. Colette Fozard was then my deputy, but in fact one of the Chairs of the convention resigned a week after the meeting, and Colette was appointed Vice-Chair in the subsequent reshuffle.
The Messukeskus was hosting an pet fair at the time. Check out the show-jumping rabbit:
I then went back to Dublin again for another work trip, and also visited the World Health Organisation in Geneva. At home in Leuven, the M Museum was hosting an exhibition to mark the 500th anniversary of the publication of Thomas More’s Utopia:
But I must say that the election of Donald Trump caused me to do so much doomscrolling that I read only three books in the whole of that month, the lowest tally since I started keeping count (and probably the lowest since I learned to read). They were:
Fiction (non-sf): 1 (YTD 28)
Kramer’s War, by Derek Robinson; get it here.
sf (non-Who): 1 (YTD 74)
Prime Minister Corbyn: and other things that never happened, eds. Duncan Brack and Iain Dale; get it here.
Comics: 1 (YTD 23)
Antarès, Épisode 1, by Leo; get it here in French and here in English.
800 pages (YTD 56,100 pages)
0/3 (YTD 59/193) by women
0/3 (YTD 12/193) by PoC
With only three books, I won’t choose a best or worst of the month.
The third thing in the main text of the book is actually “DX”, a poem by Joe Haldeman. The second verse (or equivalent; it’s rather free-form in format) is:
You dig a hole
and cover it with
logs
I got hold of this because it includes the one and only published fantasy story by my distant cousin Elizabeth Helfman. It’s a compilation of 32 stories and four poems originally published in 1987, chosen by the good taste of Datlow and Windling, including classics like Ursula Le Guin’s “Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight”, Jonathan Carroll’s “Friend’s Best Man”, George R.R. Martin’s “The Pear-Shaped Man”, and “Delta Sly Honey” by Lucius Shepard. In fact I think I was surprised by how many of the authors I already knew. The only other really obscure writer apart from Elizabeth Helfman is John Robert Bensink.
Anyway, it’s a good solid collection, though it reminded me from time to time why horror isn’t usually my thing. You can get it here.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
Before long, I was asking myself how a tiny, hole-in-the-wall operation like The Classic could possibly require so much work. What with repairing, replacing, purchasing, cleaning) Polishing, picking up and delivering, my unpaid labor was soon snowballing into a full-time job, most of it menial drudgery. Each morning at breakfast, as strictly as a general marshaling her army of one, Clare would tick off the chores I was expected to discharge that day. Order more coffee for the espresso machine, buy more toilet paper, replace the burnt-out light bulbs, fix the broken seats, tack down the carpet in the lobby, chase to the printers, the distributors, the post office, the bank. There came a point when I began to wonder if our love affair was really a way for Clare to make up for years of neglect to her capital investment with the benefit of cheap labor. So I complained, if feebly, reminding her that I did after all have classes to attend and assignments to do.
I picked this up from the freebies table at Novacon, and eventually got around to it as the most popular book on my unread sf pile as of the end of last year. (Yes, it’s now June.) I’d previously read the author’s Tiptree-winning Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein, so I was prepared for some fairly dense prose. I wasn’t expecting to be left until quite a late stage before being able to decide if this was really an sfnal book or not; in the end, I decided that it is – the plot is about an obscure religious cult with cinematic ambitions, and the author’s gradual entanglement therewith. The blurb suggests that it’s a cross between Sunset Boulevard and The Name of the Rose, and I think that is probably fair, though I have not seen Sunset Boulevard.
I’m not a film buff, and my Oscar-winners project has been in part a journey to try and get into the minds of those who are. There are lots of other areas of human endeavour that leave me cold – I cannot get excited about makes of car, for instance, and sports events outside the major championships don’t do all that much for me. Roszak did in fact manage to convey to me what it is to care about films. The book dates from 1991, still a time when films physically existed entirely on celluloid; it’s weird to reflect how thoroughly the practice of digital storage has affected our experience of the cinema.
Anyway, it’s a bit rambling, but I liked the sense of geography (mostly California but with a bit of Europe and elsewhere) and the cult itself was an interesting concept. You can get it here.
Next on the unread sf pile was Mythos by Stephen Fry, which I have in fact read in the meantime, so you’ll see it coming up here soon.
Second paragraph of third section of main narrative:
On arrival in Ireland, William Hall is believed to have been involved in mining at Red Bay near Carrickfergus in Co. Antrim and to have died there in 1640. There were other Halls in Antrim at that time. However, they were no connection to William Hall and the subsequent Halls of Narrow Water. William’s son Francis was born in 1620 and married Mary Lyndon daughter of Judge Lyndon of Galway. We do not have any historical background on the Lyndon family of Galway, but given his status as a judge he would have been from a family of some influence. There is a Francis Hall recorded as holding land in 1663 in the Barony of Glenarm, which is where Red Bay is located. Francis subsequently moved to Glassdrumman in County Armagh before buying the townland of Narrow Water and eight other townlands in 1680. Francis and Mary had four children, Roger, Edward, Alexander, Trevor and Frideswid. The marriages of these children saw the beginning of a series of marriage alliances between the Halls and several influential and powerful families in Ireland. Roger married Christine Poyntz, daughter of Sir Toby Poyntz; Edward married Anne Rowley and moved to Strangford, establishing another branch of the Hall family who were also to marry into a number of prominent families. Frideswid married Colonel Chichester Fortescue of Drumiskin, the eldest son of Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Thomas Fortescue Governor of Carrickfergus Castle, continuing the link with the Chichester Family.
I have mentioned previously that one of my father’s best friends as a child was Roger Hall, of the Halls of Narrow Water Castle near Warrenpoint on the southern shore of County Down; and my aunt Ursula and Roger’s sister Moira Hall shared a house in London for many years. I renewed contact with the Halls last summer, for the first time in decades; here’s F with Roger’s son M, who now runs the castle and the estate, in the snooker room which carries many memories.
Growing up, I didn’t especially know Roger and Moira’s younger brother Bill (formally Sir William Hall), but we had a great lunch together with various other relatives last August, and I was subsequently sent his book about the Hall family, which is available by private circulation only.
It’s a breezy 250-page compilation of archival material and personal reflection. The Troubles and the wider political situation are inevitably part of the book. One of the worst atrocities of the whole period took place literally at the castle gate. But the focus is on the Hall family and on their role within the community, and I must admit that my personal interest was in the anecdotes about my own family in the book.
To be honest, for most of the the three and a half centuries that the Halls have been based in Narrow Water, they kept their heads down and were unremarkable County Down landlords. The picture becomes more interesting with Frank Hall (Bill, Moira and Roger’s great uncle), a UVF gunrunner and spy. To Frank’s disgust, his nephew married a Gibraltarian and their children were brought up as Catholics, the ultimate betrayal for a fervent Loyalist.
Bill, Moira and Roger’s father died when the boys were still quite young, which led to complications in the administration of the Narrow Water estate. The legal convolutions to prevent it falling into the hands of the Catholic church are apparently a case study in such things. Undaunted, all of the children of that generation (there were three more sisters, but I only knew Moira) had adventurous lives. I’m very glad that Bill took the time to compile it all into digestible form.