• Mon, 12:56: RT @PulpLibrarian: Time for another pulp countdown, and today it’s my top 10 public relations campaigns! #SundayMotivation https://t.co/5pX…
• Mon, 16:03: The Daughters of Earth, by Sarah Groenewegen https://t.co/IRwHMDcLXp
• Mon, 16:20: Awww. Lovely interview! Josh Wardle knew all of the tricks for how to make something go viral. For Wordle, he did all the opposite. https://t.co/eWp6RWiUld via @slate
• Mon, 18:59: RT @BSFA: The 2021 BSFA Award longlist has been announced! If you missed the noise over the weekend, check it out here! https://t.co/My…
• Mon, 20:11: RT @NicholasPegg: Even for a liar of Boris Johnson’s shamelessness, it’s going to be a bit tricky for him to try the standard procedure of…
• Mon, 20:48: This is near us – drop in if you are passing. https://t.co/b9q074oTG8
• Tue, 10:45: RT @rachlove31: @PickardJE He literally told a 7 year old she was right to cancel her birthday party then had his own https://t.co/J0TALHLk…

Second paragraph of third chapter:

At four the storm abated. The clouds cleared and she stared up at the inky black. Focused on the stars and labelled several of the constellations. She saw a shooting star and wished Judith and Maude would return safely from their journey south to Manchester.

In contrast to the Faction Paradox series, which I have given up on, I am thoroughly enjoying the Lethbridge-Stewart books published by Candy Box. Here we have the Brigadier and colleagues fighting snowstorms in deepest Scotland, along with a cell of feminist activists which has in fact been taken over by alien forces. There are layers of uncertainty and deception, and a major twist in the developing plotline of the overall series. I enjoyed it a lot, as I have enjoyed the others. You can get it here.

• Sun, 13:39: RT @BobRushy: 1981 was the peak of British sci-fi television https://t.co/JVfaBdJLHG
• Sun, 15:30: BSFA long lists, Best Novel and Best YA: Goodreads / LibraryThing stats https://t.co/rbuW6G9yyo
• Sun, 16:43: BSFA Best Art longlist https://t.co/cNqD0JxYjv
• Sun, 17:17: Carbone & Silicium, by Mathieu Bablet https://t.co/TjHyRlwh08
• Sun, 18:47: November 2014 books https://t.co/kuNizMnnI9
• Sun, 19:05: BSFA Non-fiction long list https://t.co/NvSYToUaB5
• Sun, 21:09: BSFA non-fiction long-list https://t.co/pHfunMR3xw
• Sun, 21:14: BSFA Short Fiction long-list https://t.co/pHfunMR3xw
• Sun, 22:28: The @bsfa long list is out! https://t.co/9wQY1sdgrM

I've definitely spent more time on this than I should, but here's how to get (most of) the 60 long-listed stories nominated for the BSFA Short Fiction Award for 2021. Yes, yes, Amazon, I know, but I get a very small bonus if you buy anything from those links. And I've changed to my own version of alphabetical order.

I've raised a couple of eligibility queries below which came up in my research. Apologies if the administartors already considered those questions. No blame also if they have not – I am very appreciative of the amount of effort that goes into administering awards like these…

My previous notes on this year's BSFA long lists:
Non-fiction
Art
Novel and YA

OK, I've probably spent way too long on this, but here's where to get the BSFA Non-Fiction award nominees. NB that I have changed the quirky alpapetisation of the BSFA annoucnement to my own quirky alphabetisation. NB also that I link to Amazon for convenience, and because of course I get a minuscule bounty if you buy anything from tose links. I have to say that one or two of these are beyond my budget.

My other notes on this year's BSFA long lists:
Short fiction
Art
Novel and YA

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.

With my new job, I started a fairly intense period of travel which was only really interrupted by the pandemic two years ago I went to London (twice actually):

…to a conference in Florence (actually my previous visit had been in 1991 not 1990):

…and to another in Montenegro.

We also went to a couple of museums in Belgium, and I did some cultural archaeology:

I read 26 books that month.

Non-fiction 1 (YTD 45)
TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 5: Tom Baker and the Williams Years, by Philip Sandifer

Fiction (non-sf) 4 (YTD 41)
Home, by Marilynne Robinson
Rules, by Cynthia Lord
Beach Music, by Pat Conroy
The Grass is Singing, by Doris May Lessing

SF (non-Who) 16 (YTD 110) (most of these were Clarke submissions)
Station Eleven, by Emily St John Mandel
Into the Fire, by Peter Liney
The Martian, by Andy Weir
Annihilation, by Jeff VanderMeer
Authority, by Jeff VanderMeer
Acceptance, by Jeff VanderMeer
War Dogs, by Greg Bear
Wolves, by Simon Ings
Memory of Water, by Emmi Itäranta
The Bone Clocks, by David Mitchell
The Peripheral, by William Gibson
Sphinx: The Second Coming, by James Thornton
Consumed, by David Cronenburg
Bird Box, by Josh Malerman
Shades of Milk and Honey, by Mary Robinette Kowal
The Heart of Valour, by Tanya Huff

Doctor Who 4 (YTD 56)
Empire of Death, by David Bishop
Lungbarrow, by Marc Platt
Time Zero, by Justin Richards
The Crawling Terror, by Mike Tucker

Comics 1 (YTD 18)
Sugar Skull, by Charles Burns

~8,500 pages (YTD ~90,100)
7/26 (YTD 75/270) by women (Robinson, Lord, Lessing, Mandel, Itäranta, Mandel, Huff)
0/26 (YTD 16/270) by PoC

The best of these was Station Eleven, by Emily St John Mandel, which went on to win the Arthur C. Clarke Award and is now a TV series; you can get it here. The second best was Emmi Itäranta's Memory of Water, also a Clarke shortlistee, which you can get here. I also very much enjoyed Sugar Skull, the conclusion of Charles Burns' graphic novel trilogy; you can get it here.

On the other hand, Sphinx: The Second Coming, by James Thornton, was pretty awful; you can get it here. And Into the Fire, by Peter Liney, was probably even worse, but I only read the first fifty pages; you can get it here.

Second frame of third chapter:

Do you think so?

French bande dessinée given to us for Christmas by a friend. Carbone ("Carbon") and Silicium ("Silicon") are two artificial intelligences constructed in the near future, given humanoid bodies, and observing and participating in the gradual decline of humanity and the end of the world in environmental catastrophe. It's much slower paced than, say, Barbarella, but thoughtful as well as grim. As my regular reader knows, I'm not a huge fan of stories with anthropomorphic robots; however this somehow worked for me. You can get it herehere, here, here, here, here and here.

More on the BSFA long lists: 28 works of art are listed in the Best Art category, but no links are given, so I'm supplying them here. Of the 28, 13 or 14 are book covers (in one case it isn't clear); 6 are art installations; 4 are standalone graphics; two are graphic stories, and two are short films. I have tracked down all but one of them (and am a bit surprised that I couldn't find that one in particular, for reasons noted below. Found it).

My other notes on this year's BSFA long lists:
Short fiction
Non-fiction
Novel and YA

My other notes on this year's BSFA long lists:
Short fiction
Non-fiction
Art

As usual, now that the BSFA long list is out, I've gone through it and counted how many people are recorded as reviewing each book on Goodreads, and owning each book on LibraryThing, and the respective ratings on each system. I have bolded the upper quartile (19 out of 74) in each column. They are ranked by the geometrical average of Goodreads reviewers and LibraryThing owners.

I'm going to call attention to a few points. First, 74 is really way too long for a long list to be useful with a deadline of a few weeks. (Previous years had 56, 46, 45, 48 and 34 books on the long list; TBH I think anything more than a couple of dozen is pushing it.). I'm aware that there is a very long tail. Quite likely (judging from what I've seen of Hugo nominations) two-thirds or more of those long-listed books have only one vote. Member participation is a great thing, but it would be good for the outputs to be a bit more useful.

Eight of the 74 books long-listed have no owners at all on LibraryThing, and seven of those have fewer than ten owners on Goodreads. Enthusiastic yet small fanbase? Or simple self-promotion?

There are no less than five books which are in the top 25% of all four columns. They are Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir; Cloud Cuckoo Land, by Anthony Doerr; Fugitive Telemetry, by Martha Wells; A Desolation Called Peace, by Arkady Martine; and Empire of the Vampire, by Jay Kristoff.

Last year, the shortlist consisted of the books that had been 1st, 2nd, 19th, 25th, 30th, 32nd, 40th, 48th, 54th and, er, 56th out of 56 on the equivalent table for the 2020 long list. The winner was the book that placed 2nd. In 2020, the eventual winner of the 2019 Best Novel award had placed 5th out of 4616th out of 4527th out of 4826th out of 34. So there is limited predictive value to these calculations. But I think they are a decent indicator of how well-known a particular book is among the general reading population.

In the past, I've found LibraryThing to reflect my own tastes better, and Goodreads to be more representative of the wider public. It's worth noting perhaps that Project Hail Mary, at the top of the table, has by far the highest ratio of Goodreads reviewers to LibraryThing owners of any of the books that actually has any LibraryThing owners at all – 192325 on Goodreads, 1896 on LibraryThing, over a hundred times more on the former than the latter. In the other direction, of the books with more than a handful of owners on each system, Blackthorn Winter by Liz Williams, the sequel to the book I voted for last year, has 70 on Goodreads to 24 on LibraryThing, a ratio of less than three to one.

Anyway, here's the full detail.

The BSFA is offering a YA award this year for the first time, and I've done the same exercise for the 21 books on the long list, bolding the top six in each column. Two books are in all four upper quartiles: Iron Widow, by Xiran Jay Zhao, and Redemptor, by Jordan Ifueko.

Two books are also on the Best Novel long-list. Two books have no LibraryThing owners at all; both have fewer than ten on Goodreads. Again, enthusiastic yet small fanbase? Or simple self-promotion?

• Sat, 15:56: Crash https://t.co/jjY8sL6Jw3
• Sat, 18:42: Saturday reading https://t.co/502OZEKDgY
• Sat, 19:04: RT @nicolacoughlan: Just walked into Times Square and I had no idea this was there I am both the giant yellow woman and the very small blue…
• Sat, 19:09: RT @nicolacoughlan: I googled it and she definitely is

Current
The Dark Forest, by Cixin Liu
Scream of the Shalka, by Paul Cornell
Breasts and Eggs, by Mieko Kawakami
Neuromancer, by William Gibson

Last books finished
The Wandering Scholars, by Helen Waddell
The Doctor – his Life and Times, by James Goss and Steve Tribe
The Three Body Problem, by Cixin Liu
Neither Unionist nor Nationalist: The 10th (Irish) Division in the Great War by Stephen Sandford
“Bloodchild”, by Octavia E. Butler
The God Complex, by Paul Driscoll
Why I Write, by George Orwell
“Press Enter ◼️”, by John Varley

Next books
Indigo, by Clemens J. Setz
High Fidelity, by Nick Hornby

• Fri, 12:10: RT @cher: Had So Much Fun With Meatloaf When We Did “Dead Ringer”. Am Very Sorry For His Family,Friends,& Fans. Am I imagining It, or Are…
• Fri, 12:13: Meat Loaf as the Spice Girls’ bus driver in Spice World. (And Richard E. Grant as their agent.) https://t.co/v8E5Ot6n3X
• Fri, 12:30: RT @BrusselsTimes: Flanders, where 75% of adults and 61% of the total population has received a booster dose, is currently the fastest vacc…
• Fri, 18:36: Peter Davison’s Book of Alien Monsters and Peter Davison’s Book of Alien Planets https://t.co/tyxt9HPRTr

Second paragraph of third story of Peter Davison's Book of Alien Monsters ("Beyond Lies the Wub", by Philip K. Dick):

'What's the matter?' he said. 'You're getting paid for all this.'

Second paragraph of third story of Peter Davison's Book of Alien Planets ("Exile", by Edmond Hamilton):

But the four of us were all professional writers of fantastic stories, and I suppose shop talk was inevitable. Yet, we’d kept off it through dinner and the drinks afterward. Madison had outlined his hunting trip with gusto, and then Brazell started a discussion of the Dodgers’ chances. And then I had to turn the conversation to fantasy.

Two anthologies brought out during Peter Davison's time at the helm of the TARDIS, both in fact edited by Richard Evans, who has a story in each under the name Christopher George. As can be inferred from the titles, the first is more about alien species and the second more about planets, though there is plenty of thematic overlap. Both have gorgeous covers by (uncredited but obviously) Chris Foss.

But they are actually very different anthologies. Peter Davison's Book of Alien Monsters (1982) includes nine stories, eight of which are original and were presumably commissioned for this book (the exception is "Beyond Lies the Wub", by Philip K. Dick). But most of the other eight are by major British authors – Robert Holdstock, Dave Langford, Michael Scott Rohan, Christopher Evans and one woman, Dyan Sheldon (her first SF publication, according to ISFDB, and last for several years as well; she is better known as a YA writer). They are decent enough, but only the Garry Kilworth story has been subsequently published elsewhere. You can get it here.

Peter Davison's Book of Alien Planets (1983), on the other hand, contains eight stories, only two of which are original – one by the editor, and one by Mary Gentle, who at that time was still a newcomer with just one novel, A Hawk in Silver, to her name; this seems to be her first published short fiction, but she had two more stories published in Asimov's that year (1983), and of course has never looked back. The others are all classics by the likes of Edmond Hamilton, Ray Bradbury and two by Arthur C. Clarke, "The Star" and "History Lesson". From Davison's foreword, it appears that these were very much chosen by him as personal favourites. Most of them have a grim twist at the end. It is the more solid of the two anthologies, but you are more likely to already have most of the stories in it. You can get it here.

These were the two shortest books on my shelves acquired in 2015. Next on that pile is Neil Gaiman's early book about Duran Duran.

• Thu, 12:56: RT @GuitarmoogMusic: Seriously, don’t put yourself at risk of #LongCovid That means avoiding Covid. I’m 44 and it has made me an invalid.…
• Thu, 15:44: RT @RichardBullick1: @nwbrux An interesting additional game is to guess the first five letter word of those who post their results, working…
• Thu, 16:05: The BBC’s children’s programming is a lifeline – losing it would be a tragedy https://t.co/uxWLqzvcYa “Those who assume the BBC’s kids’ output is not what it used to be are simply the people who don’t see it.”
• Thu, 17:11: RT @JasonGroves1: Official study into Boris Johnson’s now-abandoned dream of building a bridge to Northern Ireland cost taxpayers £900k acc…
• Thu, 17:36: RT @thenicolabryant: Here’s the official link. Xx https://t.co/puggRzK9qQ
• Thu, 17:53: For no particular reason: AdoreLints AdornIslet AdornStile AdornTiles AiledSnort AloneDirts AltosDiner AntedLoris AntedRoils AntisOlder ArsonTilde ArsonTiled AstirOlden DalesIntro DaterLions DaterLoins DealsIntro DealtIrons DealtRosin DeltaIrons DeltaRosin
• Thu, 18:11: Calvin, by F. Bruce Gordon https://t.co/I17K9nIPCi
• Fri, 09:13: Wordle 216 3/6 ⬜ ⬜⬜⬜ ⬜ ⬜⬜⬜ Tough, and a lucky guess.
• Fri, 09:16: Dammit. Awfully sad to hear this. https://t.co/az4SFThIBj
• Fri, 10:45: RT @fakehistoryhunt: Late 1920s daybed from George Gershwin’s New York apartment. With room for books, trinkets, books, glasses of absinth,…

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Then came the news of his father's impending death and Calvin rushed to Noyon. After a series of quarrels, Girard Cauvin had been excommunicated by the cathedral chapter, and he died on 26 May 1531 without the sacraments of the Church. John's brother Charles had to negotiate for a posthumous absolution in order that their father could be buried in consecrated ground. Calvin's reaction to the death was curiously muted. Writing to Duchemin, who was worried about the delay in his book's publication, he evinced little grief or emotion, all the more perplexing given an effusive expression of warmth towards his friend.¹ What accounts for this contrast? His relationship with his father was complex, though not cold. It is entirely possible that Calvin's emotional bonds lay more with the friends with whom he lived, studied and travelled than with a family he had hardly seen. We cannot dismiss the influence of the Stoic philosophy of Seneca with which he was engaged; the letter may speak to a stylized role of impassivity as a means of dealing with his loss. What is certainly misleading is any suggestion that he was unaffected by death and grief. The raw emotions that poured forth later at the loss of his infant son and wife, as well as at the death of close friends, counter any sense of a Calvin hewn from stone. It is more likely that in 1531 he was masking feelings and emotions which had not yet found articulation. Only after his conversion and in his biblical commentaries, in the stories of the Old and New Testaments, and particularly in the psalms, did he find an emotional vocabulary inaccessible to a young man of twenty-two.
¹ Ganoczy, Young Calvin, 71.

Anne got this as a souvenir of our Geneva trip in July 2020; it's a pretty dry and detailed biography of the major figure of Geneva's history, what he was trying to do and what he did. As usual (I keep saying this about theology books, but it's true) the ideological points mostly soared over my head, but I found a lot of interesting stuff. Calvin lived from 1509 to 1564, and from 1541 became the most important person in Geneva – he never held public office, but politics in the city became completely polarised between his supporters and his opponents, and usually his supporters won. (But not always.)

There's a lot here about the politics of Geneva as a city-state and Calvin as an individual with regard to France (where he was born and brought up), vs the Holy Roman Empire, vs Berne and the nascent Swiss Confederation (which Geneva did not fully align with until 1584, twenty years after Calvin's death). I'd have liked a bit more reflection on how Geneva became a theocracy in the first place – it had been an ideologically Protestant republic since 1536, before Calvin arrived – and also how it managed to survive as such, when other such experiments failed (for instance in Münster shortly before). But the books is about Calvin, not Geneva.

Calvin's wife died in 1649 after only nine years of marriage; he is not reported to have had other partners, but his brother Antoine was a major supporter throughout his career, and he had many other close friendships, some of which went sour when ideological differences emerged. He is remembered for his writing – and his output at the peak of his career was phenomenal – but his preaching was clearly an important factor as well; none of that survives, apart from a few second-hand notes taken by people in the congregation. Gordon is clearly a fan of his subject (most biographers are) and does his best to find in his favour, performing particularly intense gymnastics when it comes to the execution of Michael Servetus.

The most interesting part for me was the relationship between Calvin and England. He actually had something resembling a personal relationship with Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset and regent of England in the first couple of years of the reign of Edward VI (1547-1549). But Somerset was overthrown, and when Edward died in 1553 his Catholic sister Mary took over. Calvin had hopes of winning England back when Elizabeth, a Protestant, came to the throne in 1558. However, in what Gordon calls "perhaps the worst mistiming of the European Reformation", that same year saw the publication in Geneva of Knox's The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstruous Regiment of Women and Goodman's How superior Powers ought to be obeyed of their subjects, both of which opposed the legitimacy of women as rulers. Knox and Goodman had been thinking of Mary I of England and Mary of Guise in France, but Elizabeth took huge offence and returned Calvin's correspondence unopened, and although he still had some powerful sympathisers in England, he never again had the access to the top in London that he'd had ten years before. He was much more successful in Scotland, but there is surprisingly and disappointingly little about that here; he was of course less directly involved, Knox being the main figure.

Anyway, really a book for specialists only, but I got a bit more out of it than I had expected. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2020. Next on that pile is After Atlas, by Emma Newman.

• Wed, 13:48: I really NEVER thought that the day would come that I tweeted David Davis with approval. https://t.co/at90me5GUC
• Wed, 13:48: RT @lewis_goodall: PM says he’s not familiar with the famous quote DD has deployed, seems surprising given the PM is a biographer of Church…
• Wed, 18:01: Of the City of the Saved…, by Philip Purser-Hallard https://t.co/nfqz7zlb03
• Wed, 22:40: “Even at this moment hundreds of thousands of men in England are being trained with the bayonet, a weapon entirely useless except for opening tins.” George Orwell, 1940
• Thu, 07:54: A tough one today! Wordle 215 3/6 ⬜ ⬜ ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
• Thu, 10:45: Disney Removed Rey And Finn’s Romance From ‘The Force Awakens’ Novelization https://t.co/9z0mhT4lIa and it’s just part of a wider huge problem, as @leana_ahmed explains.

Second paragraph of third chapter:

He’d dragged himself awake that morning with great diffs, head thick and sluggy deepdown in his brow-ridge, and fully been unable to recall the evening he’d made of it with Sinovi and Hekate. He guessed waragi, ouzo and / or substances akin had been attendant. His timebeast head, as well as previous experience of Hek and Sino, suggested so.

I’m afraid this is the end of the line for my reading of Faction Paradox. The City of the Saved is a place where all humans who have ever lived or died are resurrected; but they then engage in the usual city hall politics of any small state, and I failed to really engage with any of the characters. So I have put it down after 100 pages, and won’t be going back. If you want to prove me wrong, you can get it here.

• Tue, 13:26: My distant cousin Elizabeth Helfman in very good company in a 1980s @EllenDatlow / @terriwindling anthology. https://t.co/S5vkAAowF6
• Tue, 15:00: Today’s Dutch word. A little tricky, but not as tricky as today’s English word! Woordle 213 3/6 ⬜ ⬜⬜ ⬜⬜ ⬜⬜
• Tue, 16:05: Study: Risk for sudden death during sex low https://t.co/u7ZUlgHkLa Well, that’s a relief.
• Tue, 18:38: October 2014 books https://t.co/fFactGY3B6
• Tue, 20:48: This may seem like a ridiculous story, but it happened to our car a few years back – the wee buggers gnawed most of the way through the brake cables. Fortunately the damage was spotted and repaired when we got the car serviced. https://t.co/GLVUtYGG6z
• Tue, 21:19: RT @Bigfinishrevie1: New novelisations https://t.co/qrTfX3r6Yb

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.

This was the month that I changed jobs, hosting a big farewell party in my favourite local to Schuman (the 1898, since you ask) and taking a week off in between leaving the one and joining the other. This was also the month that I bought my first iPhone, and the photos I post here are therefore going to drastically improve in quality. With the job change I got a professional head shot done; not cheap, but worth it.

I had two fantastic trips to Central Europe. I spent the last weekend of my old job in Budapest, where I caught up with a surprising number of old friends and had a lovely boat trip on the Danube. This is the very first photo I took with the new phone, showing the Hungarian parliament all lit up. I do hope that Budapest has better days to come.

I also paid my respects to my favourite statue in Budapest, which has since been dismantled in a shocking act of vandalism.

The weekend between jobs, I went to a student-run conference in Ljubljana, where I was the oldest participant apart from a retired Italian diplomat. Also great fun; one of the organisers insisted on a commemorative photograph with me.

I also took the chance to meet up with my friend L, who at one point led a Dutch political party but was then in Slovenia. Her daughter V, who much later would feature in two Laibach videos, also came along for the lunch but isn't in the photo.

I have a favourite monument in Ljubljana too, the monument to the Unknown French Soldier, "mort pour notre liberté". As far as I know, it is still there.

I had one more trip that month: I spent a night and a day in London in the first week of my new job, a journey that was to become routine until the pandemic intervened.

This was also the month that I first discovered the battlefield of Neerwinden and took B there. She still likes to go and light a candle in the chapel.

Much less happily, this was the month that my tax accountants, previously a Brussels boutique firm who had been taken over earlier that year by a multinational as part of its founder's retirement plan, badly screwed up my tax return. Fortunately I caught it before the damage (which would have been very costly) was done, but I found another boutique firm, this time based in Leuven, and switched my business to them.

I read 19 books that month.

Non-fiction 4 (YTD 44)
The Strangest Man, by Graham Farmelo
Some Girls: My Life in a Harem, by Jillian Lauren
Edward Gibbon and Empire,eds. Rosamond McKitterick and Roland Quinault
Angela's Ashes, by Frank McCourt

Fiction (non-sf) 1 (YTD 37)
The Professor, by Charlotte Brontë

SF (non-Who) 9 (YTD 94)
The Hive Construct, by Alexander Maskill
Broken Monsters, by Lauren Beukes
A Kill in the Morning, by Graeme Shimmin
Wool, by Hugh Howey
Up the Walls of the World, by James Tiptree
Queen of the Tearling, by Erika Johansen
Bête, by Adam Roberts
Astra, by Naomi Foyle
The Long Mars, by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter

Doctor Who 5 (YTD 52)
Divided Loyalties, by Gary Russell
The Room with No Doors, by Kate Orman
Camera Obscura, by Lloyd Rose
Silhouette, by Justin Richards
Lights Out, by Holly Black

~6,500 pages (YTD ~71,600)
10/19 (YTD 67/244) by women (Lauren, McKittrick, Brontë, Beukes, Tiptree, Johansen, Foyle, Orman, Rose, Black)
0/19 (YTD 16/244) by PoC

The best of these were Bête, by Adam Roberts, which you can get here, and The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius, by Graham Farmelo, which you can get here. Nothing too awful, I'm glad to say.

• Mon, 18:38: Using the method of two words with totally different letters for my first two guesses. Woordle 212 3/6 ⬜ ⬜⬜ ⬜⬜
• Mon, 18:57: Where Was the Room Where It Happened?, by BdotBarr [Bryan L. Barreras] https://t.co/lkF2drjTLx
• Tue, 09:00: RT @Dominic2306: Updated blog: PM was told about the invite, he knew it was a drinks party, he lied to Parliament https://t.co/J3jslbQV9A h…
• Tue, 10:45: How I Attained Persistent Self-Love, or, I Demand Deep Okayness For Everyone https://t.co/mfcifjsJ1D Long but very interesting.

Second paragraph of third section (on Battery Park):

Fort Amsterdam changed names several limes (based upon the ruling country), including being named Fort George during the rule of George I, George II and George III. During the American Revolution, George Washington's troops seized the fort from the British in 1775. Guns from the fort fired on the British during the Battle of Long Island. Alexander Hamilton (along with several of his fellow King's College students) stole cannons from Fort George on August 23, 1775. The British recaptured Fort George and ruled New York from the fort for the remainder of the Revolution. The colonists finally took back the fort on Evacuation Day on November 25, 1783 after the British left.

When I read Ron Chernow's biography, on which Hamilton: The Musical is based, I reflected that New York itself comes across as a major character in the story, and this little (70-page) guidebook efficiently links the relevant moments of the show to the real places associated with the events it portrays, concentrating largely on the city where Hamilton lived and died, with a few excursions to New Jersey and further afield. It's a little jewel of a book, with history and geography neatly packed into two pages for each of the New York and New Jersey places mentioned, and proposed walking tours depending on how much time you have and whether you're Team Hamilton or Team Burr. The Room Where it Happened was at 57 Maiden Lane, which no longer exists; but a number of other places do, including in particular the Grange, Hamilton's home for the last couple of years of his life, which has been moved twice but is open for visitors in non-pandemic times. Recommended for Hamilton fans, or people who want a slightly different walking tour of the history of New York. You can get it here.

• Sun, 12:56: These are the Hamangian thinkers. I met them yesterday. They were made about 5000 BC, so they are 7000 years old. Most prehistoric art relates to fertility or hunting. These two are just a man and a woman, sitting and thinking. They have had a lot to think about in 7000 years. https://t.co/9XfzXMydTj
• Sun, 13:50: RT @wwhyte: @nwbrux 2000 years younger, but in a similar vein, this mountain goat is just vibin and sees no reason to stop https://t.co/aVl…
• Sun, 16:40: Animal Dreams, by Barbara Kingsolver https://t.co/XQEyTVSrgM
• Sun, 17:11: RT @bufocalvin: https://t.co/180PCZw09n
• Sun, 18:54: RT @chicagoworldcon: (1/5) Nominations for the 2022 Hugo Awards, Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book, and Astounding Award for Best Ne…
• Sun, 19:08: 670 days of plague; and 19,989 days of me https://t.co/5asSlQfY1u
• Sun, 20:48: RT @CarlRMay: Perhaps these are the first theorists…. #medicalsociology #impsci https://t.co/AfJsjDVOMI
• Sun, 22:46: RT @mpk: @nwbrux “waiting for the lateral flow test result”
• Mon, 09:14: This is truly grim and worth three minutes of your time to watch, https://t.co/GD1YeAczbn
• Mon, 10:45: RT @IlvesOtto: Me when I’m trying to figure out what to have for dinner https://t.co/Hg5MEGuFWm

Second paragraph of third chapter:

They wanted to gather prickly-pear fruits for jelly. They knew a storm was coming and they went anyway, while he was in his workroom. He follows the narrow animal path between thickets of thorn scrub along the bank, shining his light along the edge of the rising water. Acacias lean into the river with their branches waving wildly in the current, like mothers reaching in for lost babies. The girls ignore his cautions because they are willful children who believe nothing can harm them. Hallie is bad but Cosima is worse, pretty and stubborn as a wild horse but without an animal's instincts for self-preservations-sand she's the older. She should have some sense.

I've generally enjoyed Kingsolver's work, and enjoyed this too: her second novel (after The Bean Trees), a story of Arizona and Nicaragua in the mid-1980s, where the main viewpoint character returns home to care for her fading father, the town doctor, and rekindles a youthful romance while also uncovering layer after layer of her own history and her family's history; at the same time her sister is in deadly danger in Central America and their home town is threatened by environmental disaster. This is the most overtly political of Kingsolver's novels that I have read, and I didn't feel that the politics merged quite as smoothly with the action; at the same time it's a vivid framing for what is going on for the protagonist and her father (who also gets some tight-third narrative). Generally good stuff, and you can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired last year, also my top unread book by a woman and my top unread non-genre fiction book. Next on all three of those piles is The Postmistress, by Sarah Blake.

• Sat, 12:56: How Did E.E. Smith Become “Doc”? https://t.co/alClz0hyar In case you were wondering.
• Sat, 14:48: Dutch King Willem-Alexander retires coach amid slavery row – BBC News https://t.co/tfFGTgqpE3 We saw a really interesting (and horrifying) display about this at the @HaagsHistorisch Museum in The Hague.
• Sat, 16:05: ‘Don’t Look Up’ Doesn’t Get the Climate Crisis https://t.co/niI0uhnfFG A detailed critique.
• Sat, 16:50: A Radical Romance, by Alison Light https://t.co/nu4tu1eNdP
• Sat, 17:58: Don’t Look Up https://t.co/ES95T4mpe3
• Sat, 18:31: Saturday reading https://t.co/E4xTStKXEn
• Sun, 00:28: RT @rantingkat: “He’s so worried he’s almost doing his job”

Current
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 Three Body Problem, by Cixin Liu

Last books finished
Twice a Stranger: How Mass Expulsion Forged Modern Greece and Turkey, by Bruce Clark
The Gift of Rain, by Tan Twan Eng
Embers, by Sándor Márai

Next books
“Bloodchild”, by Octavia E. Butler
Why I Write, by George Orwell

I said last week that I thought my next film might be The Aviator (2004); what with one thing and another, I did end up watching a film where Leonardo DiCaprio and Cate Blanchett are romantically entangled, but it wasn’t The Aviator.

Don’t Look Up is an entirely conscious and overt satire on humanity’s, and especially America’s, failure to deal with climate change (and perhaps COVID to an extent). There is a good piece here by Eric Lewitz detailing how the film gets it wrong, and perhaps hits the wrong targets, and another (if you can get through the New York Times paywall) by Ross Douthat explaining how he would have written it better. Those critiques are fair on the detail, but the details that are important here aren’t those of the impending catastrophe itself; the crucial question asked is whether we would be able to respond to a measurable, imminent, world-ending threat, and the answer in the movie is no. It’s in the tradition of many end-of-the-world satires and warnings, thinking of On the Beach and The Fire Raisers, in particular.

The details that do matter are the performances and staging. It’s over the top, and goes on a bit too long, but wow, Meryl Streep is pretty impressive at 72 as the genderflipped President Trump, and I warmed much more to DiCaprio here than I did in Titanic. It’s good to see Jennifer Lawrence and Cate Blanchett doing something a bit different. Mark Rylance is suitably sinister and crazy. Oh, and there’s Timothée Chalamet, escaped from Dune.

Getting the details right is not the issue. The problem is the big picture. Natural (and man-made) catastrophes are with us always, as this dramatic footage of last night’s volcanic eruption in the Pacific reminds us.

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Raphael was ‘Raph’ when I met him. He was everybody’s property; he could be phoned or called on at his home at any time (dropping in to use his lavatory was not unheard of). Comrades from across the world would turn up at short notice, expecting a bed or a floor, a meal and a conversation that went on half the night. ‘Another twelve Italian Marxists for breakfast!’ I would joke, or half joke – he had once entertained such a group and wowed them with sausage, bacon and fried eggs. God’s motley came and went: elderly Party members and fellow travellers; those who belonged to – the distinctions had to be mastered – the ‘old’ New Left and ‘new’ New Left from the late 1950s and the 1970s respectively; anarchists, Trotskyites, Eurocommunists, militants and contrarians; all manner of trade unionists, railway men and miners, and Labour politicians, many of whom were or had been students of Ruskin; local East End villains, whose life stories Raphael was busily recording; sophisticated French scholars of memory bearing silk scarves from Paris; American and Australian leftists; postmodernists and eager postgraduates from all over; publishers, writers, journalists, conservationists, museum workers, archivists, teachers, the History Workshop editorial collective and old Workshop hands; dear friends, old lovers, extended family and friends of family – many with lives and histories interwined [sic].

This was the first book I finished in 2022, and it's a great start to the year. I had previously hugely enjoyed Light's Common People, the history of her own immediate ancestors; here she goes even more personal, into her marriage to fellow historian Raphael Samuel, from their first meeting in 1986 to his death in 1996. He was twenty years older, and Jewish; she had studied English at Churchill College, Cambridge (fellow Cambridge alumni will wince in sympathy) and gradually drifted into history and commentary, which was what brought them together. The first half or so, about the development of their relationships with each other and with their very different families, is lovely. But the strength is in the second half. I think even for someone less interested in history as a discipline than me, this would still be a tremendous memoir of love and loss; in particular, when she gets to Samuel's illness and death, she is sparing with the details but eloquent in her sparseness. She goes into much more detail on the funeral arrangements, but of course that's something that a surviving partner can control and direct unilaterally, unlike most aspects of a relationship, which have to be negotiated. A great book, strongly recommended. You can get it here.

• Fri, 12:56: RT @EURACTIV: The nine years spanning 2013-2021 all rank among the 10 hottest on record, according to an annual report a US agency released…
• Fri, 14:02: Hooray! President Ahtisaari out of hospital after his second bout with coronavirus. https://t.co/HBNvhj1Pif
• Fri, 16:05: Wordle letters https://t.co/z8hOeo773E seaoriltnducypmhgbkfwvzxjq
• Fri, 18:14: Once & Future vol. 1: The King Is Undead and vol. 2: Old English, by Kieron Gillen et al https://t.co/EWHc462unH
• Fri, 21:10: RT @MSmithsonPB: This is doing the rounds https://t.co/cM592esXJc
• Sat, 09:40: Odd, by John Wyndham https://t.co/yLJkaKPhTV
• Sat, 10:45: How interesting. https://t.co/yN57f1bkPx