• Thu, 18:17: RT @Mij_Europe: The speed at which consensus has switched on @BorisJohnson – from Teflon/defies gravity to inevitability of his departure i…
• Thu, 18:42: The second paragraph of the third chapter: 2021 so far https://t.co/Gx3F2gIUIk
• Fri, 07:41: Christchurch 1993 was the only GB election I ever campaigned in, helping the Lib Dems get what is still (just!) the biggest Tory-to-Lib swing ever. Ironically I am now quite friendly with Rob Hayward, the losing Tory in that election! https://t.co/LDN5tywggK
• Fri, 08:12: RT @pmdfoster: As a Shropshire lad, born and bred, the #NorthShropshire result is completely amazing. Really didn’t believe that was possib…

Since 2014, more or less, I've been including the second paragraph of the third chapter (C3P2's, for short) of books that I have read as part of my reviews here (If there are no chapters, I look for the second paragraph of the third sub-section within the text; if there are no sub-sections, as is sometimes the case for shorter pieces, I just take the third paragraph from the beginning.) I was originally inspired by H, and have carried on; it feels like a differently valid way of engaging with the literature that I am reading. Now that we are eleven and a half months through 2021, I thought I'd look back over the year so far and see which of the C3P2 extracts is most interesting.

Comics

Not all graphic novels or bandes dessinées are divided into chapters, but most of them are, and a lot of those that I read are in fact albums combining half a dozen monthly issues. So it's not too difficult to identify the C3P2 in most cases, and one can make adjustments of course; if there are no internal sub-sections, take the second frame of page 3, or whatever is most convenient. My top three for the year so far are:

3) Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts, art by Hugo Martínez, written by Rebecca Hall

As will be discussed later on, non-fiction in general does better than fiction in terms of the C3P2. This isn't necessarily the case in comic form, but I love this streetscape by Hugo Martínez of early 18th-century New York, with the hidden legacy of slavery. You can get it here.

2) Coraline, art by Terry Dodson, written by Denis-Pierre Filippi (biggest frame of page 3)

The plot of this two-album series made no sense at all, but the art is gorgeous and this is a nice reaction frame from the second volume. You can get it here.

1) Old Friends, art by Roberta Ingranata, written by Jody Houser

In general fiction books don't provide good C3P2's, and Doctor Who books are no exception, but again comics are different and I love this character moment between the Thirteenth Doctor and the enigmatic Time Lord known as the Corsair. You can get it here.

Special mention 1: Brian Aldiss's chair

After the great writer Brian Aldiss died in 2017, his daughter Wendy photographed everything in his house as away of dealing with her own grief, and then published them. The third photograph in My Father's Things, very evocatively, is Brian Aldiss's favourite chair, now forever empty.

You can get the book here.

Fiction

I'm lumping all fiction other than comics together, because although this constitutes by far the largest share of my reading, the C3P2's tend not to be as memorable. Though I am just waiting to read a book where we read something like:

Chapter 3

"What are you doing, Jake?" Isabelle asked.
"Oh, I'm trying to come up with a good second paragraph for the third chapter of my book," Jake replied. "There's this guy who has nothing better to do than compare that sort of thing."

The C3P2 test is not passed well by many fiction books. By chapter 3, the plot is already getting under way, and most writers will have established some momentum. Often paragraphs reflect dialogue between characters, or inner musings, and become correspondingly more difficult to separate from the surrounding text. To pick on the worst example of the year so far, in Angel of Mercy, by Julianne Todd, Claire Bartlett and Iain McLaughlin, a spinoff novel featuring the minor Doctor Who character Erimem, the second paragraph of the third chapter is:

Petrol.

You can get it here.

More positively, my top five fictional C3P2's for the year so far are:

5) 4.50 from Paddington, by Agatha Christie:

She looked defiantly at Miss Marple and Miss Marple looked back at her.

It's short but it's effective, like the scene between the Doctor and the Corsair. You can get it here.

4) Second paragraph of "A Bit of our Harlem", the third story from A Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick, by Zora Neale Hurston:

The boy approached the table where the girl sat with the air of a homeless dog who hopes that he has found a friend.

A simple but vivid simile. You can get the book here.

3) Cloud on Silver aka Sweeny's Island, by John Christopher:

Smells came over the still waters of the harbour, unidentifiable, disturbing in a way that she was not sure if she liked or disliked. And distant cries, in a language she did not know. A large catamaran, with twin red sails, was cutting across the bows of a motor-launch which was chugging out on one revved-down engine. Across the harbour the town glittered white under blue skies lightly strewn with cirrus. She thought suddenly of London, and so of John. He would be leaving the office about this time, joining the crowd that surged towards Holborn Viaduct station. Or perhaps calling in at the Printer's Devil for a drink. She smiled; that was, on the whole, more likely. Standing with one elbow on the bar, a pint of light ale in front of him, talking boisterously, laughing from time to time that deep reverberating laugh which, she so well remembered, drew people's attention to him from the furthest corner of the most crowded bar. He would not think of her until later — in the compartment crowded with strangers, walking alone along the road from the station to the neat detached house with the garden he was so proud of, and the three boys he was so proud of, and the wife with whom he spent his evenings and week-ends bickering.

I didn't much care for the book as a whole (you can get it here), but I think this is an effective bit of characterisation and scene-setting.

2) Little Free Library, by Naomi Kritzer:

She could see the Little Free Library from her living room window, and watched the first day as some of the neighborhood kids stopped to peer in. When she checked that afternoon, she noticed that Ender’s Game, Dragonsinger, and Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine had all been taken. The next day, someone had left a copy of The Da Vinci Code, which made her grimace, but hey, there were people who adored that book, so why not. She put in her extra copy of Fellowship of the Ring along with two Terry Pratchett books.

I loved this story anyway, and this is a nice bit of scene-setting for the concept that books really are gateways to other worlds. You can get it here.

1) The Silence of the Lambs, by Thomas Harris:

Dr. Hannibal Lecter himself reclined on his bunk, perusing the Italian edition of Vogue. He held the loose pages in his right hand and put them beside him one by one with his left. Dr. Lecter has six fingers on his left hand.

Vivid, economical and memorable. You can get the book here.

Special mention 2: Welcome to Night Vale Scripts

It's very difficult to really identify a C3P2 in a script for a play or film. The exception is Welcome to Night Vale, which is (mostly) a monologue by a single narrator in a very weird town. I love the second paragraphs from both episode 3, Station Management, and episode 28, Summer Reading Program. The second paragraph of episode 3, Station Management, is:

The Night Vale Business Association is proud to announce the new Night Vale Stadium, next to the Night Vale Harbor and Waterfront Recreation Area. The stadium will be able to seat fifty thousand, but will be closed all nights of the year except November 10, for the annual Parade of the Mysterious Hooded Figures, in which all of our favorite ominous hooded figures — the one that lurks under the slide in the Night Vale Elementary playground, the ones that meet regularly in The Dog Park, and the one that will occasionally openly steal babies, and for a reason no one can understand, we all stand by and let him do it — all of them will be parading proudly through Night Vale Stadium. I tell you, with these new facilities, it promises to be quite a spectacle. And then it promises to be a vast, dark, and echoey space for the other meaningless 364 days of the year.

You can get it here, in Mostly Void, Partially Stars, by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor.

The second paragraph of Episode 28, Summer Reading Program, is:

Nevertheless, in a show of civic dedication, or mindless bloodlust – and they really are so similar – Night Vale's librarians have banded together in defiance of authority to reinstate Summer Reading. Colorful posters with appealing statements like, "Get Into A Good Book This Summer!" and "We Are Going To Force You Into A Good Book This Summer!" and "You Are Going To Get Inside This Book, And We Are Going To Close It On You And There Is Nothing You Can Do About It!" have appeared overnight around the library entrance and in local shops and businesses, all sporting the clever tagline, "Catch the flesh-eating reading bacteria!" The Sheriff's Secret Police have responded by interrogating the proprietors of businesses where the posters have appeared, and by removing and confiscating the posters themselves. Although, to be honest, listeners, the graphic design work is really cute. I mean, have you seen them? The little flesh-eating germ, with his sun hat and library book, using a screaming semi-skeletal human victim as a beach chair? Ah! Adorable.

It's collected in Great Glowing Coils of the Universe, by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor, which you can get here.

Non-fiction

Non-fiction, whether scholarly monographs or anguished autobiography, tends to produce much the best C3P2's. There are so many to choose from; but these are my four favourites of 2021 so far, three of them autobiographical, which I think is perhaps telling.

4) Statement and Correspondence Consequent on the Ill-Treatment of Lady de la Beche by Colonel Henry Wyndham, edited by Anne Auriol (second paragraph of the third letter of the collected correspondence, from Lady de la Beche to her legal adviser):

If General Wyndham would only be good enough to state what I have to hope from him, I should at once be enabled to arrange my plans for the ill-fated and unhappy future! Under existing circumstances, and remembering my unfortunate connexion of near sixteen years with him, which has entailed so much misery upon me and my poor mother and brother, and more especially at my time of life, I consider I am in every way entitled to a definitive settlement, whether it is yielded as a matter of right, or merely that which his own kindness of heart and feelings of honour may dictate to him to do.

An extraordinary cri du cœur from my distant relative Letitia de la Beche, who separated from her geologist husband after a brief marriage and then took up with a war hero, who after sixteen years dumped her for her cousin. Spectacularly, the online text has Letitia's own hand-written annotations. Even without that, this is a great paragraph.

3) The Republic: The Fight for Irish Independence 1918-1923, by Charles Townshend:

Martial law was restricted to the south-west to keep Dublin open for those, in Sturgis's jokey phrase, 'as wants to negotiate'. A few on both sides seem to have wanted to. They found a new intermediary in Patrick Joseph Clune, Archbishop of Perth, a man with some experience of the war — he had been visiting his native Clare at the time of the Rineen ambush and the reprisals that followed it, and his nephew had died in Dublin Castle along with McKee and Clancy on Bloody Sunday. Shortly after the Kilmichael ambush he was enlisted by Joe Devlin as a go-between, and spent most of December moving between Dublin and London, talking to Griffith in prison, and twice to the Prime Minister, who certified him as 'thoroughly loyal'.¹ He seems to have drafted agreed truce terms that included immunity for Collins and Mulcahy.
¹ Lloyd George to Greenwood, 2 Dec. 1920. HLRO F/19/1/28.

One of those books where every paragraph tells its own story, but is also part of the bigger story, and makes you want to read more about how Ireland became independent. You can get it here. (I haven't yet blogged this one, but I finished it at the weekend.)

2) A Woman in Berlin:

Halsbrecherischer Treppenabstieg. Ich blieb einmal mit dem Absatz an einer Stufenkante hängen. Todesschreck, konnte mich eben noch am Geländer fangen. Weiter, mit weichen Knien. Ich suchte und tastete lange und herzklopfend in dem stockfinsteren Gang herum, bis ich die Hebel der Kellertür fand.

A breakneck rush down the stairs. I was scared to death when my heel got caught on the edge of a step. I barely managed to grab hold of the railing in time. My knees went weak, but I went on, heart pounding, slowly groping my way through the pitch-dark passage. Finally I found the lever to the basement door.

This is an incredible narrative of life in Berlin as the Third Reich disintegrated, which you can get here. The English translation above doesn't quite get the staccato urgency of the German original – "Halsbrecherischer Treppenabstieg"; "Todesschreck"; "Weiter, mit weichen Knien" (and this is before the Russians have even arrived). It's an intense and evocative short piece which is true to the spirit of the book as a whole.

1) A Buzz in the Meadow, by Dave Goulson:

From a very young age I kept newts and common toads in tanks in my bedroom, and this went atypically well. The toads in particular made great pets, seemingly taking to captivity and providing great entertainment by hoovering up mealworms with their extending, sticky tongues. When I grew bored of them, or ran out of mealworms from the supply that I bred in a box under my bed, I could simply release the toads back into the garden. However, I longed to have some more exotic amphibians, and eventually I badgered my parents into buying me a pair of North American leopard frogs for Christmas: attractive, bright-green frogs with (as you might guess from the name) a profusion of black spots. I filled one of my glass fish tanks with piles of stones, peat, some plants and a small pond, to make an attractive home for them. It looked great and the frogs settled in well, but after just a few weeks their energetic hopping about caused one of the piles of stones to topple; I came home from school one day to find them both squashed.

This is a little short story of its own, my top C3P2 for the year (unless I read something better in the next couple of weeks). Poor frogs! You can get it here.

So I'm going to keep this up; it makes me happy, and does no harm.

• Wed, 12:56: Kasteel van Horst blijft ook tijdens restauratie publiekstrekker: “Nog meer parel van Hageland worden” https://t.co/rLN6cSTI6Y Brief glimpse of the Jean-Christian Hansch ceilings at 0:32-0:38.
• Wed, 15:55: RT @File_770: The World in�Worldcon https://t.co/7PiHswcwoO
• Wed, 18:36: A Desolation Called Peace, by Arkady Martine https://t.co/UHJQ6jhy9f
• Thu, 06:51: I am changing my vote, because I am very unhappy at the behaviour I have seen from @WinnipegIn23 in the last day or so; on top of other issues, claiming falsely that I asked them to contact site selection to make sure than my ballot had arrived. I made no such request. https://t.co/vlnm7KfD1g
• Thu, 09:24: Tremendously grateful to whoever it was that sent half a dozen small jars of luxury chutneys to me at my office. There was no accompanying note, so please let me know if it was you! https://t.co/LhgiBJ44Mf
• Thu, 10:45: Europe remembers its forgotten war https://t.co/ubaOZUZPYK From the front line in Ukraine.
• Thu, 10:59: RT @PickardJE: truly @MichaelLCrick is the king of by-election interview slam dunks https://t.co/DiWPfh9B5J

Second paragraph of third chapter:

(Three months ago, even if she'd somehow reached this exalted position in the Ministry, complete with her own tiny office with a tiny window only one floor down from the Minister herself, Three Seagrass would have been asleep in her house, and missed the message entirely. There: she'd justified clinical-grade insomnia as a meritorious action, one which would enable her to deal with a problem before anyone else awoke; that was half her work done for the day, surely.)

Sequel to last year's Hugo winner A Memory Called Empire, which I greatly enjoyed, but did not write up at the time due to being involved with Hugo administration myself. I really enjoyed this one too – horribly lethal alien incursions, grand sweeping palace politics, and a smart kid and a fish-out-of-water diplomat who separately try to save the day. Martine's gimmick of giving her main culture's characters names that start with numbers is surprisingly effective at creating the sense of a totally different civilisation. It's quite a long book – 480 pages plus a glossary and pronunciation guide – but it did not drag. Kindly sent to me by work colleagues when I was down with COVID, to accelerate my recovery. It certainly didn't do any harm. You can get it here.

• Tue, 12:56: Weak defenses made cyberattack on Irish hospitals easy, experts find https://t.co/j9PcI0dJkp A cautionary tale.
• Tue, 14:51: RT @ChairmanYaffle: “HSE’s failure to have any official in charge of cybersecurity” and to not even have properly deployed or updated anti-…
• Tue, 18:36: Le dernier Atlas, tome 3, by Fabien Vehlmann, Gwen De Bonneval, Herv� Tanquerelle and Fred Blanchard https://t.co/yq5QrNFQlt
• Tue, 19:30: RT @EURACTIV: The new #Bulgarian government will propose a “very fast” new process that should help Sofia lift its veto and unlock the star…
• Wed, 10:45: RT @BrusselsTimes: The book’s print is so small it is said to have seriously damaged the eyesight of both its compositor and corrector. htt…
• Wed, 11:59: RT @Ryanair: The UK Covid Alert Level has been increased from Level 3 to Level 4 https://t.co/7TTpwIDz98

Second frame of third chapter:

Captain Cartier: No, I haven’t myself… but scientists have detected
a significant underground mass, exactly where you predicted, yes.

Third and final volume of the award-winning bande dessinée series, of which I very much enjoyed volume 1 and volume 2. We start a year on from previous events, with the reappearance of the mysterious Umo, an enigmatic huge extraterrestrial entity, after it was banished at the end of the last volume, and its incursion into mainland France, throwing the government of President Fillon into disarray and bringing about new and nasty alliances between the forces of state coercion and the underworld, while our protagonist Tayeb mobilises the George Sand, a giant killer robot, to try and save the day. To be honest, I was not convinced that Vehlmann and De Bonneval successfully kept all the plates spinning in their convoluted plot, though they ask a lot of interesting questions. But the art by Tanquerelle and Blanchard is very good, and the first volume of the trilogy set a very high bar which the other two did not quite reach.

You can get the whole third volume in French here.

• Mon, 18:14: Shanghai Sparrow, by Gaie Sebold https://t.co/nxF1S2Hnft
• Mon, 18:56: Beautiful World, Where Are You, by Sally Rooney https://t.co/74IOCsX6Sh

Second paragraph of third chapter:

At one o’clock she told her colleagues she was going to lunch, and they smiled and waved at her from behind their monitors. Pulling on a jacket, she walked to a café near the office and sat at a table by the window, holding a sandwich in one hand and a copy of The Karamazov Brothers in the other. At twenty to two, she looked up to observe a tall, fair-haired man entering the café. He was wearing a suit and tie, with a plastic lanyard around his neck, and was speaking into his phone. Yeah, he said, I was told Tuesday, but I’ll call back and check that for you. When he saw the woman seated by the window, his face changed, and he quickly lifted his free hand, mouthing the word Hey. Into the phone, he continued, I don’t think you were copied on that, no. Looking at the woman, he pointed to the phone impatiently and made a talking gesture with his hand. She smiled, toying with the corner of a page in her book. Right, right, the man said. Listen, I’m actually out of the office now, but I’ll do that when I get back in. Yeah. Good, good, good to talk to you.

Having hugely enjoyed both Rooney's novel Normal People and the TV series, I had very high hopes for her new much-hyped novel. I am sorry to say that those hopes were not fulfilled. It is a story of two young women friends and the two men they are in love with; none of them is particularly interesting, nobody does anything particularly interesting and they have no particular hurdles to surmount other than admitting their true feelings for each other. The detached third-person narrative voice also really annoyed me. You can get it here.

This was my top unread non-genre fiction book, and also my top unread book by a woman. Next on both lists is Animal Dreams, by Barbara Kingsolver.

Second paragraph of third chapter:

The fox, his tail quivering and his eyes brilliant, tilted his head at an angle precisely calculated to charm.

Steampunk is not always my thing, but this is a good mashup of an alternate technological Victorian England, with also uneasy coexistence with the fey and the Otherworld, while also engaged in colonial oppression in China, all told from the point of view of an orphan girl who goes to spy school. Fun stuff. You can get it here.

This was the SF book that had lingered longest on my unread shelf. Next on that pile is Jani and the Greater Game, by Eric Brown.

• Sun, 16:55: April 2014 books https://t.co/f7MSQ8ag0p
• Sun, 17:59: Boundary Commission 2021 input https://t.co/krwayktmO9
• Sun, 21:49: RT @andrewteale: @nwbrux Oswestry 1918-1983 has exactly the same boundaries as the current N Shropshire seat, but Oswestry 1885-1918 was a…
• Mon, 10:45: ‘They were a bit abrasive’: how kids’ TV Clangers secretly swore https://t.co/xZIzOq4Mv9 Glorious.

My first comment on the current Boundary Commission proposals for Northern Ireland (click to embiggen):

My more detailed input to the Boundary Commission:

Dear Commissioners,

1. I am a long-term observer of your work, a Visiting Professor at the Facuty of Social Science in Ulster University, and have been part of the BBC’s telecast commentary team for every Northern Ireland election since 2010.

2. Nonetheless, I am writing to you purely in a personal and private capacity, not on behalf of either Ulster University or the BBC, or of any other body. I have absolutely no objection to my name being associated with my remarks below.

3. Thank you for publishing your recommendations for the current review. It is a thorough and well-explained piece of work and I have in fact only one minor amendment to propose.

4. I will however present some arguments in support of some of your proposals, as I know that this will make a difference in the deliberative process.

5. Your work has been made considerably easier than was the case in the previous aborted reviews by the fact that Northern Ireland will retain its current number of 18 parliamentary seats. This has meant that for a number of constituencies, alignment with the required quota has been achieved by adjusting the parliamentary boundary to coincide with the new ward boundaries, and/or by transferring a ward or two between neighbouring constituencies. The results are not always elegant but they are sufficient.

Rule 7

6. I have consistently argued that the Commission should not be shy about invoking Rule 7. The Court of Appeal unfortunately quashed the most recent review partly because of the use of Rule 7.

7. I would observe that the Court’s judgement calls attention particularly to the Commission’s obligation to explain its reasoning in relying on Rule 7 in detail, and I think that even a sympathetic observer (such as myself) would have to concede that the Commission did not explain its adoption of Rule 7 at length in the last review process.

8. The lesson for me is that the Commission should still be ready to use Rule 7, but if it does so, it must also be ready to explain why at some length, even to the extent of publishing potential alternative arrangements that do not use Rule 7 and analysing why they do not satisfy the other Rules in the way that a Rule 7 map would.

9. Fortunately this time around, this is a largely academic argument, as it seems that satisfactory maps can in fact be generated without resort to Rule 7. But the issue will not go away, especially if, as is likely, Northern Ireland’s number of seats changes for the next review.

Belfast

10. Although the additions to South Belfast, expanding it to South Belfast and Mid Down, look rather drastic on the map, in fact the areas in question are closely linked to Belfast and it makes sense to include them in the constituency.

11. The same argument cannot really be made for Garnerville and North Down. Garnerville looks to East Belfast, not Holywood let alone Bangor. But I accept that moving it to North Down minimises the need for change elsewhere.

Downpatrick / Strangford and Quoile

12. I support the proposed transfer of the Downpatrick wards to Strangford, and the proposed renaming of the constituency to Strangford and Quoile. Both the Strangford and Quoile and South Down constituencies will be more compact. It can be argued that Downpatrick does not particularly look to Newtownards or Comber, but it does not particularly look to Warrenpoint either.

Dungannon / Mid Ulster; North Armagh / Fermanagh and South Tyrone

13. More reluctantly, I support the proposed transfer of the Dungannon wards to Mid Ulster. The result is to leave an awkward salient of Fermanagh and South Tyrone wards extending well into the north of County Armagh. But disruption elsewhere in the West is thereby minimised.

14. In particular, it is must be admitted that Dungannon is no more closely linked to Enniskillen than to Cookstown. It is a 15-minute drive from the Thomas Street roundabout to Chapel Road in Cookstown; to get to Enniskillen takes almost an hour, if traffic and roads are good. For their part, travellers heading east from Fermanagh have been able to avoid Dungannon since the M1 was built in 1967 (and most have done so).

The Loughries / Carrowdore border between North Down and Strangford and Quoile

15. I agree with and support the principle of the Commission’s decision to keep the existing north-south boundary between North Down and Strangford / Strangford and Quoile, between Six Road Ends and Ballyblack. The area to the east of this line has been in the North Down constituency since it was created; the population to the west lives mainly around Newtownards. The local government re-warding process unfortunately and unrealistically put these two different populations together.

16. However, it is quite important in general to minimise the departures of the parliamentary boundaries from the local government ward boundaries. There is no reason not to align the next section of the boundary, essentially transferring the townland of Ballybuttle from Strangford / Strangford and Quoile to North Down. The number of voters cannot be very many.

17. On the other hand, it is sensible to keep the easternmost part of the boundary where it is; the boundary between the Loughries and Carrowdore wards runs right through the middle of Millisle, and it will be disruptive to inhabitants to put them in different constituencies.

Conclusion

18. I live and work in Belgium, so unfortunately it is very unlikely that I will be able to participate in any public hearings in this review.

19. Nonetheless, I wish the Commission well in their work, and hope that they will take seriously the arguments in favour of the minor amendment I suggest to their proposals. I look forward also to reading other submissions.

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.

My conversations with my current employer continued in April 2014, but then petered out for a few months. I did have work trips to both Cyprus and Barcelona; much more enjoyably I also went to Eastercon, Satellite IV in Glasgow, where I had a great time despite forgetting to bring any actual money (thanks, once again, to the friends who helped me out with some instant liquidity) and managed (to some later confected controversy) the transmission of the Hugo final ballot to most of the world's media, and started a fight with Vox Day. I then celebrated my birthday with a visit to a convention in Antwerp, where F met the true Voice of Mario.

Colin Baker was also there.

I read twenty books that month. Unlike in some previous cases, I don't appear to have uploaded covers at the time.

Non-fiction 6 (YTD 19)
Adventures with the Wife in Space, by Neil Perryman
Anglicising the Government of Ireland, by Jon Crawford
Understanding the Lord of the Rings, eds. Rose A. Zimbardo & Neil D. Isaacs
Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell
Other People's Countries, by Patrick McGuinness
Need for Certainty, by Robert Towler

Fiction (non-sf) 4 (YTD 12)
Buddenbrooks, by Thomas Mann
Revelation, by C. J. Sansom
The Good Husband of Zebra Drive, by Alexander McCall Smith
Cheese, by Willem Elsschot

SF (non-Who) 5 (YTD 27)
Any Given Doomsday, by Lori Handeland
Inverted World, by Christopher Priest
Deathless, by Cat Valente
The Ocean At The End Of The Lane, by Neil Gaiman
Assassin's Quest, by Robin Hobb

Doctor Who 4 (YTD 26)
Amorality Tale, by David Bishop
Return of the Living Dad, by Kate Orman
Hope, by Mark Clapham
A Handful of Stardust, by Jake Arnott

Comics 1 (YTD 3)
Aldébaran #5: La Créature, by Leo

~6,300 pages (YTD ~26,300)
5/20 (YTD 24/85) by women (Zimbardo, Handeland, Valente, Hobb, Orman)
0/20 (YTD 2/85) by PoC

The best of these was Orwell's classic Homage to Catalonia, which you can get hereThe Ocean at the End of the Lane, which you can get here, and Other People's Countries by Patrick McGuinness, which you can get here. Very underwhelmed by Lori Handeland's urban fantasy, Any Given Doomsday, which you can get hereAmorality Tale, which you can get here.

• Sat, 14:48: The Treaty of Westphalia https://t.co/IQfqSQ3Gzs What shall we do about Luxembourg?
• Sat, 15:50: The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers https://t.co/pI6bzBMxiL
• Sat, 17:01: The stucco ceilings of Jan-Christian Hansch, part 3: the ones I’ll never see https://t.co/lNbPSH9qBs
• Sat, 18:05: RT @EdMcMillanScott: @MatthewParris3 “Someone decent needs to stand up and rid us of @BorisJohnson but Tories are championing an empty vess…
• Sun, 00:02: Am puzzled by commentary that North Shropshire has been Tory since the Great Reform Act. Mostly, sure; entirely, no. When the seat was first created in 1832, Rowland Hill (he of the stamps) had to share it with a Whig, John Cotes of Woodcote, who however stood down in 1835. 1/
• Sun, 09:23: RT @Astrozombies76: Happy birthday to Sarah Sutton who played Nyssa in Doctor Who alongside the 4th and 5th Doctors. She’s 60 today. ⭐ #d…
• Sun, 10:45: RT @nicktolhurst: The whole fishing conflict has essentially been for nothing as it has only achieved poisoning relations while UK eventual…

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers won the first ever Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form in 2003, and the Nebula for Best Script of 2003 (awarded in 2004). It also won two Oscars. IMDB users rank it top film of 2002 on one system but only seventh on the other. For both Hugo and Nebula, it beat Minority Report and Spirited AwayHarry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and Spider-Man, and the other Nebula finalists were Finding Nemo and a Futurama episode. As with the previous film, The Two Towers scored a knockout victory with Hugo voters, and I think I'd have voted with the majority again even though it is definitely the weakest of the three LOTR films.

Just before I dive into this film, I want to point readers to this critique of my review of Fellowship of the Ring, with a follow-up post including some very interesting links for the reader/watcher who wants to go farther down the rabbit hole.

Most of the actors in The Two Towers who had been in previous Oscar/Hugo/Nebula-winning films were covered last time. There are however two additional old faces to add to the mix, both from Oscar-winners rather than Hugo- or Nebula-winners. Bernard Hill, Théoden here, was the captain of Titanic five years ago, and also attempted to quell Gandhi twenty years ago.

Going back a lot further, Gríma Wormtongue, Saruman's mole in Théoden's court, is played by Brad Dourif who was Billy Bibbit in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, twenty-seven years ago.

This is the film that should not in fact have been made. Peter Jackson's original vision for LOTR was to make two films, or a trilogy with The Hobbit as the first installment. With the death of Boromir in the first film, and everything post-Isengard and post-Faramir in the third film, The Two Towers only uses 70% of the material of the original (more or less seven out of ten chapters in both Books) and new material is introduced for the sake of dramatic tension; which means that for the Tolkien fan, it does feel a bit padded. The worst bit of padding is the exciting bit where Aragorn appears to have fallen off a cliff and died. It seems about as dramatic as Father Jack losing his slippers in Father Ted. The shift of Faramir's character to i) wanting to take Frodo and Sam to Minas Tirith and then ii) changing his mind is also not terribly smoothly done. One thing that is in the book but a bit disappointing on film: the Ents, who I'd always envisaged as much more thickset and tree-like. Very difficult to get that designed, I guess, especially given that every frame with Treebeard in took 48 hours to render. I remember Ralph Bakshi having similar problems. I also still wince at the infantilisation of Merry and Pippin, though they are starting to grow up here.

But there are two tremendously good things about the film, at the beginning and the end, quite apart from the fact that New Zealand is also made to look fantastic. To start at the end, the Helm's Deep battle sequence is spectacular and shows the money and time thrown at it, while also giving the protagonists some space for character development. (With the flaw that again the extra Elves seem a bit bolted on, and there is a downhill cavalry charge which doesn't seem all that realistic.) I had forgotten that the explosion bringing down part of the wall was also in the book. It's difficult to convey a sense of topography in a filmed battle (well, I imagine it's also difficult to understand the topography of a battle when you are actually fighting one), but I think the film does it pretty well.

(I see when I first wrote up the film trilogy I was also impressed by the flooding of Orthanc; it made less impression on me this time, watching the three-hour theatrical presentation rather than the four-hour director's cut.)

And the Top Thing I Love about The Two Towers is the establishment of Gollum as a character. I never had a good sense of what he might look like from the books – there's a sense of webbed feet, a slightly amphibian note; an unpleasant narcissist with an over-riding obsession. But Andy Serkis' performance combined with the post-production treatment of Gollum's appearance makes for one of the most spectacular bits of character development I've seen between page and screen. This doesn't feel bolted on at all: it's true to Tolkien's concept of the character and at the same time gives it a little extra.

I'm putting this just under halfway down my list of Hugo- and Nebula-winning films, below Who Framed Roger Rabbit and above Bambi, also both films with a lot of animation in. Next up is the only film to win Hugo, Nebula and Oscar.

I went back and reread the book as well, or rather Books 3 and 4 of The Lord of the Rings. The second paragraph of the third chapter (of Book 3) is:

He [Pippin] woke. Cold air blew on his face. He was lying on his back. Evening was corning and the sky above was growing dim. He turned and found that the dream was little worse than the waking. His wrists, legs, and ankles were tied with cords. Beside him Merry lay, white-faced, with a dirty rag bound across his brows. All about them sat or stood a great company of Orcs.

Obviously I love the whole book with a deep deep love, and it's difficult to write about the middle bit in isolation. But I'll say this – often the second volume of a trilogy, or even the middle third of a long book (which this is) suffers from middle-book syndrome, getting the characters from the beginning to the end. I think Tolkien largely avoids this problem by throwing in surprises throughout – we do not know if Merry and Pippin are still alive until the third chapter, we do not know if Frodo and Sam are still alive until the second Book, Gandalf reappears from the dead, and Frodo briefly seems to have been killed by Shelob at the end. He also plotted out the movements of the characters against the calendar meticulously, and the fact that he has done his homework is modestly obvious. I still love the whole thing, with a deep deep love. Even if there are more named horses than women.

• Fri, 12:56: Well worth 8 minutes of your time. https://t.co/GV8G9NCVm8
• Fri, 14:50: RT @davidallengreen: The ‘write a political novel in five words’ contest has a winner.
• Fri, 16:05: https://t.co/1ppuNzoavz
• Fri, 17:11: Chinese bogeyman looms over New Caledonia’s independence vote https://t.co/Xtev7TbmUf Wow, this is fascinating.
• Fri, 18:13: The Last Defender of Camelot, by Roger Zelazny (2002, not 1980) https://t.co/ID0zZkzDvS
• Fri, 18:48: Friday reading https://t.co/WAH7m6sSuM
• Fri, 20:48: RT @goodnewsfinland: Although I love all the #Moomin books, this is the one that has stayed with me and that I go back to. It’s hard to ove…
• Fri, 21:50: Just in case you didn’t know, his mother invented Liquid Paper. https://t.co/Friemk8BD5
• Sat, 10:45: RT @cooraysmith: Blimey. https://t.co/JQgbUGz0T4

Current
The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Republic: The Fight for Irish Independence, 1918-1923, by Charles Townshend
Startide Rising, by David Brin
Night of the Intelligence, by Andy Frankham-Allan
Black Oxen, by Elizabeth Knox

Last books finished
Lying Under the Apple Tree, by Alice Munro
"Blood Music", by Greg Bear
Doctor Who Annual 2022, by Paul Lang
This Town Will Never Let Us Go, by Lawrence Miles
The Life of Evans, by John Peel

Next books
An Introduction to the Gospel of John, by Raymond E. Brown
An Excess Male, by Maggie Shen King

The title of the third story in this collection is given as "Engine at Heartspring's Center", and the second paragraph, as presented here, is:

She was regaining her feet, the signs in the sand indicating flight and collapse. She had on the same red dress, torn and stained now. Her black hair—short, with heavy bangs—lay in the only small disarrays of which it was capable. Perhaps thirty feet away was a young man from the Center, advancing toward her. Behind him drifted one of the seldom seen dispatch-machines—about half the size of a man and floating that same distance above the ground, it was shaped like a tenpin, and silver, its bulbous head-end faceted and illuminated, its three ballerina skirts tinfoil-thin and gleaming, rising and falling in rhythms independent of the wind.

That of course is a problem. The title of the story is usually given as "The Engine at Heartspring's Center", and the second paragraph is, memorably:

Choose any of the above and you might be right.

An entire page has been omitted from the ebook. I repeat, the entire first page of the story has been omitted. In fact, the last page of the previous story, "For a Breath I Tarry" is missing as well. Other pages are missing throughout the ebook. I don't think that I have ever seen this before, from any other ebook that I have ever read. It is shockingly contemptuous of the author and of the reader. I acquired this over a decade after publication, so there is no excuse for not fixing the problem.

In addition, the very title of the collection shows disrespect to both reader and writer. In Zelazny's lifetime, a largely different collection of stories was published with the same title, in 1980. Each story had an introduction from Zelazny, shedding light on what he was trying to do (and largely succeeding) in each case. There's none of that here, just an introduction from Robert Silverberg saying that Zelazny was a great guy and a great writer.

I never thought that the day would come when I actively disrecommended a book by Zelazny, one of my favourite authors, but that day has in fact come. All of the stories here are great, but all of them are readily available elsewhere, mostly in collections authorised by Zelazny in his lifetimes, and many of them can be found for free online. Shame on ibooks, Inc. for publishing such a crappy effort, and shame on the Zelazny estate for authorising it. I understand that the print edition of this collection was poorly produced and some buyers found that their copies fell apart.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2016 (as part of a Zelazny bundle). Next on that pile is The Space Machine, by Christopher Priest, of which I have somewhat higher hopes.

• Thu, 18:05: One Bright Star to Guide Them, by John C. Wright https://t.co/t86mXKXYLb
• Thu, 18:18: The Last Witness, by K. J. Parker https://t.co/QdSjsiK4fs
• Thu, 22:39: Still leaves Labour 17 seat short, even with a 6% lead – and that’s on current boundaries. https://t.co/ziYg3WqWD8 https://t.co/vEb8SRmjLF
• Fri, 09:20: RT @five_books: “As the Philip K Dick once put it: ‘The sci fi writer sees not just possibilities but wild possibilities’” —@nwbrux. From s…
• Fri, 10:45: RT @apcoworldwide: With #France set to hold the Presidency of the #EU starting in January, our team in Paris shares the priorities and obje…

Second paragraph of third section:

We heard all about you, the old man said, the stuff you can do. Is it true?

I picked this up as a recommendation from one of the lists of novellas that should have been on the 2015 Hugo ballot, though in fact this didn't make the top 15. I don't think I was aware at the time that K.J. Parker is a pseudonym for Tom Holt, best known for his comic fantasy. This is not comic at all. It's a grimly convincing story of a man who is able to extract and delete specific memories from other people, but with the consequence that he himself retains those memories; and he never forgets. He's not a pleasant character, but it's a very well-drawn story, and would probably have got a vote from me if it had been on any list I could have voted for. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2015. Next on that list is A Little Gold Book of Ghastly Stuff, by Neil Gaiman.

Second paragraph of third section:

His voice was like bubbles rising in a swamp. “Kicktoad no more, Little Tommy! I am called Bufotenine the Great now, yes I am. Apprentice no more, but Master! Yes!”

This ended up on my unread list as part of the 2015 Hugo packet. It was a story that was slated onto the Best Novella ballot, which I refrained from reading at the time, as I was always going to vote No Award in a category where all five finalists had been put there through an organised campaign by a racist misogynist whose declared aim was to destroy the Hugos. However, I decided that I'd work round to it eventually in good faith; and here we are.

It's not very good. It's a story about four people who as children had a very Narnia-like adventure and are now dragged as adults into a new encounter with the other world by Tibalt the talking cat, who is killed and resurrected towards the end, in case you hadn't got the point. As my regular reader knows, I am not a huge fan of the comic series DIE, by Kieron Gillen and others, but it takes a similar idea and does it much better.

The dialogue of One Bright Star to Guide Them is florid. Many important points of the action happen off stage. (Our protagonist is a captive at the end of one chapter, and free at the start of the next, a transition that is never explained.) All of England is next door to all the rest of England. Wright had his moments earlier in his career; this is not one of them. His behaviour around the Puppies in 2015-16 would anyway have disinclined me to vote for him (yeah, I know, artist from the art, but the Hugos are community awards and choices have consequences). But this story is in no way Hugo worthy.

You can read it for free online here if you want to cross-check my take. I am sorry to report that I cannot now find the rest of the 2015 Hugo packet in my archives, so unfortunately I have had to remove Big Boys Don't Cry, by Tom Kratman, and Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth, a collection of essays by John C. Wright, from my unread list. If you happen to have kept your own copies of those from the 2015 packet, please don't feel under any obligation to send them to me. Doing so would be a violation of the honour code on which the Hugo packet is made available.

This was the shortest unread book that I had acquired in 2015. Next on that list is Seven Deadly Sins, by Neil Gaiman.

• Wed, 12:56: Blood donation – Service du Sang – Belgian Red Cross https://t.co/4opYmkohQF Unfortunately I can’t give blood in most European countries because my blood is too British. But if you can, you should think about it.
• Wed, 19:01: RT @AyoCaesar: Nowhere in this article does it mention that Allegra Stratton’s husband, James Forsyth, is the political editor of The Spect…
• Wed, 19:12: Not Before Sundown, Sinisalo; Camouflage, Haldeman; River of Gods, McDonald; Iron Council, Mi�ville https://t.co/Uu6pSsXrlC

• Tue, 12:56: On Neon Yang’s Toxic Reputation https://t.co/fX6FkLwib5 and why it is not deserved.
• Tue, 16:05: If Rod Liddle has the right to lecture Durham students about sex work, where’s my invitation to talk about cats? https://t.co/kJlkzBGA79 Another manufactured anti-woke controversy. (I promise not to write too often about the awful Liddle.)
• Tue, 18:13: Waste Tide, by Qiufan Chen https://t.co/aNywnyoy0E
• Tue, 18:36: 630 days of plague, and COVID 20 days on https://t.co/N9b4H98VMt
• Wed, 10:45: RT @HNTurtledove: Salvador Daleks https://t.co/ehjAx2mq0i
• Wed, 11:18: RT @BCommNI: There’s just one week left to give us your views on our Initial Proposals for Parliamentary constituency boundaries in Norther…

Second paragraph of third chapter in original (NB that in the English translation by Ken Liu, this passage is about a quarter of the way into the third chapter, rather than near the beginning):

她不知道自己跑了多久，也不知自己身在何方，紧迫感缓慢地拉扯她的神经，让她无法遏制逃跑的欲望。可是并没有人在追她。没有任何有形的威胁，更像是一种无形的未知，从遥远海平面般的边界袭来。她的眼角似乎瞥见，那是无法形容的光芒，带着金属镀膜或晶体折射般的繁复虹彩，又仿佛流云或者海浪般变幻莫测，吞噬着她背后原本黯淡黑白的空间。

She [Mi Mi, the protagonist] didn't know how long she had been running, nor where she was. A sense of urgency tugged at her nerves, making it impossible for her to give up the desire to run, but there was no one after her. There was no concrete threat, only a formless, unnamed foreboding that swept over the sea at her from the distant horizon. Out of the corners of her eyes, she seemed to glimpse some indescribable glow, a complex iridescence found in the sheen of metal coating or the luster of crystals, fluctuating in the manner of waves or racing clouds, devouring the dim, black-and-white space behind her.

Another of the Chinese contemporary SF works that is being widely recommended – I picked this one up from Vector in the spring. It's a grim contemporary tale of pollution off the Chinese coast, in a community that has grown up from migrant workers who have come to process waste, and something non-human that has also emerged in the meantime. The metaphor of monsters living in the rubbish dump goes at least as far back as ancient human societies, but I felt this pulled that old story together with the contemporary structural problems of China, both managing its own growing and demanding society and dealing with America. Ken Liu's translation has its quirks – I don't really need to know about the precise tonal pronunciation of words that are used only a couple of times – but it's fluent and seems to catch a time and place, fictional but closely related to today's China. Recommended. You can get it here.

This was the top unread book by a writer of colour on my pile. Next is the other Chinese sf novel recommended by Vector, An Excess Male, by Maggie Shen King.

• Mon, 12:56: NATO thwarted a Russian invasion in 1980. Could its playbook work today? https://t.co/YryNm4bE2W Maybe.
• Mon, 18:17: March 2014 books https://t.co/DUMsXDObNM
• Mon, 18:34: The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun, by J R R Tolkien, ed. Verlyn Flieger https://t.co/KdGOp7iQFj

Second paragraph of third chapter:

The fragment has no title, though it obviously presages Tolkien's much longer and more elaborate tratments of both the fair-copy manuscript and the typrescript of ‘Aotrou and Itroun’, as well as the final version published in The Welsh Review. The verse is alliterative and unrhymed, though the line is metrical, in iambic tetrameter. The story breaks off at the moment of the lord’s approach ‘with lagging feet’ to the cave of the fay.

This is minor Tolkieniana, to be honest. It's a poem published in 1930 about a Breton lord who buys a magic potion for his wife; and it all goes horribly wrong. Verlyn Flieger, who is one of the most prolific and interesting Tolkien scholars out there, has done a great job of presenting the poem itself and three earlier goes (a draft and two other poems on closely related themes). But even the completist can rest easy without this on their shelves. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2017. Next on that pile is Tower [of London], by Nigel Jones.

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 Worldcon planning meeting in London, dealing with the fallout of the Jonathan Ross affair. That was my only trip away that month; work continued to be grim, but I established initial contact with my current employers about coming to work for them instead.

Here's B with an emu.

I read 27 books that month. Crucially, this was also the month that, inspired by H, I started to try and include the second paragraph of the third chapter of every book I read in my write-ups here. I've found that a useful addition to my routine; a sort of intake of breath and nod to the original text before saying whatever I have to say about it. I dropped it at the end of March 2014, but soon picked it up again.

Non-fiction 4 (YTD 13)
The Assassination of the Prime Minister: John Bellingham and the Murder of Spencer Perceval, by David Hanrahan
The Big Finish Companion v1, by Richard Dinnick
Essays on Time-based Linguistic Analysis, by Charles-James N. Bailey
Companions: 50 Years of Doctor Who Assistants, by Andy Frankham-Allen

Fiction (non-sf) 2 (YTD 8)
The Other Hand, by Chris Cleave
Brick Lane, by Monica Ali

SF (non-Who) 10 (YTD 22)
Ancillary Justice, by Anne Leckie
Dominion, by C.J. Sansom
Animal Farm, by George Orwell
Sigrid and Gudrun, by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Amber Spyglass, by Philip Pullman
Unearthed, eds. John J. Johnston and Jared Shurin
Spin, by Nina Allan
Anthem, by Ayn Rand
Best Served Cold, by Joe Abercrombie
Tarzan and the Forbidden City, by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Doctor Who 11 (YTD 22)
Doctor Who – The Paradise of Death, by Barry Letts
Christmas on a Rational Planet, by Lawrence Miles
Mad Dogs and Englishmen, by Paul Magrs
Tales of Trenzalore, by Justin Richards, George Mann, Paul Finch and Mark Morris
Salt of the Earth, by Trudi Canavan
Search for the Doctor, by David Martin
Crisis in Space, by Michael Holt
The Garden of Evil, by David Martin
Mission to Venus, by William Emms
Invasion of the OrmazoIds, by Philip Martin
Race Against Time, by Pip and Jane Baker

~7,200 pages (YTD ~20,000)
6/25 (YTD 19/65) by women (Ali, Leckie, Allan, Rand, Canavan, J Baker)
1/25 (YTD 2/656) by PoC (Ali)

I hugely enjoyed returning to Animal Farm, which you can get here, and reading for the first time Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice, which you can get here, and Nina Allan's Spin, which you can get here. On the other hand the 1986 Doctor Who Make-Your-Own-Adventure books were generally pretty awful, with the worst being William Emms' Mission to Venusyou can get it here.