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The Return of the Discontinued Man, by Mark Hodder

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

The king's agent stood, now a Knight of the Most Distinguished Order of Saint Michael and Saint George.

I thoroughly bounced off this, an alternative steampunky history, the fifth in a series featuring the madcap adventures of Algernon Charles Swinburne and Richard Francis Burton across various timelines. (On steampunk I sometimes sympathise with Marigold's dad in Questionable Content.) When I realised that on page 70 I still had no idea what was going on and no particular sympathy for any of the characters, I gave up. But you can get it here, if you want.

This was the top book on my rapidly dwindling pile of those acquired in 2014. Next up there is The Rain-Soaked Bride by Guy Adams.

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Zodiac Station, by Tom Harper

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

I was always a solitary child. Back then, those white deserts at the top of the globe fired my sense of adventure. I read Willard Price, Jack London, Alistair MacLean. Other boys could reel off every player who ever scored for Liverpool; I could tell you about Peary and Cook, Nansen and Amundsen. I grew up, a lot of things changed but my dreams didn't. If anything, they were more urgent. The Arctic wasn't a place to prove myself, but to lose myself. Somewhere to escape to.

Decent thriller set in a slightly fictional Arctic research centre, where our protagonist arrives to find his boss mysteriously dead and everything in increasing disarray. Like a lot of these books, the plot depends a bit on crucial coincidence and lucky escape, and there is an sfnal McGuffin at the end which justifies the means and motivation of the bad guys, but it's entertaining enough. You can get it here.

This was the sf book (at least, billed as sf) that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is Hurricane Fever, by Tobias S. Buckell, which I have meantime read and will write up shortly.
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Angel of Mercy, by Julianne Todd, Claire Bartlett and Iain McLaughlin

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Petrol.

I confess that I am losing faith in the series of books about spinoff Doctor Who companion Erimem. Here she and her gang end up in a sealed crime-ridden near-future city which is the subject of a reality TV show. It's pretty obvious what's going to happen, and in due course it does. I'll give another couple of these a try but unless I see an uptick I'll leave them after that. You can get this one here.

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The Mists of Avalon, by Marion Zimmer Bradley

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Second paragraph of third chapter (buckle up, it's a long one):

She had travelled but little before, except, long ago, from Avalon to Tintagel. She contrasted the frightened, despairing child of that first journey with herself today. Now she rode at Gorlois's side, and he went to some trouble to tell her something of the lands they passed through, and she laughed and teased him, and at night in their tent she went willingly to his bed. Now and again she missed Morgaine, wondering how the child would be faring – would she cry at night for her mother, would she eat at Morgause's bidding? But it was pleasant to be free again, riding in this great company of men, conscious of their admiring looks and their deference- none of them would dare to approach Gorlois's lady, except with an admiring glance. She was a girl again, but not, now, frightened and shrinking from the strange man who was her husband and whom she must somehow manage to please. She was a girl again without the childish awkwardness of her real girlhood, and she was enjoying it. She did not even mind the ceaseless rain that obscured the distant hills so that they rode within a little circle of mist.

One of those classic works of fantasy which I must have first read soon after it was published in 1983, and which is now tarnished by association with its author's personal history of child abuse.

The novel has some merits, but it has deeper flaws than may be initially apparent. It's great to take a traditionally male story – King Arthur, Lancelot, Galahad, etc etc – and tell it mainly from the point of view of the women in the story, in particular Morgaine who is very much the villain of the original legendarium – Arthur's half-sister, mother of their incestuously conceived son Mordred who eventually kills his own father. The book is a thousand pages long, but doesn't drag; we know what the ending is going to be, but the journey there is exciting and somewhat magical, with three different versions of Glastonbury coexisting in parallel strands of the same geography, two of them accessible only by the adept.

But. A lot of readers took to the portrayal of lovely paganism in contrast with rigid and blinkered Christianity, and sighed when at the end the Christians largely won. But the portrayal of Christianity is much darker than the reality of the time. The sexually repressive arm of recent Christianity has been transplanted by Bradley to the Dark Ages. Actual research on medieval Celtic Christianity shows that it was much more relaxed, including saints who actually performed abortions. The key baddie, the puritanical bigot bishop Patricius, is obviously meant to be St Patrick, who is supposedly buried at Glastonbury (though Downpatrick will disagree). But the real St Patrick seems to have been relatively relaxed about sex; he was much more upset about theft and murder. One of his two surviving works is a letter pleading for the freedom of enslaved kidnap victims. (You can read what you want into his autobiography's allusion to an otherwise unidentified sin committed when he was fifteen). Even in my teens, I felt that Bradley's portrayal of him was rather unfair.

On top of that, the paganism espoused by most of the key characters is actually rather repressive too. Arthur and Morgaine conceive Mordred in a drug-fuelled pagan ritual which they are given no choice about participating in. Avalon's women have no more choice about which men they are given to than Camelot's women do; the only difference is that the Lady of the Lake personally determines the fate of her subjects in Avalon, whereas patriarchal Camelot is more diffuse. (And, gulp, a mother figure deciding who the young people in her care will have sex with, some of them well below what we'd consider the age of consent today, is very creepy given what we now know about the writer.) Avalon also fetishises virginity more than the Christianity portrayed here. (See this really good analysis by Alexandra Lindstrom, from 2005, on these and other points.) I hope that those readers who developed an interest in paganism based on this book were alert to the negative nuances as well.

So, yes, interesting to return to it after many years, but its flaws have become more obvious with time. If you don't already have it, you can get it here.

This was the top book on my shelves by Librarything popularity which I had not already written up here. Next is The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde.

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Humankind: A Hopeful History, by Rutger Bregman

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

En de mens? Die verscheen op 31 december ten tonele, rond 11 uur ’s avonds. Toen hebben we eerst nog een uurtje als jagers en verzamelaars rondgetrokken, om op het laatste moment, rond 23.58 uur, de landbouw uit te vinden. In de zestig seconden voor middernacht voltrok zich alles wat we ‘geschiedenis’ noemen. Met piramides en kastelen, ridders en jonkvrouwen, stoommachines en vliegtuigen. And we humans? We made our entrance on 31 December, at approximately 11 p.m. Then we spent about an hour roaming around as hunter-gatherers, only getting around to inventing farming at 11:58 p.m. Everything else we call 'history' happened in the final sixty seconds to midnight: all the pyramids and castles, the knights and ladies, the steam engines and rocket ships.

Edited to add, some months later: interesting that the “aeroplanes”, “vliegtuigen”, at the end of the original paragraph were replaced by “rocket ships” for the English translation.

At the end of last year I read and largely enjoyed Bregman's Utopia for Realists. This has a grander sweep – the story of how humanity is much nicer and well-intentioned than people think. With some detail, he debunks the Stanford prison experiment, the Milgram electric shock experiment, and the Kitty Genovese case; and looks at the true story of the shipwrecked kids who failed to go Lord of the Flies and at various other statistics supporting his thesis. Fundamentally I want to agree with the book; I'd much rather that people are nice to each other. And mostly it's convincing; what is lacking is an answer to the Problem of Evil, though I guess that the point of the book is more the Invisible Prevalence of Good. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired last year and also my top uread non-fiction book. Next on those lists respectively are Time Must Have a Stop, by Aldous Huxley, and Paul: A Biography by Tom Wright.

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Menapii in Nieuwkerken-Waas, Nehalennia in Colijnsplaat

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Today is Open Monument Day in Flanders, but it caught me a little by surprise and I was too late to book tickets for the one thing I really really wanted to see, the stucco ceilings of Jan Christian Hansche at Beaulieu Castle in Machelen near Brussels. Apart from that, my tastes run to the ancient rather than modern, and the most promising Roman-era event was a celebration of the Menapian tribe in the small town of Nieuwkerken-Waas, near Sint-Niklaas, on the far side of Antwerp from us.

Here the patch of land behind the town hall has been launched as a new civic park, and it turns out that the foundations of several buildings constructed by the Menapian tribe have been found on the site. The Menapii were basically the pre-Roman inhabitants of western Belgium, and they resisted Julius Caesar fiercely before being assimilated. (The Nervii were in central Belgium, and the Tungri in the east, collectively the Belgae.) It's relatively unusual to find non-Roman tribal structures from that era, and Nieuwkerken-Waas was making the most of it. Half the park has been set up as a Menapian fort; the flatter half was hosting archaeological experts, and the local scouts erecting a replica Menapian building.

One chap was demonstrating Menapian pottery and milling:

I was particularly fascinated by the mathematical / scientific demonstration, talking about the quadrivium and the Platonic solids, including the mysterious dodecahedra.

Note in particular his phallic pendant.

Sometimes a tired legionary needs a belegde broodje.

Having already driven an hour from home to Nieuwkerken-Waas, I realised it was about the same distance again to a particularly weird bit of Low Countries Roman heritage, the temple of Nehalannia at Colijnsplaat on the Zeeland island of North Beveland. I don't think I'll ever persuade anyone to go there with me, so this was obviously the day to go there.

Colijnsplaat is basically a normal enough Dutch coastal town with a lovely harbour.

Over on the right there, you may have missed the southern end of the Zeelandbrug, the longest bridge in the Netherlands at just over 5km.

I had yummy lunch at what Tripadvisor recommended as the top restaurant in Colijnsplaat (it's certainly top of my sample of one), the Bistro Zeelandia.

And then it was off to the temple. I have to be honest, it's not on the same scale as the Parthenon in Nashville.

Inside is a fairly small square space, though apparently the local Pagan community uses it for ceremonies.

The goddess Nehalannia is mainly known from votive tablets cast overboard by sailors looking for safe passage. She is usually portrayed with a dog and a basket of apples. Nobody seems to know why.

Beside the temple, a scaled down replica of a Roman era ship was installed last week.

It's intriguing to think of the ancestors of the direct, Calvinist sailors of Zeeland paying their respects to the goddess, with her dog and her apples, by chucking votive tablets overboard on departure from the long-submerged port of Ganuenta. But in living memory, Colijnsplaat has been spared from an Act of God (or of the Gods). When most of Zeeland was devastated in the great flood of 1953 (in which 1,800 were killed in the Netherlands, 70,000 made homeless, and 9% of the country's agricultural land made unusable), here the villagers physically held back the water by pressing the wooden flood defences with their own bodies. I felt a common theme between the monument by Jan Haas at one end of the village, and the temple at the other.

This was my first time in the Netherlands (apart from changing planes in Schiphol) since Dordrecht almost two years ago (part 1, part 2). I’ll be back soon.

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American Beauty

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American Beauty won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1999, and four others: Best Director (Sam Mendes), Best Actor (Kevin Spacey), Best Original Screenplay (Alan Ball) and Best Cinematography (Conrad Hall). The Nebula that year went to The Sixth Sense, and the Hugo and the next year’s Nebula to Galaxy Quest.

I have not seen any of the other four Oscar nominees, which were The Cider House Rules, The Green Mile, The Insider and Hugo-winner The Sixth Sense. IMDB users have it 4th on one ranking and 8th on the other, respectable enough, with Fight Club, The Matrix and The Green Mile ahead of it on both.

1999 was the year that our second child was born, and I saw very few films. One of them, oddly enough, was American Beauty, which I caught in early 2000 on a visit to Budapest. It’s one of very few Oscar winners that I saw in a cinema soon after original release – the others are Chariots of Fire, Gandhi and The Return of the King. The other films from that year that I have seen are The Matrix, American Pie, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, Cruel Intentions, Sunshine and Never Been Kissed. I will admit that American Beauty is a well-made film, but I probably like it the least of the lot. Here’s a trailer.

 

I normally start off these reviews by listing the actors who have been in earlier Oscar-winning or Hugo/Nebula-winning films, or in Doctor Who. This time there aren’t any. Amused to see Alison Janney, shortly before her breakthrough as C.J. in The West Wing, as the traumatised Mrs Fitts, and Scott Bakula, of Quantum Leap and Enterprise, as one of the two Jims.

As I said, I will admit that American Beauty is a well-made film, but I just don’t like it very much. All of the (100% white) characters are just awful people, with the exception of the central characters’ daughter Jane Burnham, who (rightly) hates her parents, and the two neighbouring Jims, whose healthy relationship is a bitter contrast with the heterosexual couples at the centre of the story. The script tries to make us sympathise with Lester Burnham as he goes through a mid-life crisis, but really he generates a lot of his own misfortunes, and we are invited to share his very creepy male gaze; though admittedly it’s hardly his fault that the next door neighbours are all psychopaths.

When almost every character is so awful, it’s difficult to be interested in what happens to them. The cinematography almost pulls this off, but I wasn’t really fooled when first watching it in Budapest in 2000 and I was even less fooled this time. I’m putting it very low down my list, only just shy of the bottom ten, below Mutiny on the Bounty, which is also about awful people but at least has good scenery, and above Braveheart for not taking its dreadful protagonist quite as seriously.

But the cinematography is very good, and the music also compelling. The theme tune is particularly haunting.

 

But the whole thing left me feeling rather icky.

IMDB trivia points out that this was only the second Oscar winner of the 1990s to have a contemporary setting (after The Silence of the Lambs). It’s closer in spirit to the winners of twenty years before, Kramer vs Kramer and Ordinary People (which I didn’t like) and Terms of Endearment (which I did).

Next up is Gladiator, of which I know nothing except the title. But before that, I look forward to watching The Sixth Sense and Galaxy Quest, and seeing what Hugo and Nebula voters thought was better than The Matrix, which is my favourite of the 1999 films that I have seen.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

1920s: Wings (1927-28) | The Broadway Melody (1928-29)
1930s: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-30) | Cimarron (1930-31) | Grand Hotel (1931-32) | Cavalcade (1932-33) | It Happened One Night (1934) | Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, and books) | The Great Ziegfeld (1936) | The Life of Emile Zola (1937) | You Can’t Take It with You (1938) | Gone with the Wind (1939, and book)
1940s: Rebecca (1940) | How Green Was My Valley (1941) | Mrs. Miniver (1942) | Casablanca (1943) | Going My Way (1944) | The Lost Weekend (1945) | The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) | Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) | Hamlet (1948) | All the King’s Men (1949)
1950s: All About Eve (1950) | An American in Paris (1951) | The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) | From Here to Eternity (1953) | On The Waterfront (1954, and book) | Marty (1955) | Around the World in 80 Days (1956) | The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) | Gigi (1958) | Ben-Hur (1959)
1960s: The Apartment (1960) | West Side Story (1961) | Lawrence of Arabia (1962) | Tom Jones (1963) | My Fair Lady (1964) | The Sound of Music (1965) | A Man for All Seasons (1966) | In the Heat of the Night (1967) | Oliver! (1968) | Midnight Cowboy (1969)
1970s: Patton (1970) | The French Connection (1971) | The Godfather (1972) | The Sting (1973) | The Godfather, Part II (1974) | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) | Rocky (1976) | Annie Hall (1977) | The Deer Hunter (1978) | Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
1980s: Ordinary People (1980) | Chariots of Fire (1981) | Gandhi (1982) | Terms of Endearment (1983) | Amadeus (1984) | Out of Africa (1985) | Platoon (1986) | The Last Emperor (1987) | Rain Man (1988) | Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
1990s: Dances With Wolves (1990) | The Silence of the Lambs (1991) | Unforgiven (1992) | Schindler’s List (1993) | Forrest Gump (1994) | Braveheart (1995) | The English Patient (1996) | Titanic (1997) | Shakespeare in Love (1998) | American Beauty (1999)
21st century: Gladiator (2000) | A Beautiful Mind (2001) | Chicago (2002) | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) | Million Dollar Baby (2004, and book) | Crash (2005) | The Departed (2006) | No Country for Old Men (2007) | Slumdog Millionaire (2008) | The Hurt Locker (2009)
2010s: The King’s Speech (2010) | The Artist (2011) | Argo (2012) | 12 Years a Slave (2013) | Birdman (2014) | Spotlight (2015) | Moonlight (2016) | The Shape of Water (2017) | Green Book (2018) | Parasite (2019)
2020s: Nomadland (2020) | CODA (2021) | Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) | Oppenheimer (2023)

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January 2013 books

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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 exciting work travel this month was to a conference in Dubrivnik, made rather more exciting when I got trapped by a snowstorm in Munich with the Wall Street Journal correspondent and got home a day late. (He took the train the next day, I waited until I could fly, and my luggage took several more days to come home.) I did get a couple of decent pics of Dubrovnik:

and did a bit more photography closer to home:

Medically, I had an exciting skin allergy test stretching over several days, and as a result I now avoid nickel, iodine, cocamidopropyl betaine (a big cosmetics ingredient) and parabens (likewise).

The month finished with a reception hosted by Peter Robinson and Martin McGuinness as First Minister and Deputy First Minster of Northern Ireland, at which Robinson startled me by quipping that life as a Tottenham Hotspurs supporter could be summed up with a slogan familiar to McGuinness, "Tiocfaidh ár lá!"

I was also doing a New Who rewatch which cut into my reading time, so managed only 16 books that month:

Non-fiction 5
The Doctor's Monsters, by Graham Sleight
Making Ireland English, by Jane Ohlmeyer
Challenges for EU foreign policy in 2013, ed. Giovanni Grevi and Daniel Keohane
TARDIS Eruditorum – An Unauthorized Critical History of Doctor Who, Volume 2: Patrick Troughton by Philip Sandifer
Chicks Unravel Time, ed. Deborah Stanish and L.M. Myles

fiction (non-sf) 1
Faces in the Pool, by Jonathan Gash

sf (non-Who) 3
The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins
Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
Jack Glass by Adam Roberts

Doctor Who 6 (9 counting non-fiction)
The Indestructible Man, by Simon Messingham
Human Nature, by Paul Cornell
Casualties of War by Steve Emmerson
Step Back in Time: Extra Time, by Richard Dungworth
Step Back in Time: The Water Thief, by Jacqueline Rayner
A Big Hand for the Doctor, by Eoin Colfer

Comics 1
The Hive, by Charles Burns

~4,200 pages
4/16 by women (Ohlmeyer, Stanish/Myles, Collins, Rayner)
0/16 by PoC

I most enjoyed two of the Doctor Who reference books, The Doctor's Monsters which you can get here and TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 2 which you can get here. Wooden spoon to another Doctor Who book, Eoin Colfer's standalone short story, which you can get here.


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Friday reading

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Current
Felaheen, by Jon Courtenay Grimwood
The Bloodline Feud, by Charles Stross

Last books finished
The Return of the Discontinued Man, by Mark Hodder – did not finish
Blood of Atlantis, by Simon Forward
Hurricane Fever, by Tobias S. Buckell
The Man Who Walked Through Walls, by Marcel Aymé
The Ruby’s Curse, by Alex Kingston
Rose, by Jon Arnold
The Massacre, by James Cooray Smith

Next books
Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts, by Rebecca Hall
"The Saturn Game", by Poul Anderson

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The Primal Urge and Cryptozoic!, by Brian Aldiss

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Second paragraph of third chapter of The Primal Urge:

As you went through plate glass doors into a foyer ambushed with cactus, a sign in sanserif announced, “Only books stand between us and the cave. Clyde H. Nitkin. The IBA ran mainly on dollar lubrication supplied by the Clyde H. Nitkin Foundation, and the words of the great man, at once original and obvious, were in evidence throughout the building. In the cafeteria downstairs, among the Mojave Desert decor, was “To read is to strike a blow for culture. Clyde H. Nitkin.” In the Main Exhibition room on the ground floor was “Speech is silver: silence is golden: print is dynamite. Clyde H. Nitkin.” Up in the library, appropriately enough, was “Only by libraries can man survive. Clyde H. Nitkin.” And, most touching heart cry of all, reserved for the board room up by the roof, was “Dear God, I would rather be an author than Clyde H. Nitkin.”

Second paragraph of third chapter of Cryptozoic!:

Ann let go of him and stretched. They had materialized beside a dead tree. Its bare shining arms were like a reproof to the girl; Bush realized for the first time what a slut she was, how dirty and unkempt, and wondered why it did not alter what he felt about her – whatever that might precisely be.

As sometimes happens, my reading lists threw up two related novels simultaneously, both 1960s works by the late great Brian Aldiss. They are very different in content, The Primal Urge being set in a contemporary (1961) world, and Cryptozoic! set in the much more distant future as well as the even more distant past. Both however look at the impact of new technology on England and the consequent disintegration of British society and government.

The Primal Urge is both more approachable and has aged much less well. The story is about the revolution in 1961 Britain caused when everyone of adult age installs lights in their forehead which glow if they are sexually attracted to the person they are speaking to. (The book was banned in Ireland.) A few foolish people resist the compulsory modification to their bodies, but the population as a whole embraces it, and soon, each other. The humour is not exactly subtle – one of the protagonist's love interests is called Rose English, and there is a psychiatrist called Dr Croolter B. Kind. It's a long way down the list of Aldiss's novels, perhaps an attempt to break into the mainstream by writing a contemporary comic novel with an sfnal twist, and for that reason has dated very badly; but it's clearly written and you know where you are. You can get it here.

Cryptozoic! aka An Age shows more of Aldiss's greatness as a writer, but doesn't quite come together as a novel. A couple of hundred years from now (in a setting which nonetheless feels like England in 1967), people have developed the technology of mental time-travel by use of a drug (called CSD, totally different from LSD of course). Our protagonist returns from an extended mental time trip to find that a fascist government has taken over, and he is sent on a meandering quest to eliminate a fellow time-traveller who is a threat to the government. It's the sort of story that Moorcock and Ballard were doing just that bit better at the time, but there are some Aldissian twists to it all the same (notably the protagonist's relationship with his father and his lover). You can get it here.

The Primal Urge was the top book on my unread list acquired in 2015; next on that list is Day of the Dead, Neil Gaiman's script for his Babylon 5 episode.

Cryptozoic! was the top book on my unread list acquired in 2018; next on that list is City of Miracles, by Robert Jackson Bennett.

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540 days of plague

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So, the good news is that the Belgian numbers are pretty stable, with today showing hospitalisations, ICU cases and reported infections down since yesterday, and infections also down from last week. Of course, kids have gone back to school in the last few days, which will cause an uptick; but it feels like it’s all under control.

The Brussels rentrée is under way, with the Liberals hosting a reception a week ago at the Grand Central – you can see me talking to a Bulgarian MEP at a couple of points in this video.

And there’s another reception this evening, hosted by POLITICO; setting this entry to post just before I arrive at it.

Also very glad to say that last weekend our village held its annual zomerfeest, cancelled last year, but arranged at short notice last week. All the traditional elements were there, the nature walk on Saturday:

With some wildlife as well:

And on Sunday there was an exhibition of local artists, including in the church:

IMG_1339.JPG

While in the beer garden behind the parochial hall, a trio sang Yves Montand’s La Bicyclette and other chansons:

Quand on partait de bon matin
Quand on partait sur les chemins
À bicyclette

 

Nous étions quelques bons copains
Y avait Fernand, y avait Firmin
Y avait Francis et Sébastien
Et puis Paulette

On était tous amoureux d’elle
On se sentait pousser des ailes
À bicyclette

Sur les petits chemins de terre
On a souvent vécu l’enfer
Pour ne pas mettre pied à terre
Devant Paulette

Faut dire qu’elle y mettait du cœur
C’était la fille du facteur
À bicyclette

Et depuis qu’elle avait huit ans
Elle avait fait en le suivant
Tous les chemins environnants
À bicyclette

Quand on approchait la rivière
On déposait dans les fougères
Nos bicyclettes

Puis on se roulait dans les champs
Faisant naître un bouquet changeant
De sauterelles, de papillons
Et de rainettes

Quand le soleil à l’horizon
Profilait sur tous les buissons
Nos silhouettes

On revenait fourbus, contents
Le cœur un peu vague pourtant
De n’être pas seul un instant
Avec Paulette

Prendre furtivement sa main
Oublier un peu les copains
La bicyclette

On se disait c’est pour demain
J’oserai, j’oserai demain
Quand on ira sur les chemins
À bicyclette

If you leave early in the morning
If you go on these roads
By bicycle

 

We were a bunch of good friends
There were Fernand and Firmin
There were Francis and Sébastian
And then there was Paulette

We were all in love with her
We were all growing wings
On our bicycle

On these small dirt roads
We often went through hell
To not make our feet touch the ground
In front of Paulette

One has to say that she really put her heart into it
She was the daughter of the postman
On a bicycle

And ever since she turned eight
She followed him around
On all the ways in the neighbourhood
By bicycle

When we came close to the river
We threw into the bracken
Our bikes

Then we rolled around in the fields
Making a changing bouquet come to life
Of grasshoppers, butterflies and
Tree frogs

When the sun at the horizon
Began to cast our shadows
Over the shrubs

We returned exhausted and content
Yet the heart a bit vague
Because I never had a moment all alone
With Paulette

To take her hand all furtively
To forget a few of the friends
The bicycle

I told myself I’d leave that for tomorrow
I will dare to, I will dare to tomorrow
When we will be on the roads
By bicycle

We’re not back to normal yet, but the trajectory is clear, and the weekend celebrations of the turn of the seasons in our village helped to reinforce that feeling.

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The Wonder, by Emma Donoghue

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

A shake of the coif-covered head.

Set in mid-19th century Ireland, an English nurse is sent to investigate the mystery of a child who apparently survives without food, in the immediate aftermath of the Famine. It's pretty obvious to the attentive reader what is really going on from an early stage, but it's a well-told story and the ending was unexpected. (However, I really doubt that a 19th-century Englishwoman would be unaware of the Biblical story of manna!) You can get it here.

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A Hero Born, by Jin Yong

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Second paragraph of third chapter (goes to four paragraphs in English translation):

忽聽得巨鐘下的銅缸內噹噹噹響聲不絕，不知裏面是何怪物，眾僧面面相覷，手足無措，當下齊聲口誦﹁高王經﹂，豈知﹁救苦救難﹂、﹁阿彌陀佛﹂聲中，缸內響音始終不停，最後終於大了膽子，十多個和尚合力用粗索吊起大鐘，剛將銅缸掀起少許，裏面滾出來一個巨大的肉團。眾僧大驚，四散逃開。只見那肉團一躍站起，呼呼喘氣，卻是韓寶駒。他被罩在銅缸之中，不知後半段的戰局，眼見焦木圓寂，義兄弟個個重傷，急得哇哇大叫。提起金龍鞭便欲向丘處機頭頂擊落。全金發叫道：﹁三哥，不可！﹂韓寶駒怒道：﹁為甚麼？﹂全金發腰間劇痛，只道：﹁千 …… 千萬不可。﹂ A knocking from inside the bell in the hall suddenly interrupted their work. The monks looked at each other: was it a monster? They began chanting “The King’s Sutra”, accompanied by the mysterious banging. Eventually some among them pulled the bell aside and together lifted the censer. To their horror, out rolled a ball of flesh. The monks jumped back in fright. The ball then slowly uncurled and stood up; it was Ryder Han. He was unaware of how the fight had ended, but immediately spotted that Scorched Wood was at eternal rest and his martial family gravely injured. Taking up his Golden Dragon whip he marched towards where Qiu Chuji was lying and raised it above the Taoist’s head.
“Third Brother, no!” Gilden Quan cried.
“Why not?”
“You mustn’t,” was all his brother could manage through the pulsing pain in his stomach.

Back at Eastercon, I attended a panel on Chinese sf and fantasy, and this was one of several books strongly recommended. The author is described by Wikipedia as Hong Kong's greatest writer, and also one of the key renewers of the subgenre of wuxia, heroic martial arts fantasy set in what we would call the Middle Ages. A Hero Born is the first of four volumes comprising the translation of Jin Yong's most famous book, The Legend of the Condor Heroes, originally published in 1957.

It is a lot of fun. intersecting plot lines include children with a hidden heritage growing up, the Seven Freaks of Jiangnan (a group of virtuous martial artists each with his or her own skill) and Genghis Khan. Unlike a lot of Chinese literature that I have previously tried, I never got lost with the characters or the geography. I don't think I will persevere with the series, but this was a great start. You can get it here.

One always has to wonder what the linkage is between literature and politics here. Deng Xiaoping was a big fan, and the author (real name Louis Cha Leung-yung) was the first non-Communist who he met in Hong Kong. I think that the core message of the desirability of a united China dealing collectively with external and internal threats is pretty clear, but it's not shoved down your throat. (And most countries would want the same for themselves.)

This was my top unread book by a non-white writer. Next on that list is Dominion: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction from Africa and the African Diaspora, eds. Zelda Knight & Ekpeki Oghenechovwe Donald.

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December 2012 books and 2012 books roundup

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This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging which will fall in 2023. Every six-ish days, I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.

The BBC commissioned a piece from me that I am really proud of – outside my usual area of commentary, but a topic close to my heart: the nineteenth-century Irish politician Arthur McMurrough Kavanagh, who was born without arms or legs.

At work, it was a bit quieter after the excitement of my November trip. I went to Geneva with intern MG for two days. Very sadly, a Serbian friend took his own life in dramatic circumstances. In the outside world, Patrick Moore died.

At home, after a failed effort in November, I managed to get a good picture of all three kids at the Paterskerk in Tienen for our Christmas letter:

Anne’s brother R and his wife V came for New Year, and we had oysters:

Also the glorious Belgian state issued us with a tandem bike for little U, which was tried out by everyone:

 

I read 17 books that month.

Non-fiction: 4 (2012 total 52)
The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain, by Ronald Hutton
My Old Man: A Personal History of Music Hall, by John Major
The Bible
The Comic Strip Companion: the Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to Doctor Who in Comics: 1964-1979, by Paul Scoones

Fiction (not sf): 3 (2012 total 45)
The Ten Word Game, by Jonathan Gash
Bleeding Hearts, by Ian Rankin
War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy

SF (not Who): 2 (2012 total 62)
Non-Stop, by Brian Aldiss
The Year’s Best Science Fiction, 25th Annual Edition, ed. Gardner Dozois

Who: 6 (2012 total 75)

The Colony of Lies, by Colin Brake
Sanctuary, by David McIntee
The Burning, by Justin Richards
Scream of the Shalka, by Paul Cornell
Devil in the Smoke, by Justin Richards
Doctor Who Annual 2006, ed. Clayton Hickman

Comics: 2 (2012 total 21)
Ōoku: the Inner Chambers, vol 6, by Fumi Yoshinaga
Aldébaran 2: La Blonde, by Leo

~7,200 pages (2012 total 77,800)
1/17 (2012 total 65/259) by women (Yoshinaga)
1/17 (2012 total 12/259) by PoC (also Yoshinaga)

Tes best of these were the completion of my two big reading projects for 2012 – War and Peace, at a chapter a day, and The Bible. But I liked most of the books I read that month; I’m going to single out John Major’s history of music hall, and the companion to Doctor Who comics, as especially noteworthy. I did not expecially enjoy the Who novel Colony of Lies, or Rankin’s Bleeding Hearts, both from authors whose other work I have enjoyed.

I failed to do a 2012 books roundup at the time, so this is a reconstruction.

Total books: 259 – ninth highest of the 17 years I have been keeping track, so firmly in the middle.
Total page count: ~77,800 – seventh highest of the last 17 years, so a bit above average.

Diversity:
65 (25%) by women – higher than any previous year, lower than any subsequent year, augmented by 10 Agatha Christie novels.
12 (5%) by PoC – more than any year before 2009, less than any year since 2015.

Most books by a single author:
2012: Jonathan Gash (11), Ursula Vernon (6), Ian Rankin (5), Alison Plowden and Justin Richards (4 each); though the Ursula Vernon and Alison Plowden books could be considered as component parts of a single work in each case.

Doctor Who fiction

Novels, collections of shorter fiction, etc excluding comics
2020/ 2019/ 2018/ 2017/ 2016/ 2015/ 2014/ 2013/ 2012/ 2011/ 2010/ 2009/ 2008/ 2007/ 2006/ 2005/ 2004/
18 32 32 51 39 43 59 72 75 80 71 71 179 27 28 5 1
7% 14% 12% 21% 18% 15% 20% 30% 29% 27% 26% 21% 48% 11% 14% 3% 1%
All Who books including comics and non-fiction
2020/ 2019/ 2018/ 2017/ 2016/ 2015/ 2014/ 2013/ 2012/ 2011/ 2010/ 2009/ 2008/ 2007/ 2006/ 2005/ 2004/
25 43 42 55 42 54 68 81 76 87 78 81 180 49 32 5 1
9% 18% 16% 23% 20% 19% 23% 34% 29% 29% 28% 23% 49% 21% 15% 3% 1%

Third highest tally and pecentage ever.

Top Doctor Who book of the year:
Shada, the long awaited novelisation by Gareth Roberts from Douglas Adams’ script. Shame that Roberts turned out to be a bigot. (Review; get it here.)

Honourable mentions:
All-Consuming Fire, by Andy Lane (review; get it here)
Doctor Who: The Brilliant Book 2012, ed. Clayton Hickman (review; get it here)

The one you haven’t heard of:
The above-mentioned Comic Strip Companion, by Paul Scoones (review ; get it here)

The one to avoid:
Torchwood: Into the Silence, by Sarah Pinborough; disposable autistic character (review; get it here

 

Non-Whovian sff

2020/2019/2018/2017/2016/2015/2014/2013/2012/2011/2010/2009/2008/2007/2006/2005/2004/
11477108688013012465627873785475687976
43%33%41%29%38%45%43%27%24%26%26%23%15%32%33%55%51%

Second lowest tally and third lowest percentage ever.

Top SF book of the year:
Among Others, by Jo Walton – like most of the Hugo and Nebula voters, I found that the author had somehow got inside my head and shared my memories. (Review</a>; get it here.)

Honourable mentions:
Assassin’s Apprentice, by Robin Hobb (review; get it here
The Testament of Jessie Lamb, by Jane Rogers (review; get it here)

The one you haven’t heard of:

Revise the World, by Brenda W. Clough (review; get it here)

The one to avoid:
Dagger Magic, by Katherine Kurtz (review; get it here)

 

Non-fiction

2020/2019/2018/2017/2016/2015/2014/2013/2012/2011/2010/2009/2008/2007/2006/2005/2004/
5049505737474846536966947078704242
19%21%19%24%17%16%16%19%20%23%24%27%19%33%34%29%28%

Eighth highest tally of 17 years, firmly in the middle; tenth highest percentage, also fairly average.

Top non-fiction book of the year:
The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance, by Edmund de Waal – brilliant story of heirlooms, Proust, the Holocaust and Japan. (Review</a>; get it here.)

Honourable mentions to:

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Written by Herself, by Harriet Ann Jacobs (review; get it here)
A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, by Diarmaid MacCulloch (review; get it here)

The one you haven’t heard of:

Pawns of peace: evaluation of Norwegian peace efforts in Sri Lanka, 1997-2009, from NORAD, the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (review; get it here for free)

The one to avoid:

The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, by Emile Durkheim (review; get it here)

 

Non-sfnal fiction

2020/ 2019/ 2018/ 2017/ 2016/ 2015/ 2014/ 2013/ 2012/ 2011/ 2010/ 2009/ 2008/ 2007/ 2006/ 2005/ 2004/
40 45 36 26 28 42 41 44 48 48 50 59 24 33 35 9 19
15% 19% 14% 11% 13% 14% 14% 19% 19% 16% 18% 17% 6% 14% 17% 6% 13%

Third highest tally and joint highest percentage ever.

Top non-genre fiction of the year:
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Brontë – I came to it late, but much my favourite Brontë novel – seems somehow a bit more in balance than her sisters’ books. (Review; get it here.)

Honourable mentions:
The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James (review; get it here)
Goodnight Mister Tom, by Michelle Magorian (review; get it here)

The one you haven’t heard of:

Lust, Caution: And Other Stories, by Eileen Chang (review; get it here)

The one to avoid:
The Vatican Rip, by Jonathan Gash (review; get it here)

 

Comics

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

Eigtht highest tally and eighth highest percentage, firmly in the middle.

Top comic of the year:
Digger, by Ursula Vernon, a deserving winner of the Hugo. (Review</a>; get it here.)

Honourable mention:
The Unwritten Vol 3: Dead Man’s Knock, by Mike Carey (review</a>; get it here)

The one you haven’t heard of:
The Countdown Annual 1972 (review</a>; get it here)

The one to avoid:
Bounced off vols 5 and 6 of Ōoku: the Inner Chambers, by Fumi Yoshinaga (review v5, review v6</a>; get v5 here, get v6 here)

 

Making up the numbers: Walt Whitman and Sophocles.

My Book of the Year

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Brontë: Helen is an early feminist heroine, rushing into what rapidly turns out to be an unsuitable marriage and then making the tough choices facing any woman attempting to navigate their own course in a small-minded, small-town society. It’s interesting that New England is her preferred haven of liberty. I was captivated by it.

Other Books of the Year:

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

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Shakespeare in Love

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Shakespeare in Love won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1998, and six others – Best Actress (Gwyneth Paltrow), Best Supporting Actress (Judi Dench, who is only on screen for 8 minutes), Best Screenplay, Best Art Direction, Best Costume Design and Best Original Musical or Comedy Score. The Hugo that year went to The Truman Show.

I have not seen any of the other four Oscar nominees, which were Elizabeth, Life Is Beautiful, Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line. That was the year I lived in Bosnia and then Croatia, so I have seen very few films from 1998; apart from the Oscar and Hugo winners, I have watched There’s Something About Mary, Sliding Doors, Primary Colors, Bulworth, Playing by Heart and that’s it. I like all of these, Bulworth least and, I’ll be honest, Shakespeare in Love most.

IMDB users, as so often, take a different view, ranking it only 15th on one ranking and an incredibly low 44th on the other, which is a worse aggregate ranking than any Oscar winner since Cavalcade (slightly worse than Tom Jones). The Big Lebowski and Saving Private Ryan top the two counts. Among the allegations about Harvey Weinstein is the story that he lobbied mercilessly to get Shakespeare in Love its nomination and win ahead of Saving Private Ryan, but to be honest it’s entirely in character for Oscar voters to go for the big warm-hearted romantic tale ahead of a gritty reality-based war film. (I admit that they have sometimes made the other choice.)

Here’s a trailer.

Because this is a film made with mainly British actors in 1999, loads and loads of the cast have also been in Doctor Who, one of whom was also in an Oscar-winning film. That one is Simon Callow, here the randy Master of the Revels, previously impresario Emanuel Schikaneder in Amadeus, and also of course Charles Dickens in The Unquiet Dead, the third episode of New Who.

The only representative of Old Who is Martin Clunes, here Richard Burbage, previously the spoiled aristocratic Lon in an early appearance in the Fifth Doctor story Snakedance.

Mark Williams, the stuttering tailor Wabash here, went on to be Rory Williams’ father in several Eleventh Doctor stories.

Barnaby Kay is Nol here and went on to be the Viking Heidi in The Girl Who Died:

And Nicholas Boulton is the actor Condell here and the Businessman in the Tenth Doctor story Gridlock.

I love Imelda Staunton, the nurse here and the invisible voice of the computer in The Girl Who Waited.

As noted above, this film is far from most people’s top ten films of 1999, and you may not have seen it. It’s a romantic comedy – the first comedy to win Best Picture since Annie Hall, more than twenty years before – set in Merrie England, which was the setting of a spate of Oscar-winners in the 1960s but has since been visited only for parts of Chariots of Fire (which is perhaps too late to be Merrie). The plot is that beautiful (and completely fictional) Viola de Lesseps is in love with young playwright William Shakespeare, disguises herself as a man in order to join his theatre company, and the two of them end up playing the lead roles in the first ever performance of Romeo and Juliet. This is surely the first Oscar-winning film about the writer of a previous Oscar-winning film. The two leads, played by Gwyneth Paltrow and Joseph Fiennes, are tremendously watchable, and I think there’s more sex in this film than in all the previous 70 Oscar-winning films combined.

(I’m going to pause to recommend the Arkangel audio of Romeo and Juliet. Romeo is Joseph Fiennes (who plays Shakespeare himself in Shakespeare in Love) and Juliet is Maria Miles (Elfine in Cold Comfort Farm). But both are somewhat overshadowed by three excellent supporting performances: Clive Swift (who has been in Doctor Who three times over the years) doubling up as both Friar Laurence and the Chorus; Elizabeth Spriggs (who was, among other things, one of the cannibalistic old ladies in Paradise Towers) as Juliet’s Nurse, and best of all, Mercutio is played, in his native Scottish accent, by David Tennant. You can get it here.)

I guess I should try and do my usual thing of going from the bits I didn’t like to the bits I did, but really, there’s very little to dislike here. Historical purists will complain that it’s hugely inaccurate in terms of what people wore, said and did in England in the 1590s, and I would add (as I must) that there actually were non-white people in London then and had been for centuries. Fine. It’s entertainment, not education. It’s very funny and the music is great.

As mentioned, Judi Dench is only in it for 8 minutes, but my god does she dominate those 8 minutes.

I think one has to admit that Paltrow and Dench somewhat overshadow Fiennes and the other male actors, good as they are. Again, fine. Too many romances portray the woman as lacking agency; Viola here challenges convention and while she is not ultimately completely successful, the point has been made.

I’m surprised by how far up my ranking I’m putting this – just outside the top ten, below Rain Man but above Terms of Endearment.

Next up is American Beauty, which I actually saw in the cinema when it came out.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

1920s: Wings (1927-28) | The Broadway Melody (1928-29)
1930s: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-30) | Cimarron (1930-31) | Grand Hotel (1931-32) | Cavalcade (1932-33) | It Happened One Night (1934) | Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, and books) | The Great Ziegfeld (1936) | The Life of Emile Zola (1937) | You Can’t Take It with You (1938) | Gone with the Wind (1939, and book)
1940s: Rebecca (1940) | How Green Was My Valley (1941) | Mrs. Miniver (1942) | Casablanca (1943) | Going My Way (1944) | The Lost Weekend (1945) | The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) | Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) | Hamlet (1948) | All the King’s Men (1949)
1950s: All About Eve (1950) | An American in Paris (1951) | The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) | From Here to Eternity (1953) | On The Waterfront (1954, and book) | Marty (1955) | Around the World in 80 Days (1956) | The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) | Gigi (1958) | Ben-Hur (1959)
1960s: The Apartment (1960) | West Side Story (1961) | Lawrence of Arabia (1962) | Tom Jones (1963) | My Fair Lady (1964) | The Sound of Music (1965) | A Man for All Seasons (1966) | In the Heat of the Night (1967) | Oliver! (1968) | Midnight Cowboy (1969)
1970s: Patton (1970) | The French Connection (1971) | The Godfather (1972) | The Sting (1973) | The Godfather, Part II (1974) | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) | Rocky (1976) | Annie Hall (1977) | The Deer Hunter (1978) | Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
1980s: Ordinary People (1980) | Chariots of Fire (1981) | Gandhi (1982) | Terms of Endearment (1983) | Amadeus (1984) | Out of Africa (1985) | Platoon (1986) | The Last Emperor (1987) | Rain Man (1988) | Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
1990s: Dances With Wolves (1990) | The Silence of the Lambs (1991) | Unforgiven (1992) | Schindler’s List (1993) | Forrest Gump (1994) | Braveheart (1995) | The English Patient (1996) | Titanic (1997) | Shakespeare in Love (1998) | American Beauty (1999)
21st century: Gladiator (2000) | A Beautiful Mind (2001) | Chicago (2002) | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) | Million Dollar Baby (2004, and book) | Crash (2005) | The Departed (2006) | No Country for Old Men (2007) | Slumdog Millionaire (2008) | The Hurt Locker (2009)
2010s: The King’s Speech (2010) | The Artist (2011) | Argo (2012) | 12 Years a Slave (2013) | Birdman (2014) | Spotlight (2015) | Moonlight (2016) | The Shape of Water (2017) | Green Book (2018) | Parasite (2019)
2020s: Nomadland (2020) | CODA (2021) | Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) | Oppenheimer (2023)

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The Texas abortion law

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Surfacing after the usual intense week at work to catch up on news from outside my professional area of concern. And good heavens, the new Texas law on abortion, which the U.S. Supreme Court has declined to annul, is a truly horrible development.

My own position on the overall issue is that pregnant people should be trusted to make their own healthcare decisions, and the legitimate role of the state in intervening is very little indeed. I set out my thoughts in some detail before the Irish referendum in 2017:

However, even if you describe yourself as pro-life, surely you cannot support the Texas law that criminalises victims of rape and incest, and people whose medical situation requires that the pregnancy cannot go to full term. Rachel Cunliffe writes about the biology of this in the New Statesman.

And in particular, surely you cannot support the vigilantism of the Texas law, where anyone is entitled to sue anyone else who they suspect of being involved with an abortion. As Sue Halpin points out in the New Yorker, it will (as usual) be non-white people who bear the brunt of it, just as they are penalised by the new voting laws in Texas.

David Frum in the Atlantic thinks that Republicans have over-reached, and will pay the price for it, drawing a historical parallel with Prohibition. I do hope so, but I certainly feel for those who will be and are already being directly affected by the new law in Texas, and in the other red states that are rushing to follow where Texas has led.

Not much I can do from here other than write about it, so that’s what I have done.

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