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  • Mon, 12:56: RT @G_S_Bhogal: My peoples, the time has come for a MEGATHREAD. In 40 tweets I will explain another 40 concepts you should know. Strap in…
  • Mon, 18:06: Blood of Atlantis, by Simon Forward https://t.co/pOkzFrsPRv
  • Mon, 19:54: RT @wef: The panel agreed that there’s been significant change in recent years. Employees are looking for ‘inspirational ethics’, explained…
  • Tue, 10:45: A giant space rock demolished an ancient Middle Eastern city and everyone in it – possibly inspiring the Biblical story of Sodom https://t.co/gvJ1FozGCt Wow!!!!!
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Blood of Atlantis, by Simon Forward

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Another trawler nosed its way into the circle of piers, hunting for a berth among the gently jostling vessels. The most recent arrival was tying up, a couple of the crew handing off packing crates to be stacked on the pier by a third man.

In contrast to the Erimem series, I'm greatly enjoying these set of adventures of Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart set just before the arrival of the Third Doctor into his life. Here he is sent off to the Aegean Sea to investigate mysterious threats, with his usual crew of assistants (who all get something to do) and an eccentric archaeologist and a Soviet officer who becomes a reluctant ally, along with a ruthless South African baddie. It fairly cracks along and I enjoyed it. Forward wrote one of the first Doctor Who books I read this century, before the 2005 reboot, and I've liked his work more often than not; this one's certainly in the "more" category. You can get it here.

book cover
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Jack, by Marilynne Robinson

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

“Yes,” she said. “Good evening.” There were tears in her voice.

This is the fourth book in Robinson's Gilead series, about two families from the town of that name in Iowa. We had got parts of Jack's story in the earlier books Gilead and Home, but I confess I had forgotten most of the details and enjoyed Jack as if it had been a standalone novel. The protagonist is the alcoholic, self-loathing son of a preacher, who falls in love with a black woman, Della (whose father is also a clergyman), in St Louis in 1956. It's a slow-moving story, but it's moving as well as slow. Jack gradually finds his path to redemption and Della her path to independence; it's not an easy time for a relationship like theirs, but Robinson takes us through it all carefully and believably. I really enjoyed this. You can get it here.

Jack bubbled to the top of three of my lists simultaneously – top unread book acquired this year, top unread book by a woman and top unread non-sf fiction. Next on the first of those lists is Mortal Engines, by my fellow guest at next year's Eastercon, Philip Reeve; top of both the other two is The Wych Elm by Tana French.

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Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings

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More or less on a whim (and a couple of positive recommendations seen on Facebook) I made a rare excursion to the cinema, my first since the pandemic, to see Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. It is a lot of fun. I’m really unfamiliar with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, having seen only Iron Man (which I didn’t like) and Captain America: Winter Soldier (which I didn’t like much more), Thor: Ragnarok (same again) and Black Panther (which I really liked, but failed to write up at the time). But I’m happy to report that Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings can very much be enjoyed as a standalone film, on its own merits. Here’s a trailer.

It’s a super-hero film at heart; our protagonist, Shang-Chi (Simu Liu) is a super-skilled martial arts fighter working as a car valet in a San Francisco hotel. He is estranged from his father Wenwu (Tony Leung), who has become the leader of a global crime syndicate through use of the mystical Ten Rings, which give him super powers. Shang-Chi and his not-quite-girlfriend Katy (Awkwafina) go on a quest to find first his sister Xialing (Meng’er Zhang) and then their father, who is obsessed with finding Ta Lo, the hidden home village of their long-dead mother Ying Li (Fala Chen). Wenwu, however, is unwittingly being manipulated by dark forces trying to break through into our world to destroy it.

I had not seen any of these actors in anything before. However, I cheered when Michelle Yeoh, who I knew from Star Trek: Discovery, appears as Shang-Chi’s aunt, one of the guardians of Ta Lo; and I boggled at Ben “Gandhi” Kingsley as a dissolute actor who helps the protagonists. I hadn’t quite taken in that Kingsley had actually portrayed the same character in a couple of preious Marvel films, as an actor pretending to be The Mandarin, the leader of the Ten Rings, before he is captured by the real thing. The film as a whole is funny as well as action-packed, and Kingsley carries quite a lot of the humour and does it very well.

I felt it was an interesting window into Chinese culture a fifth of the way into the 21st century. Quite a lot of dialogue is in Chinese (and in my local Belgian cinema that meant squinting hastily at the French and Dutch subtitles to get what is going on). The story starts in San Francisco, and stays there long enough to meet Katy’s Chinese family; we then move to Macao (though we don’t see much more than Xialing’s fight club) and finally meet lots of Chinese mythical creatures in Ta Lo (which is actually filmed in Australia, but we’re led to believe it’s a secret part of China). There is a lot more going on than I realised.

The special effects are really something. The emergence of the monster for the final battle is tremendous, and the various creatures of Ta Lo beautifully done. We take these things for granted these days, but it’s always worth remembering that this is fairly new technology.

But really what makes the film is the fight sequences. Utterly unrealistic of course, and our protagonists have numerous very narrow scrapes. But the choreography of violence is so impressive that it rapidly got me past the ick of people harming each other and into the wow of how well it was put together. I’m well aware of course that there is a long tradition of this from kung-fu and wuxia, which I don’t know so I can’t say how much of this is genuinely new; but I found it all very watchable. Here’s the opening of the fight on the bus in San Francisco, a brilliant scene which must have taken days to stage.

Anyway. My exploration of Chinese sf continues. I have a long way to go.

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The Sixth Sense

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The Sixth Sense won the first Nebula Award for Best Script for 22 years, after the original Star Wars in 1978. The other 1999 finalists were The Devil's Arithmetic, The Iron Giant, The Uranus Experiment: Part 2 and The Matrix.

I find several things puzzling about this. I can't understand why anyone would have voted for it ahead of The MatrixGalaxy Quest, which won the Hugo that year (beating The Sixth Sense and The Matrix) and the Nebula the following year, was not on the 1999 Nebula ballot.

The Nebula ballot notoriously included The Uranus Experiment: Part 2, a porn film which includes a 20-second sex scene shot in zero gravity on a parabolic flight. In a spirit of scientific enquiry, I have conducted my own investigation, and I can report that full docking in zero-G was not achieved, at least not in the footage that made it to the screen. (Personally, I think it was an entirely valid nomination, though the film is almost devoid of plot.)

The Sixth Sense has one actor who has returned from a previous Oscar/Hugo/Nebula winner. It is little Haley Joel Osment, playing Cole Sear, the psychic child at the centre of the plot (and in my view the best performance in the movie); five years ago, he was Forrest Gump's son, Young Forrest, in Forrest Gump.

Look, I know that this film is generally considered a masterpiece and won loads of awards. I found it boring and unmemorable. I actually watched it twice within three days, after realising that I had retained almost nothing about it first time round. Without spoiling, there is a major Plot Twist ten minutes from the end, which I spotted eleven minutes from the beginning. Bruce Willis spent an hour and a half working out what I already knew, and it just wasn't very interesting.

I'm putting it right down at the bottom of my list of Hugo and Nebula/winning films, between Curse of the Cat People and Heaven Can Wait. Looking forward rather more to Galaxy Quest, which is next on my list.

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550 days of plague

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I’ve been thinking about how long I’ll keep up this series of ten-day check-ins. On the one hand, regular writing is good discipline in general. On the other hand, I really hope this will all be over soon. I posted my 540-day update on the way to a reception hosted by POLITICO:

At the reception, I got talking to Morten Rud Petersen, a former Danish minister; he told me that Denmark was to drop all COVID-related restrictions in a few days’ time, declaring the pandemic effectively over. I can see this happening in Belgium too, in a couple of months, if things keep on as they are currently. Infection numbers here are if anything drifting downward slightly, and numbers in hospitals and ICU are stable, despite the start of the new school term more than two weeks ago; an average of 7 deaths per day is still 7 too many, but it’s a third of the per capita rate in the UK right now, and a tenth of the per capita rate in the USA. The vaccination campaign is coming to an end.

Not to gloat, of course; Belgium has had the worst death rate over the whole pandemic of any Western European country (there are nine Eastern European countries and four in Latin America which are worse). But at least it’s not Peru, where the pandemic has claimed 6 lives in every thousand, one in 160 – twice the rate of the next worst country (Hungary).

I hunted down a picture that has been illustrating some recent articles about vaccinations in history – not a lot to say about it, but it is worth recording.

I had a slightly weird week, with Anne and F off to visit her parents from Thursday to Thursday. It’s the longest time that I have spent alone in this house, which we moved into in 2001 (and paid off the mortgage on last month). I was able to keep myself amused in the evenings, worked from home a couple of days, went to see a film on Saturday (which I’ll write up tomorrow) and went to the Netherlands on Sunday.

I got a slightly more high-profile media opportunity than usual on Thursday, when a colleague kindly passed me an invitation to talk about EU defence on Al-Jazeera. Since that was one of my WFH days, viewers will have been treated to our picture of baby B on the back wall of our study.

As Gore Vidal said, never turn down an opportunity to have sex or appear on television.

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February 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.

A truly formative experience for me this month was attending the Los Angeles Doctor Who convention Gallifrey One. I had one hell of a good time.

At the end of the month I was in Berlin accompanying the foreign minister of the unrecognised state of Somaliland, which was also tremendous fun. Here he is sitting next to German academic Annette Weber, who was appointed EU Special Representative to the Horn of Africa two months ago, in July 2021.

I also got out with B and F to the Three Tumuli of Tienen, which have since been massively cleaned up.

In the outside world, the Pope announced his abdication, the second of the year following Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands the previous month; there was a third to come (and another in 2014). Some relevant reading.

I read only 13 books that month, my New Who rewatch slowing me down.

Fiction (non-sf) 1 (YTD 2)
The Red and the Black, by Stendhal

sf (non-Who) 5 (YTD 8)
Matilda, by Roald Dahl
Dark Eden, by Chris Beckett
London Falling, by Paul Cornell
Empty Space: A Haunting, by M. John Harrison
Captain Vorpatril's Alliance, by Lois McMaster Bujold

Doctor Who 6 (YTD 12, 15 counting non-fiction)
The Menagerie, by Martin Day
Original Sin, by Andy Lane
The Turing Test, by Paul Leonard
Snake Bite, by Scott Handcock
The Silurian Gift, by Mike Tucker
The Nameless City, by Michael Scott

Comics 1 (YTD 2)
Slaapkoppen, by Randall C.

~3,400 pages (YTD 7,600)
1/13 (YTD 5/29) by women (Bujold)
0/13 (YTD 0/29) by PoC

Loved Captain Vorpatril's Alliance, which you can get hereEmpty Space, which you can get here.

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Friday reading

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Current
Set This House in Order: A Romance of Souls, by Matt Ruff
Dominion: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction from Africa and the African Diaspora, eds. Zelda Knight & Ekpeki Oghenechovwe Donald

Last books finished
Felaheen, by Jon Courtenay Grimwood
Rose, by Russell T. Davies
Doctor Who: The Massacre, by John Lucarotti
Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts, by Rebecca Hall and Hugo Martínez
The Bloodline Feud, by Charles Stross
"The Saturn Game", by Poul Anderson

Next books
The Rain-Soaked Bride, by Guy Adams
Great Glowing Coils of the Universe, by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor

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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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