Gelon was friendly with him, and one day he took the old fella aside. This was some years back, before the war and before Desma had run off, when their boy, Helios, was still alive, though barely. Anyway, Gelon asked if Helios would see the year out. Now the old fella looked thoughtful. After a long pause, he said if Gelon could get him an ox, he’d soon find out. Gelon, being poor, said he couldn’t afford an ox. Okay, well, what about a sheep? Even a lamb would do? Gelon said he’d try. That night he stole a lamb from Alberus’ farm, brought it to the prophet. The prophet told him to be at Dismas’ the next evening, and he’d tell what he’d found. Then he bowed, took the lamb under his arm, and stumbled off into the night.
This book got rave reviews in some quarters for its depiction of ancient Greek society in Syracuse with Dublin accents. I found it brutal and not at all funny, and drifted off after seventy pages. You can get Glorious Exploits here.
‘Steenbergen in het bos’ of later ‘Vaalbeke ten wauwere’, gelegen aan het lagere en moerassige deel van het Kouterbos (later aan de vijvers), behoorde als een leen van de heren van Heverlee tot de 15de eeuw toe aan de familie van Spontin.² Dat verschillende heren invloed hadden in een bepaald gebied is te begrijpen in de verhoudingen van het middeleeuwse leenstelsel van leenheren en leenmannen. Nadien erfden verschillende families de bezittingen van Steenbergen of verkochten ze verder. De hertogen van Arenberg verwierven de bossen rond het gebied van de heren van Steenbergen door het huweliik van Charles van Arenberg met Anne van Croÿ, na het overlüiden van haar broer die geen erfgenamen had (1612). De heerlikheid bleef in handen van de heren van Steenbergen.³
“Steenbergen in het bos” (Steenbergen in the forest), or later “Vaalbeke ten wauwere,” located on the lower, marshy part of the Kouterbos (later on the ponds), belonged to the Spontin family as a fief of the lords of Heverlee until the 15th century. That different lords held influence in a given area is understandable in the medieval feudal system of lords and vassals. Subsequently, various families inherited or sold the Steenbergen estates. The Dukes of Arenberg acquired the forests surrounding the area of the lords of Steenbergen through the marriage of Charles of Arenberg to Anne of Croÿ, after the death of her brother, who had no heirs (1612). The lordship remained in the hands of the lords of Steenbergen.
³ Mertens, E. p. 60; lijst van de heren van Aarschot, Bierbeek en Oud-Heverlee: de Croÿ en Arenberg
This was the other lovely local history book (after @Wouters Wondere Wereld) that I picked up during one of the lockdown breaks in 2021, a nicely illustrated chronicle of the small resort area 2 km south of our house, known as “Het Zoet Water”, ie “The Sweet Water” or “The Fresh Water”. Currently the ponds are drained stretches of mud waiting for a municipal refreshment; the whole area is already the most touristy spot in our commune, and has perhaps potential for more.
It’s a short punchy book with lots of photographs, looking at the history and economics of the once isolated community, and the influence of the Dukes of Arenberg in its development. At one point the houses around the ponds became a local hotbed of Protestantism (these things are relative), but most of the heretics were firmly persuaded to move to America. Later, the development of one of Belgium’s first amusement parks brought in capital and even a royal visit from the excited young Prince Philippe in 1964 (he is now our king). With the decline of the amusement park (due to growing expense and competition) the Zoete Waters has settled back on providing a playground for children and a showground for artworks, along with a number of decent restaurants which we duly patronise. If you follow me on social media, you’ll have seen my occasional posts of Christmas services from the Baroque chapel of Our Lady of Steenbergen, tucked into the woods just beside the lake.
Current The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien: Revised and Expanded Edition Our Song, by Anna Carey Burning Brightly: 50 Years of Novacon, ed. Ian Whates Mean Streets, by Terrance Dicks
Last books finished The Twist, by George Mann et al The Partition: Ireland Divided, 1885-1925, by Charles Townshend
Next books Paradise Towers, by Sean Mason and Silvano Beltramo Het lijkt Washington wel: Hoe lobbyisten Brussel in hun greep hebben, by Peter Teffer East of Eden, by John Steinbeck
“Two Hearts” was next in my list of joint Hugo and Nebula winning fiction, having taken the Hugo for Best Novelette in 2006 and the Nebula in the same category in 2007 (though that was the Nebula for 2006). Before reading it, I thought, well, I had not actually read Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn before, so maybe I should read it first and see what I thought?
The second paragraph of the third chapter of The Last Unicorn is:
The unicorn was gray and still. “There is magic on me,” she said. “Why did you not tell me?”
Reader, I hated it. I found it the worst kind of sentimental glurge. The dissonance of calling the wizard Schmendrick is one more false step on top of the teeth-grinding saccharinity of the rest of the story. I lasted not much more than fifty pages. I’m sorry, I know it’s a much-loved classic, and perhaps I am a bitter ageing man, but I could not take it.
“Two Hearts” does not have internal sections, so here is the third paragraph.
But it didn’t ever eat children, not until this year.
Back in 1968, Beagle published his classic fantasy novel, The Last Unicorn. I have never read it, nor have I seen the film made some time back (apparently very successful, though Beagle did not profit much from it) and so I expected this follow-up novella (written almost four decades later!) to leave me pretty cold. In fact, it had entirely the opposite effect: I was totally captured by the lyrical and moving story of a king’s last quest, told through the eyes of a young girl, in a fantasy world where Bad Things Happen but you can hope for Good to have a partial victory at the end. Perhaps I am just getting sentimental in my old age, but I loved it.
Again, I must be getting bitter as I get older, because I really didn’t like it this time. Perhaps my teeth were still on edge from reading The Last Unicorn.
The estates of “The Wild Geese” were seized and sold or given to Protestants, and penal laws were introduced forbidding Catholics to hold office or to serve in the armed forces. Father’s land at Leixlip had only been rented of course, but the new tenants seized our stock and equipment and I was reduced once more to buying malt to keep the brewery going.
A few years ago I wrote about Christian Davies, commonly call’d Mother Ross, who was born in 1667 and lived as a woman in Leixlip and Dublin until her husband was conscripted into the army, and then herself joined up, living as a man for many years, until she was eventually discovered and became a bit of a celebrity. This is not a terribly good novelisation of the story (indeed, the original account that we have supposedly received from Christian herself is something of a novelisation), but I was on a long plane flight and short of other things to read, so I pursued it to the end.
A couple of beats that I really felt were missed: the author has rather a tin ear for the dynamics of the relationship of southern Irish Protestants to the United Kingdom, and I winced several times as his characters simply got it wrong. And from Christian’s own memoirs, it’s pretty clear that she had several enjoyable relationships with girlfriends while living as a man and ostensibly still looking for her husband; Lloyd simply doesn’t take her there, and instead invents a back-story of sexual assault in Ireland. Not really recommended. You can get Mother Ross here.
About the author: “Geoff Lloyd was born in 1928, served on the lower deck in the Royal Navy (postwar), spent most of his career in the UK Civil Service, moving around the British Isles. He travelled widely in Eastern Europe, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India and retired to Portugal. His interests include music, history, and travel. He has written eighteen novels, three plays, short stories, etc.” I won’t be seeking out more of his work, but I admire his energy, if he is still with us.
This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is The Partition, by Charles Townshend.
See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Ecuador.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
Galápagos
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
87,317
8,121
Wish You Were Here
Jodi Picoult
281,521
2,100
Through Gates of Splendor
Elisabeth Elliot
31,697
3,556
The Old Man Who Read Love Stories
Luis Sepúlveda
29,251
1,780
Shipped
Angie Hockman
71,391
555
Shadow of the Almighty
Elisabeth Elliot
11,200
2,245
End of the Spear
Steve Saint
12,308
1,078
Natural Selection
Elin Hilderbrand
61,553
126
This week’s winner, Vonnegut’s Galápagos, is one of four books on the list which are set on or around the eponymous islands. Unlike Wish You Were Here, Shipped and Natural Selection, it is not a contemporary novel about relationships, but a gloomy post-apocalyptic reflection on the end of humanity. Wish You Were Here, which is far ahead on Goodreads but well behind on LibraryThing, is set during the pandemic and so has a certain post-apocalyptic element too. Notable that Shipped and Natural Selection score really well on Goodreads and much less well on LibraryThing.
Three of the other four books on the list are about the life and legacy of Jim Elliott, an American missionary who was killed by annoyed indigenous people in 1956. The two by his widow score particularly well on LibraryThing, less so on Goodreads. Luis Sepúlveda is from Chile, so unfortunately none of the top eight is by an Ecuadorean writer. The top book by an Ecuadorean author set in Ecuador is Jawbone, by Mónica Ojeda.
I disqualified four books. The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina, by Zoraida Córdova, gave me the most trouble, but in the end I concluded that more than half of it is set in the USA where Orquídea’s four children live. As we have seen previously, The Old Patagonian Express, by Paul Theroux, covers several countries. The Undocumented Americans, by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, is about the immigrant experience in the USA. Everything Here Is Beautiful, by Mira T. Lee, is set in the USA and Switzerland (one of the main characters has an Ecuadorean boyfriend).
Coming next: Cambodia, Zimbabwe, Guinea (Conakry) and Benin – we’ll be back in Africa for a bit.
I could hot desk in the open plan area, as Arthur had suggested, but then I wouldn’t have such luxuries as shelves for my client files, or a permanent noticeboard, or a drawer to keep spare pens and Post-it notes in. Even sharing with Kawan Baik was better than that.
Another contemporary romance (following on from The Friend Zone Experiment), this has two young British Asian lawyers in London gradually figuring out their destiny, while also navigating the perils of white patriarchy in their profession and the ethics of dodgy political assignments. There are some glorious moments, including a particularly gruesome wedding chapter. The ending surprised me; I didn’t expect the characters to go (literally) there. Again, you know where the story is likely to end up emotionally from roughly page 3, but the journey is gripping and very entertaining. You can get Behind Frenemy Lines here.
Belinda stepped outside the time machine, feeling her pumps scrape against a pavement that her feet did not belong on.
The episode that this novelisation is based on was broadcast on Easter Sunday this year, and I wrote:
Lux was the episode shown at Easter and I watched it with other fans in Belfast. The basic concept of yet another ancient deity emerging – which turns out to be rather easily defeated – didn’t appeal to me, and the acknowledgement of segregation felt a bit by-the-numbers, but I loved the episode’s fanservice, reminiscent of The Girl Who Loved Doctor Who. Everyone’s favourite episode is Blink, right?
James Goss has picked this up and run with it, and turned in another cracking novelisation (following City of Death, The Pirate Planet and The Giggle). It’s a story with several epic shifts of scale – the small-minded tableau of a Florida town, the big imaginative expanse of the fans’ cramped living room, and the superhuman struggle between the Doctor and a rogue god. The fourth-wall-breaking scenes of the Doctor and Belinda with the fans, Hasan, Robyn and Lizzie, are really excellent, and I found I had something in my eye at the end. As usual with this writer, recommended. You can get Doctor Who: Lux here.
Bumping this up from a social media post I made a couple of weeks ago: I came across a fascinating article, “Tolkien, Sayers, Sex and Gender”, by David Doughan, which looks at the possible reasons why Tolkien disliked the work of Dorothy L. Sayers. He says in a letter of 31 May 1944 to his son Christopher:
I could not stand Gaudy Night. I followed P. Wimsey from his attractive beginnings so far, by which time I conceived a loathing for him (and his creatrix) not surpassed by any other character in literature known to me, unless by his Harriet. The honeymoon one (Busman’s H.?) was worse. I was sick . . .
Doughan says, in the abstract of his paper:
Tolkien’s expressed “loathing” for Dorothy Sayers and her novels Gaudy Night and Busman’s Honeymoon is remarkable considering that Sayers is generally considered to belong to the same milieu as the Inklings. Possible reasons for this are the contrast between the orthodox Catholic Tolkien’s view of male sexuality as inherently sinful, requiring “great mortification”, and Sayers’s frankly hedonistic approach. Another reason may be Sayers’s depiction of an independent Oxford women’s college getting by successfully without men, and her representation of marriage as a source of intellectual frustration for creative women.
Indeed, Sayers was very friendly with Tolkien’s friends C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams, and is sometimes seen as an honorary member of the Inklings. But there is no evidence that she and Tolkien ever met, even though they graduated from Oxford in the same year (1915) and were both first published in the same volume of Oxford Poetry (also 1915).
In fairness to Tolkien, he doesn’t say that he hates all of the Lord Peter Wimsey books; he says that he particularly hated Gaudy Night and Busman’s Honeymoon, the last two books of the thirteen, but that the series had “attractive beginnings”. People who are bigger Wimsey fans than me tell me that they also hate Busman’s Honeymoon, so it’s a point of view which reasonable people can take. (For a counter perspective, Busman’s Honeymoon has the highest reader approval rating of any of the individual Wimsey novels on Goodreads, with Gaudy Night second.)
Doughan speculates that Tolkien’s dislike of Gaudy Night is because it showed a successful Oxford college run by women, and that Tolkien felt uncomfortable about such a scenario. Personally, without having gone into the details, I think this argument fails on two grounds. I have not read Gaudy Night myself, but again people who are bigger Wimsey fans than me tell me that it’s very much about internal rivalries and poisonous academic politics, rather than portraying the women’s college as a feminist utopia. I think it’s more likely that Sayers’ satire of the collegiate snakepit hit too close to home for Tolkien, and made him uncomfortable.
A very stupid person told me on social media (in a comment now deleted) that Tolkien simply hated and feared women. This is just rubbish. On women’s education, Tolkien’s record is actually rather good. A few years back, I came across this fascinating snippet in John D. Rateliffe’s essay, “The Missing Women: J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lifelong Support for Women’s Higher Education”:
A vivid glimpse into Tolkien as a teacher of women can be found in the biography of Mary Challans, better known by her pen name, Mary Renault. Renault’s biographer notes that Tolkien had tutored women from St. Hugh’s while working at the OED and describes the impact of Tolkien’s return from Leeds on Renault and her fellow students at St. Hugh’s in these terms:
the women at St. Hugh’s […] had every reason to be grateful for his return. He was a conscientious lecturer, offering al-most double the statutory hours in order to ensure that his students, female as well as male, covered the entire subject. Indeed, he was unusual in being notably sympathetic to women undergraduates.
We don’t have any contemporary references by Challans to Tolkien during her undergraduate days (1925–28), although we know she was obsessed with all things medieval at the time and that long afterward her letters exchanged with her old college roommate, Kasia Abbott, make “frequent references to their old teacher Tolkien”. And that, when asked about him more than sixty years later, Kasia described him to Renault’s biographer as “darling Tolkien”. We don’t have any correspondence between Tolkien and Renault, unfortunately, but we know that Tolkien and Renault admired each other’s fiction; he singles out The King Must Die and The Bull from the Sea for special praise and mentions receiving “a card of appreciation” from Renault, describing it as the piece of fan mail that had pleased him the most.
Considering just how much reader correspondence Tolkien received, to single out the postcard from Mary Renault / Challans as “perhaps the piece of ‘Fan-mail’ that gives me most pleasure” is a very strong statement indeed.
A couple of people suggested to me that perhaps Tolkien and Sayers had had an unsuccessful romantic encounter as students at Oxford, which then poisoned his perception of her forever. I think this is unlikely for several reasons. First of all, Tolkien actually says that he liked the earlier Wimsey books, and that his aversion to both books and writer developed later, possibly even as late as Gaudy Night; so he was not carrying an old grudge over three decades. Second, it’s totally plausible that Tolkien and Sayers, at different colleges and studying different subjects, would simply never have had occasion to meet as undergraduates.
Third, Tolkien was (as far as we know) obsessed with Edith Bratt throughout his Oxford years, and Dorothy L. Sayers’ not entirely successful love life as an undergraduate is also well chronicled in her own records. Of course, that doesn’t exclude some unrecorded disastrous attempted flirtation – or even a non-romantic yet enduringly bitter exchange of very different intellectual and/or political views – but Sayers in particular was pretty open about her past life, and doesn’t ever seem to have mentioned Tolkien in correspondence, even when he became famous (which was long after she did).
Sometimes people just don’t get on with each other, even if they have friends and interests in common, and sometimes later analysts can learn from the interaction, and sometimes there is not much there there; and I tend to feel this is one of the latter cases.
Brian (narrating): I just want to go… get this thing started.
I’ve really enjoyed Burns’ weird stories in the past, and I’m sorry to say that I didn’t find this one as much to my taste, perhaps because it is not as weird. Brian, the protagonist, is a teenager who is obsessed with classic films such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Last Picture Show, and also with his friend Laurie. He stumbles around rocky outcrops, both physical and emotional, and doesn’t quite manage to get where he needs to go. It’s OK as a coming of age story, but I wanted a bit more. You can get Final Cut here.
Next on my pile of unread comics in English is Ness: A Story from the Ulster Cycle, by Patrick Brown.
“And my cells won’t renew in space. What would be the point? I’d only suffocate all over again.”
Another in Cutaway Comics’ explorations of unseen parts of Doctor Who history, this goes behind the backdrop of both The Three Doctors and more importantly Underworld. It is about the difficulties of the Minyan princess Malika, who tries to prevent Omega from destroying the planet Minyos and then leads a further attack on him from the planet Draktria in the fourth of four parts. I found it a rather right-wing narrative; Malika and her family have been elevated against the common people of Minyos by superior technology supplied by the Time Lords, and the rebellion of the Minyans against their oppressive rulers is stoked by Omega and an evil populist politician. The Draktria chapter is straight from the playbook of great powers recruiting loyal but doomed native troops from the colonies. The writer does not seem conscious of the tropes that he has put into the story… The art is generally good but Ridgway doesn’t always get his characters’ faces consistent.
You can get Omega here, along with a DVD and an audio version starring Brian Blessed; unfortunately I don’t have those as I bought it from the Cutaway stall at Gallifrey One.
Current The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien: Revised and Expanded Edition The Partition: Ireland Divided, 1885-1925, by Charles Townshend
Last books finished Jerusalem, Part 1, by Selma Lagerlöf Silence: A Christian History, by Diarmaid MacCulloch (did not finish) The Casuarina Tree, by W. Somerset Maugham The Irish Assassins: Conspiracy, Revenge and the Murders that Stunned an Empire, by Julie Kavanagh The House of Doors, by Tan Twan Eng The New Machiavelli, by Jonathan Powell
Next books The Twist, by George Mann et al Burning Brightly: 50 Years of Novacon, by Ian Whates East of Eden, by John Steinbeck
[Rick Edwards:] No it doesn’t. In 1979, French astrophysicist Jean-Pierre Luminet used a punch-card computer to work out what one [a blackhole] would look like. He didn’t have a printer, so he drew the result of his computations by hand – and it looks quite like Interstellar‘s black hole, Gargantua.
This is a popular science book, aimed perhaps at the older end of the teenage market. It takes ten well-known films – The Martian, Jurassic Park, Interstellar, Planet of the Apes, Back to the Future, 28 Days Later, The Matrix, Gattaca, Ex Machina and Alien – and hangs a series of short reflections off them about the state of play in real science of the concepts developed in each film. It is breezily presented as a dialogue between the two podcast hosts. I found the sidebar sections a little annoying, and would have preferred them to be integrated into the main text, but otherwise it is harmless enough. Of the films I have not seen, Gattaca sounds the most interesting. You can get Science(ish) here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2021. Next on that pile is The Irish Assassins: Conspiracy, Revenge and the Murders that Stunned an Empire, by Julie Kavanagh.
4:00 AM The Griffen boys – Hal, eighteen, and Jack, fourteen – and the two hired hands had begun the milking. The barn was a marvel of cleanliness, whitewashed and gleaming. Down the center, between the spotless runways which fronted the stalls on both sides, a cement drinking trough ran. Hal turned on the water at the far end by flicking a switch and opening a valve. The electric pump that pulled water up from one of the two artesian wells that served the place hummed into smooth operation. He was a sullen boy, not bright, and especially irked on this day. He and his father had had it out the night before. Hal wanted to quit school. He hated school. He hated its boredom, its insistence that you sit still for great fifty-minute chunks of time, and he hated all his subjects with the exceptions of Woodshop and Graphic Arts. English was maddening, history was stupid, business math was incomprehensible. And none of it mattered, that was the hell of it. Cows didn’t care if you said ain’t or mixed your tenses, they didn’t care who was the Commander in Chief of the goddamn Army of the Potomac during the goddamn Civil War, and as for math, his own for chrissakes father couldn’t add two-fifths and one half if it meant the firing squad. That’s why he had an accountant. And look at that guy! College-educated and still working for a dummy like his old man. His father had told him many times that book learning wasn’t the secret of running a successful business (and dairy farming was a business like any other); knowing people was the secret of that. His father was a great one to sling all that bullshit about the wonders of education, him and his sixth-grade education. He never read anything but Reader’s Digest and the farm was making $16,000 a year. Know people. Be able to shake their hands and ask after their wives by name. Well, Hal knew people. There were two kinds: those you could push around and those you couldn’t. The former outnumbered the latter ten to one.
This is the top book published in 1975 as rated by Goodreads users and owned by LibraryThing users – the second place goes to Tuck Everlasting, by Natalie Babbitt, of which I confess I know nothing.
This was King’s second book, after Carrie, and like Carrie it is tremendous. It leans on Bram Stoker’s Dracula, not so heavily as to be ripping it off, but enough that you can see the footprints. It also lays the ground for many future vampire stories, and in particular it sets up a lot of the lore for Buffy, which can only be a good thing.
Of course, what makes it a great novel is the combination of 1) the detailed mapping of the people of a small Maine town, with the arrivals of the struggling writer who is the main viewpoint character and of the sinister strangers who, spoiler, turn out to be vampires, and; and 2) the delicious ramping up of tension and then release, as we know that something horrible is going to happen and then it does. At the other end of New England, H.P. Lovecraft at his best was a master of this sort of thing, and King clearly drank from the same wells.
It has its problems; there is only one significant female character, and I didn’t like the way her storyline ended; and the means and motivation of the vampires are not quite as internally consistent as I would have liked. But I really enjoyed the book as a whole, and sometimes I had to just pause for a moment and admire the writing.
The telephone wires make an odd humming on clear, cool days, almost as if vibrating with the gossip that is transmitted through them, and it is a sound like no other – the lonely sound of voices flying over space. The telephone poles are gray and splintery, and the freezes and thaws of winter have heaved them into leaning postures that are casual. They are not businesslike and military, like phone poles anchored in concrete. Their bases are black with tar if they are beside paved roads, and floured with dust if beside the back roads. Old weathered cleat marks show on their surfaces where linemen have climbed to fix something in 1946 or 1952 or 1969. Birds – crows, sparrows, robins, starlings – roost on the humming wires and sit in hunched silence, and perhaps they hear the foreign human sounds through their taloned feet. If so, their beady eyes give no sign. The town has a sense, not of history, but of time, and the telephone poles seem to know this. If you lay your hand against one, you can feel the vibration from the wires deep in the wood, as if souls had been imprisoned in there and were struggling to get out.
My Kindle copy came with an Afterword written twenty-five years later, in 1999, and also with two short stories, “One for the Road” which is a post-epilogue postscript for the novel, and King’s early story “Jerusalem’s Lot”, which is set in the 1850s and about witchcraft rather than vampires (and leans a bit more heavily on Lovecraft). It also includes a number of deleted or edited scenes from the book, most of which I found rather good, though I agree with King and his editors that the final text of the book was better without them. So that’s a nice bit of extra value.
This was the top unread sf book on my shelves, and the top book I acquired this year. Having recently inherited some of my father’s library, the next two on those piles respectively are East of Eden, by John Steinbeck, and If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, by Italo Calvino.
Non-fiction 7 (YTD 60) Science(ish): The Peculiar Science Behind the Movies, by Rick Edwards & Dr Michael Brooks Het Zoet Water door de eeuwen heen, by Jean Binon and Paul Coeckelbergh American Prometheus: the Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin The Years, by Annie Ernaux Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy, by Serhii Plokhy Silence: A Christian History, by Diarmaid MacCulloch (did not finish) The Irish Assassins: Conspiracy, Revenge and the Murders that Stunned an Empire, by Julie Kavanagh
Non-genre 7 (YTD 32) Behind Frenemy Lines, by Zen Cho Mother Ross: An Irish Amazon, by G.R. Lloyd Glorious Exploits, by Ferdia Lennon (did not finish) The Emperor of Portugallia, by Selma Lagerlöf Jerusalem, Part 1, by Selma Lagerlöf The Casuarina Tree, by W. Somerset Maugham The House of Doors, by Tan Twan Eng
SF 6 (YTD 98) Prophet Song, by Paul Lynch Annie Bot, by Sierra Greer ’Salem’s Lot, by Stephen King The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle (did not finish) “Two Hearts” by Peter S Beagle Howul: A Life’s Journey, by David Shannon
Comics 4 (YTD 27) The School of Death, by Robbie Morrison et al Omega, by Mark Griffiths and John Ridgway Final Cut, by Charles Burns Histoire de Jérusalem, by Vincent Lemire and Christophe Gaultier
6,600 pages (YTD 62,000) 7/27 (YTD 99/246) by non-male writers (Ernaux, Kavanagh, Cho, Lagerlöf x2, Bellamy, “Greer”) 2/27 (YTD 29/246) by a non-white writer (Cho, Eng)
2/27 reread (“Two Hearts”, Ghost Devices)
204 books currently tagged unread, down 5 from last month, down 78 from September 2024.
Reading now The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien: Revised and Expanded Edition The New Machiavelli, by Jonathan Powell The Partition: Ireland Divided, 1885-1925, by Charles Townshend
Coming soon (perhaps) The Twist, by George Mann et al Mean Streets, by Terrance Dicks Paradise Towers, by Sean Mason and Silvano Beltramo Doctor Who: The Well, by Gareth F. Powell Doctor Who: The Mysterious Planet, by Terrance Dicks The Mysterious Planet, by Jez Strickley Burning Brightly, ed. Ian Whates Het lijkt Washington wel: Hoe lobbyisten Brussel in hun greep hebben, by Peter Teffer Wag the Dog, by Andreas Heinemann-Grüder An Island Called Moreau, by Brian Aldiss Dragon’s Teeth, by Ian Bancroft The Enchantments of Flesh and Spirit, by Storm Constantine Madame Prosecutor, by Carla del Ponte The Good Wife of Bath, by Karen Brooks East of Eden, by John Steinbeck “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate”, by Ted Chiang Thief of Time, by Terry Pratchett The Enigma Score, by Sheri S. Tepper Gitanjali, by Rabindranath Tagore Amongst Our Weapons, by Ben Aaronovitch An Experiment with Time, by J. W Dunne Camp Damascus, by Chuck Tingle If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, by Italo Calvino Ness: A Story from the Ulster Cycle, by Patrick Brown Spa 1906, by Drac Say Nothing, by Patrick Radden Keefe
Deftly, Mr Misnomer stitched the transparent thread through the innards of the computer. His long surgeon‘s fingers spliced the nanoscopic connections with practised ease. Fizzing and spluttering, the autopilot of the crashed skimmer sprang to life.
Another book that I really didn’t get on with. The plot ostensibly is about Bernice Summerfield investigating a mysterious artefact, the Spire, which is almost three hundred miles high (or almost 482.803 kilometers high, as Philip Jose Farmer would have said). I found the writing very confusing, with too many characters whose means and motivation were not clear to me, and a choppy narrative abruptly switching between points of view. I understood what happened at the end, but not so much of the beginning or middle. You can get Ghost Devices here.
This is the second last of the Bernice Summerfield novels that I read in 2014-15 and did not get around to writing up at the time. The last is Mean Streets, by Terrance Dicks, which promises to be a little different.
Annie is suspended in an agony of knowing Doug is displeased. She can focus on nothing else. It eats her memory, corrosive and hot. She can still hear his voice: No, it’s a fucking party. She has identified his words as sarcasm, his tone as scathing.
This is the last in a series of posts that I began in 2012, when I determined to read all of the winners of the BSFA Award for Best Novel, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the James Tiptree Jr. Award, now the Otherwise Award (and currently on hiatus). It’s been an interesting process; the awards have occasionally overlapped – Air by Geoff Ryman won all three – but more often they have charted somewhat different courses through the genre. It’s a sufficiently complex subject to deserve its own post.
Meantime since I started this series I found myself physically counting the votes for the BSFA Awards several times just before the pandemic, and served on the Arthur C. Clarke Award jury twice, in 2015 and 2023. (I have had no engagement with the administration of the Tiptree / Otherwise Award.)
As a result of my previous Clarke service I was invited to the presentation of this year’s award in June in London, despite at that point having read only one of the six shortlisted novels (The Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley), and was therefore not very surprised when the award went to one of the five books I had not read, Annie Bot by ‘Sierra Greer’ (Caragh M. O’Brien). Here she is accepting the award.
So, I finally got around to reading the book. And I’m afraid it is not for me. I hate cute anthropomorphic robots; the protagonist is a sexbot, which is the extreme case of cute anthropomorphic robot. She is in an abusive relationship with Doug, and is in fact obsessed with him by design. Navigating this set-up to a satisfactory conclusion is a difficult task, and I did not feel that it was accomplished here. The Clarke judges are entitled to make their choice on the basis of their own feelings and reactions, and it’s good when they pick a book that has been overlooked by the other awards; but I think that if I had been on the jury this year, this book would probably not even have been shortlisted.
As I said, that concludes my read-through of all of the Clarke, BSFA and Tiptree/Otherwise winners. So I’m starting a new project, reading a new book (or two) by every winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature who was not a white man – that’s 29 of the 121. The first will be Selma Lagerlöf, the tenth winner, and I’ll be reading both her early Jerusalem and her later The Emperor of Portugallia.
Anne Frank Remembered: The Story of the Woman Who Helped to Hide the Frank Family
Miep Gies
66,423
1,600
The winner here is not at all surprising, and in fact we’ve only had two countries where the winner had a higher ranking on both Goodreads and LibraryThing – the USA and the UK; and only another three where the winner had a higher ranking on LibraryThing but not Goodreads – Russia, Kazakhstan and Afghanistan. This week’s winner also won when I did this exercise in 2015.
In the improbable case that you don’t know, The Diary of a Young Girl is the journal of a Jewish teenager hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam during the Second World War, with her own family, another family and a random dentist taking refuge in an hidden annex to her father’s office. The diary ends abruptly, because they were all arrested in August 1944 and deported to a series of concentration camps, where all of them except Anne Frank’s father died. I’m personally fascinated by the story, and have written about the translation and about Anne’s writing here and here, and also about the dentist who she shared her room with.
Goodreads combines the numbers for all three editions of The Diary of a Young Girl currently on the market, while LibraryThing separates them out (and I have combined them above), but it would have been the winner anyway. Also worth noting perhaps that the eighth book is also about Anne Frank.
I disqualified six books this time. Less than half of The Fault in Our Stars by John Green is set in the Netherlands (though I believe that it too has a lot of Anne Frank in it). The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt is set in New York. Amsterdam by Ian McEwan, despite the title, is mainly set in London. Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali is set in many countries, though she does end up in the Netherlands. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell is actually set in Japan. And Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman is global in scope.
That’s it from Europe for a while; next are Ecuador, Cambodia, Zimbabwe and Guinea-Conakry.
The second section of the third chapter of Prophet Song is long, what with the lack of paragraphing. I count 872 words.
She is distracted at work, pacing within, seeing before her some shadowed obstacle and seeking a path around it, saying to herself over and over, they will not take my son. There are rumours in the company of a blood-letting, of a phased wind-down, none of it can be true. They are called into the meeting room where it is announced the managing director Stephen Stoker has been stood down, he did not come into work this morning, they are told that Paul Felsner will replace him. He comes before them pulling on the tips of his fingers with a small hand and cannot hide his delight. She watches about the room as he speaks selecting for his supporters by the clapping hands and smiles, seeing the wild animal among them, seeing how it has done away with concealment and pretence, how it prowls now in the open as Paul Felsner raises his hand in hieratic gestures speaking not the company speak but the cant of the party, about an age of change and reformation, an evolution of the national spirit, of dominion leading into expansion, a woman walks across the room and opens a window. Eilish finds herself stepping out of the lift onto the ground floor. She crosses the street and goes into the newsagent’s, points to a pack of cigarettes. It has been a long time, she thinks, standing alone outside the office building, sliding a cigarette from the box, fondling the paper skin, running its odour under her nose. The cottony taste of cellulose acetate as she lights and pulls the hot smoke into her mouth, recalling the day she last quit, this feeling of some younger self, perhaps Larry was with her, she doesn’t know. Memory lies, it plays its own games, layers one image upon another that might be true or not true, over time the layers dissolve and become like smoke, watching the smoke that blows out her mouth vanish into the day. Watching the street as though it belongs to some other city, thinking how it is so that life seems to exist outside events, life passing by without need of witness, the congested traffic fuming in the dismal air, the people passing by harried and preoccupied, imprisoned within the delusion of the individual, this wish now she has to escape, watching until she is brought clean outside herself, the light altering tone by tone until it becomes a lucent sheen on the street, the gulls nipping at food in a gutter are dark underwing as they whip up out of the path of a lorry. Well now. Colm Perry is standing beside her tapping a cigarette on its box. I didn’t know you smoked, Eilish. She is squeezing her eyes as if to see an answer to a question she has not been asked and then she shakes her head. I can’t say that I do. Colm Perry lights a cigarette and exhales slowly. Neither do I. She pulls the dark burn inside her and wants the burn some more, studying Colm Perry’s wrinkled shirt, knowing the cerise face of a drinker, the look that rests sly in the eye of a man well in on the joke though he is laughing at them from the outside. He glances behind towards the automatic door. The gall of that man, he says, there will be a purge soon enough, they like their own kind so keep your head down, that’s all I have to say. He looks again over his shoulder and pulls out his phone. Have you seen the latest? What she sees on the phone are images of graffiti on windows and walls denouncing the gardai, the security forces and the state, triumphant scrawls in sprayed red paint. The writing looks like blood, the building looks like a school. St Joseph’s in Fairview, he says, they are saying the principal called in the GNSB who came and arrested four boys, they haven’t yet been released, it’s gone on a few days but the story’s only online now, there are parents and students gathering outside Store Street Garda Station waiting for the boys to be freed. My son has been called up for national service, she says, he is to hand himself over the week he turns seventeen, he is still just a kid in school, and this after they take his father. Colm Perry looks at her and then he shakes his head. Bastards, he says. He cups his hand to his mouth and thinks long upon a drag then extinguishes the cigarette on the smokers’ box. You’re going to have to get him out, he says. Get him out where? She watches him shrug and open his hands and then he puts them in the pockets of his jeans. He is looking across the street to a newsagent’s. Right now, he says, I’d love an ice cream, an old-fashioned cone with a 99, I’d like to be on a beach freezing my butt off, I’d like for my parents to be still alive, look, Eilish, I don’t know, England, Canada, the USA, it’s only a sug-gestion, but you’re going to have to get him out, look, I must go back inside.
I picked this off the shelf in a California bookshop on the margins of last year’s Gallifrey One, knowing that it had won the Booker Prize but incorrectly under the impression that it was a gritty realist slice-of-Dublin-life story. I was of course wrong about this. It’s set very firmly in middle-class Dublin, but in the very near future where an extremist party wins an election and creates a police state, in turn sparking armed resistance, civil war and the collapse of society; it’s told through the viewpoint of a mother of four whose trade unionist husband disappears early in the book and who witnesses her family disintegrating.
Lynch is very clear in interviews that his intention was to bring the horrors of the Syrian conflict home to a local audience, and I think he very much succeeds. The litany of familiar Dublin place names converted into locations of violent convulsion is tremendously effective. The conversion of standard Irish official banter into the language of oppression is chilling. The worst of the violence happens off screen, but its aftermath is vividly realised. And of course it’s not just Syria; I remember Bosnia when I lived there nearly thirty years ago, which had undergone a similar implosion, and today we can look at Palestine, not only Gaza but also the West Bank, for societies being destroyed by violence.
If I had been writing a book like this, I would have also gone into the grand politics of the disaster, looking at bad and evil leadership decisions, and ineffectual international interventions which could have been done better. But Paul Lynch is not into finger-pointing; it’s simply the human experience of state violence followed by violent state collapse, and I find it all the more effective as a result. The non-paragraphed style brings an immediacy to the prose, while of course also being a salute to Joyce’s retelling of everyday Dublin life from a previous century. I am not sure if I could say I actually liked the book, but I do recommend it. You can get Prophet Song here.
I haven’t read any of the other books on the Booker Prize longlist or shortlist for 2023, but I will get to Tan Twan Eng’s The House of Doors very soon. Oddly enough, Prophet Song is set in the city where one of my parents was born, and The House of Doors in the city where the other was born.
This was the top unread book that I had acquired last year, and also I had thought that it was the top unread non-genre book on my shelf, but I think it is pretty clearly in the dystopian sub-genre of sf. Next on the former pile is Camp Damascus, by Chuck Tingle; next on the latter pile, after acquiring some of my father’s books last month, is East of Eden, by John Steinbeck.
I went to China last week, for the second time this year and third time in my life, a couple of days working in Beijing and then a couple of days at Galaxycon in Chengdu. Just a few notes here.
I am food I am drink I am comfort I am security I am warmth I am love I am your mother
NIK HARRIS
This is a collection of art, poetry and short prose pieces on motherhood, that I picked up for free at Novacon in 2021. It was sponsored by the British branch of La Leche League,so there’s a not very subtle emphasis on breastfeeding, but in general it’s a nice assembly of pieces of varying quality, speaking to the experience of maternity, which is designed to be an appropriate gift to a new mother. One aspect that is left out is the experience of parents of children with special needs. It is basically out of print, but you can probably get Musings on Mothering here.
Because I picked it up at a science fiction convention, I initially classified it as the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves, but now that I have actually read it, I realise that there is no sfnal content, and I will count it as poetry, which takes up about three quarters of the book.
The next long-unread sf book on my shelf is another that I picked up at that Novacon, Howul: A Life’s Journey, by David Shannon, who is married to Bernardine Evaristo.
Osgood: Sorry, babbling. / Uh, hope you’re not too busy, but we’ve got a little problem that we’d appreciate some help with… / Actually, it’s quite a big problem.
Starting Year Two of Titan’s Twelfth Doctor sequence, this is a compilation of three separately published stories. The title story starts with a character called Christel Dean, who is clearly an incarnation of well-known Doctor Who fan and writer Christel Dee, teaching at a remote Scottish boarding school with added Sea Devils. Oh, and the Doctor has a new companion, a stuffed swordfish called Sonny. The second story, “The Fourth Wall”, gets properly recursive with characters being absorbed into (and occasionally escaping from) comics, thanks to alien meddling. And the third story, “Robo Rampage”, is a sequel to the Fourth Doctor story Robot, featuring the twenty-first century UNIT. All three of these are above average; I particularly liked the art of Rachael Stott in the first two. You can get The School of Death here.
Next in this list is The Twist, by George Mann et al.
Current The Irish Assassins: Conspiracy, Revenge and the Murders that Stunned an Empire, by Julie Kavanagh The House of Doors, by Tan Twan Eng Jerusalem, by Selma Lagerlöf
Last books finished “Two Hearts” by Peter S Beagle Het Zoet Water door de eeuwen heen, by Jean Binon and Paul Coeckelbergh Glorious Exploits, by Ferdia Lennon (did not finish) American Prometheus: the Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin Histoire de Jérusalem, by Vincent Lemire and Christophe Gaultier The Years, by Annie Ernaux Howul: A Life’s Journey, by David Shannon The Emperor of Portugallia, by Selma Lagerlöf Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy, by Serhii Plokhy
(the amazing effect of an intercontinental plane flight with not much sleep)
Next books The Twist, by George Mann et al The Partition: Ireland Divided, 1885-1925, by Charles Townshend Silence: A Christian History, by Diarmaid MacCulloch
Une seule fois, je me suis mal servi de ce pouvoir de l’écorce. J’avais faim, les fruits du figuier n’étaient pas mûrs. Moi qui avais tellement le désir de mordre dans une figue chaude de soleil, juteuse et sucrée, j’ai maudit l’arbre, je l’ai condamné à ne jamais porter de fruits. J’ai prétexté une parabole, pas la plus convaincante.
Just once, I misused the power of the husk. I was hungry, and the fruit on the fig tree was not ripe. My desire to bite into a fig—warm with sunshine, juicy and sweet—was so great that I cursed the tree, and condemned it to never again bear fruit. I said it was for a parable, not the most convincing.
translated by Alison Anderson
I confess that I picked this up and read it quickly at the end of August so that I would have a nice round number of books for the month (32). I was not at all impressed with Nothomb’s The Book of Proper Names when I read it in 2007, but I feel vaguely obliged to engage with one of Belgium’s best-known writers, and pulled this off the shelf in a bookshop to have another go.
Well, it’s not what I expected; it’s an account of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ, from his point of view, anticipating and then experiencing his painful death and then attempting to express the experience of return to the flesh. I have to say that I was not grabbed by it. You can find plenty of more interesting Bible fanfic on AO3. There is a hint that Jesus’ relationship with Mary Magdalen (here, “Madeleine”) was physically intimate; but it’s a work of fiction so who really cares?
I fear that Nothomb is on her second strike for me. I’m not sure if there will be a third.
De jaarlijkse ‘Week van het Bos’ was voor Ad weer de uitgelezen gelegenheid om aan een oude lindeboom een nieuw leven te schenken. Hij zou de stam versnijden tot de beeltenis van de verzorgers van het bos, de zeer gewaardeerde bosarbeider. Een uitverkoren boomstronk aan het Zoet Water in Oud-Heverlee kreeg de typische boswachtershoed aangemeten, terwijl de lange regenjas elegant gesneden werd uit de mooie schors van de lindeboom. De figuur kreeg een gelaat en werd Wannes genoemd. Intussen heeft de natuur haar werk gedaan en is de sculptuur spijtig genoeg vergaan.
The annual “Forest Week” was once again the perfect opportunity for Ad to give new life to an old linden tree. He would carve the trunk into an image of the forest’s caretakers, the highly esteemed forestry workera. A selected tree stump at Zoet Water in Oud-Heverlee was fitted with the typical forester’s hat, while the long raincoat was elegantly carved from the beautiful bark of the linden tree. The figure was given a face and named Wannes. Nature has since taken its course, and sadly the sculpture has decayed.
I bought this just as the pandemic was starting to lift, and the local history society held a carefully socially distanced launch of a couple of its books, including this one. It is a compilation of the public art of our local sculptor, Ad Wouters, whose monogrammed AW you can see on the hat of the Wannes sculpture above. Ad is actually Dutch originally, but has lived in these parts for decades and his work decorates the forest and some of the streets. This book takes us through it all, with more than half of the pages devoted to the woodwork that he specialises in, and the rest describing his work in other media: ceramic, polyester and recycled materials. In each case the reason for the artwork is described and its history and current location, and sometimes also with a poetic reflection from local poet Wim Van den Abeele. It’s a nice production. You can get @Wouters’ Wondere Wereld via the local history society here.
I have previously posted elsewhere about Ad Wouters’ work. Here is a video I shot during lockdown with six of the closest sculptures to our house:
And here’s an Instagram post of two of the wooden sculptures at De Torenvalk park, a bit further away:
I see however that I have missed a lot of his sculptures in the city cemetery in Leuven, and in the Botanic Garden there. Also a lot of the art is just outside his own home, on the terrain that he has christened “Het Land van Bompa”, “Grandad’s Land”. More exploring to do!
The boy with grey eyes. A planet, viewed from space, imploding. A gaunt woman wrapping her arms around Asha’s middle and whispering sister.
Big chunky queer time-travel Regency romance crossover space opera; what’s not to love? I confess that I got this purely because I enjoyed the author’s novelisation of The Church on Ruby Road, and basically this has everything you would expect, dynastic manoeuvrings and far future warfare. I get a lot of books like this, and often I don’t last past the first fifty pages, but I kept going with this one to the end and it was satisfying. You can get The Principle of Moments here.
This was my top unread book by a writer of colour. Next on that pile is The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng.
See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Guatemala.
These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
Grave Secrets
Kathy Reichs
36,567
4,129
The Popol Vuh
7,537
2,083
I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala
Rigoberta Menchú
6,340
1,564
The President
Miguel Ángel Asturias
6,486
1,161
Harsh Times
Mario Vargas Llosa
8,026
358
The Bird Hotel
Joyce Maynard
14,457
164
Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala
Stephen C. Schlesinger
1,972
510
The Most Beautiful Place in the World
Ann Cameron
1,345
458
This week’s winner is one of a series about Canadian forensic investigator Temperance Brennan, called in to investigate two multiple murders in Guatemala. Published in 2002, and it sounds like its heart is in the right place. The runner-up is a Mayan sacred text, which is the winner this week for the top book by a local writer. (I hesitate to use the word ‘Guatemalan’ as the Popol Vuh was written long before the country was given that name.)
The country of which Miguel Ángel Asturias’ President is the head of state is not actually named, but everyone seems to think it is Guatemala. I also had to dig quite hard to get confirmation of the location of the Bird Hotel, but am confident in the end that it ticks my box.
Speaking of The Bird Hotel, it is second on Goodreads, and far ahead of the rest, but has a strikingly low LibraryThing score for a mainstream English-language lit fic book. I guess it’s possible that it was marketed heavily to Goodreads users.
I disqualified eight books which include Guatemalan passages but not for the majority of the text. They are Merrick by Anne Rice (mostly in the USA), Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano (covers the whole region), In the Midst of Winter by Isabel Allende (mostly in the USA), The Old Patagonian Express by Paul Theroux (covers both continents), The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins (covers the whole region), We Are Not From Here by Jenny Torres Sanchez (mostly in Mexico as far as I could tell), Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here by Jonathan Blitzer (covers the whole region) and Red Glass by Laura Resau (again, mostly in Mexico).
Back to Europe next for the Netherlands, and then Ecuador, Cambodia and Zimbabwe. I think I know which book will win next week.
Second paragraph of third chapter, with illustration:
The Congregation of Christian Brothers, who published Éire – Sean is Nua [Ireland – Old and New], were a Catholic celibate community who founded several Catholic education schools and who, with this publication, portrayed themselves as supporters of Irish Republicanism. Our Boys, another Christian Brothers publication, was a reaction to The Boy’s Own Paper and other British boys’ papers, viewed as imperialist propaganda. Our Boys was first published in 1914 and sought to present a Catholic and nationalist alternative to Irish children.
This is a totally comprehensive listing of how Ireland is portrayed in comics. The start of the story is actually told in a very intertesting appendix, looking at revolutionary era cartoonists – Grace Gifford, Ernest Kavanagh, Joe Stanley (Padraig Pearse’s press office during the Easter Rising, who published Ireland’s first comic, Greann, in 1934) and Constance de Markievicz.
Most of the book looks at the mainstream comics industry as it has developed since 1940, usually featuring American writers trying to get to grips with local complexity. There are some cringeworthy moments, for instance the heroic Gay Ghost who comes from the castle of Connaught in County Ulster. There are a number of stories featuring Nazi meddling in Ireland, usually with the involvement of the IRA, though the latter are not consistently portrayed as being on either side.
In the post-war decades, Irish creators start to get in on the act, with the Christian Brothers publishing Eire – Sean is Nua [Ireland – Old and New]; and there’s also a flattering biography of Eamon de Valera from the early 1970s, at a time before the events of his life after 1921 were taught in school history classes.
The Troubles offered plenty of narrative opportunities for long-running comics series to visit Ireland’s shores, some of them more effectively than others. Sometimes the comics publishers found that they had bitten off more than they could chew; a 1986 story with Spiderman visiting Northern Ireland was aborted by Marvel after the publishers received a bomb threat. Was it credible? I guess it doesn’t matter.
The main narrative (before the appendix) look particularly at the work of Garth Ennis and Malachy Coney, mainstream comics writers who are from Northern Ireland. Ennis doesn’t always do it for me, but I remember his early Troubled Souls and Coney’s Holy Cross stories with great affection.
Those of you who know the author will not surprised to learn that it reads like he speaks; this isn’t polished academic writing, it’s a rush of enthusiastic information, crammed onto the 259 A4 pages with wafer-thin headers and footers. But the information is cool, and important. I’ll try and get hold of the French-language comics mentioned (including Partitions irlandaises) and will report back. Meanwhile you can get Irish Conflict in Comics here.
I know, I know, reading about other people’s diplomacy games is about as interesting as listening to other people’s dreams. But after many brief unsuccessful attempts to defeat the AIs on WebDiplomacy.net, and two successes, one as Turkey and one as Italy, I finally scored another victory, this time as France, and I feel like recording it here.
Spring 1901
I started with a simple strategy: smash England and then smash Germany. (This is not what actually happened.) I took the risk of leaving Burgundy open and moved my northern army to Picardy, tried for the English Channel (bouncing for the first but not the last time) and sent my southern army to Spain, so that I would get at least one build. I was lucky with Burgundy, and though Italy could have tried a stab with the army in Venice, the Austria situation was of course a higher priority there.
She unpacked her clothes, but was drawn back to the wall-paper. She looked closely at it, ran her hand over the circular bouquets of bluebells on the pale-pink background. It was like seeing a face in a crowd she couldn’t quite place. But then it came to her. The street in West Belfast from her childhood. The room she shared with her little sister, Sarah. Not much money in the house. Bare wooden floorboards before that became fashionable. No oilcloth or carpet in their room, but that same lovely pink wallpaper covered with bluebells just beside their bed.
Gerry Adams will need no introduction to anyone familiar with Irish politics; as well as his public career, he has published a number of books, and my brother got me this short story collection as a joke, a few years back.
It’s not very good. Adams’ command of language in his public speeches has always been somewhat clunky, and that’s true here as well. Abrupt shifts of tone and setting make it difficult to focus on whatever it is each story is about. I read the first four and put it in the charity pile. The author is retired now, but was wise to stick to his day job. You can get Black Mountain here.
This was the non-genre fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is The Good Wife of Bath, by Karen Brooks.
