Bibliography, November 2021

BOTM: F. Herbert, Dune (1965)*

R. Aickman, Dark entries (1964)
P. Fitzgerald, The beginning of spring (1988)

B. Sanderson, The final Empire (2006)
---------, The well of ascension (2007)
---------, The hero of ages (2008)
W. Tevis, The man who fell to earth (1963)
C. Wilman, Rednecks and Bluenecks: The Politics of Country Music (2005)

Obviously, the best book I read this month was Dune. However, I have read it a lot of times, so I did briefly agonise about whether it should be BOTM again. And, had I a standout alternative, I might have gone there. But I didn't. Honourable mention for Rednecks and Bluenecks which had a lovely turn of phrase, as well as fascinating context on the Iraq political controversy. I dread to think what the current analysis would look like. I also enjoyed Sanderson, but it was a little too fond of the twist at the end. I did really enjoy Fitzgerald - I think her historical novels are excellently imagined and conceived. However, Dune is Dune. 

I watched it because of the film. It's better than the film, though I thought they did a good job with it this time.

Bibliography, October 2021

BOTM: M. Shipstead, Great circle (2021)

G. Tindall, The fields beneath (1977)
C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins (1938)
N. Gaiman, Norse mythology (2017)
P. Lively, Treasures of time (1979)
P. Lockwood, No-one is talking about this (2021)
M.S. Lovell, The Mitford Girls: The Biography of an Extraordinary Family (2001)
N. Mohamed, The fortune men (2021)
R. Powers, Bewilderment (2021)
B. Pym, Quartet in Autumn (1977)

A chance conversation with Anna revealed that she overwhelmingly reads books published since 2000. I do not: I've read 48 novels this year so far. Eight were published after 2000, and six of those were the Booker shortlist. In comparison, 17 were published before 1960. This seems reasonable to me. It would be a slightly weird position to believe that the majority of great literature was written in two decades when they've been writing good ones in volume for at least fifteen. This month, both Pym and Lively were really good novels: well observed, imaginatively done, and shining a light into stories less often told. Both are older than me. Non-fiction is usually more modern as the scholarship usually needs updating in a way a stories don't. Both Tindall's book on the history of Kentish Town and especially James' classic on Haiti have endured. The Black Jacobins is a product of Marxist theory, which does date it, but James is too good an historian to follow it blindly, and his analysis breaks free of ideology. It remains a shamefully neglected piece of history.

All that said, my favourite book this month was contemporary. I liked a lot of the Booker shortlist. Even Lockwood's sort of twitter one was not as bad as I thought. There were very funny bits. None were outstanding, but a number were decent. Best I thought was Shipstead's Great Circle which runs a strong, deep, central narrative around a female aviator (not a neglected subject) in the early age of flight. It has a secondary, parallel narrative that provides a lighter counterpart, which works really well. But the main narrative is the star - beautifully written, ranging over a wide canvas, and packing real punch at several points. It's not a masterpiece, but it's very good, and it was my favourite.

Rest of the Booker shortlist was tight. Mohamed (Second part) and Powers (first) both wrote very uneven books which, had they sustained them would have pushed them higher. Galgut, the favourite, I found underwhelming. My ranking:

1. Shipstead
2. Arudpragasam
3. Mohamed
4. Powers
5. Galgut
6. Lockwood

Bibliography, September 2021

BOTM: I. Asimov, Foundation (1951)*

A. Arudpragasam, A passage north (2021)
I. Asimov, Foundation and Empire (1952)*
ꟷꟷꟷꟷ, Second Foundation (1953)*
E.F. Benson, Queen Lucia (1920)
J. Cameron, An Indian summer (1974)
D. Galgut, The promise (2021)
P. Lively, Judgement day (1980)
J.G. Williamson, Trade and poverty: when the third world fell behind (2011)

In my mind, I have a broad understanding of history in all periods and can understand all full length treatments easily based on my general knowledge. Williamson was enthralling, but blew that belief away. It turns out A-level economics is not enough to dive in to pages of data. Part of me wants to dig much deeper; part of me doesn't. Quite a few of the others were underwhelming on their own merits. I thought I would love Benson, but I found it a slog. I thought Galgut would be harrowing, but profound, but instead it was easy, too easy, and managed to tell the story of the betrayal of a promise to a black woman by erasing her voice. I'm sure it was deliberate, but I didn't feel it worked.

That 'not working' was an issue for me too in the later, and much beloved, Foundation novels too. By the time we get to the Second Foundation, I feel Asimov has lost track of his central conceit. Instead of psychohistory being about mass movements and probabilities, it relies on a shadowy cabal of psychics to fix the outcomes. If he could secure a millennium-long magician elite, the probabilistic aspect feels a bit pointless. My other complaint, though this really applies across the whole thing, is that he gets the maths wrong. And every time he talks about the capital world of the galaxy, all I can think of is that he doesn't know how big a billion is.

Having said all that, it's still magisterial. Yes, psychohistory is total nonsense; yes, it's ridiculous to imagine that a galaxy-wide polity could exist in a meaningful way in the manner described; no, there are no women at all in the first book. But it's fantastically imaginative, broad in scope, and little sounds cooler than a universal Galactic Empire. I also like its openness and its cleverness. Asimov wasn't afraid to poke holes in his own model: the Mule is a wildcard so that breaks the prediction, Foundation inhabitants think about their destiny and so that undermines it too. These come later, but the unfolding of the original concept is still the best bit - and that's captured economically and brilliantly in the opener. 

Apple better not mess this up.

The Oval, 5th September 2021

It happened about five o'clock, though it may have been later. Evening shadows over the grounds are a trope of cricket writing, but shadows are supposed to be of church steeples. In this case it was the mass of the huge Vauxhall End stand at The Oval. But shadows there were and, suddenly and implausibly unexpectedly, we had entered my favourite part of watching the cricket. We were sitting in, give or take, the same seats that I first watched test cricket sixteen years ago for an overcast Ashes securing day, and again, four years later where watched us actually win the Ashes themselves.

Yesterday wasn't one of those successful days for England, though - thankfully - nor was it a repeat of this test in 2007, where I watched Dravid score 12 in 96 balls and seemed to spend an hour getting each run. But it didn't matter. We were amongst cricket people, at the cricket, and very little else mattered. I'd brought a set of people who didn't know each other at all at eleven, but by the afternoon had developed their own in-jokes. To our left was a ten year old whose excitement was matched only by the sharpness of his eyesight and his understanding of the LBW rule. We didn't need the replay to tell us Jadeja was out and they had wasted a review, he'd already talked us through it. At lunch we took the admiration of the group behind us because one of us had managed to bring a large pie; after tea we managed a full cheeseboard. I personally continued my unbroken run of smuggling drinks into the ground in defiance of the absurd ban on bringing alcohol in, though the lack of effort they put into bag searching did rather demean the outcome. 

And the cricket, well, it was exactly why only test cricket really counts. I don't really think anyone was superlative, but it didn't matter. It was enthralling, while allowing time for conversation (and more drinks. There were a lot of drinks). Early England inroads made us hopeful that we'd limit India to a manageable lead before a hundred run seventh wicket partnership rather drained us of all optimism. My low case prediction of a 350 target with some big batting after tea came rather depressingly true. It was shortly after that that the shadows fell, and this time my low case predication was entirely wrong. We didn't end four wickets down at the close of play. Somehow, we avoided subsiding like, well, England, and we watched Rory Burns hold out on his home ground and Haseeb Hameed write the next lines of what will hopefully be a deeply satisfying redemption story this summer. 291 to get today with all wickets in hand is possible, if unlikely.

And we drank in the summer evening, talked novels, and watched that slow patient cricket, and - pausing briefly after the cricket itself to have a further drink - I walked home listening to the only known popular music act to entirely specialise in cricket songs singing about sleeping on the boundary.

I fully expect us to lose today, but it doesn't matter. It was marvellous, and by that I truly mean that it is a marvel. None of this should work, but it does, almost every time. I had missed the cricket far more than I realised, but no longer. Marvellous indeed.

Bibliography, August 2021

BOTM: J. Didion, The year of magical thinking (2005)

W. Golding, The inheritors (1955)
W. Holland, Paupers and pig killers. Diaries 1799-1818 (1818)
J. Kaufman, Kings of Shanghai (2020)
M. Kurlansky, Milk: a 10,000 year odyssey (2019)

J. Lindsay, Picnic at hanging rock (1967)
E. Newby, Something wholesale (1961)
K. St Clair, The golden thread. How fabric changed history (2018)
R. Silverberg, A time of changes (1971)
A. Hussein, The weary generations (1963)
T. Nasrin, Lajja (1993)

Didion's book is a masterpiece. Everyone knows that and they are right. It's beautifully written, and engrossing. I read it in a morning when I could not put it down. I think it's the skill she has in articulating her thoughts in a moment of unimaginable awfulness (with her husband dead and daughter in acute care in hospital) in a way that immediately makes them resonate both in their depth but also in their reality. It's also very easy going and somehow uplifting. There's a lovely bit about marriage in there, which is written in the context of it going, but should be something we think about all the time. 

I found some of the others harder going than I had imagined. Golding, Holland, Newby, and Kaufman were books I expected to race through, but they were slower and less impressive than I had hoped. All of them had better second halves than first. I did really like the duo of subcontinental novels that I read and The weary generations in particular was outstanding.  

Bibliography, July 2021

BOTM: L. Sprague de Camp, Literary swordsmen and sorcerers (1976)

M. Baylis, Man belong Mrs Queen (2013)
D. Brin, Startide rising (1983)
D. Brin, The uplift war (1986)
J. Strachey, An integrated man (1986)
M. Pollan, The omnivore's dilemma (2006)

K. Wilhelm, Where late the sweet birds sing (1977)

I enjoyed lots here. Pollan a close runner up and I really liked the first third on the dominance of corn in our food system. It's made me mutter - to Anna's horror - that maybe we should eat more seasonally. I think the conceit is unbalanced though, and the latter sections don't really work as well. I could completely have lived without the foraging / hunting section. Plus I have also gone over some of this ground before. 

Bizarrely, I hadn't gone over the ground of de Camp's account of the major heroic fantasy authors of the first half of the twentieth century. In this, he covers who he sees as the biggest nine with some linking contexts and mini-biographies and reviews. It was illuminating, and hugely enjoyable to read. Some of the judgements are dated: there's a too quick dismissal of the lack of women in Tolkien and some clumsy psychology (though driven by the fact that almost all the American writers are really weird).  However, he knows his stuff, and I have a huge fondness for clear judgements, backed up with reasons, especially when picking through a lot of scattered short story material. As also a protagonist, de Camp is really good at showing the overlapping nature of the worlds people created; and also contextualising the famous bits into their wider oeuvre. 

This is not the definitive history of fantasy literature, but it's probably a lot more more fun than one. I'm going to read some Conan the Barbarian now.

Bibliography, June 2021

BOTM: S. Alexievich, The unwomanly face of war (1985)

D. Brin, Sundiver (1980)
J. Critchley, House of vanities (1990)

D. Mask, The Address Book (2020)

A. Oz, The Hill of evil counsel (1976)

S. Schama, The Story of the Jews 1000BC – 1492 (2013)
J. Strachey, Cheerful weather for the wedding (1932)

H.R. Trevor Roper, The invention of Scotland (2014)

I loved a lot of these: Critchley and Strachey were razor sharp and acutely observed; Schama's book episodic, but with many very good episodes;  And I did like very much Trevor-Roper debunking of Scotland's traditions. Alexievich was something else. They gave her the Nobel for this, an exceptional collection of testimony from Soviet women who fought in the Second World War. I'm not sure they should have done. It's value doesn't lie in the writing - she does little of that - but in the arranging and allowing those voices to speak. The arranging does matter. Managing that mass of material and removing the author's voice is itself a major achievement. But the centre stage is held by the women themselves. It's a work of history of the highest level and a stunning piece of sustained editing and presentation to keep the momentum of them without it dissolving in a repetitious litany of largely depressing narratives. The subject matter is fascinating as well as horrific, and another corrective to the view we have of the War which remains stubbornly centred on Western Europe. It's always worse in Russia.