Bibliography, September 2023

BOTM: S. Alexievich, tr. B. Shayevich, Second-hand time (2013)

L. Bracket, Shadow over Mars (1944)
N. Blake [C. Day-Lewis], Thou shell of death (1936)
F. Leiber, Conjure Wife (1943)
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Secret lives and other stories (1975)
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Devil on the cross (1980. English version 1982)
M. Pye, Antwerp (2021)

R.A. Salvatore, Streams of silver (1989)*
R.A. Salvatore, The Halfling's Gem (1990)*
T. Spector, Spoon-fed (2020)

This is what happens when you slightly let yourself succumb to temptation. I wouldn't say that any of the five genre novels I read were terrible, but only Conjure Wife could be said to be of real value. I enjoyed them all though, even if Salvatore's middle Icewind Dale novel has laboured plotting. It shares that defect with almost all the rest of my reading. I'm really liking Ngũgĩ, and his books are very well written, but Devil on the cross could do with digesting its Marxism (the short stories are better).

Even Alexievich's book, though I do think it is the best of the lot, and I think is essentially the one she won the Nobel for, suffers from uncertain narrative flow. Some of its passages are also just a little too long for me. These are niggles though, it is a masterpiece (again) and is a real testament to the historian's ear for source material allied to the ability to edit it to allow those voices to become something bigger. If it doesn't have the precision and pace of The unwomanly face of war, that's an impossibly high bar, and it's still enormously moving, humanising and powerful. 

Bibliography, August 2023

J. Shapiro, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005)

N. Cardus, Autobiography (1947)

I. Colegate, The Shooting Party (1980)
E. Donoghue, Room (2010)
P. Godfrey-Smith, Other minds (2017)
T. Judt, Postwar (2005)

A. Kwei Armah, The beautyful ones are not yet born (1968)
A. Levy, The long song (2010)
T. McCarthy, C (2010)

L. Osborne, The wet and the dry (2013)

I. Pears, The instance of the fingerpost (1998)

This was a great month. Three standout books for me and only one duffer (Tom McCarthy's 2010 Booker nominee isn't as bad as his 2015 nominee, but it is bad). Vastly better, and shamefully not nominated at the time, was The shooting party, a finely etched gem of a book littered with brilliant quotations. It may be my favourite novel of the year so far. It was also better than Tony Judt's great book on post war Britain, which wore its many pages lightly, and held the narrative and the analysis very well till about the mid 1990s, where recency trumped perspective. It's a triumph, though I do wish I had read it on publication. The world has changed.

Best of the lot, and rightly garlanded with the prizes, was, in its conception, a book that also emphasises the importance of time and place. Shapiro is marshalling a lot of academic work by others, and I don't know it well enough to tell where, but he is doing it brilliantly. The focus on a year is inspired and allows those of us not deep in the literary scholarship to anchor our understanding of what drives some of those key plays. This reading of Julius Caesar in the light of the wars of religion will stay with me forever. Despite what may seem from outside to be a narrow focus, this is in fact a hugely accessible book, which says its many things lightly and fluently. It's a pleasure to read.

As a result of this month's reading, I have now read the full 2010 Booker shortlist. It wasn't great. My ranking below, though 3 and 4 were much of a muchness:

1. Donoghue, Room
2. Galgut, In a strange room
3. Levy, The long song
4. Jacobson, The Finckler question 
5. Carey, Parrot and Oliver in America
6. McCarthy, C

Bibliography, July 2023

BOTM: C.T. Powers, In the memory of the forest (1997)

F. Butler - Gallie, Touching cloth (2023)
J. Cocker, Good pop, bad pop (2022)
J. Duindam, Dynasties: a global history of power 1300-1800 (2015)
P.J. Farmer, The alley god (1970)
C. Jarman, River Kings (2021)
L. Kennedy, Trespasses (2022)
A. Rutherford, Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics (2022)
R.A. Salvatore, The crystal shard (1988)
T. Snyder, On Tyranny (2017)

This was not a great month. Many of them were mediocre to poor, though I did find Duindam's survey of dynastic power interesting, if slightly slow going sometimes. At least part of that is around expectations. There is some pompous reviewing of Salvatore's debut novel, the one that launched a thousand sequels. It's obviously far from the best written novel, but it does its job just fine. The mythos holds together, the setting is compelling, the characters have little nuance, but they occupy their place in the plot very well, and it gallops long, and lots of things sound really cool. Thoroughly enjoyable. Adam Rutherford's book, which has much better prose, drove me into an absolute fury with its underlying smugness and lack of precision and honesty. Far from a recommendation.

Powers does all the right things well. It's billed as centring on a murder. It isn't in any way (though there is a murder at the start). It's actually a fascinating novel about a landscape we all know little about, even - as the book is at pains to say - many of the people who live there. We're really bad at the complexity of Eastern European history, and this is a very welcome look at how communities thought and didn't think about their vanished Jewish populations. It's well done, deep and expansively written, and nowhere near as dry as I'm making it sound. It's a resounding success as a novel

Infuriating books: a case study

I am very relaxed about bad books. Some books are bad in ways that are entirely expected. There is no pleasure or value in pointing that out. Some bad books can even be fun. Most are just boring. To be read, thrown our and no longer thought about. 

However, there are two kinds of book that infuriate me and force me to think about them: books that are overpraised despite being bad (this doesn't happen very often - reviewers are usually pretty good at this); and bad books that could have been good books if authors had worked harder. 

Combined, those books end up taking up disproportionate amounts of my thinking, often because I feel so let down by what I actually read. Control, Adam Rutherford's book about eugenics, is one of those books. Here is everything I didn't like about it: 

Structurally, the book is a short history, followed by a short summary of where we are now. Both had good parts, both were bad. 

Part I
This is the better section. Scientists don't automatically make decent historians (though more so than the reverse), but he's done the work, and writes well. It's a good canter through the cast, though I think it would have benefited from a better chronology and a wider geographical scope. As acknowledged, it's US, UK and Germany only. I think that's an issue. There were other major racists. But it's not major. However, it is peppered with historical asides that don't really add anything and are sloppy. Is it true that 'The powerful really only seek one thing, and that is to maintain their power.'? (p.59) I don't think so, though plenty do. It's certainly not true to assert glibly 'Hitler was a man of his time, and was legitimately appointed to the position of German Chancellor in 1933.' (p.141, my italics) ignoring the role of paramilitaries in early 1930s Germany, and also the obvious areas in which Hitler was an outlier.

These aren't needed, but also stand in juxtaposition to his dismissal of any erroneous position as 'pseudoscience.' Sometimes this is justified: I enjoyed his dismissal of the Nordic Theory (northern European are best etc), and its thesis that Nordic men are actually the progenitors of the ancient Romans, Greeks and Egyptians. But, for example, it wasn't an unreasonable hypothesis that there would be single genes for things it turns out there aren't, it's just wrong. All wrong science isn't pseudoscience. Indeed, I'm not even sure eugenics is based on this. Towards the end, Rutherford writes: 'Eugenics is a busted flush, a pseudoscience that cannot deliver on its promise. Maybe that will change in time, as we unpick our genomes ever more precisely.' If the issue is simply that the current science won't bear the weight that this put on it, that's important to know, but hardly fundamentally false.

I found this particularly true given the shortness of the period under discussion. The whole debate happens over pretty much one lifetime. This remains a very 

Part 2

However, my main reservations are for the moral and ethical judgements that permeate the whole book, but especially the current state of play. Rutherford has the standard scientist's confidence about their ability to make judgements. He clearly feels that he and his colleagues should be trusted to make the fine judgements about ethics. Here he is:

'Ethical discussions about research into human embryos and genetics occur in every lab as standard, and are a prerequisite for the work to take place. In my experience, these essential and thoughtful processes are largely unaffected by the intellectual posturing of academics who aren’t really involved, but enjoy a scrap on social media.' (p.200)

I am uncertain if all scientist's processes are unaffected by other academics' work, but in any case, he doesn't rely on scientists anyway. As is clear in the opening of the book, rogue scientists, even Chinese ones, are constrained by the legal framework. He is presumably happy with that framework, though it's hard to see how the law differs in kind if not content from 'Pseudo-philosophical articles' or debates that are 'just semantic arguments about definitions of words.' 

In fact, much of the book is a demonstration that definitions of words do - in fact - matter. Perhaps surprisingly, there isn't an argued definition of eugenics in the book at all. I infer from the argument, and the title, that he believes it is national level coercion and includes both euthanasia, abortion (on such grounds) and sterilisation, 'sculpt[ing] society through selective breeding' (p.13). He is clear though on what it's not: it's most definitely not parental choice terminations of babies with Downs Syndrome, that's fine. Now, I think you probably can a distinction around this, but is going to take work - work that he doesn't put in. It's no good saying 'the decision to terminate a pregnancy because of a pre-natal diagnosis is something that I believe is an absolute personal choice and should be an unstigmatised right for women and parents. To do so is not eugenics.' Personal choice isn't absolute. Everyone knows this. Financial incentives for sterilisations are bad, apparently, but I don't think there's an hard economic distinction between society paying you to be sterilised and not paying for enhanced care and support needed for children with severe conditions. If we invested more resources to care for Downs babies and adults, I'm confident that would reduce the termination rate. I don't have a view on whether we should, but either both are coercion, or neither are. 

If there, he's trying to put a line where I don't believe there is one, he's guilty of an extraordinary lack of sophistication elsewhere by omitting lines where there should be lines. Discussing enforced sterilisation, he notes that the Cheyenne 'claims ... sterilisation, sometimes without their knowledge or understanding, had been performed on more than a quarter of Native American women of child-bearing age. How is that different from the actions of the Nazis? Why is that not attempted genocide?' (p.154) Here, we have a claim of sterilisation of a quarter of a population, sometimes without proper consent. That's a lot of conditional words, but even if they are taken maximally, it simply doesn't measure up to enforced euthanasia of whole populations. It's an obscene comparison. I think it's made in good faith, in revulsion at the actions against the Cheyenne, and a geneticists perspective that draws no distinction between sterilisation or murder - their impact on populations in the long term being identical. But all bad things are not the same, and it's wrong. This inability to do distinction properly hampers the book.

Finally, I think he gets into a mess about heritability. As this is clear on, eugenics was conceived of based on as a theory of genetic determinism. Historical eugenicists believed that they could breed better humans. Rutherford is at pains to show how misguided this is and how much of heritability is environmental. I think he's very good on pointing out the weirdness of putting faith in high risk, high cost, genetic solutions when we have well evidenced social interventions that would work better. However, I think he opens the door without even noticing to a eugenics-adjacent position on heritability, which deserves discussion. It's in several places, for example 'alcohol use disorder or alcohol dependency are contemporary and more precise diagnoses, and we know that they are heritable, because everything is.' (p.174) But if it's heritable, then the cause of that heritability doesn't really seem to me to matter if you are trying to 'sculpt society'. If disease selected abortion is OK - 'they are medical techniques specifically conceived and designed for the alleviation of suffering in individuals.' - then why is behavioural abortion not OK. Why should we condemn children to be born into terrible circumstances if it is behavioural, when we don't if it is disease related? Is it eugenics to sterilise those people who would be terrible parents, who either lack capacity to consent or are unable to discharge basic parental obligation? If the distinction is choice, then the genetics is irrelevant. These are complex issues, which I am sure much has been written on. I don't pretend to have expertise in it, but it needs to be addressed here. 

I did think this last criticism was perhaps unfair. That's policy, not eugenics, but then I read this section at the end, 'If we truly wanted to reduce the sum total of human suffering then we should eradicate the powerful, for wars are fought by people but started by leaders.' (p.251) Leaving aside the quality of this argument, which is low, this is a political book. You have to so some of the political work.

Overall, this is such a missed opportunity; It's an relevant topic. The core content about the science and the scientists is well explained and well discussed. I wanted so much more. It is fatally undermined by lack of definitional work, unnecessary overreach and unexamined political positions that are central to the book as written. It's a bad book.

Bibliography, June 2023

BOTM: C. Townsend, Fifth sun (2019)

S. Alexievich, Last witnesses (1985)
L. Booth (ed.), Wisden Cricketer's Almanack (2023)
R. Guha (ed.), The Picador book of cricket (2001)
C. Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin (1939)
M. Kosser, How Nashville became Music City USA (2006)
A. Martine, A memory called Empire (2019)
M. O'Farrell, Hamnet (2020)
N. wa Thiong'o, Petals of Blood (1977)

A lot of this was very good. Only a couple were excellent. People should all read Alexievich, but it wasn't as good as her superlative collection of voices from women in the war. It needed a structure. People all have read Hamnet, but I felt that its Shakespearean conceit was pointless, though the writing was supremely moving. Martine has written a space opera heavily influenced by Byzatine cultural asumptions - which I thoroughly enjoyed, but may be niche.

The two best: Guha's collection of cricket writing was superb. The start was slow, but more than made up for it by an outstanding series of essays collected in one place. It was as good as it should have been. Better yet, though, was Townsend's book on the Aztecs, which was revelatory, clear on the what it was telling us (and how to pronounce it - massive surprise). It was a great book and gave me the depth and insight that I wanted in this area. I've always been fascinated by the pre-Columbian American civilisations and I was delighted to discover that there is more source material than I had thought.

Bibliography, May 2023

BOTM: O. Butler, Kindred (1979)

L. Blissett, Q (1999)
L. Borodin, The year of miracle and grief (1984)
F. Butler-Gallie, Priests de la Resistance (2019)

E. Chang, Lust, Caution and other stories (1979)
J. Fforde, The Eyre Affair (2001)
K. Harris, The Queen at the Cricket (2022)
R. Kapuscinski, The shadow of the sun (1998)
K. Rundell, Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne (2022)

G. Taber, The Judgment of Paris: California vs. France (2005)

I liked parts of lots of these a lot. But many were flawed. Q is brilliantly mad (it's about sixteenth century anabaptists), but too long; Rundell's writing is spiky and very enjoyable to read, but I found the focus slightly off. Kapuscinski writes magnificently, but is slightly wincingly dated in some of his descriptions of African society. 

Largely immune from this were Priests de la Resistance which is actually a sneakily affecting book, with rich anecdotes to tell, told well, and forcefully reminding us of the Christian imperative to act. A marvellous book. Best of all was Octavia Butler's time travelling novel of race and America. Tight, clever, impactful and narratively surprising. It's a great novel.

Bibliography, April 2023

BOTM: A. Hochschild, King Leopold's ghost (1999)

R. Adams, The memories of Milo Morai (1986)
J. Aiken, Black hearts in Battersea (1964)
S. Altun, The Sultan of Byzantium (2011)
S. Barnes, A la recherche de cricket perdu (1989)
R. Bassett, Last days of Old Europe (2019)
A. Burgess, The kingdom of the wicked (1985)
N. Gaiman, The Sandman 5: A game of you (1993)
R.N. Lebow, Archduke Franz Ferdinand Lives!: a world without world war I (2014)
T. Pratchett, Soul music (1994)
S. Selvon, The Lonely Londoners (1956)

It gives me no pleasure to report that the Turkish thriller about a secret society based on the last line Byzantine Emperors is terrible; nor that the imagination of a counterfactual world where WW1 does not happen is also extremely poor. They are both books to avoid. By contrast there are three books on here that are excellent. Sam Selvon's novel on the early Caribbean migrants into Britain is both important and a delight to read. It sort of peters out towards the end, but it is well worth immerses yourself in. Of course, my preferred nostalgic past is not the bedsits of the 1950s, but the lost world of late imperial aristocracy, preferably Habsburg. Richard Bassett thinks so too, and his memoir of his Central European career, and his encounters with the flotsam of the Habsburg world as the cold war ended is just marvellous. Yet again, it makes me curse my stupidity in spending time in Zagreb when Trieste was right there, and it it is enthralling, as well as very nicely done. 

However, best of all was the vastly less warm, though vastly awarded, narrative of the horror-show of Belgian colonialism in the Congo. As we all know now, for Belgian, read personal possession of the King of Belgium. It's tight, clear, and very good on the sheer recency of it all. I also very much appreciated the end, where we get both context on other colonial regimes too (a bad reading of it would single out Belgian / Leopoldine methods alone) and on the weak Belgian reckoning with its own history (the infamous Congo museum was a frequent venue for school trips for me). I don't know the story or nineteenth century Africa as well as I should. This is a critical addition to that. And it's told very well.