Bibliography, February 2025

BOTM: H. Nicolson, Diaries (ed. N. Nicolson, 2004)

J. Dench, Shakespeare: the man who pays the rent (2023)

H. Mantel, A change of climate (1994)

E. Morris, Colonel Roosevelt (2010)

C. Van Tulleken, Ultra-processed people (2023)

J. Waine, A company of slayers (2023)

I really struggled to get momentum this month, hence only six books. I blame Anna for going away for a fortnight to work. Children are time consuming. Lots of value though. It didn't come off in Tulleken, which was disappointing because of embarrassing overreach. Fascinating on the nutrition; absolute woo woo on everything else. (Sample quotation: 'I see the avoidance of tax as part of ultra-processing'). No such issues elsewhere. Colonel Roosevelt is a very good end to the biographical trilogy, and really frames that tragic final act for Roosevelt. Mantel's novel also very good. Dench was great on Shakespeare and on how little time she has for many people. I liked it a lot.

Dench is an actress of the highest quality; Harold Nicolson is not an author of comparable standing. I've read one of his novels and it was fine; I suspect there's a reason why we don't read them now. I get the feeling that his political career was similar. However, as a diarist, he is superb. Fortunately, he is also at the thick of things during the war, even if he is slightly detached. My father bought them for me because he loved them, and so did I.

Bibliography, January 2025

BOTM: B. Wilson, The secret of cooking (2023)

L. Bardugo, Six of Crows (2015)

G. Ehrlich, The solace of open spaces (1986)

R.F. Kuang, The Poppy war (2018
G.Lamming, In the castle of my skin (1953)

M. Margolyes, This much is true (2021)

E. Morris, Theodore Rex (2002)

I've been really busy this month, and Morris' second volume of his TR biography is long. It's also very good, though I think less effective than this first. That's primarily because the business of the administration has to co-exist with the account of the man, and I don't think it does that perfectly. It's still hugely compelling, and I've bought the third and final volume already. I've decided to read a lot of Americans this year. I think I will find their past more congenial than their present. On Americans, I loved Ehrlich's book about Wyoming. I think the only other books I've read about Wyoming are the My Friend Flicka series - about horses (secondary ambition: read a book for every state). Horses feature in the Solace of Open spaces but the land and the people dominate. And it's a beautiful book about just that. It was written post bereavement, and those jagged moments cut through, but don't dominate, adding another layer to a fine book about place.

Curiously, my favourite book was also one where sadness (divorce, not death) sat just under the surface. I love Bee Wilson's work. This is her third BOTM - behind only Fermor and tied with Wodehouse, Trollope, Gibbon and Bryson. That's a dinner party! - and I didn't even mean to buy it. I casually took it out of the library, read it in a weekend, and bought a copy the next day. It's a fantastic book. It's easy and engagingly written, also funny. I found it also a font of practical advice - not all of which I agreed with. It's also got excellent recipes, which is why I bought a copy, but I'd read it even if you aren't intending to make anything it. That said, her recipe for gochujang carrots is outstanding. It's going to get used a lot this year.

Bibliography, 2024

I read 122 books in 2024, exactly the same as 2023. A second consecutive year of being back over ten books a month since the children were born. Last year, six graphic novels got me over the line; this year it was eleven children's books, most - but not all - of which the children read first.

Similar ratios: lots of fiction (though only 55 for grown ups) and cultural output still down on long run averages. Maybe I've read most of the great memoirs. A 7:5 split to fiction in Books of the Month towards fiction, and history edging out culture (though East West Street is actually both). Note also the ghastly modernity of the results. For the first time, no BOTM novels were written before I was born (of the 28 published before 1980 read this year - Baldwin's Giovanni's Room best, but edged by Morris in June).

One of the children's books made BOTM, pretty much exactly in line with overall reading volumes, but it was an outstanding book. I read Impossible Creatures first of all my novels this year, and it was my favourite of the whole year. I think it's a marvel. It helps that she's clearly read everything I've read, and then stuffs lots of it, joyously, into a single work. I also think she does it with just the right amount of whimsy. Anna tells me that she gets the Welsh wrong, but I'm pretending I don't know that. Read it, and make your children read it. Were I to choose an adult novel, I'd choose Patchett.

Choosing non-fiction is a straight duel between Teddy Roosevelt and the medieval church. It is possible that the appeal of Morris and Heather's books may be reduced if you have less affection for the subjects than I do, but they are both important, and brilliantly done. I think achievement of Christendom is the greater, given the complexity of the material. It was my favourite of all. I think it's right, but even if you don't agree with it, it's a masterful grand narrative of a central narrative of Christianity and the many streams that gave us the medieval catholic church.

Jan: K. Rundell, Impossible Creatures (2023)

Feb: R. McCrum, Wodehouse: a life (2004)
Mar: M. Conde, Crossing the Mangrove (1989)
Apr: P. Sands, East West Street (2016)
May: P. Fitzgerald, At Freddie's (1982)
Jun: E. Morris, The rise of Theodore Roosevelt (1979)
Jul: M. Lee, Eight lives of a century-old trickster (2023)
Aug: M. Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000)
Sep: S. Harvey, Orbital (2023)
Oct: Leaman & Jones, Hitting against the spin (2021)
Nov: P.  Heather, Christendom (2022)
Dec: A. Patchett, The Dutch House (2019)

Bibliography, December 2024

BOTM: A. Patchett, The Dutch house (2019)

A. Gray, At Christmas we feast (2022)
J. Hawes, The shortest history of Germany (2017)
T. Hughes, The Iron man (1968)
D. Landy, The Faceless ones (2009)
A. MacCaffrey, Dragonflight (1969)
J. Ng, Under the pendulum sun (2017)
D. Olusoga, Black and British: A Forgotten History (2016)
Orme, Going to church in medieval England (2021)
M. Paver, The crocodile tomb (2015)
M. Paver, Warrior bronze (2016)
O. Thomson, The other kaisers (2010)
G. Wolfe, The shadow of the torturer (1984)
A. Wood, Powder monkey (1953)

I saw out the year with a glut of children's books (at least five of the nine novels I read). I liked most of them, which isn't true of my adult reading. I had issues with Olusoga, which was annoying. The stuff he knows well was well done, and it is undertaught, though not by as much as he claims, but his headline case is plain wrong: there have not always been black Britons beyond isolated examples, which is why there are no chapters in the book on the period between the Fall of Rome and the Tudors. It's a weird opening to take. 400 years just isn't that long ago. Elsewhere, Thomson's book on German Emperors was just rubbish, and my decision to retreat to comforting science fiction was badly let down by the execution of Ng and Wolfe. The latter of which is meant to be a classic, but I just couldn't face book two, even though I a two volume set out of the library. 

So, having covered all those, Patchett's novel is great. She's an exceptionally good novelist, and I think this is one of her very best. She has this extraordinary gift of being able to imbue not much happening (no melodrama, no high stakes plots) with very high engagement. They're engrossing, and brilliantly played out. I think very much the same about Arnold Bennett, and that's high praise indeed. I said the same last time I made one of her novels my favourite, and it's a reminder that you don't need a gimmick to make things work.

Bibliography, November 2024

BOTM: P. Heather, Christendom (2023)

A. Berkeley, Trial and Error (1937)
B.J. Catlos, Kingdoms of Faith: A New History of Islamic Spain (2021)

M. Chabon, Gentlemen of the road (2007)
A. Christie, The Sittaford mystery (1924)
A. Christie, A murder is announced (1953)
H. Eyres, Wine Dynasties of Europe (1990)

J. Firnhaber-Baker, House of Lilies (2024)

I. Pezeshkzad, My uncle Napoleon (1973)
E. Rasmussen, The Shakespeare thefts (2010)

I went to an Agatha Christie evening mid-month, hence the golden age crime kick here. They were good. She remains the best of them all. Elsewhere, very pleasing blocks of historical reading, on the Capetians and Islamic Spain, both of which I liked, though both had a few issues of style and content. Catlos was better. I also hugely enjoyed My Uncle Napoleon. It was sold to me as reminiscent of Wodehouse in pre-revolutionary Iran. That is an accurate description and it is therefore huge fun. It's too long though. Wodehouse keeps it tighter.

Preamble over, I now want to talk about Peter Heather's book, which I loved. It's straddles both my Masters and especially my Doctoral research so I was disposed to care lots about it. I'm no expert on the later western church, so I've no skin in that game, but he does also confirm what I argued in my doctorate about Theodosius I so I'm pleased with that. I am also delighted to see the rare sight of someone doing the maths properly and using that to point to the centrality of royal and imperial power to Christianization. There's lots of like about that, for example, very good on the numbers of churches which were quite low till well into the middle ages. It’s also, if we were looking for relevance, an exemplary political economy analysis in relation to the papacy, and showing how little actual power popes had till the failure of both the Empires that followed the End of Rome in the West. Bizarrely, it came to my attention through work, but I'm very very glad it did.

Bibliography, October 2024

BOTM: N. Leaman & B. Jones, Hitting against the spin (2021)

R. Adams, J. Sutphin & J. Sturm, Watership Down: The Graphic novel (2023)
M. Baer, The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars and Caliphs (2021)
J. Bate and R. Jackson (eds), Oxford illustrated history of Shakespeare on Stage (2001)
Ar. Bennett, The old wives' tale (1908)

P. Everett. James (2024)
P. Fitzgerald, The means of escape  (2000)
N. Gaiman, Sandman 01: Preludes and Nocturnes (1989)
A. Panshin, Rite of Passage (1969)
M. Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
P.G. Wodehouse, Piccadilly Jim (1917)

In my head, I've not read much about the Ottomans. I discover that this is the third general history of them that I have read. It was good, though it suffers from the normal Ottoman problem, which is that the first part up to Suleiman is way more exciting than the rest, and general histories never really analyse the shift. I need to read a more detailed account of the period between Lepanto and the Siege of Vienna.

That repeating pattern is true for a lot of this list. It covers a lot of typical reading sections for me. Bennett, Wodehouse, Gaiman were all reminders to do more of that. BOTM wasn't by authors I knew, but it's not the first cricket or stats book I've read. It was excellent and really effectively mined the vast amount of data we now have about cricket (and was good at telling about the growth of that data). I loved it.

I didn't really love the Booker shortlist. I read most of them last month, but saved James to the end because I loved Everett's previous novel. However I made the mistake of reading Huckleberry Finn first (which I didn't particularly like either). Despite what you might have been expecting: this is not a retelling and that annoyed me beyond all measure. If you want to use a text, then you have to engage with it, not just deviate from it dramatically about half way through. This is particularly true when the ending of Finn is so obviously the most problematic bit from Jim's perspective, and most fertile for reinterpretation. Ranking:

1. Orbital
2. The Safekeep
3. James
4. Stone Yard devotional
5. Creation Lake
6. Held

I do think Everett will win.

Bibliography, September 2024

BOTM: A. Harvey, Orbital (2023)

J.M. Coetzee, Boyhood (1997)

A. Funder, Wifedom (2023)
A. Gurnah, Afterlives (2020)
L. Holland, Sistersong (2021)
R. Kushner, Creation lake (2024)
J. Roth, The imperial tomb (1938)
A. Michaels, Held (2023)
C. Wood, Stone yard devotional (2023)
Y. van der Wouden, The safekeep (2024)

Almost all fiction, though Boyhood is practically a memoir. I confess I am unsure of the validity of the distinction. The only definite non-fiction was mediocre. I don't like personal reflection in biography, especially not when it's facile. By contrast, but several novels were excellent. Honourable mentions to Gurnah, who I bought on the strength of his Nobel, and van der Wouden, which had too much sex in the middle, and a slightly overneat ending, but an excellent twist. My favourites were Coetzee and Harvey. Coetzee also has a Nobel, and wrote one of my favourite ever books. This is not Michael K but it's a brilliant evocation of provincial South Africa at a particular time. I'm not sure there's a deep message here, but I loved reading it. Orbital is completely different, though also short. It's a lush, lyrical imagination of a day in the space station. Nothing happens, but it happens beautifully. The prose can be a little purple, but the anchoring in the (invented) individuals on the station really works. It's the best of this year's Booker shortlist so far.