Bibliography, December 2021

BOTM: C. Brenchley, Three twins at the Crater school (2021)

D. Adams and M. Cawardine (1990)

E. Carrere, The kingdom (2014)
D. Devonshire, Wait for me (2010)
K. Addison, Witness for the dead (2021)
C. Mieville, Perdido Street station (2000)

M. Rubin, The hollow crown, 1307-1485 (2005)

E. Taylor, Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (1968)

C. Thubron, Emperor (1978)

I. Vincent, Dinner with Edward (2016)

Three great books here. Taylor is one of those largely forgotten novelists that deserve not to be, and this was excellent. Better though was Dinner with Edward. I read it in a single sitting and it was exactly what you would want this memoir to be. The right balance of introspection and external engagement, and in this case combined with a lovely bit of food porn. I am already committed to the apricot souffle. Looking online, I am not the only one.

However, and with full credit to Anna, my favourite book is intensely personal. I had never imagined that anyone other than me would write a loving pastiche of the Chalet School set on Mars under a steampunk future British Empire. But they have, and it is amazing. Tonally, it's near (though not absolutely) perfect, the world-building is unobtrusive, and the plot contains the right mix of excitement within a fundamentally secure environment. There's another one. I hope there are many more.  

Couple of final thoughts on The Kingdom. Lots of chat about how good this is in religious circles, but I found it very difficult to read. I felt, like I did with Tey's The Daughter of time (and in fact Thubron's on this list), that it was fatally flawed as a book because it couldn't decide what it wanted to be. Firstly, the autobiographical section, and especially the intrusions into the main text, were unnecessary (the section on the author's pornography watching habits was a particular low point). Then it falls between two stools: is it a novelistic treatment of Luke and Paul or is it a serious analytical work? I wish it had been the former, but it kept trying to be the latter, and you just can't do that without footnotes. Frustrating, though some sections were very good indeed.