Bibliography, March 2023

BOTM: N. wa Thiong'o, A grain of wheat (1967)

L. Binet, HhhH (2010)
------ Civilisations (2019)
P. Carey, The fat man in history and other stories (1980)
G. Dangerfield, The strange death of liberal England (1936)
N. Gaiman, The Sandman: The Doll's House (1990)
------ The Sandman: Dream country (1991)
------ The Sandman: Brief lives (1994)
B. Evaristo, The Emperor's Babe (2001)

G. Heyer, An Infamous army (1937)
D. Landy, Playing with Fire (Skulduggery Pleasant #2) (2008)

J. Kenrick, Musical theatre: a history (2008)
R. Mabey, Wild cooking (2008)
S. Tharoor, Inglorious Empire (2017)

For about fifty pages, I thought Dangerfield's classic was going to be my favourite. That section is wickedly well written, sharp and bright. I loved it. The rest is good, and has lots of biting passages, but struggles to contain the narrative that he's writing and lacks tightness. It needed a better chronology, and I think it should have been shorter. It is still a classic.

Several others were excellent. I'm unconvinced by the French vogue for autofiction in general, but I thought Binet's book on Heydrich was very good. And he's right about Littell. I also really liked Evaristo's early work on on Roman London (though it isn't really). It's very good, funny, and poignant too. I have nothing to add to general comment on The Sandman which I obviously read because of the television adaptation, but is none the worse for it. I read about Musical theatre because I love it, and it did its job well too.

However, best of all was Thiong'o. I read it because I wanted to read more African literature (this is Kenyan), but I found it compelling. It does not have a string of memorable quotations, like Dangerfield, but it was compelling, both in structure and plot. The story of the British exit from Kenya is known, though not well known I fear, and this does it well. Where I think it did it excellently, was in the complexity and range of the responses to it. This was his penultimate book in English before he exclusively wrote in Gikuyu afterwards. I can't wait to read them.