Pilgrim stumbles into Autumn 2020

September

1. The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater - 4 stars
2. Making God Real in the Orthodox Christian Home by Anthony Coniaris - 1.5 stars
3. A Very Declan Christmas by Maggie Stiefvater - 2.5 stars
4. Fated by Benedict Jacka - 3.5 stars
5. Flight in Yiktor by Andre Norton - 4 stars
6. Lost and Found: Memory, Identity and Who We Become When We're No Longer Ourselves by Jules Montague - 4.5 stars
7. The Atrocity Archive by Charles Stross - 3.5 stars
8. The Concrete Jungle (novella) by Charles Stross - 3.5 stars
9. Pimpf (novella) by Charles Stross - 4 stars

October

1. Down on the Farm (novellette) by Charles Stross - 3 stars
2. The Jennifer Morgue by Charles Stross - 4.5 stars
3. Equoid (novella) by Charles Stross - 3 stars
4. Prester John by John Buchan - 3.5 stars
5. Sleep of Death by Philip Gooden - 2.5 stars
6. Death of Kings by Philip Gooden - 2 stars
7. The Good Son by You-Jeong Jeong (trans. by Chi-Young Kim) - 4 stars
8. Judgment on Deltchev by Eric Ambler - 3.5 stars
9. The Queen of Nothing by Holly Black - 3.5 stars
10. The Lost Sisters (novella) by Holly Black - 3.5 stars
11. Reading the Bible the Orthodox Way (tract) by Fr. John A. Peck - 1 star
12. The Pale Companion by Philip Gooden - 2.5 stars

November

1.King Ahab - Or Falk and Jenny (novella) by Matti Aikio - 4 stars
2. Firewood (deleted scene) by Sebastien de Castell - 2.5 stars

January: Average score = 3.44
February: Average score = 3.23
March: Average score = 3.6
April: Average score = 2.56
May: Average score = 2.31
June: Average score = 2.625
July: Average score = 1.9
August: Average score = 2.92
September: Average score: 3.44
October: Average score: 3.08
November: Average score: 3.25

My Rating System

1/2 star - this is vile. I regret ever opening these pages.

1 star - this was a complete waste of my time.

1 1/2 stars - either boring, but with occasional flashes of inspiration; or a 2-star book let down by poor writing.

2 stars - OK. It passed the time pleasantly enough, but I don't feel that my life would have been the poorer if I had never encountered this book. In non-fiction, it is an adequate coverage of a topic, but not a good read.

2 1/2 stars - as for 2, but with occasional flashes of quality.

3 stars - I am glad that I read this but I probably won't want to re-read.

3 1/2 stars - either something disposable, but with real flair, or a book let down by poor writing (or translating).

4 stars - a good, really enjoyable book, but not a great one. I will keep, and may well reread.

4 1/2 stars - a great, but flawed book.

5 stars - a book that reading has changed my life a little.

Currently Reading:


God and the Problem of Evil by Chad Meister and James K. Dew
Started: 5/9/2020


Think Again: How to Reason and Argue by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
Started: 27/9/2020


Victoria & Abdul by Shrabani Basu
Started: 30/10/2020


The Way of the Pilgrim and the Pilgrim Continues His Way translated by Olga Savin
Started: 10/12/19

Kindle:


Daily Prayers for Orthodox Christians by John (Ellsworth) Hutchison-Hall
Started: 3/9/2020


Computer Hacking: Beginner's Guide by Alan T. Norman
Started: 21/10/19


An Introduction to Music Theory by Trevor Bray
Started: 15/9/2020


Meghan and Harry: the Real Story by Lady Colin Campbell
Started: 26/9/2020


34 Years in Hell: My Time Inside America's Toughest Prisons by Jamie Morgan Kane
Started: 28/9/2020


The King's Letters by Sebastien de Castell
Started: 27/11/2020


Tyll by Daniel Kehlmann (trans. by Ross Benjamin)
Started: 28/11/2020

Series in progress

Fiction
Heartstrikers by Rachel Aaron: 1, 2-5 - Bethesda Heartstriker: Mother of the Year
Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch: 1-4, 5, 6-7 - The Cockpit; False Value
Dania Gorska by Hania Allen: 1 - Clearing the Dark

Chronicles of Amber by John Gregory Betancourt: P1, 1-10 - Chaos and Amber
Dominion of The Fallen by Aliette de Bodard: 1 - Children of Thorns, Children of Water
Pieter Posthumous by Britta Bolt: 3 - Lonely Graves
Alpha and Omega by Patricia Briggs: 1-2 - Fair Game
Mercy Thompson by Patricia Briggs: 1-8 - Fire Touched
Sianim by Patricia Briggs: 3-4 - Masques
World of the Five Gods by Lois McMasters Bujold: 1.1, 2 -Penric and the Shaman, The Paladin of Souls
Chains of Honor by Lindsay Buroker: P1-P3, 1-2 Snake Heart, Assassin's Bond
Emperor's Edge by Lindsay Buroker: 1-8 - Diplomats and Fugitives
Fallen Empire by Lindsay Buroker: P-3 - Relic of Sorrows
The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher: 1 - Fool Moon

Holly Danger by Amanda Carlson: 1 - Danger's Vice
Spellslinger by Sebastian de Castell: 1-5 - Crownbreaker
Greatcoats by Sebastian de Castell: 1 - Knight's Shadow
The Daevabad Trilogy by S. A. Chakraborty: 1 - The Kingdom of Copper
Chronicles of an Age of Darkness by Hugh Cook: 1 - The Wordsmiths and the Warguild
The Saxon Chronicles by Bernard Cornwell: 1-2 - The Lords of the North
Sharpe by Bernard Cornwell:1, 6, 8-9, 13 - Sharpe's Triumph
Arkady Renko by Martin Cruz Smith: 1 - Polar Star

Marcus Didius Falco by Lindsey Davis: 1-6 - Time to Depart
Flavia Albia by Lindsey Davis: 1-2.5 - Deadly Election
Priya's Shakti by Ram Devineni & Dan Goldman: 1-2 - Priya and the Lost Girls
John Pearce by David Donachie: 1, 14 - A Shot-Rolling Ship
The Privateersman Mysteries by David Donachie: 1-2 - A Hanging Matter
The Marie Antoinette Romances by Alexandre Dumas: 2 - Cagliostro
The Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas: 1-3 - Louise de la Vallière
Cliff Janeway by John Dunning: 1 - The Bookman's Wake

The Beginner's Guide to Necromancy by Hailey Edwards: 1 - How to Claim an Undead Soul

Metro 203x by Dmitry Glukhovsky: 1-1.5 - Metro 2034
The Archangel Project by C Gockel: 1- 1.5 - Noa's Ark
Shakespearean Murder Mysteries by Philip Gooden: 1-3 - Alms for Oblivion
The Earthsea Cycle by Ursula le Guin 1 - The Tombs of Atuan

Forever War by Joe Haldeman: 1 - Forever Free
Benjamin January by Barbara Hambly: 1 - Fever Season
Darwath by Barbara Hambly: 1-3 - Mother of Winter
James Asher by Barbara Hambly: 1-2, 4-5 - Blood Maidens, Darkness on His Bones
Sun Wolf and Star Hawk by Barbara Hambly: 1-3 - Hazard
The Windrose Chronicles by Barbara Hambly: 1-3 - Firemaggot
The Stainless Steel Rat by Harry Harrison 4-5, 9 - The Stainless Steel Rat Is Born
The Paper Magician by Charlie N. Holmberg: 1-2, 4 - The Master Magician

Conqueror by Conn Iggulden: 1 - Lords of the Bow

Alex Verus by Benedict Jacka: 1, 9 - Cursed

The Danilov Quintet by Jasper Kent:1 - Thirteen Years Later

The Jane Doe Chronicles by Jeremy Lachlan: 1 - The Key of All Souls
The Book of the Ancestor by Mark Lawrence: 1 - Grey Sister
The Kalle Blomqvist Mysteries by Astrid Lindgren: 3 - Master Detective

Robert Colbeck by Edward Marston: 1 - The Excursion Train
The Raven's Mark by Ed McDonald: 1 - Ravencry

The Psammead by E. Nesbit: 1-3 - The Phoenix and the Carpet
Moonsinger by Andre Norton: 1-3 - Dare to Go A'Hunting

Giordano Bruno by S.J. Parris: 5 - Heresy
Brother Cadfael by Ellis Peters: 1-8, 9-12 - The Rose Rent
The Gaian Consortium by Christine Pope: 1 - Breath of Life
Discworld by Sir Terry Pratchett: 1-15.5 - Soul Music
The Devices Trilogy by Philip Purser-Hallard: 1-2 - Trojans

Divergent by Veronica Roth: 1, 2.5 - Insurgent

The Witcher by Andrzej Sapkowski: 1 - The Last Wish, Time of Contempt
Old Man's War by John Scalzi: 1 - The Ghost Brigades
The Rhenwars Saga by M. L. Spencer: 1 - Darklands
The Raven Cycle by Maggie Stiefvater: 0.2, 1 - The Dream Thieves
The Laundry Files by Charles Stross: 1-2.3 - The Fuller Memorandum
Merchant Princes by Charles Stross: 2 - The Family Trade
The Dolphin Ring by Rosemary Sutcliff: 1, 3-6, 8 - The Silver Branch

The Ember Quartet by Saba Tahir: 2 - An Ember in the Ashes
Jem Flockhart by E. S. Thomson: 2 - Beloved Poison
A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain: 1-2 - Part 3

Miss Silver by Patricia Wentworth: 1 - The Case is Closed
Aspects of Power by Charles Williams: 1 - Many Dimensions
The Gestes by P. C. Wren: 1 - Beau Sabreur

Non-fiction

The Spiritual Life by Hieromonk Gregorios: 1 - Be Ready

The History of Middle Earth by Christopher Tolkien: ??

Series Completed in 2020

DFZ by Rachel Aaron: 1-3
Dragon Blood by Lindsay Buroker: P, 1-8
Heritage of Power by Lindsay Buroker: 1-5

Series up to date

Paul Samson by Henry Porter: 1-2 - The Old Enemy
The Hitman's Guide by Alice Winters: 1-2
Tom Mondrian by Ross Armstrong: 1
The Folk of the Air by Holly Black: P1-3, 1-3 - How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories

N.b.
(i) This list is still probably incomplete.
(ii) The named book is the next to be read
(iii) Inclusion of a series does not imply intent to complete it.
(iv) I have read some of the series in bold type during this year (2020), others are outstanding.
(v) I have pruned out of this list some series that I began in 2019, but definitely do not intend to continue.

The Raven Boys ( Book 1 of The Raven Cycle) Maggie Stiefvater - 4 stars
30/8/2020- 1/2020

This was a very pleasant surprise. I do not have a lot of patience for novels where American authors, instead of drawing on the traditions of their own continent, find implausible explanations as to why the supernatural from alien cultures migrate to their shores, but my interest was piqued by the author's choice to focus on the "King Who Sleeps" legend of Owain Glen Dwr, rather than the more obvious choice of Arthur.

And it started badly, with the tired tropes of

poor but feisty girl, with a Special Gift

quartet of arrogant boys from moneyed, well-connected backgrounds, who attend nearby expensive, exclusive free-paying school.

The stage seemed set for lots of "mean teens" conflict.

But instead it went off in a completely different direction. This urban fantasy is not particularly well-written, but it did have some beautiful passages. And its plot is consistently unpredictable. It hooked me.

Blue is the only non-psychic in a family of psychics. Her only gift is that her presence enhances the abilities of those who are sensitive. However she is not particularly depressed by this, being usually content to be helpful. She is quite comfortable, if somewhat bored, at school; she deliberately cultivates an image of eccentricity and is not bullied. Her problem: all her relatives agree that if she kisses her true love, he will die.

The boys are not caricatures of the well-off. Each has their own faults, their own problems, and their own blindspots. Gansey comes from privilege, and has a blindspot about how offensive he can be, unthinkingly, on the subject of money. But it mortifies him. And he is driven by the awareness that, coming from as much privilege as he does, it is incumbent on him to use it to do something really special. Ronan is the aggressive one, throwing away all his advantages, and at war with the world. He discovered his father's body. He is hurting. Adam is the scholarship boy, poor but proud, working multiple jobs to keep himself at that school, quietly determined to make his own way, whatever it costs him. And Noah is the one who is so diffident that no one really listens to what he is saying

What set this apart for me was firstly that the characters are far better delineated than in most YA novels. They cannot be summed up in glib phrases - even though that is exactly what Blue does when she first meets the "raven boys" (so nick-named for the insignia on their school uniform)!

Secondly, there is no "instalove". Not because of the prophecy about Blue, although that does make her very wary of relationships, but because real people do not do that. Instead there is embarrassment, uncertainty, and gradually becoming comfortable in one another's company.

But most of all, there is no meanness in this novel. What characterises all the relationships in this book is how much all the characters care for one another. It is primarily about friendship.

The quest for Glendwr is the obsession of one of them. The others commit to it because it matters to him. That is what friends do.

There is real risk here, and contemplation of the reality of death and loss. Their is also a realistic portrayal of what it is like to have a violent father. But ultimately this is a very positive book, in its perception of what people are like. Friendship and loyalty are its strongest themes.

Helmet Reading Challenge: 3, 34

ETA: Despite being a book with a mature tone, the author has not needed to include any bad language, sexual content or graphic violence. The single implied dirty joke near the end seemed a little out of place.

ETA: This fulfilled the "book you have a prejudice against" for the Helmet Reading Challenge.

This is a really good review of The raven boys. I too enjoyed it when I read it, for many of the same reasons - the portrayal of friendship between well-rounded characters who don't conform to the usual YA tropes. I also thought the rural setting was very well done, both the descriptions of the countryside and the small town whose poor residents coexist with the rich schoolboys.

>6 Sakerfalcon: Thank you Sakerfalcon.

I have finally managed to write a review of a book that I really liked!

Making God Real in the Orthodox Christian Home by Anthony M. Coniaris - 1.5 stars
18/12/19 - 2/9/2020

This was a very difficult book to read. On the one hand it contained valuable insights, which caused me to persist, but it was also banal, irrelevant, and at times, quite offensive.

Since I am not cradle Orthodox, there are customs - as opposed to beliefs - with which I am unfamiliar. Most books in Orthodoxy concentrate on the faith, both doctrine and how to live it out in daily life. But they do not discuss the customs, and the symbolism, because they are what are explained to children; they are so familiar to adults who have grown up in the faith to be second nature. In discussing how to teach one's children the true meaning behind such customs, it teaches those readers who did not grow up with such observances, about both their existence and meaning.

Unfortunately, the author does not distinguish between what the Orthodox do (or should!) and what it would be a good thing, in this author's personal opinion, if they started doing. He elevates observances that he would like to see introduced to the same level as the established customs of the Church. Some of his ideas were good, but the level of hubris involved in writing in this way was startling to me. Most Orthodox authors, even respected theologians, demonstrate humility, and diffidence in expressing their own opinions; with this author, it is the converse.

Similarly, for this American author, it is clear that the rest of the world simply does not exist. When he writes "we" it is clear that he means "we Americans", not "we Orthodox". Such arrogance is, unfortunately, something I have often found from American authors, but when writing in the context of the teachings of the universal Orthodox Church, for a priest from one diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church to write as if the mother church did not exist is bizarre. (I understand that some branches of Orthodoxy now recognise the Orthodox Church of America as autocephalous, but this is not a universally agreed position.)

As an example: Christmas is an Orthodox feast. Thanksgiving is not. Yet this author teaches how Orthodox Christians should celebrate both. Why does he believe that the rest of the Orthodox world has a duty to celebrate the beginning of the American immigrants' genocide and subjugation of the indigenous population? In America itself, it is a political issue as to whether it is appropriate to celebrate those events. To teach that a local cultural holiday, of dubious origins, ought to be observed by the worldwide Church as a Christian festival is something that I find deeply offensive. (Note: many national holidays have their roots in events that we nowadays might not consider appropriate to choose to commemorate. I am not suggesting all such holidays be abolished! But to elevate them to the status of a religious event feels blasphemous.)

This parochialism becomes more and more pronounced where his writing becomes more pastoral in intent. Since this is a book addressed to parents, it is understandable that he writes a lot about what he considers wrong with modern parenting. But he makes it clear that in his narrow and insular mind, it never occurs to him that the problems he sees around him are peculiar to American culture . Not that problems exist only in America; however issues facing Orthodox families very from country to country, as the problems that they face relate to their interaction with the host culture - and American culture is not universal. If he did not presume to address the rest of the Anglophone world with assumptions that they share American attitudes, then his advice might be genuinely helpful to his own local community.

However the latter stages of the book worry me even in that, more limited, context. In this section he is giving more general parenting advice, and he seems heavily influenced here by prevailing American secular prejudices.

Although he castigates parents for never really forgiving their children, and not giving them second chances, the next moment he is quoting American psychologists to the effect that the child is irretrievably shaped by their childhood experiences, and that a child who was treated ballot will inevitably perpetuate such behaviours in their adult life. Although his intention is obviously to motivate his readers into behaving responsibly as kind and just parents, the fact that he is willing to thus condemn as irretrievable those children who were not fortunate enough to have good parents is thus extremely hypocritical: parents must believe that their child is capable of reform, no matter what they do, whilst he believes that a certain category of children will be incapable of it!

He tells pious parables of the effects of a youth worker trusting a former juvenile car thief with his keys, "because that's all behind you now. I trust you." Then a few pages later he writes (quoting Peck and Havinghurst):

The general conclusion seems inescapable that a child's character is the direct product, almost a direct reproduction, of the way his parents treat him. As they are to him, so he is to all others.

(emphasis mine)
I have met this belief frequently in American books, often enough that I have the impression that it is an unquestioned cultural norm there. I first met it when reading A Man Called Dave, where I was shocked to find that not only did he have to deal with the long-term physical and mental consequences of an abused childhood, but that he also felt that he had to hide what he had been through, because of people knew, he would receive not supportive sympathy, but further rejection, because anyone who knew would take it as unalterable fact that he must have been warped by that into something dangerous.

That belief is not universal. In my own country, we do not assume that the children of bad parents will necessarily become bad people. The adult children of Fred and Rosemary West (who sexually abused and murdered their own children, as well as others), were able to come forward, knowing that they would receive sympathy for what they had been through, to ask for help and support for their younger siblings. (The children in that large family had a very close bond, and fear of being separated, with the youngest possibly left to endure the worst, had prevented any from going to the police.)

To find an Orthodox priest preaching an almost Calvinistic predestination to damnation for victims of abuse, simply because it is the assumption of the secular culture that surrounds him, was deeply troubling.

It is also clear that, for this author, women are irrelevant. Although he pays lip service to the effect of parents on the child, it is clear that he is only thinking of fathers.

And again, extreme hypocrisy is evident. On the one hand, he justifies the fact that the Orthodox Church does not ordain women - an issue on which Orthodox theologians are currently divided - as follows:

We hear much today about the subject of women priests. Why don't we ordain women as priests? Why should we? God has already ordained them into the sacred priesthood of motherhood. Who can ever be a more effective priest to her children than a dedicated Christian mother?

But then, later:

In one congregation a study showed that where fathers worshipped with their children, 85% remained faithful to the church, and where the child participated with no interest by the parents, only 15% remained faithful to the church.

So, according this study, the beliefs of the mother have zero influence, since there are 0% of children who worshipped with their mothers, but not with fathers, and "remained faithful to the church". (I find it implausible that the congregation contained no widows - to say nothing of other reasons why a woman might be raising her children alone - and no housebound or unbelieving fathers.) The fact that I am correct in my interpretation of his claim is made clear by the next sentence:
If a child sits next to his father in worship, he catches something that will never depart.
No mention is made of sitting next to their mother.

Fr. Coniaris states explicitly that he believes that the problems of modern (American) society would be all solved if "we" followed the practice of an (unnamed) foreign country where "in every household" women and children obeyed the father as the head of the household. (He does go on to explain that the father ought to act so as to be worthy of this.)

To discuss his interpretation of Ephesians 5:22 would definitely take this into the realms of debating both religion and politics. So I am not going to criticise his opinions, but only the consistency of those opinions.

When discussing the feasts of the Theotokos (the title Orthodox reserve for the Virgin Mary) he explains that Orthodox consider her greater in honour than the cherubim, more glorious than the seraphim, because hers is the most perfect example of submission to the will of God. Yet, when thinking of her as the mother of the twelve year old Jesus, upbraiding the son whob had gone missing, but was found in the Temple, Fr Coniaris assumes that her motives were selfish (Naturally (my emphasis, again)His mother, not realizing that He could have any other duty apart from pleasing her and avoiding trouble to her, reprimanded Him), rather than motivated by the normal motherly urge of anxiety about a child's safety.

Projecting his negative views about women onto the Mother of God is very much at variance with the doctrine that he propounded earlier.

I got from this book explanations of Orthodox cultural practices that I have not found elsewhere.

But I found it, peppered as it is with references to the author's other works, a disturbingly conceited volume. The author seemed completely unable to distinguish between himself and his own, culture-bound, opinions and that teachings of the church that he represents.

Despite his repeated references to psychological research, to provide pseudo-scientific support for his views, he never provides the sort of references that can be followed up (although he is scrupulous in doing so when his own writings are involved).

The Orthodox Church recommends turning to its representatives for spiritual guidance, but it is also very clear in defining that authority lies with the conciliar universal Church, and that no one priest can presume to speak for her authoritatively (except when simply promulgating agreed doctrine). So to find such an attitude from a Orthodox priest was an unpleasant surprise.

This is not a book for "Orthodox Christians". It is addressed only to American Orthodox men. The pastoral advice this book contains may be helpful to them (if somewhat long-winded and repetitive). The fact that the only men are expected to read this is that after long section telling men how to be good fathers, there is no comparative section for women. So either all women are innately perfect - or they are irrelevant!

But its complete rejection, in practice, of a parental role for women, and its judgmental rejection of abused children, mean that I cannot recommend this book, even though I found parts of it useful.

I note that the book was first written in 1977, them revised and expanded in 2004. A lot of Fr Coniaris' attitudes are perhaps more understandable in the context of the era in which it was written. My point is that they should not be. He is writing as if he is the mouthpiece of the unchanging Orthodox Church, not a seventies American male infected with the popular psychological theories and cultural attitudes of that time and place.

Helmet Reading Challenge: 24, 40

Books from January awaiting review: 2
Books from February awaiting review: 1
Books from March awaiting review: 1
Books from April awaiting review: 2
Books from June awaiting review: 4
Books from August awaiting review: 1

>8 -pilgrim-: 1.5 stars seems generous.

>10 Karlstar: It was not a complete waste of my time, because I did learn some useful things about traditions in observance amongst Orthodox Christians.

That covers quite a lot of the book.

Books from January awaiting review: 2
Books from February awaiting review: 1
Books from March awaiting review: 1
Books from April awaiting review: 2
Books from June awaiting review: 4

Given BookstoogeLT's complaint here that he wanted to know "what it took" to get a 5 star review from me, I hereby notify him (and anyone else who may be interested) that I have just added a review of a 5 star book from August to my Summer thread.

>13 -pilgrim-: I just saw that. glad to see it is possible :-)

A Very Declan Christmas (a short story from The Raven Cycle) by Maggie Stiefvater - 2.5 stars

Although this is chronologically the first story about "the Raven boys", it references something about one of them that was not yet manifested in the first book of the cycle proper, The Raven Boys, and thus is quite a major spoiler for the subsequent books.

However Declan does not get a very good reputation from that first book, even though one gets the impression that it is desperation and worry over his wayward younger brother that causes him too act in this rather bullying way.

So it was lovely to see what a caring, protective elder brother a ten year old Declan was like.

>13 -pilgrim-: Thanks for the review, sounds fascinating!

I read Empire V by Viktor Pelevin back in February, but never got round to reviewing it, as I am still not sure I have wrapped had around it completely.

I have just learnt that it is being made into a film. The question is, will that make things clearer, or more confused?

Fated (Book 1 of the Alex Verus novels) by Benedict Jacka - 3.5 stars

This is the first book in a long series about a wizard, who runs a magic shop. After his apprenticeship terminated abruptly, and in a violent way, he now has a lot of people who would like to see him dead, whilst the manner of the termination has also left him not on good terms with the Council - and he feels resentful towards them too. He seems in over his head; his primary goal in this first book is s simply staying alive.

But he lives in London, not Chicago, and his field is divination.

It is obvious that Benedict Jacka is familiar with the Harry Dresden novels (and Jim Butcher is one of the blurbers of Fated). But this is not simply a clone; the parallels are overt, and the differences deliberate.

The magic system is more clearly explained here - I did not get the same irritating sensation of a new skill being "pulled out of the hat", when the plot demanded it. Here we get an explanation of both the different types of people who can work with magic, and the different types of magic items.

And, although Alex, like Harry, is used to living on his wits, and talking his way out of a situation, he is less of an arrogant jerk about it. He can be cocky and flash, but that is a deliberate plot when dealing with opponents who despise weakness, rather than genuine hubris.

Alex puts his life on the line to protect those he cares about, because he cannot conceive of not doing so - and without continuously patting himself on the back about what a great guy he is, for not leaving them in the danger he had dumped them in!

The mindset of Dark Mages is examined more fully here. Whereas those that I encountered in Storm Front were power-seeking idiots (consorting with demons is never a good idea!) the ones in Fated have studied their Aleister Crowley: Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

Or, as Alex Verus explains to a friend:

Dark mages follow a philosophy called the True Way. The True Way says that good and bad as we see it are conventions. Our ideas about good and evil come from customs and religions designed to benefit the people in power. Dark mages think that obeying them makes you a sheep. Like when you asked for that cube from that man today? A Dark mage would say you should have just taken it.’
'You mean stealing it?’
‘A Dark mage would tell you that you only feel stealing is wrong because your parents brought you up that way. Right and wrong are just conventions, like which side of the road you drive on.’
Luna thought about it for a few seconds, then shook her head.
‘But he’d have called the police.’
I nodded. ‘That’s the bit they think matters. What stops people breaking the law is the threat of punishment, and the threat only means anything if there’s the power to enforce it. To a Dark mage, power is reality. The more power you have, the more you can shape the reality around you. Strength, cunning, influence, whatever, but the one thing they don’t tolerate is weakness. Dark mages believe weakness is a sin, something shameful. If you’re not strong enough to take what you want, it’s your fault.’

‘That man, Cinder,’ I said. ‘What do you think he would have done if he’d found you?’...
‘Whatever he wanted,’ I said. ‘He might have ignored you. He might have laughed and walked off. He might have raped you and left you bleeding on the ground. He might have taken you back to his mansion as a slave. And he wouldn’t think twice about doing any of those things.’ ... ‘And something else,’ I went on. ‘No other Dark mage would think twice about him doing any of those things either. If you can’t stop him, it’s your fault...'

I find that a lot more chilling than tentacles.

Divination is a field of magic often mentioned, but then usually sidestepped, because having the heroes know what is going to happen rather ruins the plot. The attempt to show how a Diviner works was one of my main reasons for sticking with the Heartstriker novels.

Here both the power and the weakness of divination are portrayed. A diviner can look into the future and see the consequence of any given action, enabling him to choose whether or not to take that action to get that result.
BUT

he can only see a future that is fixed. If I have not yet decided what I will do, if he does X, then all he can see is the range of my possible reactions to X.

he can no more have his attention in two places at once than anyone else. So he can look into the future and see who will walk through his door in an hour's time, but while watching that, his attention is not on who is coming through the door right now.
The true usefulness of divination is shown here, but the great weakness is that Alex has no other innate spellcasting abilities. To cast anything else, he needs magic items.

One of the problems that I have with magic fantasies, is that the purpose of magic is to give the magic-user power over the untalented. This is usually taken for granted as their right. To consider the Potterverse, what is one of the first things a young Harry does with magic in the "real world"? He uses it to humiliate his adoptive family. (Yes, they are horrible, but this is hardly the appropriate response.) And those "lovable jokers", Fred and George, sell love potions i.e. date rape drugs (since their purpose is to compel someone into a relationship when they are otherwise unwilling). It is taken for granted that the purpose of learning magic is to be able to control others, and get what you want.

I have often felt that this is a dangerous fantasy to sell to children.

This book takes that aspect seriously. When Alex was a schoolboy, someone asked him what he really wanted - and he replied that he wanted not to have to worry about what "these idiots" thought of him. It is a powerful temptation.

Alex accepted the offer of power; he is now living with the consequences.
(Note: Although some horrible things occur in this book, there is not graphic description. This is about attitudes, not a wallow in what evil people can do.)

But the philosophical aspect does not stop this also being a fast-paced adventure, as Alex finds himself being recruited by a variety of people who want his help on obtaining an artifact - and who don't take "no" for an answer.

Helmet Reading Challenge: 7, 9, 30, 39

>18 -pilgrim-: Do you think you'll continue the series?

>20 -pilgrim-: Probably, yes. But not at a "pace restlessly until I get next volume" level.

I would recommend it to you - it has the positive points of the DFZ stories, without what were, for me, the downsides.

>18 -pilgrim-: I dnf'd this back in '13. I haven't seen the author writing any other series so I figured they were a one character/series kind of author.

>21 BookstoogeLT: He has juvenile series as well (earlier, I think). But Alex Verus is now on Book 11.

>20 -pilgrim-: Your review definitely caught my eye. Adding it to my wish list.

Flight in Yiktor (Book 3 in the Moonsinger series) by Andre Norton - 4 stars
Started: 16/7/2020-16/9/2020

I read this as part of the double volume, Moonsinger's Quest. Here the story of Krip Vorlund, the Free Spacer, and Maelen, the Moonsinger, continues, but we see them through new eyes.

Farree is a small, hunchbacked creature. He is despised and abused, and lives by his wits, mostly scavenging, in the Limits (the most disreputable part of the space port on Yiktor). He dare not even call himself by his own name; he is known as "Dung", and accepts the appellation. He has vague memories of escaping from a master, and that he comes from somewhere else. But he has no memories of that place. He is probably somewhere between a child and an adult, but this is mostly irrelevant. His only friend is a small animal, kept by a beastmaster for fighting and gambling purposes, with which he has some form of telepathic communication.

Farree has no knowledge of the Thassa, and little of Yiktor's feudal lords. His life changes when Krip and Maelen visit the beastmaster, with their usual agenda of freeing intelligent animals from his control.

Because Farree's perspective is so limited, it is harder in this book to work out what is going on. He has none of the cultural understanding of Krip or Maelen. Because of his experience of long term abuse, if he has questions, he does not ask them.

Sotrath's third ring is apparent again, and that is what has prompted Maelen's return to Yiktor. But she and Krip are not the only off-worlders to arrive...

The plot explores Yiktor further, and we learn a little more of the history of the Thassa.

The portrayal of someone who has experienced long-term abuse is very well done. Farree finds it difficult to accept, or believe in, friendship, when it is offered him. There is a trend, which I loathe, in recent YA novels, of piling abuse upon abuse on their protagonists, and then have no emotional damage as a result, or have all the trauma and psychological damage erased by their first kiss from the "right guy". But there is none of that here. What Farree has been through is not dwelt on, but the level of insecurity and self-loathing that it has induced in him is well-portrayed.

In the course of the story, we learn more about the Thassa, and a little of Farree's true heritage. But we also see his evolution into someone who can trust his friends.

One further thing that I like about these stories: the exact nature of the relationship between Krip and Maelen is never spelt out. They care deeply for each other, and where one goes, the other will follow. Are they friends or lovers? This is never answered; nor does it matter. It is the depth of their relationship, not its kind, that is important.

And one caveat: in stories so skillfully woven, and more reprinted, why is the standard of editing so poor? Molaster, deity of the Thassa, has become Molester here! Words are used when others are clearly intended, and spelling errors remain. In a reprint of a classic literary novel, such mistakes would have been caught. Why are standards lower in SF?!

My second objection is about the cover. Every cover I have seen for the book acts as a spoiler for the story's main plot twist!

Helmet Reading Challenge: 7, 9, 24, 25, 28, 33, 39

>24 -pilgrim-: Re the editing: according to ISFDB, the double volume was published by Baen Books. My mates at Good Show Sir (obligatory plug) would be entirely unsurprised by any criticism of Baen's editing standards. It's entirely possible that the text was set by scanning an earlier edition, OCRing the image, and then printing the result without proofreading it. The specific error that you mentioned is a plausible result.

>24 -pilgrim-: Thanks for that, good to hear that there is still some good Andre Norton I haven't gotten to yet.

>25 haydninvienna: Is that normally how reprints are done?

>26 Karlstar: You should definitely read the first two Moonsinger books first, if you haven't already.

>26 Karlstar: For older books, yes. There aren't any computer files, so they have to start from scratch and the cheapest and fastest way is to do it as >25 haydninvienna: decscribed.

If you're interested, you can check out a place called onedollarscan. They do that for individuals. I'm thinking about it for archiving some old theological volumes I own that were made in the 50's and 60's.

>24 -pilgrim-: A lot of ya completely trivializes abuse and I'm glad I'm not the only one it bothers...

>26 Karlstar: >28 BookstoogeLT: No particular issue with doing it that way if it's done properly. You may know about Project Gutenberg's Distributed Proofreaders system—basically you get a page or so of the scanned image of a random book and the OCR text file, and you proofread the text file. The edited text is then checked and (IIRC) the result is Gutenberg's published text. Even then errors slip through. I read the PG text of the Novels of Thomas Love Peacock and there's a bit of weird stuff in there still.

The gold standard though is to set the new edition directly from a high-resolution photographic copy of the old one. One of the foundation texts of Australian constitutional law is The Annotated Constitution of the Australian Commonwealth by Quick & Garran. It was first published in 1901. I have a copy of a reprint done in Sydney in about 1979 that was done by photo-setting the whole text using the original as camera-ready copy. It's gorgeous, and guaranteed error-free. Of course the downside is that it's not searchable.

And of course there's the Oxford English Dictionary (the big one). When this was to be republished on CD-ROM in 1990 or thereabouts, they tried OCRing it but could get nowhere near the required very low error rate, so the whole thing got re-keyed, and then had to be marked up to preserve the print edition's typography. (You can still get it, all 20 volumes, on paper for the trifling sum of £862.50.)

>28 BookstoogeLT: Looking at another review of Flight in Yiktor demonstrates why this trivialisation matters. When Farree's insecurity is described as "annoying", it bodes ill for the level of sympathy that real victims of abuse can expect to receive.

ETA: If you have been treated as if you, and anything that you want, are completely unimportant, it IS going to take a long time before you believe that some stranger might think differently.

To react any other way is also extremely dangerous. It is quite likely that the "kindly stranger" is, in fact, intending to take advantage of the isolation resulting from such a part, and does not mean well.

---

The website that you mention sounds interesting. I have some interesting, rather specialised books from the 1940s that might be useful for.

>30 -pilgrim-: the only problem is, much like the uploading of a brain to the net in many SF books/movies/shows, it's a destructive process :-/ So you have to be willing to lose the physical copy.

>31 BookstoogeLT: Ah. Not acceptable in my situation, then.

27 I haven't read any of that series, so I'd have to start at the beginning.

>32 -pilgrim-: and that's what's stopping that process from happening to a lot of old books. The books themselves are valuable as material items, not just as containers for the info within them.

>34 BookstoogeLT: Can it cope with books that have physically deteriorated? Mildewed in storage, for example?

>33 Karlstar: It's worth it. Moonsinger was possibly the first SF I ever read (from school library). I was nervous about revisiting it (which I did earlier this year), and it was as good as I remembered.

ETA: Touchstone fixed.

>35 -pilgrim-: I have no idea. I haven't gotten past the destructive nature of the conversion, so I still haven't used them. I did look in their faq about the condition of the books they'll take and I didn't find a thing.

They do a scan and ocr, with additional options (wth commensurate payment of course) for better versions. I think there is a version where you can pay to have someone go over the text? But I expect that option to be very pricey.

I have the Microsoft Office Lens app on my phone, and it's supposed to be able to do OCR. Just out of curiosity I tried using it on a random page on an oldish book (A Preface to the Faerie Queene, published in 1962). The result was about as good as the results from the Internet Archive (that is, not very good). The point of that is that Office Lens can image a page in a bound book without destroying the book, so might have offered a DIY alternative.

>38 haydninvienna: Was that a paperback or a hardback that you experimented with?

The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross

Contains The Atrocity Archive & The Concrete Jungle, along with a Foreword by Ken MacLeod and an Afterword by Charles Stross

The Atrocity Archive(Book 1 of The Laundry Files) by Charles Stross - 3.5 stars
22/9/2020-25/9/2020

I was discussing recently with haydninvienna and Maddz about how urban fantasy divides into two main camps: those who treat magic as a science, and those who treat it as an invocation of supernatural entities. Charles Stross does both, and with sufficient rigour that I would classify this as science fiction.

Anyone who has studied higher mathematics, or theoretical physics, has, at times, the Alice-in-Wonderland feeling of being required to "believe ten impossible things before breakfast". Consideration of n-dimensional vector spaces requires one to consider the possible existence of other worlds where the laws of physics operate very differently, and which would not be detectable from our own. Stross takes the implications of such mathematical constructs still further, leading to the concept of multiple realities, increasingly divergent from our own, and requiring entropy to tunnel though to ours. Demons are recategorised as intelligent extraterrestrial entities, and summoning is requires an understanding of N-spaces sufficient to warp them. Genuine mathematicians, physicists and computer scientists are name-dropped continually, and additional, secret, theorems attributed to them. The explanations of how traditional sorcerous devices, such as the Hand of Glory, "really" work, is a nerd's delight of pseudoscience.

The next construct posited by the author is that, if there is a threat to the nation from the unsupervised exploration of mathematical and philosophical constructs, which may lead to uncontrolled magical events and the possible invocations y of demonic entities, then there will exist a department of Her Britannic Majesty's Government tasked with dealing with this threat.

Our hero, as the book opens, is a former hacker - and Stross understands the mentality of real hackers, as opposed to the script kiddies who make the news headlines - currently employed by said government department, primarily to maintain its computer systems. However he has just applied for "field work".

Stross has worked in IT for many years, and it shows. As a former scientific Civil Servant myself, I can confirm that his portrayal of the ambience is spot on.

The mixture of eldritch horror, scientific detail and humour meant that this book had a lot going for it for me.

However one aspect of the book spoilt it for me: The Ahnenerbe was real. And so are the horrors perpetrated by Himmler's SS occult division in the course of their "researches". So Nazi occultists are not a glib joke.

But mitigating the horror of the Holocaust by inventing a purpose for it, beyond fanatical racial hatred, trivialises the enormity of what people can do to one another, just by inflating cultural differences and demonising "otherness". To suggest, even for the purpose of fiction, that it had some sort of "greater purpose", I felt was an insult to the 10 million dead. I think Barbara Hambly dealt with these themes, in her Sun-Cross fantasy duology, with far greater subtlety and sensitivity.

Stross is as realistic in his politics as he is in his computer science. He admits in his afterword that his original choice for an obscure terrorist group, writing in 1999-2000, became considerably less obscure after the events of 2001, and necessitated the choice of a different group as his villains.

Nevertheless, blackening the name of a current controversial religious figure who has not definitively been linked to terrorism by claiming he trains suicide bombers (as well as summoning demonic entities) also seemed both tasteless, to me, and also irresponsible - it will only further inflame the anti-Western orientation of his followers.

His afterword also attempts to justify the user of real groups and political situations by casting the entire book as an allegory for real conflicts, intended to make points about the nature of real world situations. The foreword, by a friend, also assures us that what seems tasteless is not really do, since it is justified.

These apologia confirm my impression that Stross does not really succeed in pulling that side off. The humour becomes inappropriate, with that context.

However, this is an extremely clever book, with a lot going for it. The characters have believable personalities, even where they start as caricatures. Bob (the protagonist) is a likeable guy, with a conscience, even if his mouth is irrepressibly irreverent.

So, I will continue with this series, even though I found the tone sometimes off. This is the author's first novel (originally published in serial forum in Spectrum SF magazine); I hope his style will become more even as the series progresses.

Note: I am uncertain how an American audience will cope with this; there are multiple unexplained allusions, often to British pop culture. Some I can remember: Monty Python, Lovecraft, Norse myth, Yes, Minister, Tolkien, Omar Khayyam are just a few I caught.

And a working knowledge of inter-war European occultism helps too, of course. ;-)

Catching all the references is not essential, but they do add to the fun side.

Helmet Reading Challenge 7, 24, 30, 35, 41

The Concrete Jungle (from The Laundry Files) by Charles Stross - 3.5 stars
25/9/2020-26/9/2020

This novella follows fairly shortly after the events of The Atrocity Archive. It starts with Bob being sent to investigate a problem with Milton Keynes' cows.

The satire on the Civil Service is more pronounced- and delicious.

But the tone is still off. There was a character in the first book, who we were encouraged to laugh at. Them he died, and it was a gut-punch to Bob (and so the reader) to discover that he was a human being, leaving a wife and children. In The Atrocity Archive, this was dealt with realistically, as a government department would deal with the death of a colleague. So it is completely tasteless to suddenly play it for laughs again, with the discovery that Fred has been resurrected as a zombie, in order to act as a fearsome nightwatchman for the Laundry.

As an author, you can make an emotional point by suddenly giving an apparently comic character gravitas. But you don't get to switch back to the original tone, turning it into a cheap trick.

Furthermore, one of the effective parts of The Atrocity Archive, was the way it realistically portrayed the camaraderie, as well as the petty frustrations and consequent backbiting, among workmates. For the sake of a cheap joke, the previous portrayal of Angleton as an understanding, as well as intimidating, boss has been undermined. (The emphasis in this story is on making him very scary indeed.)

These stories are still suffering from an uneven tone.

I enjoyed the main plot and the name-dropping of famous physicists and explorers - all the government files on previous occurrences of related phenomena were (supposedly) written by real historical figures.

I am still intending to continue.

This week I got into a bookshop for the first time since March. And the second book had a sale on. This was not good for my resolve not to buy books this month. Oh no, not at all... I bought as many books on Monday as I did in the entire rest of the month!

And they were real, solid, paper books too.

>42 -pilgrim-: What a nice feeling :)

>42 -pilgrim-: That sounds fabulous. What books did you buy?

>44 BrokenTune: It had a good military history section so:

Spymaster: The Life of Britain's Most Decorated Cold War Spy and Head of MI6, Sir Maurice Oldfield by his nephew, Martin Pearce
M: Maxwell Knight, MI5's Greatest Spymaster by Henry Hemming
Lady Death: the Memoirs of Stalin's Sniper by Lyudmila Pavlichenko
Military fiction:
Das Boot by Lothar-Günther Buchheim
Classic adventure fiction:
Prester John by John Buchan
Historical crime fiction:
Sleep of Death & Death of Kings by Philip Gooden
Biography:
Victoria and Abdul by Shrabani Basu

... and a duplicate of an Alex Verus novel that I have already read! (Marked)

Total cost: £17

>45 -pilgrim-:

I have read and enjoyed, Das Boot.

Prester John and Spymaster are on my shelves, the latter being a gift to my wife that I want to read.

Some time ago I embarked on a mission to acquire all of John Buchan's books. I believe I have most if not all of them at this stage. I have only read a fraction of them so far.

>46 pgmcc:

I am in a similar situation with John Buchan, I'm afraid.

But after Prester John turned up in other book that I read this year, I was intrigued by the prospect of a very different reference to the myth.

>47 -pilgrim-: Have you read Umberto Eco's Baudolino?

It is about a crusade to find Prester John.

>48 pgmcc: It is on my TBR pulls in a location that I am not. And yes, the concept of unread Eco makes me twitch every time I think of it!

BTW, you should really read The Atrocity Archives, if you have not already, Peter. It should be compulsory reading for anyone who has had the misfortune to encounter the internal workings of the British Civil Service.

Unless, of course, your handlers have forbidden it?

>50 -pilgrim-: I read your posts on The Atrocity Archives and am tempted. I do realise you have a penchant for practising your BB aim at me. Glad to see your enthusiasm for target practice is keeping up.

Unless, of course, your handlers have forbidden it?

This begs the question as to who my "handlers" might be. Given my debrief and training sessions take place in France, or so I say, keeps the question up in the air.

In relation to the internal workings of the British Civil Service, Robert Aickman has a great comment about civil servants in the opening pages of his story, The Unsettled Dust. I shall look the quote up later and post it on this thread.

>51 pgmcc:
This begs the question as to who my "handlers" might be. Given my debrief and training sessions take place in France, or so I say, keeps the question up in the air.

But still pertinent. Fortunately for the world, occult divisions have their joint intelligence meetings too. (The Jennifer Morgue has Bob attending one, as a very junior delegate.)

As to BBs, I have just bought a sniper biography. Surely that should tell you something?

;-)

>36 -pilgrim-: LT says the first book in that series is The Moon of Three Rings, but the touchstone says Moonsinger, which appears to be the omnibus edition. I'll look for that. Your touchstone goes to a different book.

>40 -pilgrim-: >41 -pilgrim-: That sounds interesting, putting it on my list too!

>45 -pilgrim-: What a great haul! I was reading some of the background on Lady Death: the Memoirs of Stalin's Sniper recently, I'll put that on a future list too.

>53 Karlstar:

Moonsinger = Moon of Three Rings + Exiles of the Stars
Moonsinger's Quest = Flight in Yiktor + Dare to Go A'Hunting

The two omnibus editions are currently available in Baen paperback.

I first came across details of Pavlichenko's career in Avenging Angels: Young Women of the Soviet Union'WWII Sniper Corps - which is truly excellent, by the way.

Lyuba Vinogradova takes the view that Pavlichenko was not actually the best of the Corps, in terms of most kills, because she joined later and it would have been hard to attain those figures in a few months, given where she was stationed, but had her "score" artificially inflated by the Kremlin as she was considered more suitable for an overseas tour (not her fault).

I am looking forward to reading Pavlichenko's version of things.

>52 -pilgrim-:
You are really getting into this and it pains me to tell you I have just acquired The Atrocity Archive on Kindle. See what you did? Are you happy now?

>55 pgmcc: *whistles insouciantly while cleaning BB gun*

I hope you enjoy it Peter. It is uneven, but has some superb moments.

Pimpf (novella from The Laundry Files) by Charles Stross - 4 stars

I read this out of order: in this novella Bob Howard is already a managerial grade, whilst The Jennifer Morgue starts 4 days after he is promoted to SSO.

Other than that point, there were no problems caused by reading this at the "wrong" time; it is a fairly self-contained story at within The Laundry itself.

Bob, having reached managerial rank, annoyed someone in HR (naturally), and justified himself by claiming to be overworked, finds himself scheduled to be mentoring an intern. Since said intern has the same reverence for authority as a younger version of Bob - and was recruited for much the same reasons - this proves to be a far from trouble-free experience.

I was right; Stross' writing style has improved. My earlier complaints regarding unevenness of tone did not apply here; the humour and darker content mixed appropriately.

It is said that Charles Stross' long experience of working in IT prepared him for writing these books. It seems to have really given him a grudge against women managers! So far, all female managers have been evil and career-obsessed, whilst their male colleagues are caring and supportive (even Angleton...well, some of the time!).

The subject this time is: MMORGs.

(It was bundled in with my copy of The Jennifer Morgue.)

September Summary

Average rating: 3.44

7 fiction:
Novels: 2 urban fantasy, 2 science fiction
Novellae: 2 science fiction
Short stories: 1 urban fantasy

2 non-fiction: 1 Orthodoxy, 1 neurology

Original language: 9 English

Earliest date of first publication: 1977 (Making God Real in the Orthodox Christian Home)
Latest: 2018 (A Very Declan Christmas)

4 paperback, 2 Kindle, 1 author's website

Authors: 3 female , 3 male
Author nationality: 3 American, 2 British, 1 Irish
New (to me) authors: 3 (3 familiar)

Most popular book on LT: The Raven Boys (4,104)
Least popular: A Very Declan Christmas (6)

No. of books read: 8
From Mount TBR (books owned before 2020): 2
Books owned before joining Green Dragon: 1
No. of books acquired: 21 (16 physical, 5 eBooks)
No. of books disposed of: 0
Expenditure on books: £75.49 (inc. Kindle Unlimited subscription)

Best Book of September: Lost and Found
Worst Book of September: Making God Real in the Orthodox Christian Home

Books awaiting review from January: 2
Books awaiting review from February: 1
Books awaiting review from March: 1
Books awaiting review from April: 2
Books awaiting review from June: 4
Books awaiting review from September: 1

>58 -pilgrim-: Glad to see that Average Star Rating be that high. Last month had me worried!

>58 -pilgrim-: & >60 BookstoogeLT: You both had great star averages last month :)

60, >60 BookstoogeLT:
I haven't checked, but that could will be my highest star average since -pilgrim- joined GD!

There was one book that I DNF'd that would probably have brought the average down if I had managed to finish it - I spent a relatively long time on it, since it was a review copy, which I felt obligated me to give it a fair chance, but it was just too depressing.

>61 Narilka: I'm pretty sure it was the highest, or second highest, that I've ever had :-D

>62 -pilgrim-: I gather you don't rate dnf's?

>63 BookstoogeLT:
I sometimes review and rate them, if I think a "warning to others" would be helpful.

But I don't include them in my monthly statistics.

This is the book that I mentioned in >62 -pilgrim-:. Even though I didn't finish it, it was the book that made one of the greatest impressions on me last month, and certainly affected my mood, so I thought I should try to describe it:


Property: A Collection by Lionel Schriver -DNF (2.stars)
Started: 10/9/2020

This consists of two novellas, with a selection of short stories sandwiches between them, all on the theme of "stuff" - attitudes to money, attitudes of entitlement and resentment, decisions made of the basis of certain objects.

The American author divides her time between Brooklyn and London. Some of her stories are set in America, some in London, one in Belfast, one near Nairobi. She has herself lived in these cities; she appears to be writing what she knows.

Some of her characters are American, some are British. Several are Americans who are living abroad. I disliked all the protagonists. I think I was meant to.

There are very few likeable characters in this book, and they are all abused or taken advantage of by the others.

There is a sense that some decency may exist amongst the older generation, but the younger characters (i.e. in their forties or younger) were all selfish, self-obsessed, incapable of caring about others, and frustrated by having less money than they felt entitled to. The fact that they would be less well-off than their parents had been at their ages, given the same amount of effort, is true of course, (Dorling's flawed Do We Need Economic Inequality? covered why this is so quite adequately). But the attitude that this justifies cruelty to those still less well off is disgusting.

I complained in my last review of literary fiction, Seeking Mr Hare, that the characters were psychologically implausible, in my opinion. This book, in contrast, is well-written and plausible throughout.

I have met a lot of the types portrayed. There is the freeloading thirty-something still living with his parents, who has never had a job, and never intends to, because he has worked out carefully how to make his parents provide for the rest of his life - and the liberal activists who consider that he has a right to abuse his parents in this way. There is the well-educated, well-brought up American who spends her life pottering around on aimless "projects" because she had the liberal values to despise slavish adherence to "getting ahead" and "the American Dream", and the moneyed background to never fear actual poverty. There is the American twenty-something freeloading her way around the world, treating other countries as theme parks for her amusement, oblivious to the fact that these places are not curated for her to send home "exciting adventures" but may have actual dangers.

Then on the other hand, there are the people who are struggling to get by, in underpaid "service" jobs, or still living in shared accommodation in their forties, because they are trying to work ordinary lives in a ridiculously overpriced capital. They get their "revenge" by stealing from those poorer than themselves.

No one displays any type of morality, or any awareness that the concept exists. Even the embezzler who finds that luxury does not make him happy, is explicitly not tormented by guilt, but merely by boredom with excess and unearned respect.

These are very well drawn vignettes, but I do not want to spend time with these people; I meet them too often in everyday life.

There are those whose sense of entitlement induces them to take from everyone around them - with complete disregard for whether those others have less than themselves. Family relationships are just another link to exploit; there is no love there, and "caring" is a resented duty, not a natural instinct.

And there are the exploited, who come to hate the world so impartially that they strike back in a generalized manner, not caring that the people whom they revenge themselves on have done them no harm (they are simply those whom they CAN hurt),and that the harm they inflict is out of all proportion to any wrong they have suffered.

It is a very bleak view of humanity.

I fear it is an accurate one.

Why do I rate it low, compared to Vadim Babenko's similarly bleak portrayal of Russians and Americans? I think it is because the latter both had a narrative plot which I did want to see the end of, and was portraying a world of which I had heard before, but do not live in.

I did not need to revisit these realities. I do not understand why two of the blurbs described these stories and "comic" and "funny". These were reviews from the Daily Mail and Woman and Home; I can only assume that they were inviting their readers to indulge in Schadenfreude about lives different to their own.

This just depresses me further.

Having read Lionel Shriver's portrayal of Americans, I would be tempted to despise the whole nation.

Then I think of MrsLee, lovingly assembling a history of her family, not for public consumption or display, but as a reminder for her family of much-loved family members.

I was discussing issues with American literary fiction earlier with BookStoogeLT; the Americans portrayed here are less about the hustlers, and more about the "entited". But the moral remains the same:; this is the literary class writing about their peers. The descriptions can be devastatingly accurate, yet not representative of the nation as a whole.

I had to remind myself, repeatedly and firmly, that her characters are not representative of ALL Americans. They are, unfortunately, representative of the Americans that I have met i.e. the ones who live over here.

The book is dedicated to "one of the three people who make my life worth living". Maybe I am reading too much in here, but this makes me feel that the impression of people that one gets from this book is not a cynical literary pose, but a truthful portrayal of the milieu in which she lives - one with a dearth of meaningful connection to other human beings.

She lives in a particular social "bubble" and portrays its mindset well. The fact that she treats the Post Office employee who compensates himself by stealing from the past that he is supposed to be delivering is treated as "enterprising", and one of the few stories that gives a "happy ending" to the protagonist, is symptomatic of this privileged mindset. The author never stops to think that these days, few people communicate by letter. Those that do are likely to be the elderly, not geared up to the electronic world, or those too poor to own a computer. He is compensating himself for inadequate renumeration by stealing from those even poorer.

And intercepting letters from the Inland Revenue is apparently an excellent joke - despite the fact that this may result in fines that people can ill afford (since there will be "proof of posting" they will have difficulty proving non-receipt). Presumably intercepting urgent hospital appointments is equally amusing to the author - even though that non-receipt will be treated as "wilful non-attendance without notification" and be "penalised" by putting the patient to the back of the queue (I have had it happen.) Not to mention the dire consequences of "failing to attend" (due to non-receipt of notification) of medical assessments for state benefits...

Although at times Shriver send to be attacking the entitled attitude that she describes, anger at not getting what one has decided one "deserves" in life seems to be an attitude that she empathises with.

I felt that the American journalist in Belfast (in The Subletter) might be a self-portrait of Shriver, who, like her protagonist, travelled the world "looking for cultures to appropriate" (as she herself says in an interview) and stopped in Belfast. The character, Sara Moseley, is a "professional American"; she writes fluff pieces for a local newspaper, explaining events in America, or casting an outsider's eye on local politics. She has no qualification for giving her opinions, other than her outsider status, which she jealously guards whilst in Belfast, whilst heartily despising the affectations of her fellow ex-pat Americans, their attempts to display their "local knowledge" by incorrect attempts to adopt local pronunciation, and beliefs that having an ethnically Irish name gives them some sort of common ground with the bully-boys of the nationalist cause. (She herself hangs out with unionists - and with a similar blindness to violent excess.) Her remarks are trenchant as she points out that not only do the earnest, naive Peace Corps volunteers look ridiculous to the natives, and earn their bemused pity, but that this "conflict tourism" is actively harmful. Since atrocities are committed to attract the attention, and hence the wallets, of these beguiled wannabe Irish, they become not just voyeurs, but "enablers".

I found this recent interview with Lionel Shriver informative in understanding her mindset. I found the last novella helpful in understanding my own reaction.

Lionel Shriver writes well. Her characters are incisively portrayed, and believable. I just found no reason for me to be reading this.

But it was depressing for me, because these characters were believable, and familiar. When I read, in an American review of this collection that the reviewer had to "rush to Wikipedia" to understand the setting of the final novella (specifically, what the Good Friday Agreement was), I realised what the problem was. I am not the intended audience for this book.

Just as Sarah Moseley, the author-avatar, sneers at her fellow Americans for "conflict tourism", so Lionel Shriver is practicing exactly the sort of writing that she condemns: she is holding up this breed of entitled American, and this form of oppressed victim, for the amusement of people who have never encountered either, so that her audience can experience the same frisson of horror, revulsion, and well-distanced pity as do the conflict tourists whom she, by proxy, castigates.

Thus hypocrisy is added into the mix.

ETA: I should add that I received a free review copy of this book as part of the Amazon Vine programme. Without the obligation to write a fair review, I would probably not have persisted with it as far as I did.

>65 -pilgrim-: That was the sort of book that tries to convince the reader that there are no good people nowadays.

Unfortunately the "petty malice" version is something that I have experienced too much of recently, so it hit me at a very bad time.

The portrayal of Americans was even more pernicious; they all had the same narrow set of attitudes. Without the reminder of the diversity of folks I have met here, one could easily fall into the trap that they are representative of Americans as a whole, and not simply a particular social class.

My conclusions are:
a) Lionel Shriver is a very skilled writer
b) I will probably never pick up anything by her again.

>65 -pilgrim-: Ugh. What a horrible sounding book. The problem is, there ARE lots of people like that in America. The other problem is that those those who aren't like that aren't touting how much they aren't. They're busy living their quiet lives.

I have found that a certain social set of people here view things as "I see it this way, so everyone else must as well. Or they're Hitler". Hopefully some of us can be an antidote to such thinking :-)

Glad to see you posting too.

>65 -pilgrim-: Such an excellent review of a book that sounds like something that is superficially persuasive.

And thanks for the link to the New Yorker interview. I have struggled with Shriver's books (well, I gave up after one...) before but that article and your review gave me an understanding of why that was.

>65 -pilgrim-: What I enjoy about your reviews, negative or positive, is that as >68 BrokenTune: says, they give me an understanding of why. That is something I can rarely articulate beyond the very superficial in my own reviews. Thank you for the kind mention as well. We can rarely see how we are perceived by others, and it is so easy to lie to ourselves. I think we all have generalizations about the citizens of other nations, it is good to keep in mind that there is a difference between "people" and "individuals." I doubt I will ever have the chance to travel to a foreign land to give others an impression of Americans. So far as I have seen, most of the people around me are simply doing their best, trying to live their lives, love their families. Happily, I have not had much exposure to the kind you mention. I intend to keep it that way. ;)

>67 BookstoogeLT: "The other problem is that those those who aren't like that aren't touting how much they aren't. They're busy living their quiet lives.",

Agreed. Now I feel very privileged to have not met very many of those sorts of people at all. Or perhaps it is that I have good evasive technique?

There's been comment in various places around LT about how litfic tends to talk a lot about unpleasant people. We are very likely getting a selective or distorted view, which is a bit weird when the author would say she is presenting "truth". Really, this is another way of saying that Satan is much the most interesting character in Paradise Lost.

>70 haydninvienna:
It was not simply the focus on unpleasant people that got to me, but the authorial tone, which so often seemed to endorse their attitudes.

Satan may be the most interesting character in Paradise Lost, but I didn't get the impression that Milton identified with him!

>68 BrokenTune:, >69 MrsLee:

Thank you both for your kind words about my reviews.

And I am now, more than ever, looking forward to reading MrsLee's book, and seeing more of those "other Americans".

>65 -pilgrim-: Hearing how someone like you works through the process of determining what works and does not work in a particular title is a always valuable to others. There is a difference between one who reads and then posts a two sentence review and one who reads thoughtfully and notes the places where the author may or may not have succeeded. So many newspapers have abandoned book review columns that what happens here in the Pub is particularly valuable.

Nice assessment of the book and Shriver's take on her fiction. I have read several of her books, but she's not a favorite. She's one I struggle with and for some of the same reasons you did with this collection. I often wonder how lauded she'd be if she was a man (and with her name, many think she is).

I try not to be 'that American' whenever out of the country. It's something a lot of us are shamed into because of our more oblivious countrymen. We go about on eggshells, afraid to voice an opinion for fear of being 'that American'. We feel that our accents give us away and wonder should we just go ahead and butcher local place names or try to do it right. Either way is wrong so we can't win. It sounds like I'm trying to be a victim, but I'm not. I could easily say fuck it when traveling abroad, but I don't. I really can't since I'm aware of our reputation in the world.

Thanks for giving us the benefit of the doubt. America is HUGE and there are lots of culturally distinct areas which is sometimes hard for people from small countries to get, but the EU has made it easier since it was formed. Think of the US like that and you'll probably have a better frame to work from.

>74 Bookmarque:
Of course your accents give you away when you are abroad - so does everyone's. Why should that worry you? No one should feel ashamed of their actual identity. I only modify my accent when abroad to try to remove regionalisms that might be hard for those from elsewhere to understand, not to try to obscure where I come from.

And as to the pronunciation of place names, wherever possible I ask first, but if forced to make the attempt, I simply do my best, and then ask whether it was correct. British placenames are so gloriously inconsistent that you are sure to mangle them badly - but no one will think the worse of you for that. A Scotsman is unlikely to pronounce Frome correctly (or an Englishman, Penicuik) either. And as to Bicester... I'll leave Richard to explain why that is pronounced the way it is!

I am not aware of American visitors behaving in any particular, uniform way - as you say, you come in too many different varieties!

But tourists, in that sense, are neither the subject of Shriver's book, nor her own rôle. The slice of American society that she is portraying is that which prefers to live in other parts of the world. For example, the girl who treats the rest of the world as her personal theme park does not follow the normal cycle of work to earn money for holiday, enjoy holiday, then repeat - she simply moves from one household from whom she can scrounge accommodation and food (and by whom she expects to be entertained) to another - populated by people who have never heard of her before she turns up on their doorstep - fuelled by a vague network of "a friend of a friend who went to school with..." She is the "professional American" who justifies her freeloading by the YouTube videos and social media posts about her experiences aimed at her countrymen 'back home".

Or Sara Moseley, whose sole qualification as a journalist lies in her ability to give "an American's eye view" of local events for a regional newspaper, whilst also writing freelance articles that she attempts to sell to American news outlets, purporting to explain for her fellow countrymen the "quaint oddities" of life in Belfast during the Troubles.

The term "conflict tourism" refers to travellers of this ilk, for whom simply the novelty of living in a foreign country is not enough. It must be one riven by conflict, in order to make the photo opportunities with local waifs sufficiently dramatic, and garner them extra kudos in the eyes of their audience. So they migrate from one trouble spot to another, often mouthing platitudes about"wanting to help", whilst really all they are looking for are opportunities to impress their intended audience (which is certainly not the locals!)

I can't see you ever indulging in such behaviours, Bookmarque.

There are countries where the mere fact of you being American may count against you - usually because the locals have a tendency to hold all Americans personally responsible for the foreign policirs of the governments that they elected. (There are places where being British elicits a similar reaction.)

But mostly, the British only react hostilely to those Americans who seem to feel that the fact that they ARE American gives them some sort of superiority, or entitles them to special treatment.

>75 -pilgrim-: And as to Bicester... I'll leave Richard to explain why that is pronounced the way it is!: that’s unfortunate because Richard can’t explain why, beyond that in English place-names the apparent disyllable “-cester” routinely gets slurred into “stur”. I have not come across any worthwhile explanation as to why, other than centuries of possibly rather lazy pronunciation. Bicester becomes “bisster”, Gloucester becomes “glosster”, Leicester becomes “lesster”, and so on.

I am back online, and slowly catching up.

Can I just add how much I HATE being forced into an app style layout, simply because I access this site via my phone?

I now cannot see whether my Touchstone has taken, and whether it links to the correct object? I believe that is now all stuffed right down at the bottom, after a lot of scrolling, instead of alongside my preview. That means that when LT gets its badly wrong, not recognising some and mangling others, it is a very awkward process to work out what has happened and correct it.

I have lost the ability to enlarge or shrink posts at will, and then pan across them. Font size is always a trade-off between how readable text is, and how much can be included on a page.
Now Big Brother LT has decided that he, not I, is the best judge of what size text suits my eyesight.

It is now impossible to avoid having multiple sizes of font on screen at the same time - and the constant refocusing that this forces strains eyes.

I chose LT above its competitors because its simple, unflashy, style made it easy to read. The enforced lack of choice now imposed means that I shall be able to spend far less time in the forums than I used to.

And if it spreads to my catalogue, I shall need to move it elsewhere.

Does anyone have any suggestions? Migrating my catalogue is something that I really would prefer not to have to take on, given everything else, but a catalogue that I cannot read will be useless to me.

New features are all very well. But not the removal of old capabilities.

I don't see the advantage in making LT look like other sites. If that is what was important to me, I would be on those other sites!

I think if you click 'desktop view' at the bottom it will revert to the non-phone dimensions and lay out.

And thanks, I'd never be a conflict tourist. For sure. And it's not my accent that I meant, but pronunciations - do I go for it and say Bisster or sound the rube and say Bi-cester? Either way I get rolled eyes. One for trying to 'fit in' and the other for being from away. Can't win, so I just muddle through.

>78 Bookmarque: Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU!
With all the huge font stuff around, my eyes never found that switch, in tiny font (as I said, refocussing is an issue), despite checking down there for something like it.

I have never seen a " rolled eyes" response to an attempt at the correct pronunciation, only to an ostentatious insistence on a wrong one. Shriver's own example was the Americans who try to prove how informed they are by saying BelFAST rather than BELfast, not realising that the stress is only on the second syllable when the city is qualified by an adjective e.g. West Belfast. (Note: I am assuming that Lionel Shriver is correct in her assertions, am not from around those parts, myself.)

And, for bonus points, how WOULD you pronounce "Frome"?

One thing I noticed while living and traveling abroad for several years is: The travelers who are jerks are jerks at home and abroad. The people who are jerks to travelers are jerks to locals too. This especially was true of the sexual harassers.

I mostly have had positive experiences and interactions on my travels, thankfully. Oddly enough, my most 'heated' exchange with a British person occurred here on LT several years ago. Someone got mad at me for making a joke about the Stamp Act. :(

Oh boy, I know I'm stepping into a trap. I'd say Froom?, but I'd ask with it also. It's probably pronounced Wiggle with a silent Q.

For the record I've always said BELfast.

But Berlin makes me think twice - in New Hampshire the town is BURRlin. Don't ask me why. Probably for the same reason here in WI Tripoli is pronounce triPOLY. And in Kentucky it's VerSALES not Versailles. And in Massachusetts it's PEAbiddy, not Peabody. That one tripped up my Northern Ireland assistant years ago and she howled herself into a fit of laughter.

Place names are weird.

>80 libraryperilous: I would agree with you wholeheartedly about the behaviour of travellers and their reception, in general.

But I do not agree that the sexual harassers follow the same pattern. I have had it explained to me by an online friend from a southern European country (I will not identify it further to spare his fellow countrymen's blushes), that he "knew how to treat English girls", but that he would be risking his life of he treated his fellow countrywomen the same way. - and that is why he wanted to get work in Britain!

I enquired further, and then had to hastily inform him that behaving in the way he suggested would get his face slapped at best, and more probably end with his being arrested. (He was of the "no really means yes" school of thought. It seemed to only extend as far as "May I join you?" and attempted kisses. ) "But English girls are easy!" he complained. At first I was not only completely insulted, but puzzled as to what I had given him that impression. Then I realised that the beaches near his hometown are advertised here mainly on account of the sunshine and the incredibly cheap booze. So the only English girls he was likely to have actually met, were those for whom the cheapness of the alcohol is the prime consideration when booking a holiday. Sexual availability is not an attribute I would particularly allocate to my countrywomen as a whole. But he had not met a cross-section of British society - only that portion of it that was currently engaged in getting as blootered as possible, as far as possible.

Both he and the girls that he had met were behaving differently abroad to how they would do at home. Based on false assumptions, and holiday "letting hair down".

>81 Bookmarque: Well done - you are correct! (And I have enough Somerset connections to be sure of that.)

And yes, I am well aware that American place names LOOKING like places in Europe should never lull me into assuming that they are PRONOUNCED the same.

Nebraska has a Cairo...pronounced CARE-o. I know...weird.

>81 Bookmarque: >82 -pilgrim-: >84 MerryMary:

While the Northern Ireland Troubles were not amusing in any way, one of the things that caused a smile in the early years of the disturbances was the attempts of English newscasters to pronounce place names. They all had trouble with the word "Lough" as in Lough Neagh, Belfast Lough and Lough Foyle. The "gh" always got them. I am not the best at phonetic spelling but the proper pronunciation is (here is my best phonetic attempt which is by no means perfect) "Lawwghh". It is not "Lock". This gave great amusement one news time when a newscaster who had mastered the "Lough" difficulties was reporting on an incident in "Armagh". Being the confident master of NI place-names with his mastery of "Lough" he pronounced "Armagh" as "Armaaghh" with a hard "g". Armagh is simply "Arma".

Portglenone is pronounced with the "-one" at the end pronounced, "-own" as in "cone". One BBC newscaster pronounced it, "Portglen-one" with the "one" pronounced as the number.

Scottish newscasters never had those difficulties, but then they are Celts too.

I put my hand up and admit I would be no expert at pronouncing place-names in other countries, but then I am not paid to broadcast national news to millions.

Going back to >74 Bookmarque: and >75 -pilgrim-: My form of Sarf Efrican often confuses when I am lucky enough to be overseas. The most amusing (to me) occasion was in Washington, when I wanted a recording of Copland's Lincoln Portrait as a souvenir. I had great difficulty convincing the (very helpful) salesman that a version narrated by Maggie Thatcher (he thought it would have a home connection for me) was foreign enough to be no better than weird; I came away with one narrated by "Stormin' Norman" Schwarzkopf. In London I have several times been taken for Australian, which may horrify Richard.

>85 pgmcc: Those are some lovely examples, Peter.

Given my country of birth, I have never had any problems with the correct pronunciation of "Loch". However, for many English people, the production of the correct sound seems almost impossible.

My favourite BBC pronunciation moment was: the Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
In the scramble to cover his arrest, I heard 3 broadcasters pronounce the initial letter of his surname in 3 different ways within the context of the same news item. And let's just say that it was not the resident "Moscow correspondent" who got it right.

Still on the subject of the same elusive phoneme, the American voice of my satnav recently advised me to "take the slip road onto the M4 West (Sluff and proceed towards the Slough turnoff"... the delicious part being that "Sluff" and "Slough" were two completely different attempts at the SAME placename - within the one sentence! (Slough is pronounced to rhyme with "Ow!")

>65 -pilgrim-: What a great, but depressing review. I was traveling for a bit and still catching up on my reading here. I always appreciate the depth of your reviews and how much time you put into them.

I'll echo some of the responses here. There are too many Americans like the ones described, but they aren't all. As Bookstooge eloquently said, those folks are busy living their lives and not getting attention and are not interesting subjects for stories. Hopefully, that's most of us. Unfortunately, the outliers get the spotlight.

I've said for a long time that it is depressing how, when given a chance, so many people will take the opportunity to steal. Many people seem to think they are entitled to more, and stealing is their right. Unfortunately we're obsessed with money as a measure of success. Living a good life and helping others isn't enough.

>78 Bookmarque: Clicking 'desktop view' didn't change anything for me, but I'm on a desktop, so that may be expected behavior.

Yes, that is the expected behavior on a laptop or large tablet. The button works for whatever size screen they've said is a phone or small mobile. Something like 900px. Try it on a smaller screen and it will probably work.

Now, if I could just get it to wrap the columns around to fit my screen, in the way that it used to.

I am better off with the current "desktop version" than the forced scaling.

But a way to get rid of the eyestrain from multiple fonts and font sizes being always on my screen, and the ability to have wordwrap, regardless of whatever scaling I set, would be nice. I know it sounds a big ask, but it was what I already had until a few weeks ago!

>86 hfglen: Not horrified. I remember that when Tony Greig was doing cricket commentary with Richie Benaud (most definitely Australian) there were this who thought that Greig was Australian as well. Greig was from the former Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. And I've been taken for Welsh in England.

>92 haydninvienna:, >86 hfglen: And I have been taken for South African...
(Claire and Peter know what I actually sound like, so I will leave it to them to speculate as to why!)

Sleep of Death (Book 1 of Shakespearean Murder Mysteries) by Philip Gooden - 2.5 stars
8/10/2020-13/20/2020

This is a murder mystery set in 17th century England. A temporary member of Shakespeare's company of players is asked to investigate a possible murder. The only evidence that something may be amiss, is that a young man finds that the circumstances of the death of his father echo that of Hamlet's father in a certain play that he has been watching obsessively, since its first performance shortly after his father's death.

The good thing about this book is that the author really knows both his Shakespeare, and the period. Social attitudes are correct, as are (as far as I can tell) details of lifestyle and living standards. The language includes neither archaisms not jarringly modern turns of phrase.

Against that is the personality of the protagonist, and narrator, whom I never warmed to. (Although I am glad that he narrates his adventures in the past tense; I loathe the modern affectation of writing in the present tense.)

He is a parson's son, who uses his patrimony to fund his move to London to pursue his dream of going on the stage, despite his father's abhorrence of players and expressed disapproval of his son's preferred career path. Now, if you are going to take advantage of your father's early death to defy his wishes, and follow a career that he believed will damn you, I feel it inappropriate to take his money to do so. The father and son were apparently close; this behaviour is like spitting on his grave.

Once in London, he attempts to show off his superior learning - he is fluent in both Latin and Greek - to everyone he meets. To his acting fellows, to his employers, to the local boatmen... Now, if you are going to reject the education that your father gave you in preparation for an academic career, because you want to be an actor instead, that is one thing. But if it is so important to you to be an actor, then BE an actor; why is it necessary to show off how well qualified you are for a career that you have decided NOT to follow? If I drop out of university to become a carpenter (for example), there is nothing wrong with that, but to then be the carpenter who proceeds to show off to colleagues, trying to demonstrate how good a literary critic I could have been is to make myself seem both arrogant and ridiculous. (There is some excuse for such behaviour from the carpenter who always wanted to study literature, but who was forced into the family firm instead; for the volunteer there is none.)

Thirdly, one of the first acts that we see him perform is to frame someone for a crime, because he thinks the man is actually guilty of it, but cannot prove it. Admittedly another, innocent, man seemed likely to be blamed. But the author's approval of this subterfuge is uncomfortable - haven't we learned of the dangers of a police force that believed it was acceptable to "fit up" a "villain" for a crime, simply because they genuinely believed he was guilty, but there was a disappointing lack of evidence? Here we are being asked to approve of a random bystander following the same course of action (being spotted at it is what gives him his commission to investigate the death mentioned earlier).

So, I really disliked Nicholas Revill.

I also found it really easy to spot the murderer - much, much earlier than Mr. "Look at me, I am so wonderfully intelligent that you should all be awestruck" Revill. (If you know anything about the Lord Chamberlain's Men, it will be easy for you too!)

The pacing did not feel right either; I never found myself hurrying back to read some more.

The conceit of dividing the book into five acts, just as Revill has the structure of a party explained to him, was an interesting one. But a book is not a play, and this may explain some of the pacing problems.

The other narrative device, of having the opening section of each Act narrated anonymously by the murderer, simply irritated me, however. It usually contributed little, except near the end, where it permitted the disposal of a recently introduced character whose murder was thus easier to explain than having Revill discover it - enabling a rapid rush to the conclusion of the drama.

This was quite well-written, and I was curious to find out the explanation for the corresponding features of the two events. But it was a book I could put aside, and return to a few days later, without much impatience.

At least it was Nicholas Revill's attitude that irritated me; I never felt condescended to by the author.

I hope now the set up has been established, the series may improve. I intend to continue.

Helmet Reading Challenge: 7, 13, 15, 24, 37

>77 -pilgrim-: You may be aware of these threads already, but I haven't noticed you posting in them so I thought I'd mention it. Discussion about the site changes is taking place in the Talk about LibraryThing group and Tim has solicited feedback on the site changes in various threads. The most recent thread is one asking people to "Weigh in on these fonts?", so I guess he’s considering a font change as the font has been complained about quite a bit.

They don’t always change things based on member feedback, but sometimes they do, so it seems better to throw out some feedback than not if one has opinions about it. I haven’t offered any feedback on the font thread because I find them all pretty readable and don’t see the point in swaying the vote one way or another with some preference of miniscule importance to me.

>95 YouKneeK: Sorry, some of the threads are also in the New Features group. I fail to pay attention to what group I’m in sometimes when the topics all show up together. I think the former is more where they solicit opinions before making changes, and the latter more where they accept feedback after the changes.

>95 YouKneeK:, >96 YouKneeK: Ah, I am still catching up, so am late back to my own thread.
That information looks very helpful. I had tried browsing the "Talk about Library Thing " thread, but the very thing I have been complaining about now makes browsing difficult. (For GD, I simply start at the top thread, and work my way down. I don't really want to have to read every thread in "Talk About Library Thing" in that way!)

Death of Kings (Book 2 in Shakespearean Murder Mysteries) by Philip Gooden - 2 stars

Well, I did continue with this series. And Nicholas Revill sank lower in my estimation.

Throughout Sleep of Death Nicholas Revill was in a relationship with a whore called Nell. They appeared to have some fellow feeling through both having come from the provinces - although they both enjoy the sport of watching their fellow provincials getting gulled ("coney-catching") - and their sexual relationship did not involve money. He is neither her customer nor her pimp.

In Death of Kings, Revill takes up with a second woman "on the side" - and she is the wife of his fellow cast member and "best friend".

Although a lack of understanding of the possibility of fidelity to one lover is perfectly consonant with the prevailing attitudes of the period, to betray his best friend like that is universally understood as totally reprehensible behaviour, in that period even more than now. And there seems no motivation for it, other than that the connection is required in order to set up the plot.

It is one thing to take a dislike to a character (particularly when his attitudes are perhaps normal for the setting), but another when he appears inconsistent. There is no suggestion that his relationship with Nell has hit any problems, not has he previously expressed any "I am so gorgeous, I must share myself around", or "one woman is just not enough for me" attitudes. The fact that the author felt no need to give any explanation of Revill's behaviour, other than "she wanted it", have me the uncomfortable feeling that he believes that all men would accept the offer of sex from a pretty woman, and so in his mind there was nothing to explain.

I felt that Nell's heated arguments in the previous book as to why she wanted to be a whore - and how dare Nicholas suggest she might want to leave London with him - rather implausible. She implied that it was a profession in which she had control of her working hours and conditions (which is unlikely - it would be the pander that controlled that) and paid better than any other line of work. The latter I believe to be untrue; women could run businesses at the "skilled trades" level; it was in matters of education, and professional activity, that they encountered serious discrimination. The whole diatribe sounded too much like the "Happy Hooker" speech; it sounded like a male justification of why it is OK to frequent prostitutes (or write about them?) rather than something a woman might actually say. Combining that with the attitudes in this book, and the fact that all the female characters so far have been unfaithful to their husbands and desperate for sex, particularly with the protagonist, and the extremely unpleasant language used about a quartet of ugly sisters, is making me feel that it is not the character's, but the author's, view of women that is the issue.

I should add, however, that although Nick and Nell's conversations mainly take place during sex, the physical side is implied rather than described. The result is amusing rather than embarrassing.

That said, I rather enjoyed the setting of this book, which revolved around the historical fact that Lord Chamberlain's Men put on a performance of Richard II, on the instigation of a follower of the Earl of Essex, when it meant reviving an old play, and under circumstances where it would be interpreted as incitement to approve the example of Bolingbroke and despose a legitimate reigning monarch, solely on the grounds that the rebel's rule would be better.

Despite that political misstep, no one in the management of the company sufferers for it, and they retained Queen Elizabeth's favour. This story purports to explain why.

The sight of Nicholas Revill getting enmeshed in the machinations of Sir Robert Cecil was delicious.

Why I have rated this relatively low is not my irritation with the lead character, but the fact that this takes one plot twist too far and, as far as I can see, thereby makes nonsense of what went before.
MAJOR SPOILER: Cecil sees Revill in person when he recruits him as a spy, but thereafter only gives him orders via Minion N. When Minion N turns out to be also working for the other side, if he did not want Revill to carry out Cecil's orders, why did he simply not pass them on? Why try to kill him instead? Revill has no alternative way of contacting Cecil (although I suppose N might fear that Cecil would contact Revill independently of N). Maybe the later orders that Revill was given, which seem to serve little useful purpose, WERE invented, with the intention of getting him either killed or incriminated as a plotter. (But if incriminated, he would be formally interrogated under torture, and would reveal his orders - so that would be a bad idea.)

Furthermore, Cecil apparently knows he has a traitor in his organisation, and is setting up Revill to expose him, by dangling him as bait. But Revill gets lost in the Palace, and there is no one around from whom he can ask directions. So how does Cecil know where he is? He is taken to the rooftops to be murdered, but how can Cecil predict that that will happen? A stiletto in a crowded corridor would serve just as well. It seems that Cecil is following the probable killer, rather than the victim. But if he already knows the identity of the traitor, why does he need this proof. Yes, Revill does get the villain to monologue a full confession before striking the fatal blow, but no one should have been relying on that happening. If Cecil has reasons to doubt the man, then why not simply interrogate him? (Although the historical Sir Robert Cecil may have actually been both more merciful, and more punctilious about ascertaining actual guilt, than was usual for his era, the character in the novel does not demonstrate those traits.)

Although this sequel did nothing to make me warm to Nicholas Revill, my main problem with it was the implausibility of certain parts of the plot.

The author certainly knows his history. I am not convinced that he knows how to turn it into fiction.

Helmet Reading Challenge: 7, 13, 15, 24, 30, 37

Prester John: Authorised Edition by John Buchan
9/10/2020-12/10/2020

After the eponymous character turned up unexpectedly in a Charles Williams novel, I was intrigued by the prospect of locating him in Africa. Here, however, Prester John is a portrayed as a legendary historical Emperor of Ethiopia. I was aware of the Renaissance era theory to this effect, based largely on mediaeval confusion as to where "the Indies" were, combined with a growing realisation of the actual situation in India and future East. Prester John was recognised as a Christian monarch who was not Roman Catholic; thus the Coptic Orthodox Church seemed, to Western Europeans, to be the "obvious" explanation. (In reality, the legend was probably a conflation of the Nestorian Oriental Orthodox Church of the East, and garbled tales of Kublai Khan's wealth (since he was obviously not Jewish or Muslim, he "must" be some sort of Christian...!)(

Prester John starts in a small village in Fife, Kirkcaple, with three schoolboys playing truant from church to have mock adventures on the beach. Two of the boys, including the narrator, Davie Crawfurd, are Church of Scotland, Tam is Free Church of Scotland and he recognises the black man on the beach as the Reverend John Laputa, a minister who recently preached at his church. They spy on the minister, initially as a game, but are discomfited by what he is doing. When he heads back towards his clothes, and realises are there, Tam insults him in broad Scots, and he chases them with a knife. They flee, after throwing stones.

These early chapters are redolent of Buchan's own boyhood, growing up in Kirkcakdy in Fife, the son of a Free Church minister. But whereas Buchan himself gained social elevation through education, reading classics at the University of Glasgow and Literae Humaniores at Oxford, leading to a civil service career that culminated in the Governor-Generalship of Canada and a peerage, David Crawfurd, who is likewise a minister's son, had his progress down a similar path halted by the death of his father. A ministerial stipend did not allow sufficient savings to provide for Davie and his mother, so he is forced to abandon his studies at the Universary of Edinburgh. An uncle provides a home for the mother, and finds employment for Davie as a shopkeeper, in South Africa.

Travelling third class, Davie notices the Reverend Laputa among the first class passengers (but avoids his notice, given the previous hostilities). He encounters him more times, sometimes in unexpected circumstances, but does not appear to be recognised in return.

On arrival, Davie finds that his job to be assistant to a shopkeeper in the remote outpost of Blaauwildebeestefontein. It is a place that has the reputation of not keeping its staff, except for the shopkeeper, who has been there for years. The employer is impressed by our Davie, and tells him to write for help if he needs anything.

The shopkeeper turns out to be a drunk, so the next section of the book is the story of a nineteen year old, in his first job, operating what is, in effect, a solo operation, with only the local schoolmaster (also a new arrival). This part is also redolent of its setting. Buchan worked for a time in a government post in South Africa; the landscape is vividly described and his love of it is obvious.

But gradually Davie realises that there is something wrong. The black children stop attending the school, and only the children of the Dutch farmers still come. Some black men are acting very arrogantly in the store, and Davie surmises that they have some hold over the storekeeper. He has been told about I.D.B. (illegal diamond broking) by Tam, who is now a merchant seaman, and whom Davie met again in Durban; Davie now suspects this is what is going on, and decides to investigate.

In the process he becomes caught up in a native uprising, led by an extremely charismatic figure, who considers himself the heir to Prester John.

This is where the action really starts, it is fast-paced and a gripping read. Even though everything would have stopped much earlier, if not for an extremely stupid move on Davie's part, I can forgive the book that; a young man under fire for the first time may well not be thinking clearly in the heat of the moment.

This is a story of how colonial service can be the making of a young man, who is not afraid of hard work - as indeed it was for Buchan. I suspect it has a subsidiary motive, besides providing adventure and entertainment for boys - and yes, the audience is definitely male (the only woman mentioned is Davie's mother!) - of recruiting for the colonial service. As such, it cannot be surprising that Britain's overseas empire is presented as a Good Thing.: Davie apparently finds the concept of "Africa for the Africans" as laughable.

But I am not sure that it is as simple as that.

The justification given for colonisation is the bringing of civilisation - by which education is primarily meant. Certainly, there is the unspoken assumption that the results of Western European civilisation are superior, so that other cultures automatically benefit by being introduced to them. But I think Buchan is completely genuine in his belief that the colonial service is an opportunity to serve one's fellow man, rather than an opportunity to exploit (as some certainly did). He is more scathing about those who ARE trying to exploit Africa for their own enrichment than about any other group of people. He himself benefitted immensely from access to the Scottish education system, and he devoted a lot of his Governor-Generalship to making sure that the these opportunities were available to as many Canadian children as possible.

There is a marked difference between Davie's outlook, and that of Tam, who left school at 14 and ran away to sea.

In the first chapter, Tam casually uses the "n-word" to describe the visiting minister. But that is the ONLY time that the word is used in the book. It is also into Tam's mouth that Buchan puts the views (perhaps common for his era?) that black people are innately inferior. But this is quite explicitly NOT Davie's view; he frequently denigrates those who underestimate the intelligence of the native inhabitants of Africa.

And Tam is not an admirable character in other respects too. As a boy, he was the most easily scared of the trio, and hid his fear behind insulting language. When Davie and Tam meet by chance again in South Africa, they are delighted to see each other again, and Tam tells Davie to get in touch if he thinks anything is "up" and there is adventure in the offing. In the course of the novel, Davie receives the offer "contact me if you think there is trouble" several times - and Tam's offer is the only one that he did not take up.

I suspect Buchan's own view is that racism is the result of fear of what is different, which is itself the result of lack of education. He would have to tread carefully, because the parents of many of his juvenile readers might share Tam's views. But I think a portrayal of the errors of the "uneducated white man", in order to contrast it with the contents of the main part of the book, is the point of Tam's inclusion in the story.

Davie's usual term for the indigenous inhabitants of South Africa is extremely problematic nowadays, but I do not think it is intended offensively. I know that by Gandhi's time the term Kaffir was generally understood to be derogatory. But when it was used in Kipling's short story Si Monumentum Requeris, Circumspice is does not seem to be meant that way. Buchan comes between those two eras; Prester John is a very early novel, published in 1910. I don't know if the term had acquired a generally derogatory tone by then, and certainly its Arabic origins were derogatory, but that is not how Buchan (and Davie Crawfurd) seem to understand it.

In this novel, Kaffir seems to mean "indigenous inhabitant of the region where the story is set", and their language or languages, as opposed to Zulu, or Swazi, who also appear in the story, but are not local. Davie is well aware that Africans are not a homogenous group, and he draws clear distinction between different tribes. (I am dubious about his accuracy, but not his understanding of the situation.) Kaffir appears to be his term for those Africans native to South Africa.

On the rare occasion that he makes pronouncements about race, then Davie uses the generic term "the Black man", in comparison with "the White". And the only derogatory characteristic that he ascribes is "impulsiveness". Given that he characterises Europeans as "greedy" at times, I would say that it is clear that Crawfurd/Buchan see no inherent differences between races, whilst sometimes being critical of cultural differences. The "Kaffirs" are never portrayed as servile or fawning. They have their own lives, and societies. Davie sometimes visits their kraals with a wagon of goods for sale, whilst the schoolmaster is being taught languages by a local elder (and passes some of that knowledge to Davie, who apparently becomes "reasonably fluent in Kaffir").

Davie is also fully aware that Africa had a history before the Europeans arrived. Not only is the great Ethiopian empire of Prester John an integral part of the story, but the other great historical empires, such as that of Zimbabwe, are also discussed by his schoolmaster friend, and treated as equally deserving of admiration as, say, the Roman or the Persian. They are dismissed only in that they, like the Romans and the Persians, existed in the past.

Given that the Boer War is the very recent past, in terms of the setting of the book, it is probably worth mentioning that Davie's usual term for that ethnic group is "Dutch". Boer is only used when specifically referring to Dutch farmers. The Dutch are portrayed as hardy and admirable; there is no hostility about the past, and it is noted approvingly that when the uprising starts the Dutch farmers rapidly reform commandos and make a spirited and effective contribution assisting the troops.

Chaka and his military prowess is also remembered a part of the recent past - and as an opposing general worthy of being remembered with high respect.

The story is set near the border with Mozambique and the only ethnic group that come out of the book really badly are the Portuguese. (It took me a while to realise that the use of "Portugoose" as the singular of Portuguese was intended totally unironically!) The description of the horrible Henriques as "that Portuguese Jew" gave me another uncomfortable moment, but it is Tam speaking again, and there is no reason anywhere else to suppose that Henriques is anything other than Catholic. So I surmise this is an attempt to emphasise Tam's reprehensible racism, rather than actual casual anti-Semitism on the author's part (even if it now reads rather awkwardly.)

Why I think that even Davie's views are not that of the author is this:
I have said that Davie is in favour of colonisation. He is a realistic portrayal of a young man of nineteen, in rather over his head. He is sometimes brave and resourceful, sometimes foolhardy, sometimes cowardly. He cries, rather more often than the hero of a modern novel, from terror, relief, exhaustion and so on. He is likeable, plausible, and the main protagonist. But he is not a hero - although he certainly has his moments.

But the main antagonist - the leader of the uprising - is repeatedly described in the most glowing terms. Both literally and figuratively, he is a giant among men. He is handsome, charismatic, a leader who can unite different factions and convince them to follow him, a competent general and so on. He is a great man and a great leader. No character in the book contradicts that point of view. He may be the enemy, but he is one his opponents admire. He can be cruel - when expected of him by his followers - but never pointlessly so (he prevents Henriques, who intends to murder Davie "as a precaution"). His only flaw is that he can become enraged and thinks less carefully at such moments (see the earlier discussion of "impulsiveness").

And it is to this character, who explicitly responds to the accusation that he has received an excellent (Western) education, and should therefore "know better", that it is precisely because he has done so, and travelled to Britain and America, that he is acting thus, that Buchan gives a compelling speech, castigating the treatment of black people in America, and the hypocrisy of sending "Ethiopian Americans" (by which I think he means "African Americans") to preach to Africans, and the exploitation of Africa by greedy colonists. He argues explicitly for "Africa for Africans".

So the book has characters arguing for both sides. But the "Africa for Africans" argument comes from the noblest and most admirable character in the book...

The final chapter ends with Davie who has acquired a fortune as a reward from a grateful government endowing schools in his own native land, and in South Africa - and it is specified that the education there is of the highest quality, designed to produce leaders in society, not "a factory to turn out teachers and preachers".

And the statue set up in front of the latter school, to inspire its pupils is a statue of Prester John, but the face and figure is that of Revd. John Laputa, the "heir of Prester John" and leader of the uprising.

I can't help feeling that Buchan's own agenda is to empower through education. After which "Africa for Africans" might not seem such a "ridiculous" idea as it did to Davie Crawfurd.

In a book whose topic is who should rule in South Africa, a discussion of racial attitudes and colonialism seemed unavoidable. But Buchan had packaged it all in an excellent adventure story.

I was surprised to find that Buchan was the son of s Free Church minister himself, given that his protagonist is Church of Scotland and the reprehensible Tam is Free Church.

There was enormous controversy in the nineteenth century in the Free Church of Scotland regarding its involvement in American abolitionist campaigns. Although Scotland has never had a large black population (greatly increased after Works War II, so currently 0.7% of total population), and all slaves were free, by law, from the moment they stepped into British soil, since 1833, the involvement of the Scottish Presbyterian churches in the American Anti-slavery societies explains the visit of Revd. Laputa to Fife. However Scottish anti-slavery campaigning had the same whiff of paternalism as the American societies that they were working with. This presumably accounts for why Britain was included in the diatribe I mentioned earlier, with reference to black people "being treated like a pet".

This is an impressive debut novel. It has the same excitement as his better-known works. Although the terminology is uncomfortable to modern ears, and the overt message distinctly unfashionable, I still think it carries a hidden agenda, wrapped in a package suitable for an audience not yet ready to listen to that message. Am I reading too much into the author of simple adventure stories? Well, this was a writer who went on to work for Military Intelligence. And, although this was his first novel, it was not his first book - that was a descriptive work on South Africa. There is no doubt that he genuinely cared about the country; it was not simply a convenient backdrop for a story.

Helmet Reading Challenge: 7, 9, 24, 30, 31, 38

>99 -pilgrim-: So no magical stories about Prester John then. I think I'll pass! :-D

>100 BookstoogeLT: And no Holy Grail. Just the treasures of an ancient king...

The Good Son by You-Jeong Jeong (trans. by Chi-Young Kim) - 4 stars
Started: 12/9/2020-15/10/2020

This is a story set in contemporary Korea, by a Korean author. I have seen reviews which complain that it lacks anything specifically Korean about it; apart from such comments being excellent examples of the "entitled Americans who treat the rest of the world as existing as a theme park purely for their amusement" that I was discussing in >65 -pilgrim-: - since there is no reason that a book by a Korean author should be specifically Korean, any more than I demand that a book by an American author must have a uniquely American "feel" - it also misses the point that what is quintessentially Korean about the story is not the setting but the attitudes of the characters. Of course one major modern city is much like another. But what seems like an obvious response to her bereavement, to Yu-jin's mother, may not seem so normal to someone from a different culture.

A lot of reviews give away an important plot twist; having come across this by accident, whilst trying to find out a little about the author, initially I felt it fairly pointless to continue. I actually only did so because I had received my copy as part of the Amazon Vine programme, and felt obligated to continue in order to write a fair review. I am very glad that I did. This book is far more than just a thriller.

As a trained nurse, I would hope that the author has the requisite knowledge to do what she does here accurately, even though some of the symptoms that she describes - hallucinations and amnesia - do not fit my understanding ofpsychopathy.

The book opens with a young man, Yu-jin, wakiing up after disturbing dreams, with no precise memory of how the night before ended. Since he has epileptic seizures when he stops taking medication, as he currently has, this does not particularly worry him. The blood everywhere, and what he finds downstairs, does.

It rapidly becomes obvious to the reader, and, slightly later, to Yu-jin, who committed the murder. The "why" is also fairly obvious - although the exact details become apparent much later, Yu-jin's "dream" gives enough hints.

But that is not the point of the book. It is a chilling, and disturbing, look at the thought processes of a psychopath. As such, it is mesmerising. The point of this story is not "whodunnit", but why they do what they do - and what will happen next.

Helmet Reading Challenge: 7, 9, 22, 25, 32, 35

Judgment On Deltchev by Eric Ambler - 3.5 stars
Started: 13/9/2020-16/10/2020

pgmcc hit me with a BB a while back, regarding Eric Ambler; this was my first foray into his writing. It is rather an unusual plot. It was written in, and is apparently set in, the fifties.

The narrator is an author, who had been commissioned to write a report for British news consumption on the trial of Jorgen Deltchev for treason.

The story takes place in an unnamed Balkan country (which feels rather like Bulgaria). Deltchev is the former President of the country; he was a former telecommunications minister in the pre-War government, who was instrumental in organising resistance to the fascists during the War. Afterwards, he opposed closer relations with the Soviet Union, notwithstanding their role in helping overcome the fascist forces, and was in favour of negotiating with Western powers. His interim government was doing a sterling job in reconstructing the country, until he suddenly announced that he was going to hold free elections, in accordance to the promise that he made to the Western powers. In an obviously manipulated election, he lost.

His popularity amongst the people made his arrest and trial inevitable, but the choice of allegations is what becomes interesting, particularly when the narrator starts to wonder whether some of them are true.

The narrator has offensively condescending attitudes towards the local agent of the news bureau that he is working for. This is a mistake. I disliked the attitudes of the narrator a lot of the time. But his worldview should not be confused with that of the author, since his attitudes cause him to make a lot of mistakes, which often have unpleasant consequences for him.

I liked the way the novel compared Jorgen Deltchev's career, and fate, with other, real, Balkan politicians. This nicely served the dual purpose of delineating Deltchev's peril, and reminding readers that such things had happened, and were happening, in Europe "in the present time" (of when the book was written).

This novel does not really follow the conventions of the genre with which it is now labelled (i.e. 'thriller'). I presume this is because it precedes the existence of such categorisation.

I found it completely plausible. Although I jumped to the (almost) correct conclusion far, far earlier than the narrator, that can be put down to his general cluelessness about southern European politics.

In contrast to spy novels (by authors such as Fleming) contemporary with this, I noticed that Judgment on Deltchev features strongly written female characters who are neither femmes fatale not sex kittens.

I can see his influence on Le Carré.

Helmet Reading Challenge: 7, 24, 37

>103 -pilgrim-: What is this "helmet reading challenge" and numbers I see in the latest of of your posts?

>104 BookstoogeLT: Something I was put onto by Sakerfalcon:
https://www.helmet.fi/en-US/Events_and_tips/News_flash/Helmet_Reading_Challenge_...

I have actually been putting the figures in all year (except for when I forget!)

>105 -pilgrim-: Thanks.

October Summary

Average rating: 3.08

11 fiction:
Novels: 3 historical crime fiction, 2 thrillers, 1 science fiction, 1 adventure novel, 1 urban fantasy
Novellae: 1 science fiction, 1 horror, 1 fantasy

1 non-fiction: 1 Orthodoxy

Original language: 11 English, 1 Korean

Earliest date of first publication: 1910 (Prester John)
Latest: 2019 (The Queen of Nothing)

6 paperback, 3 website, 2 Kindle, 1 softback

Authors: 5 male, 2 female
Author nationality: 4 British, 2 American, 1 Korean
New (to me) authors: 5 (2 familiar)

Most popular book on LT: The Jennifer Morgue (1822)
Least popular: Reading the Bible the Orthodox Way (8)

No. of books read: 12
From Mount TBR (books owned before 2020): 1
Books owned before joining Green Dragon: 1
No. of books acquired: 51 (1 physical, 50 eBooks)
No. of books disposed of: 7
Expenditure on books: £22.28 (after credit applied)

Best Book of October: The Jennifer Morgue
Worst Book of October: Reading the Bible the Orthodox Way

Books awaiting review from January: 1
Books awaiting review from February: 1
Books awaiting review from March: 1
Books awaiting review from April: 2
Books awaiting review from June: 4
Books awaiting review from September: 1
Books awaiting review from October: 7

Eh, something seems to have gone screwy with my picture links! The ones that link to pictures that I uploaded myself are OK, but any that link to the cover image on an LT work page have gone to placeholders. Anyone else getting this?

ETA: Seems now to have been fixed.

I see no pictures for posts 107 & 108 if that is what you're talking about.

edited to add:

3.08 is MUCH better than the 2's from a bit ago. Glad to see that number coming up.

>110 BookstoogeLT:
No, those were unillustrated. When I posted >109 -pilgrim-:, the pictures for >103 -pilgrim-:, >99 -pilgrim-: and many earlier book covers (excepting >102 -pilgrim-: & >65 -pilgrim-: which link to my junk drawer) were not displaying.

>99 -pilgrim-: Prester John sounds very intriguing. I had kind of given up on Buchan after not at all enjoying The 39 Steps. So, maybe this is one I should try.

>107 -pilgrim-: This all sounds like you had a great reading month exploring a lot of new authors.

>112 BrokenTune: I would be very interested in hearing what you make of it.

It CAN casually be read as "dated adventure novel" (particularly with the unfortunate use of "Kaffir", which startled me so much that I watched carefully HOW Buchan used it, and came to the conclusion that either, like "Negro", it has drifted from being a simple ethnonym to a pejorative one, or that Buchan had misunderstood its meaning).
But, when one considers both the era in which he wrote, and his known attitudes, particularly towards indigenous culture when in a position of authority in Canada, my impression is the he is doing something rather more subtle.

His political career espoused forward-thinking views. Given that he was a bright chap, with wartime experience in drafting propaganda for military intelligence, I think he was quite capable of choosing an indirect way of influencing the next generation's attitudes to race and the colonies.
--
And yes, it was rather a good month. But a lot of that was continuing series by authors that I had enjoyed previously - Charles Stross and Holly Black. That took up almost half of my October reading. Of the new authors, two were good finds, one very poor, and one "OK".

I persisted with the "OK" author more than I had intended, simply because for part of the month I had few books available, and was feeling too ill to be able to focus on the ones that I had been intending to read.

The Pale Companion (Book 3 of Shakespearean Murder Mysteries) by Philip Gooden - 2.5 stars
27/10/2020-29/10/2020

Well, I had not intended to continue with this series. But I was stranded away from home, and feeling too ill to make sense of the books that I had brought with me. The bookshop that I got to did not have a wide range. The adult section seemed to be almost entirely comprise of either romances, or the sort of crime fiction or thrillers that start with the terrorising, torture or murder of women - both being genres that I loathe. So this seemed the safest choice - and suited my needs well enough.

This time Nicholas Revill forms part of a touring company of the Lord Chamberlain's Men that have been sent off into rural Wiltshire, to a country house within a days'walk of Salisbury, to provide entertainment to accompany the wedding of the son of a wealthy patron.

The description of the place as "not many miles from his father's parish" felt rather odd, given that earlier books described it as being near the coast. (Salisbury is 84 miles from London and 64 from Bristol.)

Nicholas spends, by his own admission, very little time thinking of his girl back home in London, and an awfully lot mooning after a lass of higher rank. And, as usual, there are a lot of clues laid out for the reader that Master Revill fails to notice, or misinterprets. However I found him far less annoying this time, mainly because he is aware that the joke is on him in regard of his romantic pretensions, and does not spend much time trying to show off his cleverness. (And the one time he does, he gets a thorough beating for it, and seems to actually recognise that his suffering is the fault of his "big mouth".) Our obnoxious lad appears to be growing up - he is even thinking seriously of making a marriage proposal.

All in all, I wrote enjoyed this pastoral. Nicholas has a larger role in this adumbrated company - that of Lysander in A Midsummer Night's Dream - and seems to have absorbed something of the personality of his persona. Meanwhile corpses appear in all sorts of locations - I particularly liked death by sundial (one inscribed Tempus edax rerum no less).

(I leave the translation of that to pgmcc - it's been a while since I gave him any Latin to have fun with ;-) )

The historical accuracy was jarring a little this time though - one point that was ubiquitous but trivial, that other significant to the plot.

The trivial point was the number of times a gentleman or nobleman invited Nicholas to call him by his first name, without prefix, as a mark of friendship. The friendship is plausible, the dropping of title is not. Given that, in the 20th century, Prince Charles expected that his girlfriends to address him as "sir", I think it hardly likely that three centuries earlier - a far more status-obsessed period - they would have been verbally more lax. And if that sounds odd, consider the American habit of having children address their fathers as "sir"; that shows respect, but does not imply any less love.

I think permission to familiarity would be by permitting use of name, as opposed to formal address. So Justice of the Peace, Sir Adam Fielding, would treat Nicholas as a friend by letting him call him "Sir Adam", rather than "Your Worship". "Adam" sounds so wrong, to a man who is senior both in years and authority.

And even though Sir Adam was on friendly terms with Lady Elcombe, I still would not expect him to call her anything other than "Lady Penelope" when speaking to someone who barely knows her.

Rank, and forms of address which denoted rank, meant more then.

The second point comes right at the end, as part of the denouement: (MAJOR SPOILER (and medical detail):Lady Elcombe was pregnant when she married Lord Elcombe, as a result of youthful indiscretion.

Now I have no doubt that highborn ladies had the same urges as lower born ones. But the difference is that rank involves inheritance. In an era where a marriage was more an alliance between two houses than anything to do with love, the virginity of the bride was of paramount importance. The heir must be a true heir. Sheets were inspected for "tokens of virginity" after the wedding night.

In such a climate, most young women of sufficient breeding would also take care that whatever "fooling around" they did with the man of their choice, they would take care that their hymen was not broken in the process, and hence pregnancy would be extremely unlikely.

So although an unacknowledged bastard on the husband's part is not surprising, a supposed virgin trying to father her child on her new husband is much less feasible.

One explanation for Queen Elizabeth remaining the Virgin Queen was that she has been sexually abused by her (later) stepfather, Thomas Seymour, shortly before he proposed marriage to her (at the age of 13). Her mother was dead, she was exiled from court, and in his wardship. It is plausible, although not certain - and admittrdly an effective way of ensuring that she could marry no one other than him (keeping his wardship secure).

That is only one theory. But it shows that inspections aimed at confirming vicinity were still taking place in that era.

So the prospect of casual sex resulting in pregnancy, in that class, send implausible to me.

Yet again, the author has added a final twist to the plot that seems both unnecessary and implausible.

Has anyone read Dear Life by Rachel Clarke?

It is obviously very pertinent, but I am afraid that I might end up throwing it across the room, as hfglen feared that I might do with another book - and for the same reasons!

>116 -pilgrim-: Sorry, I haven't even heard of it or the author...

>116 -pilgrim-: No, sorry. This isn't a title that I've come across either.

Ok, I guess I will have to try to find it in an open bookstore, at some point. and take a look at it, before committing

The Queen of Nothing (Book 3 of The Folk of the Air) by Holly Black - 3.5 stars
20/10/2020-21/10/2020

Holly Black is another modern author who uses words without apparently understanding what they mean: when a fairy smith creates a sword that can shatter the firmament, I expect it to damage the sky, not the earth. And she still has the problem that I commented in my reviews of her earlier books, of putting her characters through impossible physical contortions: On my knees, it is a small thing to lie back on the cold stone. Really? Has she tried it? I used to gymnastics, and I could not complete the manoeuvre she describes - from on her knees to flat on her back, with no intervening position - even at my most athletic (and the character is a normal, if athletic, human).

But her lack of writing skills are counterbalanced, for me, by her ability to describe her worlds, and the people in them.

The Far, or the Fair Folk, have become a fashionable theme in recent years - the latest supernatural fad, after vampires and werewolves. I grew up with them woven into the landscape, so for me "fairies" were never the twee figures of Victorian story, or even the more ambiguous figures in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Fairies were called "the guid folk" for the same reason that the ancient Greeks referred to the Furies as "the Eumenides" - because you really, really did not want to get on their bad side.

Holly Black's conception of Elfhame corresponds so closely to my own that I can forgive the periodic awkwardness of her writing style.

I read The Cruel Prince and The Wicked King last year, and have been awaiting the final book of the trilogy with a certain degree of impatience (not sufficient, however, to splash out on the hardback!) and then I was slow to stay out, because I was wary that book would in fact be a letdown after all the anticipation. I need not have worried; it was the best of the trilogy.

I felt the cruelty displayed by Cardan and his friends in The Cruel Prince epitomised fae behaviour, but it was also a somewhat uncomfortable read at times, because that type of "because I find it fun and I can" attitude overlaps with the "mean teens" high school elite trope. And the "attraction to the bad boy" aspect was a little irritating.

In The Wicked King, the hints given earlier were enlarged upon, confirming Cardan's character as having considerably more depth that might first appear , and we are not being asked to approve of the "bad boy" regardless of the awful things that he does, but to realise that they are a defence mechanism, as he tries to prevent something worse taking place. But there is still a lot of space given to the "Will they? Won't they?" theme, when both characters really ought to be focussing on other, urgent matters. (Still, they ARE teenagers, so perhaps their prioritising their hormonal urges over logic, and endlessly obsessing about relationships, is realistic.)

Now, in The Queen of Nothing all the relationship questions are more or less resolved, and the focus is firmly on the politics of Faerie, which I always found the most interesting part of the story. Everything comes to a satisfying conclusion, in a way that neither felt artificially forced nor predictable, with enough new challenges to prevent the outcome spreading inevitable.

However one part of the resolution - the exiling of Madoc to the human world, forbidden to ever handle a weapon again - looks like s suitable starting point for a new series, should the author device that she wishes to continue. I admit that Madoc is one of my favourite characters, so I was glad to see the breach between him and Jude resolved. After all, she IS more like him than like her human father, and he loved her in his way. But a redcap surely does not need weapons to fight...

What I particularly enjoyed about this series was that the author never redefined the fae to suit her own purposes, but worked within the traditional concepts of what they can and cannot do.

Although Jude and Taryn, mortal twin sisters adopted by a fae after he killed their parents, are our point of entry into this world, this book is not primarily about what the fae do in the mortal realm, but about how the fae live with each other.

The concept of immortal beings (unless killed) with no concept of morality, but who physically cannot lie, constrained by geas, in a world where knowledge of a being's true name gives one power to command it, is intriguing. Fae come in varying kinds, so their goals are not all alike.

It is the working out of the consequences of such premises that interested me, rather than the love story. But that too turns out to be more plausible than first appears. The physical attraction appeared to be against all reason - although that does happen in real life too - but it was not accompanied by irrational levels of trust, or a sudden forgetting of everything that had happened before.

The first book came close to some fairly hackneyed tropes, but never feel into them gratuitously, and the latter books developed the story into something more nuanced.

Note: there are abusive backgrounds in this story (taken as a whole) but they have permanent effects on personality, that the relevant characters are continually working to overcome. It is not wallowed in, but neither is it glibly treated.

>119 -pilgrim-: The Guardian published an extract from Dear life earlier this year. It will still be on their website, which might be an easier way to get a flavour of the book, especially now bookshops have closed again.

>121 Sakerfalcon: I found a review, but not the extract. Tried downloading the Kindle sample. Her attitude seemed fine but I fear it is going to turn out to be "what it is like to work in palliative care" i.e. yet another book about " what it is like to watch someone die". I have been there, and done that already.

What I want to address is how to die. Both in a spiritual sense, and in terms of how to access the sort of care, and the sort of death, one wants for oneself.

>122 -pilgrim-: I suspect it will be from the practitioner side from what I remember of the extract.
I think
this may be it.

>123 Sakerfalcon:
Thank you Claire. I wish I could have a conversation like that. I have been trying to get straight answers for over a year and a half now.

Still leaves me undecided about the book though. It seems to me that she is primarily trying to address doctors, and correct their false assumptions. That is a worthwhile thing to do.

But it is just making me angrier.

The Lost Sisters (A The Folk of the Air novella) by Holly Black - 3.5 stars

I was readingThe Folk of the Air series last year, but only recently discovered this little addition to it.

This is a very short novella, in Taryn's voice, as she stands in front of her mirror, trying to compose a letter to her twin. Through it, we see her perspective on the events of the first book, The Cruel Prince.

This is actually a much more polished book than the main novels. Taryn has tried to acclimatise to Faerie, so she rationalises everything into the structure of a fairytale. The results make her more understandable - and also help explain her actions at the start of Book 3, which otherwise rather come out of nowhere.

I enjoyed the clever references, and the structure, and the fact that what Taryn wants to say and the information that she actually conveys often part company. This more than made up for the fact that this is basically a retelling from her point of view, of the events of the first book.

Down on the Farm (A novelette in The Laundry Files series) by Charles Stross - 3 stars

This is a novelette that should be read after The Jennifer Morgue (not, as I did, before it).

The farm in the title is not a real farm. It is a very secluded Laundry facility, colloquially known as "the Funny Farm". The Laundry runs its own mental hospital for the same reason that the authorities run the Village for retired agents in The Prisoner - you can't have patients taking to either fellow patients or regular NHS staff about state secrets.

And given that a) Laundry personnel have a tendency to experience some pretty traumatic events in the cause of their work and b) Charles Stross, like Ben Aaronovitch posits that too much higher thaumaturgy causes brain damage - as in literally destroying chunks of brain tissue - then it is obvious that the Laundry needs an entire facility dedicated to dealing with the mental health problems of its current and former employees. As one might expect of anything connected to the Laundry, it is a rather singular institution with a terrifying Matron.

A letter of complaint has arrived. (And its manner of arrival is itself of some concern.) Bob, having only recently achieved the rank necessary to conduct an independent operation, is flattered to be asked by his boss, Andy, to investigate the complaint. (And gradually less flattered, as he realises that it his relative lack of experience so that he does not smell so strongly of thaumaturgy that makes him the ideal candidate for the rôle.)

There are the short-stay category of patients, who have been traumatised by their work, and need to be treated by staff who realise that the fellow who is gibbering about hideous demonic entities that tried to eat his brain is taking perfectly rationally about a terrifying experience.

Then there are the long-term cases. There is no cure, and Bob quickly realises that the extensive wards around the Farm are to prevent magical harm escaping. There are extremely powerful brain-damaged thaumaturges here. And they are not allowed anything with which they might start to cast a spell.

Until Bob notices the group who regularly play chess...

There was a lot to enjoy going on here, and a steady development of an ever-thickening plot.

We have established that all names at the Laundry are pseudonyms, even Bob's - hence Boris, and Bob's ultimate superior, (James Jesus) Angleton. (This is a precaution against the use of one's real name against one by Interdemensional Entities (more commonly referred to as demons)). So the group of elderly inmates, all pseudonymised as famous mathematicians, was rather enjoyable.

But there was a lapse in taste, that somewhat spoiled the book for me. The portrayal of mental illness was at best clumsy, and - particularly in the case of an inmate who was faking his illness - at times downright distasteful.

My country spent large sums over the past few decades in trying to raise public awareness and destigmatize mental illness. To see the name of one condition used to label a set of symptoms that do not relate to it undoes that. Since Charles Stross bases himself in Edinburgh, he should know better. Maybe it would not have struck me so much, if my previous non-fiction read had not been Jules Montague's thoughtful discussion of mental illness, and the importance of continuing to recognise the humanity of the sufferer..

I enjoy most of the humour in these books and short stories, and I love the intricate plots. I wish Stross would stop letting himself down with this addiction to cheap shots, though.

I have not been reading much this month. Partly because I found the radiotherapy both more time consuming and more exhausting than anticipated, and then because an eye problem has meant that I cannot see well enough to read. It's probably nothing serious (unlike the haemorrhage in June), just the result of a knackered immune system. I have been trying to keep up with news here in the forum, but even here I fear I have missed things.

Sio I have been trying to make up for lack of trading by catching up on posting reviews written during the time when I had no Internet (again). Plus a few written without being able to read back what I wrote - so please be understanding of the AutoCorrect has butchered things more than usual!) and I haven't noticed.

Pain levels too high for me to concentrate on audiobooks,; the result is that it is nearly hallway through the month with only one novella read. But I wanted to put down my impressions about it whilst they still resonated, so please excuse the extra typos!

King Ahab - or Falk and Jenny (novella) by Matti Aikio (trans. by John Weinstock) - 4 stars
13/8/2020 - 13/11/2020

This is a story about jealousy. But, despite being portrayed as being about the romance between Falk and Jenny, which is disrupted by jealousy, it is dependant on the story of another man who is jealous: Jenny's father, Captain Peter Steen, is jealous of his cousin. And, like the jealousy of King Ahab of Naboth over his vineyard, Captain Steen is obsessed with his cousin's copper mill. And, as with Naboth, death ensues.

The story is narrated in the third person present, with most of the time being spent with the thoughts of the two jealous men - Captain Steen and Falk Fløiberg. It is not a habit that I normally like - but here this stream of consciousness approach is justified; they thoughts of both men are so fluctuating and inconsistent that their personalities can only be understood by this demonstration of how mercurial, and obsessive, their thinking can be.

The strange double title refers to the two stories of jealousy involved here. Neither predominates, v each affects the other.

The literary style took a little getting used to. The passages of description are lush. People suddenly speak, or think, by expressing themselves in poetry. The boundary between narrative and poetry is blurred. But once I relaxed into the style, I enjoyed the incredibly vivid word-pictures painted by even the most prosaic of situations.

At first I thought this was going to be a Norwegian version of the Victorian "comedy of manners", since it opens with the vivid, but rather merciless, depiction of the personalities in a rural setting, dependent on the "great families" (in this case, very minor landowners) of the district for their entertainment, with everyone obsessed with their social standing. (Or perhaps a more acid-tongued Jane Austen would be a better, although anachronistic, analogy?) But this was a misapprehension.

I started slowly because their neuroses make both the male protagonists easy to dislike; both have the habit of taking out their dissatisfaction with life through verbal cruelty you the most vulnerable available person. When most time is spent with the thoughts of the nastiest people in the village, I thought this was going to be a more spiteful book than I was in the mood for. But the apparent malice in the descriptions is actually part of the mental state of the observer being described.

I warmed to the book when I realised that book is not the love story that it is sold as, not even the story of a gentleman's jealousy, but as disguised autobiography.

Falk Fløiberg,, the law student of Sami origin, who doesn't manage to complete his studies, but spends time tutoring Captain Steen's sons on a rural estate, and finances the Captain's daughter, sounds awfully like the young man who changed his name to Matti Aiko - a Sami who became a student, probably intending to study law, but who never completed his studies, but who spent 3 years as a teacher in an private school serving a small group of Islands in southeast Norway, where he got engaged to young local lady. Matti Aikio, published this, his first novel, the autumn after his sojourn in Lyndgor. Fløiberg's dreams of academic recognition and worldwide acclaim seem appropriate as an expression of Aikio's hopes.

The parallels in their lives run deeper than this; I think Fløiberg is Aikio's searingly honest exposé of the less pleasant spectra of his own character. Reading the more florid prolonged outbursts of Fløiberg's thinking, I think he would nowadays be diagnosed as suffering from bipolar disorder (formerly known as manic depression). Having known someone with this diagnosis, I have experienced both how charming and lovely they can be, and also how cruel when they want to revenge on someone else their own sourceless unhappiness. I do not think this bodes well for Jenny's future. The most detailed account of Aikio's life (and he died in 1929, when the condition was still not fully understood) suggest that it may be appropriate to suggest that he is describing himself in this also

I feel uncomfortable commenting with anything more than a vague hypothesis about a real person, niwdeceased. But his personality is described by those who knew him as at times brilliant, the life and soul of a party, witty, flashes of genius, but at other times dull, crude, with a high opinion of himself and not sticking to things.

However there may be a touch of snobbery in ascribing dilettantism to a student from a poor background, who started his degree late, having had to pre-qualify with a different subject, both to enable him to support himself by teaching, and because his studies are not in his native language, and then realises that his ambitions are literary rather than professional.

Certainly I felt that the critics who stayed his characters as implausible extremes misunderstood his intent - I think that he is trying to portray genuine mental illness, in an era when it more usually appeared in novels in crude caricatures.

The sexual aspect is another matter. It did make me uncomfortable that Falk's passion for Jenny seemed to be purely built around her physical attributes - particularly when she is 16 and he 23. Conversely, any hints of sexual desire from the housekeeper are treated with derision with Falk's verbal cruelty finding an outlet there.

However, with Falk, his attraction to Jenny's youthful blossoming is explicitly related to the joy he feels in seeing the landscape of his youth burst into green life in spring, after the snows of a winter in the Rondane mountains. For all his university airs, he is portrayed as a "child of nature" at heart. And the acuity with which both Jenny and Miss Naadheim's feelings are described gives them more depth as characters than simply their sexual attractiveness (or otherwise!) to Falk - even if Falk himself is incapable of appreciating women on any other level. There is a strong, possibly wish-fulfillment, element of the "good woman who accepts a bad man in spite of his faults" in the denouement here.

When @BrokenTunes asked me earlier whether this was any good, I said that I would have to reserve judgment until I had finished it. There is a lot in here; there are the vivid and verbose descriptions of nature, the clinical, precise and merciless dissection of social anxiety amongst the rural middle class, and the stream of consciousness accounts of the increasingly wild thoughts inside two men's heads - where it is often not immediately apparent what is talk and what they are imagining. There are sudden leaps in time and place, as well as in style, as we switch between Captain Steen's estate and Fløiberg's ambitions to make a name for himself in Kristiania (now better known as Oslo). Years pass. There is the romance - and there is the investigation into a death.

I was worried that this book was going nowhere, but it all leads to a denouement which was not at all the one that I expected, but was immensely satisfying. Looking back, it felt the only possible outcome.

I heartily recommend this book. With the added advice: don't try to work out where it is going, definitely do o not try to fit a genre label to it - just go with the flow.

In retrospect one can see how this novel sank without trace on first publication. I doubt Norwegian polite society was ready for such an attack on its peccadilloes, or such a soul-searching exposé of the author's insecurities and character flaws. Matti Aiko later claimed that his next book - which focussed on describing Sami culture - as his "first". He might have simply been uncomfortable at King Ahab's poor reception and wanted to "relaunch" himself as writer, but perhaps he was embarrassed at having written something so self-revelatory (and so critical).

However I was startled by the casuall snti-gypsy slur: "Hans Braaten was a drunken worker with gypsy blood in his veins." - as if that explains his drunken, lazy behaviour, and every other bad facet of his character. Casual racism in a book written in the first decade of the twentieth century might seem unremarkable, were it not for the fact that this comes from a Sami author. At the time that the books was written the Sami were also regarded as subhumans by some Norwegians. Since the insecurity felt by a crypto-Sami character, from a mixture of love of his native landscape and dear of exposure as a Sami, is one of the important themes in this novella, it was jarring to see the victim of racial slurs happily applying crude racial stereotypes himself. (Braaten's gypsy blood had no other relevance to the plot than to serve as a quick explanation of why he is irredeemably a 'bad lot')

Helmet Reading Challenge: 5, 7,?, 13, 32, 45

Firewood (a deleted scene from Shadowblack in the Spellslinger series) by Sebastien de Castell - 2.5 stars
26/11/2020

I started reading the Spellslinger series when the first book came out, but it was rather a long wait until the last in the sequence was published, and I have rather lost momentum. I read this excerpt as an opportunity to revisit Kellen's world.

This is a deleted scene from the second novel, which the author has released on his website. The author was fond of the interaction between Kellen and Reichis, but excised it because it does the piece at a crucial point. (He is right about that.)

However, I have never warmed to Reichis - the aggressive squirrelcat with a penchant for eating eyeballs - so another scene of him bullying Kellen (in a way that seems to be intended as "for his own good really") is something I could easily do without.

So it was Kellen's musings over Nephenia that I regret the removal of. Seeing how he thinks of the girl that he felt so strongly about in Spellslinger makes what happens in the next book (Charmcaster) all the more poignant.

Reviewing a book from September:



Lost and Found: Memory, identity and who we become when we're no longer ourselves by Jules Montague - 4.5 stars

I started reading The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat when it first came out; my reactions were mixed. On the one hand, it was indeed fascinating to see how bizarrely things go wrong when parts of the brain stop functioning; however as I read on, I got the uncomfortable feeling that this was the late twentieth century equivalent of a freakshow. The author seemed to be inviting us to goggle at the weirdness of it all, rather than attempting to elicit empathy towards the men and women whose lives had fallen apart in such unexpected ways. Maybe he thought the sympathy would be automatic? I don't know.

Lost and Found also looks at what happens when things go wrong with the brain, but this time focusing on changes originating in disease rather than physical trauma. Jules Montague is the pseudonym for an Irish doctor of Indian origin, who currently works in a London hospital. Her patients encompass the range from rural Irish to the multicultural mix of inner London. She is therefore familiar with a wide range of cultural expectations of how people "should" behave, and the responses of those around them when they do not follow these norms.

She discusses a mixture of cases, not on a case by case basis, but to demonstrate how they illumine her understanding of identity. And she does so with immense sympathy both for the sufferer, and their bemused families.

She was prompted to write this by a question from a long term friend. They had grown up together. She knew her friend's mother as being a wonderful parent in terms of providing material things, parties, transport to social events etc. - but not demonstratively affectionate. As her dementia became worse, however, she took to tearfully telling her daughter how much she loves her. The daughter wanted to know "Is this real? Or is this just a symptom of her illness?"

The obvious, glib answer is: "Yes, this is how she always felt. But she was too self-controlled to say such things before; as the dementia destroys inhibitions, her real feelings, before demonstrated only in actions, are coming through. This is your real mother."

But what of another dementia patient, who also led a controlled, respectable life, a much-loved pillar of the community, who, as he loses his inhibitions becomes an unkempt, foul-mouthed wreck who masturbates during conversations (such as a doctor's consultation) and urinates publicly? Would we also say that this is "the real version", previously held in check? Do we discount his previous behaviour and actions?

Dr. Montague covers the different types of dementia, where different parts of the brain are being destroyed by the disease, and also other illnesses caused by gradual harm to the brain.

She covers confabulation, where the brains of patients with damaged memory capabilities try to fill in the gaps with false information - so that they lie without being aware of it.

She covers how amnesia works - and the people who fake it. (And what they gain from doing this.)

She discusses whether people who cannot remember criminal activity should be penalised for it, or whether the law is punishing a different person from the offender. What about the paedophile (previously convicted who had served his sentence and been released) who developed dementia so that he no longer felt such urges? Should this individual stand trial for other past abuse, or was that done by a different person?

She discusses DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder) - which used to be called multiple personality disorder - and how this led, in America, to a court case where the offender walked free, despite having (as one personality) gleefully admitted the crime: the court recognised each personality as a separate person (and swore each in separately), and held that it would be illegal to punish the dominant personality (and the others) for a crime committed by another.

She covers both the claims made about Multiple Personality Disorder (and the resultant TV appearances) and the subsequent debunkings. (Her conclusion is that people do use dissociation, and the creation of separate identities, as a coping mechanism for handling long term trauma, such as childhood abuse, but that it is not therapeutic to encourage this separation, such as by treating the different personae is different people, giving them different names etc.)

She covers the attempted suicide who overdosed herself into a persistent vegetative state. Her loving mother has fought to keep her on life support, and has been rewarded by small signs of recognition, even though the girl appears unconscious. Her loved ones feel that this is "still her", even though there is no behaviour from her that corresponds to the person they knew. But how much is that related to appearance?

If her brain damage has been the result of physical trauma, like a car accident, would they feel it was "still her" if she was also unrecognisably disfigured? The relation of appearance to identify is considered through the effects on people who have had face transplants and the struggle to come to terms with the change - and the reactions too of the families of the donors.

In a book that mainly treats terrible events with sympathy and understanding. there was some surprising, albeit limited hope.

Amongst the stories of desperate families keeping apparently comatose relatives alive for decades, there are a few who suddenly"woke up". But not to anything like their previous lives - and knowing what they have lost. Is this something they themselves truly want?

But why did this happen with a few cases, and not others? The discussion moves into precisely which areas of the brain were damaged, and which stimuli "got through" to them. This involves distinguishing between different types of similarly unresponsive states.

And this is where things get really interesting: because of the possibility of the communicating with the apparently unaware. The dread of being aware but unable to respond has haunted mankind's nightmares from early times (hence coffin bells etc.). Now it haunts doctors, who have to decide what exactly constitutes "brain death".

It turns out that for some coma patients, thinking about taking part in an activity (such as a sport they used to play) activates the relevant part of the brain, even if nothing physically moves. And they can activate that part of the brain when asked to - thus establishing limited communication. (The latest evolution of "blink once for yes...")

But even such breakthroughs have their dark side. The doctors think they are getting a response - and any interaction is an improvement for the suffering families. But if these"yes/no" questions can now be asked, and the patient is asked "Do you want this life support switched off?" and gives an affirmative response, who would dare end a life on the basis of the colouration of a CT scan?

Every advance raises more problems.

I wondered in writing this review whether I was including too much information, and may be "spoiling" the book. But I don't think so. I have only described the questions raised - not Dr. Montague's answers.

And it is the fact that she does not give glib answers, but uses her medical knowledge as a starting point for a meditation of what it means to be human, and what makes us "us", as individuals, that made this such a worthwhile book.

As such it is necessarily "waffly" at times. She does not have pat answers. She describes her own responses to situations. She uses her medical experience to illustrate situations with real, rather than generalised cases. (I noticed that she gives names and dates where the person has chosen to discuss their condition publicly, but been respectfully vague in those situations where consent could not be given (such as dementia, or the comatose suicide attempter).) But she does not mandate our responses.

Helmet Reading Challenge: 7, 18, 33, 45

>132 -pilgrim-: That sounds like a very interesting read. I have a close family member who was recently diagnosed with dementia and the family are learning to cope. Do you think it would be helpful to them? One of the family is a surgical nurse. I also have a family member who is schizophrenic, so I am very interested in the changes that happen in our brains, but I would not read a medical tome at this point. Is it a book and "everyman" could read?

>133 MrsLee: Very much suitable for the "everyman" reader.

It is very much about effects rather than biological processes. It is about how the various parts of the brain contribute to making us "us", and what the effects are when particular parts of it are no longer functioning as they should. No biology knowledge required.

It covers a wide range of issues, so you may find it not detailed enough if looking for advice regarding coping with a specific condition.

But at the level of the difficult process of coming to comprehend personality changes in a loved one, by explaining what the illness is doing to their brains, then it might be very helpful.

There are different types of dementia, even though it is popularly seen as a single condition. How the damage affects a person depends on the type.

I found it both informative and extremely humane. If you have a personal interest in the topic, it has the right degree of gentleness. It is very much about people still being people, even when they are no longer the people that they were.

>134 -pilgrim-: Purchased, thank you.

>135 MrsLee: And I omitted to say earlier, how sorry I am that your family is having to cope with this, in addition to all the other troubles that you have been through this year.

November Summary

Average rating: 3.25

2 fiction:
Novella: 1 literary fiction
Short story: 1 fantasy

Original language: 1 Norwegian, 1 English

Earliest date of first publication: 1904 (King Ahab - or Falk and Jenny)
Latest: 2018 (Firewood)

1 Kindle, 1 website

Authors: 2 male
Author nationality: 1 Norwegian (Sami), 1 Canadian
New (to me) authors: 1 (1 familiar)

Most popular book on LT: Firewood (2)
Least popular: King Ahab - or Falk and Jenny (1)

No. of books read: 2
From Mount TBR (books owned before 2020): 0
Books owned before joining Green Dragon: 0
No. of books acquired: 37 (14 physical, 23 eBooks)
No. of books disposed of: 0
Expenditure on books: £84.04

Best Book of November: King Ahab - Or Falk and Jenny)
Worst Book of November: Firewood

Yes, I have been buying books when I have not been able to read! The physical books mainly originate in a WHSmith sale at the beginning of the month, and the eBooks due to Black Friday giving me a chance to acquire books I have been waiting for.

Books awaiting review from January: 1
Books awaiting review from February: 1
Books awaiting review from March: 1
Books awaiting review from April: 2
Books awaiting review from June: 4
Books awaiting review from October: 3

>139 -pilgrim-: There are really impressive review stats.
I've given up on tracking pending reviews as it just depresses me to hardly any progress.

>140 BrokenTune: Thanks. I was feeling mildly depressed by them, because I did review all the books that I read in 2019.

And a little of what I was doing in November, when I couldn't see to read at all:

I listened to a BBC dramatisation of Dead Man's Ransom by Ellis Peters ♪♪
Finished: November 2020

The dramatisation was done by Bert Coules, and this performance was recorded by the BBC in 1995.

I last read this during a binge read of the Cadfael mysteries some time in the late eighties. It was during a period of illness that time also. Maybe because I had been ill when I was reading it then, but I found I remembered nothing of the plot.

So I enjoyed it as if for the first time. The plus points were having a Welsh- speaking actor, Philip Madoc, playing Brother Cadfael. Madoc had the necessary mellifluous tones to invest Cadfael with the requisite gravitas, whilst still maintaining his warm humanity. Welsh actors playing the Welsh characters allowed the dialogue to switch authentically into that language when appropriate such as Elis' supposed inability to speak English.

However I have come to the conclusion that a radio dramatisation, even serialised, is not a good format for a murder mystery. I remember that there were a lot of twists and turns in Ellis Peters' books, but in a format such as this, information cannot be slipped in as "colour" when describing a scene. So when the author plays fair with her readers, and prefigures all major revelations, it is hard to lay down 'red herrings'. I was constantly mentally going "this scene appears to be irrelevant, oh - it must be because X is going to be crucial to the plot later". Thus I found the story rather more linear and obvious than I remember the book being.

The part that I did find fascinating was the contrast between Welsh and English law. I seem to be developing an interest in the history of law...

>142 -pilgrim-: IIRC that was re-broadcast on Radio 4 Extra "just the other day". I listened to it too, via the internet.

>143 hfglen: What did you think of it?

>144 -pilgrim-: I liked it, though it's a while since I read the book and don't recall how much was omitted in the dramatisation. I agree on the benefits of having strategically placed Welsh-speaking actors in key roles. BBC4 seem to be good at that -- their dramatisation of Murder on the Orient Express ended this morning, with Poirot and M. Bouc played by actors with, respectively, a Belgian-French and a French-French accent. Fascinating.

>145 hfglen: If that is still available once I can get online via my own equipment, I think I shall follow up on that. Thanks, Hugh.

>146 -pilgrim-: Radio 4 Extra for 4 weeks; the clock started ticking on Monday.

>147 hfglen: I'll keep my fingers crossed that the lockdown level is relaxed during that period, so repair shops are allowed to open again.

>142 -pilgrim-: I've not listened to any radio adaptations of, well, anything, but I think I understand what you mean. I'm entirely biased, because the Cadfael novels (all of them!) are favorites of mine, but I enjoy curling up with the physical copies. I also think they are deceptively simple mysteries, which might contribute to the difficulty of fair play for listeners.

>149 libraryperilous: I find the simplicity of the Cadfael novels to mean they are very good resort when I am ill/in pain and my mental focus is not good.

Their strength lies in the humanity of their characters, and the fact that Ellis Peters makes a real attempt to bring her historical setting alive, not in the convolutions of plot It is more than a convenient peg on which to hang a story. She makes the period live, and people who lived by very different mental guidelines seem relatable.

The characterisation is present in the radio version - and Philip Madoc makes a wonderful Cadfael, even though I find it hard to visualise anyone other than Sir Derek Jacobi, having followed the BBC televised version many years ago.

But the evocation of place and time that actually makes up quite a bit of the books is where radio loses the visual element of the description. This was a dramatisation, not an audiobook, and that is the downside of that approach.

This was one of a series of BBC Cadfael adaptations. I think, after all, that I may go back for more. My physical copies disappeared many moves ago. It is annoying, because they had the lovely 'mediaeval manuscript' covers.

And it seems that I may make it into my Winter the without any assistance from the pifflers, piffle-meisters and piffleresses of the Green Dragon.

Is it wrong that I am obscurely sad about this?

>151 -pilgrim-: I suspect it is because there has been a General Strike by the Piffle Guild. Piffle Meisters weren't getting the same pay scale, as say, Masters of Ironing.

I think there was some professional pride at stake. Interguild rivalries can be intense. Then you throw in disciplines like Bookstoogefu and man, everybody is fighting!

Just in case you couldn't tell, I'm a Master of All 3 Disciplines, so the Guild Strike really isn't hurting me. The money is rolling in by the wagonload...

>155 BookstoogeLT: Master of Ironing? I would never have guessed!

>156 -pilgrim-: yep! MastersofIroning.wordpress.com

There's a website, so you know it's real and official.