The circumstances of [David] Hunter Blair’s conversion were spectacular. During the winter term of 1875 he obtained leave to study music in Leipzig and from Leipzig proceeded to Rome in time to attend the ceremony at which [Henry] Manning was created a cardinal, on 15 March 1875. Manning was a special hero because of his stern espousal of the doctrine of papal infallibility, which he had recently defended against Gladstone’s charge that it ‘equally repudiated modern thought and ancient history’. Swept away by enthusiasm, Hunter Blair, ten days after the Manning ceremony, was himself received into the Church. He was a notable convert: Archbishop (later Cardinal) [Edward] Howard confirmed him, Pius IX himself blessed him and conferred on him the honorary post of papal chamberlain.
When I was nine years old, the final edition of Burke’s genealogies of noted Irish families was published. The Whytes qualified for entry not for being famous, as we weren’t (apart from one or two notable ancestors in the 16th and 17th centuries) but because we happen to have a genealogy that goes back to the twelfth century, though I suspect that the earliest parts are fake. I noted with very slight interest that the family listed immediately after us in Burke’s had changed their name at some point, and vaguely wondered why. Eventually I found out.
(And, good heavens, they published people’s private addresses back in those days! Merlin Holland, Oscar Wilde’s only grandchild, is still alive aged 80, but has lived in France for many years now.)
Richard Ellmann’s Pulitzer-winning biography of Wilde is pretty comprehensive. It starts with his parents, noted surgeon Sir William Wilde and the revolutionary poet and writer born Jane Elgee but known as Speranza. (Oscar was born at 1 Merrion Square.) 550 heavily footnoted pages take us through the 46 years of Oscar’s life, though it’s clear that there is a lot more to say about him (and some of it has been said).
It’s a story that combines many elements. While still a student at Oxford, Wilde rapidly became famous for being famous, to the point that D’Oyly Carte sent him on a (very enjoyable) lecture tour of America before launching their opera about him, Patience. But he was a genuinely good writer as well; Ellmann goes into some of his work, but I think more could also be said about the extent to which it echoed his life.
Wilde was a posh boy who made a career out of being a posh boy, but intellectually he was genuinely a supporter of socialism, Irish nationalism and revolution. This is what gives the drawing-room comedies their vicious edge; he is echoing back to his English hosts what he actually heard them saying behind the polite niceties.
He very courageously chose martyrdom because of his sexuality. He could have escaped to France, Italy and/or the USA and avoided prosecution. But he chose to stay and face his fate in the courts, though he knew it would probably kill him.
Nancy Mitford (born four years after he died) has a telling observation on his legacy in The Pursuit of Love, in an exchange that would have fitted well into one of Wilde’s own plays:
Linda and I were very much preoccupied with sin, and our great hero was Oscar Wilde.
‘But what did he do?’
‘I asked Fa once and he roared at me – goodness, it was terrifying. He said: “If you mention that sewer’s name again in this house I’ll thrash you, do you hear, damn you?” So I asked Sadie and she looked awfully vague and said: “Oh, duck, I never really quite knew, but whatever it was was worse than murder, fearfully bad. And, darling, don’t talk about him at meals, will you?”’
‘We must find out.’
‘Bob says he will, when he goes to Eton.’
Wilde was witty but not wise; he spent his way through both money and relationships extravagantly. Even the grand love affair with Bosie Douglas, which brought him down, seems to have brought him as much pain as pleasure. He genuinely loved Constance and his sons, but accepted that the consequences of his own choices had parted him from them.
It’s a really interesting book and I recommend it, though I know that scholarship in the last four decades may have advanced our knowledge of Wilde a bit further. You can get it here.
This was my top unread non-fiction book. Next on that pile is H is for Hawk, by Helen Macdonald.
We watched the National Theatre production of The Importance of Being Earnest, starring Ncuti Gatwa as Algernon, a few weeks back. I didn’t feel that the stage production transferred to the screen all that well – obviously in live theatre, a lot of the experience is bound up in the audience dynamic with the actors. But Ncuti Gatwa is, as ever, completely magnetic, and Sharon Clarke (who was Grace O’Brien, Graham’s wife / Ryan’s grandmother, in Doctor Who) steals the scene as a very West Indian Lady Bracknell.
Note also Richard Cant, Brian Cant’s son, as Canon Chasuble. The staging more than hints at intense relations between Algernon/Jack on the one hand and Gwendolen/Cecily on the other, and livens it up with music long postdating the original 1895 production. I think the only production of the play that I had seen before was a 1988 BBC version with Joan Plowright and Paul McGann. (But can that be right? I feel it was a bit earlier.)
Anyway, the play itself is very entertaining if just a bit implausible, and although the good lines are front-loaded in the first half, the whole thing is fun.
I've just had a cute, kinda meta conversation about psychological safety at work.
I mentioned it offhandedly in the big team meeting this morning and just now a colleague called me just to ask about it. He said he hadn't heard of it before but he was interested. I'm no expert but I tried to explain that it's about feeling safe to challenge people, to be unpopular, to be more of your whole self at work.
And of course him asking me this is itself an example of psychological safety. Something that he noticed himself at the end of the conversation. He's cool, I really like him.
I wrote what I thought was a fun and helpful comment somewhere on R3ddut. The mods decided it was written by AI so they removed it. Do I get a statue with three arms and six fingers per hand as a reward? Should I missspel more words in my next comment?
In anticipation of the 25th anniversary of my bookblogging, which will come in late 2028, I’m reposting my monthly summaries since November 2003 when I started. (I already did this in 2019-2023, but this gives me a chance to consolidate all the posts and links to this WordPress site rather than my old Livejournal.) Everything will be linked under the bookblog nostalgia tag.
The big work news of February 2004 was the tragic death in a plane crash of Boris Trajkovski, the genial President of Macedonia who was very friendly with me and many others. This was the day after we published a report on pan-Albanianism (concluding that there was not much there there). I also went to London to shadow my boss at a Chatham House meeting where the other speaker was the late great Albert Rohan.
4,400 pages (YTD 8,300) 3/21 by women (YTD 6/21) none by PoC
The best of these was probably The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, which won the Hugo the following year; you can get it here. Molvania has some good lines; you can get it here. The one to skip: The Meeting of the Waters.
I've got very little of interest to report :) I had a lovely visit to Wandlebury with Becky and Stu with a picnic lunch and photos of dead people. (Very dead, roughly saxon/viking era archaeology, which is interesting given it's an iron age feature). Since then I've mostly been reading and playing minecraft and whinging about my shoulder. I've asked the GP if there's anything else I can do until I hear back from the waiting list for NHS physio/possible hydro-distension and a GP will get back to me on the 21st. I've contacted the Spire to ask how much it is privately and they said they'd call me yesterday morning but didn't.
But I am going to do things next week! Heading to London on Sunday to see Jess, Paul and Emi in the pub (they're visiting back from the US), and then BEER on Tuesday 19th. If the weather co-operates I'll be at the beer festival all afternoon and possibly into the evening. And the week after next is half term and we're off to Whitby for a week, which will hopefully be lovely
Not only did diffrentcolours greet me this morning with "Happy Minnesota statehood day," this evening he got me blueberry muffins.
Because the other day when he looked up Minnesota's state soil (when the polycule was talking about gardening and V and I were waxing poetic about how amazing soil is, as we do) he saw that
a) this date was coming up and
b) the state muffin is blueberry!
(Of course states are bullshit, the United States doubly so. Land back! But blueberries are tasty.)
Best SFX: the Liberator. I love that ship. It is stunningly beautiful, especially that shot where it seems to be simply hanging in space. It was a genuinely alien concept, wonderfully brought to life. The team working on the new SFX that are an option on the Blu-ray did her proud with the new model work.
Most woeful use of SFX: There are a number of candidates. :-) Since we've been talking about Harvest of Kairos a lot, let's give an award to Brian the Spider for managing to not be the most awful thing about the episode. Unfortunately, the Liberator makes it into this category as well, at least in its "unconvincing cardboard cutout" incarnation. One of the nice things about the new SFX is that having built a new hero model, they also had the budget to film a lot more shots of the model than the original SFX team did.
Apologies for length, but this is an important monograph about an important Doctor Who story.
I first watched the original version of The Daleks back in 2007, from the DVD set of the first three Who stories. I wrote then:
Great fun. I had of course read David Whitaker’s novelisation, roughtly 25 years ago. A few things that sprang to mind:
1) the settings were very convincing – the Dalek city (OK, we know with the eye of hindsight that it was a model shot), the sense that this was a big landscape with forest, swamp and caves.
2) Barbara’s romance with Ganatus – there is surely some fanfic dealing with that somewhere?
3) The devious Doctor, sabotaging the TARDIS deliberately to get a chance to explore the city.
4) The time travellers, despite Barbara’s relations with Ganatus, are all set to just bugger off and leave the Thals to their doom at the end of episode 4.
5) The end of episode 6 is indeed a literal cliff-hanger – with a brutal resolution
6) Terry Nation’s attack on pacifism. A lot more ideological than I remembered from the book.
7) The Daleks at the end talking about the total extermination of the Thals practically raise their plungers in Nazi salutes – sounds silly when I describe it but actually very effective.
8) the one bit that really didn’t work – the fight at the end; the time-travellers and Thals win too easily.
Anyhow, well worth it. I watched with the closed caption commentary, which to be honest was more annoying than helpful on the whole. Though it was interesting that the very day of the filming of the Doctor’s first encounter with the Daleks was 22 November 1963, the day before the first Doctor Who (recorded over a month before) was to be broadcast, and also the day of John F Kennedy’s assassination. (And of the deaths of C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley; but who remembers that?)
When I came back to it in 2009 early in my Great Rewatch, I wrote:
The Daleks really is where Doctor Who gets going. There is a case to be made that the pepperpots never get so interesting again. Certainly they are incomprehensible, blankly hostile, psychopathically destructive, and strangely watchable. The conversion of the Thals from pacifists to fighters has some moral ambiguity – the Tardis crew are motivated by their own need to get away, and there is a certain air of tragedy even in the final victory. (Shame that the actual final fight scene is a bit crap.) And Barbara gets the first Who romance with Ganatus (comprehensively rewritten to Barbara/Ian by David Whitaker for the book).
Coming back to it again, I felt that it holds up really well, especially if you are sensitive to the cramped sets and other constraints of the production. The four main cast are very good, clearly getting into their stride. And I should have previously mentioned the superb incidental music of Tristram Cary. You can get it in this box set.
The colorised and abbreviated version of the story released a few years back (you can get it here) foolishly dumps Cary’s music, misses some of the plot and loses out a bit on pacing, but ends with this lovely montage of the rest of the Hartnell era.
I know the novelisation well, and re-read it for this post. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
I ran towards the sound, the branches of trees cracking and powdering in clouds around me as I forced my way through. I found Barbara with her back pressed up against a tree, the knuckles of one hand pushed hard against her teeth. She was staring away from me into some bushes. I caught the glint of the eyes of some animal or other and stopped dead still.
There was a time when this was literally the only Doctor Who book in existence (under its excellent original 1964 title of Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks); indeed it was the only commercially available representation of any Doctor Who story, in those days long before video-recorders (let alone DVDs). So we have Whitaker taking much greater liberty with Terry Nation’s TV script than almost any other novelisation (John Lucarotti’s treatment of The Massacre differs even more from the story as broadcast, but he was reverting back to his own original script).
And the result is quite possibly the best of the novelisations, judged as a novel. The opening of the story is comprehensively rewritten, Ian being an unemployed research scientist who accidentally encounters Barbara, who has been tutoring the mysterious Susan, and gets involved with the Doctor and his Tardis. So much time is invested – wisely – in setting the scene that we are a third of the way through the book before we reach the equivalent point to the end of the TV story’s first episode (out of seven).
The biggest novelty, for those of us who have read almost any of the subsequent hundreds of Who books, is that the whole story is told in the first person, from Ian’s point of view. (It’s not unknown in later Who literature, but it is very unusual.) This does require a certain amount of narrative juggling, but Whitaker gets away with it better than I remembered from when I first read this, three decades ago.
Today’s generation of fans will squee at the pronounced sexual tension in the Ian/Barbara relationship here – the TV story has Barbara close to flirting with Ganatus, one of the Thals, but he barely gets to look at her on the printed page. Poor Susan rather fades into the background as well after she has done her mercy run to the forest. The characterisation of the Doctor is much more harsh and edgy than Hartnell’s depiction; since Whitaker was the story editor, perhaps this was what he had originally in mind? (A possibility supported by the surviving first cut of the first ever episode.)
And the Daleks themselves are pretty memorable here, though Whitaker seems a bit confused about their size – three feet high at one point, four foot six at another, though the illustrations are of our “normal” sized pepperpots. However, this confusion is compensated for by the glorious description of the mutants within the metal casings, and their glass-enclosed leader. The TV show has never managed such memorable presentations of the creatures inside, though it has occasionally tried. (The versions encountered by the Ninth Doctor come closest.)
Anyway, this is an excellent read, well worth hunting down.
In for a penny, in for a pound, I thought, so I went and also rewatched the Peter Cushing film Dr Who and the Daleks. Last time I saw it, in 2010, I wrote:
As a Doctor Who fan, it is impossible not to judge this film in comparison with the original seven-part Dalek story, so I won’t really try. The positives: it is in colour, which is a huge difference. It looks better (except, oddly enough, the interior of Dr. Who’s Tardis, which just looks like a film set with some machines dotted around it). The plot is tighter – it’s difficult (with one exception, which I’ll get to) to remember what has been cut from the original story to produce a film half its length, and some of the best bits are still there. The music is decent – not as unearthly as in the TV version, but not offensive either.
The huge difference, however, is in the performances and portrayals. Peter Cushing plays elderly slightly comical scientist Dr. Who, who keeps a time machine called ‘Tardis’ in his back garden, shaped like a police box for some reason. He doesn’t have the grumpy gravitas of William Hartnell, but I detect some homage to his portrayal in the approach taken by Sylvester McCoy. Roberta Tovey as his nine-year-old granddaughter Susie is actually rather good, and recasts Carole Anne Ford with perhaps a bit more grit.
When I first saw this on a Saturday morning repeat aged about 11, the surprise was that Ian is played by Roy Castle, who of course I knew as the presenter of the BBC children’s programme Record Breakers. This was actually his second film role – he had also appeared with Peter Cushing in another Max Subotsky film with a doctor in the title (Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors) earlier in 1965. Castle’s Ian starts as a clown but more or less settles into the heroic sidekick to Cushing’s Who by the end, probably the closest of the four main characters to the TV version (though William Russell’s Ian is much brainier).
The most serious cut in the film as compared to the TV original is Barbara, Dr. Who’s other grand-daughter, played by Jennie Linden. She gets almost nothing to do, except that her over-vigorous embrace of Ian sets Tardis going in the first place. (And even that is portrayed as Ian’s clumsiness.) She is practically background scenery, especially when compared to Jacqueline Hill’s history teacher.
Rewatching it in close proximity to the original TV story brought home to me how much better the latter is. Just compare the almost wordless acting of Hartnell and Russell here:
versus Cushing, Castle and Tovey playing the same scene for weak laughs here:
Obverse Books have published a novelisation of the film, ostensibly by “Alan Smithee” but I believe actually by Iain McLaughlin. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
Ian considered himself to be fit and healthy. He had been drilled into good shape during his National Service and he was still active now, playing football twice a week and turning out for the local cricket side during the summer. He also went dancing – hopefully from now on with Barbara – every weekend, but even he was feeling the effects of the journey. He was out of breath and perspiring heavily. His shirt was soaked with sweat and his muscles ached.
It made me realise that the visual comedy of the film is one of its key elements, very difficult to transfer to the printed page! Anyway, you can get it here.
So, on to the latest of the Black Archives, Oliver Wake’s monograph on The Daleks, concentrating on the original TV series but also referring to the Whitaker novelisation and the Cushing film, and to later Dalek and Terry Nation stories. There is a real break of format with previous Black Archives, with no less than eighteen short chapters each addressing a different aspect of the story, and building the overall case (which is surely unassailable anyway) that The Daleks can be seen as the crucial founding text of the show as a whole. A short introduction explains the book’s agenda:
I aim, firstly, to explore the influences and inspirations Nation called upon in devising the story; secondly, to analyse the story’s mixed authorship and the ways in which varied contributors gave it meaning; and thirdly, to examine The Daleks’ world-building as a piece of televisual fantasy fiction.
The first chapter, “Commissioning The Daleks”, recapitulates what we know about how the story came into being – it was written very quickly, which meant that it was ready for production when an early gap needed to be filled.
The second chapter, “The Bomb”, looks at how the story portrays radiation sickness and the neutron bomb.
The third chapter, “A Climate of Fear”, looks at other portrayals of the aftermath of nuclear war in fiction up to the mid-1960s. Its second paragraph is:
Stories of nuclear weapons had been science fiction and consequently were hidden away in niche publications. After the Second World War they began to emerge into the mainstream, in Britain at least; in the more conservative USA they tended to remain hived off in the sci-fi niche¹. Every conceivable scenario of nuclear devastation was played out in literature, much of it ill-informed and scientifically illiterate. ¹ Brians, Paul, Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction, unpaginated online edition, Chapter 1.
The fourth chapter, “The Survivors”, queries the extent to which the story is meant to show the future of Planet Earth humanity.
The fifth chapter, “The Dead Planet”, looks at the Petrified Jungle and also in some detail at the Magnadon (the dead metallic lizard).
The sixth chapter, “Alien Sound”, looks at the brilliant soundscape of the story created by Tristram Cary’s music and Brian Hodgson’s effects. As I noted earlier, this is one point where the Cushing film is seriously deficient.
The seventh chapter, “The Time Machine”, looks at the influence of Wells’ novel and George Pal’s film adaptation on The Daleks.
The eighth chapter, “The Mutants”, looks at what we are told about both Thals and Daleks as mutations, and points out the inconsistencies. (I must say I prefer this approach to desperately trying to retcon everything.)
The ninth chapter, “The Aryan Thals”, points out the problematic of the perfect Thal race being tall and blond, leaning again on The Time Machine.
The tenth chapter, “Pacifism, the Thals and Terry Nation”, goes into Nation’s well-documented political views, which he expressed as pacifist and sometimes socialist. (So Gareth Roberts is completely wrong on this, not surprisingly.) Ian’s argument with the Thals is Nation’s argument with himself.
The eleventh chapter, “Gender and Authority”, looks at the story’s problematic treatment of gender roles among the Thals and the character of Dyoni, and queries how both Thal and Dalek societies are actually governed.
The twelfth chapter, “Martians and Ants”, looks at the influence of The War of the Worlds (both the Wells novel and the 1953 film) and the early John Wyndham story “Wanderers of Time” on The Daleks.
The thirteenth chapter, “The Power (and Irradiation) of the Daleks”, looks at the Daleks’ dependence on static electricity, their life support systems, and their vulnerability to radiation, and then asks, what do they eat?
The fourteenth chapter, “Outer Space Robot People”, makes some interesting points about who the Daleks are shown to be, as opposed to later portrayals.
In their first appearance, the Daleks are scared isolationists. They are survivalists trapped in their fallout shelter, unable to go outside but possessive of the world beyond their city. This jealousy manifests as paranoia and xenophobia when the Doctor’s party and then the Thals come calling.
The sixteenth chapter, “The Direction of the Daleks”, calls attention to the work of Christopher Barry and Richard Martin in bringing the story (and the Daleks) alive.
The seventeenth chapter, “Extermination, Then?” looks at how the Daleks’ catchphrase slipped subtly into the script.
The eighteenth chapter, “Dal to Lek”, looks at the sources for the name Dalek. These include Wyndham’s “Wanderers of Time” and Nation’s general fondness for cycling through similar names. Wake considers and discounts the relevance of the fact that “dalek”/“daleko” means “far away” in the languages once known collectively as Serbo-Croat.
If I may divert for a moment, I am not quite so sure. My relationship with Balkan nationalisms is ambivalent, but there is a haunting Serbian First World War song, “Tamo daleko”, about the exiled remnants of the Serbian army sheltering on Corfu. (As a Serbian military friend once said to me, it’s not so much like Dire Straits’ “So Far Away From Me”, which would be a literal translation of the title, as “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary”, only less jolly.) I do not know if Nation was ever exposed to, say, a Serbian restaurant playing live or recorded folk music, or some other aspect of Serbian culture, but I can imagine him hearing this song somewhere, somehow, and “daleko” sticking in his subconscious memory. It is the heavily emphasised second word of each of the first three verses; even if you don’t speak any Serbian, it is difficult to miss.
A brief conclusion pulls all this together and looks at questions of authorship.
An even briefer note looks at one of the story’s many variant titles, “Beyond the Sun”, and how this might have come to be.
I was a bit worried at first that I wasn’t going to like this Black Archive; Wake’s style starts out a little jerky. But he settles down fairly quickly and delivers a must-read analysis of one of the most important Doctor Who stories. You can get it here.
I really enjoyed this contract. I learned a ton of nurse-y stuff and am more able to handle more complex floor assignments. A lot of trauma on this floor.
The new contract is in Des Moine, Iowa. UnityPoint Luthern is a 189 bed, trauma level IV hospital, which makes it about twice the size of the little Iron Mountain, Michigan hospital I've worked at, but about half the size of where I am now. I'll see a steady stream of elective surgeries, and minor emergencies like COPD exacerbation, chronic heart failure exacerbation, and systemic infections that need IV antibiotics. Easy enough stuff.
My last day is this coming Wednesday - I'll drive back to Lansing Wednesday night, pack a few things, take kids to school Thursday morning, and head up to Negaunee.
Well, Switzerland marks the 100th country in the world by population (of 234 on the Worldometer list), so i thought it would be a good moment to look back over the last two years of posting about the best known book in each country.
First of all, of course my methodology is a white, Western measure of the extent to which particular authors and works are recognised in the mainly Anglophone world of LibraryThing, Goodreads and StoryGraph. This doesn’t make my analysis valueless, but it does mean that each of my posts should be regarded as a jumping-off point rather than a definitive answer to the question, “What should I read about this country?”
(I was very amused when a work colleague, planning to go on holiday to Tunisia, told me that he had asked an AI agent what books to read about the country and it recommended my Tunisia page and therefore Flaubert’s Salammbô – I hope that the fictional account of Carthage in the third century BC was useful.)
Second, for developing economies there is therefore a bias towards Western writers who have gone in as white saviours – literally in a couple of cases where there is a strong Christian element to the story. For each country I have therefore tried to also note the top-ranked local authors, and in cases where the list is rather male, the top-rated women authors.
Third, I’m genuinely finding this project fun, especially as we get to countries that I know less and less about – though even in the more familiar European territory, I’m finding new work published since I did a similar analysis for European countries only in 2015.
Of the hundred books so far, there are fifty known to be by men, forty-nine known to be by women, and the Epic of Gilgamesh whose author is unknown.
54 are by authors who (in my judgement) are not from the country that they have written about in this case, but 46 are by local writers.
I count one play (Italy); two graphic novels (Iran and Côte d’Ivoire); 19 science fiction or fantasy; 22 non-fiction; and 56 fiction other than plays, graphic novels, or sff.
A few striking individual cases:
Most visible country, not surprisingly given all the biases noted above is the UK, where the eighth-ranked book is better known than the top book in all but two other countries (Italy and the USA).
Countries still awaiting discovery, where the winners are least well known: Togo (The Village of Waiting, by George Packer), by some distance, followed by the UAE (The Dog, by Joseph O’Neill) and Benin (The Viceroy of Ouidah, by Bruce Chatwin).
Tallest poppies, where the winning book is particularly far ahead of the rest: Algeria, where L’Étranger is way better known than any other book set there (including any others by Albert Camus), followed by Kazakhstan (One Day in the Life of Alexander Denisovich, by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn) and Burundi (Small Country by Gael Faye).
Most dominant author: All of the top eight books that I found for Colombia are by Gabriel García Marquez.
Special award to: Denys Finch-Hatton, because half of the books on the Kenya list are about the protagonists’ love affairs with him (two versions of Out of Africa by Karen Blixen, and a biography and autobiography of Beryl Markham).
Here is the overall table, in alphabetical order by country, also noting the overall ranking of popularity of each books measured by comparative GR/LT/SG popularity.
See here for methodology, though NB that I’m now also using numbers from Storygraph. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Switzerland.
Title
Author
GR raters
LT owners
SG reviewers
Heidi
Johanna Spyri
212,815
14,145
16,290
The Sanatorium
Sarah Pearse
205,740
2,418
29,120
The Magic Mountain
Thomas Mann
63,457
11,051
4,251
The Other Einstein
Marie Benedict
88,207
1,757
7,882
The Physicists
Friedrich Dürrenmatt
44,556
2,126
5,881
The Enigma of Room 622
Joël Dicker
76,499
1,019
5,884
The Visit
Friedrich Dürrenmatt
39,324
2,078
5,166
The English Assassin
Daniel Silva
45,379
2,413
2,200
When I did this survey less systematically back in 2015, I awarded the prize to Frankenstein; but I have checked, and in fact considerably less than half of the book is set in Switzerland. So I have had to disqualify it here.
I declared Heidi the runner up in 2015, and I declare her the winner this time. In case you don’t know, it’s a wholesome tale of an orphan girl, brought up by her grumpy grandfather, bringing hope and healing. Johanna Spyri, the author, lived in Switzerland all her life. (Incidentally the bridge over the Rhine near Maienfeld, the town where most of Heidi is set, is called the Tardis Bridge. Yes, really.)
The Sanatorium was only published in 2020, so would not have been on my 2015 list, but it has clearly done very well, rivaling Heidi on Goodreads and actually beating her on StoryGraph. It’s a murder mystery set in, er, a sanatorium. The Magic Mountain a classic novel which came third in my 2015 survey, comes third again; it too is set in a sanatorium.
The Other Einstein is about Albert’s first wife, Mileva, and her unhappy life with him in Zürich. She was an ethnic Serb from what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire and is now Vojvodina, and was also a talented scientist to the point that she may deserve credit for some of the work published under Albert’s name.
I am not completely sure about The Physicists, a play about three physicists in, yes, a sanatorium. But it was originally written in German, and the name of the sanatorium, Les Cerisiers, is French, and Dürrenmatt is in general a very Swiss writer, so I think it counts.
The Enigma of Room 622 is a mystery novel by French-speaking Swiss writer Joël Dicker. All his previous books were set in America, but this one is in a somewhat fictionalized Geneva.
The Visit, like The Physicists, is a play by Dürrenmatt which is not explicitly set in Switzerland, but the protagonist’s real name turns out to be Kläri, which is very Swiss.
Again I wasn’t completely sure about The English Assassin, a baroque tale of wartime looting of Jewish property coming home to roost decades later, but I think enough of it happens in and around Zürich to count for my purposes.
Thanks to StoryGraph we gained The Enigma of Room 622, which scored relatively poorly on the less Francophone LibraryThing, and lost Memories, Dreams, Reflections by Carl Jung. Hotel du Lac, by Anita Brookner, was in a very close ninth place both with and without StoryGraph numbers.
I disqualified a lot of other books without needing to think too hard. Only one apart from Frankenstein caused me any head-scratching – Daisy Miller by Henry James. However the action switches to Italy from Switzerland just before the half-way point in the book.
The next four countries are very different from each other – Sierra Leone, followed by Belarus, then Laos and then Turkmenistan.
Oh Lord. So many to choose from, mostly in series 4, although all of them have some good moments. Probably Moloch (good moment - Vila involuntarily teaming up with Servalan). I know a lot of people hate Animals, but one of the reasons for doing so is a lot less icky when you know that the out-of-universe explanation is that the episode was written for Cally and hastily rewritten for Dayna after Jan Chappell left. So hastily that they didn't take into account the age gap between Dayna and Cally, and thus age gap between "replacement actress for Cally's role" and Justin.
As with "most favourite", I'm pairing two seasons, and for the same reason - the Blakeless series 3 and 4. Blake, and the interplay between Blake and the others, is what transfixed me about the show in the first place, and that's gone. Tarrant's constant sniping at and jockeying with Avon for control of the ship and crew doesn't work for me, and doesn't have the same dynamic, in the way Avon doing it to Blake does. Ditto Jenna's mild hero worship of Blake, and Dayna's (initially) of Avon.
There's also a lot of aimless drifting in series 3 and 4, and 4 suffers terribly from the change in producer and the incoherent characterisation from a parade of writers who knew nothing about the series (and also Ben Steed...). This doesn't mean there are no redeeming features, because there are some good to stunning episodes, including anything written by Chris Boucher. There's a reason why that man had his own fan following, not just the actors.
In case you hadn’t noticed, this year’s Hugo Voter Packet is out, with tremendous efficiency; I had however already located a lot of the finalists online, and wrote up this listing of the stories in advance.
1) My top vote goes to “In My Country”, by Thomas Ha. I thought this was a tremendously creepy depiction of a totalitarian society where thought control and euphemism are heavy and omnipresent. Also on the Nebula ballot.
You didn’t know these things about him when he first moved to your city. You’d talked yourself out of the associate’s degree before high school graduation, pragmatism trumping college dreams, and taken an apprenticeship as an electrician with a program specializing in bot tech. You were progressing well, nearing the end of your training. You liked unravelling tricky problems the best, diagnosing a malfunctioning bot like a doctor might a patient.
We adopt a pair of cats. We name them Shaun and Liz.
4) “Wire Mother” by Isabel J. Kim. What do you do if you are a teenager whose mother has been replaced by an AI? Second paragraph of third section:
Rina’s in her late twenties. Before there was Rina, there was Wren, and before Wren, there was Agatha, all of whom were pretty, strawberry-blonde women who Cassie’s father had dismissed before they turned thirty. On the screens, Cassie’s mom is forever twenty-five. Some digital people age in simulacrum. Others stay the same as when they were created, and AMY was made the moment that Cassie’s father had the funds to make himself a wife
5) “Laser Eyes Ain’t Everything” by Effie Seiberg, about a superhero who is also a wheelchair user. I appreciate the message but I found the prose a bit clunky. Second paragraph of thirdsection:
The union leader, a woman named “Big Dig” with hands like gopher claws, went through the agenda. Most of it was assigning press stuff. But eventually we got to the one real thing on the agenda—the union wanted to defeat Doctor Croc, a green scaly menace who’d been razing buildings, most recently a conference center.
6) “Six People to Revise You” by J.R. Dawson. I didn’t really understand this one, and to the extent that I did, I wasn’t sure if it was sf. Second paragraph of third section:
In anticipation of the 25th anniversary of my bookblogging, which will come in late 2028, I’m reposting my monthly summaries since November 2003 when I started. (I already did this in 2019-2023, but this gives me a chance to consolidate all the posts and links to this WordPress site rather than my old Livejournal.) Everything will be linked under the bookblog nostalgia tag.
The most crucial event of January 2004 was that little U took her first steps, at 13 months.
My first work outing of the year was to the Liberals’ New Year reception in Brussels, after which I note that I had an awful lot of whisky with MEP Graham Watson. I was on a panel with the Bosnian and Croatian foreign ministers as well. (Fraser Cameron sitting between them.) This was shortly after returning from a conference on Moldova in Munich.
We also did a report for the new Independent Monitoring Commission in Northern Ireland, comparing its mission with Balkan equivalents. This was also the month that I started to seriously strategise about getting a job with the new European Commission due to take office at the end of the year. (Spoiler: I didn’t get a job there in the end.)
The Lord of the Rings is of course one of my favourite books ever, but that was a re-read (you can get it here if you still need to). My best new book this month was Claire Tomalin’s Samuel Pepys, which is superb and made me a real Pepys fanboy (and also a bit of a Claire Tomalin fan). You can get it here.
When I got off the tram and took off my mask, it caught on one of my Bluetooth earbuds.
It made the earbud fall off my ear, bounce across the platform, and fall between the edge of the platform and the just-starting-to-move tram.
A transgym pal was waiting at the station and chose this moment to come over to me and say "How's it going?"
It's going bad! I explained, and he immediately jumped down onto the track to fetch it for me.
Aww! That is a good friend. The tram had just been, and they're like every twelve minutes on the weekend or something, so it wasn't really worrying but still.
Sometimes the most chaotic person you know and like, who you haven't seen in a dozen years because he's Canadian and lives like six thousand miles away, is having his last day in town before he's off on the rest of his adventures (he's done Iceland and Glasgow and has Cardiff and Somerset left to go) and the beer makes you talk about poetry and astrophysics and the inspiration to be creative and then someone wants to bum a cigarette from him and then she and her partner sit down and we chat for ages before we find out he's called Patrick and she's called Izzy and the drinks flow and the cigarettes are shared and I got home so late I don't know if I'll make it to transgym in the morning which is usually a highlight of my week...
But it's fine, there's transgym (almost) every week and when else could I have seen Bill? Not until next year when he says he's coming back. And when could we have bumped in to Izzy from Cardiff and Patrick from Dudley? Neve!
So many meetings. And the space between the meetings was taken up by meetings overrunning.
In the middle of the afternoon, when I was propping my chin up on my hand looking miserably at my computer screen because I'd been awake since 3am and couldn't get back to sleep and D asked me if I'd had lunch, and I said no and asked if I wanted a sandwich so I said yes.
And he brought me not just the sandwich and bag of chips like I expected and a can of Coke which was nice of him, but tucked on the plate next to the sandwich was a little candy bar! One of the own-brand Snickers we get from the grocery store.
It made me feel so cared for. I really needed that little candy bar and I didn't even know to request one but then there it was anyway.
Taking the question as actually meaning romance and not just sex:
"What the writers intended" - well, they mostly didn't so it's a bit hard to have a favourite. There's clearly an emotional relationship between Avon and Cally, enough for Vila to believe Blake in Voice from the Past when Blake tells him that Avon and Cally have paired up, but one would think that if they really had taken it any further than just good friends Vila would have known about it. But of the ones where there's at least a hint, that one.
"What the actors apparently didn't realise they were opening up to wilful misinterpretation" - Blake and Avon. As I mentioned a few days ago, I did not see a romantic or sexual attraction there until I first encountered Watervole in a con dealer's room and she tried to sell me a slash zine. I noted that I had no objection to gay smut, I just didn't find it believable with those two. So she told me to go and watch a particular couple of episodes/scenes with the sound off and watch the body language. Um. Yes. I don't know whether those characters were in fact at it, but I do think Avon would have liked to have been. :-) (And resented like hell the fact that Blake had that effect on him in addition to the unwanted emotional attraction.)
I have had a migraine this afternoon and evening, which is the warning sign I'm pushing my sleep schedule too much, again
I read the new Murderbot book, very hard to put down, enjoyed it very much
earlier this week fanf and I joined 20th wedding anniversary celebrations for atreic and emperor, who remain lovely people who collect lovely people around them, yay
last weekend Kodiaks lost to Coventry Phoenix 1-8, but I got my first ever WNIHL point with an assist on that goal. And then the next day we turned a 2-1 lead over MK Falcons into a 4-2 loss in the last ten minutes of the game and that hurt quite a lot. But also it was lovely to see some Hull camp friends on the MK side, both on and off the ice
I started watching Ted Lasso, currently half way through season 1 and enjoying it very much. The episodes are short enough and the people / plot engaging enough I'm managing to stick with an entire episode at a time without getting distracted
next week I'm seeing a 40th anniversary screening of Top Gun in the local IMAX screen. I got teased about did I remember seeing it on original release, which no, not quite, but it's very nearly 37 years since I first saw it on a tiny coach TV screen on a school trip to Germany. I still know most of the lines by heart
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
fromtheheartofeurope_feed
