john257hopper's 100 books in 2024

For some inexplicable reason, my thread for my 100 books of 2024 got created in another group. I could have sworn I started it in here, but it was in the Monthly Author Reads group for some reason.

So here it is again pasted from that group, my thread for my reads of 2024.

I read 104 books in 2023, one more than in 2022, which was one more than in 2021. In fact there is a remarkable consistency my total of books read in recent years:

2018 104
2019 110
2020 111
2021 102
2022 103
2023 104

1. Robots of Dawn - Isaac Asimov

This is the third of Asimov's robot novels featuring Elijah Baley and humaniform robot Daneel Olivaw. It is set two years after the events of The Naked Sun, though written some 30 years later, and containing themes (such as differing sexual mores on different planets) that would not have been explored in the earlier novels written in the 1950s. This is even more so a novel of ideas and sharp dialogue between a relatively small cast of characters exploring and critiquing these ideas. On the first Spacer world, the only other humaniform robot, Jander Pannell, is deactivated in unusual circumstances, and Baley is called in from Earth to investigate the circumstances. Numerous possible explanations and a variety of suspects are considered for this crime which Baley coins "roboticide". The final explanation, though, involves an unexpected pivotal character and provides a backdrop link to Asimov's Foundation series, which is set many millennia after the action of this novel. Possibly a bit overlong, but a very satisfying read for an Asimov fan.

2. The Stationmaster's Farewell - Edward Marston

This is the ninth book in the Railway Detective series set in the 1850s. A very popular local stationmaster in Exeter, Joel Heygate, disappears and his charred body is found at the base of a Guy Fawkes Day fire when it burns out. A number of people have obvious motives, including a local criminal who had sworn vengeance against him, the victim's own estranged brother, and his own successor as stationmaster who had been a rival for the position when Joel was appointed. The eventual culprit and their motive turns out to be completely unexpected, and could not be worked out by any reader in advance as new factors are introduced near the end of the plot. There is also an amusing sub-plot where Inspector Colbeck's future widowed father in law Caleb Andrews is pursued by two rival widowed sisters. At the end of the story Colbeck and Madeleine are married at last. I enjoyed the story as usual, though I felt the resolution of the plot was a bit of a cheat.

3. Happy New Year - Jason Ayres

This is the tenth book in the wonderful Time Bubble series, again centred around the life experiences of a minor character who has popped up a couple of times before, in this case Amy Reynolds, who nursed the dying Thomas Scott in hospital in January 2025 in the previous novel, and appeared as a little girl in an earlier novel whom Josh bumped into in 1992. The 39 year old Amy is transported back to the previous December 31st (2023) and after one or two further slipbacks realises she is reliving every 31 December and 1 January (her birthday). Inevitably she tries to change her future, in particular during her 30s by taking revenge on her ex boyfriend Rob who she had caught shagging the next door neighbour, and when they first met trying to get off instead with his much better friend Gary. As her life regresses she tries to tackle more serious problems like stopping her mum drinking herself to death, and rescuing her elder sister Rachel who died in the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami. As she regresses into childhood, she enjoys the experience of being a child with foreknowledge, while being worried about what will happen before she is born. However in the chance encounter with Josh in 1992, she is able to pass him just enough information for him to eventually put her back on the correct time stream. As much fun as ever, and interesting to see what happens to minor characters and how they were affected by the ripples of the actions Josh and co originally set in train.

4. Cousin Phillis - Elizabeth Gaskell

This novella has apparently been described by many critics as the author's crowning achievement in short fiction. I personally preferred Mr Harrison's Confession, though I can see why this more serious work is generally rated more highly. It is well written and presents a good portrayal of life on the Holman farm. But I found it curiously unemotionally engaging. It ended quite suddenly and I thought it felt almost more like a novel fragment than a novella. I discovered subsequently that further parts were planned but never written.

5. The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters - Adam Nicolson

This book is an exploration of the themes in Homer's Iliad and Odyssey and how they may relate to later human history and the world today. His central thesis is that Homer's epics probably originate about a millennium earlier than the 8th century BC period to which most historians assign it, and the Trojan War earlier than the 13th century BC period. This is based on comparing events and background details in the epics with archaeological evidence of the arrival of the ancestors of the Greek people in their current homeland, leading to the clash of two very different peoples, the nomadic proto-Greeks and the city-based Trojans ("The idea I have pursued is that the Homeric poems are legends shaped around the arrival of a people – the people who through this very process would grow to be the Greeks – in what became their Mediterranean homeland"). He pursues some interesting evidence about words existing or not in the Proto Indo European (PIE) language, to draw conclusions about the probable place of origin of these proto-Greeks, for example in small, inland communities, given that there are no PIE words for city or sea.

This is fascinating stuff, but I was not really convinced that this shows the epics were penned as early as he says, given that it is generally accepted anyway that Homer was recording, in the then very new medium of writing, epics passed down in oral form from generation to generation for centuries beforehand. Other scholars have pointed out that, given the similarity of style, the two epics were probably written down by the same person consecutively, as the Odyssey is aware of the existence of the Iliad, but not vice versa - "The Odyssey, with extraordinary care, is shaped around the pre-existence of the Iliad. It fills in details that are absent from the earlier poem – the Trojan Horse, the death of Achilles – but never mentions anything that is described there".

Despite this very interesting exploration of historical, archaeological, cultural and linguistic issues, I had a problem with aspects of his writing style and choice of material. The language is often rather elaborate and I found some of the description overblown and too "stream of consciousness" for my liking. I didn't see the point of including some of his personal material, in particular the inclusion of an incident from his youth when he was raped by a stranger of his own age, which seemed entirely gratuitous to me. So I was left with rather mixed feelings about this book.

>5 john257hopper: The nearest thing to a novella by Elizabeth Gaskell that I have ever read is Cranford which I found to be a bit dull. I really like her longer work North and South combining social commentary and a great love story. Having grown up in the industrial north of England, where my uncle actually owned one of the last operating cotton mills, which inside felt like about the third circle of hell, before moving to the South. I realized how little things had really changed in the century following the writing of the book.

>7 scunliffe: I quite agree on both counts. I loved North and South and Mary Barton but found Cranford dull.

>5 john257hopper: Cousin Phillis is admirable, but I preferred the humour of Mr Harrison's Confessions. Glad you've found yourself!

>7 scunliffe: I've read everything except the ghost stories. It must be time for a re-read of North and South. I suppose the mills are in Asia now. I hope they're better places to work.

ETA Loved Cranford!

>9 pamelad: thanks Pam. I was starting to wonder why I had received no comments on my reads so far this year!

I guess I could summarise Cousin Phillis for me as admirable, but not very enjoyable, if that makes sense.

6. The House of Doors - Tan Twan Eng

This book by this Malaysian author was longlisted for the Booker Prize 2023. It is set in Penang mostly in 1921 but with flashbacks to 1910 (and with a framing narrative in South Africa in 1947). It is narrated by Lesley Hamlyn, wife to a lawyer Robert Hamlyn, and centres around their hosting a visit to their house by Robert's old friend the author W. Somerset Maugham and his secretary and lover Gerald Haxton. Maugham is at that moment gathering material for his collection of short stories, published later as The Casuarina Tree. A large part of the book consists of a digression where Lesley tells Maugham about a murder trial back in 1910 where she was a witness at the trial of her close friend for murdering a man. These threads do link together, though it made the narrative feel a little disjointed to me. I did love the writing though and will read the other two novels by this author.

>1 john257hopper: So… The weird thing is that as I was reading your reviews, I realized I’ve read them before! I don’t follow Months Author Reads so I’m wondering what really happened! Regardless, glad to see you here for sure.

>12 Tanya-dogearedcopy: Thank you Tanya, I appreciate your kind comments :)

7. The Casuarina Tree - W. Somerset Maugham

This is an excellent collection of short stories published around a century ago and all based on the lives and exploits of the white colonial community living in Malaya at the time, their relations with each other and with the native communities. The final story, The Letter, was the inspiration for a major plot thread in Tan Twan Eng's 2023 novel House of Doors, which I read immediately before this. I love Maugham's crisp writing style and straightforward approach to telling a story. Unlike most short story collections which generally contain at least one or two weaker stories, I thought all six stories here were really good.

I think Maugham was a better writer than Tan Twan Eng. His prose seems to have a consistent level of high quality, whereas Tan Twan Eng is more variable, or at least it is in House of Doors.

>15 scunliffe: I have only read one of Eng's novels so far, so cannot judge fairly really. I think it hard to judge such things for a living writer at, presumably, the height of their powers. There is a consistency of quality of Maugham's writing though based on my reading so far, though that is only this collection of short stories, plus The Painted Veil.

>3 john257hopper: This series sounds right up my alley. Adding to TBR.

>17 R_Rose: yes, it's great fun, and thought provoking.

8. The Holocaust: History and Memory - Jeremy Black

This is an important book covering not only the facts of the history of the Holocaust but also reactions to it in various countries across Europe and wider from the immediate post war period until the 2010s when the revised edition of the book was published. One of the key trends is the argument about the extent of collaboration and co-operation from non-Nazis in various countries in persecuting and killing Jews. In the immediate aftermath of the war, and until the early 1960s, the emphasis was on post-war reconstruction, and the priority was the formation of Cold War alliances. In the West, this meant there was a lazy assumption for example that the German people collectively were merely passive victims of a small band of Nazi leaders and the SS. There was a widespread belief that the latter groups were solely responsible for atrocities against Jews and others, rather than the German army being key perpetrators, and collaboration and acquiescence by many ordinary non-Jewish Germans. It also meant much wilful blindness in, for example, France at the role of French police in deporting Jews to their deaths, often without or ahead of any Nazi pressure having been exerted. In the East, Cold War realignments meant that the Soviet Union emphasised their own central role in the anti-Fascist struggle and that Jewish victims of mass killings such as that at Babi Yar in Ukraine were described merely as killings of "peaceful Soviet citizens", denying the anti-Semitic element of the murders.

This situation started to change, at least in the non-communist world, from the 1960s with events such as the Eichmann trial reawakening consciousness of the Holocaust, and the advent of the new 1960s generation questioning the roles of their parents during the war. In Russia and Eastern Europe, this process did not start until after the fall of communism and has been rather more uneven, given the much more virulent historical role of anti-Semitism there and the more active part played by many non-Jewish and non-Nazi people in persecuting and killing Jews.

The book also looks at themes such as the debasing of the terms Holocaust and genocide when they are applied to other violent and killing episodes, often emotively or by states or actors that have a particular political perspective in mind in so doing: "large-scale killing alone, however reprehensible, does not compare with the Holocaust, because the attempt to define and destroy an entire ethnic group and its complete culture represents a different scale and intention of assault, indeed a global assault". It also deals with the role of Holocaust denial or minimisation, the latter of which sometimes overlaps with the relativism mentioned above.

This is a fascinating and obviously horrific book, and makes for very difficult reading in places, not only because of its subject matter, but also it is written in a sometimes overly academic style which can come across as a bit dry.

9. Mrs Warren's Profession - George Bernard Shaw

This play first performed in 1902 deals with bold themes for the time, with the title character a former prostitute and now owner of a brothel which is a successful business; none of this is explicitly stated, but the inferences are clear. The key relationship is between her and her daughter Vivie, and there are some sharp dramatic scenes, after a slow start in what comes across as a rather inconsequential Act I. A good read.

>19 john257hopper: I see there is a new book on the same subject by Dan Stone. Got a very good review in the NYTBR. But yoiu have probably had enough for now, it is such a desperately shocking subject. But one that must not be forgotten, as your summary suggests.

>21 scunliffe: Thanks, yes, I need a contrast after that. But thanks for the heads up.

>21 scunliffe: strangely Amazon would not host that review of this book, as they said it breached their community guidelines, though they don't say why.

Ah they have posted it now, after I changed all references to "Jews" to "Jewish people" (even when that read poorly in context).

10. Richard II - William Shakespeare

This is not one of the better known of Shakespeare's historical plays, but I found its language rich and quite stirring. It centres around the King's conflict with the Lords Appellant who opposed him during the tyranny into which his reign had descended by the 1390s, in particular his cousin Bolingbroke, son of the King's uncle John of Gaunt, and the future King Henry IV. I think this will stimulate me to read the other historical plays covering the tumultuous 15th century.

A few years ago, I did a re-read of all of Shakespeare’s History plays. I did a lot of bonus reading & listening too:

• Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare (by Isaac Asimov) - chapters on each of the plays with commentary on the play itself and its context seated within historical frameworks
• The Shakespeare Book (DK book edited by Stanley Wells) - Meant for Middle Graders but not inappropriate for adults
• Shakespeare’s Kings (John Julius Norwich) - Stops short of Henry VIII but everyone else is in there
• A selection of episodes from the BBC podcast, In Our Time” (hosted by Melvyn Bragg) I love it when British academics “fight” on air: lots of rattled teacups and stuttering over really obscure but interesting points 😂
• Hollow Crown episodes - Ben Whitshaw’s portrayal of Richard II is top tier)
• various historical novels set to the relevant king in print and audio (can think of the ones set during R2’s reign though!)

Two of my favorite things are Shakespeare and history so I tend to get a little carried away😅

ETA: Tracked down my R2 list!

• The Canterbury Tales (by Geoffrey Chaucer; translated by Burton Raffel) performed by six unlabeled narrators) Naxos recording which I thoroughly enjoyed until the last story which was about sin. Hours of being preached at was painful even without having to sit in a hard wooden pew.

• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Anonymous; translated by Simon Armitage; narrated by Bill Wallis - Gorgeous recording of the translation and in the original! Bought the print which has color illustrations by Clive Hicks-Jenkins. Pictures look like modern pastel and TBH I scrunched up my nose at them when I first saw them; but they kinda grow on you

• The Vanishing Witch (by Karen Maitland) - Dark Historical Fiction set in 1380. Times are rough and a terribly clever woman is suspected of being a witch… I always get excited when I see a Karen Maitland book but I always forget how long they are!

>25 Tanya-dogearedcopy: Many thanks for all these recommendations, Tanya. I should try Canterbury Tales. I listened to a podcast on Chaucer on my commute this morning.

I have read The Vanishing Witch and a number of other books by Karen Maitland. Always long and dark in tone. I have a couple of hers unread I should get round to reading sometime.

11. Six Tudor Queens: Jane Seymour, The Haunted Queen - Alison Weir

This is the third in the author's six novel series tracing the lives of Henry VIII's six wives. Jane Seymour was less significant as a political figure than her two predecessors and I had expected this to be a shorter novel, but it wasn't, though didn't feel at all overblown, given the consistent quality of Weir's writing. The novel covers her early life and the slow build up of her life at court first as a maid to Katharine of Aragon, then her frustration and dislike at the rise of Anne Boleyn, and the King's meeting and growing interest in her. At a purely human level, I can see why Henry was attracted to Jane's quieter and more amenable personality after the volatile Anne. Jane is not directly complicit in the horrific and dramatic events of April-May 1536 when Anne Boleyn was brought down, but of course she directly benefits and quickly marries Henry and becomes Queen. The King definitely genuinely loves her, and tolerates her attempts to soften the harsh edge of many of his actions, most famously, though unsuccessfully, over the Pilgrimage of Grace rebellion and the dissolution of the monasteries. In this novel Jane has one or two miscarriages before giving birth to the long awaited heir, the future King Edward VI, before tragically dying a few days later. In an afterword, the author explains how she has interpreted evidence about Jane's health and other developments to reconstruct the idea of the miscarriages and the causes of her sudden death. She thinks Jane died of a pulmonary embolism, exacerbated by weakness caused by food poisoning and the strains of childbirth (so it apparently wasn't a death in childbirth per se, or puerperal fever). A great read, with a tragic ending that left me feeling sad, even though of course totally anticipated.

12. The Unhappiest Lady in Christendom - Alison Weir

This e-short is told from the point of view of Princess Mary, King Henry VIII's elder daughter, and picks up the action from the ending of the Jane Seymour novel, covering Jane's funeral and, in brief, the actions of the following couple of years, so is in effect a bridge between the Jane Seymour and Anne of Cleves novels. I guess really this could have been included in one or both of those novels, so doesn't offer any new perspective on events, unlike the other e-shorts in this series.

I have read and enjoyed Alison Weir's non fictional histories, but but not any of her fiction. How does she compare with Hilary Mantel?

>28 scunliffe: She is considered to be less "literary" than Hilary Mantel. Alison Weir would never win the Booker Prize, though in my view this is probably more of a reflection of the Booker's priorities than anything else. I enjoyed the Wolf Hall trilogy as well, though.

>29 john257hopper: I enjoyed the first two of the trilogy, but The Mirror and the Light was simply too long. By half way through I was saying 'just hurry up and cut his bloody head off."

13. The Purple Cloud - M P Shiel

This is a post apocalyptic novel published in 1900 but feels quite modern in a lot of aspects. Adam Jeffson is the sole survivor of an early expedition to the North Pole. As he returns from the polar extremities he encounters large numbers of dead fish and animals, followed by shiploads of dead mariners, and a smell of peaches and almonds. He gradually realises that almost every living animal is dead, both on sea, in (or from the) air, and on land ("I could have come to land a long time before I did: but I would not: I was so afraid. For I was used to the silence of the ice: and I was used to the silence of the sea: but, God knows it, I was afraid of the silence of the land"). When he reaches London and is able to check newspapers, he realises that all living things have been wiped out by a purple cloud arising east of New Zealand and then proceeding at a pace of about 100 miles a day westwards. Panic ensued as people stampeded westwards to try to escape.

This is a horrific and chilling explanation, but after this the novel somewhat lost its way for me. Basically for months and then years he wanders around the world looking for survivors and there are endless descriptions of piles of bodies in streets, buildings, down mines (to try to escape the poison cloud) and so on - "the arrangement of One planet, One inhabitant, already seems to me, not merely a natural and proper, but the only natural and proper, condition; so much so, that any other arrangement has now, to my mind, a certain improbable, wild, and far-fetched unreality, like the Utopian schemes of dreamers and faddists....It seems to me not less than a million million aeons since other beings, more or less resembling me, walked impudently in the open sunlight on this planet, which is rightly mine". These thoughts are symptoms of a growing dislocation and megalomania. He starts to use his engineering skills to, highly implausibly, burn and destroy whole cities, and build himself an opulent palace in Greece. Eventually he finds one other survivor, but cannot decide on his attitude towards her and treats her horribly, though in time this changes. It is implied at the end that they are basically a new Adam and Eve.

This novel had many strengths as an early post-apocalyptic story, but the wanderings around the world were just too long and drawn out and affected the pace of the narrative, and the final encounter with the other survivor does not come across as realistic.

14. The Prince of Abissinia: A Tale - Samuel Johnson

This novella is ostensibly a tale about an Ethiopian prince, Rasselas, who, chafing under the boredom of the life of luxury he leads in the Happy Valley, contrives to escape with two companions, his sister Nekayeh, and a man named Imlac. In fact this is a vehicle for Johnson's exploring various philosophical ideas, in particular around the sources of and how to seek happiness in life, including who in society has or might achieve happiness and how, whether through living a good life or not, and what that means. There are some interesting pithy aphorisms arising from their conversations with each other and with other characters, including with a philosopher-astronomer who believes he has the personal power to move the sun and planets. Quite amusing and interesting.

>32 john257hopper: This does sound interesting, particularly since I've just read an oddity by Henry Fielding, a contemporary.

>33 pamelad: I just read your interview, will maybe try that one.

15. The Glass Pearls - Emeric Pressburger

This was quite a powerful novel by the author better known as half of the 1940s/50s classic film producing partnership of Powell and Pressburger. Written in 1965 it was forgotten about for half a century, after a negative review in the Times Literary Supplement, and reissued in 2015. Set at the time it was written it concerns a (fictional) escaped Nazi war criminal living in London under an assumed identity and seeking a normal life, 20 years after the war's end. He knows the net is closing on him, but does not know exactly who is wielding it, and who is helping them. This novel is highly unusual in being written from the war criminal's point of view, allowing the reader to identify to some extent with the subject's dilemma, while rightly not arousing particular sympathy for him...even more so as, shockingly, he is not just a "standard" concentration camp or Nazi official, but a Mengele type who performed experiments on subjects' brains. This is particularly remarkable a feat of writing given that the author was Jewish.

The book was a very good read, and also gave a good feel for the England of the time, two decades after the war, but before what we usually think of as the 1960s had really taken hold. The ending was certainly dramatic, with a twist in the resolution. My only criticism is that I think it might have been slightly better had the reader not become aware almost at the start of Karl Braun's true background, but come to realise it more slowly as clues emerge. He is certainly clever and cunning and could have deceived the reader for longer, as he does the characters he interacts with, especially Helen Taylor, his (sort of) girlfriend. But this was an excellent read.

16. We - Yevgeni Zamyatin

This is my second read of this early modern dystopian classic, written in the early years of the new Soviet Union, but almost immediately banned, then smuggled out and published in the West in 1924 - so we are now marking the centenary of its free publication. The writing style is quite brutalist - ironically, like Stalinist architecture - with the characters having serial numbers not names, and being described as looking like the letters of the alphabet in their serial numbers. The writing is also minimalist, with characters described in terms of angles and lines and simple colours - a lot of white and yellow, with true beauty being found only in the action of machines and the pure logic and simplicity of mathematical operations ("only the four rules of arithmetic are steadfast and eternal. And it is only the code of morals that resides within these four rules that is great, steadfast, and eternal").

The philosophy of the One State and its Benefactor is that happiness can only be achieved by absolute unanimity as though each individual is a cell of one body. The main character D 503 is chief builder of a rocket called the Integral, through which the Benefactor aims to spread his version of happiness to other planets, as the newspaper says: "YOU ARE CONFRONTING UNKNOWN CREATURES ON ALIEN PLANETS, WHO MAY STILL BE LIVING IN THE SAVAGE STATE OF FREEDOM, AND SUBJUGATING THEM TO THE BENEFICIAL YOKE OF REASON. IF THEY WON’T UNDERSTAND THAT WE BRING THEM MATHEMATICALLY INFALLIBLE HAPPINESS, IT WILL BE OUR DUTY TO FORCE THEM TO BE HAPPY. BUT BEFORE RESORTING TO ARMS, WE WILL EMPLOY THE WORD".

Eventually, the One State decides the only way to true uniform "happiness" is through a medical operation to excise the imagination from human brains, which seems to actually lead to the creation of machine conglomerations of people - though these chapters are very unclear and I found myself rather confused at what was going on for a sizable chunk of the book, which is why, despite its powerful overall message about the dangers of mindless collectivism, I don't think it is anywhere near as effective as a dystopian novel as is Orwell's 1984.

>36 john257hopper: I'm still reading We, taking it slowly. Here's Orwell's article.

1984 thoughtcrime? Does it matter that George Orwell pinched the plot?

>37 pamelad: thanks for sharing that article, Pam. I agree with this conclusion:

"Perhaps We deserves more recognition than it has had, but if Nineteen Eighty-Four had never existed, it is extremely doubtful Zamyatin's book would have come to fill the unique place Orwell's work now occupies."

>38 john257hopper: I think that We deserves a great deal more credit, and that 1984 wouldn't exist without it. Zamyatin provided the imagination and the imagery that Orwell lacked.

>39 pamelad: I don't doubt We deserves a lot of credit. But I kind of understand why it has not received the traction of 1984 - partly as it was not originally written in English, but also it has a more fantastical feel, whereas 1984 gives a great feel for the mundanity of everyday life in the totalitarian society of Airstrip One, which I think makes it a more effective dystopian novel - it's easier to imagine oneself in that scenario.

Incidentally, re your thread, what do you think of Brave New World? It's a long time since I read it, 2007. I also read it (and 1984) at school in the early 1980s.

17. Salammbô - Gustave Flaubert

I was disappointed by this. Having listened to a 4 part podcast series on the first Punic War, which contained a number of dramatic readings from this book, I expected to find it more gripping. But now I have given up on it around a third of the way through. While Flaubert clearly researched the historical background very assiduously from Roman historian Polybius's work, the narrative reads like what we would now call an info dump, as though he was so determined to show off his research that he barely remembered to tell an actual story. I found it an uninteresting drag so cut my losses after chapter 5 of 15.

>40 john257hopper: It's many years since I read Brave New World. It really impressed me at the time, so I read a lot of Aldous Huxley's other books as well. Of variable quality and interest! I don't think I'd be as impressed today, but might give Brave New World another try.

>42 pamelad: yes, think I'm due for a re-read also.

18. Oedipus the King - Sophocles

This classic play is an out and out dramatic classic of murder,
incest, self-mutilation and suicide. It is amazing to think that this play was performed nearly 2,500 years ago, five times longer ago than Shakespeare's plays. Put another way, when Jesus was born and lived, this play was as far in the past to people living then as Shakespeare's plays are to us now in 2024. It won second prize in a competition in 429 BC to a play now lost to us written by a nephew of Euripides, one of the other two most prominent Greek tragic writers of the era. What huge influence this and other plays of the era has had on the literature of the past two and a half millennia.

19. Disease & History: From ancient times to Covid 19 - Frederick Fox Cartwright and Michael Biddiss

This book is a partly chronological, partly thematic study of the history of disease and how it has influenced, or may have influenced, the course of human history. Some of this is through grand historical events and developments, such as the ancient Greek struggle between Athens and Sparta, the fall of the Roman Empire, the Black Death, or the Spanish conquest of Mexico. Other chapters cover illnesses affecting the lives of pivotal historical figures, such as: the certain syphilis that led to the extreme cruelty of Tsar Ivan the Terrible; the probable syphilis that affected Henry VIII and may have led to the sharp change in his personality in the late 1520s from the perfect Renaissance prince of his earlier years to the cruel tyrant of his last couple of decades; and, most famously, the haemophilia that afflicted Queen Victoria's descendants and in particular the final Romanov heir, the boy Alexei, whose parents Nicholas and Alexandra allowed themselves to fall under the sway of Rasputin and others, contributing in part to the downfall of the dynasty.

There are also thematic chapters on specific diseases such as syphilis, smallpox, influenza, typhus and various types of malaria, how these diseases may have originated (often disputed or unknown), how they spread and how they have been partly or wholly combatted (though it's not always a straight line of progress).

Generally speaking the content I have described above was very good and interesting, but I thought the book lost focus and conviction as it went on. Much of the later material on historical personalities such as Napoleon and Hitler was not really how disease the influenced their actions and subsequent history, but more of a recounting of their rise and fall. Some of the later thematic material was also weaker, I thought, for example that on mob hysteria, the influence of Joan of Arc's voices, and the rise of environmentalism. There was some portentous language such as: "The solution will then surely lie in the hands of one or all of humanity’s age-old enemies, Famine, Pestilence, and War – those Horsemen of the Apocalypse who also bring with them Death upon his Pale Steed". The slightly polemical epilogue on COVID 19 (written in November 2020) concluded that it "had already served to demonstrate that the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse who haunt our histories were continuing to circle us, but now on swifter steeds".

Overall, though, this was a good read and a worthwhile reminder than historical events and developments are not just caused and directed by political and military forces.

As a one time historian, I have often wondered why historical analysis focuses so much on human actions. The role of geography, changing climates, and as you mention here, disease, is often not well recognized. And most of all, the role of purely random chance.

>46 scunliffe: yes, I would say random chance is probably THE most underrated factor...indeed people often refuse to believe it can even be a factor at all.

20. The Resurrection Mystery - Karen Charlton

This is the long awaited seventh book in this series of Regency era mystery novels featuring Bow Street Runners Detective Stephen Lavender and Constable Ned Woods. This presents a rather complex plot involving poisonous trousers, jewel thefts, feckless young aristocrats, bodysnatchers, disguises and vengeance based on past tragic events, and more. In the process of the story, Woods and his wife Betsy acquire a new foster son and a pet dog. Bow Street is under new command, that of Magistrate Conant, who is a stereotypical police boss, trying to limit his officers from displaying any initiative and trying to break up the successful Lavender-Woods partnership. By the end of the novel, and after the successful resolution of all the plot threads, he seems to have accepted their success, and Lavender is being referred to as the Chief Constable, with Woods as Assistant Chief Constable. Great to have the series back, and the characters are as great as ever, but I think this lacked some of the strong central drive of most of the earlier novels.

21. The Heart of Midlothian - Sir Walter Scott

This is one of Scott's most famous novels, named after the Tolbooth prison in the heart of Edinburgh. The basic plotline concerns Effie Deans, who gives birth to a child who disappears and who as a consequence is arrested and tried for its murder on the basis of a harsh Scots law in force at the time which gives a presumption of guilt to a mother in these circumstances. Her sister Jean makes a solo trip to London to beg mercy from the King and Queen. This plot is well and dramatically told, as are the rebellious events around the death of Captain Porteous, but much of the story's effect was marred for me by the heavy use of Scots vernacular for the speech of many of the characters, and the doings of rigid and unbending members of the Scottish kirk. I know it is not the point for the style of novels written two centuries ago, but this could have been a better read if around 30% shorter. That said, this is a good novel and rightly regarded as one of Scott's best novels.

>44 john257hopper: Natalie Haynes has written several books twisiting mythology to be more women centered. the children of Jocasta is an excellent take on the story. If you havent heard about her, you might want to take a look

>50 cindydavid4: Thanks Cindy, I have heard of her and I have one or two of her books but not read them yet. Ed. just checked, I have A thousand ships, obviously about Helen of Troy.

Some years ago I read a brace of novels told from the point of view of Briseis from the Iliad, by Cherry Gregory, The Girl from Ithaca and The Walls of Troy.

I thini a thousand ships is my fav of hers

22. They: A Sequence of Unease - Kay Dick

This dystopian novella won a minor literary award in 1977 then went out of print a couple of years later and was only rediscovered in a second hand bookshop after the author's death in 2001. It concerns the takeover of the reins of power by a mysterious and shadowy group, or collection of individuals, known only as They. They hate individualism, single people, all creative art and literature, whether new or pre-existing. They randomly take action, smashing art, stealing books, beating up or arresting and torturing people who are or who carry out the things they hate. The prose is very matter of fact, and the relationships between the narrator and other characters rather unclear. While I usually enjoy (if that is the right word) dystopian stories I did not enjoy this as the motivations and background of the oppressive They were not explored, giving it a rather fantastical feel, a bit like a J G Ballard modern dystopian horror novel. It might be argued that this approach adds to the starkness and horror, but it didn't quite work for me.

>48 john257hopper: Time to try another Detective Lavender book. I enjoyed the first two. It's a big advantage that Karen Charlton is English, because there are so many books by American writers that are set in England, and they don't ring true.

>54 pamelad: that's true sometimes, though it depends on the level of research they have done, of course.

It's a lovely series, one of my very top 2 or 3 historical mystery series.

>55 john257hopper: I am not so sure that it is simply a matter of research. There are subtleties in language that can be hard to fully understand, in both directions. I have been married to an American for 20 years, and even now we can still misunderstand each other by not realizing these subtleties.

Recent Example:
Wife: how many bunches of kale do you want me to buy?
Me: a couple
Wife, slightly exasperated: That doesn't help, exactly how many?

In English 'couple' means precisely two. In American it can mean a less specific few. And so on and so on.
As someone once said "two nations divided by a common language."

Also subtleties in class can be difficult for the non English to grasp, especially when only revealed in dialogue. Which is probably why Evelyn Waugh leaves Americans cold.

>54 pamelad: Elizabeth George is a prime example. To the born and bred English, she drops clangers with a deafening effect. I never got through the first ten pages of the first and only of her books that I have ever tried. Creating an English sounding pen name is not enough.

23. Body of Proof: The Investigation of Theophilus into the Resurrection of Jesus Christ - Leonard Wibberley

This is effectively a sequel to the author's The Centurion: A Roman Soldier's Testament of the Passion of Christ. In the New Testament, Theophilus was the dedicatee of the Gospel according to Luke and the Acts of the Apostles, but his real identity is contested. Here he is a grain merchant who witnesses Jesus Christ's confrontation with Pontius Pilate and, moved to pity, offers him a cup of wine. After the crucifixion, Pilate commissions him to investigate rumours of Christ's resurrection, talking to a wide variety of different people. What this novel puts across well is how contemporaries, Jewish, Roman, Greek, or whatever, would have viewed the existence and teaching of a man who initially seemed to be just another of the many Jewish messiahs who had emerged from time to time. Over time Theophilus's bafflement and hostility to the Christian doctrines is worn down, but this is not a smooth process and the story is not at all "preachy". I enjoyed this, though I thought there were too many digressions into the general history of the Roman Empire of this time, unconnected to the subject of the book's subtitle, sometimes seemingly just to give the story a salacious feel by the inclusion of incidents lifted from Suetonius's Twelve Caesars.

>57 scunliffe: yes, this is a well worn issue, though I have never read anything by Elizabeth George.

What annoys me equally is when books published in Britain, written by British authors, and set in Britain, with no American element to their content, still sometimes use American terms like "pocketbook" for what we call a "wallet", i.e. the item where a man keeps his money and credit cards etc.

I mean, why? It grates hugely on me.

>59 john257hopper: And I no longer know which purse to picture: the woman's equivalent of the wallet, or a handbag. Perhaps writers use Americanisms to make their work international, thereby annoying everyone outside the US. Or it might be generational, with younger writers using more.

During my historical romance addiction I've come across some absolute horrors: cream in tea; Scottish people eating oatmeal instead of porridge; dukes tossing sovereigns to street sweepers; waking up, looking at the Regency clock and noting that it's 8:32 am.........

24. The Big Four - Agatha Christie

This early Poirot novel is pulp fiction and not really a whodunnit. Poirot and Hastings go on the hunt for the members of the Big Four, a criminal syndicate led by a Chinese man who is the master planner, an American industrialist who provides the wealth, a French woman who provides scientific know how, and a mysterious number 4, the Destroyer, who seems to be able to adopt almost any disguise at will. This syndicate is supposed to be behind every riot, labour unrest and political upheaval across the world, including the Russian revolution, and even behind some natural disasters using the French woman's expertise, aiming at world domination and the collapse of civilisation. Yes, four master criminals with thousands of agents supposedly in every country at their disposal. This is so ridiculous I could scarcely suspend my disbelief at points, but I guess was kind of enjoyable hokum.

One contemporary review, in The Scotsman of 17 March 1927 sums it up perfectly for me: "The activities of Poirot himself cannot be taken seriously, as one takes, for example, Sherlock Holmes. The book, indeed, reads more like an exaggerated parody of popular detective fiction than a serious essay in the type. But it certainly provides plenty of fun for the reader who is prepared to be amused. If that was the intention of the authoress, she has succeeded to perfection".

25. Hide and Seek - Wilkie Collins

This is one of Collins's less well known novels, but is still a good example of his solid grasp of the essentials of a sensationalist mystery novel. The mystery essentially revolves around the identity of the father of Mary ("Madonna") Grice, a deaf and dumb child of around 10 years old, a man who abandoned Mary's mother, the young woman he had made pregnant. Different characters have different levels of knowledge about the truth of Mary's origins, so there is more mystery for most of the characters than there often is for the reader. I liked the interplay between the characters though and enjoyed this, albeit in a somewhat more low key way than Collins's greater works. The author's depiction of Mary as a disabled child who is somewhat more than just a passive figure was seemingly quite unusual for the time, and he apparently researched it quite well. A good read.

26. Witness for the Prosecution - Agatha Christie

This is a reread of this classic Agatha Christie short story on the train back home from seeing the play version at County Hall in London. The play obviously expanded the storyline a lot, but the basic plotline and much of the dialogue was the same. The written story almost feels like a summary of the stage version, it's a very taut piece of writing, with not a word going to waste.

27. Titanic Lives: Migrants and Millionaires, Conmen and Crew - Richard Davenport-Hines

This is an exploration of the Titanic disaster through the colourful and varied lives of some of the 2000 plus people, passengers and crew, who sailed on her notorious maiden voyage in April 1912. The story has been told so many times, but this is a somewhat different approach that allows us glimpses into the lives of a huge and varied cast of characters from American millionaire industrialists, to poor immigrants from Eastern Europe and the Middle East taking all they had in the world with them in a quest for a new life in the United States promising better economic conditions or freedom from religious or racial persecution. While fascinating in concept, it quite often threatens to become little more than long detailed lists of people and brief details of their backgrounds without much of a narrative structure. The usual range of dramatic, colourful horrific and pathetic incidents that one would expect are present here though, so this has quite a powerful impact in reminding the reader about many aspects of this most famous of maritime disasters.

28. Robots and Empire - Isaac Asimov

This is the fourth and final book in Asimov's series of robot novels. This is set 200 Earth years after the action of the previous three so does not feature detective Elijah Bailey, though a distant descendant of his appears, alongside the long lived Solarian/Auroran Gladia, and of course Robots Daneel Olivaw and Giskard Reventlov, the latter of whom has acquired the ability to read human emotions. The whole course of this novel is basically around Giskard and Daneel arriving through stumbling ratiocination at a new Zeroth Law of robotics, that a robot may not harm humanity or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm. They arrive at this law in the course of foiling the plans by two Auroran roboticists to wipe out Earth through accelerating its natural radioactivity until it gallops out of control and makes the planet unlivable, thus, in their estimation, freeing the galaxy for the Spacer worlds to conquer. This is, as always, a very clever narrative, yet, I felt it suffered without a strong and likeable central human character, so this is probably my least favourite of the robot novels, though still very good.

29. The Vampyre: the secret history of Lord Byron - Tom Holland

This horror novel is based on the mechanism of the supposed contents of the lost memoirs of Byron, which in reality were burned on his death with their contents unrevealed. Here they reveal Byron's transformation into a vampire, before he becomes world famous, the first real celebrity in the modern sense. There is a framework narrative set in the present day but the main story is Byron recounting his vampiric life and adventures around Greek and the near East; this is a very well written and atmospheric Gothic narrative, by an author better known as a historian of the ancient world. Inevitably there are some very disturbing and repellent incidents (frankly also true in Byron's real world biography), and by the end, I definitely felt my next read should be something "cleansing". But this is an excellent traditional horror story.

30. Doctor Who and the Empire of Glass - Andy Lane

This is a spin off Doctor Who novel featuring the first Doctor William Hartnell and his companions Steven Taylor and Vicky. I enjoyed the historical backdrop of early 17th century Venice, though I thought the history was rather crowded with Galileo, Shakespeare and an anachronistic Marlowe all featuring as prominent characters. Another Time Lord, Irving Braxiatel, is trying to convene an Armageddon Convention, a meeting of alien races designed to seek agreement to outlaw various weapons or methods of warfare, and to use the Doctor to try to mediate. Needless to say all does not go according to plan, and the various betrayals and counter-betrayals by some alien races left me a little confused. Enjoyable stuff overall.

31. Alchemy - S J Parris

This seventh entry in the author's series of 16th century murder mysteries sees historical Italian religious renegade Giordano Bruno called to investigate the murder of an alchemist in Prague, the capital city of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II. Rudolf is eccentric and capricious but also a patron of artists and scientists and a protector of the city's Jewish community against the extremely widespread anti Semitism of the time. Various factions want to sow hatred of the city's Jews and/or topple the Emperor, and the machinations of Bruno's old nemeses in the Catholic church are as ever in the background. The real reasons for the murder of the alchemist and the later murder of a Jewish bookseller relate to murkier doings and include what I thought was a ludicrous plot element around the Emperor and a young Jewish woman, Esther. After the resolution of the plot threads, Bruno is left contemplating a job offer of Imperial librarian.

32. To a Native Shore: A Novel of India - Valerie Anand

The author is better known for her historical novels usually set in Medieval or Tudor England, but this was I think her first novel, published in 1984, about an interracial marriage between a white English woman and an Indian man. I am assuming this is based on the author's own experiences. Melanie Purvis is from rural Somerset, Avtar Singh is from Chandigarh. This novel is in general not so much about racist prejudice per se, but much more about the duality of the cultures competing within Melanie and pulling her in two directions. I thought this internal conflict was very well described and quite nuanced. At varying times I thought she would settle definitively for one or the other. She visits England against Avtar's opposition as she yearns for a break from the ordered tradition of the Punjabi community. The final moment of decision came when her English relative Frances makes a casual remark about Melanie's future child being half caste, "they’re neither one thing nor the other, are they? People won’t accept them here". Melanie counters that the child will be “Indian as well as English. Inheritor of two lands, two tongues, two literatures. Someone with a chance of growing up richer, more knowledgeable and less prejudiced than anyone limited to only one of each. Is that supposed to make people into something less than human?" Melanie is reconciled with Avtar and returns to India to have her baby, while intending to return periodically to England for work and personal reasons. I really enjoyed this thoughtful novel.

33. Hamnet - Maggie O'Farrell

This prize winning novel is a fictional retelling of the short life and death of William Shakespeare's only son. It contains two time tracks, starting with Hamnet's illness and death, with alternating chapters going back to his parents' marriage. For much of the novel, Hamnet's mother, here called Agnes (Anne) Hathaway is the dominant character, a semi-magical white witch character (for which there is no historical evidence). But the last third of the novel follows on from the young boy's death from plague, centring on his parents' contrasting reactions to his passing, expressing their grief in very different ways, Agnes by being unable to move or carry on with her day to day life, William by returning to London and throwing himself into his dramatic work. The other two Shakespeare children, Judith, Hamnet's identical twin, and the elder daughter Susannah, also come across clearly with distinct characters. The author's writing style is very evocative of the sights, sounds and smells of Elizabethan Stratford and (in brief at the end) London. I greatly enjoyed the novel, though I thought the descriptions of grief, while very evocative, were perhaps a little overdone, and was initially slightly confused by the rapidly changing timestreams. The close connection of the names of Shakespeare's only son and his most famous play, crucial to the novel's ending here, is not accepted by all historians, though. A powerful novel.

34. Hamlet - William Shakespeare

This is a re-read of this most famous of the Bard's tragedies, and his longest play. Despite its colossal reputation, this is by no means one of my favourite of the dozen or so of the plays that I have read and in some cases, but not this one, seen on stage. I find it rather uneven. At its best it contains very striking dramatic incidents and so many phrases and lines that are remembered today and part of the English language. But it is contains some stretches that seemed pointless and unclear until their closing lines, for example Act II Scene II, and most of Act V until the fight and the series of deaths at the end.

35. The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

This is justifiably an out and out classic of 20th century American and indeed world literature. It tells of the migration of impoverished tenant farmers westwards from the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma to a supposedly better future in California. Alternating chapters detail the travels and experiences of the extended Joad family, with every other chapter containing more general descriptions of the experiences of the broader mass migration westwards. The style is very matter of fact in describing the struggles of the Joads as they move across the country, losing members of their party to death (two grandparents) and desertion (one son, one son-in-law), and their increasingly desperate search for work of any description and to get enough food to feed their party. They move through a succession of camps of varying quality and face provocations from the police and local populations in many areas, denounced as "Okies" swarming into California causing civil disorder and labour unrest, and even preaching "red revolution" merely for wanting to find the dignity of adequately paid labour to feed their families. A monumental and moving work.

36. Eadred - Mark Craster-Chambers

This short work covers what little we know about the life and reign of this mid 10th century Saxon king. Arguably we ought to know a little more, as it was under his reign that England definitively gained its territorial integrity as one country, under roughly the same borders it still has today. These pocket books on little known kings are a good idea (though there seems to be only one other, on Harold I Harefoot). That said, I was disappointed and irritated at the large number of typos, including sloppy punctuation, within such a short work.

37. The Harvest Gypsies: On the Road to the Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

This short book is a collection of articles Steinbeck wrote for the San Francisco News in 1936 about the issues of migrant labourers in California. His articles not only expose starkly the horrible conditions in which many migrant families lived, which progressively worsened over time on the road and in encampments, but also covers the earlier history of migrant labourers in the state, Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans and Filipinos, as well as proposing some practical solutions to the problems. These are worthy and well argued, but clearly did not have anywhere near the impact on public and wider opinion that The Grapes of Wrath has had. What a talent to write so well in both reportage and fictional form.

>74 john257hopper: a few years ago, my daughter had The Grapes of Wrath on her high school reading list. I read the same books as she did so we could talk about them over dinner and, if she was spitballing ideas for a paper, I would have a better grasp of what she was talking about. Anyway, I hadn’t read GOW since my high school days and I was amazed at not only how much I remembered but how much I really loved it despite its heartbreaking portrayals. The next time I read it, I think I’ll pick up a copy of The Harvest Gypsies: On the Road to the Grapes of Wrath. I’ve been reading a little more NF lately and have been developing a greater appreciation for long-form journalism in particular— so it seems like a perfect fit!

It is a novella size, fyi, but it packs a punch

38. To Seize A Queen - Fiona Buckley

This is the twenty-third book in the Ursula Stannard series of Elizabethan mysteries. Such a long series inevitably ebbs and flows but, after a couple of very strong entries, I thought this was rather weak. Seemingly random individuals living on the Cornish coast in and around Penzance and the Lizard peninsula are being kidnapped and Ursula impersonates a distant relative of one of them and inhabits his house in order to try to find out what happens. On the positive side, there are as usual some colourful and interesting characters and I nearly always like a novel set in Cornwall. But I found the scale and motivation of the whole kidnapping plot when this was revealed to be utterly implausible, as was the fake royal progress and the Queen Elizabeth doubles. I thought Ursula's reaction to Juniper Penberthy was out of character and, for the first time, I found myself hoping this would be the final end to the series. We will see - Ursula is 60 years old, which is probably the equivalent of about 80 now after all.

39. Whose Names are Unknown: A Novel - Sanora Babb

This novel depicts the lives and struggles of Oklahoma farmers in the Depression and Dust Bowl drought, and their westwards migration to California in search of work. If that sounds like a plot summary of The Grapes of Wrath, that's because it is. This novel had the misfortune to be written and considered for publication just at the same time that Steinbeck's masterpiece hit the shelves and sold the best part of half a million copies over the next five months, so "obviously, another book at this time about exactly the same subject would be a sad anticlimax!”, in the publisher's words. The novel didn't see the light of day for another two thirds of a century and was published in 2004, a year before the author's death at the age of 98. It is a shorter novel than Steinbeck's and its prose has a starker simplicity and portrays with somewhat greater clarity the sufferings of the families, especially the central family of the Dunnes. We learn much more about the Dunnes' lives in Oklahoma than we do those of Steinbeck's Joads - two thirds of this book is set in Oklahoma, as opposed to only the start of Steinbeck's, and there is less focus here on the actual journey westwards. That said, I would say that Babb's characters are less memorable than the Joads, and for me at least, I would say that this novel pulled somewhat less of a personal emotional punch.

40. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

This is a re-read of this famous dystopian novel set in the US in a near future (compared to when the novel was published in the mid 1980s) where a theocratic and ultra-patriarchal society has taken power in a political coup, overthrowing and massacring the President and Congress. We only find out later how the coup succeeded and, as before, I was struck by how rather unrealistically quickly this new regime seemed to have altered the mindset of the majority of the population. The storyline is suitably horrifying and the dystopic element works well, though the narrative does meander somewhat and I found the timeline sometimes a little confusing. I had mixed feelings about the postscript describing a conference 200 years in the future discussing the Handmaid's story as a historical record, I understood the point and the backstory it provided was satisfying to read, but the novel would probably have ended more effectively without it. 4/5

41. In Pursuit of Memory: The Fight Against Alzheimer's - Joseph Jebelli

This is a gripping account of the history of the discovery of and research into this cruelest of diseases, which takes over and eventually destroys the brains of its victims over time from within. I have a personal interest in that my 86 year old dad was diagnosed with it two or three years ago and has gone downhill this year and has just had to go into a care home. That said, it is not always a disease of old age and some of the most shocking sections of the book dealt with families who have suffered throughout several generations from early onset Alzheimer's in their 50s or even 40s. There has been fierce scientific and medical debate about the causes of the disease and latterly, looking into genetic factors, including some that mean certain communities across the world are less susceptible to the disease and may provide the basis for the holy grail of a cure for the disease. At the moment there are only available (at least here in the UK) cholinesterase inhibitors, such as donepezil, that slow down the symptoms for a while - better than nothing but far from a cure. The author was motivated to pursue his own clinical career due to the Alzheimer's of his own grandfather, and is upbeat that a cure will eventually be identified, probably based on genetic engineering, too late for his grandfather and for my dad, but which should offer better prospects for millions of future sufferers and their families.

Sorry about your dad, John. It's a disease we dread.

>81 pamelad: Thanks Pam, appreciated :).

42. The Story of Ireland - Brian Inglis

This is a good readable general history of Ireland, though I hadn't realised when I first downloaded it, that it only goes up to the mid 1960s (so largely before the main period of "The Troubles"). The first three sections of the book, first published in the 1950s, only go up to 1921, with the addition in this edition of a final section "After the Treaty" and a revised introduction bringing the text up to the then present day in the 1960s. My main problem with the book was that the the first three sections covering the history of Ireland up to 1921 divided the material into three themes: nationalism; land and people; and culture and religion. These themes were too overlapping for me, and hindered rather than helped an understanding of the chronological flow of events and longer term developments.

That said, I learned a lot and this was a useful introduction for the general reader, though of necessity outdated in its coverage. It is good to understand how the crucial relationship with Britain and the sectarian divide in Irish society have arisen and evolved, with all the nuances that these can involve (for example, in the 18th to early 20th centuries, there was quite a strong element of Protestantism in Irish nationalism, whereas the latter is generally thought of now as being exclusively Catholic). There were some other striking factors, such as: the deep concern caused by mass emigration from Ireland - in 1950 for example, 1.5% of the population emigrated and the author claims (though I find this a bit hard to accept given the horrors of WWII in particular) that Ireland was the only country in the world whose population declined in the first half of the 20th century; and the very primitive condition of much of the Irish economy, especially its agriculture, until into the second half of the 20th century. A fascinating read.

43. Night Birds on Nantucket - Joan Aiken

This is the third in the author's Wolves of Willoughby Chase series, set in an alternate early 19th century where the Stuarts remained on the throne and King James III rules Britain. Dido Twite is again our heroine and, once again, we are dealing with a Hanoverian plot by the Slighcarps to overthrow the Stuart King. In this case, the plot is pure Jules Verne, involving firing a massive gun from Nantucket to destroy the King in his palace in London. The plot is foiled with the help of a pink whale. Sounds ridiculous but it's quite good light-hearted fun, which I needed, given health-related stuff going on in mine and my family's lives at the moment. One stand out quote was when a character describes a smell as being enough "to make a bad egg burst out crying and go home to mother."

44. Ziska - Marie Corelli

This is a short but powerful and quite horrific novel about the titular reincarnated ancient Egyptian woman and her desire for revenge against her former lover who murdered her, a warrior called Araxes, reincarnated in the form of a French artist Armand Gervase. It contains some dramatic passages about the power of love and passion and vengeance, and how these can lead to disaster, as exemplified in the dramatic final chapter set in basement of the Great Pyramid. Marie Corelli is very little read nowadays but should be better known - this novel came out in the same year as the much more famous horror novel Dracula, as well as Richard Marsh's The Beetle, another little known and underrated work and author.

45. The Thirteen Problems - Agatha Christie

This is a set of thirteen short stories set within a framing device of Miss Marple talking with some of her local friends in St Mary Mead, including her author nephew Raymond West, and later to different guests at a dinner party. Needless to say, she is able to solve every crime without getting out of her chair. In her Foreword, Christie says that Miss Marple "is at her best in the solving of short problems; they suit her more intimate style", whereas "Poirot...insists on a full length book to display his talents". I think this is right, and in her full length novels, Miss Marple often gets lost in the plot driven action of the other characters, whereas I thought these stories are pretty much all good, tight pieces of writing, with the exception of the rather confusing Affair at the Bungalow (though that was probably partly due to the nature of the character narrating it). These stories were originally published in magazines in the late 20s/early 30s and collected in this book in 1932.

46. Robin Hood: The Wrath of God - David Pilling

This is the second in the author's series of short historical novels based around the legend of Robin Hood, in this case identified as Robert/Robyn Hode, originally of Barnsdale in Yorkshire, before becoming an outlaw in Sherwood Forest. As with the first novel, I didn't particularly enjoy this and don't warm to this portrayal of the legendary outlaw, who uses a lot of violence sometimes with less than convincing justification, particularly in his blanket hatred for all churchmen, though in this one he faces a particularly ruthless and fanatical opponent in the form of the Inquisitor Odo de Sablé. At the end of this one, Matilda (=Maid Marian) has been kidnapped and Robyn has been betrayed and faces death. Not sure I will bother to continue the series though.

47. Who Killed Kennedy: The Shocking Secret linking a Time Lord and a President - David Bishop

This is a rather unique Doctor Who spin off novel ostensibly about a plot to change history by preventing the assassination of JFK, though the great bulk of it follows the efforts of an investigative journalist James Stevens in the early 1970s to look into the events that the reader knows as the plots of the early Jon Pertwee TV stories set on Earth, from Spearhead from Space until Day of the Daleks. For the Doctor Who geek this continuity-heavy read is great fun, though Stevens gets the wrong end of the stick rather spectacularly. The William Hartnell Doctor's companion Dodo Chaplet features in the story in a rather unique and slightly odd way, though I thought it worked well for her character. Enjoyable.

48. British General Election Campaigns 1830–2019: The 50 General Election Campaigns That Shaped Our Modern Politics - Iain Dale (ed.)

I have finished this generally excellent collection of essays about the 50 UK general elections between 1830 and 2019 on the eve of the next general election on 4 July 2024. These essays were all written by different authors, which has the benefit of perhaps a livelier and more interesting approach, while also leading to a certain inconsistency of approach and quality - though I would argue not that much inconsistency over the 50 different authors. The handful I thought were less good were as follows:
1900 (Mark Fox) - poorly written and repetitive, despite being only 9 pages, including a howler where he stated that Keir Hardie was the first Labour Prime Minister, instead of being just the first Labour leader
1974 Oct (Michael McManus) - too many extracts from the author's play about the interaction between Heath and Thatcher
1979 (Simon Heffer) - tone was too redolent of the author's own political views
2010 (Adam Boulton) - too much boasting about his and Sky's role in the TV debates
2017 (Stephen Parkinson) - perhaps a little too defensive about the underperforming Conservative campaign (though this was a more minor concern).
Overall, a very good collection for political geeks and those interested in constitutional history. 5/5

49. Wandering Soul: A Jakarta Daughter's American Dream - Kya Rose

This is a lightly fictionalised memoir of an Indonesian lady's experiences growing up in her country and, in later life, moving to the US for a few years, for work and finding love there, before returning to her home country. It is a tale of Kya Rose's burgeoning talents and creativity across a number of spheres including food and fashion. It is also a story of how her passions and personal relationships rise and fall against a backdrop of periodic abandonment by her father during her childhood and young adulthood, complemented by the mutual devotion of her relationship with her mother. It's a moving and detailed story, full of the richness of Indonesian culture. I recommend it to anyone who loves Indonesian or wider south east Asian culture and cuisine, and anyone moved by a story of a good and kind hearted person struggling against adversity to make her way in the world and overcome the obstacles in her way.

I am currently visiting the Scottish capital Edinburgh for a short city break, and have read two short accounts of the 19th century city, as follows:

50. Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes - Robert Louis Stevenson

This is a short set of sketches of Scotland's capital by one of the 19th century's most famous Scottish authors. Stevenson is not a great fan of many aspects of the city, and despairs of its weather: "Edinburgh pays cruelly for her high seat in one the vilest climates under heaven", which is "shifty and ungenial in summer", as I can readily verify from my current visit this week. Such is the consequence of this that "the delicate die early and I, as a survivor, among bleak winds and plumping rain, have been sometimes tempted to envy them their fate." A very bleak beginning, though he mellows as he goes on and paints some interesting vignettes of life in the city and descriptions of its geography and built environment. Worth a look.

51. Notes on Old Edinburgh - Isabella Bird

The author of this short work was a 19th century explorer and naturalist who was the first woman to be elected a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. The work consists of 4 short chapters covering the author's investigation into the grinding poverty of the 1860s in the multi-storied tenements (or "lands"), where whole families live in tiny squalid rooms, some with no natural light or ventilation, with almost no items of furniture or other possessions. The author asserts that "more dirt, degradation, overcrowding and consequent shamelessness and unutterable wretchedness, exist in Edinburgh than in any town of twice its size, or in any area of similar extent to the one explored, taken from the worst part of London", describing the features of "a loathsome infectious sore" covering a sizable part of the centre of the city. There are some horrific accounts of the life circumstances of many families and individuals, with many common features such as lack of access to running water or gas, filth, apathy, contrasted with too ready an access to cheap whisky. In accordance with the mores of the time, the author draws a link between poverty and lack of Christian commitment in a way we would not do now. This makes for sobering and depressing reading, and one senses the author's frustration at the lack of action to alleviate poverty on the part of the city's middle class and intellectuals.

52. God's Highlander - E V Thompson

This historical novel centres on the notorious Scottish Highland clearances in the early to mid 19th century. Wyatt Jamieson is a liberally-minded minister in the Scottish church sent to a parish in the Highlands, where the factor John Garrett, employed by the absentee landowner Lord Kilmale, is determined to clear the area of highland crofters to make way for more profitable sheep. At the same time, church and state are in conflict and the path is set for the schism of the Free Church from the main body of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. These conflicts are played out in various ways including through bloody conflict as Garrett resorts to terror tactics to achieve his aims. I enjoyed the story, though not quite as much the author's The Tolpuddle Woman.

53. Peril on the Royal Train - Edward Marston

This is the tenth book in the Railway Detective series set in the 1850s. After two or three strong entries in the series, I didn't enjoy this one quite as much. A goods train is derailed at a remote spot in Scotland by a pile of rocks on the line hidden round a bend. There is the usual list of potential suspects, including some sabbatarians determined to stop trains running on a Sunday and even, briefly, a shepherd upset at trains running over his lambs. The plot thickens though and about half way through it becomes apparent that this crash, appalling though it is, is a dress rehearsal by unknown suspects for an audacious attack on the train taking Queen Victoria and Prince Albert and their family for their summer holiday at Balmoral. As usual, the main characters simultaneously amuse and irritate with their perennial mannerisms and idiosyncrasies, but I have come to love Tallis and Leeming.

54. His Excellency Eugene Rougon - Emile Zola

This is the second volume in Zola's sweeping Rougon-Macquart cycle. This is rather different from its predecessor The Fortune of the Rougons. It is really a political study of the rise and fall and partial rise of the title character under the rule of Emperor Napoleon III. It contains a lot of wry observations about political patronage and the mutual dependency between patrons and clients, still very relevant today. The characters are generally based on amalgamations of real historical personages during the early rule of the Emperor, and the events depicted closely mirror reality, according to the translator's preface in this Delphi ebook version. That said, I did find the narrative dragged in places and I found myself skimming considerable chunks, and, while it's cleverly constructed, I can't say I really enjoyed it as a novel.

This summer is the 100th anniversary of the attempt by mountaineers George Mallory and Sandy Irvine to summit Mount Everest. They disappeared - and Mallory's body was only found 75 years in 1999, while Irvine's has never been recovered. I have read two books to mark this centenary.

55. Climbing Everest: The Complete Writings of George Leigh Mallory

This is the assembled writings of George Mallory, whose final attempt to climb Mount Everest in 1924 ended in tragedy. They are mostly articles in magazines, some of which are quite specialist and clearly aimed for an audience of mountaineers. The ones on the Alps were less interesting, but his successive articles on Everest, based on his expeditions in 1921, 1922 and then what turned out to be final one in 1924, inevitably carry a poignancy for the reader. Before 1921 apparently, "No westerner had been within 60 miles of Everest, nor did it appear on any detailed maps". The sheer amount of effort and perseverance in managing, for example, to climb up an extra 1,000 feet on successive expeditions, is remarkable, and the sheer logistical difficulty in transporting sufficient supplies and equipment in an increasingly thin atmosphere: "The atmosphere was enervating to the last degree; to halt even for a few minutes was to be almost overwhelmed by inertia, so difficult it seemed, once the machinery had stopped and lost momentum, to heave it into motion again. And yet we must go on in one direction or the other or else succumb to sheer lassitude and overpowering drowsiness." It takes immense physical and mental strength and inner confidence to make the attempt with any hope of success, and problems are greatly multiplied than in lower mountain such as the Alps.

56. The Lost Explorer: Finding Mallory on Mount Everest - Conrad Anker & David Roberts

This is a dramatic account of both Mallory and Irvine's final and probably unsuccessful attempt to climb Mount Everest that ended in disaster in June 1924, and the discovery of Mallory's body on the mountain in May 1999 by a group of climbers including the co-author of this work, who actually discovered the body himself. There is a sharp contrast drawn between the differing attitudes and approaches of 1924 and 1999, and the very sharp difference in the techniques, equipment and clothing available to each climbing party. The extreme cold, the bitter winds, the thin, thin air getting more extreme and more thin as climbers near the summit comes across very clearly....so many climbers have had to give up even just a few hundred feet for the summit as they are very close to death in the extreme conditions of what is accurately called the Death Zone. What struck me about Mallory was his very driven and daredevil nature, combined with an alarming absentmindedness and technical gaucheness (the latter somewhat made up for by Irvine). I tend to agree with the author's conclusion that almost certainly they did not make it to the summit but that they literally fell somewhat short and thereby created probably the greatest mystery in the history of mountaineering. A great read.

>95 john257hopper: I really enjoyed Into the Silence by Wade Davis which also described th4 expeditions prior to 1924, and also set them in the context of the aftermath of Word War 1.

57. The Kaiser: War Lord of the Second Reich - Alan Palmer

I have finished this excellent biography on the 110th anniversary of the beginning of the First World War. There was a lot more to the Kaiser than the bogeyman of the Great War, though he was a ruler of contradictions, a very capricious man led by his emotions and not instinctively by rational calculation or a sober analysis of strategic advantage to his country. Of course he was hardly the first (or last) ruler to have this characteristic, but it had serious consequences during the period before and after the turn of the 20th century as diplomacy and military and other technology were evolving slowly into what we would recognise as more modern forms.

At times he was belligerent and undiplomatic in a way that shocked and destabilised his own and other governments: for example, when a relatively new Kaiser in 1891 he told army recruits, paraded to swear loyalty to him, "that should he order them to shoot down brothers, sisters, mothers or fathers they would have to fulfil his command 'without a murmur'. This 'terrible new speech', as his British, Queen Victoria's daughter mother called it, offended opinion in England, France and even in Russia as well as provoking open criticism in Berlin." Yet at other times he betrayed a tender feeling, especially towards his English family, for example when he held his grandmother Queen Victoria in his arms as she died. He was even an honorary Admiral in the British navy. As late as 1911, he was feted on the streets of London yet, understandably, a few years later he was hated and, at the end of the war in 1918, "hang the Kaiser" was a popular refrain and even the Liberal Prime Minister Lloyd George briefly thought he should be shot.

The course of his life and reign is a clear illustration of the lottery that is hereditary monarchy and how it can throw up someone who was not temperamentally suited to exercise the levers of power in a modern democratising state. Indeed, it was an accident he came to the throne when he did, as his much more liberal-minded father Emperor Frederick III died in 1888 of throat cancer after a reign of only 111 days (he was already very ill when succeeding his own father), and perhaps Wilhelm may have mellowed if he had ascended the throat at a later age. Unquestionably he did mellow to some extent during his long exile in Holland after he abdicated in November 1918, forming a good relationship with the Dutch at both an official and personal level and, later on in the 1930s, being genuinely disgusted by racial persecution, and deploring the "pagan nihilism of Hitler's pseudo-philosophy", while at the same time, like many non-Nazi Germans, attracted by the patriotic fervour of the Nazi movement. He died, still in exile, in 1941. In the author's conclusion, "William's tragedy was to have been 'bound', not merely to an army which cast him aside, but to an inherited system of government which sought to impress the people without winning their hearts..... He was not the inspired leader of the Reich, but a mirror of Germany's strength and weakness. Long ago Edward VII described his nephew as 'the most brilliant failure in history'. It was a cruel anticipatory epitaph. Unfortunately, for William and for Europe, it proved to be tragically apt." Excellent biography.

>97 john257hopper: Sold! I won’t be able to start it right away but I bought the ebook edition and hope to get to it before year’s end 🙂

58. The Library: An Illustrated History - Stuart A P Murray

This is a rich work exploring the history of libraries from ancient Assyria to the present day. This is an admirable and fascinating concept, and the book is richly illustrated, meriting its title, and is overall a pleasure to read. That said, the execution of the concept didn't entirely work for me. As well as being a history of libraries, their physical and literary development and the essential role of cataloguing, it also attempted to cover the history of writing and written media, with forays into publishing and bookbinding. All related of course, but it just often felt a bit too skating and a little over ambitious.

Most of the book moves chronologically through the history of libraries, with a spread of coverage across the world. There is an understandable US bias, given the work's origin, though as a Brit, I would have liked to see more coverage of British libraries outside London, Oxford and Cambridge. There are common themes of course and the saddest one is the destruction of numerous libraries across the world in warfare and invasion, but also through natural fires and sheer accident and attrition. The final section of the book consisted of potted accounts of prominent libraries across the world, arranged in no particular order as far as I could tell, and quite often with unnecessary duplication, such as quotes from library's mission statements which, as is often the nature of such statements, are very similar and usually not very revealing about what that particular library does. But overall this is a worthwhile read, and I am sure I will be coming back to it for reference and dipping into in future.

59. The Fire Next Time - James Baldwin

This is a pair of essays by the American writer and civil rights activist. The first and very much shorter one, "My Dungeon Shook" is a letter from the author to his namesake nephew on the centenary of the emancipation proclamation by Abraham Lincoln in 1863. He advises him that he "can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a n*****" (my ellipsis), and defines integration to mean that black people "with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it."

These themes are expanded in the much longer essay "Down at the Cross", which originally appeared in the "New Yorker" as "Letter from a Region in my Mind" in which he recounts how he sees the growth of black people's consciousness as they grow up in a white-dominated society; his absorption into, and then alienation from the black churches of his youth, and the salvation he thought he could find from the grim realities of life: "When I watched all the children, their copper, brown, and beige faces staring up at me as I taught Sunday school, I felt that I was committing a crime in talking about the gentle Jesus, in telling them to reconcile themselves to their misery on earth in order to gain the crown of eternal life." He says he realised that "the Bible had been written by white men. I knew that, according to many Christians, I was a descendant of Ham, who had been cursed, and that I was therefore predestined to be a slave. This had nothing to do with anything I was, or contained, or could become; my fate had been sealed for ever, from the beginning of time."

He spends much of the essay detailing his discussions and disagreements with the Nation of Islam, then led by Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X, an organisation which believed that all black people in the US should adopt Islam (or were really already Muslim, so a "readoption") and declare themselves an independent self-governing society. While he understands why the message of this organisation is so powerful and compelling, he cannot accept Elijah's contention that all white people are devils, saying that he "did not care if white and black people married, and that I had many white friends. I would have no choice, if it came to it, but to perish with them, for (I said to myself, but not to Elijah), ‘I love a few people and they love me and some of them are white, and isn’t love more important than colour?"

Baldwin concludes that one must "accept the fact, whatever one does with it thereafter, that the Negro has been formed by this nation, for better or for worse, and does not belong to any other – not to Africa, and certainly not to Islam. The paradox – and a fearful paradox it is – is that the American Negro can have no future anywhere, on any continent, as long as he is unwilling to accept his past." There is no alternative but to forge a single nation: "we, the black and the white, deeply need each other here if we are really to become a nation – if we are really, that is, to achieve our identity, our maturity, as men and women. To create one nation has proved to be a hideously difficult task; there is certainly no need now to create two, one black and one white". A hopeful message written at a time in the early 1960s when many struggles still had to be fought. Thought-provoking read.

60. The Lost King - Rafael Sabatini

This novel centres on the boy king Louis XVII of France, who never ruled in practice, as he was in prison at the time of his father Louis XVI's guillotining, and almost certainly tragically passed away two years later through abuse and neglect at the age of 10. There were several claimants who pretended to be him in subsequent years, but recent DNA tests on fragments of the boy's heart matched those of his mother Marie Antoinette's hair, so almost certainly he did not survive. In this novel, a Swiss farmer and clockmaker Charles Deslys is really the ex-boy king smuggled out of France. The drive of the narrative, however, is his being set up as a false King by those wanting to oppose the restored Bourbon king Louis XVIII, in particular the cynical political survivor Fouché, who has survived Royalist, Republican, Bonapartist and restored Royalist regimes. The irony is that Fouché initially doesn't realise in supporting Charles's claim that he is in fact the real McCoy. Or is he, after all? Until quite late in the narrative, the story seemed to me to leave some room for doubt about Delsys's absolute true identity. In any case, at the conclusion, Napoleon is making his dramatic return from his Elban exile, and Delsys is absolutely delighted to be able to give up his pretensions and return to his simple life in Switzerland with the woman he loves.

61. Casino Royale - Ian Fleming

This was the first James Bond novel, written in 1952, and the first I have ever read. James Bond has become such a British icon through the films that it is difficult to discern the original written character from the shadow cast by the actors playing the role over the last 60 years. To my mind, there is little doubt that, if the Bond films had never existed, Fleming's novels would not now be read, except by hardcore readers of Cold War spy fiction. I thought this was quite well written though, with some dramatic and sometimes quite horrible incidents. Too much, to my taste, of the first half or so was taken up with the rules of card playing in the eponymous gambling establishment, where Bond has to bankrupt and discredit a Soviet agent, "Le Chiffre". He succeeds, but is then kidnapped and brutally tortured by the agent before being rescued by an unlikely source. Le Chiffre is killed, and we are only about two thirds of the way through. Much of the final third seems rather tame and non-descript, until the very dramatic twist in the final chapter (no spoilers here). All in all enjoyable and I will read some of the others.

62 and 63. Henry IV, Part I and Part II - William Shakespeare

These are some of the Bard's most famous historical plays. Part I contains quite a bit of comedy particularly from Sir John Falstaff and Mistress Quickly and some good politicking in the civil war between the king and his opponents, but somehow it did not quite gel as a whole for me.

I thought Part II was noticeably inferior to Part I. The comedy grated on me more in this half and I just found it more irritating - what on earth is Act II, Scene IV all about, for example? The politics wasn't so much to the fore. King Henry's death scene was quite moving - he really does not rate his son at all, and indeed this pair of plays could be said to be rather unfair on the reputation of the future king Henry V.

>102 john257hopper: I've read through the James Bond series a couple times and each time, I've come away with an entirely different take. The first time, I was convinced that Fleming was being deliberately provocative by writing some "politically incorrect" sentiments. Later, I blew right past those same passages, writing it off to the times. But the last time, I listened to the celebrity-narrated versions and was surprised to realize that I may have read them wrong! In any event, Dan Stevens (Casino Royale) was able to create a hugely sympathetic character in Bond.
What I like about the books is that they don't shy away from the vicissitudes of the life in the service. You never who is going to get hurt or how bad-- which keeps the tension in the plots. Later on, they do a get a bit more "Hollywoody" but they are still enormous fun :-)

>103 john257hopper: I love reading Shakespeare's plays, especially the Histories! I won't natter needlessly on but I've often thought that scene was presented differently than the way we read it, like it was a fully developed bit of comic business off to the side and that the main character(s) would walk through and emerge on to the stage, creating a false wing for the stars to enter from. It is admittedly odd though, a huge distraction in the sequence of events.
As for Henry V getting a bad rep, it gives him street cred when he redeems himself-- though how he treats Falstaff later...

>104 Tanya-dogearedcopy: Thanks for engaging with my reviews, Tanya, appreciated :).

I will continue to read the Bond series over time. I will probably also read Henry V quite soon as well, as I am listening to a historical podcast which covered Henry IV last week and is moving on his son next week :)

64. Lion City: Singapore and the Invention of Modern Asia - Jeevan Vasagar

I have been reading this book about the history of Singapore, in the run up to, on the plane, and while on a holiday to this tiny island state. The author is a Financial Times correspondent who grew up there after his father fled political turmoil in Sri Lanka. The book covers the origins of the city state, the root causes of its split with Malaysia, and how the current ethnic make up has grown up and developed over time. It describes how the economy has developed from poverty to prosperity in a very short space of time in terms of historical nation-building, through the seeming paradox of encouraging enterprise by providing favourable conditions for business development such as low taxes and government loans, while also having a very "top down" approach to regimenting the people's social life.

The main driver for the latter has been the perceived need to ensure the unity of the multiethnic society in face of (some) real and (probably more) perceived political threats. There has been a broad consensus in effect that "Material comfort in exchange for circumscribed politics is a deal that most Singaporeans have been willing to tolerate". The author posits that "From the 1950s onwards, Western theorists proposed that prosperity is the midwife of liberty. As a country becomes well-to-do, the growth of an urban working class and the expansion of education systems to meet new economic needs brings with it political change, they argued. That has certainly been the case elsewhere in Asia. In South Korea and Taiwan, traditional elites yielded in the face of pressure from trade unions and student movements". On the other hand, "while Singapore’s economic success has brought with it potentially disruptive social change, its ruling elite has largely succeeded in assimilating or quashing threats to its dominance."

Of course there are limits to this, and as education levels increase and more and more Singaporeans are outward facing, the author believes the elites will have to come to a new accommodation and move on from a situation where any dissent is seen as an existential threat to the unity and health of society. The election of 10 opposition Workers Party MPs in the election of 2020 may be the first step towards this as their leader was for the first time recognised as the official Leader of the Opposition.

Singapore's international position is a curious one. Philosophically and socially conservative, they have always been allied with the West, in particular the US, but also being a tiny Chinese majority country, surrounded by larger countries including of course China itself, they have had to tread a fine line, largely successfully.

I may have made this book sound drier and more "textbook" like than it actually is. It's full of fascinating nuggets and stories about the history of this paradoxical but, in my view, rather wonderful very tiny country.

65. Inspector Singh Investigates: A Most Peculiar Malaysian Murder - Shamini Flint

This is the first book in a series starring a Sikh inspector in the Singapore police. In this story, he is seconded over the border to Malaysia to assist a Singapore model Chelsea Liew, who is accused of murdering her Malaysian Chinese husband Alan Lee after a bitter custody battle, which culminates in him converting to Islam in order to gain custody of his children. There are needless to say, a plethora of suspects, both of Alan's brothers, his elder son, a girlfriend and possibly others. The final resolution of the mystery touches on the Lee company's activities in Borneo, encroaching on native people's ancestral forests. I like Inspector Singh and I also liked the colorful cast of characters involved and the feel for Malaysian life, landscapes and attitudes. I will definitely pursue this series.

66. The Garden of Evening Mists - Tan Twan Eng

This is the second book I have read by this Malaysian author, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2012. Teoh Yun Ling is a judge in Kuala Lumpur retiring one day in the late 1980s, and the novel is set partly during the Second World War when she was a Japanese prisoner of war, and partly in 1951 when she was learning the art of Japanese horticulture from Nakamura Aritomo, a Japanese expert who remained in Malaya during the war. As was the case with The House of Doors, I found the flitting between timelines sometimes confusing, especially as this sometimes happened in section breaks on consecutive pages. Nevertheless, I love the poetical writing style of this author. This is above all, a novel about memory and its loss over time, as shown by Teoh trying to come to terms with her memories of wartime torture and privation in a slave labour camp, her memories of her younger sister who was forced to work in the labour camp brothel and who was killed along with almost all the other prisoners when Japan lost the war, and her mother's progressive dementia as she retreats in her mind from the memory of losing her daughter. Despite all this sadness and tragedy, and a number of other deaths and suffering during the communist-inspired State of Emergency in the 1950s, I found this an inspiring and thought-provoking read, at least partly because I was reading it on holiday in Malaysia and finished it on my return from a day trip to Cameron Highlands, where the 1951 strand of the story is set.

67. The China Bride - Amanda Nairn

Hang Li-Poh was a Chinese princess who married into the dynasty of the sultans of Melaka (Malacca) in the 15th century, thus forming an alliance between the most powerful polity on the Malayan peninsula of the time with the mighty Chinese Empire to the north. Or at least this is according to the Malay Annals, though there are no references to her in the Chinese Ming dynasty records, or in those of the Portuguese who conquered Melaka in 1511, so she may be a mere myth, or possibly confusion for a slightly earlier Chinese woman who married into the Melakan sultanate.

Anyway, this fictionalised version of the Chinese Princess starts off as a pawn in the expansion plans of her brother the Emperor when she goes to Melaka to form a marriage alliance that will make the Sultanate subordinate to the Empire, and put her putative son on the Melakan throne. However she soon realises the Melakans are not a pushover and have their own distinct and worthy culture and society, plus unexpectedly she forms a genuine loving bond as the fifth wife of the Sultan Mansur Shah. She must negotiate between the court factions surrounding the other four wives, and the delicate relationships between the Chinese community of the 500 strong party who accompanied her and the existing population. After various turns of fortune's wheel, the Princess rises and falls but is a survivor and looks back on her life in the 1500 postscript just as the Portuguese land and storm the city.

68. Harold Harefoot - Mark Craster-Chambers

This short work covers the little that is known about King Harold I Harefoot, a son of the much more famous King Canute. The author makes a good and fairly persuasive attempt to resurrect in part his reputation from the very negative and self justificatory historical narrative dictated by his stepmother Queen Emma, in her Encomium. That said, like his other work on Eadred, I found the writing style a bit frivolous in places and there was again a large number of typos for such a short work.

69. The End of Eternity - Isaac Asimov

This is one of Asimov's standalone SF novels, though by implication it may take place in an alternate version to the universe where the Foundation saga takes place. The Eternals are an elite who exist outside Time, but are recruited from the ranks of suitable ordinary human beings, and who supervise the numerous centuries of human history and make adjustments to them to push them along what they believe to be desirable pathways, thus creating numerous different versions of Reality for each century, differing to a greater or lesser experience from each other. Being godlike beings, Eternals are supposed to not be too involved in human emotions but one of their number, Andrew Harlan, falls in love with a woman he encounters Noys Lambert and is prepared to risk even destroying Eternity to have her. But there is more to Noys that meets the eye in the end. This is a high concept novel, full of mind boggling ideas about time travel and the nature of reality and cause and effect, though the hard science of course reflects the the fact that it was written and published in the mid 1950s. The characters are weak - Asimov, as so often, is much less good at creating believable characters than he is at concept forming and world building

70. The King's Mother: Lady Elfrida: England's First Queen - M J Porter

This is the first of a trilogy of novels about the queenship of this Saxon lady who is most famous as the alleged murderer in 978 of her step son King Edward (the Martyr) in favour of her son, Ethelred (the future Unready), though this author considers her innocent of this charge. The subtitle derives from the fact that as the third wife of King Edgar she was the first consort to be crowned, alongside her husband at his belated coronation.

The action of this novel begins shortly after Ethelred becomes king and she is one of the members of the Regency Council (the author has written an earlier trilogy of novels about Elfrida which it would have been better to have read beforehand). But the boy king grows up fast and declares himself fit to rule but, at least in Elfrida's eyes, falls under the sway of evil counsellors. The action of this novel ends in 984 when the king banishes his mother from court.

While well researched, and despite my fascination with the Anglo Saxon period, I didn't enjoy this novel that much, partly as I thought the writing was fairly average, though probably more due to the numerous typos and errors in the text. In particular, and this really irritates me, the author, or perhaps a typesetter, has no understanding of the correct use of apostrophes. This infuriated me and reduced my enjoyment of the story a fair bit. Not sure I will read the rest of the trilogy, or the author's other works.

71. Never Greater Slaughter: Brunanburh and the Birth of England - Michael Livingston

This is an excellent analysis of the evidence for and historical background of the Medieval battle of Brunanburh, where the Saxon king Athelstan defeated a combined force of Scots, Irish and Vikings. While little known compared to other famous battles in English and British history, and with its exact site lost for over a millennium, it was actually a very decisive battle that changed the course of English history. As the author says, "if the English had been defeated at Brunanburh, if the alliance to topple Athelstan had won, the map of the British Isles would have been irrevocably altered.... Athelstan had placed the entirety of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms under one rule. Others before him may have dreamed of it, but Athelstan had made it real. He made – of West Saxons and Mercians and all the rest – an English people". Now after his death two years later, the Vikings made a resurgence and were far from finished, so "it wasn’t a lasting victory for England, but it was a victory that meant England could last". Its significance lies in the fact that "In one day, on one field, England came of age." Just as when a person comes of age at 18 or 21, it doesn't usually mean that they act like an adult consistently from that day on, I would say.

While the site of this decisive battle has been disputed, there are two main contenders (plus a few others that seem to be individual hobby horses) - the Wirral, in North West England, and the Humber in North East England. Using textual, practical military, geographical and archaeological evidence, Livingston makes for me a pretty definite case for the Wirral. Particularly as I think placing the Dublin Vikings on the other side of the country in October 937 doesn't seem to fit with what we know or can reasonably surmise about their other movements the summer of that year. And there have been archaeological finds of weapons and metal objects there in sufficient quantities to point to a great battle.

This was an excellent and enjoyable read about a battle that, wherever exactly it took place, definitely deserves to be better known - in a foreword by Bernard Cornwell, the famous novelist of these times, he says "Brunanburh is as significant an engagement as the battle of Yorktown in 1781 and, just as Yorktown established the existence of a United States of America, so Brunanburh sealed the creation of England".

72. Conclave: A Novel - Robert Harris

I love a political thriller, especially based around elections, and I found this novel about the election of a fictional successor to a recently deceased Pope very gripping, the different personalities and factions providing plenty of food for speculation. Harris appears to have researched the arcane procedures thoroughly and says in his acknowledgement he interviewed off the record a Cardinal who had taken part in at least one conclave. Harris can indeed make almost any background into an effective thriller, as the breadth of his work shows. I partly guessed the final twist part way through, though was a little disappointed as this seemed a little farfetched in practice.

73. Complete Works of Sappho - Sappho

This collection consists of three translations of the surviving fragments of the ancient Greek poetess Sappho. Only one complete poem survives by her, and that a short one. Even from many of the intriguing fragments consisting of only a line or a few words, her use of imagery is impressive. What a pity we have probably less than one tenth of her original corpus, and much of that second hand through the reporting of later writers.

The three translations here, from 1907, 1910 and 2011, are very different, with the fragments divided differently and in different orders, so it is rather hard for an amateur like me to see how they relate to each other. Still this is a remarkable collection of words penned over two and a half millennia ago.

74. Holmes and Moriarty: The new official Sherlock Holmes novel - Gareth Rubin

This is a very recently published Sherlock Holmes spin off novel. The Great Detective and Watson must ally themselves with their great enemy Professor Moriarty and his sidekick Colonel Sebastian Moran to defeat an even greater menace to the world than the latter pair represents. This menace concerns the poisonous venom of a host of deadly green spiders and a plot to use this venom to somehow conquer the world through giving certain leading individuals superior powers deriving from this venom, with, to boot, a ridiculous Princes in the Tower/overthrowing Queen Victoria subplot. I thought for a Sherlock Holmes story the plot was a mess - it would work for a Jules Verne novel, but doesn't work in this context for me. I didn't care for the narrative structure either, with alternate chapters told by Moran in a very different voice jarring with Watson's familiar tone.

The timing is also a problem, as this story clearly takes place before The Final Problem - and yet in that latter story, Watson has never seen nor heard of Moriarty. Why do so many authors overuse Moriarty when he was only directly in that one original Conan Doyle story? I mean I understand at one level, but it gets tired. I thought the characterisation of Holmes and Watson was quite good but this was not enough to lift this mess for me, and I can't give it more than 3/5, and in that I feel I may well be being too generous.

>114 john257hopper: Must try another Robert Harris. I really liked An Officer and a Spy, which was about the Dreyfus affair. Will not try Holmes and Moriarty though. Thanks for the warning.

>117 pamelad: I've read most of his novels, and An Officer and a Spy was a standout one. I also loved Fatherland and the Cicero trilogy.

75. The Witch's Head - H Rider Haggard

This was a less well known and early work by Rider Haggard. It is slightly oddly titled, as the eponymous appendage hardly features, only when it is found early on in the book, and then again right at the end when its apparent true role becomes clear. The great bulk of the the novel is a story of bitter and estranged family and business relationships, and a more traditional Haggard-esque tale of derring do in battle during the Zulu wars, in which only our hero Ernest Kershaw and his loyal sidekick Jeremy Jones survive from their regiment, alongside their loyal Zulu servant Mazooku. So rather uneven, but nevertheless, I mostly enjoyed this.

76. The Case of the Married Woman: Caroline Norton: A 19th Century Heroine Who Wanted Justice for Women - Antonia Fraser

"From time immemorial, changes in the laws of nations have been brought about by individual examples of oppression. Such examples cannot be unimportant, for they are, and ever will be, the little hinges on which the great doors of justice are made to turn." This was the example that early 19th century author and fighter for the rights of married women Caroline Norton saw herself as fulfilling, as she expressed in this quote from her Letter to the Queen of 1855. Married as teenager to George Norton, Caroline (the granddaughter of the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan) soon fell foul of her husband's violent rages whenever he did not get his own way. At this time, the 1830s, a husband had absolute authority over his children, and in the event of marital breakdown, custody was granted to a mother only in extreme cases (for example when a father was in prison about to be transported to Australia). The irony was that, notwithstanding Victorian morality, an unmarried mother had more rights over her children than a married mother. In due course, Caroline's efforts led to the law being changed so that the default position would be that children under the age of 7 would be in the mother's custody (Infant Custody Act 1839). Further, despite being a successful writer, in law Caroline's earnings from her work belonged to her husband. In time, her efforts led to the law being changed so a married woman could own her earnings from business (Married Women's Property Act 1870), and so that the grounds for divorce were made somewhat fairer (the Matrimonial Causes Act 1857).

Mostly before all these developments, though, Caroline became famous through her association with a notorious court case in 1836 where her husband accused her of adultery (then called "criminal conversation") with no less than the Prime Minister Lord Melbourne. It is undoubtedly true that she was very close to him, and there were surely some reasonable grounds for outsiders to suppose an affair (and her mother thought she was Melbourne's mistress), though the court found it was merely "great familiarity", a conclusion with which the author agrees, so the court acquitted Melbourne of adultery with her (again, as a married woman, she could not be sued by her husband, so, in effect, Melbourne was being sued for depriving George Norton of his wife's services). Caroline and Melbourne clearly had great mutual affection, though they became more distant after the accession to the throne of Queen Victoria the year after the trial, when the new young monarch relied heavily on her Prime Minister's advice (even to the extent of still seeking his advice after he was replaced as Prime Minister ater a few years by the Tory Robert Peel).

Caroline's later life was less dramatic though tinged by frustration as she was still tied in marriage to George Norton, and even more by sadness due to the fates of her children, her youngest son Willie who died in an accident aged 9 and her eldest son Fletcher who died of consumption aged 30. Tragically, her middle son Brinsley, only outlived his mother by a few weeks, dying also of consumption at the age of 46. That said, she found some happiness and peace of mind in her last few months by marrying Sir William Stirling-Maxwell, ten years her junior. Many of her novels and pamphlets sound fascinating and Caroline Norton should be better known as both an author and pioneer of female equality.

77. Enemies: A Love Story - Isaac Bashevis Singer

I had never read anything by this author before, but this was an interesting, humorous and slightly frustrating story. Herman Broder is a Holocaust survivor in New York in the early 1950s. His wife Tamara and their children were killed by the Nazis and he now lives in an apartment with Yadwiga, a Polish peasant woman who saved his life by hiding him in her hayloft for three years. At the same time though, Herman is having an affair with Masha, another Holocaust survivor, who is separated from her husband and living with her mother. As if this wasn't complicated enough, he finds out that Tamara has managed to survive (though sadly not their children). She is now in New York too, and living with her uncle and aunt. He must dodge between these three women, and this throws up a range of humorous sitcom-like situations, though with a blackly comedic tinge as the characters are mentally scarred by their wartime experiences, feeling survivor guilt and often deep scepticism of their religion for "allowing" the Holocaust to happen. A number of them characters veer between a determination to create new lives and relationships, and suicidal ideation or reckless promiscuity. I enjoyed seeing how things would turn out, but I found the ending a bit disappointing and ambiguous. I would read more by this author.

78. Wieland - Charles Brockden Brown

This 1798 novel has been described as the first American gothic novel. The language is very dense and complicated and it took me some 5 days to read despite being only 200 pages long. The story involves the relationships between a small group of mostly related people and some bizarre incidents over disembodied voices and strange flashes that drive the group apart and lead to tragedy. I found the solution to the mystery rather unclear and unconvincing, and wasn't sure what to make of Carwin's role. The last few pages about the story of some minor characters was an odd way to end the book as well.

79. Death Keeps His Court: The Rule of Richard II - Anselm Audley

This short book recounts the traumatic and violent events of the middle of Richard II's reign, when leading nobles and members of the king's own family (the Lords Appellant) turned against the favourites whom they considered to be responsible for corrupting the king. These favourites were mostly genuine friends of the king, and he was intensely loyal to them, but this otherwise admirable trait extended to letting them break the law with impunity. Richard's problem was that he had an absolutist vision of his role as king that clashed with the nascent parliamentary democracy and rule of law, combined with fatal personality flaws. In the author's conclusion. "Richard's personality warped the politics of his reign from beginning to end. In small groups of close friends he inspired great loyalty; in his country he inspired fear, resentment ans mistrust". While he was forced to abandon his favourites in 1388, Richard took a terrible vengeance against the Lords Appellant just under a decade later. Two years later his reign ended in ignominy at the hands of his cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, the future king Henry IV. While his end may inspire some sympathy, Richard was a tyrant and clearly temperamentally unsuited to power.

80. Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist - Charles Brockden Brown

This short unfinished work written in the very early 1800s is the author's prequel to his most noted novel Wieland, published a few years earlier. It concerns the back story of one of the main three protagonists in that novel, Carwin, including how he developed his ability to imitate and throw voices. Carwin falls in with the mysterious Ludloe/Ludlow (the spelling varies during the book) who seems to be the key to some strange secret society, whose aims are rather unclear. It's all rather confusing and ends abruptly.

81. Paths of the Norseman - Jason Born

This is the second in the author's series of novels centred on the exploits of a fictional Viking, Halldorr Olafsson, whose tale is weaved into a narrative drawn from the Norse Sagas. In this one Halldorr is part of the group moving from Greenland to find more favourable lands further west and alighting on the coasts of what is now eastern Canada and the north eastern United States. I found this one a little more uneven than the first book, but still a very good read, with some impressive and sometimes horrific set piece scenes, and colourful characters. Born is a good writer and does his research well. It's eight years between my reading of the first and second books, but I will read the third volume in the series much sooner.

82. The Phantom of the Opera - Gaston Leroux

This is by far the author's most famous novel, though this is largely due to its many and often very famous adaptations, from a now lost German film in 1916, though Lon Chaney's iconic 1925 film portrayal to Andrew Lloyd Webber's famous stage musical. I first read this in 1998 but had completely forgotten the detail, and have never, to the best of my recall, seen any adaptation of it. It has its moments of humour and horror, but overall I found it not very satisfying and the characters sometimes rather annoying. I prefer the author's locked-room The Mystery of the Yellow Room. That said, this deserves to be acknowledged as a classic of Gothic literature, albeit at the lighter end of the scale. At one point, the "ghost" is compared to the figure of death in Poe's much darker The Masque of the Red Death.

83. The Three Doctors - Terrance Dicks

This is a novelisation of the first Doctor Who TV story to feature multiple doctors, to commemorate the 10th anniversary season of the TV show in 1973. First Doctor William Hartnell was too unwell to make a full appearance, only taking part by offering advice from the TARDIS scanner screen. This novel doesn't expand greatly on the TV show, but adds extra colour to some of the characters' back stories and also adds more detail to Omega's world and the battles with the Gel Guards, which look and sound fairly risible on screen. The unique feeling of hopelessness the doctors feel when initially trying to work out how to defeat Omega was brought across well.

84. Kidnapped - Robert Louis Stevenson

This is a re-read of this classic adventure novel, probably Robert Louis Stevenson's second best known full length novel after Treasure Island. I think I actually prefer this one. The pace is pretty consistent throughout the narrative set in 1751 a few years after the Jacobite rebellion, as we follow David Balfour from his sojourn with his miserly uncle Ebenezer, to his betrayal and capture onboard a ship taking captives to slavery in Carolina ("with the rebellion of the colonies and the formation of the United States, it has of course come to an end; but in those days of my youth, white men were still sold into slavery on the plantations, and that was the destiny to which my wicked uncle had condemned me"). On this voyage, he partners with Alan Breck Stuart and is involved in a shipwreck, facilitating his escape. However, he suffers near starvation and then wanders cold, desperate and lonely through the Highlands (..I could drag myself but little further; pretty soon, I must lie down and die on these wet mountains like a sheep or a fox, and my bones must whiten there like the bones of a beast."). He encounters various colourful and usually shifty characters, and is reunited with Alan Breck. He is finally restored to his inheritance with his uncle being confronted and his role in his nephew's kidnapping exposed. On the final page, in the unaccustomed bustle of the city of Edinburgh, David is bewildered by the "huge heights of the buildings, running up to ten and fifteen storeys, the narrow arched entries that continually vomited passengers, the wares of the merchants in their windows, the hubbub and endless stir, the foul smells and the fine clothes, and a hundred other particulars too small to mention, struck me into a kind of stupor of surprise." Great stuff.

85. Poppy Field - Michael Morpurgo

This is a short and heartwarming story published in 2018 for the centenary of the end of the First World War, aimed at younger readers to explain how and why poppies became the symbol of remembrance, especially (but by no means exclusively, of course) associated with that specific conflict. It is the 2010s and a young Belgian boy Martens is told a story by his grandfather of how his own mother Marie handed poppies to English soldiers from the trenches camping around the family farm. It's a nice story, but there is a significant problem with the timeline, as the grandfather's own stated age of 60 is too young to fit in with the dates of his parents' marriage and his birth a decade or so after the war, and the near contemporary life of young Martens, whose father died in 2005 when he was very young. The book is complemented by an account by a Royal British Legion senior officer of the real history of the poppy as a symbol of remembrance, which was conceived by an American lady Moina Michael and popularised in Britain in the two to three years after the war by a Frenchwoman Anna Guérin before being formally adopted by the RBL in 1921.

86. War Horse - Michael Morpurgo

This is one of Morpurgo's most famous books now thanks to film and stage versions, but the book came out back in 1982. Obviously aimed at younger readers, it nevertheless tells the story from Joey the horse's point of view without undue sentimentality, his life on a farm in Devon, his being taken by the British Expeditionary Force to France in summer 1914, and how young Albert follows him to war when he is old enough. Joey is owned by various groups of soldiers on both British and German sides, hauls gun carriages, rescues the wounded and sees a lot of action and, of course, death and destruction. The narrative brings across the necessary historical background without undue effort and tells a great story where the reader is keen to know what happens next.

87. Catriona - Robert Louis Stevenson

This is the less famous sequel to the author's renowned thriller Kidnapped. This is a direct sequel in fact, with the action starting at the same point Kidnapped ends. Most of the book is taken up with David Balfour's efforts to clear James Stewart's name of involvement in the Appin murder. The final third of the novel concerns David and the eponymous lady's travels in Holland and France in a will they-won't they get together situation, and mostly avoiding her father, James More. Frankly I found this novel nowhere near as dramatic and readable as Kidnapped, and rather dull in places. Also there was even more impenetrable Scots dialogue in this one that was sometimes hard to follow. One for completists only really (though it's satisfying that David gains his inheritance after his treacherous uncle Ebenezer dies).

88. The Road to Culloden Moor: Bonnie Prince Charlie and the '45 Rebellion - Diana Preston

This is a colourful and very readable account of the life of Prince Charles Stuart, the Young Pretender, and his doomed attempt in 1745-6 to recapture the throne from the unpopular Hanoverian king George II. Charles was born in Italy and had never visited the country over which he claimed sovereignty at that time. While Charles Stuart was almost the epitome of a romantic leader whose followers would die for him, he lacked the necessary grasp of strategy and tactics to execute a successful invasion. He made a number of key misjudgements: relying on French support which was never forthcoming (though that was not truly his fault); underestimating the military strength of the British government, as he appears to have assumed many British soldiers would not fight him as they would recognise him as their rightful king; and overestimating the willingness and capacity of both Scottish Lowlanders and English Jacobites to rise up in his favour. More generally, while the country didn't much like the Hanoverian rulers, the economy was expanding and the country was richer, and simply too many people had too much of a stake in this society to risk supporting a Jacobite invasion and rebellion, even if they may have sympathised with Charles Stuart's cause.

All this said, he did attract considerable early success, winning a military victory at Prestonpans, capturing Edinburgh and later, after crossing into England, easily capturing Carlisle and famously marching as far south as Derby. But it was not sustainable, and the government, after being initially caught on the hop, had amassed considerable forces to oppose the Young Pretender. The idealistic Charles was frequently at loggerheads with his more hardheaded chiefs who realised the advance could not be sustained and the support for his challenge just not wide or deep enough. The last few chapters tell the bloody story of the battle of Culloden itself, a battle that lasted only 30 minutes but which presaged the bloody suppression of the Highlanders and their whole way of life, including breaking up the clan system and even banning tartans, plaids and kilts for decades. And, of course, Charles's retreat and wanderings through the Hebrides and the role of Flora Macdonald. After he eventually slipped away from Scotland, eluding his pursuers, he spent the remaining 40 plus years of his life (he was only 25/26 at the time of the invasion), bitterly regretting his failures and turning increasingly to alcohol. His is a fascinating and colourful and tragic story though.

89. George Silverman's Explanation - Charles Dickens

This short story is narrated by the title character in old age man recalling the grinding poverty of his childhood in a cellar in Preston and the early deaths of his parents from fever. He is rescued and discovers the delights of having his immediate needs satisfied ("I told him that I didn’t feel cold, and didn’t feel hungry, and didn’t feel thirsty. That was the whole round of human feelings, as far as I knew, except the pain of being beaten."). He next grows up in a sort of religious community run by Brother Hawkyard and Brother Gimblet in a section that reads like a parody of certain millenarian religious sects. Later he acts as a tutor to a young girl with whom he falls in love, but later matchmakes for her with a young man he is also educating. This last section was more conventional than the more hard-hitting and satirical earlier sections.

>88 john257hopper: LOL, I was introduced to this little corner of history about 30 years ago when I read ‘A Stitch in Time’— which has since been re-titled as Outlander. I re-read Gabaldon’s first-in-series every few years and am about due to pick it up again soon! Preston’s book will be a great background read. 🙂

Ooh! The ebook is on sale! I feel like it’s book destiny!

90. The Complete Stories Volume I - Isaac Asimov

This is a rich collection of Asimov short stories all published in the mid to late 1950s. Many of these stories I read first in the 1980s as a student and they created a great impression on me, in particular The Dead Past (the first Asimov short I ever read, I think), Franchise, Living Space, and Satisfaction Guaranteed in particular; also some of the less substantial ones such as The Fun They Had and Someday. A fair few of the stories I found I had not read before, whereas previously I thought I had pretty much read all of his earlier short stories. The collection closes with the mindblowing The Last Question, which I believe was Asimov's own favourite of his short stories.

A modern reader in the 21st century unfamiliar with Asimov's work would be struck by the unfuturistic technology of Multivac, and computers being all analogue, with valves, and nothing digital nor a silicon chip in sight. Also, as is so often with Golden Age SF, there are virtually no female characters with agency in any of the stories. And almost everyone smokes and has the social attitudes of a mid 20th century American male. I say these things not to criticise the stories at all - they are mostly wonderful. But, as ever, SF writing often says as much if not more about the time it was written than the time it is set. A great collection.

91. Lethbridge-Stewart: The Forgotten Son - Andy Frankham-Allen

This was the first in a series of spin-off Doctor novels starring the then Colonel Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, later a Brigadier and the head of UNIT, the international organisation that fights alien invasions. This novel takes place immediately after the TV story The Web of Fear in which he first appeared, and straightaway the recently defeated Great Intelligence is back again for another round, controlling more robotic Yeti, this time removed from the London Underground and threatening a Cornish village. This village also happens to be the almost forgotten birthplace of Lethbridge-Stewart himself, and the plot features his mother, and forgotten brother who died young. Also back from The Web of Fear were the luckless involuntary agent of the Intelligence, Staff Sergeant Arnold, and the cowardly Driver Evans. I found the links between the various characters and the embodiment of the Intelligence sometimes a little confusing. Overall, while it was great to see the Brig given star billing in his own story, his personality here didn't always ring true, in particular his engagement to Corporal Sally Wright and his informal interaction with her while they are both on duty. I will pursue the series though for sure.

92. Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990 - Katja Hoyer

The author of this brilliant account was born in the former East Germany (GDR) in 1985, and is now a naturalised British citizen and writer in German history. As such, being born in the country and thereby having the family cultural background, but not having been old enough to form substantive memories and views, she is perhaps particularly well placed to cover this topic with sensitivity but without a massive axe to grind. Apparently, when the book was translated into German (yes she wrote the book in English despite her origin), the book was not as well received in her country of birth, with some reviewers claiming she was too pro-GDR. The reader can make up their own mind. She covers the whole history, not only political, and biographical with the roles of Wilhelm Pieck, Walter Ulbricht, Erich Honecker and Erich Mielke, but also economic, social and cultural. The narrative is also studded with personal recollections from ordinary GDR citizens from a wide variety of backgrounds, adding colour and depth to the main narrative. She certainly does not shrink from coverage of the lack of democracy, transparency and opportunities for political participation and travel, nor the repellent surveillance culture of the notorious Stasi. But at the same time, she acknowledges that East German society had some strengths, such as social mobility and educational opportunities for the working class, and opportunities for women through the provision of childcare, which exceeded that in West Germany at the time. For some East Germans, those maybe not motivated by politics or a desire for travel, but looking for economic security and provision for their families, the "package" no doubt seemed very attractive.

Of course the contradictions rose to a head in the mid to late 80s, and the final collapse of the GDR regime, along those in most of the rest of Eastern Europe, was stunningly quick and almost incredible, as I well remember observing the events as a young man just out of university. And the reunification of Germany was almost as quick - and many people would say in hindsight, probably too quick, given the failure to properly integrate East Germans into the new polity, which has resulted in economic and social inequality between the two uneven "halves" even to this day. A great and very readable account.

Two novellas by George Eliot:

93. The Lifted Veil

This short Gothic story is very unlike Eliot's other work. It is a horror and paranormal novella. The central character Latimer, after falling ill, acquires an unwelcome inability to see into people's minds and see their real unmediated thoughts and feelings, and also anticipate some future actions they will take. This "gift" rapidly makes his life hell. The writing here is dense and doomladen, and quite horrific in places, with an atmosphere redolent in places of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and even in my view the less well known very early American author Charles Brockden Brown's novel Wieland. This novella showcases the diversity of Eliot's writing.

94. Brother Jacob

This is a humorous novella about a young man call David Faux who wants to run a sweet shop when he grows up, steals some money from his mother and deceives the title character who is his brother and has, in more modern parlance, severe learning difficulties. In the second chapter he is back as an adult with a false name and setting up his shop. Establishing himself in his business under his new identity and denying his real relatives, he courts a local girl. But then Brother Jacob turns up and greets him affectionately and, after initial unconvincing denials, he is exposed and has to leave town and abandon his new business and wife-to-be. Thus Jacob is unwittingly, but quite deservedly, the instrument of his deceitful brother's disgrace.

95. The Pickwick Murders - Heather Redmond

This is the fourth in the author's series of whodunnits featuring the young Charles Dickens, on the cusp of publishing his first major work Sketches by Boz. One of these sketches (well worth reading) concerns an earlier visit he paid to Newgate prison and his impressions of the place and the unfortunates incarcerated in there. Charles gets an unwelcome opportunity to experience this at closer hand when he is falsely accused of murder and imprisoned. His alleged crime? The murder of prominent scientist Samuel Pickwick, President of the Lightning Club, after Charles is lured to their premises with the deceptive promise of membership of the exclusive club if he passes a strange initiation rite, at the conclusion of which he is instead caught covered in blood after he discovers the rotund President's murdered body. The reason for this miscarriage of justice seems to be that he has angered Sir Augustus Smirke, the newly elected MP for Eatenswill, after a negative Morning Chronicle article on his election. This always seemed rather flimsy and indeed the final explanation is more complicated and involves an old enemy the author made on a previous case. Of course, his fiancée Kate and friends work tirelessly for his release and exposure of the real murderer. Overall though, this was my least favourite of the series, and the whole thing just seemed so implausible and rather unsatisfying. I think I am cooling on this series.

96. Stasi Vice: An East German Crime Novel - Max Hertzberg

This is the first in a series of novels featuring Lieutenant Reim of the Stasi, set in Berlin in 1983. Reim is set a task by his boss to cover up the traces of an affair he (the boss, that is) is having, which needless to say turns out to be far more complicated and also involves Reim's estranged ex-wife. The writing style is quite sparse and grim, and neither Reim nor any of the other characters elicit reader sympathy. The author worked on the Stasi archives in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall and, according to his website, has also worked as a co-operative development worker and book seller before taking up writing. While all this obviously gives him a direct perspective on the ethos of the times in 1980s East Germany, I can't say I enjoyed it as much as David Young's Karin Muller series, as that had more rounded character development. I may pick up the next in this series though as I am fascinated by stories set in totalitarian societies.

97. Shed No Tears: A short story from the last days of the GDR - Max Hertzberg

This is a short story by the author of the Lieutenant Reim and East Berlin series of novels, downloaded for free from his website. It is 27 September 1989 and Katrin is a high school girl who, despite getting good grades, is denied entry to university as her father Martin is involved in opposition reform protests. That very day she is planning to escape to the West with her boyfriend using the recently available route into Austria via Hungary. The story simply recounts her day, trying to go about normally and not attract any attention, being unable to say goodbye to friends in case of betrayal or risking those friends' own safety, and self-consciously avoiding talking about it to her father, who wants to stay and try to achieve political reform, in case their flat is bugged. In only 14 pages it encapsulates much of what life in East Germany was like in the 1980s.

>141 john257hopper: The irony of untold numbers of East Germans who planned their escapes months, weeks, even days before the border was opened!

Do you need to sign up for the author’s newsletter to get the story? I didn’t see the story on the web-site but maybe I missed it?)

>142 Tanya-dogearedcopy: Hi Tanya, yes I think you do need to sign up. Slightly annoyingly the Kindle and epub links were dead, so I had to download it as a pdf.

98. Supping with Panthers - Tom Holland

This is a loose sequel to the author's The Vampyre: the secret history of Lord Byron, though, after a very strong start, I thought it lost its way and ended up being too long. The first section is set in the partly fictional Indian state of Kalikshutra where the population is subjected to a terrible disease of the blood, and which is regarded with shock and revulsion by the inhabitants of neighbouring areas. The much longer middle section set in London draws on a number of Victorian and Gothic themes in addition to vampirism, including opium addiction, Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper, as well the Biblical she-demon Lilith. Bram Stoker is a major character and Oscar Wilde also features briefly. While I initially thought these features wove together successfully, after a while I thought it came across as somewhat self-indulgent and excessive, albeit very well written from a literary point of view. Like its predecessor, the repellent nature of many scenes (albeit germane to the plot) led me to feel I should read something more cleansing next.

99. A Tudor Christmas - Alison Weir

This fairly short book covers the various aspects of a Tudor Christmas, showing how the roots of so many aspects of the festivities are significantly older than their often presumed Victorian/Dickensian origins. The book is divided into short chapters for the twelve days of Christmas (or 13 really, as Epiphany is treated here as a final final day of celebration after twelfth night), with themes often covered in the relevant days, e.g. charity on St Stephen's/Boxing Day, a focus on children on the 28th for the Massacre of the Innocents by Herod, new's year day gift giving, and so on. There is also a fair amount of coverage of the decline of many Christmas customs after the Reformation, and the outright banning of the festival by Parliament in the 1640s, as King Charles I's reign descended into the run up to civil war. A fascinating book with some nice line drawings.

100. The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain - Charles Dickens

Yay, my 100th book of the year with a few days in hand!

This was the fifth and final of Dickens's Christmas books, published in December 1848. This is quite a long one, divided into three long chapters. The plot centres around a chemistry teacher Redlaw, who is bowed down by sorrow, wrongs and troubles from his youth. He makes a bargain with a phantom, who is his darker alter ego, to get rid of these negative feelings, but without losing the knowledge and experience they created. In return though he must pass the "gift" on to others. The results are terrible: without being able to feel the negative emotions people become hard and cynical, they turn against each other, husband and wife, parents and children, father and sons. Redlaw realises he is "turning into stone" and giving rise to a tail of "selfishness and ingratitude". He inveighs on the phantom to "come back, and haunt me day and night, but take this gift away! Or, if must still rest with me, deprive me of the dreadful power of giving it to others .. and...restore the day to those whom I have cursed". Eventually the phantom points indirectly to a solution through the loving and kind Milly. Another key character is an unnamed wretchedly poor boy, who is unaffected by Redlaw's curse, as he has had no emotional feelings in his life anyway and only an atavistic will to exist. There are some wonderful other characters as well whom I loved, especially the Tetterbys and the 87 year old Philip, Milly's father in law. All in all I loved this story, which shows redemption through accepting past negative thoughts and emotions and not trying to pretend they have never existed. It's not as colourful or full of stark imagery or symbolism as A Christmas Carol, but is almost as good in many ways and should be better known today than it is.