( poll )
( new to me )
Anyway, this was better than I had anticipated.
Henry VI, Part I | Henry VI, Part II | Henry VI, Part III | Richard III | Comedy of Errors | Titus Andronicus | Taming of the Shrew | Two Gentlemen of Verona | Love's Labour's Lost | Romeo and Juliet | Richard II | A Midsummer Night's Dream | King John | The Merchant of Venice | Henry IV, Part I | Henry IV, Part II | Henry V | Julius Caesar | Much Ado About Nothing | As You Like It | Merry Wives of Windsor | Hamlet | Twelfth Night | Troilus and Cressida | All's Well That Ends Well | Measure for Measure | Othello | King Lear | Macbeth | Antony and Cleopatra | Coriolanus | Timon of Athens | Pericles | Cymbeline | The Winter's Tale | The Tempest | Henry VIII | The Two Noble Kinsmen | Edward III | Sir Thomas More (fragment)
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wwhyte was kind enough to get me both this and Bate's more recent book on Shakespeare for Christmas. Since I'm just over halfway through my absorption of the Complete Works at present, I decided to read the earlier book (first published 1997, updated 2008) at this stage and save the more recent until I've finished the plays (probably March given my Christmas break).Well, it's ( jolly good )
( lots of pictures )
A lot of people have been raving about this, and why it is the best Pratchett book for ages. It is set in a mildly alternate universe, in what might or might not be the South Pacific (the mutiny on the Bounty and Moby Dick are referenced); in Pratchett's characteristic liberal humanist way, religion and good behaviour are explored, in a coming-of-age tale for his two teenage protagonists. Lots of gently witty one-liners, but the one that will linger with me longest is the observation that "the perfect world is a journey, not a place". Awfully good.
This is, in a sense, a sequel to Sacco's brilliant Safe Area Goražde, but following just one person, Neven, a Sarajevo Serb, a former fighter on the Bosnian side in the war who Sacco got to know as his "fixer" when he first visited Sarajevo just after the war ended in 1995. (I first went there myself in early 1997, and the city of Sacco's book is definitely the one I knew.)
Anyone who has worked in that sort of environment knows the essential nature of the fixer. Sacco captures it well: but it's not just about Neven's murky past and dubious present, it's also about the dodgy wartime goings on between the "legitimate" government and its bully-boys (and one of the personalities featured in the book was in the news again recently, having apparently committed suicide earlier this month) and the inevitable resulting questions about who is right and who is wrong; and it's also about the effect that Sacco's observation has, not only on the people and situations he is observing, but on Sacco himself.
If there is a weakness in the book, it is perhaps that the casual reader might take Neven's experiences as in some way typical of the Bosnian (or any) war. Neven is a somewhat unusual character. But then again, we are all of us unusual characters, and perhaps Sacco is right to just take a single personality and follow him through the conflict, in his own words and as others reported him. Anyway, well worth reading.
I really enjoyed the first volume of this series, and I really enjoyed this one as well. Covering the period from June 1929 to September 1930, it doesn't have the same narrative climax (May Day 1929) as the previous book, but it does have a strong set of internal plot arcs. Marthe and Kurt delve deeper into the heart of what makes the city tick, but at the cost of their own relationship; Kid Hogan, an African American jazz clarinettist, finds love and corruption in the city's music halls; and the marginalised, the exploited, the Jews, the Communists, the unemployed, all have their stories at least illuminated if not necessarily told. I'm only sorry that, first, we will presumably have to wait another four years for the next and final volume, and second, that it will presumably only take us to the Nazi seizure of power. But this is strongly recommended.
Further to my secondary research on the Elizabethan period, here is a biography of William and Robert Cecil, respectively Lord Burghley and Earl of Salisbury, who were the chief ministers of Elizabeth I and James I, and established stability while overseeing England's first ever peaceful transition between reigning dynasties.
The Cecils, like the Tudors, were minor Welsh-speaking gentry who moved to England and made good. Loades asserts that they shared with the Tudors a sympathy for the urban middle classes rather than the House of Lords. It's an interesting assertion, but unfortunarely he doesn't source it and the evidence he provides isn't terribly substantial. But it is worth bearing in mind as we read about the Queen and her leading counsellor that they were indeed dynastic parvenus, whose ancestors were not aristocrats.
We get a very good picture of Cecil as super-efficient administrator and courtier, playing the game and playing it well. Loades is vigorously revisionist in places: he detects no long-standing rivalry between Cecil and Dudley once it became clear that the Queen was not going to marry the latter, and goes out of his way to rehabilitate the reputation of Thomas, William's first son and Robert's elder brother. (Which inclines me to take his assertion about the Tudors' social instincts more seriously.)
I was already pretty familiar with the general outline of the history from other recent reading, but Loades added some interesting extra details - notably on the astonishing career of Mary, Queen of Scots, whose catastrophic failure as a ruler resulted in her becoming one of William Cecil's more burdensome dossiers. Frankly if her story were written as a novel it would be difficult to believe. Another topic that was new to me was the weird political and economic consequences of the state's support of piracy against Spain.
Ireland, once again, features only as an occasional source of backgroud trouble, and then the scene of the disastrous end of Essex's career, which I now realise was probably the biggest impact Ireland had on English politics between 1399 (the fall of Richard II) and 1641 (the Phelim O'Neill rising and massacres). No particular quotes from or about William Cecil's Irish friend Nicholas White, but I was able to fill in one gap: White is said to have been a tutor in Cecil's household in the 1550s. This must presumably have been to the older son, Thomas, who was born in 1542 (the next child, Anne, was not born until 1556 - she grew up to disastrously marry the Earl of Oxford, who didn't write the works of Shakespeare); Thomas was sent to Camnridge in 1558 and then to the Continent in 1561. Robert was not born until 1562, by which time White was launched into his Irish political career.
Anyway, good solid stuff.
I had read this years ago, but only remembered this after the rather silly ending of the last essay (set in 1982, with ex-President Allende inviting retired General Pinochet for a cup of tea). These ten alternate history essays were written in 1979. I think I bought the book for Owen Dudley Edwards' take on Gladstone in 1880, killing Irish Home Rule by enacting land reforms (which I don't see as very likely; the Home Rule genie was already out of the bottle by then).
There are two rather interesting essays exploring the potential for preventing the American War of Independence, one looking at how British policy might have been improved, the other imagining Benjamin Franklin facing down his own hard-liners and making peace in 1775. Both of these take as an important element the British decision to keep Canada rather than Guadeloupe in the 1762 peace negotiations. The arguments are 1) (counterfactual) that a continuing French presence to the north would have incentivised the British colonies of the eastern seaboard to stay in line with London, and 2) (factual) that the details of working out British administration in the newly acquired territory were destabilising further south. The two essays differ on the ultimate settlement - one has Britain and America continuing to be linked in union, the other imagines a more peaceful path to independence à la Canada in real life. But it is a successfully thought-provoking exercise.
Not so sure about the rest. We have four essays on regimes that might have survived if more statesmanship and shrewdness had been shown by their leaders - the French Empire in 1870, Kerensky in 1917, Dubcek in 1968 and as noted above Allende in 1972-3. These are interesting analyses of fatal mistakes made by rulers (admittedly in difficult circumstances) but not real alternative histories. Two others take the premise of German reunification in 1952, and the sparing of the life of Emperor Maximilian of Mexico in 1867, and fail to make either really interesting in terms of their consequences. I think the Maximilian question genuinely is a boring one, but more could have been done with Adenauer. Of course, that's easier to say now that German reunification has actually happened; when these essays were written in 1979 it was still unimaginable, though in fact only ten years away.
The most audacious of the essays is by Louis Allen, imagining that General Tojo called off the attack on the US planned for late 1941 and satisfied himself with the Dutch East Indies; and then joined with the Germans to defeat Russia; only in turn to be defeated when the Germans turned on them with American help. Tojo develops nuclear weapons and destroys San Francisco and Los Angeles, but still loses the war. I'm not particularly well versed in the history of the Pacific theatre, but it was an interesting read.
( I confess my infidelity )
Henry VI, Part I | Henry VI, Part II | Henry VI, Part III | Richard III | Comedy of Errors | Titus Andronicus | Taming of the Shrew | Two Gentlemen of Verona | Love's Labour's Lost | Romeo and Juliet | Richard II | A Midsummer Night's Dream | King John | The Merchant of Venice | Henry IV, Part I | Henry IV, Part II | Henry V | Julius Caesar | Much Ado About Nothing | As You Like It | Merry Wives of Windsor | Hamlet | Twelfth Night | Troilus and Cressida | All's Well That Ends Well | Measure for Measure | Othello | King Lear | Macbeth | Antony and Cleopatra | Coriolanus | Timon of Athens | Pericles | Cymbeline | The Winter's Tale | The Tempest | Henry VIII | The Two Noble Kinsmen | Edward III | Sir Thomas More (fragment)
( this is more like it )
Henry VI, Part I | Henry VI, Part II | Henry VI, Part III | Richard III | Comedy of Errors | Titus Andronicus | Taming of the Shrew | Two Gentlemen of Verona | Love's Labour's Lost | Romeo and Juliet | Richard II | A Midsummer Night's Dream | King John | The Merchant of Venice | Henry IV, Part I | Henry IV, Part II | Henry V | Julius Caesar | Much Ado About Nothing | As You Like It | Merry Wives of Windsor | Hamlet | Twelfth Night | Troilus and Cressida | All's Well That Ends Well | Measure for Measure | Othello | King Lear | Macbeth | Antony and Cleopatra | Coriolanus | Timon of Athens | Pericles | Cymbeline | The Winter's Tale | The Tempest | Henry VIII | The Two Noble Kinsmen | Edward III | Sir Thomas More (fragment)
( didn't really like it )
Henry VI, Part I | Henry VI, Part II | Henry VI, Part III | Richard III | Comedy of Errors | Titus Andronicus | Taming of the Shrew | Two Gentlemen of Verona | Love's Labour's Lost | Romeo and Juliet | Richard II | A Midsummer Night's Dream | King John | The Merchant of Venice | Henry IV, Part I | Henry IV, Part II | Henry V | Julius Caesar | Much Ado About Nothing | As You Like It | Merry Wives of Windsor | Hamlet | Twelfth Night | Troilus and Cressida | All's Well That Ends Well | Measure for Measure | Othello | King Lear | Macbeth | Antony and Cleopatra | Coriolanus | Timon of Athens | Pericles | Cymbeline | The Winter's Tale | The Tempest | Henry VIII | The Two Noble Kinsmen | Edward III | Sir Thomas More (fragment)
I'm probably being rather unfair to this book, but I'm giving up on it not quite half-way through. Hickman, herself a diplomat's daughter, has pulled together an engaging collection of correspondence from the wives (and occasionally other female relatives) of British diplomats posted abroad throughout the last four centuries. The material is amusing and sometimes moving. But I felt that the book lacked a substantial intellectual framework, such as any serious interrogation of the concepts of Britishness, diplomacy, or wives. And I think Hickman did intend it to be that kind of book, but it isn't.
I must say also that having lived abroad in three countries in the last twelve years, and having myself set up from scratch two local offices (and overseen the setting up of a third) for my various employers, I did find myself rather unsympathetic to some of the accounts of hardship reported by people whose government-funded bureaucracies weren't always able to guarantee them a perfect quality of life. In the non-profit sector things are a bit different.
In fairness, some of the hardships are very real. Hickman's father was deputy head of the British embassy in Dublin in 1976 when the ambassador, Christopher Ewart-Biggs, was killed by the IRA: perhaps the most moving section in the book (and one of the longest single extracts) is her mother's description of the aftermath for the Ewart-Biggs family. It is the more vivid for me because I worked with Jane Ewart-Biggs many years later, administering the book prize established in her husband's memory.
I'm inclined to put this up on Bookmooch, but I know that some on my friends list have a personal interest in this topic, so you folks get first shout.
An impulse purchase while in the Fitzwilliam Museum the other week, this is a survey of recent findings in archaeology about early wine-making. McGowan concludes that grapes were first domesticated for wine-making in eastern Turkey or the south Caucasus (certainly my Georgian friends would agree, and would be a bit more specific). We wander around Mesopotamia, Persia, Egypt, the Levant and the eastern Mediterranean, using the latest analytical techniques to try and pin down places of production and trade routes. The extent of the wine trade into ancient Egypt in particular was pretty remarkable, and the Mesopotamian sacred barmaids rather intriguing.
I wasn't completely satisfied by the book, however. It seemed a bit of an artificial distinction to relegate beer and mead to mere details, when it would seem that beer was at least as widespread. And while the argument about the extent of ancient international trade in wine was well developed, I would have liked more comparison with trade in other luxury goods, or indeed other goods at all. I have to say also that the style is at times an uncomfortable mix of the anecdotal and the jargon-ridden. I couldn't really recommend this book to people who are not already somewhat interested in the archaeology and culture of the period.
I picked this up in Paris a few weeks back, and was inspired to re-read it - of course, I had first read it as a teenager - by young F picking up Zlata's Diary to read at the weekend.
Gosh.
I had forgotten just how gripping the story actually is - eight people stuck in hiding, with the inevitable personality clashes between two married couples with three children and an older, not-quite-confirmed bachelor; the story told by the youngest (but, by her own account, smartest) of the crew; the desperate grasping for hope as the news of the war starts gradually to turn to the possibility of a German defeat; Anne's fifteen-year-old love for the seventeen-year-old Peter; and the final, crushing, end of the narrative in mid-stream as the Franks and their fellow fugitives are taken from the back-streets of Amsterdam, never (with one exception) to return. I cried on the train tonight reading the final pages of the book, and I challenge anyone to read it and remain unmoved.
A number of points seemed very fresh to me (perhaps also they were not so visible in the edition I would have read 25 years ago). The Franks and their fellow fugitives were from Germany; Anne and her sister actually teach the others Dutch at various points, and she expresses her desire to become a full Dutch citizen after the war. I don't remember previously reading of, for instance, the extent of Anne's problems relating to her mother, or of the difficulties of the lavatory arrangements; I think the new version of the account is stronger for including them.
I have a minor concern about the translation. In the very first entry - the only one in this edition given in the original Dutch - Anne, addressing "Kitty", her new diary, says ik hoop dat je een grote steun aan me zult zijn. The English translation is "I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support". Well, frankly, it's a bit of a stretch from the single noun steun to "source of comfort and support" - normally it would just mean "support", and having spotted the translator over-egging the meaning here, I wonder where else it may have happened. This may be a minor quibble (I'll get a Dutch edition for young F, and decide for myself). The major point is that Anne Frank beats out the most impressive teenage livejournaller by a factor of ten or a hundred.
And she died. She ded horribly and painfully and unnecessarily, along with millions of other people, as a result of evil decisions made by evil men. And her story is the more vivid because she wrote about it; but there were six million other Jews killed because they were Jewish, and millions of others killed for similar reasons of state policy. Those incredible figures become more real to us from reading her account; but she was only one among millions.
32) The Life of Elizabeth I, by Alison Weir
This was a fortuitously good paired reading of biographies: Starkey concentrates on Elizabeth's life from her conception and birth in 1533 to her accession to the throne in 1558, while Weir concentrates on her reign from then to 1603. I read these as part of my larger 16th-century project, but both are good books in their own right - Starkey's marginally the better, as he is telling a less familiar story and also challenges received wisdom (for instance he unhesitatingly puts the dying Edward VI at the heart of the Lady Jane Grey affair, where traditionally it has been seen as Northumberland's doing). Both biographies concentrate on the personality of the queen - Weir makes the point that her private life was very much lived in public, and I would add that it was clearly very political.
Starkey's approach is somewhat psychological. He has three main sets of conclusions: that Elizabeth learned important lessons of statecraft from the bitter failures of her sister Mary's reign, that her attitude to religion was a sincere adherence to what evolved into High Church Anglicanism, and that her attitudes to both marriage and religion were perhaps crucially formed during her residence with her father's last wife and her second husband, Thomas Seymour. Indeed, Seymour's appallingly intimate behaviour with his teenage stepdaughter would surely be characterised today as sexual abuse (my assessment, not Starkey's), and that must have left its traces in Elizabeth's attitude to men (and indeed women - it's noticeable from Weir's account how often she became unreasonable about sexual relationships among members of her own household).
Weir concentrates essentially on the internal politics of Elizabeth's court, which is great as a means of studying her statecraft, but does mean we miss out on some of the other important policy areas - notably, from my point of view, Ireland, which figures only as the scene of the death of the elder Earl of Essex and the catastrophic military failure of his son. Weir is anyway much more interested in the personal dramas of Elizabeth's relationships with the younger Essex, Leicester, and Mary Queen of Scots, which are all in fairness rather good stories. She is particularly good on using appropriate contemporary quotes (though misattributes Nicholas White's letter to the Earl of Shrewsbury).
Anyway, good reading both.
( interesting )
Henry VI, Part I | Henry VI, Part II | Henry VI, Part III | Richard III | Comedy of Errors | Titus Andronicus | Taming of the Shrew | Two Gentlemen of Verona | Love's Labour's Lost | Romeo and Juliet | Richard II | A Midsummer Night's Dream | King John | The Merchant of Venice | Henry IV, Part I | Henry IV, Part II | Henry V | Julius Caesar | Much Ado About Nothing | As You Like It | Merry Wives of Windsor | Hamlet | Twelfth Night | Troilus and Cressida | All's Well That Ends Well | Measure for Measure | Othello | King Lear | Macbeth | Antony and Cleopatra | Coriolanus | Timon of Athens | Pericles | Cymbeline | The Winter's Tale | The Tempest | Henry VIII | The Two Noble Kinsmen | Edward III | Sir Thomas More (fragment)
28) House of Cards, by C.E. Murphy
29) Hands of Flame, by C.E. Murphy
( Catie's urban fantasies )
A fairly standard New Adventure, introducing the sinister character of Irving Braxiatel, renegade Time Lord and cultural collector, with lots of fun archaeology for Benny and combat for Ace. The actual plot is a rather ludicrous Sekrit Plan involving the overthow of a warmongering dictatorial regime by means of an electronic theatre and a long-lost play, so it makes as much sense as many Who stories.
This is one of those classic collections, assembling the top sf stories published before 1965 as voted for by the membership of SFWA in the late 1960s. (I wonder how different the results would be, if a similar poll were taken now?) Most of these stories were very familiar to me, but it filled in a couple of gaps - I don't think I had read either Theodore Sturgeon's "Microcosmic God" or Alfred Bester's "Fondly Fahrenheit" before. Anyway it's good to have such a selection of classics within a single set of covers.
23) 30 Hot Days, by Mehmet Ali Birand
( a Turkish take on the summer of 1974 )
24) Glafkos Clerides: the Path of a Country, by Niyazi Kızılyürek
( the old sea-dog reminisces )
As always, a generally good selection, with a lot of the stories revolving around virtual identities and gaming. I had read two of the 25 before, as they were Hugo nominees; of the rest, the ones that will stay with me are the first, "Baby Doll" by Johanna Sinisalo, a terrifying tale of future sexuality; in the middle, "End Game" by Nancy Kress, which retreads some of the ground from her "Beggars in Spain" but takes it in a new direction; and the final story, James Van Pelt's "How Music Begins", a tale of alien abduction, romance and a high school band. All good stuff; I still have the Dozois collection to look forward to.
I'd been looking for this for ages, having very much enjoyed the first three books in the series. Jessica Jones, superhero against her will, confronts her internal demons, both the guilty secret of how she acquired super powers, and her personal nemesis. There are so many pages here where Bendis and the artists achieve statements that couldn't be made in any other medium - the schooldays flashback, Jessica's first encounter with other superheroes, and the unspoken parts of her conversations with her friends and lovers. As I said of an earlier volume, it would probably require more familiarity than I have with the Marvel universe to fully appreciate it, but I very much enjoyed it all the same.
( all new to me )
Henry VI, Part I | Henry VI, Part II | Henry VI, Part III | Richard III | Comedy of Errors | Titus Andronicus | Taming of the Shrew | Two Gentlemen of Verona | Love's Labour's Lost | Romeo and Juliet | Richard II | A Midsummer Night's Dream | King John | The Merchant of Venice | Henry IV, Part I | Henry IV, Part II | Henry V | Julius Caesar | Much Ado About Nothing | As You Like It | Merry Wives of Windsor | Hamlet | Twelfth Night | Troilus and Cressida | All's Well That Ends Well | Measure for Measure | Othello | King Lear | Macbeth | Antony and Cleopatra | Coriolanus | Timon of Athens | Pericles | Cymbeline | The Winter's Tale | The Tempest | Henry VIII | The Two Noble Kinsmen | Edward III | Sir Thomas More (fragment)
This is a brilliant book, and I think could be enjoyed even by non-Who fans provided they have at least a mild interest in southern England (and Wales). Griffiths sets off on a quest to find Doctor Who locations - not to do a comprehensive listing, because that has alreay been done, but to check out the places that linger most vividly in the memory, from the years between Spearhead from Space and Destiny of the Daleks, and from the four years of the new series (this book, written between November last year and September this year, is already in the shops).
Some of the locations of the Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker years have disappeared (buildings get demolished; quarries get filled in); some cannot be found despite the best efforts of Griffiths and his long-suffering family; but about half of the places he looks for can indeed be located and retain a certain ineffable Who-ness. Examples: the villages of The Android Invasion and The Dæmons; the original Bad Wolf Bay from Doomsday and Journey's End; the tunnel of Day of the Daleks which Griffiths locates despite a huge argument with his wife. There is apparently a website here which I haven't had a chance to look at yet, with lots of photos.
I haven't read Griffiths' earlier book, Dalek I Loved You, but I imagine it is at least as good. Part of the charm of his writing is that he factors in further anecdotes about the journeys he makes, and also fits in the story of his own family: his mother's death, his wife's pregnancy, his teenage son's reactions to his own obsessions. It is a touching an memorable little memoir. Strongly recommended.
12) Captain Underpants and the Attack of the Talking Toilets, by Dav Pilkey
13) Captain Underpants and the Invasion of the Incredibly Naughty Cafeteria Ladies from Outer Space (and the Subsequent Assault of the Equally Evil Lunchroom Zombie Nerds), by Dav Pilkey
14) Captain Underpants and the Perilous Plot of Professor Poopypants, by Dav Pilkey
15) Captain Underpants and the Wrath of the Wicked Wedgie Woman, by Dav Pilkey
16) Captain Underpants and the Big, Bad Battle of the Bionic Booger Boy, Part 1: The Night of the Naughty Nostril Nuggets, by Dav Pilkey
17) Captain Underpants and the Big, Bad Battle of the Bionic Booger Boy, Part 2: The Revenge of the Ridiculous Robo-Boogers, by Dav Pilkey
18) Captain Underpants and the Preposterous Plight of the Purple Potty People, by Dav Pilkey
( the titles give you a pretty good idea )
A collection of scholarly essays on the subject of the title. I admit I skimmed most of them, as they are more about writers not usually considered part of the genre, though there is an interesting essay on why Lord Dunsany is not as good as either Tolkien or Lovecraft, and another on mermaids. The 'Circe' chapter of Ulysses, and a play by Yeats called The Only Jealousy of Emer, get a lot of attention.
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