November 2011 Books

OK. Lets get down to business. I'll start as usual with the Non-Fiction. I don't know why I do this. Perhaps because it relates to the real world rather than to some fantasy created by a novelist or poet. Start with reality and then drift off through normal fiction and sci-fi into the wider realms of fantasy.

First off, I read Mark Stevens's Broadmoor Revealed which is an account of the creation and operation of this secure asylum for the criminally insane. Stevens has only been able to use documents from before 1900 for his research. He starts by describing how the place came into being and its design and construction. Then something on the running of the place. And then he describes a number of the inmates in some detail. It's an interesting book that leaves you wanting to know more, much more. Then there was Jeff Jeven and Jonathan Cape's biography of Jeven's father told as a graphic book, Green River Killer. I thought the story they had to tell was fascinating, but was definitely not impressed by doing it through graphics. All the interesting nuances that could have been used are lost. Peterson Anderson's book of 204 photos in World War II Photo Stories was OK to look through, but I felt it could have done with more narrative linking the photo stories. But, then, that's me. Max Arthur's Fighters against Fascism is about the Spanish Civil War (1936 - 1939) and Englishmen who fought on the Republican side. Too often we forget this war which the Germans and Italians especially used to test out their battle theories before using them for real in the Second World War.

And, finally, an utterly incredible book. It's old. But that doesn't make any difference. It's Apsley Cherry-Garrard's The Worst Journey in the World about Scott's 1910-12 expedition to the Antarctic. One element of the work there was to collect Emperor Penguin eggs so the embryology could be studied to test a theory about the evolution of birds. They could only be collected in the depths of winter in incredibly low temperatures. So low, indeed that Chery-Garrard's teeth cracked. It's a really moving book, especially the account of how they realised that Scott must have died and then, when they found how close he was to the next depot, they all felt guilty about not having made an attempt to put another depot a few miles further on.

So now it's fiction's turn. Andrey Platonov's The Foundation Pit is an interesting story set in Soviet Russia which is also a criticism of collectivisation. How he got away with publishing it, I don't know. Lovely story. Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood is an extraordinary love story set in Japan. You don't want it to stop, even though it has a firm finish beyond which it cannot really go. The translation into English is utterly superb. Lee Vidor's Under Total Eclipse We Will Tremble Like Birds has an interesting title and a disclaimer saying that the Holocaust really happened. But, I'm afraid, it goes pretty fast downhill after that. If a student of mine had handed an essay in that was written like this book, I would have handed it straight back and told them to go away and re-write it.

In the way of historical fiction I've only read Julian Rathbone's The Last English King. It is a fascinating story following one man from his Anglo-Saxon village, his career as a bodyguard and fighter for King Harold and then, having fought at Hastings, his further adventures as a pilgrim to Jerusalem. The story goes back and forth between the pilgrim and his companion s and past events in England. It's well structured, well researched and well written.


Thrillers have been quite a heavy portion of my literary diet this month. Three Philip Kerr novels about his excellent Berlin based detective Bernie Gunther, A German Requiem,March Violets and The Pale Criminal. These range from Berlin in the later 1930s to after World War II. If you didn't know your Berlin before opening one of these books, you will by the time you put it down. There is extraordinary topographic detail demonstrating Kerr's superb research. David Downing's Zoo Station is also set in Nazi Germany and is about how an Englishman married to a German woman spies for the Nazis, Soviet Russia and the UK simultaneously. This, too, has excellent topographic research on Berlin and its environs. Sara Blaedel's Call me Princess is about a demented rapist. The police follow clues suggesting it's one man, but to their horror, it turns out to be someone very close at hand. Victorine E Lieske's Not what she seems combines romance with murder - or should that be the other way round? Good read, though.

And, finally, romance. Sarah Morgan's Bought: Destitute yet defiant is a pretty good read. As too is Patricia Watters' Colby's Child set in the wild west of the USA in the  gold rush years. You will be pleased to know that the hero turns his back on gold for the heroine. And then there were Richard Crawford's Soul Mates, Shannon Stacey's Yours to keep, Janice Cantore's Accused and Bonnie Nadzam's Lamb. As you can tell, I enjoy reading these romances, but so many of them are formulaic that they tend to run together in a jumble in my memory. The trouble is that I've been suckered by Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte and most romances I read follow in her footsteps.

Octob er 2011 Books

OK. I’ve had a spell on holiday in southern Spain. In Andalucia – you know: Seville, Granada, Cordoba and Malaga way. If you haven’t been, you really should visit the Alhambra in Granada. Book online well in advance of your travel date, otherwise you may not be able to get in. Let’s get going with the Non-Fiction books that I’ve read this month. First off, I followed up last month’s Donne biography by reading Felicia Wright McDuffie’s To our bodies turn we then which explores in great detail aspects of his poetry and prose. It’s an eye opener. Then came the heartbreaking tale of how Zana Muhsen failed to rescue her sister from the Yemen in A promise to Nadia. John Man’s Xanadu is mainly a biography of Marco Polo, but is at least as much as about what China, Tibet and Mongolia were like when he was there. Fascinating. Linda Leaming’s Married to Bhutan is a love story with that country and its people. It makes fascinating reading. Stephen Hawkin and Leonard Mlodinow wrote The Grand Design which, as you might expect is about cosmology and the universe. It may need revision if those neutrinos have managed to travel from The Large Hadron Collider to Milan faster than the speed of light. But then a lot else will need to be rewritten as well. Haruki Murakami wrote about his marathon running habits in What I think about when I talk about running. And, finally, the mind blowingly stunning book edited by David M Wilson of The Lost Photographs of Captain Scott. The Lost Photographs of Captain Scott David M Wilson Little, Brown & Co., 2011; iv + 94 ISBN: 978-0-316-17320-1 This is the story of an incredible survival. When he saw how useful photographs might be in reporting on the 1901 – 1904 Discovery Antarctic expedition, Captain Robert Scott appointed Dr Herbert Ponting as the expedition’s photographer for the 1910 – 1913 Terra Nova expedition. The intention was for Ponting to record all the work – scientific and exploration – that the members of the team were involved in. When Scott saw the early results he asked Ponting to teach him photography. This was in the old, slow days of plate cameras and guessed exposures. Ponting also taught each of the leaders of the separate teams at Scott’s request. In those days the Royal Navy required its cartographers to sketch the landscape they were mapping. This applied to the Antarctic as to anywhere else. The difficulty here was that sketchers needed to do their work with bare hands in severely sub-zero temperatures, risking frost bite. So it was a slowish procedure. On one page in this book the sketches and photographs of one landscape are directly compared, to the benefit of photography. Scott may have been new to photography but he was a quick learner. To start with, his photographs are beautifully composed. Perhaps unintentionally, they also demonstrate the vastness of the hostile Antarctic environment compared to the frailty of human beings and all their equipment, dogs and ponies included. Scott photographed the early stages of the South Pole journey. They used ponies to climb the Beardmore Glacier. One photograph of the team spread out in a long line, with each man walking beside a pony hauling a sledge, suggests the individual’s isolation at times. Another photo of a sledge piled high with equipment, pulled by three men at the traces and a fourth man pushing tells us of the immensity of the task the Polar team undertook. In one sense, it is a pity the camera was sent back from the top of Beardmore because it was too heavy. But in another sense I don’t want to see the record of these incredibly brave men getting progressively weaker as they struggled back from the Pole having found that Amundsen had got their first. Once the expedition got back to England Frank Debenham pooled all the photographs. Later he passed them over to Ponting. He died intestate and insolvent. Somehow a set of contact prints of Scott’s photographs survived to be auctioned in 2001. The author of this book – a great-nephew of the Dr Edward Wilson, a member of the team that died – with the agreement of the owner of the photographs has compiled this incredible and beautiful reminder of that expedition. So now for fiction’s turn. Marilyn Chin wrote Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen, a surreal collection of 41 linked stories about the adventures of a pair of Chinese twins whose grandmother owned a restaurant in California. Jody Hedlund’s The Preacher’s Bridge is a fictionalised biography of John Bunyan (author of The Pilgrim’s Progress) and his wife. Now for murder-mysteries and thrillers. Edward Marston’s The Amarous Nightingale is set in Restoration London. The setting is described in excellent and clear detail. The solution to the problem of finding the killer is a surprise, which is a good thing in a murder novel, I think. Dana Stabenow’s Fire and Ice is a murder set in Alaska which could be set anywhere in the world: it focuses so tightly on solving the murder that the setting is largely irrelevant. Arnaldur Indridason’s Jar City is set in Iceland and takes you deep into the heart of that society before exposing the killer. Tshombe Kelly’s killer can only be found through Sarah’s Diary. And is somewhat elusive. And, at last, romances. Sandra D Bricker’s Always the baker, never the bride has the talented pastry chef taken from the shop she works in to a new employment and, ultimately, to be her employer’s wife. Ciana Stone’s All in time combines romance with science-fiction, which is not always the best of combinations, but works this time. Sylvia Day’s Catching Caroline is a pair of slightly gruesome stories involving romance and vampires. Colleen Gleason’s Lavender Vows on the other hand, restores your faith in the romance novel. Christine Courtenay’s Trade Winds is a good story. My last romance of the month was Bella Andre’s page-turning From this moment on.