john257hopper's 100 books of 2023

Welcome to my thread for 2023 reads.

I completed 103 books in 2022. I am currently reading two more one of which I aim to finish on 2 January and the other will take a few more days probably.

1. The Real Oliver Twist - Robert Blincoe: A Life that Illuminates an Age - John Waller

My first read completed in 2023, though I started this on 27 December.

Robert Blincoe was a workhouse orphan who in 1799 at the age of 7 began an "apprenticeship" of some 14 years in cotton mills in appalling conditions that left him partially disabled for life. The core of this book is based around Blincoe's memoir, told to a radical journalist John Brown in the 1820s. Interspersed with what we know of Blincoe's life from that source, is well researched information from other sources bearing on his life and times, including an account of the factory reform movement and the long-running campaign for a maximum 10 hour working day which dominated the early decades of the 19th century. The book also traces what we know about Blincoe's later life as a fairly successful businessman who had overcome huge adversity, and recounts the lives of his children, especially his son Robert who was a popular clergyman.

The book contains accounts of the lives and actions of a wide range of personalities involved in the campaign to better the lives of children working in factories in the early industrial revolution, including radical journalists like John Brown, early trades unionists such as John Doherty, benign factory owners such as Robert Owen, and, within Parliament, figures like the Tory Lord Ashley (future Earl of Shaftesbury) who led many successful parliamentary campaigns for progressive social causes. One noteworthy point at the political level was how quite often it was Tories who were in the forefront of the campaigns for progressive legislation in Parliament, rather than Whigs (future Liberals), as one might expect from a modern viewpoint. Whigs were more closely identified with the rising class of industrialists like the mill owners, whereas there was a strain of paternalistic and romantic Toryism that saw the industrialists as upstarts interfering with the old fashioned relationship where a benevolent landowner at least decently looked after the workers and peasants on his estate, despite the huge gulf between them.

The title of the book stems from the possibility that the young Charles Dickens had read Blincoe's memoir before he wrote Oliver Twist; at the time he was also a Parliamentary reporter so would have been well aware of the debates around factory reform legislation. There is no direct evidence, but the events in Oliver's early life do match quite closely to those of Blincoe's. A closer literary link is with Frances Trollope's Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy, which we know for a fact draws for its dramatic incidents on many features of the memoir - a pity that this novel has not achieved the fame of Dickens's masterpiece.

This is a great read about a key turning point in Britain's history, and one man's involvement in it as a victim but who also overcame adversity and made a decent life for himself and his family.

Happy New Year! Looking forward to following your reading in 2023

>2 john257hopper: This sounds interesting. A good start to 2023.

Happy new year Jen, and once again also to you, Pam :)

2. The Face in the Glass: The Gothic Tales of Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Another hangover started on 27 December, but completed this year.

Mary Elizabeth Braddon is to my mind one of the most underrated 19th century writers. This is a collection of her ghost stories, a couple at least of which I have previously read in other anthologies. They are generally very well written and quite atmospheric, though some of them do get a bit repetitive when read in order in a collection like this, for example the idea of apparitions or sights appearing to people at the time when they or someone they love is at that moment or is shortly to be dying. I thought the most effective were probably The Shadow in the Corner, The Face in the Glass, The Island of Old Faces and Herself.

3. The Lost Lights of St Kilda - Elisabeth Gifford

I have for a long time been fascinated by this tiny group of islands far off the coast of Scotland, the furthest flung inhabited part of the British Isles until the final small population of 36 souls were evacuated in 1930. Their survival had become increasingly precarious due to their economy of bird products and tweed being unable to keep up with the changing world in the late 19th and early 20th century, and the population having diminished as young people and whole families left the island to seek a future elsewhere.

This story concerns the visit of two eager young Cambridge archaeology students - Archie Macleod, son of the island's owner, and his friend Fred Lawson - to the island in summer 1927 and how they interact with the locals, particularly with young Chrissie Gillies. We are also presented with Fred Lawson being a prisoner of war in France in 1941 and through jumps between time zones, the novel traces the course of events between 1927 and 1941, and the happy ending that results for our leading characters. For once in a novel set partly in the Second World War, the War is not the main focus, the islands of St Kilda are the real hero of the story - a beautiful and terrifying set of rocks essentially in the open Atlantic and subject to that ocean's raw power and fury.

Birds were the very essence of the islanders' lives, the source of protein and one of the main economic strengths of the islanders: "the sky is alive with bird wings.. The black-tipped bent spikes of the great gannets’ wings, the flutter of scissorbeaked kittiwakes, fulmars, skewars, puffins, petrels – the same birds that supply most of the islander’s primitive diet." Even now, when St Kilda is a World Heritage site, it is "home to a tenth of the British Isles’ seabird population". Its inhabitants understandably saw it as the centre of their universe and its way of life against the encroachment of the outside world. As Chrissie says, "I believed in my heart that there was no better place or family that a child might have than this island, this jewel that had fallen from the pocket of God and where all men feel Him near and find the blessed solace of being welcome at every hearth along the strand of lighted bothies, be it even in the greatest and the darkest of storms."

4. Operation Mincemeat: The True Spy Story that Changed the Course of World War Two - Ben MacIntyre

This is the gripping true story of the Second World War deception operation by which the Allies managed to convince the Germans that the planned invasion of Sicily in 1943 was in fact a decoy and that the real invasion was to be targeted at Greece in the eastern Mediterranean and Sardinia in the western Mediterranean. The success of the operation paved the way towards the invasion of Italy, toppling Mussolini and taking that country out of the war, the first major breach in the Axis coalition. The whole story reads like a rather unlikely thriller, disguising a dead body in a Marines uniform, planting a carefully constructed series of fake documents on him, drafted and presented in such a way that they would convince the enemy of their genuineness. The key was "not merely to conceal what you are doing, but to persuade the other side that what you are doing is the reverse of what you are actually doing." To do this they had to create a whole backstory for the fictional dead Marines officer, Major William Martin, and concoct supporting evidence for the documents and other materials found in his possession that would withstand investigation by any German or other enemy agent in Britain.

The effectiveness of the plan also relied on understanding the psychology of individuals and nations, not just of the Germans, but also of the officially neutral Spaniards, juggling between those who were really pro-Axis and those (such as the Spanish navy) who were often pro-Allies. A lot of its success also depended on wishful thinking by those in the chain, wanting to believe the information, or wanting to ingratiate themselves by submitting the prized and explosive information further up the chain. It even convinced Hitler, supporting his entrenched belief that the Balkans was the soft underbelly of the Nazi Empire (ironically, Goebbels was the only leading Nazi who didn't fall for the deception).

We meet a rich and varied cast of characters from all the participating nations, including on the British side a wide variety of people who were also novelists, most famously Ian Fleming, who took the original idea for the misleading corpse from a minor novel by a former top policeman published in 1937. (That said, this connection may not be so surprising as "the greatest writers of spy fiction have, in almost every case, worked in intelligence before turning to writing . Somerset Maugham, John Buchan, Ian Fleming, Graham Greene, John le Carré.") We also come across the crucial role played by non-existent agents to deceive the other side and draw attention away from the activities of real agents - "Real agents tended to become truculent and demanding; they needed feeding, pampering, and paying. An imaginary agent, however, was infinitely pliable, and willing to do the bidding of his ....... handlers at once, and without question."

One of the other tensions and fine balances the Allies needed to show once the body had been discovered was that of seeming to be reasonably alarmed when the papers were lost, but without making too serious an effort to recover them, and hoping that they would not be returned unopened by a friendly Spaniard. In the author's words, "in reality if top-secret plans really had fallen into enemy hands, and the breach of security was detected, then those plans might well be abandoned, or at least substantially altered. The Germans must be made to believe that they had gained access to the documents undetected; they should be made to assume that the British believed the Spaniards had returned the documents unopened, and unread. Operation Mincemeat would only work if the Germans could be fooled into believing that the British had been fooled." Such multiple levels of motivations go to make this such a fascinating and thrilling read - if a spy novel published today had this plot it might well be dismissed as too far-fetched to be believable.

The leading instigators of the deception Ewen Montague and Charles Cholmondeley deserve great credit for their massive, but necessarily secret, contribution to ensuring the Allied victory on the European continent. After the war, the details of the deception were kept under wraps for years, partly to protect Anglo-Spanish relations, though Montagu published a partial account in 1953, and a film version was released in 1956 in which, bizarrely, Montagu played the minor role of a senior military officer, while his own role was played by an American actor. The final mystery of the real identity of the dead body - a poor and luckless Welshman, Gwyndyr Michael, who probably committed suicide through ingesting - was not revealed until the 1990s, when an inscription was added to the Spanish grave of Major William Martin, the most fictional person to make a major contribution to winning a war

5. Vanishing Point - Jason Ayres

This is the sixth Time Bubble novel, rather longer than its predecessors. Josh and Alice work with an Australian couple Henry and Vanessa to enable the transfer of the mind and consciousness of an individual back through their own timeline into the brain of their earlier self; or, alternatively, into the artificial mind of an android duplicate. This is high concept stuff, though they seem to achieve these amazing goals rather quickly, even within the constraints of the fictional universe in which this all takes place. Things take a dramatic and nasty turn when Vanessa becomes obsessed with Josh and starts to change time in increasingly drastic ways to get her man. It turns out right in the end, and this was mostly a great page turner as ever. Even before the Vanessa stuff, though, I was shocked by some of Josh and co's working practices, e.g. sending people back in their own time stream without their consent to check how they deal with that situation.

6. The Amber Spyglass - Philip Pullman

This was a re-read of the final book of the His Dark Materials trilogy, following watching the final series of the excellent BBC TV adaptation. I think this will always be my least favourite of the trilogy, as it doesn't for me have the same feel of magical wonder as the other two books, and especially Northern Lights. However, watching the TV series and re-reading the book have helped me understand it a lot better this time round - prior to these experiences, I remembered very little indeed from my first reading back in 2010. One exception was the Land of the Dead which still had a feeling of great sadness and pathos about it, and even more so the concept that everyone has their own death that accompanies them throughout their lives ready to call them when the moment comes. I found the mulefas a fascinating civilisation, though I thought the connection between these generally more relaxed chapters and the rest of the plot somewhat tenuous for the most part. A multi-layered and rich novel though.

7. Doctor Wortle's School - Anthony Trollope

This was another quite enjoyable fairly short novel by Trollope. The eponymous headmaster discovers that two of his employees Mr and Mrs Peacocke are not in fact lawfully married. They had married in the USA, in St Louis, believing Mrs Peacocke's wastrel first husband to be dead, but he subsequently turned up. While Doctor Wortle is understanding of their position, others in the community including the local gossip Mrs Stantiloup, and the Bishop, take a dim view of the supposed immorality of this situation, despite the Peacockes' mutual devotion. The situation is eventually resolved after Mr Peacocke makes a journey across the whole of the USA. This is an interesting exploration of what was a moral dilemma in 1881 but which would not be now. There is also a more conventional subplot about the Wortles' daughter Mary's engagement to a young aristocrat.

8. A Detail Of History: The harrowing true story of a boy who survived the Nazi holocaust - Arek Hersh

Arek Hersh was an 11 year old Jewish boy in Poland at the start of the Second World War. Somehow memoirs like this of young people who have suffered so much so young never lose their power to shock or sadden, although I have read a fair few Holocaust memoirs. Separated from his family at the age of 11 by what turns out to be a lucky chance, he avoids their fate of being taken to an extermination camp, though instead works in a harsh labour camp. The vagaries of fate take him hither and thither via the Lodz ghetto, a lucky period in a relatively benign orphanage, and eventually to Auschwitz where, in a stroke of pure chance, he takes advantage of a commotion in a queue to move from the line going to the gas chambers to the line of those spared at least temporarily for work. As the Allies advance, Hersh, like numerous others, goes on forced marches/train journeys across the shrinking Nazi territory first to Buchenwald and then finally to Theresienstadt, where he is liberated by the Red Army. After the war, he was one of several hundred orphans who were taken to Britain and settled initially in the Lake District (the Windermere children).

Arek Hersh struck me as a very resourceful boy, with a spirit of daring that enabled him to take advantage of slight chances that came his way, plus a large admixture of pure luck. Of course at times he recounts how he almost almost lost all hope, such as when on the cattle wagons to Auschwitz, and later on the forced train evacuation to Theresienstadt. But his will to live and resourcefulness see him through in the end. I am pleased to see that Arek Hersh is still alive at the age of 94 and indeed just received an award from the British Prime Minister this very month (January 2023).

9. The Chateau of Briis: A Lesson in Love - Alison Weir

One of the short stories linking the six volumes of Weir's series of novels about the wives of Henry VIII. This one recounts an imaginary love affair the teenage Anne Boleyn conducts with a young French noble at the court of the philandering King Francis I. As Anne is let down in love, this provides her with a lesson in handling men that she will come to use in real life against King Henry later on.

10. Six Tudor Queens 2: Anne Boleyn, A King's Obsession - Alison Weir

This is the second in the author's six novel series tracing the lives of Henry VIII's six wives. Anne Boleyn, along with Katherine of Aragon, were by far the most significant of Henry's wives, their relationships with him having huge political and religious significance. Anne is a fascinating character. Initially repelled by the King after he has used and discarded her older sister Mary, he pursues her relentlessly, but she learns from her sister's experiences and holds him at bay, refusing to become his lover and yet another to-be-discarded mistress.....anyway, the story is too well known to be recounted here. My view of Anne Boleyn is mixed. She was undoubtedly innocent of the absurd and vile charges which led to her show trial and execution in May 1536 alongside five men, including her own brother, and the last few chapters of the novel covering these events is almost unbearably gripping and suspenseful, even though the reader knows the outcome. And yet, Anne was also manipulative and once she'd decided to use the King's obsession with her to ride to supreme power as Queen, she became increasingly mean and nasty, eventually wishing the deaths of Katherine and the latter's daughter Mary, still a child or very young woman at this time. She was a victim of her own hubris, eventually betrayed not only by her husband, but also by her uncle, who presided at her trial, and her father, who was one of her judges who voted for her guilt. Eventually, ironically, it was her sister Mary who came out of it the best, happily married to a Calais garrison soldier William Stafford. A wonderful, colourful novel, this has everything in terms of highs and lows, as per its subject's life. 5/5

11. The Grandmother's Tale

This companion e-short to Weir's Anne Boleyn novel centres around Margaret Butler, Anne's octogenarian grandmother, who has survived not only the judicial murder of two of her three grandchildren, but also of her son, ambitious courtier Thomas Boleyn. Here she is reminiscing in her ancestral family home of Hever Castle in Kent, while Thomas Cranmer is helping to avoid her having to leave, as the castle may revert to the Crown following Thomas's death. This is quite a poignant and bittersweet short story as Margaret looks back, and also seems to look forward to Hever in future centuries. 4/5

12. The Tower is Full of Ghosts Today

This very short light-hearted but slightly creepy companion e-short to Weir's Anne Boleyn novel concerns one or more ghosts of the Queen haunting the Tower of London in modern times. 3/5

13. The Jungle Book - Rudyard Kipling

Growing up in the 1970s, Disney's animated film version of this late 19th century children's classic was a seminal film. I had never read the book before now though. It's a collection of stories, not a novel, and Mowgli's growing up and adventures in the jungle with Baloo the bear and Bagheera the black panther, the wolves led by Akela, and fighting off Shere Khan the tiger occupy only the first third of so of the book, with notably Shakespearean sounding dialogue from all characters and lots of illustrations. The rest of consists of unrelated tales about the White Seal, the mongoose Rikki-Tikki-Tavi and his battles with cobras, and elephants and some other lesser stories and songs. I thought the Mowgli sections were the best, or perhaps that's just because they are the ones I am most familiar with. I also liked the White Seal leading his fellow seals to an island where they could be free from being culled by humans, the Rikki-Tikki-Tavi story which was quite memorable and bloody, and the elephants' "dance" sequence, but some of the rest made rather less of an impression on me. As a consequence, very good in parts, but felt a little disjointed.

I liked Dr. Wortle's school but boy is it not very standard-Trollope, is it? Some of the lines were unexpectedly modern to me.

Operation Mincemeat sounds great and I really enjoyed your review!

>11 john257hopper: I also liked Dr Wortle's School, which seemed very tolerant for the time and had a lot to say about religious hypocrisy from small-minded, nasty people.

14. The Artful Dodger - Martin Lake

As is title suggests, this is a spin off novel from Dickens's Oliver Twist, following the adventures of Jack Dawkins, the Artful Dodger, member of Fagin's gang, after he is transported to Australia for stealing a snuff box. It tells of his suffering at the hands of other criminals on the six month passage to New South Wales, and the alliances and rivalries he forms and breaks during a colourful convict life out there. While his adventures are entertaining and varied, by half way through the book I was beginning to think this could be a novel about any 19th century boy convict as there was no Dickensian connection. Then his kindly employer Dr Foster took him along with his household back to England, where he was able to renew some old connections, after finding out in shock about the execution of Fagin and the murder of Nancy. However, this part of the book did not end up being as interesting a follow up to Dickens's classic as I hoped. He falls in with some ex-members of Fagin's gang we didn't know about, and discovers an arch rival in Mr Justice Fang, the judge who heard the case where Oliver was accused of stealing the wallet of Mr Brownlow, his future benefactor. The plot and its resolution are a bit far fetched, particularly in that it leads to Dawkins being associated and friendly with Lord Palmerston the future Prime Minister, and hobnobbing with the likes of Gladstone (then a Tory) and Liberal leader Sir John Russell. While entertaining, I did not really take this too seriously. I felt the novel rambled rather was not particularly well written and I can't say I enjoyed it as much as I did the author's quartet of novels about Edgar Atheling.

15. In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom - Yeonmi Park

This is a memoir by a North Korean defector and now human rights activist. Following precarious years of hardship and malnutrition, Yeonmi at the age of only 13 escaped from her country with her mother in March 2007. Living in the northern border city of Hyesan, China was just across the frozen Yalu river and beckoned with its relative economic prosperity and comparative freedom. But Yeonmi's struggles were only just beginning as her mother was almost immediately raped and then they were bought and sold, and abused by successive waves of human traffickers. After two years in China, and searching for Yeonmi's sister who had defected separately at around the same time, they eventually made their way (counterintuitively from a geographical point of view) via Mongolia, to South Korea. She had been forced to grow up very quickly, having to make life-changing and potentially life-ending decisions, all before she was even 16 years old. But despite that enforced growing up, the very limited confines of her (and of course nearly all her fellow country people's) growing up and education in North Korea meant that she has no concept of freedom or democracy, or even, really tragically, of human love:

"I wasn’t dreaming of freedom when I escaped from North Korea. I didn’t even know what it meant to be free. All I knew was that if my family stayed behind, we would probably die—from starvation, from disease, from the inhuman conditions of a prison labor camp. The hunger had become unbearable; I was willing to risk my life for the promise of a bowl of rice."

As the bartering began for Yeonmi and her mother, she was "caught between fear and hope. We were numb, and our purpose was reduced to our immediate needs: Get away from the dangerous border. Get away from this terrible bald broker and his frightening wife. Get something to eat and figure out the rest of it later."

But later on she was separated from her mother and "was beginning to realize that all the food in the world, and all the running shoes, could not make me happy. The material things were worthless. I had lost my family. I wasn’t loved, I wasn’t free, and I wasn’t safe. I was alive, but everything that made life worth living was gone."

Even after Yeonmi and her mother escaped to South Korea, the process of getting used to life in a freer and much more prosperous society was very hard. The utterly alien mindset caused by a very limited mental horizon is perhaps one of the hardest aspects for the Western reader to get his or her head round - for example when asked what her hobbies were: "I had no idea what a “hobby” was. When it was explained that it was something I did that made me happy, I couldn’t conceive of such a thing. My only goal was supposed to be making the regime happy. And why would anyone care about what “I” wanted to be when I grew up? There was no “I” in North Korea—only we". She could not even name her favourite colour and until a teacher told her her own, which she then parroted: "It took me a long time to start thinking for myself and to understand why my own opinions mattered. But after five years of practicing being free, I know now that my favorite color is spring green and my hobby is reading books and watching documentaries." Until that time, Yeonmi "had always thought that being free meant being able to wear jeans and watch whatever movies I wanted without worrying about being arrested. Now I realized that I had to think all the time—and it was exhausting. There were times when I wondered whether, if it wasn’t for the constant hunger, I would be better off in North Korea, where all my thinking and all my choices were taken care of for me". Her journey to freedom and success has been a difficult one. She has been an activist speaking out against North Korea and in favour of freedom for nearly a decade and it is amazing to think she is still not yet 30. A remarkable journey by a remarkable individual.

16. Oliver Twist (Play) - Charles Zachary Barnett

This is a play script of Dickens's novel, produced in 1838 before the novel had even finished its serialisation in Bentley's Miscellany. Obviously it condenses the novel considerably, into three acts with a lot of very short scenes. However, I thought it actually condensed the highlights and most dramatic episodes of the novel rather effectively, almost an Oliver Twist greatest hits. Quite enjoyable.

17. Oliver Twist and the Mystery of Throate Manor - David Stuart Davies

In this spin off novel, Oliver Twist is a 28 year old junior lawyer in the marvellously named firm of Gripwind and Biddle. Oliver and his assistant who is none other than Jack Dawkins, the Artful Dodger, are tasked with making an alteration to the will of Sir Ebenezer Throate. The old man, disgusted with his wastrel of a son, charges the pair with finding his long lost illegitimate other son, offspring of a "moment of madness" with a maidservant a quarter of a century before, so that he can make him his heir. The plot is twisty and turny with various red herrings as to the identity of someone making successive attempts on the life of Sir Ebenezer, though the central device of the wastrel brother and the virtuous brother of course mirrors the roles of Monks and Twist themselves in Dickens's novel. This was colourfully written, if rather implausible in places and, as in Dickens's novel, Twist is actually probably the least interesting character in the story. The final line hints at further stories featuring Oliver and Jack, but this does not seem to have been followed up by the author so far. The book also contained rather a lot of typos. Overall, worth a read, though I didn't enjoy this as much as the author's spin off Sherlock Holmes novels of which I have read two so far.

18. Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters - Malcolm Hulke

This is an excellent novelisation of the Jon Pertwee Doctor Who story The Silurians. Already an excellent TV story, this novelisation adds depth to many of the characters and gives them motivations and back stories that would have been difficult or impossible to show within the confines of a TV story, albeit that at 7 episodes, this was one of the longer ones. The moral dilemmas of the clash between two advanced and intelligent civilisations are quite well explored. I would have liked a bit more detail of the effects of the epidemic on wider British society though if anything this was actually shown better on screen, with passengers collapsing at a London train station. This is an excellent and intelligent read, one of the best Target novelisations.

19. Doctor Who: The Scales of Injustice - Gary Russell

This is a spin off Doctor Who novel set between the TV stories Inferno and Terror of the Autons, providing a leaving story for the 3rd Doctor's companion Elizabeth Shaw. The Silurians - or Earth Reptiles as they are called here - are back, emerging from a shelter under the Channel Islands. Once again there are extreme Silurians who want to wipe out all the "furry Apes" and other factions who realise that humanity now vastly outnumbers them and that they must seek compromise if they are to have a future as a revived reptilian civilisation. On the human side, things are more complicated with UNIT, department C19 and the mysterious Glasshouse as separate organisations all involved in a way I found sometimes rather confusing. I found the narrative uneven, with a lot of set up and some dramatic and violent set piece scenes, but not enough actual plot for me - a contrast from the TV story The Silurians and its Cave Monsters novelisation. On the plus side though it was nice to get to know some of Liz Shaw's and Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart's lives and human frailties outside the stories.

20. The Second Jungle Book - Rudyard Kipling

Like its predecessor, this is a collection of short stories and songs that were first published in magazines before being collected in book form in 1895. These were well written, though I thought the Mowgli stories were less interesting than those in the first collection, and less clearly focused around the animals or aimed at younger readers. Also there were no illustrations in this book. One or two of the non-Mowgli stories were actually my favourites, The Miracle of Purun Bhagat about an Indian prince turned spiritualist and Quiquern, providing a big contrast set in Eskimo territory.

21. Joanna: the Notorious Queen of Naples, Jerusalem and Sicily - Nancy Goldstone

This was a very colourful and dramatic slice of Medieval European history focusing on a little known and fascinating ruler, one of the most powerful female rulers of the Medieval age. "During her long, eventful reign, Joanna held together a large and far-flung dominion, which included Provence and all of southern Italy, and even expanded her rule, however briefly, into Sicily and Piedmont.....For more than thirty years, this queen fed the poor and cared for the sick; built churches and hospitals; reduced crime and promoted peace; protected trade and introduced new industry within her borders. She guided her subjects to recovery from the many instances of plague, war, famine, and depression endemic to the second half of the fourteenth century." So, why is she called the "notorious" Queen? This is because of the accusation that she murdered her first husband Andrew of Hungary, though she was cleared of this in a trial in 1348. However, this set off a very turbulent period of threatened and actual invasion, negotiating with 5 or 6 successive popes, marital turmoil with the first three of her four husbands, and seeing the deaths of her young children by Andrew and by her second husband Louis of Taranto. Joanna's final fall came at the hands of another Hungarian invasion, after she fell foul of the battles of rival Popes at the time of the Great Schism of the Papacy, an event "which would bitterly divide the church for the next forty years and be as damaging to Europe, and especially to the kingdom of Naples, as any war". Her murder as a wretched prisoner in a remote castle I found particularly sad and bathetic, an ignominious end to a great ruler. In conclusion, the author rues the fact that Joanna's story "when it is recounted at all, focuses entirely on her notoriety, as the queen who murdered her husband, and not on the many impressive accomplishments of her reign." A great read.

22. The Tyrant of Siena - Jude Mahoney

This is a short action adventure novel set in Renaissance Florence featuring the doings of a young noble Giovanni Lascorza and his mentor, companion and servant Otto Baldwinson, fighting for their city against another major Tuscan city, Siena. While the events are violent and dramatic, I thought this was not well written - the dialogue sounded artificial and too modern, and the narrative seemed a bit crude and lacking depth. I got no real feeling for any of the major characters and felt we never really got to know any of them. The history surrounding the eponymous historical tyrant, Pandolfo Petrucci, was also inaccurate, as the story was held to be taking place in 1483 and yet the tyrant did not come to power in Siena until 1487. There were also a fair number of typos. All in all, I doubt if I will bother with the sequels.

23. The Decameron - Giovanni Boccaccio

I have spent the last fortnight reading through this 1903 translation of Boccaccio's Decameron, one of the classic works of Medieval European literature. The Decameron is a similar idea to the contemporaneous Canterbury Tales by Chaucer. In the Italian version, 10 young people (7 women, 3 men) from Florence escape from the Black Death which is ravaging the city (and the rest of Europe of course) in the mid 14th century. They settle in a happily deserted but richly appointed villa outside the city and over the course of a fortnight each of the 10 tells one story a day to their fellow escapees (they break for Friday and Saturday twice, hence 10 days of stories). For each day one or other of the 10 is the king or queen of the party and sets the theme for the day's 10 stories, such as tales of women deceiving men, or vice versa, reversals of fortune, etc. The tales are mostly very short, though given the large number of them, the book weighs in at over 1000 pages. Many of the tales are very salacious, and quite sexually explicit by pre-modern standards, with both men and women enthusiastically engaging in copulation (though there is a lot of what we would call rape as well). Boccaccio has a grudge against members of the clergy and religious in general who are frequently the butt of jokes and the committers of sexual peccadilloes in the stories. The tales can also be quite repetitive though and there were a few I found rather dull and unclear. But the format means that this is a gem of a collection that can be absorbed in small doses more easily than reading a thousand page novel. The author concludes with an epilogue defending in fairly modern terms his stories against critics who would say they are unsuitable or harmful. The 1903 translation was slightly old fashioned but largely easily comprehensible (the Delphi Collected Works of Boccaccio also contain two other copyright-free translations from 1620 the first attempt at a nominally complete English translation and 1886 the first genuinely complete English translation). A gem of stories and some day I will read a more modern translation.

24. The Body in the Library - Agatha Christie

This was the usual quick page turner, though I was not impressed by any of the characters. The final resolution of the origin of the eponymous corpse and who was responsible for it was rather rushed and complicated at the end, and I couldn't really determine how Miss Marple arrived at her convoluted findings. One of the two murderers wasn't on my personal list of suspects. One amusing aspect is the wry metafictional observations , such as when Colonel Bantry, the owner of the eponymous library, says that "Bodies are always being found in libraries in books. I've never known a case in real life.", or when a young boy remarks says he reads all the detective stories and that he has "got autographs from Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie and Dickson Carr and H C Bailey." Miss Marple also confesses herself as not being "clever enough" to write detective stories. Despite these occasional sparkles, this was a rather mediocre read.

25. A Song for Lya - George R R Martin

Many years before Game of Thrones, George R R Martin wrote this SF novella which won the prestigious Hugo Award for best novella in 1975. This was a cracking read, packing a lot into its less than 100 pages: an Earth empire with colonies, a well crafted and intriguing alien civilisation, interesting interpersonal relationships, and a central plot device that felt both horrific and in some ways liberating, prompting interesting speculations about religion and philosophy. Frankly there was more going on here than in some of the very long books in his Song of Ice and Fire series. On the strength of this, I will definitely seek out more of his non Game of Thrones work.

26. War Lord - Bernard Cornwell

So at last with this thirteenth novel in the series, which I started reading in 2005, Uhtred's saga comes to an end. Events move towards the final battle where King Athelstan defeats his enemies at the Battle of Brunanburh in 937, the decisive battle that shaped England into the shape it occupies today. For Uhtred of Bebbanburg, this presents a dilemma as Northumbria is caught between Athelstan's wish to annex it to his kingdom of Wessex, Mercia and East Anglia to form Englaland (sic), and the desire of King Constantine of Scotland to extend his territory south. To complicate matters further, there is an Irish claimant Anlaf of Dublin. Uhtred feels conflicted in his attitude towards Athelstan, but in the end events drive him to support that King, as he supported his father King Edward (the Elder) and grandfather King Alfred. The novel is full of the usual blood and thunder, and the description of the final battle is quite gripping and dramatic. So this final Uhtred novel ends with the elderly war lord still in control of Bebbanburg, which he has fought for, had taken from him and then recaptured, against all his enemies, "and whenever I sit on the terrace I wonder if, a thousand years from now, the fortress will still stand, still unconquered, still brooding over the sea and the land. I think it will remain until Ragnarok comes, when the seas will boil, the land shatter and the skies turn to fire, and there the story will end." Indeed it does still stand as the medieval Bamburgh castle was built on the site of the Saxon fort on the brooding cliffs. Afitting end to this series which I have quite often started to weary of, but with which I have persevered.

27. Blood and Blade - Matthew Harffy

This is the third in the author's series of novels set in 7th century England featuring Beobrand, a Kentish thane who is in service of King Oswald of Northumbria. As a break from fighting Picts, the main plot centres around Beobrand accompanying his master down south so the latter can form an alliance with King Cynegils of Wessex by marrying his beautiful daughter Cyneburg. However, escorting her separately to her new home, Beobrand loses her when she is captured by a band of Mercians. Of course he eventually tracks her down. The overall story arc of war against the Picts resumes though in a final battle to capture their stronghold in what is now Edinburgh, mirrored by Beobrand's personal war against the Nathair family. As I have remarked before, while covering very similar ground to Bernard Cornwell's Uhtred series, albeit set 300 years earlier, I think Harffy's characters are more rounded and interesting than Cornwell's.

28. The Centurion: A Roman Soldier's Testament of the Passion of Christ - Leonard Wibberley

This is a novel told largely from the point of view of Longinus, the centurion who is ordered to administer the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth. This is a tough assignment for him as he has developed some sympathy for Christ, who had saved his Celtic servant Ruafocus from a fatal disease. The story is told in quite a straightforward but quite gripping way, from the first rumours of Jesus preaching, at which time he is just one among many Jewish preachers, to his becoming more and more popular, as stories of his miracles attract more and more witnesses, who cannot all just be dismissed as credulous. It is easy to see how Jesus was increasingly perceived as a threat to the Roman authorities, preaching what sounded like sedition but in a completely non-violent way, and to the local Jewish leadership, especially the Pharisees, performing miracles but acting unofficially outside the limits of Jewish authority. As the author says: "First, he did not preach only in the Temple but more often in the open whenever a crowd had gathered around him. Second, he never dealt with the Law, but talked about their daily lives and their Father in Heaven who looked after them so that they could feel his presence in the mountains and fields and valleys. Again he used no subtleties, but spoke directly so that there was no hidden meaning in his words. And finally he made up little stories, about planting seeds or harvesting grain or going on a journey, or losing a coin, or lighting a lamp, or building a house, all of which applied directly to their own lives." Yet, strangely, after he is condemned to crucifixion, the crowds overwhelmingly mock and deride him. A moving novel, whatever one's religious views - not for no reason has the story of Jesus been called the greatest story ever told.

29. The Wolves of Willoughby Chase - Joan Aiken

This is an alternate historical fiction/children's novel, with a fantasy-type feel to it, though no actual fantasy elements. It is 1832 in an England where wolves roam the landscape, having invaded the country which is ruled by King James III through the Channel Tunnel (though these details are only given in a short frontispiece, not in the actual text of the novel). Our heroine is Bonnie Green, an appealingly feisty girl who, together with her cousin Sylvia, escape the clutches of their wicked governess Miss Slighcarp and her friend Mrs Brisket who runs a school that feels like a female equivalent of Dickens's Dotheboys Hall from Nicholas Nickleby. There are some other appealing and engaging characters and I enjoyed this escapade. There are many sequels which I will try to read.

30. The Black Prince and the Capture of a King: Poitiers 1356 - Marilyn Livingstone & Morgen Witzel

The battle of Poitiers was one of the two biggest victories on land (along with Crecy a decade earlier) by the English in the first phase of the Medieval conflict now called the Hundred Years War. This book however is a bit of a misnomer in that the battle and the capture of the French King Jean II occupy only the last two of the nine chapters of the book; it is rather a history of the progress of the conflict during the ten years between Crecy and Poitiers. It is well described, and very well researched though and brings across quite clearly the movement of the English army led by the Black Prince rampaging across the French countryside, bringing terror and destruction in their wake. The Prince does, however, emerge as a very good leader of men, able to inspire great loyalty and devotion among his comrades and earning the respect of the rank and file through tours of encampments to talk to them. King Jean emerges as a civilised and cultured man, personally very honourable, but with a certain obstinacy that could stand in the way of wise strategic decision-making. The technology of English/Welsh longbows versus French crossbows is explained as a major factor in the English victories during this phase of the war. The book gives a good feel for what is probably the epitome of Medieval welfare.

31. The Scapegoat - Daphne du Maurier

This is one of du Maurier's less well known novels, but it is very well written and atmospheric. Published and set in the 1950s, the titular character is John, a lonely Englishman staying in France who is an expert in Medieval French history, but who is affected with a vast ennui about his life and future. In a hotel bar in Le Mans he bumps into Jean comte de Gué, who is his exact physical double. They drink and dine, compare experiences of dissatisfaction with their own lives, and English John cannot tear himself away. The next morning he wakes up in a hotel room to find the comte has taken all his clothes and possessions and left him his own, forcing a swap of their lives on him. He encounters the comte's family and, while the story is very well told, and actions have their internal logic, he is accepted by the household far too readily for me, which I simply cannot believe would happen as it does here, notwithstanding that there are tensions and a lack of intimacy with his wife. He forms a bond with the count's daughter who accepts him utterly, but is otherwise very wise for her age. In fact, initially only the dog smells that something is wrong - though towards the end Jean's lover Béla also surmises his identity. John is kinder than his French counterpart and tries to put to right some wrongs. Jean returns in the end, and the novel ends somewhat unsatisfactorily with Jean resuming his role as count and John driving off to "find himself" in a nearby monastery, as he had been about to do at the outset. The descriptions of the French countryside and the way of life are very evocative of a timeless quality.

>35 john257hopper: I went looking for this, only to find I'd already read it. LibraryThing is so useful for recording what you've read.

You're reading a great deal of historical fiction lately.

>36 pamelad: Hi Pam, yes it's my most frequently read genre of fiction, historical fiction from various eras. The Scapegoat is set around about when it was published in the 1950s, though :).

32. The Cater Street Hangman - Anne Perry

A week or two ago I had barely heard of this author; but when she passed away just recently, I realised I already had a couple of her books. This was the first in an eventual series of over 30 books in a whodunnit series set in late Victorian London. The whodunnit aspect however takes second place to the interactions between the characters, particularly the household of the upper middle class Ellison family, and they with Inspector Thomas Pitt. One of the daughters Charlotte is our principal character and, while I did warm her to as the novel went on, most of the other characters irritated me to a greater or lesser degree. I understand about the "everyone has their place and should know it" Victorian attitude, but I felt it was rammed down my throat ad nauseam, and a bit more plot would have been good in places. The eventual unveiling of the murderer in the last few pages was a little sudden and unlikely. I will probably follow the series at least part of its long way, though am in no rush to do so.

33. Kin of Cain - Matthew Harffy

This is a prequel novella to the author's Bernicia Chronicles series and features the hero Beobrand's older brother Octa (who is murdered at the beginning of the first book) and other warriors being sent out by King Edwin to hunt down and slay a mysterious beast that is terrorising the countryside and killing both animals and people. After adventures in the bleak misty and marshy locale, they eventually encounter the beast near its lair. It turns out to be a wild young man, who is protected by his mother.... and his name is Grendel! So this short story offers a theoretical origin for the Beowulf story. As such it is a good and well written piece though, while tragic, it doesn't really convince as the stuff of legend.

34. Midlife Crisis - Jason Ayres

This is the seventh in the author's Time Bubble series. None of the main regular characters are in this one, it centres on the life of Richard Kent, a disgruntled ex-policeman turned pub landlord, who has turned up in some of the earlier novels. At age 42 in 2018 he is suicidally depressed by the way his life has turned out. A guardian angel offers him a chance to relive six days in his life, from buying his first record in 1984, dating his dream girl in 1994 and attempting to foil a robbery in 2013. It turns out he cannot make any direct changes to the past, though he can learn lessons to put the past in perspective and improve his mental attitude for the future (as well as gaining revenge on some unpleasant types in the process). This was rather different from the other previous novels in the series, though I enjoyed some of the reminiscences of the 80s and 90s.

35.Recollections of Alexis de Tocqueville - Alexis de Tocqueville

Alexis de Tocqueville was a prominent French politician and writer in the middle part of the 19th century, writing famous works on the Ancien (i.e. pre-1789) Regime in his country, and on American democracy. These are his recollections of the famous revolutionary events of 1848, primarily in France, but also elsewhere in Europe. De Tocqueville is a sharp observer of his political allies and adversaries, with a keen eye for political movements and the mechanics of constitutional reform. He is a moderate, pragmatic Republican during the revolution of 1848 which saw the demise of the very last French king, Louis-Philippe. His descriptions of various waves of revolutionary events in February, May and June 1848 come across as quite confusing and it was often hard to see who exactly among the competing factions in the National Assembly was in the ascendancy or not - the overwhelming impression one gets is of chaos and members of factions not really having a clear idea what their actual political aims are, other an inchoate opposition to the prevailing rulers. There are gaps in the narrative as de Tocqueville insists only on covering events he has personally witnessed, even at the expense of a sometimes somewhat incoherent story. He is worried by the rise of Louis Napoleon as President, sensing that he aims at proclaiming himself effective monarch, as indeed he does after the events of this book as Emperor Napoleon III (and arrests de Tocqueville at the same time, putting an end to the latter's political career). The last section of the book details de Tocqueville's experiences as Foreign Minister for a few months shortly before this time, negotiating with German states as Prussia comes to dominate amongst them; with Russian Emperor Nicholas I and with the Ottoman Empire. Interesting, but rather too detailed and as a first hand account inevitably does not give a rounded picture of events.

36. The Enchanted April - Elizabeth von Arnim

This is a low key story set shortly after the First World War of four ladies who are strangers to each other on holiday for the month of April in a small castle in the Italian countryside. Mrs Wilkins and Mrs Arbuthnot both see a newspaper advert at the same time and decide to share the costs with two other ladies, the young Lady Caroline Dester and the elderly Mrs Fisher. Each of these four ladies is looking for peace and solitude but is unable to find in the beautiful Italian sunshine due to the presence of the others and their thoughts and feelings about their outside lives. Various men intrude themselves, or are invited, onto the scene. This is very much a novel on thoughts and feelings and an inner desire for peace and contentment and what the characters try to do to achieve that.

37. The Secret Commonwealth - Philip Pullman

This is the second book in Pullman's Book of Dust trilogy, and takes place twenty years after the first book, and most of a decade after the action of The Amber Spyglass, the final book in the His Dark Materials trilogy. Lyra is now 20 and still living in Jordan College, Oxford. Sadly she and her beloved daemon Pantaleimon have fallen out and can hardly stand each other; Lyra seems to have fallen under the influence of two rationalist thinkers and authors who deny the existence of daemons. Things come to a head and Pantaleimon runs away. The plot essentially involves Lyra travelling a path east across Europe, the Middle East and Asia to find him, following legends of communities of other people lacking daemons, and dodging through perilous local political and religious turmoil, at the centre of which is a character Marcel Delamare, who is the brother of Mrs Coulter, and hence Lyra's uncle (though this fact is given no significance in this book). The story is grim and gritty and while a good story in itself I missed the atmosphere of magical exuberance that pervades the other books set in Lyra's universe. I also thought it was rather too long and my enjoyment of this one is rather qualified. I wonder how the story will be resolved in the final part which is apparently to be published later this year.

38. Grave Expectations - Heather Redmond

This is the second in the author's series of whodunnits with a young Charles Dickens sleuthing together with his now fiancee Kate Hogarth. A woman is discovered murdered in the flat upstairs from the one Dickens shares with his younger brother Fred. She is dressed in an old fashioned wedding dress. The sleuthing in this one goes back 50 years to a gruesome story Charles reads in an old journal slipped under his front door by an unknown person. While I quite enjoyed this, some of the logic leaps and assumptions seem a bit strained. The connections to Great Expectations are more substantial than those to Tale of Two Cities in the first book in this series; not only the wedding dress, but also convicts and blacksmiths. There is a good sense of Dickens struggling to make ends meet at this time of life, having to work on his sketches of city life that will later be collected as Sketches by Boz, and on songs, in order to stay afloat, pay his rent to his unscrupulous landlord, and support his feckless father, while also trying to help people in distress, such as the blacksmith he believes to have been wrongly arrested for the murder of his upstairs neighbour, and the mudlarks. As in the first book, there are various knowing references such as when Dickens snorts "Who would want to read a book by me?". I am highly irritated when Americanisms such as "me either" and "city block" are put into Dickens's mouth, but I know this frequently happens in published works these days. I will pursue this series, though I feel a bit disappointed with the execution.

39. The Science of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials - Mary and John Gribbin

This book looks at the concepts in Pullman's famous fantasy series and how they are or might be reflected in the science and technology of our world, e.g. Northern Lights, Dust, the alethiometer, movement between worlds using the subtle knife, the amber spyglass, and so on. In doing so, the Gribbins discuss dark matter, sub-atomic physics, string theory, quantum probability, the Butterfly Effect and chaos, entanglement, the Many Worlds theory, Schrodinger's cat and more. The authors explain stuff as clearly as they can, there are some really tough scientific and philosophical concepts here in this short book. My only slight disappointment was the lack of coverage of the concept of daemons, which I always find one of the most appealing concepts in Lyra's world.

40. Stormboar - Jude Mahoney

This is a prequel to the author's Heroes of Florence series set in Renaissance Italy, of which I have read the first in the series The Tyrant of Siena. This novella contained all the weaknesses of that novel, not well written, and lacking depth of characterisation or plot. There were also irritating spelling and punctuation errors. So, despite my great interest in this colourful period of history, I doubt I will be reading any more in the series.

>46 john257hopper: That's a lot of weaknesses! Did it also have vocabulary errors? Examples I keep meeting are diffuse for defuse, luxurious for luxuriant and disinterested for uninterested. I think uninterested is disappearing from the language.

>47 pamelad: - I didn't spot any of them. I think disinterested vs. uninterested is well worth preserving.

41. Black Hearts in Battersea - Joan Aiken

I actually read this book earlier this month, but forgot to post the review - discovered when I spotted a discrepancy in my book numbering between here and my reading list.

This is the second in the author's series of books beginning with the Wolves of Willoughby Chase. The continuing and principal character is young Simon who goes to London to be a painter. He falls in with an eclectic bunch of characters, including the traitorous Twites with whom he lodges and their mischievous but appealing scamp of a daughter Dido. Simon discovers a plot by Hanoverians to overthrow the king of Britain in this alternate 19th century, James III (Stuart). While quite good fun, I didn't enjoy this quite as much as the first one and the ending seemed a little rushed. I will pursue the series though.

42. The Making of Charles Dickens - Christopher Hibbert

This is a well researched analysis of the first 30 or so years of Dickens's life, tracing the links between the early events in his life and his developing literary approach. Much of this is material I have seen covered in other books, but Hibbert shows how repeated patterns come up, such as strong brother-sister relationships being seen as more ideal than husband-wife ones, reflecting in particular his close and, to modern eyes, bizarre, relationship with his sister in law Mary Hogarth who died so suddenly and so tragically young; and the repeated ripples of assertions of self confidence in later life reflecting the knock back Dickens suffered after his initial schooling in Chatham when he had to work in the infamous blacking warehouse on the site of what is now Charing Cross station. Much of Dickens's life and attitudes towards his own progress and relations with others seems to demonstrate an absolute imperative to avoid the feckless attitudes and precarious economic situation of his father John Dickens whom he had continually to bale out for the reminder of the latter's life. This is fascinating stuff though I did think Hibbert perhaps went slightly too far into Dickens's middle life to suit the title.

43. Golden Cargoes - Fiona Buckley

This is the twenty-first book in the Ursula Stannard series of Elizabethan mysteries. The Spanish Armada has been defeated, and subsequent events feel like an anti climax - in the first half of the book, the most drama seems to come from a young lady, Arabella Mercer, being brutally forced by her widowed mother to marry a local landowner Sylvester Waters. Distasteful for sure, but not a national threat. However, it soon turns out that the families concerned are mixed up in much more serious events involving a range of crimes including piracy, theft and murder. Arabella has been in love with and, though ignorant of the fact, pregnant by a local carpenter Gilbert Gale. During her sufferings she is exposed to some of her family members' horrific secrets and is clearly mentally damaged by the end of the book, and unable to find happiness with Gilbert as planned. I thought this human dimension was well handled, and the plot a bit more original than they sometimes have been.

44. Cradle - James Jackson

This is the third book in the trilogy centred around the rivalry between the fictional Christian Hardy, an agent of Sir Robert Cecil, King James I's Secretary of State in the early years of the 17th century; and the English renegade and Spanish agent "Realm", a callous and utterly amoral individual who seeks to frustrate and destroy the interests of his mother country whom he blames for the deaths of his parents in a Catholic uprising decades before. After the first two novels were set around the Spanish Armada and the Gunpowder Plot, this one is set around the English colony of Jamestown in Virginia which struggles for existence against marauding native American tribes, but which is here also undermined not only by Realm as part of Spain's ocean-spanning war against England, but also by Sir Robert Cecil himself for reasons I wasn't entirely clear about, but which seem to be because King James apparently suspects Jamestown will grow into a powerful colony of religious and political dissenters to challenge the English state. Another central character backing Hardy was Prince Henry, elder son of King James.

While this is a fascinating historical backdrop, I did not enjoy this novel. Aside from the grim nature of much of the plot and what I thought was the rather gratuitous use of set piece violence, a major fault is that the dialogue often seems too unrealistically theatrical. While witty banter and verbal sparring are often fun to read, every character in this book talks in exactly the same way, such that I sometimes forget whether I was reading about the doings of Hardy or of Realm. And important and dramatic incidents were described in very matter of fact terms, e.g. "To furious shouts and residual violence, the mutiny was quelled and the exodus halted". And although John Smith and Pocahontas both feature in this story (the former particularly prominently), the famous scene where she intercedes with her father to save Smith's life is only mentioned in passing in a throwaway line after the event. So overall, rather disappointing.

45. The Fortune of the Rougons - Emile Zola

This was a re-read of the first novel in Zola's 20 novel Rougon-Macquart cycle about the lives of two related families in the Second Empire period of Napoleon III between 1851-70. When I first read this almost exactly ten years ago, I wasn't too impressed and found it dull and slow moving. I have a more positive opinion now, and quite enjoyed most of the interplay between the generations of the two branches of the family, especially the opportunism and desire for fame and fortune of Pierre Rougon, dominated by his wife Felicite, the tragic backstory of his mother "Aunt" Dide, and the youthful romanticism, both political and emotional, of Silvere and Miette. While some of the manoeuvrings around the fictional town of Plassans dragged a bit, for the most part I enjoyed the story and feel an appetite now to tackle the following books in the series, which I did not feel ten years ago. At one point, the families are described colourfully as "a pack of unbridled, insatiate appetites amidst a blaze of gold and blood". Once the Coup d'Etat has brought the Emperor to power and buried the second French Republic, it is the Rougons' time to prosper: "Their appetites, sharpened by thirty years of restrained desire, now fell to with wolfish teeth. These fierce, insatiate wild beasts, scarcely entering upon indulgence, exulted at the birth of the Empire — the dawn of the Rush for the Spoils. The Coup d’Etat, which retrieved the fortune of the Bonapartes, also laid the foundation for that of the Rougons."

46. The Lerouge Case - Emile Gaboriau

This is the first in a series of crime novels written in the third quarter of the 19th century by this French author, who died tragically young aged only 40. It is widely considered to be the first French detective novel. I really enjoyed this - there was an economy of style and a crispness about the narrative that I relished. The murder of the Widow Lerouge was discovered and reported to the police in the first couple of paragraphs and the crime was seemingly resolved by chapter 4; only to give rise to unravellings of various characters' lives and pasts, with different motivating factors affecting their possible involvement in the cause of Lerouge's murder. There are inevitably echoes of the origins of Sherlock Holmes - "The misfortune is that the art is becoming lost. Great crimes are now so rare." This crime concerns not only murder but infant substitution and lifelong deceit. A great read and I am glad there are many more in this series (I thought until a few minutes ago it was a five book series, but I now realise it is some 10-11).

47. Listen to the Moon - Michael Morpurgo

This is a beautifully written and life-affirming story as Michael Morpurgo's novels frequently are. Like Why the Whales Came and Wreck of the Zanzibar, it is set in the beautiful Scilly Isles off the coast of Cornwall, more specifically in and around one of the smallest inhabited islands in the group, Bryher, during the First World War. A young girl is found seemingly abandoned on the uninhabited island of St Helens by two fishermen Jim Wheatcroft and his son Alfie, whom they christen Lucy after an initial word she utters. The story runs on two time streams, as Lucy settles into life with the Wheatcrofts but also faces prejudice and hostility from other islanders in the atmosphere of war hysteria prevailing in 1915. The other time stream shows how Lucy came to be abandoned on St Helens and her struggles to survive there until she is found. The story covers themes of tolerance, confronting mindless prejudice and the twisted version of patriotism that can become war hysteria, and how families can adopt newcomers and offer them unconditional love and shelter. No spoilers, but there is a beautiful symmetry about the plot and bittersweet endings to some of the plot threads that I liked. A lovely read. 5/5.

48. Hell Bay (Ben Kitto 1) - Kate Rhodes

This is the first in a series of modern day crime novels set in the beautiful Scilly Isles off the coast of Cornwall, one of my favourite holiday destinations, indeed where I am currently on holiday at the time of finishing this book and writing this review. I have some mixed feelings about this. The Scilly setting was well described and redolent of the colour of life on these islands, but also contained some glaring errors, e.g. mentioning landing on the (non-existent) landing quay on the uninhabited island of Samson, and a reference to the first daily crossing on the Scillonian ship to Penzance being at noon (the one and only trip of the day leaves St Mary's at 4.30pm). I also found the basic plot of the novel unrealistic in terms of whether this sequence of events could really take place in such a small community as Bryher and was unimpressed with the final unveiling of the killer. I will keep reading the series though purely because of the Scilly setting and I feel some personal sympathy with the central character.

49. Ruin Beach (Ben Kitto 2) - Kate Rhodes

This is the second book in the author's crime series set in the Isles of Scilly, which I have read on my holiday there. I read it quickly and as a page-turning thriller it is effective, but had the same mixed feelings about this as its predecessor; while there was an appealing general feeling of life on the islands, there too many errors (e.g. Round Island, St Helen's and Tean are not the Eastern Isles of Scilly; the waters do not "plummet for hundreds of metres between most of the islands"; and there are not flocks of grazing sheep on Tresco). Again, the volume and types of crime that the plot involves are simply unrealistic in terms of the real Scilly and I simply cannot take it seriously in this context. I also found the final revelation of the killer(s) rather unlikely and, unless I am going mad, there was a major unresolved plot thread and unanswered question - what happened with Mike Trellon??

I am home from Scilly now so the following books will wait until a likely visit next summer.

50. The Isles of Scilly (Collins New Naturalist Library, Book 103) - Rosemary Parslow

I have enjoyed working my way through this book about the natural history of the Isles of Scilly during my holiday and for a couple of days after leaving. I think the audience for this book is somewhere between the general reader and the natural historian. As the former myself, I enjoyed the general descriptions and nuggets of information about my favourite islands, but also skimmed through much of the details about the habitats of specific species of plants and animals. Being so isolated and with its own very mild climate compared to the rest of the UK, it hosts many species of plants in particular that cannot grow, either at all, or not so well, elsewhere in Britain, a factor behind its prominent role in the flower and bulb industry from the late 19th century into fairly recently (tourism is now some 85% of the local economy). There are very few land mammals and no predators such as foxes or stoats. I am fascinated by the history of the islands, including just when and how they ceased to be one island, divided into three sub-islands, and then gained their current formation at a later time. This final separation has seemingly been dated any time between the Bronze Age and the 15th century, though it seems to be settled that the island of St Nicholas split into Bryher and Tresco in the 16th century and it is still possible to walk between them at low tide (though, having done it on a previous visit, I would not recommend it for most people). The islands played an important role in the English Civil War and both world wars. More recently, and given that much of the islands are low lying, concern around rising sea levels has caused the building of more defences, particularly in the capital Hugh Town, which is largely built on a sandbar connecting the Garrison peninsula to the bulk of St Mary's, the largest island in the group. A fascinating book, albeit more detailed than for my personal needs.

51. The Secret of the Sands - Harry Collingwood

This "boy's own" style story of the sea was the first published story (1878) of this little known writer, whose name is a pseudonym of one of Nelson's fellow Admirals, Cuthbert Collingwood. It is a simple tale of a dying man rescued from the sea providing a secret to some buried treasure; then a hunt for that treasure by the hero of our story (also called Harry Collingwood) and his associate Bob Trunnion, in the course of which they fight off sharks, sea monsters, pirates and island natives, rescue a damsel in distress, find the hero's lost father and eventually find the buried treasure. It's an undemanding tale but a little too frequently makes the mistake of telling the story, rather than showing it through the actions and words of the characters. Our hero is almost superhuman, and at one point acquires 17 wounds, including in the neck and most of his limbs and has an artery severed, but still manages to recover from his wounds. Quite good fun, though.

52. Borg versus McEnroe: The Greatest Rivalry, the Greatest Match - Malcolm Folley

It's Wimbledon time, so time for me to read a book about tennis, by far my favourite spectator sport. This book by a tennis journalist recalls the rivalry between these two giants of the tennis court that dominated the late 70s and early 80s, though really Connors has to be added as a third member of the triumvirate, albeit perhaps at a slightly lower level. In particular it focuses on their epic Wimbledon final of 1980, when Borg won his fifth consecutive title, but not before McEnroe had saved seven match points in a fourth set culminating in a titanic tiebreak which the American won 18-16. Often referred to as "the tiebreak", it was frequently repeated on TV in later years during rain delays when there was no live play. Borg and McEnroe were polar opposites temperamentally and in their playing styles and yet there was a form of respect between them - McEnroe very rarely behaved badly according to his "Superbrat" reputation during matches with Borg, unlike with other players. This was a fascinating look back at a particular era of the sport which felt like a clash of two different generations (though Borg was only 3 years older). Borg's sudden departure from the tennis scene aged only 25 in 1981 after losing the US Open final to McEnroe, having lost his Wimbledon title to the American earlier that summer, was a shock then, and still comes across as such now. How differently these things were handled in an era long before the internet and social media.

53. Little Wonder: The Extraordinary Story of Lottie Dod, the World's First Female Sports Superstar - Sasha Abramsky

Charlotte "Lottie" Dod (she hated the moniker) is little known nowadays, except by tennis enthusiasts, but in her day she was one of the greatest all round female athletes of that, or indeed of any, day. She still holds the record as the youngest Wimbledon singles champion, when she took her first title aged 15 in 1887. She won it four more times and, no doubt, could have done so many more times as she had outclassed all her opponents through her use of strokes and techniques then unknown in the women's game. However, at the age of 21 she turned to new challenges and competed at a high level in a range of sports and activities, including ice skating, tobogganing, hockey, golf, mountaineering (where she climbed really challenging peaks in the Alps and Scandinavia) and archery, where she won a silver medal in the 1908 London Olympics. She was feted at the time, though seems to have fairly swiftly faded from the public consciousness, becoming less physically active as sciatica worsened. After the First World War, where she served as an volunteer nurse tending to wounded soldiers returned to Blighty, she started on her last major endeavour, choral music, in particular singing in, and administering, the Oriana Madrigal Society, the country's premier choral group, for which she was also feted. A spinster, as she aged she retreated into private life, but taught her brother's children to play tennis. She attended Wimbledon regularly until well into the 1950s. Retiring eventually to a nursing home in the New Forest, and having survived all her siblings, she passed away in 1960, almost the last of the generation of Victorian lady tennis players. Not only for her achievements on the tennis court, but for her wide ranging talents in a range of fields, the author describes her in her time as "hands down the most famous, most versatile and most accomplished female athlete on earth", but one who in later life had become a "silhouette", seen as "a distant memory from an impossibly long-gone era". She deserves to be remembered as a pioneer of female sport.

Three short works by Honore de Balzac from his La Comedie Humaine:

54. An Episode under the Terror

This short story set during the notorious Reign of Terror during the French Revolution is based around a woman collecting a mysterious package, and fearing both the couple from whom she is collecting and the shadowy figure trailing her. Though short, this conveys a convincing atmosphere of the fear and suspicion of the time.

55. The Vendetta

This novella concerns a vendetta between two Corsican families, the daughter of one of whom falls in love with the only surviving son of the other, and is rejected by her own father. They marry against this opposition and have a very tough time and eventually perish - this was quite dramatic and stark and moving.

56. The Recruit

Another short story, this concerns the life of the mother of an aristocrat who has fled the French revolutionary terror. The mother maintains a precarious liberty by treading very carefully. She receives intimation that her son is returning, only to be cruelly surprised. A shock ending.

57. The One Thing More - Anne Perry

This gripping novel is a murder mystery set during the French Revolution, in the run up to the execution of the former King Louis XVI in January 1793. In the desperate economic situation of the time, the inhabitants of Citizen Bernave's house, including his extended family, servants, and others, are shocked one night when a band of desperate citizens invade the house, wrongly believing they are hoarding food. Bernave confronts them, but when the confusion is over, he lies dead, stabbed in the back (i.e. by one of his household, not by the intruders). Needless to say, there is a complex set of motives, arising both from the turbulent politics of the time, with double dealing between the rival political factions, and from the past personal actions of the characters. This story has the reader guessing as to the exact motives of Bernave and several of the others right up until a dramatic set of revelations in the final chapter.

The central political thread running throughout the novel centres around moderate revolutionaries who think that the execution of the king, whatever his personal faults and the undoubted evils and injustices of the Ancien Régime, is an act of barbarism which will bring all the surrounding countries invading and tearing France apart, as was indeed the case. The novel has interesting and thoughtful things to say about how revolutions in seeking to destroy all that went before them, the evil and the good, so often end up not replacing them with values and institutions that are better than their abolished predecessors. As one of the non-political characters says, "All I want is safe streets and food in the shops...... I don’t care whether it’s the King, or Marat or the Commune, or who it is. And I think most of the women in France feel the same. What’s a revolution for if we’re all still cold and hungry, and scared stiff of our neighbours in case they take a dislike to us and make a false report to some Section Leader, and the next thing you know, we’re charged with something?". The fanaticism of the Jacobins is well illustrated by an oration by the cold Louis Saint Just: "The vessel of the revolution can arrive in port only on a sea reddened with torrents of blood! .....We must not only punish traitors, but all people who are not enthusiastic. There are only two kinds of citizen, the good and the bad. The republic owes the good its protections. To the bad it owes only death!". As Célie Laurent observes of the humourlessness of the radicals, "Was it really necessary to be humourless in order to be good? Could one not possibly bring about social change for the better, and still keep the ability to see the absurd, and to laugh at it?". A really gripping novel, though I am puzzled by its banal and seemingly meaningless title, what is that all about?.

58. The Puffin Keeper - Michael Morpurgo

This lovely little book is about a small boy who is shipwrecked with his mother and other survivors and rescued by a lone lighthouse keeper on Puffin Island in the Isles of Scilly (this is clearly based on the Round Island lighthouse, off the north east coast of Tresco; the real Puffin Island off Tresco is little more than a rock). He is drawn to the islands and the puffins and to the keeper, and returns when he grows up and lives there. This is a lovely heart warming tale with some beautiful pictures.

59. The Lost King of France: The Tragic Story of Marie-Antoinette's Favourite Son - Deborah Cadbury

This fascinating and gripping books tells of the short life and fate of the son of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, who after his father's removal from power and execution became in the eyes of royalists King Louis XVII (though he never of course ruled in any sense), until his tragic and degrading death in the Temple Prison aged 10 in 1795. Even more, this is the story of the numerous pretenders who claimed to be him during the first half of the 18th century. There were an astonishing one hundred such claimants, some more plausible than others. Dozens of them wrote letters to their pretended sister Marie Therese, the only surviving member of the young Dauphin's immediate family, cruelly exploiting her misery and grief at the murders of all her close family. The most serious and persistent of them was Karl Wilhelm Naundorf, who not only vigorously pursued the claim until his death in 1845, but his descendants were still pursuing it 150 years later. The careful comparison of DNA from Naundorf and from surviving hairs from Marie Antoinette's sisters, and with the shrivelled heart of Louis XVII, finally proved in 1999 beyond reasonable doubt that Naundorf could not have been the Dauphin (the story of the survival of the small heart would make a fascinating thriller in and of itself). This gave some closure to the sad story of the poor boy. Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the French Revolution, the tragic fate of this poor boy, a hapless pawn of all sides, separated from his family and kept in degrading and insanitary darkness, is deeply upsetting.

60. Caspar Hauser - Jakob Wassermann

This novel is based on the story of the enigmatic story of Caspar Hauser, a mysterious young man who appeared on the streets of Nuremburg one day in 1828. He had apparently been kept imprisoned in a small cell for as long as he could remember. For a few years he was a national sensation, with his other worldly attitudes and snippets from his horrible childhood. There was speculation that he might be an unwanted aristocratic heir, though others thought he was a charlatan. He was murdered by an unknown person in December 1833. While the mystery of Caspar Hauser is fairly well known and intriguing, I thought this novel was overlong and the machinations of the various guardians of the young man were at times tedious and somewhat confusing. Though much of the novel is told from Caspar's point of view, his origins and motives are studiedly ambiguous and we are not clear what is real and what is his genuine or self-induced fantasy.

>66 john257hopper: I've attempted one of Jakob Wasserman's books, My Marriage, which was so whiny, miserable and nasty that I gave up on it. Caspar Hauser sounds almost as punishing.

>67 pamelad: I didn't dislike it, but I was quite glad to finish it.

61. The Last Days of Pompeii - Edward Bulwer Lytton

This is a richly written early 19th century novel. While the setting is suitably dramatic as per the title, the actual events of the impending eruption of Vesuvius and destruction of Pompeii are very much in the background, against the central plot of the rivalry between the Egyptian priest Arbaces and the Greek Glaucus over the same woman, Ione. Another priest Apaceides (who has converted to Christianity) is murdered by Arbaces and Glaucus is framed it. About to face a hungry lion in the arena, he is only saved by the apocalypse itself. This novel is very melodramatic and theatrical to the modern reader, but I enjoyed its richness, despite some occasional overlong digressions - though even these had their poignancy when compared to the ruins found in recent times.

62. The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips - Michael Morpurgo

I was a bit disappointed with this. At the risk of spoilers, this is not really about the cat displayed prominently on the cover - it's about the narrator Lily Tregenza, her wartime experiences, and her friendship with Adie, a black American soldier. The ending is quite heartwarming, but this didn't really connect with me emotionally as much as do most of Morpurgo's other books (except insofar as interracial marriages always make me feel more hopeful about the human race).

63. Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town - Mary Beard

This is a brilliant and highly readable account by the famous popular classicist, author and TV personality. She explains in detail what we have discovered in the ruins of Pompeii, what it might mean, but also just as importantly warns against jumping to conclusions based on over-interpretation of the evidence available, sometimes based on what we might like, or believe might be true, based on our impressions of Roman life from popular culture. It is a fascinating exploration of the ruins and it is surprising what we do know, for example the numerous surviving graffiti range from election posters, enabling us to reconstruct much of the political history of the town, to scurrilous scribblings equivalent to the modern day equivalents in toilet cubicles and bus stations. I was particularly struck by specific examples such as the House of the Painters at Work, where painters were interrupted on the job on the very day of the eruption of Vesuvius, and we can see exactly where they left each panel on the wall at the time when they presumably made, or tried to make, their escape from the falling pumice or lava flow. Another thing that struck me was the stuff that has been lost since it has been excavated, for example wall paintings that were pristine when uncovered in the 18th or 19th century, but which have now faded almost or completely to nothing. One of the major myths about Pompeii's destruction that she exposes is the fallacy that the interruption was unexpected - the evidence was that there had been tremors in the weeks and months leading up to the eruption and many townspeople seem to have moved possessions out of the town before the end (there had been a major earthquake 16 or 17 years earlier, so this was not uncommon). I could write a whole essay on this wonderful description, but suffice to say this is an excellent account for the general reader.

64. My Father is a Polar Bear - Michael Morpurgo

This heartwarming short story of a boy separated from his natural father and only discovering him by chance years later mirrors the events of Morpurgo's own early life. A nice little story.

65. Sea of Tranquility - Emily St John Mandel

I found this an initially puzzling but later gripping story, about anomalies in different time zones over a 500 year period between 1912 and 2401, demonstrated by a flaw that links people and sensations in these zones. The novel also explores the simulation hypothesis, the idea that the whole of reality is an illusion which is mind-bending and, of course, not an original SF concept, but handled deftly here and in an engaging way that doesn't overwhelm the story. A very good read.

66. Rock Bottom - Jason Ayres

This is the eighth in the author's Time Bubble series, and like its immediate predecessor, it focuses on the life of a minor character, in this case Kay, a middle aged woman who has made a series of bad decisions especially in her choice of men and has ended up alone in a decrepit flat over a chip shop run by an aggressive, racist bully. Like Richard Kent in book 7, a guardian angel offers her a chance to relive six days in her life, which she uses wisely to better herself while taking revenge on her ex husband and her first boyfriend. One of her trips is her dream date in 1994 with Richard Kent, as his was with her in his book. She uncovers her husband's crooked business dealings (though with unrealistically convenient ease, I thought) as well as more innocently reliving a childhood Christmas and her first concert, and travelling the world before settling down. More seriously, she is able to solve a local murder of a young Polish girl. I enjoyed this though I would like to see some of the original main cast of characters come back into the plots of this series.

67. The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector's Story - Hyeonseo Lee

This is an account of the author's childhood growing up in the North Korean town of Hyesan, on the banks of the Yalu river that borders China. The horrors of life in North Korea are vividly recounted, but in some ways in a matter of fact way, as these experiences were normal for anyone growing up there in the 80s and 90s, with no point of comparison - witnessing her first public execution at the age of 7 and seeing starvation during the 90s as the economy collapses after subsidies from the fallen Soviet Union dry up. She escapes to China in late 1997 just before her 18th birthday and spends several years in Shenyang and Shanghai, including various narrow escapes, but she shows great resourcefulness and is able to thank her lucky stars that she learned some Chinese characters as a child. She eventually ends up in South Korea. She eventually succeeds in persuading her mother and younger brother to escape. But there are powerful drivers pulling the family members in all directions - her mother, now in her 50s, has grown up, married, raised children and lived her life in a society with an utterly different mentality and after a while yearns to return to the North, regardless of the risks of capture, imprisonment or death; and her brother pines for his fiancée, whom he fails to persuade to follow him into China, owing to the risk it will cause for her parents. The author encapsulates the dilemmas in her introduction: "..... I still love my country and miss it very much....Even for those who have suffered unimaginably there and have escaped hell, life in the free world can be so challenging that many struggle to come to terms with it and find happiness... a small number of them even give up, and return to live in that dark place, as I was tempted to do, many times." Migration, even to what is objectively a much better life situation, still carries with its own contradictions and conflicted emotions.

68. A Short History of Malaysia: Linking East and West - Virginia Matheson Hooker

I have been reading this account on the eve of my first visit to Malaysia and Singapore. The book covers the deep history of the peninsula and the islands that now form part of the nation state, including where prehistoric sites have been located. It covers the rise of individual states from Melaka in the 15th century, then later Perak and Johor, the rise of and role of Islam, and influence of migrations of peoples, especially the Malays, Chinese, Indians and the difficult position of the Orang Asli, "aboriginal" inhabitants who have frequently faced economic and political disadvantage. The role of the colonial nations, the Portuguese, Dutch and British is covered. There is a lot of sensitivity over the cultural, political, religious and economic definitions of what it means to be Malay, and the role of Malays within Malaysia as a nation state. That said, despite flashpoints especially over race riots in 1969, and tensions between the economic fortunes of the main ethnic groups, it seems fair to say that overall Malaysia has done fairly well in regard to race relations compared to some other countries. That said, the negative side of this positive desire for national unity between ethnic communities is a tendency to suppress political and cultural dissent through the use of the draconian Internal Security Act, thereby effectively restricting the discussion of controversial issues connected to the respective positions of the different communities. The book was published in 2002, so doesn't cover the fall and much more recent resurrection of Dr Mahathir Mohamed, or the return of the persecuted Anwar Ibrahim to the political leadership.

Overall the book was interesting and covered a lot of ground, albeit I found it rather dry in places. There is a very useful timeline, and glossaries of political terms and Malay cultural references.

69. Tanamera - Noel Barber

This was a wonderful novel covering a whole swath of Singaporean and Malayan history from the 1920s to the late 1950s, with a varied cast of characters from British planters, Chinese businessmen, ruthless Chinese guerrillas, heroic Malayan peasants, and various double agents of dubious provenance. This description may make it sound though this is a story of stereotypes, but it is anything but, covering difficult issues in relations between national and ethnic groups sensitively and from different viewpoints. Events inevitably focus mostly around the build up to the Second World War and its duration and aftermath, including the Communist insurgency of the late 1940s and 50s. Our central characters are Johnny Dexter, an English planter, who has grown up in Singapore in the eponymous house (which means "red earth" in Malay), built by his grandfather, and a Chinese girl Julie Soong, daughter of his father's business partner. They defy racial conventions of the time (on both English and Chinese sides) by becoming seriously involved, meeting with anger and rejection from their respective families. After a lot of vicissitudes, both romantic and war-related, they of course end up together.

As well as the central romantic narrative, the changing relations between the British and Malayan communities are obviously an ongoing theme. The Dexters are comparatively liberal and come to realise that independence is both inevitable and, ultimately, desirable. Before this all the communities in Singapore must go through the horrors of war, having until almost the last moment refused to believe that Singapore can truly be vulnerable to the Japanese. The sense of shock and dislocation is total. At the same time, despite horrific Japanese treatment of the Chinese in particular, the invaders have at the same time shown that the "yellow" man can overcome the white man. The final main sequence shows Julie and another woman being kidnapped by Communist guerrillas, including one who has a personal vendetta against Johnny. There are some quite horrifying and shocking scenes in this book, but also some beautiful descriptive passages, and a narrative drive that never flags. A great read.

70. The Pineapple Trail - Sharifah Hamzah

This near contemporary novel is set in 1998 in a fictional small town based on the pineapple industry in southern Malaysia in the state of Johore, Simpang Nenas. It concerns two sisters, Safia and Nora, and their different outlooks on life and the career and romantic choices they make, though they both end up in marriages that break up, for differing reasons. It's a simple narrative and the ordinary human drama a bit of light relief after the drama of the long novel Tanamera I read before this. Not my usual cup of tea in terms of themes, but the Malaysian setting was the draw for me.

71. Tom Brown's Schooldays - Thomas Hughes

This is a seminal novel of English public (i.e. private!) school life in the 1830s, arguably the first influential novel in a school setting, that has formed a template for many subsequent school-based novels, including much more recently, the Harry Potter series.

I found the novel amusing in many places, and pointed in its detailed description of the customs of school (Rugby) life, though it also dragged for me in places and it took me a longer to read than a novel of its length (slightly under 300 pages in my version) normally would. There is a real historical personage here - Dr Thomas Arnold, the headmaster of the real Rugby School at the time. The author, expressing his views and experiences through the title character, clearly has a lot of respect for Dr Arnold, and the changes he brought about to the "public" school system; as one (adult) character says "perhaps ours is the only corner of the British Empire which is thoroughly, wisely and strongly ruled just now".

The real central "character" of the novel, though, is probably the custom-bound way of life of the school itself, with its arcane traditions that the students value and revere more than the masters if anything. There are detailed descriptions of the original version of the sport of rugby as well as, of course, cricket, described by one character as "the birthright of British boys old and young, as habeas corpus and trial by jury are of British men", as it is an "unselfish game" that "merges the individual in the eleven; he doesn't play that he may win, but that his side may", as opposed to individual sports where the object is to win for oneself.

An interesting examination of the life and mores of a particular section of society at a particular time, but which has been massively influential on the literary genre well beyond that place and time.

72. Forward the Foundation - Isaac Asimov

This was the last Foundation novel Asimov wrote, and indeed it was published in 1993 posthumously by his widow, Janet Jeppson Asimov. Chronologically, it is the second of the prequel Foundation novels that he wrote in the last few years of his life, detailing the life of Hari Seldon and his attempts to develop psychohistory and establish his Foundations to mitigate the collapse of the Galactic Empire. It covers some 40 or more years of Seldon's life including his rather unlikely decade as First Minister of the Empire, and his increasingly frustrated attempts to keep his project going. As such it had for me at least an aura of sadness throughout, exacerbated by the sad demises of several of Seldon's loved ones. I couldn't help feeling that many of Seldon's attitudes as he aged mirrored those of the author. One aspect that irritates me slightly is the harping on about growing old at ages we don't normally regard as such ("Seldon's eyes twinkled in a face now lined by age, his sixty years given away as much by his wrinkles as much as by his white hair")!

>80 john257hopper: The older you get, the older old gets! Can we agree on ninety?

>81 pamelad: At 57, I bridled at this a bit;). He's even described as aging at 40, which now to me seems pretty young!

73. Blessed are the Dead - C. B. Hanley

This is the eighth book in the author's series of Medieval murder mysteries featuring Edwin Weaver, scribe to Earl Warenne of Surrey during the political upheaval after the barons' revolt against King John and the latter's death, when the country is ruled by William Marshal as regent in the name of the boy king Henry III. Earl Warenne is in dispute with another noble Baron Robert de Vieuxpont over the ownership of Tickhill Castle, which he has to reason to believe should come back to him on behalf of his ward Alice. Edwin and his pregnant wife Alys have to adopt false identities as a merchant and his wife in order to infiltrate the castle and find out de Vieuxpont's motives. Eventually it emerges that a vital official document has been mislaid when the body of a messenger is discovered. In fact, the latter's demise is not the lynchpin of the story; the main narrative drive is Edwin's determination to protect Alys during her pregnancy and get back to his quiet family life. This is understandable and moving, but perhaps a little overdone here, and I thought the story was a bit less substantial than many of the others. Still, this was quietly enjoyable and I like Edwin and his family, and am glad there are to be more in the series.

74. The Knight Who Saved England: William Marshal and the French Invasion, 1217 - Richard Brooks

This is an account of the life and military times of William Marshal, a major but undeservedly neglected figure in English history. His steady role supporting the Angevin kings of England over several decades was unparalleled. In particular it is no exaggeration to say that his role of regent in the minority of the boy king Henry III, after the death of King John, saved the country from conquest by the French dauphin Louis. Owing to the unpopularity of King John, most of his barons supported Louis's very tenuous claim to the English crown, willing even to countenance the heir to the French crown on the English throne, rather than see John triumph. John inadvertently and ironically performed probably his best service to the future of his dynasty by dying in 1216 at the age of 49, taking some of the wind out of the sails of the barons' support for Louis. But even so, Louis held London and had a number of other successes before William's strategic leadership led to English victory in two decisive battles, at Lincoln in summer 1217 and at sea, off the Kentish coast at Sandwich, in the autumn of that year. Lincoln was "a decisive shift..... Before Lincoln, the royalists had never risked confronting Louis in the open; afterwards he dared not face them again." But London still held out. The naval battle of Sandwich was the end for Louis's claims, leaving him "unable to replace the losses at Lincoln, definitively ending his cross-Channel adventure". Even at the time it was "perceived as a major event, a providential deliverance from foreign invasion, comparable from our point of view with the Spanish Armada, Trafalgar, and the Battle of Britain." Without these two victories, England would have become a province of France, and the French crown, having already gained Normandy and other lands from the English crown during King John's reign, would have become vastly stronger. The only surprise is that these battles are not much better known as the key turning points in English history they undoubtedly are.

The book was a little uneven and there were drier passages on the evolution of military technology that I struggled with a bit. But these are important to understanding how things turned out the way they did, so no real complaint.

75. The Stars, Like Dust - Isaac Asimov

This is chronologically the first of Asimov's Galactic Empire trilogy, though published second in 1951 after Pebble in the Sky the previous year. Asimov once described this as his least favourite novel and in some respects it hasn't aged well, particularly in the depiction of the only female character. On the other hand, the science and technology feels more advanced than in the original Foundation trilogy, written a decade before but set many thousands of years later in galactic history. Of course it is a truism to say that SF says more about the time in which it is written than the time in which it is set. The plot here centres around a rebellious aristocrat whose father has been executed by the aptly named Tyranni who rule a confederation of planetary systems near the Horsehead Nebula. The final plot Macguffin about the inspiration for the rebellion being the US Constitution is a highly implausible anti-climax that was not Asimov's idea, but insisted on by the editor of the magazine in which the story originally appeared in parts. Certainly one of his weaker novels, but still a decent page turner.

>85 john257hopper: I enjoyed I, Robot so would give some other Asimovs a try. Not this one, but do you have any favourites?

>86 pamelad: The Foundation series are some of my favourite books of all time. I would probably start with the original trilogy, Foundation, Foundation and Empire and Second Foundation. They are primarily novels of ideas rather than action.

I would also recommend The Naked Sun, a robot novel and whodunnit.

76. Robin Hood: The First Arrow - David Pilling

This short novel is the first in a series of light touch historical novels based around the legend of Robin Hood. In this one, he is Robert Hode of Barnsdale in Yorkshire, who is not an outlaw at this stage, but has had some brushes with the harshness of forest law in Medieval England. Many of the early legends of Robin Hood that were first collated and written down in the mid 15th century (over two centuries after the time when this novel is set early in the reign of the boy king Henry III), feature in the narrative here. It is quite bloody and violent and Robert/Robin is not always the gentlemanly rogue of popular literature and film. I enjoyed it, though I didn't particularly warm to the central character. I will pursue the series though.

77. Robin Hood: The True Legend - Sean McGlynn

This short book is an exploration of the potential true historical origins of the legend of Robin Hood, covering when, why and how the legend arose and the identity of possible "real Robin Hoods" who may have inspired it. The legend was first referred to in the mid 13th century, though the earliest surviving stories and ballads date from a full two centuries later around 1450. There is little firm basis for many elements of the story such as the Sherwood Forest location, while Friar Tuck and, in particular, Maid Marian were much later additions to the legendary corpus. The element of robbing the rich to pay the poor is also quite a late development and less prevalent than in all the modern filmic and literary portrayals and, while he is a heroic character in many ways, he is also a man depicted as being capable of acts of great violence, and not always against people who might be said to deserve it. The author covers a number of potential candidates as inspirers of the legends, looking at the characteristics of their actions as depicted in various ballads (themselves of course mixtures of fact, possible fact, and definite fiction, including some fantasy). He cover a number of personalities, including Hereward the Wake (surely far too early), the colourful and scurrilous Eustace the Monk, and the renegade knight Fulk Fitzwarin. The candidate he zeroes in on is much less famous, but I agree with him is much more plausible: William of Kensham, an archer who, with his followers, lurked in the Weald of Kent in 1216-17 defending the land against the invading French under Prince Louis, whom most of the barons had preferred on the throne against King John. He became known as Willikin of the Weald, but strangely is scarcely known at all today (as indeed is the whole French invasion of those years, despite how it came much nearer to succeeding in conquering England than did, say, the much more famous Spanish Armada). I think in this William we have a much more plausible candidate than the others. A fascinating read.

78. Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters - Laura Thompson

This is a very detailed, and well written collective biography of the six Mitford sisters. I think that the study of their lives could almost be a prism through which much of the social and political history of the middle third of the century - social, as exemplifying the mores and decline of the traditional aristocracy; and political, as among the sisters there was an: out and out Nazi (Unity, who met Hitler 140 times and was rumoured - almost certainly falsely - to have been his mistress); a Fascist and Nazi sympathiser (Diana, who left her first husband to marry Fascist leader Oswald Mosley); and a Communist (Jessica, who eloped and went to the US and supported the civil rights movement there in later decades). Among the other sisters, Nancy, the eldest, was a novelist and author of non-fiction works on French history, Deborah, the youngest became Duchess of Devonshire, and Pam was the "boring" one (though married to a Fascist sympathiser). There was also, which is less well known, a brother Tom, who was killed in the closing weeks of the war fighting the Japanese. Their mother was also very soft on Hitler, even during and after the war. This book explores their lives and loves in great, sometimes perhaps over exhaustive detail, trying to see the sisters and their actions (rightly) in the context of their times, but sometimes in my view going a little too far in bending over backwards, for example, to use Diana Mosley's unwavering loyalty to her husband as justification for her ongoing fascist/Hitler-sympathising and anti-semitic attitudes even long after the war. I thought some of this could have been reined back a bit, and that is the reason for my docking a very good book half a point in my rating. But this is a very good read and instructive about so much of English society in the middle decades of the 20th century.

79. The Underground Railroad - Colson Whitehead

This novel won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2017 and other awards. Set at an unspecified time in the mid 19th century, it tells the story of Cora, a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia, her escape, and various actual and near recaptures, through the seemingly more enlightened South Carolina, the murderous North Carolina (where "the negro race did not exist except at the ends of ropes"), devastated Tennessee, freedom for a while in Indiana, and then final freedom at an unspecified place in the North. It is of necessity a grim and gritty story, with horrors aplenty in all these locations. The one issue I have with this is the fantasy element - the underground railroad here is a literal, physical railway underground, not a figuratively named network of escape routes. I do not understand why the author made the decision to depict it in this way. It is unnecessary and not only adds nothing to the narrative, indeed in my view it detracts from it, as it may lead some readers to wonder, what else about the events depicted may not be real? I just feel that this detracts somewhat from the historical horrors the author rightly lays bare.

80. The Mystery of Edwin Drood - Charles Dickens

This is a re-read of Dickens's last and famously unfinished novel. This has many of the elements of a classic mystery story, a disappeared and probably murdered victim, and more than one suspect, albeit not the plethora of suspects familiar from the novels of Agatha Christie and others. The murderer of the title character can really either only be his uncle John Jasper, a rival for the hand of Drood's fiancée Rosa, or Neville Landless, an angry young man from Ceylon who faces prejudice. It is heavily implied that Neville and his sister Helena are of mixed race, from the comments of others characters and from the illustrations, though also Neville looks down on the native people of Ceylon ("I have been brought up among subject and servile dependents of an inferior race"). This novel also deals quite openly with opium taking through John Jasper's addiction and through the personality of the aged Princess Puffer, who keeps the opium den he frequents. In practice, the evidence points pretty clearly to John Jasper as the murderer, so the mystery may be less of one than one might think initially, though alternative theories and continuations have been produced over the 150 years or so since the novel's publication in monthly parts, culminating in September 1870 three months after the author's death and leaving readers hanging rather bathetically as the mysterious Dick Datchery starts to eat a meal prepared by his landlady Mrs Tope. Had this been finished I feel this would have been good addition to the Dickens canon, though probably not one of his very best.

81. The Mystery of Edwin Drood: Charles Dickens' Unfinished Novel & Our Endless Attempts to End It - Pete Orford

This book charts the various attempts to continue Charles Dickens's famous unfinished novel, half completed when he died in June 1870. Being published in monthly instalments, the well ran dry in September when the first six instalments had been published, three before and three after his death. Thus the public was cheated of the denouement of a story they had started in the reasonable expectation it would continue until its natural end. Orford draws a distinction between conclusions which finish the story in literary form, and solutions which attempt to offer a thesis as to how Dickens intended or could have finished the story. In the early years after Dickens died, the attempts were generally written more closely to Dickens's style, indeed I read one of these John Jasper's Secret around the time of the bicentenary. More recent conclusions have had the freedom to adopt different styles or themes. The solutions on the other hand are particularly put forward by those who see it as an exercise in logic or a puzzle to solve. All very well, though some take this to extremes in seeming to propose what seems to them a perfectly logical construct, dismissing contrary evidence, even that presented by Dickens's biographer John Forster or members of the Dickens family. The "solutionists" often came across to me as a rather po-faced bunch. Orford also divides responses to Drood into 4 broad trends, though I wasn't always necessarily convinced of the divisions between them, especially the arguments between "Detectives" and the "Academics". Some of the academic theories are extreme, inventing castles of speculation on the thinnest of quicksand, such as that claiming Jasper was influenced by the Thuggee cult in India. Human ingenuity in forming theories is simultaneously amusing and exasperating.

82. The Currents of Space - Isaac Asimov

This is the second novel in Asimov's Galactic Empire Trilogy, published in the early 1950s. This is set before the Galactic Empire ruled by Trantor comes into being, though it has expanded rapidly over the previous half millennium and rules half the Galaxy at the time of this novel, with its overall supremacy seeming inevitable to most. The story concerns the Squires of Sark, who rule and exploit the nearby planet of Florina, which is the Galaxy's only source of a valuable and multi-use substance called kyrt. But cosmic disaster is, or may be, about to strike Florina and only one man holds the secret of it, though his mind has been broken and he is a pawn between the factions vying for control on Sark and in the wider galaxy. This trilogy is generally considered to be among the weaker of Asimov's SF works, but I thought this story was stronger as a political thriller than The Stars, Like Dust.

83. The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices - Charles Dickens & Wilkie Collins

This novella was a collaboration between Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, portraying themselves fictionally as Francis Goodchild and Thomas Idle, who are different kind of idlers, the former a busy idler who likes to "waste" his time with meaningless activities, and the latter who is bone idle. Their peregrinations are quite amusing (though I found chapter 5 at the Doncaster horse races rather tiresome), but the highlights of this are the two ghostly stories told by other characters as stories within stories, which were quite eerie and raised the standard of this otherwise fairly trivial piece of comedy writing.

84. The Red Inn - Honore de Balzac

This short story concerns a violent incident at the eponymous hostelry and the condemnation and execution of an innocent man. It started in a fairly low key way but became quite gripping and dramatic in a Gothic way. Good stuff.

85. The Haunting of Hill House - Shirley Jackson

This is a classic haunted house story published in 1959, where the house itself is really the main character, and the plot driven by the effect it has on its visitors, especially on young Eleanor Vance, with ultimately tragic consequences - in the words of Dr Montague "the menace of the supernatural is that it attacks where modern minds are weakest, where we have abandoned our protective armor of superstition and have no substitute defense." The story is very atmospheric and claustrophobic, and highly effective in its genre. What marred it slightly for me was some of the bizarre dialogue between the characters, even before the hauntings really took effect. A shocking ending.

86. The Net of Steel - Fiona Buckley

This is the twenty-second book in the Ursula Stannard series of Elizabethan mysteries. As I was reading this, I got the feeling that the author might be about to finish this series. Partly this was because of her age (she is 86 this year), but also the feel of the narrative itself - a very dramatic plot, a deeply personal revenge attack on Ursula's extended family and household, conveying a real feeling of dread and terror ("I feel as though there is a net of steel all round us, all round me, and it is closing in on me.") This plot was wrapped up with still 50 pages to go, and after the trial and execution of the revengers, there was a further feel of finality with a nicely romantic end where Ursula's son Harry gets married and she bequeaths Hawkswood to him, retiring to her recently inherited estate of Faldene, which is now hers following the deaths of the uncle and aunt who brought her up. Yet at the end, waking up in her new house, she is still privately prepared in case she is once again called upon to do her duty.

87. Amorality Tale - David Bishop

This is a Doctor Spin off novel featuring the Jon Pertwee incarnation and Sarah Jane Smith, set between the TV stories The Monster of Peladon and Planet of the Spiders, his swansong. It is set during a real historical incident, a great smog in London in December 1952 which for several days combined natural weather with the effluvia of thousands of coal fires to blanket the city in a choking smog. Several thousand excess deaths occurred, mostly among the very old and very young and those already vulnerable to breathing problems. Here the Doctor is already established in situ at the start of the novel as an East End watchmender ("Fixing Time"), with Sarah incongruously working as a barmaid in a dodgy club The Red Rooms. The main backdrop though is East End gang warfare, centred around Tommy Ramsey's gang, and indeed the first third of the novel was really a gangster story with almost no science fiction elements. But after a Friday noon confrontation between Tommy's and a rival gang, the latter's leader turns into a shape shifting alien. The Xhinn have come to Earth to conquer and absorb it into their empire, adding poisonous gas to the existing smog to wipe out more people, while also taking over the local police forces and using them to capture and kill the population under the guise of evacuating them due to the weather. There are some gruesome set piece scenes here and the Doctor and Sarah must work with Tommy Ramsey to defeat the aliens. Tommy is an interesting and quite an appealing rogue in some ways, despite also being a murderer and extortionist. There are one or two other interesting and rounded characters too, making this is a very good and dramatic read.

88. The Tempest - William Shakespeare

For the 400th anniversary of the publication of Shakespeare's First Folio, I thought I would read one of the plays in it which, but for its publication, would have been lost to us. While a performance of this play (though I have never seen one) contains some strong imagery, I don't think this worked as a playscript. After a strong start in Act 1 with the shipwreck, and Prospero's backstory conversation with Miranda, I thought it meandered after that and I didn't enjoy it much.

89. The Greatest Day in History: How the First World War Finally Came to an End - Nicholas Best

This is a brilliant day by day account of the last 8 days of the First World War from Monday 4 November to Monday 11 November. It effortlessly combines third person narrative and first person accounts from both famous and ordinary observers of the events from all sides and in a wide range of countries across the world as they happen into a dramatic and gripping account that reads like a novel. We read of the mixed emotions of soldiers on the Western Front, a mixture of relief and disbelief at the advent of peace, though also frustration (especially though not exclusively from US sources) that they would not have a chance to militarily defeat the Germans; rather the Armistice would allow Germany to claim they were never actually defeated, while its severely draconian terms would breed massive resentment. This indeed became part of the myth of the stab in the back that Hitler later exploited. We hear from civilians, pacifists and conscientious objectors as the war rolls through its last days and they reacted differently after it ended. We read of the negotiations towards the Armistice and the false news of an Armistice on 7 November that got round the world before it was revealed to be a few days premature. This is not just a military account. There are massive political changes in Germany, the final end of the Hohenzollerns as Kaiser Wilhelm is increasingly compelled by force of circumstance to recognise that he and his dynasty are doomed and that many of his subjects are turning to Bolshevism (though by no means all of course and unlike in Russia this was short-lived). It is sobering to realise that only 8 months earlier things would have been very different, if the German offensive of spring 1918, which came within sight of Paris, had succeeded.

After a chapter a day for the 4-10 November, there are four chapters covering the 11th: early morning; 11am; afternoon; and evening. Fighting continued right up until 11am: "In scores of different places along the front line, soldiers were still fighting and dying as the hands moved towards 11 o’clock. Some had no idea the war was about to stop. Others did know, but didn’t care. They still had ammunition to fire off, objectives to take, friends and family to avenge. Others just carried on fighting because that was what they had been ordered to do. The habit died hard in men who had never done anything else." But sometimes this was conscious: "A shameful number of American majors and colonels had chosen to press on regardless, rather than call their men off and risk damaging their careers. They were still sending troops into action, knowing perfectly well that the fighting would stop in a couple of hours and any further sacrifice was needless. They would rather their men died than have a permanent black mark on their promotion prospects". On the other hand, many held back, not wanting to risk death at the last moment. Over 2,700 men were killed on the Western Front on 11 November (not all of them before 11am, some fighting continued afterwards due to ignorance of the Armistice, or even just due to a stopped watch). They included: Private George Ellison, who was hit by and died at ten to eleven, almost certainly the last British fatality of the war; while Canadian Private George Price was killed by a shot at two minutes to eleven.

This was a great and hugely readable account and very far from being a dry military history (unlike some histories of the Great War I have read).

90. Villette - Charlotte Bronte

While this was as well written as one would expect, I found third Charlotte Bronte novel too slow and have given up on it around 70% of the way through. The main character Lucy Snowe is an English teacher at a girls' school in the fictional city of Villette in the fictional country of Labassecour (which feels rather like Belgium). I enjoyed some of her passive aggressive clashes with Mme Beck, the headmistress, who was probably the most interesting character in the novel, but was rather bored by the romantic manoeuvrings (and it's not that I never like romance as a plot element, it just didn't work for me here). This novel was a reworking of the first novel Charlotte wrote The Professor, but which was published posthumously; the theme and plot is similar, but characters and setting different.

91. The Dalek Invasion of Earth - Terrance Dicks

I am celebrating the 60th anniversary of Doctor Who by reading a couple of novelisations of classic TV stories from the pen of the late, great Terrance Dicks. This is a novelisation of the second ever Dalek story, first broadcast in late 1964 after the show had been on for a year. It is also the last story for the Doctor's first companion and grand-daughter Susan. The plot is dramatic and there is room for a bit more expansiveness on characters' motivations and the descriptions of the extensive devastation of a London conquered and largely destroyed by the Daleks. Terrance just had a gift for telling a proper story without pretension or bashing the reader over the head with his views, and this is always very enjoyable.

92. The Wheel in Space - Terrance Dicks

This is not one of the better novelisations of a Doctor Who TV story, but is a workmanlike adaptation of what was anyway a fairly pedestrian story, usually regarded as the weakest of the early Cyberman stories, though though there are some colourful human characters among the Wheel's personnel. The Cybermen's plot is very convoluted and also requires suspiciously ready acceptance of unlikely coincidences by the Wheel's crew. The story is also noteworthy for the first appearance of companion Zoe.

93. Aztec - Colin Falconer

This is a novel depicting the dramatic and horrific events of Cortes and the Conquistadors' conquest of the race now known as the Aztecs (though this is a 19th century coining for a range of warring ethnic groups living under the domination of the Mexica led by the Emperor Motecuhzoma (Montezuma)). The plot pivots around the Aztec woman Malinali who becomes Cortes's interpreter and eventually lover, betraying the wider civilisation in the end as her own tribal group chafes under Montezuma's domination. Aside from the bloody horrors perpetrated by both sides, the strongest theme to emerge from the story for me is the clash of civilisations and utterly different mindsets. Modern readers will understandably view Cortes's actions in modern terms as the crudest imperialist conquest and subjugation, yet he would have defended his actions in terms of bringing the benefits of Christian civilisation to a race that practised the bloodiest forms of human sacrifice on an industrial scale. So each had their own utterly opposing and utterly mutually incomprehensible conceptions of religion. Notwithstanding these fascinating ideas, this was not a pleasant read, with all the torture and killing - and yes, I know it is historically accurate, but I felt it could have been leavened with some deeper character development. Perhaps one of the most interesting characters was the Spaniard Norte who had lived among the Aztecs for some years, and adopted their customs, married an Aztec wife and had children, and yet still yearned eventually to be accepted again by his former Spanish comrades in arms. Malinali is still a famous and very controversial figure in Mexican history for the ambiguous role she played.

94. In Search of Anne Bronte - Nick Holland

This is a brilliantly written biography of the youngest of the Bronte sisters. She has often been overlooked compared to her elder sisters, but in my view, she is the author of the very best novels in the family's combined body of literary work. Her novels Agnes Grey and Tenant of Wildfell Hall deal with issues such as child misbehaviour, neglectful parenting, domestic abuse and alcoholism in a way that was highly unusual if not unique for the time. And her poetry has a stark and bleak simplicity to it (as does that of Emily). It is particularly sad that a large part of the reason for the denigration of Anne's work is down to the efforts of the surviving sister Charlotte to diminish her memory, especially preventing the republication of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall for a decade after Anne's death (despite the fact that it had been the fastest selling Bronte novel of them all). It is deeply sad that such jealousy should arise on the part of another member of this exceptionally literarily gifted family.

That said, this book shows the closeness of the sisters and, indeed of the whole household, very clearly, and their general separation as a family unit from most other members of society (isolation which may, in part, tragically account for the deaths of Emily and Anne in particular at such young ages, as they hadn't acquired any immunity to the then lethal diseases that were rife, especially TB). Anne comes across as a very sensitive, unconfident and a shy young lady (albeit not quite as much as Emily), anxious to please her sisters and be seen as good as they, but the author is keen to emphasise how she was firm in her principles and could be forthright in the face of injustice. She comes across to me as the middle ground between the ethereal otherworldliness of Emily and the more worldly and more cynical Charlotte.

Seeming to be always constantly ill in her adulthood, with colds, coughs, and asthma, Anne was sadly easy prey for the TB that she probably caught during a visit to London in summer 1848, when she and Charlotte visited their publisher to unveil themselves as the real Acton and Currer Bell. Unwittingly, she seems to have passed the disease on to Emily and their brother Branwell, causing both their deaths before the end of that year, with her own passing early in the following summer at the age of 29, not at the Haworth parsonage like all her siblings, but in Scarborough.

And thereafter followed the tragic, albeit non malicious, ruining of her reputation by Charlotte, who may also have destroyed much surviving material written by both her deceased sisters. It took over a century until Anne's reputation was restored and, in the author's words, "Readers across the world are now placing Anne where she belongs, alongside her sisters Charlotte and Emily, and in the very first rank of nineteenth-century writers."

95. Pebble in the Sky - Isaac Asimov

This was the earliest published novel in Asimov's Galactic Empire trilogy, but set after the other two. It is a little under a millennium into the rule of the Galactic Empire centred on the planet Trantor, and Earth is a backward, radiation-soaked planet, its population of only 20 million inhabitants despised and looked down on by the rest of the Galaxy. This is in part because of its audacious and ridiculous claim to be the original planet on which human beings first originated, against the conventional belief that humans arose separately on myriads of parents and then intermarried to become one species. Some extreme forces on Earth have a radical and horrible plan to change this situation and take their revenge on the Galaxy whom they spawned and who have now rejected them. An extra element in the pack is Joseph Schwartz, a man from the 20th century who has somehow been transported forward millennia in time...it was interesting to reflect on the thoughts and reactions of a man from contemporary (1949) Earth against the utterly strange world he finds himself in, though this element was not essential to the main plot. This is a good dramatic novel with much to say about the nature of mutual prejudice between peoples and is my favourite of the Galactic Empire trilogy and for me probably the only one of the trilogy that is comparable in standards and impact to Asimov's better known work.

96. My Tomorrow, Your Yesterday - Jason Ayres

This is the ninth book in the Time Bubble series, centring on life experiences of Thomas Scott, who has been mentioned a few times in earlier novels and who crossed with Josh, one of the main characters. Thomas Scott wakes up in a hospital in January 2025 where he is dying of cancer, his tearful daughter by his side. But after the darkness has closed in, instead he wakes up and it is New Years Eve. It dawns on him that he is living his life backwards. Throughout the novel, his entire life runs backwards, in the middle of the night he slips back a day. This simple conceit fuels what for me is one of my favourite books in this series, full of time travel anomalies, cultural references and unintentional humour and pathos, his technology downgrading with each succeeding year, meeting his wife Sarah for the first time on the day she is killed by a drunk driver, and tearfully saying goodbye to her when he first meets her on a Club 18-30 holiday in Ibiza, meeting his parents on their deathbeds, having to cope with never seeing his daughter Stacey again after she is born, and losing his interest in girls and sex when he becomes a child. He manages to change the timeline to save his wife from the killer drunk driver and his daughter from a sexual assault, and makes lifestyle changes to avoid getting lung cancer. At the end of the novel, he has just been born - and then time starts to go forward. He has, it seems, been given his alternate lifestream where he lives to old age happily married to Sarah.

97. The King's Mother: Book 3 of the Beaufort Chronicle - Judith Arnopp

This is the final novel in the author's trilogy tracing the life of Margaret Beaufort, one of the most powerful women of the late Medieval period, as the mother of the first Tudor King Henry VII. This traces the reign of her son, the final remnants of the War of the Roses, the famous pretenders Lambert Simnel and the much more threatening Perkin Warbeck, and other rebellions such as the Cornish uprising. As is always the case at this period of history, the main concern among the rulers is the provision of male heirs to the throne and, less essentially but desirably, a clutch of daughters to form marriage alliances on the international stage to England's benefit. We follow Margaret's emotional rollercoaster as the ruling family descends from three sons born to King Henry and Elizabeth of York, a very healthy position, to only one, the future king Henry VIII, following the death of the heir Prince Arthur. There are more tragic deaths of royal children: Edmund the third son; one of the daughters Elizabeth; and the final daughter Katherine who dies shortly after her mother dies in childbirth ("It takes time to recover from the loss of a child. It is even worse when that child has lived long enough for us to recognise their laugh, understand their humour, and know their sorrows and fears."). The key relationship though is that between Margaret and the King her son, and as lays dying, she reflects that "since my thirteenth year, Henry has been my reason for breathing, my reason for rising each morning. He was living proof of my faith in God's goodness, and the only living creature that I have loved more than I love myself."

98. The Castle of Wolfenbach - Eliza Parsons

I have given up on this quite quickly, partly because I found it hard to distinguish the characters, but also due to the poor formatting of the book, with no separate lines for new dialogue, resulting in solid blocks of text which is a bugbear of mine. This was one of the Jane Austen "horrid novels" mentioned in Northanger Abbey.

99: Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein - Richard Brinsley Peake

This is a play version of Mary Shelley's novel, produced by an early 19th century dramatist famous for lighter and more comedic productions. This shortened version of the classic novel effectively combines moments of horror and drama with comedy, especially represented in the characters of Fritz and Mme Ninon, with some songs thrown in. It sounds a bit odd but it actually seems to work. Mary Shelley attended a production of it in 1823, five years after the novel was published, and apparently liked it and rated the actor playing the part of the monster.

>106 john257hopper: Pebble in the Sky---------the very first SF book I read. I don't remember much about it . this was probably close to 1950, but it did start me on a path of reading SF for quite a while. I have actually been thinking about reading it again. I wonder what I would think of it now?

100. A Christmas Carol Murder - Heather Redmond

Yay, my 100th completed book of the year!

This is the third in the author's series of whodunnits where the young Charles Dickens is solving murders in mid 1830s London as he attempts to start a writing career, and is gathering his material for what would become Sketches by Boz. Here he becomes involved in murderous events surrounding the counting-house of Emmanuel Screws and Jacob Harley, after the latter's body is found dead dangling in chains from the former's upper window. All family members of both elderly bankers come under suspicion as Dickens attempts to solve the killings without the help of his fiancée Kate Hogarth, from whom he is temporarily estranged due to a misunderstanding over a baby whom he has temporary acquired in odd circumstances involving a fire and a case of mistaken identity. I enjoyed this book and the links between this and Christmas Carol are of course much more obvious and ubiquitous than for the previous two novels. I was disappointed that Mr Hogarth Snr was not prepared to trust Charles and I could see how this breach would be difficult for he and Charles to ever fully mend. All turns out well in the end though, with some colourful characters along the way. The Americanisms here were a bit less grating too, so that was a plus.

101. The Holly-Tree - Charles Dickens

This was one of Dickens's Christmas pieces published in the Christmas 1855 edition of the magazine Household Words which he edited. I don't know why this is not better known, as it is a lovely short piece of writing, full of pathos, heart warming scenes, humour and some ghostly goings on. The narrator Charley, believing his fiancée Angela has left him for his best friend Edwin in the run up to Christmas, resolves to escape to America to leave them to it. But he gets snowed in at the eponymous Yorkshire inn and is brought to mind of various ghostly and humorous goings on in other inns he has frequented in his life, or in his imaginings. The boots in the inn tells him a story about a small boy and girl (aged 8 and 7) who ran away to Gretna Green to get married (a much more heartwarming story than it might sound to modern ears). When the snow melts, he comes across Edwin again, and it was all a misunderstanding, and he returns to Angela. A lovely piece. 5/5

102. The Haunted and the Haunters - Edward Bulwer-Lytton

This is a very effective short ghost story about a haunted house in the middle of London, the typical place where no tenant has served out their term and all quitted after a day or two. The author builds up an atmosphere of thick horror and oppression very well within a few pages - "I felt as if some strange and ghastly exhalation were rising up from the chinks of that rugged floor, and filling the atmosphere with a venomous influence hostile to human life". The narrator is determined to find the true rational explanation for the hauntings as he refuses to believe in the supernatural and, in the end, he does identify the source, but it is based on a Medieval monkish curse. A gripping piece of writing.

103. Elizabeth of York: The First Tudor Queen - Alison Weir

This is an exhaustively well researched biography of Elizabeth of York, eldest daughter of the Yorkist King Edward IV, who in marrying the Lancastrian King Henry VII, united the rival houses in the Wars of the Roses and founded a new dynasty, the Tudors. Elizabeth emerges as a sympathetic and empathetic character, though not without guile when needed, particularly in picking her steps carefully when Richard III was king. Within the constraints of the Medieval queen's position, she managed to exert considerable influence for the good. Multiple pregnancies weakened her system, as happened to so many women at all levels of English society before the advent of modern medicine. After the tragic death of the heir prince Arthur in 1502 at the age of 15, only prince Henry was left as heir, a precarious position with the Tudor dynasty depending on one 10 year old boy's life. So she got pregnant again, though her previous pregnancy had made her dangerously ill - and this one, her seventh, cost her life on her 37th birthday, and that of the daughter she gave birth to. The emotional impact of her passing probably hastened King Henry's own demise six years later, as the evidence suggests they were an unusually devoted and loving couple by the standards of Medieval royalty. The author concludes that "Elizabeth is often unfairly overshadowed by her successors, the wives of Henry VIII, but she was more successful as queen than any of them. For this, and for her integrity, her sweet, good nature, and her many kindnesses, her memory deserves to be celebrated."

The only issue I had with this book was that the author's exhaustive research meant that some sections were little more than long lists of jewels and clothes, or gifts given to relatives, or to the poor or religious institutions. Of necessity, much of the main narrative covers the events of the later Wars of the Roses, the controversies of Richard III's rule, and the early Tudor period, though the author skilfully tries to trace what we know, or can reasonably surmise, of Elizabeth's role in the events of one of the most significant half centuries or so in English history.

Congratulations on your historical 100 plus.

Here is the 2024 group: https://www.librarything.com/ngroups/24197/100-Books-in-2024-Challenge

>116 pamelad: thanks Pam :)

104. Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery - Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

This is an early collection of short tales by this Irish author, though published anonymously in Dublin in 1851. Several of these stories later formed the basis of other, sometimes more famous stories and novels, though not always for the better in my view. I highly rated three of the four tales, but was equivocal about the fourth, which was effectively a full length novel and longer than the other three put together. 4/5

The Watcher - I have read a later version of this story under a different name "The Familiar" in the author's more famous collection In A Glass Darkly. It's an atmospheric tale of a man haunted to death by mysterious footsteps and an aggressive and angry figure that approaches him in various places. His psyche disintegrates and he eventually dies horribly after one final encounter.

The Murdered Cousin; or, Footsteps in the Lobby - this short story was an early version of the author's most famous full length novel Uncle Silas. A young lady who is ward to her reclusive uncle is trapped by him and his son into agreeing to a forced marriage with the latter, but bravely holds out even when the pressure turns to murder for her inheritance. I think this works better as a short story than as a novel actually.

Schalken the Painter - I read this story 15 years ago in a collection of Victorian and Edwardian ghost stories. It's a chilling story of a forced marriage contract between the title character's sweetheart and an unearthly figure who appears suddenly and offers the painter's master, who is the girl's uncle, gold for her hand in marriage. Chilling and effective.

The Evil Guest - this is a much longer story, a full length effectively, about a murder mystery and growing tensions between a set of characters, and an atmosphere of horror, bitterness and betrayal. I thought this was overlong and a bit confusing and nowhere near as good as the shorter tales in this collection. Sometimes less is more. This was also expanded even further in a novel A Lost Name, which I am far from sure I will ever read.