Thoughts: Shadow of the Great Game: The Untold Story of India’s Partition, by Narendra Singh Sarila

Posted on 15 September 2022 by Dove

I love how every non-fiction book title is [Snappy Title]: [Cumbersome Thesis Statement So You Know What The Book Is Actually About]. Every single one. I can’t not notice it anymore.

Anyway, I’ve by pure coincidence happened to read a surprising amount about Indian independence from the British Empire very recently, so I’m going to line those reviews up instead of going chronologically through my reading/backlog, the better to compare and contrast. I am of the bad habit of reading a single non-fiction book per subject and assuming I know some stuff afterwards, but honestly, the more I read about India the less I felt like I knew. Understatement of the year, but turns out it’s an extremely complex subject that is impossible to entirely contain in one book… and the whole world, and all of human history, is made up of uncountable events of similar complexity. Terrifying. Mind-bending. Things like ‘the size of the universe’ don’t really get to me, because they’re so far out of my comprehension that my brain just goes, “That’s nice,” and moves on. But show me how huge the Earth is and how fractally complex all human life is and I’ll blue-screen on the spot.

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Thoughts: The Transit of Venus, by Shirley Hazzard

Posted on 14 September 2022 by Dove

Uh looks like I entirely forgot to post this after I wrote it? Here you go!

Last book I started before giving birth, first book I finished afterwards. I read a couple of chapters to baby, in the hope that he will learn from the examples of the characters and make better choices with his own life.

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Thoughts: The Mists of Avalon, by Marion Bradley

Posted on 10 September 2022 by Dove

Warning before we start – there’ll be mentions of real life crimes in this one, involving children.

Some explanations are in order. I know we’re all meant to be living in a Death of the Author world but some things don’t die. It’s one thing to pretend Kate Bush wasn’t a Theresa May fan, or that you didn’t see that one post describing Patrick Rothfuss’s unfortunate-looking fundraising shenanigans, and another thing to turn a blind eye to actual crimes – and not just lying about prostitutes. Marion Zimmer Bradley falls under the ‘actual crimes’ umbrella, and honestly I don’t have much time for the people I see in Facebook comments and similar yelling at anyone who mentions her crimes when her name comes up in recommendations, because “no author is perfect”. I think this is something people should be informed about before reading or purchasing Bradley’s work.

Yes, it would be lovely to read it without the knowledge at the back of your mind. Yes, it is unfair that we can no longer have the experience of a “pure” first reading. But that cat is well and truly out of the bag – Bradley herself, by her actions, has made it impossible to enjoy her work without a bad taste in your mouth.

As far as I can tell, you can’t have multiple cuts in WordPress (oh for the halcyon LiveJournal days!) so unfortunately I couldn’t separate out the bad stuff in a way that’s easily skippable.

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Thoughts: Mothering Sunday, by Graham Swift

Posted on 29 August 2022 by Dove

I have my soft spots, like anyone, and one of my guiltiest ones is life in stately homes and fancy old estates, despite my dislike of the British class system. I also like quiet stories where not much happens, but at the same time, everything happens. It took everything in me not to inhale Mothering Sunday in one gulp. Not that I have anything against swallowing a book whole, just that my son would probably have something to say about me being emotionally unavailable for so long, if he was old enough to talk.

Short thoughts for short book today, though not because I didn’t enjoy it or because there isn’t anything to say about it. Some books are just like that, compact in your mind.

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Thoughts: The Man Who Was Thursday, by G. K. Chesterton

Posted on 25 August 2022 by Dove

Another one off the backlog pile! Annoyingly it’s been so long since I read it that most of my very specific feelings have faded with time, but eh, we press on. Spoilers though. I deliberately didn’t read the Introduction till after I’d finished because even the publisher warns the first-time reader about revealed plot details. It was a good choice to wait, so if you want to read it, skip my thoughts.

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Thought: June Fourth Elegies, by Liu Xiaobo (translated by Jeffrey Yang)

Posted on 23 August 2022 by Dove

More dissident poetry! It was a rough early June in 2017 when we lost Irina Ratushinskaya and Liu Xiaobo in quick succession. This one felt a little bit like the baddies won though, if I can use such simplistic/childish language. Whereas Ratushinskaya lived to see her freedom and the end of the Soviet Union, Liu died in detention, the first Nobel prizewinner to do so since 1935 (says the internet).

I’m going to try to keep the comparisons to a minimum, but humans are pattern-seeking creatures, and I haven’t read nearly enough poetry in translation to help myself. So no promises.

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Thoughts: Mind of the Raven, by Bernd Heinrich

Posted on 14 August 2022 by Dove

Slightly embarrassing admission, I picked this one up as story research (for a story that I haven’t finished or touched in a while – indeed, the same story I read Gifts of the Crow for – but still).

The tempting thing is to compare it to Gifts of the Crow, and indeed the authors seem to have rubbed scientific shoulders before, which makes sense given that they’re in the same field, but let’s not, if only because it’s been a long time and having a baby has melted vast holes in my brain.

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Thoughts: Grey is the Colour of Hope, by Irina Ratushinskaya, translated by Alonya Kojevnikov (with poems translated by David McDuff, Richard McKane and Helen Szamuely)

Posted on 12 August 2022 by Dove

Grey is the Colour of Hope is Irina Ratushinskaya’s prison memoir, written in 1987 after her release from the Small Zone in the Barashevo camp, but before the dissolution of the USSR. This gives it both a very particular angle on history, and strangely a sense of timelessness too. In the limbo in which it was written, it resonates with a more general ongoing repression – maybe if I’d read it before 2014 it wouldn’t pierce so deeply, but of course I didn’t, and Russia is once again up to its old tricks, the cast of characters barely changed.

Even more so now that even as I write this I find myself in one of those little limbos – Salman Rushdie has been stabbed, his fate unknown. By the time you read this, it too might be oddly specifically dated.

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European microstates and special territories, ranked by their suitability for dinosaur smuggling

Posted on 12 June 2022 by Spuggy
(Based on images by Nikolai Karaneschev and Nobu Tamura. CC BY SA)

(exceptionally mild spoilers for Jurassic World Dominion, a movie I myself have not seen, follow)

In the latest Jurassic World movie, genetically-modified dinosaurs – having escaped the island – are sold at a black market bazaar to depraved billionaires who want to gamble on them, eat them, or use them as weapons. The bazaar is coded as being Middle Eastern – it’s even graded with the “yellow filter” that Hollywood often uses to make non-Western countries seem dirtier and more threatening – but, technically, it’s not. It is, according to the script, in Malta.

Malta is an interesting country – a small Mediterranean island between Libya and Italy, speaking a language that is closely related to Arabic but with a vocabulary borrowing heavily from Italian/Sicilian (Maltese is the only semitic language written in the Latin alphabet) – but what Hollywood cares about here is that it has some of the aesthetic trappings of the Arab world while being European and majority white, meaning that if anyone says “Wasn’t that bazaar scene a bit racist?” they can say “Uh, nuh uh, this just a white European bazaar”.

But this got me thinking: if you wanted to smuggle dinosaurs into Europe (meaning in this case, primarily the EU, plus the UK and Switzerland), how would you do it? What would be the best place to set up your military-grade dino dealing fair? Here is every microstate, dependency and special territory (outlying bits of EU countries where customs and some other bits of EU law don’t apply), ranked by how good a place it would be for a Jurassic black market.

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Thoughts: Der Hundertjährige, der zurückkam, um die Welt zu retten, by Jonas Jonasson, translated by Wibke Kuhn

Posted on 30 March 2022 by Dove

This was our latest German Skype session reading, and now we have only one more Jonas Jonasson left to read, so I guess he’d better get cracking on the typewriter before we run out!

Not a huge amount new to say since the last time I talked about Jonasson – he’s still light and funny and dry and slapstick. He still sometimes skates a little too easily over politics, but in a way that fits his general irreverence in the face of life and death. Maybe I’m just too British, and used to political-flavoured humour with an undertone of anger (think Pratchett)? Either way, I wouldn’t say it’s a dealbreaker for me, just something I noticed.

It was a weirdly comforting read though in the pandemic, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t laugh out loud multiple times. Jonasson can still bring these crazy threads together and have them pay off in delightfully madcap ways.

In some ways these books are really good for learning with, because they alternate stretches of easy, colloquial German with dense world politics interludes in a way I greatly appreciate, and though of course Jonasson takes a liberty or two I still find myself learning stuff.

Where the first Hundred Year Old Man book skipped through a hundred years of history, this one is very much situated in the very recent past – Brexit, Merkel, Putin, Trump, Kim Jong-Un, and Allan Karlsson lurching between them all, briefcase full of uranium in tow. So that was a weird experience too, reading something so recent that still feels so far away because so much has changed in such a short time! Not just the pandemic either, just so much has happened. Trump is gone, Merkel has gone, Brexit has receded into the background drumbeat of ugh, Putin’s been pretty busy*… Not to mention the pandemic.

I can’t help but wonder if it’s all going to provoke Jonasson into trying to keep up with the world for a little longer before he lets Allan rest for good. I won’t lie, I’d be happy to follow him as far as he gets…

*I originally drafted this post at the end of January and this reads absurdly now. I can’t even remember what I was thinking of in particular. What could he possibly have been doing that could be considered “busy” before starting an illegal war?

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