Adventures in the Mouse House

56. War & Peace by Leo Tolstoy

I wish I wasn't so far behind with this, or that I took notes or something, because I had a lot more thoughts about this that I can't remember.  This was supposed to be the first of four big projects this year and is the only one that I finished.

To my immense surprise, given that both war and all things domestic bore me, I loved this book.  (Most of it, anyway).  Which is why it's especially frustrating that it took me so long to read.  In short, it follows the fortunes of several upper class Russian families through the Napoleonic wars. Mainly, the appeal is Tolstoy's pithy descriptions of the characters that are spot on.  The early "war" portions were more interesting than I expected - mainly young men overwhelmed and blundering around the battlefield.  Later on, the battle of Borodino goes on forever but I think that was Tolstoy's point.

Tolstoy is at his best with the domestic scenes, which surprised me, because, as I said above, I have zero tolerance for that kind of stuff.  Jane Austen gives me the stabby rage.  I think it's the sheer variety of the characters and seeing how they live.  I would particularly have liked to know more about the religious pilgrims that Princess Marya interacts with.  When the Rostovs are being useless and taking two days to leave Moscow I wanted to slap them all into next week.

Conversely, this book is at its weakest when Tolstoy philosophises about history and fate etc, and where he has Napoleon as a character - it's just never convincing.

I've read a lot of 19th century Russian literature but mainly Gogol and Dostoyevsky - this is a lot easier going.  I also read Anna Karenina about 20 years ago and I don't particualrly remember liking it.

I've hardly used my British Museum membership this year, mostly down to health reasons, but also because of lack of motivation due to the overcrowding of recent exhibitions and the fact that I don't like the space in the new Sainsbury Wing.

That led me to look for reviews of Sunken Cities before I booked a coach ticket.  The only one I got as far as reading was the Guardian's - they hated it, but it was one of those reviews that was so sneering and mean-spirited that it just made me want to go.  At one point the reviewer admitted that they hate Egyptian and Hellenistic culture.  So why would you even - oh, never mind.

As it happens, this is the first time I've been impressed with what they've done with the exhibition space.  It's quite dark, the walls are all painted dark blue.  (But not so dark that I had trouble seeing everything, and I have fairly extreme difficulty getting enough light to see things properly on a good day, so clearly they know what they're doing).

The exhibition showcases finds from two "lost" cities of the Nile delta, Thonis-Heracleion and Canopus, which were founded in the 7th century BC and gradually sank as the channels of the Nile changed, were subject to earthquakes, etc, but are believed to have been inhabited as late as the 7th century AD.

There are lots of large monumental scuptures as well as the largest collection of ritual items ever found.  (In other places the metal would have been melted down for repurposing as they became obsolete).  Many of these are shown alongside videos of the archaeologists uncovering them.  This is something else the Guardian reviewer hated but I personally get excited watching underwater archaeology at work.

Then the exhibition takes a turn into telling the story of the Osiris myth.  I thought it was a bit of a non-sequitur but, like any good geek, I *love* that myth, and there were a number of excellent statues that normally live in Egypt, including several that I've seen in textbooks so it was fantastic to see the real thing.

The reason for telling this story becomes apparent when you turn another corner and the exhibiton takes you through the ritual that was done surrounding the Osiris myth every year.  We know about it from various sources but in Thonis-Heracleion and Canopus they have found physical evidence for the ritual.  So that was pretty exciting too.

There was a bit of a crush at the beginning of the exhibition but as I went on it was still busy but far less crowded, which made for a nice change.

I was going to buy the book as it's very nice indeed but I'm aware that I've been haemorrhaging money lately so I declined.  I can always order it later.

Definitely recommended, but it's only on for another week.

52. The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle

This novella was recommended to me by Jonathan L Howard, author of the excellent Carter and Lovecraft.  It's basically a non-racist re-telling of The Horror at Red Hook.

The first half is the backstory of Black Tom (Charles Thomas Tester), a black man in 1920s Harlem who makes ends meet by doing what looks like low-level gangster jobs (acting as courier, etc) except that the trade is in occult objects, and his musings on how he's not going to allow himself to be broken by manual labour and racism like his father was.  This is the better half of the book.

The second half is from the point of view of one of the detectives hired by the family of the mysterious white dude who is buying up lots of slum property in Red Hook and this is where it becomes obvious this story is a re-imaging of Lovecraft's most infamously racist tale.  Although it is where most of the action lies, is less fulfilling because the character just isn't interesting.  However, the final battle and the outcome are very well done.

A quick read, and definitely worth your time.

50. Beloved Poison by ES Thomson

I heard about this in the Guardian. It's shortlisted for a Scottish crime fiction award (the McIlvanney). The rest of the contenders are the usual suspects, but, as a historical novel, this caught my interest. Not enough to buy it, obviously, that's what libraries are for.

It's set in a crumbling hospital that used to be a monastery in 1850s London which is being shut down to make way for a railway station. Everything we learn about the place leads the reader to believe this is no bad thing.

The narrator is Jem Flockhart, the hospital's apothecary, who is a woman living as a man because there has been a Flockhart as the apothecary at St Saviour's for generations and her father had no sons. A lot of readers have complained that this is a cliche (I went on to Goodreads and immediately needed to shower.) Look, assholes, there's three choices to deal with women as protagonists in historical novels and apparently they all make people bitch. Either you don't use women, and that's just not acceptable to a lot of modern readers. Or you have women as women, and the sexists masquerading as sticklers for historical accuracy shout you down. Or you can use the cross dressing trope (and, interestingly, more evidence is coming to light that this actually happened a lot more than has been previously thought) and get accused of being a cliche. Representation matters, people, so STFU if that's the worst criticism you can come up with.

Interestingly, as the novel goes on it becomes more obvious that Jem and his/her father haven't been fooling many people but they've all gone along with it.

Jem becomes friends with a young architect sent to supervise the demolition works. They find six tiny coffins hidden in a disused chapel (more than a little reminiscent of the real-life mystery of the six miniature coffins found in Scotland which has been used as a basis for many a modern book). They start to investigate and people start dying.

I had a mixed reaction to this book. Thomson has a PhD in the history of medicine so that part is spot on. She captures the Victorian era reasonably well. It falls short of pitching you right into the era as the Shardlake books do to the Tudor era, but those books are my benchmark. She makes an overly heavy-handed use of foreshadowing. However, the literal and figurative claustrophobia of the hospital environment is unsettling and there was enough going on that I wanted to find out what happened next.

Overall, not bad for a first book. However, it's supposed to be the first in a series and while I think it was a good stand-alone book, I didn't find anything about it a good basis for a series. Not convinced I will be following up.

48. Neptune's Brood by Charles Stross

Of Stross' books, I've read all of the Laundry novels and the detective stories (Halting State and Rule 34). I thought I should read some of his sci-fi and this was sitting on the shelf at the library at an opportune time.

The voice is totally different from the two series that I've read (which are different from each other, but quite close). It's a lot more difficult to read as hes examining more complex concepts.

In the far future where biological humans have been extinct for thousands of years, synthetic people are colonising space. There is no faster than light travel, with complicated implications for finance. A mendicant scholar who studies the history of finance is looking for her missing sister, who may or may not hold the key to a missing space colony and the biggest financial scam of all time. She is being chased by their mother (a real piece of work), a spacefaring cult whose ship is a gothic cathedral (yes, that's as great as it sounds) and a ship of pirates/insurance underwriters who have taken on a giant bat form.

In other words, it's good fun as well as dealing with difficult concepts. Stross digs deeply into the economics of colonising space. At times this felt like a Ken Macleod book - he even uses the line "early days of a better nation" which is, of course, the title of Macleod's blog.

It took me a while to get into it but couldn't put the last third down; recommended.

47. Knight's Shadow by Sebastien de Castell

The Greatcoats, book 2. I reviewed book 1 recently.

This one is even better - lots of swordfights, lots of smart-assery, but it's more elegantly plotted, and All The Feels are turned up to 11 as more and more sacrifice is demanded of the heroes to complete their quest (which may in fact be a non-quest, as there is debate as to the character of their late king). Massive betrayals, but also some redemption.

The only other fictional characters I feel about like I do Falcio are Harry Dresden and Jant from The Year of Our War. But it's not just the character, I love everything about this book.

The only social media de Castell does is Twitter - does this meant I have to open a Twitter account just to tell him how I feel about this book? Damn.

45. The Empire Stops here: A Journey along the Frontiers of the Roman World by Philip Parker

I meant to read this when it came out, forgot about it, and then stumbled across it in the library recently.

I'd wanted to read it because while I have little interest in Rome itself, it's life at the fringes and the hybrid cultures that arose as a result that interests me. I'm all about the liminality.

In that respect, the book is pretty disappointing. It doesn't really work as a travel book either - just brief descriptions of the surviving physical remains of the empire at its fringes. What it does reasonably well is give brief histories of how an when Rome came to be at the ends of the empire, how long they stayed and how it fell. Which is not what I was looking for but provides decent background knowledge. There were just enough interesting factoids to keep me going through the full 500 pages.

It starts in Britain and works its way round to West Africa. There wasn't a lot I didn't already know in the Britain segment but as it got further from my area of knowledge, the more interesting it got.

It's not a bad book, but it kind of doesn't succeed in doing any one thing particularly well, and as an introductory survey of a massive subject it's just too big.

43. One Virgin Too Many by Lindsey Davis

Of all the books clamouring for my attention, this one got me because of the end of the last book in the series, where Vespasian has ordered Falco back to Rome urgently. It turned out all he wanted to do was to give Falco a bogus sinecure as Procurator of the Sacred Fowl as a reward for uncovering a plot to poison them.

Compared to Two for the Lions, this one's fluff (which could well be intentional). There's lots of weird stuff going on but Falco is even slower than usual at putting it all together as he's even more preoccupied with personal matters than normal. As to where the missing child was, it was pretty obvious even to me.

The portrayals of the priestly class are straight out of Asterix comics. While it's hardly surprising that Falco is not well disposed towards them, Davis portrays them as buffoons at best and dangerous lunatics at worst and it's kind of at odds with the picture she usually paints of Roman life (human with good and bad qualities).

I still enjoyed it, but it's far from the strongest book in the series.

One of the nifty things about growing up in a country that is traditionally not very good at the summer Olympics is that the CBC and CTV showed (what seemed to be) a random lot of events with participants from various countries, and the roundup at news time was about which countries had the most medals and highlights from throughout the day.

Over here, nothing but Team GB this and Team GB that. Non stop. Mostly no mention even of which countries got the other medals. Radio 4 this morning couldn't stop saying how many medals Team GB has got with ZERO mention of where that is in comparison to other countries. Even if I was British I'm pretty sure I'd be completely fed up with that (and thoroughly embarrassed by how parochial my supposedly world-class news outlet is) by now.