Adventures in the Mouse House

3. Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics by Tim Marshall

Or Geopolitics for Dummies. A good basic explanation of how geography limits the options of various world regions. This is the 2016 edition and is very much up to date for now, but if it isn't updated regularly it will date quickly.

Having said that, there's a lot of information that will continue to be useful, where Marshall explains how and why various countries have developed in the way that they have.

Parts of this book were a bit basic for me, but I did learn a lot. The best chapter was the first, on Russia. I studied Russian history at university and this book gives a context we weren't given to a lot of events that otherwise don't make a lot of sense.

This book (or something like it) should be required reading for everyone. It explains a lot about how and why the world is the way it is.

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1. Fight Like a Girl edited by Roz Clarke and Joanne Hall

(Usual disclaimer applies - this book had the best launch event ever).

A collection of fantasy/SF short stories by women, about women in combat situations. The settings range from hard SF to traditional fantasy & everything in between. All the stories are well written, but some grabbed me less than others (hard SF and high fantasy being not generally my thing, nor are protracted fight scenes). Not that it's all about fight scenes. I enjoyed the Lovecraftian horror one a lot (predictable) but Gaie Sebold's at the end is by far the best. All The Feels, as the young people say.

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60. Dead Bad Things by Gary McMahon

I picked up an early novel of his about a decade ago, and enjoyed it but never followed up. I found this one lying on the freebie table at BristolCon and nabbed it.

The prologue is a bit naff, but the main book grabbed me right from the start. A young police woman and her partner are called to investigate a disturbance in a posh part of Leeds and find a grisly murder has taken place. Her father, also a police officer and truly nasty person, has recently died and she finally works up to tackling all of the evidence he left behind. Meanwhile, a psychic called Thomas Usher (who I understand is a recurring character in McMahon's work) is living in a "grey area" (area so haunted it's left derelict) in London trying to lie low, but keeps getting messages from a supernatural force trying to manipulate him - or help him, he doesn't know which.

I greatly enjoyed this book - the murder mystery is interesting, the Thomas Usher bits are malevolent and disturbing and the solution is fairly satisfying. Will definitely looking for more of his in the future.

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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.