philomytha

1913: The World before the Great War, Charles Emmerson
This was a good, fairly light, snapshot of the world just before the outbreak of WW1. Emmerson selects a range of cities around the world, starting and ending in London and crossing Europe, North and South America, the Middle East and some of Asia, with a brief glimpse of Melbourne, Algiers and Durban for Oceania and Africa, and gives a summary of their political and social situations in 1913, often with an overview of the history of each place. For getting a good overall image of the relations between various parts of the world, especially between England and her empire, it's an excellent book, and I learned something especially about the Argentina-UK connection that comes up so often in novels of this period and a bit later, and also I enjoyed the German tourist's guide to London in 1913. Of course there are thousands and thousands more things the author could have included, but it's a fun read.


Hawthorn: a Scottish ghost story, Elaine Thomson
Aka the bog trauma story. This was very readable, though rather languidly paced. Our hero Robert Sutherland is working with a team making the first Ordnance Survey map of Scotland, only he falls in a bog and then onwards his life becomes weird. And very full of swooning, at least three quarters of the book is him swooning, having hallucinations, fevers and other problems, while milling about waiting for the plot to happen. I would have liked more map-making, which is more flavouring than part of the story, and it would have been nice to have more female characters who weren't evil or dead, and I feel like it could have committed harder to the ending of discrediting Sutherland for extra horrific interest. But there really was an excellent amount of manly swooning.


The Riddle of the Sands, Erskine Childers (available here at Project Gutenberg)
One of the oldest of the spy novel genre, written in 1903. I found this tremendously fun to read, unexpectedly hilarious and delightful, not so much for the plot as for the two main characters, Carruthers and Davies, and their fabulous odd-couple adventures sailing around the German coastline trying to figure out what the dastardly Germans are up to. Carruthers, fastidious, cynical, very posh and clever, and Davies, straightforward, enthusiastic, loyal, and brilliant at sailing but rubbish at intrigue - the book is written in the first person from Carruthers' perspective and I adore his narrative voice, he is clearly an absolute nightmare in many ways but with a saving dose of self-awareness and a genuine and growing affection for Davies and his very different virtues. There are tons of references to maps and charts and the interested reader can follow along with every nautical detail of the story, but I was not interested in the nautical details except in the superb competence kink in Davies' navigational skills. Luckily Carruthers also doesn't understand most of the nautical details and so the reader can keep up as much as they need to. I did get a bit lost in the details of the plot, but I didn't mind because I was having fun with the Davies/Carruthers show. I also watched the 1979 Michael York film, which was good fun: it elides a lot of the plot, but leans in nicely to the Davies/Carruthers dynamic, though I am not quite able to cope with film!Davies's giant moustache. But film!Carruthers is perfect; the shopping list sequence is hilarious in the film and even more hilarious in the book. This might be fun to request for Yuletide to see if anyone wants to write me some actual Davies/Carruthers, too.


Midnight in Vienna and Appointment in Paris, Jane Thynne
WW2 spy novel series. These were inexplicably readable and I am trying to work out why. The plots were weak and the characters pretty two-dimensional, most of the characters were either real people or straight from Central Casting (would you like a mildly alcoholic private investigator with a failed romantic life and a problem with authority? of course you would. would you like to guess what kind of WW1 experience he had? you won't need two guesses. would you like to guess whether or not he is ruggedly handsome and inexplicably attractive to women who as we know love a low-life boozer?). The narrative was fluid and easy to ride along with, but a lot of the interest for me was in the fact that the author has lifted great chunks of her story from a variety of the history books I've read over the past few years, especially the complete works of Helen Fry, who probably should have a co-author credit for the second novel. And, as I said, most of the characters are real people: Thynne never bothers to invent a character when she can just use Noel Coward or Dorothy Sayers or Maxwell Knight or some other poor sod. The plot is weak: again, Thynne just uses real events and hitches her plot to them, but there's very little suspense or sense of danger or excitement, the characters have little interest in or awareness of the stakes and mostly spend their time wondering why they're even getting mixed up in this business. 'Um, I had a hunch' is a key plot motivator in both books, used so often the author unconvincingly lampshades it a few times. The heroine's assorted romantic options are a large chunk of the plot: her Viennese former fiance, her fellow student at Oxford turned refugee, her best friend's brother who happens to be Churchill's aide, and of course our inexplicably attractive to women piece of rough, the hero. No doubt she will shack up with the hero after extensively exploring all the other options over the course of multiple books. In fact, the two lead character and their dynamic are also not original, being 2D versions of Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott, transplanted to 1940 and with connections to the security services. The period setting is pretty well done, superficial but filled in at least a few degrees better than the popular press version of WW2. The second book's plot was particularly weak: for most of the book our heroes were running around on the basis that there was a German spy ring infiltrating Trent Park - which is a great concept - but then at the end it's oh no there is no German spy ring at all, we picked up the German spies the day they arrived for being Very Bad Spies and probably Canaris is sending Very Bad Spies on purpose because he wants Hitler to lose. Which is historically accurate, but when the plot of your spy thriller novel is 'catch the German spies before they reveal our very important secret' then saying 'oh no actually there aren't any spies' at the end is a pretty major cop-out. If you were writing a much darker and more serious novel about how spy work is pointless and people run around frantically and suffer for no reason and no gain at all, then this would have been a perfect ending: Le Carre could have pulled it off, but this was not even remotely that kind of book, this is your basic frothy romantic suspense wartime adventure, and in this kind of book you have to play the plot straight, or if there are twists they have to be the sort of twists that make it more exciting, not less exciting. So: the author's done her homework and the period setting is decent, the romance is nice and the narrative carries you along without requiring any actual thought, but the plot is not very well constructed.


No 2 Whitehall Court, Alan Judd
Another attempt to find some good WW1 spy adventures: this one features a female agent, Emily Grey, a linguist who is seconded to work for the fledgling MI6 under its famous head C, Mansfield Cummings. The author of this book knows his stuff, he's written a biography of C and there's evidence of plenty of research--but that is the problem with this book. Or one of the problems, anyway. Again, half the characters are real people, and I'm increasingly thinking that this is a mistake in this sort of fiction, because our heroine and POV character can't really have relationships with them. She's observing them without having an impact on them, and when your main character can't have any kind of relationship other than historical observer with many of your other key characters, the novel suffers. And that is the problem with this book: it's flat, plodding, the prose is leaden, the characters atomised, and considering that it's sold as a WW1 spy thriller, it's almost totally lacking in any kind of thrills. About the closest we get to suspense is when Emily starts to suspect that someone is following her - and someone is, it's MI5 to keep an eye on her in a completely harmless way and it all ends in farce. In general the farce was the best bit of this book: Emily is given a hapless failed Marine named Nigel to be her general fixer and bodyguard, and Nigel is absolutely shit at his job in almost every way and also is very believably chauvinistic and patronising towards Emily despite his obvious incompetence. This was where the story came to life - the sequence where Emily and Nigel are on a warship heading for Rotterdam and Nigel is a complete nuisance with far too much luggage was all hilarious - but there were never really any consequences from Nigel's incompetence, Emily is only very mildly annoyed by it and in the end Nigel gets to be a hero and save the day revealing an entire hitherto unmentioned bit of supreme competence. Otherwise, the real villain is telegraphed so hard you can see it from space, which meant that by the time the characters finally caught up with the reader, the overwhelming feeling was 'took you long enough' rather than 'oh wow, I didn't see that coming but it makes so much sense' - the latter being what any half-decent writer of a thriller is aiming for. The spy plot and depiction of how spying worked was all rock solid - as I said, the author's done his research, he knows how all this worked in reality, but what he doesn't know is how to take these historical realities and turn them into a tense, interesting, characterful plot. I was deeply surprised to learn that Judd's written many previous spy thrillers many of which have excellent reviews, I would have taken this to be a first attempt at fiction by a history geek. Anyway, the further this book got from repeating bits of history, the better it was as a novel, which is why the horrible Nigel was the best bit. But I'll definitely go take a look at his non-fiction now.

Return of the Dark Invader, Franz von Rintelen
Rintelen had so much fun writing his wartime memoirs that he decided to write a sequel too. This is not as successful or as entertaining as the first volume, partly because he doesn't have nearly the interesting material of wartime sabotage and capture to discuss, but mostly because in peacetime Rintelen has become an obsessed monomaniac about Franz von Papen and the evilness of the postwar German government. All honour, chivalry, goodness and truth are gone from Berlin and Rintelen is here with his green ink to tell you all about it, with lawsuits. Lots of lawsuits. One thing that was less apparent in the first book but which is very apparent here is that Rintelen is very rich, rich enough that even the hyperinflation years don't seem to hurt him that much, and more than rich enough to keep bringing lawsuits against everyone. But there were some interesting moments mixed in to a lot of somewhat unhinged ranting and stories of the 'and then everyone applauded' variety that do not convince. There was a rather sad, sparse account of Rintelen returning home once he was released from the American prison, and discovering that he and his wife didn't know each other any more and couldn't make it work - and also later there was the deeply hilarious excursion into Rintelen's winter sports adventure which ended up with him going for a rather tipsy walk around a frozen lake and falling in and having to be rescued by his date - he was separated from his wife, but had plenty of lady friends. And, inevitably, more of his profound love affair with various English officers - who, unlike his fellow Germans, were in his mind still capable of honour and chivalry - and his moving to England around about the time the Nazis took power. Though he doesn't seem to have that much insight into his reactions, he very much gives the impression of someone who thrived in wartime but then couldn't find a way to function in peacetime.


Europe's Last Summer, David Fromkin
A popular history of the events leading up to the start of WW1, with a focus on the final weeks before the fighting started and also on identifying and exploring exactly why it started, whose decisions drove it and whether anything could have prevented it. This was very readable and summarises a lot of information very concisely and clearly. Fromkin's conclusion is interesting: he divides things up into two separate wars, a local Balkan conflict where Austria-Hungary was determined to invade and conquer Serbia but with no interest or intention towards any kind of wider conflict, and a much bigger Great Powers war started by Germany to maintain and increase her position of pre-eminence in Europe. Fromkin argues that Germany encouraged and pushed Austria-Hungary to be more aggressive towards Serbia in order to create the pretext needed to go to war with Russia and France, because Germany thought that if they waited any longer for their war they would have a greater chance of losing it, and they needed Austria-Hungary to be prepared to fight alongside them. The problem Germany faced was that while they had an alliance with Austria-Hungary, they did not think Austria-Hungary would back them up in a conflict that Germany started. But once Austria-Hungary had an actual reason why they really wanted to fight, because they believed Serbia was an existential threat, and a pretext in the Serb-backed assassination of their crown prince, Germany could co-opt their aggression for its own ends which were that of a pan-European war.

Fromkin also takes issue with the popular idea that WW1 came out of nowhere, pointing out the massive military build-ups that had been happening over the previous decade in all the Great Powers involved, the many smaller wars and proxy wars and colonial wars in which the Great Powers had been embroiled in from the very start of the twentieth century, the naval arms race between Germany and the UK and the general belief in all of these countries that a major war was inevitable and the only question was when. So then he tackles the question of why this war, why August 1914, why not earlier or later, and unpicks the various diplomatic efforts that had prevented previous crises from turning into war and argues that in this particular crisis, many key players both in Germany and in Austria-Hungary were actively pushing for their two wars.

And as for why Germany wanted a war at all, a large chunk of that was because the Prussian military aristocracy that had been running the country were seeing their traditional backing start to fade, and they needed a reason to justify their maintaining of power at home, and they had all been very much indoctrinated in the belief that war was one of the pinnacles of human achievement. And they had convinced themselves that the French and the Russians were just itching to invade them, and so it was their job to invade first to prevent this from happening. So having a war, in their view, was a good thing and a necessary thing, and their key question was, how could they arrange this war so that they would have the maximum chance of winning. By harnessing their war to the Austrian response to an assassination, they were able to make it appear as if the wider war was started by someone else, whereas in actuality Germany was encouraging and supporting Austria-Hungary to respond very aggressively to the assassination rather than accept a political or legal restitution (which Serbia was willing to make; in prior potential conflicts Germany had largely reined Austria-Hungary in). And, tragically, Franz Ferdinand had been the key person on the Austrian side who had been very inclined to keep going with diplomacy and peace-making rather than war, and was also a close friend of the Kaiser, who had also been key on the German side to preventing previous crises from flaring up into wars but who now, with his friend assassinated, was in a much more belligerent mood.

I plan to read some other books on the origins of the first world war next for other viewpoints, but the interesting thing about this book is the way it explores and interrogates the connection that's otherwise a little baffling: how you make the step between the assassination of the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary by a Serbian terrorist, and German, French and British troops slaughtering each other in the mud of Flanders.


The Morning Gift, Eva Ibbotson
Absolutely first class, an utterly delightful romance novel which takes the 'marriage of convenience' trope and does fantastic things with it. Twenty-year-old Ruth Berger, due to a complicated mix-up, is left behind in Vienna in 1938 when her partly-Jewish family flees the Nazis. Quinton Somerville, a family friend and English professor of paleology, is also in Vienna and the only way he can think of to rescue her is to marry her, so that as a British subject she can safely reunite with her family in London and then, hopefully, quickly get the marriage annulled. Things rapidly get more complicated for them both. This was a joy to read, I inhaled it all in one evening and loved every page, Ibbotson is incredibly funny in her prose, her characters all live and breathe and have such wonderful inner and outer lives, and she writes with gorgeously vivid and realistic experience of living in Vienna and of being a refugee in London, since Eva Ibbotson also fled Vienna for London at the outset of WW2. I loved it absolutely to pieces.

Also I enjoyed it so much that I went straight out and got two more by the same author.

A Countess Below Stairs, Eva Ibbotson
This was equally delightful, though a trifle more romance-tropey and fairytale in nature: the young Countess Anna Grazinsky, having fled St Petersburg in 1919 with her family and lost their family jewels along the way, takes up a job as a housemaid at a romantic English country house and rapidly goes through the entire household befriending everyone and everything in sight, and especially the young lord, wounded in the RFC and engaged to an extremely unpleasant but very rich young woman. This one is more romantic fairytale and less realistic and funny, but again, the descriptions of all the characters are sheer delight, the settings are beautifully done and I adored it too. I especially liked the depiction of disabled characters in this, who are both a significant part of the plot and also very well realised as characters.

Madensky Square, Eva Ibbotson
This is the account of a year in the life of Susannah, a fashionable dressmaker in the eponymous square in Vienna, pre-WW1. It was a bit different from the other two, it wasn't a coming-of-age story or a get-together romance, Susannah is 36 and already in a settled relationship. But I absolutely adored it, maybe most of all of these three, it was so immersive and so full of beautifully vivid characters living their lives. It's told in the first person and Susannah slowly reveals all her secrets as the book goes on, I loved how in a story that doesn't have a lot of surface plot, Ibbotson maintains the tension and interest by gradually letting Susannah unfold so that we find out how she got to be who she is and why. And also we explore the lives of her friends, neigbours, employees and clients, through Susannah's interest in them all. There are lots of romances, of course, including Susannah's own, but it's not a romance novel the way the other two are. Absolutely gorgeous.

And I have several more Eva Ibbotons waiting for me now...

I don't think it's Wednesday anywhere any more, but last night I was too brain-fried to post anything, so here you are today, what I've been reading lately.

Recently Read

Behold, Here's Poison by Georgette Heyer
Another Heyer murder mystery. This one was perfectly readable, but it didn't charm me the way Heyer usually does. None of the characters were particularly likeable, and while a long familiarity with Heyer's tropes meant that I recognised Randall as the romantic hero and definitely not the murderer, even he didn't particularly appeal to me. The murder was clever, but I felt that the choice of murderer with the whole blackmail plot was less than perfect, it was a bit tacked-on to the intricate family drama Heyer's set up. Not quite 'the butler did it' but close.

Brothers in Arms by LM Bujold (audiobook)
As ever. It is fun reading the series in publication order and seeing Bujold develop the characters and their backstories and interconnections. I think the series gains a lot from being written out of chronological order, it adds richness to the chronologically earlier books. BiA is still my pick for the most perfectly plotted book, I adore how it all leads up to the pivotal scene where Mark shoots Galen, and then unwinds from there, every action matched with a reaction and every plot thread accounted for.

The Transatlantic Marriage Bureau by Julie Ferry
This was great. It's the history of how wealthy American heiresses married into the English aristocracy, told with a fairly tight focus on the lives of a couple of women who married English aristocrats themselves and then, for a generous fee, performed introductions and set up encounters between other young women they deemed suitable, and impoverished heirs to assorted titles. Lots of detail about upper-crust society in New York and London and on the Continent, lots of fascinating detail about how the social networks worked and how women climbed and fell and what their motivations were. It makes me wonder if this is a setting much used for romantic novels, and if not, why not. Also it makes me want to read the works of Edith Wharton, who is much quoted in the book for her novels which apparently contain thinly fictionalised versions of many of the historical women, who were her contemporaries and in some cases friends.

ETA: this book apparently now is titled 'The Million Dollar Duchesses', for mysterious reasons, so if you want to find it you might need to search for that instead

I did also skim-read Gentleman Jole for fanfic reasons, no prizes for guessing which fics I wrote in a recent exchange... It was pretty readable, perfect for a really hot, sleep-deprived day in which 'nothing happens and everyone is fine' was a positive bonus.

Currently reading: not sure whether to pick up a history of the Roman roads in England, which seems likely to amuse, or a history of Bomber Command. I borrowed both from the library, somewhat in a hurry to choose anything because Cub's finished school and they don't like you abandoning your kids in the children's section while you browse at leisure, but it's hard to pick out books when someone's dancing around your feet complaining about boredom.

This post about what you're reading on Wednesday thing seems like a good idea and I've been meaning to do it for ages, so here goes.

Currently reading

I am in the middle of Guy Adams's The Clown Service series. It's ... very readable, I think is the best way to put it. It's not excellent, or even very good, the prose is workmanlike at best and the characters are very loosely sketched out, but the plot zips along happily and the story's full of tropes I like. I picked it up on spec in the library because the cover and blurb looked interesting and reading the first few pages didn't make me put it down in disgust (which the previous book I'd picked up did after the main character, advertised on the back as a tough German cop who started her career on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall, got brutally raped in the prologue).

Anyway, The Clown Service is about Toby, an MI-6 fuckup who gets transferred to the one-man department that deals with counterterrorism as it relates to the supernatural, and together they save the world from exciting supernatural peril. The one man who's run the department solo for about a million years has the wonderful name of August Shining, and he's basically Nightingale or possibly the Doctor, and also he's gay and the book I'm currently reading - the third in the series - seems to be all about his romantic backstory during the Cold War, so that's fun. And in the first book Toby falls headlong in loyalty with Shining, who takes him under his wing and mentors him, so what with that and lots of Cold War spy plots and the whole everyday-world-plus-magic thing, it's not hard to see why I stuck with it. The first book is zombies, which I'm not so keen on but fortunately it wasn't much zombies and lots of Cold War relics coming back to bite Shining and Toby. The second book is strange magical assassinations, and I guessed whodunnit before Toby did but not how theydunnit. The third so far is Shining being interrogated about his love affair with a mysterious magical guy in Berlin, and I'm not sure if there are any more, but if there are I'll probably pick them up when I'm finished this one.

Recently read

Envious Casca and Why Shoot a Butler?, two of Heyer's contemporary-to-her murder mysteries. They're pretty good, fun reads, not as good as her Regencies but pretty good, and of course the background romances are very nicely done. Much better than Death on the Cherwell by Mavis Doriel Hay, picked up off the library's display of vintage crime fiction, which reads like she read Gaudy Night and tried to do the same thing only without the interesting characters or sparkling prose or romance or much of anything, really. I may finish it to find out who killed the Bursar and to see if it improves, but it's been sitting half-finished for several weeks and the library will want it back, so maybe not.

I seem to be reading almost all non-fiction lately, though I am going to read the next couple of Penric & Desdemona novellas at some point soon. There's just so many fascinating non-fiction books out there. I tend to swing back and forth between history and biology/earth-related sciences as the two subjects I'll always pick up a book about, and this lot is all about ecosystems, more or less.

The Earth Care Manual by Patrick Whitefield
I thought this was a gardening book, picked it up in the library to get some tips for this year's garden, and started reading the chapter on soil because I want to know more about soil improvement. Utterly fascinated, I borrowed it on the strength of about one and a half pages about how to tell what's wrong with your soil from looking at the weeds that grow there. I have finally found something that describes my basic attitude towards gardening and generally the care of the very small patch of land that I own. I'd heard of permaculture before but it always sounded really gimmicky, zones and forest gardens and stuff, but this has all the details and all the theory, and it made me want to double down on my efforts to restore natural systems in my own little garden. Especially in combination with...

The Third Plate by Dan Barber
This is the book on food and ecology that I've been looking for. Very restaurant-centric, which I struggled with at first because I don't really care about restaurants, but then we got to the growers and farmers and it completely hooked me in on how flavour and quality relate to environmental sustainability and soil health. I'm not sure the word permaculture is ever used, but the various farming systems he described are all definitely permaculture systems of one kind or another. I particularly loved the description of the fully sustainable fish farm, and the stuff about soil health and how soil management skills can lead you to a situation where the insect pests attack the weeds and leave your crops alone. It sounded a lot like rediscovering the milpa field system of the pre-colonisation Americas which Brand describes in the next book.

Whole Earth Discipline by Stewart Brand
The environmentalist pro arguments for nuclear power and genetic engineering and urbanisation. The nuclear and urbanisation arguments I've heard before, the genetic engineering one was new to me but well put. Written before Fukashima, though I'm not sure it changes the facts except in terms of the total number of nuclear accidents; I remember at the time reading about how rooftop solar power was hugely, hugely more dangerous than nuclear power owing to people falling off roofs a lot when installing the panels. I thought his argument about comparative harm is pretty good: even in a bad scenario where nuclear power does wind up with a half dozen more Chernobyls as well as a thousand-square-mile area where the waste is kept where humans can't go for a thousand years, that's still an awful lot less ecological damage and far, far fewer human deaths han even the most mild (and most unlikely, on current data) climate change impacts. And he had some good analysis of the rhetorical approaches used by both pro and anti disputants on these questions, and I always appreciate a good discussion of rhetorical techniques. He also, unusually in my experience for a male writer, had a strong understanding of how urbanisation benefits women. A good read.

The Virtues of the Table, Julian Baggini
I was a bit hesitant to start this, because I thought it was going to be insufferable. It was not, but I suspect it helps that I've read a lot of philosophy, know what virtue ethics is, and am generally familiar with and inured to the approach a philosopher takes to problems. There were some useful insights into how to think about food, but also a lot of fairly bland stuff. He was generally on stronger ground when talking about the ethics of food production, killing animals and types of agriculture; his economics was uninspired and his discussions of pleasure and hedonism trite, though I did like the section on eating alone and why we feel awkward about it. The recipes were a little gimmicky but did make me like him better. A lot of the time, as is common in philosophy, it looks much easier than it is, because once you've come out and asked the question 'why do we feel like it's wrong to take pleasure in eating alone' then it almost answers itself, and you don't recognise that the work of the philosopher is in formulating and asking the question.

Adventures in the Anthropocene by Gaia Vince
This one I had to read in small bites because some parts of it were deeply depressing. But others were fascinating and hopeful, like the fellow making artificial glaciers for water storage. Lots of stories about how people are shaping the world and reacting to a changing climate, or suffering from it, or both.

A Farewell to Ice by Peter Wadhams
This one was a bit more formal and scientific than the others, you can see that Wadhams is used to writing journal articles and other academic materials, but it's interesting enough that I didn't care. Loads of details about ice, and the weather in the arctic, and about how it's changing. The author has a bit of the cantankerous old man going on, but I'll forgive him that because I think he's right to be alarmed and upset about how climate change is affecting the arctic. If you want to know more about permafrost methane release or how the melting arctic sea ice could affect weather in Europe and North America, this is the book for you. Also, when else are you going to get a chance to read the words 'the frazile pancake cycle'?

I Contain Multitudes by Ed Yong
Fascinating, fascinating book about our internal ecosystems and how they work. Like the 'Gut' book, this one is a great source of fun facts to annoy the people around you, such as that frequent cleaning of your toilet seat increases the population of poo bacteria on it (your toilet seat has to be colonised with some kind of bacteria because everything is colonised with bacteria, when you sit on it it gets colonised with harmless human skin bacteria, when you clean with antibacterial cleaners you wash all them off and the colonies of poo bacteria deeper inside your toilet move out and make their home there instead). Basically all these human-bacteria books are a great triumph for relaxed cleaning, since they all essentially vindicate what our grandmothers said, that a bit of dirt is good for you. But this book has a lot more than that: tons and tons of incredible stuff about how life evolved, how bacteria evolve, how bacteria naturally genetic-engineer themselves (this connects up with the 'Whole Earth Discipline' book that also points out that it's perfectly natural for life forms as different as rice and frogs to swap genes with each other and that scientists doing this in the lab to breed better rice aren't doing anything new) and an awful lot about how microbiology works in general.

We've just got back from a week's holiday with the in-laws. No injuries, no trips to A&E, no significant breakages, so that's a success. There was some fun stuff too: a random trip to the Tank Museum to escape rain falling sideways turned into a bit of an adventure when it happened that there were Daleks and UNIT troops holding a running battle inside the building as part of their summer holiday programming. Since Cub had never seen either a Dalek or a tank before, I have now made him believe that they are the same kind of thing, and he calls them all tanks interchangeably and possibly believes that Sherman tanks would wander around talking to small boys with an excellent voice synthesiser. The other fun thing for me was that they had a Tiger tank in the museum - in fact they had several - so I took a very bad picture of it. It was a pretty formidable beast, though inside a massive barn of a museum with a lot of other tanks they're less impressive than they are outside where you have a better sense of scale. Other than the surprise fannish stuff, we did a lot of walking, ate a lot of pub lunches, discovered the only pub in Dorset where it takes 45 minutes for them to bring you a cup of tea (they advertised cream teas outside, so we went in and ordered some: the scones and cream and jam arrived in the usual time, and then after 45 minutes and several escalating trips back to the bar to complain, the tea finally showed up), and saw some lovely churches. Philomythulus enjoys going into churches, they're dimly lit and cool and quiet and have pews he can sit down in and chill out on. We saw buzzards, deer, foxes, lizards, peacocks and their families, and a tiny frog that delighted Cub. 'Frog came on holiday to see Cub and Mummy,' he kept announcing for the rest of the day. And we rode on a steam train and on two ferries, which made both boys extremely happy. So it was a pretty good holiday apart from the fact that when he's away from home, Philomythulus doesn't really sleep. Which meant that I had a lot of time to read while I sat up with him.

Susannah Clarke, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell
This blew me away. Absolutely blew me away. It's been on my 'oh yes, I must get round to that someday' list, but for some reason I had formed the opinion that it would be a bit meh, so I hadn't really bothered, but Mr P recorded the TV series and wanted me to watch it with him, and I wanted to read the book first, so I did. And wow. If anyone else hasn't read it, go read it now. Such incredibly confident, masterful writing, the perfect slow-build plot, the worldbuilding done with such ease and grace, the prose and style absolutely flawless, the characters all so human and perfect... it's a masterpiece. That makes it sound like it might not be interesting, but it is - I was desperate to know what would happen next, and while it took me a while to warm to Strange and Norrell, by the end I adored them both. Anyway, this was amazing and if you haven't read it you are missing out on something special.

Charles Stross, The Annihilation Score
The latest Laundry Files offering, the one where magic comes out of the closet and onto the front page in the form of superheroes. It was fairly entertaining, but I was never wholly convinced by the way Stross wrote Mo as the first-person narrator: it felt like a woman written by a committee of male Guardian readers. I've loved Mo in her appearances in the other books, and I loved her here too but I kept being annoyed with the author. But the plot was exciting, the bureaucracy was believably annoying and the whole superhero thing was nicely pulled off.

Lois Bujold, 'Penric's Demon'
A new Five Gods novella. This was fun and light and entertaining. I liked Penric's adventures, I liked his approach to the demon and I liked the ending. Also I might be interested in some fic that explores having sex while having a demon ;-).

Cath Staincliffe, Dead to Me
A Scott & Bailey tie-in novel. I've rarely been impressed with tie-in novels - good fanfic is usually better - but this one was good, a pre-series murder mystery where Janet and Rachel work together for the first time. It edged into melodrama a few times, and if you'd rather not read too much about babies dying you might want to avoid it, but it's a good murder mystery with good characterisation and writing and good canon voice. I've bought her other Scott & Bailey novels on the strength of it.

( cut for holiday pictures of Tiger tank and dawn mist )

I seem to have been all about police and murder mystery stories lately, so now I have some reviews for you.

Babylon

The new police drama, not to be confused with Babylon 5, the epic SF drama. This has just started and I've just watched the first episode. Very modern-British, in the sense that it started with comic full-frontal male nudity and the most commonly used word in the show was fuck, in all of its conjugations and declensions. It's about internal politics in the Met, the police's media relations and the levels of chaos and organisation that exist between the Met Commissioner and the PCs and PSCOs on the street - a police procedural with no detecting and lots of office politics. Very self-aware, funny in places, very political and satirical. It's trying a bit too hard to be clever to have any heart, but it's good enough that I'll give it another episode or two.

Broadchurch

Now that was top-notch drama. It's a fairly realistic murder mystery, at least realistic from the perspective of what the family of the murder victim goes through during the investigation, and it's absolutely excellent. I have to say I could have done with someone other than Tennant playing the lead, because honestly I don't care that much for him and there was a shade too much emphasis on his manpain and him standing at the top of a cliff looking broody, and I think it would have worked better for me if it was anyone other than the Doctor doing all that. But it was a fantastic murder mystery. And as a mystery, it's excellent too, and I won't say a word about whodunnit except to advise you that if you want to know how many episodes it is, don't do what I did and check the Wikipedia page, because right at the start of the summary of the final episode it tells you in big letters who the killer is, and it's definitely something you want to be unspoiled for. (It's 8 episodes, to spare you.)

( More spoilery thoughts )

Bill Slider series by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

These were recommended to me by the lovely nnozomi and I'm having a wonderful time with them. They're fun and readable and the mysteries are well-constructed and the police procedure seems reasonably good. I rather suspect that the author has got all her literary quotations by way of Sayers, though - I don't think she ever references anything obscure that isn't in Sayers. Also, all the characters are punsters and tend to make terrible wordplay jokes at the slightest provocation (one from the latest book I've read: 'as painfully hip as a hospital waiting list'). But I like the complexity of Bill's romantic relationships and the relationship between Bill and Atherton, and I'm also enjoying the glimpse back at the late 80s/early 90s. It's also unexpectedly good for having a lot of gay characters, generally at least one per mystery. I'd recommend these to lovers of the Cadfael books. They don't share anything in terms of setting or structure or formula, but they're at similar levels of cosiness and the characters are likeable in similar ways and the murders, while unpleasant, are not dark or grim or full of maggots, and they're both easy to read without making you feel like you're losing brain cells in the process. I binge-read the Cadfael books in the weeks after Mods as mental escape and decompression, and these books are getting me through three weeks running at DEFCON 1 in the domestic department.

I've also started the first Bryant & May book, Full Dark House, but I think it's going to be one of those books where I don't know whether I like it until I get to the end. The author is doing lots of complicated things and I'm not sure yet whether I trust him to pull them off in a way that satisfies me and makes me want to read more in the series. It's interesting how the first book you read from a new author is all about trust: do I trust this author not to suddenly turn around and whack me with something spiky, do I trust them to make sense of this story and not leave it in a tangled mess, are the characters people I want to spend time with? I had a bit of this with the first Bill Slider book, because practically the first thing he does is cheat on his wife and it made me think maybe this wasn't the book for me, but the author sold me on it by the end of the book. And I'm hoping Fowler will sell me on what he's doing with Bryant and May, but he hasn't quite got there yet.