Books I hadn't heard of before

I read book reviews and I'm often reasonably up on the anticipated and well-promoted books of the season.  So when I go to real bookshops my favourite thing is to find books I hadn't heard of before.  Here are some I've enjoyed recently.

'Fear and His Servant' by Mirjana Novaković, trans. Terence McEneny

I found this on a trip to Bath, in my favourite bookshop, Mr B's Emporium of Reading Delights.  It's narrated mostly by the devil, who has gone to eighteenth-century Serbia to investigate rumours that there are vampires there, but also partly by a sad noblewoman he meets there.  The devil, in disguise as an Austrian count, is strangely petrified of the vampires, but the people in Belgrade are also worried about the advancing Ottoman armies.  This book probably has all sorts of political resonances because it was published in the early 90s, soon after the wars in the former Yugoslavia; but I don't know enough about Balkan history to pick them up, so I just enjoyed its compelling oddness.

'The Godmother' by Hannalore Cayre, trans. Stephanie Smee

An impoverished middle-aged police translator of Arabic becomes tired of acting as a shill for the institutional racism of the French state, while also finding herself with some very specific knowledge after decades of listening in to recordings of people arranging drug deals.  I found this at Mr B's too.

'Dimension of Miracles' by Robert Sheckley

I found this in Topping's bookshop, also in Bath.  (They have very high shelves and those rolling ladders to get at the top books! And the building they're in has a portico and pediment like a Palladian temple, and turns out to be where my mother and her siblings went to Sunday School.) I mostly just picked it up because of a blurb by Neil Gaiman saying Douglas Adams had told him it was the only thing he thought was like the Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy.  And it is like it, though with a bit more pointed satire of earth I suppose.  It is striking how few things are like the Hitchhikers' Guide -- that's the only thing I've come across which is older, but even in terms of later things there's not much.  The best thing I can think of is 'Space Opera' by Catherynne M. Valente, which is a brilliant and very over-the-top story where aging rockers find themselves having to represent Earth in a sort of inter-galactic Eurovision Song Contest to prove that humans count as a sentient species.

'Vagabonds!' by Eloghosa Osunde

I found this in the Waterstone's in Exeter that's between the High Street and the Cathedral Green.  This bookshop still throws up good things for me, even though most of the Waterstone's energy has moved down the road to the High Street shop that's opposite John Lewis.  It's set in Lagos and is partly narrated by the servant of the spirit of the city, with the stories of Lagos's outcasts, underground people and ghosts in between.  It's very good and has an amazing energy.  There seems to be a lot of excellent writing coming out of Lagos, and it gives the impression that the city is a crazy and relentless place.  I'd love to go but I would never dare.

Parker and Herbert

I went to Evensong at Exeter Cathedral yesterday. Wednesday seems to be the childrens' day off, and you just get the adults from the choir, and no organ, so they often sing plainchant and Elizabethan church music. The way they blend their voices into a smooth rich noise is wonderful.  Yesterday for the first time ever I heard one of Tallis's tunes for Archbishop Parker's psalter sung for a whole psalm, and not just for the first phrase. I've often thought it a shame that people don't use them as intended, but I expect that one of the things holding them back is that Parker was not a gifted poet. And indeed at the cathedral yesterday his words had been bumped for George Herbert's translation of the 23rd Psalm.

Poor old Parker. His Psalter book is actually rather wonderful, full of relevant translations, little tables about which Psalms are relevant to which thoughts or emotions, even Augustine's wonderful thing about how music stirs the senses and whether this is good or not, which is pretty honest of Parker as not entirely fitting his case. (I think someone once said that the Reformation was an argument in the mind of St Augustine, and sometimes he seems to be a high-church ritualist and an austere Puritan in the space of a page.) I looked it up to see how Parker translated the 23rd Psalm:

The Lord so good who geveth me food
my shepeheard is and guide.
How can I want or suffer scant
when he defendth my side?

To feede my neede he will me lead
in pastures greene and fat.
He forth brought me in libertie
to waters delicate.

My soule and hart he did convert,
to me he sheweth the path
Of rightwisenes, in holiness
his name such vertue hath.

Yea though I go through death hys wo
his vaale and shadow wyde
I feare no dart, wyth me thou art,
wyth staffe and rod to guide.

Thou shalt prouyde a table wyde
for me agaynst theyr spite:
With oyle my head thou hast bespred
my cup is fully dight.

Thy goodnes yet and mercy great
will kepe me all my dayes
In house to dwell in rest full well
wyth God I hope alwayes.

He's not well served by his rhyme scheme here -- too bouncy. But I'm not so sure George Herbert's is drastically better:

The God of love my shepherd is,
And he that doth me feed:
While he is mine, and I am his,
What can I want or need?

He leads me to the tender grasse,
Where I both feed and rest;
Then to the streams that gently passe:
In both I have the best.

Or if I stray, he doth convert
And bring my minde in frame:
And all this not for my desert,
But for his holy name.

Yea, in deaths shadie black abode
Well may I walk, not fear:
For thou art with me; and thy rod
To guide, thy staff to bear.

Nay, thou dost make me sit and dine,
Ev’n in my enemies sight:
My head with oyl, my cup with wine
Runnes over day and night.

Surely thy sweet and wondrous love
Shall measure all my dayes;
And as it never shall remove,
So neither shall my praise.

"In death's shady black abode" isn't great. Neither is as good as the prose translations, either Coverdale's in the Book of Common Prayer, or the King James Version.

Someone must have noticed that Herbert's translation fitted the meter of the Tallis setting, and put the sixteenth-century tune with the seventeenth-century words. But I would put money on this having been done no earlier than the twentieth century, because of all the settings Tallis wrote at Parker's commission, the chosen tune is the third. This is the one which is given as an example the words "Why fum'th in fight?" a.k.a. Why do the nations furiously rage, but it's most famous as the one that Ralph Vaughan Williams took up and turned into a famously English piece of music, his Fantasia on a theme by Tallis. This isn't the right tune for Psalm 23 -- Parker marked all the Psalms with symbols to show which tunes were appropriate, and to put it simplistically, Psalm 23 is a happy Psalm, and tune 3 is a sad tune. That's why it's so English.

Yesterday was the day when George Herbert is celebrated in the Anglican church. He gets rather fetishised as the ideal vicar, though for myself I find his troubles and doubts more interesting and admirable than his certainties. His poems are often very angry at God. I don't think Matthew Parker gets a day, but he ought to have one, as a tribute to all the church people who have been mauled between the opposing jaws of Anglicanism -- for him it was vestments but I expect Rowan Williams could sympathise.  And for all the people who put good and useful things together using the best resources they have, even if they're not very good poets.

Reading in 2018

So I did read some books in 2018.  I'm pretty sure it's not entirely helpful to keep such close track of what I read, as I end up thinking of my reading in terms of number of books read, which is clearly one of the least important things about what I've read.  It puts me off big, difficult reading projects.  But now I'm addicted and it would take quite a big effort to stop.

When I was an undergraduate, a first-year I think, there was a Guardian column with the premise that you could only read 3000 books in your lifetime, and I remember complaining about this to someone who couldn't understand why I found it so annoying.  Perhaps I need to concentrate on letting that long-lived annoyance go...

Anyway it hasn't been a vintage reading year, but there have been some very good things.  Early in the year, I enjoyed Shashi Tharoor's Inglorious Empire, about what the British did in India.  He puts cricket, tea, and something else I forget on the plus side, and points out quite how much damage was done by milking the country of its profits to benefit Britain.  I'm pretty sure the other positive thing isn't trains -- he points out the cost that India paid to get them, and how they were only built to make the extraction of resources more efficient.

Paul Beattie's Booker winner, The Sellout, is very funny in an angry way.  It's about a black man who ends up reimposing segregation in his black neighbourhood.  I like books that are angry and funny.  I would like to write an angry funny book myself.

Hideously memorable was Emmanuel Carrère's The Adversary.  It's a true story about a man who suddenly murdered most of his family, but it reads like a nightmarish thriller.  I can't get out of my head the image of a student who one day doesn't bother to get up for an exam, and whose life then gets more and more complicated as he refuses to confront the consequences of his actions.

I remember enjoying Olivia Manning's Levant Trilogy, which I didn't realise was a sequel to her Balkan Trilogy.  I also can't remember much about it now, apart from that I enjoyed it...  Perhaps that means I am safe to read the Balkan Trilogy at last?

Lucy Hughes-Hallett's Peculiar Ground is an extremely good novel set in two time periods in the same country estate.  This is another sort of book I would love to write.

Mohsin Hamid's Exit West has a pleasantly mythic quality about it.  The premise is that doors are opening up in cities, doors that lead to some random other place in the world.  It follows a young couple whose city descends from normality into civil-war-ridden chaos, and their experiences as refugees.

Marian Keyes' The Break is classic Keyes, to the extent that I read it twice this year.  She writes reliably humane and funny chic-lit, unpretentious but well-written and the best the genre has to offer.  It's about a woman whose husband suddenly decides he needs a break from their marriage and sets off round the world, and how this affects her and her teenage children.  There's a bit where a young woman has to have an abortion which, as this is Ireland and before the 2018 vote, means that she has to travel to England, with all the expense and stress that involves.  I do love Marian Keyes.

Dorothy Baker's Cassandra at the Wedding is brilliant and an excellent revival.  It's about the difficult relationship between sisters, one of whom is getting married, to the other's dismay.  It's extremely well-written.

Andrew Sean Greer's Less was one of my favourite books of the year.  It's about a middle-aged writer who wants to avoid his ex-boyfriend's wedding, so accepts lots of random invitations around the world.  It's funny and quietly touching.

Patricia Lockwood's Priestdaddy was probably my other favourite.  It's a memoir by the woman who wrote Rape Joke, and is very funny.  It's about when she and her husband had to move in with her crazy parents for a while because of medical bills.  Her father is a Catholic priest -- he was ordained and married with children when he converted -- and is very eccentric.  Her writing is honest and unobvious -- I particularly appreciate that when people write about religion.  As a married man her father is sometimes sent to parishes where the previous priest has abused children, and Lockwood is well aware both of the damages the church can do and of the honest love it can show to a community.  Mainly it's just a very funny book though.

Valerie Martin's The Ghost of the Mary Celeste, though not as brilliant as her sinister Property, was very good and not quite what I expected.  I think I will seek out other things she's written.

Lydia Millett's Mermaids in Paradise is quite brilliant, perhaps third tying for my favourite.  It's about a bright and cynical woman on honeymoon with her lovable jock husband.  They discover mermaids in the bay by their resort, and then try to protect them from exploitation.  It has an amazing ending.

Jakob Wegelius's The Murderer's Ape will definitely be given to my god-daughter, niece and/or nephew at some point.  It's a very readable children's story about Sally Jones, a hard-working and clever gorilla who works as an engineer on a boat.  When the captain is imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit she travels over the world trying to clear his name.  The book is very nicely presented too, with maps and illustrations of the main characters.  It's an excellent adventure story. I like that Pushkin has branched out into publishing books that are less worthy and more fun than their previous fare.

This is the eighth year I've kept track of my reading:

• Total number of books read: 211
• Gender of authors of each book: 74 male (roughly 35%), 137 female (roughly 65%)
• Number of non-fiction: 26 (roughly 12%)
• Number of re-reads: 58 (roughly 27%)
• Number read on Kindle: 92 (roughly 44%)

Reading in 2017

In January I read quite a few good things.  The anonymous diary of the fall of Berlin published as A Woman In Berlin was far from light reading.  It's one of those books where you don't mind how very grim it is because it seems so important to know about these things, and probably everyone should read it.  (It was interesting what silenced her in the end.)  On the fiction side, equally vital is Valerie Martin's Property, about a genteel white woman in the ante-bellum South of the US.  The two have a lot in common: a sense of a world so skewed as to be science fiction, although one is fact and the other based on it.  Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life and Others is actually science fiction, the sort that takes ideas and uses them to make humans strange and familiar at the same time.  The title story was filmed as Arrival.

In February, Jessa Crispin's Why I am Not a Feminist was not only very good but very humane.  She's not a "feminist" because she thinks the word too diluted by compromised uses.  But I was pleasantly surprised how much what she said was kind and generous common sense, and then I was ashamed of myself for being surprised, because why shouldn't people be angry and kind at the same time?  The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen was brilliant and very funny, about a Vietnamese man employed by the US, first in Vietnam during the war and afterwards in the US itself.  It reminded me of Catch-22 in a good way -- the same despairing humour with the occasional twist of the knife.  A lot of Muriel Spark's books are funny, but not The Driver's Seat, which is mostly just odd and rather quiet.  Nonetheless it's very typical of her unusual mind.  You read it quickly and easily and then later somehow you feel like you've been punched.  She reminds me of a more subtle but angrier Chris Morris.  I have thought about this book a lot since.

In March I read The Saga of Gösta Berling, by Selma Lagerlöf.  She won the Nobel Prize for literature but I had never heard of her before.  This is a strange crazy book, about a defrocked priest who lives in a rural Sweden that is half myth.  The cover is awful -- do not look at the cover.  I was proud of myself for enjoying At the Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails, by Sarah Bakewell.  It made me want to read more (some) Simone de Beauvoir but then I saw how long The Second Sex is.  Kate Summerscale's The Wicked Boy had an unexpected second half that saw me pressing it on my mother, god-mother, etc. 

In April, East West Street by Philippe Sands was another vital book.  He tells the stories of the concepts of "crimes against humanity" and "genocide" as well as the stories of the people who came up with the terms and of his own ancestors in an understated way.  There's no need to hammer home the point when it comes to the holocaust -- the horror speaks for itself.  C. E. Morgan's The Sport of Kings is crazily over-ambitious but very good.  I also enjoyed Stanislaw Lem's Cyberiad but I can't remember much about it now...

May and June seem to have been quiet months in terms of memorable new books.  The Good Immigrant by Nikesh Shukla had some very good pieces in it.  July was better, with Laurie Penny's Bitch Doctrine: Essays for Dissenting Adults making me want to write to her from a spontaneous sense of alikeness, an impulse I suppressed.  The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich tells the stories of Soviet women soldiers, and is very good.  Nell Zink's Nicotine is great, but then she just seems to be one of those writers who spring fully-formed from somewhere.  Cathy O'Neil's Weapons of Math Destruction is a well-written and important book about AI algorithms, transparency, and justice.  Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner?, by Katrine Marcal, is very good indeed, a feminist (i.e. humane) critique of economics.  Taiye Selasi's Ghana Must Go is a novel about a family who move between Ghana, Nigeria, and the US.

In August I enjoyed Elinor Lipman's My Latest Grievance, and found David Olusoga's Black and British very interesting.  In September Michael Chabon's Moonglow disconcerted me -- I'm still not quite sure how I feel about it -- and K. J. Parker's Two of Swords serial at last restarted after about a year and a half of emails from Amazon apologising for the delay. 

In October I read Naomi Alderman's The Power, the best book of the year.  I have given it to four people since, and recommended it to others.  It's funny and angry, and the framing letters between two writers are mischievously well done.  It's a proper adult treatment of gender -- it annoys me when people suggest that women are better than men, or that if women ran the world there'd be no nastiness in it, because that is clearly naive and stupid.  This book does not fall into that trap.  I've read stuff by her before and enjoyed it, but I wouldn't have predicted she was going to produce something this good.  Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi is also very good, and I enjoyed The Nix by Nathan Hill, though not without some reservations.

In November I followed up a recommendation by Francis Spufford and read The Lindchester Chronicles by Catherine Fox.  These are very good, but you might need to have some acquaintance with Anglicanism to really feel them.  Mary Beard's Women and Power: a Manifesto was very good but I'm not totally convinced it was a manifesto as such.  The great thing about her writing is that she's so clearly not someone who's imagining things or over-egging the pudding, she's someone who looks fairly and sensibly at the world, so that it's tremendously reassuring to hear her rationally point out the weird stuff that's going on.  Modern western culture skews towards gaslighting and negging women into their stereotypical roles, and when Mary Beard points it out you know you're not being paranoid.

In December I unexpectedly came across Ece Temelkuran's Women Who Blow On Knots, in which four women from Tunisia, Turkey and Egypt travel in a dangerous road trip around the Arab Spring -- I don't know why I hadn't heard of it, it's very good.  I also enjoyed Fay Weldon's Spa Decameron.  It's not as rude as the actual Decameron, obviously, because nothing is.  I think we need more modern books based on the Decameron -- I remember enjoying Jane Smiley's Ten Days in the Hills a while ago.  I also started Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism, but I'm still reading the third part, so it doesn't count really.  It's very good though it took me a while to get into it, but by the time she got to the Dreyfus Affair I was fascinated.  The Dreyfus Affair made me think of the O. J. Simpson trial, and Cecil Rhodes made me think of Silicon Valley.  Reading it feels healthy, like confronting a fear which you don't really want to admit you have.

This is the seventh year I've kept track of my reading.   

• Total number of books read: 206 (but counting the 15 parts of the Two of Swords that I reread as 2 books)
• Gender of authors of each book: 80 male (roughly 39%), 121 female (roughly 59%) , 0 not sure, 5 anthologies
• Number of non-fiction: 45 (roughly 22%)
• Number of re-reads: 20 (roughly 10%)
• Number read on Kindle: 46 (roughly 22%)

Reading in 2016

TL;DR: read Jarett Kobek's I Hate the Internet!  Also, Golden Hill by Francis Spufford; everything Zen Cho has ever written; Nell Zink's Mislaid and The Wallcreeper; Jane Smiley's Hundred Years trilogy; Becky Chambers' Long Way to a Small Angry Planet; Catherynne Valente's Radiance; and The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan.

In January I read two very good humane sci-fi novels: The Best of All Possible Worlds by Karen Lord, and The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers.  I shall definitely read Becky Chambers' next one when it's out in paperback.  I also enjoyed Kim Newman's The Secret of Drearcliff Grange School -- sometimes I don't like his stuff but this was very well-pitched -- and Gerard Russell's Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms, about minority religions in the Middle East.

There was nothing quite as good in February, though I did like Catherynne Valente's Deathless, a combination of Russian fairy tale with 20th-century (Russian) history.

In March I loved Nell Zink's Mislaid and The Wallcreeper, which came out at the same time.  The first is about a separated family and is very funny.  The second is weirder but very good, about a young American couple living in Germany.  Like everyone I read Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life, and it totally absorbed me and took over my brain.  It didn't seem important at the time how insane and manipulative it is.  It is an amazing book in its way but I think I'd have mixed feelings about recommending it. I preferred her first one, about a turtle that makes you immortal.  Also crazily intense was Steve Toltz's Quicksand.  Somehow uncanny was Richard Beard's Acts of the Assassins, which is difficult to describe, but is sort of about someone investigating the deaths of the disciples but set in the present.  Reassuringly sane, as well as erudite and witty, are Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Turkish Embassy Letters from her time in Istanbul when her husband was British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire.

In April I enjoyed Mary Beard's SPQR, which wasn't the same old Roman Empire thing, and Andrea Wulf's biography of Alexander von Humboldt.  I also liked Kevin McNeil's The Brilliant and Forever, about an island in Scotland where alpacas live alongside humans but suffer from a lot of prejudice and discrimination.  Three friends, two humans and one alpaca, enter the island's famous short-story competition.  All three of these books pleased me by not being books I had read before -- so many books seem like remixes of things I've already read many times.  The Humboldt biography (called The Invention of Nature) cracked that thing where biographies always end on a down note (slow decline or an early death) by concluding with chapters about some of the people Humboldt had influenced, showing his ideas living on.

May was a good month.  I enjoyed Jonathan Coe's Number 11, Barbara Pym's Crampton Hodnet, Elizabeth McKenzie's The Portable Veblen, and Bradley Somer's Fishbowl, which is about a goldfish which leaps from a balcony at the top of a high rise and what he sees as he falls down the stories.  But I also read two of my books of the year.  The last volume of Jane Smiley's Hundred Years Trilogy, Golden Age, was brilliant.  She is such a reliably engrossing and intelligent writer.   I will definitely reread this trilogy before long.  I also loved Peter Frankopan's The Silk Roads.  It takes as its starting point the assumption that all histories are biased, and present a particular perspective about what is important and what questions are worth asking.  So he wrote a history of the world taking as its centre-point the area that is now roughly Iran and the middle Asian republics that get lumped together as the -stans.  I enjoyed it hugely.  I was surprised how interesting and eye-opening the 19th- and 20th-century sections were.  I gave it to my father for Father's Day, and I don't usually get him a present for that.  He read it in Myanmar and enjoyed it.  Also I have just given it to my brother for Christmas.

In June I went to Istanbul for my birthday.  I had meant to read pretty solidly but somehow didn't have the oomph in the heat, and none of the things I read that month really stood out.  I did quite like Neal Stephenson's Seveneves though it was also rather frustrating and inadvertently ridiculous.  Sometimes he strays into what I think of as Isaac Asimov territory, where the physics is all precisely real but the people aren't.

July wasn't much better, though I did enjoy Lauren Groff's Fates and Furies.  I reread one of my favourite books, Muriel Spark's A Far Cry From Kensington, to cheer myself up.

Things improved a lot in August.  Tim Marshall's Prisoners of Geography, a book about global geo-politics centred around ten maps, was very good, and made things like Putin's interest in the Crimea more explicable.  I also discovered Zen Cho.  I adored her Sorceror to the Crown, like a very intelligent Georgette Heyer with magic and a hint of P. G. Wodehouse -- it starts with a hapless young man whose aunt is trying to make him give a talk in a girls' school.  Then I read everything else of hers that I could lay my hands on, most of it short stories on the internet.  I await her future career with considerable interest.  I also loved the Raj Quartet by Paul Scott.  I first heard of it in an interesting reference to it in a talk Rowan Williams gave about sexuality long before he was archbishop of Canterbury, and I'd been meaning to read it ever since.  It's one of those things like A Dance to the Music of Time which sounds a bit hard work but turns out to be very good, and not something you ought to read but something you want to read.  And I reread Cathleen Schine's Rameau's Niece for the fourth time since records began (in 2011), which I think is an unequalled number.

In September I really loved Catherine Valente's Radiance, set in a slightly different world where the other planets are much nearer, and people have worked out how to travel to them in massive catapults.  It's about a woman who never returns from making a documentary about the disappearance from Venus of a community which makes a living harvesting milk from the huge whale-like things that live there.  Again, not a book I had read before.  Likewise Eugene Vodolazkin's Laurus, about a fifteenth-century healer travelling through Russia and beyond.  I just googled it to check the spelling and found that it was one of Rowan Williams' books of 2016.  So go me!

In October I liked the last of Amitav Ghosh's Opium Wars Trilogy, Flood of Fire, although I am a little worried about the fate of Pugli.  Did Ghosh realise what an unfair thing he had done to her?  I also enjoyed Walter Jon Williams' Dread Empire's Fall sci-fi novels, starting with The Praxis.  It's the sort of thing I usually steer clear of -- militaristic hard sci-fi where everyone's happy living under fascism -- but I had heard this was particularly good and I'm glad I made an exception.  I also liked Emma Bull's War for the Oaks.  But definitely the stand-out book was Francis Spufford's Golden Hill, which is just brilliant.  It's set in the small colonial New York of the eighteenth-century and is a picaresque adventure in the style of the time.  A young man arrives in town with documents to require payment of a huge sum from one of the trading houses, refusing to explain what he wants it for, and acting in a generally suspicious manner.

In November I really enjoyed Elizabeth Bear's Karen Memory.  It's the first book I've read by her and I think she might be a reliable author to read in future.  I also liked Marge Piercy's feminist classic, Woman on the Edge of Time, which is crazy in a good way, and I think rather better than The Handmaid's Tale.  Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint was mannered but good in a way that lingered more than I expected.  But my favourite book probably of the whole year was Jarett Kobek's I Hate the Internet.  This was a great book to read in the immediate aftermath of the Trump election, because it's very angry in an energising way.  It starts with a list of trigger warnings, which you can read here.  In the UK some bits had to be censored with thick black lines because of our libel laws.  These censorings are all annotated with the words "Jim'll Fix It", and often involve a paragraph in which the only words visible are "Peter Thiel".  I read it because of a review in the Graun which compared it to Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary, but it's really more like Kurt Vonnegut.  I have since recommended it to a friend who loved it, and given it to another who also loved it (although it was a present so she has less motive to be honest if she didn't, but I bet she really did).  And I reread it in December.  Go Jarett Kobek!

December is harder to assess because it's still now.  I only recently finished Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, and am still feeling a bit numbed by it.  It's a very good book, and it feels necessary to know.  I think it will turn over in my mind for a while.  Perhaps our image of the holocaust has been over-simplified in time.  To Arendt, writing in the early 1960s, it seemed like a long time ago, while to us that seems like the immediate aftermath, and some of the things that she talks about weren't things I knew were even issues.  She caused a furore at the time by mentioning the alliances between Nazis and Zionists -- Eichmann at least seems to have sincerely wanted to arrange mass Jewish emigration until the orders came through in 1941 for the Final Solution.  I found it odd that Arendt assumed you had to have a Jewish state to prosecute crimes against Jews -- but I suppose this is a reaction against the way that the Nazis were careful to make Jews stateless before acting against them.  But who acts for the stateless who aren't Jewish?  I am feeling a pull, after the events of this year, to read books from different perspectives.  Jesmyn Ward's Men We Reaped, a memoir of the author's experience of the deaths of young black men in her community, is very powerful and moving.  W. Willow Wilson's excellent Alif the Unseen has a devout Muslim veil-wearing heroine and lots of djinni on the internet.  I liked Tobias Jones' A Place of Refuge, about setting up a community in the woods in the Somerset countryside.  Benjamin Markovits is always good, and I finally got round to reading his You Don't Have to Live Like This, about (mostly white) people trying to rescue Detroit, and their conflict with the (mostly black) residents.

This is the sixth year I've kept track of my reading.   

• Total number of books read: 209
• Gender of authors of each book: 82 male, 127 female, 0 not sure, 0 anthologies
• Number of non-fiction: 25 (roughly 12%)
• Number of re-reads: 34 (roughly 16%)
• Number read on Kindle: 69 (roughly 33%)

Writing this summary is a more relaxing way to spend New Year's Eve than unsuccessfully trying to party...

Return to Istanbul part 4

I've just seen the news that 10 people have been killed at Istanbul Atatürk airport. I think there may be extra anger there because this has happened in the holy month. I saw a thing on Al Jazeera news about how Ramadan, particularly the iftar feast at the end of the day, is the best way to counter the image of angry Islam that terrorists are putting about, and that seemed like a good point to me. The hate-filled people who are doing hate-filled things make me so angry I become full of hate too (though, obviously, not to the extent that I'm going to act like them). But I had a really lovely time in Istanbul and remembering the iftar feasts by the Blue Mosque, which were like huge happy picnics, and ought to be the international image of Istanbul, just makes me feel angrier about the people who did this. I still want to go back there again some day; it's one of my favourite cities. I hope things get better for it, and for the Turkish people.

Head of Sappho

This is the last of my posts about this trip. I ran out of both time and oomph to look at sights, so I didn't get to some of the places I'd wanted to go -- I didn't revisit Topkapı Palace, or go to any of the great mosque complexes, or see the museum of Islam and the Sciences. But one of the highlights of my first trip was the Istanbul Archaeological Museum so I was determined to go back there. Unfortunately it turned out to be undergoing renovations. One of the most amazing things, the Alexander Sarcophagus (when I went with Fiona she said it rendered Michelangelo unnecessary) wasn't visible. Some of the smaller highlights had been gathered into a small room, including an amazing head of Sappho, about four feet high.  Last time I went I was very impressed with their display, which was roomy and informative without being oppressive.  They had huge pictures of the artifacts on the walls, which made you notice things you wouldn't otherwise have seen, like a little owl at the feet of a statue of Athena, or the detail of someone's clothing.  When they reopen I hope they do that again, because at the moment their information boards like they were made in the 80s and have been pulled out of storage.

The cats were still playing among the broken columns and statuary in the courtyards, though there were fewer than last time.  I was pleased to find this tombstone for a dog which I remembered from before

The translation of the text (I expect via a Turkish intermediary) said:

His owner has buried the dog Parthenope, that he played with, in gratitude for this happiness.  (Mutual) love is rewarding, like the one for the dog: Having been a friend to my owner, I have deserved this grave:

Looking at this, find yourself a worthy friend who is both ready to love you while you are still alive and also will care for your body (when you die).

Return to Istanbul part 3

Anastasis, or Harrowing of Hell

The thing I most wanted to see in Istanbul this time was the Chora church, or Kariye Müsezi.  Like Hagia Sophia, it was converted into a mosque after the conquest, and then in the twentieth century into a museum. It's a lot smaller than Hagia Sophia, but has many more surviving mosaics and frescos. Unfortunately it's not easy to get to, being right out by the land walls and not near any tram stops. I ended up getting a taxi, which was easy and surprisingly cheap.

The wedding at Cana (water into wine)

The main part of the church was closed so I couldn't see a few of the mosaics, but actually most of the surviving ones are in the narthex and exonarthex. For many years now I have preferred to travel with a Blue Guide if there's one available for the city where I'm going -- there tends to be for the sorts of cities I prefer -- and these have helpful glossaries for terms like exonarthex as well as really detailed floor plans. (The Istanbul one also has lists not only of Emperors and Sultans but of Ecumenical Patriarchs.) The Chora mosaics contrain three complex cycles of illustrations, including many scenes from the life of the Virgin, which you have to follow round in a particular order -- I don't know if it's intentionally meant to make you feel dizzy, but it's not the sort of art you can quietly contemplate, it's more something you have to battle. The parecclesion, a sort of side-chapel, is full of very well-preserved frescos, including a massive anastasis or resurrection, with Christ pulling Adam and Eve from their sepulchres.  There weren't many other people there, maybe because it was partially closed, or maybe because it's not easy to get to by yourself, though I think it's the sort of place that cruise-ship travellers get bussed out to. I'm very glad I saw it, and taking a taxi was a pragmatic solution. It cost about £7.50 including tip; the driver was pretty obviously taking me a long way round but I decided not to worry about it because it was interesting to see the land walls, which are still in good shape. If I were the sort of person who enjoyed long walks in hot weather I would have walked the land walls.

After that I went to somewhere where it was literally just me and some lizards, the church of Theotokos Pammakaristos, the Joyful God-bearer, also known as Fethiye Museum. Again this Byzantine Church was converted into a mosque after the conquest, but the main building is still a mosque. The surviving mosaics are in a side-chapel, so they turned that into a museum with its own separate entrance. Apparently the mosque is worth seeing, architecturally, but it's not usually open so you have to go at prayer time, wait til prayers are over, and then ask someone nicely if you can have a look around, and I was too shy. It was in a very traditional and non-touristy part of town where women were wearing full black hijabs with only their eyes showing. Apparently you might hear Kurdish spoken around there (not that I would recognise it).

A lot of the mosaics are lost but there are still many left, a few entire scenes and quite a lot of bishops and saints. The simpler plan made them easier to look at than the ones in the Chora, and it was nice to be entirely alone there.  The parts where the mosaics have gone are just bare brick now, so you can see the contrast between the bare bones of the building and the sumptuous decoration it once had.

Pantocrator at the top of a dome full of prophets

After this I decided to catch a boat back to the main part of the old city and ended up going to Asia by accident, which sounds a lot more dramatic than it was. It was only the second time I'd been to Asia, the first being when I went to Israel and Palestine (there's a Blue Guide for there too).