All the letters in a name

Monogram of Justinian

Monogram of Theodora

How my 4-yr-old niece wrote Rebecca in my birthday card

Return to Istanbul part 2

Looking east from Galata tower over the Bosphorus to Asia, and south over the Golden Horn to Old Istanbul

Zoe looks good for a 70-yr old; Christ keeps an eye on her

Last time I went to Istanbul I travelled with a friend whose attitude to new places is a bit more interesting than mine: where I just seek out and try to contextualize old things, she looks for varied experiences. So we did a lot more cool things then. But I did miss some of the subtler things in Hagia Sophia. Most of its mosaics have gone, but those that are left have some interesting people in them. I couldn't get a good picture of the Emperor Leo VI, whose total of four marriages scandalised the ecclesiastical establishment, prostrating himself before the pantocrator. There's also a mosaic of the fascinating Zoe, who lived in obscurity for fifty years until from various deaths she became the nearest in line to the throne, and had to make a political marriage. She seems to have rather got into the swing of things, and had a fine time intriguing and promoting people -- she probably murdered her first husband to put her lover and second husband on the throne, only to have him turn on her and try to exile her. She even ruled in her own right for a bit, jointly with her detested sister, before picking out a third spouse in her 60s, and apparently sharing a bed with him and his mistress. In the mosaic she is on the other side of the pantocrator from her third husband, but there's evidence that the husband in question has been updated, probably from her first. I saw a similar thing once in a missal given to Westminster Abbey by Henry VIII.

In the galleries there are a few things that are less beautiful but just as interesting with some background knowledge. Henrico Dandolo's tomb slab is still there -- he directly played a big role in the end of the Byzantine empire. As doge of Venice in the early thirteenth century, being a) blind and b) in his eighties didn't stop his managing to subvert the Fourth Crusade by cunning degrees from an attack on Muslim-held lands, which although objectionable was sort of the point of a crusade, to an attack on the Christian Byzantine emperor. He apparently leapt from his galley to lead the attack which conquered Constantinople, leading to the Latin kingdom. In the later carve up, Venice officially owned one quarter and one eighth of the empire, and looted tons of sparkly stuff which you can see (often ambiguously labelled) in Venice, like the bronze horses at St Mark's and the porphyry statue of the tetrarchs. Although the Greeks eventually got the empire back, it was tremendously weakened by this act of barbarism, and relations with the west were even more damaged. Many Byzantines said that they would rather see the turban in the streets of Constantinople than the cardinal's hat, and in 1453 they got their wish.

Famous in the world of runes, but something I missed seeing last time, is this piece of graffiti naming a certain Halfdan. Apparently it's from the ninth century. Vikings got absolutely everywhere in the early middle ages, and the Varangian guard of vikings in Byzantium was sort of equivalent to the Pretorians in ancient Rome, personally loyal to the emperor and outside the political complexities of the court. But I like to imagine the circumstances in which this was scratched onto a marble balcony looking out over the main space of Hagia Sophia. Did the viking standing next to him think he was a dick? Hagia Sophia is pretty amazing even now, stripped of lots of its decoration and with huge sections of iron scaffolding holding up one side of the immense dome -- when I went in this time I had to find a quiet corner to start in. It was the biggest dome in the world for hundreds of years, certainly until the early modern period. It would have flickered like being inside a jewel, and the liturgy must have been intense and overpowering. In the tenth century Winchester Cathedral -- the new Anglo-Saxon structure, not the larger Norman stone building -- was said to have so many side chapels that people literally got lost in there. I expect Hagia Sophia was pretty stupefying to all the senses. Was carving his name onto the balcony Halfdan's way of interposing something between himself and reality, like the people now who view it entirely via selfies, as if like Perseus fighting Medusa they were dealing with something too dangerous to look at directly? Or did the liturgy just go on for a really, really long time, and he got bored of being on duty?

Return to Istanbul

Over the course of the last year I have finally paid off the loans I took out to do my M.Sc., so for my birthday last week I took my first holiday in ages. When I was choosing where to go it was between three places I wanted to go back to: in order of difficulty, North Italy; Istanbul; and Jerusalem. I chose Istanbul as a bit more of stretch than Bologna and Venice, but more feasible than Jerusalem, especially given that I wanted to travel alone.

Istanbul has changed since I went last time, in 2008. I think Turkey has been hard hit by the political events in its south-west. Istiklal Caddesi, which Daesh bombed earlier this year, wasn't quite the street of high-end fashion designers and upmarket consumerism that I remembered; and I read today that Islamist extremists have forced the cancellation of the Gay Pride march which was due to take place there next week. Also everything was cheaper than I remembered. I spent a total of £250 over four full days and two half days in the city, eating out at least once a day and often twice, buying books and other souvenirs in museum gift shops, and taking taxis to the more out-of-the-way sights. And my hotel was way nicer than I was expecting for what I'd paid -- it's the first hotel I've ever stayed at which had a boutique feel, like someone had deliberately designed it to be in magazines, and it's the first where I've ever ordered room service (£2.50 for a freshly-made cheese and tomato sandwich).

I wasn't totally sure about going during Ramadan, but guide books suggested it would be fine, and they were more than right. I was staying in Sultanahmet, the oldest part of the city, near the Blue Mosque, and when I first arrived I stumbled upon the huge iftar celebrations for the end of the day. There's a massive plaza in front of the Blue Mosque, where the people assemble in large numbers every evening, covering all the lawns and benches and laying out neat little picnics. They open their bottles of water, and shake their pots of ayran, and carefully unwrap their food and lay it out: then when the muezzin sings there's a great sigh and they all tuck in immediately. There's a big party atmosphere with tons of over-excited kids running around. I went to the Ashill beer festival the night before I left, and there was a similar vibe going on, except that iftar in Istanbul had a) no alcohol and b) racial diversity. The Blue Mosque had a big sign between two of its minarets saying "Dost istersen Allah yeter", which google translate says means 'If you want friendly God enough'.

The Empress Theodora's throne sat here

Being in an Islamic country reminds me of that humane gentleman Thomas Browne, who said "I could never hear the Ave Marie Bell without an elevation". On my birthday I sat ouside Hagia Sophia, where the minarets are still in use although it is now officially a secular museum, and the muezzins of Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque seemed to be singing a coordinated duet for the noon prayers. Hagia Sophia is pretty stunning even in its knocked-about state. The selfie stick wasn't a thing when I went before. There are two ways to look at the constant taking of photographs in which most tourists engage (and I'm not much different). On the one hand you could say that it's a shame not to look at things directly in the present, but only to experience them as a future anticipated moment in which you'll look back into this past. Sometimes it might be better to let things happen, and then let them stop happening. On the other hand, when you're composing a photograph you look very carefully and pay direct attention. Also we officially cannot bear very much reality, and maybe interposing some glass between ourselves and the things in front of us is a sort of defence mechanism. But I saw a thing in Hagia Sophia which was new to me: some people were walking around with selfie sticks out in front of them, videoing themselves as they went, and watching everything through their camera as a backdrop to themselves. This seemed pretty extreme. Do people ever actually watch these videos later? How do they feel if they do?

The books as physical object

When I first got my Kindle, the most notable thing about it for me was how quickly I forgot whether I was reading something on paper or screen. It was surprisingly hard to judge the reading experience, because after a minute or two I would forget I was using a Kindle at all. It turns out that reading is all about the words! And I still have the same thing -- the other day I spent ages searching my house for a book I wanted to reread, only to realise it had been on my Kindle all along. (It had a particularly memorable cover design, and I was sure I'd owned the physical object.)

Now I find that I have a slight preference for books on paper, as long as they're not too large, and are well designed. I've never been that bothered about book smell -- old books mostly smell musty, or peppery, or of disintegrating leather bindings, and only occasionally have that sweet lignin--vanillin smell. (I own a set of Lucy Toulmin Smith's edition of John Leland's itineraries which smells amazing.) Books where layout or pictures are important are that bit easier on paper -- poetry for example, or guidebooks. Modern books should be paperbacks, and they should be unpretentious, and designed by the sort of designers who want you not to notice that they've been designed at all. The book as a physical object used to be my professional life, and I have read some of the most beautiful books in the world. (The Bury Psalter, for example, or the Trinity Gospels -- the thought of the Rustic Capitals in the latter still makes my heart feel tight.) I am hard to impress therefore -- I think that modern hardbacks in particular are nasty objects. And a book on my Kindle I can reread at a moment's notice anywhere in the world. But still a nice clean paperback in my bag feels like a small, everyday luxury. I think it's a bit like travel methods. If I need to get to a place I would rather go by train than by car or coach or plane; but usually the main point of travelling is the place you're going to.

But back when I first got my Kindle I thought about this a lot. I felt sad that a lot of my pleasure in browsing in bookshops had been removed. This was also at a time when I did not own permanent book shelves, when something like two-thirds or three-quarters of my library were long gone to Oxfam or the Cambridge market book stall, and the remnant were tightly sealed in cardboard boxes in my parents' garage, inside a metal shed which had been carefully closed up to keep out mice. The idea of the book as a physical object began to feel strangely metaphysical. I thought about someone I had heard of once who built an actual, physical memory palace. I yearned for the way that my library, even with bad books in it, had seemed like an outward reflection of the mind which had read them. I imagined a conceptual ideal of a library, with all the significant books of my life neatly arranged around the walls, each book placed among or against the books it spoke with. And inside it I would be in my proper setting, like a picture in a frame or a tiger in its jungle.

So that seems like the significance of physical books to me now -- not that they look nice, or that they smell nice, or that they survive being dropped in the bath, because they don't. It's their symbolism, the way they signify an entire mental experience, something that's changed you or spoken to you, perhaps in the smallest way. You could say (this might be going a bit far) an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. (Spritual is almost certainly not the right word.) And at the time when I was thinking about this I had abandoned the most liberal church in England to go to St Paul's cathedral instead for Evensong, and sit under the resplendently mosiaced dome while the choir chanted the canticles, something I was ashamed of even as I felt I needed to do it. For a long time I was troubled by my preference for quite high church services, given that they so often seemed to me to be about superficial things. I care nothing and less than nothing for chasubles and acolytes. I was brought up, and I am, a Protestant and we care about the words. We read them and we study them -- we take them in and dwell on them. We could never place beauty, or anything for that matter, higher than truth. We cannot bow down to things made by human hands (I still just physically can't) -- we would rather go into a lion's den or a burning furnace. We worship God as well in a forest or on a mountain or in someone's living room as in an old draughty building, perhaps better. But still there is something in the symbols too. The icons I own are not to be worshipped, but they are signs of something that has been spoken in my mind, and not just mine but those of many people widely scattered through time and space. The fourteenth-century building that my parents' church despairs of keeping maintained, and heated, and welcoming to normal people, is to my mind a sign of an ongoing love and attention to God, and to truth, for the whole life of a small and troubled Devon town. So I will keep my library of printed books, and add to it, and I will keep going to Evensong instead of Family Praise, and attending to Tallis and St Augustine rather than Graham Kendrick and Nicky Gumbel, because none of these things are the thing itself; and with that understood, they are free to take their real significance as signposts to other things that are true.

Some music I like

1. I've liked this Miike Snow song, 'Genghis Khan', for a while, and now it has an excellent video.


2. The video for this Zara Larsson song, 'Lush Life', is just her dancing. There's no narrative as such. But on the plus side it doesn't make me feel bad about the Anglican communion.


3. This AlunaGeorge song, 'I'm In Control', doesn't have a video at all yet.

4. This video isn't for music, but if you feel like vegging out a bit it's just the view from the front of a train over a half-an-hour journey in Sweden. Soothing.

Reading in 2015

I reread way less than last year, and a bit less on kindle, but rather more non-fiction. I think I probably read a bit too much again -- a lot of what I read was pretty meaningless filler, but then it's so hard to work out what will be good. Next year I think I will aim for between 150 and 180 books.

• Total number of books read: 211
• Gender of authors of each book: 94 male, 111 female, 4 not sure, 2 anthologies
• Number of non-fiction: 39 (18.5%)
• Number of re-reads: 28 (13.3%)
• Number read on Kindle: 68 (32.2%)

The stand-out things of the year were Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan books, and Jane Smiley's ongoing Last Hundred Years trilogy. I read the first three Ferrante books in January after they got so many rave reviews on the Millions End-of-Year summaries for 2014, then pre-ordered the fourth one out of impatience. I don't know of any other portrayal of female friendship that's so unsentimental and true. I've always been a big fan of Jane Smiley, but I think her Last Hundred Years trilogy may be her best work. I read Some Luck and Early Warning this year, and Golden Age is out in paperback next year. They tell the story of an American family from the Depression to the near future, and they are really strikingly good. Every now and then I start reading a book and realise that I am in safe hands -- I remember feeling that when reading Wolf Hall and The Children's Book -- and I felt the same way when reading these books.

There hasn't been anything this year that's felt like an amazing find, though. I enjoyed Astray by Emma Donoghue, a collection of short stories based on American historical documents. K.J. Parker's serial Two of Swords is very good -- it tells the story of a war from lots of different angles in monthly installments. I liked Claire North's three Gameshouse novellas, and Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch trilogy. Perhaps the most remarkable book was Sarah Gainham's Night Falls on the City, the story of an actress in Vienna in the 30s. Her husband is not only a prominent left-wing politician but Jewish, and the Nazi tanks are about to roll across the borders. The next two in the trilogy are not quite as good, but are still worth reading.

In non-fiction, I particularly enjoyed Mr Foote's Other Leg, about comedy in the London theatre at the time of the more famous Garrick. It makes a reasonable case for the eponymous Mr Foote's being the inspiration for the famous Pete and Dud sketch 'One Leg Too Few'. The Moth, a collection of true(-ish) stories, is very good indeed. The Rainborowes is a very interesting story of a family of Puritan merchants who fought Barbary pirates, emigrated backwards and forwards between the London dockyards and Massachusetts, and even got involved in the famous Putney debates -- it was a Rainborowe who said "It seems to me that the smallest he that is in this kingdom hath a life to live as the greatest he." But the most important non-fiction book I read this year was probably Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me, which seems like someone saying something believeable about race in America, at last.


This is the fifth year I've done this so I can now make a nice table:

	2011	2012	2013	2014	2015	Total
Total number of books read	209	175	155	217	211	967
Male:female authors (percentages)	51:44	52:45	49:51	50:49	45:53	49:48
Percentage non-fiction	13	22	14	10	19	15
Percentage re-reads	11	22	41	30	13	20
Percentage read on Kindle	35	57	27	41	32	39

This Missy Elliot song is very good.

Also the Pharrell bit is very good in its rhythms, once it's got past the obligatory bit about sperm. (What is it with male rappers and their sperm?) "Hermès Trismegistus" is an excellent lyric. I think it's saying that the fashion industry or consumerism in general is all made-up alchemy. So I have reluctantly decided that Pharrell is quite talented. But I am not going to change my mind about Pitbull.

I've been reading some stuff about Jung. He was very keen on alchemy -- he saw all that soror mystica stuff as a sort of mythologisation of something inside the human soul. I used to think that if I had loads of money I would undergo Jungian analysis, because it's charmingly crazy. Partly this was because in Robertson Davies' Deptford Trilogy when the alcoholic son has Jungian analysis he's told that every single character he meets in his dreams, without exception, is just an aspect of himself. That idea is very appealing from a self-importance point of view. For example, the other day I had a dream where I worried about the strain on my mother of looking after my very elderly grandmother. If everyone in that dream was me then I can spend some time feeling sorry for myself about the inevitability of aging and mortality. But unfortunately it turns out that's not a Jungian thing at all, so I'm forced to think about other people instead of just myself. Heigh ho.

Internet, you have pleased me

I don't know if this is real, but apparently rumblr is like grindr but for fights. You can taunt each other online first to get into the mood.

These people will put a tweet into cuneiform (Persian from circa 500 BC), bake it onto clay, and post it to you. This is some consolation for the fact that it looks like you can no longer get one of Kanye's tweets hand embroidered to order.

I tried singing this song to my cat. She immediately left the room. I respect her for that.

Asian Mike Lavin And His Cat from Andy C on Vimeo.

Things I have considered calling my cat

So I have a cat now. She came from a rescue shelter, where she had been for four of the six years of her life. We had a difficult start, but we seem to be getting on better. It's not her fault that really I wanted a dog, but couldn't afford the daycare. But it is her fault that I have big red scars on my legs. So, swings and roundabouts. I have no idea what's going on in her head, not even a smidgeon of a jot of an idea. It might be nothing, or it might be something really really complex.

Minxie
This is actually her name, and I'm sticking with it. It's a fine name. If she'd been called Snookums I might have had to change it but Minxie captures her pretty well. She's quite nice but not reliable. She went to the shelter because she took against her owner's new husband and baby. I totally would not trust her with a baby.

Bella
I once decided that if I got a dog I would call her Bella, so I could shout 'Chow Bella' at dinner time. Minxie is not a dog though. If she were a dog I think I'd know how to communicate with her. Also Bella just isn't a very good name.

Victoria Regina
She's really not amused. She is not prepared to play. I've mostly given up trying to get her to. Also even if she does make a leap for a toy, if I twitch it out of the way at the last minute in a playful manner she gets embarrassed and has to pretend she was actually leaping at something else -- or if she puts her paw up to pat it but isn't quick enough she has to pretend she was stretching her foreleg out to lick it instead. I don't understand this. There's only me and her here, and she's missed the boat on dignity where I'm concerned, I clean up her poo.
Apparently Queen Victoria was often amused, but I still bet she wouldn't leap after a mouse on a piece of elastic.

Snarlygoggs
I was reading some seventeenth-century will inventories with notes and came across the word 'snarlygoggs', which apparently is a Devon dialect word for the rough stuff left in the dregs when cider is made, which was often in turn used to make illegal cider brandy. Minxie does snarl at me -- not so much now as before. I came up with a policy which was that if she snarled and hissed I would hiss back and not look away, though I was actually a bit scared of her for a while. I think that at first she was hoping that she could be boss. She's welcome to manipulate me, but I won't be bullied. I don't think I could live with a pet that frightened me.

Kasparov
She's a lazy cat, which is great, but unfortunately she turns out to be quite intelligent, which is not so good. She gets bored. I've got her some cat puzzles, most successfully this treat maze. She has to push the treats down the holes to make them fall out at the bottom. Since I got it our interactions have improved, and she asks for treats to be put in it -- she seems to prefer them like that rather than just given to her. Once I have put the treats in she sits and studies it intently like a chess player planning her first move. She also has a ball which intermittently dispenses treats as it's rolled around. Once it's empty she likes to dribble it to me like a footballer and repeatedly roll it against my feet. I like it when I know what she wants. (Obviously in this case her name would have to be Kaspurrov.)

Merricat
Not that she's merry, but I read Shirley Jackson's American Gothic classic 'We have always lived in the castle', and this is the name for her if what's going on in her head is lots and lots of things. (Also although I've never read any of her books, Edwidge Danticat is a brilliant name.)

Emma Bovary
I think this fits her character quite well. She really really wants, but I don't know what she wants, and I'm not sure she does. She wants to be inside and outside at the same time. She wants me to do something but whatever I try is not that thing. She wants me to open the door so she can go outside, but not that outside, an outside where it's not raining. But I've gone off giving tragic names to pets since when I was fourteen I called our new puppy Tess after Tess of the D'Urbervilles and she died young and horribly. We then got another puppy from Tess's mother's next litter and I called her Eliza-Louisa after 'Liza-Lou, Tess's younger sister whom Angel marries in the book. My family humoured me about all these names, though we actually called her Elly day-to-day, and she lived to a very good dog age. (And anyway the cat's name would clearly have to be something like Emmew Bovary or Emma Bofurry.)

Mini me
She's grumpy, overweight and lazy, doesn't like men or children, gets bored easily and makes herself miserable by over-thinking things. If she could type she'd probably be blogging about me right now. Alternatively, she's a space so blank I can see anything reflected in it...

Snookums
I have occasionally called her Snookums when she curls up on my lap and purrs loudly. I think we'll get on ok in the long term. She keeps making my kitchen smell awful, but if I learnt one thing from the sitcom Friends it's that that's not her fault.

Ow my mind

Our new super computer will have a quarter of a million cores.

A quarter of a million cores!

This just blew my mind so much that I had to post it, even though I'm at work and shouldn't really be writing a blog post. EDIT: turns out that's just the next phase. When it's finished it will have 480 000 cores!!! !1!!!

Videos on the internet

1. How creepy is this? Know your place, women!


2. On the other hand, this evasive dog is very excellent.


3. Hurray for John Oliver! Unfortunately his thing about online harassment is not available in the UK, but this one is quite good:

Politics

My local polling station is at the church up the road. I went on my way home from work. There was a long line of people outside, but it turned out they weren't waiting to vote, but queueing for the Thursday evening soup kitchen. That's politics for you.

Books

1. Soon after writing my blog entry on Exclusion and 'In the Light of What We Know' I read Joyce Carol Oates' 'The Accursed'. Stephen King said of it that it "may be the world's first postmodern Gothic novel", overlooking that Oates herself has already written several postmodern Gothic novels, but you can't really blame him for not being familiar with her oeuvre because she is scarily prolific, and produces a new book about twice a year. Anyway I enjoyed 'The Accursed' hugely, but I did wonder how African American readers would find it. The narrator, unreliable to the extent that he even appears in his own narrative as a baby possibly sired by the devil, tells of terrible hauntings and supernatural crimes in early twentieth-century Princeton, starting when no one will speak out against the lynching of a young black man and his sister. The book concerns itself entirely with the white and variously privileged members of the Princeton community, and I wondered whether it might be offensive to a black reader that the black people in this book are there only to be transgressed against. On the other hand Oates does make it clear that the refusal of the WASPs to engage with the African Americans as human beings is the terrible flaw that destroys their ordered society, and there didn't seem to be any such awareness in 'In the Light of What We Know'. Heigh ho. I expect everyone has different reactions.

2. I'm rereading Neal Stephenson's 'Baroque Trilogy', a series which comes to the conclusion that the continued existence of slavery will undermine even something as fine as Hanoverian England. It's hard from this perspective of now to see Hanoverian England as such a great thing, but I suppose it was better than having the Jameses back. I love these books but have not so far managed to persuade anyone else how great they are.

3. It turns out that K.J. Parker is a man. I feel a bit disappointed by this, though I know that's sexist of me. On the plus side he chose 'Parker' because it's a pen name... The books are great, especially the Engineer Trilogy, which starts with 'Devices and Desires'. Not many people convey the amazingness of precision engineering -- I suppose he has a lot in common with Neal Stephenson in that regard.

Deja vuuu-uuu

Who can sing like Sia? Very few people. Is there a 74-year-old more groovy than Giorgio Moroder? I sincerely doubt it! (Though my mum has 11 years to catch up.)

This is available on YouTube but in a slightly less 'up' version, so I'm going to have a go at embedding a gadget I stole off of popjustice:

I heart pop, I really do. This on repeat is going to be the soundtrack to a long weekend trying to make Nasa's WorldWind work on a borrowed MacBook.

Exclusion

I recently finished one of the most disappointing books I've ever read, and I can't quite put it out of my mind. The book is In the Light of What We Know, by Zia Haider Rahman, and I'm about to give spoilers for it, so consider this an alert.

The first spoiler is that it is very well-written and compelling. It is readable, and provocative of thought. Obviously, it wouldn't have disappointed me so much if it had been bad. The narrator is a London banker at the time of the 2008 crash, the expensively-educated son of academics from Pakistan. One day an old friend from his Oxford student days turns up at his house and starts telling him a long story centred around a trip to Afghanistan when it was newly under US occupation in 2002. This friend, Zafar, was born in Bangladesh and is from a much poorer background than the narrator.* He's the cleverer of the two, though not as clever as he thinks he is. A lot of the novel is about class and race, and particularly Zafar's feelings of exclusion by the posh people at Oxford, who stand for him as the English in general. Reading this made me remember my own experience at Cambridge -- for large parts of my first term there I felt surreally out of place, with the "I don't belong here" parts of Radiohead's Creep stuck in my head, and I'm as middle class as it's possible to be without falling over. I think most people feel out of place in Cambridge, and I've had a tendency to feel a sort of exasperated scorn for fully-grown adults who think the way to deal with that is to try really really hard to fit in, by emposhening their voice and dressing like a mannequin in a Savile Row window. For a brief period of time this novel made me think I should be more tolerant of those people, on the grounds that I'm failing to check my privilege as a member of the middle-classes. So it probably briefly did some good there. That's because this novel very convincingly portrays Zafar's feelings of exclusion and frustration, particularly at the hands of his on-and-off girlfriend, whose name is Emily and then something improbably hyphenated, and who is very posh, and plays the violin impeccably but without feeling like someone out of an E.M. Forster novel. At one point she tells Zafar how to pronounce Beauchamp, which makes him feel discomfited although clearly the correct way to deal with that is to pronounce it Byoo-champ loudly and often thereafter. Emily becomes more and more central to the plot -- it's because of her that he's in Afghanistan in 2002, and it's quite clear that what happens in Afghanistan is going to be the main point of the book -- and part of my relish for the book was looking forward to finding out what was going on with her, in the filling in of her story by this clearly very accomplished and intelligent writer.

And this is where the disappointment comes in. Because by the end of the book it becomes clear that Emily, who had some intriguing possibilities, is not in fact a person at all. Emily is a McGuffin. She has no existence to her as a person and is just a way of moving the plot along. The whole book falls apart when you realise this, and start to think about the other women in it. The narrator is married, in a way that reminds me of how when I was about three or four and my imaginary friend Elizabeth and I played at being grown-ups we always had anonymous husbands somewhere off-stage. Zafar fell in love with Emily because of her daftly posh surname before he even met her, and her brother went to Eton with the narrator. (Emily, of course, could not have gone there.) For both of these men, women just do not count. They would be able to express their social yearnings and webs of connection much less indirectly if they were homosexual, but they aren't the sort of men who have enough imagination to be unexpected. Both men are so clueless that Zafar actually tells the narrator about the cause of menstruation as if this were a little-known and interesting fact, and he has only found out because the bio-mechanics of fertility impinge on his personal life. Their real communications are with other men.

The problem is that this too reminds me of my time at Cambridge, and a different sort of exclusion, less common and more upsetting (to me) than class exclusion. When people don't see me because of my gender somehow that riles me in a way I can't rise above. It makes me feel suffocated, and furious and ineffectual at the same time. I felt the same way when I came to the end of this book -- I felt dismissed as self-evidently not counting. Zafar in the book has got so used to seeing himself as the victim, the highly-intelligent victim of others' stupid prejudice, that his own ugly prejudices don't occur to him. The question is whether they occurred to the author. His potted biography is sufficiently similar to Zafar's to make it hard not to guess that Zafar is a loosely based on himself.

I don't know why this affected me so personally. I finished the book a week or two ago now, and it's still bothering me. I suppose it's because I was enjoying the book so much, and it let me down so badly. (And I'm not complaining about what happens at the end, but at how it's portrayed.) The lesson from the whole thing really is that if you are feeling excluded, and prejudged, then stop and look around you for the people you might be accidentally excluding by being so preoccupied in your own exclusion.

* There seems to be a thing now for the sort of bildungsroman about two friends where the narrator is less clever but more fortunate. (Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels are just as good as people say they are, though also slightly terrifying in how completely they skewer that thing where when you're a teenager you love your best friend so fiercely you also hate her.)

Giorgio Moroder is 74

I've been feeling a bit on the old side recently, but according to Giorgio Moroder's analogy in this very excellent song I'm hardly even born yet:

74 is the new 24

Reading in 2014

I read too many books in 2014. I think next year I will try replacing every fourth book with a hearty walk or something. Here is a breakdown:

• Total number of books read: 217
• Gender of authors of each book: 107 male, 108 female, 2 not sure
• Number of non-fiction: 22 (10.1%)
• Number of re-reads: 66 (30.4%)
• Number read on Kindle: 89 (41%)

As usual, many of the best books I've read this year have been rereads, but I have read some good new stuff too. I think the most memorable books I've read are the Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff Vandermeer, Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance. They're set in the near future after something odd has happened somewhere on the American coast. It starts with a research expedition, the eleventh or twelfth, entering the affected area. Everyone on it is known just by their job title; one of them, the biologist, lost her husband to the previous expedition. When I read the books I thought they were good but not startling, but they stayed in my mind for ages.

My favourite new author of the year is probably Angela Thirkell. She's like a less snide E.F. Benson, or a softer version of P.G. Wodehouse, or a more middle-class (and less brilliant) Jane Austen. She wrote many gentle social comedies set in the 1930s or so. The Brandons is probably a good starting point. It's about an attractive and lovable widow, adored by everyone, with two grown-up children. Her deceased husband's dying aunt summons them all so she can decide who is to be her heir, and mild but interesting social problems ensue.

I loved Karen Joy Fowler's We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, and so did my mother. Karen Joy Fowler is a very good author and everything I've read by her has been great, including the odd sci-fi-ish Sarah Canary. Also loved by my mother, but more straightforwardly a fun book, is Bird Brain by Guy Kennaway, the story of a man who loves pheasant shooting and comes back as a pheasant after he dies. It has talking dogs in it without being sentimental. Also excellent are the Flavia de Luce books by Alan Bradley, a series of murder mysteries solved by a bratty upper-class neglected little girl. I also like Marie Brennan's Lady Trent memoir books. They are set in a Victorian-like world with dragons and are about a woman's struggle to be accepted as a serious naturalist in a very constricted world. Unusually they also deal with the problems of class.

Unsurprisingly Kate Atkinson's Life After Life is great. I quite liked Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries but I thought her The Rehearsal was really brilliant, conveying the strangeness of female adolescence.

In non-fiction, John Drury's biography of George Herbert was very good. But probably the most surprising book I enjoyed this year was Simplicissimus by Hans Jakob Christoffel Von Grimmelshausen. This is a seventeenth-century picaresque novel set during the Thirty Years' War and was actually very readable and good. I found it on the Classics shelves of the excellent Waterstone's by the cathedral in Exeter. Apparently Thomas Mann said about it:

It is the rarest kind of monument to life and literature, for it has survived almost three centuries and will survive many more. It is a story of the most basic kind of grandeur - gaudy, wild, raw, amusing, rollicking and ragged, boiling with life, on intimate terms with death and evil - but in the end, contrite and fully tired of a world wasting itself in blood, pillage and lust, but immortal in the miserable splendour of its sins

though presumably he said it in German.

Good things

I love Dragonette:


Going home on the bus in the dark reminds me of when I started work as a developer two years ago, and the strange feeling of being old and young at the same time.

This bugs me

1. I keep hearing people say that Grace Hopper invented the term bug, and feeling unable for social reasons to point out that this is not true. There is a record of an actual bug (a moth) being removed from the computer she worked on (it had jammed something up) but the term 'bug' was used in engineering as early as Thomas Edison. Just wikipedia it! It has sources.

2. On the other hand, I love you xkcd. This one has a particularly good mouse-over tooltip.

Closing some tabs

1. I did a girls' career event the other day, in which I tried to explain why coding is sometimes beautiful, and probably just made them all think it's a career for loonies. (I don't mind that too much, there might be a young-me-type there who hears and understands.) Here are some links about the beauty of coding:
http://kottke.org/14/06/getting-high-on-programming
www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/06/coder_s_high_the_intense_feeling_of_absorption_exclusive_to_programmers.html

2. Of course the tech world has its own problems. Love that someone called "bingo" in this talk.

3. Life involves weird challenges sometimes. Watch this mini version of the hero's journey:



4. Watching these people move in medieval armour is seriously freaky. It reminded me of an Italo Calvino novella in which a famous knight is a suit of armour with nothing inside.


5. Chart about US inequality. British poor pay more taxes. Even the Daily Telegraph thnks the middle classes should revolt (now the "officer class" are affected).

6. This modern setting of a medieval Icelandic hymn makes things feel better: