john257hopper's 100 books of 2020 (including at least 12 previously unread from 1001 books list

Happy new year to all. I am again going for the 100 books challenge, having read 110 in 2019. I'm also aiming once again to read at least one book a month from the 1001 books everyone should read list. Last year I managed 14 from that list, with three months where I read two from the list (and one month when I didn't read any).

Happy New Year and happy reading!

Thanks Jen :)

Hope it's a good reading year!

Thanks mabith :)

Wishing you 100 good books in 2020!

Thanks Pam :)

1. Northern Lights - Philip Pullman

This is a re-read, after watching the excellent BBC TV adaptation at the end of last year. It's a real, multi-layered plot full of interesting concepts and characters, that a reader of any age can get a lot from. I love the notion of personal daemons and wish I had one! The only issue now is whether I wait a year until the second TV series to re-read A Subtle Knife.

2. Caging the Lyon - H A Culley

This is the third book in the author's Normans series, featuring his fictional ancestors the de Cuillys, a Norman family. The action here takes place during a time of bitter conflict between England and Scotland in the 12th century (the title refers to William, called the Lion, the Scottish king), with branches of the family on different sides. I am very interested in the history of this period, which keeps me reading, though I find these as novels to be somewhat unsatisfactory. The author has done his research impressively and clearly wants to make his novels well grounded in historical fact, but this periodically spills over into rather excessive information dumps, as though he wanted to write a non-fiction book as much as, if not more than, a novel. The dialogue also sometimes comes across as too modern and/or stilted. A family tree of the various de Cuilly branches would also be helpful, not least because the list of characters at the start of the book is unhelpfully listed in order of appearance, not in family or other linked groupings. Despite these shortcomings, there was enough action to keep me reading and a few memorable scenes.

I had thought this series was a trilogy but have just found out having finished this that there is a fourth one available (and I see online there is a fifth one albeit set earlier on between the first two books).

3. The Irish Princess - Elizabeth Chadwick

This is another of the author's colourful slices of Medieval historical fiction, a genre of which she one of the most prolific contemporary authors. While some may dismiss these as lighter, even romantic fiction, they have well rounded characters and interesting set pieces, plus a sound chronological narrative structure that gives a good feel for the ebb and flow of the passing years and the background political situation. This novel is set mostly in Ireland in the 1160s and 70s, the time when the English king Henry II was first sniffing round the country, and setting in train so many of the historical forces and events there over the following eight centuries and more. The central (real historical) characters are the titular Aoife, her father an Irish king Diarmait MacMurchada, and Richard de Clare, a Norman knight, whom Aoife marries at her father's decision for political reasons (though it turns out happily). Other characters around then are also often real historical characters. A very good read, though not quite one of her very best (which for me is represented by the trilogy about William Marshal).

4. The German Opposition to Hitler: The Resistance, the Underground, and Assassination Plots (1938-1945) - Michael Thomsett

I was prompted to read this book after attending a talk last week at the German Ambassador's residence in London by Helmuth von Moltke, son of his namesake father who was one of the Kreisau circle of intellectuals trying to set out plans for a free and democratic Germany after the hoped for overthrow of Hitler's regime. Like most of those resisting the Nazi regime, whether simply intellectually, or politically and militarily, the elder Helmuth paid with his life for his opposition to the regime, the closing years of that short life being told at that talk through the letters he exchanged with his wife, now published in book form. The book in question in this review is, unlike that, a wide ranging look at all the forms, individuals and forces who offered resistance to Hitler and the Nazis, from even before the dictator was appointed Chancellor in January 1933 until the ill-fated 20 July 1944 bomb plot, which came the closest to wiping him out, though still nowhere near close enough. It was, naturally, extraordinarily difficult to make the necessary contacts under such a regime to plan effectively, with the ever present threat of betrayal by an informer though, even so, by 1944 the resistance was much more widespread than the regime was prepared to admit, or than the Allies were prepared to accept, once it had been decided that the complete military defeat of Germany and the Axis was the only plausible outcome to the war and that no negotiations with a putative post-Hitler German government would be possible. There was a wide range of resisters from the rigid and hopelessly naive intellectual Carl Goerdeler through top military leaders such as General Ludwig Beck, to more junior military figures who took decisive steps such as Colonel Claus Stauffenberg, instigator of the July 1944 bomb plot. In other walks of life, there were the religious dissidents such Dietrich Bonhoeffer and students such as Sophie and Hans Scholl. Some, especially before the war, opposed on principle removing Hitler by force, though most believed, or came to believe, that co-ordinated force had to be used. There were so many near misses and missed opportunities that are galling to read about; Hitler had the devil's own cunning as well in avoiding mishaps by often changing his itinerary at the last moment, and starting or ending speeches or visits earlier or later than planned. Overall, the internal German resistance was flawed in its often unclear strategy and tactics, but ultimately heroic and tragic. This book gives a lot of information, but I thought could also have slowed down the pace a bit to offer some more reflective analysis.

5. Pebble in the Sky - Isaac Asimov

This is one of those Asimov novels that I am less familiar with, not having read this for almost 30 years, unlike the Foundation and robot novels I have read multiple times. This one is set in the early centuries of the Galactic Empire, whose final end many millennia later is the backdrop for the Foundation novels. The characters are less memorable than in most of the other novels, and the central theme is the mutual suspicion and bigotry between Earth and the rest of the Galactic Empire that has obvious racial parallels both for when this novel was written in the late 1940s and the present day. The controversial idea that Earth was the original home planet of the human race that features here is also explored in other Asimov novels. Not one of his greatest, but still a good read.

6. Isaac Asimov's I Robot: To Preserve (Mickey Zucker Reichert)

This is the final novel in the author's trilogy of spin off novels about the life of Susan Calvin, the robotics pioneer in Isaac Asimov's early robot short stories published from the 1950s onwards. It is 2037 and Susan is still threatened by both the Society for Humanity and a shadowy rogue government agency for the secret of a supposed code to deactivate the Three Laws from robot brains, the constraints which force them to obey humans and prevent them from harming them. Faced with proving the innocence of Nate, a humaniform robot, of the crime of murder of a leading roboticist, Susan is once again put through the emotional wringer and loses more of those few she loves and trusts. Not far into this book she is leaving her short lived medical career and become a roboticist. This was like the second novel in being a police procedural/murder mystery rather than a medical thriller as was the first, and in my view the best of the trilogy, but still a fairly gripping page turner. I would consider reading other books by this author.

7. If This is a Man/The Truce - Primo Levi

In commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, I have read what is probably the most famous memoir from a survivor. If This is a Man is, however, rather different from other such memoirs I have read, as its theme is not so much the detail of his lived experiences, or particular atrocities (though these are of course covered), but what Auschwitz and the Holocaust represented - in the author's words, "the demolition of man": "Imagine now a man who is deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time of his house, his habits, his clothes, in short, of everything he possesses: he will be a hollow man, reduced to suffering and needs, forgetful of dignity and restraint, for he who loses all often easily loses himself."; and "if I could enclose all the evil of our time in one image, I would choose this image which is familiar to me: an emaciated man, with head dropped and shoulders curved, on whose face and in whose eyes not a trace of a thought is to be seen." Notwithstanding these bleak quotes, I did not find this memoir bleak, as throughout his year at Auschwitz, Levi survives by never losing an ultimate belief in human dignity and hope, though, paradoxically, "our wisdom lay in ‘not trying to understand’, not imagining the future, not tormenting ourselves as to how and when it would all be over; not asking others or ourselves any questions." The book ends with the Nazi abandonment of Auschwitz and the notorious death march (which Levi avoided only by virtue of being ill with scarlet fever at the time) culminating, after a ten day period of further struggling with the forces of cold, hunger and disease, with the Red Army liberating the camp on 27 January 1945.

My edition was paired with its sequel the somewhat longer The Truce, which details the author's lengthy enforced peregrinations across eastern and central Europe to eventually get home well into the autumn of 1945. This is less immediately memorable as a read, but does contain descriptions of the many colourful characters of different nationalities with whom he makes his itinerant life. Finally, the book ends with the author providing lengthy answers to some of the most common questions he was asked in the post-war period by audiences to whom he spoke about his books and his experiences, to ensure the events of the Holocaust remained alive in the minds of succeeding generations as: "Strong though the words of If This is a Man are, they are still weak before the will to deny or forget."

8. Black Coffee - Agatha Christie

This is a 1998 novelisation of a play Agatha Christie wrote early in her career and which was performed in 1930. It concerns theft of a formula for an explosive devised by scientist Sir Claud Amory, and then murder as he is poisoned by a member of his household, just as Hercule Poirot arrives, called in by Sir Claud to investigate the theft. This is a classic locked room mystery, but I found the characters uniformly rather irritating. As in a number of other Christie novels, nationalist stereotypes of the time against Italians in particular, grate rather. I found Captain Hastings' character completely pointless here - he contributes nothing whatsoever to the plot. Poirot comes across as rather more arrogant than usual as well. Overall, definitely not one of my favourite Christies, though it functions as well as ever as a lightweight page turner.

9.The Willow Marsh Murder - Karen Charlton

This is the sixth in this series of Regency era mystery novels featuring Bow Street Runners Detective Stephen Lavender and Constable Ned Woods. This is set in the marsh country near Ely in Cambridgeshire, where our heroes are summoned to solve a murder mystery at the ancient pile of the feuding and backbiting Delamere family - but the reasons they have been summoned there turn out to be both less and more than they expected. The endless family feuds and complicated relationships did grow a little wearisome at times, though it was enlivened by a smuggling theme. Two months ago I read the novella The Death of Irish Nell, which was a prelude to this novel - indeed several chapters from that novella are reproduced within the narrative here, which felt like a slight cheat at first, though it does make sense in context. Another very good read in this wonderful series, albeit not quite as good as the first few.

10. The Trial - Franz Kafka

This was the first Kafka I have ever read. Like most of his works, he never completed this, and it was published only after his early death from tuberculosis in 1924. Although the term "Kafkaesque" is often used simply to describe an impenetrable bureaucracy or maze, this novel has a nightmarish quality about it, with the inexplicable events happening to Josef K after his arrest for a crime that is unknown to both Josef and the reader. He confronts a colourful and strange array of bizarre characters while trying to navigate his way through this moral and judicial maze. The ending of the novel as published is abrupt and violent. There have been many interpretations of this over the years, but overall it is perhaps best to see simply as a piece of (mostly) atmospheric absurdist literature, with humorous undertones, and not try to over-analyse it. The very structure of the text makes it quite hard to read, being divided mostly into very long paragraphs, with dialogue embedded within them, not on separate lines, a characteristic that often puts me off reading a novel, though in this case, it seems appropriate.

11. Stasi Winer - David Young

At the end of the previous book in this series set in 1970s East Germany, I wondered whether there would be another one, given that Major Karin Muller had resigned her post in the Kriminalpolizei, in disgust at the covering up of crimes from the Nazi era. However, she is back 18 months later, by the simple expedient of her boss having refused to accept her resignation, accumulated her backpay and not had her chucked out of her grace and favour lavish apartment. I'm glad she's back, as this is the fifth novel in a great series. That said, this had a less original plot than the others, being effectively a sequel to the first novel in the series, featuring a young girl Irma Behrendt now making her second attempt to escape her life in East Germany for the West, this time across the frozen ice of the Ostsee in the bitter winter of 1978/79. Despite this slight lack of originality, the chase sequences were dramatic and exciting, with the reader having mixed feelings given the ambiguous motives of both pursued and pursuers. By the end of the novel, Karin is back but has been demoted back to Oberleutnant. I look forward to seeing what happens next.

12. Uncle Silas - J Sheridan Le Fanu

This is 19th century Irish author Sheridan Le Fanu's most well known full length novel, a mystery and "sensation" novel sometimes compared to Wilkie Collins's Woman in White. I must say, though, I didn't think this was in the same class as the Collins classic. While there are some interesting scenes and characters and a reasonable air of mystery was built up around the title character, I thought the novel lacked colour and depth. For me, not really a patch on the author's novella Carmilla, the original vampire story that inspired Bram Stoker.

13. The Reluctant Assassin - Fiona Buckley

This is the sixteenth book in the Ursula Stannard series of Elizabethan mysteries. I continue to love the continuing characters who have felt like family members as I have followed their lives over the last 14 years of reading. However, I found the plot of this one too hard to swallow, the central kidnap plot failing to convince me and striking me as too implausible in practice for this rather absurd bunch of conspirators aiming at a private endeavour to assassinate Mary of Scots. I do wonder if the series is coming to a natural end, though I assume the author intends to continue another few years to cover the final fall of Mary of Scots and perhaps the Spanish Armada.

14. The Priest Hole - Amy Cross

I picked up this horror novel fairly blindly as one of the 99p Kindle daily deals a couple of years ago. It turns out that it is not the sort of thing I would normally read; my taste in horror is very much gothic atmosphere- building, rather than blood and gore, and this was much closer to the latter end of the market, despite the promise offered by the title of a more historically based and hopefully more thoughtful story. Nykolas Freeman is a hunter of witches and Catholic priests in Jacobean England and commits a particularly egregious and horrific crime in 1608 in a house in the west country of England, which he then burns down. In the present day, the house having been restored, a small family of a single mother and her two daughters comes to stay to start a new life after the death of the husband/father. The action alternates between the two time zones, which bleed into each other. While this is an interesting enough scenario, I was put off by the extreme violence and by what I thought was an unnecessary dwelling on the details of torture and bestial cruelty, at the expense of building up an atmosphere. I didn't find any of the characters well written or interesting, and I am not likely to read any more by this author, whose output of horror novels over the past decade seems to be quite vast (though there is a sequel to this novel, which I might possibly pick up from curiosity when I am feeling strong-stomached).

15. Five Children and It - Edith Nesbit

This is another delightful classic from the pen of Edith Nesbit. Our five young heroes and heroines (or four really as one is a baby the others call Lamb) discover a Psammead or sand fairy who can grant them a wish a day. Needless to say they get the wishes wrong and don;t think through the consequences, but it all turns out right by sunset each day. I didn't enjoy this quite as much as The Railway Children, but it was still very enjoyable, with a lot of nice illustrations throughout.

16. The Passion of Frankenstein - Marvin Kaye

This is a sequel to Mary Shelley's seminal novel, predicated on the assumption that Frankenstein's monster returns from the Arctic wilderness to which he consigns himself after his creator's death, and returns with Captain Walton to Scotland to have his wounds treated. So far so good, and this starts well and feels like a worthy continuation in the style of the original. However, soon after they get to Scotland, the quality declined, and I found the narrative rather silly, involving Burke and Hare and a Deacon Brodie (son of the infamous one). There were some well written reflections on the part of the "monster" on the nature of his existence and his desire to expiate the guilt he feels for the crimes he committed in the original novel. But overall this for me failed to live up to its initial expectations.

17. A Kestrel for a Knave - Barry Hines

This was the book that put Barnsley on the map in literary terms in 1968, made more famous by Ken Loach's film Kes the following year. The author paints a sharp picture of life at the time and there is some evocative description of the countryside where Billy Casper found his kestrel. But I'm afraid I found the narrative dull and have given up just over a quarter of the way through. Unfinished.

18. Deacon Brodie - Robert Louis Stevenson

Prompted by the appearance of Deacon Brodie in a novel I have just finished, I read this script of an 1880s play on the infamous Edinburgh criminal scripted by one of Scotland's most famous authors. The play was apparently a flop, and it is not hard to see why. The action is confusing, and to the non-Scottish reader, much of the dialect is hard to follow due to the Scots dialect. When it was easier to follow, it wasn't really worth the effort.

19. Sword at Sunset - Rosemary Sutcliff

This novel is the sequel to the author's famous and wonderful Eagle of the Ninth trilogy. Although ostensibly written for a more adult audience, it is written in the same ageless and beautifully written style that can truly be enjoyed by readers of all ages. The narrative viewpoint changes from that of the Romans at the centre of the trilogy, to that of Artos (Arthur) the Romano-British leader fighting over several decades against the growing incursions of Saxon invaders, including Cerdic. Some of the classic elements of Arthurian myth are present, but this is very much a realistic and reasonably gritty historical novel (Sutcliff also wrote a more mythology-based trilogy on King Arthur). My only criticism would be that, at 500 pages, it is probably a bit too long, but with writing this good, it is a joy to read.

20. Sir Nigel - Arthur Conan Doyle

This is one of the historical novels which Conan Doyle regarded as the genre for which he wanted to be most remembered, the success of Sherlock Holmes notwithstanding. It is a beautifully written story of the young life of the (fictional) eponymous Medieval knight, whose later life had formed the subject of Doyle's earlier novel The White Company (which I have not read). I had read Sir Nigel over twenty years ago, but remembered nothing of it; this time it was (mostly, apart from some somewhat repetitive battle scenes) a joy to read, and from a modern reader's viewpoint, unintentionally quite funny in terms of some of the foolishly heroic actions young Nigel carries out to prove himself and satisfy the sense of honour that formed the basis of the rather bizarre belief system called chivalry, here in full swing during the early years of the Anglo-French conflict later called the Hundred Years War. The action of the story concludes with Nigel knighted on the battlefield of Poitiers in 1356, after capturing the French King John. Good fun, if not taken too seriously.

21. England Expects: The Battle of Sluys - Gordon Corrigan

This is a short account of a sea battle early on in the Anglo-French conflict later called the Hundred Years War. The battle is hardly known today whereas other battles during this protracted conflict, such as Crecy, Poitiers and Agincourt are much better known, though arguably less decisive in a strategic sense. The author argues that Sluys in 1340 prevented a French invasion of England that would have altered the course of the next several centuries of French domination of England; instead of which the prospect of such an invasion was removed and the rest of the conflict took place on French soil rather than English, albeit with numerous twists and turns and, of course, eventual English defeat after losing all their possessions in France, except Calais. The course of the battle itself occupies only one chapter of this short work, but the reasons for English victory centre around more united and strategic leadership, better professionalisation of the armed forces and the superiority of English longbows against French crossbows.

The author's descriptions of the consequences of the battle and the counterfactual if it had gone the other way are vivid and worth quoting:

"the English victory at Sluys meant that the coming battles of the war would all be fought on French soil, with French towns and villages, and French peasants suffering the destruction, the burning, the pillage and the massacres, and not English ones. French lands would be laid waste, and not English ones. The threat of a French invasion of England was now no more, and would not re-emerge for another four hundred years."

"If the French fleet had put to sea and intercepted the English expeditionary force there can be little doubt that the English ships would have been scattered and the fleet defeated in detail. King Edward, had he not been killed, might have been captured and hauled off to Paris in chains. The French fleet could then have gone on to effect a landing in England where there was very little to oppose them. In conjunction with their reinvigorated and encouraged Scots allies they could well have taken London and declared Edward III deposed, and replaced him with one of the many claimants, or even by Isabella, ensuring a French client upon the English throne."

22. The Lily and the Lion - Maurice Druon

This is the sixth in the series of Accursed Kings novels set in 14th century France (the Lily) against the backdrop of an unstable monarchy and war with England (the Lion). This is in particular the story of French noble Robert of Artois and his attempts to regain his territory; first in alliance with Philip VI, the first Valois king, who takes the throne once the main branch of the Capetian dynasty has died out, after King Charles IV's widow gives birth to a posthumous daughter; and secondly, in alliance with King Edward III of England, encouraging him to pursue his claim as the legitimate king of France as the son of Isabella the She-Wolf, sister of the last Capetian kings. So the stage is set for what later historians called the Hundred Years War. This is great historical fiction about a fascinating period, but the author has a tendency to overdump historical information, telling rather than showing the course of events through the narrative. This book contains an overlong epilogue about the later life of the Italian man who has featured earlier in these novels, and who in these stories is in fact actually the dead baby king John I, which is historically fascinating, but hangs rather at the end and doesn't feel like a true part of the novel.

23. The Phoenix and the Carpet - Edith Nesbit

This is the sequel to Nesbit's Five Children and It that I read last month. I remembered this affectionately from a TV adaptation in the 1970s, but I must admit I didn't find this quite as engaging as its predecessor. Again, the story relies on them getting the wishes they choose wrong and ending up in various scrapes, but somehow these did not engage as much in this one. Perhaps this was partly due to there being no illustrations in my edition, which added to my enjoyment of the first novel, and of The Railway Children. All that said, still a good children's story that a reader of any age can enjoy.

24. A Stitch in Time - Penelope Lively

I'm trying to read books with lighter themes during the current emergency. This is a classic children's mystery story written and set in the 1970s. Maria Foster is an 11 year old girl on holiday with her parents in Lyme Regis, staying in old Victorian house, where she hears a swing creaking and a dog barking that no one else can hear. She gets to hear more about Harriet, a girl of her own age, who lived in the house in the nineteenth century, and gets increasingly confused between the events of the two ages, though it isn't entirely clear whether this is a timeslip or a vivid imagination. The story is well written and describes the environment of Lyme Regis, a town I love, very well, particularly the fossils in the rocks, which prompt Maria to see the past as being preserved in the present and, in a sense, still continuing alongside contemporary events. Some of the experiences and feelings of a family holiday in the 1970s at the seaside rang true to me as a child of that decade (though we went elsewhere and my visits to Lyme Regis have all been in my middle age)!

25. A Traveller in Time - Alison Uttley

My third consecutive classic children's book, which I am reading as a lighter contrast to the current grim reality. This is also a timeslip/imaginative work like Penelope Lively's A Stitch in Time, but this time moving between the present day (which on internal evidence must be 1907, though the book was published in 1939) and Elizabethan England of 1582. In both time periods the setting is the fictional estate of Thackers in Derbyshire, a farm in the 20th century and in the 16th century one of the estates of Anthony Babington, a Catholic plotter who sought the release from captivity of Mary, Queen of Scots and her placement on the English throne. Penelope Taberner, staying there with her great aunt and great uncle, soon discovers she can pass from one time period to the other, but cannot control when it happens. The writing is very good, with a great feel for the colour, warmth and detail of life at Thackers in both time periods. This is a moody and atmospheric novel, with the transfers between time periods feeling dream-like/flow of consciousness, such that I sometimes forgot which time period I was in (which I think was the point). The actual plot to rescue Mary from her captivity at nearby (historical) Wingfield manor and hide her at Thackers is only a small part of the narrative. I am fairly sure I read this novel as a child in the late 70s/early 80s (though in my memory it was shorter than its 400 pages here) and also think I watched a 1978 TV adaptation, though I remember no details.

26. Cranford - Elizabeth Gaskell

This is the third of Gaskell's novels I have read, but I didn't like this nearly as much as North and South and Mary Barton, which were rich novels with deep themes and interesting characters. This was a rambling and largely plotless (albeit short) novel about the lives of various ladies in the eponymous fictional town, which is based on Knutsford in Cheshire. The characters didn't really distinguish themselves from each other in my mind, and despite some humorous passages, didn't elicit my interest. A bit disappointing.

27. The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills

I was prompted to read this novel set in and around the stone circle of Avebury in Wiltshire, after listening to the audiobook of Children of the Stones, one of my all time favourite TV series filmed and set there in 1977. This novel had many good elements: two timelines, one set in modern (2005) Avebury, the other in the same place in the late 1930s and into the war; archaeology; the occult; wartime dangers and heroism; a fairly wide cast of characters, some of them real historical figures (explained in the author's note at the end); and exploration of themes such as dementia. The two time zones are connected through a 2005 young woman India, working part time in TV and part time in a cafe, while looking after her grandmother Fran, and Fran's own youth in the 1930s working with archaeologists to restore fallen stones from the circle into their original positions; with appearances and connections with other family members as well. Despite all these elements, I found the narrative a bit rambling and rather too long, and the elements didn't always hang together satisfactorily for me, though the last few chapters of tying things up raised it in my estimation.

28. The Colony - F G Cottam

This is the first of a horror/supernatural trilogy based around what happened to a community who vanished in the early 19th century from a remote (fictional) Hebridean island, and the evidence shown of a haunting on an old film from the 1930s taken by a crofter who lived alone on the island. The characters are all fairly cliched and few of them came across as particularly sympathetic, and some of their actions seemed rather unlikely. There is quite a good sense of mystery and creeping horror as the plot develops, with various members of a modern expedition to the island being bumped off one by one, though the book is fairly short, and the final resolution came rather suddenly with a few loose ends tied up in a "they (the few survivors) lived happily ever after" sort of way. These criticisms aside, the storyline was intriguing, and I like the background context as I am always drawn to stories set on remote islands, so I will read the sequels at some point.

29. The Land Beyond the Sea - Sharon Penman

Taking place in parallel to Penman's sequence of novels about the Angevin rulers of England (Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine; and Richard I the Lionheart), this is a novel about the French Crusader state of Outremer, an aspect of the whole time period which will be less familiar to most readers. The main characters are Baldwin, the leper king of Outremer and Balian d'Ibelin on the European side, as well as Saladin and his brother Adil (Saphadin) on the Saracen side (and who were very well portrayed in the author's Lionheart novel). There is a rich array of other characters, the vast majority of whom are real historical figures, with some necessary differences for narrative purposes (which the author as always explains carefully in an afterword describing the in depth research she has done on the historical background, trying to navigate her way round the various primary and secondary sources on Middle Eastern history and politics which, for the past as for the present, are more often than usually particularly prone to bias one way or the other). There is the usual blend of political infighting, violence and personal relationships, and some sensitive handling of issues - I learned a fair bit about leprosy from this novel which busts some myths about that disease - and a nuanced portrayal of the good and bad points of each side of the cultural and military divide. An absorbing read, though perhaps slightly too long.

30. Seeking Jerusalem - H A Culley

This is the fourth in the author's series of historical novels featuring his fictional ancestors the de Cuillys, a Norman family serving under the Angevin kings of England. As the title suggests, the action transfers to the Third Crusade and King Richard the Lionheart's attempts to recapture Jerusalem from the Saracen leader Saladin. Despite being very interested in and having read a lot of both fiction and nonfiction about this period, I have been lukewarm about this series and this book for me continues that trend. The author is too fond of telling events in narrative form rather than showing them happening through the actions of the characters, almost as though he really wanted to write a nonfictional narrative while working his ancestors into the story. This is to take away nothing from his research, which is sound, but this does not make for the most engaging read as a novel and for this reason, I will probably not read any of his other novels, though they are also set against historical backdrops I find interesting.

31. Wax - Ethel Lina White

This is the second mystery novel I have read by this 1930s author, once bracketed with Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, but now little known. The central plot is a fairly gripping one of a series of murders surrounding a sinister waxworks in the fictional town of Riverpool, with elements of drug taking. However, its impact was diluted for me by large stretches of the narrative focusing on the mundane activities of the inhabitants, which feel distinctively inter-war middle class, and which make the story seem very dated, even more so than its age would suggest, i.e. more outdated than many 19th century books seem to me. This dilution of the central plot meant the story largely didn't work for me, as it lacked the tautly constructed feel of a Christie novel. Perhaps this is why her name has faded, other than as the author of The Wheel Spins, the novel on which the Hitchcock film The Lady Vanishes was based.

32. Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro

I had managed to avoid knowing anything about this Booker-shortlisted 2005 novel or its 2010 film adaptation, so was able to experience reading it in the way it was surely intended, with the real story creeping up on you as you go through it. Initially, it seems to be a simple and rather mundane story of the narrator, Kathy H, reminiscing in adult life about her school days at Hailsham, which appears to be an ordinary English boarding school. After casual references in the text, the reader comes to realise the true nature of the lives of Kathy and her friends Ruth and Tommy at Hailsham, later at the Cottages, and then in life in the outside world. Though the reader has realised it by then, the full uncovering of the horrific situation in the revelatory penultimate chapter is tragic and poignant. This novel defies easy categorisation. Sometimes classified as science fiction, I don't think it's that; the central plot revelation is dystopian, yet the main backdrop is also contemporary England. A thought provoking read.

>39 john257hopper: This novel was my first encounter with Ishiguro. It is a thought provoking read (also turned me into a giant Ishiguro fan and now I read everything he writes).

>40 jfetting: - I will try others of his books in future now that I have read his two best known.

33. Pellucidar - Edgar Rice Burroughs

This is the sequel to the author's better known At the Earth's Core. This tells of the narrator's further adventures in the land inside the hollow Earth, battling against various races of hostile people, allying with others and forging his own subterranean empire along with his wife Dian the Beautiful whom he had rescued in the previous novel. Obviously of its time, but I wouldn't mind as long as there was a better plot, but this lacks the freshness of its predecessor. I did, though, download to my phone a map of Pellucidar from Wikipedia, which helped in following his perambulations.

34. Bad News: What the Headlines Don't Tell Us - Mark Pack

This is a highly readable and entertaining look at the practices of the journalism industry, by a psephologist and podcaster who is also currently interim co-leader of the Liberal Democrats in the absence of a Parliamentary leader of the party. He looks at the all the media (print, TV and online), including at their characteristic usage of language and set phrases, (mis)use of statistics, confusion between causation and correlation, reliance on too few or too unreliable sources and/or not questioning those sources, coverage of only one side of an argument, and many others. His central thesis is that these phenomena are not, for the most part, motivated by political hostility per se, but rather by the tendency of all media, whether high or low profile, left wing, right wing or centrist, to privilege the exciting and dramatic over the mundane, with the level of reliability or truth usually second place, buried under the drama. This may all sound like rather a truism, but he explains how the phenomenon works at different levels of media from local to national, and in different countries, and over time (this is not any means a recent phenomenon). For the British reader, perhaps the most memorable recommendation is to read Daily Mail articles from the end, as the truth behind the overblown drama often lies in the last paragraph. An entertaining and thought provoking read.

35. The Man in the Moone - Francis Godwin

This is a real curiosity: a science fiction novella published in 1638, 80 years before Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, often cited as the first novel in the English language. It purports to be the account of a Spaniard, one Domingo Gonsales who, after various adventures in Spain and on the Atlantic, discovers a new species of swan on St Helena. After experimentation with an ingenious device of pulleys, he discovers the swans can lift him into the air and he becomes the first man to fly. After a naval skirmish with the English, he escapes up a mountain and the swans carry him up into space and to the Moon. The Moon is, of course, peopled with humanoid beings, the Lunars, as well as plants and animals. Many of the former are 30 times bigger than people on Earth, reflecting the length of the lunar day. The plot of the novella, such as it is, more or less stops on the Moon, and the narrator describes the customs and utopian society of the Lunars, including their apparent link with Native Americans. Leaving the Moon, he lands in China and is detained as a magician. He alludes to a second part of his story where he will tell us more, but this does not appear to exist. A fascinating curiosity.

36. The Time Bubble - Jason Ayres

I'm a sucker for a time travel story and this provides some light hearted escapism. It is 2018 and in an unnamed town in the south of England, two A level students, Josh and Charlie discover a time bubble in an underpass below a new railway line being built as part of the HS2 project. After some experimentation, they realise that the amount of time someone disappears into the bubble doubles each time. After the initial novelty and some minor mishaps affecting others, this quickly becomes serious after Charlie's girlfriend Kaylee disappears and he is arrested for her abduction and murder, although she reappears from the bubble after two days. As the timeslip periods continue to double and days turn into weeks, months and years, one of the boys' teachers, Peter Grant, suffering from a rare form of leukemia, has discovered a way to use the bubble to prolong his life in hope of a cure. This makes the last few chapters of the book feel rushed, but these events are filled in in subsequent volumes in this 10 book series. Although the plotline and characters are not exactly deep, I do like most of them (and Peter is a lifelong Doctor Who fan like me!), so I enjoyed this and devoured it in a single day, finishing it shortly after midnight. So much so, in fact, that at the time of writing this the following morning, I've already started reading the second book in the series.

37. Global Cooling - Jason Ayres

This is the first sequel to the author's Time Bubble novel, featuring the same set of main characters during one of the future episodes that featured only briefly near the end of the first book. It is 2029 and the fragments of a destroyed comet head hit the earth and cause devastation. Months later the dust in the atmosphere cuts off the sun's rays and cause an exceptionally cold winter in the northern hemisphere. As a post-apocalyptic novel, this was quite good, but there was much less about time bubbles and anomalies in this one, except near the end, so I didn't enjoy it quite as much as its predecessor. Still good enough to keep me pursuing the series, I feel fairly sure, but not immediately.

38. Frontier Wolf - Rosemary Sutcliff

This novel is part of the author's famous Eagle of the Ninth series, though written over 20 years after the original trilogy and set in between the second and third novel. A young Roman soldier Alexios Flavius Aquila is disgraced after a failed military engagement on the Danube and as a punishment sent to command a garrison on the bleak northern frontier of the Empire, in what is now Scotland. He gradually earns the respect of these "Frontier Wolves", many of whom have been recruited from local tribes. The garrison exists in relative peace with most of the local tribes, partly due to this local recruitment, but this is threatened by the combination of an inspection of the garrison by an overbearing commander who refuses to compromise with the local customs, and the headstrong actions of the younger brother of the local tribal chief. The results: violence and war, with destruction and death on both sides. Aquila sees comrades and allies killed around him and earns the respect of his men, so much so that when the crisis is over, he refuses a promotion and stays on with his fellow Frontier Wolves. This was as beautifully written as everything by Sutcliff. I didn't find it quite as engaging as the original trilogy, though she sets a very high standard, so this is still a very good novel. It could have done with a glossary of place names, as those used here are not the usual Roman locations likely known to most readers of her works.

39. Year Zero: A History of 1945 - Ian Buruma

I read this book in honour of VE Day, rather expecting it to focus at least in part on the last few months of the war in Europe leading up to VE Day. Instead it started from the last few weeks of the war and focused thematically on the main trends from then until the end of the year: the exultation of release from concentration camps, combined with the dire state of the survivors; the cycles of revenge that the end of hostilities gave rise to in the occupied countries; the return, or attempted return, of huge numbers of displaced persons to their homes; attempts to drain the poison of fascism and militarism from Germany and Japan; and the beginnings of the rebuilding of society in all the devastated countries. The first steps towards rebuilding were combined with a limited but very real sense of optimism at the potential for a new start in individual countries and also, at least initially, internationally with the establishment of the United Nations, hence the title of the book. That said, the author concludes prosaically that:

"the sense one gets from newspapers around the world on the last day of 1945 is that most people were too anxious to get on with their own lives to care much about the global news anymore. During a worldwide war, everywhere matters. In times of peace, people look to home."

and

"If there is anything to be gleaned from these glimpses of the global mood on New Year’s Eve, it is that a certain sense of normality was beginning to seep back into the daily lives of people who were lucky enough to be able to lift their heads from the direst misery of the immediate postwar period."

My only criticism would probably be that the author tries to cover too much ground, in too many countries, and I might have preferred it if all the material on, say, Japan had been in one section, rather than scattered thematically throughout the chapters - though this may just be my personal preference.

40. Red Icon - Sam Eastland

This is the sixth novel in the Inspector Pekkala series, which I have read exactly five years from the previous one. I have always felt ambivalent towards this series. While the political backdrop of the Soviet Union in the time of Stalin and around the Second World War makes for an always interesting backdrop, I have often found the plots and central character rather unbelievable. In this case, while these factors are still present, I enjoyed the twists and turns of this convoluted plot connecting a bizarre religious sect the Skoptsy, an icon stolen from Rasputin's flat in 1915 and the nerve gas manufactured by the Nazis towards the end of the war, and felt more affinity for the main characters than normal (I still find Pekkala's associate, Major Kirov, much more believable and likeable than the Inspector himself). In addition to Kirov's name being that the same as that of the Bolshevik leader of Leningrad in the early 1930s, the author continues the irritating habit of naming minor characters after real famous people (a Krupskaya and a Voroshilov in this instance). Despite these flaws, this was a better page turner than most and, as with the previous novel in the series The Beast in the Red Forest, continues the trend whereby, unlike many series, I enjoy this one more the longer it goes on rather than the more usual reverse situation.

41. The Volga Germans - Sigrid Weidenweber

This is the second novel in the author's sweeping trilogy of novels set throughout Russian history from the time of Catherine the Great in the late 18th century. This focuses on fictional families of Volga Germans - German citizens who were enticed to Russia by the Empress to develop virgin lands around the Volga in south west Russia. The prospectus they were sold was false in some respects, but after initial struggles against famine, extreme winter cold and attacks by Cossacks and Kirghiz bandits, they established a thriving and industrious community, seeing themselves in contrast with what they saw as the subservient and lazy Russian peasantry. The bulk of the story's first half concentrates on the early pioneers Martin and Ute Meininger and their son Christoph, who establish a small community out of almost nothing in the 1760s and subsequent decades. Much of the 19th century is more lightly skipped over, but then the action focuses in dramatic detail on the late 19th century and early 20th, against the backdrop of the growing revolutionary movement. Ironically, one factor that united Tsarists and revolutionaries alike in the early 20th century, even long before the First World War, was anti-Germanism and the community suffered greatly. I love a soundly historically based family saga and this is good and fairly dramatically told, though the author sometimes offers information dumps on cultural and historical issues rather than working them into the plot, albeit not to the same extent as in the first novel, Catherine.

These good points notwithstanding, I must criticise the novel in a number of respects. There are some historical errors and over simplifications, both with the real history (date of Nicholas II's coronation, details of the Russian revolutionary movement) and the history of the fictional families, e.g. many discrepancies between the dates in the family tree at the front of the novel and the evidence within the text, which are just plain sloppy. Some readers may not care about, or even notice these mistakes, but more serious are the many typos and format problems, especially random chunks of text in bold. The contents list ignores the later chapter titles and breaks. I assume these formatting errors are the reason why this series is no longer available in the Kindle Store. I hope the publisher rectifies these errors and makes the books available again, as I would still love to read the final volume From Gulag to Freedom.

42. Death at the Frost Fair - Karen Charlton

I love the characters and set up in this series and it was great to see and preorder this novella back in April, so soon after the last full length novel was published in February. This concerns a death on the famous frost fair on the river Thames in 1814, the very last time the river froze over. It is as usual colourful and full of the warmth and vitality of the very three dimensional characters. I'm docking it half a point as I wasn't entirely happy with the deception our heroes played at the end on their colleagues about aspects of the case.

43. A Life; or The Humble Truth - Guy de Maupassant

I loved this simply told story about the life of a young aristocratic woman, Jeanne. After being brought up in a convent, she leaves at age 17 and quickly meets and falls in love with Julien de Lamare. But after a romantic holiday in Corsica (with some lovely descriptions of the island in the early 19th century, when its most famous son was still languishing in remote exile on St Helena), disillusion rapidly sets in. Jeanne must come to terms with Julien's changed character and her shocking discovery that he has fathered a child by her maid, Rosalie. She discovers around the same time that she is herself pregnant, and gives birth to a son, Paul, whom she dotes on. Later on, Julien also has an affair with the wife of another couple they both know, whose cuckolded husband wreaks a terrible revenge on the pair. Finally Paul deserts her, runs up huge debts and at the end of the novel, reveals by letter that he has married, but his wife has died, leaving him with a baby daughter that he expects her to raise. It all sounds like very soap opera stuff, but told in a very matter of fact French way. Good stuff.

44. Sherlock Holmes and the Lady in Black - June Thomson

This is a full length Sherlock Holmes pastiche novel by an author who has produced several sets of short stories in this genre, which I have mostly liked. This novel, however, was disappointing. Despite starting quite strongly with good descriptions of the Sussex coast, where Holmes has retired to keep bees, and what looked like a decent air of mystery being built up, it never really developed and the plot resolution around tensions between the generations of a local family was not really a mystery at all and quite mundane, albeit sad. There were discrepancies between dates in the background detail in some cases and I was also irritated, as I was in one of the author's short stories, about a situation where Holmes was speculating about future women bishops and Prime Ministers in a way that neither he nor almost certainly anyone else could plausibly have foreseen in 1908 - just too knowing and jarring. Finally, there seem to be rather a lot of cars around for 1908, even in descriptions of events taking place many years earlier than that date.

45. The Adventure of the Lion's Mane - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

This was one of Conan Doyle's last Sherlock Holmes stories, published in The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes in 1926. It is one of only two narrated by the great detective himself, with Watson nowhere in sight - this is set after Holmes's retirement to keep bees on the Sussex Downs. The last Holmes stories Conan Doyle wrote are usually considered the weakest, but this is a good one involving an apparent attempted grisly murder in a seaside cove which turns out to have an unexpected and more natural cause. Much better than the pastiche novel The Lady in Black, which I have just read and is a sequel to this story.

46. Everything Flows - Vasily Grossman

This is a short powerful novel by the Soviet author more famous for his epic masterpiece Life and Fate set during the Second World War and the last years of Stalin. Even more than that masterpiece, this is a searing indictment of Soviet totalitarianism, and its roots in Russian history and culture. In many ways, it is not really a novel at all; while the characters are fictional, the situations are all too real. It is the mid 1950s and Ivan Grigoryevich returns to Moscow after 30 years in the Gulag during the mass release of prisoners in the comparatively more liberal period after Stalin's death. He is welcomed by his cousin Nikolai and the latter's wife, but they cannot understand his outlook and feelings, nor he theirs; it is though they are from different worlds. He also comes across Pinegin, who originally informed on him and who is shocked at Ivan's survival. Fleeing his cousin's flat in Moscow, he returns to his home city Leningrad and forms a brief attachment to his landlady Anna Sergeyevna, a former activist during collectivisation of agriculture in Ukraine in the early 1930s. There are some shocking passages in the book around the politically instigated famine of that time, and around the sufferings of wives of those arrested as "enemies of the people". All of this makes this book sound depressing and, of course, at many levels it is, but it also encapsulates Grossman's belief, expressed through Ivan, in the inevitable fundamental victory of human freedom. I would say that really to appreciate this book, the reader really needs a fairly detailed knowledge of Russian history and culture, and it is unlikely to appeal to the wider readership that the more narrative-driven Life and Fate does. But it is equally, though in a different way, a masterpiece of 20th century Russian and world literature.

>55 john257hopper: I have just finished Stalingrad, which was originally published during the Stalinist era. Vasily Grossman had to make many compromises with the censors. I have also read Everything Flows, which is an indictment of Stalinism, bravely uncompromising. Grossman had certainly left Socialist Realism behind.

For light relief I enjoyed An Armenian Sketchbook.

I bought Stalingrad the other day, but can't quite steel myself to embark on it yet.

47. Moscow Dreams - Julia Goussev

This short novel tells the story of a group of school friends in Moscow around the time of the coup against Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in August 1991 and the amazing events in the following months and years leading up to and following the end of the Soviet Union on the last day of that year. These dramatic events, though, are simply the backdrop to their adolescent anxieties about boy/girlfriends, passing their exams and making decisions about their futures, similar to dilemmas faced by millions of other teenagers across the world, albeit with a twist of a formerly totalitarian society at a time of dramatic transition, with their choices initially being comparatively narrow, but now much wider but very uncertain. Not a deep read, but a decent page turner.

48. The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman - John and Carol Garrard

This is a magnificently well researched biography of the great Soviet Jewish author and journalist, best known for his masterpiece of the war on the Eastern Front and the Holocaust, Life and Fate, unpublished in his lifetime, but finally published in his home country during the glasnost era in 1988, nearly a quarter of a century after his death; and for his war reportage directly from the front line of the Battle of Stalingrad. The biography traces his life from his relatively privileged beginnings in a middle class Jewish family in Berdichev in Ukraine before the 1917 Revolution, his days as a chemistry student, then his decision to throw that up to become a writer, his first published piece being about his hometown in 1929. He published short stories, articles and a couple of novels before the war, but it was during that titanic conflict that he became well known, being, in modern parlance, embedded with the Red Army fighting in Stalingrad. There he saw for himself at first hand the heroism of ordinary soldiers, but also the consequences of foolish and even criminal political decisions that cost hundreds of thousands of soldiers' lives, for example through Stalin's order that no army should ever retreat, even when it made logistical sense to do so, thus allow 1 million soldiers to be encircled at Kiev for example, who were then either killed or taken captive. When the tide of war had turned, he was also with the Red Army on their march towards Berlin, seeing for himself the devastation and effects of the Holocaust at Treblinka (his article "The Hell of Treblinka" was used as evidence at the Nuremburg trials), and in particular the mass murder of almost all the Jewish population of Berdichev, including his own mother, in September 1941. He exposed the shocking collaboration between the Nazis and many of the Jewish people's own Ukrainian neighbours, exploiting the centuries old anti-Semitism in eastern Europe, and taking advantage of Ukrainian rage against the Soviet authorities due to the Terror Famine of a decade earlier.

The post war years are, in the main, his struggle with the Soviet literary bureaucracy to get his works published, even in censured form to remove aspects too sensitive to be written about, such as: Russian and Ukrainian anti-Semitism; the specific Jewish nature of the Holocaust (Jewish victims were routinely described simply as "peaceful Soviet citizens", thus removing the racial dimension from their extermination); the criminal waste of Red Army lives due to poor political and military strategy and decision-making; and his growing realisation that Nazi Germany and the Soviet system were mirror images of each other in many ways, a theme most starkly explored in his final work, Everything Flows. After his comparatively early death of stomach cancer in 1964, he was virtually forgotten both in his home country and abroad for over 20 years, though punctuated by the publication abroad of Everything Flows and Life and Fate from smuggled out manuscripts. Only in the last days of the Soviet Union were his works published there and he belatedly received the recognition he deserved. The authors interviewed his surviving second wife and stepson and others in the early 1990s to supplement their research, making this a very rounded account of the life and work of this man who viewed himself not as distinctively Russian or Jewish, but as a product of Russian and European humanism. He was a man who "considered extreme nationalism and ethnic violence the most tragic aspects of human history, and particularly of twentieth century history because they could now be implemented with the power of modern technology. He saw no point in fighting to assert one's national origin and to destroy other nationalities, but he treasured the individual, nurtured by a specific national culture". This is a great read for anyone interested in Russian or European literature and history, or in the central ideological fault lines in the twentieth century world.

>59 john257hopper: I will seek this out. It is listed in the bibliography of Robert Chandler's Stalingrad. I had also been considering Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century by Alexandra Popoff, but there are no reviews on LT yet.

Also on my list for this year are Anthony Beevor's Stalingrad and Svetlana Alexievich's Last Witnesses.

>60 pamelad: - I have had a look at this as well, though it's a bit pricey at the moment (and I need a break so am reading some different and lighter stuff).

49. The Iron Horse - Edward Marston

This is the fourth novel in the Railway Detective series set in the mid 19th century, at the time when the railways were revolutionising the economy and social life of Britain. This story starts with the discovery of a severed head in a hatbox at Crewe station, and concerns the murderously bitter rivalry between the trainers of the leading horses contending to win the 1854 Derby. I quite like the central characters Inspector Colbeck and Sergeant Leeming, though the former is a bit too irritatingly perfect and the latter a rather cliched stolid sidekick of a plod - they don't really feel like three dimensional characters. The scene of the actual Derby race itself in the final chapter, with people of all classes able to travel from far away on the new-fangled excursion trains to enjoy the occasion, reminded me of the crowds travelling to the bare-knuckle fight in the second novel, The Excursion Train. The dialogue in this one seemed a bit more natural than the sometimes rather stilted dialogue in the earlier novels. Overall, a decent engaging page turner

50. The Academy of Secrets - S J Parris

My 50th book of the year :)

This is a short story in the author's series of mysteries featuring the historical Giordano Bruno. In the main series, in adulthood, fleeing from the Inquisition, he has become involved in variously intricately plotted mysteries in England and France, but this novella sees him as a much younger man in his Neapolitan priory of San Domenico Maggiore. Already interested in matters of science and philosophy of which the Church disapproves, he finds fellow intellectuals meeting in secret, and also finds more earthly pleasures. The only mystery comes right at the end, but this is as well written as the author's full length mysteries.

51. Shirley - Charlotte Bronte

This was the second novel by Charlotte Bronte, but I didn't find this anywhere near as interesting as Jane Eyre (or indeed the other three Bronte novels by Emily and Anne). While set in an interesting historical period, the economic depression following the Napoleonic wars and the era of Luddite opposition to industrialisation, this was only a minor part of the backdrop and nowhere near as vivid as the description of industrial strife and economic hardship in Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South, which I read last autumn. The title character was not really the most prominent one (she wasn't mentioned until nearly a third of the way through) and I can't say I found any of the main quartet especially interesting, though there was some amusing sharp dialogue between Shirley and her uncle. The minor character of schoolboy Martin Yorke was also quite funny. Overall, definitely my least favourite Bronte novel.

52. The Brontes - Brian Wilks

This is a decent account of the lives of the Bronte family, from Patrick's origins as the son of poor peasant farmers in Ireland, to the tragically short lives and literary careers of his famous trio of daughters, all of whom he outlived, but who for the most part emerge here as three distinctive individuals. The Brontes' story is a wonderful soap opera of characters in the relatively liberal atmosphere of the Haworth parsonage, with the early deaths of so many of them, played out against a background of poverty and disease in the wider community in early 19th century Yorkshire. Unfortunately, this book was littered with typos, including inaccurate punctuation that irritated me considerably.

53. Gray Mountain - John Grisham

This Grisham novel is set just after the collapse of investment bank Lehman Brothers that led to the global crash in 2008. Samantha Kofer is a young lawyer unhappily working for another New York legal firm which is feeling the pinch in the wake of the collapse, and is furloughed for a year with the uncertain assurance of a new job at the firm in a year's time if she does a period as an unpaid intern a long way from her home in the Big Apple. The internship she gets is working for a legal aid firm in Brady, Virginia that specialises in "black lung" cases, cases of miners with lung diseases through exposure to coal dust, and other cases where people have been killed due to negligence by unscrupulous mining companies, including poisoning of water supplies, and the destruction of whole mountains through strip-mining for coal. She gradually acquires a taste for helping "the little guy" in these cases, as opposed to her previous corporate clients. She also acquires new friends and enemies as some of the companies play dirty, both legally and physically in defending their claims. A good page turner with good themes of justice, though without the shining brilliance of some of Grisham's earlier classics.

54. A Web of Silk - Fiona Buckley

This is the seventeenth book in the Ursula Stannard series of Elizabethan mysteries. As before, I love the regular characters whose lives I have been following over the last 14 years of my life (and I think about 22 of theirs, though I'm not entirely sure). I found the plot of the last novel, The Reluctant Assassin, implausible and I'm afraid I found this one equally so. The half brother of the conspirator Ursula exposed in that novel now wants to take revenge on her, by setting her up to commit a theft through a ruse entirely dependent on her making a foolish misjudgement, which she duly does, despite being adamantly opposed to the course of action leading up to this until the previous page. The other central villain was a more interestingly ambiguous character, though.

55. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

This 2001 novel set in Barcelona after the civil war is apparently the most successful novel in Spanish publishing history since Don Quixote. It rather defies easy categorisation, being part historical fiction, part thriller/mystery, part gothic mystery, and part love story. I enjoyed it overall, but I did think it lost its way a bit after the strong initial establishing of the basic mystery around the wonderful concept of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, where ten year old Daniel chooses a book which will affect his whole life. I found the story within a story realisation a little confusing at times. Overall, very well written and it probably deserves many of its accolades. I only realised after starting this that the author had died of cancer aged only 55 a week or so before I bought the book.

56. Lady Audley's Secret - M E Braddon

Victorian novelist Mary Elizabeth Braddon is little known today, but in her time she was a prolific writer of sensation novels, a la Wilkie Collins, and this is this is her best known novel. I really enjoyed it and it contains a heady mix of powerful themes, bigamy, changes of identity, treachery, murder, revenge, insanity and domestic abuse. That said, like many Victorian novels, the characters are rather one dimensional and sometimes hard to distinguish, especially the female ones. Atmospherically written, on the strength of this, and some of her short ghost stories I have read in various collections over the years, I would read more novels by Braddon.

57. Cast the First Stone - C B Hanley

This is the sixth book in the author's series of historical mysteries set in the early 13th century. Our hero Edwin Weaver, scribe to Earl Warenne of Surrey, is back in his home town of Conisbrough in South Yorkshire after his traumatic experiences at the naval battle of Sandwich in the previous book. When the unpopular local bailiff Ivo is murdered, many of Edwin's fellow townspeople blame one of the French masons who had been working on the bailiff's house. Edwin's investigations are frustrated by the local desire to pin blame on the foreigners in their midst, whatever the evidence, a sad trait in some communities even today. But things turn nastier for Edwin when his belief that the mason Denis is innocent causes some of the local community, even people Edwin has known for years, to turn on him and he is himself convicted by a local jury of complicity in the murder. Then there is a further killing of a member of Edwin's family and he must race against time to find the real culprit before the sheriff of Yorkshire arrives to confirm the local verdict. Needless to say, he succeeds but only very narrowly. I like Edwin and his wife Alys and the local villagers are well described and quite interesting characters - this is a series I have enjoyed over the past five years. What slightly brought this down for me was that the original murder victim Ivo the bailiff was deeply unpopular and many people had cause to resent him, so would his death really be greeted by the near unanimous foreigner-baiting depicted here? In reality, it seems to me many would have privately welcomed his demise, and not been so keen to find a (right or wrong) culprit.

58. The Secret Lives of Introverts: Inside Our Hidden World - Jenn Granneman

As a lifelong introvert, there was much in this book with which I could identify: the need for solitary downtime to recharge after the over-stimulation of work or social interaction; the stress caused by a dissipation of my mental energies in too many directions simultaneously; the preference for a small number of high quality interactions, rather than a large number of meaningless ones; the preference for meaningful conversations over small talk; avoidance of conflict due to the over-stimulation it inevitably causes. Despite this, there was a little too much repetition in this book, and I did not find it as good or inspirational as Susan Cain's Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking, which I read seven years ago. Worth a read, though, for anyone interested in introversion/extroversion, or anyone whose significant other or close family member is different from oneself in this respect.

59. The Shepherd's Life: A Tale of the Lake District - James Rebanks

This is a memoir by a Lake District shepherd who has, perhaps surprisingly, become a Twitter sensation in recent years. This memoir of the farming experiences of himself, father and grandfather is a passionate defence of a way of life that he sees as a continuity of a shepherding tradition going back centuries and even millennia (his own family has apparently farmed the same land for 600 years). He writes movingly and evocatively of the timelessness of the fells and the sense of purpose of a life in tune with the rhythms of nature (the book is divided into four sections by the seasons). Yet, despite this positive view, he does sometimes come across, particularly in the early part of the book, as somewhat bitter towards the rest of the world, basically anyone not part of this farming tradition. He had a troubled schooling, not seeing the point in trying as he was a part of this continuity of the farming tradition, and stubbornly resisting his teachers' desire to "better" himself. Later on, though, he took A levels in evening classes and then a history degree at Oxford, before returning to his farm. He certainly represents a strong ambassador for a particular way of life, though I feel ambivalent about some of the ways in which he expresses this.

60. The Fortress - Hugh Walpole

This is the third novel in the main series of the author's Herries Chronicles, following the lives of the various branches of the Herries family in the Lake District in the 19th century. The focus here is the bitter feud between the two branches of the family headed by Judith Paris and Walter Herries, epitomised by the construction by the latter of the eponymous house, on high ground overlooking the house of Judith's branch of the family. Like its predecessor, this gives a wonderful feel for the ebb and flow of the lives and generations in the beautiful and majestic setting of the Lakes, where I am currently on holiday for the fourth consecutive year. The action of the novel takes place over a period of just over half a century, with a lot of change in the world outside, though this doesn't come across as clearly in affecting the lives of the characters as the political and economic changes in the previous volume (though Judith's son Adam joins the Chartists). These are wonderful novels, full of colourful characters and interesting incidents, and I look forward to the final volume on my next holiday here next year.

61. Fell Murder: A Lancashire Mystery - E C R Lorac

This is a well plotted murder mystery set on a fell farm in Lancashire, just south of the Lake District. An elderly curmudgeonly farmer is killed with a shotgun on his own farm and the local police call in Inspector Macdonald from CID. Although an outsider, his Scottish background and understanding of farming enable him to penetrate the locals' reticence. I liked the author's writing style and, while inevitably feeling slightly dated as it was published in 1944, came across to me as quite fresh in the hands of this author compared to some other golden age crime writers, helped by the timeless farming setting. I will seek out more by this author. (The book also includes a short story Live Wire, about a criminal whose cunning robbery backfires on him).

62. Lakeland: A Personal Journey - Hunter Davies

This is a very enjoyable light-hearted exploration of the Lake District by this Cumbrian author (whose biography of Wordsworth I read last year), covering the places, people and traditions that have made up this beautiful corner of England, especially since it first became well known to outsiders as a place to visit for leisure in the 1770s. Davies loves this area, where he has lived for much of his life, though he is no diehard opponent of change as some others are, commenting that "the warning of Lakeland being ruined has been around for 200 years, when Wordsworth was moaning about white-washed houses and all the larches and fir trees being planted.....It is a living place, not a museum." A pleasurable read on my return from holidaying there, with some interesting references to pursue on my next visit.

63. Whose Body?: Lord Peter Wimsey Book 1 - Dorothy L Sayers

This is the first Dorothy Sayers novel I have read and I am fairly sure there won't be another one. I found the central protagonist irritating; obviously meant to be Woodhousian, this personality didn't work for me as a sleuth and he isn't a patch on Hercule Poirot or Sherlock Holmes (though he invokes the latter on a couple of occasions). I thought the plot was just absurdly convoluted and completely unconvincing as recounted in the post-arrest confession of the murderer. Disappointing.

64. A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy - Laurence Sterne

This 250 year old novel was a fictional satire on a more serious non-fictional account of a journey through France and Italy by Sterne's contemporary Tobias Smollett. The satire is in the fact that the traveller here (Yorick, a minor character in Sterne's most famous novel The Life and Adventures of Tristram Shandy) is entirely uninterested in seeing the famous sights, more in meeting and bickering with a motley collection of monks, innkeepers and aristocrats and flirting with various women he meets. Sterne died in 1768 before completing this book, so Yorick never actually makes it to Italy, and the novel finishes with him awkwardly discussing sleeping arrangements with a lady and her maid when there are only two proper beds available. Quite funny, with a few slightly rambling diversions.

65. Doctor Who: The Sands of Time - Justin Richards

This is a spin-off Doctor Who novel, a sequel to Pyramids of Mars, the classic Tom Baker TV story from 1975. This features the fifth Doctor, played by Peter Davison, accompanied by Tegan and Nyssa. After a dramatic start in a late Victorian British Museum where Nyssa is kidnapped, the action takes place across several different time zones, in London and in Egypt, featuring an attempt by Nephthys, Sutekh's sister-wife to restore herself to power and wreak havoc. The action was quite varied and felt very reassuringly "Doctor Who-ish", unlike some spin-off novels, though I found the flitting between time zones and some of the plotting sometimes a bit confusing.

66. The Mirror and the Light - Hilary Mantel

After many years of waiting, here it is at last, the final volume in Hilary Mantel's double Booker Prize-winning trilogy fictionalising the life of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII's chief minister during the 1530s, a crucial, turbulent and fascinating period in English history. Often when final volumes in series appear a long time after their predecessors, expectations have been ratcheted up to such an extent that the reality fails to live up to those expectations. In this case, though I think this is at least as good as Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, and in some ways better. Mantel's writing style is rich and evocative and sometimes veers into streams of consciousness, which isn't everyone's cup of tea, but those who have read the first two volumes will know what to expect and if they have liked it, should like this also. Cromwell is a fascinating historical figure as one of the very few personalities in the pre-modern era to rise from very humble origins (son of a Putney blacksmith) to a post that was effectively prime minister, albeit that post would not exist for nearly another two centuries. Like all leaders of the time, he committed acts that would now be universally regarded as cruel and unjust persecution, but he also showed a modern belief in things like supporting the poor and spending money on infrastructure projects. A brilliant trilogy about a fascinating historical personage.

67. The Story of the Amulet - Edith Nesbit

This is the third volume in Nesbit's trilogy featuring the eponymous five children from the first book and their magical adventures with the Psammead, a creature they find in the sand in the countryside in the first book. This follows the same pattern, with the children's ill-considered wishes landing them in all sorts of scrapes, this time travelling back in time to a variety of ancient civilisations, Egypt (in a couple of different time periods), Babylon, ancient Britain (briefly) at the time of Julius Caesar's abortive invasion of 55 BC, and even Atlantis at the time of its destruction. The changes of scene keep up the pace quite well, and this is a good book, though perhaps the formula was wearing a bit thin by this time.

68. Henry VIII - William Shakespeare

This is one of the later and less well known of the Bard's plays (am reading it in the aftermath of The Mirror and the Light), and was co-written with another dramatist, John Fletcher. It telescopes the events of over 10 years between the execution of Buckingham for alleged treason to the birth of Elizabeth, taking in the fall of Wolsey and the King's divorce from Katherine of Aragon. A decent play for anyone knowledgeable enough about the Tudors to spot the historical errors! The play is perhaps most famous for being performed at the time the original Globe theatre burned down in 1613 due to a cannon being set off.

69. Realm - James Jackson

This is a richly written novel of the Spanish Armada, based on the real historical events, but centred around the rivalry between the fictional Christian Hardy, an agent of Sir Francis Walsingham, creator of England's first real secret service; and the Spanish agent "Realm" an Englishman totally devoted to the Spanish Catholic cause, after his parents died during the Northern uprising against Queen Elizabeth nearly 20 years earlier. The novel, like its successor Treason which I read three years ago (not realising it was part of a series), it starkly portrays the poisonous religious rivalry and cruelly ruthless treatment of Catholics in England and Protestants in Spain. There are some horrific set piece scenes. Despite the Armada (obviously) being defeated, Hardy finishes the novel having lost several family members and dear friends.

70. The Man in the Brown Suit - Agatha Christie

This is one of the less well known Christie novels from her early period in the mid 1920s. For much of the time it doesn't feel like a traditional Christie novel, given its setting mostly at sea and in South Africa. The narrator is Anne Bedingfield, daughter of a palaeontologist, who witnesses a man falling to his death on the London tube tracks after being frightened by someone behind her. She gets involved in the machinations of an international criminal gang smuggling diamonds, led by a mysterious individual known only as The Colonel. The usual blend of false identities and red herrings which is quite good fun.

71.City at World's End - Edmond Hamilton

This is a post-apocalyptic time travel story, written in 1951 at the height of cold war fear of nuclear annihilation. Middletown, in some unspecified part of America, suffers a super-atomic bomb, but instead of being destroyed it is propelled forward in time billions of years to a time when a dead Earth is revolving round a red giant of a sun. They find remnants of a long vanished civilisation. But then the dying Earth is visited by aliens, and the Middletowners are faced with various dilemmas striking to the heart of their existence as the last survivors of the human race. This is a classic novel of ideas and concepts, rather than memorable characters, with interesting reflections on what it means to be human.

72. Execution - S J Parris

This is the sixth novel in this series of murder mysteries featuring historical Italian religious renegade Giordano Bruno, a refugee from the Inquisition in his Italian homeland in the 1580s, now back from his French sojourn in the previous novel, Conspiracy, and again working for spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham in England. This mystery centres around the murder of a young woman involved with the Babington conspiracy, a plot by a group of rather naive and idealistic Catholics to spring Mary, former Queen of Scots from imprisonment and place her on the English throne after assassinating Queen Elizabeth. The group of conspirators is already riven by rivalries and double agents and Bruno must play the part of a Spanish priest offering the support of his supposed native country for the plot. The eventual reasons for the murder stretch into the personal lives of the characters beyond the religious politics of the time and this is the usual richly written brew of colourful characters and sometimes rather far-fetched plot developments. Another good entry in the series.

73. The Notting Hill Mystery - Charles Warren Adams

This is a very early detective novel, published in 1865, though the sleuth is actually an insurance broker, not an actual detective or policeman, investigating an insurance scam that turns out to have been the motive for a series of murders. The very nineteenth century phenomenon of mesmerism also plays a strong part. The entire novel is told not through a plot narrative, but through extracts from interviews and depositions for a court case, giving the novel a slightly post-modern feel. Indeed it is almost like a series of lectures on how to make logical deductions, a tour de force that Sherlock Holmes (not created for over 20 years after this novel's publication) would have been proud of, but a feature which he decried as lacking from Watson's human interest-focused stories of his exploits. An interesting curiosity if you stick with it, but not really surprising that later detective novels didn't follow this style.

74. The Woman in the Water - Will Barton

I really enjoyed this murder mystery set in the beautiful city of Bath in the 1760s, at the time of the construction of the magnificent Georgian streets and squares that grace it to this day. The plot was rather uneven, and the final resolution felt rather rushed in the last 20 pages or so, but this was beautifully written, with some colourful and sympathetic characters and I really enjoyed it. Although the subtitle suggests this is the start of a series, the author seems not to have written any further books yet (this was published in 2016), but I hope he does.

75. The King Without a Kingdom - Maurice Druon

This is the seventh and final novel in Druon's Accursed Kings series of novels set in 14th century France. The previous six novels were a splendid series of novels full of drama, conflict and scandal, a colourful Medieval soap opera of fighting kings and their families and nobles, marred on occasion by the author's tendency to "infodump" chunks of history instead of showing it through the plot. This final volume of the series jumps forward over 25 years to the reign of John II and the run up to the Battle of Poitiers. The style is very different and is told in the first person by the Cardinal of Perigord, who is travelling across France and between the lines trying to make peace between French and English. This unfortunately leads to even more infodumps, whole chapters of it, especially in the first part and not much of a feeling that I was reading a novel. So a bit of a disappointing close to the series.

76. 1356 - Bernard Cornwell

This Bernard Cornwell novel is set during the run up to, and course of the Battle of Poitiers, a famous English victory during the conflict with France later known as the Hundred Years War. Slightly annoyingly when coming across Thomas of Hookton, I realised that this is a sequel to the author's Grail Quest trilogy, of which I read the first volume Harlequin nearly 20 years ago but never felt inclined to read the rest. This doesn't matter too much in terms of following the plot though, which centres around the quest for La Malice, an ancient sword supposedly used by the apostle Peter when defending Jesus in the Garden of Gesthemane. Like nearly all Cornwell novels, this is full of set piece battle scenes with graphic descriptions of violence and bloodshed. The novel ends with the massive English victory against the odds, and the capture of the French King John and his younger son Philippe (the Dauphin Charles was sent away from the battlefield earlier). A slightly abrupt end, perhaps, though the author's customary historical note fills in usefully on subsequent events

77. Isaac Asimov Must Live!: A Science Fiction Play in Three Acts - Martin A Ramos

This is a short light-hearted story written in play script - a 100 year old Isaac Asimov, still hale and hearty and about to embark on another addition to the Foundation series, meets some real humaniform robots who challenge him to change the Laws of Robotics; then he meets some aliens who want to use his brain to write an actual Encyclopedia Galactica. Very funny if you know Asimov's works.

78. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

This is my first reading of this novel which is one of the two most famous of Austen's novels, along with Pride and Prejudice (which I have not managed to finish, though I will try it again some time). This is the story of the lives and loves of the Dashwood sisters, Marian and Elinor and, while I enjoyed the first half, my interest tailed off in the middle, and only resumed slightly further towards the end. While I hugely admire Austen's clever use of language and her place as one of the giants of English literature is fully deserved, those of her novels I most enjoy are Northanger Abbey as a pastiche of the Gothic horror genre, Mansfield Park for its more unusual characters and scenarios and Persuasion for its setting in Bath and Lyme Regis, two towns I love.

79. Little House in the Big Woods - Laura Ingalls Wilder

I read this book and several of it successors as a child in the 1970s, but it is nice to re-read them as an adult with a different perspective. It is a perspective on a lifestyle very different from anything we have experienced, where Laura and her sisters, Pa and Ma live in the log house in the middle of nowhere, with very few interactions beyond occasional visits to and from various uncles, aunts and cousins, living their lives according to the seasons and the dictates of nature, and growing or making most of what they need to live. It provides a welcome contrast and escape from current reality. These editions are beautifully illustrated with the original Garth Williams illustrations.

80. The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi, 1857 - William Dalrymple

This is an extremely well researched and highly readable account of the decline and fall of the 300 year old Mughal Empire in India during the Uprising of 1857. While I had owned this book for over seven years, I was only now inspired to read it by listening to the author being interviewed on Iain Dale's Book Club podcast about his latest book on the history of the East India Company.

The history of British involvement in India had already been very long and involved by the early 19th century. The British authorities in India had generally quite good relations with the ruling Mughal dynasty (a Muslim dynasty ruling the predominantly Hindu country) at this stage, and a number of British men, the so called "White Mughals" had become totally imbued in Indian culture, speaking the language, and adopting customs and costumes, and marrying Indian women, and sometimes converting to Islam. However, by the 1840s and 50s this atmosphere had changed. An increasing atmosphere of Christian evangelism has taken root both in British India and in Britain itself, and they had virtually said that the Mughal Emperor Zafar would be the last of his dynasty. This was matched by an increasingly radical Islamic Jihadi influence which rejected the tolerant Sufi ways of the Mughal court, which was a centre of culture and learning that had fostered generally positive Hindu-Muslim relations.

The uprising itself was actually led by high caste Hindu sepoys (soldiers in the British army in India) on 11 May 1857, due to proximate reasons of harsh military discipline being imposed. However, it was neither the "single coherent mutiny or patriotic national war of independence beloved of Victorian or Indian nationalist historiography". There was a mixture of nationalist and religious motives, exacerbated to some extent by socio-economic discontent, though this was not a major factor. There were horrible massacres of many Europeans including women and children, sowing the seeds for future appalling vengeance. At the same time, the "mutineers" killed those Hindus who had converted to Christianity, while sparing Europeans who had converted to Islam.

There were many reasons why the Uprising failed. Zafar himself held an equivocal position - he tried to assume leadership of it up to a point, seeing it as an opportunity to restore Mughal greatness, but at the same time he was repelled by the degradations and killing of obviously innocent European people being perpetrated by his subjects in his beloved Delhi. The Indians' strategy and tactics were poor, with a lack of co-ordination between sepoy regiments, and failure to grasp the importance of a potential attack on the besieging British rear on the Ridge outside Delhi. The British had much superior sources of intelligence and also the support of the Sikhs, due to their historic enmity with Hindus, despite the Sikhs' much more recent wars with Britain. Then, as now, the Gurkhas were also a key part of the British army. The general chaos was exacerbated by the activities of local tribesmen outside Delhi indiscriminately robbing everyone on all sides.

The British recaptured Delhi in September 1857. The British desire for vengeance at the reverse to imperial fortunes had tragically been sharpened by the murders of their fellow countrymen, women and children, and by what later turned out to be entirely false reports of rapes of European women by the sepoys. However, what followed was effectively near genocide - indiscriminate killing of unarmed non-combatants, women and children, and even in the cases of adult men, generally with no attempt at distinguishing between the guilt and innocence of individuals. Even totally pro-British loyalist Indians, who had assumed they would be safe, were often killed out of hand. There was also much destruction of Delhi, and the elimination of many symbols of Mughal culture, over and above the natural destruction that is an inevitable part of any military conflict. This ghastly situation came about, as it so often does, by an extreme process of "othering" and seeing the opponent as less human - the British came to see even women and children as "not human beings, but fiends, or, at best, wild beasts deserving only the death of dogs".

As for Zafar, the last Mughal himself, he was captured and many members of his family systematically hunted down and killed. A peacable and cultured 82 year old, he was subjected to an ignominious show trial, where he was absurdly accused of being the leader of a vast Muslim conspiracy aimed at replacing the British Empire and exiled, together with members of his immediate family, in fairly primitive conditions in Burma, where he died five years later.

Despite this sorry story of death and destruction, cooler heads prevailed in the end and much of the more extreme levelling and destruction of Delhi did not happen, with influential voices (including, back in Britain, Disraeli) calling for new approaches. The 250 year old East India Company was wound up, so that India would "at least now be ruled by a properly constituted colonial government rather than a rapacious multinational acting at least partly in the interests of its shareholders." The Mughal legacy was largely forgotten, and the later wellsprings of Indian nationalism that led to independence 90 years later came from new generations often educated in Europe and with more cosmopolitan attitudes.

A great read, just a pity my edition lacked the photographs. Full of very useful notes and a comprehensive bibliography, maps and dramatis personae.

81. At Risk - Stella Rimington

This is a re-read of the first of the author's series of intelligence-based thrillers, a theme she has been more than anyone else qualified to pursue as the ex-Director General of MI5. The plot was as gripping as I remember it, with a stark depiction of the mindset of terrorists utterly convinced of the rightness of their chosen course of action, though again I was slightly disappointed that the connection between the two terrorists relies on a massively remote coincidence. Liz Carlyle is partly autobiographical, though the author claims the other characters and plot are all imaginary. Nevertheless, the author's own background means that this is a very well written and authentic thriller.

82. Sherlock Holmes and the Tangled Skein - David Stuart Davies

The two greatest literary creations of the late 19th century meet in this pastiche where Sherlock Holmes confronts Dracula, and which is also a sequel to Hound of the Baskervilles. As such it carries a lot of literary weight and stories can sometimes sag under such weight. This one works for the most part, though, with a good sense of mystery and horror and an authentic Holmesian feeling. Unlike Hound of the Baskervilles and also Conan Doyle's much less well known Adventure of the Sussex Vampire, the plot explanations here were genuinely supernatural, not cases where villains were exploiting the supernatural to hide their crimes. A good read, though I'm not generally a fan of literary creations meeting each other.

83. The Buddha of Suburbia - Hanif Kureishi

This novel, published in 1990 but set in the 1970s, offers a view of life, love and growing up by Karim Amir, a mixed raced teenaged son of an Asian father and English mother living in Beckenham in the south east London suburbs (in the borough of Bromley, next door to my own borough of Bexley). Karim is a few years older than me, but I can identify with many of his (non-racial) cultural reference points as a fellow product of the 1970s suburbs. This is also of course, though, a novel about the naked racism faced by Asian and black people particularly severely at this time, when the National Front held frequent marches and in an era long before the Stephen Lawrence murder when the police frequently appeared to be, and no doubt in many cases actually were, indifferent to or even casually sceptical of the racist violence suffered by families like the Amirs: "The lives of Anwar and Jeeta and Jamila were pervaded by fear of violence. I'm sure it was something they thought about every day. Jeeta kept buckets of water around her bed in case the shop was firebombed in the night." This is not a heavy novel, though; Kureishi writes with a lightness of touch and a humour about the situations and the very rounded, realistic and believable characters. Their lives are complex - Karim's father leaves his mother and moves in with another white woman, Eva, while Karim's cousin Jamila is forced into marriage with a stranger from India after her father Anwar nearly kills himself on a hunger strike to bend her to his will. I found the first half of the novel in Beckenham very enjoyable, but when Karim grows up, moves to London and gets involved with the acting fraternity, my interest tended to wane; while still written very well, I didn't really care for any of these characters. Karim falls in and out of numerous sexual relationships with both women and men, but still feels somewhat of an outsider. After a brief sojourn with his acting circle in New York, he returns gratefully to London, where despite his problems, he feels much more at home. With its quintessential 70s setting in cultural and political terms, the novel ends with the watershed election of Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government in 1979. A very good read and a superb recreation of a time and place.

I'm just now catching up on threads and I'm pleased to see your positive review of The Mirror and the Light. I'm also interested to see your review of the Little House book - I must have read them hundreds of times when I was a kid. I remember those illustrations vividly.

Thanks as ever for your thoughtful reviews!

# 97 - thanks Jennifer. I hope you and your family are well :)

84. The Silver Collar - Antonia Hodgson

This is the fourth in this series of adventures featuring Thomas Hawkins in early 18th century London. This isn't really a whodunnit in the usual sense, as the villain is pretty quickly established as Lady Emma Vanhook who, in turns out, is actually, the mother of Thomas's common law wife, Kitty. Vanhook is a cold-hearted and manipulative person who kidnaps Kitty and wants to use her for her own ends. The silver collar of the title refers to a device worn by a young black slave girl Nella/Affie, whom Emma brought back from Antigua where her husband owns a plantation. Thomas and his friends., especially young Sam and Jeremiah, Affie's father, eventually track Emma and Kitty down to a farmhouse in Essex, encountering the usual range of colourful characters en route. The addition of the slavery element gave this story an additional poignancy.

85. Surrounded by Idiots: The Four Types of Human Behaviour - Thomas Erikson

This book explains the DISC system of classifying human behaviour into four groups categorised as red (proactive/direct/aggressive), yellow (creative/extrovert/overpowering), green (passive, indirect, good listeners) and blue (calm, analytical, details-oriented). Pretty sure I did some exercise around these many years ago at a training course at work and most of us civil servants were a combination of green/blue - not wholly surprising. 95% of people are more than just one colour though, and 15% are combinations of three colours. Many of the portrayals in the book read as rather simplistically based on people being wholly of one colour, which makes the suggested solutions for handling people in one group or another, or relations between people in different groups, a bit unrealistic. Some interesting ideas and food for thought but, as with many books of this type, it's rather repetitive and could really be shorter.

86. Zuleika Dobson - Max Beerbohm

This is a satire on Edwardian university life and chivalric attitudes, published in 1911. Zuleika Dobson is a very attractive young lady who comes to Oxford to visit her grandfather, the warden of the (fictional) Judas College. The Duke of Dorset is stricken with love with her, a condition that also afflicts every other male student; despite Zuleika's contempt, they are overcome with the logic of their position, and jointly commit suicide by drowning themselves. It sounds awful, but is handled in a light hearted way that has its own internal logic. The narrative viewpoint changes occasionally, which is slightly jarring. The author has a habit of coining evocative new words such as: tuist; vagrom; Egomet, inelubilable, disbuskined, aseity. An amusing read.

87. Oxford - Jan Morris

My visit to Oxford this week inspired me to read this book by journalist Jan Morris. The style is very similar to that of her book on Venice I read a few years ago - richly and evocatively written, almost dreamily stream of consciousness in places, a mixture of history, culture and travel guide. Originally written in the 1960s and revised in the 70s and 80s, and combined with her occasional vagueness on dates, I was unsure in places just when an event or anecdote described as recent actually happened. She focuses, inevitably, on the history of the University and its long and complicated relationship with the city (including being on opposing sides in the English Civil War, the university royalist, the city parliamentarian). At least when this book was written, almost a quarter of the city area was owned by the university and its colleges. The individual colleges have their own ethoses and traditions that have shaped their own history and that of the whole country and indeed the whole world, as, despite great differences in size and wealth, they have collectively produced such a huge proportion of the world's political, social and cultural elites for many centuries. Oxford is a city that has a timeless feel to it; while it is by no means the oldest city in England (early Medieval rather than Roman) it has never been burned down or bombed, so its records are particularly complete.

The book does in places start to read like a somewhat repetitive list of cultural artifacts and Oxonian connections from different walks of life. However, there are some contrasting and slightly refreshing non-academic links as well, such as those relating to the car industry and Cowley, trying to give a more rounded picture of the city. The text is spiced with many anecdotes, some of which I suspect are at least embellished. But the overall feel makes this a very enjoyable, albeit occasionally slightly irritating, accompaniment to a visit to this most English, but also internationally connected, of cities.

88. La Belle Sauvage - Philip Pullman

This is the first volume of Pullman's Book of Dust trilogy, and is a prequel to Northern Lights. Our heroine Lyra is a baby in this novel, and mysterious forces are out to seize her for the future role she is destined to play. Young Malcolm Polstead, son of the owners of the Trout Inn at Pole Meadow on the outskirts of the Oxford, and his friend Alice, must vanquish dark forces and floods, fleeing to escape Lyra's would be captors. This is a really good and gripping chase novel, and I really enjoyed it, in some ways more than Northern Lights. There are fewer overt fantasy elements, though enough to keep lovers of that particular aspect satisfied, and I continue to really love the concept of personal daemons to act as one's adviser and companion. At the end of the novel, Lyra is placed in scholastic sanctuary at Jordan College, where she will grow up into her role in Northern Lights.

89. Peaceweaver - Judith Arnopp

This Anglo Saxon historical novel concerns the life of Eadgyth, daughter of the earl of Mercia, given away in marriage at the age of 13 to a Welsh prince, and then later and more prominently wife of King Harold II during the short months of his reign before its bloody end on the field at Hastings. Much of the narrative focuses on her rivalry with the near identically named Eadgytha, called Swan Neck, Harold's "handfast" wife and mother of his several children. Later on during the critical period the two ladies are thrown together in adversity, working to look after injured soldiers during the final battle before witnessing the terrible end of the king they both love. Well written historical drama, with a substantial historical note at the end explaining how she has drawn on the real events and the later fates of the characters (which are usually unknown).

90. The Lincoln Assassination - John Butler Ford

This short book details the events leading up to the assassination of probably America's greatest ever President on 14 April 1865. It shows the rather amateurish plotting of John Wilkes Booth, that almost reads like farce, if one did not know it would be successful in the context of what to us seem like ludicrously inadequate security measures - though most of the conspirators were on board only for kidnapping the President and taking him south of the Potomac river, not killing him. The book is terse but presents a clear and dramatic account of events. Despite the natural horror at the assassination of a great man, there is no doubt that the trial of the conspirators was not a fair trial in the heightened political atmosphere of the immediate post-Civil War situation. His successor Andrew Johnson tried to continue his policies of healing the national divide, but lacked Lincoln's personal impact and statesmanlike gravitas.

91. A Stitch in Time - Amanda James

This is a light-hearted time travel novel, with a somewhat more significant romance element than I would normally choose to read, but the time travel elements were quite well handled. Sarah Yates is a history teacher in Sheffield who one evening is visited by a mysterious handsome stranger, John, who tells her she has been chosen for a task to "stitch" holes in the fabric of time, the stranger being the "needle" who directs her missions. She travels back to Sheffield in 1940, London 1913, Kansas in 1874 and London in 1928. Some of the missions feel more serious than others, though they are mostly quite good fun, and I'm a sucker for almost any time travel story, so this was a pleasant, undemanding read.

92. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

This is a big book in every way, not just in its physical size, but also in its long term influence, and the range of issues it considers at length through its descriptive passages and the interactions over a period of years between its leading characters.

By modern standards, and even by the standards of the 1930s when it was published, this book has of course a strong racist element. The white Georgian characters who form the core of this story all clearly regard black people as inherently inferior; they do not for the most part treat them cruelly, but they regard them as wayward children or pets who cannot run their own lives and exist only to serve their white masters. Mammy, the main black character is the single exception to this rule, regarded with respect and affection by everyone, and indeed she is probably the strongest character in the book. But it is important for an understanding of the context to note that, inexplicably to us in the 21st century, Mammy and all the other black characters themselves also regard themselves as having no separate existence apart from service to their white masters, and black house servants (and yes they do use the "n" word to refer to themselves) regard black field servants as an inferior caste on whom they look down in the same way as the white people look down on the blacks as a race.

Modern discussion of this novel centres almost exclusively around its racial element, but there is so much more in here: the horrors of war and a city (Atlanta) under siege; the privations suffered by families trying to make ends meet in a situation of society tearing itself apart in the Civil War (I think perhaps we in Britain don't quite get the impact this had and still in some ways has on American society, as our own Civil War was much longer ago); the impact of what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder on the mental health and conduct of soldiers on both sides, and the ill treatment by both sides of their prisoners of war; and moral dilemmas over the lengths one can and should go to protect one's family and loved ones in a desperate situation, versus wider societal responsbility.

The central character Scarlett O'Hara is often irritating, shallow and selfish, but also capable of strong love and loyalty, strong-willed and resourceful, and very willing to challenge the rigidly stereotypical standards of a society that believed it wrong for women to assert themselves in personal relationships or economic terms. When the former characteristics were to the fore, she reminded me rather of Becky Sharp in Thackeray's Vanity Fair, but Scarlett has more positive features (by the same token, Melanie Hamilton was much like Amelia Sedley in the Thackeray classic, looking for love and security and easily duped). Rhett Butler is the ultimate cynical character and epitome of the man determined to preserve his freedom of action in all circumstances by not committing himself, but also refreshing in his lack of tolerance of the cant and hypocrisy that dominates society's mores. It is ironic that Scarlett and Rhett, while being the central heroes of the novel, regularly flout the conventions and rigid morals of a society with which the author clearly totally identifies. Meanwhile, the other main male character, the cultured and well travelled Ashley Wilkes, with whom Scarlett is in love for almost the whole of the novel, pales into watery insignificance next to these central pairing.

There is much more that could be written about this novel, such as the author's very partial political views of the Reconstruction period after the Civil War, and her seeming complete lack of recognition that slavery was in any way wrong. This will always be a controversial novel, but overall it deserves its reputation as a sweeping epic and flawed masterpiece of American and world literature.

93. Murder on the Brighton Express - Edward Marston

This is the fifth novel in the author's Railway Detective series set in the mid-19th century in the early and exciting period of initial expansion of the railways. Like all the others, this is a good page turner, though the dialogue sometimes feels a bit stilted. Inspector Colbeck's sidekick Sergeant Leeming seemed more intelligent in this one, and less of a slightly thick underling. Colbeck's boss Superintendent Tallis was a bit less relentlessly overbearing as well. The plot centred around a crash between the London Victoria to Brighton express and a goods train, resulting in a number of deaths and serious injuries, including to some of the great and good of Brighton society. Colbeck swiftly realises the crash was the cause of criminal activity and not negligence on behalf of the well respected driver of the express train, but meets with official resistance. A number of the injured survivors present reasons for being unpopular enough with people to merit being a target for murder, but the eventual target and the brain behind the crash are unexpected. I felt this was slightly above some of the others in the series, though the basic idea of taking murderous revenge on an individual by causing a train crash, in which there is no guarantee of their death, just seemed too implausible.

94. The Country Child - Alison Uttley

This is a fictionalised account of the author's childhood on a farm in Derbyshire in the last years of the 19th century. Uttley is more famous as the author of many children's books in the mid-20th century, including (for older readers) A Traveller in Time, which I read at the start of the COVID period in March. This book too is a pleasant read during difficult times, with life being governed by the ebb and flow of the seasons of the farm, and the author's alter ego Susan Garland experiencing few external influences, apart from at the village school, yet still feeling like she is a fairly well-grounded character (Uttley not only moved beyond her own rural upbringing, but became in 1906 only the second ever female honours graduate of Manchester University, and in physics to boot). A very pleasant and comfortable read, with some nice line drawings as well (and also an introduction to some words which I assume must be Derbyshire vernacular of the time, as I can find no reference to them on Google...).

95. The Secret Documents of Sherlock Holmes - June Thomson

This is the fourth collection of seven pastiche stories I have read by this author, another such collection supposedly found in a trunk by a descendant of Doctor Watson, and consisting of Holmes stories unpublished during their partnership for one reason or another, and which are based on mentions of other cases in the published stories. As with the other collections, these read as authentic and both Holmes and Watson comes across very well. These are mostly ordinary cases - mercifully, no sign of Moriarty - and some of them in fact based on relatively harmless and pretty much non-criminal deceptions (The Ainsworth Abduction, The Ferrers Documents, The Camberwell Deception), with a couple of more dramatic murder stories (The Wimbledon Tragedy, The Barton Wood Murder). Great collection.

96. The Storm - Daniel Defoe

This is an account by the author more famous as the writer of Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, of the Great Storm of 1703, one of the most famous weather events in British history, which he described as "The Greatest, the Longest in Duration, the widest in Extent, of all the Tempests and Storms that History gives any Account of since the Beginning of Time". This is considered to be one of the first pieces of journalism in a fairly modern sense, and one of the first detailed accounts of a meteorological event. After a brief discussion of ancient Roman and Medieval sources on storms and how awful the weather in Britain was, the bulk of the book consists of various accounts Defoe collected from around the country of the damage and destruction wrought across the country. These accounts show how widespread the devastation and death was, but it is all very repetitive and anecdotal and, to a modern reader, rambling and lacking in analysis or summation. What struck me was that, although this has sometimes been described as the worst storm in British history until superseded by the modern Great Storm of 1987, Defoe reckoned that some 8,000 people died in the 1703 storm (including some in Holland), whereas only 18 died in the 1987 event in Britain (plus four in France). An interesting historical curiosity, though my version appears to be truncated, to my annoyance.

97. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes - Suzanne Collins

This is the prequel to the author's mostly excellent dystopian Hunger Games trilogy, set decades earlier and featuring future President Coriolanus Snow as a young student at the academy in the Capitol that rules over the 12 districts in the state of Panem. It is only 10 years after the end of the civil war that created this dystopian society and for the Hunger Games of that year, students are selected to act as mentors to the unfortunate children selected from the districts to fight each other to the death for the Capitol's entertainment. Snow is selected to mentor Lucy Gray Baird, the girl tribute from District 12, reckoned to be the weakest no-hoper of the lot. Needless to say, things do not turn out as planned. The first two thirds of the book cover the dramatic events in the run up to the Hunger Games and during the tense and bloody struggle itself. The final third takes a rather unexpected turn, though, and the scene shifts to District 12. I found this section rather an anti-climax after the previous drama and tension, and the final chapter contained an inevitable but rather sudden feeling plot twist. Overall, this final third pulled the novel down to 4/5. As far as I can see, this novel is a standalone prequel, and not the start of a new trilogy, but I guess we'll see.

98. The White Ship: Conquest, Anarchy and the Wrecking of Henry I’s Dream - Charles Spencer

This is an account of a 900 year old shipwreck that had a profound effect on English history, leading to civil war and anarchy on a scale that was unprecedented in British history (or at least as far as we know, given that we know comparatively little, for example, about the chaos that must have took place during the vacuum after the Roman legions left 700 years earlier). The White Ship was an advanced craft for 1120, and it was piloted by an experienced captain, whose father had captained the flagship of King Henry I's father William the Conqueror when he had invaded England 54 years earlier. But disaster ensued on a rock off the coast of Barfleur in Normandy on a freezing cold late November night, sending almost all the 300 or so passengers and crew to the bottom of the Channel, including King Henry's only legitimate son and heir, William, two of his numerous illegitimate children (several of whom who were fairly important figures in their own right) and a significant chunk of the cream of the Anglo-Norman ruling class. The cause was chronic drunkenness among both crew and passengers, ironically given large amounts of wine by Prince William himself; intoxication so obvious that several passengers actually disembarked before launch in fear of the consequences, including the king's nephew and eventual successor Stephen of Blois (though he also apparently had diarrhoea brought on by his excessive drinking). William was initially taken away in the only lifeboat by his bodyguards, but he ordered the boat to turn back to rescue his half sister Mathilda, and the boat was swamped by desperate drowning people. We know all this through the account of the only survivor, probably the lowliest of the ship's complement, a butcher named Berold who had joined the ship to chase debts he was owed and whose life was saved by his rough woolen garments protecting him from the extreme cold, and his managing to cling on to part of the ship's mast. Very few bodies were ever recovered, though one of these was that of Richard of Lincoln, one of the king's illegitimate sons.

Henry had invested all his hopes in his son William. Possibly due to the intense rivalry he had experienced with his own elder brothers, Robert Curthose and king William II Rufus, Henry only had one legitimate son, in a probable attempt to provide clarity and a clear undisputed succession for both the throne of England and the ducal seat of Normandy. (He had around 9 illegitimate sons, out of over 20 children born out of wedlock to a total of over half a dozen different women). His wife Mathilda had died a couple of years before the disaster. He married again, to Adeliza of Louvain, but they had no children. He forced his barons to swear allegiance to his legitimate daughter Mathilda as his successor, but this was disputed by his nephew Stephen who seized the crown and a bitter civil war ensued, in which much of the country was ravaged, plundered by both sides and by bands of mercenaries. The ebb and flow of war shifted but there was no peace until 1153 when finally Stephen acknowledged as his successor his rival Mathilda's son Henry. Almost certainly none of this would have happened had the White Ship not sank. So it is fair to say that, while there have been many better known shipwrecks (Mary Rose, Titanic, Lusitania), none of these were as politically influential as the White Ship disaster; as the author concludes, "The shipwreck impacted spectacularly on the next generation, resulting in the bloodiest anarchy that England has ever suffered.", the "vacuum" of William's death having, following Henry's failure to produce a replacement heir with his second wife, "morphed into a chasm, into which the subjects on both sides of the Channel fell headlong". Great narrative history that explains the contextual historical background very clearly and colourfully.

99. The Stasi Game - David Young

This is the sixth and apparently the final book in this crime series set in East Germany in the 1970s and early 1980s. I was slightly taken aback and disappointed to see this in the Introduction, but by the end of the story it is clear why this might make sense at this point (no spoilers here). The story, like one of its predecessors, harks back to events during the Second World War, in this case the notorious firebombing of Dresden by British planes in February 1945, carried out indiscriminately on a city that many would argue had limited military or economic significance. Oberleutnant Karin Muller (demoted at the end of the previous novel) is hanging onto her job in the Kriminalpolizei, called on to investigate a body trapped in concrete on a building site in Dresden, which turns out to be connected to new evidence discovered about the wartime raid. I didn't think this was one of the very best in the series, but I will miss the characters if this is indeed the last one in the series.

100. Stealing the Future - Max Hertzberg

My 100th book of the year!

This is an East German murder mystery with a difference - it is set in an alternative 1993 where the GDR still exists, but not as a communist state. They still overthrew communist rule and the Wall still fell, but as a result of minor differences in the sequence of events, a referendum resulted in East Germans voting not to reunite with West Germany. In this scenario, the East Germans are, at least in the view of the main characters in this novel, trying to construct a democratic, independent socialist alternative to both their predecessor Soviet bloc state and the West. While a fascinating idea, it struck me as unrealistic both from the narrative of the novel, and from my own memories as a young man in 1989-90 when these events happened. The murder mystery here surrounds the gruesome slaying of a politician from West Silesia, which is threatening to secede from the GDR, taking it with many sources of raw materials and energy. It's also linked to events in the USSR, which still exists and is still led by Mikhail Gorbachev, but which no longer holds sway over the GDR. Some fascinating ideas for anyone interested in the geopolitics of the end of the Cold War, but the main problem is the author seemed to me to be clearly not terribly interested in the murder mystery, but much more interested in the political speculation; which is fair enough, but I can't help feeling the author would have been better writing a non-fictional "what if" work, rather than a whodunit. I didn't find the main characters particularly appealing either. So I doubt whether I will bother with the rest of the trilogy.

Congratulations on reaching the 100, John.

Well done on the 100 mate !

pamelad and bryanoz - thanks!

101. Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut

Well, this is a weird one. This short fictionalised memoir/novel based on historical fact (am not sure entirely which) is ostensibly about the author's experiences in the US army in World War Two and in particular his capture by the Germans near the end of the war, and his incarceration in the eponymous meat processing plant in Dresden, as a result of which he survived the controversial fire-bombing by British and American planes that devastated the city in February 1945. But really most of it is about a fellow soldier Billy Pilgrim who for some reason keeps flitting about in his own timestream and is kidnapped by aliens. This was rambling and disjointed and, while I realise this may have been the point of the author's writing it, it didn't work for me and was disappointing. At least it was short.

Congratulations on 100!

>120 jfetting: Thanks Jenn!

102. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - John Le Carre

I tried this novel following the sad death of John Le Carre last weekend and have abandoned it a little before the half way mark. While I recognise his literary talent and reputation, I'm afraid this third novel of his I have read confirmed that I just do not get on with his writing style and cannot really enjoy his novels. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold was the only one I enjoyed in part. I think it is that the doings and ramblings of the often slightly seedy characters seem indistinguishable from each other in my mind that makes it hard for me to get into them and follow the plot. So I fear that is probably it for me with his novels.

103. The Door into Infinity - Edmond Hamilton

This short story/novella is a slice of early 20th century pulp SF/adventure. Paul Ennis's fiancee Ruth is kidnapped by a mysterious group called the Brotherhood of the Door, who offer her and others as sacrifices to mysterious entities apparently outside our universe. He and Inspector Campbell go to her rescue in a cavern under the sea. Fun and undemanding, but very much a Fu Manchu-type story, with racial stereotypes prevalent at the time it was written.

104. The Talisman - Jonathan Aycliffe

In the run up to Christmas in six of the last seven years I have read one of Jonathan Aycliffe's brilliant modern Gothic horror novels. He has a way of conjuring up a thick atmosphere of dread through building up the tension through sounds and glimpses of evil, with sparing use of overt shock tactics. This one revolves around the discovery of an ancient Babylonian talisman and a statue that predates even the Babylonians, representing a primeval version of Satan (Shabbatil). It may sounds a little corny but this is a really tense and gripping novel (short as well at well under 200 pages, though it didn't feel short, in a good way). Academic Tom Alton 's life is affected with the most tragic of consequences for his family and some of his friends. The vanquishing of Shabbatil at the end was a little too sudden and easy to be wholly convincing in context, but the ending was studiedly ambiguous as some of his other novels. If you don't know this author, I recommend him - his books are most similar to Susan Hill's The Woman in Black, so if you like that, you should like Aycliffe's work.

105. Wakenhyrst - Michelle Paver

This is the third gothic horror novel I have read by this author. While Dark Matter and Thin Air built up an atmosphere of dread through scene setting in bleak and remote landscapes (Antarctica and the Himalayas respectively), this was set in the (by English but probably not wider standards) bleak landscape of the Suffolk Fens. While this worked to some extent, I just didn't think this had the atmosphere of the other two books. I thought the main narrative set in the early 20th century dragged in places as the unexplained happenings in the life of Edmund Stearne and his relationship with his daughter Maude ambled on, with the occasional dramatic flash, but didn't really gather pace until Edmund's mental deterioration at the start of 1913, with his growing conviction that a demon imprisoned in the local church since the Middle Ages had now been released and was inhabiting the heads of members of his family and household. This results in a grisly murder, but this is a result of one man's monomania, rather than a wider atmosphere of horror; thus this comes across more as an interesting historical murder mystery with a supernatural twist, rather than a gothic horror novel. The author is a good writer, though, so this is still definitely worth a look.

106. A Christmas Requiem - S J Parris

This is the third novella S J Parris has written about the young life of Giordano Bruno, who is the subject of her main series of six (so far) murder mysteries featuring the adult monk sleuthing mostly in England, working for Sir Francis Walsingham. Here Bruno is a 21 year old novice, challenging the authority of his prior and often sailing close to the wind. He is summoned to Rome (at Christmas, though this has no relevance to the plot) to demonstrate his memory system to the ultra-heresy hunting pope Pius V and manages to fall foul of him and another ultra-conservative cardinal, as well as incurring the wrath of an aristocratic lady by refusing her sexual advances. It is as well written as ever, and the descriptions of Rome are very evocative, especially those of the then recently painted frescoes of the Sistine chapel ceilings.

107. Murder in the Snow: A Cotswold Christmas Mystery

Gladys Mitchell was one of the most prolific female authors of whodunnits in the middle decades of the 20th century. In the 30s she was brigaded with Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, and once described by Philip Larkin as "The Great Gladys", but she is now almost forgotten. To be honest, after initial enthusiasm, I rather struggled to finish this novel and to me it is clear that she is no Agatha Christie. The sleuth in this and almost all her others is Mrs Beatrice Bradley, but she lacks the impact and distinct personality of Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot. The plot was rather intricate but seemed to me to lack the satisfactory resolution of a Christie novel, and I found the characters rather two dimensional and indistinguishable. I rather doubt I will try any of her other novels.

108. The Christmas Hirelings - M E Braddon

This is a beautiful and heart-warming Christmas story about an old man's redemption through the innocence of a small child whom he befriends, leading to a family reunion. It's very humorous as well as sad in places. It also shows prolific Victorian author Mary Braddon's versatility as a writer. I have read her most famous work, the sensation novel Lady Audley's Secret and several of her ghostly horror short stories in various collections over the years, and really enjoyed all of these. She penned over 80 novels, short story collections and other stuff, and should be much better known.

109. The Heavenly Christmas Tree - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

110. The Christmas Tree and the Wedding - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Two very short Christmas stories. The Heavenly Christmas Tree was much the better one, a poignant vignette of a poor boy rejected by others at Christmas in the freezing cold (4/5). The Christmas Tree and the Wedding was also about a put upon small boy, but weaker and not very Christmassy.

>127 john257hopper: The eldritch screeching of Mrs Bradley made an impression on me.

>130 pamelad: To be fair, I may be missing something as there are many previous works featuring her which may have helped with understanding her central role. I have wishlisted the very first one which I may have a look at some time, though I feel no great compulsion.

111. Doctor Who: Twice Upon a Time - Paul Cornell

This is a novelisation of the Doctor Who Christmas special from 2017, which was Peter Capaldi's final episode at the end of which regenerated into his first female incarnation played by Jodie Whittaker. My interest in the TV show had ebbed considerably during the Capaldi era and I had considered giving up on it before his last season, but I found that season an improvement and this was a good special to end his era. The Doctor encounters his first incarnation in the snows of Antarctica, at the very end of his own life after defeating the Cybermen for the first time in the story The Tenth Planet. They are taken out of time by a mysterious glass woman and encounter a First World War British army captain taken from the trenches just at the moment of his death. The glass entity is taking people from the point of their deaths, and recording their memories before returning them to their fates. The Doctor's former companion Bill Potts, whom he believes to be dead, is also present, but the Time Lord is not sure she is the real deal. The Doctors grapple with the dilemma over not being able to save the Captain (whose surname turns out to be Lethbridge-Stewart), which they resolve by rolling time forward to the Christmas Truce of 1914, thus saving his life. The story is good and satisfying, though some of the dialogue is banal and there are perhaps too many continuity references (e.g. the Doctor owning a VHS recording of the Daleks' Master Plan!). The depiction of the 1914 Christmas Truce owes somewhat more to myth than historical reality, but this is a suitably heartwarming conclusion to a Christmas episode.