2023/171: Release — Patrick Ness

The boy takes a breath. “Today was a day I had to let go of a lot of stuff. Like everything that was tying me down suddenly got untied.”
“And I the same,” the spirit says. “Today is the day my destiny changed.”
“So did mine.”
“I know,” the spirit says. “I heard it coming. I followed the longing for it.” [p. 275]

Over the course of Saturday in a small town somewhere in Washington State, a gay teenager's life is transformed. Also, the world -- possibly the universe -- is saved.

Adam is seventeen; still half in love with his ex, Enzo; maybe half in love with his current boyfriend, Linus; doing his best to obey his evangelical parents; reliant on his friendship with Angie. Saturday morning starts with errands for his mother, and Saturday night he plans to attend Enzo's going-away party. Between those two events Adam finds himself questioning the limits and certainties of his world, and unwittingly saving the world. For on the other side of town, the ghost of a murdered girl is rising from the lake, and somehow she's entwined with the Queen of another realm. The spirit sends the Queen on a mission of vengeance, accompanied by a seven-foot-tall faun who's unable to warn her of the dangers...

I loved this. Ness wraps together the two stories -- the primary narrative of Adam's Saturday, and the secondary (and perhaps more significant) story of the Queen, the ghost and the faun -- with care and restraint, leaving the reader to make the connections between the two. Adam's interactions with his family and friends are so vivid, especially the pivotal conversation with his father. ("It hurts my heart that you're afraid"). His gradual realisation that he's freer than he thought he was, that his world is opening up, is something I wish I'd read as a teenager, feeling doomed by very different constraints. While the story of the Queen and the spirit and the faun seems at first lighter and more predictable -- though told in a more poetic, mythic style -- it's a different sort of delight. The faun, in particular, is fascinating: "He wonders if she will win this time. And if she doesn’t, will he have time to eat anyone before the worlds disintegrate?"

I'm about to reread The Rest of Us Just Live Here for a book club discussion, and I'll be thinking about Release and comparing the ways in which the fantastical intrudes on the mundane, and how irrelevant it is or isn't.

Fulfils the ‘doesn't fit any of the other prompts’ rubric of the 52 books in 2023 challenge. I mean, it probably could be shoehorned into several of the categories, but there isn't room because they're all fulfilled.

2023/170: The Dreamers — Karen Thompson Walker

This is how the sickness travels best: through all the same channels as do fondness and friendship and love. [p. 137]

I'd enjoyed Walker's The Age of Miracles, so had good expectations of her second novel. I don't think I knew that it was a pandemic novel: and technically it's not, because it was published in 2019. But it is spookily prescient, with conspiracy theories, refusal of vaccines and masks, blaming of outsiders ...

At a university campus in California, a student falls asleep and can't be woken. The sickness spreads; the inhabitants are told to avoid contact with others; the army sets up roadblocks to prevent anyone leaving town. And it turns out that the sleepers are dreaming, furiously dreaming: 'there is more activity in these minds than has ever been recorded in any human brain — awake or asleep' [p. 60].

Walker's cast includes a survivalist father and his two young daughters; their next-door neighbours, who have a small baby who's feeding on donor milk and could have been exposed to the virus; an ageing college professor whose lover is slowly dying in a care home; a psychiatrist, quarantined in the hospital and worrying about her daughter; and Mei, the roommate of the first student to die, whose shyness has prevented her from making friends with the other girls in her dorm. Each of them deals -- or fails to deal -- with the crisis in different ways. And each of them suffers loss.

There's a distinctly SFnal element to the story: the dreams -- perhaps prescient, perhaps creating whole realities -- experienced by those who've succumbed and fallen asleep. Walker's focus is, instead, on survival mechanisms, on the ways in which people push back against quarantine and lockdown, and on the small acts of kindness or selfishness which shape the world. Like The Age of Miracles, it doesn't really finish: it fades. But that openendedness fits the premise better than any definite resolution would.

It was unsettling to read this account of a pandemic, albeit a localised one, and see how accurately Walker's fiction predicted some aspects of the Covid pandemic. But this is, mostly, a kinder virus. "...how much quieter that ending would be, a whole world drowned in sleep, than all the other ways we have to fall." [p. 284]

2023/169: The Fell — Sarah Moss

... when you deprive people of external stimulus their brains slow down, almost a survival strategy, who could bear to be running on all cylinders and locked in like this, you’d go mad, poison yourself with your own fumes. [p. 25]

Kate is desperate to escape the claustrophobic confines of the home she shares with her teenaged son, so she goes for a walk. But the country's in lockdown, and Kate is supposed to be isolating after a colleague caught Covid: she's breaking the law just by leaving her garden. And she's heading up to the fells, in November, without her phone and with dusk approaching.

This is a short but powerful novel about Covid, survival, the will to live, and the ways in which people's lives are inextricably intertwined. It's told from four points of view: Kate herself, with her lack of will to live ('the longer this goes on the less she objects to dying') and her frustration with lockdown restrictions; Matt, trying to make sense of his mother and occupying himself with online gaming and half-hearted attempts at housework; Alice, their next-door neighbour, who's a cancer patient and is terribly lonely; and Rob, a divorced father who volunteers with Mountain Rescue.

Moss's writing is spare and precise: I found it very evocative of that first winter of Covid, with the usual seasonal slump in my emotions magnified by hopelessness, loneliness (not something I generally suffer from) and rage. Kate's urge to be up in the high places, 'muscle and bone doing what they’re made for', enjoying her solitude, was immensely relatable: I also found Matt's helplessness and muddled emotions familiar, and I ached for Alice and her fear of her body's rebellion. Rob is, in a way, the outsider: but his sense of duty, and the guilt he feels at abandoning his teenage daughter to go out in the dark and the weather to search for a missing woman, is in sharp contrast to the inward-looking, self-absorbed narratives of the other three. (This is not a criticism of Kate, Matt or Alice: their circumstances force them to focus on their own lives, however much they'd like to be interacting with other people or with the wide open spaces.)

It's strange to read novels about the (ongoing) Covid pandemic, especially the first year with the lockdowns and the uncertainty, and remember how comprehensively it changed (and continues to change) my life. Moss, focussing so closely on her four characters, barely refers to the wider world, the political shenanigans and the massive social and economic shifts of 2020. I think I find this tight focus preferable to the novels which try to capture the mood of a nation, or a state, or a city. But watch this space!

2023/168: The Night Manager — John Le Carré

The combined rôle of saviour, escaped murderer, convalescent house-guest, Sophie’s avenger and Burr’s spy is not an easy one to master with aplomb, yet Jonathan with his limitless adaptability assumed it with seeming ease. [p. 313]

Le Carré's first post-Cold War novel, published in 1993. (Adapted for TV by the BBC more recently: I haven't seen this version but it stars Tom Hiddleston, makes several changes to the plot, and is highly praised by Le Carré himself.) Jonathan Pine, the central character, is an orphan, an 'army wolfchild ... caterer, chef, itinerant hotelier, perpetual escapee from emotional entanglements, volunteer, collector of other people’s languages, self-exiled creature of the night and sailor without a destination'. More importantly, he's a man with a strong moral code, a thirst for adventure and an attitude towards women that is not entirely healthy. Part of his backstory involves a French-Arab woman, Sophie, who passed him some confidential documents from her arms-dealer boyfriend. She told him not to send copies to the British intelligence agencies, as the boyfriend had contacts there. Pine decided he knew best; sent the documents to a contact in British Intelligence: Sophie was brutally murdered. Pine blames himself for her death, and he's right about that. He also blames one of the boyfriend's arms-dealer pals, a fellow called Roper. When he's given the chance to infiltrate Roper's inner circle, destroy his business and avenge Sophie, he jumps at the opportunity.

This is an intricately-plotted novel with many digressions (Pine building his fake identity via sojourns in Cornwall and Canada) and almost as many factions. Pine, despite his solipsism, is an engaging character, a close observer of everything and everyone around him (which extends, of course, to Roper's girlfriend Jed, who he thinks is stupid but cannot help falling in love with anyway) and possessed of rather more courage than is good for him. Unfortunately, the aspect of The Night Manager that's stuck with me is an extended torture scene near the end of the novel: it's not explicit but the sheer inescapability, the unrecoverable damage, is distressing.

I like Le Carré's writing a great deal, and am trying to ration my consumption of his novels since there won't now be any more. I don't think this is one I'd return to, though at least I now know to skip forward at a particular point. And I am tempted to watch the TV adaptation, especially for its radical reworking of 'Leonard Burr', the dogged and stoical intelligence operative who single-handedly saves the day.

Minor gripe: what is this satellite company named 'Inmarisat'?

2023/167: Time Shelter — Georgi Gospodinov (translated by Angela Rodel)

...one day, very soon, the majority of people will start returning to the past of their own accord, they’ll start “losing” their memories willingly. The time is coming when more and more people will want to hide in the cave of the past, to turn back. And not for happy reasons, by the way. We need to be ready with the bomb shelter of the past. Call it the time shelter, if you will. [loc. 592]

The first ever Bulgarian winner of the International Booker Prize, Time Shelter deals with nostalgia (in a very different, and much more European, way to Prophet) and features a character who, to a veteran reader of science fiction, appears to be a time traveller. Gaustine, who the narrator isn't sure whether he invented, is 'equally at home in all times'; writes letters to the narrator as if from 1939; and '[jumps] from decade to decade just as we change planes at an airport'. Whether this is time travel or delusion or a kind of performative outsider-ness is never explained.

The novel starts with Gaustine creating a clinic in Zurich for sufferers of Alzheimers, who often seem to live (or want to live) in the past. Each floor of the clinic recreates a different decade, lovingly and meticulously recreated: brands of cigarettes, copies of magazines, the colour of the wallpaper. The clinic proves extremely popular, not only with the patients but with their families. More clinics open, and eventually a referendum is held, in which each European country decides which decade of the twentieth century they will live in. 'There was something romantically doomed about such a referendum, especially given the recent fiasco with Brexit ...' (Britain is not allowed to participate, not being part of the EU any more.)

Much of the rest of the novel concerns the political, artistic and economic movements trying to influence referendum results in various countries, with an understandable emphasis on Bulgaria, where the rival factions favour the 1920s (the Heroes) and the 1970s (the Socs). More generally, the Seventies and Eighties prove most popular, with only Italy voting for the Sixties. Meanwhile our narrator bemoans what is lost, fears what might be to come, and wonders whether Lot's wife -- turned to salt as she looked back -- was the Angel of History.

I felt my literary credentials shrivelling as I read this. I loved the narrator's cultural milieu, his quotations of Auden and the Doors, his appreciation of the tumultous past of Europe. But I became lost in the increasing fragmentation -- of the novel's structure, and of the world, and of the narrator's identity -- towards the end of the novel. And I'm not sure that even in this weird nostalgia-shaped Europe a historical reenactment would lead to World War 3.

From the author's afterword:

For a person who loves the world of yesterday, this book was not easy. To a certain extent it was a farewell to a dream of the past, or rather to that which some are trying to turn the past into. To a certain extent it was also a farewell to the future.

2023/166: System Collapse — Martha Wells

Visual, audio, or text media could actually rewrite organic neural processes. Bharadwaj had said that was what I’d done with Sanctuary Moon: I’d used it to reconfigure the organic part of my brain... it could and did have similar effects on humans. [loc. 2020]

In which Murderbot, along with ART / Perihelion and assorted humans, deal with agricultural robots, ancient contamination, mutiny, lost colonies and PTSD.

I'm not going to go into the plot too much: it's a perfectly good adventure novel with some excellent characters (old and new), and the usual sarcastic, distinctive narration. I've been trying to work out why I found the novel unsatisfactory, and I think it's primarily because Network Effect was such a gamechanger, in terms of Murderbot's interpersonal relationships and found family. At the end of that book, Murderbot was considering joining ART's team and travelling through the wider universe, and this seemed like the beginning of a whole new phase. And then: not.

The human parts of Murderbot (and I don't just mean the cloned tissue) are definitely coming to the fore, and the events of Network Effect are causing unexpected and unwelcome repercussions which interfere with Murderbot doing its job. For much of this novel it's separated (by circumstance) from most of its support network. It forms new relationships -- notably with Tarik and Iris, who are part of ART's crew -- and begins to deal with the aftermath of trauma.

It's not at all a bad novel, but I suspect my expectations were unrealistic. I did enjoy it more the second time around, after skimming Network Effect (a stratagem I highly recommend, since there isn't much in the way of recap) and reminding myself of what had happened in that novel.

2023/165: Dark North — Gillian Bradshaw

That was the first I saw of the Empire: skill at building, and power, and tolerance. It astonished me -- and I didn't even know that Auzia was just one small fort on the fringe of something so vast a single mind can't know it. [p. 224]

Gillian Bradshaw has taken a single mention of 'an Ethiopian soldier ... a notable jester' in the Historia Augusta and spun a novel around that nameless African man. Dark North is set in Roman Britain in 208AD, during Septimius Severus' efforts to (a) prove that Britain is an island and (b) conquer all of it, even Scotland. The protagonist is a cavalry scout called Memnon: Romans can't pronounce his actual name, rendered here as Wajjaj. We first encounter him in the process of swapping the Second Parthica's standard for a lewder version of the same, an escapade that earns him the plaudits of his fellow soldiers but encourages his commander to send Memnon off on a long, potentially hazardous journey away from any chance of retribution. En route, Memnon encounters, and saves the lives of, two Romans from the Imperial household: Castor, the Imperial chamberlain, and Athenais, a secretary and a member of the Empress' household. Memnon befriends them, and their influence and support is invaluable to him when his duties (and his personal affairs) involve him with the Emperor's feuding sons Geta and Caracalla; with unrest amongst the tribes; and friction between the Aurelian Moors and the Frisian troop with whom they share a fort.

Memnon is a fascinating character: a notable jester indeed, but also a man who's lost (and bloodily avenged) his family, who fears that his bloodthirsty vengeance has made him a demon, who is the stealthiest and probably the cleverest scout in his unit, and who would quite like Roman citizenship but has no ambition to be anything other than one of the lads. 'Ethiopian' was used to refer to anyone south of Libya, and Memnon's origins are sub-Saharan: his dark skin is remarked upon as 'ill-omened', and he is likely the first Black man that any British tribesman has encountered. He's capable of extreme, and effective, violence, but clearly happier playing -- and getting away with -- creative practical jokes. Unfortunately his superiors have recognised his worth, and Memnon is forced to take life more seriously. The episode in the Historia Augusta, neatly woven in, is something of a last plantive rebellion...

It's a shame that this is out of print and unavailable as an ebook: I think Bradshaw has only written two novels set in Roman Britain (the other being the marvellous Island of Ghosts, set a generation earlier and featuring a troop of Sarmatian cavalry: one of my favourite historical novels), and it seems a shame to have 50% of them unavailable.

Fulfils the ‘Secondhand’ rubric of the 52 books in 2023 challenge. (I read this via the Internet Archive: it was a scan of a withdrawn book from the Bedlington branch of the Northumberland County Library, last borrowed in July 2019.)

2023/164: Shadow of the Eagle — Damion Hunter

He had wondered, between meeting the Old One at Llanmelin and the little blue trail markers in the bog, whether this province that had bred his mother was going to take him in or spit him out. The bog had offered an unpleasant third possibility, a gruesome combination of both. [loc. 3193]

After my reread of Frontier Wolf, I found myself in the mood for more historical fiction set in Roman Britain. I'd bought this a year or so ago, but not read it: I might have been more inclined to do so if I'd realised that 'Damion Hunter' is a pen-name of Amanda Cockrell. I am, I freely admit, biased against historical novels by male writers: all too often they focus on the military aspects of a story, to the detriment of characterisation and atmosphere. This is not the case with Rosemary Sutcliff (despite the, I think, exclusively male protagonists of her Roman Britain novels) and it's not the case here.

Shadow of the Eagle is set in Britain, around 78-80AD. The central character is Faustus Silvius Valerianus, son of a Roman father and a British mother: after his father's death he sold the family farm and enlisted in the Army, and shortly thereafter he's posted to Britain. There -- besides being haunted by his father's ghost, who's unhappy about the farm being sold -- Faustus encounters several fascinating individuals, including the tomboyish Constantia; the scholarly Demetrius; and Tuathal Techtmar, an Irish prince in exile. They are all, in various ways, caught up in Agricola's campaign to (a) prove that Britain is an island and (b) conquer it.

There are many viewpoint characters (perhaps too many?) including Faustus and Agricola, the Britons Calgacos and his wife Aelwen, and a girl in the Orkneys, Eirian, who listens to the seals. Faustus also becomes involved with the little dark people, familiar from Sutcliff: the aborigines who inhabited Britain before the Picts, Celts et cetera. Perhaps, as one of their elders says, he's related to them via his mother... Though he's a loyal soldier, Faustus also has considerable sympathy for the outsiders, the conquered, the enemy: he's an intriguing and complex character.

Apart from the multiple viewpoints this novel is very much in the Sutcliff style (though sadly the author doesn't have Sutcliff's knack of capturing an ephemeral moment in a single image, such as reflected light on a boathouse roof or a lamp guttering as the rain approaches). I enjoyed it, and will read the rest of the series -- so far there's one further book, Empire's Edge.

2023/163: The Plague and I — Betty MacDonald

[The nurses] may have had their innate sympathy and kindness worn thin by the complete ungratefulness and foolhardiness of the patients, but to me it seemed more likely that they had obtained their vocational training kicking cripples and hitting small children. [loc. 1632]

An account of the author's nine-month stay in a sanitorium near Seattle in 1937-8. This was recommended to me as great pandemic reading. It took me a while to get around to it, but I can confirm that it is witty, dry and very much of its time. MacDonald is apparently better known for The Egg and I, a memoir about chicken-farming, which I would previously have said held no interest for me. After reading this, I'm tempted to familiarise myself with her other works.

Tuberculosis was known as the 'white death', spreading by airborne transmission and, in the 1930s, was the cause of nearly 7% of all deaths in North America. (By 2010 it was down to 0.0036%.) MacDonald's understanding of the symptoms was limited to popular stereotypes, and it took her a while to realise that her constant cough, fatigue, chest pains et cetera were signs of underlying illness. 'I thought that everybody who worked felt as I did.' Once diagnosed, and relieved to find that she was 'really sick instead of ambition-less and indolent', she was admitted to a sanitorium, where the prescribed treatments were complete rest (no talking, no writing, no laughing: no reading!), good food and fresh air. There were a great many rules, which MacDonald lived in constant fear of breaking. Occasionally someone would go off to have a lung collapsed. (This was deemed therapeutic.)

And yet this is an immensely cheerful account -- or, perhaps, a lonely and frightening experience seen through the eyes of a cheerful and good-humoured woman. MacDonald befriends Kimi, a Japanese woman in the same four-bed ward; encounters a number of other patients, some of whose prognosis is better than others'; undergoes a number of treatments which seem very strange from the vantage point of the twenty-first century; and is eventually discharged. Very little happens, but the little things that do happen -- a snitch on the ward, a visit from MacDonald's two young daughters, a trip to flouroscopy, the coming of the Occupational Therapy lady -- are described vividly and amusingly. Which is not to say that MacDonald is all sweetness and light: her acid observations and her black humour delighted me.

Fulfils the ‘Classic’ rubric (at least 40 years old) of the Annual Non-Fiction Reading Challenge: first published 1948.

2023/162: Loki: Journey Into Mystery — Katherine Locke

'... back then, you could hide your heart under your guile. You've got more heart and less guile this time.' [loc. 724]

A novelisation -- or 'prose novel', a term which respects the original's literary credentials -- of Kieron Gillen's Loki: Journey Into Mystery, which began in 2011. The Loki of Journey Into Mystery is not (any of) the current Marvel Cinematic Universe Loki(s). He's a kid: literally, an adolescent, resurrected by Thor after sacrificing himself to save Asgard. Asgard itself was not destroyed, but has crash-landed near Broxton, Oklahoma. Loki has a Starkphone (the first thing he says is 'even people online think I'm lying. Why do people always assume that?') and, though we don't encounter them directly, Tony Stark and Steve Rogers are still ... around. Loki is not super-popular with the Asgardians, who all think that despite death and resurrection he's incapable of change. This Loki is determined to change. He intends to escape his story, his fate, and be a hero. With the aid of a magpie named Ikol, a (hellhound) puppy named Thori, and a romantic interest named Leah, he faces down Asgard's enemies and tries to outwit his former self's machinations. Much more mythological material here than in the MCU, and some really poignant moments as Loki -- who is, after all, still a kid, even if he's also the resurrected age-old god of chaos and mischief -- fights, flees, dissembles and makes sacrifices of his own.

Katherine Locke takes no liberties: she sticks to the original story and dialogue, and her creative input focusses on description and character exposition. Reading this novel was quite a different experience to reading the comics, which I devoured avidly some years ago. I do generally prefer prose to graphics, but while reading Locke's novel I was very aware that I was missing a dimension of pacing and tension that had been provided by the artwork. Perhaps, too, the prose format pins down some of the story in ways that were left ambiguous in the original. Still, Locke's style is engaging and the story's well-paced: I enjoyed this, and think some readers will find it more accessible than the graphic novel.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review: UK Publication Date is 19th December 2023.

2023/161: Old Country — Matt Query and Harrison Query

“Wild things go on in old country like this, Mr. Blakemore. You’ve gotta follow the rules. That’s really all there is to it.” [p. 119]

The premise of this novel is fascinating: a young couple, Sasha and Harry (and their adorable dog Dash) buy a house in a remote valley, then discover that it's haunted by a spirit which must be appeased. In spring, there will be mysterious lights in the pond; in summer, a screaming naked man pursued by a bear; in autumn, scarecrows. Their neighbours, Dan and Lucy, give them clear and copious instructions on the little rituals they need to perform to keep the spirit from becoming dangerous.

Harry, ex-military, ignores every single rule.

He goads and challenges the spirit; deliberately does the opposite of what he's been instructed to do; refuses to be guided by Dash's behaviour (though frankly the dog is more intelligent, and much more likeable, than Harry); and causes the death of an innocent man. Sasha, though slightly less infuriating than Harry, is not much use. (I can't help suspecting that the reason her bosses let her 'work from home', which seems to consist of one or two online meetings a day, is because she's less effectual than she thinks she is.) Sasha is more willing to believe what Dan and Lucy tell them, but she doesn't argue (much) with Harry when he takes the fight to the spirit. To be fair, Harry does seem to have a degree of PTSD from his time in Afghanistan, and he's been trained to be proactive. But he won't even accept what he's told by Joe, the Native American who owns most of the valley -- though not, as far as I can tell, a surname. Harry goes on the defensive, more or less saying it's up to the local tribes to sort it out. Joe, luckily, does not suffer fools gladly: "The only thing my people can do for you, white man, is remind you not to be stupid."

Harry and Sasha -- both of whom have a lot of emotional baggage -- do grow and change over the course of the novel, and affairs in the valley may have changed as well: but, despite the unsettling manifestations and the juxtaposition of glorious wilderness and supernatural threat, I didn't find this a very satisfying read. Except for Dash, who rocks.

2023/160: The Jason Voyage — Tim Severin

...here in Georgia, and at a higher level in Moscow, enormous efforts had been made to prepare for our visit - months and months of planning had been made and checked, resources delegated, schedules dovetailed, oarsmen selected and prepared, Tovarisch put on standby, an entire apparatus set in motion. All for a small open boat manned by a handful of volunteers, bobbing along at a snail's pace towards Soviet Georgia. [loc. 3489]

In 1985, Tim Severin attempted to prove the story of Jason and the Argonauts -- at least the part about the sea journey from northern Greece, through the Bosphorus and across the Black Sea to Colchis -- by ordering the construction of a reproduction Bronze Age galley, recruiting a team of rowers to row it, and making the 1500-mile journey. This is his account of the voyage, and it's a gripping read.

Severin uses Apollonius' epic poem Argonautica (written in the 3rd century before Christ) as a guide, and points out that it's the earliest story of an epic voyage: the original story seems to predate the Odyssey, and the Argo is the first named ship in history. Severin had a master shipwright build the new Argo to a design produced by a naval architect: his team consisted of volunteers, including rowing champions and the captain of a 150,000-ton supertanker, from Britain, Norway, Greece, Turkey and then-Soviet Georgia. The twenty-oar galley struggled at times -- the currents in the Bosphorus flow strongly out of the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara and thence to the Aegean -- but the crew succeeded in making the journey with only sail and oar.

This was a great read, but I could have done with more context for some of Severin's statements about mythology (were the Olympian gods really unknown at the time of Jason's voyage, which Severin believes to have been no more than a generation before the Trojan War?) and some of his identifications of modern landmarks with mythological places seemed tenuous. Sadly, the Kindle version could also do with some proofreading: at one point, the Bosphorus is said to be 2112 miles wide (which is approximately 2109.5 miles in excess of actuality) whilst there are frequent references to other ships loading and receiving Argo, rather than cargo. There are also a couple of points where sentences, paragraphs or whole pages have been shuffled. A map would also have helped, but the original photographs -- and a decent translation of Apollonius -- have been included.

Fulfils the ‘Travel and Global Culture’ rubric of the Annual Non-Fiction Reading Challenge.

2023/159: A Man With One of Those Faces — Caimh McDonnell

Paul said nothing, in a way that left nothing unsaid. [p. 35]

In return for a house to live in and a pittance to live on, Paul Mulchrone is obliged by the terms of his great-aunt's will to do six hours of charity work every week. Luckily, Paul has 'one of those faces': he's inoffensive and nondescript, adept at passing for whichever long-lost relative is expected by the residents of the local hospice. His friend, Nurse Conroy, calls him the granny-whisperer. She approves of him, more or less: he's hurting no one, and he brings joy to the people he visits. Except one, an elderly man who seems to think Paul is the son of an old enemy, and tries to murder him. The assailant comes off worse, suffering a fatal heart attack: Paul is stitched up, and then embroiled in a murder case -- he was the last to see the old fellow alive ... and the deceased was an infamous crimelord, presumed dead these thirty years.

Then the dead man's enemies come looking, very interested in what Paul might have learnt before the demise of the man in the hospice. Aided and abetted by Nurse Conroy (a great fan of true crime) and negotiating with DI Jimmy Stewart (days from retirement, naturally) and his hapless sidekick Wilson, Paul's life gets a great deal more ... interesting.

Unexpectedly acquiring three months' free Kindle Unlimited, I trawled the site for novels set in Dublin, so that I could fulfil a book challenge prompt ('a book set in Dublin') without falling back on James Joyce. This grabbed me from the first page and was a rollicking read, with plenty of humour as well as some elaborate plotting, intriguing characters (I was especially taken, in a faintly appalled way, with Bunny McGarry, very much an old-school copper prone to resolving conflict with ... well, more conflict) and quite a bit of violence. Paul is a surprisingly likeable protagonist, Brigit (Nurse Conroy) an improbable but splendid foil to Paul's frequent bouts of haplessness, and DI Stewart and Bunny McGarry a fascinating glimpse of different traditions in policing. Plenty of hurling terminology, too, so very educational. This is the first in a trilogy -- the main plot is resolved, so I'm not desperate to read the other two novels, but I am tempted.

Fulfils the ‘Set in Dublin’ rubric of the 52 books in 2023 challenge.

2023/158: A Fatal Grace — Louise Penny

It was almost impossible to electrocute someone these days, unless you were the governor of Texas. To do it on a frozen lake, in front of dozens of witnesses, was lunacy. Someone had been insane enough to try. Someone had been brilliant enough to succeed. [loc. 1134]

Having very much enjoyed the first of the Inspector Gamache books, Still Life, I decided to treat myself to the second. (After reading The Brutal Telling, out of sequence and finding it jarring, I'm determined to read in order.) A Fatal Grace, set over the Christmas period in Three Pines, is at least as intricately plotted as the other two novels I've read: it also expands on Gamache's backstory, especially the mysterious Arnot case which, as of Still Life, was blighting Gamache's career.

The primary plot thread, though, deals with the demise of CC de Poitiers, New Age influencer and generally despicable human being. Nobody liked her, so the list of suspects is long: and as Gamache investigates it becomes clear that CC's whole identity, as well as her death, is intrinsically connected to the picturesque little village of Three Pines, where she'd recently bought a house. Gamache enjoys the reunion with his friends in Three Pines, suffers the reappearance of the awkward and uncooperative Agent Yvette Nichol, and painstakingly unravels the clues -- antifreeze, niacin, The Lion in Winter, a Christmas bauble -- to reveal the murderer's identity in the nick of time. All good: but unknown to the Inspector, his opponents are at work...

I enjoyed this novel, though had some reservations about the description and characterisation of CC's overweight daughter Crie. There's backstory for Yvette Nichol as well as for Gamache, and the latter's wife Reine-Marie is introduced, as are some intriguing hints of what might come next. I'm not going to rush into the third novel, but I'm looking forward to reading it.