Ersatz TLS discussion

First new thread of 2025! Welcome, everyone.

Here are some of my best books of 2024:

Fiction
Tove Ditlevsen Enfance: La Trilogie de Copenhague T1
Louise Erdrich The Sentence
Isabella Hamad Enter Ghost
Yasmina Liassine L'oiseau des français
Bernard MacLaverty Grace Notes
Seicho Matsumoto Tokyo Express
Madeline Miller The Song of Achilles
Elizabeth Strout Tell Me Everything

Non-fiction
Jenny Diski Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told?
Laure Hillerin La comtesse Greffulhe : L'ombre des Guermantes
Anna Keay The Restless Republic: Britain Without a Crown
Barbara Kingsolver Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983
Joanna Rakoff My Salinger Year

Once again, best wishes to everyone for 2025 and as always, happy reading!

Thanks for this new thread... I may attempt to list my best books of 2024 at some point, but since I don't keep an organised list they may prove difficult to round up!

The only book on your list I've read is Grace Notes, which I like a lot... indeed, I think I've read all MacLaverty's novels. He's not prolific, to put it mildly.

My Salinger Year sounded promising, but the reviews are mixed since Salinger himself never appears (apparently), so some felt the title was a bit of a swizz. Overall, though, it's well rated, so - maybe. I'm sure many of the others are well worth reading too, but my TBR list (including already purchased books) is quite long!

scarletnoir wrote: "My Salinger Year sounded promising, but the reviews are mixed since Salinger himself never appears (apparently), so some felt the title was a bit of a swizz...."

Joanna Rakoff had dealings with him over the year she worked for his publishers, mainly by telephone. He was their most important writer. One big part of her job was answering his fan mail as he didn't want to have it forwarded. I wouldn't say the title is a swizz as he loomed large in her life that year.

I dont know if anyone has read When The Grey Beetles Took Over Baghdad, its a 2001 novel by Iraqi Jewish author Mona Yahia(she now lives in Germany)

Set in 1950s and 1960s Baghdad, semi-autobiographical, it follows a young Jewish girl in the last perilous years of Baghdad Jewry. Witty with macabre elements, coup after coup and the slow changes in the treatment of the Jews, it is an important account of how the Jewish diaspora from the arab countries became non persons from 1948-1970.

Iraq had about 150,000 Jews in 1948, by 1957, only about 4,000 were left, mostly in Baghdad, the rest had all left to Israel or the West

AB76 wrote: "I dont know if anyone has read When The Grey Beetles Took Over Baghdad, its a 2001 novel by Iraqi Jewish author Mona Yahia ..."

Sounds interesting.

Thanks for our first new thread of 2025 and Happy Healthy New Year to all including those who didn't get my best wishes on the last thread.

After finishing the marathon The Eagle and the Hart I have gone back to crime fiction. I have found another series from a new to me author:

https://www.fantasticfiction.com/c/ia...

I have read the first one. The body of a student from the local university is found raped and murdered in woodland by a bit of a wide boy. A couple of academics and the local Mr Big are running a porn site using students from the university, including the victim. A decent read although the ending requires a bit of a suspension of disbelief.

Off books sort of. I have just got round to starting to watch the 2nd series of Wolf Hall. Funnily enough, although I thought The Mirror and the Light was the best of the trilogy, this production isn't gripping me quite as much as the first one. Although the acting is great.

My favourite authors and books of 2024, in no particular order:

Percival Everett - Erasure and several other novels
Charles Portis - The Dog of the South
Thomas Mullen - Darktown and the other two books in the trilogy
Jonathan Coe - Bournville - Coe on top form
Erri de Luca - Impossible
Qiu Xiaolong - Death of a Red Heroine and books 2 and 3 of the Inspector Chen series.
Tom Nolan - Ross MacDonald: A Biography

giveusaclue wrote: "Thanks for our first new thread of 2025 and Happy Healthy New Year to all including those who didn't get my best wishes on the last thread...

I have just got round to starting to watch the 2nd series of Wolf Hall. Funnily enough, although I thought The Mirror and the Light was the best of the trilogy, this production isn't gripping me quite as much as the first one. Although the acting is great...."

I agree... there seemed to be a relentless gloominess about this series, with Cromwell invariably carrying a hangdog expression. We knew it wasn't going to end well for him, but he didn't! And although the music was OK it was always the same - maybe they could have paid for a few more tunes.

giveusaclue wrote: "I have just got round to starting to watch the 2nd series of Wolf Hall.a..."

Don't forget the Films and Series thread ... 😉

Simon Mason's A Killing in November was recommended by CCCubbon and I agree with her that it's a good read.
2 detective inspectors — both called R. Wilkins! — work together on a case centred on an Oxford college. They share a name but otherwise are very different: colour, class, temperament, though both are good detectives ...
It's quite gripping and I've now gone on to the second in the series.

Dreadful news that meta will abandon their fact checkers and move them to Texas not Cali, where there will be "less bias " in the moderation teams

Zuckerberg and Musk have kotowed completely to Trump and this will only be worse for truth and social media, you really couldnt make this stuff up!

AB76 wrote: "Dreadful news that meta will abandon their fact checkers and move them to Texas not Cali, where there will be "less bias " in the moderation teams

Zuckerberg and Musk have kotowed completely to Tr..."

From now on, everything on these platforms will consist of "alternative facts" dreamed up by these wealthy and power-mad loonies, then.

scarletnoir wrote: "AB76 wrote: "Dreadful news that meta will abandon their fact checkers and move them to Texas not Cali, where there will be "less bias " in the moderation teams

Zuckerberg and Musk have kotowed com..."

Trump is being granted everything he wants for 2025-2029, just been watching his news conference, a blizzard of alternative facts with Greenland and the Panama Canal areas he wants to aquire and make Canada basically the 51st state, as Trudeau told him without yank subsidies, canada will collapse....insane

Still my favourite time of year, with lots of rain, not much sun and lots of long dark evenings Reading has started well in 2025, after a good 2024, i'm well over due a really duff spell of books,

Posting this here as the woke moderators at the G still havent let this post go through...

currently reading: The Midnight Bell by Patrick Hamilton (1929). Though its part of the 20,000 Streets triology, i'm only going to read this first novel as its so perfect right now. Its 1920s Fitzrovia, off the Euston Rd and young waiter Bob falls for a prostitute, Hamilton creates the world of the public house in all its grime and glory. A location on the edge of the mighty West End, interwar london, some great comic sections but also a hard line in realism.

War Without Hate by Bierman and Smith covers the Desert Wars of 1940-43. Its very well written but the pace of conquest and re-conquest has become dizzying and it does feel like the book is more weighted towards El Alamein than the battles of 1940-42. Its told with real wit, characters abound and Rommel is a star player. The 50yo hero general, strutting about with stolen british goggles on his head, using a stolen Mammoth command vehicle and sometimes flying over his troops in a small plane. While i have covered every avenue of WW2 with interest, this is amazingly the first time i have read a history of 1940-43 in Italian Libya and British Egypt.

Charisma and Disenchantment is a collection of two lectures that Max Weber gave to students in Munich in 1917 and 1919. Well translated, they are a wonderful gem of new work from Germany in the Great War period

Lastly, as Trump now wants to buy Greenland and take the Panama Canal Zone, i am reading up via the net on the PCZ and the Carter treaty that sold it to Panama in 1979(which Trump says was a bad bad deal)

AB76 wrote: "Still my favourite time of year, with lots of rain, not much sun and lots of long dark evenings Reading has started well in 2025, after a good 2024, i'm well over due a really duff spell of books, ..."

Guess your house hasn't been under a flood warning? 🫢

AB76 wrote: "...Posting this here as the woke moderators at the G still havent let this post go through...."

I can't see what could be wrong with that post, AB.

giveusaclue wrote: "AB76 wrote: "Still my favourite time of year, with lots of rain, not much sun and lots of long dark evenings Reading has started well in 2025, after a good 2024, i'm well over due a really duff spe..."

not yet, lol. its been dry and cold here today anyway

AB76 wrote: "Logger24 wrote: "AB76 wrote: "...Posting this here as the woke moderators at the G still havent let this post go through...."

I can't see what could be wrong with that post, AB."

exactly, idiot w..."

Your comment is now there.

Thanks for the new thread, GP

I’ve finished Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station. Although Marxism is the enveloping theme, there is less analysis of it as a system of thought than one might expect. It’s also quite old now, completed in early 1940 (so Trotsky is discussed in the present tense, because he hadn’t been assassinated yet). But despite all that it says ample for a non-specialist, and it’s perfectly brilliant on the succession of personalities and their life stories.

I think my top reads in 2024 (including some I started in 2023) were:

Lord Byron – Don Juan
Céline – Voyage au bout de la nuit
Katherine Rundell – Super-Infinite: The Transformation of John Donne
Jenny Uglow – The Lunar Men
Seneca – Six Tragedies
Emile Zola – L’Argent
Ivan Turgenev – A Sportsman’s Notebook
Annie Ernaux – Mémoire de fille
Thomas Hardy – Jude the Obscure

I got pleasure from many others, fiction and non-fiction, too many to mention.

Logger24 wrote: "Thanks for the new thread, GP

I’ve finished Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station. Although Marxism is the enveloping theme, there is less analysis of it as a system of thought than one might exp..."

How is The Eagle and the Hart going ?

Gpfr wrote: "AB76 wrote: "Logger24 wrote: "AB76 wrote: "...Posting this here as the woke moderators at the G still havent let this post go through...."

I can't see what could be wrong with that post, AB."

exa..."

at last!

giveusaclue wrote: "How is The Eagle and the Hart going ?"

Going along nicely. I'd forgotten how mighty (and how profoundly unpopular) was John of Gaunt.

Also finished The Small House at Allington. It’s not surprising I can never foresee how a detective murder mystery will work out. I couldn’t even foresee how things would end up for any of the main characters in this Trollope.

Logger24 wrote: "giveusaclue wrote: "How is The Eagle and the Hart going ?"

Going along nicely. I'd forgotten how mighty (and how profoundly unpopular) was John of Gaunt."

Yes, strange that compared to some of his contemporaries.

I've read the 2nd in Simon Mason's D.I. Wilkins & D.I. Wilkins series, The Broken Afternoon. The "rough diamond", Ryan, is continuing to rub people up the wrong way, and the suaver Raymond is getting the praise.
I do think Mason should stop detailing what he thinks are Raymond's chic oufits 🙄.

I think you might like these, give.

Gpfr wrote: "I've read the 2nd in Simon Mason's D.I. Wilkins & D.I. Wilkins series, The Broken Afternoon. The "rough diamond", Ryan, is continuing to rub people up the wrong way, and the suaver ..."

Thanks G, they are on my evergrowing tbr pile!

Seems a bit quiet in here in 2025 so far, i hope all are well and not nursing any new ailments or situations?

The Eagle and the Hart - The laxity, irresponsibility, extravagance and utter egoism of Richard II, continuing even as a huge French force threatens to invade, is amazing to read. Even more amazing is how a group of rebel lords defied him and in early 1388 brought about a proceeding in parliament, with the king obliged to sit and preside, which caused his most powerful friends (a duke, an archbishop, a chief justice, the chancellor) and their associates to be tried and condemned for treason (on a generous reading of the statute of 1352), and forthwith executed, those who had not already fled the country. All this a decade before he is deposed.

Now I’m onto young Henry of Lancaster joining the Teutonic Knights on a crusade to convert the pagan Lithuanians, and then travelling on through the courts of Europe to visit Jerusalem and the holy sites. Great stuff.

Much reference to contemporary records - Froissart and Walsingham and unnamed clerks - and a multitude of modern academic monographs. Ms Castor makes it all flow very readably, in the modern idiom (“no exit strategy”, “cognitive dissonance”, etc). Quite a few passages seem to lean heavily on another general work, Jonathan Sumption’s The Hundred Years War.

Meanwhile, for a bit of diversion, I’ve started Nick Hornby’s Funny Girl, the book that was turned into a TV series with a delightful performance by Gemma Arterton. How he does the zippy, hilarious conversations among the scriptwriters, the producers and the actors is something to behold.
...
No ailments here, but it's plenty cold (two weeks way below freezing, night and day), so much encouragement to stay in and read.

Logger24 wrote: "The Eagle and the Hart - The laxity, irresponsibility, extravagance and utter egoism of Richard II, continuing even as a huge French force threatens to invade, is amazing to read. Even more amazing..."

Your review is so much better than mine Logger. It wasn't a good time to be in the reach of the King then or later (Henry VIII).

House is no longer under a flood warning or alert and today it is a beautiful sunny day, hovering around 2/3 °C. So solar panels people have may be working but the wind turbines certainly won't as it is perfectly still.

Logger24 wrote: "The Eagle and the Hart - The laxity, irresponsibility, extravagance and utter egoism of Richard II, continuing even as a huge French force threatens to invade, is amazing to read. Even more amazing..."

cold here but still and dry....my mind is in north africa and 1920s london, with a bit of mid 60s Baghdad, via my reading

good anecdote from N Africa,Maj-Gen messervy was captured by the Afrika Korps briefly in the chaos as Rommel swept through allied lines during the Fall of Tobruk. Thinking quickly he ditched his epaulettes and assumed the role of cook, doling out food to the captured men. an Afrika Corps officer asked him "arent you a bit old to be a private?" and Messervy played along complaining how jolly rotten it was to have been called up at his age. He escaped with a dozen other men about an hour later as more confusion reigned

Logger24 wrote: "The Eagle and the Hart - The laxity, irresponsibility, extravagance and utter egoism of Richard II, continuing even as a huge French force threatens to invade, is amazing to read. Even more amazing..."

Re the Teutonic Knights, the popes might have approved of them, but there was a lot of slaughter of pagans who would not conform to Christianity. Dan Jones talks about this in his book Crusaders.

Hamilton in The Midnight Bell is telling a largely autobiographical tale and i think this makes it even stronger, with a young waiter in a sort of lovestruck spin with a lady of the night

What makes it more interesting is both are young and troubled, there is no 20 something harlot enticing a naif, its more a kind of situation of errors, misreads and deillusions.

Written when he was 26, i'm impressed with the style, the language and the pacing,he probably surpassed this with Hangover Square 12 or so years later but this is a really good english interwar novel.

giveusaclue wrote: "Re the Teutonic Knights, the popes might have approved of them, but there was a lot of slaughter of pagans who would not conform to Christianity. Dan Jones talks about this in his book Crusaders."

Yes, strange bunch the Teutonic Knights. I learned from the book that they actually had their origin in the Holy Land, being modelled on the Knights Templar and having a base in Acre, which was news to me as I had a vague idea of them always fighting up north in snow and ice - thanks, I think, to a very confusing movie by Eisenstein, Alexander Nevsky.

AB76 wrote: "good anecdote from N Africa,Maj-Gen messervy was captured by the Afrika Korps briefly ..."

Great story! It reminds me of that bit in Master and Commander where the captain of the captured French vessel deceives Russell Crowe into thinking he's the ship's doctor.

I’ve also been reading up some back numbers of NYRB. One has a piece on Selected Writings of James Fitzjames Stephen, brother of Leslie and uncle of Virginia and Vanessa. This volume, edited by Christopher Ricks, is on the Novel and Journalism. Priced by OUP at a very moderate $210, it seems to be the first of a projected six. It actually looks well worth dipping into. The reviewer, Tim Parks, says JFS reads novels like a prosecuting attorney scrutinizing a defendant’s testimony.

On Austen:

“Each incident, taken by itself, is so exquisitely natural, and so carefully introduced, that it requires considerable attention to detect the improbability of the story.”

On Dickens, one of the authors JFS thinks altogether too willing to feed readers with pathos:

“[He] gloats over [Little Nell’s] death as if it delighted him… touches, tastes, smells, and handles [it] as if it was some savoury dainty which could not be too fully appreciated.”

And readers, says JFS, are complicit: reality is more solemn.

Compared with that kind of knifework, his brother Leslie’s essays in Hours in a Library, a three-volume set inherited from my father, while interesting, seem rather High-Victorian ponderous.

Logger24 wrote: "AB76 wrote: "good anecdote from N Africa,Maj-Gen messervy was captured by the Afrika Korps briefly ..."

Great story! It reminds me of that bit in Master and Commander where the captain of the capt..."

i have to say, the book about the Desert Campaign is truly superb, its not new, its over 22 years old but wonderfully mixes all areas of good WW2 history. There is comedy, madcap adventures, odd personalities and then the warfare itself. I recommend BWB as a source of older accounts of history, amazon led me to nothing like the half dozen BWB history books i have found in last 2 years

the book is:Alamein: War Without Hate
(although my copy is just War Without Hate: The Desert Campaign 1940-43

scarletnoir wrote: "My favourite authors and books of 2024, in no particular order:

Percival Everett - Erasure and several other novels
Charles Portis - The Dog of the South
Thomas Mullen ..."

Portis's book had charm and wit.

Gpfr wrote: "First new thread of 2025! Welcome, everyone.

Here are some of my best books of 2024:

Fiction
Tove Ditlevsen Enfance: La Trilogie de Copenhague T1
Louise Erdrich [book:The Sentenc..."

Glad to see the new thread and a new year. The Song of Achilles was a disappointment, I'm afraid. Eric Shanower's graphic novels on the Trojan War, starting with "A Thousand Ships," do a much better job with the same material.

AB76 wrote: "Seems a bit quiet in here in 2025 so far, i hope all are well and not nursing any new ailments or situations?"

It occurred to me that we haven't heard from Bill for a while. I've just looked him up and it says his last activity was October. I hope he's OK.

Gpfr wrote: "AB76 wrote: "Seems a bit quiet in here in 2025 so far, i hope all are well and not nursing any new ailments or situations?"

It occurred to me that we haven't heard from Bill for a while. I've just looked him up and it says his last activity was October. I hope he's OK."

I was thinking that as well. I seem to remember him saying he was reading very little, so I hope it’s just that and nothing else.

AB76 wrote: "..i have to say, the book about the Desert Campaign is truly superb..."

It's now on my TBR list. I've tried reading about the campaign - an uncle was a gunner in the Eighth Army - and I thought Alamein to Zem Zem might be the book but I had trouble getting into it despite the fame of Keith Douglas, and I didn't look around for anything else.

A couple of years ago I met a very old German gentleman who lives nearby and who was in the Afrika Korps. He said it was terrible, because ”we got bombed to sh*t” by the Allied aircraft when they had no air cover at all.

Logger24 wrote: "AB76 wrote: "..i have to say, the book about the Desert Campaign is truly superb..."

It's now on my TBR list. I've tried reading about the campaign - an uncle was a gunner in the Eighth Army - and..."

its an exciting campaign there is no doubt, the sheer scale of movement is dizzying, Libya is an enormous country and the lines moved 200 miles or more back and forth at least 3 times in 18 months. I wasnt quite as aware how close to Alexandria, El Alamein is, only 65 miles. the author describes how with Rommel so close, the british fleet moves to Beirut and Haifa and many diplomatic and military staff start planning for evacuation if needed

Alexandria is a fascinating city for me but via my reading the Spina stories about Italian Libya, i know a lot more about the other Libyan towns in Cyrenaica towns like Benghazi, Derna, Tobruk and Bardia. All of these feature in the battles, as they wage to and fro

Benghazi became another location linked to the Holocaust, it had a small but vibrant Jewish population of about 2,000 in 1940 but these were evacuated to Tripoli or into prison camps as the frontline became fragmented and Benghazi lost its jewish heritage for good. Bad conditions and lack of food led to a loss of life among these poor Libyan Jews, a small percentage of which were Italian.

I will try and attach a map in photos that shows Cyreneaica. Map added to photos

When The Grey Beetles Took Over Baghdad by Mona Yahia(2021), is an autobiographical novel about being a young girl in Iraq between the late 1950s and late 1960s, as slowly the last 3,000 or so Iraqi Jews found life becoming impossible and the majority fled by 1970

Baghdad had a lively and aincient Jewish population in the 1940s, at least 120,000 lived in the Iraqi capital and formed key pillars of urban life. Things started to turn sour in 1941 with a violent pogrom called "the farhud" but they got much worse in 1948, leading airlifts by Israel and a flood of emigration to other places in the world.

By 1957, according to that census, barely 6,000 remained and that is approx where the story begins Yahia is most effective addressing official jewish life and customs as well as family life but the novel loses focus when odd, rather boring 10 page childish sections intervene. I guess they may be all about growing up but the novel drops off a cliff when these interfere with the life of Jewish Baghdad or the rising tensions as regime after regime falls in coups and counter coups.

After the Six Day War her parents argue over leaving Iraq, her older brother is imprisoned and life contracts into being careful, her father burns family portraits, references to Israel in case the house is searched.

I'm half way through and the chapter on Yom Kippur was fascinating, the small jewish population gathered in the 5 or 5 synagogues in the city, the young women dashing between them, the menfolk sat on one side, the women on the other. Its describes well the community bonds, even in hard times but she overhears adults discussing being "in Jerusalem in 1968" I found it via a section on Iraqi Jewish literature a few years ago, in a magazine and am glad i';m reading it, even if there are sections where i dislike the tone of childish events

Re Bill: he doesnt post much but i am also concerned about him

Finished The Midnight Bell the first novel in the 20,000 Streets trilogy by Patrick Hamilton. A sad, bittersweet, realist tale of infatuation and the London of the 1920s, i recommend it to all!

Next up is a chance find 4-5 years ago, a french novel about soldiers on leave in Paris during the Algerian War On Leave by Daniel Anselme . Penguin have done well to get this forgotten novel out in a new 2014 translation. i look foward to reading it as i move, in my mind, from one great metropolis to another.

giveusaclue wrote: "Logger24 wrote: " Re the Teutonic Knights, the popes might have approved of them, but there was a lot of slaughter of pagans who would not conform to Christianity..."

Religious intolerance is nothing new - unfortunately even now it has still to be consigned to history.

Logger24 wrote: "a very confusing movie by Eisenstein, Alexander Nevsky..."

I daresay... saw this at around 11yo in a cinema in Paris, presumably with French subtitles - so I didn't understand a great deal, or expect to - but it's such a visual film with the great battle on the ice, and the unforgettable (and for an 11-year-old) scary scene where babies are dumped into the flames by the knights. I did at least understand that they were the "baddies" in all of this. It's brilliant.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2009...

Edit: I should have mentioned the close collaboration between Eisenstein and Prokofiev on this and other films: I once read long ago that although music was usually added to the images once they'd been filmed, Eisenstein on occasion deliberately obtained the music first and then either filmed his scenes to match, or at least edited them in accordance with the music (I don't remember the details). It is terrifically effective:
https://www.carnegiehall.org/Blog/201...

There are at least two versions of the scene available on YouTube - a short, restored version with much better visuals and cleaner sound - but no dialogue:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaHto...

and what looks like the original version - dirtier visuals, rougher sound - but far more effective IMO. (Also much longer, but you don't need to watch the whole thing to get the feeling.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcPix...

Whatever the political background, this was an extraordinary piece of film making for the time, using a huge number of extras for the scene.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexand...

scarletnoir wrote: "giveusaclue wrote: "Logger24 wrote: " Re the Teutonic Knights, the popes might have approved of them, but there was a lot of slaughter of pagans who would not conform to Christianity..."

Religious..."

So true unfortunately

Gpfr wrote: "AB76 wrote: "Seems a bit quiet in here in 2025 so far, i hope all are well and not nursing any new ailments or situations?"

It occurred to me that we haven't heard from Bill for a while. I've just looked him up and it says his last activity was October. I hope he's OK..."

Let's hope so - if he's tuning in from time to time, he may have a response to mine about Eisenstein and Prokofiev, if that is of interest to him.

AB76 wrote: "When The Grey Beetles Took Over Baghdad by Mona Yahia(2021), is an autobiographical novel about being a young girl in Iraq between the late 1950s and late 1960s, as slowly the last 3,000 or so Iraq..."

Although many of us (most?) I suspect feel that Netanyahu's behaviour in Gaza is inexcusable, the history of the Jews both recently and in the more distant past does serve to explain why a good number of Jews do support his refusal to take the foot off the throat... He should, though - but almost certainly won't.