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The Best Science Fiction Novellas of the Year #2
Terry Carr (editor) 1980 (Ballantine 1980)



Five "long stories" published in 1979 including two new authors (for me) in Barry B. Longyear and Ted Reynolds. None of them knocked my socks off although the Card story Songhouse did draw me in and slightly dislodged my suspenders. The others were just fair to middling.
The Longyear story Enemy Mine is probably the best known having been made into a film which I've not seen but is apparently standard Hollywood drivel. It's a hackneyed tale of two wartime opponents stranded together (in this case spaceship pilots crasing on a planet) who find that they have to cooperate to survive and eventually bond over their shared passion for Tunnock's Caramel Wafers of some such. In this case the alien is an asexually reproducing reptillian who snuffs it and leaves the resourceful earthman to bring up his baby lizard who calls him "uncle". This story won the Nebula award for best Novella while the others were nominated. Obviously a thin year for SF short fiction.
This was the second and last of this series which was published alongside Carr's long running "Best SF of the Year".

Pigeon Post
Arthur Ransome 1936 (Puffin 1988)



"The Swallows, Amazons, and friends search for gold in the Lake District Hills-camping out, evading dangers, and staying in touch via homing pigeon.

Nancy and Peggy Blackett receive a letter from their Uncle Jim who's on his way home after failing to find treasure in South America. When they hear a tale about a lost gold mine in the Lake District hills, Nancy and Peggy decide to find the mine as a surprise for their uncle. The children comb the nearby hills, while being shadowed by a mysterious figure they dub "squashy hat." Undeterred by drought, sudden brushfires, and the continuing presence of Squashy Hat, the young prospectors persevere in their quest-with surprising results (aided by Dick's knowledge of chemistry)." (from Blackwells)

Another Swallows and Amazons that I thought I'd read as a boy but realised I hadn't after starting it. It has an exciting ending but the first three quarters describing the search for and refining of the "gold" is a bit dull. Full marks though to a bunch of ten to fourteen year olds for making their own charcoal and then using it in a home made blast furnace to smelt the ore. It's a pity they had never heard of fool's gold (snigger).

In 1936 this won the first Carnegie Medal for the best children's book. That got me thinking that it would be interesting to read the other nominees until I saw that one of them was Noel Streatfield's Ballet Shoes

The Most Dangerous Enemy
Stephen Bungay 2000 (Aurum 2009)



"This history of the Battle of Britain provides an encyclopaedic academic rigour: the author went back to original sources both in the Public Record Office and the German archives. Challenging virtually every time-honoured myth and assumption about Britain's victory, the book questions the traditional myth of an amateurish, honourable British Few up against a pitiless and regimented German war machine. It actually asserts exactly the opposite: that it was Britain's pilots who were the ruthless combatants and its aircraft production that was the well-oiled machine, and the Germans who never quite recovered from their amateurish underestimation of their most dangerous enemy." (from Google books)

I was reading a review of James Holland's Battle of Britain book which said that it was well worth reading but that if you were only going to read one book on the subject then the Bungay book was the gold standard.

Bungay shows that the Luftwaffe could never have won using their existing strategy and even if they had used precision bombing and commando raids to put the British radars and the Fighter Command sector HQs out of operation they probably still would not have succeeded. Even if the air battle had been lost the dominance of the Royal Navy would have wrecked any attempt at Sealion.
The author list ten people who he says were responsible for the British victory of which the two most important were Hugh Dowding, the man who had organised Fighter Command and made sure that it wasn't lumbered with hundreds of useless Boulton Paul Defiants, and Keith Park who brilliantly ran 11 Group at the sharp end of the battle. The author writing twenty years ago thinks that it was a shame that there was no statue of Park so it's good to see that this was rectified on the seventieth anniversary of Battle of Britain Day in 2010.

Mathematical Magic Show
Martin Gardner 1975 (Penguin 1985)



"Martin Gardner begins his mathematical magic show by conjuring numbers out of Nothing.
He ends it by letting us dabble with the eerie mathematics (and metaphysics) of Everything....
Here, from America's mathematical Pi'd Piper, is a richly various gathering (the eighth) of his incomparable entertainments from Scientific American. Here are choice games, puzzles, illusions, and uncategorizable diversions from around the mathematical world, some of them easy, some of them tough and supertough, all of them illuminated by what Time magazine has called Martin Gardner's "playful genius for mathematics and logic." (from Powell's)

I'm not much good at the problems but the maths is always interesting.

Vivian Woodward: Football's Gentleman
Norman Jacobs 2005 (Tempus 2005)



"One of the true greats of English football, Vivian Woodward led England to victory in both the 1908 and 1912 Olympic Games. An amateur throughout his career, he was famous for his sportsmanship and was an embodiment of the Corinthian spirit. Arguably Essex's greatest sporting son, Woodward's biography will appeal to anyone with an interest in the history of English football." (from Goodreads)

After Harry Kane's jump to third I had a look at the list of the top ten England goalscorers. They were all household names except for Woodward, the man who held the record for more than forty years. I was interested in finding out a bit more about him and this was the only biography I could find.
The book is disappointing as it mainly consists of reports of nearly every game he played culled from newspaper reports. He was an amateur and had his own Architecture practice but there's nothing about his professional life. Nothing much about his personal life or any romantic relationships (he never married). He volunteered in the first world war serving in the footballer's pals batallion and he was wounded on the western Front but there's virtually nothing in his own words on this or any other aspect of his life in or out of football. He died at the age of 74 after being confined to a nursing home for several years with nervous exhaustion. The book states this without comment but I looked up the condition and apparently it was often used as a euphemism for shell shock. It's a sad thought that he may have spent his final years incapacitated with PTSD.

One of the teams he played against was Page Green Old Boys which sounds like the sort of club Rammy might join.

Last Call
Tim Powers 1992 (Avon 1993)



"Last Call, an urban fantasy novel by Tim Powers, follows Scott Crane, a recent widower and the child of Georges Leon, a powerful gambler who killed the proprietor of a hotel in Las Vegas to take control of a powerful Tarot deck-inspired system of magic. The book plays on the legend of the Fisher King, an Arthurian fable about the wounded king tasked with guarding the Holy Grail. Scott Crane's father has taken over as the Fisher King, but Scott, wanting to dethrone him, is willing to risk his life in a magical game of Tarot-inspired poker to end his father's reign. Last Call, the first in a loose trilogy of fantasy novels by Powers, is followed by Expiration Date and Earthquake Weather. " (from SuperSummary)

When a fantasy novel is set in a fantasy world like Middle Earth I don't have any problems suspending disbelief. Contemporary fantasy or magic realism fiction is another matter and regarding the few examples like this one that I've read, I have had trouble buying into the premise. I read the author's The Anubis Gates many moons ago and really enjoyed it. That story shared many themes with this one but was set in the early 19th century and the historic remove seemed to ameliorate the dissonance between the fantasy elements and the real world setting.
That said, I quite enjoyed the read. It's well written and even though it's a five hundred pager I had no trouble finishing it. I might even read the sequels if they ever pop up on the charity stalls.

Winner of the 1993 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel.

Elizabeth II
Douglas Hurd 2015 (Penguin 2018)



"In September 2015 Queen Elizabeth II becomes Britain's longest-reigning monarch. During her long lifetime Britain and the world have changed beyond recognition, yet throughout she has stood steadfast as a lasting emblem of stability, continuity and public service.

Historian and senior politician Douglas Hurd has seen the Queen at close quarters, as Home Secretary and then on overseas expeditions as Foreign Secretary. Here he considers the life and role of Britain's most greatly admired monarch, who, inheriting a deep sense of duty from her father George VI, has weathered national and family crises, seen the end of an Empire and heard voices raised in favour of the break-up of the United Kingdom.

Hurd creates an arresting portrait of a woman deeply conservative by nature yet possessing a ready acceptance of modern life and the awareness that, for things to stay the same, they must change." (from Blackwells)

I wonder how many people wanted to read this series chronologically and then found that Penguin were publishing them in apparent random order over a period of at least seven years. As number two wasn't available in paperback I knocked this last one off. It's not very interesting as not surprisingly it doesn't tell us much that we don't already know. The only new fact for me was that George VI was at the Battle of Jutland. I might get the George one next to get the least interesting ones out of the way first.

The Midnight Library - Matt Haig

Lone Pine Five
Malcolm Saville 1949 (Girls Gone By 2008)



Girls Gone By is a micropublisher specialising in out of print children's fiction from the early to mid 20th century. Most of their books are written by women for girls with Malcolm Saville being an exception in that his books have mixed sex protagonists and readership. This book from the Lone Pine series is typical in that the 2008 edition was the first complete version published since 1960 with later editions being heavily revised and cut.

The book is set in The Stiperstones hills in Shropshire and was ranked 16th out of 20 in a poll of Lone pine fan club members. Books 1,3 and 5 all feature flooding as a plot device with breached sea defences, a nazi sabotaged reservoir and a flooded underground river being the sources of the aquatic peril. I'm hoping number seven continues the sequence with a tsunami causing a forty foot Severn bore which destroys Shrewsbury.

Indecent Exposure
Tom Sharpe 1973 (Pan 1981)



"Indecent Exposure, Tom Sharpe’s second South African novel, is a brilliant follow-up to his Riotous Assembly, which the Sunday Mirror called, “One of the most savagely hilarious satires ever, a startlingly original first novel.” Once again the setting is Piemburg, the deceptively peaceful looking capital of Zululand, where Kommandant van Heerden, Konstabel Els, and Luitenant Verkramp continue to terrorize true Englishmen and even truer Zulus in their relentless search for a perfect South Africa.

While Kommandant van Heerden gropes his way towards true “Englishness” in the company of the eccentric Dornford Yates Club, Luitenant Verkramp, whose hatred of all things English is surpassed only by his fear of sex, sets in motion an experiment in mass chastity with the help of the redoubtable lady psychiatrist Dr. von Blimenstein; their efforts are rewarded by remarkable and quite unforeseen results. Meanwhile, the Kommandant, riding to hounds in the Aardvark mountains, succumbs to the bizarre charms of Mrs. Heathcote-Kilkoon, as Luitenant Verkramp’s essays in counter-espionage backfire in the bird sanctuary. Once more, Konstabel Els, homicidal to the last, saves the day—or what’s left of it—in one of the most savage hunts ever chronicled in fiction.

And if you’ve ever wondered why Tom Sharpe, as a young man, was deported from South Africa (but not before enjoying its unique prisons), you need only read Indecent Exposure and its companion, Riotous Assembly." (from Grove Atlantic)

I read most of Tom Sharpe's books decades ago with this solitary chap left on the shelf unread. It's enjoyable and amusing but kind of forgettable, a bit like all the others. It's also amusing to read some of the reviews on Goodreads by people who can't see the humour in police brutality, racism, rape and torture. Strange folk.