📗 Books 2025, 3: The Great When by Alan Moore

I think I read somewhere that this ends on a huge cliffhanger. It doesn’t. Or I wouldn’t describe it in those terms.

It has an epilogue, entitled ‘The Old Man at the End’, set 50 years or so after the main story. Someone we take to be the protagonist fears for his life; and the close-third-person narration hints at or mentions some events that intrigue. But we’re not left hanging.

The book is described as ‘a Long London novel’. though, so we certainly expect additions to the series in time.

The term ‘Long London’ is not used in the book, I think, though our normal, everyday London is called ‘Short London’ at one point. ‘The Great When’ is used, and is one of the terms for another London that exists parallel to ours in some sense. Certain people, with certain kinds of imagination (or damage) can find and use some few portals between the two realms.

You know the sort of thing. Parallel worlds, unseen realities, aren’t exactly new. But Moore is such a good writer, this is a high, fine example of the form, even if there have been others like it before. The richness of his description and believability of his characters make this a five-star affair, if I gave stars to books.

And books are key here. It all kicks of in 1949, when Dennis Knuckleyard, 18 years old, orphaned in the war, and working in a second-hand book shop, comes into the possession of a book that doesn’t exist.

It is imaginary, being named in an Arthur Machen tale. Which means he has to get it back to the other London before very bad things start happening.

Highly recommended, and I eagerly anticipate the next volume, despite not being cliffhung by this one.

Blogging and reading in 2024

A much-delayed summary of last year.

I read 26 books in 2024. One less than in 2023, but one every two weeks on average.

But only 98 posts, which is down on the year before. Here’s the monthly breakdown:

Month Posts
Jan 13
Feb 10
Mar 6
Apr 6
May 8
Jun 5
Jul 6
Aug 7
Sep 10
Oct 12
Nov 9
Dec 6

Light blogging year, then, but I’ve written quite a lot of fiction, so there’s that. To say nothing of things like the currently-1500-word essay on my thoughts and feelings about AI, wherein I try to understand those things. That might appear here one day. I hope so.

📗 Books 2025, 2: Vivaldi and the Number 3 by Ron Butlin

I read about this some four years ago on Jack Deighton’s blog. It sounded interesting enough that I tried to order it via Pages of Hackney. But they told me it was out of print.

I couldn’t even find it on Amazon; no Kindle version. So I left it.

Until just recently, when I had cause to by some second-hand books from World of Books. Something made me think of this one. Quick search, and there it was.

And it’s even weirder and more fun than I imagined from reading Jack’s review. It’s a series of short stories, with some interconnections, about various classical composers (plus some philosophers). But it’s all deeply surreal. You’ll find Beethoven living in present-day Edinburgh, for example.

What’s it all for? I don’t really know. But they’re great little vignettes, easily digestible, and lots of fun.

Tales From Right Now

I haven’t really picked up on blogging properly since this year started. I didn’t, for example, write a summary post about last year’s entries, as I generally do. I’m also behind on books updates. The other day’s post was about a book I finished very early in January.

In fact, I’ve been kind of off the whole thing since November or so. Maybe earlier, but the USA’s apocalyptically stupid choice of head of state was the anti-icing on the un-cake of my feelings about the world in general.

I feel like I might be coming out of that downturn now. And strangely, I think I’ve got my new blog theme to thank for it. In part, anyway.

It seems daft, but just freshening the place up can make a difference, you know? So thanks once again to @Mtt, or Matt Langford, for the lovely Bayou Theme.

And we’ll see if things pick up a bit, here on the Bitface.

📗 Books 2025, 1: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie

I got this by Agatha Christie for Christmas and started straight after Conclave, so technically last year. But I didn’t finish it till the new year, so 2025 it is.

Another great one from Christie, with a killer twist. Poirot has retired and is living in the country. But that kind of character never really gets to retire, do they?

A Complete Unknown, 2024 - ★★★★★

This is a glorious film. A dramatised version of Bob Dylan's early years on the New York folk scene and ascent into fame.

He visits Woody Guthrie in hospital, where Pete Seeger just happens to be visiting too. Seeger takes Dylan under his wing, encouraging him to focus on folk music.

Clearly some liberties have been taken with the details of events, but it's all in service of the story.

Timothée Chalamet gives an incredible performance as Dylan, and Monica Barbaro is luminous as Joan Baez. Their voices work beautifully together when they harmonise, and it's notable that both actors did all their singing vocals.

We see moments of the next few years, culminating in Dylan's famous appearance with an electric band at the Newport Folk Festival.

For a film set in the sixties, it's surprisingly pure. Not just in the sense of Seeger and the other folk purists on the Newport organising committee. There's hardly any suggestion of sex, and no drugs at all.

No drugs. In the sixties. Unless you count cigarettes (of which there are a lot) and alcohol (most of which Johnny Cash, played by Boyd Holbrook, has already consumed). There are scenes where Dylan, at least, is clearly meant to be stoned, but no consumption.

I think that says something about our times, rather than the time of the movie, but I'm not sure what.

Will you enjoy this if you're not already a fan, and/or know some of the story? Probably not as much as I did, but see it for the beautifully-realised exteriors and interiors of old New York, for the performances, and of course, for the music.

I want to go to a singalong showing now.

Unpleasant Men

This morning I read the whole of the Vulture article about Neil Gaiman. That link’s to an archived copy, because someone said on Facebook that the original has had the references to Scientology removed because of legal threats. And also it’s paywalled.

It’s so depressing that a man who seemed so decent, so generally a positive force in the world, can turn out to have been an abuser all these year. Allegedly, I suppose I must say.

You know, Paul Cornell included Gaiman as a character in one of his Shadow Police stories, The Severed Streets. If I remember the ‘Neil Gaiman’ character was a villain. We took it as fun at the time; but I wonder if Cornell had an inkling that he wasn’t the nice guy he seemed.

In other shitty-men news, Matt Mullenweg has been blowing up most of the good feeling people have about WordPress over the last few months. I’m glad I moved my site off it a few years ago. But now he’s attacked a woman who used to work on WordPress but hasn’t for years. For no very obvious reason, it seems.

Just being shitty.

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, 1967 - ★★★½

Surprisingly funny in places, a film about race in America in the sixties. Still relevant today, in some circles at least, I'd imagine.

Highly enjoyable, even if the point is extremely heavy-handed at times.

📚 Books 2024, 26: Conclave by Robert Harris

After my recent viewing of the film based on this, my daughter got me the book for Christmas.

It’s surprising how compelling a book can be when you know exactly what’s going to happen, and it’s about something that you wouldn’t normally give a toss about. Though on the latter, I suppose the boy can leave the church, but it always leaves its mark, or something.

Anyway, it turns out this Harris guy can really write. Who’d’ve thought?

I note with interest that the ‘why this story, why now’ question that I mentioned when writing about he film, never even crossed my mind while reading this. I approach a book with a different set of expectations from how I do a film, maybe.

📚 Books 2024, 25: The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder

Finished reading several weeks ago, in fact. I’m way behind with the change of year.

Anyway, this is an odd little book. I stress the ‘little’ because it’s very short. We’re in Peru. An ancient rope bridge, of Inca origin, collapses one day, killing the five people who were crossing it. A priest, Brother Juniper, witnesses the event and decides to use it to prove God has a plan for humans.

The narrator, however, tells us that Juniper’s eventual vast book on the subject was derided, destroyed, and in any case incomplete. The narrator knows things about the people that Juniper never learned. How the narrator knows these things is never stated — we might assume it’s because the narrator is also the author, though that’s rarely a safe assumption.

That’s the start. The rest of the book consists of the stories of the victims and how they came to be there on that day.

It’s good. Won the Pulitzer.