The Martian – Andy Weir

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I’m stranded on Mars.
I have no way to communicate with Earth.
If the Oxygenator breaks down, I’ll suffocate.
If the Water Reclaimer breaks down, I’ll die of thirst.
If the Habitat breaches, I’ll just kind of explode.
If none of those things happen, I’ll eventually run out of food and starve to death.
I’m screwed

The above quote is from the rear cover of the book and it sets the premise of the story so well that I knew I was going to enjoy it. Yes I know the film starring Matt Damon came out in 2015, but I’ve never seen it. This is also my first time reading an Andy Weir book and with the release of smash hit film Project Hail Mary earlier this year he is difficult to avoid at the moment, so I thought I would go back to the beginning and his first novel. There are one or two scientific errors (see spoiler alert at the end of this blog) but it appears to be largely accurate, I’m not a space expert by any means so I could largely ignore the plot devices I knew wouldn’t work as the plot is so well told, and what I did know would work is properly explained. It is also very funny, which I wasn’t expecting.We start with Mark Watney realising he is alone on Mars as the rest of the crew of Earth’s third manned mission to Mars have taken off without him during an emergency evacuation of the planet as they believed he was dead in a sandstorm that had potential to destroy both their habitat and also the craft ready to take them back to orbit. They did attempt to find his body but couldn’t see anything due to the sand and had to give up as the lander was starting to lean to an degree that would have prevented take off. Watney however was injured by a flying radio antenna which pierced his spacesuit and took out his communication to the Mars Ascent Vehicle which was why they saw no vital signs from him.

The style of the novel is interesting as we don’t follow Watney in real time as he does things but in retrospect as he writes up his log, so when things go wrong the first clue is often a gap in the date at the start of the next log entry. My first impression whilst reading was that was going to be the entire structure because after all who else can he talk to, the habitat radio equipment was destroyed in the storm. But on page forty nine I finally got a chapter which wasn’t Watney’s monologue, entertaining as that was. and it was somebody on Earth realising that Watney was alive. Mindy Park had looked at satellite images of the Ares 3 landing site and spotted that the pop up tents were deployed and the rovers weren’t where they should be, that then lifted the story to two parallel tales, the day to day survival of Mark Watney and the NASA conversations as to what they could do to help, which frankly initially at least, looked like very little.

The story develops at Watney solves one problem after another, often whilst inadvertently causing another. He was originally picked as the mission botanist, but as that would have involved little work other than experiments in growing a small number of plants to see how they would cope he was also trained as the maintenance engineer, both skills that would be vital for his survival. He quickly realised that if he could wait it out until the next mission was due then he had insufficient calories to keep him going, so planting food would be essential. But Martian soil didn’t have the nutrients or bacteria needed to successfully grow anything so he needed to solve that, he also didn’t have enough water for crops as well as himself so that needed to be fixed somehow. Weir had obviously done a considerable amount of research around the various issues and how to get round them with the resources Watney would reasonably have to hand helped of course by the fact it was supposed to be a six person mission on the surface for a month and five of them had left after just six days leaving a lot of food and water to keep Watney going for months whilst he figured out how to create more starting with the handful of potatoes he had.

It’s really well written and an entertaining read and now I’m tempted to watch the film and definitely read more by Andy Weir.

Spoiler alert – do not read beyond here if you haven’t read the book or seen the film

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  • The massive dust storm that forces the crew to abandon Mars leaving Watney behind could happen but wouldn’t have the life threatening implications given in the story, the Martian atmosphere is too rarefied to cause that sort of damage to equipment, especially something as heavy as the launch craft or the Habitat and wouldn’t blow an antenna across to Watney with so much force as to penetrate his spacesuit and almost kill him. But I know why it is written that way as Weir needed a plot device to plausibly abandon Watney. The sandstorm later on in the book, which causes him to make a massive diversion, is a far more accurate depiction in that several days after entering it he still hasn’t realised anything is wrong.
  • What would kill Watney however, and well before a rescue could get there, would be cosmic radiation, there is simply no way he would survive that long especially with the number of EVA’s he performs.

With those caveats, and I believe there are more issues with the film which aren’t in the book but which presumably were changed to make it more dramatic, in the book the science is pretty good especially the chemistry and the botanical solution for growing potatoes.

The Hollow Man – John Dickson Carr

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‘Harrumph. To begin with gentlemen! Having been improving my mind with sensational fiction for the last forty years, I can say -‘
‘But, if you’re going to analyse impossible situations,’ interrupted Pettis, ‘why discuss detective fiction?’
‘Because’ said the doctor, frankly ‘we’re in a detective story, and we don’t fool the reader, by pretending we’re not.’

That has to be one of the most self-aware statements of any character in a book that I’ve read in a long time, and comes in the concluding third of the novel, page 186 in this edition to be precise, which I’m certain the good doctor would want me to be. I first wrote about amateur detective Dr Gideon Fell back in November 2020 so I thought, almost six years later, I should read another of John Dickson Carr’s excellent novels featuring him, especially after I found this copy whilst looking for something else and remembered how much I’d enjoyed ‘The Mad Hatter Mystery’. Carr doesn’t fetishise his detectives and like that previous book we don’t really learn much about Gideon Fell, he is a large man and happily married to his unnamed wife, she remains without a name through all twenty three of the Fell novels and the short stories, and he is interested in writing although quite what isn’t clear and that’s about it. His address is given in this book as Number 1 Adelphi Terrace which implies that he has a certain amount of wealth as that was a particularly fine row of houses on the Thames riverside sadly demolished in 1935, which is also the year this book was first published which I don’t think is coincidental. We’ll come back to interesting streets later in this blog…

The first mystery is the death of Professor Grimaud in an attic room which is locked from the inside and no possible way for a murderer to exit as the walls are too high and sheer and there is deep snow on the ground, and roof, that proves that nobody went out through the window as there are no footprints anywhere and the snow had stopped falling before the gunshot was heard. John Dickson Carr is a specialist in locked room mysteries and indeed chapter seventeen is a very interesting lecture on just such cases by Dr Gideon Fell where he examines the various types of of locked rooms and just how a murder can be committed in them and the assailant manage to escape, or preferably not be in the room in the first place. Needless to say the particular solution in this case isn’t one of the ones explored by Fell in his lecture.

The second mystery is how the prime suspect, an illusionist called Pierre Flay who had appeared in a public bar to threaten Grimaud a few evenings earlier, came to be killed at pretty well the same time. Shot in the back at very close range in the middle of a wide snow covered street with no attacker visible to the three witnesses and by the same gun that killed Professor Grimaud which was found ten feet behind him.

The third mystery is the significance of the three graves in the painting purchased by Grimaud after encountering Fley and the reasons he might have bought it. There are other oddities such as the chameleon overcoat, was it black or was it yellow tweed and where were either of them? Carr has written another great story here and the American title of the novel ‘The Three Coffins’ alludes to the mysterious and it turns out highly significant graves. It is the sixth novel he wrote about Dr Gideon Fell and I’m going to have to search out others as I’m rapidly becoming a fan of this nowadays less well known amateur detective.

I promised at the beginning to explore another street and here we see Carr thinking hard about something that could easily pass the casual reader by and that is the name of the dead end road where the body of Pierre Fley was found, and that was Cagliostro Street. Unlike Adelphi Terrace and indeed Russell Square where Grimaud and his family lived which are, or at least were, real places in London Cagliostro Street doesn’t exist but looking up Alessandro Cagliostro who lends his name to the place is fascinating and his life certainly adds a certain background to various characters in the book, even if you don’t really understand why until the very end.

Leaves of Grass – Walt Whitman

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First written in 1855 and constantly revised and added to throughout Whitman’s lifetime, I have two very different versions both published by Penguin Books USA. One from the Drop Caps series published in 2014 which is a selection from the original volume (see above) and a complete edition from the wartime Penguin series (see below) printed in New York initially to avoid shipping across the very dangerous Atlantic in WWII. But by 1943, when this book was published, most of the titles were not in the UK list at all and were aimed at the American domestic market. Indeed Leaves of Grass didn’t appear in the UK lists until 1986 when it was published in the Penguin Classics series. I’m glad I also have the over eighty year old copy, because otherwise I probably wouldn’t have realised that the Drop Caps copy is seriously abbreviated, even though its title implies it is extended, in that it apparently consists of ‘Leaves of Grass and other Selected Poems and Prose’ although interestingly it does include the preface to ‘Leaves of Grass’ which is missing from the earlier edition I have. There are over two hundred poems in the complete edition as opposed to twenty five in the Drop Caps version although that does include the longest works.

The first poem in the Drop Caps edition is ‘Song of Myself’ which doesn’t appear until poem 26 on page 22 of the complete edition published during the war, but I like that the Drop Caps edition starts with this although it is easily the longest poem in the collection at 79 pages in the Drop Caps and 55 pages in the wartime version due to the much smaller font in that edition, because as a compete beginner with Whitman’s poetry it gives a good introduction to his style. Of particular interest in this poem is the use of repetition to give greater emphasis, here is section seven of the poem to give an idea of what I mean:

  Has any one supposed it lucky to be born?
  I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.

  I pass death with the dying and birth with the new-wash’d babe, and
      am not contain’d between my hat and boots,
  And peruse manifold objects, no two alike and every one good,
  The earth good and the stars good, and their adjuncts all good.

  I am not an earth nor an adjunct of an earth,
  I am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and
      fathomless as myself,
  (They do not know how immortal, but I know.)

  Every kind for itself and its own, for me mine male and female,
  For me those that have been boys and that love women,
  For me the man that is proud and feels how it stings to be slighted,
  For me the sweet-heart and the old maid, for me mothers and the
      mothers of mothers,
  For me lips that have smiled, eyes that have shed tears,
  For me children and the begetters of children.

  Undrape! you are not guilty to me, nor stale nor discarded,
  I see through the broadcloth and gingham whether or no,
  And am around, tenacious, acquisitive, tireless, and cannot be shaken away.

The end of the ninth line and the five consecutive lines after it starting with ‘For me’ are by no means the longest run of repeats in the poem, indeed section fifteen has 44 lines starting with ‘The’ and listing various jobs out of the 62 lines that make up this section and of the eighteen not to have ‘The’ followed by an occupation at the start most have it within the line itself. The constant repetition builds a pleasant rhythm, especially if you read the poem out loud.

The fact that there are multiple versions of even ‘complete and unabridged’ editions depending on which version by Whitman the publisher uses makes it quite confusing for instance in the Drop Caps edition and also the version on Project Gutenberg there is a poem entitled To a Common Prostitute’ but that is missing from the wartime ‘complete’edition along with many other poems on Project Gutenberg. If it wasn’t for the other poems left out I would have assumed prudishness from the editors of the wartime edition. Prostitution is one of the occupations listed in part fifteen of ‘Song of Myself’ mentioned above and there are seven other references to prostitution in the Project Gutenberg version. The poem is short and insightful as to Whitman’s easy going and non self-censorish nature so to conclude this introduction to his works let’s have To a Common Prostitute’ as it again illustrates his use of repetition:

  Be composed—be at ease with me—I am Walt Whitman, liberal and
      lusty as Nature,
  Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you,
  Not till the waters refuse to glisten for you and the leaves to
      rustle for you, do my words refuse to glisten and rustle for you.

  My girl I appoint with you an appointment, and I charge you that you
      make preparation to be worthy to meet me,
  And I charge you that you be patient and perfect till I come.

  Till then I salute you with a significant look that you do not forget me.

The cover of the book above has the first and third verses of ‘One’s-self I sing’ which is the first poem in ‘Leaves of Grass’ in the section entitled ‘Inscriptions’ and is left out of the Drop Caps edition. The entire poem reads:

  One’s-self I sing, a simple separate person,
  Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.

  Of physiology from top to toe I sing,
  Not physiognomy alone nor brain alone is worthy for the Muse,
      I say the Form complete is worthier far,
  The Female equally with the Male I sing.

  Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power,
  Cheerful, for freest action form’d under the laws divine,
  The Modern Man I sing.

How to Land an A330 Airbus – James May

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First published in 2010 this book coincided with the first series of May’s television programme Man Lab, which it closely resembles in concept, indeed there are several items that appear in both. Let’s look at the nine “vital skills” the book attempts to teach which are as follows:

  • How to Land an A330 Airbus in an Emergency
  • How to Escape from Butlins – a holiday camp for those unfamiliar with the name
  • How to Fight a Duel
  • How to Deliver Twins
  • How to Drive the Peppercorn Class A1 4-6-2 Pacific Locomotive Tornado
  • How to Invade and Occupy the Isle of Wight
  • How to Defuse an Unexploded WWII German Bomb
  • How to Play the First Movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in C Sharp Minor (The Moonlight) with no Previous Experience

Of these ‘defusing a bomb’ was covered in series one, episode one of Man Lab, ‘duelling’ was also in series one but split between flintlock pistols in episode two and sabres in episode three, whilst ‘Escaping from Butlin’s’ became escaping from Dartmoor Prison in series two, episode one. There are quite obvious reasons why no attempt to deliver twins without medical supervision wasn’t attempted on the television show and invading the Isle of Wight would have been quite an undertaking for what was a fairly low budget programme. Landing an Airbus could have been safely done in a simulator. presumably driving steam locomotive Tornado could also have been done on a preserved line whilst May could definitely have played the Moonlight Sonata as he has a degree in music from Lancaster University. The closest he gets to this one is in series two, episode three where he teaches somebody to play the guitar.

The real joy of the book however are the superb, and absolutely essential, diagrams by Mike Garland and particular mention should go to Bobby & Co who designed the book it really is very well laid out and although nobody should actually attempt any of the things described in the book you feel that a lot of thought has gone into making it as real as possible. With that in mind here is the cockpit of an A330 to have a quick panic about.

It is helpfully followed on the next double page spread with all the things you can safely ignore blanked out but even so there are still a lot of knobs, switches and digital readouts (the mass of mechanical dials has thankfully been replaced) to pay attention to. There is also a helpful disclaimer:

This guide has been prepared only for use in absolute dire buttock-clenching emergency. None of the advice given above has been sanctioned by Airbus or any of its associates. Do not attempt to fly the A330 Airbus on a recreational basis or use one for joy riding in a hoodie. The A330 Airbus is not a toy.

The one ‘skill’ I do have a small amount of experience in is fighting a duel and this is due to being a competitive fencer in my youth and becoming the armourer of the local club. I can therefore say that the description of sword fighting is pretty accurate which bodes well for the rest of the information in the book and again there is a sensible piece of advice which in this case, when choosing your opponent for a duel it is advisable to avoid people who are champions at fencing or shooting you are bound to come off the loser and that is not a position you want in a duel.

At this point I’d like to include another of Mike Garland’s excellent illustrations, in this example clearly based on the opened cover of a Haynes vehicle maintenance guide:

May’s book, like indeed Man Lab, which I remember fondly, is great fun, and informative in a way that you hope to never need to know any of this and in fact its main drawback is that if you ever did actually need to do any of the nine ‘skills’ you almost certainly won’t have the book to hand, or indeed have any idea where you last saw it. Having said that it was a good read and I have probably learnt something which can never be a bad thing. Especially if the one thing you learn is always to try to find a professional, defusing a bomb is not for amateurs and they are only a phone call away.

Closed Casket – Sophie Hannah

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At first, or possibly even second and third glance, there seems to be nothing linking this weeks blog with the previous one, Finn Family Moomintroll. But it was Sophie Hannah who did the English verse translations of the three Moomin picture books published by Sort Of Books, ‘The Book about Moomin, Mymble and Little My’ in 2001 along with ‘Dangerous Journey’ and ‘Who Will Comfort Toffle?’ both in 2003. I must admit that I hadn’t initially realised this either, it was just a feeling of ‘that name sounds familiar, I wonder why?’ that prompted me to check. At the time Hannah was known as a poet rather than as a writer of mysteries, which is something she moved into later. Up until the time of writing this blog Hannah was published six novels continuing the stories of Agatha Christie’s great Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, this is the only one I have and was the second title in the series she has written following ‘The Monogram Murders’.

This definitely feels like a story from the so called Golden Age of murder mysteries, the 1920’s to 1930’s, even down to the plan of the house where the crime was committed which appeared so often at the time. Large country house away from major conurbation, tick, disparate group of guests staying for the weekend, tick, guests include renowned detective, tick, taciturn butler, tick, moderately incompetent local police, tick, yes all the characteristics are there. That’s not to imply that the book is formulaic; rather that at least some of those points, and often all of them, would appear in bestsellers of the period. This time the large country house is in Ireland and the poison is the old familiar strychnine, used by Christie in five novels, including her first ‘The Mysterious Affair at Styles‘, along with five short stories, although this time it isn’t immediately obvious that it is the cause of death. It does feel like a Poirot story though, I was initially worried that it would be a pastiche as it would have been so easy to write. Anyone familiar with the superb David Suchet TV adaptations feels they know exactly what Poirot would do or say in pretty well any scenario so a new Poirot story could easily fall into variants of those or worse a parody. I’m glad to say Hannah managed to avoid those traps waiting for her and wrote a story that could potentially come from the pen of the Queen of Crime herself.

The biggest difference between Hannah’s book and those of Christie can best be illustrated by pulling from my shelves a small number of Agatha Christie examples, taken from the first Penguin million of her books to make sure the titles are suitably random:

  • The Murder of Roger Ackroyd – 242 pages
  • Lord Edgware Dies – 244 pages
  • Murder on the Orient Express – 215 pages
  • The Sittaford Mystery – 250 pages
  • The Mystery of the Blue Train – 245 pages

In contrast this edition of ‘Closed Casket’ sprawls over 369 pages, in all cases I have ignored in the page count contents lists, pages of diagrams such as the plan of the house in ‘Closed Casket’, and other extras to the main body of the text. You can clearly see that the new book is vastly larger than Christie’s own works. Indeed looking at most writers from the golden age 230 to 250 pages seems about the normal length of a book. Bearing this in mind it is perhaps surprising that ‘Murder on the Orient Express’, despite being one of the most famous and having such a large number of suspects, is quite so short. At this length Hannah is by no means unusual with modern murder mysteries frequently being around 400 pages, Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club books are all between 400 and 450 pages, however I did feel that in the spirit of the Golden Age a tightening up of the prose would have been appropriate for a Christie follow-up, but that is a minor criticism of what was a very enjoyable read, I started with book two as that was the one I had to hand but I will go back to ‘The Monogram Murders’ and on to the later tales when I come across them. The books aren’t Agatha Christie but are probably as good as we are going to get and a suitable tribute to a great writer fifty years after she died in 1976.

Finn Family Moomintroll – Tove Jansson

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This is the third book in the Moomin series, written and illustrated by Tove Jansson in 1948, but the first to be set in the Moomin house and the surrounding area, it was also the first to be translated into English. Oddly the first Moomin book was the last to be translated as I covered in ‘The Moomins and the Great Flood‘ back in 2018. Finn Family Moomintroll consists of seven interlinked stories, each of which can be read on their own but together tell of a character called The Hobgoblin and his magical hat who rides around on a flying black panther in his hunt for rubies to add to his collection, especially the huge King’s Ruby. Indeed the original Swedish title is Trollkarlens Hatt (The Hobgoblin’s Hat). The main problem with having this children’s book as the first English language one is the relatively large number of characters that had made their home in the Moomin house by now. Apart from Moominmamma, Moominpappa and their son Moomintroll there is Snork Maiden and her brother The Snork, Snufkin, The Muskrat, Sniff and even a Hemulen all of whom have their own personalities that had mainly been explored in the first two books so it can be a bit confusing for new readers. This volume adds Thingumy and Bob as new residents and The Groke as a rather scary visitor wanting to retrieve something that Thingumy and Bob had taken from her and hidden in their suitcase. Fortunately Little My and her own brand of chaos hasn’t appeared yet.

Unusually the book starts with a preface and all the characters preparing for the winter hibernation with Moomintroll looking at the first snow:

“Tonight”, he thought, “we shall settle down for our long winter’s sleep.” (All Moomintrolls go to sleep about November. This is a good idea, too, if you don’t like the cold and the long winter darkness.)

So after a final meal of pine needles, which apparently helps sleepiness and provides long term sustenance, they all go to bed and the next thing we know it is the first proper chapter and Snufkin has already got up from his long one hundred nights sleep. He and Moomintroll wake Sniff and together they got for a walk up a nearby hill where they find on the top a large top hat which they decide to take home for Moominpappa. The hat is too large for him so they decide to use it as a waste paper basket and Moomin threw the eggshell from his breakfast into it. The next day some small clouds are drifting about the house, but unusual ones because you could get on and ride them, see Moomintroll and Snorkmaiden doing just that on the cover. It turns out that the hat had changed the eggshell pieces into the clouds and anything in the hat for any time is also randomly altered ut only for a short period, no more than a day. Jansson uses this transformative power to explore the concepts of things changing and peoples acceptance or resistance to the way things alter. Even Moomintroll is completely changed when he hides in the hat and nobody recognises him apart from his mother when she looks deep into his eyes and recognises her son at which point he changes back.

I have a couple of copies of this book, the one at the top is a lovely collectors hardback from Sort Of Books and was first printed by them in 2017, it includes a fold out map of Moomin Valley as opposed to the single page illustration from earlier editions. I also have a paperback version in the form of the first Puffin edition from 1961 which can be seen below and which really popularised the Moomin stories in the English speaking world. Both books have the same text using a translation by Tove Jansson’s friend Elizabeth Portch which was done in 1950 and originally published by Ernest Benn Ltd.

Included in this edition and also the Ernest Benn volume from 1950 is a charming letter from Moominmamma introducing the Moomins and saying that she has heard that there aren’t any Moomintrolls in England, I apologise for the poor reproduction of this letter but despite the paperback being sixty five years old it is in mint condition and appears to be unread and I don’t want to crack the spine to take the photo. This letter is not included in the more recent Sort Of Books edition,

The book covers almost a complete year with the final lines of being: “It is autumn in Moomin Valley, for how else can spring come back again?” A final positive sentiment in a book that deals with important issues around change and resistance to change in a way that speaks to children everywhere.

Gone to Earth – Mary Webb

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The ninth book in my reading of the first ten Penguin Books in first edition all done in their 90th anniversary year, and the first one I’ve struggled to get into. I think it is partly down to the dated handling of the subject matter, a young girl pursued by two very different men but mainly due to the use of phonetic Shropshire dialect whenever characters, especially Hazel, speak. This does make reading the book almost 110 years after it was first published quite difficult, I may live in Shropshire, in fact only a few miles from where the book was written, but I’m not from here originally and I’ve never heard dialect as broad as it is depicted in the book. As a brief introduction to quite a simple bit of dialogue here’s Hazel explaining why she is afraid of the small wood known as Hunter’s Spinney at midsummer and the way she is put down, and will continue to be put down by Mrs. Marston.

”In Hunter’s Spinney on midsummer night there’s things moving as move no other time; things free as was fast; things crying out as have been a long while hurted.’ She suddenly opened her eyes and went on dramatically ‘First comes the Black Huntsman, crouching low on his horse and the horse going belly to earth. And John Meares o’the public, he seed the red froth from his nostrils on the brakes one morning when he was ketching pheasants. And the jeath’s with him, great hound−dogs, real as real, only no eyes, but sockets with a light behind ’em. Ne’er a one knows what they’s after. If I seed ’em I’d die,’ she finished hastily, taking a large bite of cake.
‘Myths are interesting,’ said Edward, ‘especially nature myths.’
‘What’s a myth, Mr. Marston?’
‘An untruth, my dear,’ said Mrs. Marston.

I’ve got an idea from the context what ‘the jeath’ is but it’s not a word I have ever seen before or indeed can find in a dictionary. As for the characters Hazel is depicted as a rural innocent, yes she’s aware of sex and reproduction as it happens with the animals around her in the countryside but not really as it applies to her so she is confused by the interest she raises in both Edward Marston, the chapel parson and his rival local land owner Jack Reddin. Her mother died when she was young and she was left to be raised by her father who is only really interested in his harp and his bees so never had a female to explain things to her, by the time the book starts she is eighteen and never had a relationship with a man or indeed wanted one, but all the same she is a bit too innocent, too fay, to be entirely believable as a character. The book revolves around the conflict between the two men and Hazel not sure where she should be and whom she should be with, this isn’t even resolved when she marries the priest, in fact she is if anything more drawn to Reddin after that point.

I have to say that although I did get to the end of the 284 pages it was a struggle, none of the characters drew me in particularly except perhaps the parson Edward and even he I felt needed a good talking to so that hopefully he would stop pussyfooting around Hazel and just take control of their lives together, unfortunately nobody had that chat with him. I guessed something similar to the ending was going to happen as I couldn’t see any other way Webb could draw to tale to a logical conclusion but the book was still strangely unsatisfying and the first of the ten books from Penguin’s original production that I haven’t really enjoyed. It’s entirely likely that I’m not the audience she was writing for, it was after all made into a film by the great British film-makers Powell and Pressburger so it was obviously highly thought of at the time, it’s just not for me.

Camelot – Edited by Jane Yolen

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This collection of new short stories was published in 1995 by Philomel Books which is now a children’s imprint of Penguin Books but at the time was a division of the Putnam and Grosset Group, Philomel does seem to have had a varied history of owners over the years since it was formed by Ann Beneduce in 1980 taking the poetic name for a nightingale and has always specialised in children’s titles which I hadn’t realised when I picked it off the shelves to read. Frankly the only reason I own the book is that it contains the first printing of the Terry Pratchett story ‘Once and Future’, I used to buy various anthologies just to track down Pratchett short stories but since 2012 when ‘A Blink of the Screen’ was published which gathered presumably all his fiction short stories together in one volume I’ve stopped the hunt. Pratchett’s story tells the tale of the pulling of a sword from the stone only in his version it’s controlled by a time traveller who has built an electromagnet into the rock so that he could control who succeeded, needless to say his plan doesn’t work out a expected. Interestingly in ‘A Blink of The Screen’ Pratchett states:

There’s a lot more of this deep on a hard drive somewhere. It may yet become a novel, but it started as a short story in Camelot, edited by Jane Yolen, in 1995. I’d wanted to write it for nearly ten years, I really ought to dig out those old discs again…

Sadly he didn’t live to have another go at it.

Of the nine other stories, and one song by Jane Yolen, the only other author I have heard of is Anne McCaffrey, famous for her Dragon Riders of Pern series of novels, and her offering ‘Black Horses for a King’ is probably the best of the collection, closely followed by Pratchett. Frankly the McCaffrey story is strong partly because she largely ignored the brief and simply wrote a good short story with nothing to make it Camelot apart from the leader of the warriors being called Lord Artos, which is probably close enough to Arthur to be included. The story is actually the first part of the novel ‘Black Horses for a King’ by McCaffrey which came out in 1996 so either she was inspired to continue the tale, and develop it into the story of the early days of British cavalry, in a way that Pratchett considered doing with his contribution or she was already working on the novel and simply extracted part of it when asked to supply something for this collection.

The real joy in the book are the lovely illustrations by Winslow Pels who has just the right amount of mystical whimsy for the book. The one above is for ‘Excalibur’ by Anne E Crompton who was sixty five when she wrote this story and a well established writer of children’s stories although this is the only example of her work I own, I quite enjoyed it but not enough to seek out any of her other works.

The other stories included along with Amesbury Song by Jane Yolen and Adam Stemple are:

  • The Changing of the Shrew by Kathleen Kudlinski
  • Wild Man by Diana L Paxton
  • Gwenbwyfar by Lynne Pledger
  • Holly and Ivy by Jaes D Macdonald and Debra Doyle
  • The Raven by Nancy Springer
  • All the Iron of Heaven by Mark W Tiedemann
  • Our Hour of Need by Greg Costikyan

I cannot find any examples of this book being reprinted after coming out in 1995, so I’m guessing it wasn’t a great seller and as the best parts are available elsewhere it has probably had its day.

J R R Tolkien and C S Lewis in Puffin

On By bookramblings142In Milestones in Publishing6 Comments

This blog is coming out a day earlier than usual, on Monday the 11th May 2026, to mark the exact anniversary, one hundred years ago, since Tolkien and Lewis first met. To celebrate the occasion I have chosen to look at the very different histories of the two authors famous children’s books with relation to the best known publisher of paperbacks aimed at this market, Puffin Books an imprint of Penguin Books. Although Lewis was the first of the two to appear in Puffin, for reasons that will soon become clear I’m going to start with Tolkien and Puffin Story Book PS161 published October 1961 with a lovely cover by Pauline Baynes which wraps round the whole book, but without most of the pictures from the Allen & Unwin hardback. The only image retained was the map and that was at the insistence of Tolkien who felt that it would be difficult to follow without its assistance, but the omission of most of the illustrations wasn’t to be the biggest problem with this publication.

Allen & Unwin didn’t have a paperback imprint of their own that that could publish Tolkien in the 1960’s but they were also worried about devaluing the brand as they were making good money selling Tolkien in hardback but after talking with the author they decided on a limited run of 35,000 copies to test the market for a paperback. Puffin duly published the book and as usual five copies were sent to the author requesting one to be signed and sent back for Sir Allen Lane’s personal collection, this Tolkien duly did, it was only a few months later that he noticed what would become a deal breaker. First I will show an early passage from the 1961 Puffin edition:

and now the same section from the 1966 Unwin paperback:

The original dwarves has become dwarfs, checking revealed dwarfish rather than dwarvish and elfish replaced elvish, Tolkien was not happy to say the least but it was too late to do anything about it. It appears that the printers, Cox and Wyman, had made the changes and quoted The Oxford English Dictionary as their authority, unfortunately for them Tolkien was Merton Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford University and had worked on the OED so he was even less impressed by this argument. Tolkien did not allow Puffin to reprint ‘The Hobbit’ or indeed publish any others of his works and Sir Allen Lane’s copy in the Penguin Archive in Bristol is believed to be the only signed example, as he would apparently refuse to sign any Puffin copies put before him. A lot of this I knew but for extra details, including the last bit regarding signed copies, or lack thereof I am indebted to the article by Jules Burt in Penguin Collectors Newsletter 100.

Now let’s move on to Lewis and his Narnia series of seven books, these were all published by Puffin although like Tolkien none of his other works were published by Penguin Books, but not because he refused publication, unlike Tolkien the Narnia books went through multiple reprints at Puffin. Pauline Baynes had illustrated the original hardbacks and provided new covers for the Puffin editions which also ties these books nicely to ‘The Hobbit’.

Oddly as can be seen from the lists below Puffin didn’t publish the Narnia books in order, the Puffin list first:

  • PS132 – The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe – October 1959
  • PS173 – Prince Caspian – April 1962
  • PS192 – The Magician’s Nephew – June 1963
  • PS205 – The Last Battle – January 1964
  • PS229 – The Voyage of the Dawn Treader – March 1965
  • PS240 – The Silver Chair – June 1965
  • PS244 – The Horse and His Boy – September 1965

Actual first publication sequence and probable correct reading order

  • The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe – published by Geoffrey Bles 1950
  • Prince Caspian – published by Geoffrey Bles 1951
  • The Voyage of the Dawn Treader – published by Geoffrey Bles 1952
  • The Silver Chair – published by Geoffrey Bles 1953
  • The Horse and His Boy – published by Geoffrey Bles 1954
  • The Magician’s Nephew – published by The Bodley Head 1955
  • The Last Battle – published by The Bodley Head 1956

There is a good argument that ‘The Magician’s Nephew’ should be read first as it covers events well before any of the other books, also ‘The Horse and His Boy’ is actually set towards the end of ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’. One thing is absolutely clear however and that is that ‘The Last Battle’ should not be read fourth as it is definitely the last book in the series.

Tolkien and Lewis were the ‘star’ members of a literary group called The Inklings who met regularly at The Eagle and Child public house in Oxford to discuss their ongoing works. Tolkien was rather dismissive of Lewis’s overly Christian allegorical novels, such as the Narnia series, as he didn’t regard them as serious literary works unlike his own output which he slaved over for years. But despite disagreements the two men remained friends for decades with Tolkien regularly visiting Lewis before his death in 1963. Tolkien survived him by ten years.

The Narnia books are now published by Harper Collins rather then Puffin, but still have the original, and iconic, Pauline Baynes illustrations inside them over seventy five years since they first appeared.

Everyday Life is Full of Math – Jun Mitani

On By bookramblings142In ReviewsLeave a comment

I have recently been introduced to the excellent series of recreational mathematics books from A K Peters/CRC Press and I thought I would start with the one that I have which is aimed at young adult readers, so aged fourteen upwards, to introduce maths pupils to concepts that their school would probably not cover, but which are thought provoking additions to the syllabus. Mitani is a professor of Information and Systems at the University of Tsukuba, Japan specialising in geometric modelling techniques for computer graphics and he does cover some to the basic concepts of this work in one of the chapters. But this book grew out of posts he was making on X (twitter) on everyday maths which have been expanded to make each chapter but even then they are not long. There are thirty three chapters covering a wide selection of topics in just 187 pages so no individual section is daunting for somebody using this book as their first venture into recreational mathematics. The book is also heavily illustrated which makes the probably unfamiliar concepts explored within it more understandable to those first dipping their toes into maths for fun. Hopefully they also have inspiring maths teachers like I did, thank you Mr. Braybrooke, Mr. Roberts and Mr. Jones.

Some of the ways of looking at what for me are well known mathematical ideas are new to me and are fascinating because of their fresh approach, for example the chart above is actually the first thousand digits of pi after the decimal point. You read it from left to right then front to back so the front row represents the first fifty digits which I have split into five blocks of ten digits for ease of display in this blog i.e. 1415926535 8979323846 2643383279 5028841971 6939937510. Unfortunately the question below the chart is somewhat given away by the title of the chapter ‘Looking at Pi’ but the diagram beautifully illustrates the randomness of this irrational number, and also makes it easy to spot the Feynman Point (near the back left) where unexpectedly you have six consecutive nines from position 762.

No book introducing recreational mathematics could possibly avoid magic squares but again Mitani has an unusual spin on the idea, yes he explains ‘normal’ magic squares where all the row, columns and both diagonals add up to the same value but he then goes on to examine the example of the one inscribed on the Passion facade of Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. My photo of that magic square can be seen below, note the absence of 12 and 16 and the duplication of 10 and 14 but this allows for an even greater number of combinations. Here not only do all rows and columns along with the diagonals add up to 33 but so do the four shaded 2×2 squares, the centre 2×2 square, the four corners, opposite sides (14+14+2+3) and (11+8+9+5) and the diagonal opposites (11+14+3+5) and (14+9+8+2). A truly special magic square on a truly special building.

But you really notice the country of origin for this book when you find chapters on origami, the art of paper folding. One of the notes on the rear cover includes “Introduces math found in real life, like origami”, a more Japanese statement it’s difficult to imagine. There are four chapters dealing with aspects of paper folding, one of which, shown below, is specifically origami and is no where near as complex as the chapter tile implies at first sight, but does allow explorations in the field of topology.

The final chapter I want to highlight is even more Japanese specific as it relates to the seating pattern on the iconic bullet trains, the first really successful high speed train network in the world. The maths here is actually very simple but neatly explained and other chapters include aspects of a famous combinations puzzle, the Tower of Hanoi, Pascal’s Triangle and my favourite the still unproven Collatz Conjecture which would lead to a prize of $830,000 if you could prove it. The best thing about Collatz Conjecture is it is so easy to understand, but why does it apparently always work, you could win the prize either for proving that it does always work or alternatively finding an example where it doesn’t. I remember getting obsessed by Fermat’s Theorem when I was the age this book is aimed at, again a very simple concept with a huge financial prize for the person who solved it. That however has now been done, which is possibly why Mitani doesn’t have a chapter on that.

The book is available from Routledge. My one, very minor, criticism is that although the book is clearly print on demand no attempt has been made to run the file through a spell checker to convert from American to English spellings when printing in the UK, although this would have been a simple exercise to do. Having said that, the book is otherwise excellent and I wish it had been available when I was thirteen or fourteen and starting to get interested in the neglected corners of mathematics.that aren’t covered at school.