#30 P.D. James, The Private Patient
P.D James is surely an outstanding figure of the murder mystery genre. She has been doing it for 46 years and, at the age of 87 is still going. Or is she? Towards the end of this book her detective, Adam Dalgliesh, hints at impending retirement and also gets married. I haven't read the first story, Uncover her face (1962), but poor Dalgleish has, surprisingly, only had 14 noteworthy cases since then (according to Wikipedia). James dabbled for a while with a female detective, Cordelia Gray, but then returned to Dalgliesh. Since he was already a Chief Inspector in 1962, he must be well into his 70s by the time of this story and his marriage. I do find this irritating about James. On the one hand, her characters seem to be fixed, in their manners and class atttitudes, in the 1950s, yet they all have laptops and mobile phones and James makes no attempt to set the stories in an earlier period - this one is explicitly post-2005. Her characters use the phones, but rarely the computers. The police, in her later stories, never use the internet or even the internal networks of Scotland Yard (I concede there is one exchange of emails, for private purposes, in this latest book). Dalgliesh, doesn't send his secretary an email or a text message, he drives two hours to London and leaves a note on her desk. He doesn't use his computer to send and receive documents, he delivers and picks up hard copy in person.

Anachronisms aside, James does write a good yarn. I liked that the story ended without complete resolution of the case - you have a pretty good idea what happened, but without the kind of evidence that would stand up in court. Her red herrings are perhaps a bit obvious and I guessed correctly at the identity of the culprit early on, but it was kind of satisfying to watch it unravel. (I never liked Agatha Christie because she always has a card up her sleeve that she doesn't let anybody see until the end - I think that's cheating.) I like the way the witnesses are complicit in covering things up for the sake of relationships or out of guilt for long ago mishaps in their lives. In short, I enjoyed this book much more than the last one I read. Not bad for an 87 year old. I'd like to be that sharp at her age!

Now here's my complete list of 2009 reads. It is, I'm slightly ashamed to say, very heavy on 'quick reads', i.e. detective fiction. Seems I had a lot more energy, or time, for 'serious' things last year. This year I started reading several books that I haven't finished (e.g. Toni Morrison's Beloved of which, after one chapter, I realized I'd have to be in a different mood entirely to appreciate). But it was especially fun to re-read all of Sjöwall and Wahlöö and recall the the 1960s. I wish Stieg Larsson hadn't died (or maybe it's a good thing that he did and he didn't have to stretch the Pippi Longstocking metaphor too far). Jungstedt's Unseen was a great start, but I didn't like her second book at all. Bryson was a good laugh and, although I'd like to read his book about Australia, I probably won't read much more than that. As for the rest, I'd have a hard time choosing between Saviano, Said and Joppke for the best book. For the worst, I think Cox's Servant Problem.

2009 reads, the complete list
Detective stories
The Girl who Played with Fire, Stieg Larsson
Murder at the Savoy, Sjöwall and Wahlöö
The Terrorists, Sjöwall and Wahlöö.
Roseanna, Sjöwall and Wahlöö
The Man who Went up in Smoke, Sjöwall and Wahlöö.
The Man on the Balcony, Sjöwall and Wahlöö.
About Face, Donna Leon
The Laughing Policeman, Sjöwall and Wahlöö
The Fire Engine that Disappeared, Sjöwall and Wahlöö.
The Abominable Man, Sjöwall and Wahlöö.
The Locked Room, Sjöwall and Wahlöö.
Cop Killer, Sjöwall and Wahlöö
Unseen, Mari Jungstedt.
Stiff, Shane Maloney
The Girl who Kicked the Hornets' Nest, Stieg Larsson
Unspoken, Mari Jungstedt
Hypothermia, Arnaldur Indridason
The Brush-Off, Shane Maloney
The Private Patient, P.D. James

Other fiction
Bartleby the Scrivener, Herman Melville

Travel Writing
Songlines, Bruce Chatwin
Notes from a Small Island, Bill Bryson

Political economy
Gomorrah, Roberto Saviano
An anonymous book manuscript
The Clean Industrial Revolution, Ben McNeil
Water Politics in the Murray-Darling Basin, Daniel Connell
The Servant Problem, Rosie Cox

History & Politics
The Question of Palestine, Edward W. Said
Istanbul: Memories and the City, Orhan Pamuk
Veil: Mirror of Identity, Christian Joppke

Not much more to add to my previous posts on this book. The British solution is typically instrumental: you cannot talk to a CCTV camera (meaning you can't relate to someone who can see you, but you can't see them). In the end, the decision to allow the niqab in school is a local (private) one, in which the government does not intervene - and individual schools have the right to ban it (in each case that has been brought there have been alternative schools that accept it). Nobody at all objects to the hijab (and many schools have incorporated it into the school uniform). The only jarring note is that British Muslims remain dissatisfied (compared to their French counterparts).

In the conclusion he explains that American commentators have got it wrong - that the source of The Problem is socio-economic disadvantage rather than inability to 'integrate' or 'tolerate' Islam. Europe is not a 'closed Christian club'. The Germans will have to change though [and probably accepting citizenship was a first step on the road]. I liked what he said about 'identity': "collective identities cannot be modelled on individual identities; they may spring from an internal dialogue that needs no excluded other." (actualy he was citing a Canadian scholar called Abizadeh). This internal dialogue seems the best hope for the future.

Although it hasn't many pages, I'm still reading Veil in snatches. I have to keep putting it down to have a good think. It's probably decades since I've read a book about western politics and political philosophy and it's clear that the story of the headscarf controversies has ramifications beyond the mere propensity of Muslims to cover their women. Joppke looks at the French controversies in terms of a contradiction between two aspects of liberalism, that of equity, or 'ethical liberalism', and that of liberty. The two cannot be reconciled except insofar as the broad majority of French Muslims are supportive of republican secularism which, fortunately, they are.

In Germany, the controversy was (is?) between liberalism and an essentially illiberal notion of Germany as a 'Christian-occidental' state. According to Joppke the history of this paradox lies in the fact that, unlike France, Germany had no revolutionary separation of Church and state, but its secularism emerged on the basis of a continuing 'Christian-occidental' tradition. While the French derive their cultural identity from the revolution, the Germans derive theirs from their Christian tradition. Germany's 3 million Muslims therefore present the German state with a real quandary. Thus while the constitution prescribes freedom of religion, the courts have also determined that the constitution does not prevent the Lander, which control the schools, from legislating in a way that discriminates against Muslim women teachers, but not Christian nuns, wearing the headscarf in school. Most of the Lander have legislated in this way, except Berlin which banned both. 'Christian-occidentalism' in Germany has also resulted in the fact that most people of Turkish origin - even though 3rd or 4th generation and having acquired German citizenship (in a relatively recent reform), still regard themselves as 'Turks'. German Jews, apparently, while not Christian are 'occidental', but the poor Muslims are neither - even if they adhere to all the German secular values. I wonder if this will change if Turkey joins Europe (or if this is a reason it cannot). I also wondered to what extent German Jewish emigrants to Israel have influenced the nature of the state there - identifying itself as 'Jewish-occidental' in contrast to the Oriental neighbours.

The British case provides yet another contrast. I'm on this chapter at the moment, so my responses are still unformed, but at the moment things are looking bad. British liberalism is of the liberty variety. The British, according to Joppke, therefore have no real cultural identity, but a patchwork of different ones. Essentially the state has followed a path of multiculturalism, even though this is not explicit. It leads people to live in fairly separate communities in which there can be no integration because there's nothing to integrate into (the idea of integration implies something that transcends the different cultures). In the British school system, large amounts of state funding are provided to religiously based schools. Joppke, fairly persuasively I must say, clearly favours the French version in which everyone can share the values of the republic and be integrated. He doesn't seem to be arguing that it would be possible for the Germans or British to adopt the French view, considering their very different historical developments. He is just saying that the British tradition of liberalism has presented the state with a dilemma, first manifested in Northern Ireland where two illiberal Christian cultures found living together intolerable - now they live side-by-side rather than being integrated - and now in the clash between English liberalism and Muslim illiberalism. Islam, he argues, doesn't recognise the separation of the private and public spheres and while the state wants them to be liberal, the majority of the community actually want "to insulate their offspring from the virus of reflection that is implanted by a secular curriculum" (p. 87). They reject the idea of a 'westernized' or 'European' Islam that seems to be more commonly accepted in other parts of Europe. The liberal state has only begun to respond in cases of what he calls the 'extreme veil'; i.e., niqab and jilbab.

This is as far as I've got. Before Howard we had official multi-culturalism here. Then Howard tried to proclaim our 'Christian-occidental' identity and, inter alia, we got a race riot for a reward. The legacy of this shift has not yet disappeared (viz, the recent attacks on Indian students, even though on a smaller scale than the Cronulla event). Neither has the earlier legacy disappeared: when Sheik Hillaly said that an uncovered woman was like 'putting meat before the cat' - he was howled down by Muslims from all over, especially women. I'm hopeful that we have some kind of identity that transcends the varied religious/ethnic ones and we won't end up down the British or German roads. But I'm not sure.

On a tangent, since I was thinking about it today in light of the Chinese execution of a mentally ill Briton for drug smuggling and the British reaction to it ('intolerable', 'unacceptable', etc), it occurred to me that western liberalism is beginning to be an endangered species. Not only is it fraught with contradictions (tolerant of apartheid, etc.), but it seems unable to cope with the challenge of illiberalism in the form of Islam, China, etc., except by undermining itself.

Yesterday I heard a story about a guy who ripped the niqab off the face of a woman in the street in Leicester. She was talking about it. She has a quite posh accent (in other words she belongs to the professional classes) and she was on her way to the office with her briefcase when a man walked towards her and removed the bit of cloth that covers her face. She explained that the niqab, which she began wearing a few years ago, is part of her identity and having it ripped off made her feel naked. People at the office advised her to report the incident to the cops. The cops were very sympathetic and are searching for the offender, but don't have a lot to go on.

I happen to be reading, in dribs and drabs, a book called The Veil: a mirror of identity by a political scientist, Christian Joppke. It is about the West (specifically Europe), where Islam presents a problem for the liberalism that prevails there. Joppke says

the Islamic headscarf is a provocation which cannot be suppressed unless the West denies its own values, such as tolerance and religious freedoms. This is the central paradox of all headscarf controversies: the headscarf is an affront to liberal values, but its suppression is illiberal also and as such a denial of these same values....

However, the rub is that pure Islam, at least in the form it has been retrieved by the revival, underwrites patriarchy. As Mahmood [2005] concedes, 'piety' (which is the ethos of the female mosque movement) 'and male superiority are ineluctibly intertwined' (p.175). And the most pertinent sign of male superiority is the headscarf itself. The famous headscarf verse of the Koran prescribes: "Enjoin believing women to turn their eyes away from temptation and to preserve their chastity; not to display their adornments.... to draw their veils over their bosoms and not to display their finery except to their husbands ..." This entails the reduction of women to their sexuality, which represents a 'danger [...] to the sanctity of the Muslim community' (Mahmood 2005: 111). The function of the headscarf is to limit and confine this sexuality to its rightful owner, the husband.... To the degree that women 'choose' a pious life... they choose subordination.

Mahmood is an academic anthropologist and the the above omits (via the ... device) much of her argument and direct quotations from the Koran. There is more theoretical stuff along these lines, but what Joppke aims to do in the book is contrast the French headscarf controversies with the British and German ones.

Having got some way into the French chapter so far, I have to say I'm quite sympathetic. I'm inclined that way anyway as I agree with his argument about the liberal paradox. Liberalism encompasses both freedom (of religion, for example) and equality and, whichever way you look at it, the headscarf is an affront to the latter. The French republican version of liberalism has declared the separation of church and state in a way that means the state (or the public sphere) transcends the private (including the religious) sphere. In the schools, for example, children are supposed to be educated in a manner unencumbered by the private sphere so that they will be integrated into the republic. This is an ideology that says children are not innately religious and they do not automatically belong to any religion. If they are allowed to bring their religious symbols to school, they will not learn the transcendental republican ideology and they will not be integrated. Instead France will become a patchwork of private ideologies. Until now, the plan has worked, and the vast majority of French Muslims feel integrated - moreover, they adhere to a fairly secular version of their religious practice (no veils, rarely going to Friday prayers, etc.). They declare themselves French first, Muslim second (or third or whatever). The controversies have arisen because of the Islamic revival and the adherence by a minority of Muslims disaffected with republicanism. As Joppke points out, Islam does not accept the separation of the public and private spheres. Neither did the Catholic Church before it was defeated by republicanism many decades ago.

The English, and the Anglo-Saxons generally (by which he means Americans and Canadians) have gone down a different path of multiculturaliism, which emphasises freedom of the private sphere. Parents of little girls are allowed to dress them up in veils because they are 'Muslim' before they are British. But even the multiculturalists balk at some of the extreme versions. Genital mutilation, for example, is not accepted - possibly it has no Koranic text to bless it anyway - and the intrusion of the niqab into the public sphere generates controversy, unlike the ordinary headscarf. The German case is different again - in Germany the Christians do not accept that Islam is a legitimate German phenomenon.

In Poland, these days, we have also the controversy of the Cross. Public schools have put up crosses in the classroom to symbolise the end of communism and the role of the Polish Pope in getting rid of it. The Polish courts have said this is OK, because Poland is a 'Catholic country', but in Wroclaw some students have objected to having crosses in their classrooms.

Among the many recommendations that cover the inside and outside of this book, one of the reviewers describes Maloney's style as 'literary'. I think that is a massive over-rating, but the language is certainly colourful, clever and often very funny. Very much in the Paul Keating tradition (PK is an PM who made us all laugh by calling his successor, John Howard, 'the dessicated coconut' and so forth.) Maybe it's the Irish Australian tradition. The plots of Maloney's stories are usually devices through which he can take the piss out of Australian political life and, in this one, the arts scene. 'Comic futility' is the description I like best.

This was one of those books that I began slowly and then, reaching a certain point, found that I was unable to put it down until I'd finished. In this case, the turning point was chapter 22 'On the ships that passed through the Bosphorus, famous fires, moving house and other disasters'. The first part of the chapter was about two tankers that collided in the strait and exploded, one of them drifting into another and setting it alight as well. Then, as the waterway was lined with old wooden houses, some of them went up too. The story is woven into the theme of the book - a city that used to be a splendid world capital in the process of decline and decay - so beautifully that, instead of finishing the chapter and turning out the light, I ploughed on to the end.

Some things made me uneasy. Pamuk comes from a wealthy family (also in decline) and I always wondered whether the Melancholy (hüzün) that he describes as the pervading mood of the city is more of a class thing than a popular thing. Anyway, as basically the only (or so he claims) Turkish writer to have written in such depth about the city and, as a Nobel Prize winner whose work has been translated into many languages, Melancholy is sure to become the common depiction. Paris, to which he often refers, may be the City of Light, but Istanbul is now the city of black and white, of melancholy. There are lots of black and white photographs to emphasize the point. Moreover, it's easy to see why he is not very popular with the regime: it's clear he doesn't think a great deal of Ataturk and the Republican 'modernization' program (or 'westernization' as Pamuk would put it). While the Ottomans may have blown it, they left behind a legacy of cosmopolitanism that Ataturk destroyed. At the same time, I read on p. 221 about the Muslim refugees fleeing from "ethnic cleansing in the new Balkan republics" after the First World War. This was new to me - it's not something that pops up frequently in the western media in the way that the ethnic cleansing by the Turks - of Armenians, Greeks, Jews, etc. does. Pamuk's grandmother was Circassian - they originated in the north Caucasus and migrated to Turkey (among other places) after a war with the Russians in the 1800s. So opposition to 'Turkification' is possibly somewhere in his roots.

At least among Pamuk's social circles the hüzün that he sees as the 'essence' of the city is best found in the poor neighbourhoods. He scarcely talks about the major tourist highlights that all westerners go to see (I don't remember going to see them myself though, apart from the great bazaar, which was awful.) He talks about the 'picturesque' parts (the description comes from John Ruskin) and how they capture the real decline of the city in the 20th century and give it its true identity. But "none of these things look beautiful to the people who live amongst them." By 'poor' he means old, because since 1950 the city has expanded 10-fold in population. Yet these were the same areas apparently visited by Nerval and Gautier, two authors whose accounts he admires, a hundred years before he was born.

The final chapter recounts arguments with his mother about his future career. (The book is dedicated, possibly because he is dead, to his father who seems to have been a complete wanker.) She wants him to continue his architectural studies that he has already decided to drop, rather than have a career as an artist. Her reasoning is that nobody in Istanbul respects artists and he would have to spend his life crawling and dependent in order to live. He links this argument of hers to the decline of the city - its lack of interest in and inability, through poverty and global provincialism, to support people who are 'different'. The arguments took place in the early 1970s, and what is really nice about this chapter is that a year after this book was published in English, Pamuk won the Nobel Prize. It's almost as if, at last, through people like Orhan Pamuk the city has turned its fortunes around.

Pretty lazy day today. Finished the whole book in one go. It is the usual rather gloomy stuff from Inspector Erlender - perhaps he's a little more cheerful this time than usual and seems to be getting on with his kids for a change. In which he solves a murder that everyone thinks was suicide and, at the same time, solves a 30 year-old missing persons case or 2 of them actually. Good one.

Here in Australia it has taken us 200 years to begin the process of public recognition that white people are walking around on land that was stolen from somebody else. Not only that, but the descendents of the people it was stolen from are still here and only just beginning their long road out from being ignored, subhuman, fated to disappear. Citizenship rights were granted in 1967. Terra nullius was annulled by the High Court in 1992 - 204 years after the arrival of the first English settlers.

Reading Said's book - which is basically an argument for the existence and continued survival of Palestinians - I was reminded very much of this sad history of colonial Australia. The first part of the book is an eloquent study of how the Zionist project affected the Palestinian population, most of whom simply disbelieved that what was happening - the violence and dispossession - could become permanent. It must surely be one of the few texts in English about what it really feels like to be on the receiving end of a colonial invasion.

The book was originally published in 1979 (the edition I read had a short update written just after Gulf War I) and reading it as an historical document, I dared to become optimistic that - despite the evidently increasing intransigence of the Israeli settlers and their supporters in the state - things are in fact moving much faster there than they did in Australia. As Said himself points out Israel was founded as a European colony in Asia at precisely the time that European colonialism in the rest of the world was disappearing. It is an anachronism.

To found a state in Asia and people it with a largely immigrant population drawn initially from Europe means depopulating the original territory. This has been the simple desideratum of Zionism, with very complicated ramifications. Yet for the native Arab Palestinian and for the immigrant Jew who took his place, the mere fact of substitution has never really varied. And it is this fact with which the search for peace in the Middle East must begin, and with which it has not yet even begun to deal. [p. 181]

The last sentence here is important because it was written only 30 years ago and yet there have been tremendous changes. When Said wrote, the PLO had only recently achieved widespread recognition as the body representing Palestinians. In reality this means that the West (not just the Arab and other Third World states) had decided to accord Palestinians recognition as a people, and a people with national aspirations. Prior to that they were just 'Arabs' who should be equally at home in Jordan, Lebanon or even further afield. But even then, the so-called "Middle East Peace Process" was seen in terms of an international settlement between Israel, Egypt and the US (all of whom had pursued their own interests in the region without a thought for the Palestinians). It took another decade and a half for the PLO to be seen as an essential negotiating partner, i.e., for the recognition to sink in that the Palestinians could not continue to be ignored.

From this perspective it is easier to see why Arafat accepted the Oslo agreement. By establishing the PA, he forced the Palestinians to the centre of the "Peace Process". On the other hand, it has also enabled Israel and the US to treat the Palestinian nation as existing only in the West Bank and Gaza, and to continue to ignore the rights of Palestinians living in exile (mostly in Jordan and Lebanon). Thus, reading between the lines, Arafat also countered the danger, to which the Intifada had given rise, that Palestinian politics would be divided between those living directly under Israeli rule and those in the diaspora. It looks as if the latter is happening anyway, with the rise of Hamas for example. I wonder how long the diaspora will continue to share the national aspirations of those living in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. There is now a couple of generations who were born in exile and those who fled, who remember their old homes and their attachment to the country, are now in their 60s or more. It seems to me that the movement will rely more and more on the people who are still there and that's where the Zionist project is really ultimately doomed.

Waiting for take-off at the airport yesterday, I read an interview with the late Giovanni Arrighi. He began his academic career at what was then called the University of Rhodesia and Nyasaland and, in the interview, he talks about his studies of the southern African labour force, remarking on what I think is also true of the Palestinians in Israel. In both South Africa and Israel, the European settlers seized indigenous land for their own farms, cutting the indigenous population off from its livelihood. When people are cut off from the land like that they have to live by wage labour and they have to struggle against those who have power over their livelihoods. South African workers joined COSATU which became the backbone of the ANC. The Palestinians, on the other hand, are mostly unemployed and without prospects of employment (particularly in Gaza). Arrighi's point, however, is that when you try to control people by depriving them of a decent living, you have to increase the level of repression. Eventually your repression will backfire. Your victims will hit back at you and they will gain international support. This is the road Israel has set out upon. It won't last 200 years.

I read Jungstedt's first book, Unseen, a couple of months ago and really liked it. This one wasn't half as good. In fact I thought it was quite bad - bearing the signs of something got out in a rush. The plot was all over the place - a large part of the book devoted to a quite irrelevant love affair between two of the characters from the previous story. The author seemed to be having trouble deciding whether she wanted to write a whodunnit or a book about people's dysfunctional relationships. Moreover, it lacked the sense of place that the first one did. The dénouement was frankly unbelievable.

I guess the next one will be called Unheard! I hope it will be better.

I borrowed a copy from a fellow Stieg Larsson fan at the office who rushed out to buy it the day it arrived in the shops. Actually she had to go twice because on the advertised day it hadn't arrived. I have been reading a couple of chapters a night for about a week and then last night I sat up until 5 am to finish it! Now I've got a great hole in my life because there will be no more stories about Lisbeth Salander.

#21 was Rosie Cox's The Servant Problem. It took me quite a lot of time to read because it was really only good in parts (a curate's egg indeed). I expected something with a broader scope I guess. This book was very focused on the UK and an awful amount of space was taken up with au pairs. There is some justification for the latter focus in a UK context because au pairs are subjected to an absurd regime in which they are not officially described as domestic workers at all, but "members of the family", on a "working holiday" and so forth. Since the arrangement is so informal, their conditions are really subject to caprice. However, I don't think au pair arrangements are the biggest problem globally in the employment of women in domestic jobs. There is surprisingly little discussion of other paid domestic help. Although nannies do get a fair amount of attention it is via a couple of case studies - not very helpful when you're looking at a huge amount of women's work worldwide. There were some good stories in the book, but I really wanted a more comprehensive study.

#22 was my first real foray into Herman Melville. What I'd read before was a passage from Typee when I was tutoring in the History Department at Adelaide way back when. It was a first year history subject which, inter alia, looked at western perceptions of non-western people in the 17th-19th centuries. I don't remember the passage much and I have only the vaguest notion of Moby Dick, which I haven't read at all. So for my first venture, and in honour of wouldprefernot2 and also because it is short, I chose Bartleby the Scrivener. This story, I subsequently discovered, came packaged together with another called Benito Cereno. I read them both last night.

I would prefer not to say too much about Bartleby. Maybe there is something there about an internal struggle many or most of us experience - for me it was too tempting to think (perhaps wrongly) of his internet namesake. Being not in the least psychological, Benito Cereno was much easier to deal with. It was a gripping tale, written not long before the Civil War, of the white privileged class not seeing what was happening around them and the threat they were under from the slaves. Maybe the story is not so well known because Melville clearly expresses views of "The Negro" that are not at all acceptable today. He seemed to be warning white Americans that bad things were happening under their very noses. Post-Civil War that might not be such a good look for a literary figure from New York. But at a more abstract level, I thought that as a story of blindness induced by stereotyping it was excellent.

I'm very curious to know what others here think about Melville.

I read my first one of these in April last year. This one is set in the 1980s and the "hero", Murray Whelan is a lowly electorate 'fixer' working for Charlene Wills, state Labor upper house member and Minister for Industry. The publishers must've asked Maloney for a 'bio', because it says "Shane Maloney is co-director of the Brunswick Institute, a weatherboard think-tank financed by his wife." This self-deprecation kind of sets the tone of the book. Murray Whelan also has a weatherboard, though in the book its roof springs a leak, causing the ceiling to fall in and the power to short-circuit and he's a single dad whose wife's career has taken her to Canberra, from where she definitely doesn't finance him. The story is all about this, as well as corporate swindles, murder, attempted murder, and Labor Party backroom deals. Very enjoyable.

This is yet another Swedish detective story! As the blurb says: "just when you thought you'd exhausted the supply."

I really liked this one for several reasons.
1) It is set on Gotland. I've always wanted to visit Gotland because their sheep wool is so pretty. Basically the sheep are all black or at least dark coloured. I once knitted a jumper for my ex from Gotland wool that I bought in Stockholm. It was two-tone - grey with black - and soft. He wore it a lot. Apart from the distance from Sydney, the main deterrent to going there is that although the permanent population is only 58,000, there are 600,000 visitors in summer. The rest of the year it is windy and wet (which it often is in summer too). Ingmar Bergman used to live on Fårö, a small neighbour of Gotland. The book gives a nice sense of the physical side of the place.
2) It built up a lot of tension at about 3 this morning, which meant that 15 minutes later when I'd finished it, I had trouble getting to sleep.
3) In keeping with the Swedish tradition in this genre it presented a rather bleak picture of the society. Jungstedt isn't as overtly political as Sjöwall and Wahlöö (although there's a little of that too), but she writes more about the isolation and despair people can feel even among their closest family. Like S&W, the cops don't always get on with each other and they spend an enormous amount of time wasting time. Like Stieg Larsson, Jungstedt is a journalist, so her intrepid reporter helps to solve the crime. Unlike Larsson, it's not nearly so tongue in cheek.

The author, Daniel Connell, has spent many years working in the Murray-Darling Basin Commission and as a journalist and local historian, before writing a PhD thesis on which the book is based. I found the early parts of the book, on the history of the wrangles over how to manage the Murray after Federation, most fascinating. I understand a lot more than I did before about why it has been so impossible to reach any kind of institutional arrangement that would look after the health of the river system - even long after all parties know and agree that the rivers are in critical danger. The book also has a lot of interesting detail about the salinity problem, the relative importance of flows in the Murray and the Darling, the relationship between groundwater and surface water and so forth. Up to 2007 when the book was published, water trading tended to exacerbate rather than relieve the problem as a result of different jurisdictions (water entitlements meant different things in different areas). Connell tries to be optimistic - he points to the rising power of the Commonwealth relative to the states and an increasing tendency to resort to the law rather than to politics to resolve issues. The Commonwealth, of course, is the only government that can take a basin-wide view. More power to its elbow!

Author: Ben McNeil who is a scientist from UNSW with a masters in economics. Subtitle: Growing Australian Prosperity in a Greenhouse Age. Publisher: Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2009.

This is a useful little book that, instead of endlessly repeating the doom and gloom scenarios coming out of the science, discusses the positive changes that can be made and are being made. Probably the strongest point that comes across is that business is already seeing the way things are going to go and is making investments to reduce carbon emissions. Business is, in many respects, streets ahead of government - especially the Australian government which, for some reason seems beholden to the coal industry.

I marked a few points:
1) He quite effectively deals with the local idiots who argue that we can't make any difference because we're too small and it's a global problem, therefore basically we should wait until the big boys have reached an agreement. Our insignificance, he points out has never stopped us doing research on global diseases or going to war in Iraq or Afghanistan.
2) Another myth debunked. Reducing GHG emissions is not necessarily going to stuff the economy. Since 1996 Australian GHG emissions have grown by about 15% and the UK's have fallen by 10%, but the Australian GDP has grown by 65% and the UK's by 55%. Australian GHGs seem to have fallen for the first time in 2005 (GDP growth rate unchanged). I wonder if that has continued. On p. 165 there is also a graph showing how US emissions growth initially fell and then grew much more slowly after the 1973 and 1979 oil shocks, while GDP grew at a much faster rate (even if you only look at the data up to 1990 so you avoid all the complications introduced by bubbles).
3) Longer-term costs of adaptation are lower for early movers and higher for economies that delay. This is because economies that defer the introduction of a carbon price become more carbon-intensive, so when the carbon price is eventually introduced they will lose a lot of money.
4) The major problem I have with his argument is that I don't know and he doesn't tell me the relationships between different carbon emitting parts of the economy. If, for example, a significant part of the population switches from flying to business meetings to online conferencing, will we be emitting more or less carbon? I'm asking this because airlines run on oil which is a lower polluter than coal which produces most of the electricity (90% in this country) that runs the computers. A CEO (or similar) of IBM told my radio a few months ago that the IT industry actually emits more carbon than the airline industry.

McNeil's focus is too micro. But it's a good start to getting the debate out there. I hope Kev will read it, and then stop pussyfooting around.

This is number 9 in the Sjöwall and Wahlöö series. I've now read or re-read all of them in the last 6 months. As is very often the case in these books, you don't find out why they've chosen this title until well into the book. To begin with it's a story of a woman murdered and dumped in a bog. Later on, by a series of events, during which a cop gets killed by a wasp, the trail leads to the murderer. In the meantime we have visited once again the class divisions of Swedish society, the incompetence of the police (and bureaucracies generally), prejudice, misguided loyalties and people getting caught up in things over which they have no control. I was slightly disappointed that Beck's new relationship didn't develop at all, but S and W were never about personal relationships, only about observing social phenomena. Anyway, it's another good read.

I need to get back to some non-fiction!

Number 8 in the Martin Beck series by Sjowall and Wahloo. The strange coincidences that link an apparent suicide in a locked room and a bank robbery. DCI Beck has recovered fully from his injuries and now regards his actions on that occasion as a mistake. I have to say they did seem uncharacteristic. More characteristic is the strange relationship he has now fallen into. The negative commentary on the Swedish welfare state is getting more strident in these later novels. In this one they talk about the massive rate of unemployment (by Swedish standards it was, but it was still only 2%!) I'm finding it rather interesting and slightly weird to be transported back to 1972 and to be reading once again about, for example, the Ustasja (who were also very active in support of breaking up Yugoslavia here too throughout the 1960s-70s). Things I'd forgotten.

Holidays were good for keeping up 10,000 steps a day. Now I'm back at work and the idea of being on my feet and moving for 1 hour 45 minutes a day is very daunting - even if it doesn't seem a lot of time. I'm really quite shocked at how little time I normally spend moving around. Yesterday I managed 1,300 steps (though it was exceptionally low). The day before I walked across the Bridge to a function at the old Customs House and clocked up only 4500 steps which was massively disappointing. Today I walked to Berry Island (which is not actually an island) and back, so I'll make 12,000 before I go to bed tonight. This thing is either going to improve my health massively or cripple me. Not sure which it'll be yet.

Yesterday, as noted, was lazy. I slept a lot and read another Sjöwall and Wahlöö. This one is The Abominable Man and is about an ex-cop who goes on a killing spree - targeting his former superiors. The book is full of completely serious commentary on how the police 'normally' behave. Martin Beck gets badly injured at the end, so I'm going to have to start number 8 straight away to see how he recovers :)

I didn't take my camera today as I already have a large backlog of stuff to upload. But if I have to keep up this walking thing for 4 months, I'm sure to get back there. I need to go back to the project I had before of trying to track what happened to the local Aborigines after white settlement. The area I was in today was Wollstonecraft, named after Edward who had the first large land grant on the North Shore. He basically was given all the land from the Pacific Highway down to the harbour. Berry Island had such a huge concentration of middens (shellfish rubbish dumps) that they were quarried for lime! And somebody put a park bench in the middle of some rock engravings, to better enjoy the water views. One of the Council signposts says that the Cammeraigal were thought to have died out with a fellow called "Tarpot" (nothing to do with racism of course) in 1888, but they now say there are some present day survivors. Anyway I'm curious to find out what Wollstonecraft did with all that land. Alexander Berry was his business partner who married Edward's sister and their son David inherited the estate. So that's something to go on.

While on vacation I have read number 5 in the series: The Fire Engine that Disappeared. This one was about an organized crime gang in which the fellows at the bottom end of the chain get bumped off. We don't find out who the people at the top end of the chain are. The supposed hero of the series, Martin Beck, doesn't even feature in the solution of the problem (he does, however, move closer to the inevitable end of his marriage). Well, S & W are unusual anyway.

I re-read number 6, Murder at the Savoy, out of sequence earlier this year. So now it's on to number 7 which is either The Abominable Man or The Locked Room.

This book was lent to me by my Italian friend who found it very funny. I have to admit it gave me quite a few belly laughs. Something about the names (Bryson had obviously given a lot of thought to these and produced some quite plausible ones of his own) and the fact that the main feature of every English town is a car park.

I could share with Bryson the feeling that England is at once terribly familiar and terribly foreign. Stories like the one about the bus that is timetabled to arrive at the railway station four minutes after the train has left (or conversely the train timetabled to leave four minutes before the bus arrives) reminded me of the fish and chip shop near where I lived that closed for lunch. But it's changing. Even he admits that railway coffee had become drinkable over the previous 20 years.