February 2020 Journal (Patreon)

Of Walking in Ice (Werner Herzog) - As compellingly weird and evocative as the best Herzog films. Like most of Herzog's work, it's a chronicle of mad yet successful hubris, tracking Herzog's on-foot journey from Paris to Munich in an attempt to (somehow) prevent his mentor Lotte Eisner from dying. Glad to know this approach works on the page too.

Love and War (Paul Cornell) - Ace's comphet in the Virgin New Adventures is consistently one of their biggest problem's, and Love and War's centering of Ace in a heterosexual relationship may be the most egregious instance of this tendency. But if you can get past that, this is a fantastic and shocking book whose influence on contemporary Doctor Who is tangible and entirely justified. Russell T Davies was right to bring back Cornell in 2005. The revival would be incomplete without him.

101 Things You Thought You Knew About the Titanic... but Didn't! (Tim Maltin & Eloise Aston) - A taut, well-researched little volume that blows holes in the long-propogated Titanic myths while elucidating the most fascinating parts of the catastrophe. Its greatest feat is how it debunks the one-dimensional fables about hubris that form much of Titanic's mythos, while delicately unpacking the human motivations and errors made in the disaster. As readable a Titanic resource as exists.

Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the birth of agriculture (Bruce Pascoe) - Superlative and vital. This is a corrective tome which meticulously and passionately unveils its astonishing revelations about the Australian first peoples and their innovations in tremendous depth. A must-read for poco students and anyone who cares about subaltern populations.