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I didn't lose a single guest today. The loungeroom was a little silent when we realised that not all the party was there, mid-afternoon. It appeared certain people had wandered into some bookspace, though, and took a little while to find their way out.

The story of Chanukah

I asked if anyone wanted it and lo, someone made the mistake of replying. I added some new jokes. They're very bad, these new jokes, but they make up for so many people having seen this before:

Once upon a time there was war in the Middle East. This is a rare and unusual occurrence. As a result of that rare and unusual occurrence, Israel (or Judea, or whatever that stretch of territory was called around 165 BCE) was overrun by rather pagan invaders. This led to some interesting history being written, down the track. It also led to the establishment of a festival which can be technically classified under "They tried to kill us, we survived, let's eat." Unlike other festivals in this category,* the story is not about death. Also, the invasion was more about freedom of religion than about mass murder and eliminating Jews from the face of the earth. This qualifies Chanukah as a cheerful festival.

Permeating the Jewish tradition about the reign of Antiochus in Judea are many exciting tales. They include stories of patience in adversity and of blood and gore. There are stories of alcoholism, preceded by patience in adversity and followed by blood and gore, and of weaving cloaks from those odd bits of wool that get caught on brambles when sheep walk too close.

Of all these stories, the most famous one is how the Maccabees** won back the Temple. They won back a lot more than the Temple, but the Temple was the important bit. The straw that broke the camel's back were the pigs, apparently. Pigs in the Temple. And straw. And camels.

No, only pigs. Sorry.

Still, the problem with the Temple was that it was being used for worship of a rather interesting Hellenistic pantheon. The pigs were the symptom, not the problem.

The Maccabees were a strong Jewish family. They could have been role models for Che Guevara, because their preferred type of politics was charismatic, and their preferred form of warfare, guerrilla. They had not, however, read Karl Marx. They also didn’t speak Spanish. They did, however, practise all those heinous acts forbidden under Antiochus' enlightened pagan rule, namely Torah study, keeping Sabbath holy, keeping a kosher kitchen, circumcision, and so on. They didn’t like the obligatory nature of Antiochus’ intriguing variety of paganism. Other rebellious souls who kept kosher suffered martyrdom for their efforts. But then, they weren’t charismatic guerrilla leaders.

After long and bloody trials and much hiding in the wilderness, the Maccabee family and their followers won back Judea and - most importantly - the Temple.***

Let me remind you that Antiochus had insisted that all Jews worship his own, not-at-all-Jewish, deities. This worship was enforced everywhere, including at that holiest of holies, the Temple. It was used for worship that looked decidedly unsavoury to the pure-minded revolutionaries. (Revolutionaries are always pure-minded.) When the Temple was won back, they wept because it was defiled (putative pigs!).

The solution for the defiled Temple was simple. Firstly came a big spring clean. After that, re-sanctification.

Re-sanctification was a big problem. Not that re-sanctification in itself was a difficult procedure, but there was no holy oil. The Temple had, after all, been defiled, and that went for most of its contents, too. In fact, there was only enough holy oil for one day, instead of the required eight. But one little lamp of oil lasted eight days, and the ancient Judeans declared that “A Great Miracle Happened Here****” and threw a party to celebrate. Jews ever since then have spent 8 days of the year enjoying the miracle.

The Hebrew acronym describing the event became the basis of gambling using a spinning top, probably around the eighteenth century. It is pure co-incidence that the annual Jewish gambling and gift-giving stint is between Melbourne Cup Day and Christmas.





*Note 1: other key categories for Jewish festivals include "Let's be miserable together" and "Something important happened on this day, but it was thousands of years ago and we will spend the whole day trying to remember, and half the night too" and "Three thousand years ago or so we probably planted/harvested/rioted around now" and "We haven't overeaten for a few days, time for a festival" and "Let's do no housework."

**Note 2: users of Word are advised to turn their spellcheck off at this point. The MacAfees were not major players in ancient Jewish history.

***Note 3: the hiding in the wilderness is where the cloaks came in. Public nakedness is seldom encouraged in Judaism.

****Note 4: these days most of us say "A great miracle happened there." If you live in Israel you get to celebrate locally, though, and use the words of the ancients. That reminds me, one day I must try making the alcohol of the ancients. My family liqueurs went down very well this year and that was only the alcohol-of-the-near-moderns. Imagine how good it can get with older drinks!

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I had a lovely time yesterday. I was tired beyond imagining, but the only time it showed was when I tried reading aloud and the words kept coming out funny.

I don't have to cook till Tuesday night, and I think I shall have a quiet day. Tomorrow I have messages to run (the ones I couldn't do on Friday beacuse the intense exhaustion started then), but till tomorrow I can take things a little more slowly than usual.

Please don't expect anything intelligent from me for a few days!

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I wasn't expecting Chanukah presents, so it's taken til now for the lovely things I've been given to make themselves known. My friends obviously know me, for I have a bottle of Moet, some rather good coffee beans, a 2010 diary (in Hebrew), lemons, loquats, lots of chocolate, some practical goodies and a very pretty blank book. That's not everything. When I tidied up last night, I put some things in safe places, so I am due pleasant discoveries as the rest appears.

My leftovers include nearly a litre of daiquiri (I blame Donna for that!), lots of chocolate coins, some salad (I gave away lots of salad and still have some left, yet I'm pretty sure that people ate heaps - it's a mystery) and a half a cheesecake.

I hope you didn't want me to report on my day. There's stuff happening, but I don't want to talk about it till it's sorted, which could take a few months. It's not a book contract this time. it's definitely related to books, however. Lucy Sussex and Ian Nicholls have been pushing me into this, and things have suddenly progressed.

And I feel guilty, because lists of presents and food with mentions of tales untold hardly makes an entertaining post.

How about I have another open question session? Usual rules apply. Ask anything you like, including historical and technical questions, about my writing, about my personal life. I have the right to refuse to answer. Sometimes I assert my right to not answer when people ask something just a bit too personal, but it's more likely to happen when someone asks an apparently simple question that actually involves hours of historical research.

I'll be open to questions right till the end of Chanukah.

Lavie Tidhar - The Bookman

The latest book I've read from Angry Robot's review scheme is Lavie Tidhar's The Bookman. Since Tidhar's name keeps cropping up in my vicinity, I was very curious to check out his writing. My verdict? It's a lot of fun, not so much because it's a humorous book, but because it's full of literary games.

Ignore the English past as it happened. Like Dan Abnett's Triumff, this is an alternate London where the timelines we know are warped and strange and corrupted. People who lived centuries apart and characters from fiction similarly removed in time live alongside each other. Tidhar gives absolutely no justification for this, or for a blind character writing legibly. These things need to be put aside. In fact, Tidhar's writing is mostly strong enough for them to be able to be put aside.

The Bookman depends wholly on the unravelling of plot twists being satisfactory. I found the twists not surprising but solid, which meant I enjoyed it right to the end. The dates and historical sequences might be entirely warped, but the rest of Tidhar's alternate Earth works well enough. It's steampunky and Empire and full of revolutionaries and the disaffected: as I said earlier, it's fun.

Its particular distinctive element (I've been talking to a political journalist and my language is irredeemably warped) is that this is a novel that takes literature seriously. It's not so much that there are literary allusions as that the alternate universe is crafted around a core group of authors and their works. They are essential to the world and to the plot. The novel pays special hommage to some particular pulp tales in the same manner as ROD (ROD TV is still my favourite anime – deal with it). The uncertainties between fiction and fact, between human and simulacrum kept me reading.

If you haven't read Conan Doyle or Verne, then you will miss some crucial stuff, I suspect. If you haven't read a vast range of literature, from Alcott through to the Chalet School books then you miss some facets of how the universe operates. Books count: I'm going to watch for other reviews with great interest, because I suspect that who has read what will influence how The Bookman is reviewed.

Tidhar plays some fine literary games. Most work. I rather suspect he uses the games to disrupt our realities, but that could just be me being pretentious. In fact, this book ought to be up itself and it isn't. I wonder if it's because of the Persons from Porlock appearing early on? Or was it the passing reference to Batman?

There are more and more books that weave literary and historical conceits together and use them as the base for a plot or a world. Literary dreaming is becoming a strange subgenre of its own. Lavie Tidhar's book is good reading and a welcome addition to this subgenre.