Decimation

It is the tenth month, but actually the twelfth; it is the day of the dead, and yet it is about sleep; it is cold, seen in frost and mirrors, and yet the warmth of fires and companionship. This is December, nor are we out of it. For every ten words, only one survives; for every ten pages of shattered sense, one will say something.

The new booklist is out, at Bookbinding. If I had had another 24 hours, I would have put a few words about Frank Beddor's The Looking Glass Wars in – it is as fantastic a retelling of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland as Gregory Maguire's Wicked is of The Wizard of Oz.

I have grown old. It is no longer a world where one could rely on verity and be taken seriously. It is one where everybody invents their own truths, and so it is not one, but many. It is all Copenhagen writ large, with Einstein not taking Bohr's advice. And so I leave December to the burial of the dead, to the spirit of Phlebas the Phoenician, and to the bitter meetings of Titania with Oberon. What else can be done, when truth is fallen under the feet of the High King's horses in the granite of Babylon?