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16. Sixteen prophetic dreams of Queen Trishala

Today in Rogerson's festive countdown we explore 16 dreams onset by the conception of a Jain monarch's son

A white elephant
A white bull
A white lion
Lakshmi
Mandara flowers
Silver moonbeams
The radiant sun
A jumping fish
A golden pitcher
A lake filled with lotus flowers
An ocean of milk
A celestial palace
A vase as high as Mount Meru filled with gems
A fire fed by sacrificial butter
A ruby and diamond throne
A celestial king ruling on earth

Queen Trishala is the mother of Mahavira, the last of the revered prophet teachers of the Jain. She was one of a family of seven princesses and one of her sisters became a Jain nun, while the other five married kings.

Her husband was King Siddhartha, to whom she explained an extraordinary series of 16 powerful dreams (14 in some accounts). Advised by seers, the king was able to tell her she was about to give birth to a strong, courageous son full of virtue.

Tomorrow: the hidden 17 of the Bektashi

• Taken from Rogerson's Book of Numbers by Barnaby Rogerson

Reference and languagesReligionIndiaBarnaby Rogerson
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Comfort reading: Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

A great deal warmer, and much more comforting, than its title, this month's Reading group selection is a cheerful favourite of many – including me

For me, Stella Gibbons's comfort never runs cold. In times of disorder, illness or general despondency, I return like a homing pigeon to Cold Comfort Farm: to its hapless, hoof-dropping cattle, encrusted porridge and erotically flowering sukebind, and to the riotous conflict of cool, sophisticated urbanite Flora Poste with her untowardly passionate rural relatives.

Set in an unspecified "near future", some time after "the Anglo-Nicaraguan wars of 1946", the novel commutes by air (now commonplace for short-hop travel) between No 1 Mouse Place, a snug little house in fashionable Lambeth, and the brooding fastness of the chilly farm, somewhere in the wilds of Sussex. The orphaned Flora, expensively educated and possessing "every art and grace save that of earning her own living", prevails upon her distant relations, the Starkadders of Cold Comfort, to take her in.

Once ensconced, she addresses herself to hygienic interference in the affairs of the clan: poetical, unkempt, sensationally beautiful Elfine; amorous Seth, who secretly loves the talkies better than the myriad women he gets up the duff; fiercely territorial Reuben; and the unforgettable Great-Aunt Ada, who once saw "something narsty in the woodshed" and has been reclining in bed ever since on four tray-meals a day, directing operations.

Cold Comfort Farm is a parody of the doomy, tragic, close-to-the-earth gothic novels of writers like Mary Webb and DH Lawrence, and, earlier, Thomas Hardy. Where, for Webb or Hardy, a misstep, malformation or sin inexorably predicts a wasted, prematurely-ended life, or at least an awful lot of misery, Gibbons rolls up her sleeves and blithely enters the tragic landscape, tidying it up and setting things to rights. Marriage and fulfilment, rather than death and disgrace, are high on the agenda – and good haircuts, smart clothes and liberal helpings of The Higher Common Sense (as preached by Flora's guru, the fictional but indispensible Abbé Fausse-Maigre) will help to make them happen.

Early on in the novel, Gibbons blithely informs the reader that like Baedeker, she will use a system of asterisks to mark out particularly impressive passages. *** indicates that the reader should really sit up and take note, standing by for deep, animal hungers, invented dialect vocabulary like "mollocking" (a brilliant coinage for Seth's lustful misadventures), heavy loins and furrowed earth. Gibbons enjoys herself enormously at the expense of people who insist on "living life with a wild poetry", and are often to be discovered "weeping on their bed" because of a tactless utterance at lunchtime.

But what I love most about CCF is its lightness of heart, as well as touch. It may be parodying "loam and lust-child" novels, but its characters' happiness remains as important to the book as its literary fun-poking. At the book's conclusion, a triumphant Flora looks from a newly ordered Starkadder throng to her own hearth. The happy ending she seeks for herself is indisputably a cosily romantic, rather than a stirringly ambitious one (although she does assert early on that she would like, at the age of 53 or so, to write "a novel as good as Persuasion, but with a modern setting".) But its sunlit, satisfying resolution ensures it will always be "purest happiness" for me to see the cover of this old, trusted friend.

FictionImogen Russell Williams
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15. Fifteen ranks of the Knights Templar

Today's festive countdown instalment, extracted from Rogerson's Book of Numbers, sheds light on the influential crusaders order

Grand Master
Seneschal
Commander of the Kingdom of Jerusalem
Commander of the City of Jerusalem
Commander of Tripoli and Antioch
Drapier
Commander of Houses
Commander of Knights
Knight Brothers
Turcopolier
Under Marshal
Standard Bearer
Sergeant Brothers
Turcopoles
Elderly Brothers

The Knights Templar were a crack force of armed monks, established in 1129 to protect pilgrims journeying to Jerusalem, and then employed to defend the crusader kingdoms of Outremer. After the fall of Outremer to Turkic and Egyptian forces, the Templars no longer had a function for a medieval Europe without any appetite for crusading, and in 1312 they were suppressed by the pope, under pressure from the French king Philip IV.

His reason was straightforward: the throne was bankrupt and he wanted the Order's considerable wealth – lands bequeathed to them, priories in all the nations of Christendom and a banking business.

Because of the violence and suddenness of their suppression (and the accusations of heresy levied against them) a conspiratorial glamour continued to attach to the name of the order, in contrast to its rival Hospitaller Knights of Saint John (who had the good sense to take over the island bases of Malta and Rhodes and still to an extent survive as a charitable institution). Indeed, the traditions of the Templars – or, to give them their full name, the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Solomon – would be enthusiastically mined some 400 years later by the quasi-Templar freemasonry lodges established in Europe and North America.

During their heyday, the Templars' grand master was the absolute ruler over the order and answered only to the papacy. The seneschal acted as both deputy and advisor to the grand master. The commander of the kingdom of Jerusalem, the commander of the city of Jerusalem and the commander of Tripoli and Antioch had the same powers as grand master within their own jurisdictions. The drapier was in charge of the Templar garments. The commander of houses and the commander of knights acted as lieutenants to higher authorities within the order. The knight brothers were the warrior-monks who wore the white tunic and red cross. Each was equipped with three horses and apprentice-like squires.

The turcopolier commanded the brother sergeants in battle. The under marshal was in charge of the footmen and the equipment. The standard bearer was one of the sergeants and charged with carrying the order's banner. The sergeant brothers were warriors who did not have proof of eight quarterings of noble blood and thus had but one horse and no squires to assist them. The turcopoles were local troops who would fight alongside the Templars. Sick and elderly brothers were no longer fit for active service but still members of the order.

Tomorrow: the 16 prophetic dreams of Queen Trishala

• Taken from Rogerson's Book of Numbers by Barnaby Rogerson.

Reference and languagesBarnaby Rogerson
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Comfort reads: Kim by Rudyard Kipling

Reader Tim Hannigan finds a comfortable travelling companion in Kipling's 'little friend of all the world'

The great explorer Wilfred Thesiger usually carried just two books when he stepped into the wild. One was Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim; the other was Rudyard Kipling's Kim. He could read them over and over, he said, with the joy of poetry. I would have been happy to make do with just the latter title, for at some bleak bivouac in the Empty Quarter – or indeed at home in a British winter – Kim would offer all the warmth I could ever ask for. This is the ultimate comfort read, and the promise of its joy and colour is always something to cling to as you trudge across a desert of bad weather, hard work or turgid texts.

Published at the threshold of the 20th century, Kim is the story of the eponymous orphan boy – of Irish descent but Indian-born, "a poor white of the very poorest" and a street urchin in the great Mughal city of Lahore. He falls in with an itinerant Tibetan lama on a quest for a sacred river, and ends up conscripted into "the Great Game", the imperial cold war of espionage and derring-do fought on the fringes of the British Raj.

In synopsis, then, it sounds like a Boy's Own adventure. But while ripping yarns can certainly be comforting, it's not the plot that makes Kim soul food of the first rank. When Laurens van der Post was interred in a Japanese prison camp in World War II Indonesia, he found himself willing to trust a Korean informant simply because of the reassuring associations of the man's name – he was called Kim. And there's the crucial clue: what makes Kim such a glorious wellspring of comfort is its humanity. The hero is known in the alleyways of Lahore as "Little Friend of all the World", and the book revels in the joy of human company. People are good, it says; neck-deep in the "broad, smiling river of life" is a good place to be; and with Kim you can be neither cynical nor lonely.

Kipling has, of course, been roundly condemned by many a post-colonial critic, his very name made a byword for objectionable empire nostalgia. It's certainly true that the India of Kim is an unchanging place, with British rule an incontestable part of the scene. But the warm soul of the book is in its people, not its politics. It brims with Indian noise and heat and colour – a great comfort in itself when the world outside your window is slate-grey and sodden. And yet these roaring bazaars and clamorous caravanserais are peopled not with some massed and inscrutable Other; they are brim-full of friends, men and women with voices and stories of their own.

The other great solace is in the writing itself. There is style without pretentiousness, and simplicity that is neither bleak nor chiselled. It is comfort food that is somehow rich and refined at the same time, and I can read it again and again. Before the cold comfort of digital connectivity I always carried a copy of Kim on long backpacking trips as a potent charm against the horror of booklessness in remote places.

For all its comforting qualities Kim is not entirely without darkness. Towards the end of the book, buckling under the burdens of responsibility, the teenaged hero suffers one of the most convincingly drawn nervous breakdowns in English literature. But this is actually where you'll find the greatest solace of all, for in the world of Kim when a collapse comes there will always be a clean white room in a rambling farmhouse to rest in, a mighty matriarch with silver bangles and a sharp tongue to nurse you better, and friends ready to cross half a continent to check on your recovery.

And when that recovery comes – as it always does – there's the irresistible discovery that roads are simply meant to be walked upon, "houses to be lived in, cattle to be driven, fields to be tilled, and men and women to be talked to." There's no greater comfort than that.

Rudyard KiplingFiction
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14. Bach and gematria

Today in our festive numerical countdown, extracted from Barnaby Rogerson's Book of Numbers, deconstructing Bach

By giving each letter a number from its order in the alphabet you can deconstruct the name Bach as follows: 2 for the B, 1 for the A, 3 for the C, 8 for the H – which makes 14. A pleasing mirror, or reversal, of this number can also be formed from JS Bach – which gives 41.

This pseudoscience of substituting numbers for letters is known as gematria (or abjad in Arabic), and has innumerable variations depending on whether you include vowels or which language you translate back to or transcribe into. It has often appealed to creative minds and may have been behind Bach's playful manipulation of the number 14, achieved by itself (in the 14 canons of the Goldberg Variations for instance) or in pairs of sevens that occur throughout his work.

Gematria is a very ancient tradition, particularly in the near east, where it has often had official sanction, with poetic inscriptions commissioned by rulers to reveal the date of the publication of a book or the construction of a building. There are examples dating back to Sargon II of Assyria (in the eighth century BC). In the first century AD, gematria became a recognised tool of Jewish hermeneutical scholarship and it was a tradition respected by many of the Ottoman sultans. It seems only to have taken root in the imagination of western Europe, however, in the 17th century.

Tomorrow: 15 ranks of the Knights Templar

• Taken from Rogerson's Book of Numbers by Barnaby Rogerson (Profile).

Reading on mobile? Listen to the 14 canons of the Golberg Variations

Reference and languagesJS BachBarnaby Rogerson
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When will publishers wake up to the challenge of Amazon?

The books industry still underestimates the disruptive power of Jeff Bezos's awesome ambition

So Amazon are the bad guys, again. At least according to Harper's Magazine they are. For the former Amazon employee James Marcus, Brad Stone "drops the ball" in his biography of Jeff Bezos, The Everything Store, when he accepts "what is literally the company line – that these extorted dollars 'create the foundation on which everyday low prices become possible'."

Marcus tells how some publishers are being "pressured" to pay "for the privilege of presenting their lists to [Amazon] marketing team and buyers" – a story denied in a footnote by an unnamed "Amazon spokesperson" – and goes on to assemble an impressive rap sheet of sharp practice:

Of course it's legal. So is Amazon's control of an estimated 65 percent of the e-book market, a near monopoly that's apparently of no concern to the supine Department of Justice. So is its bare-bones price of $9.99 for popular e-books, a loss-leading tactic that might be classified as predatory pricing if there weren't so many legal hurdles to making such a charge stick. So is the funneling of its British revenues through a subsidiary in Luxembourg ...

... and on it goes. But Amazon's aggressive style of doing business is nothing new. What astonishes me is the continuing ability of publishers to underestimate how radically Amazon has changed the industry.

Mike Shatzkin is one of those who have understood Amazon's disruptive power all along. But such is the industry's denial that even Shatzkin has to watch his words. Only last month he had to publish a blogpost clarifying that he did not say publishing is "spiralling down the drain".

What he did say was that "publishers would face a real selling job with authors when Amazon's share grows by another 25% from its current base or if Barnes & Noble closed" – but here he's quick to add the rider that "Neither of those things is likely to happen in the next few years".

After considering the great big Amazon-shaped hole in ebook sales figures, and the puzzling finding that ebook sales – with Amazon figures not included – appear to be falling, Shatzkin argues that the internet is creating two publishing industries.

One of them includes all of us: all the publishers, all the retailers, all the industry bodies counting books and sales. And one of them is "private" or "proprietary"; it is Amazon. They are publishing an unknown number of titles selling an unknown number of copies netting an unknown number of dollars under a numbering system nobody else can crack or track.

Shatzkin is clearly right to argue that as Amazon's market share continues to climb the challenge for other publishers just gets steeper and steeper. But it's not at all clear how much longer publishing, or indeed literary culture can survive this ever-widening divide.

PublishingEbooksAmazon.comJeff BezosLiz Bury
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Which science fiction classic should be the next HBO box set?

HBO's award-winning adaptations are novelistic in ambition, but TV executives hoping to follow Game of Thrones should look to the stars

It's almost commonplace to suggest that the HBO box set is now television's answer to the novel – witness the wily self-publishers who have started publishing ebooks as a "box set". The television series matches the blockbuster novel point for point – an ensemble cast of larger than life characters, a high stakes plot, an original and detailed location – all wrapped around an instantly recognisable high concept, whether it's a mobster in counselling, a portrait of drug dealers on the street or the fight for the Iron Throne.

Which makes it all the more surprising that HBO is no longer developing Neil Gaiman's American Gods. Of course, it's hard to translate the warmth of Gaiman's storytelling voice to the small screen, but the novel is so clearly stuffed with televisual magic that some network or other is certain to pick it up sometime soon. Or maybe the magic is part of the problem. Maybe executives at HBO think that audiences who have gorged on the swords and sorcery in Game of Thrones aren't quite ready for Gaiman's urban fantasy. Perhaps HBO should turn to science fiction for its next hit.

There's nothing new about science fiction on screen – shows like Star Trek and Doctor Who have made it a televisual staple. But these are television shows in the old style, with paper-thin plots and puddle-deep characters stretched over dodgy special effects. Things are no better in the cinema, where a summer of sci-fi produced another fistful of flops in Elysium, Oblivion and After Earth, with Hollywood still to learn that audiences are bored of generic action movies dressed in science fiction costumes. Now is the perfect time for a real sci-fi show, with the kind of breadth and depth HBO has shown television can achieve.

Imagine a world where the Allies lost the second world war, and imagine a United States under the domination of a Japanese military government. Philip K Dick's alternate history The Man in the High Castle provides a clear high concept – it's all too easy to picture the US flag twisted in to a Nazi swastika on the box-set cover art. But, unusually for Dick's writing, there is also an ensemble of characters attempting to build lives in this strange new reality.

There hasn't been a compelling production of a Philip K Dick story since Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. Dozens of Hollywood film adaptations have swerved the odd twists of logic and other weirdnesses, which make his novels such compelling alternatives to cookie-cutter action plots. But almost three decades after his death, Dick remains the most famous science fiction author of his generation, and for good reason. The Man in the High Castle could be a dark classic of intrigue and paranoia, but only for the producer that has the courage to tell the story as written by its author.

Through the 60s and 70s, Samuel R Delany wrote some of the most groundbreaking, experimental science fiction. Delany was recently declared the 30th Grandmaster of Science Fiction by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA), the first black writer to win the highest honour of a field that does not do nearly enough to overcome its old white male homogeneity. I'm tempted to put forward his novel Dhalgren for television adaptation, but while I and other fans of the weird would love to see the fictional city of Bellona on the small screen, I'm willing to concede the novel described by William Gibson as a "riddle that was never meant to be solved" might fail to win over primetime audiences.

But Delany's earlier and slightly more restrained novel Babel-17 could bring a sophisticated strand of space opera to television screens. Set in the middle of a vast interstellar conflict, Babel-17 tells the story of spoken code which has been developed as a weapon, but the starship captain, linguist and poet Rydra Wong discovers Babel-17 is a complete language – weaponised to alter the minds of enemies who attempt to learn it, offering new ways of thinking and turning them into traitors. This fascinating and unusual high concept comes with a complex, multifaceted protagonist, who moves beyond stereotypes of the kickass heroine as she finds her loyalties tested – just the kind of science fiction to consign the cliches of Star Trek to history.

Science fictionTelevisionScience fictionGame of ThronesHBOTelevision industryUS television industryDamien Walter
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Guantánamo's books blacklist suggests censors' random sense of security

From Jack in the Beanstalk to John Grisham, the Guantánamo banned books list makes no sense. But send me a book for the Camp Delta library, and I'll see if it makes it past the censor
Russell Brand banned from Guantánamo Bay

My five-year-old is currently obsessed with writing poetry. He told me at bathtime today that he hoped to be a famous poet. I suppose this must mean that he is a nascent terrorist.

It is rare that we get an insight into the theory behind the banning of books in Guantánamo Bay, but the censors have a particular thing about poetry: "Poetry … presents a special risk, and DOD [Department of Defense] standards are to not approve the release of any poetry in its original form or language. This is based on an analysis of risk of both content and format."

My lad is named in part for my favourite poet, Wilfred Owen, whose poem Futility has twice been excluded from Guantánamo. Poetry is, you see, very dangerous: you never know what those poets mean when they write all those words. This is particularly true where a poet suggests that the "great" war may have been pointless, just because 16 million people died, many squabbling with machine guns over a very small patch of land in eastern France.

My study has turned up one other specific policy: it was the censor's view that Guantánamo detainees should be denied any materials that would help them learn English. This was a shame, as the guards thought it would be a great thing if they were able to communicate more readily with the prisoners. Be that as it may, it seemed a step too far when the censor banned The New Dinkum Aussie Dictionary.

But for the most part the censors simply do not explain their actions. We hit an opaque barrier when GT Hunt, one the Guantánamo lawyers, tried to honour detainee Saifullah Paracha's request for a Bible. Hunt sent one to a Gitmo chaplain for delivery. The next time he visited the base, Hunt received a military dressing down: delivery of the Bible would be a potentially fatal breach of prison discipline. Hunt was not qualified to take the other side – rather, we needed an evangelical minister to remind the military that, in the context of their global crusade, the Bible was the "Christian book". Indeed, I often used to drive along Interstate 10 near New Orleans, where huge billboards advertised the well-funded ministry of the Reverend Ceflo Dollar, whose name seemed so appropriate. Where was the Almighty Dollar when we needed him?

In a way, one has to respect the discriminating censor's eye, for the same fate befell a four-volume Tafsir. To no avail, the president of the American Muslim Society explained that this was a commentary on the Qur'an.

If there was a degree of consistency in the refusal to respect the detainees' free exercise of their religious faith, the next series of banned books was harder to understand. A colleague took in four children's titles: Puss in Boots, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, and Jack and the Beanstalk. All four were returned to him with the censor's annotation: "These items were not cleared for delivery to the detainee(s)." We agonised: what could be the theory behind this? Perhaps after reading Jack and the Beanstalk, the military feared that prisoners would escape by planting magic seeds?

I tried to take the magazine Runner's World into Bisher al-Rawi, who was a keen athlete. It was banned, but I got Swimming Times to him. This perplexed me, given the careful consideration that had apparently gone into the beanstalk as a means of escape. A fleet detainee who surmounted the barbed wire and sprinted past thousands of heavily armed American soldiers would still encounter the second largest land-mine field in the world before he reached "Free Cuba"; on the other hand, the swimmer could leap into the Caribbean just yards from his prison camp.

There came a point where I ceased any attempt at rational analysis, and leaned back, simply to enjoy the censor's random sense of national security. We got 1984 and Animal Farm by George Orwell into Shaker Aamer, along with Kafka's Trial – all these were surely the true bibles of the Guantánamo authorities. The Gulag Archipelago failed the test, perhaps because the military had been offended when we referred to the prison itself as a gulag. I felt that the Soviets were the ones who ought to have been offended: as of today's count, there are 162 prisoners left in Guantánamo Bay, 82 of whom have long been cleared for release – but they are still there. No Soviet gulag ever achieved a point where marginally more than 50 % of its inmates had been told they were free to go but could not leave; that seemed much more in line with 1984.

John Grisham was taken aback, but rather flattered, that The Innocent Man was rejected; since Scott Turow's Presumed Innocent had also been refused entry on to the base, one must presume that the censors have a problem with any suggestion of innocence.

A string of authors then began to compete to be barred: John Kampfner, John Pilger, Clare Short, George Galloway, and even me (should I be flattered as an "author"?). I think we were all rather proud of being on the black list. I for one had written a book about Guantánamo Bay called Bad Men, and it would clearly be a threat to national security if all the information I had got out of the prison should be allowed back in. Meanwhile I suspect the combative Jeremy Paxman was a tiny bit embarrassed that his book, The English, was allowed in.

And so la lutta libra continua. It is probably wrong for me to promise fame and fortune to writers – but if you send me your book, there is a reasonable chance that the strange censor in Guantánamo Bay will see you as an international terrorist threat. Then, like my small child with his poetry, you will be on the road to fame and fortune.

• Clive Stafford Smith is the director of the legal charity Reprieve. If you would like to test the literary taste of the Guantánamo Bay censors, please contact him at clive@reprieve.org.uk

Clive Stafford SmithCensorshipGuantánamo BayUnited StatesGeorge OrwellFranz KafkaJohn GrishamClive Stafford Smith
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Comfort reading: The Scar, by China Miéville

It might not be Miéville's best novel, but this fantastical 'ripping yarn' can't be beaten

• Read more for our Comfort reading series

The Scar probably isn't China Miéville's best novel. That accolade should go to The City and the City or Embassytown, books which set out from the start to discomfit and unsettle: the first playing with spatial awareness and the very ground beneath the characters' feet; the second coining new vocabulary to portray an alien world and worrying at theories of language and meaning. But for world-building immersiveness and sheer rollicking readability – Miéville aimed to write, as he put it, "the ripping yarn that is also sociologically serious and stylistically avant-garde" – it can't be beaten.

It's the second novel to be set in the Bas-Lag universe: a fantastical world in which humans, Remades (criminals punished by being surgically altered), walking cacti, women with scarab beetles for heads, "scabmettlers" who make armour from their own congealing blood and many other wild and wonderful hybrid creatures rub alongside each other. But it's also a world in which power is always wielded, brutally, from above. Miéville has lambasted JRR Tolkien's presentation of fantasy as a cosy "consolation", and The Scar is anything but consoling. His main character, Bellis Coldwine, is a lonely, withdrawn woman forced into exile: she is press-ganged onto a floating pirate city, Armada, ruled by a close-bound pair known only as the Lovers – who carve matching scars into each other's faces – and their enigmatic bodyguard, Uther Doul. We gradually discover that the citizens of Armada are on a quest to harness the power of a rift in reality – the Scar, or one of the scars, of the title – but Miéville doesn't deal in fulfillment, or triumphal homecomings. The journey is everything.

The journey, and the monsters. Miéville has often said,, "I'm in this business for the monsters", and The Scar contains some of his best. The aquatically enigmatic grindylow, "unclear things … pulling their way through water". The anophelii, terrifying mosquito-people who once "ruled the southern lands in a short-lived nightmare of blood and plague and monstrous thirst" known as the Malarial Queendom and are now confined to a tiny island for everyone else's safety (the women swell up as they drain their victims of blood; the men are nervous. As in our world, only the females bite). And best of all, "the mountain-that-swims, the godwhale, the greatest beast ever to visit our world, the avanc". This mythical creature, which is bigger than can possibly be imagined – though Miéville has fun trying – is the only thing strong enough to drag the floating city towards its goal. In a world full of magic, a legendary being so extraordinary that even the characters barely believe it's real adds another layer of wonder.

If Bas-Lag is a cold and hard place for its inhabitants, dangerous and mystifying by turns, however, there is something intensely reassuring for the reader about being hundreds of pages deep in a fantasy world and knowing there are hundreds more to go (the paperback clocks in at 795pp). I first read (some of) The Scar on a weekend in Porto, and remember clearly the sense of visiting two vivid new places running in tandem: the real and the fantastical. Some books are best experienced when you're 14 (I'm thinking chiefly of Alan Garner's exhilaratingly bleak Red Shift, which will always be in my top 10 even though I can never return to it with the same teenage intensity). Others can make you read as though you're 14 again: heavy with time, light on responsibility, eager to surrender to a world more extreme and highly coloured than the one around you and not at all averse to a wee bit of portentousness. And just as there is something comforting about knowing there's a rich alternative world folded into fiction to explore, there is something comforting, of course, about being able to close the book.

Science fictionChina MiévilleFictionJustine Jordan
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13. Hallows of Britain

Our numerical festive countdown, extracted from Rogerson's Book of Numbers, the Welsh legends that have proved inspiring for Tolkien, Rowling and Japanese animators

Dyrnwyn (sword of Rhydderch Hael)
Basket of Gwyddno Garanhir
Horn of Bran Galed
Platter of Rhegynydd Ysgolhaig
Chariot of Morgan Mwynfawr
Halter of Clydno Eiddyn
Knife of Llawfrodedd Farchawg
Cauldron of Tyrnog
Whetstone of Tudwal Tudglyd
Robe of Padarn Beisrudd
Mantle of Tegau Eururon
Chessboard of Gwenddoleu
Mantle of Arthur

This list from the medieval Mabinogion manuscript gives us a precious insight into the heroic Iron Age culture of ancient Britain as it survived in Wales. Though found in a collection of 13th-century manuscripts bound into two books, the 11 stories clearly predate Geoffrey of Monmouth's skilful retelling of the legend of Arthur, and the Mabinogion was also a source that provided Tolkien with rich imagery. It cast shades, too, over JK Rowling's Harry Potter, and has inspired Japanese anime.

Among its legends, the most potent, perhaps, were those of Dyrnwyn – the "white hilt" sword of Rhydderch Hael, which, if any man except Hael drew it, would burst into a flame from point to hilt; and the mantle of Arthur, which was basically an invisibility cloak. Other magical clothing came in the form of the robe of Padarn Beisrudd, which fitted everyone of gentle birth (but no churl could wear it), and the mantle of Tegau Eururon, which only fitted ladies whose conduct was irreproachable.

Many of the stories were about the provision of plenty: if food for one man was put into the basket of Gwyddno Garanhir, it would suffice for a hundred; the horn of Bran Galed always found the very beverage that each drinker most desired; the platter of Rhegynydd Ysgolhaig always contained the very food that the eater most liked; the knife of Llawfrodedd Farchawg would serve 24 men simultaneously at any meal; while the cauldron of Tyrnog would instantly cook any meat put in for a brave man, but never boil for a coward. In similar vein, if the sword of a brave man was sharpened on the whetstone of Tudwal Tudglyd its cut was certain death, but if of a coward, the cut was harmless.

Futher wish-fulfilment arrived in the form of the chariot of Morgan Mwynfawr, which transported him in a moment, wherever he desired, and the halter of Clydno Eiddyn, which provided whatever horse he wanted.

Finally – and most Potter-like – there was the chessboard of Gwendolleu – a golden chessboard with men of silver. When the men were placed upon it, they would play themselves.

Tomorrow: 14 and Bach

• Taken from Rogerson's Book of Numbers by Barnaby Rogerson (Profile).

Reference and languagesWalesFairytalesBarnaby Rogerson
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