The traditional end-of-year poll of books read. There is not a complete agreement with the tallies in my end-of-year books post, but it’s near enough. (Rumour has it that you can also fill in the poll with Twitter or Facebook credentials.)

And if you haven’t, please look at my 2014 books poll.

Looking back, I discovered that I never did a proper books roundup of 2012, unlike in previous years (2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005). Well, there’s plenty of time to put that right. So here are my picks of both last year and this, in various categories. (Curses – LJ ate a long version of this post, so I’m going to be much briefer than I wanted. Probably just as well)

Total books: 237 this year, 259 last year – more than 2006 or 2007, less than any year since. More active weekends, plus devoting some commuting time to watching Doctor Who and Game of Thrones episodes.
Total page count: ~68,000 pages this year, ~77,800 last year, ~88,200 in 2011

Diversity: 71 (30%) by women this year, 65 (25%) by women last year – compares with 22% in 2011, 23% in 2010, 20% in 2009, 12% in 2008 and I don’t seem to have counted previously. This year’s total augmented by 10 Agatha Christie novels.
11 (5%) by PoC this year, 12 (5%) by PoC last year – compares with 5% in 2011, 9% in 2010, 5% in 2009, 2% in 2008. Could do better.

Most books by a single author:
2012: Jonathan Gash (11), Ursula Vernon (6), Ian Rankin (5), Alison Plowden and Justin Richards (4 each); though the Ursula Vernon and Alison Plowden books could be considered as component parts of a single work in each case.
2013: Agatha Christie (10), followed by Terrance Dicks (7), Jonathan Gash (6), Philip Sandifer (5), Cressida Cowell, Gary Russell, Ian Rankin and Neil Gaiman (4 each).

Non-fiction

2013		2012		2011		2010		2009
46	19%	53	20%	69	23%	66	24%	88	26%

Best of 2012: The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance, by Edmund de Waal – brilliant story of heirlooms, Proust, the Holocaust and Japan.
Best of 2013: A Room of One’s Own, by Virginia Woolf – wish I’d read it when I was an undergraduate, a fundamentally important essay about literature and gender.

Non-sfnal fiction

2013		2012		2011		2010		2009
44	19%	48	19%	48	16%	50	18%	57	18%

Best of 2012: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Brontë – I came to it late, but much my favourite Brontë novel – seems somehow a bit more in balance than her sisters’ books.
Best of 2013: The Complete Stories of Zora Neale Hurston – brilliant collection of this unjustly obscured writer, not done any favours by its publisher.

Non-Whovian sff

2013		2012		2011		2010		2009
65	27%	62	24%	78	26%	73	26%	78	23%

Best of 2012: Among Others, by Jo Walton – like most of the Hugo and Nebula voters, I found that had somehow got inside my head and shared my memories.
Best of 2013: The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man’s Fear, by Patrick Rothfuss – I don’t usually go for big fantasy epics, but this somehow got to me.

Doctor Who fiction

2013		2012		2011		2010		2009
72	30%	75	29%	80	27%	71	26%	70	19%

Best of 2012: Shada, the long awaited novelisation by Gareth Roberts from Douglas Adams’ script.
Best of 2013: I’m going to cheat here. Although I enjoyed a lot of the Who,Torchwood and Sarah Jane fiction I read this year, pride of place goes to Philip Sandifer’s TARDIS Eruditorum series of books (vol 1, vol 2, vol 3, vol 4) which were tallied above with non-fiction, but are setting a new standard for Who criticism. (Honorable mention along the same lines to Graham Sleight’s The Doctor’s Monsters.)

Comics

2013		2012		2011		2010		2009
30	13%	21	8%	27	9%	18	6%	28	8%

Best of 2012: Digger, by Ursula Vernon – a deserving winner of the Hugo.
Best of 2013: The Blue Lotus, by Hergé – the master of the genre finds his stride.

Making up the numbers were two poetry collections, Paul Muldoon in 2013 and Walt Whitman in 2012.

What do I need to round this off? Oh yes, a poll…

Non-Fiction 3 (2013 total 46)
Tardis Eruditorum vol 4: Tom Baker and the Hinchcliffe Years, by Philip Sandifer
Information is Beautiful, by David McCandless
Stuff I've Been Reading, by Nick Hornby

Fiction (non-sf) 5 (2013 total 44)
Eyeless in Gaza, by Aldous Huxley
Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson
The Popinjay, by Iona McGregor
The Truth Commissioner, by David Park
The Devils, by Fyodor Dostoevsky

SF (non-Who) 8 (2013 total 65)
Two unpublished novels
Patternmaster, by Octavia E. Butler
Rendezvous with Rama, by Arthur C. Clarke
The Wise Man's Fear, by Patrick Rothfuss
Looking for Jake and other stories, by China Miéville
The Father Christmas Letters, by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Next Generation, vol. I, by John Francis Maguire (provisionally classified as sf)

Doctor Who 4 (2013 total 72)
Dancing The Code, by Paul Leonard
Death and Diplomacy, by Dave Stone
City of the Dead, by Lloyd Rose
The Men Who Sold The World, by Guy Adams

Comics 2 (2013 total 30)
Animate Europe! (responsible editor Hans H. Stein)
Le Chat du Rabbin tome 1, by Joann Sfarr

~6,800 pages (2013 total ~67,000)
5/22 (2013 total 71/257) by women (McGregor, Butler, Rose and two more)
1/22 (2013 total 11/257) by PoC

Reread: Treasure Island, The Popinjay, Rendezvous with Rama, City of the Dead – 4 (2013 total 28)

Acquired 2011 or before: 12 (2013 total 105) – Rendezvous With Rama, City of the Dead, Death and Diplomacy, Treasure Island, Eyeless in Gaza, Looking for Jake, Le Chat du Rabbin v 1, Dancing the Code, The Devils, The Next Generation v I, Letters from Father Christmas, The Truth Commissioner
Acquired 2012: 1 (YTD 30) – The Men Who Sold The World
Acquired 2013: 9 (YTD 122) – The Wise Man's Fear, Pattern-Master, The Popinjay, Animate Europe, Information is Beautiful, Stuff I've Been Reading, TARDIS Eruditorum v 4, 2 unpublished.

Reading now:
About Time: The Unauthorized Guide to Doctor Who, 2005-2006; Series 1 & 2, by Tat Wood
Saints of the Shadow Bible, by Ian Rankin
The Secret River, by Kate Grenville

I’ll write this up in full next year when I read volumes II and III; just to note for now that it is a political novel written by an Irish MP in 1871, set twenty years in the future (ie 1891) in a Utopian future Westminster with women MPs, Irish Home Rule, and a recent British conquest of China. After much searching I found all three volumes available from iTunes.

I was unaware of the existence of The Believer, the magazine for which Nick Hornby writes a regular book review column, but I may have to give it a go (I also find the Charles Burns covers very attractive). This assembles columns from mid 2006 to the end of 2011 (though he skipped 2009), all very deftly written with self-deprecating humour, aware of his own prejudices. One of the delights of the book is his discovery of YA literature as a thing of beauty, starting with Skellig (which I haven’t read) and then Tom’s Midnight GArden (which I have). Sadly Hornby refuses to read anything sfnal (he doesn’t like “sprites and hobbits and third universes) so our tastes are not completely aligned. (I didn’t count, but the number of books that I have read which are also reviewed by Hornby here is certainly less than ten and may be as low as six).

You will have noticed that I tend to write most about non-fiction books here, and it’s Hornby’s non-fiction recommendations which are going on my wishlist now: Spike & Co., by Graham McCann, about Spike Milligan, Eric Sykes, Ray Galton, Alan Simpson and Beryl Vertue (who is Steven Moffat’s mother-in-law); Austerity Britain, 1945-51, by David KynastonClaire Tomalin’s Dickens biography. But basically the joy of the book is one of meeting a fellow enthusiast for reading.

I found this a bit of a slog, to be honest. An awful lot of time is spent setting up the bourgeois country town whose peace is destroyed by a few men who turn to revolutionary violence for no particularly good reason. It’s obviously rather chilling to read in retrospect, given that the forces of revolutionary violence did actually win in Russia decades after this was written. But I would have liked some more sympathetic characters.

Interesting that America, with its egalitarian but tough environment, is explicitly the inspiration for several characters.

As in previous years, I found your votes very helpful in thinning out my unread shelf this year, and I would once again very much appreciate your advice on what books to read next, by filling in this poll. (I believe that even if you don’t have a livejournal account, you can sign in with your Twitter or Facebook credentials.)

So as not to overburden the polling process, I’ve stripped out of my unread books list all books by white men which I acquired before 2013. This left about 50 in each category (sf, non-genre and non-fiction) which is a pleasing symmetry.

NB that the question for the non-fiction books is different from the questions for the other two categories.

Individual recommendations, pro and anti – preferably of books actually on the lists – are very welcome in comments.

Edited to add: aargh! I see at least one mis-categorised book in the non-genre section. Oh well.

• The Blood Telegram
  
  US complicity in the 1971 Bangladesh genocide.
  (tags: usa bangladesh pakistan )

• Food banks: cowardly coalition can’t face the truth about them
  
  The British government’s successful war on the poor.
  (tags: ukpolitics )
• A visual history of the Apollo missions
  
  All the moon-landing photographs online.
  (tags: space photos )
• A Deadly Mix in Benghazi
  
  Thorough report from NYT: locals, not Al-Qaeda, inflamed by video.
  (tags: libya )

Those of us of a certain age who grew up in the UK will vividly remember the music played to accompany the gallery of viewers’ submissions for the kids’ art programme Vision On, which ran from 1964 to 1976. The name of the tune is “Left Bank Two”, by composer Wayne Hill; it is performed by the Noveltones on vibraphone.

Delightfully, the theme music played by Ulster Television (ITv’s local franchise in Northern Ireland) from the early 1970s to the early 1980s (ie most of the time I can remember watching the channel) is also by Wayne Hill (in some accounts co-credited with Earl Ward), a tune called “The Antrim Road”. Comments on this Youtube rendering describe it as much the best of the old ITA idents; I’m not going to put in the research time myself to form a judgement on that.

My one source tells me that Wayne Hill also wrote the theme to a forgotten ATV series called The Power Game, which has now become the anthem for Middlesbrough Football Club, as played by the Cyril Stapleton Orchestra:

Apart from that, there’s very little else online: two tracks from the Jumping Jewels‘ LP Guitars About Town. And I have found nothing biographical about him, except that in the 25 March 1967 issue of Billboard he is referred to as “the late Wayne Hill”. So, this man who composed two of the iconic tunes of my childhood died before I was born. Let’s raise a glass to his memory.

Those of you (not very many) who are Foursquare users: they have a lovely animation now of all your past check-ins over at https://foursquare.com/timemachine, slightly marred by advertising for the Samsung Galaxy. At the end it gives you a downloadable graphic: this is mine.

I like it – though this is friends-locked basically so that people cannot quite so easily detect which is my favourite Brussels restaurant. (I tell people about it all the time, though, so it would not be a stunning piece of detective work…)

• An open letter to the citizens of Bulgaria and Romania
  
  From @TheEconomist: “You’re welcome.”
  (tags: ukpolitics migration bulgaria romania )
• Internet Archive puts classic 70s and 80s games online
  
  For @MarioFannio.
  (tags: internet )
• How To Backup Your Facebook Data In 5 Easy Steps
  
  Warning: I have not tried this myself yet.
  (tags: facebook )
• The Year We Broke the Internet
  
  Long but important – why viral sharing is bad for us all. #fb
  (tags: internet )
• Scientists tell us their favourite jokes: ‘An electron and a positron walked into a bar…’
  
  *Groan*
  (tags: funny )

Facebook is loathsomely opaque when it comes to retrieving information about any discussions you've been involved with. But they are featuring a "Year in Review" app which delivers supposedly your 20 top posts from 2013, mine being as follows:

The official White House reply to a petition to build the Death Star.
(21 January; 23 likes, 2 comments, 6 shares)

Danijela's birthday
(22 January; 32 likes, 7 comments)

"Under a car park?"
(4 February; 62 likes, 5 comments, 41 shares)

My pictures from Gallifrey One
(21 February; 14 likes, 10 comments)

The illuminated Atomium
(9 March; 30 likes, 2 comments, 1 share)

Being Clement Attlee
(17 April; 21 likes, 11 comments)

Vintage Dutch safety posters
(10 May; 14 likes, 4 comments, 3 shares)

Combined joy
(18 May; 20 likes, 1 comment)

GRRM vs JKR
(3 June; 16 likes, 7 comments, 4 shares)

William Marshall, Earl of Pembroke
(28 June; 15 likes, 8 comments)

"the Croats have us by the throat"
(2 July; 12 likes, 2 comments, 2 shares)

South Sudan [in happier times]
(9 July; 32 likes, 2 comments)

Office drinks
(23 July; 22 likes, 6 comments)

Miley Cyrus
(27 August; 11 likes, 7 comments)

Tom Baker's biggest memory of Doctor Who
(14 November; 40 likes, 1 comment, 6 shares – this was a much bigger hit on Twitter)

My son and I appear in the Five(ish) Doctors
(24 November; 44 likes, 12 comments)

Berlaymont flags at half-mast for Mandela
(6 December; 46 likes, 3 comments)

My Christmas present
(24 December; 48 likes, 16 comments)

Happy Christmas!
(25 December; 84 likes, 3 comments)

Family portrait
(25 December; 209 likes, 38 comments)

The algorithm doesn't seem to include the last 24 hours' worth of posts; I've had an extraordinary viral success overnight with a snapshot of a New Statesman article about the Daily Mail which I found on Twitter and uploaded to Facebook – it has now been shared 111 times, apparently, but only 11 of those are by people I know (one of whom, admittedly, is an MEP). Also 53 likes (which is more than all but three of the above) and 10 comments. I would of course prefer if Facebook would give me access to my own data so I could crunch it to my own satisfaction. This is what will doom them in the end. I hope.

Well, the slow death of lj appears to have accelerated this year. I admit I am conscious myself of posting less – work has had its intense moments, Facebook and Twitter are becoming preferred channels for my stray political and literary thoughts, but more importantly, a lot of my spare time which I would previously have spent blogging has been taken up by Loncon 3, the 2014 Worldcon next August. (Have you signed up? Hotel bookings open on 2 January!)

Setting the bar far lower than I have ever done before, 23 posts got 10 or more comments, more than a third of them in April, and only six from the second half of the year. (Compare 37 with 12 or more last year, 26 with 12 or more the year before, and far higher counts in 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, and 2005.) They were, in chronological order:

31 December [2012]: What should I read in 2013? – 33 comments
6 January: A Euro Coins meme – 25 comments
9 February: January Books 11) Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman – 18 comments
23 March: The Oscar poll – 41 comments
1 April: Not an April Fool: distancing myself from the Lib Dems – 14 comments
5 April: 2013 is the first of a sphenic triplet – 10 comments
14 April: April Books 6) Swallows and Amazons, by Arthur Ransome – 10 comments
21 April: This won’t do: all-male conferences – 19 comments
22 April: Books of 1963, 1913, 1863 and 1813 – 24 comments
24 April: Yet another pronunciation quiz [Kiribati] – 12 comments
26 April: 26 April – 12 comments
30 April: April Books 18) 1632, by Eric Flint – 12 comments
30 April: Congrats to the new Executive Producer of Doctor Who – 10 comments
2 May: Perry Rhodan – 10 comments
10 May: Data point [flu jab] – 11 comments
12 May: The Brussels dialect of English – 13 comments
23 May: Georgian restaurant in London – 14 comments
11 June: How to find missing historical documents [the missing census] – 10 comments
26 July: Links I found interesting for 26-07-2013 [royal baby names] – 10 comments
10 August: 50 SF Novels That Everyone Should Read – 16 comments
24 September: 50 years of Who: 1963 – 11 comments
4 October: [locked post about a politician] – 10 comments
24 November: Links I found interesting for 24-11-2013 [review roundup for Day of the Doctor] – 11 comments
24 November: The Doctor Who anniversary weekend – 14 comments

First of my Christmas books, a nice present from , compiling David McCandless’s personal favourites from the infographics he has posted at http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/ which I have glanced at from time to time in the past, and will now start reading more regularly.

Oddly enough I found myself less interested in the political graphs than in his desperate attempts to make sense of psychobabble and cooking – here’s one for instance mapping what flavours go with what main dishes. I also felt that he gave a bit too much weight (ie any at all) to the climate deniers in a couple of compare and contrast graphs. But the futurology ones are all very interesting. The other problem – which is hardly McCandless’s fault, but is imposed by the format – is that the graphs are all static. If you want nifty moving graphics of the future (and immediate past) of our world, you need to talk to Hans Rosling over at Gapminder.

Latest output from the prolific Sandifer’s blog, with a few extra essays and updates included. This is of course my favourite era of Old Who, the run from Robot to Talons of Weng-Chiang, and so I read the book with more than the usual degree of interest (also looking to see if my brother is quoted again – he is, in the essay on Brain of Morbius but talking about Terror of the Zygons).

As usual I found myself nodding in satisfied agreement 90% of the time and blinking in surprise 10% of the time. Sandifer’s deconstruction of The Android Invasion, for example, is brutal; his defence of Planet of Evil a little surprising. Almost fifty pages out of 320 total are devoted to a single story – but The Deadly Assassin was my favourite Old Who story anyweay, and Sandfer convinces that there is far more going on within those 100 minutes than I had realised (and also makes it seem pretty obvious in retrospect). I also very much liked the “Time Can Be Rewritten” entries on spinoff books (Managra, System Shock, Asylum, Corpse Marker and Eye of Heaven), all of which I had read and most of which I enjoyed. And the penultimate piece on The Valley of Death, a Big Finish “lost adventure” by Hinchcliffe, points out some general problems with the era as a whole. Basically this series – in the definitive ebook / print version – joins About Time as key material for the inquiring Whovian.

(Sandifer is currently offering discounts on all his e-books, including the first four Tardis Eruditorum volumes, valid until 1 January.)

This will never be more than minor Tolkieniana for the completist, but it is awfully pleasing to see how what started as just a couple of short notes to the oldest Tolkien children in 1920 had turned into heavily illustrated stories about the adventures of the North Polar Bear and battles against the evil goblins by the time the youngest of the family had grown out of them in 1942. John Rateliff has pointed out the considerable amount of imaginative cross-fertilization between some of the later and the Hobbit, which was being written at the same time. Tolkien can hardly have imagined that future scholars would pore over his Christmas fun in such detail.

This is the first of two volumes compiling Sfar's graphic fiction stories about the Rabbi's Cat, set in pre-independence Algeria, in the local cultural tradition that gave us Jacques Derrida and Bernard-Henri Lévy. The cat (who is the narrator) learns to talk in the very first pages by eating the rabbi's parrot, and becomes a commentator on his human family and their friends, partly naïf, partly satirical, and the plot weaves between actual experience and fantasy rather pleasingly. The precarious social position of the Algerian Jewish community is very sympathetically portrayed; I felt Sfarr went a bit off the boil in the last story, when the Rabbi and his cat go to visit the son-in-law in Paris, where the Rabbi's very understandable alienation became a bit Orientalist, but I have the second volume (in English this time) on my shelves and look forward to reading it.

• Romania and Bulgaria: ‘If people go to Britain, of course it’s to contribute’
  
  Confusing the rhetoric with, y’know, facts.
  (tags: ukpolitics eu migration romania bulgaria )
• Why the Web Won’t Be Nirvana
  
  How Newsweek got it wrong in 1995.
  (tags: internet history )
• How Fanzines Helped Put Doctor Who Fans in Charge of Doctor Who
  
  Great article from The Atlantic.
  (tags: doctorwho )

When this book was published in 2008, it must have seemed safely theoretical: the idea of a truth and reconciliation commission for Northern Ireland had never found much favour with any of the political decision-makers, and there was no reason to think it would change. Now, I understand that the creation of some such mechanism is actually one of the crunch points in the current political negotiations led by Richard Haass, so David Park's somewhat sideways look at the Troubles is going to hit closer to home than he perhaps expected.

I'm going to be personal about this. The one person who is most responsible for this change of circumstance is Ann Travers, whose sister Mary was shot dead by he IRA one Sunday morning in 1984 as she and her father, a magistrate, were leaving church (he was badly wounded in the attack, but survived, and died exactly four years ago today). During the Troubles, both Republican and Loyalist terrorists would occasionally target their victims at church, which tended to provoke more than the usual amount of revulsion from anyone with any ounce of humanity. The Travers attack was more than usually upsetting for my own social group, because they were Catholics, and had been at Mass at the ultra-respectable St Brigid's on Derryvolgie Avenue; and for us middle-class South Belfast Catholics, the shooting made it very clear that the IRA were not on our side. Mary Travers, who was training to be a teacher, had done a student placement in my school. Her brother later became a friend of mine at Cambridge. The parish priest, Ambrose Macaulay, was a friend of my parents. As it happened I attended Mass at St Brigid's precisely a week after the shooting, one of the tensest religious ceremonies I can ever remember participating in (I can't remember why I was there, normally we were either Derriaghy or Aghaderg). If our own supposed side were happy to take pot-shots at the most successful members of the community, not caring about destroying other family members, where the hell did that leave us with regard to the Loyalists or the British? Lots of people had it worse than we did during the Troubles; but none of us had it easy.

Anyway, the clock moves on; and the only person convicted of involvement in the Travers shooting (not one of the gunmen, but a female accomplice) was appointed by Sinn Féin to a particular political patronage position in 2011 after the last Assembly election. There followed a very raw political controversy, led by Ann Travers, with the immediate result that new legislation was passed to prevent people with terrorist convictions getting that sort of job; and the net result has been to make unviable the pacto de olvido approach which had hitherto seemed dominant (this of course at a time when the original pacto de olvido is also fraying). Combined with the dispute over how often particular flags should fly over Belfast City Hall, we have the current Haass process, which apparently will recommend setting up a new Independent Commission for the Recovery/Retrieval of Information, rather similar to the Truth Commission of David Park's novel. So what seemed a slightly stretched political fantasy when published almost six years ago turns out to be oddly prophetic.

Having made that lengthy excursion, the book is quite engaging in a masculine sort of way – there are four alternating viewpoint characters, the two IRA men who shot a young informer many years ago, the informer's police handler, and the titular Commissioner who is drawn into this particular story by his own complex family dynamics. I found a number of details a bit jarring, particularly with regard to the internationally appointed commissioner himself (I guess that's a realm I move in more than the author does), but it's a fine character study of four men coming to terms with the damage they have done to themselves, to each other, to the women in their lives and to the long-ago victim. There are no winners, and perhaps that is the moral.

As with last month’s Torchwood book, this is another pre-Miracle Day story which features very few of the previous regular Torchwood team, but instead has Rex Matheson, CIA agent, getting swept up in mysterious goings on which are related to Torchwood and the post-Children of Earth cleanup. The villain is a splendidly spooky character, Mr Wynter, whose extensive powers are matched by a need which must be satisfied. There is an excellent set of forking time lines at the end – in a way that TV WHo never quite manages to pull off. A decent novel on the fringes of the Torchwood universe which feeds into and slightly reinforces Miracle Day.

• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The legacy of the teen heroine
  
  @naomialderman reflects.
  (tags: buffy sf )
• Every episode of Paddington, on YouTube
  
  You’re welcome.
  (tags: tv )
• Phobos 360
  
  The inner moon of Mars, from all angles.
  (tags: astronomy )

• Britain’s Bulgaria-Romania phobia
  
  @dimobe dissects the UK rhetoric.
  (tags: eu ukpolitics romania bulgaria li )
• Reading digital sources: a case study in ship’s logs
  
  Brilliant analysis of 19th-century sailing!
  (tags: maps history )

• Jason O Mahony’s Irish Political Predictions for 2014.
  
  (tags: ireland li )
• FREE, complete Big Finish Audios by big-finish on SoundCloud
  
  Sample of 8 great Doctor Who plays from @bigfinish.
  (tags: doctorwho audio )
• Zeno of Elea: the game
  
  (tags: mathematics funny )
• Turing: what happened and what should have been done.
  
  by @JackofKent.
  (tags: sexandgenderandsexuality ukpolitics )
• Bah humbug behind bars
  
  The British government hits prisoners harder.
  (tags: ukpolitics )

A picture is worth a thousand words, or at least can graph the impact of 2,845 tweets since my last roundup on 15 December last year.

Basically my Tom Baker tweet of five weeks ago has broken all records, with 1,074 retweets and perhaps over 600,000 impressions directly, plus an unknown number (maybe 20% more, maybe 40%) who picked it up and modified it.

#fb Tom Baker's answer when asked about his favourite memory of #DoctorWho

— Nicholas Whyte (@nwbrux) November 14, 2013

As I said at the time, my only regret was not giving more prominence to the source. It's difficult to imagine that I will equal that level of virality again any time soon.

Up till then, my most retweeted tweet of all time was this one, a mere 92 retweets which still eclipsed my previous record of 33:

Dalek Found At Bottom Of British Pond, Probably Just Biding Its Time http://t.co/rAOvats1JJ Be afraid. Be very afraid.

— Nicholas Whyte (@nwbrux) May 23, 2013

Not quite so many retweets for this one a couple of weeks later (86 rather than 92), but slightly better eyeball numbers (about 100,000 rather than 40,000, thanks largely to Charles Stross and Nick Harkaway) for a tribute to a favourite author:

Iain Banks quotes http://t.co/dQLmUAAKFL Too many good lines here to single any one out.

— Nicholas Whyte (@nwbrux) June 10, 2013

The Tom Baker tweet got 43 direct replies, which is another record. Two other tweets managed 7, one a completely inaccurate prediction about the Mid Ulster by-election, and one where the replies may look like an irrelevant trolling of a Foursquare checkin with commentary about Somali politics, but it's actually a fair cop as I was at the cafe for a public meeting about Somali politics. Seven was also the previous year's record.

I am up from 1,296 followers on 15 December last year to 1,625 today.

• Mobile phone chargers to be standardised under EU law
  
  Hooray!
  (tags: eu )
• If the Prime Minister wants to change the EU, he has to stop making enemies
  
  …and also wake up to Germany’s real position.
  (tags: eu ukpolitics )
• How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk
  
  Strangely I appear to be from somewhere near the Gulf Coast.
  (tags: usa linguistics )
• When Marcel Proust Met James Joyce
  
  Nobody quite seems to remember what happened.
  (tags: literature )
• Accountant who claims he is Princess Margaret’s son wins court ruling
  
  Even the deluded have rights.
  (tags: law )
• Nontraditional Paths of Isolated Hugo Award Fans
  
  Very interesting take on Worldcons and Hugos.
  (tags: sf )

Five and a half years ago I was reminded of this book’s existence by , and as I was recovering from jetlag at her place last weekend, she kindly lent it to me and I zoomed through it as I lay on her spare bed. I have to confess that I still would have difficulty placing the 1547-48 siege of St Andrews in the wider narrative of Scottish history; but I guess McGregor’s evocation of a town pushed beyond breaking point by a religious conflict must have chimed with me as a teenager in Belfast, and I found it just as good today. In particular, she doesn’t allow either side a monopoly of good or evil; the leaders of both Protestants and Catholics are more likely to be evil and indeed arrogant, but there’s plenty of viciousness at lower levels as well. The core of the story is the path to maturity of the young hero, a Bildungsroman played out in times of civil war. I don’t think I ever read any other books by McGregor but now I wish I had.

I’ve read most of Miéville’s novels, but hadn’t come across much of his short fiction except insofar as it has been nominated for various awards. This was a good set of stories, mostly leaning towards horror, mostly set in contemporary London (one set in New Crobuzon). There’s a lot of very effective writing and scene-setting – I particularly liked the short story told through correspondence and diary entries about a wandering street. Nothing that quite grabbed me by the throat, but all very pleasing.

I’d read this Eighth Doctor Adventure five years ago, before starting my systematic read-through of the sequence, and enjoyed it well enough as effectively a standalone novel; I liked it even more as part of the series, having got to know companions Fitz and Anji rather better over the last few months of reading. In particular, the intense description of New Orleans as a setting really does stand out as an exceptionally good evocation of place. Good to return to it.

32 years on. Two years ago for the thirtieth anniversary, invoked John Donne.