Monthly Archives: June 2026

September 2004 books

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In anticipation of the 25th anniversary of my bookblogging, which will come in late 2028, I’m reposting my monthly summaries since November 2003 when I started. (I already did this in 2019-2023, but this gives me a chance to consolidate all the posts and links to this WordPress site rather than my old Livejournal.) Everything will be linked under the bookblog nostalgia tag.

Back at work, I continued lobbying for a Commission cabinet position until it became obvious that this was not my year. (I have not seriously tried again since.) I had another op-ed on Macedonia as the political situation there took another twist. I travelled to Moldova, Belfast and ended the month in Portugal, with a day trip to the Hague. A writer whose books I don’t especially like rather sweetly got in touch and offered to send me some more so that I could make a more informed judgement; I accepted. And we celebrated little U’s christening (sadly since then we have lost both Liz, her godmother, and Guy Van Haver, the parish priest).

I read 12 books that month.

Non-fiction: 2 (YTD 32)
Judgement Day: The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic, by Christopher Stephen
The 9/11 Commission Report

Non-genre 1 (YTD 12)
To The Nines, by Janet Evanovich

SF: 7 (YTD 56)
The Warrior’s Bond, by Juliet McKenna
The Tale of the Next Great War, ed. I.F. Clarke
Star Trek: Enterprise – The First Adventure, by Vonda N. McIntyre
Monstrous Regiment, by Terry Pratchett
The Gods Themselves, by Isaac Asimov
Downbelow Station, by C.J. Cherryh
Brother Berserker, by Fred Saberhagen

Comics: 2 (YTD 5)
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, Marjane Satrapi
The Sandman: Endless Nights, by Neil Gaiman

I see that when I first tallied this month I counted Janet Evanovich as sf; I think that was wrong and will have to correct the record going forward.

4,300 pages (YTD 36,400)
5/12 by women (YTD 29/109)
1/12 by PoC (YTD 2/109)

The best of these were Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, the first half of Marjane Satrapi’s memoir of growing up in Iran, a milestone in comics which you can get here; and the morbidly factual 9/11 Commission Report, which notably fails to make any connection between the September 2001 attacks and Iraq – you can get it here.

My dislike of The Gods Themselves is well recorded; I was also deeply disappointed by Janet Evanovich’s To The Nines – I had enjoyed several earlier books in the series but this one put me off the rest. You can get them here and here.

Sometime Never…, by Justin Richards

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

“That’s your considered scientific opinion, is it Fitz?’ the Doctor asked.

I had actually read this one twice before, in 2008 and again in 2015, but I came back to it again to round off the ongoing multiple-worlds narrative of the Eighth Doctor Adventures that I have been slogging through. In my first attempt, in 2008, I wrote:

Well, if I’m going to read more of the 8th Doctor novels at all, I’m going to have to start doing it in sequential order. Dipping into the series – in this case because I was interested to see a different treatment of the Princes in the Tower than we got in The Kingmaker – tends to confront me with characters (in this case Miranda and Sabbath) who clearly have deep significance for the author and for followers of the series but who are unknown to me. There are some vivid bits of description, and a twist at the end which I would have appreciated more if the whole book had not felt rather like fan-fiction in a canon I don’t know much about.

This time round, I felt that there was a decent bit of closure for the narrative, but in the end I still don’t have a strong sense of who and why Trix and Sabbath are in the series at all, and the twist at the end is a nice touch but doesn’t actually tie in with the rest of the story. But you can get Sometime Never… here.

Next in this sequence: Halflife, by Mark Michalowski.