December 2005 books and 2005 reading roundup

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.

December 2005 was an unusual month for that time in my life in that I did not travel outside my usual commute – a planned day-trip to France was cancelled at the last moment. The overnights meme says I had spent the night in 21 different places away from home during the year; I seem to have missed Berlin from the list. I certainly visited 17 countries in the course of the year (going by today’s borders – ie counting Montenegro, Serbia and Kosovo separately). We put out a report on Montenegro’s imminent independence referendum. My Armenian intern A left (she later set up her own business) and I head-hunted her Greek replacement K from the internal media team.

At home, we celebrated little U’s third birthday (she got an Etch-a-Sketch) and Anne’s brother and sister both joined us for Christmas, in time for David Tennant’s first full episode of Doctor Who. I seem to have pictures of them and the kids, but none of Anne or me. We had a full house, especially when Anne’s parents and my sister and her husband all turned up.

I read 11 books that month.

Non-fiction 3; 2005 total 42
‘with all faults’, by David Low
Pilate: The Biography of an Invented Man, by Ann Wroe
The Georgian Feast: The Vibrant Culture and Savory Food of the Republic of Georgia, by Darra Goldstein

sf (non-Who) 4; 2005 total 79
Erewhon, by Samuel Butler
Sevenacide, by Robert Shuster
Triplanetary, by E.E. “Doc” Smith
Numbers Don’t Lie, by Terry Bisson

Doctor Who 3; 2005 total 5
The Well-Mannered War, by Gareth Roberts
Human Nature, by Paul Cornell
Lungbarrow, by Marc Platt

Comics 1; 2005 total 8
Boulevard of Broken Dreams, by Kim Deitch with Simon Deitch

2,500 pages; 2005 total 46,400 – this number soared once I started commuting by train in 2007
2/11 by women; 2005 total 30/144 (21%) – a standard proportion until I started to make efforts to read more diversely
None by PoC; 2005 total 4/144 (3%) – likewise.

Best books of the month for me were The Georgian Feast, which I’m still cooking from and you can get here, and Paul Cornell’s Human Nature, which you can get here in a new edition and of course later became the only original Who novel to be later adapted to television. (Other formats adopted to television: a game book, a comic strip, a couple of short stories, more loosely a couple of Big Finish plays.) Several of these bounced off me, most thoroughly the rather dismal Sevanacide collection, which you can get here.