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.
I started October 2008, 18 years ago this month, with a day in Paris, and visited The Hague overnight mid-month. For half term we visited my sister in France, to meet very new baby S. F was enchanted; U fascinated, though we had to monitor her interactions quite carefully.
The big political news of the month for me was the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to former president Martti Ahtisaari of Finland, who I had worked with quite a lot in my time with the International Crisis Group. He was one of the most impressive people I ever met. Meanwhile globally the financial crisis gathered pace.
At work, my super-effective American intern D moved on; she is now a foreign service officer with the US State Department. Her replacement was Spanish S.
I read 25 books in October 2008.
Non-fiction 5 (YTD 56)
The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street, by Charles Nicholl
The English: A Portrait of a People, by Jeremy Paxman
Jean Sibelius, by Guy Rickards
Edmund Spenser, by Rosemary Freeman
Waterloo, by Andrew Roberts
Non-genre 3 (YTD 22)
Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero, by William Makepeace Thackeray
The Duke and I, by Julia Quinn (did not finish)
The Moving Toyshop, by Edmund Crispin
Scripts 5 (YTD 16)
Love’s Labour’s Lost, by William Shakespeare
Romeo and Juliet, by William Shakespeare
Richard II, by William Shakespeare
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, by William Shakespeare
The Life and Death of King John, by William Shakespeare
Poetry 1
Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney
SF 5 (YTD 39)
The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
Gossamer Axe, by Gael Baudino
The Sword of Shannara, by Terry Brooks (did not finish)
Astra and Flondrix, by Seamus Cullen
Sunrise Alley, by Catherine Asaro
Doctor Who 5 (YTD 166)
The Gallifrey Chronicles, by Lance Parkin
All-Consuming Fire, by Andy Lane
Doctor Who and the City of Death, by David Lawrence
Winner Takes All, by Jacqueline Rayner
Interference Book One: Shock Tactic, by Lawrence Miles
Comics 1 (YTD 4)
The Cruel Sea, eds Tom Spilsbury, Scott Gray
6,200 pages (YTD 76,100)
5/25 (YTD 39/323) by women
none (YTD 6/323) by PoC
Gonna call out four excellent reads here: Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, which you can get here, and Romeo and Juliet, which you can get here; also Heaney’s Beowulf, which you can get here, and Thackeray’s magnificent Vanity Fair, which you can get here. Worst of the month was Julia Quinn’s The Duke and I, which I cast aside after two chapters; you can get it here.
