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.
The Northern Ireland Assembly had an election in March 2007, the last one for which I did not do TV commentary, though I went over a few days later in the wake of P-Con and delivered a lecture about voting.
Apart from that, I had a day-trip to the Hague, and a longer trip to Vienna and Prishtina, all for work.
And I hired my first intern in the new job. J was an intelligent young woman who had tried various career options which didn’t work out, and was prepared to give working in international politics a fling. I’m glad to say that she caught the bug and is now a British diplomat. It also turned out that her elder brother was friends with their neighbour Rebecca Nation, the daughter of Terry Nation who wrote a lovely book for her, and J had played with real Daleks as a child. (For certain values of “real”.) I met Rebecca and Joel Nation earlier this year, and they were amused by the connection.
I read 14 books that month.
Non-fiction 3 (YTD 19)
Independent Diplomat: Dispatches from an Unaccountable Elite, by Carne Ross
Diplomacy Lessons: Realism for an Unloved Superpower, by John Brady Kiesling
1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, by James Shapiro
SF 4 (YTD 17)
Glorifying Terrorism, ed. Farah Mendlesohn
Master of Earth and Water, by Diana L. Paxson and Adrienne Martine-Barnes
Living Next Door to the God of Love, by Justina Robson
Spin Control, by Chris Moriarty
Comics 1 (YTD 6)
Blankets, by Craig Thompson
4,000 pages (YTD 18,400)
5/14 by women (YTD 17/59)
None by PoC (YTD 2/59)
The two best of these were the excellent graphic novel Blankets, which you can get here, and Shapiro’s look at Shakespeare in 1599, which you can get here. I do not particularly recommend the novelisation of problematic Doctor Who story The Celestial Toymaker, but you can get it here anyway (at a price).
