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.
November 2004 was grimly dominated by the re-election of President Bush, which I honestly had not seen coming. It was an important lesson to me to avoid wishful thinking in my elections analysis in the future.
The newly re-elected Bush administration immediately recognised what is now North Macedonia under the name of Macedonia, which probably played an important role in the failure of the following week’s referendum which would have reversed some elements of the post-conflict local government reform if it had passed.
We presciently published a report on South Ossetia, and I had another op-ed on Moldova.
My one work trip was to Geneva, where I rather bravely drove there and back; I remember a long and valuable walking conversation with Pat Cox beside the lake, where he gave me some invaluable career advice (“get up early, and read the paperwork before the meeting”), and also giving Hattie Babbitt a lift to Geneva Airport as I departed. We actually managed two family trips, one ot the Ardennes with the kids, and one with just the two of us to the Hague for a dance performance connected with the royal wedding earlier in the year.
I read 10 books that month.
Non-genre 7 (2004 total 19)
Atonement, by Ian McEwan
The Scheme for Full Employment, by Magnus Mills
The Man Who Was Thursday, by G.K. Chesterton
The Summer Book, by Tove Jansson
The Distant Past, by William Trevor
The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, by Alexander McCall Smith
Tears of the Giraffe, by Alexander McCall Smith
SF 3 (YTD 70)
Science Fiction: The Best of 2003, ed. Jonathan Strahan and Karen Haber
Missing Man, by Katherine MacLean
Year’s Best SF 9, ed. David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer
2,800 pages (YTD 46,000)
3/10 by women (YTD 34/140)
None by PoC (YTD 2/140)
The best of these is Tove Jansson’s quiet novel, The Summer Book; you can get it here. The Hartwell/Cramer collection is particularly good this year. You can get it here. On the other hand, I could not see the point of Magnus Mills’ The Scheme for Full Employment. If you want to try it anyway, you can get it here.
