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 major personal developments for me in October 2006 were breaking the news of my imminent job change to colleagues and friends, and also finding a daycare place for B, whose behaviour was becoming too difficult for her special school to cope with. We had some diversion also at work when it was rumoured that we might get the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. (We didn’t.) My foreign trips were a rather weird one-day trip to Ankara, Turkey, (the only time I have been there); a much less weird conference in Chişinău, Moldova; and a half-term visit to my sister in Burgundy at the end of the month, taking in the Eiffel Tower en route (inspired by Barnaby Bear). Here’s the view from the top (well, as far as we could get), with F (aged 7) practicing to be a teenager.
Sadly this was also the month that we lost David Stewart, of Irish sf fandom.
As well as enjoying I, Claudius and the first episodes of Torchwood, I read 16 books that month.
Non-fiction 3 (YTD 53)
Confessions, by St Augustine
Charlotte Brontë’s Promised Land, by Eric Ruijssenaars
A Wayfarer in Sweden, by Frederic Whyte
Non-genre 4 (YTD 28)
Villette, by Charlotte Brontë
The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
The File on H, by Ismail Kadarë
One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
SF 8 (YTD 62)
The Syſtem of the World, by Neal Stephenſon
The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold
Star Songs of an Old Primate, by James Tiptree Jr
Nine Princes in Amber, by Roger Zelazny
The Guns of Avalon, by Roger Zelazny
Sign of the Unicorn, by Roger Zelazny
The Hand of Oberon, by Roger Zelazny
The Courts of Chaos, by Roger Zelazny
Doctor Who 1 (YTD 12)
The Scales of Injustice, by Gary Russell
5,100 pages (YTD 48,200)
4/16 (YTD 29/160) by women
1/16 (YTD 8/160) by PoC
My own all-time favourite of my reviews is my write-up of The Syſtem of the World, by Neal Stephenſon.
The best book of the month was Ismail Kadarë’s Albanian tale The File on H, which you can get here. And the first Chronicles of Amber remain a guilty pleasure; you can get them in a single volume here. I thought The Lovely Bones was an awful book, but you can get it here if you want.
