• Diplomatic Fallout: International Crisis Diplomacy on the Defensive, Part I
  
  Though I think it was ever thus.
  (tags: war politics southsudan )
• The Great War and Global Governance
  
  International institutions: efficiency vs robustness.
  (tags: war )
• Weapons of mass reduction: The vulnerability of nuclear-arms materials
  
  Belgium improving! (Surprised it’s listed.)
  (tags: war )
• Candidates for President of the European Commission – where we stand in January 2014
  
  Update from @jonworth.
  (tags: eu )

• Truth, Lies and Migrants
  
  A study of SW England, by the TUC (thx @anthonyzach).
  (tags: ukpolitics eu migration )

I didn’t mention it at the time, but A, F, and I went up to Amsterdam for the long weekend at the start of November. It’s only two and a half hours’ drive from here. We got in by mid-afternoon on the Friday, and wandered around the city for the evening; then on Saturday morning we got up very early to see the Anne Frank House, and finished up with the Nemo Science Centre before trailing home on Saturday evening. Parking is pretty horrible, but there are workarounds.

It was the first time I had been there for over 20 years – A and I had visited briefly in 1992, and before that I guess we had gone the odd time during the year my family lived in the Netherlands in 1979-80. But you can’t live in this corner of Europe and be unaware of it – the year we first moved to Belgium, I remember hosting an American friend who had just been there for a week and spent two days lying on our spare bed detoxing, and occasionally emerging for water and toast; and work quite often takes me to The Hague, which is always somehow in the shadow of its brash sibling (cousin? parent?) up the road. And I’ve passed through Schiphol airport several times, but that really doesn’t count.

Even in my jaded middle years, it’s still a pretty exciting city, with a diverse vibrancy combined with a strong aroma of marijuana that you just don’t get elsewhere. I’d have liked longer to browse in the bookshops, but was satisfied enough with introducing A and F to Indonesian food (we don’t get that here, the south-east Asian cuisine round here is Vietnamese or sometimes Thai or Chinese) and our other cultural excursions already mentioned. I won’t leave it another 20 years before I go back. (Apart from anything else, I really want to go to the Van Gogh Museum.)

Russell Shorto has followed on from his fantastic book on Nieuw Amsterdam, The Island at the Centre of the World, which I hugely enjoyed back in 2005, with a history of the original from which New York took its template. There was lots of stuff here I didn’t know, like Amsterdam’s medieval significance as a cult centre, and the importance of the East India Company as a financial instrument and as a means of enriching the average citizen. It’s also interesting to see bits and pieces put together – the marginal position of Amsterdam allowed it to develop a spirit of tolerance and freedom out of sight of local warlords, until the entire city suddenly became rich (I summarise brutally but fairly).

Shorto doesn’t quite prove his main argument (expressed in his subtitle), which is that Amsterdam functioned as a beacon of tolerance which nurtured the creation of liberalism and modern civilisation; it was certainly important enough in that process, but there are sadly many examples of intolerance in the city’s history. He also doesn’t really situate Amsterdam in its wider Dutch, Low Countries, North-West Continental Europe context after the first few chapters; the forest is out of focus for the sake of a particularly large and interesting tree.

But he redeems this by going even smaller and following some of the personal histories of people who have built the historical image of Amsterdam, done much more briefly and humanely than Simon Schama. Three of them particularly stick with me – Spinoza, Rembrandt, and Anne Frank. The first two of these are of course world figures anyway, but it’s interesting and indeed important to go through how Amsterdam as a city shaped their work. Spinoza in particular comes across as a vital link in the story of civilisation. The third is a more intricate and intimate tale.

I’m old enough to remember Otto Frank appearing on Blue Peter the year before he died (the caption to that video wrongly says 1976, but it was 1979), and I vaguely remember reading the book and visiting the achterhuis in 1980. It’s a really big thing now. The House opens at 9 am; we joined the queue at 0850, and there were nearly 200 people in front of us; by the time we got in at 0940, the queue was easily three times as long as when we had arrived. Get there early, folks; or pre-buy tickets (it was a holiday weekend so we didn’t have that option).

And it’s a gut-wrenching experience. You know what the story is; I wrote about it a few years back. The moments in the house that really turned me inside out were the pictures cut out from magazines that Anne had stuck on the walls of the tiny room she shared with the dentist, as colour from the outside world to lighten the appalling situation that they were in; and the post-war interviews with Otto Frank, a man who had lost everything but somehow turned his daughter’s account into a triumph of the human spirit. I bought the Dutch original of the diary, and will read it soon. (One point that occurs to me now: the Frank girls, who moved to Amsterdam when they were 8 and 4, probably spoke Dutch with that very distinct Holland accent which I have begun to notice much more since I moved to Belgium. Their parents of course were German.)

Shorto starts and ends his book by interviewing Frieda Menco, a childhood friend of Anne Frank’s, whose family went into hiding the same week as the Franks, but were betrayed at the same time, and who then unbelievably met up with the Franks again in Auschwitz. He follows through the history of the city in the late twentieth century, when the student protests broke out in the 1960s (against a mayor whose record in the Resistance was impeccable but forgotten). These are important stories too, particularly for gay rights (as that set of issues first became known) and integration of immigrants. But it feels like a slightly adolescent and oblivious footnote to the deadly drama of the Holocaust.

The book is paced slightly oddly as a result of Shorto’s particular concentrations. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are not well served. But I think the average reader will forgive this; it’s a history of the manifestation of a political idea, not a blow by blow chronology. (After all, Gibbon skipped most of the Byzantine Empire.) It’s not quite as excellent a book as The Island at the Centre of the World, but it’s still very very good.

• Hugo Award Eligible Art(ists)
  
  Possible nominees gathered.
  (tags: loncon3 sf art )
• EU freedom of movement. This stuff matters.
  
  @jonworth lays it out.
  (tags: eu migration ukpolitics li )
• My attendance record (by a UKIP MEP)
  
  His own words: “flaky to say the least. But so what? “
  (tags: ukpolitics eu )
• Coalition partners reject Tory MPs’ call for veto over European Union laws
  
  A rare display of backbone.
  (tags: eu ukpolitics )

• Your Face and Name Will Appear in Google Ads Starting Today
  
  Unless you uncheck the box…
  (tags: internet )
• mIt came from Outer Space Wearing an RAF Blazer – Martin Mobberley, 2013
  
  Review of Patrick Moore biography!
  (tags: astronomy )
• Rare color film shows what London looked like in 1927
  
  Wonderful.
  (tags: history )

• Britain cannot afford to be the friendless pariah of Europe
  
  Excellent piece from @telegraph: Britain “hiding under a duvet of doubt and debt”.
  (tags: ukpolitics eu li )
• Meat Atlas – Facts and figures about the animals we eat
  
  *gulp* @boell_stiftung
  (tags: food )
• Steamship Routes of the World, 1914
  
  Cool.
  (tags: maps )
• The World’s Most Dangerous Trail on Mr. Huashan Leads to a Teahouse
  
  Just looking at this gives me vertigo!
  (tags: photos )
• Improbable Research: Postal Experiments
  
  The USPS comes up trumps.
  (tags: research funny )
• Top EU official slams British ministers on immigration
  
  #creditwhereitsdue Reding is right.
  (tags: ukpolitics eu migration )

• Little England
  
  (tags: ukpolitics eu )
• European commission braces for bitter battle over new chief
  
  Guardian reports on the EU’s imminent problematic summer.
  (tags: eu )
• Jo Cornu: “Is het nog aanvaardbaar dat er in stations en treinen geen wifi is?”
  
  New Belgian rail boss’s agenda – excellent!!!
  (tags: belgium travel internet )
• Emails link top Christie aide to GWB lane-closing controversy
  
  Extraordinary story of petty local politics.
  (tags: uspolitics )

Current
Raising Steam, by Terry Pratchett
Walk to the End of the World, by Suzy McKee Charnas
The Saint Zita Society, by Ruth Rendell
[Doctor Who] Happy Endings, by Paul Cornell (1996)
The Big Finish Companion v1, by Richard Dinnick

Last books finished
The Secret River, by Kate Grenville
[Doctor Who] Last of the Gaderene, by Mark Gatiss
Amsterdam, by Russell Shorto
Saints of the Shadow Bible, by Ian Rankin
About Time: The Unauthorized Guide to Doctor Who, 2005-2006; Series 1 & 2, by Tat Wood
The Next Generation, vol ii and vol iii, by John Francis Maguire (?)

Next books
Absalom, Absalom!, by William Faulkner
Motherlines, by Suzy McKee Charnas
[Doctor Who] Grimm Reality by Simon Bucher-Jones
Dawn, by Octavia E. Butler

Books acquired in last week
Een Geweer in het Water, by Hermann
Dodger, by Terry Pratchett
The World of Poo, by Terry Pratchett
La Galère d’Obélix by Albert Uderzo
Raising Steam, by Terry Pratchett
Dominion, by C. J. Sansom

Now that Rebus has retired, but is finding ways back into police work, Rankin seems to be hitting a new consistency of excellence. Here, Rebus and colleagues get tangled in a dodgy car accident whose ostensible only victim’s boyfriend is the son of Scotland’s Justice Minister, with links into both the 2014 independence referendum campaign and the more robust and less ethical policing days of two decades ago. Then the bodies start turning up, and Rebus finds that he himself is closer to the source of the story than he would like to be. It’s all intricately woven and unwoven, with nobody completely admirable in their behaviour and some pretty awful. There is a comedy relief scrapyard, which is a nice touch. Long may this continue.

This has been my insomnia book since September, far more successful than my previous efforts at choosing insomnia books (note for self and other insomniacs – mystery stories actually not such a great way of getting to sleep; thoughtful books about material which you are already very familiar with are a much better idea).

That's not at all to say that it's boring – just that the 28 chapters, and the 28 accompanying essays, are actually meaty and self-contained enough that you can shut the book at the end of each and every one of them and drift off happily. Indeed, now that I have finished it, I wonder what I can turn to next? (Furtive glance at two volumes of the Big Finish Companion on the shelves…)

Anyway. As I had hoped, this is an in depth and critical look at the first two years of New Who, the time of Rose Tyler as a regular companion. It's the seventh volume of the superlative About Time series, and it's difficult to imagine anyone producing a better survey of the period. (Phil Sandifer's book on this, when it comes out, will also be on the must-have shelf, but he is pursuing a different intellectual project and anyway his chapters are usually shorter.)

For each episode, as before, there are substantial sections on continuity (fitting in what we are told into what we know from other Who stories and 'real' history), analysis and the production process. This last is the biggest improvement from previous volumes; About Time 7 has practically a day-by-day breakdown of production (Eccleston's first scene, filmed on 18 July 2004, was chasing the pig down the corridor in Aliens of LondonThe Parting of the Ways). The sections on guest stars are consistently more informative than in previous volumes as well, probably because there are a lot more of them. The sections on popular culture sources for the stories remain as interesting as ever.

Wood is consistently upbeat about the lead actors, particularly about Billie Piper, who of course was known mainly as a teen pop singer before 2005. His snark, however, is fully unleashed for the plotting and sometimes the directing of individual episodes – the "Things That Don't Make Sense" section, which has always been an attractive feature of the AboutTime series, reaches new lengths and depths here. As he points out, although Series Two was a huge hit at the time, there's an awful lot of plot nonsense in it, and the real difference is that the series had a bigger budget than it had ever had or would ever have again.

This volume doesn't have the strongest accompanying essays of the series (for those, you want the second edition of Volume 3), but they are still satisfactory enough. Probably the two most interesting are  "Was Series Two Meant To Be Like This?", which speculates about original plans for the 2006 episodes, including Stephen Fry's unmade story, and "Did He Fall Or Was He Pushed?", looking at the various accounts given of Eccleston's departure and tryng to find the overall picture – the evidence pointing to his not having firmly signed on for more than a year in the first place, and then a series of circumstances and incidents which all pushed against renewal of his contract.

Though this is Volume 7 of the ongoing About Time series of books about Doctor Who, those who started with New Who can jump in here. It is strongly hinted that Volume 8, which will cover the rest of the Tennant era, as well as Torchwood and Sarah Jane, is already written – at the rate this volume goes, about 16 pages for each episode, I suspect that may appear in two pieces – and that a projected Volume 9 will cover the Matt Smith era. Anyway, it's well worth getting, not just for Who fans but generally for fans of 21st century sf television.

Standard formatting gripe – 90 endnotes? Seriously? Why can't we have footnotes, which actually put the interesting nuggets next to the text they illuminate?

• Buy-to-let property supremo shuts door on housing benefit tenants
  
  Britain’s war on the poor continues.
  (tags: ukpolitics )
• Interactive geospatial map of the Roman Empire
  
  Wow!
  (tags: maps history )
• The Fatal Floor
  
  30 seconds of terror, narrated by Patrick Troughton.
  (tags: doctorwho videos )
• What Do Y’All, Yinz, and Yix Call Stretchy Office Supplies?
  
  The New Yorker spoofs the dialect quiz.
  (tags: funny linguistics )
• The intense world theory of autism
  
  Rings a lot of bells for me.
  (tags: autism )

Took advantage of the fine weather this morning to try and reproduce the settings of some vintage postcards round our village – slightly hampered by the sun (should have got up earlier).

The old town hall, now the village library, was completely renovated inside a year or so ago, but retains the utilitarian brick facade, though the village name has disappeared. The school buildings behind ave been altered quite a lot.

The position of the sun was a particular problem for this shot and I might try it again. The building facing us from he far corner of the junction was a cafe when we first moved here in 2001, but closed soon after and is just a private residence. (In the very short walk from the former cafe to our house, you pass a former bank branch and a former flower shop, both now private residence.)

The Church of St Anne, at the core of the village, has been cleaned up since the older picture was taken (from the back garned on the adjacent property; we were not able to get across the wall). Also there was a clock on the south face of the 11th-century bell tower in the older picture, just about visible between the two small windows – it has now been moved to the east face, above the front entrance.

Finally, the one shot that turned out to be impossible to reproduce adequately is probably the nicest of the old pictures. The church in those days was painted white; the two quaint old buildings in front of it are both still there, in slightly better shape, and still painted white; but tree growth in the meantime makes it impossible to see except with the eye of faith.

I am always fascinated by vanished places and buried landscapes, and was delighted recently to discover that I inhabit the remnants of the lost continent of Avalonia, which existed as a small but separate entity between about 490 and 460 million years ago.

The (possible) extent of Avalonia

The Avalonian remnants include, from east to west, the northwest corner of Poland starting around Szczecin; the northern chunk of Germany; possibly a sliver of Denmark; all of the Netherlands; almost all of Belgium; the Calais/Dunkirk area of France; all of England and Wales (but almost none of Scotland); Ireland southeast of a line from Drogheda to the Shannon estuary; southeastern Newfoundland (including the Avalon peninsula which gives Avalonia its name), with St Pierre and Miquelon; Nova Scotia except the parts south of Halifax; Prince Edward Island; New Brunswick roughly south of Monckton and Fredericton; Maine southeast of the Norumbega Fault which runs southwest from the border to Bangor and then more SSW to Portland, possibly including also the coastal strip of New Hampshire; Massachusetts southeast of a line from the lower Merrimack river valley to Worcester, however excluding Cape Cod ; all of Rhode Island; and finally Connecticut east of Hartford and New Haven. (But not Long Island, just across the Sound.) It's a remarkable mythic assemblage, from Pomerania to Providemce, including both the Avalon Peninsula and the original Isle of Avalon.

The precise borders are debatable, because Avalonian sediments are found at many depths, and it consisted of a series of islands anyway; one map puts remnants in the Carpathians, and also straddling the Straits of Gibraltar. Wikipedia page offers several options, including these:

Avalonia in Europe (one version)

Avalonia in Europe (another version)

The end of Avalonia (one version)

The end of Avalonia (another version)

Avalonia, when it existed, started at the South Pole, an arc of volcanic islands on the rim of Gondwana, bordering land now in Mauretania/Gabon, South Carolina/Georgia/Alabama, and Venezuela/Colombia. When it split off about 490 million years ago, at the end of the Cambrian, it set sail into the Iapetus Ocean, opening up the Rheic Ocean behind it. About 450 million years ago, at the end of the Ordovician, Avalonia joined onto the slightly larger continent of Baltica as a peninsula, and during the Silurian period closed up the Iapetus Ocean, merging with the northern continent of Laurentia. The rest of Gondwana eventually caught up behind it, closing the Rheic Ocean and bringing most of what is now Europe together during the Devonian as the supercontinent of Pangaea formed.

There's a lovely iPad app which lets you assemble Pangaea at your leisure (and another which lets you dismantle it). These screenshots show the history of Avalonia, the red pin marking my Belgian home.

Anyway, greetings, fellow-citizens of the former Avalonia! I bet you never realised that we had that in common.

• No, Kim Jong Un probably didn’t feed his uncle to 120 hungry dogs
  
  Best headline of 2014!!!
  (tags: northkorea media )
• 2015: An Ugly Stramash
  
  The UK parliamentary consequences of a Scottish Yes.
  (tags: ukpolitics scotland )
• How Britain exported next-generation surveillance
  
  Number plates and abuse of power.
  (tags: humanrights )

• “Ugly and stupid”
  
  @TimFarron hits out at Tories on immigration pandering.
  (tags: ukpolitics migration libdems )
• Immigrants are not the problem
  
  Unemployment and benefit cuts *are* the problem.
  (tags: ukpolitics migration )
• The Geopolitics of the Gregorian Calendar
  
  Unusually good article from @Stratfor about the length of the year.
  (tags: timekeeping )
• Where Will We Live?
  
  The UK’s housing catastrophe – caused by all parties, esp Tories.
  (tags: ukpolitics )
• Why the Passenger Pigeon Became Extinct (@thenewyorker)
  
  “The short answer is that it tasted good.”
  (tags: biology )
• Our Airport, Your Airport
  
  The Brussels airport feelgood video. Really.
  (tags: belgium videos li )

• 10 Global Elections to Watch in 2014
  
  A geopolitical roundup which tries not to be US-centric but does not quite succeed!
  (tags: uspolitics scotland egypt )
• Why I’m against immigration
  
  …because Britain is full. A must-read piece.
  (tags: ukpolitics migration )
• Crossroads And Coins: Naomi Mitchison’s ‘Travel Light’
  
  @tithenai on Tolkien’s friend.
  (tags: sf )
• Isaac Asimov Predicts in 1964 What the World Will Look Like Today — in 2014
  
  (tags: sf )
• The Myth of Western Civilisation
  
  Ta-Nehisi Coates starts with Tony Judt’s “Postwar” and goes on from there.
  (tags: history )

• What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2014?
  
  How copyright law has changed since 1978.
  (tags: copyright )
• Murder on the Roof of the World
  
  Misleading title for great article about the Karakoram Highway.
  (tags: pakistan china )
• The Year America’s Post-9/11 Foreign Policy Failed
  
  @ForeignPolicy’s pessimistic 2014 outlook.
  (tags: uspolitics waronterror )
• US Dept of Homeland Security destroys 11 musical instruments as “agricultural products”
  
  Another win in the war on – who, exactly???
  (tags: uspolitics waronterror )

The traditional end-of-year poll of books read. There is not a complete agreement with the tallies in my end-of-year books post, but it’s near enough. (Rumour has it that you can also fill in the poll with Twitter or Facebook credentials.)

And if you haven’t, please look at my 2014 books poll.

Looking back, I discovered that I never did a proper books roundup of 2012, unlike in previous years (2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005). Well, there’s plenty of time to put that right. So here are my picks of both last year and this, in various categories. (Curses – LJ ate a long version of this post, so I’m going to be much briefer than I wanted. Probably just as well)

Total books: 237 this year, 259 last year – more than 2006 or 2007, less than any year since. More active weekends, plus devoting some commuting time to watching Doctor Who and Game of Thrones episodes.
Total page count: ~68,000 pages this year, ~77,800 last year, ~88,200 in 2011

Diversity: 71 (30%) by women this year, 65 (25%) by women last year – compares with 22% in 2011, 23% in 2010, 20% in 2009, 12% in 2008 and I don’t seem to have counted previously. This year’s total augmented by 10 Agatha Christie novels.
11 (5%) by PoC this year, 12 (5%) by PoC last year – compares with 5% in 2011, 9% in 2010, 5% in 2009, 2% in 2008. Could do better.

Most books by a single author:
2012: Jonathan Gash (11), Ursula Vernon (6), Ian Rankin (5), Alison Plowden and Justin Richards (4 each); though the Ursula Vernon and Alison Plowden books could be considered as component parts of a single work in each case.
2013: Agatha Christie (10), followed by Terrance Dicks (7), Jonathan Gash (6), Philip Sandifer (5), Cressida Cowell, Gary Russell, Ian Rankin and Neil Gaiman (4 each).

Non-fiction

2013		2012		2011		2010		2009
46	19%	53	20%	69	23%	66	24%	88	26%

Best of 2012: The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance, by Edmund de Waal – brilliant story of heirlooms, Proust, the Holocaust and Japan.
Best of 2013: A Room of One’s Own, by Virginia Woolf – wish I’d read it when I was an undergraduate, a fundamentally important essay about literature and gender.

Non-sfnal fiction

2013		2012		2011		2010		2009
44	19%	48	19%	48	16%	50	18%	57	18%

Best of 2012: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Brontë – I came to it late, but much my favourite Brontë novel – seems somehow a bit more in balance than her sisters’ books.
Best of 2013: The Complete Stories of Zora Neale Hurston – brilliant collection of this unjustly obscured writer, not done any favours by its publisher.

Non-Whovian sff

2013		2012		2011		2010		2009
65	27%	62	24%	78	26%	73	26%	78	23%

Best of 2012: Among Others, by Jo Walton – like most of the Hugo and Nebula voters, I found that had somehow got inside my head and shared my memories.
Best of 2013: The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man’s Fear, by Patrick Rothfuss – I don’t usually go for big fantasy epics, but this somehow got to me.

Doctor Who fiction

2013		2012		2011		2010		2009
72	30%	75	29%	80	27%	71	26%	70	19%

Best of 2012: Shada, the long awaited novelisation by Gareth Roberts from Douglas Adams’ script.
Best of 2013: I’m going to cheat here. Although I enjoyed a lot of the Who,Torchwood and Sarah Jane fiction I read this year, pride of place goes to Philip Sandifer’s TARDIS Eruditorum series of books (vol 1, vol 2, vol 3, vol 4) which were tallied above with non-fiction, but are setting a new standard for Who criticism. (Honorable mention along the same lines to Graham Sleight’s The Doctor’s Monsters.)

Comics

2013		2012		2011		2010		2009
30	13%	21	8%	27	9%	18	6%	28	8%

Best of 2012: Digger, by Ursula Vernon – a deserving winner of the Hugo.
Best of 2013: The Blue Lotus, by Hergé – the master of the genre finds his stride.

Making up the numbers were two poetry collections, Paul Muldoon in 2013 and Walt Whitman in 2012.

What do I need to round this off? Oh yes, a poll…

Non-Fiction 3 (2013 total 46)
Tardis Eruditorum vol 4: Tom Baker and the Hinchcliffe Years, by Philip Sandifer
Information is Beautiful, by David McCandless
Stuff I've Been Reading, by Nick Hornby

Fiction (non-sf) 5 (2013 total 44)
Eyeless in Gaza, by Aldous Huxley
Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson
The Popinjay, by Iona McGregor
The Truth Commissioner, by David Park
The Devils, by Fyodor Dostoevsky

SF (non-Who) 8 (2013 total 65)
Two unpublished novels
Patternmaster, by Octavia E. Butler
Rendezvous with Rama, by Arthur C. Clarke
The Wise Man's Fear, by Patrick Rothfuss
Looking for Jake and other stories, by China Miéville
The Father Christmas Letters, by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Next Generation, vol. I, by John Francis Maguire (provisionally classified as sf)

Doctor Who 4 (2013 total 72)
Dancing The Code, by Paul Leonard
Death and Diplomacy, by Dave Stone
City of the Dead, by Lloyd Rose
The Men Who Sold The World, by Guy Adams

Comics 2 (2013 total 30)
Animate Europe! (responsible editor Hans H. Stein)
Le Chat du Rabbin tome 1, by Joann Sfarr

~6,800 pages (2013 total ~67,000)
5/22 (2013 total 71/257) by women (McGregor, Butler, Rose and two more)
1/22 (2013 total 11/257) by PoC

Reread: Treasure Island, The Popinjay, Rendezvous with Rama, City of the Dead – 4 (2013 total 28)

Acquired 2011 or before: 12 (2013 total 105) – Rendezvous With Rama, City of the Dead, Death and Diplomacy, Treasure Island, Eyeless in Gaza, Looking for Jake, Le Chat du Rabbin v 1, Dancing the Code, The Devils, The Next Generation v I, Letters from Father Christmas, The Truth Commissioner
Acquired 2012: 1 (YTD 30) – The Men Who Sold The World
Acquired 2013: 9 (YTD 122) – The Wise Man's Fear, Pattern-Master, The Popinjay, Animate Europe, Information is Beautiful, Stuff I've Been Reading, TARDIS Eruditorum v 4, 2 unpublished.

Reading now:
About Time: The Unauthorized Guide to Doctor Who, 2005-2006; Series 1 & 2, by Tat Wood
Saints of the Shadow Bible, by Ian Rankin
The Secret River, by Kate Grenville

I’ll write this up in full next year when I read volumes II and III; just to note for now that it is a political novel written by an Irish MP in 1871, set twenty years in the future (ie 1891) in a Utopian future Westminster with women MPs, Irish Home Rule, and a recent British conquest of China. After much searching I found all three volumes available from iTunes.

I was unaware of the existence of The Believer, the magazine for which Nick Hornby writes a regular book review column, but I may have to give it a go (I also find the Charles Burns covers very attractive). This assembles columns from mid 2006 to the end of 2011 (though he skipped 2009), all very deftly written with self-deprecating humour, aware of his own prejudices. One of the delights of the book is his discovery of YA literature as a thing of beauty, starting with Skellig (which I haven’t read) and then Tom’s Midnight GArden (which I have). Sadly Hornby refuses to read anything sfnal (he doesn’t like “sprites and hobbits and third universes) so our tastes are not completely aligned. (I didn’t count, but the number of books that I have read which are also reviewed by Hornby here is certainly less than ten and may be as low as six).

You will have noticed that I tend to write most about non-fiction books here, and it’s Hornby’s non-fiction recommendations which are going on my wishlist now: Spike & Co., by Graham McCann, about Spike Milligan, Eric Sykes, Ray Galton, Alan Simpson and Beryl Vertue (who is Steven Moffat’s mother-in-law); Austerity Britain, 1945-51, by David KynastonClaire Tomalin’s Dickens biography. But basically the joy of the book is one of meeting a fellow enthusiast for reading.

I found this a bit of a slog, to be honest. An awful lot of time is spent setting up the bourgeois country town whose peace is destroyed by a few men who turn to revolutionary violence for no particularly good reason. It’s obviously rather chilling to read in retrospect, given that the forces of revolutionary violence did actually win in Russia decades after this was written. But I would have liked some more sympathetic characters.

Interesting that America, with its egalitarian but tough environment, is explicitly the inspiration for several characters.

As in previous years, I found your votes very helpful in thinning out my unread shelf this year, and I would once again very much appreciate your advice on what books to read next, by filling in this poll. (I believe that even if you don’t have a livejournal account, you can sign in with your Twitter or Facebook credentials.)

So as not to overburden the polling process, I’ve stripped out of my unread books list all books by white men which I acquired before 2013. This left about 50 in each category (sf, non-genre and non-fiction) which is a pleasing symmetry.

NB that the question for the non-fiction books is different from the questions for the other two categories.

Individual recommendations, pro and anti – preferably of books actually on the lists – are very welcome in comments.

Edited to add: aargh! I see at least one mis-categorised book in the non-genre section. Oh well.

• The Blood Telegram
  
  US complicity in the 1971 Bangladesh genocide.
  (tags: usa bangladesh pakistan )

• Food banks: cowardly coalition can’t face the truth about them
  
  The British government’s successful war on the poor.
  (tags: ukpolitics )
• A visual history of the Apollo missions
  
  All the moon-landing photographs online.
  (tags: space photos )
• A Deadly Mix in Benghazi
  
  Thorough report from NYT: locals, not Al-Qaeda, inflamed by video.
  (tags: libya )

Those of you (not very many) who are Foursquare users: they have a lovely animation now of all your past check-ins over at https://foursquare.com/timemachine, slightly marred by advertising for the Samsung Galaxy. At the end it gives you a downloadable graphic: this is mine.

I like it – though this is friends-locked basically so that people cannot quite so easily detect which is my favourite Brussels restaurant. (I tell people about it all the time, though, so it would not be a stunning piece of detective work…)

• An open letter to the citizens of Bulgaria and Romania
  
  From @TheEconomist: “You’re welcome.”
  (tags: ukpolitics migration bulgaria romania )
• Internet Archive puts classic 70s and 80s games online
  
  For @MarioFannio.
  (tags: internet )
• How To Backup Your Facebook Data In 5 Easy Steps
  
  Warning: I have not tried this myself yet.
  (tags: facebook )
• The Year We Broke the Internet
  
  Long but important – why viral sharing is bad for us all. #fb
  (tags: internet )
• Scientists tell us their favourite jokes: ‘An electron and a positron walked into a bar…’
  
  *Groan*
  (tags: funny )