Say what you like about the European Parliament website, it does at least offer some transparency about what your MEPs have been up to over the last five years. This is the public record of the three MEPs from Northern Ireland.

As a point of comparison, my neighbourhood MEP – who is also our deputy mayor, and national chair of her political party – has asked 70 questions, put her name to 10 motions, authored three reports (on consumer policy), spoken 88 times and signed 1 written declaration.

To explain the categories:

Questions asked – fairly obvious, you can ask a question to the European Commission or the European Council. Allister clearly enjoys this most. De Brún sometimes signs onto questions asked by a group of her GUE-NGL colleagues.

My conclusion

Allister is a classic "outsider", more interested in using his elected position to promote causes that interest him than in playing the institutional game. Both de Brún and Nicholson have tendencies in this direction as well, but both are also at least partly inside the system; and both appear to have similar levels of impact, despite the fact that de Brún is from a much smaller group.

An interesting book meme from :

1. I list three characters from ten favourite books.
2. You try to guess what the books are!
3. I reserve the right to be sneaky and use secondary characters.

1. Frith, Pipkin, Blackberry
2. Pastor Williams, Decuman, Lord Stansgate
3. Bruce (the father), Helen (the mother), Joan (the girlfriend)
4. Ulysse Mérou, Zira, Arthur Levain
5. Duncan, Colin, Malcolm
6. Bendico, Don Calogera, Ciccio
7. Lake of the biology department, Atwood of the physics department, Captain Douglas
8. Thorn, Gran’ma, Bartleby
9. Rupert Potter, Benny Golightly, Selina Potter
10. Ellen Emmett, Phil Graber, Dr Moreby

To make it easier, they are in alphabetical order by author. Also two of them are graphic novels.

I have a sore tooth. It’s the one that was completely replaced at huge expense last year after I broke it on an olive stone. I am seeing the dentist at lunchtime, and hope that they will sort it out.

Meanwhile I have been fighting fungus on various parts of my body. The outcropping under my left big toenail has been killed by fungicide and is growing out. The infection on my face seems to have died down for now. And a small patch on my tummy is now disappearing too.

Meanwhile here are a couple of interesting links:

I’m Glad I’m A Boy! I’m Glad I’m A Girl! Difficult to believe that this dates from as late as 1970. (hat-tip to .)

Of minority interest (though a minority well-represented among my readers): An Irishman’s Difficulties with the Dutch Language, by “Cuey-na-Gael” (real name the Rev. Dr. J. Irwin Brown); full text on-line.

Book meme to come.

I was fascinated to learn, via me good friend Fraser Cameron’s op-ed in today’s NYT/IHT, that Livejournal’s popularity in Russia goes right the way to the top: is President Medvedev’s account. Comments are moderated, and must be in Russian. Even so, his 22 April speech about the development of the internet in Russia, delivered straight to camera in jeans and casual jacket, has over 4000 comments. Even if you don’t have a word of Russian, take a few seconds to watch the way he does it – it’s an impressive performance.

Another handbook to The Prisoner, produced by fan club Six of One, and I’m afraid rather inferior to the Fairclough book – less lavishly illustrated and frankly less well written. It does have a little more background to the production, but I’ve got two other books in the reading pile which I think will have more substance.

This is a brilliant book about literature in a society which is closing itself up. There are four sections (the first two names after books, Lolita and Gatsby; the others after authors, James and Austen) but the key is the first section, where Nafisi, fired from her university teaching post for not conforming to the strict dress code, sets up a reading group for seven women to read, among other works, Lolita. There is of course a gross parallel, in that the damage Humbert inflicts on Lolita is analogous (in some cases, identical) to that inflicted by the Iranian authorities on their own people, especially women. But the wider point Nafisi makes is to describe the response of her students to great literature and to make the case that it is an essential part of the human condition – and to deny it is inhuman.

The Gatsby section goes back to the early days of the revolution, and chronicles the heady times of ideals and the gradual encroachment of the values of the Islamic Republic, culminating in a rather funny court scene where The Great Gatsby itself is put on trial. Nafisi is pretty merciless in mocking the intellectual contributions of the most doctrinaire of the students, and I suspect that they are an easy target.

The second half of the book chronicles her gradual disengagement from Iran and eventual emigration. It’s still very good but the first half is the essential part of the argument, the bit that Marjane Satrapi doesn’t have as much of.

Wikipedia has an account of the criticism levelled at the book and the author from various quarters. A lot of it simply isn’t fair: Nafisi is a specialist in English-language literature, so it’s hardly surprising that she chose that as the subject of her classes. It is true that of course this may play to the prejudices of the monoglot Anglophone philistine, but this is clearly not Nafisi’s purpose. Another rather peculiar criticism is that the book describes Iran at its darkest, between 1979 and 1996, and things are better now. This is unfair because Nafisi is diligent at specifying dates, to moor the narrative to a particular set of points in the past rather than the present, and at portraying a society as it changes for the worse, but at the same time showing hope that it may change for the better. (And anyway, while things may have improved slightly under the later presidencies of Khatami and Ahmedinejad, I don’t get the impression that the improvement is much to write books about.)

Part of this, of course, is a reflection in Wikipedia of the peculiar toxicity attached to Iran in American public discourse. I was utterly astonished the other day to catch a CNN commentator describe President Ahmadinejad as the most evil person in the world (I do not paraphrase). There are a lot of other candidates; most of them are of course on better terms with the US government. The concentration on Ahmadinejad as hate figure (consider also the extraordinarily inhospitable remarks made by the President of Columbia University when introducing him back in September 2007) also displays an unwillingness to get to grips with the roles of the Supreme Leader and Council of Guardians. It is a shame if Nafisi’s book helps perpetuate those prejudices, though I can’t believe that a thoughtful reader would take that message from it.

The last of the Hugo novels for this year, and it’s been a good year. I’ve had difficulties with Scalzi’s writing before, and so am glad to report that I enjoyed this more than the other two books of his I have read. Zoë’s Tale actually takes place in parallel with last year’s Hugo nominee, The Lost Colony, being the story of the teenage daughter of John Perry and Jane Sagan, the leaders of the human colony of Roanoke, living through and playing a key role in the key points of humanity’s conflict with the alien Conclave federation. I had forgotten most of last year’s book, but Zoë’s Tale does clear up one (but not all) of the more handwavey plot elements.

Zoë herself is rather delightful, with a line in sarcasm that readers of her creator’s blog will recognise. The other characters seem fairly three-dimensional as well. The political background, and behaviour of the most senior political leaders, once again doesn’t make a lot of sense (a standard complaint of mine, and of course a YA novel like this more or less has to involve the protagonist getting one up on the adults) but it’s a decent enough story apart from that.

So, my Hugo voting order: a close run thing, but definitely Anathem first, followed closely by The Graveyard Book. After that it gets even more difficult to choose between Saturn’s Children, Little Brother and Zoë’s Tale – the Stross is probably better than the other two but unfortunately has anthropomorphic robots which I object to. Thanks in no small part to Scalzi’s efforts, you can join the Worldcon and download four of the five books for yourself.

I became fascinated by Fanny Kemble (1809-1893) after reading her account of the death of William Huskisson, and even more so her memoir of life on a Georgian plantation in 1838-39, but rather bounced off the first biography of her that I read. This, however, was praised in the Economist, which was a good enough recommendation for me to put it on the wishlist. (And my wife got it for me for my birthday last week.)

David delivers on what she promises: assessing Kemble’s career as one of continual performance. Her time as an actress was actually very brief – the five years before her marriage in 1834, and her first year back in England, 1847-8, after her marriage finally disintegrated. She continued to perform in other ways, though: she had a long and successful stage career doing solo readings of Shakespeare’s plays, and David argues that her written words in her letters and journals (judiciously edited by herself for publication many years later, and the originals destroyed) are her most lasting performance before the audience of history (I paraphrase).

Kemble was a very intelligent and literate woman, who refused to be confined to her place as daughter or wife, and as a result became an object of fascination; as a young woman, she charmed Walter Scott; in her old age, she developed a deep friendship with the young Henry James and inspired him to write Washington Square. She was also an object of horror to her in-laws; her husband could not tolerate her desire to maintain her independence, and he and his family don’t seem to have realised just how serious she was in her opposition to slavery.

David has done a fantastic job of analysing how Fanny Kemble constructed her performances, and has amassed a tremendous range of secondary (and even primary) material to show how they were received by her audience at the time, including the (rare) hostile reviews along with the positive. I feel that Kemble’s charm is now explained for me without being disintegrated: David is clearly a little in love with her subject.

I was disappointed, therefore, that in her chapter on the 1838-39 plantation episode, David relies too uncritically on Kemble’s own account. I would have liked more depth. We know that her reminiscences were attacked for inaccuracy when they were published twenty-five years later; I am aware that there were a number of other slave narratives out there which Kemble might have drawn on, and to which she can certainly be compared. David makes an interesting point about Kemble seeing herself as a sort of inverted Miranda, but the political context is missing.

While I’m complaining, two more points of irritation: David makes a couple of very silly slips on political context, describing Paris in the 1820s as being under Louis-Napoleon (he ruled from 1848 to 1870), and speculating about the chances of the Republican Party in the 1840 US presidential election (it was not founded until 1856). And the notes are infuriatingly placed at the end of the book, mostly just citing her sources, but occasionally with some really juicy nuggets of information, printed hundreds of pages from their context; with today’s technology, there is no excuse for publishers screwing around their authors’ texts in this way.

One last point that struck me: David chronicles Kemble’s disastrous marriage and her more successful passionate friendships with women. But the most important man in her life, who provided the raw material for her successes on stage, inspired her to be a Portia or a Miranda, and to whom she wrote some of her more impassioned poetry, died almost two centuries before she was born (and like her was survived by two daughters). Shakespeare gets everywhere.

This time it’s the top 100-ish books from the LibraryThing Legacy Libraries project, where you can compare your own library against 106 famous dead people’s libraries. (The ten top contributors to the list below are Thomas Jefferson, Ernest Hemingway, Carl Sandburg, C.S. Lewis, Eeva-Liisa Manner, T. E. Lawrence, John Adams, Alfred Deakin, Karen Blixen and Walker Percy.) As usual – bold if you’ve read it, italic if you’ve started but not finished, strike through if you couldn’t stand it. These are the top 103 books from the 106 libraries; there are a few cases of duplication (where a part of one entry apears seaparately) but I think we can cope.

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
The Odyssey by Homer
The Complete Works of Shakespeare by William Shakespeare
Complete Works by Horace
The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
Iliad by Homer
The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (complete sets) by Edward Gibbon
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
On the Nature of Things by Lucretius
Moby Dick, or, The Whale by Herman Melville
The Complete Essays by Michel de Montaigne
The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell
The Golden Ass by Apuleius
The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton
Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto
Aesop’s Fables
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Metamorphoses by Ovid
Commentaries on the Laws of England by Sir William Blackstone
Parallel Lives by Plutarch
History of his own time by Gilbert Burnet
The Bible
The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan
The Spectator by Joseph Addison
Paradise Lost by John Milton
Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Ulysses by James Joyce
Hudibras by Samuel Butler
Les Fleurs Du Mal by Charles Baudelaire
The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
Dictionary by Samuel Johnson
Telemachus by François Fénelon
Inferno by Dante Alighieri
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
Complete Works by Virgil
Erewhon by Samuel Butler
Confessions by Augustine
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Histories by Herodotus
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Thus spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
The Poetical Works of Lord Byron
The Complete Poetry of John Milton
The Aeneid by Virgil
Lives of the English Poets by Samuel Johnson
Ab urbe condita by Livy
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne
Republic by Plato
Travels of Anacharsis the younger in Greece by Jean-Jacques Barthélemy
The Poems of Virgil by Virgil
Death in Venice by Thomas Mann
Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius
Dubliners by James Joyce
Lives of Great Generals by Cornelius Nepos
Book of Common Prayer
Gil Blas by Alain René Le Sage (9)
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
The works of Geoffrey Chaucer by Geoffrey Chaucer
A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes
Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
Reliques of Ancient English Poetry by Thomas Percy
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
The Orator’s Education by Quintilian
The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
Walden by Henry David Thoreau
The ancient history of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Medes and Persians, Grecians and Macedonian by Charles Rollin
The Satyricon by Petronius
An historical and critical dictionary by Pierre Bayle
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
In Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
The poems of Ossian by James MacPherson
The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin
The History of the Great Rebellion by the Earl of Clarendon
The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini
Comedies by Terence
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
The Golden Bough by James George Frazer
Candide by Voltaire
Robert Ainsworth’s dictionary, English and Latin
The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
Sartor Resartus by Thomas Carlyle
Comedies by Titus Maccius Plautus
The new law-dictionary by Giles Jacob
Memoirs of Maximilian de Bethune, duke of Sully, prime minister to Henry the Great
The analogy of religion by Joseph Butler
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Natural History by Pliny the Elder
Logic: The Right Use of Reason in the Inquiry After Truth by Isaac Watts
Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler
Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Lectures on rhetoric and belles lettres by Hugh Blair
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters
The Works of Josephus by Flavius Josephus
History of the reign of Charles the Fifth by William Robertson
History of England by David Hume

Dreamwidth: nwhyte.

Non-fiction: 5 (YTD 26)
    

Shakespeare: 4 (YTD 14)
   

Fiction (non-sf): 5 (YTD 16)
    

SF (non-Who): 7 (YTD 27)
       

Who: 2 (YTD 12)
 

Comics: 1 (YTD 4)

3/24 (YTD 17/99) by women (Tremain, Rowling, Butler)
2/24 (YTD 5/99) by PoC (Ifrah, Butler)
Total page count ~7,700 (YTD ~30,200)
Owned for more than one year: 5 (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban [reread], Lolita [reread], King Solomon’s Ring, Music and Silence, Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion)
Also re-read: Catch-22, The Big Time (for a total of 4, YTD 16).

The next book on my list is actually Reading Lolita in Tehran, so I thought I might as well re-read Nabokov’s original. (I have to admit I have absolutely no idea how important Lolita is in Nafisi’s book, but didn’t want to take chances.)

It is a fascinating novel, with the narrator appalled and disgusted by his own behaviour, and a series of other memorable characters – the ex-wife; Lolita’s mother; the dentist’s evil nephew (as played by Peter Sellers to James Mason’s Humbert in the flm); and of course Lolita herself, who gains dignity and independence, however briefly, from the terrible situations that older men have inflicted on her.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out in Iran.

I don’t believe I’d read a word of Hardy before I started this book. It’s not as bad as I feared, though it moves awfully slowly, is annoyingly condescending to people with funny accents, and fails to really challenge gender narratives for today’s reader. Hardy no doubt meant well and perhaps even intended to be a bit feminist in his presentation of Tess’s story, but it doesn’t really work; one wishes that he had let her be more of an actor (before the crime at the end of the book) and that he had shown the men who treat her so badly in a more unforgiving light. I’m not wild about Hardy after reading this, but I won’t spurn him either if his books come up in my reading.

One of the delights of Bookmooch is that, if you are not too fussy, you can get books that have acquired some character from their previous owner. My copy came to me from a young woman in Florida, who has conducted a spirited conversation with Hardy by highlighter on the text and ballpoint pen in the margin, her disagreements with him being similar to mine. At the bottom of one page, she has written that she “♡’s Dan Eckstein”. Lucky Dan.

Well, I’ve ploughed through the almost 900 pages of novel (plus 20-page glossary, plus 25 pages of supplementary material), and I reckon this gets my Hugo vote. (I’ve read all the other nominees except Zoe’s Tale, but given my track record with Scalzi’s writing I’m unlikely to put it at the top of my list.)

At first I thought this was going to be some sort of combination of The Tombs of Atuan, The Name of the Rose and philosophy of science; our hero is a trainee scholar in a rigidly ritualistic academic culture which covers his entire world. But then it turns out that this is a First Contact story, and we have the build-up to a brilliantly described commando raid in deep space. And our hero resolves the problems in his love-life, so the romantic in me was satisfied too.

I particularly enjoyed Stephenson’s playing with words: the honorific “Saunt” drawing on both savant and saint, the “Concent” combining the characteristics of a convent with undertones of concentration and concepts, our hero’s name “Erasmas” echoing most obviously Erasmus but perhaps also Rasselas and others with similar names. There are a lot of neat and witty allusions to well-known concepts in the history and philosophy of science. Erasmas’ home, the Concent of Saunt Edhar, is located at 51.3° north, the same latitude as London, or Greenwich, or indeed Bath where Herschel discovered the planet Uranus.

Stephenson loses marks on a couple of technical points, though. I mentioned last week that he has his polar orbits wrong. Also, like Asimov in The Gods Themselves, he has matter brought into universes where the nuclear forces don’t operate in quite the same way, in which case I would expect the atoms to either collapse or explode, though I suppose there could be some handwaving explanation (or perhaps I’ve misunderstood what “newmatter” is supposed to be).

I expect it will be a tight race between Anathem and The Graveyard Book for the Hugo this year. My vote goes to Anathem.

I’m laid up in bed with a stinking cold today, so getting through my to-read pile at a sedate (and sedated) rate.

I followed up my recently renewed enthusiasm for The Prisoner by getting hold of several of the books about it, and this seemed the best starting point: 135 pages of The Prisoner: The Official Companion to the Classic TV series, by Robert Fairclough, with a (rather incoherent) foreword by Kenneth Griffith in the absence of McGoohan. It’s a good basic guide to how The Prisoner came to be made, six pages of info on each episode, and then some follow-up chapters on its impact at the time and later influence, both on popular culture in general and on Portmeirion in particular. It certainly made me want to go back and re-watch a couple of the episodes which I didn’t properly appreciate last time I saw them.

The story that isn’t told, but which I imagine I’ll find elsewhere, is how and when relations between McGoohan and his sponsors deteriorated to the point where the plug was pulled, with only 17 of the planned 26+ episodes being made. Likewise, some pulling together of how McGoohan drove the creative team (including himself) insane would have been usefully illustrative. (And why did the very first Number Two, Guy Doleman, unexpectedly leave the filming several days early?)

I was also interested to note that The Prisoner was shown over all of England and Scotland, but not Wales or Northern Ireland, in its first 1967-8 run. I wonder if there was any particular reason for that?

I loved this book when I first read it twenty years ago and I enjoyed the return journey now. The fractured narrative of Yossarian’s response to the dehumanising horror of war is also very funny in places (my favourite scene is the mass outbreak of moaning at the Avignon briefing). Awful and yet hilarious.

Lovely article in this week’s New Europe about the use of Twitter by current and prospective members of the European parliament, as tracked by the site http://europatweets.eu/. Glad to see that, of incumbent MEPs, the top twitterer is my friend Sophie in ‘t Veld (of the Dutch liberals, D’66), and the top Brit is another friend, Graham Watson. The top Irish MEP is Eoin Ryan of Fianna Fáil.

Somewhat dismayed to see that the only Belgian on the list is Walloon socialist Jean-Claude Marcourt, and his single tweet, from three months ago, consists of the three words “Je découvre twitter!”

It seems almost indecently soon to look back on 2005 with feelings of nostalgia, but the Tardis team of Nine/Jack/Rose is surely one of the great triple ensembles of Who, up there with One/Steven/Sara, Two/Jamie/Zoe, Three/Brig/Liz or Four/Harry/Sarah Jane. (Almost made the list: One/Steven/Vicki|Dodo, One|Two/Ben/Polly, Four/K9/Leela|Romana, Ten/Martha/Donna. Didn’t make the list: Two/Jamie/Victoria, Five/anyone.)

This was the first book published to feature Jack Harkness as a character. It foreshadows Torchwood, no doubt unintentionally, with Team Tardis resolving abandoned alien tech and local human factionalism in an Arctic port in contemporary Russia. Richards has caught Ecclestone’s portrayal of the Ninth Doctor very well, and builds up a decent sense of terror driven by blue glowing aliens with life-6orce-sucking tentacles. We fanboys would have liked some nods to the similar Who adventures of the past – thinking especially of The Stones of Blood and The Curse of Fenric – and the Jack and Rose characterisations were less firm than the Doctor’s. But basically it is a good effort.

An excellent second volume in this series of fairytale characters in today’s New York, featuring Goldilocks as revolutionary leader exploiting dissension among the Three Little Pigs and between Snow White and Rose Red. I shall get more of these.

Funny card! (thanks, Liz)

The Prisoner: The Official Companion to the Classic TV Series by Rob Fairclough
The Prisoner: A Televisionary Masterpiece by Alain Carrazé and Hélène Oswald
Fables Vol. 2: Animal Farm by Bill Willingham
Anne-Sophie Mutter plays the Sibelius Violin Concerto
ST: TOS Season 1

It’s that time of year again when I think about my twins, those people born on the same day as me. (A brief trawl through the relevant statistics suggests that somewhat more than 300,000 people were born that day, the world population at the time being around 3.5 billion and the annual birthrate somewhere between 30 and 34 per 1000.)

I’ve done long lists of twins in previous years, here in 2008, here in 2006 and here in 2002; and a few months back I discovered that another of my twins is Valentine Strasser, who became military ruler of Sierra Leone just after our 25th birthday. Today I want to salute three literary twins:

Warren Read, whose The Lyncher In Me is the story of how an internet search opened up a dark chapter of family history,
Trish Doller, whose My Way or the Highway comes out shortly, and
Yves Cotten, whose work I haven’t yet read either in French or Breton but it looks just lovely!

Happy birthday to them, and everyone else celebrating today.

Women winners: 3/4
First time winners: 1/4 (Hoffman)
Winners born between 1942 and 1951: 1/4 (Kessel)

Ursula Le Guin is now equal top of the Nebula table with Connie Willis, both having won six.

(Official announcement here.)

Back in January, I set up a series of reading lists, based largely on my unread books list on LibraryThing. I’ve now been working this for three months, and it’s time for some major changes.

The point of all this is of course to reduce the number of unread books on my shelf, and to do so enjoyably. Each unread book represents an investment of cost either by me, if I bought it, or by someone else if they got it for me. Books are meant to be read, not to gather dust. What I want to do is to make sure I progress systematically through my unread books, and to have a system that is fairly easy to administer. There is also a minor consideration of wanting to write book reviews that others may want to read, hence my invocation of my poll from the start of the year on three of the lists (though this also helps bridge the gap between old and obscure acquisitions on the one hand, and the most recent and most popular on the other.) And this is a time of year when I like to assess various aspects of my life. All of this leads me to the following lists:

a) sf, in order of entry onto my LibraryThing catalogue:

1. Raven’s Gathering, by Keith Taylor
2. The Enchanted Isles, by K.C. Flynn
3. Misspent Youth, by Peter F. Hamilton
4. Sacred Visions, edited by Andrew M. Greeley
5. The Prisoner of Chillon, by James Patrick Kelly

b) sf, in order of popularity on LibraryThing as a whole:

1. Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, by Gregory Maguire
2. The Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood
3. Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri
4. Soul Music, by Terry Pratchett
5. The Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum

c) sf, as owned by me before start of this year and previously read by you here:

1. Elric, by Michael Moorcock
2. Stormbringer, by Michael Moorcock
3. The Summer Tree, by Guy Gavriel Kay
4. Making Money, by Terry Pratchett
5. On the Beach, by Nevil Shute

d) fiction other than sf, in order of entry onto my LibraryThing catalogue:

1. The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer
2. Sunset at Blandings, by P. G. Wodehouse
3. Cities of Salt, by Abd al-Rahman Munif
4. Chronicle in Stone, by Ismail Kadare
5. With the Light, by Keiko Tobe

e) fiction other than sf, in order of popularity on LibraryThing as a whole:

1. Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides
2. Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck
3. The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver
4. The Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd
5. The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett

f) fiction other than sf, as owned by me before start of this year and previously read by you here:

0. Tess of the D’Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy (currently reading)
1. To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf
2. Far from the Madding Crowd, by Thomas Hardy
3. Les Liaisons Dangereuses, by Choderlos de Laclos
4. Black and Blue, by Ian Rankin
5. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, by Dave Eggers

g) non-fiction, in order of entry onto my LibraryThing catalogue:

1. On the place of Gilbert Chesterton in English letters, by Hilaire Belloc
2. The lost heart of Asia, by Colin Thubron
3. The Devil’s Highway, by Luis Alberto Urrea
4. Hotel Rwanda, by Terry George
   The Bessarabian Question in Communist Historiography, by Wim Van Meurs (missing)
5. England’s Troubles, by Jonathan Scott

h) non-fiction, in order of popularity on LibraryThing as a whole:

1. Blue Like Jazz, by Donald Miller
2. Survival In Auschwitz, by Primo Levi
3. The Problems of Philosophy, by Bertrand Russell
4. The Stuff of Thought, by Steven Pinker
5. Diplomacy, by Henry Kissinger

i) non-fiction, as owned by me before start of this year and previously read by you here:

1. Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi
   Galileo’s daughter, by Dava Sobel (missing)
2. The Problems of Philosophy, by Bertrand Russell
3. On Liberty and Other Essays, by John Stuart Mill
4. Survival In Auschwitz, by Primo Levi
5. Queen Elizabeth I, by J. E. Neale

And then I’m keeping some of the lists from my January efforts:

j) (previously a) books I have already read but haven’t reviewed on-line, ranked by LT popularity (NB first two are swapped in order for obvious reasons):

1. Harry Potter and the goblet of fire, by J.K. Rowling
2. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, by J.K. Rowling
3. The hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien
4. Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
5. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee

k) (previously i) Hugo-award winning novels which I haven’t previously reviewed on-line, in order of winning the award:

1. The Man in the High Castle, by Philip K. Dick
2. This Immortal, by Roger Zelazny
3. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert A. Heinlein
4. Lord of Light, by Roger Zelazny
5. Stand on Zanzibar, by John Brunner

l) unread Doctor Who books, in order of internal continuity:

1. Sands of Time, by Justin Richards
2. Imperial Moon, by Christopher Bulis
3. Doctor Who: The Nightmare Fair, by Graham Williams
4. Doctor Who: Mission to Magnus, by Philip Martin
5. Doctor Who: The Ultimate Evil, by Wally K. Daly

m) unread New Series Doctor Who books, in order of LT popularity (nearly finished!):

0. The Deviant Strain by Justin Richards (currently reading)
1. The Last Dodo, by Jacqueline Rayner
2. Wooden Heart, by Martin Day

n) Shakespeare’s plays, in supposed chronological order (also nearly finished!) :

0. Cymbeline (currently reading)
1. The Winter’s Tale
2. The Tempest
3. Henry VIII
4. The Two Noble Kinsmen (end of the traditional chronological ordering of the plays)
5. Edward III (if I am really keen)
6. Double Falshood (if I am really really keen)

o) books owned only by me on LT, in order of entry into my catalogue (NB several have since picked up other owners):

1. EU Accession Dynamics And Conflict Resolution: Catalysing Peace Or Consolidating Partition In Cyprus? by Nathalie Tocci
2. How to Make Good Decisions and be Right All the Time: Solving the Riddle of Right and Wrong, by Iain King
3. How to Make School Make Sense: A Parents’ Guide to Helping the Child with Asperger Syndrome, by Clare Lawrence
4. The British Museum Book of Ancient Egypt, by A. Jeffrey Spencer
5. Young people in post-conflict Northern Ireland The past cannot be changed, but the future can be developed, by Dirk Schubotz and Paula Devine

p) books by PoC, in order of entry into my catalogue:

1. Cities of Salt, by Abd al-Rahman Munif
2. So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Visions of the Future, by Nalo Hopkinson
3. With the Light, by Keiko Tobe
4. Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi
5. Black Juice, edited by Margo Lanagan

Well, we’ll see how long this system lasts!

Here’s a fascinating site to match your political position with parties from all over Europe (including almost all parts of the EU, Croatia, Switzerland and Turkey):

http://euprofiler.eu/

I come out (in British terms) pretty close to the Lib Dems, which is fortunate since I am a member.

But the interesting thing is where that puts me in the political spectra of other countries:

Belgium (Flanders), where I will actually be voting – more or less bang on the Sociaal Liberale Partij spot, which surprised me since I hadn’t heard of them before. Closer investigation reveals that they used to be Spirit, but have had a certain amount of internal turmoil recently.

Austria – half-way between SPÖ and Grüne
Belgium (francophone) – equidistant from all parties
Bulgaria – none terribly close but ГЕРБ least distant
Croatia – rather pleased to be equidistant between my three favourite parties, IDS, SDP and HSLS
Cyprus – rather alarmed to be closest to ΔΗΚΟ, who are certainly my least favourite of the major parties there!
Czech Republic – closest to ČSSD
Denmark – halfway between Radikale Venstre and Socialistisk Folkeparti
Estonia – halfway between Sotsiaaldemokraatlik Erakond and the Greens (Eestimaa Rohelised)
Finland – more or less exactly on the Greens
France – closest to the minor Parti Radical de Gauche and the even minor-er Newropeans
Germany – equidistant between SPD, Grüne and Newropeans
Greece – equidistant between ΠΑΣΟΚ and the minor Ecologist Greens
Hungary – closest to the new lefty-greenish Lehet Más a Politika party.
Ireland – Labour, unexciting but unexpected
Italy – closest to the PD
Latvia – between two largely Russophone parties, Saskaņas centrs and Par cilvēka tiesībām vienotā Latvijā.
Lithuania – very close to the Lietuvos socialdemokratų partija with Frontas and the National Resurrection Party not far off
Luxembourg – again, halfway between the Greens and Social Democrats
Malta – none terribly close, Alternattiva Demokratika least distant
Poland – closest to SLD (social democrats)
Portugal – closest to PS (social democrats)
Romania – closest to the Hungarian-speaking UDMR
Slovakia – none terribly close, least distant being social democratic SMER and, alarmingly, Mečiar’s ĽS-HZDS.
Slovenia – very close to both social democratic SD and left-liberal ZARES
Spain – very close to both PSOE and the lefty independentist Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya
Sweden – not close to any, SDAP least distant
Switzerland – not close to any, Socialists least distant
Netherlands – closest to GroenLinks, D66 and Newropeans not far off.
Turkey – almost exactly on the Kurdish DTP

They haven’t done Northern Ireland yet, but I imagine I would come out closest to Alliance and the SDLP. (Would also be interested to see results from the TRNC.)

Overall apparently it is the Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya whose views most closely match my own. I wonder if they accept memberships from liberal Northern Irish Belgians? I am certainly left-of-centre, anti-monarchist and agnostic tending toward positive on Catalan independence, so I have no problem with their main policy areas. Though they are not terribly sound on immigration, or on reforming the CAP.

However, when I go to the list of party matches – which rates strength of commitment to the issues as well as the position on the two axes – things change rather radically and my closest match is the Swedish Pirate Party. I fear that this actually reflects the fact that they don’t have opinions (and therefore disagreements with me or others) on very many issues, though where they do have views (pro-gay marriage, pro-civil liberties, pro-EU integration) I tend to agree with them.

It’s also interesting that while in a lot of countries I’m fairly close to the lefty-greeny-social liberal mainstream, in a few (Romania, Latvia, Turkey) I end up close to the most visible of their ethnic minorities, and in some (Bulgaria, Malta) there’s no party that really reflects my own views. Of course, if I lived or had grown up in Bulgaria or Malta, my views might well have been different. (I’m not surprised by the Maltese result, given the rather static politcs there, but it’s surprising that Bulgaria’s recent internal political volatility has not as yet produced any openings for the centre-left.

Well, that filled out my lunch break nicely!

I bought this cheap at an Irish sf con several years back (or possibly even won it in a raffle) and finally have got around to reading it. Slightly disappointed to find that it covers only the first five years of ST:TNG (1987 to 1992) and even more surprised to realise how few of the individual episodes I can remember having seen (specifically, Symbiosis, Identity Crisis and Unification).

But it does the duty of a book like this, each episode getting a very brief plot, cast and crew summary and a slightly longer behind-the-scenes commentary, with a bit more commentary of each of the seasons. I’m familiar enough with the sub-genre from my reading of Who commentaries that I can see this is a decent effort. Oddly enough it spurs me to (re)watch the Original Series more than any later version.

I liked this much more than the other Four / Romana II / K9 novel I’ve read, The Well-Mannered War, which as it happens is by the same author. Our heroes arrive on a sinister prison asteroid, where they find themselves at the centre of a plot involving miners, corrupt judges, criminal brothers based on the Krays, Ogrons, and a dead mind-stealing criminal. The Doctor accuses K9 of never knowing the answer when it’s something important, a glorious reference to the famous Tom Baker out-take. It all pretty much hangs together, Russell juggling multiple viewpoint characters without losing track of the story. One of the good ones.