September 2006 was a momentous month for me: ploughing through unread emails in Budapest on the evening of the 1st, I found a message from Independent Diplomat, with whom I had been in communication for about eighteen months, inviting my application for the position of director of their not-yet-established Brussels office. I applied, was interviewed later in September, and got offered the job early in October. Apart from my trip to London for the interview, I also went to Washington DC and New York for networking and to Athens for a conference during the month.

With all that travel, I read a reasonably large number of books.

Non-fiction 7 (YTD 50)
What If? Alternative Views of Twentieth-Century Ireland, by Diarmaid Ferriter (listing as non-fiction rather than sf, because very few of the essays were genuinely counterfactual)
Girl with a One-track Mind: Confessions of the Seductress Next Door, by "Abby Lee" [Zoe Margolis] (presented as autobiography, though I’m sure it is somewhat fictionalised)
Peace at Any Price: How the World Failed Kosovo, by Iain King and Whit Mason
Indefensible: One Lawyer's Journey into the Inferno of American Justice, by David Feige
31 Days: The Crisis That Gave Us the Government We Have Today, by Barry Werth
Kosovo's Endgame: Sovereignty and Stability in the Western Balkans, by Aristotle Tziampiris
The Prince, by Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli

Non-genre 8 (YTD 24)
A Game With Sharpened Knives, by Neil Belton
The Last Word and other stories, by Graham Greene (NB two of the stories are actually set in the near future, so they could qualify as sf)
Mrs Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf
Esprit de Corps: Sketches from Diplomatic Life, by Lawrence Durrell
The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Persuasion, by Jane Austen
The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy
Beloved, by Toni Morrison

SF 5 (YTD 54)
A Time of Changes, by Robert Silverberg
The Terminal Experiment, by Robert J. Sawyer
Rite of Passage, by Alexei Panshin
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Third Annual Collection, ed. Gardner Dozois
Epic, by Conor Kostick

Doctor Who 1 (YTD 11)
Short Trips: Past Tense, ed. Ian Farrington

Comics 1 (YTD 5)
The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation, by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon

6,900 pages (YTD 43,100)
5/22 (YTD 25/144) by women
2/22 (YTD 7/144) by PoC

Two New York tales topped my personal list for the month: my old friend David Feige's autobiographical account of the American justice system, which you can get here, and the graphic version of the 9/11 Commission report, which you can get here. The worst book of the month was Nebula-winning The Terminal Experiment, which was not quite as bad as I had expected, but my expectations were low; you can get it here.