Tag Archives: bookblog 2005

January 2005 books

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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 year began with a big push at work on the future status of Kosovo, with a full-scale report and also an op-ed by me. We also did a report on the EU’s crisis response capacities which I’m still rather proud of, and got me a quote in the Washington Times. My new intern, A, from Kazakhstan, started working with me. I went to Rome to speak to the NATO Defence College, spoke at the European Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, and also to Ljubljana to brief the Slovenian foreign minister as he took up the OSCE Chairmanship-in-Office. Here’s me waiting to speak at the European Parliament.

I read 9 books that month.

Non-Fiction 3
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen R. Covey
The Twelve Caesars, by Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus
The Star Factory, by Ciaran Carson

Non-Genre 1
Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

SF 5
England Swings SF, ed. Judith Merril
Altered Carbon, by Richard Morgan
Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison
Nebula Award Stories Number Three, ed. Roger Zelazny
The Chick is in the Mail, ed. Esther M Friesner

3,400 pages
2/9 by women
none by PoC

Best book of the month was Dostoevsky’s classic Crime and Punishment, which you can get here, closely followed by The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, which is not as awful as the title may suggest, and which you can get here. I rather bounced off The Chick is in the Mail, but you can get it here.

June Books 4) The Assassin’s Edge

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4) The Assassin’s Edge, by Juliet E. McKenna

The fifth in Juliet McKenna’s Einarinn series, of which I am a moderate fan (see third and fourth books previously). Once again, competently done, and most of the threads from the first four books pulled together (though I did want to hear more of the lascivious island race from book #2). Among McKenna’s strengths (others are mentioned in my previous reviews) are decent battle scenes – just enough detail to make you feel that it’s a confusing, violent situation to be in, without at the same time confusing the reader (or at least this reader). There’s also a wonderfully described bath scene. And the final confrontations with the bad guys are most satisfying. I was slightly surprised, though it’s not really a criticism, by the low-key tone of the final wrap-up chapters after the plot is basically over; I’d somehow expected something more dramatic after five books and 2500 pages. But perhaps McKenna is just trying to tell us that life goes on.