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 grim news of July 2005, 21 years ago this month. was the 7/7 bombings in London, in which 56 people died, including the bombers themselves (and a friend of a friend). This was actually the first Islamist terror attack in the UK.

I had one extended trip in the middle of the month, combining a work visit to Georgia and South Ossetia and my cousin’s wedding in England. This was still three years before the war of 2008, and it was awkward but not impossible to visit South Ossetia. Mr Dzhioev, the Foreign Minister, received me hospitably enough. (Their current foreign minister has the same surname; presumably they are related.)

However, when I asked him what else I should see in Tskhinvali, given that it was probably the only visit I will ever make to the city, he gave me a funny look and said (though my translator), “Well, you didn’t come here for our scenery or our climate, did you, you came for the political situation!” Which was perfectly true, but if I were foreign minister I would have had a better reply. I put the same question to my two minders. They looked at each other. One said, “We could show him the theatre.” The other said, “It did burn down last year.” But if life gives you lemons, you make lemonade, and here is my picture of the burned out (but repainted) theatre of Tskhinvali.

My cousin’s wedding after that was a lot of fun. (Not quite sure what had been said or done to her just before this picture was taken.)

It as a lovely hot day and I got a nice picture of myself, my mother and my brother and sister with their respective other halves (Anne had had to stay in Belgium).

We also managed to have an actual party at our own house at the end of the month; I have not located any photographs from it. Young F celebrated his sixth birthday, but I don’t seem to have pictures of that either.

I read 14 books that month.

Non-fiction 2 (YTD 23)
The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici, by Christopher Hibbert
The Rules of Management, by Richard Templar

Non-genre 4 (YTD 6)
The Great Fortune, by Olivia Manning
The Spoilt City, by Olivia Manning
Friends and Heroes, by Olivia Manning
Skinny Dip, by Carl Hiassen

Poetry 1
The Knight in the Tiger Skin, by Shot’ha Rust’hveli

SF 6 (YTD 42)
The Sword of the Lictor, by Gene Wolfe
The Citadel of the Autarch, by Gene Wolfe
The Hallowed Hunt, by Lois McMaster Bujold
Keepers of the Peace, by Keith Brooke
The Light Ages, by Ian R. MacLeod
The Tough Guide to Fantasy Land, by Diana Wynne Jones

Comics 1 (YTD 5)
Ice Haven, by Daniel Clowes

3,300 pages (YTD 26,000)
5/14 (YTD 21/77) by women (3x Manning, Bujold, Wynne Jones)
none by PoC

Top books: The Tough Guide to Fantasy Land, by Diana Wynne Jones, which you can get here, and Skinny Dip, by Carl Hiaasen, which you can get here. Least impressed by The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici, by Christopher Hibbert, which you can get here.

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.

No Crisis Group publications in June 2005, 21 years ago this month, though I did get quoted in the Financial Times again, and just the one trip, to Belfast to speak at a conference. And B had her eighth birthday.

Her birthday was also the day of the last episode of the first series of New Who.

Young F took the first steps towards freedom of movement (he is now preparing for his driving test):

And I did my traditional big review of the Hugo written fiction nominees.

I read only 7 books that month.

Non-fiction 2 (YTD 21)
The Best of Xero, by Pat and Dick Lupoff
With Stars In My Eyes: My Adventures in British Fandom, by Peter Weston

Non-genre fiction 1 (YTD 2)
The Trial, by Franz Kafka

SF 4 (YTD 36)
The Best of the Best: 20 Years of the Year’s Best Science Fiction, ed. Gardner Dozois
The Assassin’s Edge, by Juliet E. McKenna
The Shadow of the Torturer, by Gene Wolfe
The Claw of the Conciliator, by Gene Wolfe

2,400 pages (YTD 22,700)
2/7 by women (YTD 16/63)
None by PoC

These are all good books, though I don’t rave about Gene Wolfe to the extent that others do. If I have to pick one as my favourite of the month, it’s Gardner Dozois’ Best of the Best, which you can get here.

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.

May 2005 was a massively busy month. Most notably from the family point of view, we mounted a massive expedition with little F and littler U to Washington, New York and Boston, seeing spaceships and whales, for my brother’s wedding in Massachusetts.

I went almost directly from the wedding to the first ever meeting of NATO’s Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council, held in Åre, Sweden, where I spoke on a panel of people with Wikipedia pages: James Elles (then an MEP), Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović (then foreign minister and subsequently president of Croatia), Pierre Lellouche (then a French MP), Dimitrij Rupel (the foreign minister of Slovenia), Nick Burns (newly appointed Under Secretary of State), and Kastriot Islami (then foreign minister of Albania).

The British election took place earlier that month on 5 May, the only Westminster election this century other than 2024 for which I did not do broadcasting coverage (I was on BBC TV for the four from 2010 to 2019, and was on RTE radio for the 2001 vote). I did manage to win a modest £30 – I advised an online betting company that they had underestimated the swing from the SDLP to SF, and they gave me a free wager in recompense, which I used to profit from the lower than expected seat total for Labour. (Which netted me far less than they gained from my advice, of course.)

The EU was thrown into disarray by the rejection of the proposed Constitutional Treaty by the French people in a referendum on the 29th, by 55% to 45%. See June for more details…

On a sadder note, my uncle Alastair Downie died around the time of the British election – the first of my uncles to have left us; I did not lose another until last year. He was 88, and the widower of my father’s only sibling, my aunt Ursula, who had died in 1998 aged only 59; my current age.

I read only 6 books that month.

SF 5 (YTD 32)
The Dancers At The End Of Time, by Michael Moorcock
No Enemy But Time, by Michael Bishop
Iron Council, by China Miéville
The Algebraist, by Iain M. Banks
Iron Sunrise, by Charles Stross

Comics 1 (YTD 4)
David Boring, by Daniel Clowes

SF 5 (YTD 32)
The Dancers At The End Of Time, by Michael Moorcock
No Enemy But Time, by Michael Bishop
Iron Council, by China Miéville
The Algebraist, by Iain M. Banks
Iron Sunrise, by Charles Stross

Comics 1 (YTD 4)
David Boring, by Daniel Clowes

2,600 pages (YTD 20,300)
None by women (YTD 14/56)
None by PoC

I enjoyed all of the above, I think David Boring most. You can get it here.

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.

April 2005 began for me with a job interview to run a Brussels-based thinktank (I didn’t get it, and the thinktank has since folded), and also included trips to the USA (Washington and New York) and, for the first time in my life, Albania.  I got a letter about Kosovo and Bosnia in European Voice; we published a briefing on refugee rights in South Ossetia (wildly optimistic, as it now turns out) and a full report on the Sandzak, which includes my favourite footnote from my time at Crisis Group:

The Sandzak of Novi Pazar is chiefly remembered as one of the smaller pieces in the game played by the Great Powers before World War I, an obscure place which doomed those who got too closely involved with it.^1
1 See, for instance, “The Lost Sanjak“, a short story by Saki (H.H. Munro) published in 1910, whose protagonist’s failure to remember the location of Novibazar (Novi Pazar) proves fatal; and Thomas Pynchon’s novel, Gravity’s Rainbow, in which a minor character, Lord Blatherard Osmo, “occupied the Novi Pazar desk at the Foreign Office … for on this obscure sanjak had once hinged the entire fate of Europe”, and similarly comes to a very sticky end.

(Lord Blatherard Osmo is eventually discovered mysteriously suffocated in a bathtub full of tapioca pudding, at the home of a Certain Viscountess, shortly before the outbreak of war in 1939.)

In the wider world, the Pope died while I was on the plane to DC, and his replacement was the infamous Cardinal Ratzinger. The runner-up in the election was the Argentinian cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio; I wonder what happened to him afterwards?

I celebrated my 38th birthday by speaking at a meeting of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Belgian Senate. Here I am with my new intern J (originally from Pittsburgh but of Ukrainian/Russian heritage) waiting in the wings.

I caught up with J again in 2019 in Kosova; she was by then the same age (38) as I am in the 2005 picture.

But it’s not all about me; I used the new camera to get some pictures of the children as well – B aged 7, F aged 5 and U aged 2.

Anne and I had a rare romantic break to the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Hoge Veluwe near Apeldoorn in the Netherlands; you can cycle through and experience the art. Anne was enjoying it more than her expression here suggests (sun in her eyes). We went back again in 2022.

On the last day of the month, B made her First Communion as arranged by the school and local church, which I found a kind and compassionate ceremony which of course meant little to her but was a comfort to us. I got a couple of decent pictures of the family.

Despite the transatlantic travel, I read only 13 books this month, and three of them were very short guides preparing for the May 2005 odyssey.

Non-fiction 5 (YTD 19)
Investing in Prevention: An International Strategy to Manage Risks of Instability and Improve Crisis Reponse, by the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit
Collision Course: NATO, Russia and Kosovo, by John Norris
Journey Around New York from A to Z, by Martha Day Zschock and Heather Zschock
Journey Around Washington DC from A to Z, by Martha Day Zschock
Journey Around Boston from A to Z, by Martha Day Zschock

SF 7 (YTD 27)
Broken Angels, by Richard Morgan
The Wanderer, by Fritz Leiber
The Snow Queen, by Joan D Vinge
Cities in Flight, by James Blish (I would now count this as four books, but I tallied it as only one in 2005)
Reach for Tomorrow, by Arthur C. Clarke
Banner of Souls, by Liz Williams
The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth and other stories, by Roger Zelazny

Comics 1 (YTD 3)
Nu We Hier Toch Zijn, by Barbara Stok

3,900 pages (YTD 17,700)
6/13 by women (YTD 14/50) by women
None by PoC

These are all good books. If I had to pick a top three, they would be the two short story collections by favourite authors – you can get the Clarke here and the Zelazny here – and Barbara Stok’s graphic reflections on life, which you can get here.

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.

March 2005 was a momentous month. I travelled twice to London and also to Thessalonica for a big Balkan conference. My Kazakh intern A left my office after a fairly brief stint; she then moved to Florida, took a family break, and is now running a hotel. I had a rare night out in Brussels with Anne at a pub quiz MC’d by none other than Nick Clegg, at that time still an MEP (our team came second).

The big cultural news of the month was the return of Doctor Who on Easter Saturday, the 26th. We sent young F to bed early and settled down to watch with Anne’s sister and an Irish friend who was visiting from Antwerp. We were blown away.

The big family news, however, was that little U was diagnosed with a severe learning disability. At almost two and a quarter years old, her non-verbal communication was at the level expected at seventeen months; her verbal communication at the level of twelve to fifteen months. She did not respond to her name, or to the word “No”. (She does both now.) Lightning sometimes does strike twice. It was less of a shock than B’s diagnosis in late 1999, but it was still a shock and we are still dealing with it.

I read 15 books that month.

Non-fiction 8 (YTD 14)
The Island at the Centre of the World, by Russell Shorto
Around Washington, D.C. with Kids, by Kathryn McKay
Around New York City with Kids, by Mindy Bailin
Around Boston with Kids, by Lisa Oppenheimer
Dave Barry Hits Below the Beltway, by Dave Barry
John Adams, by David McCullough
Tolkien and the Great War, by John Garth
Aldiss Unbound: The Science Fiction of Brian W. Aldiss, by Richard Mathews

SF 5 (YTD 20)
A Wind from Bukhara, by M.J. Engh
Science Fiction: The Best of 2004, ed. Karen Haber and Jonathan Strahan
The Saliva Tree, by Brian Aldiss
Emerald Magic: Great Tales Of Irish Fantasy, ed. Andrew M. Greeley
Tomorrow’s Worlds: Ten Stories of Science Fiction, ed. Robert Silverberg

Comics 2 (YTD 2)
Strangers in Paradise, Pocket Book #2, by Terry Moore
Bone, by Jeff Smith

5,600 pages (YTD 13,800)
5/15 by women (YTD 8/37) by women
none by PoC

The Island at the Centre of the World, Russell Shorto’s history of New Amsterdam before it became New York, was not just my book of the month but my book of the year for 2005 – a glorious reconstruction of a forgotten history. You can get it here. Bone was a comic that I had bought issue by issue when it started, and then lost track of, but I hugely enjoyed getting through the whole story. You can get it here. On the other hand, David McCullough’s biography, John Adams, is hugely over-rated and I was really disappointed in it. If you want to, you can get it here.

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.

February 2005 was rather a busy month. The Macedonian government held a major reception in Brussels on Valentine’s day, which I attended with family in tow, and then referenced in a briefing on the country published a few days later. I went to Geneva to give a lecture, and ended the month in Belgrade, but also had a couple of trips to London – on one of which I attended Picocon at Imperial College, bonding with a lot of newish friends in sf fandom; and using another for an initial conversation with my future employer, who I had met in Kosovo the previous year. It would be another year and a half before the conversation turned into something more concrete.

I read 13 books that month.

Non-fiction 3 (YTD 6)
Blowing My Cover: My Life As A CIA Spy, and other misadventures, by Lindsay Moran
Theft of A Nation: Romania since Communism, by Tom Gallagher
Cyprus: The Search for a Solution, by David Hannay

SF 10 (YTD 15)
Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell
The Ethos Effect, by L.E. Modesitt Jr
Heartfire, by Orson Scott Card
His Majesty’s Starship, by Ben Jeapes
We/Мы, by Yevgeny Zamyatin/Евгений Иванович Замятин
Manna from Heaven, by Roger Zelazny
Foundation’s Edge, by Isaac Asimov
Forty Signs of Rain, by Kim Stanley Robinson
ThiGMOO, by Eugene Byrne
Stamping Butterflies, by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

4,800 pages (TYD 8,200)
1/13 (YTD 3/22) by women
none by PoC

Best book of the month was Zamyatin’s dystopian We, a fore-runner to 1984 and Brave New World; you can get it here. Second best probably Cloud Atlas; you can get it here. Deeply unimpressed by Lindsay Moran’s take on Macedonia. You can get that here.

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.