August 2008 books

Posted on 24 October 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

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.

We spent most of August in Loughbrickland as usual, catching the partial solar eclipse on our way over and the total lunar eclipse two weeks later.

F and I visited the Doctor Who exhibition in Earl’s Court on the way over, I looked in on DWCon in Birmingham on the way back, and I finished the month at the Bled Forum in Slovenia.

In world news, this was the month of the South Ossetia war, bringing back sad memories of my visit to Tskhinvali in 2005.

Non-fiction 9 (YTD 45)
The Right Honorable Arthur MacMurrough Kavanagh: A Biography, by Sarah L. Steele
The Incredible Mr Kavanagh: A Triumph of the Human Spirit, by Donald McCormick
Born without Limbs: A biography of achievement, by Kenneth Kavanagh
Kavanagh MP: An Inspirational Story, by David Cohen
Doctor Who: the Unfolding Text, by John Tulloch and Manuel Alvarado
Teach Yourself to Learn a Language, by P.J.T. Glendening
A History of the Black Death in Ireland, by Maria Kelly
Liberal Democracy and Globalisation, compiled and edited by Graham Watson MEP and Katharine Durrant
1690: Battle of the Boyne, by Pádraig Lenihan

Non-Genre 1 (YTD 17)
Finding Time Again, by Marcel Proust

Scripts 3 (YTD 4)
The Office: The Scripts: Series 1, by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant
The Office: The Scripts: Series 2, by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant
The First Part of King Henry the Sixth, by William Shakespeare

SF (non-who) 9 YTD 30)
Teranesia, by Greg Egan
The Pilgrim’s Regress, by C.S. Lewis
The Possibility of an Island, by Michel Houllebecq
The Seeds of Time, by John Wyndham
The Child Garden, by Geoff Ryman
The Faded Sun Trilogy, by C.J. Cherryh
The Execution Channel, by Ken MacLeod
Islands in the Net, by Bruce Sterling
The Carhullan Army, by Sarah Hall

Doctor Who 12 (YTD 156)
The Second Doctor Who Monster Book, by Terrance Dicks
The Adventures of K9 and Other Mechanical Creatures, by Terrance Dicks
Terry Nation’s Dalek Special, compiled and edited by Terrance Dicks
Doctor Who – Time and the Rani, by Pip and Jane Baker
Doctor Who – Paradise Towers, by Stephen Wyatt
Doctor Who – Delta and the Bannermen, by Malcolm Kohll
Doctor Who – Dragonfire, by Ian Briggs
Doctor Who – Battlefield, by Marc Platt
Doctor Who – Ghost Light, by Marc Platt
Doctor Who – The Curse of Fenric, by Ian Briggs
Doctor Who – Survival, by Rona Munro
Escape Velocity, by Colin Brake

9200 pages (YTD 63,000)
7/34 (YTD 29/274) by women
None (YTD 6/274) by PoC
NB that P.J.T. Glendening appears to be Peter Joseph Glendening (1926-2023). I have found a photograph of him as a child and he does not appear to be a writer of colour.

Best and worst: the second series of The Office seemed to me somehow more coherent than the first and very nicely done; you can get the scripts here. Proust finishes on a high note; you can get the last volume here. On the other hand, the Bakers’ novelisation of Time and the Rani is awful; if you want, you can get it here.

July 2008 books

Posted on 21 October 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

July 2008 began very painfully. At the very end of June I had a vasectomy, and with somewhat imperfect timing moved office a few days later, thinking I would have recovered over the weekend. No. My testicles were swollen to the size of a tennis ball (felt much bigger) and I could barely walk. My gallant intern D and neighbour J did most of the packing up of the old office, and young F joined in the trip to IKEA and putting furniture together. I should also chronicle that the first external visitor to the office was A, who then worked for AP across the corridor but is now largely freelance and actually interviewed me last week. Here is D, screwdriver at the ready, wishing I would start helping her rather than sitting in the comfy chair taking photos.

More cheerfully, Anne’s brother R married V. I attended the civil ceremony in Etterbeek Town Hall.

And we all attended the religious ceremony in the Église Sainte-Croix (the one off Place Flagey) a week later.

F had his ninth birthday at the end of the month, and two friends came round to meet the star attraction.

I had a day trip to London at the end of the month, and on 1 August we set off for our summer holiday.

Non-fiction 4 (YTD 36)
Why I am not a Christian, and other essays on religion and related subjects, by Bertrand Russell
The Periodic Table, by Primo Levi
The Cruise of the R.Y.S. Eva, by Arthur (McMurrough) Kavanagh
A History of India, by John Keay (did not finish)

Non-Genre 3 (YTD 16)
Collected Short Stories, by E.M. Forster
The History of Richard Calmady, by “Lucas Malet” (Mary St Leger Kingsley Harrison)
A House for Mr Biswas, by V.S. Naipaul

SF (non-Who) 3 (YTD 21)
Children of the Atom, by Wilmar H. Shiras
Farthing, by Jo Walton
PEACE, by Gene Wolfe

6,000 pages (YTD 53,800)
7/34 by women (YTD 22/240)
2/34 by PoC (YTD 6/240) – NB that Glen McCoy was the first non-white writer of Doctor Who.

When I wrote this month up first time round in 2020, I singled out The Periodic Table, by Primo Levi, which you can get here, and Richard Calmady, which you can get here. In retrospect, though, the book that has lingered most warmly in my memory is Farthing, by Jo Walton, which you can get here. Worst of the month, and in the running for worst Doctor Who book ever, was Doctor Who – The Twin Dilemma, which if you really want you can get here.

June 2008 books

Posted on 18 October 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

We celebrated the summer solstice by having a party in our back garden – something we have done very rarely, in fact. Some nice pictures, though a lot of friends have since moved away. I wish I had taken more. (I also wish I had had my eyes open in the only one taken of me.)

Unfortunately eating leftovers I cracked a tooth on an olive stone, and the following week I had a brief visit to the hospital for a vasectomy; this was not brilliant timing for reasons I’ll explain in the July write-up.

I don’t seem to have travelled, so with the regular commute I read no less than 49 books, my second highest monthly total ever, many of them short and easily digestible Doctor Who novels.

Non-fiction 7 (YTD 32)
Lisbon: What the Reform Treaty Means, edited by Tony Brown
A History of the Arab Peoples, by Albert Hourani (with afterword by Malise Ruthven)
God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It, by Jim Wallis (did not finish)
The Conquest of Gaul, by Julius Caesar
Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time, by Dava Sobel
Fatal Attraction: Magnetic Mysteries of the Enlightenment, by Patricia Fara
The Lost and Left Behind: Stories from the Age of Extinctions, by Terry Glavin

Non-genre 3 (YTD 13)
Death in Holy Orders, by P.D. James
When Nietzsche Wept, by Irvin D. Yalom
The Penguin Dictionary of Jokes, compiled by Fred Metcalf

sf 7 (YTD 18)
Little, Big, by John Crowley
The Phoenix Exultant, by John C. Wright
Shadowkings, by Michael Cobley (did not finish)
Vellum, by Hal Duncan
Abarat, by Clive Barker
Masters of the Fist, by Edward P Hughes
New Tales of Space and Time, edited by Raymond J. Healy

9,400 pages (YTD 47,800)
3/49 by women (YTD 15/206)
1/49 by PoC (YTD 4/206)

I gave four of these 4½ stars out of five at the time, but the only one I can remember much about is A History of the Arab Peoples, which you can get here. The worst is Peter Grimwade’s novelisation of Time Flight, which you can get here.

May 2008 books

Posted on 15 October 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

Started May 2008 with a long weekend at my sister’s in France; later on travelled to Montenegro and Albania, and then for a day to Belfast.

Plenty of daytime travel and easily consumed reading meant I got through 39 books that month:

Non-fiction 7 (YTD 25)
About Time vol 6: The Unauthorised Guide to Doctor Who, 1985-1999, by Tat Wood
Kosova Express: A Journey in Wartime, by James Pettifer
Contested Island: Ireland 1460-1630, by S.J. Connolly
Letter from America, 1946-2004, by Alistair Cooke
Contested Lands: Israel-Palestine, Kashmir, Bosnia, Cyprus and Sri Lanka, by Sumantra Bose
Cyprus, by Christopher Hitchens
A Functional Cyprus Settlement: the Constitutional Dimension, by Tim Potier

Non-genre 4 (YTD 10)
The Prince of Tides, by Pat Conroy
Don Quixote part II, by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Odd Man Out, by F.L. Green
Gösta Berling’s Saga, by Selma Lagerlöf

SF 2 (YTD 29)
Template, by Matt Hughes
Jhereg, by Steven Brust

9,500 pages (YTD 38,400)
1/39 by a woman (YTD 12/157)
1/39 by a PoC (YTD 3/157)

Again I’m going to flag up the best ones and gloss over the worst. Sumantra Bose’s comparative study, which you can get here, and S.J. Connolly’s Irish history, which you can get here, were my favourite non-Who books of the month; the novelisations of The Dæmons, which you can get here, and The Green Death, which you can get here, are especially good; and About Time vol 6, which you can get here, is indispensable for Who fans.

April 2008 books

Posted on 12 October 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

April 2008 was the month that we applied for Belgian citizenship. A rare month (before 2020) when I don’t seem to have left the country at all, having arrived home from Ireland late on 31 March and departed for France early on 1 May. This was also the month that B moved from the place near the Dutch border where she had been living since leaving home in October 2007, to where she now is half an hour east of here.

I remember also a dinner in Brussels with George Soros and a few others, at which he told us that the subprime mortgage crisis would likely lead to a huge financial meltdown in a few months. He was right, of course. (He was saying this in public too.)

Regular commuting (and short Doctor Who novelisations) meant that I read 43 books in April 2008.

Non-fiction 4 (YTD 18)
A History of Africa, by J.D. Fage
Understanding English Place-Names, by (Sir) William Addison
J.R.R. Tolkien: a biography, by Humphrey Carpenter
J.R.R. Tolkien: Architect of Middle Earth, by Daniel Grotta

Non-genre 2 (YTD 6)
Saturnalia, by Lindsey Davis
True History of the Kelly Gang, by Peter Carey

SF (non-Who) 9 (YTD 27)
Brasyl, by Ian McDonald
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, by Michael Chabon
Rollback, by Robert J. Sawyer
The Last Colony, by John Scalzi
The Great War: Breakthroughs, by Harry Turtledove
The Cornelius Quartet: The Final Programme , A Cure for Cancer, The English Assassin, The Condition of Muzak, by Michael Moorcock

9,300 pages (YTD 28,900)
1/43 by a woman (YTD 11/118)
None by PoC (YTD 2/118)

I’m not going to be cruel to the books I didn’t like this month, and instead will recommend the four best new reads (with a shout out also to Carpenter’s Tolkien biography, which you can get here): Donald Cotton’s novelisation of the story we now call The Romans, which you can get here; Ian McDonald’s future Brasyl, which you can get here; Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang, which you can get here; and Moorcock’s Cornelius Quartet, which you can get here. When I was tallying books back in 2008, I counted the last of these as one volume, but these days I am tallying them separately.

March 2008 books

Posted on 9 October 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

I started the month with a trip to Cyprus, and the following weekend went to Dublin for P-Con and on to Limerick to give a lecture.

A rare picture taken at Easter weekend of the five of us together:

The long travel to Cyptus and Limerick, and the long weekend, and the short length of the Doctor Who novelisations, meant that I read no less than 44 books in March 2008.

non-fiction 7 (YTD 14)
The River of Lost Footsteps, by Thant Myint-U
Freedom from Fear, and other writings, by Aung San Suu Kyi
Berlitz Turkish Travel Pack (did not finish)
The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest To Become The Smartest Person In The World, by A.J. Jacobs
The Superpower Myth: The Use and Misuse of American Might, by Nancy Soderberg
Trillion Year Spree, by Brian Aldiss and David Wingrove
The Embarrassment of Riches: an interpretation of Dutch culture in the golden age, by Simon Schama

non-genre 2 (YTD 4)
Pass the Port: The Best After-Dinner Stories of the Famous
The Prisoner and The Fugitive, by Marcel Proust

sf (non-who) 7 (YTD 18)
Summerland, by Michael Chabon
Rogue Moon, by Algis Budrys
I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson
Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology, ed. Bruce Sterling
The Owl Service, by Alan Garner
Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Jewish Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by Jack Dann
Halting State, by Charles Stross

Comics 2 (YTD 3)
Transmetropolitan: Tales of Human Waste, by Warren Ellis
Fables: Legends in Exile, by Bill Willingham et al.

10,900 pages (YTD 19,800)
2/44 by women (YTD 10/75), though I don’t know anything about the author of the Berlitz Turkish Travel Pack or the editor of Pass the Port
2/44 by PoC (YTD 2/75), subject to the same caveat

The best of these was Alan Garner’s classic The Owl Service, which you can get here. The worst by some way are the two novelisations by Nigel Robinson of the stories we now call The Edge of Destruction and The Sensorites, which you can get here and here.

February 2008 books

Posted on 6 October 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

February 2008 began with a really glorious moment as Iain Banks visited Brussels to speak at Scotland House – which occupies the top two floors of the building that my office was then located in. I went to Geneva for what was then my regular gig at GCSP, and Anne and I had a rare romantic getaway weekend in Rome. I wrote blog posts on the Lisbon Treaty and the genetics of blue eyes. Kosovo declared independence and the Greek Cypriot leader lost his re-election bid (and died soon after). At work, my Danish intern V left (she has now founded her own NGO, fighting for gender equality) and was replaced by American D, one of the real stars who I recruited in my eight years at that job (and they were all good).

I managed to read 20 books that month:

non-fiction 5 (YTD 7)
Oxford Take Off In Russian
Algernon, Charlie, and I: A Writer’s Journey, by Daniel Keyes
The Time Out Guide to Rome
Dublin Castle and the 1916 Rising: The Story of Sir Matthew Nathan, by Leon Ó Broin
The Megalithic European: The 21st Century Traveller in Prehistoric Europe, by Julian Cope

non-genre 1 (YTD 2)
No Great Mischief, by Alistair MacLeod

script 1
Improbable Frequency, by Arthur Riordan and Bell Helicopter (Conor Kelly and Sam Park)

sf 6 (YTD 11)
The Atrocity Archives, by Charles Stross
The Rediscovery of Man, by Cordwainer Smith
Naked to the Stars, by Gordon R. Dickson
Interzone: The 5th Anthology, edited by John Clute, Lee Montgomerie and David Pringle
Matter, by Iain M. Banks
Humility Garden, by Felicity Savage

Doctor Who 7 (YTD 9)
The Year of Intelligent Tigers, by Kate Orman
Invasion of the Bane, by Terrance Dicks
Revenge of the Slitheen, by Rupert Laight
Eye of the Gorgon, by Phil Ford
Warriors of Kudlak, by Gary Russell
The Glittering Storm, by Shaun Lyon
The Thirteenth Stone, by Justin Richards

4,800 pages (YTD 8,900) not counting the two audiobooks
4/20 (YTD 8/31) by women, though I have no information about the authors of Oxford Take Off In Russian or The Time Out Guide to Rome
None so far this year by PoC, subject to the same caveat.

Four of these to particularly recommend: Improbable Frequency, a play about Schrödinger set in Dublin, which you can get here; Algernon, Charlie, and I: A Writer’s Journey, the story of the classic sf story/book, which you can get here; No Great Mischief, a lovely Scottish Canadian novel, which you can get here; and The Megalithic European, which ticked my archæological boxes, and you can get it here.

January 2008 books

Posted on 3 October 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

We saw in the new year multinationally, with Belgian friends coming for dinner and cooking a raclette for us (very nice) and then the brother-in-law and his Eastern European fiancée showing up in time for the fireworks. One of F’s Christmas presents was a meccano-style Shark Run roller-coaster, which he set up pretty much single-handed.

A modest start to the year with eleven books.

Non-fiction 2
Endgame in Ireland, by Eamonn Mallie and David McKittrick
Seven Pillars of Wisdom, by T.E. Lawrence

Non-genre 1
An Instance of the Fingerpost, by Iain Pears

SF 5
The Last Hero: A Discworld Fable, by Terry Pratchett, illustrated by Paul Kidby
Again, Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
The Rising of the Moon, by Flynn Connolly
Interview with the Vampire, by Anne Rice
National Lampoon’s Doon, by Ellis Weiner

Doctor Who 2
Doctor Who – Fury from the Deep, by Victor Pemberton
The City of the Dead, by Lloyd Rose

Comics 1
Macedonia, by Harvey Pekar and Heather Roberson, illustrated by Ed Piskor

4300 pages
4/11 by women
none by PoC

Best books of the month: An Instance of the Fingerpost, which you can get here, and The Last Hero, which you can get here. Worst by far: Interview with the Vampire, which you can get here.

September Books 8) Peter Abelard

Posted on 7 September 2008 by fromtheheartofeurope

8) Peter Abelard, by Helen Waddell

I have long been interested in Helen Waddell; although she was born in Japan, her father ended up in our part of County Down (and gets a mention in my PhD thesis because of his amateur clerical researches into local ecology), and I was always aware of her papers in the QUB Special Collections room. Here, she takes her expertise and interest in the great love story of Abelard and Héloïse in the early 12th century, and gives it a fictional twist.

It’s not as good as it should be. Good points about the book include that she has not blandly adhered to the historical chronology of events, and she is quite charmingly discreet yet clear about such crucial events as sex in the convent refectory and the mutilation of Abelard by Héloïse’s uncle’s men. She also gives us a very good idea of where the two protagonists come from, with excellent sketches of Abelard’s family back in Brittany and Héloïse’s loyalty to the convent in Argenteuil (thanks to which the book sails through the Bechdel test), and the background scenery in Paris is also very convincingly sketched.

But while we have a good idea of where they come from, I wasn’t so convinced about where they go to during the book, particularly in the case of Héloïse – this is her story as much as Abelard’s, and it is quite unjust that she does not get equal billing in the title. History remembers her (and Waddell characterises her) from her later correspondence with Abelard, where one might get the impression that her relationship with him was the only interesting thing that ever happened to her – a twelfth-century version of the Sarah Jane Smith we met in School Reunion, perhaps. (This thought may require a separate post, or at least discussion in comments.) But I don’t think that the historical Héloïse of the 1130s is a reliable witness to her own state of mind of 1116-18, when you take into account who she was writing to and the passage of time. In particular I was struck that their baby son drops out of Waddell’s narrative without a trace, which can hardly have happened in real life. Perhaps also a reader today is less satisfied with the narrative of Heloise sacrificing all for her lover than the reader of 1933 would have been.

With Abelard, as you might expect given Waddell’s other work, she portrays him much more convincingly as a poet and lyricist than as a scholar – indeed, the scholarly scenes are the least convincing in the book, probably because she has taken fewest liberties with the historical facts. Rather bizarrely, one of Abelard’s friends ends the book by prophesying him as the John the Baptist-like fore-runner to Thomas Aquinas, which is really a bit absurd but is placed in such a way that you get the impression Waddell thinks this is the whole point of the story.

Anyway, it’s an interesting effort, but more that it was tried at all than that it is particularly good.

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