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 2006 was a pretty memorable month for me. I had one of the most fun science fiction convention experiences I can remember at P-Con in Dublin, where I moderated four panels, one of which was interrupted by the BBC calling me for a statement on the death of Slobodan Milošević. My brains were eaten by Fluff.

I went on from Dublin (having spoken at a panel with Garret Fitzgerald) to Cyprus, where I presented the first Crisis Group report on the situation there at a packed event in the Ledra Palace Hotel on the Green Line. This was more significant than I had perhaps realised; it was the first time since the referendums of April 2004 that someone had come to the island to tell the Greek Cypriots that they had voted for continued partition. Tempers were still high (actually they still are, many years later) and one Greek Cypriot newspaper accused me of behaving “με αναίδεια χίλιων πιθήκων”, “with the impudence of a thousand monkeys”. But I feel it was one of the more important bits of work we did in my time at Crisis Group, and perhaps more important, I made friends on that trip who I am still in touch with. (The chap in the picture below is not one of them.)

I also presented the report in Athens and Istanbul, my first ever visit to Turkey. The reception was a bit more laid back in both cases.

Anne and I attempted to have a romantic weekend break to Maastricht. It rained. Weirdly enough I went back to that part of the world later in the month for a conference about Kosovo in a chateau very near by (in Château St-Gerlach). And we did a nice little report on the EU and the South Caucasus. Outside Crisis Group, I published a short note on how to proceed with EU integration, proposing the citizens’ dialogues later adopted by President Macron (who may have come up with the idea separately).

Meanwhile back at home, F made a scale model of the solar system in our back yard. Here are the Sun (portrayed by a space hopper), a barely visible Mercury, and more clearly visible Venus, Earth and Mars.

I read 11 books that month.

Non-fiction 4 (YTD 10)
Does Anything Eat Wasps? And 101 Other Questions, ed. Mick O’Hare
The Discontinuity Guide: The Definitive Guide to the Worlds and Times of Doctor Who, by Paul Cornell, Martin Day and Keith Topping
Lost Lives: The stories of the men, women and children who died as a result of the Northern Ireland troubles, by David McKittrick, Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeney, Chris Thornton and David McVea
Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion, by Charles Townshend

sf 7 (YTD 16)
Air (or Have not Have), by Geoff Ryman
Learning the World, by Ken MacLeod
Thud!, by Terry Pratchett
Take Back Plenty, by Colin Greenland
Different Kinds of Darkness, by David Langford
Hidden Camera, by Zoran Živković
Swords in the Mist, by Fritz Leiber

4,200 pages (YTD 10,400)
None by women (YTD 5/29)
None by PoC (YTD 1/29)

This was a really good month for books as well, despite a certain lack of diversity. The top book of 2006 for me was Lost Lives, the gruelling account of people who died in the Troubles. You can get it (for a price!) here. Others that I particularly enjoyed were The Discontinuity Guide, which you can get here; Easter 1916, which you can get here; and Thud!, 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.

As previously noted, I started the month in Skopje, and then returned to Prishtina in Kosovo for more work meetings, extended by a day when fog prevented my flight home from taking off. This was all leading up to publishing another Kosovo report mid-month. I also got quoted in the Guardian by the lovely and much missed Ian Traynor. My other trip of the month was to Vienna, a rather mad affair which included intense chats with the late great Albert Rohan and the late great Martti Ahtisaari.

My negotiations with my future employer were meantime continuing, but I received an unexpected approach from a head-hunter looking for someone to run a new thinktank on longevity issues. I don’t know a lot about the subject, but I kept up the conversation for several weeks until we mutually decided that it just wasn’t my thing. (Much later, I tracked down the person who did get the job; let’s just say that I dodged a bullet.)

At home, we had a lovely ceremony organised by the municipality in which young F attended the ceremonial planting of his special tree. Our village donates or plants a tree for every child turning seven each year; we did not make anything of it for the girls, who would not really appreciate it, but F was certainly interested and engaged.

We went back to the scene in 2013 to see if we could find the same tree, and I’m pretty sure we did.

Another seven years on, we went back again in the early pandemic. – you can see I think that it is the same tree, and the same person who stood by it aged six and thirteen, now twenty.

I read 12 books that month.

Non-fiction 5 (YTD 6)
EU’ve got mail! by Graham Watson
First Man: The Life of Neil Armstrong, by James R. Hansen
Europe and the Recognition of New States in Yugoslavia, by Richard Caplan
Fanny Kemble: The Reluctant Celebrity, by Rebecca Jenkins
Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation 1838-1839, by Frances Anne Kemble

Non-genre 1 (YTD 2)
Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott

SF 6 (YTD 9)
Azem Berisha’s One and Only Flight to the Castle, by Veton Surroi
Ghosts of Albion: Accursed, by Amber Benson and Christopher Golden
A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess
The Einstein Intersection, by Samuel R. Delany
The Space Merchants, by Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth
9Tail Fox, by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

4,200 pages (YTD 6,200)
4/12 (YTD 5/18) by women (Jenkins, Kemble, Alcott, Benson)
1/12 (YTD 1/18) by PoC (Delany)

The best and worst of these were all non-fiction. The best is Fanny Kemble’s account of slavery from the point of view of someone who married a slave-owner. You can read it for free here. Almost as good is Richard Caplan’s definitive account of the diplomatic response to the break-up of Yugoslavia, which kills a few myths and which you can get here. The worst by far is Rebecca Jenkins’ biography of Fanny Kemble. If you want, 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.

As previously noted, 2006 started with a full house of visitors and much fun, though B’s behaviour was becoing more and more difficult. I got very excited about the Lib Dem leadership, with Charles Kennedy’s dramatic fall and the nearly successful wonkish challenge by Chris Huhne to veterans Menȝies Campbell and Simon Hughes. At work we published a report on (North) Macedonia, but I was running out of steam… I had a one-day trip to Paris, and actually finished the month in Macedonia, having travelled there from Kosovo on frozen and slippery tracks over the hills after a landslide had knocked out the main road from Prishtina to Skopje; these pictures don’t quite convey just how scary a drive it was.

I read only 6 books that month.

Non-fiction 1
God’s Clockmaker: Richard of Wallingford and the Invention of Time, by John North

Non-genre 1
The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, by Arthur Conan Doyle

SF 3
Anansi Boys, by Neil Gaiman
Steppe, by Piers Anthony
Year’s Best SF 10, ed. David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer

Comics 1
Shutterbug Follies, by Jason Little

2,000 pages
1/6 by women
None by PoC

Best: Year’s Best SF 10 which you can get here. Worst: Steppe, 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.

December 2005 was an unusual month for that time in my life in that I did not travel outside my usual commute – a planned day-trip to France was cancelled at the last moment. The overnights meme says I had spent the night in 21 different places away from home during the year; I seem to have missed Berlin from the list. I certainly visited 17 countries in the course of the year (going by today’s borders – ie counting Montenegro, Serbia and Kosovo separately). We put out a report on Montenegro’s imminent independence referendum. My Armenian intern A left (she later set up her own business) and I head-hunted her Greek replacement K from the internal media team.

At home, we celebrated little U’s third birthday (she got an Etch-a-Sketch) and Anne’s brother and sister both joined us for Christmas, in time for David Tennant’s first full episode of Doctor Who. I seem to have pictures of them and the kids, but none of Anne or me. We had a full house, especially when Anne’s parents and my sister and her husband all turned up.

I read 11 books that month.

Non-fiction 3; 2005 total 42
‘with all faults’, by David Low
Pilate: The Biography of an Invented Man, by Ann Wroe
The Georgian Feast: The Vibrant Culture and Savory Food of the Republic of Georgia, by Darra Goldstein

sf (non-Who) 4; 2005 total 79
Erewhon, by Samuel Butler
Sevenacide, by Robert Shuster
Triplanetary, by E.E. “Doc” Smith
Numbers Don’t Lie, by Terry Bisson

Doctor Who 3; 2005 total 5
The Well-Mannered War, by Gareth Roberts
Human Nature, by Paul Cornell
Lungbarrow, by Marc Platt

Comics 1; 2005 total 8
Boulevard of Broken Dreams, by Kim Deitch with Simon Deitch

2,500 pages; 2005 total 46,400 – this number soared once I started commuting by train in 2007
2/11 by women; 2005 total 30/144 (21%) – a standard proportion until I started to make efforts to read more diversely
None by PoC; 2005 total 4/144 (3%) – likewise.

Best books of the month for me were The Georgian Feast, which I’m still cooking from and you can get here, and Paul Cornell’s Human Nature, which you can get here in a new edition and of course later became the only original Who novel to be later adapted to television. (Other formats adopted to television: a game book, a comic strip, a couple of short stories, more loosely a couple of Big Finish plays.) Several of these bounced off me, most thoroughly the rather dismal Sevanacide collection, which you can get here.

Looking at the 144 books I read in 2005:

SF (non-Who) 79 (55%) – the highest percentage of any year that I have tracked.
Best of 2005: Best of the Best : 20 Years of the Year’s Best Science Fiction, ed. Gardner Dozois; also King of Morning, Queen of Day, by Ian McDonald, and The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, by Diana Wynne Jones.
The one you haven’t heard of: Cultural Breaks, by Brian Aldiss
Worst of 2005: Olympos, by Dan Simmons

Non-fiction: 42 (29%)
Best of 2005: The Island at the Centre of the World: The Untold Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Founding of New York, by Russell Shorto; also The Orientalist : solving the mystery of a strange and a dangerous life, by Tom Reiss, and Better to Have Loved: The Life of Judith Merril, by Judith Merril and Emily Pohl-Weary.
The one you haven’t heard of: Collision Course: NATO, Russia, and Kosovo, by John Norris
Worst of 2005: The Truth About The Armed Conflict In Slovenia, by the propaganda wing of the Yugoslav People’s Army

Non-genre 9 (lowest number of any year on record, equal lowest percentage)
Best of 2005: The Days of the Consuls, by Ivo Andrić; also Skinny Dip, by Carl Hiaasen
Worst of 2005: The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown

Comics 8 (6%)
Best of 2005: Nu We Hier Toch Zijn, by Barbara Stok; also Bone, by Jeff Smith
Worst of 2005: Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, by Daniel Clowes

Doctor Who 5 (3%) – every subsequent year is higher
Best of 2005: Human Nature, by Paul Cornell; also The Dying Days, by Lance Parkin
Worst of 2005: Genocide, by Paul Leonard

Book of the year: The Island at the Centre of the World, by Russell Shorto. 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.

November 2005 was a heavy month for travel. I started in Montenegro, went from there for Vienna and then on to Kyiv, my first ever visit to Ukraine (I enjoyed visiting the Bulgakov house and the Scythian gold exhibition at the Museum of National Historical Treasures); and then at the end of the month I went to Berlin and from there to New York. We put out reports on the rigged elections in Azerbaijan, and also on EU visa policy in the Balkans. I also found time for an informational interview with my current employers; I thought it went rather well, but it was almost eight and a half years before they got back to me!

Back at home, the local riding school put on a show of small pets including rabbits. One of the rabbits, a Flemish Giant, was very big indeed.

I read 17 books that month, with all that travel.

Non-fiction 3 (YTD 39)
The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, by Samuel R. Delany
Never Eat Alone, by Keith Ferrazzi with Tahl Raz
Up Through an Empty House of Stars: Reviews and Essays 1980-2002, by David Langford

Non-genre 1 (2005 total 9)
The Days of the Consuls/Bosnian Chronicle/Travnik Chronicle, by Ivo Andrić

sf 10 (YTD 75)
Moving Mars, by Greg Bear
Olympos, by Dan Simmons
A Feast for Crows, by George R.R. Martin
Hogfather, by Terry Pratchett
Lords and Ladies, by Terry Pratchett
Smoke and Mirrors, by Neil Gaiman
Magic for Beginners, by Kelly Link
The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Darkness That Comes Before, by R. Scott Bakker
Counting Heads, by David Marusek

Doctor Who 2 (YTD 2)
Genocide, by Paul Leonard
The Dying Days, by Lance Parkin

Comics 1 (YTD 7)
Safe Area Goražde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992-95, by Joe Sacco

7,200 pages (YTD 43,900)
2/17 by women (YTD 28/133)
1/17 by PoC (YTD 4/133)

Best books of the month were Le Guin’s The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, a welcome reread, which you can get here; and Andrić’s Bosnian Chronicle/Travnik Chronicle/The Days of the Consuls, which you can get here. Massively underwhelmed by Dan Simmons’ Olympos, but you can get it here if you want.

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.

My two trips in October 2005 were to the Netherlands, where unfortunately I had a car accident on the outskirts of The Hague – nobody hurt, but I was pretty shaken and the other car was a write-off – and at the end of the month to Montenegro. (You can see me in Montenegro at 2:00 into this video.) At work we published the second report on Nagorno-Karabakh and I had an op-ed on Bosnia in European Voice which I am still rather pleased with.

At home we had our twelfth wedding anniversary. I got a nice pic of young F in the cupola of the Bozar museum in Brussels, the royal palace in the background.

F meanwhile was occasionally commandeering my camera to take pictures of other family members.

Due to less international travel, and commuting by car, I read only 10 books in October 2005.

Non-fiction 2 (YTD 36)
Macedonia: The Bradt Travel Guide, by Thammy Evans
Better to Have Loved: The Life of Judith Merril, by Judith Merril and Emily Pohl-Weary

Non-genre 1(YTD 8)
A Personal Matter, by Kenzaburō Ōe

SF 7 (YTD 65)
Travelling Towards Epsilon, ed. by Maxim Jakubowski
The Hidden Family, by Charles Stross
The Clan Corporate, by Charles Stross
Accelerando, by Charles Stross
Babel-17, by Samuel R. Delany
Ten Years to Oblivion, by Clem Macartney
Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett

2,700 pages (YTD 36,700)
2/10 by women (YTD 26/116)
2/10 by PoC (YTD 3/116)

Links above to my reviews, below to Amazon.

The best of these was Better to Have Loved: The Life of Judith Merril, which won the Hugo for Best Related Work that year. You can get it here. I’m not going to pick on those I didn’t like; three others that I did like were Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal, which you can get here, Charles Stross’s The Clan Corporate, which you can get here in omnibus, and Thammy Evans’ Macedonia Travel Guide, which you can get (in a newer and retitled edition) 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.

I both started and ended the month in what is now North Macedonia, visiting Slovenia and Serbia (including the Vojvodina) in between (I may also have taken in Kosovo at the start of the month – my notes are not clear). Most interesting for me was to be asked to speak at a meeting of the EU’s COWEB working group (the diplomats working on the Western Balkans) alongside Carl Bildt and Goran Svilanović. I also had a new intern at work, A from Armenia, who was quite a character. We published three pretty important reports at work – on the EU police mission in Bosnia, the situation in Mitrovica in Kosovo, and the first of two reports on Nagorno-Karabakh.

But the biggest long-term development for me of the month was discovering LibraryThing, which has been a tremendous incentive for my OCD approach to reading books over the subsequent fifteen years and has helped me very much in writing this series of posts.

I read 12 books that month.

Non-fiction 5 (YTD 34)
Emergency Sex (And Other Desperate Measures), by Kenneth Cain, Heidi Postlethwait, and Andrew Thomson
The Alphabet, by David Sacks
Uncle Petros and Goldbach’s Conjecture, by Apostolos Doxiadis
The Banovina, by Donka Stančić and Miško Lazović
The Truth About The Armed Conflict In Slovenia by Col. Nikola Popović, Col. Ivan Matović, and Lt-Col. Stanoje Jovanović

SF 7 (YTD 58)
The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown
Sandman: The Dream Hunters, by Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Yoshitaka Amano
Creatures of Light and Darkness, by Roger Zelazny
The Third Policeman, by Flann O’Brien
The Family Trade, by Charles Stross
The Man Who Fell To Earth, by Walter Tevis
Emerald Eye: The Best Irish Imaginative Fiction, ed. Frank Ludlow & Roelof Goudriaan

3,100 pages (YTD 34,000)
1/12 (YTD 24/106) by women
1 by PoC

Of these books The Third Policeman is one of my favourite books of all time; you can get it here. Of the books that were new to me, Emergency Sex has the best title and also is a gripping portrayal of life on the front lines of conflict and humanitarian aid. You can get it here. The Da Vinci Code is truly terrible. If you want, 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.

The major event of August 2005 was my first Worldcon, Interaction in Glasgow. I had a whale of a time, met many people who I had previously known only online, shared a room with Alaskan writer David Marusek, spoke on several panels, attended many more. The two best pictures of me were taken at a panel with Harry Turtledove, by Elizabeth Patrick, and just hanging around, by Anna Feruglio Dal Dan.

For our summer in Northern Ireland, the kids were able to use a trampoline:

At the end of the month, back at work, I went to an exceptionally fun conference in Macedonia, afterwards meeting with the famous Baba Tahir Emini of the Bektashi sect (who sadly died a few months later).

I read 17 books that month:

Non-fiction 6 (YTD 29)
Getting Things Done: How To Achieve Stress-Free Productivity, by David Allen
A Very British Genre, by Paul Kincaid
The Last Journey of William Huskisson, by Simon Garfield
Peace Without Politics? Ten Years of International State-Bulding in Bosnia, International Peacekeeping vol 12, no 3, Autumn 2005; ed. David Chandler
Knowledge, Power and International Policy Coordination, ed. Peter M. Haas
The Orientalist: In Search of a Man Caught Between East and West, by Tom Reiss

Non-genre 1 (YTD 7)
The Black Tor, by George Manville Fenn

SF 9 (YTD 51)
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, by J.K. Rowling
The Prize in the Game, by Jo Walton
Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell
The World Inside, by Robert Silverberg
Imperial Earth, by Arthur C. Clarke
City, by Clifford D. Simak
Cultural Breaks, by Brian Aldiss
A Mirror for Observers, by Edgar Pangborn
King of Morning, Queen of Day, by Ian McDonald

Comics 1 (YTD 6)
Like A Velvet Glove Cast In Iron, by Daniel Clowes

4,900 pages (YTD 30,900)
2/17 (YTD 23/94) by women
None by PoC

The two new books from this month that have lingered with me are Ian McDonald’s King of Morning, Queen of Day, which you can get here, and the seminal international relations book which I still swear by, Knowledge, Power and International Policy Coordination, which you can get here. I was disappointed by Daniel Clowes’ Like A Velvet Glove Cast In Iron, but you can get it here if you want.

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.

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.

December 2004 was a quieter month, celebrating little U’s second birthday and then Christmas at home with just the five of us; I cooked boar as usual, and we watched the extended versions of the Lord of the Rings DVDs during the holiday. No Crisis Group publications, though I was working hard on the big Kosovo report for early 2005, and I did have the thrill of being quoted by the prosecutor in the trial of Slobodan Milošević (at end here and then again here). I don’t even seem to have travelled – cancelled a planned trip to Albania at the last moment owing to pressure of work. (My non-systematic tally, before I started doing the overnights meme properly, was that I had been to twenty different countries in 2004.) My Slovenian intern K left; by peculiar coincidence, within a few months she was working for my present employers, and now works for one of our biggest corporate clients, so we are still in touch. This was also the year of the Boxing Day tsunami.

I read 9 books that month.

Non-fiction 2 (2004 total 42)
A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility Report of the Secretary-General’s High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change
The Uncyclopedia, by Gideon Haigh

SF 5 (2004 total 75)
Cyteen, by CJ Cherryh
The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger
The Silmarillion, by J.R.R. Tolkien
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke
The Radiant Seas, by Catherine Asaro

Comics 2 (2004 total 9)
A Contract With God, by Will Eisner
Berlin: City of Stones, by Jason Lutes

3,600 pages (2004 total 46,800)
2/8 by women (2004 total 33/149, 22%)
None by PoC (2004 total 2/149, 1%)

I hugely enjoyed both The Time Traveler’s Wife, which you can get here, and Berlin: City of Stones, which you can get here. However, The Radiant Seas failed to convert me to Catherine Asaro. You can get it here.

So looking at the 150 books that I read in 2004 as a whole (the first full calendar year that I systematically tracked my reading):

SF 75 (50% – higher percentage than in any recent years, though if you count Doctor Who and SF together it works out about average)
Best of 2004: Sacrifice of Fools, by Ian McDonald, The Time Traveller’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger, Changing Planes, by Ursula Le Guin
The one you haven’t heard of: Bad Timing, by Rebecca Levene
Worst of 2004: Humans, by Robert J. Sawyer

Non-fiction 42 (28% – also higher than any recent years, though not by as much)
Best of 2004: Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, by Claire Tomalin; J.R.R. Tolkien: author of the century, by Tom Shippey
The one you haven’t heard of: Home Rule: an Irish History, 1800-2000, by Alvin Jackson
Worst of 2004: Tolkien: A Look Behind the Lord of the Rings, by Lin Carter

Non-genre 20 (13% – lower than most recent years)
Best of 2004: The Summer Book, by Tove Jansson, Beasts and Super-Beasts, by Saki
The one you haven’t heard of: The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits, by Emma Donoghue
Worst of 2004: To the Nines, by Janet Evanovich

Comics 9 (6% – lower than any recent year)
Berlin, Maus, Persepolis are all great.

Book of the year 2004: Claire Tomalin’s bio of Samuel Pepys. 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.

November 2004 was grimly dominated by the re-election of President Bush, which I honestly had not seen coming. It was an important lesson to me to avoid wishful thinking in my elections analysis in the future.

The newly re-elected Bush administration immediately recognised what is now North Macedonia under the name of Macedonia, which probably played an important role in the failure of the following week’s referendum which would have reversed some elements of the post-conflict local government reform if it had passed.

We presciently published a report on South Ossetia, and I had another op-ed on Moldova.

My one work trip was to Geneva, where I rather bravely drove there and back; I remember a long and valuable walking conversation with Pat Cox beside the lake, where he gave me some invaluable career advice (“get up early, and read the paperwork before the meeting”), and also giving Hattie Babbitt a lift to Geneva Airport as I departed. We actually managed two family trips, one ot the Ardennes with the kids, and one with just the two of us to the Hague for a dance performance connected with the royal wedding earlier in the year.

I read 10 books that month.

Non-genre 7 (2004 total 19)
Atonement, by Ian McEwan
The Scheme for Full Employment, by Magnus Mills
The Man Who Was Thursday, by G.K. Chesterton
The Summer Book, by Tove Jansson
The Distant Past, by William Trevor
The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, by Alexander McCall Smith
Tears of the Giraffe, by Alexander McCall Smith

SF 3 (YTD 70)
Science Fiction: The Best of 2003, ed. Jonathan Strahan and Karen Haber
Missing Man, by Katherine MacLean
Year’s Best SF 9, ed. David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer

2,800 pages (YTD 46,000)
3/10 by women (YTD 34/140)
None by PoC (YTD 2/140)

The best of these is Tove Jansson’s quiet novel, The Summer Book; you can get it here. The Hartwell/Cramer collection is particularly good this year. You can get it here. On the other hand, I could not see the point of Magnus Mills’ The Scheme for Full Employment. If you want to try it anyway, 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.

I started the month in Portugal, and also went to Washington, New York, Utah, Boston, and London. At work, we published a report on Armenia. (Anne and I celebrated our 11th wedding anniversary, but I was in Portugal on the day itself.) Somewhere in the internets there is video of me giving evidence to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee in London on 26 October, but you’ll have to settle for the minutes, here and here. Misha Glenny and I emerged from Westminster to see the sad news that John Peel had died. Here I am speaking at Brigham Young University on 13 October. I had more hair then.

The saddest news of the month was the loss of my former assistant from Bosnia days, Danijela. I was able to visit her resting place in 2019.

I read 22 books that month, thanks to lots of daytime flying.

Non-fiction 8 (YTD 40)
Scholars and Rebels in nineteenth-century Ireland, by Terry Eagleton
The Measure of All Things, by Ken Alder
Roger Zelazny and Andre Norton: proponents of individualism, by Carl B. Yoke
Making Sense of the Troubles, by David McKittrick and David McVea
America Right or Wrong: an anatomy of American nationalism, by Anatol Lieven
A Treasury of Great American Scandals, by Michael Farquhar
Fermat’s Last Theorem, by Simon Singh
Walking the Bible, by Bruce Feiler

Non-genre 1 (2004 total 13)
Around the World in Eighty Days, by Jules Verne

SF 11 (YTD 67)
Veniss Underground, by Jeff VanderMeer
Destiny’s Shield, by Eric Flint and David Drake
The Well of Lost Plots, by Jasper Fforde
Primary Inversion, by Catherine Asaro
Strontium Dog: Bad Timing, by Rebecca Levene
The Thackery T Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases, ed. Jeff VanderMeer
The Locus Awards: thirty years of the best in science fiction and fantasy, ed. Charles N. Brown
The Forever Machine/They’d Rather Be Right, by Mark Clifton and Frank Riley
The Pilgrim’s Progress From this World to that which is to come, by John Bunyan
Wondrous Beginnings, ed. Steven H. Silver
The Golden Age, by John C. Wright

Comics 2 (YTD 7)
Strangers in Paradise v1, by Terry Moore
In The Shadow Of No Towers, by Art Spiegelman

6,800 pages (YTD 43,200)
2/21 by women (YTD 31/130)
None by PoC (YTD 2/130)

Best book of the month: the Locus Awards anthology pulls together a lot of superlative short stories, some of which I already knew but almost all of which I really liked. You can get it here. Also Making Sense of the Troubles is dated but thorough; you can get it here. However, you can skip Destiny’s Shield, third in an alternative timeline series about Belisarius fighting an alien invasion; the hero never loses a battle or an argument and it gets boring fast. If you want, 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.

Back at work, I continued lobbying for a Commission cabinet position until it became obvious that this was not my year. (I have not seriously tried again since.) I had another op-ed on Macedonia as the political situation there took another twist. I travelled to Moldova, Belfast and ended the month in Portugal, with a day trip to the Hague. A writer whose books I don’t especially like rather sweetly got in touch and offered to send me some more so that I could make a more informed judgement; I accepted. And we celebrated little U’s christening (sadly since then we have lost both Liz, her godmother, and Guy Van Haver, the parish priest).

I read 12 books that month.

Non-fiction: 2 (YTD 32)
Judgement Day: The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic, by Christopher Stephen
The 9/11 Commission Report

Non-genre 1 (YTD 12)
To The Nines, by Janet Evanovich

SF: 7 (YTD 56)
The Warrior’s Bond, by Juliet McKenna
The Tale of the Next Great War, ed. I.F. Clarke
Star Trek: Enterprise – The First Adventure, by Vonda N. McIntyre
Monstrous Regiment, by Terry Pratchett
The Gods Themselves, by Isaac Asimov
Downbelow Station, by C.J. Cherryh
Brother Berserker, by Fred Saberhagen

Comics: 2 (YTD 5)
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, Marjane Satrapi
The Sandman: Endless Nights, by Neil Gaiman

I see that when I first tallied this month I counted Janet Evanovich as sf; I think that was wrong and will have to correct the record going forward.

4,300 pages (YTD 36,400)
5/12 by women (YTD 29/109)
1/12 by PoC (YTD 2/109)

The best of these were Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, the first half of Marjane Satrapi’s memoir of growing up in Iran, a milestone in comics which you can get here; and the morbidly factual 9/11 Commission Report, which notably fails to make any connection between the September 2001 attacks and Iraq – you can get it here.

My dislike of The Gods Themselves is well recorded; I was also deeply disappointed by Janet Evanovich’s To The Nines – I had enjoyed several earlier books in the series but this one put me off the rest. You can get them here and 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.

I spent most of August 2004 on holiday, but this was also the moment that I set my long-laid plans to join the cabinet of one of the new members of the European Commission in motion. (Those plans failed.) I also set up and publicised my Interactive Language Quiz, based on the instructions from a McDonald’s toy. While on holiday we published reports on Macedonia and Georgia, and I had an op-ed on the Macedonian local government reform plans (rather a good one, if I say so myself). Once I got back to work, my new intern, K, a Slovenian, arrived. The month ended with me doing an RTÉ interview on the tenth anniversary of the IRA ceasefire with Albert Reynolds and John Hume – sadly, Hume was already showing his illness. (I saw him in person in Brussels a few days later in early September and drew the same conclusion.)

Cute picture: young F, recently turned 5, trying his hand at archery.

I read 18 books that month.

Non-fiction: 4 (YTD 30)
The Political Animal, by Jeremy Paxman
The Revolution of America, by Guillaume Thomas François Raynal
Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, by Niall Ferguson
Mother Tongue, by Bill Bryson

Non-genre: 4 (YTD 11)
The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Don Quixote (part 1), by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
The Accusers, by Lindsey Davies
Scandal Takes a Holiday, by Lindsey Davies

Scripts: 1 (YTD 1)
Hard To Swallow, by John Dowie, illustrated by Hunt Emerson

Poetry: 1 (YTD 1)
Lucky Dip, by Ruth Ainsworth

SF: 8 (YTD 49)
The Year of Our War, by Steph Swainston
Felaheen, by John Courtenay Grimwood
Beyond Infinity, by Gregory Benford
After the King: Stories in Honour of J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. Martin H. Greenberg and Jane Yolen
Way Station, by Clifford D. Simak
The Demolished Man, by Alfred P. Bester
Year’s Best SF 21, ed. Gardner Dozois
The Dream Millennium, by James White

5,200 pages (YTD 32,100)
5/18 by women (YTD 24/97)
none by PoC (YTD 1/97)

Lots of good books this month, but I’m picking out two quirky ones that stick in my mind: the Abbé Raynal’s penetrating analysis of the newly founded United States, which you can get for free here, and Jon Courtenay Grimwood’s Felaheen, which you can get here. Least favourite book of the month: tremendously disappointed by Lindsay Davis’ The Accusers.

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.

July 2004 began and ended with travels for me – beginning with an epic journey by train to Paris, then flying to Berlin, and then Belgrade, then driving from Belgrade to Pristina and Skopje before flying home again via Budapest, a total of six countries in ten days. It was particularly significant because one of my co-speakers at the conference I attended while in Kosovo was to become my next boss two and a half years later; of course neither of us knew that at the time.

I also got to London for a day, and was appointed to the Advisory Board of the South East European Research Centre in Thessaloniki (the centre is still going strong, not sure about the board).

My intern A, half Slovene, half Geordie, left the Brussels office but went on to do some work for us in the Balkans later in the year. (Her replacement arrived only in August.)

And on the last two days of the month we did our usual summer holiday drive to Northern Ireland via Kidderminster.

F celebrated his fifth birthday with schoolfriends – the first time we had had a kids’ birthday party, which was nice. I don’t seem to have any pictures of the party, but here’s B (at 7) up a tree in our back garden, and F (turning 5) and U (19 months) with me on a visit to Mini-Europe.

I read 13 books that month, counting The Complete Maus as two.

Non-fiction 5 (YTD 26)
Saki: A Life of Hector Hugh Munro, with six short stories never before collected, by A. J. Langguth
A Narrative About War And Freedom: Dialog with the commander Ramush Haradinaj, by Bardh Hamzaj
J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, by Tom Shippey
The Politics of Serbia in the 1990s, by Robert Thomas
The Story of Alice, by Mavis Batey

SF 6 (YTD 41)
The Holy Machine, by Chris Beckett
Newton’s Wake, by Ken MacLeod
The Human Abstract, by George Mann
Cartomancy, by Mary Gentle
The Door into Summer, by Robert A. Heinlein
River of Gods, by Ian McDonald

Comics 2 (YTD 3)
The Complete Maus, by Art Spiegelman

3,700 pages (YTD 26,900)
2/13 by women (YTD 19/79)
none by PoC (YTD 1/79)

My two top books of the month are Spiegelman’s classic Holocaust comic Maus, which you can get here, and Tom Shippey’s brilliant book on Tolkien, which you can get here. At the other end, I am not a fan of George Mann’s writing anyway, and The Human Abstract, which you can get here, is my least favourite of his books.

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.

June 2004 was the month I switched from my old explorers@whyte.com email address, which I’d had since 1997, to my Gmail address, which I’ve had ever since. Ronald Reagan died; the new European Parliament was elected. Those were more innocent times. I also posted my Hugo finalists review.

This was the month of my one and only trip to Russia, a hasty 48 hours in Moscow (actually a bit less, two days and a night). We also published reports on Moldova and Bosnia, and I had an op-ed on Moldova published in European Voice which seems to have vanished from their archive but is preserved by my former employers.

I read 11 books that month.

Non-fiction 5 (YTD 21)
Roger Zelazny, by Jane Lindskold
Black Garden, by Thomas de Waal
A Turkey Travelogue, by Mark C. Leeper
Avonturen van een Nederbelg, by Derk Jan Eppink
Tolkien: A Look Behind The Lord Of The Rings, by Lin Carter, updated by Adam Roberts

Non-genre 3 (YTD 7)
Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier
Beasts & Super-Beasts, by Saki
Reginald in Russia, by Saki

SF 3 (YTD 35)
Gather, Darkness!, by Fritz Leiber
Down and Out In The Magic Kingdom, by Cory Doctorow
On Basilisk Station, by David Weber

2,800 pages (YTD 23,200)
2/11 by women (YTD 17/66)
none by PoC (YTD 1/66)

Top book of the month was Thomas de Waal’s account of Nagorno-Karabakh, updated by his The Caucasus: An Introduction. I did not know anything much about him back in 2004; we are now friends. You can get it here. Second favourite is Saki’s eternal Beasts and Super-Beasts, which you can get here. Two to avoid: Carter on Tolkien, and On Basilisk Station.

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.

1 May 2004 was the day of the EU’s big bang enlargement, with ten new countries joining to take the total membership from 15 to 25. There was a big celebration in the Cinquantenaire and we all went into Brussels for it (including visitors).

A few days later, I travelled to Zagreb for a meeting with Norwegian diplomats, and then later in the month did a grand Caucasus tour of Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan, meeting all three presidents and both prime ministers (Georgia did not have a PM at the time), and changing planes in Prague on the way there and back, thus adding three countries to my lifetime list and bringing my total to 43 (I had been to Georgia before). Here President Aliyev, who is still in power today, tells us what he thought of our new report. (I’m at the far end of the table, on the left.)

We also did an op-ed on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

I read 14 books this month (including the first Doctor Who-related book in this sequence). That’s 22 years ago.

Non-fiction 1 (YTD 16)
Manifesto for a New World Order, by George Monbiot

Non-genre fiction 1 (YTD 4)
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, by Mark Haddon

SF (non-Who) 11 (YTD 32)
Tales of the Dying Earth, by Jack Vance
Wild Seed, by Octavia E. Butler
Shadows over Baker Street, eds. Michael Reaves and John Pelan
Singularity Sky, by Charles Stross
Blind Lake, by Robert Charles Wilson
Light, by M. John Harrison
Irresistible Forces, ed. Catherine Asaro
The Confusion, by Neal Stephenson
Too Long a Sacrifice, by Mildred Downey Broxon
Sacrifice of Fools, by Ian McDonald
Humans, by Robert J. Sawyer

Doctor Who, etc 1 (YTD 1)
Decalog 5: Wonders, eds. Paul Leonard and Jim Mortimore

5,400 pages (YTD 20,400)
3/14 by women (YTD 15/55)
1/14 by PoC YTD 1/55)

Top book of the month for me is Sacrifice of Fools by Ian McDonald, the best SF book ever set in Belfast. You can get it here. I noted at the time that I very much enjoyed Singularity Sky, by Charles Stross, which you can get here, but I can remember much less about it. I’m afraid I bounced off Light, by M.John Harrison, which a lot of people love; but the worst book of the month is Robert Sawyer’s execrable Humans. You can get them here and 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.

This was the month I turned 37. I went to Strasbourg for work, and also to the Hague with Anne, F, U and Anne’s sister H (who babysat the kids during the ceremony) for the wedding of my friend Mabel to Prince Friso of the Netherlands. Their marriage was tragically brief, as it turned out.

Romance was clearly in the air that month. A couple of days after the royal wedding, I had a birthday dinner in Brussels; a colleague visiting from out of town discovered that he really liked one of our Brussels team, and things developed from there. They stayed together for several years, though are no longer an item. Still, their little girl owes her existence to my 37th birthday celebrations.

Meanwhile at work, my Croatian intern S also left (as mentioned before, she was last heard of working for an international organisation back in Croatia), and was replaced by A, half Slovene, half Geordie. We published a report reacting to the previous month’s Kosovo violence. At this passage of time, I can also reveal that I wrote most of an op-ed on Cyprus published in the New York Times under the names of my boss and the chair of the board. The referendum, of course, went the wrong way. I had no idea that I would get more involved in that issue in the years to come.

It was a busy month when I completed reading only 5 books, all the same genre.

Non-fiction 5 (YTD 15)
What If? 2: Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been, ed. Robert Cowley (presented as non-fiction)
The Salmon of Doubt: Hitch-hiking the Galaxy One Last Time, by Douglas Adams (edited by Peter Guzzardi) (includes some fiction, but the core is non-fiction)
Green Shadows, White Whale, by Ray Bradbury (also includes some fiction, but the core is non-fiction)
Essays and Lays of Ancient Rome, by Thomas Babington Macaulay
How Bosnia Armed, by Marko Attila Hoare

1,300 pages (YTD 15,000)
0/5 by women (YTD 12/40)
still none by PoC

To be honest, I hesitate to recommend any of them very strongly, but the Douglas Adams book is at least by Douglas Adams, and the Bosnia book is good for specialists. The Ray Bradbury was disappointing.

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 2004 began with a week of travel, to Paris, Washington DC and New York. Riots broke out in Kosovo. We published a report on Serbia. I had to cancel a trip to Oslo (did not visit Norway until 2023), but I also visited Budapest, and finished the month with a work conference in Dublin and a day in Belfast, where I met (separately) with Peter Robinson and Denis Donaldson. At home, we parted company with our au pair (a grumpy Belgian). One news item which I knew was important, but had no idea just how important it would be for me, was the announcement of Christopher Eccleston as the new Doctor Who.

I read 14 books that month.

Non-fiction 4 (YTD 10)
The Sandman Companion, by Hy Bender
Ask Me Anything about the Presidents, by Louis Phillips
Eleanor of Aquitaine: Lord and Lady, ed. Bonnie Wheeler and John Carmi Parsons
Chance Witness: An Outsider’s Life in Politics, by Matthew Parris

SF 10 (YTD 21)
On, by Adam Roberts
Changing Planes, by Ursula Le Guin
Maul, by Tricia Sullivan
The Gambler’s Fortune, by Juliet E. McKenna
The Green Gene, by Peter Dickinson
Coalescent, by Stephen Baxter
The Hounds of the Morrigan, by Pat O’Shea
The Sandman Book of Dreams, ed Neil Gaiman and Ed Kramer (and, uncredited, Martin Greenberg)
Kushiel’s Avatar, by Jacqueline Carey
The Master, by TH White

5,400 pages (YTD 13,700)
6/14 by women (YTD 12/34)
still none by PoC

Some very good books this month, and none that I would particularly disrecommend. I think top non-fiction are Matthew Parris and the Eleanor of Aquitaine book, and top sf are The Master and The Gambler’s Fortune, probably in that order.

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 big work news of February 2004 was the tragic death in a plane crash of Boris Trajkovski, the genial President of Macedonia who was very friendly with me and many others. This was the day after we published a report on pan-Albanianism (concluding that there was not much there there). I also went to London to shadow my boss at a Chatham House meeting where the other speaker was the late great Albert Rohan.

I read 12 books that month.

Non-fiction 3 (YTD 6)
How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy, by Orson Scott Card
The Daily Telegraph Book of Military Obituaries, ed. David Twiston Davies
The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, ed. Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn

Non-genre fiction 3 (YTD 3)
The Woman Who Gave Birth To Rabbits, by Emma Donoghue (collection, including one story which has fantasy elements)
Memories of the Irish Israeli War, by Phil O’Brien
Molvania: A Land Untouched by Modern Dentistry, by Santo Cilauro, Tom Gleisner and Rob Sitch

SF 6 (YTD 11)
Pattern Recognition, by William Gibson
Ilium, by Dan Simmons
Worlds That Weren’t, by Harry Turtledove, S.M. Stirling, Mary Gentle, and Walter Jon Williams
The House on the Borderland and Other Stories, by William Hope Hodgson (could not finish The Night Land)
The Meeting of the Waters, by Caiseal Mór
Paths to Otherwhere, by James Patrick Hogan

4,400 pages (YTD 8,300)
3/21 by women (YTD 6/21)
none by PoC

The best of these was probably The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, which won the Hugo the following year; you can get it here. Molvania has some good lines; you can get it here. The one to skip: The Meeting of the Waters.

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 most crucial event of January 2004 was that little U took her first steps, at 13 months.

My first work outing of the year was to the Liberals’ New Year reception in Brussels, after which I note that I had an awful lot of whisky with MEP Graham Watson. I was on a panel with the Bosnian and Croatian foreign ministers as well. (Fraser Cameron sitting between them.) This was shortly after returning from a conference on Moldova in Munich.

We also did a report for the new Independent Monitoring Commission in Northern Ireland, comparing its mission with Balkan equivalents. This was also the month that I started to seriously strategise about getting a job with the new European Commission due to take office at the end of the year. (Spoiler: I didn’t get a job there in the end.)

I read 9 books that month.

Non-fiction 3
Home Rule: An Irish History 1800-2000, by Alvin Jackson
Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, by Claire Tomalin
The Procrastinator’s Handbook: Mastering the Art of Doing It Now. by Rita Emmett

SF 5
1610: A Sundial in a Grave, by Mary Gentle
Looking Backward: from 2000 to 1887, by Edward Bellamy
The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
From the Dust Returned, by Ray Bradbury
The Best of Lester Del Rey

Comics 1
Death: The High Cost of Living, by Neil Gaiman

3,900 pages
3/9 by women
none by PoC

The Lord of the Rings is of course one of my favourite books ever, but that was a re-read (you can get it here if you still need to). My best new book this month was Claire Tomalin’s Samuel Pepys, which is superb and made me a real Pepys fanboy (and also a bit of a Claire Tomalin fan). You can get it here.

The one to skip: disappointed by 1610.

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.

In December 2003 we celebrated little U’s first birthday, and at work I was dealing with the fallout from the previous month’s events, rushing out a report on Georgia on the first of the month (actually most of it had been writen before the revolution on 25 November, but obviously needed updating) followed by one on the Preševo Valley in Southern Serbia. At the end of the month Serbia had an election.

I read 13 books that month.

Non-fiction 3
The Myth of Greater Albania, by Paulin Kola
The Music of the Primes: Searching to Solve the Greatest Mystery in Mathematics, by Marcus du Sautoy
Eats Shoots and Leaves, by Lynne Truss

SF 4
Paladin of Souls, Lois McMaster Bujold
After London, by Richard Jeffries
Carolan’s Concerto, by Caiseal Mór
Gateway, by Frederik Pohl

Comics 6
Sandman V: A Game Of You, by Neil Gaiman
Sandman VI: Fables & Reflections, by Neil Gaiman
Sandman VII: Brief Lives, by Neil Gaiman
Sandman VIII: World’s End, by Neil Gaiman
Sandman IX: The Kindly Ones, by Neil Gaiman
Sandman X: The Wake, by Neil Gaiman

3,500 pages
2/13 by women
none by PoC.

I reread Paladin of Souls last year and am very happy to make it my book of the month in retrospect. You can get it here.

The one I really wouldn’t recommend is the Celtic Misht novel Carolan’s Concerto, but you can get it here.

Back in 2019-23, I revisited each of the months that I’ve been bookblogging since November 2003, in anticipation of the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging. I’m going to do the same now for the tweenty-fifth anniversary in November 2028, this time spacing the monthly updates at three or four day intervals. Also since my first go started on Livejournal and moved to WordPress only in March 2022 when I abandoned LJ, it means I can tidy up the internal links and have the definitive versions all in one place.

November 2003 was politically momentous – there were elections in Northern Ireland and Croatia, a major political crisis in Moldova, and an election followed by a revolution in Georgia, all of which affected my work, though we were able to publish a report on Mostar. I also attended a conference in Vienna with my American intern B, who now works in IT in Arizona. He left halfway through the month and was replaced by a Croatian journalist, S, who I last heard of back in Zagreb working as a press officer for an international organisation.

At home, we took the kids to a snoezelruimte, which the older two both enjoyed. (B was six and F was four.)

For me (aged 36) and U (eleven months) it was a bit overwhelming.

I read 8 books that month.

Non-fiction 1
Why is Sex Fun? by Jared Diamond

SF 6
American Gods, by Neil Gaiman
City of Saints and Madmen, by Jeff VanderMeer
Floater, by Lucius Shepard
Double Star, by Robert Heinlein
The Separation, by Christopher Priest
Ersatz Nation, by Tim Kenyon

Comics 1
Sandman IV: Season of Mists, by Neil Gaiman

2,300 pages
8/8 by white men.

The one I wrote least about at the time, but that on reflection I think is definitely the best of them, is The Separation, Christopher Priest’s story of dual identites, overlapping histories and alternate timelines for the second world war. I’ll return to it in due course, as it won both the Clarke and BSFA Awards. You can get it here. (I always felt that American Gods was interesting but flawed; you can get it here.)

The book I would not recommend is Ersatz Nation, a poorly written and jumbled narrative.