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 month I went to the Political Studies Association conference in Bath to do a panel debate on Europe, and travelled back to London talking to the journalist Tim Sebastian, which was fun.
In family news, my brother and his wife welcomed their new daughter. Also I turned 40, but I don’t seem to have done much in the way of celebration; B’s behaviour at home was getting very difficult, and we just didn’t have the energy.
5,900 pages (YTD 24,700) 2/21 by women (YTD 19/80) none by PoC (YTD 2/80)
Best of the month: Tolkien’s Children of Húrin, which you can get here, and Saramago’s Blindness, which you can get here. Worst by far: Fawcett Boom’s pointless guide to After Dinner Speaking, 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.
The Northern Ireland Assembly had an election in March 2007, the last one for which I did not do TV commentary, though I went over a few days later in the wake of P-Con and delivered a lecture about voting.
Apart from that, I had a day-trip to the Hague, and a longer trip to Vienna and Prishtina, all for work.
And I hired my first intern in the new job. J was an intelligent young woman who had tried various career options which didn’t work out, and was prepared to give working in international politics a fling. I’m glad to say that she caught the bug and is now a British diplomat. It also turned out that her elder brother was friends with their neighbour Rebecca Nation, the daughter of Terry Nation who wrote a lovely book for her, and J had played with real Daleks as a child. (For certain values of “real”.) I met Rebecca and Joel Nation earlier this year, and they were amused by the connection.
4,000 pages (YTD 18,400) 5/14 by women (YTD 17/59) None by PoC (YTD 2/59)
The two best of these were the excellent graphic novel Blankets, which you can get here, and Shapiro’s look at Shakespeare in 1599, which you can get here. I do not particularly recommend the novelisation of problematic Doctor Who story The Celestial Toymaker, but you can get it here anyway (at a price).
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 2007 was the historic month that I joined Facebook. The travel highlight was a trip to the USA, taking in New York and Washington DC as usual, and finishing in very snowy Rockport, Maine, where I spoke at the annual Camden Conference.
Also more Doctor Who fan art from young F, this time a crossover with Spongebob – what if he partly changed his house into the Tardis?
Transatlantic travel and uninterrupted commuting by train allowed me to read 24 books:
7,900 pages (YTD 14,400) 8/24 (YTD 12/45) by women 1/24 (YTD 2/45) by PoC
The best of these was Julie Phillips’ biography of James Tiptree Jr / Alice B. Sheldon (get it here), though I also liked Elizabeth Bear’s Carnival (get it here) and About Time 4 (get it here) very much. I really hated The Catcher in the Rye (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.
Momentous times as I started my new job and new office. My first visitor was former Labour MP Dick Leonard. I travelled to London in the first week of January to meet new colleagues, and to Kosovo and Cyprus later in the month for business. Despite only just starting one new job, I interviewed for another when a long-dormant application came to life; I did not get it. I also had the miserable experience of having a laptop stolen at the Gare du Nord in Brussels.
Young F delighted us with this piece of fan art.
Now that I had started commuting largely by train, my reading rate shot up and I read 21 books in January 2007:
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 final Crisis Group publication was a briefing on Kosovo. In my four years and eight months there, I had overseen the publication of 46 reports, 16 briefings and ten op-eds (in the last case, just counting those published under my own name; I was ghost-writer for a few more). Meanwhile I chose my new office, a serviced arrangement on Rond Point Schuman. In Belgium the big news was a hoax TV news programme announcing that Flanders had unilaterally declared independence. Gerald Ford died just after Christmas.
Anne’s sister joined us again for Christmas, which was just as well when one of the household had to be taken to casualty on Christmas Day itself (naming no names). The kids enjoyed themselves, though B’s behaviour was getting more and more difficult to manage:
7,400 pages (YTD 61,600) 4/20 (34/207) by women None (8/207) by PoC
For once I’m going to highlight one book I liked and two I didn’t, rather than the other way around. Norman Porter’s exploration of how to achieve reconciliation in Northern Ireland is very good and a partial recantation of his earlier views; you can get it here. I could not finish either Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee or Zeldin’s An Intimate History of Humanity. You can get them here and here.
2006 books roundup
This was the first year that I did a proper book roundup at the time. Reformatting that post to my current system:
Non-fiction 70 (34% – highest percentage of any year I have on record) Best of 2006: 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; The Breaking of Nations: Order and Chaos in the Twenty-First Century, by Robert Cooper The one you haven’t heard of: Indefensible: One Lawyer’s Journey into the Inferno of American Justice, by David Feige Worst of 2006: An International Relations Debacle: The UN Secretary-General’s Mission of Good Offices in Cyprus 1999-2004, by Claire Palley
SF 68 (33% – same as last year, a bit below average) Best of 2006 (not including rereads): The Wreck of The River of Stars, by Michael Flynn; Thud!, by Terry Pratchett The one you haven’t heard of: Impossible Stories, by Zoran Živković Worst of 2006: Galactic Patrol, by E.E. “Doc” Smith
Non-genre 35 (17% – about average) Best of 2006: The Warden’s Niece by Gillian Avery; The File on H, by Ismail Kadarë. The one you haven’t heard of: A Game With Sharpened Knives, by Neil Belton Worst of 2006: Ivanhoe, by Sir Walter Scott
Doctor Who 28 (14% – this number got bigger after this year) Best of 2006: Evolution, by John Peel; Doctor Who – The Rescue, by Ian Marter Worst of 2006: (The Companions of) Doctor Who – Harry Sullivan’s War, by Ian Marter
Comics 6 (3% – lowest of any year I have on record) Best of 2005: The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation, by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon Worst of 2006: Ghost World, by Daniel Clowes (second year in a row that one of his books occupied this spot)
My second lowest percentage of books by women in all my years of monitoring, and pretty low on writers of colour as well.
Book of the year 2006: 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.
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 mentioned, we started the month with a half-term break at my sister’s in Burgundy. Cluny is a remarkable town with a ruined abbey which dominates the urban landscape.
I moved my personal website to http://www.nicholaswhyte.info – I should start updating it a bit more often… I also visited London for orientation with the new job, and drove to the depths of the Ardennes for my last Crisis Group retreat. We got reports out on Serbia, Kosovo and Georgia, as my time with the organisation wound down.
The month ended dramatically. I had a work trip to Berlin which included, rather unusually, a meeting in the Defence Ministry (normally I end up farther east, between the Bundestag/Kanzleramt and foreign ministry). On my way out I asked the silver-haired colonel who I was meeting about the building’s history. He told me that it had originally been the headquarters of the German Navy from 1911, and was then the territorial army headquarters; and then became the centre of resistance to Hitler within the armed forces, in particular under Claus von Stauffenberg. “So after 20 July 1944, von Stauffenberg was shot in one of the courtyards,” indicating which one with a nod.
That wasn’t the really dramatic part. The really dramatic part was after I landed back in Brussels on an early morning flight and started driving the family car to the office. As I went through the Montgomery tunnel, I felt a sudden KCHUNK, and the car coasted to a halt on the uphill stretch. Phone calls to Touring, long wait while traffic pooled around me in one of the prime choke-points of Brussels suburbia, finally the Touring guy arrived and towed me to a nearby layby, more long wait while he fiddled with the distributor cap before shaking his head in bafflement and calling a pickup truck, more long wait for the pickup truck, which then couldn’t find the garage, probably because its driver was too busy talking to his girlfriend on his mobile phone to look for it properly, and eventually walked from the garage to my office with all my luggage from Berlin. The garage looked at the car for a few days and then confirmed that fixing it would cost more than we had paid for it, so since then I have largely commuted to Brussels by public transport.
In my office, my Macedonian intern E was doing handover to her successor, Belgian S. E has now moved to Budapest where her Belgian husband has a senior academic position. S now lives in Geneva, where he married a Quebecoise; their children’s French must be very interesting to hear. Here’s a picture of the three of us at a conference in the European Parliament where I was speaking that week, E on the left, S on the right and me sitting down. (And a bearded chap, who I don’t recognise, talking to us.)
I managed to read 27 books in November 2006, more than half of which were short Doctor Who books, mostly by Ian Marter.
6,000 pages (YTD 54,200) 1/27 (YTD 30/187) by a woman None (YTD 8/187) by PoC
Robert Cooper’s The Breaking of Nations was the best of these; you can get it here. Close behind is Skeletons on the Zahara, a tale of shipwrecked sailors sold into slavery; you can get it here. Claire Palley’s book on Cyprus is awful, but you can get it here. (I didn’t pay for it – a friend had been gifted a copy and passed it on to me.)
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 personal developments for me in October 2006 were breaking the news of my imminent job change to colleagues and friends, and also finding a daycare place for B, whose behaviour was becoming too difficult for her special school to cope with. We had some diversion also at work when it was rumoured that we might get the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. (We didn’t.) My foreign trips were a rather weird one-day trip to Ankara, Turkey, (the only time I have been there); a much less weird conference in Chişinău, Moldova; and a half-term visit to my sister in Burgundy at the end of the month, taking in the Eiffel Tower en route (inspired by Barnaby Bear). Here’s the view from the top (well, as far as we could get), with F (aged 7) practicing to be a teenager.
Sadly this was also the month that we lost David Stewart, of Irish sf fandom.
As well as enjoying I, Claudius and the first episodes of Torchwood, I read 16 books that month.
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.
September 2006 was a momentous month for me: ploughing through unread emails in Budapest on the evening of the 1st, I found a message from Independent Diplomat, with whom I had been in communication for about eighteen months, inviting my application for the position of director of their not-yet-established Brussels office. I applied, was interviewed later in September, and got offered the job early in October. Apart from my trip to London for the interview, I also went to Washington DC and New York for networking and to Athens for a conference during the month.
6,900 pages (YTD 43,100) 5/22 (YTD 25/144) by women 2/22 (YTD 7/144) by PoC
Two New York tales topped my personal list for the month: my old friend David Feige’s autobiographical account of the American justice system, which you can get here, and the graphic version of the 9/11 Commission report, which you can get here. The worst book of the month was Nebula-winning The Terminal Experiment, which was not quite as bad as I had expected, but my expectations were low; you can get it here.
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 started August 2006, 20 years ago this month, in Northern Ireland as usual, and I attended MeCon 9 in Belfast where the guests included Ian McDonald, Hal Duncan, Ken MacLeod, Leah Moore, and John Reppion. I thought I had pictures from it, but in fact they seem to be from the following year, and I’m not in anyone else’s that I can find. I remember having a lot of fun.
We also had a family excursion to the Legananny Dolmen and the Finnis Souterrain:
A mid-holiday work trip to London was unexpectedly extended by a day when I arrived at Heathrow to get a morning flight back to Belfast, and found myself in the immediate aftermath of the 2006 airport plot. I got the train to Liverpool and the overnight ferry, arriving not quite 24 hours after originally planned.
We published a report on Moldova mid-month (must have been just before I got back, in fact), and I ended the month in Budapest speaking at a conference in the rather splendid parliament building there.
I read 25 books that month – I think a record since I started keeping count. (Exceeded a few times since.)
6,400 pages (YTD 36,200) 6/25 by women (YTD 20/122) None by PoC (YTD 5/122)
Best of these, and the one which still sticks with me, is The Wreck of The River of Stars, by Michael Flynn; you can get it here. I also gave The Healer’s War, by Elizabeth Anne Scarborough, an enthusiastic write-up, but can’t remember as much about it. You can get it here. I found Tropic of Capricorn, by Henry Miller, thoroughly unpleasant, 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.
I was hugely honoured to be present at the Presidential residence in Podgorica on 13 July 2006, 20 years ago this month, the last leg of a trip that had started in Skopje and continued through Prishtina with an exciting journey through the mountains to Montenegro itself. There were perhaps 300 guests. The mood was festive, everyone shaking hands and embracing. The moment eventually came when the guards played a fanfare, and then a young man began to sing the new/old nation’s anthem, joined in the second verse by a young woman, without any other accompaniment, their voices trembling with emotion. For the first time in nine decades, Montenegro was celebrating its traditional independence day as an independent state. They didn’t drop a beat, or miss a note. It was one of the most electrifying things I have ever witnessed. I don’t have photographs, but I was given a souvenir first day cover.
The month started with a family trip to Antwerp to see the Sultan’s Elephant, an extraordinary live action steampunk show. I got a few film shots of the elephant and the little girl in action:
F celebrated his 7th birthday later in the month, and actually had a party, though my contribution was to take B on a long drive to keep her out of the way.
At the end of the month we drove as usual to Northern Ireland (Anne failing to be persuaded of the merits of Fury from the Deep), but made the tough decision to leave B in Belgium under the supervision of my mother-in-law. It actually went all right, but it was a bit sad.
I managed to read 24 books in July 2006, thanks perhaps to several long land-based trips.
The one I enjoyed most was The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson’s classic horror tale, which you can get here. There were a lot of other good ones, and I guess my favourite reread was Fahrenheit 451, which you can get here. I thoroughly bounced off Galactic Patrol, 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.
The big family event of June 2006 was my great-aunt’s 90th birthday. Here she is with her four children (the four on the left, with her sister-in-law) and her eight nieces and nephews, including my mother. I’m glad to say that she had another 17 years ahead of her.
Two of the pictures from my own camera show the guest of honour and the youngest guest, young F, and me with my siblings.
The other family birthday that month was B’s ninth. The big present was a crocodile-shaped water sprinkler, which all three children hugely enjoyed.
Here is a rare video (well, compilation of several short videos) of the three kids together, B just 9, F about to turn 7 and U at 3½:
Apart from that, I see I went to the Tun on 1 June so must have been in London, was in Thessalonica for a meeting with the SEERC later in the month, attended a Wilton Park conference, and seem to have ended the month with a visit to Paris. At work we published a report on the Preševo Valley of Southern Serbia. My Greek intern K was replaced by Macedonian E. (He now works for the European Commission.) And I wrote what turned out to be the last of my mega-meta-reviews of that year’s Hugo finalists. (It wasn’t possible the following year, for reasons which will become clear, and by 2008 other channels had taken over.) This was also the month that I started really getting into the Big Finish Doctor Who audios.
4,700 pages (YTD 23,300) 3/16 by women (YTD 11/73) none by PoC (YTD 3/73)
The two really good ones here are Zoran Živković’s collection of short stories, which you can get here, and Emma Crewe’s anthropological stody of the House of Lords, which you can get here. I found The Triumph of the West pretty pointless, 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.
No Crisis Group papers in April 2006, but I did publish a piece in Interationale Politik in the wake of the failed Dutch and French referenda on the EU’s Constitutional Treaty, advocating the sort of citizen’s assembly, with an element of random selection, that has subsequently been used to great effect in Ireland and which President Macron is now advocating for France and for Europe; I was ahead of my time. You can read it here.
My only trip was to Stockholm, starting on my 39th birthday; as well as attending a conference, I went to the Vasa Museum and the Nobel Prize Museum, both very interesting. We celebrated my birthday at the weekend when I got back, which also was the weekend that the lovely School Reunion episode of Doctor Who was broadcast.
More grimly, one of our neighbours was murdered by her husband, who later took his own life in prison. She had been a stalwart of the annual dorpsfeest, and a bench in the grassy space behind the parochial hall is dedicated to her memory (lovely photo by Ernst Gülcher).
4,900 pages (YTD 15,300) 2/13 by women (YTD 7/42) 1/13 by PoC (YTD 2/42)
The best of these are the two biographies of Alexander Hamilton and Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. They were almost exact contemporaries – they were born two years apart and died two years apart, she soon before her 49th birthday (of natural causes) and he a few months after his (shot dead by the vice-president of the United States).
Neither is mentioned in the other biography, and they would not have ever met (neither ever crossed the Atlantic), but they would have known about each other. John and Abigail Adams certainly knew them both. Abigail was not a fan of either. On 30 September 1785, she wrote of Georgiana,
Amongst the most celebrated of their beauties stands the Duchess of Devonshire, who is masculine in her appearance… [not intended as a positive statement]
and on 28 January 1797, she wrote of Hamilton,
Beware of that spare Cassius, has always occured to me when I have seen that cock sparrow. O I have read his Heart in his wicked Eyes many a time. The very devil is in them. They are lasciviousness itself.
Angelica Schuyler Church (who gets a lot of the good lines in Hamilton the musical) and her husband (a radical English MP) must also surely have known them both on rather better terms – John Church was an ally first of Earl Grey (he of the tea, who was also Georgiana’s lover) and then of Charles
James Fox (who she also strongly supported).
One of Hamilton’s great-granddaughters was a Georgina, but that’s more likely a homage to Washington than Devonshire. (Incidentally it was she who got the famous Emma Lazarus poem, “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses..” inscribed on the Statue of Liberty.) You can get Alexander Hamiton here and Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire here.
None of the other books this month was all that bad but I guess The Moon Pool failed to convince me; 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.
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.
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.
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.
View down the twisty mountain track (the main road to Macedonia from Kosovo was closed by a landslide so we tried driving over the top of the mountains; stupid idea)Another view down the twisty mountain track
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 TravelGuide, 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.
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).
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.
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):
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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):
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.
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.
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.
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.
