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 ( Read more... )

I've been bookblogging since November 2003, and will reach the twenty-year mark about four years from now. So I'm going to try and do some retrospective posts, every six or seven days, starting today, looking at the books I read each month a while back with also some reflections on what was going on for me in each month ( Read more... )

12) Gateway by Frederik Pohl. As good as I remembered it as being. Wrote full review for my website.

13) Eats Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss. An occasionally entertaining rant against contemporary (lack of) punctuation. I think it's all a bit exaggerated myself; language is dynamic, not static, and I doubt that the level of literacy in general ( Read more... )

9, 10 and 11) World's End, The Kindly Ones and The Wake by Neil Gaiman (Sandman vols 8-10). Excellent stuff. I still think Brief Lives is the best of them, but this is all very effective writing. Now to go back to the beginning and see what I missed ( Read more... )

6) Fables & Reflections by Neil Gaiman (Sandman vol 6) - thought-provoking as always, but a bit episodic.

7) The Music of the Primes: Searching to Solve the Greatest Mystery in Mathematics, by Marcus du Sautoy - interesting story of the humans behind the maths, but I would actually have liked more equations. My brother almost got mentioned twice ( ( Read more... )

5) Carolan's Concerto by Caiseal Mór. At first I wondered where the fantasy element was, but after a while it became clear, and I don't mean the Fairies...

4) After London by Richard Jeffries

I've been racing through this on my Palm (whole text is also online) leaving behind several other books I had previously started. This is often described as the first ever post-apocalyptic book, published in 1885; some unspecified disaster has overcome civilisation, much of England is flooded and has become a ( Read more... )

3) Paladin of Souls, Lois McMaster Bujold

I had a slow start this morning, thanks to the Brussels branch of the Liberal Democrats' Christmas party last night, and aided the waking process by finishing off Bujold's latest. This is her third fantasy, stepping away from the superb Vorkosigan space operas, a sequel to The Curse of Chalion. Richly ( Read more... )

1) A Game Of You, by Neil Gaiman (Sandman Vol 5) - excellent. I am beginning to wonder, though, whether I should go back and read it all again from the beginning now, or wait until I have bought one or two more?

2) The Myth of Greater Albania, by Paulin Kola - Not a bad historical account of Albania's policies towards Kosovo in the twentieth ( Read more... )

8) Ersatz Nation by Tim Kenyon. Another one of the ones sent me for review by Infinity Plus but I think I need to rant here about it before writing something more sober. The main character's lover gets kidnapped by the villains at some point we don't hear about and gets rescued at the end. The other main character is estranged from his wife at the ( Read more... )