From the Heart of Europe

• Thu, 12:56: RT @harriet1marsden: Ok Twitter, you’ve somehow tricked the person you fancy into coming over right before lockdown. You are now in enforce…
• Thu, 18:06: Thursday reading https://t.co/y4ieGzWr45
• Thu, 19:37: #LockdowninOudHeverlee 1: St Anne's Church https://t.co/He54CnQMEQ via @YouTube
• Fri, 10:21: RT @sammystritch: Queen Margrethe making a dachshund hat is the quarantine vibe we all need right now. https://t.co/vxMILbO7U3

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).
Books I read in August 2005:

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 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.