From the Heart of Europe

• Thu, 12:56: RT @Clnwlsh: The best ending to any writer's interview ever? Paris Review asks Ray Bradbury about the origins of a character named Mr Elec…
• Thu, 18:25: Thoughts from @SirGrahamWatson and @YBertoncini on how the COVID-19 crisis will affect the Brexit process. https://t.co/7hjvk62DsZ
• Thu, 18:38: Thursday reading https://t.co/kwYhAIkkAo
• Thu, 18:45: Thirty days of lockdown https://t.co/vGKoGLmTGo
• Thu, 20:48: A twenty-year professor on starting college this fall: Don’t. https://t.co/yZn0viCkIv Actually a very good point.
• Fri, 07:06: RT @alexstubb: I think the jury is still out on who is going to get out of this with the least damage: China, US or EU. Pace of dive and re…
• Fri, 09:45: Explaining the Pandemic to my Past Self https://t.co/lrvx21octF via @YouTube
• Fri, 10:45: A shaken world demands balanced leadership https://t.co/pKi8cGYS6b Gender-balanced, that is. From @RickZednik @WPLeadersOrg

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. (There was a time when it mattered who the Lib Dem leader was.) 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.

January 2006 books: mostly commuting by car, I did not get through as many books as I sometimes do.

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: Anansi Boys which you can get here (I was startled to discover that Neil Gaiman had come across my review and linked to it), and Year's Best SF 10 which you can get here. Worst: Steppe, which you can get here.