Although this was a year of numerous big elections around the world, I missed all the opportunities to share my regular election-themed posts about the importance of voting. This one isn’t about that either (although it is important, go vote if you haven’t yet!), but something that happened to me last weekend on Instagram. First of all, I barely ever comment on social media, not even on friends’ posts, I intentionally avoid those posts that invite a flood of comments. If I do comment sometimes, I mostly reply to matter-of-factly questions instead of sharing opinions. This time I also thought…
I planned to do this monthly, but again I was busy with everything else, so this is a recap of the first two months’ reading. Before we get to reading, book lovers, have you been following The Queen’s Reading Room on Instagram? Yes, we’re talking about that Queen, I don’t know why everybody’s so surprised that she has a book club. Anyway, I’ve been following it for years, and a few weeks ago they even started a podcast. They talk to authors about their favorite books and love of reading. I enjoyed every episode so far, even when I didn’t…
I never make New Year’s (or any kind of) resolutions, but I love to plan out the year ahead every year, and I have different methods to do that. I don’t really like New Year’s as an arbitrary date to start new things, because my principle is that when you really need to change something, why wait even for the next day? Start right now, no matter what day it is. But as a huge planner and goal-setter I like setting goals for different periods of time and the start of a new year is a great opportunity to review…
This is another post that was supposed to go out before the end of the year, but remained unpublished. Although you might be over 2023 things by now (I know I am), I decided not to discard this. I was having fun writing it during the holidays, and I hope you’ll have fun reading it. 1. Reading 45 books Well, reading in general, really. I set a goal on Goodreads every year, this year it was 35 books to read. It surprised me how well I did, because I wasn’t just busy studying the first half of the year, but…
Eventually, I have read 45 books in 2023, here’s the third part of the list. You can find the first part of this review here and the second part here. I am a bit late with the third part of my 2023 book review, because I got a bit busy during the last days of last year, but most of it was already done, I just had to finish the post. I hope you can find something among the titles that you find interesting, generally, I liked everything I’ve read in 2023. Another non-fiction in the second half of the…
I’m still on track to read 45 books in 2023, and in these posts I am sharing what they were and how I liked them. I posted about the first 15 books I’ve read this year in this post. At the time of publishing this one after Christmas, I am one and two half books (yes, two halves) closer to achieving my goal. But again, my initial goal was 35, so I’m already over achieved. Since I was studying at a post-graduate course in the first half of the year, I read significantly less during that time, that means I’ve…
If all goes well I will finish 2023 with 45 books read and here’s a list and a short review of them all. Everybody is posting their end of the year reviews around this time, this year it seems there is no overlap between my list and President Obama’s, but I’ve also read some great books. This one goes up before Christmas, when hopefully I will add many more pages, although unfortunately in Hungary we don’t celebrate Christmas like the Icelanders, where they spend Christmas reading. After listening to this podcast episode recently, I was ready to make arrangements to…
There’s a lot going on in the world these days. I haven’t really got back to regular blogging and sharing stuff, but I feel these past few weeks (months?) deserve a summary. Well first of all, this year clearly deserves to be labeled as one of my worsts. It haven’t started out as one, just the opposite, I made a career decision last year that I felt really good about and I was working towards it. Then this year I got talked into changing course, and it felt like just a slight detour at the time, because I made a…
Come mid-September and the annual high level week at the UN General Assembly, I used to be glued to the TV or some other device on hand where I could follow the speeches. Unfortunately these days I don’t have that kind of time on any random September afternoon (I’m on CET), so I couldn’t follow everything that was happening real time, but I was still very interested in the outcomes of those high level meetings. Besides the UN webservice and the still very active international community Twitter (sorry, I can’t call it anything else), I followed the happenings of the…
I have read Tim Marshall’s first book about geopolitics, Prisoners of Geography a few years ago, this one picks up where that left off with new maps to explore and topics just as intriguing. Geopolitics and the international order might be one of my top five favorite topics to read and talk about, so it’s no surprise I love Tim Marshall’s writings. His Prisoners of Geography was a world-wide best seller, it contained ten chapters, that is ten maps of somewhere in the world starting with a brief history, then detailing all the geopolitical context down to recent day politics….
