6) Blowing My Cover: My Life As A CIA Spy, and other misadventures, by Lindsay Moran

This book has been getting a certain amount of attention in the Balkans, as I have noted a couple of times previously. It's not really worth it. Lindsay Moran was a woman who made a bad career choice, took a few years to realise it was a bad career choice, and eventually realised that it was indeed a bad career choice. The book is about a) the weird training that CIA recruits go through; b) her gradual realisation that this life was not for her; c) her Bulgarian boyfriends until she met the Man Of Her Dreams; and d) the actual work of a CIA agent.

She spent the main part of her operational career in the field in Macedonia, a country I know and love. Lindsay Moran does not love Macedonia, and to be honest although there are good friends of mine who share her attitude I find her ungenerous assessment of the Macedonians one of the biggest flaws in the book. The only part of her field experience that I actually recognised was her description of a seedy hotel in Vienna from which I once updated this journal; none of the Macedonian bits particularly matched my own experience.

But it's entertainingly written - I suspect that it may be better than The Accidental Diplomat which was quite the coffee-table hit in Dublin a couple of years ago. Certainly people who are thinking of working for the intelligence services should read it to see if they are put off. And the rest of us can read it for amusement.

( long list )

I suspect that means I can't buy anything more until Easter. But Easter is early this year...

See the 12 February issue of the Tablet, an ultra-Catholic British weekly magazine, for a fascinating article about the Christian sub-texts of Buffy. Good for them in publishing something that will make many of their traditional readership sit up in surprise. By Gavin White, described here as a "former lecturer in church history at Glasgow University". I wonder what he is doing now?