This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging which will fall in 2023 Every six-ish days, I've been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I've found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia. Today we reach exactly the half-way point – 120 posts down, 120 to go.

The month started with a rather grim work trip to Barcelona, featured a more pleasant but intense trip to the European Parliament in Strasbourg in the middle and ended with a Worldcon planning meeting in London, which I ducked out of for an afternoon to visit my dying aunt in hospital. Here's the Worldcon Committee at work.

I read 33 books that month.

Non-fiction 5 (YTD 40)
A Book of Silence, by Sarah Maitland
Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, by Mary Roach
The Girl: A Life in the Shadow of Roman Polanski, by Samantha Geimer
The History of the Hobbit vol 2: Return to Bag-End, by John Rateliff
The Last Mughal, by William Dalrymple

Fiction (non-sf) 3 (YTF 37)
The House of the Seven Gables, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Far Side Of The World, by Patrick O'Brian
The Flood, by Ian Rankin

SF (non-Who) 6 (YTD 55)
The Subtle Knife, by Philip Pullman
Conjure Wife, by Fritz Leiber
Returning My Sister's Face, And Other Far Eastern Tales of Whimsy and Malice, by Eugie Foster
Mortal Clay, Stone Heart and Other Stories in Shades of Black and White, by Eugie Foster
Odd and the Frost Giants, by Neil Gaiman
Equal Rites, by Terry Pratchett

Doctor Who, etc 15 (YTD 62, 73 including non-fiction and comics)
Catastrophea, by Terrance Dicks
Warchild, by Andrew Cartmel
The Slow Empire, by Dave Stone
The Mystery of the Haunted Cottage, by David Landy
Invasion of the Bane, by Terrance Dicks
Revenge of the Slitheen, by Rupert Laight
Eye of the Gorgon, by Phil Ford
Warriors of Kudlak, by Gary Russell
Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane?, by Rupert Laight
The Lost Boy, by Gary Russell
The Last Sontaran, by Gary Russell
Day of the Clown, by Phil Ford
The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith, by Gareth Roberts
The Nightmare Man, by Joseph Lidster
Death of the Doctor, by Gary Russell

Comics 4 (YTD 28)
De Sigaren van de Farao [Cigars of the Pharaoh], by Hergé
De Blauwe Lotus [The Blue Lotus] by Hergé
De Zwarte Rotsen [The Black Island], by Hergé
Fables Vol. 17: Inherit the Wind, by Bill Willingham

~6,900 pages (YTD 56,800)
5/33 (YTD 63/224) by women (Geimer, Ropach, Maitland, 2x Foster)
2/33 (YTF 10/224) by PoC (2x Foster)

The best of these was William Dalrymple's The Last Mughal, which you can get here, and the worst Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables, which you can get here.