This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 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.
Another month when I did not leave Belgium, though I started going to the office regularly again. F, U and I had a particularly interesting excursion to just the other side of the Dijle valley where there are not one but two eleventh-century churches.
I kept up my ten-day updates.
And crucially I got my second vaccination at the end of the month.
My research into family history and genealogy continued: my great-great-uncle who died in the Johnstown Flood, my first cousin three times removed who acrimoniously split up with her boyfriend in 1842, and the baby in the park, my second cousin once removed.
This was also the month that my involvement with the 2021 Worldcon came to an abrupt end, after weeks in which the internal difficulties became ever more apparent. I resigned along with my entire team on 22 June; the Chair of the convention resigned in turn three days later.
I read 25 books that month.
Non-fiction 6 (YTD 22)
China’s Civilian Army: The Making of Wolf Warrior Diplomacy, by Peter Martin
A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler, by Lynell George
Don’t Be Evil: The Case Against Big Tech, by Rana Foroohar
Carrying the Fire, by Michael Collins
Boys in Zinc, by Svetlana Alexievich
The Johnstown Flood, by David McCullagh
Non-genre 3 (YTD 13)
Bridget Jones’s Diary, by Helen Fielding
All Among the Barley, by Melissa Harrison
The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje
Poetry 3
Blind Harry’s Wallace, translated by William Hamilton of Gilbertfield
Beowulf: A New Translation, by Maria Dahvana Headley
Beowulf: A New Translation, by Seamus Heaney
SF 9 (YTD 63)
Upright Women Wanted, by Sarah Gailey
Comic Inferno, by Brian W. Aldiss
The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women, ed. Alex Dally MacFarlane
Roger Zelazny’s The Dawn of Amber: Book 1, by John Gregory Betancourt
“Stories For Men”, by John Kessel
Come Tumbling Down, by Seanan McGuire
Cemetery Boys, by Aiden Thomas
The Monster’s Wife, by Kate Horsley
Light, by M. John Harrison
Comics 4 (YTD 18)
Monstress, vol. 5: Warchild, by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda
Once & Future vol. 1: The King Is Undead, by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora, Tamra Bonvillain, and Ed Dukeshire
Wonder Woman: The Golden Age, Vol. 2 by William Moulton Marston
Parable of the Sower, written by Octavia Butler, adapted by Damian Duffy and John Jennings
6,800 pages (YTD 32,700)
13/25 (YTD 52/123) by non-male writers (George, Foroohar, Alexievich, Fielding, Harrison,Headley, Gailey, MacFarlane, McGuire, Thomas, Horsley, Liu/Takeda, Butler)
6/25 (YTD 24/123) by PoC (George, Foroohar, Ondaatje, Thomas, Liu/Takeda, Butler)
Michael Collins’ Carrying the Fire was tremendously enjoyable and ended up being my book of the year; you can get it here. Also good were David McCullough on the Johnstown Flood, which you can get here, and Heaney’s Beowulf, which you can get here. I tried Light by M. John Harrison again, and bounced off it again; you can get it here.