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.
This was the month that I agreed to become Division Head for promotions for the 2014 Worldcon in London. I had never held a position of responsibility in a science fiction convention before. More on this as the months go by. This conversation took place at my first Eastercon at Heathrow, which will be remembered by many for the bizarre presentation at the BSFA Award ceremony… But otherwise it was great fun and the Guardian wrote it up.
I also wrote about our family:
And had a crazy visit to Strasbourg with the Georgians.
I turned 45; my intern, Colombian L, also a Doctor Who fan and a keen baker, presented me with a very welcome present.
And we had an exciting encounter with frogs.
I read only 15 books that month.
Non-fiction 2 (YTD 16)
A History of God, by Karen Armstrong
The Empire Stops Here, by Philip Parker
Fiction (non-sf) 3 (YTD 11)
Washington Square, by Henry James
The Idiot, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Great Wall of China, by Franz Kafka
sf (non-Who) 4 (YTD 25)
Rule 34, by Charles Stross
The Godmother's Apprentice, by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough
Among Others, by Jo Walton
The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde (c'mon, it's got a magical portrait – of course it's fantasy)
Doctor Who 4 (YTD 28)
Paradox Lost, by George Mann
Doctor Who: Shada, by Douglas Adams and Gareth Roberts
First Frontier, by David McIntee
Parallel 59, by Natalie Dallaire and Stephen Cole
Comics 1 (YTD 3)
X'ed Out, by Charles Burns
Running totals:
~4,500 pages (YTD 25,100)
4/14 (YTD 20/83) by women (Armstrong, Scarborough, Walton, Dallaire)
0/14 (YTD 1/83) by PoC
Best of the new reads this month were Jo Walton's Among Others (which went on to win Hugo and Nebula), which you can get here, and, from an earlier period, Henry James' Washington Square, which you can get here. Bounced off George Mann's Doctor Who novel Paradox Lost, which you can get here.
For me it was Midsummer Night’s Dream. I don’t even remember quite why, but I was talking about it with my mum and she dug out her Complete Works and I read my way through it.
I studied R&J repeatedly at secondary school (I think 3 times in 4 years!), which left me hating it, until Baz Lurhman’s film came along and made me like it again.
Charles’s primary school class did a load of work on Shakespeare before Easter, and we ended up having a long conversation about the plays last weekend. This led to me digging out the set of simplified-for-children books I picked up at the charity shop a couple of years ago.