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.

I started August by inspecting the sculpture too scandalous to see in Brussels. We spent the second half of the month in Northern Ireland, where we did a particularly lovely trip to County Tyrone:

While in Northern Ireland I completed my rewatch of twentieth century Doctor Who.

Over the 31 days of the month I read 31 books:

non-fiction 11 (YTD 46)
Full House, by Stephen Jay Gould
The Plot Against Pepys, by James Long and Ben Long
Primate Robinson, 1709-94, by A.P.W. Malcolmson
The End of the Peer Show? ed. Alexandra Fitzpatrick
A Reader's Companion to A Civil Campaign, edited by Nikohl K. & John Lennard
Science & Technology in 19th-Century Ireland, ed Juliana Adelman & Éadaoin Agnew
Granuaile: Grace O'Malley – Ireland's Pirate Queen, by Anne Chambers
Early Christian Lives, ed. Carolinne White
George Herbert, Priest and Poet, by Kenneth Mason
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy: A Practical Guide, by Elaine Iljon Foreman and Clair Pollard
Neurolinguistic Programming: A Practical Guide, by Neil Shah

fiction (non-sf) 7 (YTD 35)
Niccolò Rising, by Dorothy Dunnett
Tales from Shakespeare, by Charles and Mary Lamb
The Broad Highway, by Jeffrey Farnol
Old Goriot, by Honoré de Balzac
The Collector of Treasures, by Bessie Head
The Naming of the Dead, by Ian Rankin
Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe

sf (non-Who) 6 (YTD 49)
Western Shore, by Juliet E. McKenna
Last Call, by Tim Powers
Timescape, by Gregory Benford
Jewels of the Sun, by Nora Roberts (barely qualified as sf due to having two friendly ghosts)
The Second Interzone Anthology, ed. John Clute
The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood

Doctor Who / Torchwood 5 (YTD 54)
Another Life, by Peter Anghelides
Lords of the Storm, by David N. McIntee
No Future, by Paul Cornell
Dominion, by Nick Walters
Trace Memory, by David Llewellyn

Comics 2 (YTD 19)
Mourir à Creys-Malville, by Santi-Bucquoy
Lichaamstaal Wordt Banaal /When Body Language Goes Bad, by Scott Adams

~8,400 pages (YTD ~58,100)
13/31 (YTD 41/203) by women (Fitzpatrick, Nikohl K, Adelman/Agnew, Chambers, White, Foreman/Pollard, Dunnett, Lamb, Head, Stowe, McKenna, Roberts, Atwood)
2/31 (YTD 11/203) by PoC (Shah, Head)

The best of these were The Handmaid's Tale (a reread of course), which you can get here, and the Reader's Companion to A Civil Campaign by Lois McMaster Bujold, which you can get here, but I'm also going to give a shout to Paul Cornell's Doctor Who novel No Future, with its references to 1970s pop culture, which you can get here. I totally bounced off Jewels of the Sun, by Nora Roberts, which you can get here.