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.

At work, my Swedish intern L left and was replaced by another L, this time English. Swedish L has gone on to a career in international affairs, and announced her first pregnancy a couple of weeks ago. Work otherwise continued to be grim. My only trip that month was to London for a Worldcon planning meeting, with the evening of the 28th seeing the start of the Jonathan Ross debacle, probably the worst media storm any Worldcon has ever had to face.

Here's B at the ruined church that she loves in Tienen:

I read 19 books that month:

Non-fiction 5 (YTD 9)

Double Down, by Mark Halperin and John Heileman
Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels, by Damien Broderick and Paul di Filippo
Jane Austen, by Claire Tomalin
The Kindness of Strangers, by Kate Adie
The Unfolding Of Language, by Guy Deutscher

Fiction (non-sf) 2 (YTD 6)
Empire of the Sun, by J.G. Ballard
The Snowman, by Jo Nesbø

SF (non-Who) 6 (YTD 12)
Crowe's Requiem, by Mike McCormack
God's War, by Kameron Hurley
The Shining, by Stephen King
Evening's Empires, by Paul McAuley
Ack-Ack Macaque, by Gareth L. Powell
The Adjacent, by Christopher Priest

Doctor Who 6 (YTD 11)
Speed of Flight, by Paul Leonard
GodEngine, by Craig Hinton
The Adventuress of Henrietta Street, by Lawrence Miles
The Forever Trap, by Dan Abnett
Into the Nowhere, by Jenny Colgan
Keeping Up With the Joneses, by Nick Harkaway

6,300 pages (YTD 12,800)
4/19 (YTD 13/40) by women (Tomalin, Adie, Hurley, Colgan)
0/19 (YTD 1/40) by PoC

The best of these were J.G. Ballard's Empire of the Sun, which you can get here, and Claire Tomalin's Jane Austen, which you can get here. None particularly awful.