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.
With pandemic numbers decreasing, I had my first post-COVID trip to the United States, visiting Gallifrey One again in Los Angeles, as I had done just before the plague struck two years before, and staying with one of my oldest friends in Seattle; also doing tourism and catching up with various cousins, some of whom I had never met before.
In the wider world, Russia brutally invaded Ukraine, and I started the necessary steps to transfer this humble blog from Russian-owned Livejournal to its present home.
I also visited Gent with F to see two more stucco ceilings, though I now think that one of them is not after all by Jan Christiaan Hansche (and I was not allowed to photograph the other):
And I explored the religious views of my great-great-grandfather.
And for the time being, I kept up my ten-day plague posts.
I read 20 books that month.
Non-fiction 5 (YTD 16)
Roger Zelazny, by F. Brett Cox
Duran Duran: The First Four Years of the Fab Five by Neil Gaiman
The Evil of the Daleks, by Simon Guerrier
Pyramids of Mars, by Kate Orman
Lost in Translation, by Ella Frances Sanders
Non-genre 1 (YTD 7)
The Postmistress, by Sarah Blake
SF 8 (YTD 15)
Howl’s Moving Castle, by Diana Wynne Jones
Indigo, by Clemens J. Setz
The War in the Air, by H. G. Wells
Chaos on CatNet, by Naomi Kritzer
Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir
Fireheart Tiger, by Aliette de Bodard
After Atlas, by Emma Newman
84K, by Claire North
Doctor Who 5 (YTD 8)
The [Unofficial] Dr Who Annual [1965], by David May
The Flaming Soldier, by Christopher Bryant
The Dreamer’s Lament, by Benjamin Burford-Jones
Doctor Who: The Evil of the Daleks, by John Peel
Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars, by Terrance Dicks
Comics 1 (YTD 2)
Scherven, by Erik de Graaf
5,000 pages (YTD 12,300 pages)
8/20 (YTD 14/48) by women (Orman, Sanders, Blake, Jones, Kritzer, de Bodard, Newman, North)
1/20 (YTD 7/48) by PoC (de Bodard)
To be brief: I loved Aliette de Bodard’s Fireheart Tiger, which you can get here; I found The Dreamer’s Lament the worst so far of the Lethbridge-Stewart books, but you can get it here.