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.

My exciting work travel this month was to a conference in Dubrivnik, made rather more exciting when I got trapped by a snowstorm in Munich with the Wall Street Journal correspondent and got home a day late. (He took the train the next day, I waited until I could fly, and my luggage took several more days to come home.) I did get a couple of decent pics of Dubrovnik:

and did a bit more photography closer to home:

Medically, I had an exciting skin allergy test stretching over several days, and as a result I now avoid nickel, iodine, cocamidopropyl betaine (a big cosmetics ingredient) and parabens (likewise).

The month finished with a reception hosted by Peter Robinson and Martin McGuinness as First Minister and Deputy First Minster of Northern Ireland, at which Robinson startled me by quipping that life as a Tottenham Hotspurs supporter could be summed up with a slogan familiar to McGuinness, "Tiocfaidh ár lá!"

I was also doing a New Who rewatch which cut into my reading time, so managed only 16 books that month:

Non-fiction 5
The Doctor's Monsters, by Graham Sleight
Making Ireland English, by Jane Ohlmeyer
Challenges for EU foreign policy in 2013, ed. Giovanni Grevi and Daniel Keohane
TARDIS Eruditorum – An Unauthorized Critical History of Doctor Who, Volume 2: Patrick Troughton by Philip Sandifer
Chicks Unravel Time, ed. Deborah Stanish and L.M. Myles

fiction (non-sf) 1
Faces in the Pool, by Jonathan Gash

sf (non-Who) 3
The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins
Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
Jack Glass by Adam Roberts

Doctor Who 6 (9 counting non-fiction)
The Indestructible Man, by Simon Messingham
Human Nature, by Paul Cornell
Casualties of War by Steve Emmerson
Step Back in Time: Extra Time, by Richard Dungworth
Step Back in Time: The Water Thief, by Jacqueline Rayner
A Big Hand for the Doctor, by Eoin Colfer

Comics 1
The Hive, by Charles Burns

~4,200 pages
4/16 by women (Ohlmeyer, Stanish/Myles, Collins, Rayner)
0/16 by PoC

I most enjoyed two of the Doctor Who reference books, The Doctor's Monsters which you can get here and TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 2 which you can get here. Wooden spoon to another Doctor Who book, Eoin Colfer's standalone short story, which you can get here.