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.
We had no idea what was coming in that fateful month of January 2020. I went to London for work in the first week; went to the first Glasgow 2024 planning weekend in the middle of the month…
and also went to Rome again, where I caught the Castel Sant’Angelo across the bridge.
And the UK left the EU. I was still angry. And I still am.
Non-fiction: 6
Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain, by Charlotte Higgins
Roots and Wings: Ten Lessons of Motherhood that Helped Me Create and Run a Company, by Margery Kraus
Backstop Land, by Glenn Patterson
About Writing, by Gareth L. Powell
The Lost Worlds of 2001, by Arthur C. Clarke (in fact this is mostly SF but the non-fiction framing is key)
In Praise of Disobedience: The Soul of Man Under Socialism and Other Writings, by Oscar Wilde (mostly non-fiction but includes several fantasy stories)
sf (non-Who): 17
Exhalation, by Ted Chiang
Seraphina, by Rachel Hartman
Land of Terror, by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Demon in Leuven, by Guido Eekhaut
“Home is the Hangman”, by Roger Zelazny
The Last Days of New Paris, by China Mieville
Miss Shumway Waves a Wand, by James Hadley Chase
Distaff: A Science Fiction Anthology by Female Authors, eds. Rosie Oliver & Sam Primeau
Sirius, by Olaf Stapledon
The Raven Tower, by Ann Leckie
Once Upon a Parsec: The Book of Alien Fairy Tales, ed. David Gullen
The Testaments, by Margaret Atwood
This Is How You Lose The Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
2001: A Space Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke
The True Queen, by Zen Cho
To Be Taught, If Fortunate, by Becky Chambers
The Ten Thousand Doors of January, by Alix E. Harrow
Doctor Who: 2
Doctor Who and the Giant Robot, by Terrance Dicks
Doctor Who and the Ark in Space, by Ian Marter
Comics: 4
Auguria, Tome 1: Ecce signum, by Peter Nuyten
Auguria, Tome 2: Gaeso dux, by Peter Nuyten
Auguria, Tome 3: Fatum, by Peter Nuyten
As Time Goes By, by Joshua Hale Fialkov and Matthew Dow Smith
7,500 pages
10/32 by women (Higgins, Kraus, Kingsolver, Hartman, Oliver/Primeau, Leckie, Atwood, El-Mohtar, Cho, Chambers)
2/32 by PoC (El-Mohtar, Cho)
Three here that I really enjoyed, The Testaments by Margaret Atwood (get it here), Exhalation by Ted Chiang (get it here) and Sirius by Olaf Stapledon (get it here). But you need not bother with Land of Terror by Edgar Rice Burroughs (if you do, you can get it here).