This is the latest post in a series I started last year, 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 seem to have spent most of July 2009 working with no travel, which explains why I managed to read 34 books in the course of my lengthy daily commute. I wrote a post about Big Finish, ten years on (now it's 21!) and on versions of "Улетай на крыльяхь вҍтра". On the last day of the month we set off for our annual break in Northern Ireland via relatives in England.

Non-fiction 10 (YTD 55)
A History of Modern Sudan, by Robert O. Collins
The Root Causes of Sudan's Civil Wars, by Douglas H. Johnson
Emma's War, by Deborah Scroggins
Queen Elizabeth I, by J.E. Neale (did not finish)
The Lost Heart of Asia, by Colin Thubron
Dalek I Loved You, by Nick Griffiths
How to Make School Make Sense, by Clare Lawrence
The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts, by Maxine Hong Kingston
Veeps, by Bill Kelter and Wayne Shellabarger
Doctor Who: The Writer's Tale, by Russell T Davies and Benjamin Cook

Non-genre 4 (YTD 31)
Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck
Far From the Madding Crowd, by Thomas Hardy
Chronicle in Stone, by Ismail Kadarë
The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway

SF 7 (YTF 50)
Malpertuis, by Jean Ray
So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy, eds Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert A. Heinlein
Misspent Youth, by Peter F. Hamilton
Making Money, by Terry Pratchett
The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri

Doctor Who 11 (YTD 27)
Torchwood: The Sin Eaters, by Brian Minchin
Doctor Who Files 1: The Doctor, by Jacqueline Rayner with a story by Stephen Cole
Doctor Who Files 2: Rose, by Jacqueline Rayner
Doctor Who Files 3: The Slitheen, by Jacqueline Rayner
Doctor Who Files 4: The Sycorax, by Jacqueline Rayner with a story by Stephen Cole
The Price of Paradise, by Colin Brake
Turlough and the Earthlink Dilemma, by Tony Attwood
Downtime, by Marc Platt
Verdigris, by Paul Magrs
The Plotters, by Gareth Roberts (did not finish)
Torchwood: Hidden, by Stephen Savile

Comics 2 (YTD 18)
Fables vol 5: The Mean Seasons, by Bill Willingham
Shattered Visage [The Prisoner], by Dean Motter and Mark Askwith

Total page count ~8,500 (YTD 56,600)
8 (YTD 42/199) by women (Scroggins, Lawrence, Kingston, Hopkinson/Mehan, 4 x Rayner)
2 (YTD 13/199) by PoC (Kingston, Hopkinson/Mehan)

Top books this month were Emma's War, about a young Englishwoman who became involved in the Sudanese civil war in the 1990s, which you can get here, and The Writer's Tale, a comprehensive account of the writing of the fourth series of New Who, whose updated and even better edition you can get here. You can avoid The Plotters, a Doctor Who novel set around the Gunpoweder Plot in 1605, full of historical mistakes, though if you want you can get it here.