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.
Early in the month, I visited the Hague overnight for work – I cannot now remember why – and unusually we took a couple of days over the England and Wales leg of our family holiday, starting with cousins in Broadstairs (E in the middle has just got into Cambridge; how time flies):
where we made a small pilgrimage:
and went on to visit H in Brighton:
with dinner with cousins in Cardiff, one of them very new:
before an overnight ferry to Ireland.
This was also the month of the fantastic Olympic Games opening ceremony, and although we missed it at the time, I have grown to love it.
I read 28 books that month. For this listing, I have reclassified Sophocles and Whitman into a new Plays and Poetry section, in line with my more recent tallies. Lovejoy has an uncanny ability to tell real antiques from fake, but I am counting him as non-genre; and although I bought the Countdown Annual for its Doctor Who content, 90% of it is about other stuff so I classify it as general sf.
Non-fiction 7 (YTD 35)
Marriage with My Kingdom: The Courtships of Queen Elizabeth I, by Alison Plowden
Elizabeth Regina, by Alison Plowden
The Bible: The Biography, by Karen Armstrong
Incidents in the Life of a Slave-Girl, by Harriet Anne Jacobs
Russian Phoenix: The Story of Russian Christians, 988-1988, by Francis House
The Imprint of Place, by David Becker
Broadstairs: Heydays and Nowadays, by Nick Evans
Fiction (non-sf) 6 (YTD 20)
Tom Jones, by Henry Fielding
The Mermaids Singing, by Lisa Carey
Lucy, by Jamaica Kincaid
The Spring of the Ram, by Dorothy Dunnett
Paid and Loving Eyes, by Jonathan Gash
Last Term at Malory Towers, by Enid Blyton
Plays and poetry 4
Antigone, by Sophocles
Oedipus the Tyrant, by Sophocles
Oedipus at Colonus, by Sophocles
Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman
sf (unless entirely Who) 4 (YTD 43)
The Postscripts BSFA sampler, ed. Peter Crowther
Dracula, by Bram Stoker
Speed of Dark, by Elizabeth Moon
The Countdown Annual (1971)
Doctor Who 6 (YTD 43)
The Fall of Yquatine, by Nick Walters
Code of the Krillitane, by Justin Richards
Risk Assessment, by James Goss
Wonderland, by Mark Chadbourn
Parasite, by Jim Mortimore
Coldheart, by Trevor Baxendale
Comics 1 (YTD 13)
Keys to the Kingdom, by Joe Hill
~7,600 pages (YTD 46,400)
9/28 (YTD 48/158) by women (2x Plowden, Armstrong, Jacobs, Carey, Kincaid, Dunnett, Blyton, Moon)
2/28 (YTD 7/158) by PoC (Jacobs, Kincaid)
Best were Speed of Dark (reread), which you can get herewhich you can get hereSpring of the Ram, which you can get here. Failed to be wowed by most of Leaves of Grass, thought there are some good bits; you can get it here.
There are also 50,000 maps that you can try georeferencing yourself, taken from the million images that the British Library found in a pile of 19th century scanned books.
Here are links to pages of ones still to do:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:British_Library/Mechanical_Curator_collection/georeferencing_status
(Click on one of the purple “to georef” links to get to a page of images)
And corresponding pages of ones that have already been done
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:British_Library/Mechanical_Curator_collection/georeferencing_done
(Click on one of the gold “georef done” links to get to a page of images)