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.

The month started on a high note with the accession of Croatia to the EU, something I had helped with a bit (though many others did more).

Otherwise work continued to be pretty wretched. I did not travel outside Belgium, though did have some nice gatherings; here are my two (then) favourite foreign ministers, Natalia Gherman of Moldova and Maia Panjikidze of Georgia, sharing a panel:

I held one of my regular gatherings of current and former interns (Colombian L, Estonian L, Belarusian M, Anglo-American M, and Belarusian N, who I am due to have lunch with on Thursday; picture taken by ):

South Sudan invited me to their independence day party:

Preparations for the 2014 Worldcon continued apace. Albert II, the King of the Belgians, abdicated and was replaced by his son, Philippe. My brake cables were chewed by beech martens.

I read 24 books that month.

Non-fiction 3 (YTD 22)
A Room of One's Own, by Virginia Woolf
Shakespeare's Handwriting: A Study, by Edward Maunde Thompson
Katherine Swynford: The History of a Medieval Mistress, by Jeannette Lucraft

Fiction (non-sf) 9 (YTD 23)
The Complete Stories of Zora Neale Hurston
Dead Souls, by Nikolai Gogol
Desert, by J.M.G. Le Clézio
Confessions of Zeno, by Italo Svevo
The Last Empress, by Anchee Min
And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie
Spend Game, by Jonathan Gash
Murder on the Orient Express, by Agatha Christie
The Pickwick Papers, by Charles Dickens

SF (non-Who) 4 (YTD 39)
The Jagged Orbit, by John Brunner
Fantastic Voyage, by Isaac Asimov
Kiss of the Butterfly, by James Lyon
Mockingjay, by Suzanne Collins

Doctor Who 5 (YTD 37, 45 counting non-fiction and comics)
Harvest of Time, by Alastair Reynolds
The Also People, by Ben Aaronovitch
Vanishing Point, by Steve Cole
Plague of the Cybermen, by Justin Richards
The Ripple Effect, by Malorie Blackman

Comics 3 (YTD 19)
Misschien, by Kristof Spaey and Marc Legendre
Nooit, by Kristof Spaey and Marc Legendre
Ooit, by Kristof Spaey and Marc Legendre

~6,600 pages (YTD 37,100)
8/24 (YTD 38/141) by women (Woolf, Lucraft, Hurston, Min, Christiex2, Collins, Blackman)
3/24 (YTD 7/141) by PoC (Hurston, Min, Blackman)

The best of these was A Room of One's Own, by Virginia Woolf, which you can get here, closely followed by what were then the Complete Stories of Zora Neale Hurston (since supplemented), which you can get here. Nothing particularly awful.