March 2018 books

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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.

As usual a busy month, with two work trips to London and one to Albania; I finished the month in Skopje, on my first ever non-work trip to North Macedonia, dining with my family and my friend Stevo Pendarovski (who is in a different job now). To my delight, when boarding my plane home from Tirana, I saw the planet Mercury for the first time in my life.

They also have public art in Tirana, as my colleague M and I discovered.

I read 25 books that month.

Non-fiction: 8 (YTD 16)
An Outline of the History of Pharmacy in Ireland, by William D. Moore M.B.
A History of the Universe in 100 Objects, by Steve Tribe and James Goss
Iain M. Banks, by Paul Kincaid
So, Anyway…, by John Cleese
The Road to Somewhere, by David Goodhart
After Europe, by Ivan Krastev
Free Radical, by Vince Cable
No Going Back to Moldova, by Anna Robertson

Fiction (non-sf): 3 (YTD 11)
The Bean Trees, by Barbara Kingsolver
Julian, by Gore Vidal
How Green Was My Valley, by Richard Llewellyn

sf (non-Who): 9 (YTD 28)
Provenance, by Ann Leckie
Planesrunner by Ian McDonald
Uncanny Valley, by Greg Egan
The Enclave, by Anne Charnock
“Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones”, by Samuel R. Delany
The Murders of Molly Southbourne, by Tade Thompson
Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift
The Man Who Spoke Snakish, by Andrus Kivirähk
Jade City, by Fonda Lee

Doctor Who, etc: 4 (YTD 10)
Doctor Who Storybook 2009, ed. Clayton Hickman
Something Changed, ed. Simon Guerrier
The Missy Chronicles, by James Goss, Cavan Scott, Paul Magrs, Peter Anghelides, Jacqueline Rayner and Richard Dinnick
The Legends of River Song, by Jenny T. Colgan, Jacqueline Rayner, Steve Lyons, Guy Adams and Andrew Lane

Comics: 1 (YTD 6)
Apostata 07: Niets meer dan een wolk by Ken Broeders

~6,400 pages (YTD ~19,900)
7/25 (YTD 27/72) by women (Robertson, Kingsolver, Leckie, Charnock, Lee, Rayner, Colgan/Rayner)
3/25 (YTD 6/72) by PoC (Delany, Thompson, Lee)

I gave five books five stars on LibraryThing that month, so I will report them and not the ones I didn’t like. They were: