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.
I started the month at a work conference in darkest Kent, and on the day of the US election I was in Dublin, again for work, and spent the night in London for the sake of a rather brief TV interview. The next weekend it was off to Helsinki for my first Worldcon 75 meeting as Hugo Administrator. Colette Fozard was then my deputy, but in fact one of the Chairs of the convention resigned a week after the meeting, and Colette was appointed Vice-Chair in the subsequent reshuffle.
The Messukeskus was hosting an pet fair at the time. Check out the show-jumping rabbit:
I then went back to Dublin again for another work trip, and also visited the World Health Organisation in Geneva. At home in Leuven, the M Museum was hosting an exhibition to mark the 500th anniversary of the publication of Thomas More’s Utopia:
But I must say that the election of Donald Trump caused me to do so much doomscrolling that I read only three books in the whole of that month, the lowest tally since I started keeping count (and probably the lowest since I learned to read). They were:
Fiction (non-sf): 1 (YTD 28)
Kramer’s War, by Derek Robinson; get it here.
sf (non-Who): 1 (YTD 74)
Prime Minister Corbyn: and other things that never happened, eds. Duncan Brack and Iain Dale; get it here.
Comics: 1 (YTD 23)
Antarès, Épisode 1, by Leo; get it here in French and here in English.
800 pages (YTD 56,100 pages)
0/3 (YTD 59/193) by women
0/3 (YTD 12/193) by PoC
With only three books, I won’t choose a best or worst of the month.
