This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 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.
Very little travel in November 2020, thanks to the newly reimposed COVID restrictions, but on the first day of the month I took B to the nearby park at Helecine.
I discovered that the American artists Howard Gardiner Cushing and his daughter Lily Emmet Cushing were distant cousins of mine; and better yet, that Lily was married to the grandfather of one of my best friends in the USA.
My ten-day updates on the COVID situation continued:
F and I mounted an expedition to see various megalithic monuments roughly south and east of us, listening to The Daleks’ Master Plan as we travelled.
More art, this time at the abbey of Villier-la-Ville, by Jean-Michel Folon – Anne and I had visited his museum near Brussels a few weeks before.
I updated my list of the appearances of Belgium in Doctor Who:
And in the real world, Joe Biden convincingly defeated Donald Trump in the US election, though it took a worrying length of time before the result was acknowledged and some are still not convinced. I got some decent press coverage for predicting (correctly) that Trump did not have any chance of overturning the result in court.
I managed to read 25 books that month, but several were very short and I failed to keep a record of what I thought of them.
Non-fiction: 2 (YTD 46)
Selected Prose, by Charles Lamb (did not finish)
Mahatma Gandhi: His Life and Times, by Louis Fischer
Fiction (non-sf): 1 (YTD 35)
The Inside of the Cup, by the other Winston Churchill
sf (non-Who): 7 (YTD 99)
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, by Philip K. Dick
Borderline, by Mishell Baker
SS-GB, by Len Deighton
Painless, by Rich Larson
The Time Invariance of Snow, by E. Lily Yu
Blood is Another Word for Hunger, by Rivers Solomon
More Real Than Him, by Silvia Park
Doctor Who: 5 (YTD 16)
The Nth Doctor, by Jean-Marc & Randy Lofficier
The Official Doctor Who Annual 2021, by Paul Lang
Doctor Who: Mission to the Unknown, by John Peel
Doctor Who: The Mutation of Time, by John Peel
The Astraea Conspiracy, by Lizbeth Myles
Comics: 5 (YTD 44)
Neil Dreams, by Neil Gaiman
An Honest Answer & Other Stories, by Neil Gaiman
The Daleks’ Master Plan, adapted by Rick Lundeen
The Empire Strikes Back, written by Archie Goodwin, art by Al Williamson and Carlos Garzon
Return of the Jedi, written by Archie Goodwin, art by Al Williamson and Carlos Garzon
4,000 pages (YTD 62,800)
6/20 (YTD 75/239) not by men (Baker, Yu, Solomon, Park, Lofficier, Myles)
3/20 (YTD 22/239) by PoC (Yu, Solomon, Park)
The best new read was Rick Lundeen’s graphic story adaptation of The Daleks’ Master Plan, which unfortunately is not commercially available anywhere. It was also good to return to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which you can get here. Several less good books this month, but I will draw a veil over them.