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.
So, the first half of November 2021 wasa pretty good to me. We started with a family expedition to Modave, to see more of the ceilings of Jan Christiaan Hansche:
On my way to Novacon, I visited the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester, and was blown away by the art collection:
And Novacon itself was a lot of fun.
But I paid a price; in the corridors at Novacon, after twenty months of pandemic, I picked up a dose of COVID that put me in bed for sixteen days, as chronicled here. I don’t remember much about the rest of the month.
But I did read 31 books.
Non-fiction 6 (YTD 44)
Paul: A Biography, by Tom Wright
Building Healthy Boundaries: An Over-giver’s Guide to Knowing When to Say ‘Yes’ and How to Say ‘No’ in Relationships, by Helen Snape
Image of the Fendahl, by Simon Bucher-Jones
Ghost Light, by Jonathan Dennis
A Beautiful Mind, by Sylvia Nasar
Exploding School to Pieces: Growing Up With Pop Culture In the 1970s, by Mick Deal – did not finish
Non-genre 3 (YTD 27)
The Ice Cream Army, by Jessica Gregson
Summer, by Ali Smith
Beautiful World, Where Are You, by Sally Rooney
Poetry 1 (YTD 5)
The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun, by J R R Tolkien, ed. Verlyn Flieger
SF 13 (YTD 122)
Not Before Sundown, by Johanna Sinisalo
The Empire of Gold, by S.A. Chakraborty – did not finish
The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde
The Burning God, by R.F. Kuang
Camouflage, by Joe Haldeman
Mortal Engines, by Philip Reeve
River of Gods, by Ian McDonald
Waste Tide, by Qiufan Chen
Iron Council, by China Miéville – did not finish
One Bright Star to Guide Them, by John C. Wright
The Last Witness, by K.J. Parker [Tom Holt]
The Last Defender of Camelot, by Roger Zelazny (2002) – did not finish
Shanghai Sparrow, by Gaie Sebold
Doctor Who 5 (YTD 23, 31 inc comics and non-fiction)
The Book of the War, ed. Lawrence Miles
The HAVOC Files 3, ed. Andy Frankham-Allen
The Witchfinders, by Joy Wilkinson
Doctor Who and the Image of the Fendahl, by Terrance Dicks
Doctor Who – Ghost Light, by Marc Platt
Comics 3 (YTD 37)
Sweeney Todd & Other Stories, by Neil Gaiman
The Story of Sex: From Apes to Robots, by Philippe Brenot and Laetitia Coryn
Le dernier Atlas, Tome 3, by Fabien Vehlmann and Gwen de Bonneval
7,300 pages (YTD 67,900)
12/31 (YTD 111/262) by non-male writers (Snape, Nasar, Gregson, Smith, Rooney, Flieger, Sinisalo, Chakraborty, Kuang, Sebold, Wilkinson, Coryn; Gwen de Bonneval is male)
4/31 (YTD 41/262) by PoC (Nasar, Chakraborty, Kuang, Chen)
The best of these were two translated sf novels, Waste Tide by Qiufan Chen, which you can get here, and Not Before Sundown by Johanna Sinisalo, which you can get here; and Helen Snape’s very brief self-help book with a long title, Building Healthy Boundaries: An Over-giver’s Guide to Knowing When to Say ‘Yes’ and How to Say ‘No’ in Relationships, which you can get for free here.
I’m feeling a bit uncharitable so I’m going to call out three particularly poor books. The iBooks collection of Zelazny stories, The Last Defender of Camelot, insults the writer and the stories with appalling production values, at least for the ebook; you can get it here. Mick Deal’s Exploding School to Pieces, on 1970s TV, is superficial and poorly researched; you can get it here. And John C. Wright’s One Bright Star to Guide Them is derivative and disjointed, and not exactly subtle in its ideology; you can get it here.