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.

Alas, after several months of relaxation, COVID restrictions were re-imposed in the middle of the month and working from home started again. This meant that I also re-started my ten-day updates on the COVID situation, which continued until early 2022.

I don’t seem to have written it up elsewhere, but little U and I got to the newly opened permanent exhibition at the Royal Library in Brussels just before the museums closed.

Art commentary on Jean Mayné and his daughter Berthe Flaminé Mayné:

Sadly, we lost Colin Wilkie. And I admitted my Reddit addiction.

Non-fiction: 3 (YTD 44)
Darwin’s Island: The Galapagos in the Garden of England, by Steve Jones
Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos, by M. Mitchell Waldrop
Helen Waddell, by Felicitas Corrigan

Fiction (non-sf): 9 (YTD 34)
Kramer vs. Kramer, by Avery Corman
Secret Army, by John Brason
Secret Army Dossier, by John Brason
Ordinary People, by Judith Guest
Secret Army: The End of the Line, by John Brason
This Must be the Place, by Maggie O’Farrell
Kessler, by John Brason
Titus Groan, by Mervyn Peake
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values, by Robert M. Pirsig

sf (non-Who): 6 (YTD 92)
Palestine 100: Stories from a century after the Nakba, ed. Mazen Maarouf
Gateway, by Frederik Pohl
Carmilla, by J. Sheridan Le Fanu
To Be Taught, if Fortunate, by Becky Chambers
The Tropic of Serpents, by Marie Brennan
Wild Life, by Molly Gloss

Doctor Who: 1 (YTD 11)
The Knight, the Fool and the Dead, by Steve Cole

Comics: 6 (YTD 39)
Defender of the Daleks, #1, by Jody Houser and Roberta Ingranata
Survivants, Tome 3, by Leo
Defender of the Daleks, #2, by Jody Houser and Roberta Ingranata
Survivants, Tome 4, by Leo
Survivants, Tome 5, by Leo
For the Love of God, Marie!, by Jade Sarson

5,900 pages (YTD 58,800)
9/25 (YTD 69/219) by women (Corrigan, Guest, O’Farrell, Chambers, Brennan, Gloss, Hoser/Ingranata x2, Sarson)
1/25 (YTD 19/219) by PoC (Maarouf)

The best new book of the month was Felicitas Corrigan’s biography of Helen Waddell, which you can get here, but I also enjoyed returning to Gateway, which you can get here, and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which you can get here. Nothing too awful.

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.

The highlight of the month was a trip to western Belgium with Anne, staying at my old friend Lex’s R&Breakfast in Roeselaere. This gave rise to several blog posts:

• Théodore Jonet and his daughters Juliette and Emilie
• A giant flying penis, with bells on
• A Bruges art mystery – Jean-Claude Servais, the escalator paintings and Isabelle
• Ypres, Flanders Fields and my great-uncle’s grave
• Public art in Ostende: repression and resistance

Only later did I realise that part of my attraction to the portrait of the Jonet family may be that I have almost exactly the same age difference with my own daughters.

We also had an appropriately socially distanced work party in a park near the office; I was going in three days a week at this point.

I read only 17 books that month, but some were very long.

Non-fiction: 3 (YTD 41)
An Inland Voyage, by Robert Louis Stevenson
East West Street, by Philippe Sands
Barcelona, Catalonia: A View from the Inside, by Matthew Tree

Fiction (non-sf): 2 (YTD 25)
Bruges-La-Morte, by Georges Rodenbach
The Mirror and the Light, by Hilary Mantel

sf (non-Who): 7 (YTD 86)
Jerusalem: Vernal’s Inquest, by Alan Moore
The Sky Road, by Ken MacLeod
Shadow Scale, by Rachel Hartman
Distraction, by Bruce Sterling
Beren and Luthien, by J.R.R. Tolkien
“Jeffty is Five”, by Harlan Ellison
“Stardance” by Spider Robinson and Jeanne Robinson

Comics: 5 (YTD 33)
Isabelle, by Jean-Claude Servais
Blood Monster, by Neil Gaiman and Marlene O’Connor
Chronin Volume 1: The Knife at Your Back, by Alison Wilgus
Chronin Volume 2: The Sword in Your Hand, by Alison Wilgus
Being An Account of the Life and Death of the Emperor Heliogabolus, by Neil Gaiman

5,000 pages (YTD 52,900)
6/17 (YTD 64/194) by women (Mantel, Hartman, Robinson, O’Connor, Wilgus x2)
None AFAIK (YTD 18/194) by PoC

Standouts this month were Hilary Mantel’s triumphant The Mirror and the Light, which you can get here, and East West Street by Philippe Sands, which you can get here. Bruges-la-Morte by Georges Rodenbach is total rubbish, but you can get it here.

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.

The month began grimly, with the notorious 2020 Hugo Awards ceremony unfolding in the early hours of 1 August (in my time zone). I think we have to be clear that it went very badly wrong. Having put many hours of my own time into working on the awards that year, I felt personally that my efforts had been thrown back in my face. The fact that the first actual Hugo winner was not announced until more than an hour into the ceremony demonstrated a fundamental lack of respect for the people who should have been at the heart of the occasion. (Not to mention the rest of us.)

There was some emotional high points of the grim evening, however, and the one that will linger with me was Neil Gaiman’s acceptance speech for Good Omens.

I blogged about the Hugos, the Retro Hugo trophies and the Retro Hugos that weren’t; I also blogged about famous Welsh lesbian Amy Dillwyn, who was a distant relative; the Lib Dem leadership election; and the Bible and the Bechdel test.

This was another month when, due to the pandemic, I did not leave Belgium, but I plucked up my courage to go to Train World with U for a Paul Delvaux exhibition.

Also culturally, Anne and I went to the Fondation Folon south of Brussels, which I strongly recommend.

And I had an exciting physical meeting with an EU official.

I made one last local video on a cartographic curiosity.

Not so many books this month – several were very long, and my demi-commute hit my reading.

Non-fiction: 1 (YTD 38)
From Barrows to Bypass: Excavations at West Cotton, Raunds, Northamptonshire, 1985-1989, by Dave Windell, Andy Chapman and Jo Woodwiss

Fiction (non-sf): 5 (YTD 23)
Our Mutual Friend, by Charles Dickens
Jerusalem: The Boroughs, by Alan Moore
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey
Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel
Bring Up the Bodies, by Hilary Mantel

sf (non-Who): 3 (YTD 79)
A Boy and His Dog, by Harlan Ellison
Jerusalem: Mansoul, by Alan Moore
The Conqueror’s Child, by Suzy McKee Charnas

Comics: 1 (YTD 28)
Star Wars IV: A New Hope, by Roy Thomas and Howard Chaykin

Doctor Who: 2 (YTD 10)
The Secret in Vault 13, by David Solomons
The Maze of Doom, by David Solomons

3,700 pages (YTD 47,900)
4/12 (YTD 58/177) by women (Woodwiss, Mantel x2, McKee Charnas)
None AFAIK (YTD 18/177) by PoC

Best books this month were the first two volumes of Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (which you can get here) and Bring up the Bodies (which you can get here), and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (which you can get here).

Hugely unimpressed by Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend (which you can get here).

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.

The high point of the month was getting out of Belgium for the first time since lockdown, a three-country trip to my cousin in Luxembourg, my sister in France and work/tourism in Geneva. While we were there we watched the Disney Hamilton and saw Comet NEOWISE.

We enjoyed watching Picard and Staged, and I delved into the etymology of the Ardennes. More seriously, the Spanish Comisión de Arbitraje, Quejas y Deontología del Periodismo found completely in my favour in a complaint I had raised against a journalist who published a false story about me.

I also paused my ten-day COVID updates, but restarted my Doctor Who anniversary posts, which I had first done in 2010-11. I am still doing them, but on Facebook only.

The Hugo Awards gave us a lot of grief. The preparation of the online voting system on the final ballot was so badly delayed that we were within hours of just using Surveymonkey, before the local software solution finally came through at the last moment. Online commentators were rightly scornful of the fact that we opened voting so late, but they didn’t know the half of it. The final ballot results came through as we were driving home from Geneva, and to my astonishment it turned out that there was a tie for the Retro Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form). I checked and rechecked the votes, but there was no error.

The CoNZealand Retro Hugo ceremony passed off OK on 30 July, though my connection was poor and some of the actual winners were a bit embarrassing. At midnight on July 31st, I was at my computer waiting anxiously for the 2020 Hugo ceremony itself. We had heard worrying hints about the presentation, but as administrators we had little to do with it (indeed, the pronunciations we had painstakingly gathered earlier in the year somehow were not communicated to the ceremony team [edit: turns out they were communicated, just not used]); surely the convention leadership would take action to protect their own reputation?

…well, I’ll write more about that when I get to August 2020.

Anyway, in July 2020 I read 21 books:

Non-fiction: 5 (YTD 37)
EU Lobbying Handbook, by Andreas Geiger
The Complete Secret Army: An Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to the Classic TV Drama Series by Andy Priestner
George Eliot, by Tim Dolin
Yugoslavia’s Implosion: The Fatal Attraction of Serbian Nationalism, by Sonja Biserko
Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, by Mary Trump

Fiction (non-sf): 3 (YTD 18)
The Overstory, by Richard Powers
Guban, by Abdi Latif Ega
Listen to the Moon by Michael Morpurgo

sf (non-Who): 5 (YTD 76)
City of Lies, by Sam Hawke
Tooth & Claw, by Jo Walton
TOR: Assassin Hunter, by Billy Bob Buttons (did not finish)
“Houston, Houston, do you read?” by James Tiptree Jr
The Ruin of Kings, by Jenn Lyons
“The Bicentennial Man” by Isaac Asimov

Comics: 6 (YTD 27)
The Wicked + The Divine vol 6: Imperial Phase Part 2, by Kieron Gillen etc
The Wicked + The Divine vol 7: Mothering Invention, by Kieron Gillen etc
Gaze of the Medusa, by Gordon Rennie, Emma Beeby and Brian Williamson
The Wicked + The Divine vol 8: Old is the New New, by Kieron Gillen etc
The Wicked + The Divine vol 9: “Okay”, by Kieron Gillen etc
The 1945 Retro Hugo finalists for Best Graphic Story or Comic

Doctor Who 2 (YTD 8)
Doctor Who Annual 2020
Doctor Who and the Cybermen, by Gerry Davis

5,700 pages (YTD 44,200)
7/21 (YTD 54/165) by women (Biserko, Trump, Hawke, Walton, Tiptree, Lyons, Beeby)
1/21 (YTD 18/165) by PoC (Ega)

As so often, two non-fiction books stood out for me this month, Andy Priestner’s delightful Complete Secret Army, which you can get here, and Sonja Biserko’s horrifying Yugoslavia’s Implosion, which you can get here. I also enjoyed rereading James Tiptree Jr’s “Houston, Houston, do you read?”, which you can get here.

Some awful books too. The 2020 Doctor Who Annual was a poor effort; you can get it here. Guban, by Abdi Latif Ega, is very badly edited; you can get it here. TOR: Assassin Hunter, by Billy Bob Buttons, is rubbish; you can get it here. And Asimov’s “The Bicentennial Man” has not aged well, but you can get it here.

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.

Things began to improve this month. with restrictions gradually easing; I went for a triumphant lunch with a colleague the day that the restaurants opened again.

We were allowed to see B again for the first time in more than three months, on her 23rd birthday.

Even so, I kept up my ten-day plague posts.

I also wrote about some of the TV we had been watching – Derry Girls, Unorthodox, The Good Place, Normal People and The Beiderbecke Affair. And I asked the thorny question, Who was both oldest former US President and oldest former Vice-President, but not at the same time?

More locally, I went to church, and made a final local video about an ancient enclave of imperial territory just across the river from us.

I read 20 books that month.

Non-fiction: 6 (YTD 32)
The Beiderbecke Affair, by William Gallagher
The Queen’s Agent: Sir Francis Walsingham and the Rise of Espionage in Elizabethan England, by John Cooper
The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within, by Stephen Fry
Modern China: A Very Short Introduction, by Rana Mitter
From A Clear Blue Sky, by Timothy Knatchbull
The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir, by John Bolton

Fiction (non-sf): 3 (YTD 15)
Local Hero, by David Benedictus
The Ghost of Lily Painter by Caitlin Davies
Laatste schooldag, by Jan Siebelink (did not finish)

sf (non-Who): 5 (YTD 70)
The Sleeper Awakes, by H.G. Wells
Heaven’s War by David S. Goyer and Michael Cassutt (did not finish)
Dreaming In Smoke, by Tricia Sullivan
The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov
The Extremes, by Christopher Priest

Comics: 6 (YTD 21)
The Wicked + The Divine vol 2: Fandemonium, by Kieron Gillen etc
The Wicked + The Divine vol 3: Commercial Suicide, by Kieron Gillen etc
The Wicked + The Divine vol 4: Rising Action, by Kieron Gillen etc
De dag waarop de bus zonder haar vertrok, by BeKa, Marko and Maëla Cosson
The Wicked + The Divine vol 5: Imperial Phase Part 1, by Kieron Gillen etc
De dag waarop ze haar vlucht nam, by BeKa, Marko, and Maëla Cosson

5,000 pages (YTD 38,500)
4/20 (YTD 47/144) by women (Davie, Sullivan, 2x Ka of BeKa and Cosson)
1/20 (YTD 17/144) by PoC (Mitter)

The best book of this month, indeed of 2020, was Timothy Knatchbull’s From a Clear Blue Sky, his account of the Mountbatten bomb in 1979 and its aftermath; you can get it here. I also had a car-crash fascination with John Bolton’s The Room Where It Happened; you can get it here. Rana Mitter’s Modern China: A Very Short Introduction is not as exciting than either of the above but also very good; you can get it here.

I read some pretty bad books too. I gave up on Goyer and Cassutt’s Heaven’s War after a few pages; you can get it here. The short story collection Laatste Schooldag by Jan Siebelink fell flat for me; you can get it here. So did the second of the bandes dessinées by BeKa, De Dag Waarop Ze Haar Vlucht Nam; you can get it here.

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.

We continued to labour under COVID restrictions in May 2020, but our office had reopened for one day a week by the middle of the month and I certainly took advantage of being able to (cautiously) share physical space with colleagues.

I also indulged in some nostalgia, digging out photographs from my 21st birthday party in 1988. The lady in the red jacket later married the guy who is visible over my shoulder, who was one of my co-hosts. The lady in green married another of the co-hosts. The fourth co-host was the much missed Liz.

We finished the month with a visit to the park at Tervuren on a blisteringly hot day.

I kept up my ten-day plague posts:

And I did a last few videos from the village.

I read only 18 books this month.

Non-fiction: 5 (YTD 26)
The Hunt for Vulcan: …And How Albert Einstein Destroyed a Planet, Discovered Relativity, and Deciphered the Universe, by Thomas Levenson
Joanna Russ, by Gwyneth Jones
A Sacred Cause: The Inter-Congolese Dialogue 2000-2003, by P. E. Winter
Roger of Hereford’s Judicial Astrology: England’s First Astrology Book?, by Chris Mitchell
A border too far: the Ilemi triangle yesterday and today, by Philip Winter

Fiction (non-sf): 2 (YTD 12)
The Godfather, by Mario Puzo
The Accident, by Ismail Kadarë

sf (non-Who): 9 (YTD 65)
Riverland, by Fran Wilde
In an Absent Dream, by Seanan McGuire
The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman
Black Wine, by Candas Jane Dorsey
Arthur C. Clarke’s Venus Prime 1: Breaking Strain, by Paul Preuss
Slaughterhouse 5, by Kurt Vonnegut
The Nightmare Stacks, by Charles Stross
The Tiger’s Wife, by Tea Obreht
Make Room! Make Room!, by Harry Harrison

Comics: 2 (YTD 15)
Peanuts: A Tribute to Charles M. Schulz, ed. Shannon Watters
The Wicked + The Divine vol 1: The Faust Act, by Kieron Gillen etc

5,000 pages (YTD 33,500)
6/18 (YTD 43/124) by non-male writers (Jones, Wilde, McGuire, Dorsey, Olbreht, Walters)
0/18 (YTD 13/124) by PoC

The best of these was my former colleague Philip Winter’s account of peacemaking in DR Congo, A Sacred Cause, which you can get here. I also enjoyed rereading The Godfather, which you can get here, and reading for the first time Make Room! Make Room!, which you can get here. Nothing too awful this month.

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.

This, as you may remember, was the month that the world ended. When I woke up in Cambridge on the morning of 1 March, I had no idea that it would be my last time outside Belgium until July. I visited B a week later, on Sunday 8 March, which was just as well because we were told on Friday 13 that we could not see the girls again until the pandemic situation allowed. As it became clear how things were going, though not how log it would last, we had a gloomy socially distanced farewell lunch in the office with the last few colleagues before lockdown hit. (Colleagues in the picture are from Cyprus, the USA, Israel, Austria, the Netherlands, France and Italy.)

And that was that; we were all working from home, and not allowed to see anyone outside our own households. It also coincided with the close of Hugo nominations, the only time of the five times that I have been involved that we did not use the Kansa system first developed by Eemeli Aro in 2017; it was a complete nightmare, on top of everything else.

I marked the passage of time with two videos about our village:

and with the first of what would become a long series of ten-day updates about life in plague times.

Despite the interruption to my commute, I read 26 books that month.

Non-fiction: 5 (YTD 17)
The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of Scandinavia’s Utopia, by Michael Booth
1493, by Charles C. Mann
Strategic Europe, ed. Jan Techau
Red Notice, by Bill Browder
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith – did not finish

Fiction (non-sf): 2 (YTD 7)
Small Island, by Andrea Levy
Midnight Cowboy, by James Leo Herlihy

sf (non-Who): 17 (YTD 42)
The Golden Fleece, by Robert Graves
Deeplight, by Frances Hardinge
The Light Brigade, by Kameron Hurley (did not finish)
The Green Man’s Foe, by Juliet E. McKenna
Fleet of Knives, by Gareth A. Powell
Babayaga, by Toby Barlow
Atlas Alone, by Emma Newman
Ragged Alice, by Gareth A. Powell
The Survival of Molly Southbourne, by Tade Thompson
Middlegame, by Seanan McGuire
The Winged Man, by E. Mayne Hull
Excession, by Iain M. Banks
A Memory Called Empire, by Arkady Martine
Blake’s 7 Annual 1979
Blake’s 7 Annual 1980
The Haunting of Tram Car 015, by P. Djélì Clark
Blake’s 7 Annual 1981

Doctor Who: 1 (YTD 6)
Doctor Who: The Macra Terror, by Ian Stuart Black

Comics: 1 (YTD 6)
Die, vol 1: Fantasy Heartbreaker, by Kieron Gillen, Stephanie Hans and Clayton Cowles

7,400 pages (YTD 20,700)
9/26 (YTD 23/78) by women (Levy, Hardinge, Hurley, McKenna, Newman, McGuire, Hull, Martine, Hans)
3/26 (YTD 8/78) by PoC (Levy, Thompson, Clark)

Thumbs up for Deeplight, which you can get here; thumbs down, I’m afraid, for Atlas Alone, which you can get here.

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.

I started the month with a Bulgarian TV interview about Brexit, which had just happened:

With no idea of what was to come, I did a lot of travelling in February 2020; a work trip to the FAO headquarters in Rome, right beside the Circus Maximus;

with a statue sculpted by Gina Lollobrigida, who died last month:

I had my last transatlantic flight for two years to Gallifrey One in Los Angeles:

And went to another convention the next weekend in Brussels, where I slightly crossed the streams by going as a Ghostbuster but getting Doctor Who photos with Paul McGann, Alex Kingston and the Paternoster Gang:

And finally a trip to England at the end of the month, finishing at a friend’s birthday party. Little did I realise, as I fell asleep in Cambridge on 29 February, that it would be almost five months until I next left Belgium.

I read 20 books that month.

Non-fiction: 6 (YTD 12)
The Idea of Justice, by Amartya Sen
The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein, by Farah Mendlesohn
The Critique of Pure Reason, by Immanuel Kant – (did not finish)
A Popular History of Ireland, by Thomas D’Arcy McGee – (did not finish)
H.G. Wells: A Literary Life, by Adam Roberts
J.R.R. Tolkien’s inspiration for Lúthien: the “gallant” Edith Bratt, by Nancy Bunting and Seamus Hamill-Keays

Fiction (non-sf): 2 (YTD 5)
A Killing Winter, by Tom Callaghan
Oliver Twist, by Charles Dickens

sf (non-Who): 8 (YTD 25)
Shadow Over Mars, by Leigh Brackett
Arc of the Dream, by A. A. Attanasio (did not finish)
The City in the Middle of the Night, by Charlie Jane Anders
The Aachen Memorandum, by Andrew Roberts
2020 Vision, ed. Jerry Pournelle
Hex, by Thomas Olde Heuvelt
Children of Ruin, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
The Rosewater Insurrection, by Tade Thompson

Doctor Who: 3 (YTD 5)
Doctor Who and the Sontaran Experiment, by Ian Marter
Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks, by Terrance Dicks
Doctor Who and the Revenge of the Cybermen, by Terrance Dicks

Comics: 1 (YTD 5)
The Wicked + The Divine vol 9: Okay, by Kieron Gillen, Jamie McKelvie, Matthew Wilson & Clayton Cowles

5,800 pages (YTD 13,300)
4/20 (YTD 14/52) by women (Mendlesohn, Bunting, Brackett, Anders)
2/20 (YTD 4/52) by PoC (Sen, Thompson)

The best books of this month were all BSFA nominees, two novels and one non-fiction:

• Children of Ruin, by Adrian Tchaikovsky; get it here
• The Rosewater Insurrection, by Tade Thompson; get it here
• The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein, by Farah Mendlesohn; get it here

On the other hand I completely bounced off Arc of the Dream, by A.A. Attanasio, after ten pages; simply too badly written. (You can get it here.)

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.

We had no idea what was coming in that fateful month of January 2020. I went to London for work in the first week; went to the first Glasgow 2024 planning weekend in the middle of the month…

and also went to Rome again, where I caught the Castel Sant’Angelo across the bridge.

And the UK left the EU. I was still angry. And I still am.

Non-fiction: 6
Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain, by Charlotte Higgins
Roots and Wings: Ten Lessons of Motherhood that Helped Me Create and Run a Company, by Margery Kraus
Backstop Land, by Glenn Patterson
About Writing, by Gareth L. Powell
The Lost Worlds of 2001, by Arthur C. Clarke (in fact this is mostly SF but the non-fiction framing is key)
In Praise of Disobedience: The Soul of Man Under Socialism and Other Writings, by Oscar Wilde (mostly non-fiction but includes several fantasy stories)

sf (non-Who): 17
Exhalation, by Ted Chiang
Seraphina, by Rachel Hartman
Land of Terror, by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Demon in Leuven, by Guido Eekhaut
“Home is the Hangman”, by Roger Zelazny
The Last Days of New Paris, by China Mieville
Miss Shumway Waves a Wand, by James Hadley Chase
Distaff: A Science Fiction Anthology by Female Authors, eds. Rosie Oliver & Sam Primeau
Sirius, by Olaf Stapledon
The Raven Tower, by Ann Leckie
Once Upon a Parsec: The Book of Alien Fairy Tales, ed. David Gullen
The Testaments, by Margaret Atwood
This Is How You Lose The Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
2001: A Space Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke
The True Queen, by Zen Cho
To Be Taught, If Fortunate, by Becky Chambers
The Ten Thousand Doors of January, by Alix E. Harrow

Doctor Who: 2
Doctor Who and the Giant Robot, by Terrance Dicks
Doctor Who and the Ark in Space, by Ian Marter

Comics: 4
Auguria, Tome 1: Ecce signum, by Peter Nuyten
Auguria, Tome 2: Gaeso dux, by Peter Nuyten
Auguria, Tome 3: Fatum, by Peter Nuyten
As Time Goes By, by Joshua Hale Fialkov and Matthew Dow Smith

7,500 pages
10/32 by women (Higgins, Kraus, Kingsolver, Hartman, Oliver/Primeau, Leckie, Atwood, El-Mohtar, Cho, Chambers)
2/32 by PoC (El-Mohtar, Cho)

Three here that I really enjoyed, The Testaments by Margaret Atwood (get it here), Exhalation by Ted Chiang (get it here) and Sirius by Olaf Stapledon (get it here). But you need not bother with Land of Terror by Edgar Rice Burroughs (if you do, you can get it here).