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.
The major development of June 2016 was the Brexit referendum, which of course went the wrong way. I wrote to over a thousand British friends in the days immediately before, pleading with them to vote Remain; I led with the likely impact of Brexit on Northern Ireland, which really was not too hard to foresee. Shell-shocked the day after, I wrote this reaction with a colleague, most of which turned out to be right. I am still resentful and angry about Brexit, though I am also pretty clear that it will not be reversed any time soon. What a shame.
My major trip of June 2016 was to Northern Ireland for my great-aunt’s 100th birthday. She is still going strong and will turn 106 next month. (Sadly her oldest daughter, on the left here, has since passed away.)
I had two work-related trips as well, one at the start of the month in London, where I took in a Comics Museum exhibition of the work of Doctor Who illustrator Chris Achilleos:
And one at the end of the month to Barcelona.
It was also the month of the Belgium/Ireland match in the European Championships; out local pub allowed space for our Irish neighbours and us despite the general Belgitude.
6,200 pages (YTD 32,600 pages) 2/22 (YTD 41/109) by women (Munro, Dunnett) 1/22 (YTD 10/109) by PoC (Dumas)
Enjoyed re-reading The Count of Monte Cristo, which you can get here, and Dark Horse, which you can get here; best new read was the Selected Stories of Alice Munro, which you can get here. Several awful books in the Hugo packet, thanks to Puppy infestation; no names, no publicity.
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 had a lot of fun travel in that month. It started with a trip to Northern Ireland for the 2016 Assembly election, which was actually not all that exciting as only seven seats out of 108 changed hands; we did not know what was about to hit us. (Funny to come back to this memory after last week.)
Though the studio experience had its dramatic moments.
6,300 pages (YTD 26,400 pages) 8/23 (YTD 39/97) by women (Robinson, Carey x2, Hawking x2, Shelley, Levene, Vanistendael) 1/23 (YTD 9/97) by PoC (Tezuka)
The best of these was a reread, Walking on Glass by Iain Banks, which you can get here; followed by Mister Pip, which you can get here. The worst were Santi-Bucquoy’s disappointing Chooz, which you can get here, and Shaw’s Ragged Astronauts, 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 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 previously noted, I started the month at my sister’s in Cluny, visiting a nearby castle where her daughter dressed up.
I had two business trips to London, on the second of which I met up with one of my favourite Moldovan politicians, who I had last seen when she was Foreign Minister; meantime she had been acting prime minister for six weeks in 2015.
Back home, little U got confirmed.
With the ongoing Brexit doomscrolling, I read only 15 books that month.
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 I have previously written, on 22 March 2016, I set off from home in slightly unusual circumstances; I had the car, because Anne was in England at a family funeral, and my phone was broken so I had no means of contacting the outside world as I drove to work. When I hit the tunnel that takes you from the motorway to Avenue de Cortenbergh at around 0850, there was the usual tailback of traffic. But it became clear by the time I reached Rond Point Schuman that this was no ordinary traffic jam; the Rue de la Loi, along which I would normally coast before taking a left turn down Rue de la Science for my office (the green line on my map), was being closed off by serious-looking police, and I ended up taking a very serpentine route indeed, not helped by thinking at one point that it might be smart to double back and then changing my mind.
I finally made it to the office at 1022, those last two kilometres having taken me 90 minutes to drive, to find most of my colleagues gathered ashen-faced in the lobby, greeting me tearfully – I was the only person who was unaccounted for, due to my phone being out of order, and people were beginning to assume the worst. They informed me that two terrorist attacks, one at the airport and one at the Maalbeek/Maelbeek metro station (marked with the four-pointed star on my map), had killed dozens of people – 35 including the perpetrators themselves, as it later turned out. I had massive numbers of messages on every possible platform asking if I was all right, which is very reassuring.
The horror hit very close to home. I had flown out of Brussels airport in the morning five times already in 2016, and was originally due to do so again three days later to go to Eastercon in Manchester (in fact my plans had already changed and I took the Eurostar to London for work and travelled on up by train). Anne’s flight home from England was cancelled and she returned by Eurostar the next day. Maelbeek metro station is in the heart of the EU quarter, and I go past it most days and through it several times a month; a former colleague was actually on the train that was bombed, but fortunately escaped without injury.
Apart from that, Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play? I had two trips to London, one of which extended into Eastercon in Manchester (Mancunicon) and also went to Barcelona. I don’t seem to have taken any photographs on any of those trips. We finished the month at my sister’s in Burgundy.
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.
In the real world, this was the month of Ireland’s 2016 parliamentary election, in which Fianna Fáil did not quite regain the top spot that they had previously had, and ended up supporting a minority Fine Gael government.
I had three trips that month – one to Belgrade again, where I don’t seem to have taken pictures, and two to London, in both of which I nipped out to see exhibitions: one about John Dee, at the Royal College of Physicians, with Shana and Alison, and one about the Soviet space programme, at the Science Museum. (Some will remember a very pleasant dinner at Mele e Pere in London.) I followed up on John Dee by analysing a hand-written horoscope that he had done. Back in Belgium, I explored the sculptures of Woluwe Saint-Pierre. Here’s St Martin-in-the-Fields, at dusk.
I read rather fewer books than usual this month – the consequence of several trips where I wasn’t able to read much either in transit or when I got there. Also to be honest the accelerating Brexit debate was developing the bad habit of doomscrolling.
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 year with a trip to London (for some reason I flew to Heathrow rather than taking the Chunnel, no idea why). Mid month I attempted to fly to Serbia, but the weather was against me and I only got as far as Munich. Later in the month I successfully got to Skopje and then Dubrovnik on the same trip. Dubrovnik as always was spectacular.
At home, I started my very enjoyable rewatch of Here Come the Double Deckers!
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.
My one trip that month was to visit my employers’ headquarters in Washington DC, a first visit to the mothership a year or so after I had got hired (postponed from October when a client assignment to Geneva had killed my plans to include CapClave in the trip). I also had a day in New York.
Back in Brussels, someone took a nice shot of me at the office party (I have no idea who is behind me).
I also managed to get a decent Christmas picture of all three kids.
With the transatlantic flight, I read 29 books that month.
~7,500 pages (Year end 80,100) 10/29 by women (Year end 86/290) – Robinson, Bryce, Woolf, Robson, Okorafor, Valente, Walton, Levene, Beaton, Padua 3/29 by PoC (YTD 20/290) – Wilson, Okorafor, Padua
2015 Books Roundup
Total books: 290, precisely one less than the previous year’s 291; however 24 of these were dives into the first 50 pages of Clarke nominees that I knew were unlikely to win or be shortlisted. The fifth highest of the years I have been counting, but I have only passed that total in one subsequent year (last year, 2021).
Total page count: ~80,100, sixth highest of the years I have been counting, higher than any year since.
Diversity: 86 (30%) by women, the highest to date, since exceeded in both numbers and % in 2018, 2019 and 2021, and in % only in 2016. 20 (7%) by PoC, highest to date, since exceeded on both counts in 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021, and in % only in 2017.
Most books by a single author: 6 by Justin Richards (4), who also topped my 2014 tally.
Science Fiction (130)
Top SF books of the year: Collectively the Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist, especially the winner, Station Eleven, by Emily St John Mandel (get it here)
Honourable mentions: The Affirmation, by Christopher Priest (review; get it here) Kushiel’s Justice, by Jacqueline Carey (review; get it here)
The one you haven’t heard of: The Last Man, by Alfred Noyes (review; get it here)
The one to avoid: The Wonder City of Oz, by John R. Neill (review; get it here)
Non-Fiction (47)
Top non-fiction book of the year: The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, by Claire Tomalin (review; get it here)
Runners-up: Letters to Tiptree, eds Alissa Krasnostein and Alexandra Pierce (review; get it here) Selected Essays, by Virginia Woolf (review; get it here)
The one you haven’t heard of: Martial Power and Elizabethan Political Culture, by Rory Rapple (review; get it here)
The one to avoid: Wisdom from my Internet, by Michael Z. Williamson (review; get it here)
Doctor Who (43, 54 counting non-fiction and comics)
Best Who book read in 2015: City of Death, by Douglas Adams and James Goss (review; get it here)
Runner-up (and re-read): Walking to Babylon, by Kate Orman (review; get it here)
Best Whovian non-fiction: Companion Piece: Women Celebrate the Humans, Aliens and Tin Dogs of Doctor Who, eds. L.M. Myles and Liz Barr (review; get it here)
The two that even dedicated Whovians have not heard of: Doctor Who and the Vortex Crystal and Doctor Who and the Rebel’s Gamble, both by William H. Keith, Jr (review; get them here and here)
The one to avoid: I did not keep good notes so will be charitable.
Non-genre Fiction (42)
Best non-sff fiction read in 2015: Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (review; get it here)
The one you haven’t heard of: The Twenty-two Letters, by Clive King (review; get it here)
The one to avoid: The Sorrows of an American, by Siri Hustvedt (review; get it here)
Comics (19)
Best graphic stories read in 2015: The Sculptor, by Scott McCloud (review; get it here) The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage, by Sydney Padua (review; get it here)
The one you haven’t heard of: De Tweede Kus, by Conz (review; get it here)
The one to avoid: Boerke Bijbel, by Pieter de Poortere (review; get it here)
Poetry (just 1 but I enjoyed it)
The Whole and Rain-domed Universe, by Colette Bryce (review; get it here)
Worst Book of the Year
Wisdom from my Internet, by Michael Z. Williamson, possibly the worst book I have read this century
Best Book(s) of the year
Collectively, the Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist, in particular the winner, Station Eleven, by Emily St John Mandel. However I did not actually blog about these, being one of the judges at the time. – Best book I actually blogged about: The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, by Claire Tomalin
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 had two nice trips with Anne that month, first to Bruges, where I became fascinated by the portraits of Baron de Keverberg and his young English wife:
And then to Sofia, Bulgaria, where my former intern M married D, who I had introduced her to in the summer of 2013.
The celebrations unfortunately had to be downscaled at the last moment because it was the weekend of the Paris terrorist attacks, and D was the foreign minister of Bulgaria at the time. We returned to a locked down Brussels, where worse was to come a few months later.
This was also the month that I formally took on the role of Hugo Administrator for 2017, with Colette Fozard as my deputy. And in London for a work trip, I looked at Charles Babbage’s brain and Jonathan Swift’s cranial cavity in the Hunterian Museum.
I read 33 books that month (though in a couple of cases these were short story collections where I read only the ones from 1940).
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 in Windsor at a work retreat, and had another trip to London within the week, followed by a family trip to Luxembourg and another work trip to Geneva. The best photograph I took all month was actually of the Dijlepark in Leuven at twilight on the 31st.
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.
This month saw the beginning of a short project in (North) Macedonia, work trips also to Paris, Belgrade and London, and my godson’s wedding in Wales.
Even though my uncle photo-bombed me at the Tardis door.
This was also the month in which I was approached for the role of Hugo administrator for the 2017 Worldcon, a role which has continued to resonate for me (much more than the Promotions Divion head role I’d had for London the year before).
~4,600 pages (YTD 57,600) 4/17 by women (YTD 64/213) – Myles/Barr, Wilson, Adichie, Foster 2/17 by PoC (YTD 14/213) – Adichie, Foster
Standout best for me this month was Americanah, which taught me a lot about Nigeria. You can get it here. Least impressed by Manuscript Found in a Milk bottle, which Neil Gaiman describes as his own worst short story; I would not disagree. You can’t get it anywhere.
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.
Apart from a quick work trip to London – where Brian Aldiss signed his The Twinkling of an Eye for me – we spent most of the month in Northern Ireland. On the way, we looked in on the replica of the great clock of Richard of Wallingford in St Alban’s.
Little U was not completely convinced by the seaside.
The Hugo Award results came through, and No Award won in five categories, equal to the total number of times it had previously won in the history of the awards. The Puppies were defeated, but had inflicted damage,
I read 31 books that month, some of them mercifully short.
However you can avoid the official Hitch-hiker’s Guide sequel, And Another Thing…, by Eoin Colfer in good conscience. If you want to get it anyway, it is here.
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.
A busy travel month, as I visited London, Barcelona and, for the only time in my life so far, Nigeria for work purposes, and also went to my cousin’s housewarming/wedding party in Luxembourg.
En route to the latter, we detoured to Trier in Germany, where the Emperor Constantine’s throne room, built in the early 300’s, is now the main Protestant church in the city and was hosting a sculpture exhibition.
As we drove home, the EU summit was sorting out Greece’s finances.
Puppy madness was still dominating my reading time, so I read only 18 books that month.
Non-fiction: 4 (YTD 27) Splintered Light: Tolkien’s World, by Verlyn Flieger The Prisoner, by Dave Rogers Gulp, by Mary Roach The King’s Speech, by Mark Logue and Peter Conradi
Fiction (non-sf): 4 (YTD 22) The Luminaries, by Eleanor Catton The True Deceiver, by Tove Jansson Ulysses, by James Joyce The Sorrows of an American, by Siri Hust
SF (non-Who): 3 (YTD 77) City at the End of Time, by Greg Bear (did not finish, 100 pages only) A Scanner Darkly, by Philip K. Dick Kushiel’s Mercy, by Jacqueline Carey
Doctor Who, etc: 6 (YTD 28) Killing Ground, by Steve Lyons Halflife, by Mark Michalowski Ghost Devices, by Simon Bucher-Jones Doctor Who and the Vortex Crystal by William H. Keith, Jr. Doctor Who and the Rebel’s Gamble by William H. Keith, Jr. Doctor Who – The Drosten’s Curse, by A.L. Kennedy
Comics : 1 (YTD 11) Sally Heathcote, Suffragette, by Mary M. Talbot, Kate Charlesworth and Bryan Talbot
~6,300 pages (YTD 43,700) 9/18 by women (YTD 48/165) – Flieger, Roach, Catton, Jansen, Hustvedt, Kennedy, Talbot/Charlesworth 0/18 by PoC (YTD 11/147)
