November 2012 books
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.
Just one trip this month, to New York for a work meeting. This was just after Hurricane Sandy, and the last ten rows of my plane were empty apart from me. I've never seen that before or since.
My visit coincided with election day, as it had done in 2008. Queues of people voting, but the outcome was even less in doubt than four years before. I watched the results at the Nielsen Haydens'.
That night it snowed, and Washington Square turned into Narnia.
I also attended Philcon in Cherry Hill, NJ, outside Philadelphia, where I first met Colette Fozard, whose birthday is today - Happy Birthday, Colette!!! Here's Gary S. Blog sitting on the Loncon table.
And I tried to take a Christmas picture of the children, but failed.
I read 18 books that month, some of them quite long.
Non-fiction: 5 (YTD 48)
A History of Christianity, by Diarmaid MacCullough
The Invention of Childhood, by Hugh Cunningham
Catholics in Western Democracies, by John H. Whyte
Between the Continent and the Open Sea, by David Rennie
Interview Secrets, by Heather Salter
Fiction (not sf): 4 (TYD 42)
The Harvester, by Gene Stratton-Porter
The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James
Goodnight Mister Tom, by Michelle Magorian
The Light That Failed, by Rudyard Kipling
SF (not Who): 4 (YTD 60)
Being Human: The Road, by Simon Guerrier
Revise the World, by Brenda W. Clough
Grendel, by John Gardner
The Faerie Queene, by Edmund Spenser
Who: 5 (YTD 69)
The Ancestor Cell, by Peter Anghelides and Stephen Cole
Monstrous Missions: Terrible Lizards, by Jonathan Green
Monstrous Missions: Horror of the Space Snakes, by Gary Russell
The Sleepers In The Dust, by Darren Jones
The Angel's Kiss: A Melody Malone Mystery, by Justin Richards
~5,900 pages (YTD 70,600)
4/18 (YTD 64/242) by women (Salter, Stratton-Porter, Magorian, Clough)
1/18 (YTD 11/242) by PoC (Clough)
Three particularly lovely books this month: Henry James' Portrait of a Lady, which you can get here, Michelle Magorian's children's classic Goodnight Mister Tom, which you can get here, and Diarmaid MacCulloch's magisterial History of Christianity, which you can get here. For once, no particular turkeys.
