November 2014 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.
With my new job, I started a fairly intense period of travel which was only really interrupted by the pandemic two years ago
I went to London (twice actually):
...to a conference in Florence (actually my previous visit had been in 1991 not 1990):
...and to another in Montenegro.
We also went to a couple of museums in Belgium, and I did some cultural archaeology:
I read 26 books that month.
Non-fiction 1 (YTD 45)
TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 5: Tom Baker and the Williams Years, by Philip Sandifer
Fiction (non-sf) 4 (YTD 41)
Home, by Marilynne Robinson
Rules, by Cynthia Lord
Beach Music, by Pat Conroy
The Grass is Singing, by Doris May Lessing
SF (non-Who) 16 (YTD 110) (most of these were Clarke submissions)
Station Eleven, by Emily St John Mandel
Into the Fire, by Peter Liney
The Martian, by Andy Weir
Annihilation, by Jeff VanderMeer
Authority, by Jeff VanderMeer
Acceptance, by Jeff VanderMeer
War Dogs, by Greg Bear
Wolves, by Simon Ings
Memory of Water, by Emmi Itäranta
The Bone Clocks, by David Mitchell
The Peripheral, by William Gibson
Sphinx: The Second Coming, by James Thornton
Consumed, by David Cronenburg
Bird Box, by Josh Malerman
Shades of Milk and Honey, by Mary Robinette Kowal
The Heart of Valour, by Tanya Huff
Doctor Who 4 (YTD 56)
Empire of Death, by David Bishop
Lungbarrow, by Marc Platt
Time Zero, by Justin Richards
The Crawling Terror, by Mike Tucker
Comics 1 (YTD 18)
Sugar Skull, by Charles Burns
~8,500 pages (YTD ~90,100)
7/26 (YTD 75/270) by women (Robinson, Lord, Lessing, Mandel, Itäranta, Mandel, Huff)
0/26 (YTD 16/270) by PoC
The best of these was Station Eleven, by Emily St John Mandel, which went on to win the Arthur C. Clarke Award and is now a TV series; you can get it here. The second best was Emmi Itäranta's Memory of Water, also a Clarke shortlistee, which you can get here. I also very much enjoyed Sugar Skull, the conclusion of Charles Burns' graphic novel trilogy; you can get it here.
On the other hand, Sphinx: The Second Coming, by James Thornton, was pretty awful; you can get it here. And Into the Fire, by Peter Liney, was probably even worse, but I only read the first fifty pages; you can get it here.
With my new job, I started a fairly intense period of travel which was only really interrupted by the pandemic two years ago
I went to London (twice actually):
...to a conference in Florence (actually my previous visit had been in 1991 not 1990):
...and to another in Montenegro.
We also went to a couple of museums in Belgium, and I did some cultural archaeology:
I read 26 books that month.
Non-fiction 1 (YTD 45)
TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 5: Tom Baker and the Williams Years, by Philip Sandifer
Fiction (non-sf) 4 (YTD 41)
Home, by Marilynne Robinson
Rules, by Cynthia Lord
Beach Music, by Pat Conroy
The Grass is Singing, by Doris May Lessing
SF (non-Who) 16 (YTD 110) (most of these were Clarke submissions)
Station Eleven, by Emily St John Mandel
Into the Fire, by Peter Liney
The Martian, by Andy Weir
Annihilation, by Jeff VanderMeer
Authority, by Jeff VanderMeer
Acceptance, by Jeff VanderMeer
War Dogs, by Greg Bear
Wolves, by Simon Ings
Memory of Water, by Emmi Itäranta
The Bone Clocks, by David Mitchell
The Peripheral, by William Gibson
Sphinx: The Second Coming, by James Thornton
Consumed, by David Cronenburg
Bird Box, by Josh Malerman
Shades of Milk and Honey, by Mary Robinette Kowal
The Heart of Valour, by Tanya Huff
Doctor Who 4 (YTD 56)
Empire of Death, by David Bishop
Lungbarrow, by Marc Platt
Time Zero, by Justin Richards
The Crawling Terror, by Mike Tucker
Comics 1 (YTD 18)
Sugar Skull, by Charles Burns
~8,500 pages (YTD ~90,100)
7/26 (YTD 75/270) by women (Robinson, Lord, Lessing, Mandel, Itäranta, Mandel, Huff)
0/26 (YTD 16/270) by PoC
The best of these was Station Eleven, by Emily St John Mandel, which went on to win the Arthur C. Clarke Award and is now a TV series; you can get it here. The second best was Emmi Itäranta's Memory of Water, also a Clarke shortlistee, which you can get here. I also very much enjoyed Sugar Skull, the conclusion of Charles Burns' graphic novel trilogy; you can get it here.
On the other hand, Sphinx: The Second Coming, by James Thornton, was pretty awful; you can get it here. And Into the Fire, by Peter Liney, was probably even worse, but I only read the first fifty pages; you can get it here.