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fromtheheartofeurope_feed) wrote2025-07-05 02:01 pm
5 July books
Non-fiction
The Medieval Cookbook, by Maggie Black (2007)
Why I am not a Christian, and other essays on religion and related subjects, by Bertrand Russell (2008)
Hope-In-The-Mist, by Michael Swanwick (2010)
The Bloody Sunday Report, Volume II (2010)
Carrying the Fire, by Michael Collins (2021)
Face the Raven, by Sarah Groenewegen (2022)
Franco-Irish Relations, 1500-1610: Politics, Migration and Trade, by Mary Ann Lyons (2023)
Non-genre
Mating, by Norman Rush (2015)
The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, by Nicholas Meyer ((2015)
Speculative fiction
Collected Short Stories, by E.M. Forster (2008)
Dune, by Frank Herbert (2017)
Moominvalley in November, by Tove Jansson (2018)
If Found Return to Hell, by Em X. Liu (2024)
The Death I Gave Him, by Em X. Liu (2024)
Doctor Who, etc
Turlough and the Earthlink Dilemma, by Tony Attwood (2009)
Loving the Alien, by Mike Tucker and Robert Perry (2017)
Doctor Who Annual 2020 (2020)
The Best
There are a lot of good books today, but the standout winner is Carrying the Fire, the memoir of astronaut Michael Collins, which was my book of the year for 2021. (Get it here.)
Honorable mentions
Dune, of course. (Get it here.)
Forster’s Collected Short Stories – you may be surprised that I list it under “Speculative fiction”, but ten of the twelve stories have fantasy elements. (Get it here.)
Loving the Alien concludes a nice set of Doctor Who novels by Tucker and Perry. (Get them here, here, here, here and here.)
Why I am not a Christian, and other essays is rather humane, and I agree with it more now than I did then. (Get it here.)
The one you haven’t heard of
Even though it was a Hugo finalist for Best Related Work that year, Hope-In-The-Mist, Michael Swanwick’s biography of Hope Mirrlees and explanation of her fantastic story Lud-in-the-Mist, doesn’t seem to have scored on the book ownership sites. It’s great though. (Get it here.)
The ones to avoid
The 2020 Doctor Who Annual is disappointingly lazy stuff. (Get it here.)
Also unimpressed by Mating and The Seven Per Cent Solution. (Get them here and here.)
