It’s been a busy old month, has November. The rain’s come in, so the cattle are housed, which means there’s plenty of work to be done. Luckily it’s work that I can do with my head phones on, so audiobook time has shot through the roof. It’s also been a busy month on the blog as I return to a more frequent posting schedule after some slower months of late. I’m still planning a few revamps here and there, so join me for what could be my final Monthly Roundup in its current form.

Reading

Having put off a lot of books for far too long, November was the month I finally tackled my 2024 backlist. Since the overwhelming majority of new books I buy are by authors I trust to deliver a good story, this has led to a very enjoyable month of reading.

Black Library featured heavily, with two hardbacks and two audiobooks, all of which I thoroughly enjoyed. One of them is also a sure-fire hit for next month’s Boundy Awards, but I won’t say which just yet.

I also tackled some other much anticipated new releases from the likes of Adrian Tchaikovsky, Jack Campbell, Stephen Baxter, and Adam Roberts. The last of these proved to be the only real disappointment of the month, which I’ll be unpacking in a full review next week.

Outside of 2024 releases, I swung heavily the other way and immersed myself in the deep history of science fiction with some dystopias and utopias from the likes of Mary Shelley, William Morris, Samuel Butler, and Edward Bulmer. I haven’t reviewed these in full, but there is an article forming in my mind about scientific romance of the later nineteenth century. One for the nerds, I dare say.

Blogging

This month was, of course, #SciFiMonth, but I ended up forgetting to follow the prompts as per usual. I did join the readalong of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, and was relievedly not alone in finding it an underwhelming experience forty years after publication.

On a more positive note, I did get out some killer articles. In addition to outlining my ideas for a New History of Science Fiction, I took part in a Get to Know the Reader tag, celebrated my 1000th blog post in style, and even got in on the Thanksgiving celebrations.

Updates

Things on the blogging front are progressing very neatly. Barring a catastrophic December, I’m likely to hit 100,000 annual views for the first time, which is a massive milestone for a small-timer like myself. I’m pretty much set on both reading and blogging plans for the rest of the year, and that’s a very nice place to be. There’s nothing too ambitious, but hopefully a lot of loose ends will be cleared up.

The one semi-major development has come from social media. After recent events involving its owner, Twitter/X has become a place I visit less than before. After the bookish community threw a sizable (and not entirely unreasonable) hissy fit, engagement has dropped considerably. Like a lot of others, I’ve had to look elsewhere for ways to connect with fellow readers. Most of the alternatives are laughably bad, but BlueSky has proven to be a good place to cross-post my tweets to in order to reach an audience. The big surprise has been Instagram, however. I am not a particularly visual person, so the need to have a photo with every post is infuriating, but I’ve stumbled into a nice corner of the community over there, and even involved myself in a buddy read for the start of December.

I think it’s going to take a while for things to settle down, but hopefully the online world (and ideally the real world too) will stabilise and we can get back to talking about books. Until then, I’ll be doing that right here. See you tomorrow for a TBR & Beyond.