Six books and 2,278 pages this month, which leaves me at 35 books and 10,329 pages this year, well on track for the book a week target I set myself. It was nearly eight books as I finished two on the first day of May.
Two roleplaying books this month; the Dune: Adventures in the Imperium Core Rules and the Fall of the Imperium sourcebook for the same. I’m conflicted on the Dune implementation at the moment, as there is a very slick and light implementation of 2d20 in it, let down by poorly expressed mechanics. There is an art to writing a clear rules text, and there are few editors who seem to get that these days. Clarity is key.
Fiction books included The Searcher by Tana French, Damascus Station by David McCloskey, Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds, and The Silence by Susan Allott.
The Searcher and The Silence were impulse buys. The former has a retired American police detective who has settled in Ireland, and gets drawn into the search for a local young man who has disappeared. It’s nicely done and I may check out the sequel which has been released since. The latter is a tale of a dysfunctional family who have emigrated to Australia. The father comes into suspicion of a murder many years before and the daughter, who has returned home from London, tries to understand the dark secrets of the past. This also touches on the forced adoption of aboriginal children, so is quite a dark story.
Pushing Ice was a reread, but I’d not returned to it since it was originally released. This is classic Reynolds, with mysterious alien objects and tensions between the crew of mining spacecraft drawn into exploring it. The book ends ripe for a sequel, but it was a good point to finish.
My favourite book of the month was Damascus Station. McCloskey tells a taught and gripping tale of CIA espionage set against the disintegration of Syria. I will definitely read more of his books going forward. This felt tense and very real, and interesting has a lot of recommendations from former intelligence community members.
4 May 2024
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