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| May 2024 - 2,564 pages |
The three roleplaying books were all part of the Outgunned kickstarter package, which landed physically just before North Star. I won't add more as I'm a fair bit through writing a review of the core rules. The World of Killers and Action Flicks genre books are well worth looking at as well.
Both of the non-fiction were audiobooks which I listened to while driving to visit sites. Amy Edmondson's The Fearless Organisation is a fascinating exploration of what drives psychological safety from a team dynamics perspective. I've always come at this from a high reliability organisation perspective so it was interesting to have a succinct and interesting exploration like this, with plenty of examples. It all started from wondering why high performing teams reported more accidents and incidents than others and ended up driving a fascinating research career.
The other audiobook was Rory Carroll's Killing Thatcher, which explores the build up to the Brighton IRA Bombing which nearly killed most of the UK government and then the aftermath. This was incredibly gripping and manages to build sympathy for the IRA operators, then tear it down with the description of the bomb's consequences, then follow through with the aftermath and leave you wondering exactly how you feel about what happened and whether it was a factor in the Anglo-Irish agreement that followed soon after and set the path towards the Good Friday agreement. It also makes it plain what the Brexiteer's failure to think through the impact of exiting the EU puts at risk.
Fiction had me return to Fred Pohl's Gateway for perhaps the third or fourth time. This was pre-reading for running Across a Thousand Dead Worlds at North Star and really got me into the right mindset. I also relished reading Carlos Ruiz Zafón's The City of Mist which was the final book he published before he died. It's a collection of short stories set in the Cemetery of Forgotten books setting, which is one of my favourite series. It's a shame he passed away so soon as this reminded me just how much I loved his slightly gothic feeling urban fantasy. The language and stories are beautiful.
I also read Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. This was a fun tale of a young girl escaping a restrictive family in the company of a Mayan God who has been imprisoned. It had a very Young-Adult theme and got better as the story went on. Not as good as Silver Nitrate but definitely worth the time. Finally, I read Adrian Tchaikovsky's And Put Away Childish Things which is an enjoyable take on the idea of Narnia and other Fairy Realms with a dash of science to justify it all. The protagonist, a CBeebies presenter, gets drawn in the world of Underhill, the stories that his grandmother wrote and made her fortune with. Enjoyable.
I've got a few other books working through on slow burn at the moment, which may well pop up next month.
Hard to pick a favourite this month; it probably balances between The City of Mist and Killing Thatcher.
1 June 2024
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