Books in June 2024

The reading rate in June

June 2024 saw me read 7 books for a total of 2,333 pages, bringing me to a total of 49 books and 14,792 pages for the year so far. I'm 3 books off the target I set myself (which is 52 books, or a book per week).

Of the books read, two were non-fiction, four were fiction and was a role-playing book.

The non-fiction books were Ian Dunt's "How Westminster Works... and Why it Doesn't" and Cal Flynn's "Islands of Abandonment". The former is a very clearly written description and analysis of the UK political system, along with some modest suggestions of how to make a real difference in its effectiveness, suggestions which I doubt will be implemented even if the government changes this Thursday as the status quo of antagonistic winner-takes-it-all functionality favours any government's agenda. The latter is a beautiful set of visits to places across the globe that humanity has retreated from and nature has started to recover. Both of these were audiobooks, listened to when driving between sites.

The roleplaying book was "Broken Compass", which I have reviewed elsewhere on this blog. I'm over halfway through the first supplement for this as well, but stopped reading it to focus on Longcon. I read Broken Compass because I wanted to get a feel for the evolution into Outgunned and was wondering if it would work to hack some other more crunchy games into it (such as Space 1889). The short answer is yes, it would work very well.

The novels started with "Beyond the Light Horizon" by Ken MacLeod, the final part of the Lightspeed Trilogy. This brought the stories to a satisfying ending, and was very enjoyable. I do like the way that MacLeod continues to fly the flag for socialist utopias in science-fiction, even though it's probably a more lonely path since his friend Iain Banks died. I then moved onto Mick Herron's "This is What Happened", which I thought was going to be a spy drama echoing Slow Horses, but it was very much not that and went to unexpected places. Very well done and a little creepy.  After this, I dug into "Death in Blitz City" by David Young, a story set in the Second World War in Hull with a police team investigating a number of brutal murders. The author previously wrote the Stasi Child series of books and it was an enjoyable detective story. 

My highlight of the month (narrowly pipping Ken MacLeod's "Beyond the Light Horizon") was SA Chakraborty's "River of Silver", which is a collection of short stories set around, before and after the Daevabad trilogy. It was wonderful to dip back into this universe of Arabian Nights and Djinn and find a little more about the back story and what happened next. Definitely recommended but read the trilogy first, it's great fun.

I did also read two Stormbringer roleplaying game books fully, twice as part of Longcon preparation, but it seems a little churlish to include them (plus I didn't have time to add them to The StoryGraph!).

1 July 2024