Books in April 2025

A belated post on last month's reading, mainly as work and preparation for North Star consumed all my free time.

I read 14 books during April, for a total of 2,673 pages. That brings me to 47 books and 11,072 pages this year. As I belatedly write this, I've already broken through the target of 52 books for the year. The month's reading was dominated by roleplaying games as I continued my way through Deepnight Revelation for Traveller, and also two other Traveller related books for scenarios I was running.

Overall, I really liked what I read with Deepnight Revelation. I read through all the expansion books, which would be invaluable if you wanted to run this epic campaign. I also read the alternative route in the campaign (Deepnight Endeavour) and Mysteries on Arcturus Station. The latter takes the Classic Traveller murder mystery, adds a prequel and updates it for the current version of the game. It still allows you to set up one of the players as a murderer, which is cleverly managed. I also read Far Horizon again so that it was fresh in my mind before I returned to the game after a four month gap. I wrote about that experience last month in this blog entry.

I had a single non-fiction book this month, a profile of Volodymyr Zelensky called "The Showman", written by Simon Shuster. Now, I've seen criticism of this in some of the reviews out there, but it seemed to come across as a pretty balanced and human account of a person placed in an extremely challenging situation and rising to it. It certainly didn't make me any less sympathetic to him or Ukraine.

I managed two novels this month, with two novella collections as a tasty side-dish.

The first novel was Nick Harkaway's Sleeper Beach which is a future noir SF detective story, a sequel to the excellent Titanium Noir. Great writing and story, and a continued contrast of the lives of the effectively immortal Titans (rich folks with access to rejuvenation treatment) to the rest of humanity. I highly recommend both these books.

The second was Andrew O'Hagan's Caledonian Road. This is probably best described as a tragedy as you can see the metaphoric car crash coming as you follow the life of a pundit and art academic as he mixes with the landed gentry and brushes shoulders with Russian Oligarchs. Very much a sharp take on modern London and our elites, this was an impulse buy and I found it quite hard to put down.

The two novellas were The Drop and The Catch by Mick Herron, both set in the Slow Horses world. They were enjoyable and exactly what you'd expect if you've read any of the series.

My favourite for the month was Harkaway's Sleeper Beach.