June saw me read eight books, and only a single roleplaying game. This brings me to 65 for the year, so ahead of target for the book a week I set myself as an objective. Page count was at 2,663 with a year-to-date total of 16,008.
Only a single non-fiction in June, Timothy Snyder's On Freedom, which I recommend as a follow on to his warning about fascism, On Tyranny. Written before the present US administration, this was a warning that sadly wasn't listened to.
The roleplaying book I read was the first book of Invisible Sun, The Key. I found it intriguing, but hard work. Then again, every Cypher System game I have read has been a slog in the character generation system. There's enough here to intrigue me, and I am looking forward to reading The Gate. I'm hoping this doesn't become the large white elephant black cube in the room I have my gaming books in.
I read two books that were gaming adjacent. First of all, Marc Miller's Agent of the Imperium. This was much better than I'd anticipated and was quite a page turner. It brings up new lore about the Traveller Charted Space universe and is quite a fun time jumping epic. The other was Simon Stålenhag's Swedish Machines: Sunset at Zero Point. Stålenhag is linked to Fria Ligan, and created Tales from the Loop, and this is his latest art storybook. It's a beautifully illustrated LGBTQ tale of abandoned machines and growing up.
I also enjoyed the second Mickey 7 book, Antimatter Blues, which wasn't quite as good as the first but had a great energy to it. I will look out for future stories.
Simone St. James' The Broken Girls is another supernatural horror tinted (or should that be tainted) murder story, and kept me turning the pages. I'd picked it up because I'd enjoyed her Murder Road last year.
However, I have two books tying for my favourites this month.
The first is Has Anyone Seen Charlotte Salter? by Nicci French. This follows the story of a family whose mother disappeared when the children were growing up. A neighbour is assumed to have killed her, but her body is never found and it could have been that she just left. The tale covers the time of the murder and the modern day, when the family has reason to meet up again. However, as they do, some of the other children affected by the murder are starting a podcast to try and find out the truth. It gets messy, and you see the impact of the original disappearance on everyone involved.
The other is another Adrian Tchaikovsky book, Bee Speaker. This is the third book in the Dogs of War setting and followed a mission from Mars returning to a post-slow-apocalypse Earth, on a rescue mission for the distributed intelligence, Bees. It gets messy. Transhuman science fiction excellence.
Overall, a good month.
3 July 2025
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