This month's mix included one non-fiction, one short-story magazine and seven novels.
The non-fiction book was Sarah Wynn-Williams biography covering her time at Facebook (now Meta). She was a key member of the policy team, and it's a fascinating read about a toxic culture. At the start of the book I found her really naive and annoying, but by mid-way through you see her starting to realise what the place that she really wanted to work in is truly like. The title, Careless People, really says it all and it's no surprise that Meta are trying to suppress this. Definitely worth the time.
The short-story magazine was Clarkesworld. I've been getting this for several years and been very sporadic in how I've read it, so have made a commitment to myself to read it each month. As ever, it's a mixed bag, but there was nothing I disliked in it and much to like.
Speaking of commitments, in an effort to broaden and discover what I'm reading, I joined Elle Cordova's SF Book Club (worth it for the end of the month videos alone) and that led me to read one novel I'd never considered and one that I bought quite some time ago. The one I'd never considered was Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro, a tale about the life of an artificial person (an AI robot designed as a friend for children). There's a note of sadness though this but it was really enjoyable. The book I'd had for a long time was N.K.Jemison's The Fifth Season, which is part of an award winning series that collected Hugos and Nebulas. The latter felt closer to fantasy than science-fiction but it gripped me all the way through. It was fantasy in the sense that the technology involved in some areas was akin to magic (and could well have been magic). However, you need to be prepared for a multiple viewpoint multiple timeline novel that's part of a trilogy. I enjoyed both, and this month it will be Lem's Solaris.
Mick Herron's Clown Town was fun, but not the best of the Slow Horses books, and I felt that there was an element of forced ambiguity at the end which didn't work brilliantly for me. I also read two Kevin Wignall thrillers, The Story Starts Here and These Days Will End. The former starts with a student being expelled from school for 'drug dealing' and escalates rapidly, and the later is best described as being akin to an Agatha Christie story, set in a hotel in Italy. There's a murder, and one of the suspects and residents start to investigate. I like Wignall's writing, it carries me along nicely.
The Gnomes of Lychford is the latest from Paul Cornell, set in a town which has become the gateway between our world and magical realms. The story is really a warning about why you shouldn't have garden gnomes. Fun, but again not the best of the series. I rounded the month out with Christopher Fowler's Seventy Seven Clocks, the third of the Bryant & May mysteries. This was complicated and fun and very enjoyable.
Overall, a good month of reading.
1 October 2025