November 2025 saw me read 8 books, for a total of 3,013 pages, bringing me to a total of 106 books and 28,646 pages for the year. My page count was hugely skewed by the Lucifer graphic novel omnibus which is over a third of those pages.
I finished the final two of Martha Wells' Murderbot Diaries, System Collapse and Fugitive Telemetry. I really enjoyed them and I'll be keeping an eye out for the next book in the series when it comes out. Highly recommended.
I also read The Persian by David McCloskey. This is the latest espionage novel from the author of Damascus Station. It's very different to the previous books, as it's exploring the experience of a Persian expatriate with Swedish citizenship who becomes drawn into the conflict between Iran and Israel. Most of the story is told from the perspective of a confession. Quite a hard, but good read.
This month's book club read from Contact by Carl Sagan. I have to confess I've never seen the movie so was going in cold. I struggled with Sagan’s writing style for the first three quarters of the book but the end section lifted it hugely, overall making it worth the time. Some fascinating ideas. Part of the reason I joined the book club was to try and make myself read some of the books I wouldn’t otherwise, which seems to be working out.
I read Raven, which is a gothic horror roleplaying game and very intriguing. I'm not certain about it, so I decided to dig into some Edgar Allan Poe (an author who I haven't touched since I was a teenager), listening to an audio collection of readings of his works by Basil Rathbone and Vincent Price to try and get with the vibe. I'm now reading the scenario book that goes with Raven to try and get a better feel for how the game should go. I like it but the scenarios seem very formally structured which leaves them a little cold in feel.
Before the Poe collection, I had worked my way through Daniela Richterova's Watching the Jackals, which is all about the interactions between the Czechoslovakian Secret Service and Palestinian terrorists and revolutionaries. It's pretty dry with a tendency for long words and repetition (it feels like it was written as a set of essays that have been linked together rather than a whole narrative) but pretty informative and interesting.
I finished the month diving into the first Lucifer Omnibus graphic novel. Weighing in at over 1,000 pages, I enjoyed this a lot. Mike Carey tells a gripping and fascinating tale of the fallen angel, building on what was done in The Sandman by Gaiman. Certainly the longest book in terms of page count that I've read this year!
6 December 2025
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