Reading Roundup

The most recent instalment of Stuff I've Been Reading, largely as a reminder to myself so I can flick back through posts here and say "oh, yeah, I totally forgot about that" in 7 to 12 years times...

I worked through the entire Anthony Price bibliography I started in October 2024; reading them through in publication order definitely gives a better introduction to some of the surrounding characters, but they still work fine when read in whatever order you happened to find them in. If I go for another read through in ten-odd years I might try them in the chronological order of the events in the books for a bit of fun.

In the mood for further cold war espionage I had a look around and saw some glowing reviews of Joseph Hone's The Private Sector, the first of four Peter Marlow novels. It's good, but I found it a touch squalid so I haven't moved on to the others yet. Another suggestion was Michael Gilbert's work featuring Calder and Behrens; Game Without Rules, a short story collection, has been a most enjoyable introduction so I may well try a couple more of his books.

On the non-fiction front this year's Chalke History Festival added a number of books to the to-read pile, of which I've only finished Eleanor Barraclough's Embers of the Hands so far, a wonderful history of some of the lesser known aspects of the Viking age.

Back to the fiction, and I've mostly been keeping up with Ben Aaronovitch's superb Rivers of London series (despite only mentioning it once before on the blog, unless the search function is deceiving me); there's a new novel out this year, but while waiting for the e-book price to drop slightly to what-would-have-been-paperback levels I picked up the two most recent novellas: Winter's Gifts and The Masquerades of Spring, the latter a lovely little P G Wodehouse pastiche.

Finally, with an ongoing re-play of Cyberpunk 2077 in progress, I've gone back to William Gibson's Bridge trilogy, currently halfway through Idoru. The postmillennial future of the 1990s stands up incredibly well, obviously it's not a perfect prediction but the idea of a synthetic personality certainly strikes a chord in this agentic world.