Current reading

• Waverly; or, Tis Sixty Years Since , by Walter Scott
• Apple: The First 50 Years , by David Pogue

Read so far in 2026

• Mania , by Lionel Shriver — I got this as a "blind date with a book" at our local independent bookshop. I'd probably not have picked it up otherwise, given the author's politics, so I guess it's a good opportunity to try something different (which is the whole idea). The writing is decent, particularly the characterisation of the main players, but the satire felt superficial, and sometimes poorly integrated into the (pretty thin) plot. Diverting, but not much more than that.
• Mapp and Lucia , by E. F. Benson
• Good Anger , by Sam Parker
• A Wizard of Earthsea , by Ursula K. Le Guin — Le Guin was mentioned in The Spice Must Flow, and I realised that while I'd read some of her work I'd not read her best-known books. A well-timed Kindle sale gave me the perfect opportunity to fix that. Not entirely my cup of tea, but well-written and kept me engaged to the end.
• The Spice Must Flow , by Ryan Britt
• Dungeons & Dragons Player's Handbook (2024) , by Various — My daughter has started playing with a club, so I needed to get up to speed on "modern" D&D. This happens to be the 50th Anniversary version, and about 40 years more recent than the version I started on.
• 1Q84 , by Haruki Murakami

Previous Years

• Books of 2025
• Books of 2024

This page used to be a more general status update, but I’ve found that I wasn’t keeping up with it, so I’ve trimmed it back to just my current and recent reading, which I do record.