Books in January 2026

 

In my early days of blogging, as well as writing about gaming, I discussed what I'd read. I've decided to try that again this year, and joined Storygraph to help me keep track. Let's start with a quick look back at January...

The Iron Hand of Mars by Lindsey Davies. Number four in the Marcus Didius Falco stories, which follow the adventures of a Roman private informer in the first century AD. Under cover of delivering a new standard to a legion in Germany, Falco must investigate the legion's loyalty, find out what happened to a missing Legate, and broker peace with a rebel Gaul. Despite the complex mission, I found this one dragged a bit compared to the first three, which are best thought of as a trilogy as they follow a single story arc centred on a conspiracy against the Emperor; but it was still enjoyable enough to lure me on to number five. If you're new to Falco, start with The Silver Pigs.

Assorted Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells. These follow the self-styled Murderbot, a security android which has hacked its own operating system to remove Asimov's Laws of Robotics, and just wants to be left alone to watch soap operas, but keeps getting dragged into lethal intrigue and conspiracies. Mostly novellas; I enjoyed them all, but Wells is at her best when telling novel length stories such as Network Effect, where her worldbuilding and characterisation have room to breathe. If you're new to Murderbot, start with All Systems Red, but the series doesn't really start motoring until the third novella, Rogue Protocol.

The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van dek Kolk. How severe trauma rewires the brain and body, what treatments are most effective, and how all this was discovered. This book held a number of surprises for me, including abused children greatly outnumbering war veterans as PTSD diagnoses, how much politics gets in the way of real science and treatment, and how simple the most effective therapies are - yoga, for example, and controlled eye movement.

Simple Sabotage Field Manual. This was originally written by the OSS in World War II, to show how people in occupied Europe could conduct a million tiny acts of untraceable sabotage against their occupiers, none individually significant, but collectively making everything just that little bit harder for the invaders. The recommendations are surprisingly similar to everyday life in a large corporation.