The Year of Less by Cait Flanders. The author's experience of a year-long shopping ban and minimalist lifestyle. As is often the way with such books, the parts I'm interested in - how the author did it, what the effects were, how she would do it differently knowing what she knows now - have to be extracted from a detailed biography and multiple family anecdotes explaining her motivations. I'm interested in minimalism, but I suspect it works better if you're single and reasonably well-paid; even Marie Kondo gave up when she had kids.
Poseidon's Gold by Lindsey Davis. The fifth Falco novel, which I enjoyed much more than number four; this is a story of murder, suicide, and an increasingly complicated and interwoven series of fine art frauds. Additionally, the book delves deeply into the protagonist's extended family history, as several of the family are involved in the art frauds or suspects in the murder, and in the course of this we unravel what really happened to Falco's dead brother and runaway father. Despite these complexities, it rattles along at a reasonable pace. I begin to suspect that the mysteries centred on Rome itself are more enjoyable; we'll see.
Lonelog by Roberto Bisceglie; a standard notation for solo RPG session logging. I reviewed this in more detail here.
Shadow State by Luke Harding. An investigation into how the Russian Federation and its ruling kleptocracy use dirty money, hacking, misinformation and murder to influence Western politics. Basically, they realised they didn't need to overthrow the West militarily, they could bribe us to overthrow ourselves; I'm enraged and depressed both by how effective they've been at that, and how corrupt and spineless Western leaders have been in response.
Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen. A Pulitzer-nominated author interviews many people with first-hand experience of the preparations for nuclear war, and outlines how such a war might start, escalate, and end. Key lessons for me were how fast it would go, how hard it would be to stop it escalating, and just how much damage it would do. Scary stuff. Looking at the people in charge of the planet's nuclear arsenals, it is hard to retain any sense of optimism.
City of Bones by Martha Wells. A post-apocalyptic tale of a city on the edge of a vast desert, dotted with enigmatic ruins left by a vanished but highly technological civilisation. Treasure hunters go into these ruins to find artefacts to sell to academics, fraudsters make fake artefacts. There is also intrigue, non-humans bioengineered to survive the desert in the last gasp of the dying civilisation, and a looming disaster tied to the treasures people are hunting in the desert. If this were an RPG product, it would be a Numenera supplement. I can't do it justice in a paragraph; go read it, if only for the world-building.
Ogre's 11 by Mark Finn. This is me starting to research the next group campaign but one; the book contains 13 system-agnostic fantasy heists for the thieves in your party, which can be played individually or threaded together into a campaign. This one is going into the pile for that next-but-one campaign; the heists are interesting, with entertaining plot twists, and I think the team will enjoy playing them.
Unusual Suspects by Mark Finn. System-agnostic NPC generation for modern, fantasy or SF games. It focuses on personality traits and memorable quirks rather than statblocks, with the intent of allowing the GM to create an interesting NPC on the fly at the table, generating only as much as is necessary in the moment, then expanding later as and when needed. It's good at what it does, but I'm not sure it'll lure me away from my existing tools.
TV
These days, I don't watch enough movies or TV to be worth mentioning, but this month a shout-out to Sandokan: The Pirate Prince on Netflix.
This is very loosely based on Emilio Salgari's novel Le Tigri di Mompracem and the life of the historical Sir James Brooke. Sandokan is a prince of 19th-century Malaysia, deposed by the East India Company, torn between seeking revenge on the British and his love for a British woman. Written as a magazine serial in 1883 and published as a novel in 1900, the story is unusual for its time in being anti-colonialist, with an Asian hero and British villains, and surprisingly historically accurate, using many real places, events and people - see here for an analysis.
The TV series - produced in Italy but shot in English - makes a number of changes both to the original and real history, and is a better story for it. The heroine is significantly more feisty and has more agency, the romance is a slow burn rather than mutual love at first sight, and all of the characters have been fleshed out and made more sympathetic, with credible motivations.
It's clearly a labour of love by people who know the book and have used a light touch in updating it for the modern audience; recycling the music from the 1970s Italian TV adaptation is a nice touch, as is adding the minor character Emilio who chronicles Sandokan's adventures.
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