Read: Autocracy, Inc. by Anne Applebaum 📚 on audiobook, which came out two years ago. So much of what @anneapplebaum.wsocial.eu says about countries run by greedy narcissistic bullies could now be said about the US. #booksky #books #reading

Read: Loitering with Intent by Muriel Spark 📚 One of those ‘how autobiographical is this?’ games about a struggling 1940s writer. Snarky and funny and far more tricksy than I expected. #reading #books #booksky

Read: The Pretender by Jo Harkin 📚Peasant Pretender puppeteered by powerful Plantagenet proponents. Wolf Hall minus the portentousness. #booksky #reading #books

Read: London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe 📚As in his ‘Say Nothing’, Keefe clearly disentangles a lot of complicated world views and confabulations to illuminate a particular world, though the overarching story isn’t as sharply defined. #reading #books #booksky

Read: The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt 📚Cormac McCarthy with a sense of humour and optimism, and also an editor, and all the more likeable for it. #books #reading #booksky

Read: Last One Out A Novel by Jane Harper 📚Her usual territory: resident returns to Australian small town and insular relationships (often between 3 male friends) which led to a tragedy a few years before. Realistic characters, well observed interactions, but nothing new. #booksky #reading #books

Read: Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe 📚Fantastically researched especially the bits the TV series smoothed over. You do wonder exactly why Adams hasn’t sued over the allegations it makes about him. #books #booksky #readingcommunity

Read: Pearl by Siân Hughes 📚Hughes is an award winning poet, and it shows, in a good way as her narator writes intensely and immersively about her mother’s death. As someone who felt no cause to grieve my own mother’s death, it was… informative. #books #booksky #readingcommunity

Read: Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It by Cory Doctorow 📚Freshman outrage at the shock of big companies being unscrupulous about how they make money. Nothing you can’t hear him perform any day of the week for free. #books #booksky #readingcommunity

Read: Agents of Innocence by David Ignatius 📚Drips realism and apparently the CIA uses it as an exemplar of Middle Eastern espionage. The detail draws you in and the conflicts between ethnicities and sects is tragically still relevant. #booksky #books #readingcommunity

Read: Golden Hill by Francis Spufford 📚Dark smart pastiche of Fielding, Sterne, etc, in late 18th century New York, but there’s more to it than just quality fanfiction. The characters are ludicrously alive and you can smell the horse shit and ambition. #booksky #books #readingcommunity

Read: The Unwanted Dead by Chris Lloyd 📚 Juicy atmospheric procedural set in Paris just after the Germans marched in during June 1940. Not spies, but feels like Furst, Gerlis, Robert Harris. #booksky #books #readingcommunity

Read: All the Sinners Bleed A Novel by S. A. Cosby 📚Nails the atmosphere of Deep(ish) South small town revenge, tangled up in barely hidden racism, fully developed characters. Solid genre procedural but stands in its own right too. #booksky #books

My latest ’excursion’ into podcasting is up - an interview with spy writer Michael Dylan about his latest book The New Spy, for @spybrary. Find it where-ever you get your etc. etc. spybrary.com/the-new-s… #booksky #authorsky

Read: There There by Tommy Orange 📚Most of the book is perceptively drawn scenes of disparate cast in the runup to a powwow in Oakland. When tragic violence explodes there, it’s both the point and beside the point that they’re all native American. #booksky #books

Read: The Fraud by Zadie Smith 📚Meaty and slightly meandering like the 19th century English novels it pastiches, with a nuanced human take on slavery’s effects rather than performative shouty self righteousness. #booksky #books

Read: Everything We Do Is Music How 20th-Century Classical Music Shaped Pop by @elizabethalker.bsky.social 📚Wonderfully nerdy cross referencing of pop music with ‘serious’ avant garde, which took my listening down many weird and, it transpired, joyously unlistenable rabbitholes. #booksky

Read: Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York by Andrew Lownie 📚Fergie/Andrew bio- readable etc. but most of it’s been in the media already. Brings together the astonishing extent of their ligging and fosters a sense of righteous outrage. #booksky

Read: Villager by Tom Cox 📚Portrait of a village, seen partly through the eyes of the village, circling through time, space and points of view. Rich and enrichening and humane. #booksky #books

Read: The New Spy by Michael Dylan 📚The opposite of the Slow Horses (Galloping Thoroughbreds?) fight a bunch of terrorist threats in London. Fast read, and more action than atmosphere. Feels like a lost novelisation of BBC’s Spooks. #booksky #thrillers

Read: Reykjavik - A Crime Story by Ragnar Jónasson Katrín Jakobsdóttir 📚By the numbers, emotionally flat Icelandic noir heavy with the usual deserted islands, crusading journalist and middle aged professionals hiding a sin from their youth. #booksky #thrillers

Read: Vienna At Nightfall by Richard Wake 📚Richly atmospheric Alan Furst-ish world of pre-WW2 Austria, as completely believable ‘ordinary bloke’ is pulled into spying, with all the agonies and internal conflicts it brings, and a credibly snarky authorial voice. #booksky #thrillers

Read: The Peacock and the Sparrow by I.S. Berry 📚Leans more towards agonised burnt out spook cases of Greeneland and Deighton than gripping suspense. Feels real enough that I now need to research what actually happened in Bahrain in 2012. #booksky #thrillers

Read: Harry’s Game by Gerald Seymour 📚 Long overdue to read this (mostly associate it with the 1970s TV series and Clannad). Pulls together action, politics, ‘world’, psychology, morality, emotions, suspense, allthethings, brilliantly. Total, total classic. #booksky #readingcommunity #thriller

Read: Yellowface by R F Kuang 📚Readable and smart while disappearing up its own postmodern identity-politicking arse. I can see why publishers hyped it: industries love to see themselves reflected back as edgy and absorbing, especially when they’re cliquey and privileged. #booksky #reading #books