It's springtime! What was I reading?

Hardwired by Walter Jon Williams - “the acknowledged inspiration for the games Cyberpunk Red and Cyberpunk 2077” follows a smuggler who connects his brain directly to his vehicle when running across borders and a street mercenary who took the wrong job. Can they face off against the rulers of the earth, up in their geostationary orbits? Well, it wouldn't be a book if they couldn't. I couldn’t get this from library, bookshop.org or hive so ended up giving Amazon £3.48 for the ebook version. Good, violent, augmented reality and augmented human cyberpunk fun.

The Amulet of Samarkand by Jonathan Stroud. The first in the Bartimaeus trilogy, a bit of a silly magical escapade where you end up sympathising with a demon and hating pretty much all the humans. Just like life.

The Past is Red by Catherynne Morgan Valente - a novella about finding light in the darkness. The quote by Hank Green on the cover of my copy says "The Past is Red is magical realism meets the garbage patch. Every page is a new and surprising invention. It's hilarious and sad and filled with an inexcusable amount of wisdom". I'm not totally sure about the wisdom part, but the rest is true. A really lovely read.

This is how you lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone the former of whom wrote "I am incomprehensibly grateful to bigolas dickolas" when a tweet from that user went viral, sending the popularity of the book rocketing in 2023. This is an epistolary novella, which is well-told and well-formulated, and although it contained one twist I didn't see coming I think it was supposed to have several more. That is to say that the plotting of the story doesn't match up to the language or the characters - if you're going to make it obvious from the title of the book onwards that this is a time travel novel, then the story needs to be less predictable. Beautiful use of language though.