Favorite Reads: June 2016

Favorite reads for June. I put down more books than I finished… or am still stuck in the middle of them. Of the few I finished here are the highlights:

A Burglar’s Guide to the City by Geoff Manaugh: Probably the book I liked the least here. That’s not to say it’s bad, but it’s a mix of neat/cool facts and un-neat/un-cool rhapsodically waxing architectural that had not enough of one and too much of the other. But as a quick read, skimming to the neat bits such as monastic book thieves, tunneling bank robbers, and the guy they dubbed Spiderman who lived in a secret apartment he built in a Toys R Us, it’s a lot of fun. Added bonus feature! If you read it before bed it might give you home invasion nightmares!

The Looking Glass War by John LeCarre: A sad spy novel that the former CIA head Allen Dulles believed depicted what spy work actually was like. If you’ve read the George Smiley/Circus books you might like this one, because here they’re the villains standing aside as another British intelligence agency attempts to field a mission a bit too far beyond their capabilities.

Company Town by Madeline Ashby: A cyberpunk novel set on a city-sized oil rig about a body guard and her new assignment looking after the heir apparent to the corporation that bought the rig. It’s cyberpunk in the good way, focusing on those undermined or otherwise on the bad side of progress. I’ll warn you that I don’t think Ashby quite sticks the landing, but she’s close enough that I can appreciate the ride and the ambition she had attempting to pull it off.

Black Wine by Candas Jane Dorsey: I grew up reading a lot of fantasy, but have come around to not standing it in 99% of its modern forms (Epic, Grim, Sword & Sorcery, it’s all *blerg*). But when I find a book that sits in that 1%? Holy shit! I’m in love. This is one of those books. It’s brutal, but from the first sentence I was hooked.

There is a scarred, twisted old madwoman in a cage in the court yard.