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Reading Roundup, Q4 2024 · Pick Up and Deliver

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Welcome to Pick Up and Deliver the podcast where I pick up my audio recorder, step out
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for a walk, and deliver an episode to you while I stroll around.
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I'm Brendan Riley.
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Well, greeting listeners, it's a lovely day here in suburban Chicago.
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The sun is out.
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No, I'm lying.
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The clouds are out.
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It's a slate gray and chilly.
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It's not actually that cold for early March.
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It's perfectly fine except that it has been significantly warmer within the last week,
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so it feels extra cold today.
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Also because it is slate gray overcast, it feels gloomier than it's maybe right to feel.
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That said, there are tons of birds around.
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There's a cardinal, lots of little chirpin' friends up in the trees
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Keepin me company here, so there must not be a hawk around.
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These folks would not be nearly so noisy and active if there were a hawk around.
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Lots of sparrows on other birds having a good old time while I'm walking to talk to you
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folks.
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So, I thought I would take a few minutes today to look back at some reading I've been doing.
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I try to do four reading episodes a year in which I reflect on the previous quarter
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of reading.
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We're in March which means we're nearly done with the first quarter of 2025, which means
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I'm kind of late to reflect on the last quarter of 2024.
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Nonetheless, here we are.
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So today I'm going to talk about the books that I read in October, November and December of
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2024 and a little bit about what I thought of them and if there's a game that feels like
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it thematically or connects in another way, I will mention that as well because this is
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a board game podcast.
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But if you're not somebody who wants to talk about books, this maybe isn't the episode
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for you because it's mostly books with a little bit of game.
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But I encourage you to stick around.
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I think I make for a good conversationalist about books.
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Anyway, let's jump right in.
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The first one I want to talk about is the Penguin Pool Murder from 1931.
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This book is by Stuart Palmer and I did read this book although I listened to it because
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my wife read it to me.
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This is one of our driving books.
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Sometimes when my wife and I have to take long trips in the car, we will designated driving
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book that we keep in the car and then while we're driving she will read to me and we'll
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enjoy the book together that way.
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It's a thing we've been doing for as long as we're married and it's a nice way to pass
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the time and we both really like to read so it's a nice way to get another book read.
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She also doesn't like to listen to recorded books so if I download an audiobook and played
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it she would just fall asleep.
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But if she doesn't mind reading out loud and if she's reading out loud she can pay attention
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to the book.
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And I can it's like I have an audiobook but it's a better audiobook because it's live
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and it's my wife.
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So we listened to I listened to the Penguin Pool Murder which is the first of a series
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of books about a detective sort of in the vein of Miss Marple.
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She's meant to be a spinster at least in the first book although at the end of the first
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book she appears like she's getting married but they describe her as like late 30s and
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then she acts like she's much older than that.
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And then when they actually made the movie they cast a woman who was in her early 50s in
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this character which actually fit the description of the way she acted a lot better although like
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I said in the book she was described as being in her late 30s which for 1931 still would
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have marked her as off the market because she's too old.
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And I'm reminded of the horrifying scene and it's a wonderful life when George Bailey
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discovers that Mary never found the love of her life because he hadn't existed and there
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she was in her 30s single working at a library -- that was the worst. [sarcasm]
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So that's kind of the Penguin Pool Murder.
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It is a relatively weird murder novel in which someone is killed at an aquarium in New York
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and the our amateur sleuth gets involved because she's there with her students.
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The most memorable thing about it for me was basically the description of the life of a
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like a middle schooler in New York at the time because she sends her middle schoolers running
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around New York trying to find information for her and it's quite clear that they walk
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themselves home in New York.
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And it just it feels to me really different from the world we live in now in terms of how
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much we let kids do.
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It wasn't a great book.
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I'm not gonna... we're not gonna read any more of the ones from that series.
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I did get the movie of it which you can hear me talk a little bit about in the most recent
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movie roundup but yeah generally not worth checking out.
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That's the Penguin Pool Murder.
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If you were gonna try to play a game that went with it I think just like the movie I would
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suggest awkward guests which actually does kind of fit you have a bunch of different people
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who ended up at the place where the murder happened and you have to try to figure out which
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one had the best motive even though they all have conflicting motives.
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You're also trying to figure out where were they during the murder and which alibis can
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you trust and so on.
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And that really works well with awkward guests.
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So the next book I want to talk about is Shakedown from Scott Sigler.
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This is a 2023 novel.
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Shake Down is a military sci-fi adventure novel.
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The two things that drew me to it one it was available as an audiobook in my I think
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hoopla which you know I'm when I listen to audiobooks the top priority and picking one
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is I can get it free from the library.
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And then Scott Sigler is a writer
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I have read a bit of before he wrote an interesting trilogy of books about sort of zombie
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apocalypse the first one I think was called infected has a triangle on the cover and it was
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really good although pretty gross like a visceral kind of body horror stuff that was like
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I said pretty good but gross.
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But I like his writing it's very dynamic very engaging good characterization and so I thought
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I would check out Shakedown.
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The premise of Shakedown is really interesting.
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There's this character who has gotten himself into some military hot water and he's afraid
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he's going to be court martialed and sent out of the fleet and then said he gets an offer
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instead of getting court martialed and sent to jail he gets an offer to join the crew of
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this sort of legendary ship where every like it's really dangerous to go work on the ship
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like people die all the time.
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It's got a terrible death rate and it nobody knows why.
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And so he agrees to go rather than get court martialed and the whole premise of the novel
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is.
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It is a ship that the human fleet this is in the far future when we have like space going
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fleets or whatever.
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The human fleet has this ship that we have control of but we didn't create and it is
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essentially a interdimensional; it travels interdimensionally.
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It's able to get around certain kinds of detection because it's not in the same plane
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as human kind.
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But the dimension that is traveling in is basically hell.
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If you think about the warp as defined in Warhammer 40k this is a Warhammer 40k ship but we don't
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have any psykers on board so we don't have any people doing magic to keep the evil thoughts
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out of the heads of the crew and so the crew slowly goes mad while they are under.
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So essentially a space submarine novel in which claustrophobia becomes lovecraftian horror.
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As far as these things go it's a pretty good book.
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I enjoyed it quite a lot and I was excited to read the next one when it was done only to discover
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that came out in 2023 so the next one isn't out yet.
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Curses.
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What have I done?
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Started reading a series that's not finished?
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I'm a fool.
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So I'll keep my out for future books from Scott Sigler in this series.
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That one is called "Shakedown."
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I thought it was pretty entertaining.
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I haven't played very many submarine games but I suppose the one I would point to best
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is Captain Sonar.
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This is a game of dueling submarines and if you're playing at the full player count of eight
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players that's pretty compelling.
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One player on each team plays the captain.
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There's a navigator, a weapons person and I think an engineer and you are in real time
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sort of calling out things that people have, things that people are doing, you're making
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moves on the ship, you're firing weapons and stuff and so you're trying to keep track
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of where the other ship is as well.
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It's a pretty interesting game.
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I've played the simple version of it just called "Sonar" but I haven't played the full
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Captain Sonar game and it is one I should play.
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It's kind of a bummer that I haven't played it actually but it's just never been on the
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table when I had a chance at my game club and I haven't made it happen.
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I totally could and probably should but that's Captain Sonar and the novel is Scott Sigler,
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"Shakedown."
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Another audiobook that I read.
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Next up is a new John Scalzi novel that I picked up used at a bookstore.
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This is Agent to the Stars.
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I think new, I don't know how new it is, I don't know when he wrote this but there it is.
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Agent to the Stars, the premise is there's a character who is a feisty talent agent working
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his way up in one of the big talent agent companies in Los Angeles.
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He has a good reputation but he's still relatively new to the business so he doesn't have much
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in the way of strong clientele because Boss calls him in and says, "Hey, I've got a job
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for you. I need you to help figure out how to sell an alien race as a publicity thing."
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So basically there's an alien race that wants to do commercial trade with human beings
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but they are odious and creepy looking and so people are scared of them.
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And basically his job is to figure out how to set up people to accept this alien race when
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they arrive.
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That's kind of the idea.
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It's very funny, it's written with a really rye sense of humor.
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In terms of tone it reminds me a lot of red shirts, more than Old Man's War which has a more
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serious tone.
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I thought it was fine.
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It's definitely a book like I enjoyed it but it immediately went on the sell pile.
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I'm not going to read it again.
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I don't know maybe in 20 years I'll have fun memories of it and I won't remember it
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so I'll read it again.
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But for the most part it's not a book I'm planning to read again.
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Like I said I thought it was fine and funny but not deeply memorable.
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It also didn't have the kind of long term world building that Old Man's War did where
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it led me to five books and a novella all of which I really enjoyed.
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This one was much subtler or much less monumental.
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That said like I said it was very funny, really good writing when John Scalzi wants to be
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funny he definitely knows how and this book hits that right in the nose.
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I don't know what the board game equivalent would be.
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This feels like a role playing game to me.
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If you had a role playing game about a bunch of different people in LA who have to help
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an alien figure out how to get along or one person's hunting the alien and one person
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trying to hide them that part feels there to me.
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Oh so maybe the Visitor in Blackwood Grove would be a version of that.
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In that one you have human secret agents who are trying to figure out how to talk to
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the visitor then you have a child who's trying to figure out how to talk to the visitor
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and the one that succeeds first will win the game.
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That's not quite what's going on in this book.
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The aliens aren't quite so mysterious or difficult to connect with but that's the closest
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thing I can think of.
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So that's agent to the stars from John Scalzi.
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Well the next book I read is Dark Tower 5, The Wolves of the Callah.
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This is another Stephen King novel and the fifth of the seven Dark Tower, the fifth of
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the seven Dark Tower novels and then there is an eighth one.
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There is sort of number 4.5 which I skipped everything everything I've read says that you should
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read the seven original novels first then go back and read novel 4.5 that reading the
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wind through the keyhole I think it's called as number 4.5 is less satisfying than reading
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it in the order it was published so that's I'm doing.
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Following general wisdom of people who've walked the path before me.
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What's the point of history if not to listen to it?
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So Wolves of the Calla is an interesting entry in the Dark Tower saga because it does
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almost nothing to move the saga forward by itself.
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There are certainly story points in it that are very important.
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It establishes lore.
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It sets up things for future books but the characters on their way to the tower make no forward
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movement during the wolves of the Calla instead they get distracted by the side quest which
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feels really important and turns out to be really important and is very well defined but
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it feels like after the Wizard and the Glass, King wasn't quite done with writing
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western tales.
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He wanted to write one more really true feeling western tale and he wasn't going to get
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to do that if he pushed the characters toward the end of the story so instead he had them
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stop and he basically wrote his version of the magnificent seven.
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Like I said lots of good story lots of good world building.
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King is top notch in the series.
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I am liking these books better than anything else of his I've read although I do remember
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the gripping feeling of reading misery.
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For the most part his books I think they're good not amazing but these the Dark Tower
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ones and they're getting better with each one.
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So book five I think might be the best one yet.
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Though I really did like book four and I thought book three was pretty great they're just
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getting better and better.
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The characters are very well defined interesting conflicts thoughtful development of villains
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I liked it a lot.
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So all in all Dark Tower five wolves of the Calla another banger well worth reading.
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I enjoyed the audiobook I then went around online so people were sad that it was a different
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audiobook narrator than the ones who did books two three and four.
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This was the guy who did book one I guess.
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It turns out the guy who's who did books two three and four had some sort of illness and
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passed away.
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It's very sad.
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They did a they created a foundation for that audiobook writer to support his family
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which I thought was pretty nice.
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King and a bunch of the other people who really liked his work on their books then started
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this foundation.
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So good for you Stephen King.
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That is wolves of the Calla.
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I don't know what the board game version of this would be.
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I may have said this in the past but Western Legends probably is your winner there.
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This is a sandbox style game in which you can play.
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You play somebody in the old west riding on a horse shooting a pistol.
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You could be a desparado.
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You could be a law person but generally Western Legends is the sandbox game about the
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old west and I think it seems like that would be the way to go if you were interested
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in playing a story kind of like wolves of the Calla.
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That's that I can't think of any games.
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Oh you know Shadows over Brimstone actually or Shadows of Brimstone might be a better fit
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if you played one of the western ones because the western ones really closely connect with
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the mythos of the idea of like these extra worldly villains showing up and while the villains
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aren't inherently extra worldly in wolves of Colour they are kind of.
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They're definitely not.
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It's definitely fantastical.
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So maybe shadows of brimstone would be your game to play with this fifth book in the Dark
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Tower series.
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Next up is a comic that I read and it's interesting.
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I did not log that I had read this before.
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I don't remember reading it before but I am surprised that I didn't because this is a
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comic I bought because of the artist, the artist, D'Israeli.
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It's somebody that I've seen a number of times and I've really enjoyed their work and so
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this is a book I bought on the strength of the artist.
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It is a sort of children's fable.
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The like I said the title is Kingdom of the Wicked, the writer is Ian Edgerton, the artist
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is D'Israeli.
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This is a I think it's a one stop comic.
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I don't... or a one shot.
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I don't think that they did more although I didn't look.
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The premise is there is a main character who is a boy who had a very active imagination
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with his stuffed animals when he was a kid.
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Think about like Christopher Robin from the Winnie the Pooh books and when he
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was an adult he went off and kind of stopped visiting the magical land of his toys but that
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doesn't mean that they stopped existing and so they've carried on and things have gotten
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not great.
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So the main character is sort of having dreams about these figures and he's in therapy and
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he's trying to figure out what's going on with his life and so there is a metaphor for
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adulthood and childhood.
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There is some fantastical storytelling.
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There is some heroism, some drama.
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It's a war comic at parts and it's all with stuffed animals and toys and such.
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All in all Kingdom of the Wicked is a really solid comic.
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I encourage you to check it out if you think that sounds interesting.
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I think D'Israeli's art is excellent.
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Clearly the connection for a game would be Stuffed Fables.
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Now in Stuffed Fables you play stuffed animals going on adventures to protect the little
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girl who owns you from nightmares.
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So that's not quite the same as this but it feels very related.
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Stuffed animals having their own world of adventures.
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Now I thought Stuffed Fables was fine but kind of boring.
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The rules were pretty complicated and I thought that the actual gameplay was not very fun but
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it was very imaginative and an excellent production product design.
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There's a lot of people who really did like it so the fact that it wasn't for me doesn't
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mean it wasn't good.
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There were a lot of people who really did like it and I encourage you to check it out if
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that sounds interesting to you.
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It is, it reminded me a lot of Mice and Mystics actually in terms of the feel, it's like
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a newer version of it but in that vein.
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That's Kingdom of the Wicked.
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Only the last book I read and this, I will admit this is not a great list.
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There's only six, six and a whole quarter.
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That's not excellent.
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But the last book that I read in December of last year was Zoe Is Too Drunk for This Dystopia.
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Now I picked this for a couple of reasons.
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One, the author's name is Jason Pargin or Pargin.
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He is somebody I follow on TikTok.
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I think he's very funny and I learned he was a writer.
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He's in fact the writer who wrote John dies at the end which is a well-known book.
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Interestingly, John Dies at the End.
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I thought was written by somebody else and it turned out that it was.
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James Wong was the name, I think James Wong.
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It's a name like that.
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That and it turns out Jason Pargin when he started writing novels was an editor at an online
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magazine and he didn't want confusion or potential conflict of interest to emerge.
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So he wrote under a pseudonym so that to keep his writer life and his editing life separate.
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But eventually he retired from that magazine and became a full-time writer and in so doing,
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they've now been republishing his early books under his full name or his given name.
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If there's one thing, the John Dies at the End.
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novels are known for it's a kind of sardonic wit and this book is no different.
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This is a sci-fi future novel where the main character has inherited her mob father's
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vast estate and she's trying to figure out how much of it to leave the way it is and how
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much of it to change so that it's more ethical.
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She's trying to figure out what to do with all this money.
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It's really interesting but it's also really violent and very funny.
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And as I'm reading it, I'm like, "man, there's just a ton of world-building that's assumed
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here."
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It's assumed you know a lot of stuff and he just sort of explains it off-handedly.
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And about the third time he explained something off-handedly, I was like, oh no.
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And I went and looked at it, sure enough, I was reading book three in a series and so that
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is why I didn't understand what was going on is that I was reading the third book in
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a series without having finished read either of the first two.
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So I did finish it because I was by that point well in and I was understanding it just
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fine.
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Then I went back and read the first one which I'll talk about in the next series.
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That one's called "Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits."
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And then there's the second one is called "Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick" is
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one I'm going to be working on in the future.
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But a delightful book, well worth checking out.
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Now if you wanted a game that went with this, I mean I feel like the Android universe probably
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fits closest.
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It is definitely a cyberpunk, gritty, hyper-capitalist, very violent place.
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So Android Netrunner, or there's the old game Android which is a detective game, those
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would fit pretty well for the kind of thing that's happening in Zoey's Too Drunk for This Dystopia
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I want to say thank you for joining me today.
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I'd love to hear what you've been reading.
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You can share that with me.
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I go on over to Board Game Geek, Guild 3269 and give me that answer.
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What have you been reading?
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I'd love to hear it.
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In the meantime, I hope that you're finding good books to read and I hope that your next
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walk is as pleasant as mine was.
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Bye-bye.
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