February 2026

February was a busy month, so it took me a while to write this up, but here we are!

Bad Actors by Mick Herron

Bad Actors is the eighth book in the Slough House series by Mick Herron, featuring a team of spies who have screwed up badly enough at their job to earn a demotion to the worst assignment possible, under the disreputable and disrespectful (but often effective) leadership of Jackson Lamb. This time around, an aide to the Prime Minister has gone missing and a high-up behind-the-scenes figure in government suspects that the British intelligence services may be responsible. That leads to an attempted investigation of Slough House, who are soon discovered to be both guilty and innocent, in a situation that is, as always, complicated by the team’s own absurd blunders.

I love this series, which always strikes a great balance between the comedy of mundane office shenanigans and cleverly crafted spy drama. This entry mixes up the cast a bit more than previous books, but it continues to be a strong formula for the types of stories Herron wants to tell. There is a more interesting than usual narrative structure here, however, where the first part of the story is told after some pointedly undisclosed events have taken place, and then the second part of the story jumps backwards to reveal some key underlying events that better explain the events of the first part. Herron’s dialogue and plots are always clever, but I particularly enjoy how he plays games with the structure of his novels, using strategically ambiguous narration to help keep you on your toes and to spring surprises on the reader - one of the few things that doesn’t really translate to the otherwise excellent Apple TV adaptation of the books. I think the next book in the series is the final book in the series, and if that’s true, it makes a lot of sense. It’s a fun series, but nine books plus some novellas is quite a long way to go with these characters, even with frequent cast changes. But if I find out they’re making a tenth? I’ll definitely read it.

The Everlasting by Alix Harrow

Owen Mallory is a scholar, former soldier, and loyal member of an empire that views him skeptically due to his mixed racial heritage. His area of academic focus is the empire’s founding legend and the role of Sir Una Everlasting, an orphan girl who became a knight and served the empire’s first queen until her death. One day Owen receives a copy of a book containing the supposed true story of Una’s life. Through a series of magic-y events, Owen’s investigation of the book leads him to travel back in time to meet Una as he finds himself becoming a character in her story - and maybe he always has been? Una and Owen’s interactions create a loop where Owen learns more about the true history of the empire, Una meets her end in one way or another, and Owen returns to his present to find himself in an empire that has been changed by his actions in the past, actions he wants to go back and correct and adjust. Through these loops, Owen and Una fall in love and uncover the villain in the story who has sought to manipulate them both to shape the future, using Owen’s way with words and stories and Una’s skill with a sword to figure out how to set things right.

This is the fourth novel of Alix Harrow’s that I’ve read, and it’s safe to say I consistently enjoy her work, but this is probably my least favorite of those four stories. It’s still pretty good, pleasant and interesting, just not amazing. I enjoy the characters and their relationship, and the time looping nature of the story is a fun concept. Ultimately I struggled to engage more deeply with this because the world-building and the nature of the magic was all a bit too squishy for my taste. I never had a particularly strong sense of what the past or present versions of this empire were like — I think just kind of vaguely England with drips and drops of magic and fascism? — and I really didn’t get how the magic was supposed to work. At one crucial point in the story, Owen and Una have the opportunity to kill their antagonist. But they agree not to because they believe she would just come back and find them again anyway, which led to me, sitting there with the book in my lap to throw my hands up in confusion. Why is that the way it would work?? It sure seemed to me like killing her would put an end to things, and was not not clear to me what would have allowed her to undo her own death. And that was only the most prominent of several such issues for me. It didn’t break the story for me, I could accept that there was a reason things worked that way that I just wasn’t getting, but that inability to understand how things were supposed to work here kept me at a distance from the story overall.

One notable aspect of the book is that it’s written in the second person, generally from the perspective of Owen writing to Una. That framing mostly makes sense — it’s the story of how he found her, how he tried to help her, how he fell in love with her, how they struggled against challenges together and fought to do good together — but that structure felt a bit ridiculous in the handful of moderately-to-very explicit sex scenes that happen. Narrating to your lover about her radiant ferocity as she charges onto the battlefield with her sword held high makes a certain amount of sense in a second-person narrative; narrating the, ahem, blow-by-blow of every step of a sexual encounter with your lover to her in a story that is not otherwise intended as some kind of erotic love letter is a very funny choice. It’s fine, of course — like, duh, this is fiction and even if it’s presented as if it were Owen telling a story to Una, it’s actually a story for the reader — it’s just hard not to laugh reading a sex scene in second person. “You put your what in my what???”

I had a fun time reading this, it just didn’t fully work for me. I liked the concept she was going for and the characters and the general idea of their conflicts and what they were fighting for and the types of obstacles they confronted. But I never fully bought in to the rest of the world, which felt a little thinly sketched to me. I don’t need you to spell out all the rules and explain how everything works, but if you want me to care about the problems and consider possible solutions, I need to have some sense of how everything fits together to feel engaged by it, otherwise I’m just waiting for you to tell me what happens next. A perfectly okay book, but not a favorite.

Cairn by the Game Bakers.

Cairn is a climbing simulation game with narrative elements that appear every few hours. You play as Aava, a woman who has some kind of career and fame as a mountain climber, and has come to Mount Kami to prove that she can climb to the summit of a mountain that is thought to be unclimbable. You start in a climbing gym at the base of the mountain as a brief tutorial to walk through the mechanics of the game, which are simple to learn but challenging to master. You control each of Aava’s limbs one at a time - the game will automatically select the next limb that you should move, but you can override that choice when you like - and try to place them in crevices and on bumps and holds throughout the mountain that look supportive. The various stages of the mountain have a variety of paths you can pursue, some more straightforward than others, and there are all manner of small caves, shrines, mementos of past climbers, and even a worrying amount of corpses you can find if you’re more exploratory in your ascent. You also have to manage Aava’s hunger, thirst, warmth, health, and stamina, which means scavenging plants, collecting supplies, using your little camp stove to brew up different concoctions, and filling your water bottles at streams and ponds you encounter. As you climb, you have limited resources you can use to drill a piton into the side of the mountain to create a rest spot and cap your potential falling distance, but you are often at risk of falling. When you fall, depending on the height and on if, where, and how you have anchored yourself, you might lose a substantial amount of progress, or injure yourself, or just plain die and have to reload an earlier save. You will occasionally encounter other people or creatures on the mountain and have some interactions with them, and Aava receives messages from family members pleading to talk with her in a way that makes clear that Aava’s ascent is as much about running away from her personal struggles as it is about achieving this important feat and getting climbing sponsorships.

I loved this game. It is really challenging, but generally not unfair or especially cruel. It has a minimalist presentation, they want you as the player to be focused a lot more on how that next handhold looks and to figure out that Aava might be losing her grasp based on the way her arms or legs quiver as you plot her next move rather than showing like a big blinking stamina bar to tell you you’re about to fall. I did find it necessary to turn on an option in the game that gives you a little feedback indicating when a handhold or foothold is solid by flashing a little square as you move there, because occasionally it felt a bit unfair early on when I swore I was putting feet on what looked like a solid path but evidently wasn’t. But otherwise, this is a game about intensely focusing on looking up the side of a mountain, seeing where hands and feet might go, and patiently putting together one hold after another as you go up, up, up. It creates a very rewarding flow-state where I could listen to a podcast and just set my mind to this puzzle of a mountain, step-by-step. Every once in a while, I’d find myself in a tricky spot I thought I might be able to shimmy up, only to see Aava lose her grip and go falling into space and realize I’d just lost 25 minutes of progress. But the climb was enjoyable enough and the risk/reward was legible enough that I never felt too outraged or annoyed by those setbacks.

If there’s anything not to like about the game, I think the story, while well-told and at least a little bit affecting, didn’t fit the gameplay. It felt like the overarching theme of the story is about how Aava should not be on this mountain. Her family back home need her, she’s running away from her feelings, and, most importantly, after the tenth or so corpse I climbed past, I was like seriously, who would still be doing this?! Critically, the game gives you a choice near the end, where you can say you’ve had enough and you’re going to go back and be with your loved ones, or you can choose to climb the final summit. On first reaching this, I said ah ha, I’ve been paying attention, what Aava needs to do is let this go, forget the mountain, go home to her family and deal with real life. And I chose that and the game is basically like “okay, thanks for playing, Aava went home and is there now, the end.” Pretty anti-climactic. So I then reloaded the choice and forged ahead to see the other ending. And the end you achieve by reaching the summit really is spectacular. The final climb is incredibly difficult, but when I managed it, it felt like a great accomplishment. And the story from that point takes a surreal and beautiful turn that I wouldn’t want to give away. It almost feels like the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was such a surprising and moving and mechanically interesting moment that made me very confused why they told the story that they did leading up to that ending, because it doesn’t feel like an ending they should have steered players away from. Maybe they always meant for me to perceive the story throughout the game as the story of Aava learning not to be a quitter and learning that her loved ones were just holding her back, but it sure felt to me like the story of someone who needed to get off of this freaking mountain, so for the game to have such a lackluster ending if you choose to get off the mountain and an incredible ending if you keep climbing feels like a badly mixed message. In any case, this was a thoroughly unusual and enjoyable game and I’m kind of sad I don’t have any more mountain to climb now.

Quick reactions!

One Battle After Another - Great fun, very loose and odd, great performances, obviously resonant with our times in some ways even if I don’t know that it has a particularly coherent or optimistic message about those times, but that’s not what it’s trying to do of course.

Predator: Badlands - A real throwback, just a classic action movie. The way the first half of the movie is spent watching our protagonist predator learning different lessons on the harsh planet he has arrived at only to see each of those lessons snowball into one new tool in his arsenal after another as he delivers righteous payback to his foes and builds his own little family was so satisfying. They really don’t make many movies like this anymore.

Industry Season 4 - This show is so ridiculous. It’s Mad Men crossed with American Psycho. It can be profound and deep examinations of capitalism with characters spouting out clever monologues about the way the world works followed by everyone ingesting preposterous amounts of drugs while engaging in esoteric sex acts seemingly assembled by Mad Libs. Everyone is evil and awful and you really shouldn’t root for anyone, but also it is funny and stylish and twisty. I’m glad the next season is apparently the last because it does feel like something that will eventually collapse under its own weight, but I’ll enjoy it while it lasts.

Joyce Manor - I Used to go to this Bar - I discovered Joyce Manor’s music a few years ago (as an old-ish man, any band I “discover” these days inevitably has been around for at least a decade, naturally) and fell in love with a lot of their music and so, when I saw they had a new album coming out, pre-ordered the album on vinyl to play on my nice record player setup. But, as nice as it sounds, it’s a funny way to listen to punk albums, because the whole album is 9 songs that run a total of 19 minutes, which somewhat works against the standard experience of putting on a record and listening to it for a half hour or so before having to get up to flip it over. It’s good music, though! Anyway just looking up a link to the album led me to see they posted a very silly music video for one of their songs that’s a Great British Bakeoff parody.

That’s most of what I was thinking about in February!