Square Eyes

If they say that watching telly gives you square eyes, what kind of shape eyes do you get from reading lots ?

That's pretty much what I've been doing lately. Listening to lots of great music (check out The XX) and reading lots of book :-) Oh and wondering what drugs the Mercury Prize people are taking to have not given the prize to Bat For Lashes.

I'm currently occupied with not one but actually 3 series of book :
Harry Turtledove's WorldWar series,
Larry Niven's Ringworld series,
Jack Campbell's The Lost Fleet series.

I've mentioned the WorldWar series before, it's set in the middle of World War Two but with a twist. Space Aliens invade and try to take over the world. I'm not quite sure what to make of this series, I'm three books in but it's a bit of a struggle. I want to know what happens and how it ends (I'm a little OCD like that) but it's rather long and drawn out. 3 down, 5 to go.

The Ringworld series is one I've had an eye on for quite some time now. It's penned by Larry Niven and is set within the amazing Known Space future. You have weird and wonderful alien races, who actually feel alien. These go from the cowardly Pierson's Puppeteers with heads for hands and extreme high technology to the fierce Kzin. For a Kzin, think 8 foot tall, feline, furry, claws and would probably eat anyone who attempted to call them "cute". But they do like being scratched behind their ears.

Ringworld is mostly set on an immense artifact, a circular ribbon 100 thousand miles across with a radius just under 100 million miles. And that's orbiting a sun. It makes the Orbitals of the Culture look small. The first book has our central protagonist Louis Wu discovering the Ringworld as part of an expedition including a puppeteer, a Kzin and another human. On their travels they encounter many species of Near-Human, the artifact has been around for hundreds of thousands of years so the inhabitants have gradually evolved from Human into many different Near-Human species.

The question of "why were there human-like beings on here ?" is a question that's answered throughout the four books : Ringworld, Ringworld Engineers, Ringworld Throne and Ringworld's Children. They're all well worth a read, although Larry Niven writes better when he collaborates on books. Almost like he struggles to get his ideas on paper, with the collaborations clarifying his vision.

Lastly, I've just finished enjoying the first book in a series of 6 penned by Jack Campbell. It's called Dauntless : The Lost Fleet and begins the telling of the tale of a fleet of Alliance warships that is deep behind enemy lines having just failed in an attack launched on the homeworld of their bitter enemy, the Syndicated Worlds.

Whereas the Honor Harrington books by David Weber can get themselves badly bogged down in politics, the politics is firmly in the backseat in Dauntless. It's still there but not nearly so prominent. Instead, you have battleships and battlecruisers pounding at each other with grapeshot (from railguns), missiles, Big Frickin' Lasers (I've been reading too much Register) and disintegrators.

I've only read one of them so far and ended up enjoying it enough that after about 100 pages, I ordered the second in the series from Abebooks ... I'd quite happily recommend the people I bought it from, just under £5, sent over from the States in pristine condition and quite quickly too. Abebooks can put you in touch with a lot of independent bookstores, the one I've been ordering from is the Paperbackshop Ltd in Fairford (in Abebooks as Books 2 Anywhere).

I've not just been reading the books though - England surprised everyone by winning the Ashes back. There's a strange contrast here to 2005, the last time we got the Ashes. 4 years ago, there was total hysteria over it. The 2005 series was a slugging match between 2 very well matched sides at the top of their games, utterly captivating because both teams were putting everything into it. This series was something different. The Aussies had lost several of their Great players and hadn't really adequately replaced them. England are currently in one of their inconsistent phases.

So we won the Ashes but no-one's really all that excited about it, maybe because it doesn't feel as if we earned them ... Which is a feeling reinforced by the rubbish we're seeing from England in the one day series. The players seem extremely scared right now. Scared of playing, scared of wearing the shirt, scared of playing to their potential and it shows in how they approach the game.

Grand Prix has finished now - time to get to the next book (Ringworld Throne), game and music :-)

PS Lol at the GP coverage, Ross Brawn just got hauled bodily over to the BBC interviewers by Eddie Irvine. Makes you laugh at the audacity of them to do that but what makes it more funny is the size difference between the big Ross Brawn and the little Eddie Irvine.