Holiday Reading

In some vague and ill-thought out belief that new insights would be granted me by doing so, I took a pile of science fiction novels with me on holiday, all of which featured huge and/or mysterious alien artifacts. I love novels on a vast scale in any case, so it was no hardship to chuck Rendezvous with Rama; Orbitsville; Gateway; ...of the City of the Saved and Eon in amongst my jeans and shirts, nor was it a sacrifice to read them in the evenings whilst the kids slept and thereby precluded any chance of watching TV or speaking above a whisper to J.

In the end I only managed to read the first three of those books (regretfully putting aside the other two on the basis that they didn't really feature mysterious artifacts, just big ones) and, after careful and thoughtful reading came to the less than unexpected conclusion that 'huge alien artifacts are cool' and 'if they're made by unexplained alien races that's even cooler'. Rama was better than I remembered, Orbitsville not quite as good and Gateway quite clearly an expanded short story, albeit a good one. It's a shame - although perhaps not wholly unexpected - that the various sequels to these three classics hit a downward curve very quickly (and in Gateway's case are basically crap).

In other book news, I've also recently finished The Time Traveller's Wife, (wonderful until the slightly abrupt ending); Pride and Prejudice, (just wonderful); The Cutting Room (excellent Glasgow-based thriller) and some Buffy/Angel crossover whose title I forget (apparently written by wrapping a collection of random sentences round the words 'love', 'blood' and 'longing').

And did I mention that J and I, with the two boys in tow, managed to get stuck at the very top of a big waterfall thing on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at EuroDisney, when it managed to break down for half an hour, just before the park closed for the night. That was a laugh a minute...