Easy Travel To Other Planets I'm not often bored, usually because when there is any chance of boredom occurring, I pick up a book and I am somewhere else. When I say I'm somewhere else I mean it, just ask Mrs YS how difficult it is to talk to me when I have my head in a book. I am there, words become pictures in my mind, pictures become almost movie like as the action unfolds and I am right there in the thick of the action. Books affect me as film and Tv affects others. I have laughed out loud at Pratchett and Bryson, cried when I finished LOTR for the first time and groan with audible dismay whenever Steven Erikson cuts a murderous swathe through his leading characters. I had an RE teacher (religious, not remedial) who used to say "You are bored because you are boring." How right he was. A number of my work colleagues read nothing more challenging than the intelligence sapping lads diet of the Sun, Sport, Nuts, Loaded etc. In quiet periods they often complain of boredom. In my quiet periods I have fought a war with the rat people in London's sewers, served a life sentence for murder in one of America's toughest prisons, befriended a Japanese housewife who killed her husband, spied on a young Asian woman as a voyeur, hidden an angel in my garage, run with a barbarian army to the gates of a decadent kingdom, had a long erotic phone call with a strange girl and hidden in terror from the fearful Shrike. There was a book entitled "Easy Travel To Other Planets" and for me, that's reading in a nutshell. Now if you will excuse me I have to load my multi-rifle, don my reflec ablative armour and get into the drop ship, the time tombs are about to open and I have a planet to invade. (The books were.....King Rat - China Mieville, You Got Nothing Coming - Jimmy Lerner, Out - Natsuo Kirino, The Third Eye - David Knowles, Skellig - David Almond, Midnight Tides - Steven Erikson, Vox - Nicholson Baker and Hyperion - Dan Simmons)