I've been getting nowhere on two books that I've been reading. One is called PANDORA'S STAR, by Peter Hamilton (?). It's a very long book, first of a series of two, that started off very interesting, but has bogged down for me. In this story, mankind has spread out through the galaxy via wormholes, and has colonized many world. They've also discovered other sentient life forms. An obscure astronomer makes an observation of a star blinking out, concluding that an alien civilization must have enclosed the star in a "Dyson Sphere". It is still detectable by infrared, suggesting that the enclosure does allow the "pressure" from the star to escape the enclosure rather than cooking everything inside of the sphere.

Meanwhile, a terrorist of sorts, under the protection of enclaves of true "Socialists", is trying to obtain weapons and the cops chasing him close, in very nearly catching him.

And that's about as far as I've gotten. The storylines sound interesting, but it just seems to move so slowly...

The other book I have been reading was HYPERSPACE, which I blogged about in its own entry. I haven't given up on it yet, but it's one of those books that takes a lot of concentration, and recently I don't seem to be able to give it the attention it required.

So I started one called THE WORLD WITHOUT US, by a writer named Alan Weisman, and so far, so good. It's about what would happen to the Earth if humanity suddenly disappeared from the face of it, leaving our cities and our plastics and our chemicals and our engineering intact (for however long they last). It's a really interesting book so far, dealing with ecosystems of the desert and of Africa and other areas of the world, and with our impact, and with the power of nature in the end. I got it from the Quality Paperback Book Club before I quit, and it's keeping me interested.

Hopefully I'll get over my cold and get over my obsession with playing Bejeweled and will get back to reading and thinking a bit.