more about the sun, it seems

I figured out what I was blathering on about on Tuesday. Or that is to say, I figured out what I was supposed to be blathering on about: lack of sleep.

Basically, when it gets to this time of year I have real trouble sleeping. I mean, all this week it's still really light at 9pm, and that confuses me. For the rest of the year by 9pm it's usually dark, and my brain can go "oh look, it's dark, must be time to sleep".

But this time of year, I find myself going to bed and there's loads of light streaming in through the curtains. It's weird - it's like if you have a lie in at the weekend and you kind of drift into consciousness and it's clearly proper daytime outside, but you're still in bed.

Except it's at night, so I'm tired and want to go to sleep, but another part of my brian is saying actually it's not dark so it's not time for bed yet. What makes it worse, I think is British Summer Time/daylight savings. Without that, it would be dark at a more reasonable time.

Anyway, the upshot is that for a couple of weeks I'm going to be struggling to get to sleep.

I recently started a new book.

I've been a bit derelict with my reading for a while now. This isn't anything unusual - I tend to go in cycles of reading a lot and then nothing for ages. Usually I snap into a reading phase when I get a book I'm excited about reading. In this case that book is "Matter" by Ian M Banks.

I'm a big fan of Banks's sci-fi books - especially the culture novels, which this is one of. I get the impression he'd kind of put the culture (and possibly SF) stuff to bed, but I guess he's found a story he wants to tell... and it's a bit one. The book is some 600 pages long, which I'm pretty sure is the biggest book he's done.

I'm about a fifth of the way through and I'm enjoying it so far. It's really starting to get going - there was quite a lot of establishing stuff to start with, but now the main plot has really kicked in.

I've not actually read any of Banks's non-SF books, although I received his first - Wasp Factory - as a present for my last birthday and am intent on starting them. Banks has a great prose style, which is very readable, so I'm sure I'll enjoy them despite not being SF.