The Other Don Kelly

I picked up two more of Iain M. Banks’s “Culture” novels: Consider Phlebas and Player of Games. CP was the first “Culture” novel, and PoG was also one of the earlier ones. Both were reasonably big books, but I basically inhaled the both of them, hardly even breathing (according to Anne) until they were done. That shouldn’t be too surprising, considering that I was staying in a mountain cabin with three readers and a bunch of books, but they were both captivating and really, really good. Strangely, their reviews, and the blurbs on their backs, were, strictly speaking, accurate, but the stories themselves caught me by surprise — I suppose I expected them to be boring or twee, and they were neither.