No, it's not me, it's the book

I've spent the past couple of weeks showing Winnie off to her extended family, coping with the worst weather in years and trying to enjoy reading John Birmingham's Final Impact: World War 2.3, the third in the Axis of Time Trilogy where all these twenty-first century military personnel and their ships have gone back to World War II and change the outcome in confusing ways that go bang rather loudly.

The first two of these I manage quite well. The book-enjoying didn't work partly because I started at volume three but mostly because it was all about diferent sorts of weapons being deployed anachronistically described in intricate detail. There were some cute things: the future became fairly common knowledge in this alternate past so for instance people were calling John F Kennedy "Mr President" in 1944 and Prince Harry, a daring SAS officer, called the teenage Princess Elizabeth "Grandma" but mostly I found it a bit of a struggle. I thought my brain was rotting because I could never keep track of the different characters and their weapons and it took me five minutes to find my place every time I picked it up. But then I read antoher book in a day and realised that maybe unapologetic action adventures really aren't for me.

And it's not Mr Birmingham. I mean I quite like his journalism and I did laugh a lot at He died with a Felafel in his Hand although I wish there was some law preventing anyone over the age of 50 from reading it because my mother got some exceptionally odd ideas about what went on in my share houses from him.