I had a ton of time off from work around the holidays this year. More than I've probably had since way back in the 90's and I worked in a production facility where we would have a shutdown of the plant every Christmas for two weeks. 
 Yep, tons of time. I read exactly one book - this one - and accidently stumbled on the Mythbusters marathon that aired, 259 hours of show in one continuous session. I spent probably 60 hours in front of the TV, just, well, staring at it. 
 It was hypnotic. I tried to avoid family functions, send the wife and grown children out whenever I could, and just watched. I went to sleep with the TV on and Adam Savage giggling manically as I dozed off. I'd get up and make eggs with Grant doing some math to see if some rig he'd built would work properly. 
 After a while I sort of went numb and the episodes started bleeding together. Turns out, although I've always been a fan of the show, I rarely saw more than an episode or two per year. I just didn't watch a ton of TV until recently and even then it is usually scripted shows, not this sort of stuff. 
 Sometimes it's sports. Although that's usually because company is around and they love it. I used to, I used to spend whole weekends going to games, participating in games, and watching games on TV, football, basketball, baseball, whatever. 
 So, my father still loves it, probably more than I ever did, and my son loves it, although he's so young he has a hard time not leaving to go off and do stuff. And I enjoy that stuff too, still, although I mostly try to ignore it when I can. I mean, I only have so much time to do stuff. And apparently, a 259 hour long Mythbusters marathon is how I would spend my precious time when left to my own. 
 But, I did still manage to at least get this single book read. So, it wasn't a total meltdown on my part. Alastair Reynolds writes the kind of stuff I wish I did. It's Sci-Fi and sticks, for the most part, to real physics and such, but it's still full of balls out weirdness. 
 This one, for me, was in the vein of his novel a few years ago, Terminal World, except this is one I enjoyed way more. Nothing is spelled out for me, the reader, so it's up to me to piece together the backstory from the clues Reynolds dropped into the story. 
 So, spoilers ahead, at least sort of. I mean, nothing specific, but still, I tend to not even read the blurb on the back of the book if I've heard it's good. Even knowing that little bit can seem like it ruins twists for me sometimes. So, for me this is spoilery, but if you watch trailers to movies and think that sort of stuff is fine, then you probably won't care. 
 But still, warning - Spoilers ahead! 
 This is a relatively run-of-the-mill plot. Two sisters run away from home, both still teenagers (one 17, the other 18, I think) and join a ship at the docks and sail away. They are set upon by pirates and the elder is kidnapped and the younger has to find a way to get her back. 
 That's it. Pretty straightforward adventure. Except the setting here is very exotic. The world is not earth, but a colony in space so far in the future that Earth is merely a mythical land of human origins. Humanity has seen its civilizations rise and fall over and over. It's been millions of years, maybe tens of millions, since we ventured out into space. 
 The worlds people live on are small habitats built around black holes, the economy of the human worlds is built upon recovering artifacts from humanity's previous rises to prominence. Technology so far beyond their own that it appears to be magic. There are aliens here, but they are so odd and their motives so unknowable that they are mostly ignored. 
 It appears that these black hole habitats are outside the bulk of the Milky Way (which the inhabitants of the book call the "swirly") but I can't quite recall if they were extra-galactic, or just towards the fringes of our home galaxy. But whatever it is, there are thousands of these worlds, and sailing from one world to the next isn't terribly difficult with solar sails and ion drives. It's weeks or more to the nearest world. 
 In the course of this particular story, history goes back 1800 years. They are aware of numerous previous epochs, again, the rising and falling of human civilizations going back millions of years, but it's a boom time for treasure hunters sifting through the ruins of previous occupations, looking for trinkets that could make people rich. 
 I loved it. It made for high adventure, and an odd background for this novel to be set in. It worked perfectly for me. I couldn't have enjoyed it more. I think this is the best Reynolds book since House of Suns. Can't wait for his next novel.