Sometimes when you follow a series of books, you miss one or two out. That often happens to me, since my ‘following a series’ largely equates to keeping an eye out for when I can borrow them from the library or elsewhere, keeping costs down and avoiding my shelves filling up too much. This also raises the delicious possibility of filling in the gap at a later date as I’ve done over the past few days.

The Hydrogen Sonata was the last of the late Iain M Banks’ Culture series and was also the last piece I needed to complete the set. The books each stand alone so it wouldn’t have mattered if it hadn’t fitted there but I deeply enjoyed a final exposure to this collection which I haven’t seen before. Banks had a strong style and a deeply developed sense of the milieu of his imagined galactic civilisations and it was a pleasure to return to it.

It’s all re-reading from here in that set although that, too, can be enjoyable once in a while.