Well after being stuck in the house due to illness I got to reading this book thanks to the size of it really. I was wanting to read the HP books in order but we seem to have misplaced books 2-4 so I got stuck into this one.

This one covers the next film thats due out this year at some point I think so I figured as Finn asks so many questions during these films I may as well read it so I can have an answer for him. Again I was surprised at teh quality of the writting and just hope half the little cool bits make it into the film.

I think I missed this by about 5 books last time but there was a good few months where I didnt read anything so I’ll give it a go again.

I’ll not try and read books I dont want to unlike last time as it was just a struggle.

So far this year theres been…

1. Enigma: The Battle for the Code - Hugh Montefiore
2. Does Anything Eat Wasps?: And 101 Other Questions - New Scientist magazine
3. Band of Brothers - Stephen Ambrose
4. Big Bang: The Most Important Scientific Discovery of All Time and Why You Need to Know About It - Simon Singh
5. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - JK Rowling

Now if ever there was a book designed for me it was this. Ever issue of New Scientist has inside its back page a sort of ‘Readers Questions’ where the readers supply both the questions and answers. The difference being some of the questions they come up with are hilarious compared the normal question you might expect from such a publication.

A damn good read when all your looking for is something that you can open on a bus and get a few pages in.

Now you guys know I like my military history but this one is slightly different from the norm. This book follows the history of the breaking of the german codes during WWII and focuses mostly on the naval enigma code. For a book about codebreaking it managed to fit a surprising amount of war into it. If you’ve ever seen the film Enigma you’d maybe think that it was the folk at Bletchley Park that cracked the code single handedly but thanks to Hugh Montefiore you soon realise that folk from Poland, France and the USA all had a hand in it at some point in time although most of the plaudits do go to the UK codebreakers. You also find out just how close the Germans were to realising the code had been broken which would have been a disaster.

Like I say for a book based on codebreaking and one that has a surprising amount of maths in it its a very easy read.

Its a book about physics. I can’t help that. But its also a book about the history of astronomy and Simon Sing managed to hide most of the maths behind it all. If your interested in such things I’d give it a look but if the thought of reading about physics for fun makes you want to run away very fast then I would do just that if anyone suggests it to you