Recently I've became a loyal customer of bookline.hu - an online shop that aggregates the offerings of various Hungarian second hand book stores. My last order arrived yesterday and after getting home I've decided to skip the "sit down in front of the home PC" part of my evening agenda and read one of the new books instead. I happened to chose High Crusade from Poul Anderson - a quite entertaining sci-fi short novel. It tells the story of an English baron who's army is just about to go to war against France in the Middle Ages when suddenly a spaceship lands near them. The Englishmen do not panic, they slaughter the aliens and take control of the spaceship thanks to the fact that the alien's weapons are useless in close combat. The treason of a captured alien makes them travel a few lightyears away to another planet and the story eventually evolves into a crusade against the aliens...

The book was quite short: less then two hundred pages so I arrived at the last page not long after 11pm. Still it was as entertaining read. If you think between the lines there is some harsh society criticism (aliens enslaving weaker species to keep their own life standard high, but depend too much on technology to keep the control).

Anyway, I haven't set aside much time recently to read books, although I keep buying them at the same rate (2-3 new releases every month and varying number of second hand books)...