… now is more dif­fi­cult than ever. I sim­ply want the whole series look­ing the same. The series I’m talk­ing about is called The Tawny Man, writ­ten by Robin Hobb. As some may already have guessed, I’ve just com­pleted the Faarseer series and I’m eagerly wait­ing for the afore­men­tioned tril­ogy to arrive. No, wait, that’s not true. Why is that? As it hap­pens, I can’t find the three books fea­tur­ing the same cover style. Nei­ther Ama­zon nor the local book stores can do any­thing about it. My favorite local store does have book two and book three of the reprint edi­tion. Not even Ama­zon can pro­vide me with the first book of this series. Dammit.

This is a trend I’ve been watch­ing for almost a year now. It’s get­ting more and more dif­fi­cult to get what you want. Sure, I could just buy books with dif­fer­ent cover styles. Since the con­tent stays the same it wouldn’t really mat­ter. Well, I don’t want it that way. I want con­sis­tency. I want them so look sim­i­lar, at the very least. They should be rec­og­niz­able as a series just by look­ing at them for half a sec­ond. As if life wouldn’t be hard enough to do with­out such inconveniences.

Well, friends of Dou­glas Adams’ work may know what I’m talk­ing about. There’s a hint for all the rest of you: Answer to life, the uni­verse and every­thing. I’ve recently seen sea­son 5 of 24 and I couldn’t help think­ing of Dou­glas Adams. Jack Bauer seems to have an answer to every­thing, seems to know a solu­tion no mat­ter how bad the sit­u­a­tion he’s in – he always seems to be more than just the aver­age sol­dier with Spe­cial Forces train­ing. Yeah, of course, Jack Bauer isn’t anybody.

24 has a very inter­est­ing and intrigu­ing con­cept. I clearly have to admit that. Fur­ther­more, I like peo­ple com­ing straight to the point. I like intrigues and how sin­gle peo­ple fol­low their own agen­das, no mat­ter what it costs them. I like the idea that every­thing hap­pens in real time and that peo­ple are forced to make deci­sions in a mat­ter of sec­onds. That said, I’ve to admit that I didn’t watch 24 from the beginning.

On the con­trary, I thought of it as the usual bull­shit air­ing on tele­vi­sion today and I only changed my mind when I saw most of fourth season’s episodes. Sud­denly, I des­per­ately wanted to watch this series because it seemed inter­est­ing. I bor­rowed sea­son one from a friend of mine and I just fin­ished watch­ing it. I nearly freaked out when he couldn’t bor­row me sea­son two at once but he’s kinda busy and I’ve got to be patient. For now, that is.

For a long time now, I liked Kiefer Suther­land. He’s a won­der­ful actor and he’s not try­ing to cover up his screw-ups – as evi­denced here – like so many other actors try to do. Well, he paid for it, so what? I’ve done worse …

OK, remem­ber: Newton’s Third Law states that “For every action, there is an equal and oppo­site reac­tion.”. And that’s exactly what 24 feels like. Moves and counter-moves. Peo­ple try to achieve their goals while other peo­ple try to pre­vent them from ever reach­ing what­ever they set their minds onto. In the end, it’s quite sim­ple, ain’t it? Think binary. That’s what decision-making ulti­mately boils down to. Yes or no. Do or don’t. True or false. Really basic stuff but it works. Why? Because of the thou­sands of sub­plots. Every­body is fol­low­ing his own agenda – and we’re gonna see every minute of it. Even though Bauer seems to have an answer to every­thing – despite him say­ing “I don’t know (yet)” – the series seems to have a firm grasp on me.

Just con­tinue that way. I really appre­ci­ate series like this one. It’s good to see it work­ing because most of the other series out there seem to be crap right out of the box …