Story for bedtime

I was pretty convinced that we'll be going to see some Christmas lights in town tonight, so thought I would spend my lunchtime reading a Sci-Fi novel. Which I'm now kind of regretting because our kids were feeling too tired to go out on such a cold and wet evening, and I've seriously losting the will to finish the book. It started off quite promisingly but when the protaganists meet a super advanced race capable of doing, well pretty much anything regardless of physical plausibillity, I got terribly lost at the tedious politics and uncaring about the characters. I'll try to finish off, in the expectation that there's some fantastic twist at the end, but I'm not very hopeful.

So instead a quick and easy blip of our kids getting their bedtime stories. We should have realised this ages ago, but by getting our daughter to do the reading we can improve big sister's reading skills and satisfy little brother's threee books or more demand at the same time... Result!