What are you reading?

Currently nothing. But I do have a huge to read pile. I need to decide on what I will read next.
Maybe something by Mary Higgins Clarke

Skin Trade by Laurell K Hamilton.

Barely 100 pages into it and it's already better than at least the last three books. I'm glad I held on and didn't give up on her. She's starting to get her old magic back.

I'm reading Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Tinkermel said:

I'm reading Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

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That is a great book. I also loved One Hundred Years of Solitude (really loved it more). GGM does love to write a May-December romance more than your average guy-who-is-not-Nabokov! Incidentally, I also loved Pale Fire more than Lolita, so maybe I just have a thing for the literary underdog.... hmmm.....

I just read Funny in Farsi by Firoozeh Dumas because I needed a little post-Cormac Mccarthy light humor. It was very funny - I laughed out loud quite a few times - and very insightful into modern Iranian family dynamics and culture and how it translates in the U.S. when the family in question is transplanted to California.

Though a little late catching the bus, I am now reading the Time Traveler's Wife and enjoying it so far.

Has anyone read Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach? I think that's going to be next on my list.

I'm reading The Elegant Gathering of White Snow by Kris Radish. It's perfect for what's going on in my life right now.

benbradley said:

Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell's third (nonfiction bestselling) book, after The Tipping Point and Blink. They're all fascinating reading about social trends and such, but I have to agree with the reviews I've stumbled across, the author oversells his points and arguments, they're not nearly as strong or as clear-cut as he presents them.

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Read this, I do think I like it (even) better than the other two, though it appears he STILL overstates his case. What I like most is how he touches on so many little things (that I wonder how they're really relevant to his point, but I still enjoyed reading them) like how Asian languages have one-syllable words for digits and consistent names for multidigit numbers, making numbers easier to learn for young kids and putting Asians at a better start in math than the rest of the world. I always thought of numbers as concepts, and never noticed the number of syllables for the name of each number.

I did like one of the Amazon reviews that I think says "Gladwell overstates the obvious."

I'm rereading all of Jane Austen's novels. Though as far as modern works go I just finished Alex Sanchez's latest novel Bait.

Einstein's Bridge

I'm only about 1/5th through this and it's interesting on many levels. It's considered "hard SF" but I don't know why that should stop anyone from reading it (but I'm like that, I like that stuff), and it's one of the more interesting ones I've read since "The Artifact" (that I actually read the year it came out). It's about the the SuperCollider in Texas that Congress funded and then cancelled, and physicists who work there. There's a woman who writes technothrillers (it's got several pages where she meets her agent, so there's writerly interest there) with letter-name titles similar to Sue Grafton's series, and she's there under an alias (or is it her fiction that she writes under an alias?) writing an article for a popular science magazine, but she's also secretly (except her agent knows) writing another technothriller based there, and it appears "science fact" and popular fiction are going to collide (pun intended) in a big way...

Has anyone else read this? I could swear I saw an AW reference to it and that's what prompted me to get it off paperbackswap several months ago. I only the other day decided to pick it up and start reading. This book might deserve its own thread.

Spent the last day and a half re-reading The Gunslinger, The Drawing of the Three, and The Wastelands. Starting Wizard and Glass later tonight.

I hadn't read The Gunslinger or The Drawing of the Three in probably better than fifteen years. It was good to revisit those stories.

Venetia by Georgette Heyer.

"Act like a lady, think like a man" Steve Harvey

3/4s of the way through The Time Travelers Wife. The back-and-forth of dates and POV are what's driving me nuts. And it started off so slowly I had to force myself to keep reading (a friend gave me the book, telling me how wonderful it is, and is anxiously waiting to hear what I think). I'd say it's just okay.

stormie said:

3/4s of the way through The Time Travelers Wife. The back-and-forth of dates and POV are what's driving me nuts. And it started off so slowly I had to force myself to keep reading (a friend gave me the book, telling me how wonderful it is, and is anxiously waiting to hear what I think). I'd say it's just okay.

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It took me a while to get into it too, and yeah the dates kept me busy looking back and forth to figure out what had already happened. I think it's an interesting story, though probably not worth all the hype it received. The part that really drove me nuts was the genetics. I know people who work on the genes that the author mentions and I couldn't help but laugh at the absurdity.

Stormie, I thought the same thing when I was reading it--it was a bit confusing, a bit slow and repetitive in places. I actually put it down and let it sit for about a month. I'm glad I finally picked it back up and finished it though because by the time I was done, my opinion had done a complete 180. Now it haunts me and every time the trailer for the movie comes on, I end up talking about it to my family. They humor me but think I'm nuts.

Philip Hoare's Leviathan, or the Whale. Holy god this book is dramatic. Possibly a little too overdramatic (Philip Hoare is never 'on a boat', he is always 'marooned on a tiny spit of wood amidst the two azure infinities of sea and sky'. But seeing as the book is about such a poetic creature, and also about Moby Dick and Herman Melville I think he gets away with it.

Bram Stoker's Dracula. Don't think I've ever read an epistolary novel before, rather enjoying it.

Adzmodeus said:

Bram Stoker's Dracula. Don't think I've ever read an epistolary novel before, rather enjoying it.

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It's a Great Book. I'm reading Third Degree by Greg Iles and My Movie Business by John Irving. I read OMERTA by Mario Puzo recently. Really liked it. Think it's about time I read The Godfather.

Warhammer: Gotrek and Felix, Third Omnibus

Before that, Dragon Age: Origins, The Stolen Throne

Before that, A Forthcoming Wizard

Philip Hoare's Leviathan, or the Whale. Holy god this book is dramatic. Possibly a little too overdramatic (Philip Hoare is never 'on a boat', he is always 'marooned on a tiny spit of wood amidst the two azure infinities of sea and sky'. But seeing as the book is about such a poetic creature, and also about Moby Dick and Herman Melville I think he gets away with it.

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Okay now his history of the whale has moved into the 20th century. Japan is absolutley horrendous. The fact that they are still taking whales is repugnant.

I'm currently reading Land of Mist and Snow by Debra Doyle and James D. Macdonald.

Now reading Shiver. New YA Novel.

Just finished Winter in Madrid by C. J. Sansom, which I thoroughly enjoyed as I'm not only a Madrileña but very interested in the Spanish Civil War. Though Sansom has done very thorough research, I caught him out on a few minor mistakes regarding geography, climate and cuisine. (e.g. he says Vigo, which is a town in Galicia, when he means El Viso, a residential district in Madrid), but otherwise it was an accurate description of Madrid during those troubled times, and a fast paced page turner. Highly recommended.

Two recent reads that made an impression on me...

Richard Flanagan - 'The Unknown Terrorist'

This was awesome! In fact it could possibly be one of the best books I've picked up in all my twenty-eight years. It was one of those chance's I took when I was down at the library and didn't have particularly high expectations. I assumed it would be some silly, conspiratorial thriller with no depth.

However, all those really cool things people have said about it that make it onto the cover, it's all true. This book really is amazing, with a great story and the shock ending really was a goodie! It's also interesting and clever that this guy manages to make the most unlikely person become a terror suspect in a very believable way. Trust me, after reading this, you'll never look at pole-dancers in the same light again.

Laura Spinney - 'The Quick'

Another chance pick-up at the library but this one soudned amazing from the blurb on the back. I was really looking forward to reading it. The story starts, it goes on a bit and then all the words stop, the pages go blank and the back cover is staring at you and you're still waiting for the ending or for any of the stuff in the blurb to happen.

I honestly felt quite let-down by the whole thing and would recommend it only for those looking to stay warm when the climate shifts and we're the new arctic.

I'm reading two at the same time...sort of. I bought The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers and The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison (I adore this woman's writing!) together, but I started reading the former first. The first few pages bored me (or maybe it was the mood I was in), that's when I picked up the Bluest Eye.

Oh...my...goodness. It's mindblowing. It's heartbreaking. It's fascinating. But mostly it's heartbreaking so I stopped and gave the McCullers novel a second chance. I relate more to Morrison's book, so I prefer it, but Hunter isn't bad at all. The dialogue McCullers gives to the black characters grates me at times; I think that's the only real flaw I can find right now.