What are you reading right now?

What are you reading now, besides the SDMB of course. What’s on your bedside table or in your backpack. What’s next on your reading list?

I just finished the “Year’s Best Science Fiction, 18th Annual Colection” (Gardner Dozois, Ed).

I haven’t picked my next book yet.

Well, since this thread, I’m reading Cosmos by Carl Sagan. :smiley:

“Blood & Iron” by Harry Turtledove.

Zev Steinhardt

The Thirteen Gun Salute
Patrick O’Brian

Aubrey-Maturin in 2004!

Guns, Germs, and Steel and Colonization: Aftershocks.

Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey. It’s the third of his books I’ve read recently and I couldn’t recommend him highly enough.

I’m planning on reading something by William Faulkner next. He doesn’t seem to be as widely read here in Europe as Hemingway, Fitzgerald et al. - maybe because, unlike the others, he didn’t spend much time here and stuck to his home patch in setting his work. I read a couple of his short stories in college and enjoyed them and now I reckon I should check out his bigger works. Seeing as he’s required reading for you merkins, have you any recommendations on where to start?

Reading now:

Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky (translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)

Lady with Lapdog and other stories – Anton Chekhov (translated by David Magarshack)

Begrudgingly Reading now:

Deitel and Deitel C++ How to Program – Deitel and Deitel

Data Structures and Algorithm Analysis in C++ – Mark Weiss

What’s Next:

Doctor Zhivago – Boris Pasternak (don’t know the translator, it’s not in front of me)

Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy (translated by David Magarshack)

The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov (translated by Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O’Connor)

After that Russian Lit jag I have:

The Source – James A. Michener

Emma – Jane Austen

Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen

Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë

Antigone – Sophocles (translated by Richard Emil Braun)

This is the stack of books in my room. They will eventually be read, and replaced with other books as time goes on. It takes me a while to read books (other than class-related) now, since I’m a full-time student and work part time (and stupid enough to take on two big jobs and a summer class at the moment :smack: ), but I hope to be done with those in a year or so.

The Preserving Machine and Other Short Stories by Philip K. Dick
Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut

The Tin Drum.

Kick ass book

switching between:

Lord of the Rings Trilogy (my first time)

GI Joe Marvel Comics TPB

A+ Certification for Dummies

and then whatever copy of Stuff or Maxim is on top of the stack.

Jeez, and I used to be proud that I liked to read. :rolleyes:

Freedomland by Richard Price.

Just finished American Gods by Neil Gaiman.

I am also struggling through Shelters of Stone by Jean Auel, which is so appallingly dull that my brain hurts when I read it. (I am so disappointed because I really enjoyed the previous books in the series) But, I sort of feel obligated to finish it since it was a birthday gift from my husband.
Damn him! :wink:

I’m kind of swapping back and forth between Black Holes and Time Warps by Kip Thorne and The Origin of Species. Fortunately they’re not books with a lot of overlapping material so I don’t tend to confuse them. :wink:

Waiting in the wings I have a complete set of The Harvard Classics which I received from my aunt. I was helping her move into a new house and she said “you want 'em? Take 'em! Otherwise they’re going on the auction.” Woo hoo! :cool:

I am sitting amidst a pile of books I’ve ordered online or bought at second-hand shops: The American Stage of To-Day (a huge 1910 coffee-table book, loaded with lovely portraits), an 1874 sex and marriage manual, and an illustrated booklet on 1930s German actress Renate Müller, so I can finally do an article on her. I just finished, and forwarded to my Mom, Mrs. Miniver and Glittering Sham (a 1932 Hollywood novel, just as trashy as it sounds), and just finished Mrs. Caudle’s Curtain Lectures, an hilarious 1844 book by Douglas Jerrold.

The sex manual (Chastity, or, Our Secret Sins) is a howl. My favorite chapter is on “Vicious Servants.” The author relates that a friend hired an Irish woman as nursemaid to his children, and “in the four weeks she was with them she ruined all his boys and girls, and left the family wrecked for life. Mr. J. says, in speaking of it, ‘I would rather have laid all my children in the grave.’” Well—what a month that must have been! I hope Biddie didn’t ask for a reference. . .

Just finished “Love Among the Chickens” - PG Wodehouse as an e-book on the Handspring. Now I need to dig out my Jeeves again! I still can’t decide whether I like Wilde or Wodehouse better - but I have to be in the mood to read them.

Slogging through Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson - the middle part of a trilogy & I don’t think I’m going to make it. Very dense story, lots of characters & more politicking than I prefer.

Halfway through Salmon of Doubt Douglas Adams’ posthumous collection of odd bits. Wonderful read so far, if bittersweet.

The Chronoliths by Robert Charles Wilson. Not bad so far.

Politzania, I too have tried to read those darn Robinson Mars books and just can’t do it!

Next up: Blood Music by Greg Bear

I’m reading A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs. I’m really into it, I love old adventure novels.

I picked up the book because there is a pretty cool poster that goes by the name of John Carter of Mars. The english section in the library had about eight or nine titles in this series. I hope the rest are as entertaining.

The allegory of love by C S Lewis
The golden bough, Fraser
Fear less that De Becker guy

next up:
some mysteries that I checked out and that have been sitting around
*The Oxford history of Eng. lit, v 3 (16th century), C S Lewis
Lancelot, Chretien de Troyes
The crock of gold, Stephens

I’ve just finished Sea of Silver Light the last volume of the Otherland series by Tad Williams.

Currently reading Hogfather by Terry Pratchett again.

Life After Death , fiction by Carol Muske Dukes. I saw her speak at a local college a few months ago.

Joan of Arc and Richard II: Sex, Saints and Government in the Middle Ages by Charles Wood. Very nifty stuff.