Whatcha readin' gang?

It is time once again to let dopers know what you are reading. I love these threads because I always get a few good ideas (even though I have 10 in the queue.)

I had an endoscopy last Friday and spent all day waiting to get in, so I read two books last weekend. One: The Night Calls a Sherlock Holmes tribute by David Pirie. I enjoy David Pirie’s work, although I was disappointed with the ending.

Also The Magicians’ Guild which was a quick read and an fair start to a new trilogy. (Must all fantasies be trilogies?)

I am now reading The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason. I will steal a line from the review on Amazon because I agree with it:

Still, I am half way through the book and we have not yet gotten into the meat of the “conspiracy.”

Sunday’s are reserved for my “deep” reading, which can mean philosopy, religion, science and sometimes even “money” books. I have had On Intelligence in the queue for ages and this Sunday I will start it. Based on a recent Dope thread, it should be quite good.

While I excercise I am listening to Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. I just started it and due to some health issues it isn’t getting the play time it should (I should be excersising more…)

That’s it for me. What are the rest of you reading?

Sounds similar to the book I’m almost finished with – Gospel by Wilton Barnhardt. The conspiracy is a teensy part of the story, which is full of fascinating historical and religious stuff. It’s really a character study – the conspiracy isn’t at all necessary. I’m loving it.

I have an Amazon gift certificate, and I’ve had good luck with writers named Ian, so maybe I’ll use it for The Rule of Four.

Next up for me is King’s Row by Henry Bellaman. I have a TBR bookcase sorted alphabetically, and am resolved to read from it before buying any more books.

Just finished The Blank Slate. Very thought-provoking – very, very dense.

I’m gonna leap with both feet on the book I picked up at the library last night: The Paid Companion. What can I say? I love Regency romances – the "Amanda Quick"s are much racier than the standard entries in the genre.

The Pinker took me a week and a half – I’m thinking I’ll be done with this by, oh, Saturday morning. After all, I have to work tomorrow… :smiley:

I’m currently re-reading A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller. A great post-apocalyptic novel about the cyclical nature of human-nature, it’s always been one of my top recommendations for other people to read.

A Deepness In the Sky: So, so good. If you have not read it, go out and get it now. Unless, of course, you haven’t read A Fire Upon the Deep, which is even better; you should read that first.

A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century: Still slogging through this a few pages at a time as bedtime reading. It’s not bad. I’m just kind of low on brain power these days. It’s all running together, I’m afraid. Blah blah blah Pope, blah blah blah war, blah blah blah plague. Hmmm. Kind of like the evening news, but without the presciption drug commercials. :wink:

The Thurber Carnival: Bathroom reading. It’s quaint.

In the hopper: the next Hugo novel on my list, A Case of Conscience

At long last I finished off Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle while on a cross-country plane ride on Sunday. Now I feel like re-reading Cryptonomicon to catch all the references I missed.

Now in the midst of T.C. Boyle’s latest bit of historical fiction, The Inner Circle. The Circle refers to the people around Dr. Kinsey of gall wasp and sex survey fame. It is written as a memoir of one of the members of the circle after the death of Kinsey. Great stuff as usual from Boyle.

I’m reading Bill Bryson’s “Short History of Nearly Everything” It’s a science/history book. It mixes sections on how various scientific disciplines came into being with a general history of that subject. Bryson is an excellent writer. He’s written mostly travel narratives in the past (that I’m aware of) and they are quite funny and informative. His humor is evident here too, and doesn’t crowd out the science. He makes the science relatively easy to understand. He uses the “If you stacked dollar bills from here to the moon, it would be worth $800 trillion dollars before you left the earth’s atmosphere” kind of description a lot, which I like.

I’m on pins and needles waiting for my husband to come home from Afghanistan so I’m reading pure, unadulterated fluff. I’m reading YaYa’s in Bloom which is the third book by Rebecca Wells (Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood and Little Alters Everywhere)

a nice little entertaining read: est2 systems application manual.

RE-reading the Harry Potter books, so I’ll be ready when the next one comes out in July.

I dropped Vanity Fair halfway through about two months ago, thanks to a hideously heavy workload. I’m going to pick it up sometime in the next few days, though.

I’ve mostly been reading plays: reviving my crush on Hotspur with “Henry IV, Part One,” and being hammed by “Incident at Vichy.”

Jon Krakauer’s “Under the Banner of Heaven”. Kind of a frightening thing that’s going to keep me from dropping casually in to Utah anytime too soon.

He’s heavier on drama than he is on in-depth reporting, but at the very least he’s going to have me reading more on this topic in the near future. Anyone with a recommendation for a good, readable book on the subject would do me a favor and drop a hint…

Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke.
I’ve wanted to since I saw it at the top of the list of best science fiction works of all time. Now I finally got my hands on a copy.

I have problems reading only one thing at a time (maybe its a college thing). So here is what is on my current reading list:

I am about half way through 100 years of solitude, and can say without reservation that, thus far, it is the best book I have ever read. Fun, compelling, thought provoking, everything I hope for in a novel. I am also reading Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels (and starting tomorrow Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail). I think there is some sort of law that says you can’t graduate from college without reading something of Hunter Thompson’s. I am also reading Jerzy Grotowsky’s collected writing in Towards a Poor Theater, I am a theater geek and a director so I eat up that stuff like it was candy. Grotowsky has some great ideas about art and theater and would recommend it, but I am honestly not sure how much it will appeal to non theater folk.

My reading assignment for class Monday is Threepenny Opera (I am a theater major) and I am looking forward to starting that. (not sure if homework counts or not, but in all honesty that is what I spend most of my time reading) I like Brecht a lot, and have seen Threepenny preformed a few times, but it will be neat to sit and actually study what he was doing with the work on the page.

On Audio book I am listening to Brian Jaques Redwall during my commute to school (finding it slightly disappointing but maybe I was expecting too much), and Stranger in a Strange Land before going to sleep (I read it for the first time when I was 13, turns out there was a lot I didn’t get at the time).

In the world of comic books I am working my way though Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing and am about halfway through the American Gothic arc. But I just finished the collected Bone and recommend it heartily to anyone who likes to have fun.

Next up will be The Joke by Milan Kundera, and Wild Cards Volume 3: Jokers Wild (written by many but compiled and edited by the excellent George RR Martin, I am anxiously awaiting the publication of Feast of Crows)

I’m currently between the covers of:

The Art of Modern Rock, by Paul Grushkin & Dennis King – heavy on the visuals, but also dense with interesting text.

The Baby Name Wizard, by Laura Wattenberg – we’ve got a kid coming in September, and I suspect I won’t be done with this book before then. Also check out the website

Paying For It: A Guide by Sex Workers for Their Clients, edited by Greta Christina – my “reading about sex work” phase has now lasted about a year, so it’s one mondo phase. The essays get a little repetitive, but they’re still fascinating.

Trading Up: The New American Luxury, by Michael J. Silverstein and Neil Fiske

Windows on the World, by Frédéric Beigbeder – the token fiction title, but a good one.

The Pilgrim’s Progress in Modern English and a whole bunch of computer programming books.

I’ve been going back and reading all the books I was assigned in college but never got to enjoy because I had only days to read and write something on it.

Currently it’s the Aeneid.

I’m half way through The Dreamhunters, Elizabeth Knox’s latest novel. It’s being launched in a few weeks and is being touted as a YA novel, but I’m not seeing that. Not that it’s inappropriate for young adults to read, but it reads like an adult novel. It’s like calling The Little Friend a YA novel, because the protagonist is twelve. Anyway, I’m enjoying it a lot - it’s more similar to Black Oxen than any of her other novels.

I just finished The Dream Merchant, which I had great fun reading. Another YA novel, set in present-day London and also throughout dreamtime - a concept handled in an original and comprehensible way. I wish I’d read it when I was kid - I would have walked around with my head in the clouds for weeks (more so than I normally did)

For light relief I’ve been flicking through In Other Words which is a nice little hardback cashing in on the success of Shott’s Original Miscellany and Eats, Shoots & Leaves, and is basically a list of words in other languages that English has no direct translation for. I’ve discovered razbliuto, a Russian word that describes the ‘feeling a person has for someone they once loved but no longer feel the same about’.

I’m finally going to get around to reading A Suitable Boy, because I’ve run out of books to read at work. With about forty-five minutes available to read with each week, it should keep me occupied for some time.

On the bus I’m making my way through Apsley Cheery-Gerrad’s The Worst Journey in the World, after reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s Antarctica.

I ordered a bunch of books online last week and I’ve been reading them as they get delivered. So far I’ve received:

Battle of the Bulge: Hitler’s Alternate Scenarios by Peter Tsouras (ed)
The Crazy Years by Spider Robinson
Luftwaffe Victorious by Mike Spick
Scams! by Andreas Schroeder
Scams, Scandals, and Skulduggery also by Andreas Schroeder

Still to come:

After the Fact, Volume II by James West Davidson and Mark Lytle
Comic Books and Other Necessities of Life by Mark Evanier
Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl by Tracy Quan
Fakes, Frauds, and Flimflammery by Andreas Schroeder
The First Century: Emperors, Gods, and Everyman by William Klingaman
From Armageddon to the Fall of Rome: How the Myth Makers Changed the World by Erik Durschmied
The Hinges of Battle: How Change and Incompetence Have Changed the Face of History by Erik Durschmied
The Hollywood Book of Scandals by James Parish
If Britain Had Fallen: The Real Nazi Occupation Plans by Norman Longmate
The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry by Legs McNeil
Silent Bob Speaks : The Collected Writings of Kevin Smith
The Thunder Never Sleeps: The Story of the Waffen Deus Ex Machina by Jack Meister
Very Bad Deaths by Spider Robinson
What If: Alternative Historical Time Lines by Robert Blumetti

I also went to some bookstores last week and got the following:

The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700-2000 by Niall Ferguson
Catastrophe: Risk And Response by Richard A. Posner
The Dragons of Expectation: Reality and Delusion in the Course of History by Robert Conquest
History Lessons: How Textbooks from Around the World Portray U.S. History by Dana Lindaman and Kyle Ward
Prisoner’s Dilemma by William Poundstone
The Secret Service: The Hidden History of an Enigmatic Agency by Philip Melenson and Peter Stevens
Seduced by Hitler: The Choices of a Nation and the Ethics of Survival by Adam LeBor and Roger Boyes
The World’s 20 Greatest Unsolved Problems by John Vacca (ed)

And I bought some used books as well

I’m reading this too, and it’s a terrific book, but it’s so full of amazing stuff that I get kind of shell-shocked and have to lay it aside for a while and let my little brain process stuff before picking it up again. I’m planning to take it with me on a trip next week.
Also to take on the trip: Parasite rex : inside the bizarre world of nature’s most dangerous creatures, by Carl Zimmer. Sounds like a good thing to read while spending a week in a hotel sleeping on strange sheets, right!

I’m in the middle of Influence : science and practice, by Robert Cialdini and Through the looking glass : further adventures & misadventures in the realm of children’s literature by Selma G. Lanes.

Actually I shouldn’t even be reading this thread. I’m drowning in stuff to read and can’t find time to read it! I currently have about 25 books out of the library, with about 20 more on hold, and still I want more…