Retired, actually.
Re-reading Terry Pratchett’s Colour of Magic, currently.
Next on my list is Elizabeth: The Struggle for the Throne. A biography of Elizabeth I, covering her formative years from her birth in 1533 to her accession is 1558.
I had the same experience with this book. The punctuation made it unreadable. I wondered if my edition (Everyman Library) was just messed up, because I couldn’t imagine that Bronte would have punctuated like that.
Which edition were you reading? I have a feeling it’d be okay if the punctuation could be fixed.
I just read this as well. Very interesting, especially the tangents. I love the fact that a math problem is explained in an appendix. 
The explanation of the “Marty Hall” problem still gets me, even after this book and Cecil’s column on the subject.
Right now I’m reading American Gods by Neil Gaiman. I’m more than a hundred pages in and I’m underwhelmed so far.
But I’ve got a $15 Barnes & Noble gift card in my wallet, crying for release. Soon, little one, soon you’ll be free…
Currently working on Stone of Farewell, second in the Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn series by Tad Williams. I’m around page 200, and I like how the plot was actually moving right from the start. In many sequels, the first few chapters are just summaries of earlier books.
I’m also near the end of 2020 Vision, a collection of short stories written in 1974 about life in the year 2020. Despite having some of the big names in SF, it’s a bit of a disappointment. Predictable, uninspired stories for the most part.
I’m currently reading “Barry Trotter and the Shamless Parody.” It’s quite funny and I’m really enjoying it.
Finished up Betrayal by Clare Francis earlier this week. It was first published in England in 1995 and the cover says it’s an international bestseller. It’s a very good psychological suspense novel about a man and what follows when his lovers corpse washes ashore.
Then I reread The Notebook, by Nicholas Sparks. There’s a slim chance we’ll go to the movies with friends in the next day or so I wanted to reread it.
Today I finished up The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of the Last Tsar by Robert Alexander. It’s a gripping historical fiction.
I love threads like this.
I recently finished reading The Taking by Dean Koontz, my second-favorite author of all time (first is P.D. James). His storytelling got a little shaky for a while, but he’s gotten his feet back under him with these last 3-4 novels. Unfortunately, the trade-off is that his books have developed very Christian, ‘God watches out for good people’ themes, so the endings can be a little trite and are almost never surprising anymore, but at least the stories themselves are page-turners again.
Currently I’m reading Ludlum’s The Bourne Supremacy. I read Bourne Identity years ago and enjoyed it, but for some reason haven’t gotten around to Supremacy until now. I didn’t like the “Identity” movie, btw…I don’t think Matt Damon was right for the role, and the whole story just seemed too compressed. I wonder if I would have liked it had I not read the book first, though.
(I wondered that about Crichton’s Timeline, too: didn’t like the movie, but it’s one of my favorite books of all time. Did anyone like it who hadn’t read the book?)
I also have a nonfiction book on my headboard that I’ve been halfway through for about a month: Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct. I’m a bit of an amateur etymologist/linguist, and this is an interesting read, but I always get distracted by fiction. {grin}
P.S. to Moody Bastard, regarding your sig of “Never question Bruce Dickinson:” I love Bruce! Did you read Lord Iffy Boatrace? What a gloriously sick man… 
I’ve just finished a book on the Great Molasses Flood of 1918 in Boston by Stephen Puleo – a great piece of work on an obscure incidsent in Boston history. As with another bit of Boston-related history, the Irisjh Potato Famine, people tend to make fuin of this because of the name, but it was a opreventable tragedy in which 22 people died pretty horribly.
I just read The Eat-a-Bug Cookbook by David George Gordon, which I bought at an outdoor zoo/museum, and I read the book out loud all the way home. It’s a good cookbook (I’d love to try some of the recipes – without the bugs), and Gordon is absolutely serious about the Entomophagy. But his writing style is humorous. (At the end of the recipe for “Cream of Katydid Soup”: “immediately before serving, float the remaining katydids on the surface of each bowl of soup for garnish. Tell your guests not to eat this insect. It’s just there for appearance’s sake.” Just to be sure he’s for real, there’s a full-color photo of the result. ). The book is full of offbeat instructions. (In the recipe for “Baked Bird-Eating Spider” : “With small scissors, carefully snip off the spider’s larghe paired fangs. Set them aside – judging from the documentary footage, they make excellent toothpicks!” This recipe, too, is on the level.) Gordon gives lots of references, but he either doesn’t know of, or chooses not to cite Marvin Harris’ Good to Eat (aka The Sacred Cow and the Abominable Pig) which devotes a hefty chapter to bug-eating.
Jack L. Chalker’s Belshazzar’s Serpent. Chalker is one of my guilty pleasures.
Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford. I heard about this on PBS, and my wife got it for me as a present. Fascinating bio of ol’ Genghis and his impressive impact on the world. Who’d have thought that they could find anything new on him, but evidently that’s the case. A lot of recent work has unearthed a lot of info on his early life.
I didn’t manage to finish (or even get much of a start on) The God of Small Things. I’ll have to come back to it some time later, but I’m too impatient now.
I read Toni Morrison’s Paradise. Wow, just wow. Great book, and I recommend it highly.
I tried to pick up Invisible Man, but just like when it was assigned in high school, I got bored with it. I own a copy, so I’ll read it eventually. I hope.
I read The DaVinci Code. Nothing special, and really frustrating at the beginning. Note to Dan Brown: It’s a novel, not a fucking movie script. Don’t call it one a write the other. And one page does not a chapter make. Were you paid by the chapter? Seriously, the first 150 pages were a waste of ink, paper, and effort. Oh, and cop out a little more on the ending, please.
I need to go to the library tomorrow to find something to read.
I loved the book Timeline, and thought the movie was pretty good. While reading the book, however, I did somehow feel he wrote it with an action movie script in mind… as if TPTB at one of the studios (that had bought the rights to his other books) had said, “Hey, why don’t you try writing a book about time travel. We’ll buy the movie rights. Make sure it’s got a lot of action! How about knights?”
I’ve tried to read Bourne Identity twice, and just never could get into it. I love a good spy thriller, but just couldn’t get hooked on that one.
I did watch the movie, and I agree, Matt Damon wasn’t quite right for the role. He wasn’t bad, mind you, just not quite right.
LOL! I didn’t get the “action movie script” feel while reading it…perhaps I was too busy developing a crush on Marek (my first – and to date, only – literary crush, how juvenile!).
Hmm, maybe I was too much of a purist this time. I was annoyed by all of the changes to the Chris character, and felt that the evil corporate guy character was way underdeveloped. I also thought the script could have spent more time on the language/culture stuff. But then maybe people would have left the movie theatre feeling like they had just been forced to read a book. 
I’m not one who believes that movies are always worse than the books they’re based on, but it seems like lately they have been. {shrug}
I think Ludlum can be tough to get through. I’m a big reader, and like you I love a good spy thriller, but I think part of the reason it’s taken me so long to get around to reading Supremacy is that Identity was a tough slog at times! It’s already started coming back to me now that I’m a few chapters into Supremacy. {grin} If I read a new author that I like, I’ll read several of their other books right away (when possible) (is there a name for that? ‘chain reading,’ or something?). I did that with Clive Cussler when I discovered the Dirk Pitt series; I think I read something like 9 Cussler novels in a row. The same friend who loaned me The Bourne Identity loaned me The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum at the same time, but I just couldn’t go right to Supremacy from Identity. I tried, but at the time I don’t think I made it past the second chapter. {grin} I’ve had all three paperbacks on my headboard for a couple years now…luckily I’m still friends with that friend, so he’ll get them back eventually.
I liked Timeline as well, but the feeling I actually got while reading it was that it would make a good video game.
Misnomer, if you want to take a look at a book/movie combo where the movie lives up to the novel, take a chance on Mystic River. The screenplay is very close to the novel, even though some of the psychological depths Lehane explores are left to the interpretation of the viewer in the film.
Faster, by James Gleick. It’s a sudy of “the acceleration of just about everything” in modern culture. The front cover reads:
F S T R
JMS GLCK
It’s really interesting.
I’m also reading a book of poetry by Mary Oliver. Also Waiting for Godot (I have to for school), which is irritating me.
Me too! Insanely enough, I missed the characters for a day or two after as well.
Um, I should perhaps confess the “Me too!” had to do with getting the crush, I must admit however, that it’s not my first juvenile literary crush.
The title of this book is Dark Tide . Well worth the read.
BTW, I just saw the movie Timeline last night. Pepper Mill started watching it, too. She said that she’d go back to reading when she thought it as getting stupid.
She started reading within 15 minutes.
I agreed with her, but I have a love of bad movies so I watched the whole thing. I didn’t much care for the book, either.
Got bored with Wolves of the Calla about halfway through, and I might just skip it and move on to Song of Susannah.
In the meantime, I started The Dream of Scipio by Iain Pears, and it’s awesome. I’ve never read any of the great philosophers, but I plan to now.
Well. I finished Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit and read Richard Adams’s Watership Down over the last week (our honeymoon!). I’ve started Barnaby Rudge, and am actually enjoying it.
I’ve decided to read all the Dickens novels. We’ll see how long that idea lasts.
Oh, I completely know what you mean: usually after I finish a book I start a new one right away, but with Timeline I actually needed to wait a couple days (I guess to process everything, get over the crush, etc.). Re-reading it has never had the same effect, but I don’t think I’ll ever forget how…different that first time was.
(Your lost virginity joke here.)
So that wasn’t your first literary crush, eh? (Hopefully you know I didn’t mean the “juvenile” part seriously!) I must be reading the wrong books… What are some of the others?