Over the past few weeks I’ve read a number of series and thoroughly enjoyed all of them.
The Maze Runner
The Scorch Trials
The Death Cure
Divergent
Allegiant
Insurgent
The Goddess Test
The Goddess Hunt
The Goddess Interrupted
The Goddess Legacy
The Goddess Inheritance
The Giver
Gathering Blue
Messenger
Son
Matched
Crossed
Reached
I just started reading the 4-book The Relic Master Series and plan on reading the Delirium Trilogy after that.
I read Communion Town, by Sam Thompson, which I thought was excellent. It’s 10 very marginally interconnected stories, reflecting different writing genres, that all take place in a mythical city that is both modern and vaguely magical. I saw a review that called it “Invisible Cities meets Gattaca” and that was weirdly accurate.
I picked up Morlock Night by K.W. Jeter after it was mentioned in one of these threads, and it was a fun, goofball read that extends The Time Machine story.
In the Shadow of Blackbirds is a YA novel by Cat Winters, that was pretty good in terms of writing, but I had a hard time backing the story (which is about fraudulent spiritualists in 1918 … but then gets into real spirits).
I have now just started Hild, by Nicola Griffith, which is great so far - extremely dense historical fiction about the (imagined) life of St. Hilda of Whitby, so 7th century Britain.
Finished A Storm of Swords, Part 2: Blood and Gold, by George RR Martin, the second volume of the third book in his seris A Song of Ice and Fire. Very good. Now that I’ve read the first three books in the series, I can better appreciate the remark by Martin, who was an avid Breaking Bad fan, that Walter White was much more of a monster than any of his own characters. Not sure I completely agree with that though.
I’m taking a short break from the series now. Next up is Tobacco Road, by Erskine Caldwell.
I’m reading The Barkeep by William Lashner (a freebie from Kindle First). It’s my third Lashner and I really like it. I guess it’s a thriller, since there’s a hit man and a mystery.
A young man comes home to find his mother murdered. He makes a comment to a detective which leads to the conviction of the young man’s father, who was having an affair. Five years later, he’s approached by a man who says he was the killer, and that for $10K he’ll tell who hired him and why.
Sounds a bit convoluted (and it is) but the characters are individual and interesting.
I just finished Joe Haldeman’s Camouflage, which was very enjoyable. I have a couple more of his novels that I’ve picked up recently.
I’ve started in on Herodotus’ The Histories, but I’ve no idea what I’ll take up for a bit of light fiction - maybe more of the Hornblowers, maybe a Stephen Booth mystery. I’ll let you know when I decide. 
I got this for Christamas.
It’s a novel by JJ Abrams and some other guy. I use the word novel in a very loose sense. So far, all I’ve done is open it and flicked through a little. It’s stuffed full of notes, letters and postcards. There’s a decoding wheel. There appears to be a central novel, but most of whatis going on appears in footnotes, doodles etc in several sets of handwriting. I think will need some new Post-it notes before I satrt.
I don’t think it would translate to a Kindle very easily 
Just polished off Prisoner’s Base. It’s Nero Wolfe, fictional comfort food for me, so I don’t have much to say about it as such. As I hoped, though, it was interesting to compare against the TV dramatization: If my memory serves me correctly, they dropped one entire character/suspect, as well as few chapters where Archie more or less “joins the police” and hangs out with them at HQ interviewing suspects. As a consequence of the first deletion, Archie wound up punching the murderer in the face at the end of the TV show; in the book, he specifically comments that he wanted to punch the murderer, but might’ve done more than just laid him low.
I’ve decided to have a dip into WWII again, starting this time with Max Hastings All Hell Let Loose. I expect I’ll have to have some diversions during this long book, so there’s probably some more Wolfe in the future, as well as Fables.
Oh, had meant to mention: I’m considering adding the “WhisperSync Voice” for All Hell Let Loose. It’s $5 or so, and given the size of it, I wouldn’t mind being able to sneak in a few pages here and there in the car or on a run. I generally prefer to avoid non-fiction when it comes to audiobooks, but this seems like it might work. We’ll see.
Raising Steam by terry Pratchett .
Oh, good! Still waiting for that “best of” Haldeman short story collection from the library.
Sorry, I meant to get that table of contents for you! It is:
Hero
Anniversary Project
Tricentennial
Blood Sisters
Lindsay and the Red City Blues
Manifest Destiny
More Than the Sum of His Parts
Seasons
The Monster
The Hemingway Hoax
Graves
None So Blind
For White Hill
Civil Disobedience
Four Short Novels
Angel of Light
The Mars Girl
Sleeping Dogs
Complete Sentence
Hero is an excerpt from The Forever War. I’m only up to Seasons (and quite enjoying it). The cold weather stole my reading time, since I had to drive the boy to school the last few days.
For Lawrence Block, I recommend the Keller series (starts with Hit Man). It takes a special talent to make a ruthless killer for hire personable, and interesting.
I’ve read and enjoyed Tuchman’s book, though it’s way different from Clark’s. In point of fact, I think I prefer Tuchman’s as reading, but Clark’s as history. Guns of August read very much like an expanded version of March of Folly, with the folly centered on the July crisis. Clark’s book makes clear how–pardon my French–frigged up the entire European situation was from at least the turn of the century, and yet how incredibly unlikely war was even in the spring of 1914.
In other news, I ditched Pratchett. Few book-ditchings have pained me more. Terry! But it was no use. There was little fun and no suspense at all. I’ve never been a fan of the Moist van Lipwig stories in the first place, though they were quite passable; but this one…well. I replaced it as bedtime reading with Ground Zero, the antepenultimate installment of Repairman Jack. Much more fun.
Just finished Laini Taylor’s Daughter of Smoke and Bone. Daughter Arwen recommended it and is now slightly miffed that I finished it before she did, but I could scarcely put it down. What a fully-fleshed world Taylor creates, where no devil is quite a devil and no angel quite an angel. Now I want to visit Prague too.
Also 45 pages into March of the Wooden Soldiers, the fourth Fables compilation. Very addictive. LawMonkey, I think I have you to thank / blame for these. 
So thanks!
For non-fiction, I’ve just started Thank You for Your Service by David Finkel. I’m not a one to cry at books most of the time, but I was in tears before the end of Chapter One. Heartbreaking.
I’ve mentioned Fables on here before, but I don’t think I’ve ever really spoken rapturously about it or anything. Still, I’ll take the credit. 
I know I’m late to the party, but I finally got around to checking out John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Let Me In from the local library. I haven’t seen either movie adaptation, but had a general idea of what to expect. I’d read his Handling the Undead some time ago & really enjoyed the whole atmosphere of the novel and was pleased to see Lindqvist used the same type of tone here.
Oskar is a bullied pre-teen, living in Stockholm in the early 80’s with his mother. A series of gruesome murders catches his attention, as does a reclusive new neighbor couple - a father and his daughter. We also meet Jocke and his alcoholic, middle-aged friends, who spend their time making plans that they know they’ll probably never achieve; as well as Tommy, Oskar’s only friend, whose rebellious actions trouble his mother, Yvonne, and her boyfriend (also a policeman), Steffan and see how their paths intertwine over the course of the novel.
I really enjoyed how the story wasn’t just about the vampire and its relationship* with Oskar); you get to see how the other characters : Oskar and his parents; Tommy, his mother Yvonne and Staffan, her boyfriend; and Jocke, Lacke & Virginia interacting within their own circles as well. Hacke was a quite disturbing character (with an even more disturbing end); while Eli is written as more or less a sympathetic character.
While there are some very gory scenes, and references to pedophilia and other unsavory behaviours, I found it to be a very compelling story that gives the reader a lot to think about above and beyond the basic plot. While existentialism is a Swedish/Scandanavian thing (see Ingmar Bergman); IMHO Lindqvist’s works are a lovely and accessible example.
Just finished two mysteries: Figure Away, by Phoebe Atwood Taylor (starring Asey Mayo, my favourite fictional sleuth), and Old Bones, by Aaron Elkins (Gideon Oliver). Figure Away had me laughing all the way through it - I think it’s the funniest Asey Mayo story I’ve read yet.
This evening I’ll finish rereading another Asey Mayo, Spring Harrowing. Next up is 1636: Seas of Fortune, by Iver Cooper (part of Eric Flint’s “1632” series). And I have a couple more Gideon Oliver mysteries on hold at the public library…
I’m in the potato chips of reading: Chasing Fire by Nora Roberts. It keeps my attention and I like many of the characters, ironically I searched it out because the main character is a smoke jumper who is female. But I don’t like her much, she’s got some Daddy issues that make me want to go shower.
I also don’t like Robert’s dialog, so much of it feel fake like someone told her XYZ persons from ABC talk like this, it just doesn’t flow naturally. The mystery is interesting, but I’m certain I already know who dunnit.
Finished Tobacco Road, by Erskine Caldwell. Very good. The somewhat-humorous travails of poor white farmers in Depression-era Georgia. And they are not too far removed from present-day poor northeastern-Thai farmers. The resemblance is uncanny.
Have started Our Kind of Traitor, by John Le Carre.
Finished The Barkeep by William Lashner – a Kindle First freebie. Started out fine – a young man looking into the murder of his mother and uncovering family secrets – descended into navel-gazing and sophomoric philosophizing.