I finished Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Loved it.
Now reading some short ghost stories, notably by M. R. James.
Ah, that’s perfect, thank you! The Wolfe Pack bibliography is too detailed for my purposes (e.g., figuring out what I need to read next).
Oh M.R. James! My favorite ghost story writer!
Did you know there’s a podcast?
I did not! I will have to look into this!
I’m up to the early twentieth century in Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Jerusalem: the Biography, which I’ve enjoyed very much. A great read with lots of colourful characters and incidents along the way.
I’ve also just started Antony Beevor’s The Second World War which is much better than Max Hastings’ recent one volume history of the War.
Time for some novels next I think.
I liked the second volume because, not only did it cover some of the same period as Stephen Fry’s Chronicles, but I was old enough to remember what I was doing then as well (I was four when this current diary started, not socially aware at all - I’ll be 14 when it finishes and not much better).
But I am loving it, just in a different way.
Into The Silence, Wade Davis. A rather weighty tome about Mallory, the people he was most associated with, and his attempts on Everest, written in the context of WWI and its aftermath. It’s good so far, but the small print is slowing me down.
I used to like these novels, but Creole Belle jumped the shark for me. Dave and Clete are real-time characters, which means at this point they’re somewhere around 65 years old. What Burke has them doing in this book defies logic and physical abilities. I thought it was a muddled mess and that Burke is just padding his bank account at this point.
I have almost finished Sharon Penman’s “Lionheart”. She’s one of my favourite authors for historical fiction, once I’ve finished that one then I think I’ll be heading further back in history for Ben Kane’s “Spartacus” book.
Terry Pratchett’s Thief of Time. I really enjoy the Discworld novels. Part of it takes place in a school, and he refers to scissors as something that, “by school rules, were treated as Doomsday Machines.” 
On my own time, I’m still reading Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, which I’ve almost finished.
But for the past week, my 9 year old son and I have been reading a new book by Pearls Before Swine cartoonist Stephan Pastis. It’s called Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made.
Pastis has loads of fans among SDMB regulars, so many of you must already know about it. But in case you haven’t seen it, it’s a very funny kids’ book that answers two questions we’ve all surely wondered about:
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What if Encyclopedia Brown was a moron? Or…
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What if Calvin and Hobbes started a detective agency?
If you have kids, get it for them. (Though you may find yourself, like me, picking it up after they go to sleep and reading a few chapters ahead!
One of my favorites! I do hope Sue and Lobsang have a future together.
Just finished the classic Cannery Row - I love Steinbeck and loved the book.
Now I’ve started The Gashouse Gang. Although I’m not a fan of the St. Louis Cardinals, I’m in the mood for a baseball book, and I like reading about old baseball.
Just finished Gold from Crete by C.S. Forester (better known for his Horatio Hornblower novels). It’s a collection of mostly-unrelated World War II stories, most at sea, but some not. There was also a well-written what-if essay on a Nazi invasion of Great Britain that seemed plausible.
Also finished Lamb by Christopher Moore, a mostly-unfunny Bible spoof about Christ’s childhood friend, Biff, who was written out of the New Testament. A few laughs but not nearly enough.
Still reading Stephen C. Neff’s Justice in Blue and Gray, about legal issues raised by the Civil War (slavery, secession, the President’s war powers, the suspension of habeas corpus, commerce raiding, etc.). A bit dry but interesting to me.
Just started Dave Stevens’s The Rocketeer: The Complete Adventures, which so far isn’t as good as the movie.
You know, I didn’t find it hilarious, but I just found it interesting. Moore isn’t laugh-out-loud funny for me, and that’s not what I expect out of his books.
I liked it as a speculation of how to make sense of the gospels, and especially of how Jesus dying on the cross is supposed to get God the father to forgive humans their sins.
I am enjoying The Day of Battle by Rick Atkinson. As the second in his “Liberation Trilogy” it describes the war in Sicily and Italy.
The first in the series was An Army at Dawn about the green US Army in North Africa and its first disastrous encounter with German panzers at Kasserine Pass. I assume the third will cover Normandy to VE day.
Reading Pure now. Pretty good post-apocalypse story. The world is divided into “Pures”, people who were protected from the Big Bad Nuclear Bomb and now live in a protected dome, and the “Wretches” who somehow survived the detonation. The wretches tended to meld with whatever was close when the bomb went off - a bicycle, other people, a dog - and that makes for some pretty creepy people. The second book in the trilogy is also out, and I’ll probably read that one, too.
Rather late in my updates, some of these should really be in the February thread, but as they say on Earth: C’est la vie…
Destroyer of Worlds, Larry Niven & Edward Lerner. Oops, another series. Double-oops - this is the third in this series. Hate it when that happens. Space opera, for those of you who are Niven fans, this series is billed as a prequel to Ringworld. Pretty good.
Supervolcano: Eruption, Harry Turtledove. Another series - I need to pay better attention when I buy books. Yellowstone National Park erupts with a fury unseen for 600k years and fucks our shit up. As disaster porn, it’s OK - could have been more disastery. I think the really bad shit is going to happen in the next book (mass starvation, years without a summer, etc.)
Billion Dollar Lessons: What You Can Learn from the Most Inexcusable Business Failures of the Last 25 Years, Paul B. Carrol & Chunka Mai. I like business profiles and this one was pretty good. The last 40-50 pages were a bit of a slog once the authors got away from the profiles and descended into biz-school speak. Still, a worthwhile read and definitely the best book I’ve read by a guy with the awesome name of “Chunka Mai.”
Firestar, Michael Flynn. A re-read, this book was at times just so early-mid 1990s that I commented on it to my wife. It probably was a bit more believable 20 years ago, but now it comes across as a Libertopia fantasy about how to create a private space industry, complete with meddlin’, over-regulating governments, corporate espionage, etc. I used to recommend this book highly… now I’ll recommend it with reservations.
American Icon: Alan Mullaly and the fight to save Ford Motor Company, Bryce Hoffman. A decent business profile of Ford Motor Company from 2005-2010. Could have been more detailed, imho, and suffered because the author had the approval of Alan Mullaly and Bill Ford (so he pulled his punches at times (at best, at worst you could describe many passages as flat-out hero-worshipping)), but all-in-all it was a relatively honest look at FMC during the Great Recession.
Currently starting the rest of the books in the “Destroyer of Worlds” series - there are three of them, but they are Larry Niven so they should be pretty fast reads. FWIW, I’m keeping a spreadsheet of all the books I’m reading in 2013 - so far I’ve read 21 books, a total of 10,066 pages. 13 fiction books (6,858 pages) and 9 non-fiction books (3,208 pages.)
I’m shocked to be saying this, but Martin Chuzzlewit is pretty good so far. I’m not bored and lost in the sea of characters like I usually am ten chapters into Dickens. In fact, the title character(s) have only had a couple of pages of “scene time” and that seems to be working in the novel’s favor. Of course, I haven’t gotten to the infamous American sequence yet so we’ll see what happens then.