I’m with you on the grim death thing. I bailed after about 125 pages.
I also just set aside <i>Ruling Passion</i>, by Reginald Hill. The story is pretty good, but the narrator is abysmal (which is too bad because the narrator for all the other Dalziel and Pascoe books I’ve read is really good). I’m waiting for the print version to come in for me at the library.
I enjoyed it a lot, though I think I would have enjoyed it even more if it was a straight historical recounting (basically, more of the first section). I did like how the author weaved the historical dialogue and themes into her steampunky bits. 
Although I can’t find it online, NPR’s commentator Baxter Black got in trouble awhile back when he told the same story on the air and insisted it had really happened to him.
Just finished David Hackett Fischer’s excellent Washington’s Crossing, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004. Well-researched and very engaging. I learned a lot, including that the Hessians weren’t sleeping off an intoxicated Christmas; that there was a second Battle of Trenton, which the Continental Army also won; and that the Hessian military had a bunch of courts-martial afterwards to placate their pissed-off prince. Also intriguing to learn of the many differing schools of historical interpretation (republican, romantic, Whig, debunking, etc.) since the Revolution.
Read Stephen King’s Revival. He still spins a pretty good yarn, although the reveal near the end was over the top, IMO.
Now reading Radical, by Maajid Nawaz, an autobiographical book about the author’s journey into and out of extremist Islamism.
Finished Descent, by Tim Johnston. Beautifully written and an emotional roller coaster ride.
Next up, a short story collection by William Gay, I Hate To See That Evening Sun Go Down.
Still enjoying Harold Holzer’s Lincoln and the Power of the Press, although it sometimes plods.
Arthur C. Clarke’s sf short-story collection Tales from the White Hart really, really wants to be funnier than it is, but I suppose it’s mildly diverting.
Over the weekend, I started William S. Burroughs’s drug-addled, stream-of-consciousness Naked Lunch and so far I’m not digging it.
I’ve just finished ‘The Brain - The Story of You’ by David Eagleman. I thought it was OK. Eagleman writes very engagingly and has a knack for breaking down complicated concepts for the layperson. However, I found that I was familiar with quite a lot of the material already, just through years of picking up little scraps of information here and there through the TV and popular-science articles. As such, I found myself skim-reading quite often. I’d doubtless be more impressed if I didn’t already have this familiarity, so I still recommend it. Also, the hardcover (it’s not out in paperback yet, I believe) is beautifully designed with lots of lovely illustrations. If you want to know what a rat’s brain looks like at 10,000x (and I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t ;)) then this is the book for you! I’d give it 3[sup]1/2[/sup]/5.
I’m also about 160 pages into Ray Feist’s ‘The Magician’ and I’m pleased to say it’s still thoroughly entertaining. If you’ve read any of the Game of Thrones books you’ll see that Feist is clearly a strong influence on George R.R. Martin, although Feist introduces the fantasy elements much more quickly than Martin does. So far, The Magician is not as good as any of the Thrones series, but it’s still very good.
I haven’t really read much more of ‘Killing Floor’ since my last post. I should get back on that.
In that case, I doubly recommend it. One of the things I learnt from the book is that, in patients with traumatic brain injuries and dementia, the ability to appreciate music is one of the faculties that is best preserved. Indeed, according to Sacks, music actually helps temporarily alleviate some of the symptoms common to dementia patients. He also has a couple of fascinating case studies about people whose musical memories temporarily went into overdrive after accidents, causing them to hear songs from their childhood so vividly that, at times, they couldn’t hear what the people around them were saying. According to one of the patients, it was actually quite enjoyable 
Yeah, I think a lot of the music-related information and anecdotes from The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat were repeated in Musicophilia – he references the earlier book several times. I’ll still read it, though, for the other cool stuff.
Last Finished: Red November: Inside the Secret US-Soviet Submarine War, by W Craig Reed
Now reading: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, by Steven King
Next up: Death Without Company, the second Longmire mystery, by Craig Johnson
Finished The Waste Lands, by Stephen King, volume III in his Dark Tower series. Very good but again I notice King’s odd sloppiness. He seems to think three months after the JFK assassination was still 1963, and the day after May 31 is still May. But very good regardless.
Next up is volume IV: Wizard and Glass.
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven Covey and Psychology for Dummies by Adam Cash.
Reached 50 pages and dumped it without regret. Garbage.
Next up: The Kennedy Wit, ed. by Bill Adler, a short 1964 collection of JFK’s funnier quips, zingers and observations. I’m starting to think he had a better sense of humor than anyone running this year.
I totally disagree with your view of Naked Lunch. I don’t know if the time is wrong for you to read it or if the times are wrong for it to be appreciated, but for its time it was a very important book, albeit hard to read sometimes. Just glancing at the reviews of it on Amazon I see that it was praised by, among others, Terry Southern (“An absolutely devastating ridicule of all that is false, primitive, and vicious in current American life: the abuses of power, hero worship, aimless violence, materialistic obsession, intolerance, and every form of hypocrisy.”), Newsweek, and Robert Lowell. Any piece of writing that receives praise from this many and diverse readers surely deserves consideration as being not garbage.
Have you read any or all of it? I gave it 50 pages, which I think is only fair (especially since Burroughs later said the chapters could be mixed up and read in any order). It’s garbage to me, even if others loved it. Don’t worry, I’ll just return it to the library, not burn it.
Of course I read it, or else I wouldn’t have defended it. I guess you could call it garbage without reading it all, though, which doesn’t seem fair.
Oh I don’t know, I’ve read a lot of books I felt were grabage by page 50.
I think this is an “agree to disagree” situation.
This morning I finished I Hate To SeeThat Evening Sun Go Down, a short story collection by William Gay. The stories themselves weren’t tightly plotted, more like slices of life. I generally don’t care for that artsy-fartsy sort of thing, but dang! (excuse my French) This dude could write. I’d be reading a sentence describing the weather and feeling awestruck rather than bored.
Next I’m going to read Twilight.
I zipped through Vanessa Diffenbaugh’s We Never Asked for Wings over this snow-filled weekend. It’s a little hard to summarize the book, so I’ll just say that if you’ve read and liked her first book (The Language of Flowers), you’ll probably like this one, too. They have a few of the same elements: chapters with alternating viewpoints, a protagonist who’s rather screwed up in the head, beautiful language, and some good research thrown in.
Now I’m starting on Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs.
But of course.
