Even if Game of Thrones was too big and sprawling, Tuf Voyaging definitely is not. I urge you to try it. No one to whom I have recommended it (and there have been many) has disliked it.
That was actually why I liked it; I thought it dovetailed nicely with The Last Colony. And the characterization of the heroine didn’t seem too off-base to me; I’ve known girls like that.
I’ve got The Goldfinch, The Journals of Spalding Gray, and the 9th (I think) Sandman volume going right now. I keep thinking about the Vinge I just read, and might need to read the next in the set.
I read this when it came out - thought it was excellent. A bit disturbing and violent, though, iirc.
Finished Ragtime, and am now reading Geoffrey Household’s old thriller ***Rogue Male.
Don’t feel alone, I have the same problem. I started it after seeing Gankutsuou, a Japanese anime loosely based on the story, and yeah, flew through the first hundred or two pages and then hit a wall… and the book has sat in the back of my truck for about 5 years now.
The offspring and I read Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett again yesterday. Well we listened to it because Pterry makes a 12 hour drive so MUCH more enjoyable. We arrived in the PNW just as the dragons flew off into the sunset 
I am reading Cavalier: A Tale of Chivalry, Passion and Great Houses by Lucy Worsley – only a few pages in and already very engaging prose. The author that has a really good knack for telling a story.
Finished The Street Lawyer, by John Grisham. A young attorney on the fast-track to partnership in a blue-chip Washington law firm gets taken hostage along with eight colleagues by a homeless man. After the siege ends with the hostage taker’s blood spattered all over him – not a spoiler, as it happens early on and is described on the book-cover blurb – he changes tack to become a lawyer for homeless rights. Good but not great.
Next up is the last Grisham I have (I bought several that our library’s semi-regular used-book sale): The Testament.
I read the first two volumes of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, *Quicksilver *and The Confusion, over the past two weeks or so. I’d read them before, but forgotten just how remarkable an achievement these books are. Went to a conference and met a guy recommending I get into The Cryptonomicon; so I’m on this before I go back and finish The System of the World.
I also discovered Mark Gatiss’s novels centered on the character of Lucifer Box–quite fun! Raunchy, slightly Flashman-esque. Box is a secret agent in the British secret service.
Just finished George R.R. Martin’s Dreamsongs, Vol. I, a collection of short stories and an unproduced screenplay. The two short stories which I’d looked forward to reading, “The Skin Trade” (about a werewolf and a P.I. in a nameless, crumbling big city) and “Portraits of His Children” (in which an author encounters, in the flesh, what appear to be characters from his books), were both disappointing. There’s some other good stuff in the book, though.
Just started The Children of Men by P.D. James, which is significantly different from the dystopic sf movie based on it. So far, so good, though.
The Baroque Cycle and Cryptonomicon are indeed achievements. Some of my favorite historical fiction ever.
They are much hated by a subset of science fiction fans who would prefer more in the style of Snow Crash - which is also good, but totally different.
I realized this morning that the last of my interest in this book had quietly drizzled away. I don’t really want to know anything about sociopaths other than how to identify and avoid them and I didn’t feel this book was helping. So I laid it aside and picked up Terry Pratchett’s Guards! Guards! and now I am happy again.
I’m now reading Blindsight, by Peter Watts. Good, hard first-contact sci-fi. Unfortunately, the book is marred by the inclusion of vampires. Vampires, in a freaking hard sci-fi book! Watts tries to wrap it in a seemingly plausible branch of evolution premise, but it’s not quite working for me. It’s a constant annoyance in an otherwise (so far) excellent book.
DRAGONS! And Carrot too. 
I discovered a Little Free Library around the corner from my sister’s house, So I gave them a book and took a couple books. Consequently I started Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg yesterday. I’m only a couple pages into it tho…
I liked that book. I thought the vampire thing was gimmicky, but I liked the idea of the “Crucifix Glitch”.
The vampire is specimen of an extinct race with “a cross-wiring of normally-distinct receptor arrays in the visual cortex, resulting in grand mal-like feedback seizures whenever the arrays processing vertical and horizontal stimuli fired simultaneously across a sufficiently large arc of the visual field. Since intersecting right angles are virtually nonexistent in nature, natural selection did not weed out the Glitch until H. sapiens sapiens developed Euclidean architecture; by then, the trait had become fixed across H. sapiens vampiris via genetic drift, and – suddenly denied access to its prey – the entire subspecies went extinct shortly after the dawn of recorded history.”
In the two Watts books I’ve read, he’s put together groups of dysfunctional and downright crazy people who in real life would not be trusted to staff a convenience store, much less crew a spaceship.
Okay, just finished the adventure yarn Rogue Male. Time for another work of (ahem) “serious” literature.
I’ll let you brilliant people pick from the following books already on my Kindle:
Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
The Magus by John Fowles
I found The Magus to be somewhat mind-bending and I really enjoyed it, so that’s my vote.
Okay, you win- ***The Magus ***it is.
I just finished **The Art of Fielding **by Chad Harbach, and was quite dazzled by it. You don’t need to be a baseball fan to enjoy it - my wife started it first (it was her book club pick) and we both loved it. I’m picking my way through an old collection of Analog short fiction while I dither over over my next book. I’m trying to get into **The Corrections **by Jonathon Franzen but haven’t managed any traction yet.
Jeez astorian, you’re easy!
I’m reading my way through a mystery series by George Harmon Coxe about a newspaper photographer named Kent Murdock. I’ve read some but not all and have been having my own little mystery series tracking some of them down. The first one is from 1935 and the last is 1973. Coxe is a fine writer and I also find the details about newspaper photography as they change through the series to be fascinating.
And Murdock is, well, sexy. In one early book he meets a women he will marry but apparently she sort of disappears from the series after a few books. I’ve tried to find out exactly when and how she gets written out but with no luck. Maybe he sends her to Reno? I’m reminded of a thread currently on the Dope someplace about things that are out of date in movies and novels. Everything in these is out of date, except the good sharp writing and the crimes. Murder for love or money never gets out of date.
Aha, found the thread I mentioned: here. (It doesn’t really matter but I’m a little OCD.)