I’m currently reading Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang. I think I need to find and read all this guy’s stuff.
Yes, I read that collection too. Some very interesting stuff that stays with you for a long time. Have you seen the sf first-contact drama Arrival, based on the title story, yet?
Nope, but it looks like I’ve got a lot to look forward to. 
I strongly recommend Ted Chiang’s “Seventy-two Letters”.
Finished Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer, which was okay.
Now I’m reading Come Tumbling Down by Seanan McGuire. It’s the latest in her Wayward Children series.
Excellent movie, I thought, but quite different from the short story. Here’s the trailer (with at least one scene that didn’t make it into the final cut): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFMo3UJ4B4g
Here’s our earlier thread (spoilers ahoy!) contrasting the story with the movie: https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=810262
Just finished it; felt a bit rushed at the end. Overall, though, an interesting and worthwhile look at corporate fraud and the difference (mostly for the worst, in this case) a charismatic CEO can make.
Next up: Raylan by Elmore Leonard, crime novel about a laconic deputy U.S. marshal (the main character in the show Justified) investigating the marijuana trade in Appalachian Kentucky.
Finished Come Tumbling Down by Seanan McGuire. It’s the best novel (well, novella) I’ve read so far this year, and the second best book overall.
Now I’m reading *Mountains Beyond Mountains *by Tracy Kidder. It’s about Dr. Paul Farmer, who traveled the world providing health care to the poor.
Finished Gettysburg, by Stephen W. Sears. Robert E. Lee gets a serious ass-whoopin’ over three days in July 1863. Very good. Gettysburg is the only Civil War battle site the wife and I have toured, eight years ago. I found my direct ancestor’s name on a plaque up on I think it was Little Round Top that listed everyone in his New York outfit. I think the pictures from that trip are all stored in Bangkok, but I plan to do some more research on him.
I read The Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara, a couple years ago, but this does feel like a good time for a re-read, so that one’s up next.
A fine plan!
Voices of the Civil War: Gettysburg (Time-Life Books, Henry Woodhead, ed.) is a good illustrated guide to the battle, too. Then you might want to check out Gettysburg, a loose film adaptation of The Killer Angels (with Jeff Daniels as Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, in the role that should have won him an Oscar).
Is that the four-hour version from the mid-1990s? If so, we watched that on videotape in Bangkok back in he day. Martin Sheen as Robert E. Lee, yes? I recall the dialogue being rather stilted but the battle scenes excellent. And the Chamberlain scenes really good. I have an especial interest in Chamberlain. A fantastic individual.
Michael McDowell’s Blackwater. It’s excellent.
Finished Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder. It’s one of the best books I’ve read this year.
Now I’m reading Briarpatch, a mystery by Ross Thomas.
After a run of ubergrim books, I read Turning Darkness Into Light. At first I thought it was gonna be too twee, too British-Upper-Crust-Comedy-of-Manners, but it soon got into much more complicated territory and was a delight.
I also read Dragons in a Bag to my first-grader. Very solid middle-grade chapter book fantasy, in which all the humans are people of color living in New York.
I finished Elmore Leonard’s Raylan today and enjoyed it a lot. A laconic, badass deputy U.S. marshal takes on mining bosses, bank robbers, pot dealers and organ-nappers in his home state of Kentucky. Good stuff.
I just began Bill Bryson’s Notes from a Small Island, about an expatriate American’s thoughts on the U.K. It’s not very funny so far, but I’ll keep at it.
That’s the one. Sheen was miscast, I think; Robert Duvall makes a much better Lee in Gods & Generals but, alas, that’s a terrible movie.
And yes, Chamberlain is a hero of mine - I have a framed photo of him in my office. A polymath citizen-soldier, educator, author and statesman. He’d have been a better President than most of those we had in the decades after the Civil War.
I finished the Brice Campbell autobio If Chins could Kill: confessions of a B-Grade Actor, a quick and interesting read by a guy who’s a B-grade actor from a blue-collar background and knows and loves it. It’s interesting to see that he admired Rocky Horror Picture Show at the midnight showings, then ended up co-starring with Tim Curry in Congo. (“Yeah,” agreed Curry, “That movie kept a lot of theaters going.”)
Now I’m reading Alan Dean Foster’s ** For Love of Mother-Not**, the fifth Flinx novel he wrote (although the first, chronologically. I picked up a copy for free, and I’d been mildly curious for years, so I’m finally reading it. It’s an OK read, but on page 54 is a sentence that I think he thought was clever, but which doesn’t belong in a book that isn’t a comedy:
I suspect it’s things like that which made James Cameron insist that someone else do the novelization of The Abyss. He hated what Foster came up with for Aliens.*
I’m almost through it. Next up is a copy of Rex Stout’s Plot it Yourself
On audio I finished Horowitz’ Moriarty. You could tell something else was going on, because things Didn’t Add Up. And, although Moriarty’s name was on the cover, he hadn’t shown up in flashbacks or something, and you got the feeling he was pulling strings off-camera. Horowitz finally drew back the curtain practically at the end, and I found it unsatisfying.
Now I’m listening to Oliver Twist. Dickens is iffy. I loved A Christmas Carol, which I’ve re-read countless times. I read * A Tale of Two Cities* twice. But I loathed Hard Times. I read his other Christmas books, but disliked them all. And I couldn’t get into The Pickwick Papers at all. So I was delighted to find that I really do enjoy Oliver Twist. It’s not just that I’m familiar with the story. In fact, I think that I like it despite that familiarity, something I found with Stevenson’s Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde – in both cases the writing transcends the dullness of the adaptations of the work.
*Flinx always reminded me of Luke Skywalker – essentially orphaned boy raised by others on a backwater planet in a star-spanning civilization who finds that he has psychic capabilities and has off-beat companions in a place where empires and powerful forces clash. I wasn’t surprised when I learned that Foster was said to have ghosted the novelization of Star Wars, and when he wrote the first Star Wars novel, Splinter of the Mind’s Eye. (And more recently wrote the novelization of The Force Awakens)
I read the first Flinx book and was underwhelmed, and haven’t read any of the others. I enjoyed his novelization of the original Star Wars and thought *Splinter *was a very good sequel, too (although when I re-read it a few years ago I noticed that Luke and Leia were even more clearly on track to become lovers, before Lucas decided they’d be siblings instead). I read several of Foster’s movie novelizations back in the day, including Dark Star, The Black Hole and Outland, and thought he did a good job.
His novelizations of the Star Trek animated series, several of which go well beyond what actually aired, are excellent - his book based on the episode “The Eye of the Beholder,” in particular (found in Star Trek: Log Eight), is one of the best ST books I’ve ever read.
His Icerigger trilogy is also clever and a lot of fun.
My favorite works of Alan Dean Foster’s (and I’ve read most of the Flinx series and a bunch of his other stuff) are his Mad Amos Weird Western stories. I got the complete edition of them for Christmas and I’ll be reading it later this year.
Finished Briarpatch, a mystery by Ross Thomas, which I enjoyed.
Now I’m reading The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels, by Thomas Cahill.
I’ve set aside Bill Bryson’s Notes from a Small Island, which just wasn’t that funny and failed my 50-page rule, and have gone on to Out of Sight by Elmore Leonard, a very entertaining crime novel about the unlikely, star-crossed romance between a cop and a fugitive. Now I want to see the George Clooney/J-Lo movie based on it again, too.
Starting today on The Sun Down Motel, by Simone St. James. She writes ghost stories very well.
I started The Misbegotten by Katherine Webb, and was too disappointed to finish it. This book was as much of a “gimme” as there is – it’s in my favorite genre, and I’ve already read and enjoyed three other books by the author. But it never became more than words on a page to me, so I gave up on it.
I just finished What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe (of xkcd fame). I had this book on my to-read list for a solid 2.5 years, and kept not picking it up because it sounded like a bunch of short passages that had nothing to do with one another, and I wanted something cohesive. And I am so glad I waited, because the last few weeks have been outrageously busy, and if I ever found time to read, it was only for about 5 minutes at a time, so to have a book with short, disconnected passages that only took five minutes to read was a total godsend. The book was decent, but I would have liked to have seen more variety in terms of the questions posed than there was.
I’m about 2/3 of the way done with Neil Gaiman’s Fragile Things: Short Fiction and Wonders, and I’m impressed with how little filler there is. I’ve read one of his previous short story collections, Smoke and Mirrors, and I’ve also read short story collections by enough other authors to know that even with a talented author, collections of short stories tend to be rather like a music album: some hits, some filler. And of course some stories are still better than others, but even the weaker stories in this book are pretty good.
Lastly, I started reading Finding Gobi: The True Story of a Little Dog and an Incredible Journey by Dion Leonard. I used to go trail running with a friend of mine, and I’d bring my dog along (who is a fabulous runner). My friend recommended this book to me; it’s the story of an ultra-marathoner who comes across a stray dog during a race he’s running and winds up adopting the dog (I think, I just started the book so I’m not sure). After reading the first bit, I find the narrator pretty hard to take: he takes every opportunity to tell you about how talented he is and how much he loves doing better than other people. But I get the impression from the synopsis that coming across the dog inspires some psychological changes in him, so I’m sticking with it in hopes that the narrator will become more bearable as the story goes on.