One of my all time favorite books! Hazel is a hero for all species. And it’s not a book I would give a young child, particularly a sensitive one, there are some very dark and drear things in it. Adams was not writing for the Winnie the Pooh crowd.
Watership Down is one of my favorites as well–first put in my hands by my fifth-grade teacher, and read countless times since then. It keeps coming up, so I think maybe I’m due to read it again now. You will not be disappointed.
I love love love that book! Probably my all-time favorite sf book. Tuf is phlegmatic in the extreme, but his biting sarcasm, deadpan humor, political acumen and love of cats offsets it a bit, I think.
I’m on my 3rd attempt at Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. This time I’m listening to Simon Prebble read it and think I’m going to go the distance.
I’m also reading Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippie Dream. I love Neil Young and some parts of this book are fascinating, but I swear to God, it was outlined, organized and edited by Grandpa Simpson. Rambling doesn’t begin to describe it.
I made it through the first time, but I can’t say it was really enjoyable. That woman NEEDS an editor.
I started Skull Duggery by Aaron Elkins tonight. I am ridiculously happy to have a new Skeleton Detective book!
Yeah, I put down Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and never looked back. Some here love it, but it bored the piss out of me. I kept waiting for a plot to unfold.
I was intrigued enough by some of the secondary characters to plow through it but I really think it should have been three books.
Interestingly enough, I could not sell it to the bookstore, they wouldn’t take it. I ended up donating it to Deseret Industries. (Utah’s homegrown Goodwill)
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One of my all time favorite books! Hazel is a hero for all species. And it’s not a book I would give a young child, particularly a sensitive one, there are some very dark and drear things in it. Adams was not writing for the Winnie the Pooh crowd.
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I’m definitely getting into it now (am past the bunnies?!? stage). It is reassuring to know people here like it. I can almost always trust Dopers to have good taste in books. 
It does seem on the dark side for younger children. Fortunately the only child in my house is 2, so I’ll be sure not to let her read it. 
With all the Lord of the Rings discussion prompted by the new Hobbit movie, I’ve started re-reading the Silmarillion. I’ve read it once before, but it’s been a while and I’ve forgotten a lot of the details.
I’m thinking that, once I finish it, it’s about time to start in on the Histories of Middle-Earth.
Well at least not for another year…
Good for you! You may have heard that the BBC will be making a miniseries of it: Who would you cast in Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell? - Cafe Society - Straight Dope Message Board
Clarke’s short story collection The Ladies of Grace Adieu, set in the same universe as JS&MN, is also worth a look.
I’m reading Mary Doria Russell’s “The Sparrow” - it was recommended in another thread here, actually. It’s about first contact between a Jesuit mission and the first intelligent alien life humans have found - also, the evolving relationships between the characters and God. Very, very Catholic sort of story.
I’m enjoying it, and I’d recommend it with qualifications. Parts of the story are very good, the first-contact plot is exciting, and Russell has a knack for making alien mind-sets (including the deeply religious human characters) relateable. That said, some of the religious discussion verges on glurge. The strongest criticism I’d level, though, is that all of the characters seem to be carrying a ginormous Idiot Ball at all times. There are plenty of examples, and I don’t want to spoil a mostly well-written novel, but here’s a major one. (Don’t click the spoiler box if you don’t want to see a major plot point revealed:
[SPOILER]The mission has only one shuttle capable of conveying them between the alien planet and their orbiting starship. That shuttle has a very, very limited fuel capacity; it can take them from the starship to the surface and back, but with a margin of only 3% or so. One of the characters - a pilot whose first act in flight prep should be to check the fuel level and compute expected fuel use - strands the entire mission on the alien planet when she uses the shuttle for a point-to-point hop on the surface, leaving the shuttle without enough fuel to get back to their starship. She could have taken the shuttle back to their starship to refuel, and thus avoided the entire disaster - but she simply didn’t think to do so, and was never trained to consider this possibility.
Unrealistically stupid - but it follows from the equally unrealistic premise that there are no experienced astronauts on the first manned mission to an alien world. Seriously - the Jesuits buy a spaceship from an asteroid-mining company, kit it out for interstellar flight, and never think to hire an experienced crew. Like the sort they could hire from the mining company. The stupid, it burns.
I think part of the problem may be that Russell consciously brands herself as a “literary” writer, and wasn’t entirely comfortable with writing genre fiction. That’s just speculation, but it would explain part of her difficulty with engaging with the hard-science parts of this story. To an extent, that’s not a bad thing; if you’re writing a story about Jesuit Anthropologists in Space, you needn’t necessary be all that rigorous about how their spaceship works; it’s okay to focus on the aliens. But we do know how successful space programs work, and it’s distracting when you see a program that clearly, obviously, does not work that way; especially since the Jesuits would be the very last folks to take such a slapdash, amateur-hour approach to an endeavor as complex as spaceflight.
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That sounds like a reasonable criticism, Mr. Excellent.
How does it handle the footnotes? I loved the book, but much of the richness was in the footnotes–it’d be a very different book without them.
Thrilled to hear that there’s going to be a miniseries of it, though. 
They are read as they come up. I’m really enjoying them.
On the CD, at least, you have the option of skipping the footnotes if you wish. Or so I’ve been told.
That’s crazy! The footnotes are my favorite part.
(The same cannot be said of House of Leaves, where the entire footnote plot and handling just irked me.)
If you are absolutely panting for more footnotes when you finish Strange & Norrell, you might look at City of Saints and Madmen, by Jeff Vandermeer. The Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of Ambergris uses them to good effect–the central conceit being that the author is a Serious Scholar who is rather annoyed at being asked/required to write a pamphlet for tourists, and he has therefore decided to put all of the most interesting material in the footnotes, which he knows the average reader will ignore.
I’ve just started Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat by Bee Wilson. It’s very interesting.
Although I actually finished the book, this was my feeling exactly. It was funny for a short while, but unlike Dickens, Clarke didn’t realize that you can’t just write the same comedy-of-errors gag on every one of the 900 pages in the book.