I keep wishing I hadn’t just read Eifelheim by Michael Flynn. It’s my favorite book since June, which was the best book month of the year, hell – ever. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers, Francine Prose’s book on reading/writing, The Pest House by Jim Crace, What the Dead Know by Laura Lippman, and Softspoken by Lucius Shepard.
I’d recommend any of those as a cure for a reading slump.
Well, let’s see… If I look at the books with a page-corner folded inwards…
The Machine Gunners
Lord of the Flies
The God Dellusion
The Selfish Gene
Ghostwritten
Cloud Atlas
Robot Dreams
The Reality Dysfunction
The Penultimate Truth
We Can Remember it for you Wholesale
The Amber Spyglass
The Angry Island
The Satanic Verses
George Orwell Essays
Stranger in a Strange Land
These are all books I am technically ‘currently reading’ with varying degrees of frequency. It depends what mood I’m in on any particular night.
Heathen! 
I’m about 50 pages into The Last of Her Kind, by Sigrid Nunez. I’m giving it 50 more pages before I hurl it at the wall.
Wanted to post a link to a compilation of lists of Best Books of 2007. It’s on a blog with lots of other interesting links. (The book list is part of a list of lists.) Got this from the GoodReads Librarians group.
I’m still reading (and very much enjoying) Freedom and Necessity. Should be done in the next couple of days. Somehow, my reading time has been limited. Still deciding what my next book will be. Maybe something in German because I’ll be in Germany over New Year’s and my German is feeling particularly rusty.
GT
Just finished 900 Days: Siege of Leningrad ** by Harrison Sailsbury, Started on A Thousand Splendid Suns ** by Khaled Hosseini
**900 Days ** was a brutal read!
What will the 1100 book be?
I hadn’t realized the progression. 
I am taking Villa Ariadne with me to the beach next week. Nothing new and fresh, but I am looking forward to it anyhow. I don’t get to read for pleasure much. 
Still listening to the audiobook of American Gods. Since I only spend about 80 minutes per week alone in the car, the going is quite slow and if I miss a few days sometimes I’ll forget what was happening. One annoying thing about this audio cassette version is that it doesn’t say “American Gods, by Neil Gaiman, cassette six, side two” (or whatever) at the beginning of each side, so I’m continually losing my place and listening to a part I already heard. Yet the book is still holding my interest.
Just started to read Breakfast with Buddha by Roland Merullo. It’s about a not-terribly-religious regular guy taking a road trip with his flaky sister’s spiritual leader. It sounded like it might be an entertaining story, and so far it is, but I’m worried that it will veer into proselytizing or Chicken Soup for the Soul type stuff and then I’ll dump it.
I finished up A Handbook to Luck today. It’s a good story, but I wish one of the characters had had a better ending. Of course, she was doomed from the start because of her location.
I’ve picked up Dylan Thomas’ Adventures in the Skin Trade and Other Stories to replace it in the queue. I read this earlier in the year, but I forgot what happened in it so I wasn’t sure if my Goodreads rating was accurate. Based on what I’ve reread so far, it isn’t.
I am reading the Spiderwick books. I am not overly impressed with them. My daughter loves them though. She puts them down and I pick them up, intending to read just enough to converse with her on them. But before you know it, the book is done. They are very short books.
Since I’ve been sick for the last two weeks with an enervating respiratory nastiness, I dropped all of my previously planned reading, and went into rereading the Discworld books. I sorely needed the infusion of humor. Still do.
Recently finished Christopher Moore’s A Dirty Job. Not bad, but not his best work. Comic horror and heartfelt tribute to hospice workers are both good things, but they don’t mix well. And it seemed to be very strongly influenced by both Good Omens and Discworld. Discworld is better.
Of books others have mentioned:
Three Bags Full – I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Jonathan Strange and Mister Norell – I loved the use of footnotes and spoof of Victorian academic style – but got 50 pages from the end and stopped reading.
I think the Golden Compass was the best of Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, and the final book does not fulfill the high expectations set up by the beginning.
Sunshine – better than most of the overdone vampire fiction. So many people are writing vampire stories today that they have become boring…a sad fate for a vampire.
Does anyone else feel that Gaiman is overrated? Or that he hasn’t reached his potential yet?
I’m getting lots of good ideas from this thread.
Last month I read The Animal Dialogues (which officially comes out in a few days–I had an advance copy). Wow. Just wow. This is some of the best nature writing ever.
Before that, I read Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician. Most of it was okay, but the ending stunk. They closed it with pretty much every issue unresolved. Every question that you thought was answered got “un-answered” at the end. I have no idea what the author really intended the story to be.
At the moment, I’m reading This is Your Brain on Music. It’s a really cool book about how music affects the brain and how it differs in various societies and individuals. It gets a little slow sometimes, but I’m enjoying it.
I tried to read Guns, Germs & Steel a while ago, but I’m so busy these days I can only read in half-hour snippets and I kept getting lost. I’m going to start it again next time we go on vacation and I can have longer sessions with it.
Our book club is preparing to read the original Foundation trilogy by Asimov. I loved it when I first read it many years ago and I’m looking forward to reading it again–although I do remember it seeming to be aimed at young adult readers. Perhaps that just my memory of it.
Oh, and to respond to Tapiotar, after reading American Gods I thought Gaiman was overrated. After reading Good Omens I think he (and his co-author) is fantastic. And Moore’s book You Suck, which I read a couple of months ago, was absolutely hilarious. Loved it.
The spelling is “pastie” and the pronunciation is PAST-ee. It’s a marvelous Cornish meatpie.
We say päs-ti-ä, a fennicized version of pasty, in my family. Mom uses a normal pie crust, baked in a pie pan – less pastry than the original hand-held types, more delicious meat filling. Hers is very simple – ground beef, potatoes, onions, carrots, and seasoning – and tastier than the simplicity would lead you to believe.
As far as Christopher Moore goes, I think that Lamb: the Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal, is his best, followed by Practical Demonkeeping and The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove.
And I think that Good Omens is so good is mainly due to the influence of Terry Pratchett, author of the Discworld series. Neil on his own is in the close, but no cigar range. Although Anansi Boys is by far the best he’s done since the Sandman comic.
Bill Brysons Made in America * and * The Complete Notes
Synaptic Self by Joseph Ledoux
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
Beowulf- the Heaney translation. I keep falling asleep before I finish and have to re-start the whole thing (this is not Heaney’s fault, I’m reading too late at night).
I finished re-reading *Anansi Boys * yesterday, and I still love Gaiman, it’s just a lot more predictable after the first read. His short stories are awesome though, there’s one called “Other People” which is particularly difficult to forget.
Am looking for something good to read in a couple of days whenI finally finish the epic poem…
*Sunshine *is one of my favorite vampire books.
I’ve been too busy to read much lately, but right now I’m in the middle of Mutiny on the Bounty, by Nordhoff & Hall. It’s pretty good.
Next I’ll probably read my borrowed copy of Charlaine Harris’s An Ice Cold Grave so that I can return it. I’m not expecting very much. I don’t like this series as much as her Southern Vampire books.
Dumped about halfway through. It wasn’t so much the glurge factor, though. The story moved so slowly, and the main character kept saying how, despite all his annoying ways, the guru was so likable. I just wasn’t feeling it. I guess I used up all my suspension of disbelief on the part where he agrees to take this guy on the road trip in the first place.
Last night, I read my kids The Latke Who Couldn’t Stop Screaming: A Christmas Story, by Lemony Snicket. It’s for a younger audience than us, but we all dig that Lemony flavor.
Now I’m on to Darkness Creeping: Twenty Twisted Tales, by Neal Shusterman. Short “scary” stories for kids (about middle school level). I’m not reading it to my kids, I’m just reading it.