I’m reading Neal Stephenson’s early fiction. I’m almost done with The Big U which is better than I thought. A really bizzare, surreal and violent campus comedy. It seems to be going off the rails towards the end.
Zodiac is next.
Oops - I wasn’t clear. I usually find romance in general very formulaic, including romance that happens to include anything faery.
I actually used to work as an author in the romance (well, more erotica than anything else) genre, another reason it’s comfortable for me. When it was becoming more mainstream, erotica allowed for a bit more leeway with respect to plot, but you still had to get tab A into slot B by a certain point or you risked losing your audience’s interest. But it paid well enough that it was well worth it.
The All-American Five Radio: Understanding and Restoring Transformerless Radios of the 1940s, 50s and 60s, by Richard McWhorter. I’ve got another couple of old radio repair/restoration books kicking around from the library too, but their titles aren’t handy. This is all part of my current quixotic interest in fixing up old tube radios as a hobby, despite the fact that I don’t know the first thing about electronics.
The Post-American World, by Fareed Zakaria.
*
Imperium: A Novel of Ancient Rome*, by Robert Harris (audiobook). This one has really got its hooks in me. The narrator is top notch, with that lovely English accent I tend to think of all Romans speaking with. 
While politics today tends to irritate me, there’s something about the distance of a few thousand years that makes Cicero’s bold decision to align himself with Pompeii, the Tribunate, and the mob utterly thrilling. My only regret is that audiobooks tend always to go too fast–probably because I find myself listening to them at all manner of odd moments, as well as when I’m exercising (their ostensible purpose).
Man, this thread makes me depressed. I’ve been reading Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead since July, and am still only on the beginning of Part 3 (roughly 400 pages in). The person who recommended I read it was able to get through the book again herself in a week…
Rand is a tough read. She says so little in so very many words.
Just discovered Jason Fford in the last few weeks - burning through his books right now. Just finished “The Fourth Bear” and am currently reading “Something Rotten”.
Taking a brief break from working through Colleen McCullough’s Rome series, but expect to get back to it shortly.
Finished The Darkest Room by Johan Theorin – it was darn near perfect. A couple of mysteries, some spookiness, and a surprise that didn’t feel contrived. It’d be a great Halloween read.
The Gates by John Connolly just arrived. It’s YA horror/fantasy, similar (even the dust jacket) to The Book of Lost Things, which I quite liked. Connolly’s Charlie Parker books have an almost-supernatural feel but it seems like he doesn’t really want to go there. I think he’d like to write straight-up horror and I don’t know why he doesn’t just go for it.
I just finished the latest Jack Reacher adventure by Lee Child–Gone Tomorrow, and it made me want to investigate the role played by native Afghani tribeswomen vs. Russian and American soldiers. That bit about removing their eyelids and focusing their heads to force them watch themselves being flayed is nightmare fodder. Any Reacher fans out there? Who could play him in a movie?
I am 2/3 of the way through Julie and Julia. Wish there were more Julia and less Julie.
I also just finished an audiobook by Harlan Coban called The Innocent. Piece of crap really, but it accompanied me during my morning walk (which these days takes place in the 5:15 a.m. darkness, in which any diversion is welcome).
My niece read Sabriel awhile back and really liked it. Don’t know if she read the rest of the series, though.
For Halloween-season reading, I’d recommend Ray Bradbury’s witty, evocative and sometimes quite chilling short-story collection (his first!), The October Country. Lots of good stuff in there.
I just finished Master of War by Benson Bobrick. It’s a bio of Gen. George H. Thomas, a still-underappreciated Union general during the Civil War. A Virginian, he remained loyal to the Union; he never lost a battle and had much lower casualties among his troops than Grant and Sherman (who, Bobrick makes a pretty good although somewhat overexcited case, did all they could to undercut and/or backstab him). Thomas wasn’t flashy or egotistical, never wrote his memoirs and died of a heart attack not long after the war, so today he doesn’t have the fame he really deserves.
I’m also close to finishing Joe Haldeman’s short-story collection, Dealing in Futures. There’s some very good writing in there. I’ll tell you more about it when I finish it.
That’s good to know. I bought it a while back and then forgot why. 
For a light and quick Halloween read take a look at Zelazny’s *A Night In The Lonesome October *
Just today, I zipped through Cormac McCarthy’s short 1973 novel (almost a novella, even) Child of God, about a mentally-disturbed Tennessee backwoodsman and his grim hobbies of murder and necrophilia. No quotation marks to be found in it, either. Meh. I’d give it a C.
Would it’ve scored better with more punctuation?
I just finished **The Wind Whales of Ishmael **by Philip Jose Farmer.
Ishmael, yes, that Ishmael, pops to the surface (along with Queequeg’s coffin) after the sinking of the Pequod only to discover that a few million years have passed, and the earth has changed somewhat.
In only 153 pages Farmer uses the phrase “sailed close-hauled” at least nine times, which has to be some sort of record.
I have started **Hemingway’s Chair **by Michael Palin.
Catching Fire, the second book in the Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins. I’m really digging these books! I doubt they’re YA literature that will endure through the ages, all I know is that I’m dying to get home today and find out what happens next.
Well… it sure wouldn’t have hurt. 
Just finished Joe Haldeman’s 1985 short-story collection Dealing in Futures. I’d read it not long after it first came out, and remembered very little of it, so it was like new to me. The best IMHO were “Seasons,” about xenoanthropologists on another world, studying a primitive tribe which inexplicably turns on them; “Blood Sisters,” about a private eye in the not-so-distant future who protects a cloned beauty; “Lindsay and the Red City Blues,” a seriously weird tale about an American tourist in Marrakesh who has the vacation from hell; and “There’s No Future in It,” a time-travel story with a very clever twist ending.
Two thumbs up.
I’m about 3/4 of the way through Path of Glory, by Jeffrey Archer and I hate to say it, but it sucks at sea level and it sucks at altitude. Disappointing that this author chose two of my most obsessive areas of geekery – mountain climbing and the First World War – and managed to bore the livin’ crap out of me.
Just get to the summit, already. Or not. Or whatever. :rolleyes:
I was kinda bothered by the punctuation thing until I ventured out on the internet to see if anybody had an explanation. I’m no more enlightened on THAT front, but the first 10 links I read made me less inclined to care all that much. I thought I was a bitter pedantic jerkoff…
I don’t know if you’re saying that no quotation marks bothers you, but I’ve read McCarthy’s The Road and Blood Meridian, as well as David Guterson’s Our Lady of the Forest, which share this trait. It’s singularly annoying, pretentious, faux-stylish. You’re free to claim I’m not getting it, but frankly, I don’t think there’s much to get…