Read Joy in The Morning by Wodehouse. This is my second debauch through this lighthearted tale, my earlier encounter being well over 20 years ago. Wodehouse always delights and is a good way to unwind after a long day; I have been especially slammed at work for a month.

Picked up The Diary of H. L Mencken at a used book store last week and I'm half-way through. Entries are 1930 -1948, with a 5 year hiatus 1935-1940, and they are of interest and amusement and it is amazing how many individuals Mencken knew and had dealings with - from Bishops to Politicos to Judges to Authors and Pulishers and to a large variety of literati. Not always a grand read, but interesting and his observations are poignant on some notable authors including Scott Fitzgerald, Theodore Dreiser, and Sinclair Lewis. There is also much that is rather ordinary or plain and I would not recommend this book unless you have a particular interest in Mencken.

-Zeno

read song of ice and fire (first two books) excellent so far....but im obviosuly the last one to read it here lol

reading the "survivalist" series by Jerry Ahern - if you like trash you'll love it. Really badly written but I dig pointless action.

Really want to start digging into Proust's (trilogy?) Remembrance of Things Past. Anybody here that has read it would like to weigh in on its greatness or overatedness would be nice.

Right now I just finished Roth's The Plot Against America, and am also trudging through Moby Dick.

Finished "Contact" by Carl Sagan. It's the first sci-fi novel I have read in quite a while. Although it was slow at certain points, I found the book to be very worthwhile. Carl was an astronomer and it's always nice to read fiction with a grain of realish in it!

love in the time of cholera

Reading Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson right now. I was a bit put-off by the narrative voice at first and the way he went about introducing all the soon to be relevant details of his near-futurescape, but I'm about a hundred pages in now and it's starting to grow on me. It's still a bit irksome, but tolerable, and there are some good moments. It's a bit standard sci-fi/Neuromancerish though; I only really have myself to blame, as I apparently didn't learn from Neuromancer that I'm just not that into "cocky and talented losers/loners who are both enviable and contemptible (to correspondingly enviable and contemptible characters) act cool and save the day" narratives spun with informal, almost hard-boiled detective fiction prose. I'll probably finish it though.

Good luck. I couldn't finish it for the reasons you mentioned. Too cool for school grating character and an overwhelming forced hipness.

About to start reading Snow Crash, actually. It's on the pile of "things I should have read by now" I ordered off Amazon a while back that I'm getting through.

Most recent one I read was Ender's Game, which I somehow hadn't read until now, to my endless shame.
Really, really amazing. Any novel where the main character starts off at a six year-old super-genius boy sounds like it's going to be hard to relate to, but Orson Scott Card did a supremely good job of creating an endearing character who we really feel sorry for after being thrown into an insane world. All of his relationships were supremely well drawn - Ender and siblings, Ender and other Battle School children, Ender and officers, etc. At the risk of it sounding like a thinly-veiled barg, I personally really related to the bits about how Ender viewed the other 'normal' children and how they were affected by his presence, as that resonated surprisingly strongly with my early school career...
The finale was supremely well done, and when Ender finds the thing he finds (spoiler dodging) I thought it was really surprisingly moving. Supremely good book.
Glad I bought Speaker for the Dead with it, I'll get reading that soon.

Just finished Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts. Excellent story loosely based on the authors own experiences as an armed robber/heroin addict in Australia who escapes from prison and flees to Bombay where he lives in the slum, joins the Bombay mafia, spends time in an Indian prison, works in Bollywood and goes to Afganistan to fight the Soviets with the mujaheddin.

Starting The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss, I also have 2666 by Bolano and Kavalier and Clay waiting.

Loved Ender's Game, didnt really care for Speaker for the Dead at all, and to be honest the two books have almost nothing in common and arent similar at all imo.

raygun, check out enders shadow, i really enjoyed that one alot.

I thought Snow Crash was fantastic. One of my favorite genre novels of the last 30 years. I also love Stephenson's Diamond Age.

Interesting. I was wary of buying Xenocide and onwards since I'd heard the series really goes downhill, but if Amazon's reviews are to be trusted (which is a whole different debate) Speaker for the Dead is decent. Then again, I have to admit I'm not sure how it can be as good as Ender's Game, since most of what made it brilliant was 'concluded' by the end...
We'll see.

Cheers Orange; that's the one that's about Bean, isn't it? Bean was awesome, so I'll definitely give this a look.

I've been a huge cyberpunk fan for ages, so I'm looking forward to Snow Crash, though I know it'll be hard for it to measure up to the dizzy heights of William Gibson...

For now, though, reading Super-Cannes by J G Ballard which a parent palmed off on me as I was getting on the train. About a quarter of the way through at the moment - it's pretty good so far, but more from Ballard's depiction of 'Eden-Olympia', the business-park/utopia, and less from the actual drive of the plot (a murder mystery, broadly). Though I am interested to see how it all pans out, so I'm certainly going to keep reading.

actually, I've never been able to get through A Gibson book, no matter how many times I try. I think Stephenson write circles around him.

Last 2 books I read were Dune and Blindness which were both awesome.

I'm currently about halfway through Blindsight. Pretty awesome so far although the beginning was a bit technical/weird/clunky.

Blindsight is my favorite scifi book in 20 years. I think it's close to a masterpiece

holy crap. i just finished as i lay dying by faulkner. slow to begin with, but furiously speeds towards the end. the ending page seems like the most ironic thing he could have closed the story with. supposedly, he knew the last line before he even started writing it.

i loled.

for a complete change up, i am going to start island at the center of the world by russell shorto.

High praise indeed!

Totally agree. I don't recall any difference in style between the start and the rest though - it's all pretty technical, I guess.

Yeah, I tend to prefer what they call "hard" science fiction - those that are very technologically advanced and detailed. Greg Bear is a good example.

Likewise; Hyperion is pretty much the only 'soft' science fiction I rate highly - though I'm not sure where to stick Ender's Game. Probably somewhere in the middle, though leaning towards 'soft'.

I've read a number of books since the last time I participated in this thread. A number of good ones, and a couple I didn't like. Currently I am reading Crime and Punishment by Dostoyesky. I actually started it a few weeks ago and then lost it on an airplane after getting about 160 pages into it. I was in seclusion for about two weeks (a community of about 1500 people with no road in or out until the winter ice road opens) so I had to wait until I got back to civilization to purchase another copy.

I am now about half way through it and so far it is superb. Prior to this I had read The Double and The Gambler purchased as a single volume containing both novellas. Both of those books I hated for the first half and then loved them once I got to the second half, and I loved the first half after getting in to the second half as they both kind of gave me that "ah hah!" moment about half way through. So far Crime and Punishment has been reading smoothly and elegantly and has not felt like a chore to read at all, which is what I was afraid of.

In my amazon re-order of C&P I purchased Brothers Karamazov as well.

Snow Crash: I hated this the first time around for pretty much the same reasons as Blarg, etc. I re-read it recently and liked it a lot more. In the interim, I read the Baroque Cycle, Cryptonomicon, and The Diamond Age, which I loved. I think they gave me a greater appreciation for Stephenson. I do think Snow Crash is weaker than his later works. I'm really looking forward to Anathema, and right now I'm trudging through Zodiac, which I keep putting down in favor of more interesting/involving reads.

Gibson vs Stephenson: I feel that Gibson is the stronger writer technically, but Stephenson has a lot more fun with his characters, plots, etc. He's a joy to read, except when he gets too clever. Some of Gibson's books fall flat, but I adored Neuromancer and Pattern Recognition.

Has anyone read Halting State by Charles Stross? Read it recently and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Currently reading Zodiac and Watching the English.

Been checking this thread for book to add to my Amazon.com wish list for a while so figured I'd check in.

Currently about to begin Song of Susannah, book 6 in the Dark Tower series. Got into it way too late since I absolutely loved 2-5 and am taking my time deliberately to get the maximum out of it because I am enjoying them so much. First one was slow but readable and Wolves of the Calla was my favorite (I think). Going to read a lot of Stephen King in the near future (only read It before this). So glad I got into this series.

I agree with you on Stephenson and Gibson so our tastes may be similar. Now I have to add blindsight to the list. Had never heard of Watts somehow.