Reading list

[autographedcat]

So, I'm thinking that if I actually start talking about the books I'm reading, it'll encourage me to spend more time reading them. I used to read a lot, but in recent years I've started spending too much time in front of the computer and not enough time with a book in my hand. Time to fix that.

Currently, I'm in the middle of Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, which is one of the most entertaining general overviews of science and the history of science that I've ever come across. I really enjoy a genre of non-fiction that I call "anecdotal history", by which I mean "history told in a nonfiction but entertaining manner". I also have Kenneth Davis's "Don't Know Much About History", which I'd read before but only recently reacquired.

Last week, I read Nerve.com's Guide to Sexual Etiquette, which was a marvelously informative book with a droll style. It was slightly different in focus from The Bride Wore Black Leather (And He Looked Fabulous), which is a different sex etiquette book focusing more on altsex than more usual fare. And I'm reading Dan Savage's Savage Love in pieces. As a collection of columns, its easy to read in small pieces. (What I sometimes refer to as a "bathroom book").

So, what are YOU reading right now?

Comments

[mrlogic.livejournal.com]

Current bathroom book is The Darwin Awards II.

Current intellectual stimulation: Rereading Gödel, Escher, Bach in German translation
(Gödel, Escher, Bach: Ein Endloses Geflochtenes Band). It's rather slow going, but by gooly* I'll be good at German by the time I get through it.

Current book I'm in the middle of and really should get back to, and will, I'm sure, because I have wanted to read it for ages, but you know how it is...: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies.

I was on a kick of reading a bunch of fiction for a while, because I'd bought a bunch of new-to-me SF anthologies at cons, but I think I've gotten through all of those. I have a number of new-to-me non-anthologies I still haven't gotten to though.



*gooly: I word I found I liked much better than "golly" after I typed it, and whose right to untrammelled life I decided to respect.

[redaxe.livejournal.com]

Currently going back and forth between Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky and rereading A Game of Universe by Eric S. Nylund. Lots of fun, in two totally separate ways.

Next up: (probably) lectures by Richard Feynman.

[lothie.livejournal.com]

I'm reading some most excellent shounen-ai. ;9

[catalana.livejournal.com]

Yeah - I'm hooked on FAKE and Gravitation both...*grin*

[lothie.livejournal.com]

I gotta get FAKE next. Just finished Gravitation #4! :)

[butterfluff.livejournal.com]

There's a series -- it starts with Angel With the Sword by C. J. Cherryh. I leave them all in the bathroom. By the time I cycle all the way through, the details are vague and charming again, but since I have the overall plot, I don't sit there engrossed in the story line until my legs fall asleep.

[catalana.livejournal.com]

That would be the Merovingian Nights series. I own all of them...ah, bliss. A shame it just kind of stopped without winding everything to a close.

[jerusha.livejournal.com]

*blink*

You do know there are seven anthologies, right? I thought that the seventh pretty much wrapped everything up with a bow on it.

(If you didn't know there were 7, don't feel bad; I spent years convinced there were only three...)

[butterfluff.livejournal.com]

Endgame kind of finished it, yes.

Leslie Fish and Dirty Harry together still boggles me.

[odanu.livejournal.com]

For most people, this would probably be described as dry reading, but I'm reading both "Geograms: Assessment and Intervention" and "God/Goddess: Exploring and Celebrating the Two Sides of Wiccan Deity" by choice....and enjoying both enormously. I'm alternating chapter by chapter.

[maedbh7.livejournal.com]

LJ? Long emails from friends? IRC? AIM?

Um...otherwise?... I'm still trying to finish A Beautiful Mind, but I keep getting sidetracked. I started a book of Civil War letters, but I can't find it now.

Recently I started, read, and finished The Ethical Slut.

*lame* *sad* -H...

[allisona.livejournal.com]

I'm presently reading a big, thick anthology of original "X-Men" comics. I really liked the movies and was fascinated to contrast them to the original comics, so I finally broke down and bought a volume last week.

And when Rand Bellavia comes to visit UT in Toronto tomorrow he's going to bring me the Volume 2 "X-Men" anthology. He says the stories in this volume are pretty much the ones that put the comic characters on the map. Yay, sounds like fun reading.

[folkmew.livejournal.com]

I'm reading "Voyage" by Diana Gabaldon. Delightful bodice ripper historical time travel celtic romance thingy with nice sex scenes. :-)

I'm also reading "Creativity - where the divine and human meet" by Matthew Fox and a book about discipline by Terry Brazelton.

I think that's basically it right now.

[lysana.livejournal.com]

In my purse: Crusade by David Weber and Stephen Wright. Good bus-riding reading.

In the bathroom: I'm bouncing amongst my latest bundle of comic books, You Are SO Cursed by Naomi Nash (aka drood), and a translation of the Colloquy of the Two Sages.

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

Mostly a great many magazines (Saveur, Archaeology,Smithsonian) while I contemplate my next fiction read (most likely either the Dark is Rising series, or Good Omens, unless I reread LOTR).

[catalana.livejournal.com]

Aside from my students' exciting exams and my own dissertation, you mean?

I'm hooked on Laurell K. Hamilton right now. I've read six of her books in the last week. I read a lot of manga of many varieties. Umm...I don't know what I'll read after that. Oh, since Lackey's book "Joust" just came out in paper I'm going to read that soon too.

And then maybe back to plays for awhile; I still have a few left.

[filceolaire.livejournal.com]

I'm still working my way through the books I got in GA.
These days I can be seen on the tube reading 'Americans' which is a history of the USA as if women, Mexicans, blacks and Indians were people too. It's a bit depressing.

Honest I don't go out of my way to find these books knocking the USA. Can you recommend something telling me how great you guys are?

[filkerbaby.livejournal.com]

On one hand Lilian Harry's "Corner House Girls" series (set around WWII in a Lyons Corner House restaurant), on the other "We all wore Orange" - tales of a bloke who was brought up in Indian nation religious communes.

[pafuts.livejournal.com]

I'm reading "Don't worry, he won't get far on foot" by John Callahan. The autobiography of a quadraplegic cartoonist.

At Gafilk I was reading "Stiff: the curious lives of human cadavers"

[hrrunka]

Wolf's Head, Wolf's Heart by Jane Lindskold. It's taking me a while as I've spent less time in trains than usual recently.

[little-cinnamon.livejournal.com]

Cart and Cwidder, by Diana Wynne Jones. Again.

[joecoustic.livejournal.com]

It's actually been quite interesting. My folks let me and my brothers chose among books of theirs that were doubles and I have some books that one of my brothers got at a yard sale. So along with books that I have been choosing to read I've been dipping onto some of these unknowns. I last read 2 by John Maddox Roberts, detective stories based in ancient Rome. Although I was very confused for about half of the first one I finally felt up to speed so I read the second while I still had a feel for them. Now I'm in the middle of a book called "Federation World" by James White and it's not bad.

[keristor.livejournal.com]

At the moment I'm re-working my way through Elizabeth Moon's "Serrano Legacy" series (only 7 books because that's what she planned, it's not an open ended series like so many). After that it will be back to Catherine Asaro's Skolian Empire series, since I had only read the first two and have only just got the others. For non-fiction, "Tcl and the Tk Toolkit" (but I also need to reread Korzybski's "Science and Sanity", that's not a book I can read in bed though because it's too heavy to hold up).

I don't have books in the bathroom, I go in there for specific purposes which are non-compatible with printed paper. And it's cold...

Books...

[aunty_marion]

Just finished re-reading Diane Duane's "Stealing the Elf-King's Roses", and next fiction on the list (from the 6 or so I bought yesterday ) is Diana Wynne Jones's "The Merlin Conspiracy", now that it's out in paperback. It will probably go into the bath with me later and keep me up far too late....

Non-fiction - one of the books I bought yesterday was reduced (!) to 13.99 UKP - four books about M.C. Escher in one enormous coffee-table hardback (that's not one you put on the coffee table, it's big enough to make a coffee table *from*!). But it's a "dip in, read a bit, put it down (because my arms ache)" book. So the next other more or less non-fiction will be What Does a Martian Look Like, by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart.

Re: Books...

[keristor.livejournal.com]

I was really annoyed with the marketing of "Stealing the Elf-King's Roses", specifically the cover which looks like a trash romance and Diane doesn't do 'trash'. Plus the book isn't even a romance. I think someone saw "elf" and "roses" and that's all they thought about. Almost as bad as the original cover for "Door into Fire". The book itself is Diane's typically high standard...

I didn't realise that "The Merlin Conspiracy" is out in p/b, something else to read...

[armb.livejournal.com]

I got a A Short History of Nearly Everything for Christmas, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Currently I, like Keris, am reading Tcl and the Tk Toolkit. There's a small pile of books I bought from the local library sale, including the first Flashman, waiting to be read, or I might succumb to ordering some of my Amazon wishlist (get the remaining Aubrey/Maturin novels - I did try before Christmas, but they sent the wrong edition, and having two non-matching covers in a series of twenty when matching ones exist was annoying enough I sent them back). I've recently read Revelation Space and Cosmonaut's Keep, both of which have sequels I want to read, and American Gods.

[armb.livejournal.com]

Oh, and I might get some books from the CUSFS library sale (http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/cusfs/sale.html), though I haven't organized myself into doing so so far.