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What Are You Reading Right Now?

Baltim said:
Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman.

I'm enjoying it a lot but having just finished American Gods by the same author it feels a little samey.
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If you haven't already, you should read the Sandman collected editions. I especially recommend volumes 1, 2, 4, and 7.
 
The next two months:

1. Jacques Barzun
Title: Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning

2. Jacques Barzun
Title: The Culture We Deserve : A Critique of Disenlightenment

3. Allan Bloom
Title: The Closing of the American Mind

4. Lynne V. Cheney
Title: Telling The Truth

5. Todd Gitlin
Title: The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars

6. Gertrude Himmelfarb
Title: On Looking Into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society

7. Roger Kimball
Title: Tenured Radicals, Revised: How Politics has Corrupted our Higher Education

8. Gary Nash, Charlotte Crabtree, Ross Done
Title: History on Trial: Culture and the Teaching of the Past

9. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
Title: The Disuniting of America: Reflections of a Multicultural Society

10. Peter Shaw
Title: The War against the Intellect: Episodes in the Decline of Discourse

11. Peter Shaw
Title: Recovering American Literature

12. Charles J. Sykes
Title: Profscam: Professors and the Demise of Higher Education

Along, with, of course, texts and essays from older neoconservative & leftist writings surrounding higher education.
 
To cosmically counter balance Fiddy's choices I recently read:

1. Joe Abercrombe - First Law Trilogy
Excellent trilogy (his first?). Not a black and white character in the bunch.

2. Neal Stephenson - Snow Crash
OK. Oddly better after I realized it was written in the 90s. Feels like a cyberpunk satire. Has some memorable lines. Fun read.

3. JV Jones - first two books in Sword of Shadows series
Boring, unrealistic characters.

4. Mech - bleh, was discounted on kindle

5. Peter Brett - Desert Spear (sequel to the Warded Man)
Excellent. Both books were good fun, cool stuff. Could be a movie of Warded Man in the future (in development)

6. Patrick Rothfuss - The Wise Man's Fear (Sequel to The Name of the Wind)
For such a popular series, I was really let down in both. To me, very, very boring. The second was almost like a mad-lib of the first book.

7. Dan Simmons - Hyperion
Somehow I missed this one...always thought I had read it but as it turned out, I had not. First part is more pseudo-religious-scientific crap, hoping that was just a fluke and the rest will be, you know...sci-fi.
 
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Mach said:
To cosmically counter balance Fiddy's choices I recently read:

1. Joe Abercrombe - First Law Trilogy
Excellent trilogy (his first?). Not a black and white character in the bunch.
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Then you've got to read "Best Served Cold", set in the same world. No Bloody Nine, though. Only one character provides continuity with the trilogy.

2. Neal Stephenson - Snow Crash
OK. Oddly better after I realized it was written in the 90s. Feels like a cyberpunk satire. Has some memorable lines. Fun read.
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He's an amazing writer. His Cryptonomicon is worth reading just to learn how the expert's way of eating Captain Crunch.

7. Dan Simmons - Hyperion
Somehow I missed this one...always thought I had read it but as it turned out, I had not. First part is more pseudo-religious-scientific crap, hoping that was just a fluke and the rest will be, you know...sci-fi.
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For some reason, Simmons has a tendency to let the stories come to unsatisfactory conclusions.
 
Blind Allegiance To Sarah Palin

It's very informative and the author was one of her key people for four years on the inside.
 
Just finished:
Colonel Roosevelt by Edmund Morris
Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis by Senator Tom Daschle

Reading right now:
Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox: Vol. 1, 1882-1940 by James MacGregor Burns
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
The Gulag Archipelago Volume 1: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (P.S.) by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
 
I'm now reading a vampire triology by Nora Roberts. First book - Morrigan's Cross.
 
I just started 1861 last night and I am also reading "Christmas Frost" by R.D. Wingfield. Wingfield's dry British humor just knocks me out.
 
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. Terrific, clever, thought-provoking book about how human nature ascends and descends to levels of civilisation and barbarity. It's a collection of 6 novellas constructed like a Russian doll, one inside the other, all relating to the story that precedes and follows it. It goes forward and then back in time from a story of an American notary aboard a ship sailing from New Zealand to Hawaii in 1850, followed by a story of the amanuensis of a famous compser in 1930s Belgium; A detective story set in California in the 1970s; A comedy-thriller set in London and a Yorkshire nursing home in the present day; a sci-fi story about the awakening of sentience of a clone; and finally a post-apocalyptic vision of the far future set on Hawaii.

I spent all day yesterday reading when I should have been cleaning; just couldn't pull myself away.
 
Life Together, by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Excellent.
 
A Clash of Kings from the "A Song of Ice and Fire" saga.
 
The first in the Redwall series by Brian Jacques. I read most of 'em as a kid and thought I'd go nostalgic.
 
toddwv said:
Yes. I actually put off watching the series so that I could read the first book. Glad to say that I'm all caught up now on the series. Love the complexity and the very dark tones that permeate both the series and the books.
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Here's how it went for me. *I got a late start* Read books one and two. Wait a couple years. Jump with joy when 3 is released. Re-read 1 and 2, because I can't remember them anymore, and follow with 3. Wait several years. Jump with joy when 4 is released. Re-read books 1-3 because I can't remember what happened. Wait many, many years. Remain cautiously optimistic that 5 will actually be released next month. Consider re-reading books 1-4.
 
I'm reading A Nation of Sheep by Andrew Napoitano. Great book for Bush haters or people who love the constitution
 
My Reminiscences of East Africa
by General von Lettow-Vorbeck
 
Just begun 2666 by Roberto Bolaño. Apparently it's his master work, so I'm looking forward to it, all 988 pages. I'll report back in about a month's time.
 
Well, we can add a few more to the list.

Edited by Keith Jenkins-The Postmodern History Reader
Lydia Alix Fillingham-Foucault for Beginners
Richard Appignanesi and Chris Garratt-Postmodernism for Beginners
 
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