What books are you reading right now?

Oh, God, I hate the Russian authors. Back when I was in JHS/HS/college and working my way through the "Western Classics" I dutifully slogged through Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and some plays by Chekhov. They were deadly. Those are a lot of hours of my life I will never get back. I absolutely don't understand why they are so popular. Their plots drag, their characters are uniformly bleak and dislikable, they are verbose to the point of verbal diarrhea, and because of the confluence of the huge casts of thousands and the characters all changing names or having a zillion obscure nicknames, you can't tell the players without a scorecard.

I find the Brits, the French, and the Americans, to be far more congenial, any day. You want a big, ginormous, sweeping novel that has empathetic philosophical themes and much better writing, I recommend Hugo's Les Miserables or anything by Dickens. You want an even better sweeping novel with amazing writing and philosophical themes that's far shorter, I recommend Melville's Moby-Dick. Or, hell, Dumas' The Three Musketeers is sweeping, wonderfully written, amazing plot and characters, and blissfully substitutes high adventure in place of morose philosophical gloom.

My entirely unsolicited $0.02.

 

Thank you for the recommendations Zenquest. I'm realizing how chaste Sanderson is in Mistborn and it is a bit odd to me. I spent a couple of hours this evening. finishing The Well of Ascension, book #2 in the Mistborn series.
I found compulsively readable.

 

In my quest to read 100 books this year, I fell behind. To catch up, I read some books I might not have read otherwise, and they were TERRIBLE (I think I actually found a series worse than Twilight.)

There were some good ones, though. Right now, I'm reading The Sword-Edged Blonde, by Alex Bledsoe, which is sort of detective/noir mystery meets fantasy. The combination works surprisingly well, and I'm enjoying it much.

 

Read "The Tourist" by Olen Something on the flight from Charlotte to Providence. It was okay.
Tina Fey's "Bossypants" on PVD to ATL. The funniest parts were about her Second City experiences through 30 Rock.

 

The cups of pee thing is so true about men but it killed me reading about finding it in the SNL writer's room.

 

All lovely books, though I especially love LeGuin's original Earthsea trilogy (IMO, the books she added to it later were at best pale imitations of the richness and textured depth of the originals). The Farthest Shore might even have been my favorite of the three, though the first one was also really amazing. If you're reading the classics of YA fantasy, as it looks like you're doing, I highly recommend Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising pentalogy, which is wonderfully written (though the first book, Over Sea, Under Stone is by far the weakest of them), an exceptionally fine use of Arthuriana and other English, Welsh, and Cornish mythology. Also, Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles, though written for a younger YA audience, is an exceptional, superb use of classic Welsh mythology, deeply readable, very rich and well-crafted. And lastly, Madeleine l'Engel's A Wrinkle In Time pentalogy is an absolute phenomenon. Truly unique, with amazing writing.

 

I'm reading HP Lovecraft: The Complete Collection on Kindle right now. I've read so many takes on his works by other authors that I've decided to read the source material. So far, so good.

 

The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown.
So far I'm not real impressed with it. Nowhere as good as Angels and Demons. but much better the Perception Point.

 

It's one of my all-time top favorite series. Can't recommend it highly enough.

Totally worth it, both accounts.

I thought Forgotten Beasts of Eld was nice, but nothing special. The Riddle-Master trilogy, however, I thought was gorgeous and brilliant. Definitely, definitely recommend it.

For the record, I absolutely loathe CS Lewis as a fiction writer. I thought the Narnia books were poorly (and patronizingly, as you correctly note) written attempts to proselytize Christianity amongst children, and though the Silent Planet trilogy was infinitely better, it was still little better than hackery: and those two series were his best works. Why people speak of Lewis and Tolkien in the same breath (save for their close personal friendship) I can never understand. Tolkien was a genius of once-in-a-generation proportions, and Lewis was manifestly otherwise.

 

Do you really think so? Because I've read a lot of books that have strong female main characters and are sometimes touted as "girl books," and enjoyed the hell out of them. Do you think this one is just particularly suited to girls in tone and style, or is it something else?

 

Beyond Band of Brothers: The War Memoirs of Major Dick Winters.

Just started it this evening, bought it yesterday at the swap meet, great book so far.

 

Currently reading The Hot Zone by Richard Preston (mmm, Ebola!) and rereading Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. I read that one every few months as it is one of my all time favorites!

 

Trying to read Rule 34 by Charlie Stross but am finding it difficult. The book is written from multiple perspectives but all in second person. For some reason I am finding this very annoying.