At the moment I am 4 books through the chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the unbeliever

I found it rough going until about half way through Lord Foul's Bane, am really into them now, read book 4 in about 3 days.

I've had this series recommended to me in the past but I haven't started them yet. What did you find difficult about the first 3?

I've been reading Steward O'Nan's book, the Circus Fire, about the tragic 1944 Ringling Brothers Circus fire in Hartford, Connecticut.

The first book is quite slow to start - he spends a fair bit of time setting up Covenant's history as a (minor spoiler) Spoiler: leper. The story really only gets going once he is transported to the Land.

Currently reading Moby Dick and I am about 280 pages into the story before they actually encountered a whale, not the super powerful white whale known as Moby Dick, but just a whale.

I just finished reading A Game of Thrones, the first book of George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series. I admit it was well written and sinks its hooks into you to get you to continue on with the second book, A Clash of Kings. I'm looking forward to it.

Read Slow. He's taking FOREVER on Book 5.

And he's still actively working on it and not done yet as of last Fryday.

Seriously worried he's going to Jordan out on us.

Ha, I know! The last I checked he's over 1,050 manuscript pages or something. As a book editor and marketer, I tell you that a finished product is far off at this point, especially if this thing gets divided into two separate books.

I still have a lot ahead of me to read, and I'm not reading the next one right away. I'm delving into sci-fi in a serious way for the first time, and I'll likely read a few books in that genre before turning back to the Song of Ice and Fire series.

Finished off Jane Smiley's Private Life this afternoon. I liked it a lot. I thought she did a good job of both developing the plot and the characters over a long period of time in the novel. I comment on this mostly because prior to reading this, I read Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs, which seemed to get trapped in the inner thoughts of the main character too often, trying to be funny when it wasn't funny. I advise against reading A Gate at the Stairs; the main protagonist is a 20-year-old female college student, set in the timeframe when I was a 20-year-old female college student. I found the protagonist entirely too sophisticated for what someone that age would actually be like, especially given the character's upbringing and the setting of the novel.

However, I highly recommend Private Life. It's a fascinating portrait of two people and their marriage.

I should participate in this thread more.

I just finished The passage by Justin Cronin. It's a very enjoyable apocalyptic zombie/vampire thriller. If you liked The Stand by Stephen King, this book shares a lot of its spirit.

Halfway through Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. Pretty awesome stuff, but the shitload of namedropping makes it a little hard to follow every now and then.

Funny. I read these several times (both sets of the original Chronicles) and I found that Lord Foul's Bane started off being childish or derivative. But roughly half way through it had thoroughly engrossed me. I found the entire concept of the leprosy, the time in the Land and how it tied back to 'real' life to be intriguing. Was it a dream or not?

I think there's 6 books in the two chronicles, and recently (i.e. in past 8 years or so) a third set has been created.


Currently I am reading a crime/mystery, the first ebook that I purchased and downloaded onto my Kobo ereader. It's called 61 Hours, a Jack Reacher Novel.

I like the simple comfort of ready the Jack Reacher series and happened upon the first one (The Killing Floor) quite by accident.

Just finished Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke. It's my favorite kind of SciFi story: astronauts explore mysterious alien artifact. No Space Zombies, just good clean mystery and adventure.

I highly recommend it and will seek out its two sequels, although apparently they are not as good.

Next up: The Last Theorem by Arthur C. Clarke and Frederick Pohl.

fres, I'm about to start The Fountains of Paradise.

Finished Sally Gunning's The Widow's War last week. I'd read Gunning's novel Bound, which features some of the same characters, and liked it very much, so when I was poking around for historical fiction to read, this novel popped up. Her central heroine of the novel, Lydia Berry, is a newly widowed woman in a Cape Cod town in the 1760s. She flounts many of the conventions of the day in an attempt to gain her own independence, especially from a terrible son-in-law. Gunning establishes Lyddie so well, including her inner thoughts and conundrums, that she creates a protagonist worth rooting for. I liked this novel a lot, and would recommend it.

I also finished Arthur C. Clarke's Fountains of Paradise, but that review will go in another thread, obviously :)

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson. On a recommendation. Good but not great. 6.5/10. A sexually repressed, closeted feminist soccer mom's wet dream book.