Just finished "Freakonomics" and have started "Fifty-two Pickup" by Elmore Leonard.

midway thru wheel of time book 9-winter's heart

Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman. Very amusing collection of essays on popular culture.

The instruction book for the X-Box game "Psychonauts".

Son of a Witch by Gregory Maguire
The sequel to wicked...

Last of the Breed by Louis L'Amour....have read it numerous times before. I tend to reread books I really like.

Currently, I am reading the responses to the thread "What are you reading right now?"

Am I the only one who has replied to this simple and obvious question?

Right now I am reading (aside from this forum....props to BigBen)...

The Shadow Rising by Robert Jordan (just started getting into the Wheel of Time series a couple of weeks ago, not too bad...if a little bloated)

The Age of Gold : the California Gold Rush and the New American Dream by H.W Brands (excellent book on the culture and events leading up to and during the California Gold Rush)

Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card (read Ender's game, but had never gotten around to this "sequel", if you can really call it that, until now)

Well I got it for Christmas even though it's old. Disclosure by Chrichton. Actually pretty good if you can handle the old school technology in it.

I just got done with State of Fear, which was a fantastic Chrichton book (theme here?) Anyways, I loved it, he put a lot of time and research in to getting his facts, then spun a great story around it.

darmok, you need to get through all the ender books, you should also check out the parallel series "Ender's Shadow" Those are good as well.

Just finishing A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin. Very good book. Probably start on the second one when I finish this one.

really good series - I haven't got book 4 yet, but will soon...

I'm about to finish "Marine! The Life of Chesty Puller" by Burke Davis.

After that I'm going to start on "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand.

Time Enough For Love by Heinlein. Also, some others.

Just started reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. So far it's been really good, though I'm only about 80 pages in.

Glen Cook, Garret (name of main character) novels. He's a much underlooked scifi/fantasy author. His Black Company series of novels I also enjoyed.

down and out in paris and london, by g. orwell.

classic look at the real life of the underclass of the "first" world.

I love the character of Francie - she's so wonderfully written.. That book was on the required reading list when i started high school - I loved it then - -and it's like an old friend now... :) If you like Tree -- Joy in the Morning - also by Betty Smith - is another wonderful read...I

I hope you enjoy it..

Glamorama -- Bret Easton Ellis

Seventh Son by Orson Scott Card

I love Orson Scott Card and everything that he writes. Started reading his books back in high school when i somehow discovered 'Ender's Game'. And since I tend to reread things that i like, i've read that whole series several times, and now i've started back in on the Alvin Maker Series, of which Seventh Son is the first book.

Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart
by Gordon Livingston.

Some pearls of wisdom from his writings:
--Only bad things happen quickly.
--Not all who wander are lost.
--Feelings follow behavior.
--Forgiveness is a form of letting go, but they are not the same thing

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S. Thompson. Its a must.

"Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" by Jared Diamond. I din't like "Guns, Germs and Steel" that much but I find "Collapse" to be a very interesting dissection of past and present societies around the world and why some succeeded and some died out.

I think you're one of the few - he distorted a lot of the facts for his own spin, and the book was as badly written as anything Dan Brown ever put out! I think the concept of the "State of Fear" was interesting, but he dropped the ball in the execution.

IMO, of course.

:)

Really? I've always avoided it because I thought it was a western series (you know ,, cowboys) not my type. I may have to check it out. My fav King story was Salem's Lot, and the Stand was a close second.

I really like Ghost Story by Peter Straub too.


I am currently reading Airframe by Crighton

Just finished, Cobweb by Neal Stephenson and Frederick George... it was a book Stephenson wrote and release using the psydonym Stephen Bury. It's not a bad little techno-thriller set in the lead up to Gulf War 1.

I have just started reading Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada and the Myth of Converging Values. It was written by Michael Adams who is one of the key people at Environics, one of the bigger North American polling companies.

I hope I'm not the only person here who really enjoys fluff; usually my only free time for reading is right before bed and books that require thinking don't help me fall asleep. I'm reading The Copper Beech by Maeve Binchy. I've read several of her books and loved them; I just started this one so I have high hopes.

I loved The Copper Beech. If you like her stuff, try Scarlet Feather next. Have you tried Rosamunde Pilcher? She wrote a book called "The Shell Seekers" and it's sequel of sorts, "September".

I'm in the middle of Phillip Pullman's Trillogy "His Dark Materials", I'm just starting book 3, "The Amber Spyglass".

Lucifer: I loved that Pullman series... I just gave it to my son to read.

Leto, you won't be dissapointed with the Dark Tower series. It's a really great read. I am on the 3rd Song of Ice and Fire book by George R. R. Martin called A Storm of Swords. Great series so far, but they keep killing off my favorite people while the slimier characters thrive. It's probably going to end up being a seven part series and the fifth should be released late this year (I hope). So I guess there is plenty of time for them to get theirs.

I have just stared "My year of Meats" by Ruth L. Ozeki. So far it has the strange potential to be good. will provide short review when im finished.

Oh, I love Maeve Binchy. While I didn't like Quentins' as much as some of her other books, it's a good bit of fluff. I really enjoyed Evening Class, Tara Road, The Glass Lake, and Echoes. Echoes is probably my favorite of hers. Her book of short stores, London Transports, is also very good.

What I'm reading right now: Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, by Stephen Greenblatt. Greenblatt's a well-known scholar in the field and I've read a lot of excerpts of his other works (more scholarly than this) in my Shakespeare/Elizabethan lit classes...I had no idea he had written this book until I saw it at Costco of all places.

While highly speculative about Shakespeare's actual life, it does draw on a lot of historical detail about the time, and I find that fascinating. Greenblatt has done a great job of recreating Shakespeare's world, and I'm impressed so far.

"Light in August" by William Faulkner

"excavation" by James Rollins

I just finished Twelve the other day, by Nick Mcdonell (his first novel, he was only 17 when he wrote it). The focus of the book is on a loosely connected group of "high society" teens in New York...so uh, think sex, drugs and pop culture references. Hunter S. Thompson had the following to say about the book -

Uh, Thompson was no doubt on crack when he said this. Twelve isn't a bad book by any means; it's well written, concise (too much so even...finished it the day after I bought it), and captures the sense of loneliness and isolation the author is going for very well. On the other hand, the characters lack depth, and Mcdonell doesn't really draw any conclusions from the events contained within. The book has received a lot of praise from critics, one crackpot suggesting that it may knock Catcher in the Rye off the "required reading list". All this shows is how absolutely out of touch these people really are (after reading everyone from Thompson to the New York Times praising this novel I was expecting genius, what I got was the OC in prose...an exaggeration but you get the idea). In any case, I'd say Mcdonell is a writer to watch out for...in uh, thirty years when he has something to write about. :D

Still a decent read though.

Also, I just started reading Heart of Darkness yesterday...I don't know why it's taken me so long to get 'round to this one, but eh...so many classics, so little time ffs.

This title just reminded me - while it's kind of pain in the butt to read on screen --

http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/ebooks/

has a ton of e-books available for download-- you just need microsoft's free e-book reader... I still prefere hard copy books but it's cool to have some of these titles - especially if you have a Palm...

I read all my books on Palm. The twist is, MS Reader (the only reader that will read MS e.book files) is only available for Windows Pocket PC. If you have a Palm OS Palm, you'll have to use another reader and .pdb files.

But...there are ways to break .lit files down to their html base, then turn that into a .pdb file.

that UVA site does let you download the books in Palm format..

Sorry, hadn't looked that the link yet. I just always have to put in my two cents about the lack of MS Reader for the Palm OS. I realize it's competition, but e-books don't drive handheld sales.

New Leaders of the World - John Pilger

Love his brutally honest style.

Sort of stuck in the 19th century:

The Ionian Mission (Aubrey/Maturin series) by Patrick O'Brian
Sharpe's Tiger (Sharpe series, obviously) by Bernard Cornwell
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

I've been reading the Aubrey/Maturin books for quite a while, enjoying them both for the sail pr0n and the fun and the drama, so I decided to check out the Sharpe books to get the same thing but on land so to speak. It's a decent read so far. Jane Eyre is for class, and it's taking me forever to get through, because I have to put the book down ever so often because I want to pummel Mr. Rochester with a codfish or something. Seriously, he must be the least attractive/charming romantic lead ever.