What books are you reading right now?

When I worked at the bookstore I was doing backup on register and this girl came up to the register with her mom.
She couldn't have been more than 12 or 13 and she had a stack of yaoi manga a foot high that mom was paying for.
I knew it was some of the more graphic stuff only because some of my coworkers were huge fans and there was a part of me that wanted to ask the mom if she knew what her kiddo was reading.
But really it was none of my business and who knows, maybe the mom was a fan too.

 

I recently finished Amagansett by Mark Mills, and am about half way through his second novel The Savage Garden. I'm usually leary of reading books by the same author back-to-back, but so far so good.

 

I'm not familiar with manga, I'm guessing that some of it is sexually explicit.

I always read books way above my age. When I learned to read I pretty much skipped over "children's books," and I was reading Young Adult novels years before I was a young adult.

My mother was open about sex in the sense that she would joke about it generally, but was also very prudish about the specifics of sex (talk about mixed messages). If she had known what kind of books I read when I went to the library on my own she'd would've blown a gasket.
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The ending of The Savage Garden was little to convenient & tidy for my taste. And I had figured the answer to one of the main questions/mysteries fairly early in the novel. I haven't checked any reviews of TSG, but I'm pretty sure that many other readers did as well. Seriously, if I managed to figure it out, so could your dog.

 

Jack and the Giants by Piers Anthony and J.R. Rain - a light and humorous retelling of the classic tale.

 

I took a break from 'long' books, and read a couple of collections of short stories.

The Greatest Boxing Stories Ever Told Thirty-six Incredible Tales from the Ring, edited by Jeff Silverman. Not a bad collection, but not as good as In The Ring.

The Brushlanders, by Robert Winship. This collection focuses on stories specifically about "...the land west of Austin (Texas)..." Unfortunately that makes the pool of available stories a bit small and it shows. Quite a few of the stories left me with the feeling that the author got off to a good start and then left the story unfinished.

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And now a couple of books that I stopped reading, which I rarely do.

Picture This by Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22. The book jacket does not describe it a work based on Greek history and philosophy. Which is what it turned out to be, which is not something that appeals to me, esp. philosophical discussions. I would label the dust jacket blurb description as extremely misleading.

The Fault Does Not Lie With Your Set, by Jack Harris, Paul Huhndorff, & Jack McGrew. Another misleading dust
jacket description. This book is supposed to be about the first 40 years of television in Houston, which it is but with a limted focus mostly on just one TV station. I was hoping for a much broader history.

I might try these books again sometime in the future.........................or I might not.

 

I'm currently reading & enjoying Mutiny on the Bounty. The book itself is the Bounty Trilogy, so if I really like MOTB I don't have to track down the other two books, Men Against the Sea & Pictairn's Island.

Today's buys at the charity thrift store sale:
Born Standing Up by Steve Martin. Hopefully this will be much better than most celeb ABs.
Death of a Salesman by Author Miller. For some reason I never had to read it in HS or college.
Billy Bathgate, E.L. Doctorow.
The Robots of Dawn, Isaac Asimov. SF isn't my genre, but this book sounds interesting (I'm a Blade Runner fan).
The Story of O, Pauline Reage.
The Sunlight and the Shadows, Mark Helprin.

 

Just finished a couple of collections of classic sci-fi by Arthur C. Clarke. On the whole, I have to say I found them disappointing. I like some of Clarke's novels, though I never loved any of them. But I figured maybe since so many of the sci-fi writers of his time did their best work in short stories, his would catch me more than the novels. They didn't.

There wasn't anything wrong with them, I guess. They sounded stultifyingly dated, but then again, so do a lot of Asimov's stories, or Heinlein's, or Silverberg's, and I like their short stories very much. It's not that Clarke didn't have some interesting ideas. He did. But...I don't know. His stories just seemed...lightweight to me. The characters were absolutely uncompelling, and that's even in comparison to some of Asimov's stories, where the characters sort of seemed to come of out of a mechanical generator of 1950s stereotypes, complete with attendant dialogue. Clarke's style just seemed...disengaged. It was like he wrote without any particular investment in the stories; whereas I always got the sense with Asimov and Heinlein and their ilk that they got down and got their hands dirty and their brows sweaty writing.

But you know, Clarke is one of the greats. So I feel disappointed in how much he didn't move me.

 

There is a lot of bad sci-fi, no question. But there's also a lot of good sci-fi, including a lot of underrated stuff. But unfortunately, I think I have to conclude that Clarke was a mediocre writer who had very good ideas.

I have read Miller's A Canticle for Liebowitz. I read it in high school, didn't care for it, and then picked it up again about a decade later, presuming that I had just been too young to appreciate it properly. Unfortunately, I still didn't care for it.

So far, I think the best "hard science fiction" I've ever read is either Asimov's Robot series (The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun, Robots of Dawn, Robots and Empire) or Niven's Ringworld. The best "soft" science fiction I've ever read is definitely Frank Herbert's Dune, with first runner-up being probably Old Man's War by John Scalzi.

 

The Egyptologist by Arthur Phillips

 

Do any of you avid readers ever have the experience where you look at your stash of unread books, and know that you won't be happy with whatever selection you make,, despite a strong craving to read? It's much like being at a better grocery store with ample selection of deli meats, breads, teas, whatever, and nothing appeals to you.

 

I usually go for one of my huge collection of graphic novels in that case.
There are usually 3 or 4 I haven't got to yet.
They work as sort of a palette cleanser and then I can move on to another book.
I recommend Incorruptible about a super villain who does his best to become a hero after the most powerful hero on Earth (basically Superman) goes nuts, kills most of the other heroes and destroys the worlds infrastructure.
The only problem is he really has no idea how to go about it.
With a sidekick named Jail Bait (because she's an underage girl who he now refuses to sleep with because he's a good guy which pisses her off to no end) and an alcoholic cop as his only guide to what a hero should do, it's really well done.

 

I have been reading some John C. Maxwell books. I find them informative and inspiring. 2015 is going to be my year to get my life in order.

 

I reach for a genre that I normally don't read, such as SciFi. As strange as that sounds.

I rarely re-read books. I responded to a thread here. My list of re-reads was pretty short, although longer than I thought before I actually listed the books.