What books are you reading right now?

Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth (1992).

Unsworth would've done well to spend much less time on the courtship, and the least likeable character, and more time on the actual mutiny and establishment of the freeman's colony. This also could've reduced the unnecessarily long 630 pages. His overuse of the pidgin dialect wore very thin (I do admit to finding just about every author's attempt at writing dialects tiresome). Sacred Hunger would've made a good tight novel; it isn't a good epic sweeping novel.

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I'm about to start Drowning Ruth by Christina Schwarz.

 

Drowning Ruth by Christina Schwarz.

Yet another interesting novel that ends with a non-ending. Here's a thought--If a young woman is starting a romance with a young man, with the distinct possiblity of sex and marriage, you might want to suck it up and tell her the truth as to why their union would be a very bad idea.

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The Informant by Kurt Eichenwald. I'm 216 pages into this roughly 600 page non-fiction book.

1. The price fixing investigation of Archer Daniels Midland Company and other companies started in 1992.
2. This book was published in 2000.
3. This book does not come across as dated. Kudos to Kurt Eichenwald for making & keeping a potentially very dry subject interesting.

 

Another Jack Reacher: 61 hours. I'm closing in on the end of this marathon (this is book 14) , and should be done by the time that Book 20 ("Make Me") comes out in September.

 

Anybody bought the "new" old Harper Lee novel Go Set A Watchman yet? I haven't, but I've seen some of the news reports about how some folks are surprised even shocked.

GSAW was written first, set 20 years after To Kill A Mockingbird, which was written second, set 20 years earlier. It'll be interesting to see how that works. The last time I read sequels and prequels that were written out of order was three of the four Lonesome Dove novels. I wasn't impressed, decided to skip the fourth novel. The thing is McMurty did it intentionally. Lee's order is accidental, if the "believed to be lost, but recently re-discovered" story is true.

 

Never read To Kill A Mockingbird or seen the film for that matter. Sounds like they should be read in the published order.

 

Most people interested in Go Set A Watchman will have already read TKAM and probably seen the movie. I've read the book 2-3 times and seen the movies 5-6 times; it's now part of our DVD collection.

The movie TKAM captures the essence of the novel very well (Horton Foote won an Academy Award for writing the screenplay), but the book is definitely worth reading.

 

I finished the series... Really enjoyable. I'm anxiously awaiting the latest!

 

I highly recommend The Informant by Kurt Eichenwald. When I read the numerous promo blurbs included in my PB copy, I thought, "Yeah, right, more BS to help sell the book." They're actually right. Someone reading TI without knowing it's a true story would say, "This is a great novel! How did Eichenwald come up with this?".

 

Killing Yourself To Live - Chuck Klosterman

He's traveling around the US visiting the spots where rock stars have died and thinking about life.
It's pretty good stuff.

 

Reading some more of the Catherine LeVendeur medieval mysteries by Sharan Newman.

 

Just started an anthology of Steampunk called Steampunk'd. Lots of fun. What-if science fiction, takes place in an alternate timeline from the Victorian period forward, when steam technology was developed rather than abandoned.

 

I just finished Touch by Claire North.

Interesting concept where ghosts are able to jump into your body via touch and inhabit your body. This is the story one such ghost as he/she is pursued by forces that don't take kindly to having their bodies invaded. An interesting exploration of gender, the main ghost takes on the identity of its host, regardless of its gender.

 

As a side read I have picked up Michael Moorcock's "An Alien Heat" again. I had read his Dancers at the End of Time trilogy decades ago. This book is the first in that series, and the sort of future steampunk-esque atmosphere of the novels are strangely compelling. These are the books that caused me to explore Moorcock's Eternal Champion story arc in subsequent years.

The Dancers at the End of Time - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

I liked reading the Elric books back in the day. It's been years, perhaps I should read them again.

Have you read Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber?