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I just finished reading It Can't Happen Here. Pretty gripping book.

Just finished A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret History of Chemical and Biological Warfare by Robert Harris and Jeremy Paxman, makes nuclear weapons seem like childs toys.

Part way through The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, cyberpunk in a post cheap-energy world

Just started on Zombieslayer by Nathan Long, and seems to be pretty decent so far.

Dead Beat, Jim Butcher, part of the Dresden Files.

Maskerade by Sir Terry Pratchett.

Triumff: Her Majesty's Hero, by Dan Abnett. So far, it's very funny, in a punny, British way.

It reminds me a lot of the Ciaphas Cain stories, which is odd since Abnett's characters Gaunt and Eisenhorn are about as far as you can get from Ciaphas Cain.

Still reading Drake's RCN and the Brunner omnibus by the Black library

ok, now finally on blood of the dragon from brunner, and on "Some Golden Harbor" by Drake.

also I've got 4 Rogue Trader books to read.

Broomstick wrote:Dead Beat, Jim Butcher, part of the Dresden Files.

I think this might be favorite book in the series.

Hey, ya gotta admit - riding a zombie T. rex into battle is awesome!

Awesome enough I can forgive his geographical errors - during the early part of the series it's pretty obvious he'd never actually been to Chicago to anyone who has lived in Chicago. He has visited now, and learned to use Google Earth.

The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking. Like the previous two books fun to read, and sufficiently dumb-ificated for a lay reader like me.

Now on Jingo in my parade of Discworld books.

Just got me mitts on Surface Detail, the new Culture novel. Only about 100 odd pages in so far, but its already moving more quickly than the start of Matter.

Finished up Agincourt by Bernard Cornwell a couple days ago and now I've got a book on the Assassins (or so called Assassins as it turns out) to satisfy my history bug and I've also started in on a biography of Stevie Ray Vaughan.

Fun fact: Did you know that Stephen Tobolowsky was in a band with SRV in the early days of Vaughan's music career? Before Vaughan had even graduated high school, in fact.

Broomstick wrote:Hey, ya gotta admit - riding a zombie T. rex into battle is awesome!

Awesome enough I can forgive his geographical errors - during the early part of the series it's pretty obvious he'd never actually been to Chicago to anyone who has lived in Chicago. He has visited now, and learned to use Google Earth.

You also have to love his dog. "Mouse, kill him."

I just finished David Brin's Uplift series, which I thought was a good read. I understand there is some sort of problem with the man's thoughts, though?

He blasphemed against Star Wars.

So I get a kindle a few months back. Do I use it to impulse buy new novels and non-fiction to enrich my reading selection?

No, I fill it with fanfiction and textbooks. God damn I'm such a nerd.

Read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, though, after leaving it on my shelf for ever. It's wierd to watch Hienlein's politics wander about through his books; Starship Troopers was basically militant facism while this is very libertarian, and in between that Stranger in a Strange Land was counter-culture. That's three radically different political opinions in seven years; not bad. I wanna keep reading his stuff just to see what he advocates next.

Finished up The Falklands War 1982 which was a fairly good, if dry, history of the conflict. I'd be interested to see something written more recently with the benefit of more leaks/FoI/collapses of Juntas.

Also just re-read The Atrocity Archives.

And am now reading Spycatcher. Not a clue how liberal he's being with the truth in some of these scenarios, but there are some hilarious anecdotes.

Like bugging the Russian Embassy in Ottawa with the RCMP with 8 bugs, but labelling them randomly between 1 and 20 so that if they were ever found the Russians would pull down the rest of the building trying to find the other 12.

I must say that Terry Pratchett's Moving Pictures is genuinely underrated, with a whole set of Ankh-Morpork characters introduced that become reoccurring and popular in Discworld for many years to come (Ridcully and CMOTD, etc), plus we have a beginning of the theme of modern things being jokingly imposed on a fantasy setting with more internal consistency and with a serious message behind it (like with Going Postal).

I did a re-read of The Stand by Stephen King, except that this time it was a read of the original version published back in the late 1970s. It really is a lot better than the uncut version from 1990, which has all the problems of "late King": bloat, meandering character development and back-story that doesn't really progress the main plot or matter, and so forth. I don't think I'll be able to read the latter again.

I also tried K.J. Parker's The Folding Knife, and didn't like it. Some of the politics and minutiae about banking was interesting, but the main character is just so bland and colorless*, and virtually every single female character in the book is either an asshole, stupid, or both, often in one-dimensional ways.

*Spoiler I think I might try some more Mieville, while I wait for Towers of Midnight to come out.

Bob the Gunslinger wrote:He blasphemed against Star Wars.

Lord of the Rings as well, although his essay against Star Wars is by and far the more stupid one.

Finished the Ravenor omnibus. Now started on the first Gaunt's Ghosts omnibus;

Also Jon Stewart's Earth: The Book for some lighter reading

Guardsman Bass wrote:I also tried K.J. Parker's The Folding Knife, and didn't like it. Some of the politics and minutiae about banking was interesting, but the main character is just so bland and colorless*, and virtually every single female character in the book is either an asshole, stupid, or both, often in one-dimensional ways.

I'm a pretty voracious reader, and I found a little dry, too. I liked the wheeling-dealing scheming stuff the most, though the whole book was a pretty egregious violator of the whole show-not-tell rule.

As for me, I just read the Earth's Children series. I remembered hearing about these books as a teenager (in a 'hurr hurr cavemen sex' context), but last month, I was so unbelievably bored visiting my in-laws, that I swiped the first one from sister-in-law's old room. A few weeks later, I'm all done with the books, and I found them interesting and enjoyable. I hear the sixth and final one's due out next March, and I'm looking forward to it.

Just finished The Well of Stars by Robert Reed, a sequel to Marrow (which I now want to re-read). It was... interesting. A bit of a ride, but in some ways I liked Marrow better. BIG science fiction - artificial worlds as space ships, living nebula (sort of), and a knife that can (and does) slice through entire planets. Immortals, aliens, all sorts of things.

Perdido Street Station by China Mieville - wow, it's LOTS better than I thought it would be! Planning to read the other two in the same universe.