What Are You Reading Now?

[Coír Draoi Ceítien]

This topic doesn't necessarily have to exist, and I don't mean to invade anyone's private business, but if anyone's willing, I thought we could bring up what we happen to be reading at the moment. There doesn't have to be any lengthy descriptions of a book - I wouldn't mind just hearing title and author. It's just something that I thought up at the spur of the moment, and replies can follow the same way.

For me right now, it's Treasure Island, spurred by the fact that I just finished a biography of Stevenson's fascinating life, and I also have each of his major works lined up as well. It's a bit of a cheat, I admit, since after bringing up my "Problems with Books and Reading" topic, my response is to read a book I've already read. On the other hand, I had read it only once back in the nineties as a project back in homeschooling, so it FEELS like reading it for the first time. As it is, I'm halfway done with it in just a couple days - it's a phenomenally fast read, "perfectly" plotted and paced. Some critics may find it flat, but I believe it accomplishes what it sets out to do, which is to tell a bare-bones yarn free of deeper (deliberate) philosophical insight. It's the perfect potboiler.

[Raven]

I finished the first Game of Thrones book, today. I haven't started a next pleasure reading book, though I'll be looking through a Pharmacology textbook for study purposes today.

Game of Thrones reads quite differently from the fantasy books that I'm used to reading. Its shifting third-person limited narrative adds a lot of interest, the characters are quite vivid, and the first books ended by making me wonder what was to come -- but I'll probably not pick up the next one for months, because I simply don't have time to wade through an 800-or-so page book during the semester. This one was already too much of a distraction.
I didn't like all of the book -- some of the chapters I read just to get back to other chapters I was interested in, and at times certain elements of the writing I didn't like. Nevertheless, I'll likely read on sometime in the future.

[Coír Draoi Ceítien]

Got a few things lined up that I'm trying to get through, though I admit that I've slowed down considerably. I've read about 3 or 4 chapters in Dickens's The Pickwick Papers (I want to read Dickens in chronological order to get the feeling of how his style changed throughout his life) and about 3 of the stories in The Jungle Books (which I have, shockingly, never read). Also read a story in a collection called The Hunger and Other Stories by chief Twilight Zone scribe Charles Beaumont (who's sort of being rediscovered) and am halfway through Golden Age radio legend Arch Oboler's sole novel House on Fire, a supernatural horror story. For diversity's sake, I've also got a few library books out that I'm really just sifting through - The Collected Tales and Plays of Nikolai Gogol (probably just going to read 1 or 2 stories), a collection of creature stories (again, maybe a couple select stories), a rather brief nonfiction on Russian literature and The Oxford Book of Fantasy Stories (already read 2, may very well read the rest).

Yeah, I've really overdone it now. Eventually, I'll have it all sorted out to a couple titles. In the meantime, I want to get in as much as possible.

[Raven]

Wow, sounds like quite a reading regimen.
It's a bit sad to say, but I'm not doing any hobby reading right now. School has taken over that time. I'm looking forward to Christmas break to do some more real reading. Not sure what I'll read next, but maybe the next Game of Thrones or something lighter, a kids fantasy series perhaps.
I finished the original Earthsea Trilogy, and I'm not feeling like continuing on in Earthsea at the moment, but if I can find the first Shanarra book -- maybe at the local used book store that has a big fantasy section -- I might try that or something like it out.

[Coír Draoi Ceítien]

Had to cut down on my previous reading list - didn't finish a lot, also haven't stuck with some as I'd hoped (as usual). Right now, I'm over halfway done with Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, after which I plan to follow it up with Fahrenheit 451; I've also taken out The Oxford Book of Fantasy Stories again with the intent to finish it - I'll probably make a post about it when I'm done. I'll get back to Beaumont, Dickens and Kipling again eventually.

[Raven]

I just finished a book called The English Passengers, which was a historical fiction piece, somewhat dark in a British humor sort of way. I enjoyed it, overall, though I won't rave about it.

Just went to the used bookstore today and bought the second Game of Thrones book, A Clash of Kings. It will be my Christmas break read, or at least the first one.

[Coír Draoi Ceítien]

I finished two books over two days - Fahrenheit 451 at last and Davis Grubb's The Night of the Hunter, a significant piece of Southern Gothic which spawned the classic movie with Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters and Lillian Gish. I highly recommend both. Now I'm moving on to another fantasy - Tim Powers's On Stranger Tides, a pirate tale which inspired the Monkey Island point-and-click PC adventure games of the 90's and served as the namesake/source material of the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie.

[Raven]

Well, over my holiday break I binged on A Clash of Kings and A Storm of Swords. Together somewhere around 1800 pages of reading. I finished the second last night at about 1AM.
I'm not gonna try to tackle the next right now. Maybe in a little while.  I need a break from that world, and my semester begins on Tuesday. I probably won't pick up any pleasure reading immediately.

[Bear]

I just finished reading one of the most critically acclaimed fantasy books of our time, The Name of the Wind. It's book one of the Kingkiller Chronicles by Patrick Rothfuss, who takes an interminably long time to write anything but only writes excellent books. While his world-weaving is interesting enough on its own, the word-weaving is unsurpassed in anything I have yet read. Without giving anything away, it's a story within a story, a tale woven by a master storyteller. I can't wait to read the second book, which is out (The Wise Man's Fear), though work compels me to buckle down at least for the next several weeks. And I really can't keep up the pace of staying up between 2 to 4 am for a several consecutive days, like I did with Name of the Wind. Read it!

[Coír Draoi Ceítien]

I haven't read him yet, but I definitely have heard that Rothfuss is one of the best new talents today. Believe me, he will find his way to the blog very soon.

I'm sort of in a mix right now - my copy of On Stranger Tides got damaged recently (a corner of pages got thoroughly wet), so I'm waiting for a replacement copy. In the meantime, I've taken out four nonfiction books from the library - an illustrated encyclopedia on science fiction from the 90's, a book on myths and misconceptions about science and religion, a collection from the 50's containing 40 scientists' confirmations on God, and one more on "cracking the code" of the Pentateuch.

Fictionwise, I've got two lined up until I get my new copy, both authors having been mentioned on the blog - War in Heaven by Charles Williams (sort of a detective/supernatural thriller concerning the Holy Grail, by the third great fiction writer of the Inklings who's unfortunately not as well known as Lewis and Tolkien) and A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay (a philosophical science fiction/fantasy with Gnostic undertones about a journey to a fictional planet orbiting the star Arcturus).

[Raven]

I'll probably have to put The Name of the Wind on my list for next, after the GOT series. I happened to start book 4. Didn't intend to but ended up getting an assignment for work that involved lots of sitting and waiting, so busted it open after all. I'm not as into the 4th book because most of my favorite characters aren't featured so much.

[Coír Draoi Ceítien]

On the one hand, I could say that my reading has come to a halt. I'm not reading my novels like I was before. I guess I'm just in one of those natural slumps right now. It's not that I don WANT to read.

After all, on the other hand, I am actually in the middle of a book - the Bible. You see, all my life, I've never actually read the Bible from cover to cover. I've read most of the major stories and am thus familiar with certain events, but I've never "seriously" read it except when mandatory by an outside influence (i.e., church, school, etc.), nor have I read any of the Latter Prophets or the Writings. So I've taken it upon myself to undergo a straight read-through of the entire Bible, so I can say that I've read it at least once in my life. Deeper meditations can come later; right now, it's important to me that I just read the thing. As of this writing, I'm in the middle of Judges, and I must say that it's been a pretty interesting read. I wasn't as bored with the Pentateuch as I thought I would be - all the laws and restatements ended up being very fascinating, even enlightening. I'm really enjoying it.

So I got to work on balancing my Bible reading with my novel reading. I think I can manage it.

[Raven]

My reading has largely halted, replaced by studying and zoning out on less productive things. Ten months of nursing school left.
I stalled out in the fourth game of thrones.
I have been working on archery, at least, and starting to exercise some.

[Raven]

I just finished the fourth game of thrones. It read like an interlude, to be honest. I'm thinking of heading to the used book store tomorrow to pick up the last one that's out. I hope it picks up a bit. We shall see.

[Coír Draoi Ceítien]

I'm currently in the middle of the English translation of Futaro Yamada's The Kouga Ninja Scrolls, which, as far as I know, sparked off the ninja craze in Japan back in the early sixties. It reads as an interesting piece of historical fantasy and, for better or worse, depending on your liking, a manga in prose. It's not perfect, but what is?

I like the blending of actual history with fantastic elements. Reinterpreting history through a speculative lens is actually quite clever, although history itself makes for engrossing reading. I'm keen on trying out some more, in any culture.