The "I am currently reading" thread

[SimonS]

Love it, infact by coincidence i recommended it somewhere on this forum about a month ago.

 

There's a second one you know, 'more timewaster letters' or something like that.

 

Cheers -

 

Just been through this thread (ALL of it....) and now have 20 books I REALLY wanna read on my reserved list at the library. Their on-line library service is fab!

[Halibut]

Just finished 'Quartered safe out here', George McDonald Frasers memoir of his time in the Burma campaign at the end of the second war. Fantastic read, beautifully drawn characters and some of the best descriptions of battle I've ever read.

[taxman]

I'm reading The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks at the moment. Only 25 pages in but I love it so far.

 

Widely regarded (but not by me) as Banks' best book

 

 

I had a choice of 8 books to read next so I put them on the carpet and tossed a coin......

 

It landed on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson. Its translated from the Swedish and the author died before the book was published.

[Pilon]

Still dipping into George Orwell's 'Shooting An Elephant', a collection of essays. Brilliant for when I want my Orwell fix, but it's been too long now since my last good novel. I'm definitely ready to start a new one.

 

My choices seem to be Haruki Murakami's 'A Wild Sheep Chase', Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 'One Hundred Years of Solitude', or Graham Greene's 'The Power and the Glory'.

 

Big Greene fan; never read any of Murakami before; and the other one was a gift. Which should I choose?

[mr chris]

The Restaurant at the end of the Universe, by Douglas Adams.

 

And I hear the TV voices when I read it

[Phanerothyme]

Whooo Hooo....a return to form from the mad genius Mr Rankin after a couple of poor and feeble efforts. This one has a distinct "Brentford Trilogy" flavour about it (for those that know) and covers the familiar Rankin subjects such as crazed policemen, strange voices, running jokes, old charters and much taking tea with the parson. And music, and Robert Johnson.

 

Excellent stuff

 

The CD's a bit odd, as one might expect.

[taxman]

 

I had a choice of 8 books to read next so I put them on the carpet and tossed a coin......

 

It landed on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson. Its translated from the Swedish and the author died before the book was published.

 

I've only read the first 4 chapters but I can tell it's a corker...I was late to the pub tonight because I couldn't put the book down.

 

It promises a lot more and I can't wait to have an evening in on my own to give it a serious read

[Phanerothyme]

I've just put down "The Execution Channel" by Ken McLeod. It's a fast paced techno spycraft thriller set in England and Scotland in the near future.

 

It would have been a brilliant book, had the ending not been so weak. There are also some awful plot devices and gaping holes and inconsistencies. It starts well, and keeps the pace up until about halfway through, at which point you're committed. Then the novel starts to unravel, and laughable dialogue starts to creep in along with generous handfuls of emergency plot coincidences.

 

I've picked up my old copy of "Pollen" by Jeff Noon, and will be re-reading that for the umpteenth time just to take the taste of "Execution Channel" away.

[JenC]

Someone's just lent me Marina Lewycka's 'A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian', so I'll be starting on that tomorrow.

[Funky_Gibbon]

I've just started reading The Steel Remains by Richard Morgan, his first foray into Fantasy. So far (60 pages in) it's certainly been different from the average Fantasy novel. It's full of swearing including one laugh out loud insult screamed by a character, one of the heroes is homosexual (and Morgan isn't holding back on proving it), another one has been suggested as being a lesbian and a Committee On Morality is going around killing anyone who is gay in nasty ways.

 

I haven't got a clue what is going on at the moment but it's entertaining. It's also definitely not a book for kids no matter what some people think of Fantasy as a genre.