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What book is everyone reading at the moment?

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"Sins of the Assassin" by Robert Ferrigno. Second in a series of SF set later in this century when the former USA is divided into The Bible belt, Islamic Republic, Mormon Territories with pieces nibbled off by the Aztlan Empire to the south and something called "Canada" to the north.
And a textbook to review.
 
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"Codename Tricycle" - The True Story of the Second World War's Most Extraordinary Double Agent

by Russel Miller.

Very corageouls man, several of whose actions were used by Flemmng in writing the Bond books, including placing $30,000 on a single bet at baccarat to stop someone intimidating the other players. This was money that he had conned the Abwehur into giving to MI5...

A fascinating individual, who hated the Nazis, (and indeed had been expelled from pre-war Germany), yet was still considered by them to be a safe bet. He wasn't "turned", but was a double agent from the start, as he approached the British when he was approached by the Germans.
 
The Art Of Fiction by John Gardner. one of those rare how-to books that are not only good, but are written by someone really good at what they're how-to-ing.

Before You Shoot by Helen Garvy. a general rundown on movie production, especially geared toward low-budget production. serviceable but not dazzling.
 
The Secret in Building 26: The Untold Story of America's Ultra War Against the U-Boat Enigma Codes by Jim Debrosse and Colin Burke. An interesting account of America's counterpart to Blechley Park. The effort was run on a "no profit" basis by NCR (National Cash Register), which had suspended civilian operations for the duration.
 
The Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett

Up next: Either "Caves of Steel" (Asimov) or "Bad Astronomy" (Phil Plait), depends which one drops first from the parcel that's currently lying on my work desk while i'm on holiday... :(
 
Mastering German Vocabulary: A Thematic Approach

It's a thrilling tale of German vocabulary terms fighting against all odds to be juxtaposed with their English equivalents and dealing with the hardships of having example sentences printed under them.
 
Hocus Pocus, K. Vonnegut, 1990. What a depressing old prig he could be! He makes up a deplorable future (predicting almost nothing right, by the bye) and then tries to make the reader ashamed of not deploring it as much as he does. All this in little easy-to-read snippets, to keep you going until his uninteresting end.

Oh well. It's an artefact of the discouragement widespread in those Reagen and post-Reagen years, and valuable to that extent.
 
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Just finished The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara. I'm not a Civil War buff, but the book is excellent. It also really helped that we visited the Gettysburg battlefield not too long ago (it's a fairly short trip from the D.C. area). [Should you ever visit, I recommend getting one of their tour guides. They drive your car, freeing you to observe and listen to them explain the flow of events as you traverse the area.] It's pretty sobering to look down the ridges and hilltops and imagine thousands of Confederate troops surging across the fields toward you - or looking up at the ridge across the open fields you will have to traverse to attack the Union guns. Shaara's depiction of Confederate Gen. Longstreet's despair as he prepares the final "charge" up Cemetery Ridge is heartbreaking.
 
I have just started The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I'm only about 20 pages in so far and have no opinion on it yet other than it seems to move at a slow pace. This is the first work of McCarthy's that I've started, so other than knowing he wrote No Country for Old Men, I have no other background information at all.
 
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ParanoidAndroid said:
I have just started The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I'm only about 20 pages in so far and have no opinion on it yet other than it seems to move at a slow pace. This is the first work of McCarthy's that I've started, so other than knowing he wrote No Country for Old Men, I have no other background information at all.
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I'll be curious to know what you think of it when you're done. There were some major frustrations for me -- and the slow pace is only part of it -- but I can also see that that's a deliberate literary plot on the part of the author... Not the sort of thing I usually read.
 
Knife of Dreams - The penultimate book in The Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan. This is the volume that I've been looking forward to since I started re-reading the series in honor of the departed author. As with my past reading, this one starts out with things on the move, and with as much promise as his first few books, which won him so much acclaim.
 
Just got Mary Roach's new one, "Bonk". It's all about sex research.

As with her previous efforts, Roach very cleverly describes various aspects of historical and ongoing research into sex, from the artificial insemination of pigs (happy pigs have more piglets) to the initial efforts to image the sex act in an MRI machine (the 20-inch club, as Roach describes it)
This is very funny stuff, but informative as well.
 
I shall be settling down tonight to start reading This Sceptered Isle by Christopher Lee (not the Tall, Dark and Gruesome one, though that was a good read, too :)).

Blew this months book budget on a copy today, having heard several episodes of it on BBC7. Episode 40 today, out of 216. :boggled:
 
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The Golden Apples of the Sun - Ray Bradbury. I've found that I can't read too many Bradbury short stories in one go, his creativity is too overpowering, so in between I'm also reading Singularity Sky by Charles Stross.
 
The Whether Man said:
The Golden Apples of the Sun - Ray Bradbury. I've found that I can't read too many Bradbury short stories in one go, his creativity is too overpowering, so in between I'm also reading Singularity Sky by Charles Stross.
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Iron Sunrise, (same series) is better IMO.
 
I just finished Shalom Auslander's "Foreskin's Lament" and "Beware of God", and just started "Born on a Blue Day" by Daniel Tammet. The pile of unread books near my bed is far too high, and I hope to spend much of the summer getting thru a good chunk of them.
 
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