What book is everyone reading at the moment?

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I've just started Peter Ustinov's "Old Man & Mr.Smith" wherein God and Satan visit Earth to check up on how humanity is doing. So far, it's quite funny.
 
Scoop, a 1930s E. Waugh comedy. It's okay; goes fast enough.

Just finished a mass of John Le Carre. Helluva note when you start skimming what are supposed to be gripping thrillers. Well, but he adds too much banal before it goes into the oven.
 
Caverns of Steel, I. Asimov, 1953.

50+ years ago, I used to read kilos of sci fi. I think we go through a phase as younger teenagers (13 to 16) in which we're surprisingly tough readers; we've developed the curiosity to stick with a text to the end, but we don't have enough experience to form any distinct tastes; "literature" means just about anything in print, cereal boxes not excluded.

At about the age of 16, I suddenly quit sci fi, and never went back. Perhaps it's changed (if not improved) since the 1950s? Dunno; somebody tougher than me should find out.
 
Rant by Chuck Palahniuk. It's about to become the second Palahniuk novel in the past month I won't finish (the other was Haunted). It's told as an "oral history" pieced together from interviews with various people. I am coming to realize that Palahniuk always writes like Palahniuk. That works fine most of the time, but when he starts writing books like these two, with what are supposed to be different narrators, it gets annoying that absolutely everyone sounds exactly the same.
 
I recently finished these two

Salavation Boulevard A Muslim is accused of murdering an atheist professor. The case is investigated by a born-again Christian who works for a Jewish lawyer. Yep. Sounds ridiculous. But it was a fun, quick read that I finished on a long plane ride. It's one of those books where each chapter is about 4 pages long and ends with a cliffhanger (sort of like The DaVinci Code). The book was written by skeptic and author Larry Beinhart (who wrote the book Wag The Dog was based on).

Armageddon in Retrospect by Kurt Vonnegut. A short volume that collects several never-before-published stories of his. Quite good. A couple of the short-stories are real gems (and others not so much).
 
John Fante's Ask the Dust.

Honestly, I do not personally like it. I like it very little.

It's beloved by many people and very highly regarded so I'm probably wrong about this but I mostly just wished that Arturo Bandini would just stop and go away. :o
 
I'm re-reading "Stranger in a Strange Land" and I'm wondering why I ever liked it in the first place- I suspect because I was so young and terribly naive the time I first read it I liked it because I was told I should. Heinlein's just rubbish as a story teller, and he's absolutly paleolithic in his conception of women.

Maybe I shouldn't have re-read "Good Omens" right before. That's like having a full-course Thanksgiving full of quality traditional home cooking made by two Midwestern grandmothers trying to outdo each other- then following it up with a gas station microwave burrito.

I'll be cleansing my palate with "The Graveyard Book", which is next on deck.
 
Piscivore said:
I'm re-reading "Stranger in a Strange Land" and I'm wondering why I ever liked it in the first place- I suspect because I was so young and terribly naive the time I first read it I liked it because I was told I should. Heinlein's just rubbish as a story teller, and he's absolutly paleolithic in his conception of women.

Maybe I shouldn't have re-read "Good Omens" right before. That's like having a full-course Thanksgiving full of quality traditional home cooking made by two Midwestern grandmothers trying to outdo each other- then following it up with a gas station microwave burrito.

I'll be cleansing my palate with "The Graveyard Book", which is next on deck.
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thanks, Pisc, you've done my rereading for me. I seem to recall that, like so many, I liked that book back in the 60's, but later I read some other one of his books, name now forgotten, and was surprised at what rubbish it was.
So instead of that, I'm starting on The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak.
 
arthwollipot said:
I was never impressed with Heinlein, and I don't understand why some people rave about him.
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There are some ideas in there, good ideas, possibly shocking and important ideas for 1961... but they read like a bunch of monographs shoehorned into the mouth of a transparent Mary-Sue author surrogate with a plywood and canvas plot tacked up around him.

I mean, it is not as obnoxious, graceless and purile as Ayn Rand, but it's not good.
 
Piscivore said:
There are some ideas in there, good ideas, possibly shocking and important ideas for 1961... but they read like a bunch of monographs shoehorned into the mouth of a transparent Mary-Sue author surrogate with a plywood and canvas plot tacked up around him.

I mean, it is not as obnoxious, graceless and purile as Ayn Rand, but it's not good.
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I just flashed on the title of the second Heinlein book I read: The Number of the Beast. If you have not read it, do yourself a favor and keep it that way.
 
Heh. Usually when I say I don't like Heinlein I'm besieged by Heinlein lovers who say that I just didn't understand him and I should read Stranger in a Strange Land. I usually respond "I DID read Stranger in a Strange Land. I liked it so much I can't even remember what it was about."
 
arthwollipot said:
Heh. Usually when I say I don't like Heinlein I'm besieged by Heinlein lovers who say that I just didn't understand him and I should read Stranger in a Strange Land. I usually respond "I DID read Stranger in a Strange Land. I liked it so much I can't even remember what it was about."
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Heh, that's why I re-read it; I saw it sitting on my shelf and realised I didn't remember anything about it. Next trip to the used bookstore, it's out of here.

Towards the end, every single character- be it the man raised by aliens, the urban educated nurse, the urbane "professional witness", the elderly lawyer/author/author surrogate- in the Man from Mars' circle suddenly talks, acts, and thinks like a folksy, midwestern 1930's carnival grifter. It's appaling.
 
I did read The Puppet Masters - that was Heinlein, wasn't it? - and I vaguely recall not hating it.

But then again, I am one of the few people in the world who can claim to have enjoyed CJ Cherryh's Wave Without a Shore, so perhaps my tastes are a little strange.
 
arthwollipot said:
I did read The Puppet Masters - that was Heinlein, wasn't it? - and I vaguely recall not hating it.
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His young adult work is actually not bad either- the straightforward plots, stock characters, and uncomplicated themes (that prevent him from indulging himself with all that damned pontificating) allow him to explore some of his interesting ideas without overreaching his limited skill set, in my opinion. Most importantly, having young protagonists on the cusp of adulthood conceal his fundamentally purile image of the opposite sex by masking it as the character's inexperience.

But then again, I am one of the few people in the world who can claim to have enjoyed CJ Cherryh's Wave Without a Shore, so perhaps my tastes are a little strange.
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Never got around to her.
 
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