Because a geek can't live on comics alone, what are you reading currently and what have you read recently?

Right now I'm reading David Mamet's Bambi vs. Godzilla. It's Mamet's take on the movie biz and it's been pretty good. I think most people who aspire to write would get a lot out of it. And he has dozens of movie suggestions that you might dig.

I finished The Unforgiving Minute a few weeks back and thought it was a solid soldier's memoir. Worth giving a look.

I always finished Donnie Brasco and a couple of books about The Hells Angels. All of them pretty interesting. I'm waiting on the autobiography of Sonny Barger, one of the founders of the modern Hells Angels.

Was just going to post a thread like this, but LJ was inaccessable for me so I couldn't use it as a reference (my memory really sucks).

In 2009 so far I've read:
Wild Cards Vol 6: Ace in the Hole, edited by George R.R. Martin (reread)
Ilium, by Dan Simmons (reread)
Wild Cards Vol 7: Dead Man's Hand, by George R.R. Martin and John J. Miller (reread)
Olympos, by Dan Simmons (reread)
Spin, by Robert Charles Wilson (reread)
Dune, by Frank Herbert (reread)
Queen of Candesce (Book 2 of Virga), by Karl Schroeder
Nocturne For A Dangerous Man, by Marc Matz
Chasm City, by Alastair Reynolds
Shadow and Claw, the First Half of the Book of the New Sun, by Gene Wolfe (technically two books)
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith
Lady of Mazes, by Karl Schroeder (reread)
Altered Carbon, by Richard K. Morgan (reread)
The State of the Art, by Iain M. Banks
Feersum Endjinn, by Iain M. Banks
The Algebraist, by Iain M. Banks
Inversions, by Iain M. Banks
Against a Dark Background, by Iain M. Banks
The Yiddish Policeman's Union, by Michael Chabon
The Player of Games, by Iain M. Banks (reread)
Broken Angels, by Richard K. Morgan (reread)
Weapons of Choice, by John Birmingham
Sunstorm, by Stephen Baxter and Arthur C. Clarke
Woken Furies, by Richard K. Morgan (reread)
Ventus, by Karl Schroeder (reread)

And am currently reading:
Tehanu, the Last Book of Earthsea, by Ursula K. LeGuin
A Deepness in the Sky, by Vernor Vinge (reread)

I've been reading a ton more novels lately, mostly because I'm way behind on comics and I'm really focusing on good titles anyway, so novels have become my new hobby.

Since the demise of the previous board, I've read (the list is partial):
The Blonde, The Wheelman and Severance Package by Duane Swierczynski
Bust, Twisted City, The Follower, Hard Feelings, Panic Attack, Fake I.D., Cold Caller and Tough Luck by Jason Starr (with Ken Bruen co-writing Bust)
Out of Sight by Elmore Leonard
Gun Monkeys by Victor Gischler
The Cleanup by Sean Doolittle
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
Money Shot by Christa Faust
The Hunter, The Outfit and The Man With The Getaway Face by Richard Stark
Somebody Owes Me Money by Donald Westlake
Lucky at Cards by Lawrence Block
Bury Me Deep by Megan Abbott
Little Girl Lost and Songs of Innocence by Richard Aleas

And I'm currently reading Hard Man by Allan Guthrie, while the next book on my list is Hogdoggin' by Anthony Neil Smith.

...I think that's most of it.

All of them have been pretty good for the most part, even though I found Out of Sight a little sparse in terms of story

I think I'm detecting a pattern there, Sean...

As for me, I'll start with non-fiction: I've finished How to Build a Time Machine by Paul Davies recently, I'm currently in the middle of Story by Robert McKee, and Dreams From My Father by some sort of former US senator is still waiting for me.

In the fiction department, I've finished Good Omens, am following that with a Discworld novel I hadn't read yet (forgot the title), with Gaiman's Graveyard Book next in the pipeline.

Right now I'm in the middle of

• Girls of Riyadh (بنات الرياض : رواية in the original Arabic) by Rajaa Alsanea
• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Män som hatar kvinnor in the original Swedish) by Stieg Larsson
• The Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown : Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash by Charles R. Morris
• Life Beyond Measure : Letters to My Great-Granddaughter by Sidney Poitier

As for what I've read during the break, it's somewhat hard for me to list those. I do keep track of the books I read, but not of when I read them. For example, I can't remember whether I finished Not on Our Watch : The Mission to End Genocide in Darfur and Beyond shortly before or shortly after the board crashed. Anyway, some recent reads coming to my mind are

• Thames : The Biography by Peter Ackroyd
• Wanderlust by Ann Aguirre
• Let Me In (Låt den rätte komma in in the original Swedish) by John Ajvide Lindqvist
• Candyfreak : A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America by Steve Almond
• Taking After Mudear by Tina McElroy Ansa
• Shadow Valley by Steven Barnes
• All the Windwracked Stars, Hammered, Scardown, and Worldwired by Elizabeth Bear
• Not on Our Watch : The Mission to End Genocide in Darfur and Beyond by Don Cheadle & John Prendergast
• Cherokee Thoughts, Honest and Uncensored by Robert J. Conley
• Lust, Loathing and a Little Lip Gloss by Kyra Davis
• Flotsametrics and the Floating World : How One Man's Obsession with Runaway Sneakers and Rubber Ducks Revolutionized Ocean Science by Curtis Ebbesmeyer and Eric Scigliano
• Karma Girl by Jennifer Estep
• The Ascent of Money : A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson
• Notes from the Backseat by Jody Gehrman
• Outliers : The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
• Chiva : A Village Takes On the Global Heroin Trade by Chellis Glendinning
• Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnik
• The Elegant Universe : Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory by Brian Greene
• A Perfect Red : Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire by Amy Butler Greenfield
• Winter in June by Kathryn Miller Haines
• Winter World : The Ingenuity of Animal Survival by Bernd Heinrich
• When Broken Glass Floats : Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge by Chanrithy Him
• The Thin Black Line : True Stories by Black Law Enforcement Officers Policing America's Meanest Streets compiled by Hugh Holton
• How to Build a Dinosaur : Extinction Doesn't Have to Be Forever by Jack Horner and James Gorman
• Spring Flowers, Spring Frost : A Novel (Lulet e ftohta të marsit: Roman in the original Albanian) by Ismail Kadare
• The Story of My Life by Helen Keller
• Freedom's Sisters by Naomi Kritzer
• The Pets (Gæludýrin : Skáldsaga in the original Icelandic) by Bragi Ólafsson
• Stranger Than Fiction : True Stories by Chuck Palahniuk
• The Helmet of Horror : The Myth of Theseus and the Minotaur (Шлем ужаса : креатифф о Тесее и Минотавре in the original Russian) by Victor Pelevin
• Alex & Me : How a Scientist and a Parrot Discovered a Hidden World of Animal Intelligence--and Formed a Deep Bond in the Process by Irene M. Pepperberg
• The Omnivore's Dilemma : A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan
• The Long Walk : The True Story of a Trek to Freedom (Długi marsz in the original Polish) by Slavomir Rawicz
• Death in Spring : A Novel (La mort i la primavera : Novel·la in the original Catalan) by Mercè Rodoreda
• The Flock by James Robert Smith
• Q & A : A Novel by Vikas Swarup
• Chitra, a Play in One Act (চিত্রা in the original Bengali) and The Home and the World (ঘরে বাইরে in the original Bengali) by Rabindranath Tagore
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas : A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream by Hunter S. Thompson
• Eats, Shoots & Leaves : The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss
• The People's Republic of Desire by Annie Wang
• Night (און די וועלט האָט געשוויגן in the original Yiddish) by Elie Wiesel
• I'd Rather We Got Casinos, and Other Black Thoughts by Larry Wilmore
• The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X with the assistance of Alex Haley

I've read all of these too.

But wait, there's more! Banks's latest SF novel is Matter : A Culture Novel, and he's written a lot of good non-SF (Canal Dreams is great) too as "Iain Banks" (no M.). Birmingham wrote two sequels to Weapons of Choice, Designated Targets : A Novel of the Axis of Time and Final Impact. Morgan recently started a fantasy series too, with The Steel Remains. I'd recommend all of them.

I haven't read that one (is it her new book based on a true story?), and have you read Abbott's Queenpin : A Novel?


edit: fixed typo
edit: added original titles for the translated books

Really? A pattern? I have no idea what you're talking about...

I haven't read Queenpin yet, mainly because before Bury Me Deep I didn't think I liked Abbott all that much, but I realized that she's the kind of author that spends about half of the book putting every piece into place just so before coming in and destroying it with a sledgehammer. After Bury Me Deep, I'm definitely going to read her other three novels (The Song is You, Die A Little and the aforementioned Queenpin)

I love that a non-fiction books is titled How To Build A Time Machine. I remember having read a couple of Davies' books back when I was studying Physics at university.

I really envy you, people. How do you have so much time to read all those books? Trying to be serious with my writing and drawing, doing some paid work, and having a (not very spectacular due to economy, but more or less normal) social life, I just have like 40 minutes a day to read. It looks like I'm doing something wrong with my time, but I still have to find out what it is.

Anyway, about books...
The best one I've read recently is Some sense of reality, by Graham Greene. It's a collection of short stories.
I'm currently reading Peter David's The woad to Wuin, which is part 2 of his Sir Apropos of Nothing humor/fantasy trilogy. But I've been reading it for a long time, as I've been more focused on comics lately.

I noticed that you two only listed books in English here. Do those just happen to be your only current reads, or are you leaving books in German, Spanish, Catalan, etc. out of your posts here for the sake of Anglophone monoglots here like me? If it's the latter, don't feel you have to do that! I won't feel offended if you mention books I can't read (I'll just feel a little envious since I suck at non-native language learning and feel happy for you that you are fluent in more than one language )


Good question!

My commute is roughly 45 minutes each way. Since I commute by subway instead of driving a car I can spend that time on crosswords, people-watching, reading, etc. instead of trying to survive the traffic conditions. That's 1.5 hours/day, 7.5 hours/week, and at least 30 hours/month.

Meanwhile, I finished roughly 43 books from mid-March to mid-August. That's roughly 43 books/5 months, or roughly 8.6 books/month.

At least 30 hours/roughly 8.6 books = around 3.5 hours/book, which sounds about right to me given that most of them had only 200something or 300something pages (and the nonfiction books' pages aren't always solid text either but sometimes have maps, diagrams, photos, etc.). Then there's extra time on subways or buses to run errands (like returning stuff to the library), the occasions my friends and I don't have matching lunch breaks, etc.

So I actually don't think you're doing anything wrong with your time. All that other stuff you're up to is worthwhile as well! Happening to have a shorter commute than I do (if you do) sure isn't doing anything wrong either.

Besides, you're trying to be serious with your writing and drawing! Doesn't that time sort of contribute to at least someone's leisure reading (all these books I'm reading had to get written first)?

Yeah, it's all about making time when you can. I do most of my reading while walking to or from work, at least when it's bright enough out. A little while actually at work but waiting for it to start. I very rarely read while just 'at home'.

However, while reading and walking can be mastered without much trouble, reading and driving, I would not recommend.

Most of my reading happens while commuting or when I decide to go hang out at a bar and drink cranberry juice all afternoon. My volume varies from month to month and depending on what I'm focusing on at the time. I have my fiction, non-fiction phases. Each of which is broken down even further. Sometimes I may finish a book or two in a week, other times I may be on the same book all month. And there are times when I get tired of all the words without any pictures and all I read is comics or GNs.