What BOOK are you reading right now?

It's all in how you say it, I guess.

Kara, this is a sampling of books/authors (fiction) that I fine personal interest in; by no means a Great Books list but rather a personal interest list, no particular order.
Melville
Sherwood Anderson (Winesburg Ohio)
Sinclair Lewis (Main Street-Babbitt-Elmer Gantry)
Upton Sinclair
Theodore Dreiser (Sister Carrie-American Tragedy)
Edgar Lee Masters (Spoon River Anthology)
John Dos Passos (USA trilogy)
Herman Hesse (Glass Bead game)
Gunter Grass (Tin Drum)
Par Lagerkvist (The Dwarf-The Sybil)
Bernard Malamud (The Assistant- The Fixer)
Virgina Woolf (to the Lighthouse)
Jerzy Kosiński (Being There-Painted Bird)
Arthur Koestler (Darkness at noon)
Anthony Burgess (A Clockwork Orange)
George Orwell (Animal Farm)
William Golding ( Pincher Martin )
well, that's a start, one might say I have eclectic taste.

me also, Ossobuco...I hated Anna Karenina. What a wimp! Maybe it was the 19th C view of women, but it really turned me off. I liked Solzhenitsyn very much. The Cancer Ward affected me as I worked oncology many years as well as ICU as a nurse.

That's interesting. I remember almost nothing of Cancer Ward except that it was a fairly painful read, but that I slogged along and had an eventual positive take on it, whatever it was I thought.

On Karenina, I had a similar reaction to House of Mirth by Edith Wharton - couldn't finish either book.

Sorry for that giant skipped space in my earlier post - my cursor flipped out while I was posting, and I had thought I'd gotten it under control (something to do with lots of spell check underlinings).

Nice to see you back, VN!

I read the MAster and Margarita when I worked at the WSU bookstore in the early 1970s but I do not remember anything about other than the winking cat on the cover.

I decided, about 20 years ago, not to read any Russian novels because when I read a novel, I like to know as much as possible about the author and, if it is not a contemporary novel, as much as possible about the period either in which the novel was written or is about. I realized that I wasn't interested in Russia.

I liked The Idiot, Crime and Punishment, War and Peace, Some Maxim Gorky (titles elude me just now), and a few I can't call to mind just now. If Dr Zhivago was like the movie, I am glad I did not attempt it.

I'm somewhat the opposite in that much of my reading is a kind of travel, across the years and across the earth. That's long been my excuse for my interest in police procedurals, and behind many other books I read. I do usually read about the author, easier now that the internet is such a handy tool.

I forgot Dr. Zhivago on my list. I'm irritated with myself for not having read Crime and Punishment.
Yet.

i hated the movie version of Dr. Zhivago and looked forward to the PBS mini-series, which was supposed to be superior. I didn't like it any better.

At some point, I read that Dr. Zhivago was never considered a great novel but it was heavily promoted in the West as an anti-Communist piece. I started to read it. It begins by telling the reader of all the wonderful things that were named after the Zhivago family, including a cake, "a kind of baba au rhum . . ."

I was rather put off by the opening paragraph and got nowhere with the novel. I think I was still in high school when I attempted it.

There were several books that I had to avoid the first sentence in order to read the books. Those sentences were, "Howard Roark laughed." "Scarlet O'Hara was not beautiful." and "He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet . . ."

I tried to read War and Peace twice but stopped when the defeated Austrian general appeared and said, "You see before you the unfortunate MAck." Whether the translation was by Constance Garnett, I have no idea.

I recommend Gogol's Dead Souls to anyone interested in a Russian classic that eschews the wretchedness typically associated with Russian authors like Dostoyevsky. It's funny as hell.

His "August 1914" was interesting to me because I had studied the first WW in depth.

I have a question for (in alphabetical order) Cycloptichorn, littlek, tsarstepan, and any other Science Fiction buffs in this thread. Paul Krugman, my favorite columnist, mentioned in his blog that his favorite contemporary science fiction writer is one Charlie Stross. I have to confess I never heard of him. What is he like? Any book recommendations you can give me?

Don't know him. I need to find contemporary scifi writers, so let me know if you read and like him.

I tried him once. Couldn't get into that particular novel. Can't remember if it was my personal mood or it was because I didn't like his style. Techno heavy writer. My kind of good time reading.

He's pretty prolific a writer and he seems to get a lot of critics raving about his books. His books do have intriguing premises so I need to give him another chance as well.

I IM'ed my older son about Charlie Stross as he is the family's sci fi source. Just did it, so it will be awhile.

This is what wiki said about him. His picture says he has a sense of humor!

Charles David George "Charlie" Stross (born 18 October 1964) is a writer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. His works range from science fiction and Lovecraftian horror to fantasy. Stross was born in Leeds.

Stross is sometimes regarded as being part of a new generation of British science fiction writers who specialise in hard science fiction and space opera. His contemporaries include Alastair Reynolds, Ken MacLeod, Liz Williams, Neal Asher and Richard Morgan.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Stross published some role-playing game articles about Advanced Dungeons & Dragons in the White Dwarf magazine. Some of his creatures, such as the death knight, githyanki (borrowed from George R. R. Martin's book, Dying of the Light), githzerai, and slaad (a chaotic race notable for their rigid caste system) were later published in the Fiend Folio monster compendium .

His first published short story, "The Boys", appeared in Interzone in 1987. His first novel, Singularity Sky was published by Ace Books in 2003 and was nominated for the Hugo Award. A collection of his short stories, Toast: And Other Rusted Futures appeared in 2002. Subsequent short stories have been nominated for the Hugo Award, Nebula Award, and other awards. His novella "The Concrete Jungle" won the Hugo award for its category in 2005. His novel Accelerando won the 2006 Locus Award for best science fiction novel, was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for the year's best science fiction novel, and was on the final ballot for the Hugo Award in the best novel category. Glasshouse won the 2007 Prometheus Award and was on the final ballot for the Hugo Award in the best novel category. His novella "Missile Gap" won the 2007 Locus Award for best novella and most recently he was awarded the Edward E. Smith Memorial Award or Skylark at Boskone 2008.

In addition to working as a writer of fiction he has worked as a technical author, freelance journalist, programmer, and pharmacist at different times. He holds degrees in Pharmacy and Computer Science.
Rogue Farm, an animated film based on his 2003 short story of the same title, debuted in August 2004.

He was one of the Guests of Honour at Orbital 2008 the British National Science Fiction convention (Eastercon) in March 2008. He was the Author Guest of Honour at the Maryland Regional Science Fiction Convention (Balticon) in May 2009.

As his mother, I chuckled all the way through my reading of this bio. Charlie sounds like someone my son would love, both on the page and in person.

here's a couple of his stories on Tor.com
http://www.tor.com/?name=charlesstross&view=author

i've not read the Stross stories, but the Tor site has some great free short stories

Right now I'm reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thomson.

I just finished The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, which was one of the better novels (if utterly desolate and depressing) I've read in the last decade and a new favorite author. The rest of his books aren't available on the Kindle store till January but I will probably read each of them when they are.

Before that I'd read Pirate Latitudes, a very mediocre posthumous novel from the very mediocre, but still one of my favorites, Michael Crichton. It was not one of his best and I predictably wondered whether he'd ever intended it to be published (all posthumous work has this asterisk for me) or whether it was anywhere near finished.

I also bought The Tipping Point by Malcom Gladwell and finally got around to getting O Alquimista by Paulo Coelho. I'd been avoiding it because it was always sold in English or Spanish where I saw it, but I ran across the original-language Portuguese versions on Kindle and want to tackle them in Portuguese (it's been ten years since I've read a novel in Portuguese so it will be slow going initially).

As always, I'm looking for good recommendations. Right now I'm interested in behavioral economics and good fiction that are available on the kindle store.

Thanks, djjd!