Finished The Martian by Andy Weir. Great book! One of the best I read recently.

It has comedy, action, drama and great hard sci-fi. I cannot recommend it more. Just ready it.

Broken Angels by Richard Morgan

This one is a noir-cyberpunk that follows Takashi Kovacs, a genetically-engineered warrior-for-hire that's helping a government put down a bloody revolution. Morgan's one of my favorite fantasy authors - and his SF is just as good as his S&S.

Started Blood Meridian. Read 20 page, put down book. Seriously it reminds me too much of neuromancer in style, I cannot repeat that experience again.

So I jumped to Slaughterhouse Five, following a list of 100 best books of English literature of the century.

i could never finish that one

At least is readable. And I am enjoying it, of course it is not fun as other books, but it is interesting. And I like to variate my menu of lecture.

Ugh, I failed a trivia question last night. Who wrote The Prince and the Pauper?

...I said Charles Dickens. Omg

And I will finish it fast, as it is short. I really liked Gulliver's Travels, so ...

Finished "Tracked" by Jenny Martin -- basically dystopian novel but with NASCAR. Not good.

Read "Half-Resurrection Blues" by Daniel Jose Older -- a half-dead Puerto Rican in Brooklyn hunts down aberrant ghosts for the city's Ghost Council and stumbles upon a plot to tear open a hole into the Netherworld. Good, pulpy SF/F fiction that actually has minorities in it! Would recommend. I don't think it's brilliant or anything, but it was fun.

Reading "Afterworlds" now by Scott Westerfeld. It's a split story, with chapters alternating between an 18 year old girl who has just become an author in New York, and chapters from her book, which focuses on a girl who survives a terrorist attack by hiding in the afterlife and returns to earth able to see dead people. I'm not sure what the conflict is yet, given that there are two books and so the plotting feels twice as long, but I really liked his Steampunk stuff with Leviathan so I'll keep reading.

Just finished Ursula K Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness. Dope sci-fi/fantasy/xenoanthropology etc

The Heroes - Joe Abercrombie. Joe's got a knock for making some pretty likable bastards.

Blood and Bone by Ian Esselmont. A mercenary company whose members are cursed with immortality sail for a spooky jungle continent to deal with a renegade merc. Malaz is definitely my favorite fantasy world.

Finished Afterworlds--it ends better than its slow start would lead you to believe.

Read the first Saga trade; very good! I ordered the next and on a whim bought the first Rat Queens trade too.

Reading Brandon Sanderson's Steelheart now. It's good, not great, but I like the all-superheroes-are-actually-villains idea.

I also bought the collected works of Russell Edson and Zbigniew Herbert, two of my favorite poets. Reading them slowly, in between novels.

Saga is Very Dope, have the first five trades

I am reading David Foster Wallace's collection of essays, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again"! His essay writing is very good, very cogent; takes his love of words and forces it into a readable form. I'd read and loved a lot of his sports writing re: tennis, and if you can find any of his works online I'd highly recommend it. Of particular interest, especially for the current political season: see if you can find a copy of "Up, Simba", in which Wallace spends time with the McCain 2000 campaign for Rolling Stone. The essay was published as a standalone work but also in the collection "Consider the Lobster", which is filled with other gems

The Dragon in the Sword -

John Daker finds himself in the Six Realms, reincarnated as Prince Flamadin of Draachenheim. However, the real Flamadin has been murdered by his sister, Sharadim, in a bid to seize control of Draachenheim. From this Realm she launches a search for the Dragon Sword in an attempt to become one of the Dukes of Hell, the highest rank one may achieve in serving Chaos. Daker, reincarnated as Flamadin, must find the sword before Sharadim and lead the forces of humanity against Sharadim and her armies of Eldren.

I like the turnaround here - in the first novel, The Eternal Champion, Daker betrayed humanity and led the Eldren in a conquest of genocide against mankind. So here its kind of like the pendulum swinging the other way.

Reading the Spearwielders Tale by RA Salvatore. Pretty good book, quite a bit of funny parts in it as well. I really like his style of writting.

Just finished...

The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter
The Borgia Bride by Jeanne Kalogridis
Coronets and Steel by Sherwood Smith

None of them were real though provoking, but the first and last were nice adventures. Borgia Bride has a lot of nice political stuff, but it's more about a this is what might have happened since it is based on historical events.

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood.

I picked it off the shelf literally just so I would have something to read because I knew if I waited around for something I actually wanted to read I'd be waiting a very long time, also I'd never read anything outside of my comfort zone, my comfort zone being stupid crap. I literally just looked at the cover, saw it won a Booker Prize so it probably wouldn't be awful, and said 'screw it, this'll do'. And it is a bloody good book actually, it took a while to get going but then it got kind of crazy. I've only got ~60 pages left so I'll probably finish it soon

There are other Atwood books but my understanding is that this one is outside her norm somewhat

Finished it

I wish there was a little bit of a happier ending, but I guess there's the possibility of Sabrina coming back and discovering she's not related to the Griffens. I also missed the fact that Laura had been referring to Richard in her final conversation with Iris, and Richard had blackmailed Laura with the possibility of shopping Alex, but at least I could find that out on the Internet. So... yeah. I enjoyed it anyway.

Actually, thinking about it, it would've felt a bit cheaper if its ending was any happier, so scratch that.