What are you reading right now?

[Andrew Gifford]

Since I've moved into publishing, I've found that getting the time to read for pleasure is somewhat elusive.  Right now, during the rare quiet moments, I'm finishing off Dennis Lehane's excellent detective series -- the five book Patrick Kenzie/Angelo Gennaro mysteries.  A perfect way to escape when your job is, pretty much, reading.  The last book is Prayers for Rain (and here's the Amazon link):

Prayers for Rain (Patrick Kenzie/Angela Gennaro Novels)

The first one is A Drink Before the War:

A Drink Before the War (Patrick Kenzie/Angela Gennaro Novels)



Followed by:

Darkness, Take My Hand (Patrick Kenzie/Angela Gennaro Novels)

Sacred

Gone, Baby, Gone: A Novel

What are you reading?

[cyberianexile]

Just finished:  Prisoner of Trebekistan by Bob Harris, The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester (I love Bester), Kate Wilhelm's Storyteller (memoirs of the Clarion Workshop), and The Geographer's Library by Jon Fassman (which was uneven but had its moments). 

Currently reading Houdini: The Making of America's First Superhero (I can't resist Houdini biographies).

Currently in the iPod: Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.  My county library claims to have over 20,000 audiobooks, the majority of which are unabridged.  I find audiobooks a godsend.  It's a way to squeeze in "reading" time while I'm doing errands, washing dishes, taking a walk...or when my eyes are just too buggy from reading/writing all day. 

[Andrew Gifford]

Do update me on that Houdini biography when you're done.

Bester is wonderful.  Spent a long layover at Heathrow with The Demolished Man and loved it.

I've just begun the latest from Iain M. Banks -- Matter. Been a fan of his ever since I picked up State of the Art on a lark in 95.

[Phoemus]

I've been reading, for the past month or so, Richard Ford's The Sportswriter. Terrific book. Slow-moving, but teriffic. Also just started Colby Buzzell's My War, which seems funny. Oh, yeah, and I just finished The Long March by William Styron.

The Long March is listed as a "novel" on the dust jacket. But I think it's really a novella. I've been meaning to read Richard Matheson. I think I'll start him soon.

[Phoemus]

I love audiobooks too. (They're great to read on the Metro! on my zombie way home from work.) But I find that when I put them on my Ipod the order gets screwed up. Should I make files to put them under? Is that how you do it?

[cyberianexile]

Phoemus, if you create a playlist on your iTunes for the audiobook, you can drag the playlist onto your iPod and the track order will be preserved.

Does that help?  I can give you a step by step from CDs to iTunes to iPod if you're having trouble.  It took me a few tries to get the knack of it.

[Susan Cushman]

Just finished Dinty Moore's memoir, Between Panic and Desire. He was one of my workshp leaders at the Creative Nonfiction Conference in Oxford (MS) last weekend. Now reading Kim Sunee's memoir, Trail of Crumbs: Hunger, Love and the Search for Home. She's a South Korean adoptee. (I have two grown adopted "kids" from South Korea.) Also just finished several Anne Lamott books, and loved Grace Eventually. Having finished writing a fiction novel last year, I put it on the shelf (needs lots of revision) and started writing creative nonfiction, so that's the genre I'm mainly reading right now. Pitched a creative nonfiction book to an agent at the CNF Conference and she asked for a sample chapter, so I'm busy revising one to send to her!

[Susan Cushman]

So... has no one read anything since my post almost a week ago? Since then I finished Kim Sunee's wonderful memoir, Trail of Crumbs, and now I'm reading my friend, Joshilyn Jackson's new (last week!) novel, The Girl Who Stopped Swimming, http://www.joshilynjackson.com/tgwss.html. I posted about it on my blog todayhttp://wwwpenandpalette-susancushman.blogspot.com/.... awesome book so far!

[Andrew Gifford]

For me, I'm afraid the drawback of publishing books is that my personal reading slows down. 

So, over the last two weeks, I've read The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex about 12 times.  Whew!

It hit the printer yesterday, so I'll decompress and then get back to that Iain Banks book.

[Andrew Gifford]

I've fallen far behind on this thread!  What I'm actually reading are tons of manuscripts and so on... But I have made some time for a couple titles.

Raw Spirit

Continuing my Iain Banks kick with his nonfiction about a tour through Scotland to drink himself out of his head.  It's really great stuff, though he's clearly uncomfortable doing nonfiction.  That's a drawback... But the writing is still smart and witty, and every page makes you want a dram of scotch.

Also reading:

One Pill Makes You Smaller : A novel

It's quite a good read.  I didn't know what to expect going in, and am very much enjoying it.

[Andrew Gifford]

Read Robert Stone's Prime Green in the Atlanta airport, because that's what endless layovers are for.  It was very absorbing...a great read.  Stone looking back at the 60's and all of his shenanigans with the likes of Neal Cassady and Ken Kesey.  His brief stint as a stringer in Vietnam is pretty glossed over...but still a nice little quickie personal history of the era.

Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties (P.S.)

Currently reading The World Was Going Our Way, which is the second volume of the Mitrokhin Archive (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitrokhin_Archive).  The volumes are standalone.  The first one was more of the old cloak and dagger relationship with the US and Europe.  It was also written at a time when much of the archive was classified and Mitrokhin wanted to be anonymous, so it suffers somewhat.

Fortunately, those restrictions are lifted for the second volume.  Mitrokhin died a couple years before it came out, and the Brits (who hold the archive) cleared most of the content.  So we get a much richer study of the KGB -- this time focused on their Third World actions.  Latin America, Africa, and the Mideast.  It's great reading, as the Soviets move into the collapsing colonial world.  Of course, all this culminates in the Afghanistan debacle.  After that, the KGB become a shadow of their former selves, basically just phoning in a report from a bar and saying not to worry, the world is going our way...

Really fascinating stuff.  Despite the limitations, the first volume is worth looking at as well.  But here's the second --


The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World

[Andrew Gifford]

Just started...and loving it.

In My Blood: Six Generations of Madness and Desire in an American Family