What are you reading right now?

Cunty Boo Boo said:
Hey, I'm currently listening to an audiobook version of Starship Troopers!
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If you decide you like Heinlein (going off the possible assumption this is your first outing with Heinlein) I recommend "Glory Road" and "Job: A Comedy of Justice" (which is not only my favorite Heinlein novel, but my favorite novel of all time)
 
Higher Education, which itself borrows a lot from Heinlein. Though it is a bit too prone to bringing up teen sex and the future seems to be a bit of autistic rage at the idea of there being a nanny state. Still, it's not particularly egregious, and it's pretty interesting. Though I do tend to get more pissy at a book in the middle, and I'm about a quarter in it so far.
 
Just finished Neptune's Brood by Charles Stross. It was pretty good, IMO.


I am a massive Stross fanboy, though.
 
"Commando Courageous" a diary of the Boer War by R. W. Schikkerling.

It is a very informative and thrilling narrative only slightly edited from Schikkerling's original diary since he translated it to English himself for the published manuscript, though I'm a bit puzzled by this passage:
I made a comfortable bed in the fallen leaves and was about to lie down under a bower when the men in the wood were ordered to saddle. This was as well for the bower, it seemed, had served many purposes, and the smell was more than ancient and fishlike, and reminded me of the woman in Proverbs VII who said to the young man void of understanding, "I have perfumed my bed with myrrh, aloes and cinnamon".
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It seems to me that Schikkerling is, in a roundabout way, saying that this corner of the woods where he was resting stank of jizz and pussy. I'm not very well read in bible scripture, but that seems to be the point he is getting at with the Proverbs allusion. It just really struck me as an odd thing to be included in Schikkerling's diary since Boers are a notoriously socially/religiously conservative people and this diary was penned from 1900-1902 when the general social climate was much more conservative across the board, although I have gotten the impression that Schikkerling was a bit more liberal and openminded than most Boers due to an extensive education and largely urban upbringing.
 
The Fables comic series, I just finished 1 and now on number 2.

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Been on a science fiction kick lately...

Just finished Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie. It was complete garbage, unfocused, characters who are incredibly inconsistent, non-chronological storytelling when it would have worked better in chronological order, and internal inconsistency of worldbuilding. I'm also fairly certain the editor was retarded or incredibly baked, due to all the grammatical errors and sentence fragments in the published book. I'm baffled how it won five awards.

In the middle of The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula LeGuin. Stopped for a bit because some of the worldbuilding is pretty decent and the prose itself is fine, but a few of the things in the text broke my suspension of disbelief. (No rape or war whatsoever when dealing with a group of clannish, tribalistic humans, solely because they lack physical sex at almost any given time? Them not having a concept of human unity or oneness, despite their forming various groups and countries, using language, being social, and having communal farms? Bull. Shit.)

Just started Asimov's first Foundation book. Liking it thus far, but I'm pretty early in, so it's a bit premature to say anything else.
 
Just put half-a-dozen books on hold through my library--I have a bad tendency to get halfway through a series and give up, but I just requested the end of the Furies of Calderon series, the next couple Foundation books, and Robogenesis (think the book World War Z, but with robots. Most definitely not the movie World War Z).
 
I'm going back to reading "Kiss of the Spider Woman" by Manuel Puig and see if I can finish it this time. The book has an interesting style where its done mainly out of dialogue with no traditional narrative. Other than needing a light pencil to mark when someone is saying something (I made an"M" for Molina's parts) since sometimes I've gotten a bit mixed up; it's a good book.
 
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