What are you reading right now?

"Made to Kill" by Adam Christopher (because I love books with a robot protagonist, especially if said robot protagonist is a detective).

Also just discovered one of my new favorite ongoing comics...."Injection" by Warren Ellis (just read the Vol. 1 trade and I can't wait for issue 6, which drops tomorrow). I'm just afraid that, like most Warren Ellis comics that I love (Desolation Jones, Fell, Doktor Sleepless), it will be absolutely spellbinding for several issues and then all work on it will abruptly stop with no real explanation and the story arcs that were set up will never be resolved. It's a vicious cycle, but it gets me every time.
 
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Set This House On Fire by William Styron.
I like exploitation-style stories about people descending into depravity and just fucked up shit happening to people who pretend to be better then they're not. My copy is on pulp paper so that's a bonus for me.
 
I finished My Name is Red. I...liked it. It's not an easy read but there's enough in it to make me want to come back to it and tackle it further.

Between books at the moment.
 
Not a book, but a pretty interesting thing anyway - "Fear, Loathing and Gumbo on the Campaign Trail '72", a dystopian (and surprisingly realistic) alternative history story at AlternateHistory.com.
A little spanner thrown into the history's clockwork in the form of the Governor of Louisiana McKeithen successfully becoming a Democratic candidate at the 1972 presidential election starts a chain of events that will later on throw the United States into the Second Great Depression. The butterfly effect makes many other parts of the world, especially East Asia and Southern Africa, go to total shit.
 
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We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. Girl's sister is taken away from the family when she's really little and it fucks the whole family up, girl included. Guilt, denial, animal-rights based terrorism, all good.

If you want to read it, I would strongly recommend against reading Amazon's blurb or any of the book flap info because it's pretty (in my opinion, stupidly) upfront about a major plot revelation that happens about a third of the way in. The author does a masterful job of building up to the reveal in a way that is both heartfelt and suggests that "not all is well" and the reveal casts the whole story in a new light. The publisher ruins that by putting the revelation front and center in the blurb. Just know that it's an amazing book and you should totally read it.
 
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Going through William Gibson's Burning Chrome Anthology. Just finished Johnny Mnemonic.

I'm a filthy whore for good cyber punk.

Or even bad cyberpunk. I unironically enjoyed Snow Crash
 
I'm trying to read things outside of my normal range of reading material, so I'm working my way through Chigoze Obioma's The Fishermen. It's about four brothers whose actions trash their very close knit family. It's...different. The kind of book, I think, where I'm going to have to finish it and then consider it for a while before saying much about it.
 
Portrait of a Killer -- Jack the Ripper: Case Closed by Patricia Cornwell

It's such an shoddy, inaccurate steaming pile of bullshit that I'm writing a report on it for my Composition II, Technical Writing class.
 
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Starting on the Inspector Rebus series by Ian Rankin with "Knots and Crosses."

Also kinda stalled over halfway through Predator, Prey by Rob Sanders (the second book in the WH40k: Beast Arises series). It's just not that interesting but I have to plow through it because I know this series is going to get really awesome later on.
 
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Tolstoy's The Cossacks is in the required reading for the History of Russia course I'm taking.

I'm stoked to find out if I like young, dissolute nobleman Tolstoy as mach as I like old, mystical preacher Tolstoy.
 
Fiction: diamond Age or a young lady's primer
Non fiction : the end of history and the last man
 
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The Gift of Stones by Jim Crace. Guy's been my one of my favorite authors for a while and I'm working my way through his collection. This one's about a Stone Age village of stoneworkers and such on the cusp of the beginning of the Bronze Age in their area.
 
The Wake, Paul Kingsnorth.

This might be the most interesting experimental piece of literature I've read. It's historical fiction set in the years following the Norman Conquest of England where there were a number of Anglo-Saxon uprisings and such and follows one Anglo-Saxon landowner leading one such rebellion and he seems to be veering into fanaticism and all in all is a complicated character that's been interesting to follow.

But what makes the novel kind of experimental is that the guy tried to capture a sense of the AS mindset and worldview by writing the entire novel in psuedo-Old English. It's eminently readable: there aren't letters like thorn and ash, no cases, and words tend to be pretty similar to their modern English spelling. It's just stripped of words rooted in French or Latin (so they wouldn't necessarily be in the vocabulary of the main character) and uses Old English words for some things. It took me a little while to get into it (and this is having taken an Old English class before) and I've actually picked it up and put it down a few times in the past year, but it's bizarre (in a good way), alien (also a good way - something too few historical fiction novels get right), and utterly fascinating. Sometimes the lack of grammar and word depth makes conversations come across as though it's an excerpt from My Immortal the fanfic rather than something written by an educated adult human being, but it's minor.
 
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