What are you reading right now?

This is my pick for the weekend:

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AnOminous said:
I like "restored text." What do they mean by that? Did they rip it apart and throw it on the floor again?
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I think it refers to stuff that was originally cut from the book for editorial reasons. I have a restored edition of The Stand that has about two hundred pages of cut or censored content restored that wasn't present in the commercial edition.
 
Our Lady of the Flowers, by Jean Genet. It's a novel about transvestite prostitutes and pimps in early 20th century Paris. It's a strange book, the author frequently and with no signal switches from the characters' perspectives to his own, where it was being written, in Prison.
DuskEngine said:
Can anyone recommend some good cosmic horror that isn't by Lovecraft?
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Sorry for the late reply, but have you ever read anything by Thomas Ligotti? He's one of my favourite authors ever and his main influence is Lovecraft. His stories are less overtly science fiction focused, though - most of the horror is derived from a philosophical slant.

Most of his books are out of print and hard to come by, but Teatro Grottesco is a good collection of short stories that's still in print.
 
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Anybody trying to suppress the feels enough to read "The Shepherds Crown" by Terry Pratchett? I opened it today and all the quotes on the jacket praising him were in the fucking past tense and I decided I needed to give it another day or so.
 
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The Billy Boy: The Life and Death of LVF Leader Billy Wright
A cult figure among loyalists, despised and feared by nationalists, Billy 'King Rat' Wright is reputed to have been involved in a number of sectarian murders before he himself was shot dead by republican gunmen inside the Maze Prison in 1997.

Wright became involved with loyalist paramilitaries at the age of 16, and in the early 1990s he emerged as the UVF commander in the Mid-Ulster area. The Billy Boy documents Wright's role in the Drumcree dispute of 1995-96 and his split from the UVF, recounting how he ignored both a death threat and an order to leave Northern Ireland, only to remain in Portadown and form the Loyalist Volunteer Force. It covers Wright's trial and subsequent imprisonment for a crime it has been claimed was set up by the State; recounts the circumstances of his killing inside a top-security prison; and investigates the allegations of State collusion in Wright's death.

Terrifically gripping and often disturbing, The Billy Boy is an exhaustive account of a notorious figure of the Troubles, whose life and death were surrounded by controversy and political debate.
 
Right now I'm reading The Memory of Running by Ron McLarty. I read it like ten years ago, and it was one of my favorite books, so I'm finally rereading it again.
 
I came across this autobiography of Wendy's founder, Dave Thomas, while doing sorting for work. Since we're allowed to take an item or two, it looked interesting enough to check out.
 
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Memories being short and everything, this was released in French in early January and Houellebecq (pronounced "Wellbeck") was on the cover of the Charlie Hebdo issue which was current at the time of the massacre.

It's ... odd. I think the English translation will be coming this month. It's not as good as his earlier books (Extension du domaine de la lutte, published as Whatever in English) but I guess now that doesn't matter, as it's more or less the Satanic Verses of this decade. It will probably cause some kind of scandal in the UK and become a best-seller in the US. I thought I'd try to give it a shot and judge it as "literature" before it became a "cause."

Basic plot is that another stand-in for Houellebecq -- a vaguely boring, and bored, professor -- finds himself peripherally involved after France begins a slide into sharia, following an alliance between the establishment Left and Islamist groups to prevent the Right (aka the National Front under Marine Le Pen) from taking power. Like most of Houellebecq's books, these things are happening mostly in the margins and are perceived as they have an affect on the rest of the life of the protagonist.
 
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Took a short break from this when I became too busy to devote sufficient time to it. But I'm hoping to finish it during the weekend.
 
I'm taking an Adolescents' Literature course this semester (analyzing how to teach books to kids and common themes in kids' books), so I've been library spelunking for outside reading material and came up with some pretty good ones thanks to my younger cousins and their friends. I'm currently plowing through the Divergent series, Eleanor and Park (which I'd whole-heartedly recommend), and even doing some old-school stuff by reading the first third or so of the Animorphs books.
 
I'm reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, a multi-generational family saga mostly dealing with a fat Dominican-American nerd from New Jersey who loves designing tabletop RPGs and can't get no pussy. It's real good.
 
It's a webcomic, not literature or even a physical book, but I've been rereading Narbonic recently. It remains the greatest webcomic of all time, and watching a sort of time-lapse of its growth from a relatively simple and cartoony strip to the well-drawn epic it ends up becoming is pretty incredible.

For those of you who want to read it for the first time, make sure you turn the commentary off, as it contains major spoilers.
 
Not to be a dick grad student, but I've been reading a lot of Plantinga lately. Idk, but I really respect the man for his steadfast defense of theism in the face of today's religious climate. Also, depending upon your native intuition, his "victorious ontological argument" may well be sound, which is really an impressive achievement.
 
I've been somewhat at a loss as of late for what book to read. Henderson the Rain King is turning into a slog and I've been reading it so intermittently that I think I've lost the point. So for lack of anything better to read and because I want to just read something and with autumn coming, I'm reading my absolute favorite novel Harvest by Jim Crace. This is easily the third or fourth time I've read it since discovering it two years ago. It's a really chilling, sad book (but wistful sad, nostalgic sad, not depressing) with some absolutely gorgeous language:

Since spring we’ve waited with our fingers crossed as our better barley steadily renounced its green and let itself go tawny. From the lane, looking down toward the tracery of willows on the brook, the top end of our barley meadow, bristling and shivering on the breeze, showed us at last its ochers and its cadmiums, its ambers and its chromes. And the smells, which for so long in this slow summer were faint and damp, became nutlike and sugary. They promised winter ales and porridges. The awns and whispers of the barley’s ears were brittle and dry enough to chit-chat-chit every time they were disturbed, nattering with ten thousand voices at every effort of the wind or every scarper of a rabbit, mouse or bird. They said, “We’ve had enough. Our heads are baked and heavy now. We’re dry. Bring out your blades and do your worst.”
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