What are you reading now?

You know the deal.

At the moment, I'm reading The Red Pony by Steinbeck. It's about a pony. A red pony named Gabilan.

Outliers by Malcom Gladwell. 10,000 hours, genetic predisposition vs. environment. The Canadian hockey system and why players born in certain months never make it. Darwinian economics and timing...lots of concepts that blow things out of the water. What did someone once say? Something like "...and then there are the thoughts that others came up with, which you simply accept as your own." This book challenges those thoughts.

Two other books finally arrived today -- The Night In Question by Tobias Wolff, and Shiloh & Other Stories by Bobbie Ann Mason. Only got a few pages into each, but I can tell they're good. Can't wait to dig in over the next couple of days.

11/22/63 by Stephen King. A very different book from most of his past work, highly detailed, well written and thought provoking. It's also a good work-out for the hands and forearms at 800+ pages.

Couple of oldies from the library ...

Always Going Home by Ursula LeGuin. A massive pseudo-ethnography of the Kesh, a tribe of earth-humans in the distant future. I may purchase this for reference. LeGuin at her insidiously neferious best.

Listening to Inherent Vice (=Original Sin?) by Thomas Pynchon. Massively hilarious, a bit hard to follow without seeing the character names. Not sure how I skipped Pynchon in my unruly youth.

Mockingjay, by Suzanne Collins. (Book three in The Hunger Games trilogy).

I find her writing for the first two books to be a bit slow and tedius in the First Act, (a bit too much focus on tasty foods and pretty clothes) but she always makes up for it with intensity and action in the Third Act.

The third book seems to be starting off at a more respectable pace, as (finally) the irrelevant stuff has been wiped away. Her world-building is very unique, and the plot is impressing me more and more as it develops. There are several layers of conflict occuring at once, from the personal (the protagonist's struggle to stay alive) to the interpersonal (her conflicting, budding romance with two male protagonists), to the societal (her blossoming role in a larger war between two factions of humanity).

The writing prose itself doesn't impress me, but the story itself is quite engaging. I can see why it's so popular.

I'm also reading Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami, which reads quite simply (though I'm wondering if things have been lost in the Japanese to English translation), with a hint of the supernatural. From reading Murakami's short stories, I'm sure there will be some unexpected twists. There are currently two plot lines happening simultaneously, and I'm sure somehow the two protagonists will end up converging in the end. Looking forward to seeing how it develops.

And lastly, I'm reading: A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan. I don't think any modern writer today can compete with Egan in terms of intellectual flair. Her prose smacks of so much erudition that it actually makes me feel like a simpleton at times. She's juggling a plethora of characters in this book, and each chapter jumps to different heads, different time periods, and different forms of writing style. It's all superb, but also a bit challenging to keep track of where the storyline lies. I'm sure when it's over it'll all make sense, though. Hopefully it's not too far over my head.

I've got a couple of things in play at the moment, namely, a selection of poems by Arthur Rimbaud, also, a very large compendium of Spenser's works. This very moment, I'm re-reading The Great Gatsby, as it's been several years.

Currently I am one last goodbye by Kay Guilderdale, the Lynn Guilderdale story x :)

Run by James A. Moore. It's similar to Maximum Ride by James Patterson but with a different twist.

Somewhere behind the morning - Frances McNiel.
A paper back I picked up from my local thrift shop.
It's the first grown up book I've read that's written in diary form. Young Julia, the daughter of a working class German immigrant struggles to hold her family together in pre war england 1914.
I am enjoying the rough yet clever style of writing. It is anything but over written and pompous without being simple. The author captures Julia's witty stubbornness and determination which has me rooting for her to succeed and therefore established an emotional connection between character and reader.