What are you reading?

[Stupot]

I feel the same... You walk into a library or a bookshop and, yeah you can dismiss half of them for being chick-lit or 'not your cup of tea', but that still leaves hundreds, if not thousands that ARE your cup of tea, with many more being published each week.  There's no chance in Hell of reading them all, even if you're a fussy reader.

Even my own bookshelf is full of books that I've bought but will probably never read now.

And yet, despite all this, it's apparently difficult to get published :-(

[SSH]

Since its expensive getting English books here in China, I'm reading lots of stuff from Project Gutenberg/Feedbooks. See http://sugarlandren.blogspot.com/search/label/eBooks for some more on that.

I'd definately recommend Cory Doctorow for sci-fi fans and Rafael Sabatini for Pirate fans.

[Snarky]

I've got two books on the go at the moment.  The first is The Secret Agent by Conrad.  Right at th beginning of this, but so far so good.  And the second is The Little Friend by Donna Tartt.  The story hasn't really taken off yet, but I really loved her other book, The Secret History so I decided to give this one a go.

Has anyone read any of these books?  What did you think?

I am a huge fan of Conrad, and The Secret Agent has some of his best work in it, although it's a bit uneven and hard to get into (like several of his novels). I'm currently sort-of reading another of his books (it's also hard to get into), with a very un-PC title... let us call it The Black Gentleman of the 'Narcissus'. I've put it aside for the moment to read Kim by Kipling.

I also enjoyed The Secret History, though the whole setup is a bit cliché (the whole "tight clique of brainy, romantic student outsiders turn cultish and homicidal." I am a sucker for that formula, though; for good Tartt-inspired fun, see 'The Last Supper' with a young Cameron Diaz, Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl, The Magicians by Lev Grossman, and The Likeness by Tana French).

The last book I finished was Dark Places by Gillian Flynn. I quite enjoyed her first novel, Sharp Objects, pulpy and gimmick-twisty as it was. Its depiction of pig farming made me a reluctant, frequently relapsing vegetarian. This new book isn't quite as distinctive, but it's a perfect airport or beach novel. You can finish it in about an afternoon.

[Monsieur OUXX]

I'm slowly getting around to reading Physics for Game Developers, which I had bought used a few weeks back.

Those old theoritical books are sooo good. You rarely understand everything or put everything in application, but it helps so much acquiring new ideas. And it's thrilling the way they mix abstract concepts/algorithms, clever optimization ideas, and implementation methods.

You don't see so many of them anymore, because of the Internet. I have a few of them, they're like Bibles (e.g. "Zen of graphics programming", by Michael Abrash). Nowadays, when you go to a book store, you have hundreds of "Word for dummies" - a real pity.

Even here in Dublin, in the "Chapters" bookstore (that used to be a HUGE bookstore full of used books), they have divided the size of the IT books shelves by 3 a few weeks ago :'-(

[Igor Hardy]

For native English speakers who read Conrad, how do you evaluate him purely from the standpoint of his language style?

He's very much my idol as being Polish he managed to learn literary English to such great proficiency. And he did it while he was working on ships!?  :o

Yet here in Poland his language skills' praises may be exaggerated, so I'm curious what do think people who are capable of evaluating Conrad's style themselves.

Of course Conrad is also a terrific storyteller, but that's another topic.

[Snarky]

I'm not a native speaker, but for my money he's a terrific stylist, and writes excellent English. Of course, he had editors and sometimes collaborators to help him out should he occasionally slip up. In the annotated edition of Under Western Eyes they note places where the published version differs from Conrad's manuscript, and it's almost always a correction of some obvious error, usually punctuation-related.

[discordance]

I love Conrad stylistically. He writes gorgeously. I can never really get into his stories as stories, though, just because the style of his writing is so dense and full of symbolism and whatnot.