What are you reading now?

Just started "Superabundance" by Marian Tupy.  The first chapter is berkleying awesome...

"Sand & Steel" (about the D-Day invasion) by Peter Caddick-Addams is really good so far.  Very interesting background and details about both the Allied and German forces in the run up to June 6, 1944.

So I hate to admit it, but I'm a lot like Ove. Get off my lawn!  BTW, pay no regard to that guy Otto in the "major motion picture" movie. Ove in the book is a much better lovable curmudgeon. It's a great book. Read the book. 

Now on the third book of the Children of Time trilogy by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

I highly recommend Children of Time for science fiction fans. It is really excellent. Best SF I've read since The Expanse series. Less grand in scope, but more focused and thoughtful without devolving into old-school SF self-indulgence.

The first book is able to stand alone. No need to read any subsequent books if you do not want to.

Premise is that humanity has expanded to the stars and is terraforming worlds. On one planet, they had planned to seed it with monkeys that would undergo forced evolution by being exposed to a tailored virus in order to bring them to a level where they could be servants to humans. Catastrophe happens, and the monkeys don't make it to the planet, but the evolutionary virus does...

Thousands of years later, an ark ship from a wasted Earth makes contact with this planet.

It deals with themes of communications, empathy for the strange and alien, and the reflexive thinking of humans that leads us to conflict and self-destruction.

The ending actually surprised me, but in a very well earned way.

In reply to Gary :

I've started it a couple times.  It seems really good but a bit too relatable right now. 
 

I just finished Sideman by Mark Rivera. He's had an interesting career and the book is very readable, one of the fastest reads I've had in a while. 
 

Reading a book of short(ish) stories by Alan Moore called Illuminations. Pretty good stuff - the man can sure turn a phrase, and he is a keen observer. But like a lot of his work, it moves more slowly than it should.

Next up:  Termination Shock by Neil Stephenson.

Working on "Diplomats & Admirals" (Pre-WWII Pacific Campaign to the battle of Midway) by Dale A. Jenkins.  Very readable for history.

Santa Fe Rules by Stuart Woods.  Good enough story to keep you there, it moves along nicely without a lot of names and facts to memorize.

Been working my way through Neil Gaimen's 'Fragile Things'. Its a decent read to look through. Once I am finished it, I will be going back to Discworld books.

In reply to DjGreggieP :

Re-reading the Discworld books now. I think that's likely to be sort of perpetual, filtering them in at whatever point in the series I leave off.

Currently alternating with Christopher Moore's "Lamb," (the gospel according to Biff), P.G. Wodehouse's "The Jeeves Omnibus," and cyclist Laurent Fignon's autobiography, "We Were Young and Carefree." I feel like there are a lot of odd turns of phrase that are probably French colloquialisms that have just been translated literally.

I reread these over the last few weekends. We are a bunch of pushovers compared to these people from the 1880s to 1940s. 

In reply to chandler :

Yes. Yes. Yes.

Craig recently passed at 86. Great story of his life. Great L.A. car guy. And I'd say a great patriot too, even though he never served in the military. This book is a tribute to his ingenuity, talent, courage, ability to motivate others, and his ability to overcome many extreme adversities. He was a survivor extraordinaire, and lived the American Dream to the extreme. I highly recommend this very inspirational book.

I'm working my way through the Bobiverse series. 

Good reads link

Bob Johansson has just sold his software company and is looking forward to a life of leisure. There are places to go, books to read, and movies to watch. So it's a little unfair when he gets himself killed crossing the street.

Bob wakes up a century later to find that corpsicles have been declared to be without rights, and he is now the property of the state. He has been uploaded into computer hardware and is slated to be the controlling AI in an interstellar probe looking for habitable planets. The stakes are high: no less than the first claim to entire worlds. If he declines the honor, he'll be switched off, and they'll try again with someone else. If he accepts, he becomes a prime target. There are at least three other countries trying to get their own probes launched first, and they play dirty.

The safest place for Bob is in space, heading away from Earth at top speed. Or so he thinks. Because the universe is full of nasties, and trespassers make them mad - very mad.

CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

Book by Dan Piepenbring and Tom O'Neill

And I am just starting 

To Sleep in a Sea of Stars

Novel by Christopher Paolini

I like Chris' Eragon series.

stroker said:

Just started "Superabundance" by Marian Tupy.  The first chapter is berkleying awesome...

I am reading this now. I went to school with his co-author. 

For any of you interested in the PTO of WWII, I'm guessing you'll find Fighting in the Dark fascinating.  

Been a great book!

Currently reading Termination Shock by our pal Neal Stephenson.

Expeditionary Force series by Craig Alanson, 15 books in the series and I'm on 11.

Available on Kindle Unlimited and I highly recommend it if you like military sci Fi with humor

Absolutely fascinating book from one of the most interesting men I have ever read/listened to. The intro was a bit too in-depth for me so when that happens I have this habit of opening a random spot in the book and reading. Each time I would have to interrupt my wife to tell her some fascinating fact that he just mentioned in passing throughout the book. 

This book is from 1978, but after retiring from studying ungulates, he began studying wolves due to some close encounters in BC and that's where I first heard him. He can be found on a few podcasts speaking about wolves and his other work. I'll read anything this guy writes, I love even reading his peer reviews of professional journal articles. 

Currently reading whatever the first book is in the Jim Butcher series that isn't Dresden Files, because the library never has the first DF book on the shelf.

It's OK so far. May or may not read more of them.

Back reading my Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke. I’ve past the halfway point, so only another 500 or so pages to go. 

Read "Demon Copperhead" by Barbara Kingsolver.  Obvious why it won a Pulitzer Prize.   As an aside, it explains how devastating the opoid crisis was to Appalachia, if Charles Dickens was writing it.

"The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder", by David Grann.  Always amazing how the sailors centuries ago survived disasters.  A great read of a well documented true story.