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I am now reading Guns, Germs, And Steel The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond.
I had just finished reading 1491, and Whole Earth Discipline, both of which cite Guns, Germs, And Steel.

Chuck Palahniuk's...

Reading 1491 thanks to WP. Very interesting so far.

Necroscope got better in terms of writing style, but the plot got a bit silly, like it was trying to mesh two different styles together ("loads of supernatural stuff exists" and "there's a vaguely scientific explanation for what's going on"); either would have been good by itself (particularly the nature of the vampires) but combined it didn't really work for me.

Also he seems to have airbrushed my hometown out of existence! There's loads of references to local geography (two under assumed names and the rest just using their real names) but no sign of Peterlee. It's a new town but not that new. He must have a grudge.

Finished 1491 (well, almost, I'm on the appendices), I recommend it to everyone. A very interesting run-down on the state of the Americas before Columbus. Thanks whoever mentioned it first!

Had to divert slightly to take in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen 1 & 2 after seeing the film and trying to explain to my dad just how many ways the film is atrocious.

Just finished Fiat Lux, a coming-of-age story about a miner's son becoming a vet and (eventually) getting married in the middle of the twentieth century; very baffling protagonist, I can't work out whether he seems odd because of the contemporary sexual mores or whether he'd have stood out as odd even then. The perspective jumps around a bit between the different characters, sometimes several times per chapter. Not especially well-written, but not bad. Set locally, again, with thinly disguised local towns, again, and with Peterlee wiped off the map, again! They'd have been building the place in the fifties, how hard can it be to miss the construction of several square miles of housing and factories?

Am now on to its sequel, Fiat Lux III (don't ask), which has shifted the action to Wales, the time to 2012, and the setting to post-apocalyptic fantasy.

Star Wars: Cloak of Deception.

I like the politics in that book, so far it's quite good.

Fiat Lux III was... well, it was better than Battlefield Earth. Mostly it just felt like it needed a firm editorial slap, there was a decent post-apocalyptic romp trying to break free. Some elementary but unimportant, plot-wise scientific errors that should've been fixed. Am having a holiday before embarking on II and I.

...which leads to Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement, which is the best hard sf book I've read in I don't know how long. Really excellent. Great setting, very well described and minimalist but entirely believable characters. If you like hard sf, read this book.

Martian Time-Slip next up.

(not looking good - got a real-time radio conversation between Earth and Mars (time lag?), people walking around unprotected (cold? low pressure? wrong gasses? hard radiation? micrometeorites? dust?), canals (well, alright, Martian canals are cool))

(and Mars appears to have Earth gravity; seriously, this is not science fiction, there is no science, not even soft science or black-boxes; this is a book about a mysterious country called Mars which is almost, but not quite, entirely like Earth. *sigh* )

(and compatible biochemistry, and/or extremely adaptable Martian natives who seem to be surrogate Indians, and... oh, I give up trying to count 'em. Really, John Carter was more believable. He's thrown in a light-speed drive in a background inference. Why not just set the whole thing on a random "almost-Earth"? Why drag in a planet with such interesting quirks as Mars and then pretend they don't exist? *double sigh* I'll shut up.)

breakfast of champions by vonnegut

Martian Time-Slip... well, ok. Once I stopped thinking of it as either science fiction or as a book involving autism (just... no) it was alright as a story.

Hogg; I got as far as reading the cover and a synopsis (I advise you not even to do that; seriously, spare yourself, it's vile and sick), and then I methodically destroyed the book by tearing it into small pieces, and mentally condemned the author from "writer of weird but cool books" to "never read anything by this guy again." On the plus side, at least the copy I'd found was a translation into French (and now I see why that was the only one around - no-one would publish it in English), and so I couldn't accidentally read it while I was tearing it up. Gah. Revolted and upset anyway.

*sigh* ...moving onward, thank goodness, to The Book of Skulls. I was baffled as to why it was in the SF Masterworks series and not Fantasy Masterworks, as there was mysticism but no science, but anyway, it was a good story, if nasty in places. Told in rapidly alternating viewpoints between the four protagonists, which worked well for characterisation.

...next up, Souls in the Great Machine. Not sure what to expect from this one.

finished Childhood´s End by Clarke

reading The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff.

Kafka's the Metamorphosis. A surreal novella indeed.

The raft is not the shore ...by Thich Knat Hahn...good stuff...a real thinking book

Bad science by Ben Goldacre

Dead Reckoning: The Art of Forensic Detection, Jon J. Nordby, Ph.D.

Right now, I am reading Boneshaker by Cherie Priest. It is a steampunk zombie adventure with airship pirates and cyborgs and mad scientists and other such awesome things. It takes place in Seattle.