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I just finished The Count of Monte Cristo.  I was worried that I would find it boring but I ended up really enjoying it.  I have just started on Hyperion by Dan Simmons.  It's a highly praised sci-fi book that I've been meaning to read for awhile.  I'm just starting on it but am already enjoying it.  I don't really know much about it (based on the sound of it, I was half-expecting Hyperion to be the name of a super-hero or something), but it seems like it is going to be like the Canterbury Tales.  At the start of it a group of pilgrims are on their way to the planet Hyperion and decide to tell their tale on why they are traveling to the planet.

Would you recommend it?  I always really enjoyed and was good at math and science throughout my school years, but only semi-pursued that path (I am an engineer).  Recently I decided that I wanted to start teaching myself more advance sciences just for fun.  As a primer I recently read through Hawking's A Brief History of Time.  I also bought a couple other boooks that sound similar to what you describe (Quantum Physics for a lay audience), but haven't really started on them yet. I just randomly bought them off of Amazon and don't really know how good they are.

@bullet656: No. It's very confusing because some of his technical lingo is out of date. It's easier to read the wiki page on it and be done. I did kind of enjoy trying to decifer it though. I thought about square roots alot, of all things.

I just finished Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. What a fine fantasy tale told like a mystery novel. It seemed perfectly crafted from beginning to end. Extreme effeciency of writting I thought. Not a unecessary moment in it.

I would go right into the rest of the series but I think I'll do some heavy lifting now and hit some big titles I've never read by Proust and Joyce.

Just finished Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None this week. Remember the board game Clue? How about that mission in Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion where you have to kill off all the people locked in a house without any of them suspecting you? How about the short story "Who Goes There?" by John W. Campbell that was used as the basis for The Thing film? All of these and many many more were inspired by this story of ten people invited to an island house by a mysterious U. N. Owen only to find out they are to be knocked off one by one. Who's the killer? It could be any one of them, or none of them. Read the book to find out.

reading this.  it's freaking awesome.  

@ Matt Snee: Ah, reading through DnD manuals. Fun Fun Fun.

I just finished 100 Years of Solitude by G.G. Marquez. It's fantastic! I think my life's changed a little bit from the experience. Am I growing up? Yikes!

Oh you should read "Love in the Time of Cholera".  That shit is great.  I am reading this:

Flaubert's last and unfinished novel.  Now that I've got my couch I'm trying to read all the books I haven't managed to read this past eight year.  Gonna kick some ass!

@Matt Snee: I'm following http://thegreatestbooks.org/ and reading everything I've missed on both fiction and nonfiction lists. I hope a Flaubert book is on there.

Right now I'm reading Freud's Interpretations of Dreams, which is very academic but interesting, and a Teaching Company lecture series on St. Augustine's Confessions, which is pretty boring because it's mostly about Christian philosophy. It's also taught by two professors at once; one says a few things, then the other says a few things, and back and forth. It's like listening to a professor with two heads. I feel like I must be at Hogwarts with a visiting professor from the faerie forest.

I'm reading this now:  

@Matt Snee: That Bach book looks so cool. 

I'm reading Company Commander. A book about the real life experiences of combat infantry men at the Battle of the Bulge in WWII and Moby Dick on audiobook. 

I finally started reading a book Bilby lent me two years ago. Hell, I've had that book longer than we've beem dating. It's "The Assassin's Apprentice" by Robin Hobb. Haven't read much yet but it seems cool :)

I love that book, one of my favorites. It's real weird for the first few chapters or so. It was hard for me to get use to how the author was writing and the voice she was using. It's also weird because the main character doesn't even get named until halfway through the book, he's just known as "boy" for the beginning. It starts off weird but it gets so much better as it goes. It's a fantastic read.

Just started The100 Greatest Console Video Games: 1977-1987 by Brett Weiss after reading the review here at Pixlbit. 

that sounds like a cool book!

@Matt Snee: Check out Travis' review (http://www.pixlbit.com/review/913/the_100_greatest_console_video_games_19771987_review ).

Also, you'll be hearing a lot about it from me. I'm taking notes and making blogs out of them. I've done two and I'm only on page 54 of 229.

this:

Reich is one of my favorite modern composers, if not THE favorite.  I'm studying a lot of his work, and trying to build on some of his concepts.  This is a cool book of his essays and interviews.  

@Matt Snee: The Steve Reich book looks really interesting. 

I'm about to reread The Great Gatsby. It's number 5 right now on http://thegreatestbooks.org/ . I read it in High School, but I remember almost nothing about it. I'm getting an audio book version.

Gatsby is a pretty damn good book.  I've been meaning to read more Hemingway again.  

I'm on my biannual reading of The Lord of the Rings. I've reached The Old Forest in The Fellowship of the Ring. Next, I'm probably going to try to finish up a steam punk novel I started last year and then put down for some reason.

i want to read it just for the Tom Bombardil part.  I remember that being so interesting, but not in the films.  

I just finished American Gods and really enjoyed it.

Yesterday I started on Joyce's Ulysses, but today at lunch (around page 60) I decided I'm going to have to stop due to finding it really tedious and I didn't want to have to force myself to continue reading every time I picked it up.  I usually find someting to enjoy in every book I read (and now that I think about it I don't think I've ever stopped reading a book once I've started it), but I just couldn't do it.  It's kind of dissapointing, since I've been meaning to read it for years. Its always near the top of those "Best Books Ever" lists.  Maybe it just wasn't the right time.  I think I'll now start on something more fun in my collection...probably The Princess Bride.

Joyce has many excellent books, but I couldn't read Ulysses, either. Personally, I think it's one of those books that people pretend to like because they're told they should like it. If you want to read something good by Joyce, I recommend Dubliners, which is a collection of short stories, or Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Loved The Princess Bride when I read it many, many years ago, even before the movie the came out. I thought they did a great job with the movie, a lot of it just can't be translated to the screen and I was OK with the whole grandfather/sick kid part to frame the rest of the movie.

Thanks for the info.  I have Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man also, so I might give that I shot at some point.

I've never read the Princess Bride, so I'm looking forward to it.  I've loved the movie ever since I first watched it at school when I was in middle school.  Not sure why we watched it, I think it was as some sort of reward or something.

I definitely recommend Dubliners.  I haven't read Ulysses, but I know a lot of pretentious fucks who say it's their "Favorite" novel.  

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