I've been trying to read a little more recently.
I've read a lot of Gene Wolfe in the past five weeks or so; the
Book of the Short Sun and
Latro in the Mist. That's actually five books. Short Sun is enjoyable, and is sort of the last series in the world started by New Sun and Long Sun. Short Sun feels to me like the weakest of those three. Long Sun manages to approach total science fiction without spiritual deus ex machina, but Short Sun doesn't really try to do that at all, which is a bit disappointing. New Sun didn't either, of course, but a) it wasn't trying to follow something else that had already set a tone of science, and b) the philosophical musings that make up so much of that book add a lot.
Latro in the Mist was kind of interesting, but is my least favorite series by Wolfe so far. It's a very serviceable read, but I think it's probably more fun if you have a very solid grounding in Greek mythology (and probably Greek language.) There's a lot I recognized, but I definitely managed to get confused sometimes, and I think the way everything wraps up, I feel like I'm missing some kind of allusion to mythic structure that would explain why it goes as it does.
Saturday by Ian McEwan. I liked this. It's nothing profound, but it does a surprisingly good job of capturing one unusually (but for the most part not implausibly) stressful day. Henry Perowne feels like a good man. When I heard about this book a while ago, it seemed like a lot of the reviews focused on Iraq and 9/11. There are certainly aspects of the book that are informed by these things but they don't really seem central at all.
A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving. I've enjoyed what Irving I've read (this, The Cider House Rules, The Water Method Man). He really does a good job of setting a humorous, emotional tone without making you feel overly cheesy about it. He's also quite good, in my opinion, at making characters who are good without being saintly, which is always nice.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy. This was okay. Strangely, I think the problem is that he does too good a job creating an atmosphere of utter futility, because about 80 pages in I started thinking "So these guys are well and throughly [censored]. That's too bad." This feeling was strong enough that it lead to a sort of emotional flatness while reading most of the book. Still, despite that, the ending really got to me.
I have a bunch of things that I've started reading but haven't fallen in love with enough yet to actually pound through:
Moral Minds by Marc Hauser. This is what I'm working on at the moment. Only 50 pages in, but from the first chapter, it appears the thrust of the book will be that humans possess a moral faculty that has properties similar to Chomsky's universal grammar, and that this is the basis of our moral judgments. Arguments and consequences to follow, I'm sure. I'm very intrigued by this premise, but this is my second attempt to get into this book and I still feel like Hauser's prose is bogging me down somehow, though I haven't put my finger on it yet.
The Sorrows of Empire by Chalmers Johnson. Wherein the author argues that the expansion of the military-industrial complex is bad, un-American, and will lead to a Roman Empire style decline for the U.S.
The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. I've heard great things about this book, and I've read about the first 100 pages or so and it's quite good. It develops the history of the understanding of atoms/nuclei from the start of the 20th century on, examining a lot of the key players along the way, and then presumably gets into the bomb stuff.
EDIT: Also,
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn. From what I know of his argument (and having read about half of this), I think I agree with what he's trying to say, and I feel like I should read this book as part of my education. I find him stylistically dense and tough to slog through, though.
And I've thought about picking up Special Topics in Calamity Physics because, yes, Marisha Pessl appears to be smoking.
EDIT 2: Googling about, the glamour shot is definitely giving her a fair bit of help. But I bet she's still hotter than Gene Wolfe or Thomas Kuhn.