I’m in the middle of this:
Got it from the library for my kindle via overdrive.
The first one was surprisingly good.
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Finally got around to finishing Moby Dick! Not sure what to pick up next (I have a shelf devoted to unread books), but . . . probably something a little lighter.
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As someone who gave up on Melville thirty pages into Billy Budd, I say that’s an accomplishment. I didn’t even bother with Moby Dick. Listened to Mastodon’s Leviathan instead.
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It is a long dense read but totally worth it. A meditation on what it means to be human.
You have to read it a chapter or two at a time and come back the next day.
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It was worth it. The fact that the chapters are short did make it easier! (I’ve never tried Billy Budd, so I don’t know how it compares, but his style is pretty florid). Now I want to read Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea (already read Sea of Glory, which is why I was reading Moby Dick in the first place), but I haven’t acquired that one yet.
Out of the books I already own, I decided to start on the novelization of The Force Awakens. It’s . . . aaaahhhhh . . . not well-written, which should surprise no one 
but I bought it because after I saw the movie I was dying for more of the story. It’ll be a good summertime read and I should be able to tear through it in no time. 
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I really liked the narrative, just didn’t like the encyclopedia that came with it. Or, at least, didn’t want them combined.
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Maybe somewhere out there is a special edition: here are the chapters with the story, and here is the All About Whales and Whale Hunting part 
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Now I don’t feel so bad about the catching up on my unread Doc Savage. I am also finally reading the first Earthsea book and have been avoiding the The Sword Of Shannara after making it about halfway through it.
And I read Warren The 13th finally and need to take it back to a LFL for someone else to read. I shall have to check the library proper as it is a advance copy and missing a lot of the art. It was a fun book.
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Ooh! I will also be reading volume one of Monstress, which I learned about here on BoingBoing. Gonna start that one right now, in fact 
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Weird - for me Moby Dick just flows effortlessly off the page, I’ve read it I don’t know how many times, I pick it for comfort reading, and I just love both the story and the obsessive whale stuff. On the other hand, I’ve tried many times to read a Dickens novel, any Dickens novel, and I just have to give up a couple of chapters in. I have no idea why either of these is the case.
And while I’m on books I ought to be able to read but can’t: Cryptonomicon should be right up my street, it deals with issues I find interesting, and I’ve never got past page 80 or so. Probably never will.
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Dickens? I’ve read a few, but they are a real slog for me.
A Tale of Two Cities is easily the one I did best with. Great Expectations and David Copperfield just got to be really hard work. But I hate abandoning books, so I got through them eventually. I’m not planning to read any more of his.
The last book I did abandon was Nostromo, but I did go back and read it years later. Gravity’s Rainbow came close, though. And I don’t think I got much out of it, to be honest. I think I needed a study guide and to take a lot of time over it.
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When I taught frosh honors, we read Great Expectations. The kids loved, loved, loved it. I think it was because Dickens wrote it as a serial and the kids couldn’t wait for the next chapters. They loved analyzing the characters and their motivations, too.
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I really need to read that one becuase
this is your brain…
and this is your brain after working at boeing.
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OK, that’s weird. I’m re-reading a Bret Hart book.
ETA: But your one probably has fewer submission holds in it.
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I started V a few years ago and it was fun but I usually have several books going and also I get into moods of oh I have been looking at text all day at work and don’t want to look at more.
I will probably have to end up buying a copy of it when I get around to reading it.
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At risk of turning it into Whatcha Incapable Of Readin’… Gravity’s Rainbow 
- I got maybe a hundred pages in. The only way I’d ever try it again would be with a tour guide.
I hate abandoning books, it feels like some moral failing. Never tried Nostromo but I read Lord Jim a year or so ago, and found it hard going, especially when I realised that the plot (or the bit of the plot which had really interested me) had stopped some pages back, and wasn’t going to start again.
Now reading Harry Potter And The Methods Of Rationality referenced above, and enjoying it a hell of a lot more than I ever did the original.
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I was forced to read The Pickwick Papers at school when I was maybe twelve, and cheerfully hated every minute. 
Maybe it was the plonking heavy-banter humour of it (at least, as I remember it now).
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I have worked in the same place that inspired that book for 17 years. I think I can comprehend it by now.
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God Emperor was my favorite! It is the quintessence of Dune for me.
I have just finished Alastair Reynolds Pushing Ice, which I found engrossing. The story is a great framework for mixing near and far future elements. The main inter-personal conflict was a bit annoying, but realistically so.
Also juggling Philip Purser-Hallard’s Of the City of the Saved… (of its diverse citizenry and of its sundry divinities, with a disquisition on the protocols of history) It’s a little-known work on the fringes of extended Doctor Who fiction, a murder mystery set in giant city outside of the universe where every human who has ever lived is reincarnated - supposedly as an immortal - until somebody is somehow killed.
I am probably about to start Alastair Reynolds’ Century Rain, also.
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