Reading Absolution Gap, #3 in Revelation Space series by Alastair Reynolds. It's got pretty meh reviews but I'd like to finish the story, so grinding through it.
I'm still very slowly chewing through Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust. I'm currently at around 650 pages in, or just over a quarter of the novel read. I'm not very good at talking about books, but one thing I do love about Proust is his ability to almost exhaustively showcase the mental processes going on in the narrator's mind; you get several pages just talking about how he feels uncomfortable about talking to a girl. And he picks up on the tiniest mannerisms to give you insight into a person's character.
Currently reading the Count of Monte Cristo. It's a pretty awesome book, I gotta say, as long as you can accepts Edomd's freakish Mary Sue-ness.
I picked up Dune by Frank Herbert. I was looking for a really good, imaginative piece of fiction after the slew of non-fiction I've read. I've stopped reading fiction as much in recent years and I think I'm losing an important part of myself if I don't pick it back up. Dune has been on the list for a while. I'm only fifty pages into it, but I like it. Building worlds in my head is exhilarating and I feel like I'm connecting with my seventeen year old self, the age when I was most into science fiction.
I'd recommend reading the appendix about Kynes' terraforming as soon as the plot gets to Dune itself, they explain a lot of interesting backstory about the terraforming.
Stein On Writing: A Master Editor of some of the most successful writers of our century shares his craft techniques and Strategies I'm stuck on a couple of stories/projects right now, so I'm refilling my creative well by looking at some analysis of what other writers have done in the past. Also just finished Neil Gaiman's, "The Ocean at the End of the Lane", for the same honing-my-craft reasons. And John Esquemeling's "The Buccaneers of America" from 1684, for the same honing-my-craft reasons. Writing and Reading are two sides of the same coin, so I try to keep reading so my writing continues to improve.