Re: What are you reading
Vampire-fixated people... I can't stand the things. I've read a few, but most of the books with vampires as main characters or important secondary characters are just kinda... I don't know, I've never liked them that much.
Dune is good-- the Frank Herbert's originals and the sequels and prequels by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, but I never really got all the way into them. I read them for a while, and I'll still go for one I haven't read yet, but I got all out of sequence and confused. I'll probably go back and try again, but right now first I have a stack of books from the library I got while shelving, then I'm finishing the John Ringo sci fi fantasy series that starts with There Will be Dragons, then I'm rereading Robert Ludlum's Bourne trilogy, and then I'm going to try to do the New Jedi Order series.
Oh, Dan Brown-reading person? I've never gotten around to trying anything he's written, but I've accidently read parts of his books (little snippets, really) because it's surprisingly easy to mistake "Dale Brown" for "Dan Brown." Dale writes really good military fiction, particularly his Patrick McLanahan air force/bomber books. One of the best milfics I've ever read was Flight of the Old Dog. Never got into the guy with the nigh-identical name, though.
I'm also obsessed with Tolkien, but I haven't really looked into Children of Hurin. I've read several of the books published posthumously, and a very few by Christopher Tolkien, and they were NOWHERE near as good as Hobbit and Lord of the Rings.
Right now, though, I'm reading Charlie Bone and the Beast (Almost certainly a different title in Nimmo's native UK, since so few of her others have had the same title here and there), by Jenny Nimmo. Think Harry Potter for an even younger crowd. I think the characters are a bit less annoying, but not by far, and the books really aren't that good. I just started the series so long ago that I'm stuck reading whatever else the chick churns out.
What I'm really looking forward to, aside from rereading Bourne, is the new Pratchett, Making Money, but that doesn't come out till, as I remember October, and even then it's in hardcover.
Oh, and yeah-- I am reading Harry Potter 7, and will be the first in my family to do so since it was preordered by my mom and sister for me for my birthday, but I reserve the right to bash it and most especially the characters unrelentingly and to pray with all my heart that somebody discovers the magical version of atomic power and blows the crap out of everyone in the book. Or, barring that, someone with actual nukes discovers that there's this lunatic on the loose and gets just as lunatic and wipes them out. Yeah, I have some serious Potter-hate. Not sure why. The characters and the plot just rub me the wrong way... and they've been getting worse.
