Currently reading?

I love reading short stories (as well as writing them... when I can be bothered to make the effort... which is virtually never these days ).  I've read stuff by all the big name American short story writers like Raymond Carver and John Cheever, but mostly I find that those writers are too clever for their own good.  I would recommend the stories of Tobias Wolff - all of his stories are mini masterpieces.  They make you think, and some (like the superb Hunters in the Snow) feature wonderful black humour.  So yeah, pick up his book The Night In Question.  Joyce Carol Oates is also excellent as a short story writer, as long as you don't mind reading stuff which is slightly twisted and disturbing.

So, on to what I'm reading atm... (The weird thing is I was thinking of starting an identical thread to this earlier on today.  Spooky)  I'm reading The Time Traveller's Wife, which came out not long ago amid rave reviews.  It is just fantastic - you have to read it if you like books which are really well crafted and rich and make you think.  The author (the unfortunately named Audrey Niffenegger) has set herself a really tough challenge (ie to write a love story involving a guy who is constantly time travelling and to make it believable) but my god she pulls it off.  Every single detail of the story has been imagined and is brought to life perfectly.  I'm about two thirds through it and it's definitely a contender for my favourite book ever.

I just finished Apollo 13. I don't normally read non-fiction but the story interested me because i knew quite a bit about it already so it was really interesting! Plus i loved the film so I wanted to see how it compared and how much Hollywood twisted things!

Now I'm re-reading the Star Wars trilogy because I haven't read it for years and last time round I thought it was good! Someone like Garth Nix needs to bring out more weird fantasy stuff for me to read over the summer!

you can get em on amazon i've got it..there are some damn good books in there

I'm reading this thread on VR right now.

Best answer I've got, as I'm between books. The last thing I read was the first trade paperback of Fables (Legends in Exile).

Comics are literature too, dammit.

Erm, lots.

Lots of Kafka, The Trial, The Castle, Metamorphosis. A book by Ian Banks called Whit, about a cult member who has to go looking for her cousin in the outside world (really, really, good), The Catcher in the Rye, and I'm glancing over Pride & Prejudice again, since I was amazed by how much I liked that book. Just finished a Douglas Copeland book called Microserfs, which is quite funny, and slightly offbeat, just how I like them. Oh, yes, and I'm halfway through So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish.

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Erm, lots.

Just finished a Douglas Copeland book called Microserfs, which is quite funny, and slightly offbeat, just how I like them.

Douglas Coupland is really excellent, I think. "Generation X" and "Girlfriend in a coma" are good, too.

At the moment, I am reading "PopCo" by Scarlett Thomas. It is about a girl called Alice who designs children's toys, but she does not want to do it anymore because she feels realy guilty about how the ways lots of companies advertise to children, and make children feel wrong if they are different. Also it is about how lots of people are put in groups by advertisers and how lots of people have all the same things. It is like a protest book a bit, too ,i think. It is really good.
Scarlett Thomas is one of my favourite authors .

Just finished "the curious event of the dog in the night time" and now I'm on two others, but i can't remember what they are called, so I will get back to this later.

I could never really get started with Ulysses. I always meant to get round to it, but I never found the time.