I’ve seen this meme around a few blogs lately, and although I mostly refuse to do memes “properly” (i.e. I tend not to tag other people to post on the same meme) this one struck me as a good one.

My style of reading these days is to have about half a dozen books on the go, stashed in various areas of the house for when & where the yen strikes me to read a chapter or three. They are usually about half speculative fiction (science fiction and fantasy), one good mystery novel, one historical fact or fiction, and one popular science. At the moment, I confess, I’m not really stretching myself.

I’ve just finished re-reading a bunch of Terry Pratchett Discworld novels and Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. They were all still immensely enjoyable, full of delicious puns and cynical wit.

I’m in the middle of re-reading Asimov’s I, Robot collection. The older I get, the more pedantic I find his style of narrative exposition (oh, the dialogue, it goes on so long, and his protagonists are so obtuse), but he still has some of the greatest ideas, and his psychological insights into how humans might react to fully intelligent and self-aware robots in our society is, I suspect, spot-on.

I am, at the moment, lacking a good mystery author to keep up with. Patricia Cornwall jumped the shark long ago, I’ve read all the latest Rankins and McDiarmids, I’m a bit meh about most of the other staples of the mystery section: are there any new twisty plotters who do strong characters that I really should start reading? I rather enjoyed the Gil Mayo Mysteries on telly earlier this year, but the books by Marjorie Eccles are a little hard to get hold of here in Oz (Auntie’s marketing department has really fallen down on the job) – are they worth chasing?

My history at the moment is another reread: yet another biography of the Six Wives of Henry VIII, this time from Antonia Fraser. It’s still good – she includes a lot of the lesser-known details and weaves the narrative deftly. Recommended for anyone who wants to separate fact from fiction given the plethora of recent Tudor-period dramatisations which have taken a fair degree of license with the source material.

Lacking a mystery, I’ve got a second history on the go: Michael Wood’s In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great. It’s a tie-in to a BBC TV series, and thus a little heavy on the friendly text and coffee-table photographs while disappointingly light on the footnotes, but it’s a nicely produced overview nonetheless. The breadth of the landscapes that Alexander’s army trudged over on their way to yet another conquest is truly impressive. Of course, I only picked it up because I was looking for my copy of Tacitus, that my husband wants to borrow – have any of you seen my copy?

My science book at the moment is shamelessly chosen for its soporific qualities (I’m currently struggling with bouts of insomnia): another oldie but goodie, James Gleick’s Chaos, his 1987 introduction to and overview of chaos theory. One of the many snap! moments that led to Mr Tog and I pledging our troth lo these many years ago was that he had this on his bookshelf as well (yes, I know – I’m just a sentimental softy).

So, you lot: what are you currently reading? Is it good so far?