I'm going to Brazil for a wedding! Then to Boston for a baptism, and then somewhere that is not New York City for a few days (location still TBD).

Mine for the near future:

I started "The Age of Wonder: he Romantic Generation and the Discovery of the Beauty and Terror of Science" (Amazon - Goodreads) a couple of weeks ago, but had to put it down due to finals and extra shifts at work and other life craziness. I'll definitely read it off and on this Summer though, as the subject fascinates me.

On my packing list for my vacation (which is, yes, on a beach, so I guess these are my beach reads) are (going just Goodreads now, as this is getting in the way of my dinner and my dog is getting antsy for her food):

Short story collections: Permanent Visitors by Kevin Moffett and The Dead Fish Museum: Stories by Charles D'Ambrosio

Novels: Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain (this just came out today, I think. It was in my mailbox after work. I loved his previous short story collection and have heard great things about this debut novel) and Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway (I just finished "The Gone-Away World" a few weeks ago and liked it a lot. Really looking forward to this, his newest offer. Fun fact for those participating in the MeFi Book Club: Harkaway is John LeCarre's son).

Kind of fiction-heavy, which is unusual for me, but every once in a while I go through a faze like that.

Anyone else care to share?

Since getting a Kindle Fire I'm definitely reading more, so the idea of finishing a book before jumping to a new one is still relatively new to me. I'm finishing up the Bill Veeck biography and have Jennifer Egan's A Visit From the Goon Squad on deck. After that I'll probably finish Imagine: How Creativity Works, which was less than I expected, but interesting enough to finish.

I just mailordered a book from 2005 that somehow missed my radar until last week: Rat Scabies and the Holy Grail: Can a Punk Rock Legend Find What Monty Python Couldn't? which will be near the top of my reading list. I also still have to finish Richie Unterberger's Won't Get Fooled Again The Who From Lifehouse To Quadrophenia. After that I need to take a break from music books (the last three I read were music books and I have the 2 mentioned above) and am looking for some good fiction, which almost always takes a backseat to my love of non-fiction. Now that I'm reading significantly more I need to make more room for fiction in my diet.

but every once in a while I go through a faze like that.

I *can't* fucking believe I wrote that sentence. My brain has clearly not recovered from finals...

Rat Scabies and the Holy Grail: Can a Punk Rock Legend Find What Monty Python Couldn't?

Whoa. That sounds interesting.

Oh God. I have one more major paper to write; too early to even really fantasize.

It's really hard for me to express how burned out I am right now, after this semester, two major volunteer gigs, and a crazy demanding work schedule, aside from the normal stresses and vicissitudes of life - cat with seizures, family ups and downs, etc.

Once class ends, I'm looking forward to a very, very laid back May and June. I'm trying to take 2 major low-key R&R vacations in June, one to Martha's Vineyard and one to Acadia. And other than that, I just want to go to flea markets, work in my garden, and try to get our house into a more finshed state ...porch furniture, lights, hanging baskets and a LR couch and some new chairs, etc.

That seems as high as my goals get nowadays. I just fantasize about relaxing, the way when I was a student teacher in college I had long, langorous fantasies about sleeping. Just sleeping in a big white bed while the sun shone in. Now I envision just staring blankly over the porch railing with nothing to do.

Oh, my queue. I'm in the middle of Omnivore's Dilemma right now. After that I have a giant stack of stuff to read that I've been piling up in the time that all I was allowed to read was grad school stuff. Reading shortage is not a problem. The only problem is that all I want to read is fluff, so I look forward to a summer full of Oprah and food magazines. Oh, and I want to read that new book about olive oil.

I've got a ton of stuff ready to read on the Kindle. At the moment I'm mid-way through Game Change, which is turning out to be a terrific read, even before Palin's put in an appearance.

I try to alternate between fiction and non-fiction, but I have a number of showbiz biographies, auto-biogs and hatchet jobs I want to read queued up - Rob Lowe, Billy Crystal, Michael Jackson, Uri Geller, Liz Taylor, John Barrowman, Cybill Shepherd, Woody Allen, Dyan Cannon, Jerry Lewis, as well as Michael Palin's Diaries and Sheila Weller's Girls Like Us, which is about Carole King, Joni Mitchell and Carly Simon.I also have Julie Powell's Cleaving, which I'm looking forward to - I really enjoyed Julie and Julia.

I have the entire Sue Grafton alphabet series which I want to read in order, and The Great Gatsby, which I've always meant to read but never got round to.

I find I read much more now I have my Kindle because it's so light to carry everywhere with me.

Counting down to a week in the mountains at a rented cabin- so psyched. (We're leaving the day after you start your beach trip, ufez.) On the reading agenda...

Right now I'm reading "Asterios Polyp," an incredible graphic novel that I've had for awhile but just now got around to. It's big, but I could probably read it in a night if I tried. Instead I'm forcing myself to read it slowly, because the design of the thing is as much the point as the plot- the main character is an architect, the story involves form & function, and every single page has several layers of things happening. It's fun to LOOK at as well as to read.

Upcoming: Jean Baudrillard, "Simulations" I just finished another Baudrillard book which I enjoyed a lot ("America"), so I went straight to this one and YIKES- this is going to be MUCH more difficult to absorb. I wrestled with it a couple of days and got nowhere, so I've put it aside from now, but am determined to tackle it again soon because the ideas behind it (from what I've read about it) intrigue me a lot.

James Young, "Nico: Songs They Never Play On The Radio" I found my copy of this book, which I'd misplaced for several years, so I want to check it out again. It's written by her keyboard player from the later years of her life, so it's all post-Velvet Underground but I remember it being very good, though John Cale comes off as being a fairly nasty person.

J.G. Ballard "Super-Cannes" Ballard is my favorite author but there are still a couple of his books I haven't read, including this one.

I'm picking up a big load of library holds today, including:

*Heaven Is Here: An Incredible Story of Hope, Triumph, and Everyday Joy By Stephanie Nielson
*Heading Home with your Newborn
*Let's Panic about Babies!

I'm still waiting for the new A.J. Jacobs book, "Let's Pretend This Never Happened" by The Bloggess, and the Anne Lamott duo of "Operating Instructions"/"Some Assembly Required".

I'm reading the Tiffany Aching books at the moment. OMG *love* and can't wait to read them to Maddie when she's older.

I have Open City on hold for my kindle, as well as Patti Smith's Just Kids.

And like Senyar, I've been reading so much more on my kindle. Actually, it wasn't the device itself that stimulated the reading, it was getting my shit together to sort out my library account so I could borrow on the kindle. For all the cool stuff that we can do now, that really was one of my "OMG I'm living in the future" moments, mundane as it sounds.

Gaspode - I loved Just Kids. I'm not a big fan of Patti Smith's music, but she's a great story teller and that book was incredibly satisfying. And I'm with you on the Kindle love - it's become one of those life changing objects for me. I've read five or six books in the past few months on the Kindle, which is more than I usually read in a year. Plus it's made me so excited about reading something other than magazines and online articles that I'm even reading more physical books as well.

BoringPostcards - I was placing an Alibris order this morning and based on your JG Ballard raves I added a collection of his short stories.

I'm on goodreads.

I always thought summer was summer all around the world, just that summer was a cold season in the Southern Hemisphere.

I'll be raking through this thread pretty carefully in the next few days. I have John Green's YA novel Looking for Alaska waiting for me at the library; yesterday I found used copies of two Tim Powers books, can't even remember which ones.

Slack-a-gogo, I'll second the Ballard raves. You are in for a treat. A horrible, horrible treat.

My library just opened a downloadable book collection, so I've got The Tiger's Wife, The Forsyte Saga and The Sense of an Ending to read on my phone (I know, I know .. a definitely less than ideal reading experience. Nevertheless.). In print, I've got Jeanette Winterson's new memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, On Canaan's Side by Sebastian Barry and late NYT reporter Anthony Shadid's memoir House of Stone.

So many... I love collecting samples on my virtual bookshelves in my iPad "library" for future reference/reading. (I may pick up another inexpensive eReader that's lighter and easier to tote for just reading purposes than my iPad -- at $79, they've certainly gotten affordable.) Some favorites from my library:

--Black Spring, by Henry Miller (haven't read him in years, but craving him for some reason)
--Torch, a novel by Cheryl Strayed (I read about her in Poets & Writers; they were featuring her new memoir, Wild, about her solo walk up the Pacific Crest Trail while grieving the loss of her mother, which also looks interesting, but the prose in the novel really caught my eye)
--The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins (I find atheism comforting)
--How Fiction Works, by James Wood (it seems I prefer reading about writing instead of actually writing; never-the-less, an excellent read for any writer)
--Physics of the Future, by Michio Kaku (I know I won't be around in the year 2100, but I like imagining what life might be like)
--Winter's Bone, a novel/family drama set in the Ozarks by Daniel Woodrell (I think I saw this one on Bill's Books on the NBC Saturday morning show; I generally trust his judgment)

The new edition of the LBJ biography sounds interesting, too -- Jon thinks I'm crazy, but I've had this theory for years that Johnson was behind Kennedy's assassination. This edition says nothing of the sort, of course, but it deals with those years, just before and just after (LBJ apparently hated Bobbie Kennedy, too -- I'm just sayin').

(Course, I haven't read my last list of books-to-read yet, so at this rate, I might as well just watch TV.)

Heh, I totally misread this post, didn't I? I guess you can tell I'm excited about summer vacation. As for my reading queue, I want to pick back up with A Dance With Dragons, and also finally read The Corrections.