I still read. I just find it hard to write about reading. I read "Midnight Tides," the fifth book in Steven Erikson's "Malazan Book of the Fallen" series. It shifts time and place, centering on the back story of a minor character introduced in the previous ones. It's as good as the predecessors, so there you go.
I also read Steven Dubner and Stephen Levitt's "Freakonomics." In a word, I was underwhelmed. It contained a bunch of useful information about how Levitt and others have applied analytic techniques from economics to broader social phenomena. It focused too much on telling the stories of the various discoveries, which I felt was unnecessary filler. It also seemed to lack a coherent theme. They readily admit that, but the admission does not excuse it. It was an interesting read, but I think it was unworthy of the hype.
I followed "Freakonomics" up with the novel "The Devil You Know," a thriller set in the wilderness of Minnesota. I haven't read or seen "Deliverance," but I gather there's a degree of similarity. It's a good book, with one awful, horrible, terrible flaw: the author loooooves run-on sentences. Not just any run-on sentences, but sentences that wax philosophical, often starting with a character observing something, then getting reminded of a memory, a time and place from long ago, before everything changed, but now, here, everything is different, and he has to look forward to a time this sentence ends, and it's got this weird rhythm to it that makes the cadence all sing-song-y, and you can tell the author is trying way too hard to seem profound and lyrical, but really, the guy just isn't a good enough writer to get away with it, and it would be bad enough if he just did it a few times, but there's practically one of them on every page, and you know he labored over each one, choosing each word with careful precision, and that a ton of shallow people will eat it up and gush about how deep and wonderful it is, and it's just like, enough already I want a period.
Next up was "Moneyball," by Michael Lewis. This book clearly has a lot of strengths because it managed to make baseball interesting. A book that can do that is surely a rare find. "Moneyball" goes squarely into the Malcolm Gladwell genre of describing the application of rigorous analysis to everyday phenomena and figuring out how to do it better. This time it's the Oakland Athletics figuring out how to compete in Major League Baseball with a fifth of the money of the richest teams. It turns out the conventional wisdom of what makes a good ball player might not be that wise. It was neat. I liked it a lot.
I moved on to David Sedaris's latest short story/essay collection, "Dress Your Children in Corduroy and Denim." If you've read "Naked," "Barrel Fever," or "Me Talk Pretty One Day," you'll have an idea of what to expect. Your idea will be a little wrong, though. The autobiographical stories Sedaris chose for this one are bleaker and darker than his material from before. There's a lot less of the lightness and humor that was, if not pervasive, at least present, in previous collections. They're still good stories, though.
After that came Audrey Niffenegger's "The Time Traveller's Wife." Henry has a problem: from time to time, he travels through time. He has little direct control of when it happens and when and where he goes. He meets himself at multiple times, as well as his future and past wife, and gets into as much trouble as you might expect would befall a naked man appearing out of thin air. That description doesn't do it justice, though. Beautiful, romantic, and poignant are all better words, and they're words I don't use lightly. This is a book that will grab you. Ignore that it was a Today show choice and a People magazine something or other; this is a great book.
I hopped out of literature and went over to some cheap fantasy with Raymond Feist's "Talon of the Silver Hawk." Wow. There's a lot of mediocre fantasy out there. This almost felt like a young adult book, with its clumsy prose, crudely unrealistic characters, and heavy sprinkling of anachronism. I wonder if the other books I read by him were similarly mediocre, and I simply didn't notice because I was a lot younger. Feist is not without talent, but he has numerous weaknesses as well. They're easy reads, though, so I know I'll finish out the series (of series?), but there are many better fantasy books out there to read. Only read this series if you've run out of the better ones.
Finally, this morning I finished Iain M. Banks science fiction novella "The State of the Art," concerning a visit from his Culture to a late-70s Earth. I thought it was boring. It's not a match to any of the main Culture novels such as "Player of Games" or "Use of Weapons," which probably explains why it's a limited-release novella. If you're a huge Culture fan, you've probably already read it, but if not, you can easily skip it and lose nothing.