Finished As I Lay Dying. The hype of it left me wanting a little more, but was pretty witty and entertaining throughout, and seeing the way each character perceives certain events and misconstrues each other's intentions was refreshing. Started reading American Gods, and despite being a fantasy novel (a genre that I didn't think I'd be too interested in), I've found myself hooked so far (knocked out 200 pages in the last 2 days, which is a lot for me, as I generally take my time with a book).

Gaiman is a good writer. Fantasy or not. Don't be afraid to lay claim to liking a fantasy novel/graphic or otherwise. There is a stigma in academic circles of fantasy being a lesser tier of reading, but I don't buy into that too much. If you like that, maybe try his graphic novel series The Sandman.

I read the expanded version of American Gods earlier this summer and thought it was pretty great storytelling (if not the best writing), and I generally don't like fantasy.

I mostly only read fantasy and SF, and while I do like American Gods, I don't think it's anywhere near top tier.

Finished American Gods (the expanded version). Really great stuff IMO. My favorite of the books I've read this summer so far.

I either finished or dropped some of the books listed above. My current reading is:

Gilles Deleuze - Cinema 1: The Movement-Image — I plan to take this really slowly, and to make sure that after I read a chapter I watch scenes I know well and analyze them in terms of the concepts Deleuze introduces so that I can get a handle on how to apply them in practice.

Sigmund Freud - Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety — In the fall I'm TA-ing a course called "Explanations of Humans and Society". I'm working through the assigned books for the course; this is the third (first two were Skinner's About Behaviorism and Freud's Introduction to Psychoanalysis).

Julian Barnes - The Sense of an Ending — Hooray for reading something that won't be horrendously difficult.

Yeah I can hold a lot of threads in my head but with books 3's basically the max I'll ever simultaneously run.

I've decided that rather than jump about everywhere in my reading, which more and more is becoming suffocating, so my main reading focus now (besides things for school) is carefully reading everything in the LoA volume of Emerson's essays and lectures. Ideally I'd write something on my blog about each essay, but we'll see how that pans out.

And I'm still working through Deleuze's Cinema 1, slowly.

By jumping around do you mean reading multiple books/essays at once, or do you mean going from author to author after finished? I have always juggled books at the same time, and never found it difficult - its like watching Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and Game of Thrones at the same time - you don't get confused over the characters because after a while they should all be pretty separate from one another that they have their own identities.

I mean reading too many books at once. It's not confusing; the problem is that, when I do it, I end up not giving any of them the attention they deserve.

Hmm, to some extent I agree, and to some extent I don't think all books need the same amount of attention, so its okay to read multiple ones at any given time.

To be clear, I'm not saying what anyone else should do. I'm simply saying that it is a bad habit of mine that, when I am in the midst of too many books, none of them get the amount of attention their due. (Which is variable, yes, but still: none get enough, all get below what they specifically deserve.)

Finished Murphy, which was great but also far from Beckett's best. Now on to Satantango.

I recently listened to an audiobook of Richard Preston's Hot Zone. It's compellingly written non-fiction, coming across more like a thriller. I only wish that I hadn't read up on the Marburg and Ebola viruses before I'd finished, as knowledge of the latter takes some of the tension out of an event that's given a substantial amount of time. Even then, I feel that more time could have been given to the ebola outbreaks in Zaire and Sudan in the mid-70s.

Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari - Anti-Oedipus
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Essays and Lectures (LoA)
Stathis Psillos - Scientific Realism: How Science Tracks Truth
Bronislaw Malinowski - Sex and Repression in Savage Society
Buerton, Falk, Rheinberger (eds.) - The Concept of the Gene in Development and Evolution