What are you reading now?

As usual I have several books going at once. I'm reading The Stupidest Angel which a friend recommended, A Christmas Carol for The Green Dragon group in here, and I'm about to start Teacher Man for one of my real book clubs. I'm also part of the way through Ahab's Wife, but I'm taking a break from that.

I mentioned some books I'm reading within the Welcome topic. The books I'm reading on the bus are Fourth Circle: a novel, Dennis Covington's Salvation on Sand Mountain, Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus: the story behind who changed the Bible and Why, and Alan Berube's Redefining Urban & Suburban America: evidence from Census 2000. This latter hasn't been catalogued by the Library of Congress.

The subtitle of Salvation on Sand Mountain is "Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia." I do have southern relatives, but not from northern Alabama (or Eastern Tennessee). So, the culture is definitely not one that I have known. My relatives were from western Tennesssee (Memphis) and northern Mississippi (Pontotoc).

Today I'm about 10% into Prey for a Miracle by Aimée and David Thurlo; it's just a mystery, third of a series (I read the first two last week), that I picked up a the library. The setting is a small city just north of where I live, which was the attraction. It's my light reading for right now.

Well, I finished off The Body Farm, Teacher Man, In the Company of Liars, Too Soon to Say Goodbye and
Pomegranate Soup since I started this thread. I'm almost done with Over Sea, Under Stone for a group read in The Green Dragon here on LibraryThing.

I hope I can keep this pace up all year! :o)

Still picking away at Last Train to Memphis, and just getting a start on Voltaire Almighty, which grabbed me from the first page. And to keep vocationally/avocationally informed, Virginia's Belt Line Railroad by Hugh Moomaw...for which I am sure I have the only copy on Librarything.

#6 - Yes, you do, apperantly! LOL Unless there's a variant spelling of Moomaw floating around out there. ;o)

Finished the 3-book "Sister Agatha" mystery series I started last week. Now I'm returning to The Christmas Mystery by Jostein Gaarder, which I started reading during a Christmas visit to my in-laws'. Also returning to Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier. So far, it's a very affecting book, written with an artist's eye and a mother's tenderness.

The books I'm reading are: Yossi Klein Halevi At the Entrance to the of Eden: A Jew's Search with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land. An Israeli attempts to really meet people that he lives near doesn't know -- just started. Also Harold Bloom's BioCritique of Jorge Luis Borges. I had been reading Seven Nights by Borges earlier, both books have rekindled my interest in Borges. His essay on Dante in "Seven Nights" was quite insightful. Then there is Library: an unquiet history by Matthew Battles, good reading for any book lover. Battles is a librarian at Harvard University, which does not participate in librarything.com.

Just started reading Crusaders in the Courts by Jack Greenburg, an insiders and lawyers view of the major legal battles over civil and human rights. It is a good book, but it could have stood some fact checking, twice mentioning actions taken by President Truman in 1944, and placing a lynching that was my home to=wn's darkest hour in a different city 150 miles away.

To get discussion moving on a cold and quiet day, what magazines do M readers read? I read New Yorker, American Heritage, Mother Jones and Classic Trains cover to cover all the time. I generally buy gently used library copies (a wonderful service available in Duluth that I have not seen in other hometowns) of the Atlantic, Skeptical Enquirer, Sojourners, Minnesota History, and Sun. What are your coices?
Peace
Dave in Duluth

I'm currently reading Bob Woodruff's book, In an Instant which he wrote with his wife Lee, about the head trauma he suffered in Iraq while embedded with some Iraqi troops last year. So far I'm enjoying it.

I'm not going to list everything I've read since the last time I posted in this thread. If you really want to know you can look at my profile page.
:o)

Edited for touchy touchstones. Which still aren't working... :oP

I am reading Atul Gawande's Complications: a surgeon's notes on an imperfect science. He was interviewed on Charlie Rose, and then my nephew who is now a resident surgeon recommended it.

Genetic Linguistics: essays on theory and method by Joseph H. Greenberg. Greenberg has postulated an alternative to the Nostratic hypothesis (Eurasiatic, where he believed that the follwoing families had a common source: Indo-Euopean, Uralic-Yukaghir, Altaic, Korean, Japanese, Ainu, Gilyak, Chukotian, and Eskaleut.) Greenberg was noted for doing a lot of work on language typology and unviersals, but after he combined all Native American languages into only three broad groupings, there was a lot of outcry (he is a "lumper' most linguists are "splitters"). This is his final work, a collection of essays.

Walking the Labyrinth by Lisa Goldstein, a modern-day fantasy novel.

The Gardens of Light by Amin Maalouf, a novel about Mani and Manichaeism.