The Black Hole War - My Battle With Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics --> I dunno. Got it from some book club promotion thing. Might read it eventually. :X
That's good stuff. Nothing cutting edge obviously; it's a pop-science book so as well as the obligatory quantum mechanics crash course it's a general run down of progress made on quantum physics since Hawking decided that information gets lost in black holes up to the holographic principle and some really interesting stuff (that I must look more into) on the similarities between the atomic and subatomic worlds; essentially how the study of (if I remember correctly) rapidly spinning protons might be able to explain properties of quarks.
I'm reading 'Magician' by uh, Feist (yes, that's it) on recommendation from a friend (who has subsequently very much retracted that) and I can safely say it's one of the worst books I've ever started. Clumsy, unnatural dialogue, completely illogical world's (the enemy are a much more advanced (in some ways) civilisation who don't have steel. Or
any/very few metals. That's pretty retarded. I wish I was less obsessive such that I could just throw it aside. And this is the edition that he re-edited years later with his accumulated 'skills'.
Not a big fantasy reader, but as anyone in the know would guess, I'm a big fan of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time series. I would argue that it grew into it's own world within the space of the first couple of books but it is largely Tolkien-derived, very much so for the first book. And it's LONG. Long written (very detailed) and long worded. 13 books of an average of 6 to 700 pages each. Unfortuantely Jordan's gone and died on us so Brandon Sanderson's been called up to finish them. The 12th was his first with two final books to go but unfortuantely I reckoned it to be a fairly sizable drop in quality so anyone considering starting should go in eyes open.
Fanboy gush over.
After that I'm probably going to read the Robert Harris Cicero/Rome novels and finally finish
Time's Arrow by Huw Price.