I haven't done the Wednesday reading meme in ages, so here goes.
What I'm reading now:I'm actually in one of those brief moments between books.
Recently read: I just finished Gillian Flynn's
Gone Girl, which I suspect I am the last person in the Anglophone world to read. But in case I'm not, to avoid spoilers I won't go into details, but I'll say that while I admired the book in a technical sense, I didn't actually
like it. I know it's very middlebrow or even lowbrow to want to like the characters in a novel, but I do want to, and the only person I liked in this book was Nick's sister Go, who was mostly in the background.
Before that I read the last two of Mike Carey's Felix Castor novels, which were fine, but I thought the conclusion of the final book didnt live up to all the build-up. A lot of loose ends and intriguing hints were just abandoned.
I've also been reading a huge amount of fanfic--I think I mentioned at some point that I'd been in a mood to read stuff in fandoms I don't much care about. So I devoured
cesperanza's
Stargate Atlantis fic with great enjoyment, than switched over to MCU Captain America fic after seeing
The Winter Soldier, but didn't manage to find anything I loved. (My method of finding Captain America fic was to go through the first ten or so pages for the fandom in AO3 and download anything that didn't look terrible. This is a fallible method and recs are still welcome. Actually recs are welcome for SGA fic too.)
I continue to be baffled by the discrepancy between the quality of the canon for
Person of Interest and the quality of the fic. The show is mostly good-to-excellent, the fic is mostly conventional or cracky ship fic that often strikes me as not quite in character, and that rarely explores the full possibilities of the universe. Is there a secret treasure trove of POI fic that's not on the AO3 or something? Are people keeping it secret to reduce their digital footprint? /complaining
What I'm reading next: Probably Siddhartha Mukherjee's
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. I think I'm novel-ed out for the moment (though I'm still craving fanfic) and more in the mood for nonfiction. So again I will asks for recs, this time for good general nonfiction, such as science books, histories of interesting things, etc.