Book Meme

DuWayne Brayton has tagged me with the book meme. I didn't follow the rules precisely. There are probably more than 15 books below, and I took something like 20odd minutes to write and hyperlink all this together. The books that follow are in no particular order of favor. I don't necessarily agree with the viewpoints espoused in all of these books, but they nonetheless seem to be persistent sticks in the mud of my mind.

In the Name of Science: A History of Secret Programs, Medical Research, and Human Experimentation, Andrew Goliszek
Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body, Armand Marie Leroi
The Language of Life: How Cells Communicate in Health and Disease, Debra Niehoff
Janeway's Immunobiology
Neuromancer, William Gibson
The Complete Essays of Mark Twain
Maus I + II, Art Spiegelman
Percy Gloom, Cathy Malkasian
The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Marcia Marquez
American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis
Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card
Green Eggs and Ham, Dr. Seuss
Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Mary Roach
Sex, Time and Power: How Women's Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution, Leonhard Shlain
Grimm's Fairy Tales
A Scanner Darkly, Phillip K. Dick
American Pastoral, Philip Roth
Catharsis, Andrzej Szczeklik
Lord of the Rings trilogy, J.R.R. Tolkien
Amor y Cohetes (Love and Rockets), the Hernandez Bros.
The Jungle, Upton Sinclair
1984, George Orwell
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
The Futurological Congress: From the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy, Stanislaw Lem
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
The Portrait of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
James and the Giant Peach, Roald Dahl

Now then, I tag Arikia Millikan, Hermitage, Science Bear, Hexadecimal, Tig, Stephanie Zvan, Ktbug Ladydid, Lost Marbles, and Quietandsmall. Let's see what all of you have!

Reading

Aside from scientific papers and comic books*, I don't do much reading any more. I can't remember the last new thing I read for fun. Maybe it was World War Z by Max Brooks, and that was well over a year ago. I mean, I have read Neuromancer by William Gibson since then, but I tend to do that annually, so it doesn't really count.

The problem is that whenever I sit down to read anything, even a comic book, which is quick and awesome, I feel guilty that I'm not off reading scientific literature instead. I've got a stack of unread papers rapidly approaching the thickness of my head, and I have a large noggin. I see something that looks really interesting, read the abstract, and print it off to read later. Problem is that all too often it doesn't actually get read later, it just gets buried under everything else I've been meaning to analyze and forgotten.

But at the same time I really miss curling up with a good book and reading away.

So, dear reader, what do you recommend? Any great books you've recently parsed?

*Although I am also reading "Makers" by Cory Doctorow as it comes out, serializedy, on Tor's website. It's what made me realize I miss reading stories.