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I'm currently reading Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and Christ on a stick, it has the longest run-on sentences I've ever seen. I know Hemingway wasn't exactly renowned as a syntactic genius, but still; his other works (at least the ones I've read) weren't as bad.

Syntax aside, I really wonder why people hold the story itself in such high esteem. I suppose in the era before the internet, widespread cinema and global travel it was a lot easier to impress people with stories of countries they had only read about in the newspapers and situations they would never find themselves in.

I'm now part-way through The Stand. It's alright. There's some authorial editorialising going on and the magical stuff is a bit silly, but aside from that it's a decent read.

The cover bears a plug from Lee Child to the effect that King is the greatest living American author. Under any other circumstances that'd have me rolling on the proverbial floor (because, y'know, REACHER ) but having just fought my way through a dozen pages of Pynchon's sh***y meanderings, which pretty much encapsulate everything that's wrong with the American literary élite, I suspect he's got a point...

I'm reading "The Complete Guide to Aspergers" by Tony Attwood. It's amazing. I'm just here nodding my head... yup, yup, yup.... excellent.

A translated textbook that was used in german schools in 1938.. It is really really scary the crap they were teaching them. Even down to comments like "wipe them out" when talking about groups that arent considered "german blood"

Starting The Hunger Games by Susan Collins.

I managed to finish Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens for my latest book-reading blog.

http://www.wrongplanet.net/posts177975-start90.html

A little better than half way though The Stand (p. 825) ^^ - it's still okay, though I'm not enthused, and the pace has dropped off. However, as is often the case with this sort of thing, it's all worthwhile because a) it appears a good part of the plot of Fallout: New Vegas has been lifted from it*, which is interesting to see and b) wait a minute, is that Nyarlathotep?

*No-one's been buhned alaav on a paala tahs yet, but I live in hope.

You guys, Sarah Vowell! I'd heard she was fantastic, but seriously her books are awesome! I just finished her Assassination Vacation and Partly Cloudy Patriot and now I'm in the middle of reading Washington: A Life (by Ron Chernow) because she somehow flipped my history-loving switch. It makes me a little sad I moved away from Philadelphia. Now I have to actually plan a nerdy history tour instead of just wandering around on a Saturday.

I'm half way through "Breakfast of Champions" by Kurt Vonnegut.
It's a very humorous and dirty book with illustrations.

"Breakfast of Champions" is a great book. I've read everything of his except "Player Piano", for some reason. "The Sirens of Titan", "Welcome to the Monkey House" and "Slaughterhouse Five" are also wonderful reads.

"The Stand" may be my all time favorite novel, maybe tied with "Carrion Comfort" by Dan Simmons. I just finished "The Art of Fiction" by John Gardner, who wrote some of my favorite books, including "Grendel" and "Freddies Book".

Right now I have picked up the collected writing of Edgar Allen Poe and am reading "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket".

The Stand, then;
It was interesting reading it in the light of having recently read Earth Abides, to which it clearly owes a lot.
It was interesting reading it as a loose part of the Mythos, and there were some good pop-culture links in there. There were also some overblown ones.
I don't know enough about King's Dark Tower series (I read the first one but didn't think much of it) and later developments to understand where The Stand fits or how the updated edition of the book has been changed.
The writing was always very readable, but occasionally seemed juvenile and imitative. The story progression started and ended well but the central section was really tedious for a while.
Most of the characters were very believable most of the time, but there were several instances where they seemed to completely give up on common sense in order to do really stupid things that advanced the plot.
Some of the magical stuff was cool, some was gratuitous, but the overall spiritual theme implied a weak, petty and spiteful God prodding humanity with a stick to battle an overly-strong Adversary; very Manichean and, to me, silly and parochial theology. And not in the spirit of the Mythos neither. None of it was scary (and I have been scared or disturbed by some of his other books) though admittedly it may have been more original and disturbing for its time.
I knew beforehand how Trashcan Man ended up, but I don't think it spoiled it as it was made clear in advance what he was doing. I liked him as a character.
Mother Abagail was really f*****g annoying, but her last words got me good. Doh!

To celebrate finishing the gargantuan Stand, I've moved on to Neal Stephenson's REAMDE, which is almost as bloody long. And within a couple of dozen pages encounter two autistic characters, one of them apparently a Tarn Adams expy. This may be an interesting read.

Culpeper's Complete Herbal