What are you reading these days?

I finished A Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny for my book club. It was a very enjoyable read! Perfect for the Halloween season, and I may check out more of Zelazny's work after this. I will mention that it's a popular thing to read a chapter a day in October since each chapter corresponds to a day, but I would not recommend that. Most in the first half of the book are only a few pages long, which at least for makes a much less enjoyable reading experience when only doing a chapter a day. It gets better later on in the book, but by that point I'd given up on the chapter a day thing.

I'm also rereading Moby Dick, one of my favorite books. I think Melville is my favorite prose stylist, with the main competitor for that position being Virgina Woolf. A lot of people seem to come away from this book with the idea that it's 200 pages of plot and 500 pages of dry whale facts, but that couldn't be further from the truth. The plot portions are obviously incredible, Melville is a master of writing in a epic register and elevating the world of whaling to a mythic importance. But even the chapters that initially seem to just be about some facet of whaling are hardly dry, the infectious enthusiasm of the narrator makes them a joy to read, there is always a greater point to them about life and philosophy, and a great dose of humor to boot! This is my first reread (I think i started one briefly but didn't get very far at the time) and I'm about halfway through, but I intend to revisit this book on many occasions. I recommend it with no hesitation.