About 140 pages in out of 800+ and I can tell this is gonna be awesome. It's the first of what looks to be a trilogy, with the second book, The Twelve, currently on the best seller lists in hardback. Written somewhat in the style of Stephen King's The Stand, episodic with very good, thorough character development. Concerns government experiment with death row inmates of what is intended to be a serum that could lead to lives up to 1,000 years old. Instead, because the bumbling government is involved, of course, it creates vicious, vampiric creatures, and harbingers an end-of-the-world scenario. It seems to take place in the 2020's, a world already falling apart (with many more terrorist attacks on the homeland) with nice details like $13.00 per gallon gas and the governor of Texas is revealed to be (shudder) Jenna Bush! This is truly my kind of book, unputdownable, and highly recommended.
Also recently read (finally) Orwell's Animal Farm. I had read 1984 in high school and thought it high time to read Animal Farm. Should be a must read for anyone. Of course the story was already familiar to me, as I have read about it and seen dramatizatiins, etc. It seems to go from a sort of idealized communist paradise to a totalitarian nightmare (Stalinism?) in a short span and shouts a warning of how easy it is to control a sheep-like populace (and horses and chickens, but not donkeys, they're much too shrewd) into believing anything as long as you repeat it enough times (are you listening, Republicans?).
Also just started a really fine SF anthology from 2000 that features some of my very favorite writers, such as Dan Simmons, Stephen Baxter, Joe Haldeman, Ursula K. Le Guin, Larry Niven, and Harry Turtledove, called Redshift.
Also reading a bio of my very favorite Dodger, Sandy Koufax (Sandy Koufax, A Lefty's Legacy by Jane Leavy).
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