Just finished The Partner and The Appeal by Grisham - lots of fun. The Partner was much more satisfying than the other, though not perfectly. But a great trip through pages.
Among the several I'm currently reading, Julie & Julia is a pleasure (though this is one of the few cases where I think the film distilled the elements of the book down to the most delicious reduction, perhaps superior to the book). It captures a zeitgeist of a piece of New York after 9/11, and while the language is at times unexpectedly harsh it's generally a lovely romp.
Blow Fly by Cornwell is rather disappointing - every character, every last one, is an extreme, stereotypical eccentric that acts against their own purposes. Everyone is grossly inconsistent within the very same paragraph, making it peopled by characters in need of immediate inpatient placement in an asylum. I fully expect every character involved to be dead by murder, suicide or inexplicable spontaneous combustion by the end.
Getting through the 8th volume in Goodkind's Wizard's First Rule series (aka Sword of Truth, if you follow the TV series - which is just such a pale travesty of the books). It's better than, say, volumes 5 and 6, not as good as the first 2 or 3. Still, recommended for the sword and sorcery crowd - much more articulate and engaging than, say, Brooks' Shannara series (though the more Terry writes the better they get). Brooks has got to be the only writer I know whose first book was his worst (a very thinly disguided rewrite of Tolkein) and goes consistently up from there.
Also just finished a tome on Dylan's Basement Tapes - good documentary, if you are curious about the music.
