Children of Dune By Frank Herbert

Now reading The Heroes by Joe Abercrombie.

Pet Sematary

Cyberiada by Stanisław Lem

G. K. Chesterton - "Father Brown: The Complete Collection"

A book on Active Imagination by C.G. Jung.

Just started Speaks the Nightbird by Robert McCammon.

Cannery Row by John Steinbeck.

Snow White by K.M Shea
Swan Lake by K.M Shea

Sinuhe egyptiläinen by Mika Waltari. It's been 20 years since my uncle gave me this book and since I first read it. It'll be interesting to see how it feels to read it with more mature (I hope) eyes.

Maurice Leblanc - "The Arsene Lupin Megapack"

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. I read Norwegian Wood and liked most of it. The part that annoyed me for a long time was the inconclusive/epiphany style ending. Coming from a Fantasy/Sci-Fi fan who doesn't complain much when there's a twenty page long "epilogue" that explains ad nauseum what happened and to whom, I don't like endings that leave me wandering what happened and why there's no resolution of the central conflict in the plot, but I thought I'd give Murakami another chance since he gets such awesome reviews and 1Q84 has such an interesting sounding premise. Granted, being well reviewed is not always the mark of a good writer. Some may disagree with me, but Ed Greenwood has had some glowing reviews and I consider him to be one of the worst writers I've ever read.

THIS!

also Veterans Today

Here I am with my promised personal impressions after reading Gargantua and Pantagruel.
Let me start by saying that I don't think it can be defined as anything but a
masterpiece. Excessive, out-of-measure, irregular... totally original, utterly bizarre, incredibly inventive... not without flaws, perhaps, but a masterpiece nonetheless; fully representative of its age, yet at the same time perennially modern. After all, I'm not saying anyhting new: it has long enjoyed the status of "classic". Just like Don Quixote or Moby Dick, whatever their shortcomings, it's one of those universally
acknowledged cornerstones of Western literature, so, by all means, if you're interested do not hesitate.
That said, reading it wasn't always smooth or entirely pleasurable for me, and I still think the third book is the worst offender in this regard. Two main reasons: 1) it's way more "chatty" than the others; indeed, it is, for the most part, a long debate about a particular existential question, with little in the way of incident; 2) the constant, excessive display of erudition: in pretty much every page you find references to a number of facts, anecdotes, theories, opinions etc. from the classical era or some field of knowledge (some of them incorrect, or even invented!). Philosophy, theology, history, canon law, anatomy, botany etc. anything goes. The amount of knowledge is amazing, but it can make for pretty cumbersome reading. True, this is a feature of the work as a whole, but here it's especially obnoxious, in the last part of the book in particular. Even those accumulations, long lists of names, verbs, or adjectives that are so typical of Gargantua (and sometimes go on for pages!), here are particularly burdensome.
Things get better again in the fourth book, as adventures resume, with some wonderful inventions; as for the (posthumous) fifth book, it's still unclear how much of it is actually by Rabelais (apocryphal Gargantuas had already appeared in his own lifetime), and I honestly couldn't tell. It certainly sounds different, and strange, in places, with incredibly long and detailed descriptions of intricate palaces, sculptures, clothes, foods, rituals etc. that must carry some hard-to-discern symbolic or esoteric meaning - and, again, can be a bit tiresome to read.
All in all, I couldn't escape the feeling that some of the initial spark got lost after the first two, wonderfully entertaining, books, with their unbridled imagination and crazy characters and situations (some of them seem straight out of a modern comic book!), and never fully recaptured. However, that is just my impression and I do not want to steer you away from reading the work or influence your appreciation of it. Certainly, you get the sense that it was never planned as a whole, but was written more or less as it came over the course of many years, without any care for continuity of plot or coherent character development.
You mentioned "wordplay" and "peasant humour", especially "fart jokes", when discussing Simplicissimus. Let me say that, here, pretty much all bodily parts, functions, and products, scatological and non-scatological, are mentioned, and incessantly made an object of humour or a starting point for some bizarre invention - it's almost a celebration of flesh. Wordplay is ubiquitous, and the overall tone of the book is strongly satirical: monarchs, peasants, teachers, students, lawyers, merchants and (especially) clergy - no one is safe. I would certainly not recommend it to the faint of heart, or the easily offended!
A final note: all I said depends crucially on the translation (I chose one that's relatively recent and generally well-regarded, having won prizes; from what I reckon, it's more of the "creative", rather than literal, kind). Of course, that is true for every work of foreign literature you cannot read in its original language, but I think it's even more so for a work so old, and so distinguished by the creative manipulation of language, as this one.

For We Are Many
by Dennis E. Taylor