Friday Filler: What Are You Reading Right Now?

Yes, this is a game everyone can play! Just tell me what book you're reading right now. If you're loving the book, tell me why. Hopefully we'll all turn some of our writer neighbors on to new books. Because we are a community, right?

I'll start. Don't laugh. I'm reading "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman" by Laurence Sterne. It's like 250 years old, and it's hysterically funny. It claims to be an autobiography, but really it's a comic look at life in 18th-century England and a comic look at the art of writing a book. The narrator claims that in order to give you the most accurate portrait of himself, he must give you every detail he can imagine, and so it takes him a whole year to write about a single day of his life (that is, the first day of his life). Meanwhile, you get a bunch of amusing anecdotes, dirty jokes, political broadsides that are still funny 250 years later because politics doesn't seem to have changed, and a whole lot of fun. Don't let the fact that it's a classic work of literature put you off, and never mind those people who say it's "difficult." It doesn't take itself (or the idea of a linear narrative) seriously.

I'm also reading one of the Paddington Bear books, but I can't remember which one.

Your turn. What are you reading?