Books - What are you reading?

never finished making it through Houellebecq's 'The Rebel', although it does remain in the bedroom somewhere!

Anyone recommend some good 2nd hand bookshops in London?
Or markets?

What do peoples bookshelves look like?

Mine looks pretty bare at the moment: I haven't got one. All my books are either in the loft in boxes or stacked 2 feet high on my bedside table. Then there's the Kindle.

We recently moved into our own house, so we are slowly buying all the little bits of furniture that we never bothered buying before due to us being in rented accommodation. Next on my list is a nice bookcase.

Expect a picture sometime before the new year.

Double stacked:

Pretentious (pseudo-intellectual, intellectual-intellectual, & wtf-who-actually-reads-this-shit-intellectual) books at the front.

Jilly Cooper, Harry Potter, and all the stuff that has actually been read, at the back.

I managed to offload a bunch of books to assorted friends and forumengers before I moved house, so I have fewer than I would do otherwise and the numbers are just about at a manageable level for a change.

My system works with books I haven't read yet on the upper shelves, and books I have read on the lower shelves, grouped by theme, so Maths -> Science -> Languages -> Zombie fic -> Economics -> Sports books -> Maps etc etc. The group distribution and contents are mostly dictated by book height because my shelves are different heights. Beyond that it's chaos.

I keep my graphic novels in the TV stand thing because it's the only place they fit, and it's empty anyway because I'm terrible at DVDs.

Mine are made of baltic birch and threaded rod.

I was considering making something from reclaimed cedar. I'm not an experienced woodworker though. Will I just make a mess and lose money?

Depends on how complicated you want to get.
Mine are dead simple.

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Anyone read anything by Simon Rich? I've recently discovered him and am loving his short stories. He had me doing LOLs in Waterstones. Here's one of his stories called Sell Out which is brilliant: http://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/sell-out-part-one

He's nausiatingly talented for someone so young (4 story collections, 1 novel, writer for SNL all before the age of 30).

Favourite 2nd-hand book shops in London:

Stalls under Waterloo Bridge, south side
Slightly Foxed, Gloucester Road tube
Floating Bookshop moored up behind Paddington
Stoke Newington Bookshop
Skoob and Judd St, both near Russell Square

There's a decent section upstairs in the Gower Street Waterstones, plus whatever's left of the row of shops on Charing Cross Road.

Amazing thanks man

+1 for Judd books. Even tho it's not on fucking Judd St and till I learnt that it took me a thousand years to find the bastards...

I finished reading The Bridge by Iain Banks the other day and can't stop thinking about it, the best thing I've read in ages. I'm currently about 50 pages into A Wild Sheep Chase by Murakami and I'm not finding it that engaging at the moment.

I urge you stick with it. I wasn't quite sure I was enjoying it at first but it did grow on me.

I'm currently reading this:

Brixton Book Mongers is excellent. British Heart Foundation books and music in Streatham quite good.

I will stick with it, I've heard nothing but good things.

I'm getting close to finishing 1Q84 by Murakami. It's taken me ages to read, mainly because it's so big that I keep leaving it at home to save space in my bag. It has convinced me that I need a Kindle.

Seems that paddington floating bookshop is closing/moving

https://www.facebook.com/wordonthewater

A shame, since I commute through there and only just heard of it

Reading James Joyce's: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man at the moment - struggling to get my teeth into it. Probably due to only getting 20 mins on the train to read it, I need a solid evening with it.

May we be forgiven: unfortunately, didn't manage to sustain the hilarious bleakness of the opening 200 pages. As is so often with this kind of story - the humanising of an alienated / lost soul - as the main character becomes less irredeemable so the plot becomes less interesting. Bad people are, after all, often funnier and more interesting than good people.

Now making a start on the Goldfinch. Which everyone tells me doesn't end particularly well, so that's kinda putting a dampener on my enthusiasm to work my way through 700 odd pages.

What should I read when I finish a wild sheep chase? I know that's a massively broad question but I'm sat looking at my bookcase and realise there's nothing on there that I haven't read already. (with regards to the question a page or so ago, my bookcase is a plain black Ikea number but with the middle shelf facing the wrong way, showing mdf because I put it together after a few tins and couldn't face disassembling and reassambling the whole thing when I realised my mistake.) I suppose what I really want is for people to throw the names of their favourite books at me and I'll Google them and see what I fancy.

This so much.
Took me so long to work that out.

Also Skoob is pretty much heaven.