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I'm currently reading Silence by Shusaku Endo. For a class, obviously. But it's really interesting so far. It's about Christians in Japan.

The last book I read was Zenana by Laura Ring. Also for a class. It was okay. It didn't really speak to me in the way I thought it would, considering my own family is from Karachi. But the people in the book were very specific types of people, so I guess it's understandable. I liked her analysis though, it was really interesting.

I'm working my way through Linguistic Magic and Mystery by my friend Ivan A. Derzhanski. It's a book of twenty linguistic problem sets, adapted from problems that he designed for the contests in linguistics at the Winter Mathematics Competitions organized by the Union of Bulgarian Mathematicians. They're fun puzzles, if you're interested in that sort of thing (as I am), and the book is packed with lots of interesting additional information and a good sense of humor.

I just finished reading History Is Wrong, Erich von Däniken's thirtieth book (or thereabouts) presenting evidence that extraterrestrials visited earth in ancient times. The Nazca lines, metal libraries in Ecuador, the Book of Mormon, the Book of Enoch, and the Voynich Manuscript are the main topics of discussion in this one.

I am reading The Princess Bride! Almost done with it. It's so so so so good. Easy read, but really clever and funny and sad and exciting and cute and awesome. xD

I've been wanting to see the movie my entire life basically lol, but never set aside time for it, and when I bought the book I convinced myself I wouldn't see the movie until I read the book, and now that I've finally gotten around to the book, I love it so much I'm afraid the movie might disappoint me...

There's hardly anything better than the movie.

I've been reading "Before the Pyramids," a collection of papers on predynastic Egypt published by the University of Chicago in connection with an exhibition that's currently at the Oriental Institute in Chicago.

Interesting stuff -- the basics of Egyptian civilization were already pretty much in place for about 500 years before the traditional beginning of the first dynasty -- and upper and lower Egypt had apparently been unified for a significant part of that period.

I just finished Ayako, a gritty adult manga set in the years following World War II, by Tezuka Osamu.

Now I'm reading The Parade's Gone By..., Kevin Brownlow's classic history of the silent cinema.

Currently reading The Once and Future King, I love this book, but I have never finished it. I either get too caught up with other things and forget about it or misplace it and find another book to read xD BUT NOW I'M DETERMINED TO JUST FINISH IT. I have a mountain of books by my bedside that I want to get through and I know that once my next quarter stars my workload will increase like tenfold and I won't have any time ever.

Next on my to-read booklist:
- A Long Long Time Ago & Essentially True - Brigid Pasulka
- Death in Venice - Thomas Mann
- The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
- Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
- Kafka on the Shore - Haruki Murakami

Currently trying to make my way through Stephen King's Bag of Bones. Thankfully, it's turning out to be a lot better than the mini-series of it.

I just finished reading Arda Philology, Volumes 1, 2, and 3, which are the Proceedings of the first three Omentielvar (International Conferences on J.R.R. Tolkien's Invented Languages). The papers that I found most interesting were the ones on my own particular area of expertise, the Elvish writing systems:

"The Scripts of Aman" by Måns Björkman
"The Feanorian Mode of 'The Etymologies'" by Måns Björkman
"A Methodological Study of the Elvish Writing Systems" by Hélios De Rosario Martínez