Books I'm Currently Reading

I am currently rereading Philip Pullman's fantasy series His Dark Materials.  The first book, The Golden Compass, I read again just recently.  I just finished book number two, titled The Subtle Knife, and am now a little more than halfway through the final one, The Amber Spyglass.  I find Pullman's writing style and presentation a joy to read, and wish others would write stories the way he does.  I am also nearing the end of Sue Grafton's series of short novels based on letters of the alphabet.  My next book, which I'm about to start, is "V" is for Vengeance.  After that, it's "W" and "X"...and then my reading will have caught up with Grafton's writing.  I am also planning to take on a popular 2015 novel: Paula Hawkins' The Girl on the Train, which has been on the New York Times bestseller list for months...

That's the positive side of my reading right now.  On the negative side, I seem to be stuck in a number of books, a couple of them not so good...and a couple of them worthy classics.  The books are Disclosure by Michael Crichton, The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling, Moby Dick by Herman Melville, and Les Miserables by Victor Hugo.  The problem with Disclosure is that I am not only completely out of touch with its main character, with whose developing plight I'm expected to sympathize, but the cutting edge sci-fi aspect to it is outdated...by twenty years.  With The Casual Vacancy, Rowling introduced way too many characters at the very beginning and she hops around in a confusing manner from one of the many subplots to another.  Les Miserables is a good book as I see it, but it is very, very long...and I already know some things that happen to the main characters, not a good inducement to read further.  Melvilles' Moby Dick seems to be the most promising of the lot...I just need to take the time to read it...