Currently reading
Vineland (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin)
Tristes Tropiques
Richard III
The Dwarf
The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen
Labyrinths
Giotto to Dürer: Early Renaissance Painting in the National Gallery
Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics
Gravity's Rainbow
A Gravity's Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon's Novel
Beach week starting -- I've been reading these in sequence.
Macdonald has said that The Doomsters was his breakthrough book -- the one where he stopped simply writing genre and became... a writer. For most of this book, I didn't feel that it was working. There was still the clichéd writing of the 1950's genre, the plot was too complicated and a bit implausible..., the characters predicatbly flat... and nothing really seemed new.
Till about ch. 24 -- then, things did start to change... even so, I remained unconvinced until nearly the end, and the long monologue (no spoilers will be given here) brought everything together in a way that really was both new and disturbing - that is, in a way that was, as these things go, quite believable.
By the end, a very good book.