What are you reading right now?

I promised Faith I would do this meme when I got home. I'll cheat a little and include my holiday reading as well as my current reads.

Fiction
I rarely read fiction these days. I remember a friend saying that as she got older she read less fiction and more non-fiction. The same has definitely happened to me. I did however read one fiction book while I was away: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon, which had been sitting on my shelf for months (or maybe years?). A teenager with Asperger's syndrome finds a neighbour's dog killed and decides to solve the mystery. As a result he discovers more than he bargained for. This book won a number of literary prizes for the way it uses the first person to show how the boy sees and interacts with the world. Well written, but I'm not sure I liked it.

Non-fiction
Two holiday reads: Notes from a Big Country by Bill Bryson, and Give Me Ten Seconds, by John Sargeant. I enjoy Bill Bryson, and this collection of articles originally written for a newspaper magazine made good light holiday reading. The second book was a biography of a former BBC Chief Political Correspondent, borrowed from Tevye's holiday pile. One of those books I finished more or less in spite of myself. Too much about the internal workings of the BBC, and not as many insights into journalism and politics as I expected. Tevye felt the same, so why I bothered to start the book in the first place I'm not sure!

Today I started reading Cottage Economy by William Cobbett, with a foreword by G.K.Chesterton. This is a gem! Written in 1821 it combines instructions for labourers wishing to improve their standard of living with commentary on contemporary life and politics. Want to know how to make beer, 36 gallons at a time? Or rush lights? Or how to fatten a pig? All there! His comments on the virtues of beer and the evils of tea are priceless. Quotes to follow.