“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” 
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Currently: ‘Rebels, The Irish Rising of 1916’ by Peter de Rosa. I am fascinated by history and this history in particular (I once parked my wagon and drag outside the GPO in Dublin while I went to find an address on foot and was so choked with the emotion of where I was that I couldn’t move for several minutes). At first I suspected it was about to be an English bashing exercise but it has turned out to be a well written and researched history dating from the Casement affair in 1914.
Most recently: ‘The Pembrokeshire Murders’ by Steve Wilkins (the SIO on the case). A very detailed account of the final investigation, which took several years, sometimes though perhaps a little too detailed to be an easy read.
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The Great Dune Trilogy and the Prelude to Dune books. SciFi, but quite intricate.
Raven One by Kevin Miller - interesting but I suspect it’s a guy type of lit.
The Dragonkin Trilogy - Michael Meyerhofer
@Griffin36 - thanks for reminding me of the Lensman Series - brings back some memories - I’ll have to get these.
I’m reading (and rereading) Lindsey Davis’s Falco detective books set in the later part of the first century. They are one of my go-to therapy reads and I’ve just finished her latest involving the colourful Flavia Albia. They are well researched and a real joy.
Thinking of Tory and chick lit, I find rereading Georgette Heyer fulfils the the very light, happy ending, nicely nuanced category…
By the way, I’m STILL unpacking the books from my UK place and have many hundreds of then - anyone want 1970s university maths books? 
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Oh I love Lindsay Davis’s Falco books - I haven’t read the latest though! Georgette Heyer and Josephine Tey were my go-to reads for when I was ill in winter when I was at school, I spent a fortnight stuck in bed in ‘the hospice’ (the charming name of our school sanatorium) most years.
anybody want any 
university maths books 
!
There may be a later one than the one I was reading (Grove of the Caesars) which came out in paperback last summer but my days of buying books in hardback are over…
I’m going to need to get rid of them so if you fancy some, just say 
No really, I’m good My midwifery texts taunt me enough as I walk down the stairs, I feel like I should re-read them so even though I’m not practising I retain the knowledge!
Sorry to be so negative, but I had the book for English O level more than half a century ago and $ despite loving literature, and the book being the best of that year’s batch, I never reread any of the course books ever again. I subsequentlyspent forty years lecturing in HE and loved it, but how I hated school!
I must be the most negative reader on the site! The Mayor of Casterbridge was one of my other O level books and was possibly the most depressing book I’ve ever read. Fifty odd years on , I still remember it as 484 pages of misery!
I’ve gone for series really - on my Kindle it’s a bit addictive 
. All the Patrick O’Brien Aubrey and Maturin novels, Cadfael series - Ellis peters, Rumpole of the Bailey, John Mortimer. Marcel Pagnol séries - brilliant 
. A lot of this is rereading really as I’ve revisited Tolkien, Shakespeare, Mervyn Peake, Georges Simenon. I’ll stop now before I bore you backwards 
. I honestly do get round to other things!
Mervyn Peake, now, the Gormenghasts were a lovely read! Thanks for reminding me.
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Each to thier own!
For me the O level read was The Cruel Sea which scared me for life
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You should try Jude the Obscure. Satisfyingly bleak.
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Thinking about books for school which put you off for life, we did Trollope’s “The Warden” and I didn’t touch Trollope again for 30 years, then got bored and read another one, thought it was great and have read most of his since. Same with Elizabeth Gaskell’s “Cranford” - 30 years later I read all her books and loved them. I think the problem was we were given them too young to appreciate the subtlety of the social analysis.
(I still can’t face reading Dickens or Walter Scott though )
@DrMarkH Some of that down to reading in class, though? I remember us taking turns to ‘do’ Jane Eyre, every plodding word of it in a flat Mancunian accent. Killer.
You’ve all shared your recent reads so here are mine: The Mandibles: the history of a family (bleak, bleak, black - I gave up before the end), Les Caractères de La Bruyère (bits and v slowly with lips moving), Astérix et César, The Mermaid & Mrs Hancock by Imogen Gower (loved), Whisky Galore (a lost world), all Val McDermid’s tartan noirs. So now you see why I was in need of inspiration…
Let me guess, was it a boys’ school?
My pupils are having to read Animal Farm and The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Nighttime in première and The Handmaid’s Tale, The God Of Small Things and Much Ado About Nothing in Terminale (and also in première I make them read Politics And The English Language before we read anything else).
This year so far fiction-wise we have also read bits of Conrad, Achebe, Adichie, Dahl, Pullman, Shakespeare, Marvell, Donne, Austen, Gaiman, Mary Wollstonecraft, both Shelleys, Wordsworth, various Huxleys, James (H not MR), Asimov, and probably a few more: I hope they remember them as well as you do your school texts but more fondly…