Books in Progress

Dies the Fire, by S M Stirling. Imagine if electricity and high energy chemistry (gunpowder, internal combustion) went away. You have medieval technology plus whatever you can scavenge; chainmail is a lot easier to make than it was historically, for instance, because you can find reels of wire instead of having to draw it. If you're already concerned about a Carrington Event or a EMP attack, this may be a bit depressing.

Story Engineering by Larry Brooks. Haven't gotten far into it yet; the message thus far is "any good story has to have these six factors. You can wing it or plan it, but you have to have these. You will do better if you know what they are, instead of blindly flailing around and hoping to hit them."

Burton & Swinburne in the Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon, by William Harrison. Sometimes you can read Book 3 of a trilogy without having gone through 1 and 2 first. And you could probably do it with this one, but I wouldn't recommend it. I found it hard going. This may be because Burton does some time travel, and gets involved in the Great War , with all the gore and mess and stupidity of the real Great War, plus biological weapons. Not something I want to read about for fun. I quit about halfway through.

Agent to the Stars, by John Scalzi. The protagonist is a talent agent in Hollywood. His boss hands him a challenge: "An alien species has secretly contacted me. They want us to market them to the world, to make sure that the world sees them as Friendly Aliens rather than Evil Aliens. By the way, they look like snot and smell like rotten fish." The story is a lot of fun and has a couple of twists which took me completely by surprise.