Glad to see others have the (bad?) habit of reading several books at once! ;-)

SF, magical realism, literary fiction, mysteries, world folk&fairy tales, and non-fiction in general. SOME (but necessarily not all) specific faves - GGMarquez, Isabel Allende, Theodore Sturgeon, Sharyn McCrumb, Toni Morrison, Robert Silverberg, Kenneth Rexroth's Chinese poetry translations, Dave Barry, Merrill Markoe, Doug Adams, Shakespeare, Ngaio Marsh - too many to name!

[Glad to see John Dickson Carr mentioned. Several years ago, I organized a radio production of nine of his radio plays by our local community theatre group. It was a great experience - and his writing stands up so well over the years. So many of the radio plays from the same era are hopelessly dated (too nationalistic/overly-patriotic or too smarmily sentimental), but his are plot and character based, with few references to the time period, and with great twists at the end. They'll still be good in 500 years.]

A couple of the NF books currently on the towering stack by my bed - The Thyroid Solution by Ridha Arem (I'd recommend this to all the MC women - thyroid problems are way more prevalent among women, & many of them go undiagnosed), Shaman, Healer, Sage by Alberto Villoldo (an anthropologist studies with a South American shaman), and Ida Was a Tramp (NOT what you're thinking! ;-) It's the adventures of a guy on a tramp steamer).

Patricia Keneally, mentioned above, has a really funny website (apparently unintentionally) - she rants on and on about how she was the one true wife of Jim Morrison & rags on Pam a lot. LOL