Most recent series I read was the Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents series by Octavia Butler, which is a really top-notch bit of storytelling. She was planning a few more books in the series that take place thousands of years later, but she met an unfortunate end a few months ago and we'll never see 'em now :(
After that, I read Fledgling, which was her last book. The beginning was worrisome, because it's about vampires and it kept threatening to descend into some kind of endless tale of vampire mythos and sex (aka Ann-Rice-ism), but it found its footing about a third of the way in. She definitely has some recurring themes in her sci-fi books, namely symbiotic species' and enhanced self-healing "improved humans". She does paint a good universe, though, and she's not afraid to jump a thousand years into the future (or the past) to see how things are going.
Asimov rather did the same thing in his later Foundation books, visiting planets from his early robot-novels to see how they progressed in the intervening 12,000 years between the Robot series and the Foundation series.
Although right now I'm reading Gateway by Fredrick Pohl. Since Parable of the Talents won all kinds of Hugo and Nebula awards and I liked it, I figured I'd check out other books that did the same, and Gateway won about every award there is, so I figured I couldn't be disappointed. And thus-far I'm not. Also I'm reading that one because I got it from the library, and library books automatically move to the front of the book-queue, lest they come due for return before I get to 'em :)
So I guess I'm on a sci-fi bent right now. I come and go with book genres. After Pohl and a couple more Butler books, I might take a break and go back to the science stuff.
Speaking of cheap paperbacks, Paperbackswap.com is a good thing. It's a service where you list all the paperbacks you own. If someone wants one of yours, you send it to 'em and you get a credit. You can then spend that credit on a book from someone else. Thus-far I've traded ten old books I didn't want for ten other old books that I DO want.
For old paperbacks, this works much better than eBay. Because paperbacks that are more than about a year old just don't fetch squat on eBay. And trading 'em at Half Price Books is even worse. I'd much rather swap 'em.
