Just like the title says, a general "What are you reading now?" thread.
I just finished Masamune Shirow's "Ghost in the Shell" manga.
Better known in the US for the 1995 animated movie* and early oughts TV anime Ghost in the Shell is considered a classic among Otaku.
I have seen neither the film or TV series however, as I heard in the 90s the movie was just a boob fest and, having not seen the movie, didn't want to watch the TV show. Plus I just generally like manga better than anime.
I was surprised at the philosophical depth added to what is essentially just a cyberpunk action story, but I don't get all the complaints about it being psychobabbl-y or hard to grasp. The nature of life and consciousness are discussed for several pages but it never gets much more complicated than that. No, the great flaw in the book is that it feels disjointed. The more philosophical scenes read almost like they're from a different manga than the whizz-bang action and ever-present humor of the rest of the story. The characters, even Major Kusanagi, don't seem to develop much throughout. Ironically the only one who truly seems to grow is a minor character who goes from being the rookie of the team to bossing around the new rookies.
One feels like they're just seeing small snippets of these characters rather than getting a rounded picture. An example is that at the start of one chapter Major Kusanagi is being very intimate with 2 other women (for profit via a not-so-legal software manipulation we're told in the appendix) a few chapters later it's nearly a year in the future and she's had a boyfriend for months, also a government agent, who we'd never heard of, never seen before and never see again after the single chapter in which he plays a crucial part. That's just not good storytelling no matter how you slice it. The story overall at least is decent-to-very good, if preachy in points.
A good read for cyberpunk fans, if you can somehow find the uncensored edition (which contains the above mentioned 3 page color scene of Kusanagi and 2 other women, nice if not "plot essential") for under $20 it's worth a look. But, once again, Berserk remains unchallenged in my eyes as the greatest manga ever written.
*Which loudly trumpeted James Cameron's endorsement on it's initial English releases, and deals with electronic consciousness transferal like Avatar. Though at the time of his GitS endorsement he was best known for "Titanic".