Book Thread. I have nothing good to read.

[tkunit]

I picked up wettest county and am enjoying it, its fun to read about semi local things

[Zerocious]

Ruz, ever started reading 'the shack'?

i have to say i am pleasantly surprised by it. as i said before it doesnt get interesting until about a 100 pages into it, but from that point on there's plenty to draw from every subsequent chapter. Some real keen insights in how people perceive the 'judgment of god', 'relationship as a power struggle', etc. i'd say it's quite a page turner, however a chapter at a time will give yo enough meat to digest 'till the next time you pick it up.

anyway, not like your average read i would say, and i do recommend. Will probably read again from page 100 on or so to get it all in.

[DallasShalDune]

Everyone, read Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy now. It is amazing.

[doclinkin]

Notable books I've read this summer:

--Quick reads--
Lost Fleet series by Jack Campbell
The Strain, by Guillermo del Toro --(Vampire apocalypse begins in Manhattan)
Fool, by Christopher Moore

--Literate stuff--
In Pharoah's Army, by Tobias Wolff
The Selected Works of TS Spivet, by Rief Larsen --(boy genius cartographer maps his life)
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz

--Graphic works--
The Photographer: Into war-torn Afghanistan with Doctors without Borders, by Emmanuel Guibert
Asterios Polyp, by David Mazzuchelli
The Stuff of Life: A graphic Guide to DNA and Genetics, by Mark Schultz, Zander & Kevin Cannon
The DMZ series, by Brain Wood, various artists
The Immortal Iron Fist (to vol 4), chiefly Ed Brubaker, various artists
Criminal (to vol 3), Ed Brubaker
Little Nothings, by Lewis Trondheim
Dungeon series, by Trondheim and Joann Sfar et al.
Ordinary Victories (1&2) by Manu Larcenet
Luba, Los Bros Hernandez
No Pasaran, Vittorio Giardino --(Spanish Civil War)
Che: a graphic history, by Spain Rodriguez
The Walking Dead (vol 9), by Robert Kirkman
Mouseguard Vol 2: Winter 1152, by David Petersen
Miss Don't Touch Me, by Hubert & Kerascoet

--Degenerate Lit--
Post Office, by Charles Bukowski
Septuagenarian Stew, (same)

--Kid Stuff--
Nation, by Terry Pratchett
Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman
Gregor the Overlander, by Suzanne Collins
Extraordinary Adventures of Ordinary Boy, William Boniface

--Non-Fiction--
The Physics of the Impossible, by Michio Kaku
It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time, by David Goodwillie --(memoir NYC pre 9/11)
Deep Survival, by Laurence Gonzales -- (why accidents happen and disasters are perfectly normal if preventable)

--Couldn't get through--
The Lamentable Journey of Omaha Bigelow into the Impenetrable Losiaida Jungle, by Ed Vega Junque --(breaking the 4th wall seems self-indulgent masturbatory auto-floggery)


Ordinarily, I'm reading more nonfiction than anything else, but I think my brangs needed a rest. Fair amount of time in waiting rooms, and the like, taking care of family.

=========================================================
Best of the above?

Nation. Terry Pratchett is ordinarily a snarky wit, funny, but a little is enough. This one however was earnest, clear-eyed, sentimental but well wrought. Story of a native boy after his island is ruined by a tsunami, tries to rebuild a life for himself among flotsam and jetsam. Good for young adults and up.

Oscar Wao. Tale of a misfit latino nerd.

The Photographer. Set in Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, but relevant today.

Asterios Polyp. Graphically inventive, exploits the possibilities of the form hinted at by Will Eisner in "Comics and Sequential Art'. Story follows an acerbic bitter academic architect after his apartment and life's work burn to cinders. He re-examines his life, failed marriage. Characters are scribbled in various styles depending on how they see life, themselves, etc. One particular scene graphically illustrates the frission of a marriage as two characters intermingled graphic styles split and are rendered separately. Pretty cool, maybe more appreciated by illustrators than casual readers but anyway...

Ordinary Victories. Most of the Graphic works I like are coming out of France right now. Here, nicely executed well-painted simple story of angst and modern life.

Criminal (Vol 1: Coward. Though all 3 I've read were good). Small-time crooks and the abysmal lives they lead. Brubaker knows crime like he's served time or something like it.

Deep Survival is worth a read even if the prose is no frills reportage mostly.

Though really there weren't many stinkers in the bunch. I'm pretty sure I read more, but these are the ones that stuck for one reason or the other. I started a few but dropped them if they didn't grab on quick. There's too much to read to get stuck on a completion jag.

[dobrojim]

I recently read The Accidental Mind and would recommend it to the nerdy type
as I can be at times. Good book which discusses the wonders of brain function
in light of the constraints on brain design imposed by evolution.

I also just re-read Harry Potter #7 (the last one).

[Consequence]

You should really listen to this recommendation I'm making for you. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell is superb. It has everything you could want from an author, is challenging at times, and encompasses themes that you seem to enjoy.

Seconded. Among my favourite books.

[Zerocious]

Everyone, read Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy now. It is amazing.

k

[lupin]

Doc, do you read for a living? Do you read multiple books at one time? That's quite a list for 2-3 months.

[MJG]

Doc, do you read for a living? Do you read multiple books at one time? That's quite a list for 2-3 months.

Ha, no joke. There are 30 books on there, which is around 2.5 per week, depending on when you consider summer having started. Blows me out of the water: even if I'm really into a book, I'd probably still spend the better part of a week on it.

[doclinkin]

Doc, do you read for a living? Do you read multiple books at one time? That's quite a list for 2-3 months.

Funny. In part, yes, sorta. Leastways I'm able to declare books as a tax write-off as needed -- though mostly I give my loco library a workout. Yeah multiple books at a time, my mind is impatient and if one gets boring I'll switch for a bit. And being a visual person I read pretty quick, a couple sentences at a time more than word by word.

But most of those are graphic novels which I can chew through in 20 minutes or less for plot and story purposes then go back to ruminate on art, composition, flow etc for a day or so. My nearby favorite Library has a hearty healthy collection in both kids and adults collections. I love comics, they're just now starting to metastasize to mainstream literate culture here in the US, and many of the best works for grown ups (or emotionally mature people of whatever age) are still coming out of Europe, but even if they were pure juvenailia I'd be reading them.

Plus I don't need much sleep. Or maybe I don't get as much sleep as I need. 5-6 hours a night and I'm still functional. And I don't watch TV, with an obvious exception (and then most years I piggyback off uplinks by generous folks with an economically renegade spirit).

But this summer is a bit of an aberration, I had a couple weeks off from one family disaster, then large chunks of time for another so I've had stretches of stasis in waiting rooms and hospitals. Got to do something to stay sane.

I just read a preview copy of (web artist) Kazu Kibuishi's follow-up to his book Amulet, if you have kids or like comics I highly recommend volume 1. The art on book two isn't quite as much of a labor of love, he had to hire artist friends to do some of his color work so it's not quite as luminous as his work on the web-comic Copper. But the plot still rings various bells in the Joseph Campbell Hero With a Thousand Faces checklist of what must happen in a hero's journey. Dead parent(s), descent into the underworld, magic weapon found, animal helpers, wise elder must teach young hero, etc. All the themes you'll recognize from (the original) Star Wars.

Just also finished 'Hater' by David Moody. 'Eh'. Not really impressed. An Anger apocalypse. I liked Del Toro's (vampire apocalypse) The Strain better -- even if I'm still sulky and pissed at him for trashing the Hellboy sequel and turning it into campy kitsch rather than gloomy occult with headless nazis and genius apes and cetera. Hater was actually optioned by Del Toro to turn it into a script, but it's a weak first-person account of the beginnings of a 28Days Later type of emotional plague.

Better news is that HBO films may be producing Robert Kirkman's post-zombie soap opera comix series The Walking Dead -- or so I'm told by a professional in the biz (local comic store gique-entrepreneur). I thought World War Z would make a better HBO series, but you'd have to hire a different cast every season or every few weeks to really jump around and satisfy the various differing viewpoints.

But yeah as far as hobbies go, reading, thinking about basketball, making up stuff, keeping the wife entertained, that's about it. Eating. A little sleep. A bit of parenting. There's still hours in the day. I just mostly cut out things like exercise (high metabolism and naturally low cholesterol, and with a nutritionist wife I generally eat alright. I still need to make sure I get the heart rate up, but I slack on that. And anyway that's what a wife is for no? A very personal exerciser? ...).

But yeah, I highly recommend Graphic Novels as a way to pack in a ton of story into a short period of time. If a picture is worth a thousand words, consider the information density and creative potential of the interplay of words and picture.

For grown-ups, and the literarily snobby try:

The Photographer.
Ordinary Victories.
Asterios Polyp.
--maybe even--
Little Miss Don't Touch Me.
--or--
To Cool to Be Forgotten
[Synopsis: trying to quit smoking, the protagonist sees a hypnotherapist and warps back to highschool, to the when why and where he started smoking in the first place].

Just a suggestion. It's not for everybody. I'm just saying if you ever liked comix you might give them a try as an adult since there's a ton out there that's of high literary quality. If you need convincing start with the pulitzer prizewinning Maus and Maus II: My father bleeds history. An as-told-to memoir of survival in auschwitz by once-underground artist Art Spiegelman interviewing his father.

[doclinkin]

Tangential footnote:

Here's Copper by Kaz Kibuishi. Really remarkably beautiful work for something so offhand and throwaway and whimsical in scope.

This one's funny:
http://www.boltcity.com/copper/copper_005_climbing.htm

[pancakes3]

just jotted down a few titles to check out from the library from you all's suggestions (i couldn't decide which is more offensive to type. you all's, or ya'll's. i also couldn't bring myself to change it to 'your')

confederacy of dunces - always meant to read it
cloud atlas - the first few sentences of synopsis sounded pretty interesting
physics of the impossible - love those pseudo-intellectual books
collapse - ditto, plus just finished re-reading guns/germs/steel
amazing brain - double ditto

*by pseudo-intellectual i mean, not textbooks or science journals but rather synthesized baby food-esque knowledge. not that there isn't good stuff in these books and gladwell's books, or michael lewis.

[TheSecretWeapon]

Just got back from the beach. Do NOT read Clive Cussler. Can't emphasize that enough. I know there are folks who love his books, but after finding a couple on the bookshelf at the beach house, I can't understand why. Horrible. Awful. Vomitrocius. The one I read all the way through was so bad, I actually tried another one under the theory that maybe he'd gotten old and senile, or that he was coasting. Nope -- his writing just sucks. Rule of thumb from movies -- good dialogue is what a conversation would sound like if everyone had 30 seconds to think about what they were going to say before they said it. Cussler's dialogue reads like everyone took 10 minutes to consult with a thesaurus, a grammarian, and the plot outline. Blech.

Tried "Bonesetter's Daughter" by Amy Tan, but discarded that after 20 pages. Just terrible. She has a great reputation and it was her first book in 5 years or something. May go back and give Joy Luck Club a try just to see if it's any good. Might just be she's a "chick" writer. My wife loves her stuff (but hasn't gotten to Bonesetter yet).

Finally stumbled into something worthwhile -- a PI book called "Midnight Man" by Loren Estelman. Entertaining hard-boiled mystery book. The kind of story where the main character gets stomped and beaten nearly to death, then gets up the next day to deal with a dead body he finds in his trunk.

[doclinkin]

Rule of thumb from movies -- good dialogue is what a conversation would sound like if everyone had 30 seconds to think about what they were going to say before they said it. Cussler's dialogue reads like everyone took 10 minutes to consult with a thesaurus, a grammarian, and the plot outline. Blech.

Far as plot-driven crime and adventure stories Elmore Leonard is a guy who writes dialogue as though it was spoken by your average mush mouthed criminal type -- far as realistic dialogue is concerned. Sorta David Mamet-esque. Fun to read aloud. Half-finished sentences. --'Used to write' I should say. I haven't read his stuff in long years. Don't know if it's still any good.

At a guest house once on a summer vacation I found a copy of (pimp turned author) Iceberg Slim's autobiography. That was a great read, and dialogue crisp and realistic as you'd expect even if the accompanying description was overly florid at times.

From Mr Slim I learned the word 'ataxis' -- a deliberate flaw left in roman architecture to keep it from looking too perfect, thus making it more beautiful. And that's how I decided not to worry too much about editing. Or grammar anyway. It just has to 'sound' right to me.

Oh and Clive Cussler sucks, yes.

[TheSecretWeapon]

Elmore Leonard is a terrific writer. In many ways, the antithesis to the plot driven guys like Clancy or Cussler. Leonard once said (maybe more than once) that his idea of plot was to put some people in a room with a gun and see what happened. A couple weeks ago, I caught the original 3:10 to Yuma, and was surprised to see that he wrote the story. One helluva movie, that's for sure.

Back to Cussler for a moment -- I can tolerate tedious dialogue in the service of a good plot and a killer hook. The book I read had that killer hook (for me anyway -- I'm a sucker for Atlantis tales), but then the problem -- the hook had NOTHING to do with the rest of the story. It was in there just because. And almost nothing anyone did made any sense. Anyway.

If you're looking for a good beach read sometime, check out the Travis McGee series written by John D. MacDonald.

[doclinkin]

Slowing down somewhat in the fall, especially now that there's ball to watch. But a few titles I've really enjoyed recently:

FICTION
River of Gods: (Happy birthday India 2047) -- by Ian McDonald.
Near future cybersprawl dystopia of India, now fractured into a few new states. Vivid visceral prose, a dangerous array of interesting ideas per page. True speculative fiction like the the best sci-fi: extrapolating on trends social, political, technological. Picture Slumdog millionaire crossed with Bladerunner. Works great as fiction whether or not you dig sci-fi sicne the stories are character-driven.

Feel free to first read Cyberabad Days first if you want a taster without committing to a 700 page novel. (same author) These are short stories set in the same world. I read this one before the thicker book and all but the last story make sense as standalones, give you a good sampler.

NON-FICTION
Born to run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen
by Christopher McDougall.
A meditation on supermarathon runners (50-100 mile deals), a forgotten mexican tribe of longrunners, and ultimately the orgins of the modern human being as an endurance-running predator. Reads like the best Men's Health article you've yet found, muscular prose, clever metaphor, thought provoking concepts, solid reportage. It will make you want to chuck your shoes and run a barefoot 100 kilometers. I liked this book far more than I expected to.

GRAPHIC NOVELS for kids:
Secret Science Alliance and the Copycat Crook, by Eleanor Davis. Nerd kid is ostracized and tries to pretend he's not a nerd, but fails utterly. Then discovers the rebel chick and cool jock also happen to be secret inventor-nerds. None of them want other kids to know about it, but they cobble together plausible and useful contraptions in their spare time for their own amusement. Naturally a caper ensues, troubles occur, justice prevails via acts of spunk and gumption, bonds of friendship save the day. That sort of thing.

Cleanline art, with a Geoff Darrow-esque density of background details (only, without all the spent cartridges and gore). Bright cheery colors. Your seven year old will like absorbing all the details and thinking up useful inventions of their own. The story is okay, but the art carries the thing. Cant' wait though for a time when there's a resurgence of stories where characters don't have to apologize for being smart. I recall as a kid there was a genre of stories of science adventurers, seems to me kids nowadays lack that, get bombarded with messages of 'cool and tough' not canny and clever.

Just a few to chew on.

[DallasShalDune]

I read a three books by Thomas Pynchon since last summer and I CANNOT get enough of his stuff. I don't know if it is the random digressions, the millions of goofy characters, the puns, or the fact that all my English professors say he's incredibly difficult. It makes me feel smart ha!

But I recommend the three books I read. The three are The Crying of Lot 49, Inherent Vice, and Pynchon's opus Gravity's Rainbow. He does a great job of creating the world in his own image, really putting his stamp on it through his prose.

Crying of the Lot 49 is my favorite of the three. It is about a woman trying to discover the secrets of an organization that may or may not exist. The world around her begins to envelope the reader too, and it is hard to find out what is real and what isn't, and really, the ambiguity makes the reader do exactly what Pynchon wants the reader to do... feel lost, just like Oedipa Maas (the protagonist). The overarching theme is miscommunication, and how not communicating properly just represents Las Angeles culture in the 60s perfectly.

Inherent Vice is a lot like the previous book mentioned. It is in the style of The Big Lebowski, in ways, mixing detective noir with psychedelics of the 60s. You know the book takes place in 1970 because who is in the finals (the Bucks, man its been awhile) and represents the same confusions that Oedipa had, but through a gumshoe named Doc, and the metaphor extends to a nostalgia of the hippie 60s. It is beautifully written, and hilarious at times. Pynchon comes up with puns better than most comedians, I swear.

Gravity's Rainbow may have been my favorite if I didn't read it first. The 800 page book is 4 times as long as the short Crying of the Lot 49, and about 4 times (estimation ) as complex. I didn't "know" how to read Pynchon yet, and when a guy dresses up as a super hero, has a pie fight on a hot air balloon to escape someone trying to kill him, and the gratuitous sex scenes that involve minors and believe it or not more disgusting things, I was baffled. I knew I liked it, and I saw why it was great literature, but I didn't "get" it. Hell, I still don't get it, but after reading two more of Pynchon's novels, I have a better understanding of his he works.

I suggest his novels to anyone into weird books. The best starting place is Crying of the Lot 49 because it is better than Inherent Vice, yet easier to grasp than Gravity's Rainbow.

[MJG]

I just finished reading The Year of Living Biblically by AJ Jacobs. I didn't like it as much as his previous book (The Know-It-All), but that may because I don't give a whit about religion. It was still pretty enjoyable, just not quite as fun I thought. He's got a third book out now, but I think I'll hold off on that one for awhile, until the next time I'm in the mood for something breezy. The author kind of reminds me of the Sports Guy - his writing is an entertaining way to pass some time, but don't expect any deep or meaningful impact.

[fishercob]

I'm not a voracious reader. It's the non-habit of mine that I least like. I'm currently reading, and enjoying, "I'm Dying up Here: Heartbreak and Hard Times in Stand-up Comedy's Golden Era." Highly interesting account of he a lot of great successes that we all know (Leno, Letterman, Richard Lewis) and some greats that I'm too young to remember. Lots of angst and drugs and booze and hilarity.

Also, after the excerpt of the story of Gus Johnson brokering a peace between Isiah and Bill Simmons on ESPN.com yesterday. I pre-ordered Simmons' new book on the NBA. He's a really entertaining writing, absolutely loves the NBA, and I'm hopeful that with an editor and the permanence of a book, there will be few references to The Hills, Real World, ROad Rules, etc.

Finally, for those of you into graphic novels and stuff that's a little bit out there, I thought I'd turn you on to the work of a longtime friend of mine: Confessions of an Ivy League Pornographer. The title is pretty much self explanatory -- it's about the life and times of a Brown-educated guy who found his way into porn: http://www.ivyleaguepornographer.com/

[W. Unseld]

Doc, I'm a dweeb for traditional ie Marvel/DC graphic novels. If you like end of the world type stuff try the "Earth X/Universe X" series from a few years back, interesting stuff. DC has had some well known authors pen a few traditional hero in tights stories with some entertaining and hilarious adult themed stuff that would have naturally occurred years ago in real life. My wife the snobby lawyer initially gave me cr*p about reading them then quickly discovered one night that short of drugs and alcohol there is no better way to quickly immerse into a diversion that has nothing to do with the daily grind.