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HB's Book Notes
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| the big short, by michael lewis |
| posted by: horsebeater |
12:15 8.24.10 |
This is basically a recounting of the 4 or 5 groups of people that had predicted the mortgage bubble and had actually made money on it. it's a lewis book, so it's a relatively easy read. It tells a fun story -- with strong focus on the personalities of the people involved -- about the financial mess than everyone is familiar with on some level. You sense that, like most lewis books, you come across pretty well if you sit down and talk to lewis a lot. And lewis foreshadows some stuff too much to the point of annoyance.
On the up side, he has a number of great anecdotes and stories and gives a good sense of the exasperation of and loneliness felt by the people who saw this coming and couldn't get anyone to listen to them. It also feels like an accurate description of the wall street types who always tend to believe that they know more than everyone else.
Based upon the quality of the writing, it seems pretty clear that this was rushed to the press. I read the book in 3 days, and noted several times where lewis said the same thing in multiple places. It wasn't a tightly written book in other respects.
Also, while i could recommend the book for a lay audience, anyone involved in finance would be annoyed with the shortcut descriptions, the lack of detail and other elements of the book that would be less than satisfying. Check out the amazon reviews for the skewering it took in this regard.
Ultimately, it's probably my least favorite of the 6 lewis books i've read. It's still a decent book, but don't plunk down $20+ for it; grab it from the library instead. |
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| the girl with the dragon tattoo by stieg larson |
| posted by: horsebeater |
12:07 8.24.10 |
scandinavia month for hb book club!
i had come into reading this book with the mistaken belief that it is anything more than a thriller. it isn't. it's better than the dean koontz, harlen coben type crap that's around these days. but it's basically a half-step down from steven king. not dissimilar to a grisham book. it keeps you reading and it's a relatively interesting story, but it is what it is.
there is some attempt by the author to drape a feminist anti-rape, anti-abuse message over the story. chapters are begun with stats about women to service this goal. the fact that larson chose to spend a LOT of detail on sex abuse scenes undercuts that message for most.
I heard the first book is the best of the three and have no plans to read the other two. If you need a beach book, knock yourself out. Otherwise, feel free to skip it. |
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| out stealing horses by per petterson |
| posted by: horsebeater |
12:02 8.24.10 |
petterson, a scandinavian bookstore-owner turned author, has been in the news a bit for the release of a follow-up to 2007's out stealing horses.
out stealing horses is the story of a man in his 60's in the year 1999 and his move to the norwegian wilderness to stay away from family, live in a cabin and handyman his way to death. there is a simple beauty and a spareness to the writing that recalled for me a combination of two of my recent favorites in gilead and the road. (part of me, however, wondered how much this feeling depended upon the fact that the book was translated)
while much time is spent in 1999, much of the novel remembers the man's childhood in the late 1940's, just after world war II, and the events SPOILER ALERT that lead his loving father to abandon the boy and his family and take up with a woman that he had fallen in love with during their service in the wartime resistance.
I ultimately liked the book but it wasn't at all what I thought it was. I went in expecting something literary and ended up reading what amounted to a well-told relatively interesting (but not quite riveting) story, largely revolving around the lives of the two families during the 1940's. there some action, there's logs being cut down and floating down a river, there's multiple deaths. a lot of shit happens.
the book is a tight little package and relatively short, and thus something you can get through in a week with little trouble. (which I see as a bonus these post-infinite jest days). if there's any greater message to it, it's that war can fuck up the lives of even good people, even if it doesn't kill them. |
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| film club by david gilmour |
| posted by: horsebeater |
12:18 7.16.10 |
an xmas gift from the wifebeater, who thought that the premise of the book aligned with a prior tentfort post regarding sharing books/videos/etc with my kids.
the premise is a canadian guy lets his son drop out of high school on the condition that he watch 3 movies a week with his dad (his dad gets to choose).
the dad is a total ass. you get the sense that he let his kid drop out so he could write a book about it, because he lets him drop out at the drop of a hat. the author tries to live vicariously through his teenage son's love life, praises his son's efforts as a white canadian rapper and generally is a schmuck. even some of his takes on the movies are idiotic.
the people giving it 1 or 2 stars here are right on.
http://www.amazon.com/Film-Club-Memoir-David-Gilmour/dp/044619929X
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| the book of basketball, by bill simmons |
| posted by: horsebeater |
16:32 7.15.10 |
i am one of the sports' guys big supporters. i've never idolized him and then felt betrayed when he wrote too many red sox/celtics columns, but he's been a part of my regular online reading repetoire for 6-7 years.
and let me just say this: while he's got some damn good ideas -- as many as any sportwriter around -- his style, with constant analogies to pop culture, bad jokes, really grates after a while.
so while i like the book and recommend it for its ideas, for its comprehensiveness, and because reading knowledgable smart people's thoughts on who the best teams ever are and who the best players ever are, and what it takes to win, is worth it, if you're going to read this, do so 15-25 pages a week becuase, in the style of mr. simmons...
...reading the book of basketball is like doing shots on your 21st birthday. you do them too fast and you're puking within an hour. |
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| water for elephants, by sarah gruen |
| posted by: horsebeater |
16:16 7.15.10 |
ever since reading bridges of madison county, i have tried to, every few years, read a chick lit book, so that when i say they completely and totally suck, i can claim to know where i'm coming from.
when i picked this one up, however, i didn't realize it was chick lit. the wifebeater even said "that's a lady book" and I told her "I don't think so." I was very very wrong.
water for elephants starts off somewhat promisingly, if unbelievably. it's a story of 23 year old guy about to graduate vet school in around 1930 or so who doesn't take his final exams for various reasons and who runs off and randomly hooks up with the circus. the characters seem like stock characters from bad 1950's movies, but the story is interesting and the whole idea of the day to day logistics and mechanics and behind the scenes look at a depression era circus is pretty fascinating and carries you through the first third or so of the book. the story is told in flashback from the narrator, who is in his 90's and in a nursing home, which is annoying at first (but as the main story starts to suck, you begin to yearn for the interludes that are simply "annoying").
of course, as gruen introduces more and more stock characters with ridiculous names (camel, blackie, earl, kinko, with pegleg pete and yosemete sam apparently appearing in the sequel), and then introduces a cookie-cutter forbidden love story, with the vet falling in love with the girl that rides on the horses in the circus (the trapeze gal apparently being taken or something), and then makes sure that the husband of the love interest is shown to, of course, be SUPER-DUPER-EVIL -- let's have him beat animals a fourth time, just in case anyone still likes him, shall we? -- and then diagnosed at the end of the book as schizophrenic -- the book descends into bad lifetime movie psycho crap. Gruen telegraphs the two big twists at the end of the book for at least 150 pages, and when they arrive, they still aren't believable.
that said, the book has a kind of momentum. i realized about halfway through that the book was going to disappoint, but i went ahead and plowed through the last 150 pages anyway.
apparently this is being made into a reese witherspoon movie, which is the kind of fact that would have led me not to read the book in the first place, had i only known. |
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| the kings of new york by michael weinreb |
| posted by: horsebeater |
15:53 7.15.10 |
a book about the Murrow high school (brooklyn, NY) chess team and their success over the years in national chess tournies, with a strong emphasis on the team in a 2 year span in the middle of the last decade.
this is an easy, ok read. Weinreb is a sportwriter, and the book reads like it was written by a sportswriter, with the positives and negatives that go along with that. the ethnic make-up of the team is somewhat interesting and weinreb's descriptions of the chess in schools movement, local new york and regional tourneys, the new york chess scene, what has happened to chess in light of the internet is generally interesting, if not particularly well written. to those that existed within nerd sub-cultures at some point in their lives, lots of the back and forth will ring true. i'm sure weinreb, after hanging out with jocks, was surprised at how hardcore nerd culture and jock culture have many odd parellels (beneath-the-surface teammate rivalries, insult-based communication, etc.). his exploring that stuff was interesting, and at least kept me interested enough to speed through the book in about a week.
The truly amazing thing about this book is how the author completely screws up the chess. it would be clear to an absolute amateur that he doesn't know what he's talking about. he uses the term "sacrifice" incorrectly, he puts in diagrams of games, but chooses to show positions that have nothing to do with the text and don't really illustrate what's happening, he makes complete errors. it's really embarassing and ultimately quite frustrating to someone trying to follow along at least a little bit.
many of the amazon reviews nail this phenomenon:
http://www.amazon.com/Kings-New-York-Oddballs-HighSchool/product-reviews/1592402615/ref=cm_cr_dp_hist_3?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0&filterBy=addThreeStar
*******
Bad Points: Weinreb is not a master or even a serious player and it shows. There are numerous howlers of errors in the text in regard to chess positions and moves, which won't bother casual readers but for those who do play chess, it just grates. An example is when describing a game, he writes that in response White's initial move of 1.c4, Black played "knight to f7". Perhaps this is typo but there are many others. (FYI - in the initial position, Black knights can only move to f6, h6, c6 or a6) Had a serious player or the kids on the team reviewed the final draft these types of typos and errors would have been instantly caught. The choice of diagrams also seemed odd and he does not explain why the position is bad or the move an error to a sufficient degree for beginners to understand. Finally it would have been nice to have more pictures.
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| the damned united, by david peace |
| posted by: horsebeater |
15:44 7.15.10 |
this is a book about brian clough and his 40-odd day stint as manager of the leeds united soccer club, which was a dominant team in what's not the premier league in english "football." clough was a cocky manager, along the lines of mcenroe as davis cup coach, in that he was a great player and, as a coach, basically a cocky as hell showman and motivator and not really a tactician. (ultimately, after the book ends, clough goes to nottingham forest and wins the champions league twice).
wikipedia does pretty well:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Clough
clough's a fascinating guy and it's a fascinating story. clough loves open football and leeds had won for years with a rough and tumble style and clough basically announced to the players upon his arrival that while they had won, they had previously won by cheating, so it didn't count. you can imagine how much they loved him for that.
The book jumps around chronologically, mixing the 40 day stint at leeds with interludes from the previously 10 or so years, showing clough's early managerial successes and his incredibly cocky leadership of derby county. how he would complete trades without the knowledge of his own ownership, where derby won the 2nd division one year and then won the 1st division, the FOLLOWING YEAR, which is really quite impressive (like the Columbus Clippers joining MLB and winning the world series, really).
Fictionalized history is ultimately, however, a yucky genre. in particular, the way the author pretends to be inside clough's mind really grates after a while. There's an extreme overuse of the second person and all that.
i expect i likely would have enjoyed a nonfiction work on this even more.
so while i wouldn't recommend this, i wouldn't tell someone interested not to read it.
notably, it was turned into a nice 90 minute movie, which is currently streaming for free on netflix:
http://www.netflix.com/WiMovie/The_Damned_United/70117308?trkid=921403
i just watched the movie, and would probably recommend the movie more than the book (you get the gist of it in 1.5 instead of 10 hours).
not bad for watching to wean you from soccer post-world cup. |
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| infinite jest, of course |
| posted by: horsebeater |
15:34 7.15.10 |
i did finish this. while i'll say that i really liked infinite jest on a variety of levels, i'm not so sure that it's a "successful" book at the end of the day as a piece of great literature, in that i'm not convinced there's a coherent theme that ties the book together (even a postmodern meta- theme). and that was, ultimately, pretty frustrating to me.
if people ask me, i'm sure I'd say it's one of the top 20 books i've ever read. and i can tell you some things i really like about it. but if someone says "at the end of the day, what's the message of the book," I can't really say. and most of the time, if it's literature that I really like, i have a darn good answer to that question. |
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| Reading Infinite Jest now ... 140 pages in ... |
| posted by: horsebeater |
11:32 1.15.10 |
| who has read this before? should i be worried that it is going to suck? |
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| Tycho Brahe |
| posted by: spacehippie |
17:22 12.21.09 |
I'd never heard of him before, but a little quick searching leads me to believe that I could dig up a lot more of his life story and be fascinated by just about everything I read:
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1270/did-astronomer-tycho-brahe-really-have-a-silver-nose
http://www.nada.kth.se/~fred/tycho/nose.html |
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| bears repeating |
| posted by: simplicissimus |
11:04 12.21.09 |
| "he had a pet elk that died after getting drunk and falling down the stairs." |
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| Breaks of the Game by David Halberstam |
| posted by: horsebeater |
21:47 12.20.09 |
A portrayal of the 1979-1980 Sonics that has been hyped by the Sports Guy ad nauseum, and obviously Halberstam's sports books all come recommended.
It's a good book, but many of the things it uncovered are things that don't exactly shock the 2009 sports fan: salaries skyrocketing, free agency changing things, players playing in pain with team doctors administering shots relatively frequently, the obsessive nature of modern coaches, the ruthless business-like nature of professional sports, the racism in the NBA in the 1950s and 1960s and how it lingered in the 1970s to a degree. And it does all this without the hilarious anecdotes of a Ball Four or a Loose Balls (which I would recommend before this).
The style is to go through the Portland season, with 5-15 page discussions of the coach, scout, owner, GM, specific players on the team every few pages. Although Bill Walton wasn't even a part of the 1979-1980 team, he dominates the book to a degree, as the book goes back through Portland's history (and the championship Walton led them to in 1977).
The depiction of Portland in the 1970s is pretty quaint (but cool ... definitely a scene anyone would have enjoyed, it sounds like). Really explains why the Jail Blazers of the 1990s would have been so devastating for the city that had loved its emotional connection with their only pro sports team.
Halberstam needs a more powerful editor. I'm sure in churning out this book in a year, he didn't notice when he cited the same fact in 3 different places (sometimes only pages apart) but it was a bit jarring. I felt the same way about some of his history books as well, however.
That said, grading on the sports book curve, the writing is certainly better than the vast majority of books out there. And sports books always seem to go fast, so there must be something to what he's doing.
I should note that in one shocking passage, Halberstam basically makes the same argument that got Jimmy the Greek canned (blacks being bred in slavery makes them better athletes). I gotta say that one hit out of nowhere and surprised me.
All in all, worth reading, but if you died without finishing this one, i wouldn't worry about it. |
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| A Man Most Wanted by John Le Carre |
| posted by: horsebeater |
21:36 12.20.09 |
Y'know, I didn't see it coming. I should have picked up on the cover blurbs about Le Carre being "unafraid." I should have noticed the many descriptions of the book as "needed in our times" and similar talk. i should've noticed that "war on terror" was in quotations on the cover.
Instead it took me about 100 pages to realize that what I was reading was going to turn into an anti "war on terror" book. At that point, the real question was whether the plot was going to be fun. in my view, it was decent, but too predictable. That's a huge problem for a thriller. It had the same defect as a few other le carre novels, where you are 150 pages from the end, and you assume there will be 2 or 3 small climaxes before the ultimate climax, and he starts building and you realize that the book it only going to climax once. i hate knowing where a book is generally going to end up with 30 or 40 or 50% of the book left (even if I didn't know how the final scene would turn out).
Le Carre ends up painting the American and British in the worst possible light. Indeed suggesting that all western intelligence services are just malevolent to a degree unbelievable.
I tend to think that unless you are reading this to get a political jolt out of it, I doubt anyone would be wowed by this one. I'm sure my politics didn't help, but his old stuff is so much better (and those books aren't exactly red meat for the right) than this. Don't believe the reviews that suggest otherwise. |
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| The Big Bang by Simon Singh |
| posted by: horsebeater |
21:25 12.20.09 |
In working off backstock, I read The Big Bang by Simon Singh and would strongly recommend this. It's one of the top 3 or 4 best science books for a lay audience that I've ever read.
The cool think about the Big Bang is that Singh basically runs through ALL of the science and physics and astronomy that lead up to the big bang discovery, so he starts with the greeks and the methodology they used to determine the distance of the moon to the earth, and the relative size of the earth, and then the moon to the sun, and then distances to various galaxies.
the best part of the book for me is how it took basically all kinds of science to get to the big bang. basic geometry, physics, astronomy, chemistry.
the book has one of the better explanations of einstein's general relatively theory that i've ever seen.
He runs through the theoreticians with their ideas and the empiricists and their measurements and the nuclear physicists. A former science guy, I found it a bit on the basic side, so I'm guessing it's good for an educated lay audience. Singh really keeps it moving and olympicizes the coverage somewhat with plenty of anecdote and backstory.
All in all, good stuff.
a few fun facts:
1. einstein was apparently anti-big bang for a while, finally had to eat his words and come around.
2. the pope in the 1950s came out strongly in favor of the big bang, because it implied creation. the other scientific theory, the steady state theory, posited an eternal universe. plus, one of the two real originators of the theory was a belgian jesuit.
3. while most scientists came over to the big bang theory in the 1960's, a major piece of the puzzle didn't really fall into place until 1992, when cosmic background radiation was detected. if it hadn't been detected, the big bang may not seem as settled as it currently does.
4. tycho brahe, who allegedly died because he refused to break the seal at a dinner with the king, leading to his bladder bursting, and who wore a false metal nose, had an insane hedonistic life in a castle/observary he built in denmark (uraniborg), fundied by 5% of the GNP of denmark (tycho and the king got along). he had a pet elk that died after getting drunk and falling down the stairs.
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| the more i think about it, the more i actually disagree... |
| posted by: simplicissimus |
13:09 11.3.09 |
three things.
if you wanted to make a list of "city hatred" movies using the "suburban hatred" criteria. the list would almost be endless. from on the waterfront, to taxi driver, to the woody allen collection, to the wire. none of us notice how awful city life looks in the vast majority of films -- especially highbrow films. i think we don't consider it, because all of us have long ago internalized the view that cities are dirty, brutish, rough places filled with distasteful people doing awful and absurd things.
and that's the key: "anti" suburban films really are just giving the same rough treatment to suburbs that is already given to cities.
also, you've got to look back on the suburban movement. and not even the 1950s "near" suburbs, but more into the 1960s 1970s and 1980s "exerbs" -- tge whole selling point of exurb life was that it was far away from city life and the drugs, and crime, and (let's be honest) the minorities. these places were originally sold as a sort of shangri la. so it's really no wonder that they (being filled with humans just like the cities) were such a big fat target: it's almost too easy now to target them, but in the 1970s and 1980s the idea that people were just as unhappy in the exurbs was actually contrary to popular opinion about how great they were.
actually, if you're going to look at "pro" city films, i think most of them are acutally lower- to middle-brown. sex and the city comes to mind -- superficial people doing superficial things and thinking superficial thoughts. all set against the theme park that is early-2000s manhatten.
and, even still, if you look at the higher-brown fare ("the ice storm", "ordinary people", and these are just at off the top of my head) you're either still getting the "these people are infantile and their families are destroyed because of it" or "striving for the perfect life in the suburbs can also create it's own type of unhappiness").
i guess we don't disagree all that much, but i guess i'm saying that there's tons of "city hatred" films but we have already internalized the message before we see it, and that even those highbrow "suburban rejection" movies are more often than not really about the fallacies of thinking you can build a "perfect life" (and where else, at least until recently, were the vast majority of americans trying to do that, but the far suburbs) or the self-indulgence of the boomer generation -- finally something we can agree 100% about! -- (once again, where else were you going to find them but these beautiful suburbs?). |
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| ok... but... |
| posted by: horsebeater |
09:43 11.3.09 |
| ... apatow isn't winning the oscars, nor is he considered by serious film critics as a great filmmaker. you're right that middlebrow and lowbrow art have embraced the 'burbs. i don't think that highbrow ever has, however (uppermiddlebrow?). very little suburban love percolates out of the walls of the cedar lee. |
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| on "suburban hatred" and the arts... |
| posted by: simplicissimus |
11:56 11.2.09 |
HB wrote:
"I'm sure it's an early example of the suburban hatred that overwhelmed the arts for 40+ years to an annoying degree (I still fail to understand American Beauty's Oscar ... the idea that people in the suburbs are often discontented ... this is revolutionary stuff?)."
I think you're a little off-base here. Of course, there's plenty of examples of suburbs are lame stuff in popular culture. And most of it is just idiotic, pedantic, reflexive silliness.
But I made a similar comment a few weeks ago to a buddy of mine and his response was interesting.
Lots of movies that mock the suburbs on first glance always, ultimately, have a pretty pro-tradional story line. I mean, look at American Beauty (which was many things, but Oscar-worthy was not one of them): the end result is of being unhappy with the suburban way of life is a dead kid and a broken marriage, and all lot of ruined lives.
All the Judd Apetow movies, all the John Hughes movies, all the "crazy Bachelor party" movies etc. etc. end with powerfully pro-family, pro-grown up messages: "Going crazy and resisting the constraints of the suburbs can be fun, but ultimately your parents are trying, they love you, and your life is pretty good. So grow up and accept what's ultimately best for you."
The same goes for the stoner flicks -- Spicolli is forced to learn some American history and finds out it's good, the kids in Dazed and Confused are alright, etc. etc. -- suburban life is not so bad.
Shit, even Boogie Nights ultimately says that living the wild life will ultimately destryo you and using your cash to open a legit business is a true sign of surviving.
Sure, along the way we are treated to all sorts of props and pratfalls about how lame the suburbs and traditional lifestyle are, but the end is always almost the exact same: the kids are happy, the guy marries the girl, the dad decides not to cheat, and life goes on.
Or, the characters go off the rails and everything turns to shit.
I hear what you're saying generally, but I'm just saying that a lot of movies that put a bulls-eye squarely on the traditional/suburban lifestyle actually celebrate it when the credits ultimately roll. |
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| A Spot of Bother, by Mark Haddon |
| posted by: horsebeater |
10:00 11.2.09 |
I previously recommended Haddon's Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, so I decided to try out Haddon's regular old fiction. This comes across as an attempt to have the book turned into a Hugh Grant rom com about the wacky family that just comes together at the end! You can feel Haddon's pride in himself for writing about naughty gay sex!
Don't bother. |
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| Rabbit Run, by Updike |
| posted by: horsebeater |
12:53 11.1.09 |
Updike had to move up the reading queue after his death, and why not go back to the beginning?
I enjoyed the first-quarter of this book the most and enjoyed it best when thinking of it as a response to Kerouac's On the Road, which it was rumored to be when it came out (although apparently this was a bit overblown). Basically a young married guy just snaps for not much of a reason (which I loved...who really needs one?) and just starts driving away from his suburban life and ... doesn't have anywhere to go and ends up slinking back to his hometown (although not immediately back to his family). I like the counterpoint to Kerouac's "look at all the life and the adventure" on the road, when pretty much no one can or would ever really want to totally leave it all behind for the hope of adventure.
I don't know if it was the first, but I'm sure it's an early example of the suburban hatred that overwhelmed the arts for 40+ years to an annoying degree (I still fail to understand American Beauty's Oscar ... the idea that people in the suburbs are often discontented ... this is revolutionary stuff?). Updike does well with this, however, because while he portrays Rabbit somewhat sympathetically, he also shows the carnage Rabbit leaves in his wake as he pursues his own happiness (although none of his family is portrayed sympathetically enough to be realistic).
A few other notes:
Many of the characters in the book complain about Rabbit's happy-go-lucky nature and ultimate narcissism, but Updike seems to have the same crush on Rabbit that many of his characters do. it's hard to know what, if anything, updike is trying to say about that (I felt the same way about Rabbit's mysogyny ... Rabbit, not Updike expresses it, but you feel like Updike is blessing Rabbit's thoughts and it makes it a little icky for the reader, depending upon how much you want to attribute to the author here).
I now understand what people mean by Updike's prose. I'm not a prose guy, and ... Wow. Even I re-read several passages they were just so damn pretty/compelling.
The uber-criticism of updike is apparently that he using his prodigious prose talent telling stories that are of arguably questionable value. And while I cared about the characters, after the anti-kerouac first quarter of the book, I didn't get the sense I was reading great literature anymore. an interesting, beautifully told story, but I never got the feeling that a close analysis of the text was going to reveal the hidden secrets of life.
Finally, the Rev. Eccles character, Rabbit's pastor who develops a relationship with him and tries to reform him, is fun, largely because the nosy, problem solving Rev. is such an anachronism. it's fun to think through the morality of what Eccles does, what his proper role should be, etc. |
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| Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis |
| posted by: horsebeater |
12:37 11.1.09 |
The book that launched Lewis' career.
Despite myself, I really enjoy reading Lewis. And I mostly say "despite myself" because the idea of liking the guy that married Tabitha Soren just seems fundamentally wrong, not out of a "I wish I married Tabitha" thing, but out of a "the idea of MTV News is so ridiculous to me that this Loder and Soren will forever be in the 'bullshit' part of my brain" and so and anyone attracted to Tabitha must have something fundamentally wrong with him.
It was fun to read this now, a book about a major investment bank (Salomon Bros) failing, in the midst of the current financial crisis. Although at first I felt that Lewis' characters have become such stereotypes and the yuppies and geckos have been elaborated upon in other books that the characters in this book are something less than fresh, Lewis ultimately overcome this with a number of good stories and anecdotes: the story of the creation of the junk bond market; the pure fatness and gluttony of one of the bondtrader groups; anecdotes of how he got one of his best clients to take a shitty investment off the firms' books (why again can investment banks be both broker and player? it's like the referees have a team). so ultimately there's a lot of good stuff.
There is something about Lewis' writing that is almost compulsively readable, in fact it is so readable that I something think Lewis' writing must be less-than-serious, or it wouldn't be so easy to read. And despite my mixed emotions toward the author, Lewis seeing the ridiculousness of his own situation throughout makes him a less-than-annoying presence.
It's not as good as Moneyball, but's it's better than his football book (the Blind Side) and better than a New New Thing (where Lewis wasn't sufficiently skeptical of the internet bubble). |
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| this sounds cool, but doesn't explain... |
| posted by: simplicissimus |
01:06 10.31.09 |
| ...why you never responded to the hedron collider post. |
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| Longitude by Dava Sobel |
| posted by: horsebeater |
16:52 10.30.09 |
This book is excellent, a great book about practical science.
I never understood navigation by the stars, never even presumed to understand it, but I had just assumed that if you knew what you were doing, if you were out on the ocean, you would be able to tell your longitude and latitude by the stars. Apparently this is completely and totally wrong. You can figure out your latitude (i.e., how close you are to the north/south pole) but figuring out your longitude by the stars doesn't really work.
If you think about it, this makes sense, because if you are on the same latitude, you seen exactly the same stars, they just rise in the sky sooner the further east you are. If you have a clock that keeps GMT, then you can figure out your longitude ... but pendulum clocks didn't exactly work all that well on the high seas (and in humidity, and in varying temperatures), and pendulum clocks are what they had.
This in part explains why sea travel was such a disaster in the 16th through 18th centuries. People would know an island was at a certain longitude and latitude, and they would get to the latitude, but they wouldn't know whether to go east or west to hit the island. since scurvy would take hold the longer you were out at sea, guessing wrong often doomed half your men.
In the early 1700's, a british fleet, misjudging their longitude, crashed into the british coast, sinking, and inspiring parliament to pass the Act of Longitude in 1714, which would give a prize to whoever figured out the problem.
It was basically the coolest scientific problem of the 18th Century. All kinds of people took at stab at it.
The short little book explains it all. Wikipedia is largely a summary of the book:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_longitude
So back to the Island of the Day Before...
But the ABSOLUTE best part of this was the unguent theory, which some believed in the 16-17th centuries. it said that if you cut a person or an animal, if you treated the KNIFE that caused the wound, then you would help heal the person/animal (and vice versa, so if you put acid on the knife, the wound will hurt more). This is of course insane, but whatever.
So in the Island of the Day Before, some guy thinks he can figure out longitude if, while travelling on a boat, he can somehow be told when it is midnight in Greenwich. So before they get on the boat, they stab a dog, but don't kill it. They put the dog on the boat, and then they keep the knife in greenwich. each night, at midnight in greenwich, the assistant puts the knife into a fire, thinking that this will make the dog, on the ship, yelp (thus acting like a kind of alarm clock).
so the guys, each night, are hanging out by the dog, listening for it to yelp and saying "that must be it!" and figuring out when it is midnight, but then the would on the dog starts to heal, so they have to pull the dog's knife wound apart to keep the wound fresh.
they surmise that when the sun is at its highest peak when it is midnight in greenwich, they'll be exactly 1/2 way around the world, and this, MUST be where the international dateline. like any 5th grader, they assume that the international dateline must be a kind of time machine, of course, so they are psyched to get there and perform various experiments.
apparently the whole scene from the island of the day before about the dog is based upon a true story (which is explained in longitude).
maybe i'm a dork, but i'm a happy dork when it comes to shit like this. |
|
| Island of the Day Before, by Umberto Eco |
| posted by: horsebeater |
16:14 10.30.09 |
The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum are two of my favorite books, but I know they had the reputation of being Eco's best books, which made me nervous to start a third (so this is one of those books that you buy and then let sit on your shelf for 5 years before reading.)
Its pluses and minuses are Eco's pluses and minuses. Tons of detail in the backstory about the minutiae of the 1500's and 1600's (written from that perspective) is in turn interesting and annoyingly aimless. Eco leaves you wondering what the hell he's talking about until it starts to fall together 1/3 of the way into the book. And then once you realize why he did what he did, you're thankful (but you wonder why he did it in 20 pages instead of 5).
The title of this book refers to the international date line, and the book is written from the perspective of a person stranded near the dateline (in the 1600s) while on an expedition involving it. The middle third is very good for its ideas and descriptions of the flawed scientific process they go through. A few of the "mistakes" they make are pretty excellent, such as when his friend sinks to the bottom of the ocean and is presumed drowned, but he realized that maybe he crossed the date line and will appear at the surface 24 hours later ...
The last 100 pages drift a little too aimlessly, get a little too arty, don't resolve all that well in my view.
It was worth reading, but the reviewers are right in that it isn't on par with his top two.
One of the scenes in the book absolutely shocked me, however and inspired me to read ... |
|
| catching up |
| posted by: horsebeater |
15:30 10.30.09 |
in the past 2 years I've read:
(A)/(B)/(C) The remaining 2 books of the tinker/tailor trilogy and the spy who came in from the cold.
the spy who came in from the cold was good. not quite excellent as i felt it was a little too cute, a little too gamey, which harms it as a spy novel although it adds to the literary value. i'm not sure whether the tradeoff is worth it on balance; it's a close call.
all were worth reading. tinker tailor's my favorite.
(the year-old le carre "A Most Wanted Man" got very good reviews ... i just picked it up and will report)
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|
| conversation with two (real life) published authors at party this weekend.... |
| posted by: simplicissimus |
18:47 1.3.09 |
author 1: well, [some book] was good, but it's no ender's game.
author 2: yeah, well, what is? i've yet to meet anyone that can put that thing down. it should be required reading.
me: note to self - give hb some serious, public props. |
|
| Heart of Darkness by Conrad |
| posted by: horsebeater |
22:27 12.30.08 |
I think I am the only person the world to have escaped high school and college without having to read this novella. Search around wikipedia and you'll see it referred to as the (or one of the) "most taught novel[s] in the English language."
Finally read it this past weekend, and WOW.
I wished that I hadn't seen Apocolypse Now first (and dented the hardwood of woodmere with what came out of my ass while I watched it). It's impossible not to think of mr. sheen and mr. brando a little too much.
I have stood with publius and said that many works of art that are the first of their kind often don't hold up because, while groundbreaking at the time, they pave the way for others to do it better and the originals end up looking a tad weak by comparison. but in this one, you can almost feel how groundbreaking it was with his views of the insanity of colonialism. he didn't argue that it was bad, he just made a lot of observations that, added together, just made the whole thing seem insane. some had done this with war to some extent (crane comes to my mind) but conrad has an awful nice spin on it. It's tough to read this and think that all that much has changed in the world since 1910 or so with respect to the way people think.
the book isn't rocket science, either. i certainly appreciated solid plot, a nicely put anti-colonial message, a psychological journey and the bizarre-ness that is kurtz in 132 nice little pages. my tired, normally-not-ready-for-prime-time-literature brain had no problems with it, so I can see why it's a freshman lit standard.
but simple doesn't mean bad. |
|
| Finishing up LOOSE BALLS by Terry Pluto |
| posted by: horsebeater |
16:58 12.23.08 |
Basically an oral history of the ABA.
I was thinking I was going to hate the style, where Pluto basically strings together 3 sentence to one page quotes from the former players, coaches, GMs, owners and agents from the league to tell the story of the league, but it ended up growing on me.
Some of the stuff in this book is truly amazing. The amount of fighting and the bounties put on certain player's heads; Wilt Chamberlain coaching one of the teams (but regularly just not showing up for games); secret drafts; people unable to go into games because they didn't put their shorts on under their warmup pants.
I've read Ball Four and Veeck as in Wreck in the past 3-4 years. Those might be better books, but the stories in this book are just unbelievable. |
|
| Some guys are suckers for brains |
| posted by: mrbuckles |
16:00 12.19.08 |
Read this.
If you've read Woody Allen's Without Feather it might be familiar. If you haven't read that collection of shorts, you can find the one in question (in full!) here. |
|
| Some guys are suckers for brains |
| posted by: mrbuckles |
15:59 12.19.08 |
Read this.
If you've read Woody Allen's Without Feather it might be familiar. If you haven't read that collection of shorts, you can find the one in question (in full!) David Mitchell / Black Swan Green |
| posted by: isidorus |
09:38 12.19.08 |
I just finished David Mitchell's 2006 semi-autobiographical bildungsroman, Black Swan Green. To quote wikipedia, "The book's thirteen chapters each represent one month -- from January 1982 through January 1983 -- in the life of 13-year-old Worcestershire boy Jason Taylor. The novel is written from the perspective of Taylor and employs many teen colloquialisms and popular-culture references from early-1980s England.
Mitchell has a lot of credibility in contemporary english literature, with two of four novels shortlisted for the Booker prize. I can't speak for those books, but Black Swan Green was a real pleasure to read, especially if you were ever once an awkward middle school boy during the early 1980s. The story is rich and entertaining, centering on the protagonist's struggle to be popular and talk to girls despite his debilitating stutter. At home, his parents' marriage is unraveling and his 17 year old sister is leaving for college. Detours into thatcherite politics, the falklands conflict, new wave music and gypsies keep the story entertaining. Check it out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Mitchell_(author)
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|
| i've posted this before... |
| posted by: publius |
10:02 10.10.08 |
but here's a link to the alt-nobel prize in literature...
http://www.greatbooksguide.com/altnobel08.html
my comments from the first time around pretty much still hold for me, so i'll just paste them in here...the only thing i forgot to mention the first time around is how happy i am to see john le carre's name there...granted, he has gone way downhill in the last decade, but the trilogy of "tinker, tailor, soldier, spy", "the honourable schoolboy" and "smiley's people" is a solid enough achievement to grant him consideration.
_________________
http://tentfort.com/show_thread_posts.asp?thread_id=266
the alt-nobel prize for literature
posted by: publius 11:56 10.15.07
it's pretty shocking, looking back through the nobel prize winners for literature, how many people who clearly should have won the award did not. and the "yeah but hindsight is 20/20" argument doesn't really work very well with the nobel, as it's really like a lifetime achievement award.
this alternative reality list really is funny because it's true. granted, some of the alternate universe picks are off the rails (tolkein and rowling spring to mind - both enormously popular, neither one a very good writer), many more are not only creditable, but shocking that that person never did win (james joyce, franz kafka, rainer maria rilke, philip roth (though he will win it one year), etc.).
i also like some of the whimsical yet also perfectly justified choices. bob dylan for instance. if you can give the award to a non-writer joker like dario fo, you can certainly award it to dylan.
at its worst, of course, this list turns into nothing but a popularity contest based on the current moment in time. and it reveals the author's biases. taking the nobel prize away from either derek wolcott or seamus heaney is indefensible, but it seems to fit with the selector's general under/non appreciation of poetry. because poets (at least the good ones) very rarely sell a lot of books or have much in the way of popular name recognition.
in any case, it makes for amusing reading, as these sorts of lists always do...
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|
| I only remember Fo |
| posted by: ludwig |
21:50 10.9.08 |
When I eat Vietnamese. I tried to read one of his books and tossed it away. I'm sure many Europeans did that when Steinbeck was selected . . .
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|
| well... |
| posted by: publius |
20:51 10.9.08 |
| seeing as how i first heard his name today, i don't know that i have all that much to contribute. at first blush it strikes me as the most willfully obscure choice since dario fo...but all i know is what i've read on cnn, and i think it's safe to assume that that ain't much. |
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| Nobel frenchie |
| posted by: ludwig |
20:30 10.9.08 |
| I was hoping that publius would have some commentary or insight on Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio |
|
| team of rivals |
| posted by: publius |
13:03 8.11.08 |
just saw isidorus's post above on team of rivals, and have to concur that it's a great book. i don't read a ton of history these days (despite having majored in history in college, which i find quite hard to believe) so don't have all that many other works to compare it to.
but i burned through this book, and like isidorus, i was sad to have it end. definitely planning on queueing up some more lincoln/civil war histories in the future. |
|
| Chabon! |
| posted by: prankmonkey |
12:40 8.11.08 |
| Quite a big fan, going back to Wonder Boys (and Werewolves in Their Youth), not to mention his Pulitzer-winning turn. Just finished Gentlemen of the Road, which is a very cool, very fun, very fast adventure read. It would be worth checking out just on its own, but that fact that the book's working title was "Jews with Swords" puts it over the top. |
|
| The Yidish Policemen's Union |
| posted by: simplicissimus |
12:25 8.11.08 |
I've never read Chabon. I think I may have lied abour reading him, but I never did. In fact, (as I'm pretty sure has been discussed at one point recently) I made off with one of HB's Chabon books in law school.
However, if his other stuff is as good as this book? I'll read 'em all before it's done.
"The Wire" + Alternate reality where a (once almost-enacted in 1940 or so) plan to re-settle pre-holocaust European Jews in Alaska + The Joy of Yiddish = a fantastic book.
I kind of liken it to the Batman movie. It totally works as a page-turner, detective throwback novel. But along the way it also happens to pretty much flawlessly describe and delve into a certain aspect of all yids' souls that you gentiles find so fascinating, attractive, and absurd.
To quote a friend of mine: "All the optimists in my family line are lying in a ditch somewhere outside Krakow". Which did seem to sum up things quite nicely.
Anyhow...
very, very, very highly recommened. |
|
| Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns |
| posted by: isidorus |
01:19 3.10.08 |
I feel sheepish posting this for two reasons. First, I read maybe three books a year, not one a month or more like some of you, so it seems presumptuous to recommend something when my frame of reference is so small. Second, having never taken a history class since high school, unless you count architectural history, which i don't, i suspect you all know a great deal more about the past than I do. That said, over the last several years I've become more interested in 19th c. american history, partly because I've been working on buildings from that era, giving me some insight into the times, and partly because Deadwood is such a riveting show and so rich in period detail. So then Mrs. Dorus queues up the entire ken burns Civil War documentary series, which is awesome, but also humiliating because I realized how much basic shit about the country I do not know. For example, Chicamauga's a song by Uncle Tupelo, right? And most of all I realize that I don't know anything about Abe Lincoln beyond all of the standard ninth grade stuff. I knew the log cabin lore, that he was president during the civil war, freed the slaves, gave an important speech at gettysburg, and got shot by booth at ford's theatre. And that's pretty much it.
So I just finished Team of Rivals, which makes the argument that Lincoln's genius lay in his decision to assemble his fiercest competitors within his own cabinet, and draw upon their divergent expertise without ceding control. This argument is convincingly made, but along the way DKG tells a riveting and readable story, and a provides a reasonably thorough biography of not just Lincoln but also William Seward, Salmon Chase, Edwin Stanton, and Edward Bates, along with dozens of other notable players. It doesn't delve much into the nuts and bolts of the war itself (although the excerpts from McClellan's letters are fairly shocking in their audacity and disregard for the president) but instead focuses on the political circumstances and how lincoln arrived at his decisions.
Most amazing, though, is the mountain of evidence DKG sets forth for what an exceptional human being Lincoln was -- something I suppose I knew at a basic level, from all of the ninth grade stuff, but until you know the back story about, say, how the fancy Ohio lawyers, Edwin Stanton chief among them, snubbed and humiliated Lincoln in Cincinnati in 1857 (he was supposed to be part of their legal team), and how he was gracious to them in spite of that and decided to stay and watch the proceedings and in doing so developed respect for Stanton's abilities. DKG also gives plenty of anecdotal evidence for Lincoln's famous charm and humor, and of course his compassion and statesmanship and written / spoken genius. The interactions he had with Frederick Douglass, and the way Douglass wrote & spoke about them, are fantastic.
If you know a fair amount about lincoln already and don't find his era or his history especially fascinating, skip this -- it's 751 pages. but if, like me, you know very little, or want to learn more, it's pretty gripping stuff - almost a legitimate page turner. I'm very sad this weekend to be finished with this book.
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|
| Gawande |
| posted by: isidorus |
00:31 3.10.08 |
catching up a little on my tentforting...
Good to know there's a compilation out there. he wrote an article in the new yorker last summer about geriatric care, or the general lack thereof in the U.S., that was highly worth reading. makes me a lot more aware of what to to be aware of as my parents get a little older. anyway, it appears that the whole text is available online, so if it isn't in your compilation, here it is.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/30/070430fa_fact_gawande
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|
| Recent Hornby books... |
| posted by: horsebeater |
00:40 1.12.08 |
I read A Long Way Down and About a Boy in the past 18 months. I kind of dreaded reading them, as my expectations were low low low but I bought About a Boy right after reading and loving Fever Pitch, and the wifebeater bought A Long Way Down and...
... you forget just how EASY some books can be. These things go down so easy you feel you have to check the bookcover for k-y.
... although I expected these last two to suck (when your books are scripts-in-waiting for Hugh Grant movies, there is reason to be wary), but none of them are bad. About a Boy is solidly OK. I would even say that A Long Way Down's first third is actually very good. The book is about 4 people considering suicide, and the first third is about the night that they meet (after that the story and the characters are a little too unbelievable and the plot a little too silly). lots of good, unsentimental stuff in that first third, however. i was really impressed for a while.
... Hornby's books get worse progressively. Fever Pitch is the best; then High Fidelity; then About a Boy; then a Long Way Down.
I didn't read How to be Good and I don't plan on it. I would imagine it quality-wise falls where it exists chronologically, after About a Boy.
Fever Pitch is probably #30 or #40 of all time for me. High Fidelity in the top 75 at least.
which, really, isn't as impressive as it sounds.
cutting out the shit that everyone reads (of varying genres, sci-fi, grisham thriller, terry brooks' shanarra, bad mysteries, etc.), assuming you start reading actual books at age 13 and read 12 "real" books a year, one a month, then if you are 35 you've still read less than 300 real books in you life. So saying it is #75 is just saying it is top quartile.
300 books! that's really fucking depressing if you think about it. All this great shit in the world and you're reading practically none of it.
(and how often do you REALLY get through one a month... ack!)
we get 1,000 books to read in a lifetime, boys.
choose wisely. |
|
| Atul Gawande's Complications |
| posted by: horsebeater |
00:27 1.12.08 |
Gawande is a New Yorker staff writer. He was a medical resident (but probably a surgeon by now) who writes medical articles, and the book is his 2002 book, which took about 4-5 articles and added another 6-7 chapters. His parents were immigrants (presumably from India), but he grew up in... Athens, Ohio.
The book is just generally about the medical profession. The best stuff was already in the New Yorker, and I had already read it, but it was good to have it all in one place. Two great chapters, however, on:
(1) the unwritten secret of how medical students have to learn on real people (and how even experienced doctors have to learn on real people) and how many studies show that doctors fuck up a LOT more when they are learning. But the doctors have to teach the kids, so no one ever tells you that you're more likely to get screwed by telling the 2nd year resident do the biopsy instead of the attending surgeon.
the telling thing is how NO DOCTORS ever let residents operate or even touch their own family members. pretty much across the board.
(2) doctor error. he talks about how medicine is a much less exact science than people think it is, and how even the best doctors make multiple errors a year (and whether they get sued is a crapshoot). lots of good stuff in there.
Gawande just had an article in the New Yorker about a month ago about checklists and how in some hospital intensive care units, simply by making the nurses use written checklists they've been able to greatly reduce mortality rates (including in some inner city Detroit hospitals). Fascinating stuff.
I look for Gawande (and Gladwell, and Steve Martin) in the New Yorker as I look for O'Rourke and Bowden and Langeweische in the Atlantic. If you read Gawande's New Yorker stuff, the new stuff in his books isn't good enough to bother with, but if you aren't familiar with his other stuff, it's definitely worth a read.
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|
| just finished "tinker tailor". |
| posted by: horsebeater |
09:50 12.31.07 |
... my dad was proud of me when he saw me reading it. he introduced me to science fiction first, but got very big into spy novels and tom clancy shit in the late '70s / 80s and is happy whenever i follow his lead.
it was very good. it had its 1970-ish interludes which were a bit funny reading it now, not in that le carre is a bad writer, but in the "my wife is sleeping with my best friend, and i have such a melanchony feeling about it, but that's just the way life is" which is just a classic 1970's vibe.
Le Carre's a good writer, but I sometimes got the sense that he was trying to be too good; too tricky; to be too arty. Lots of winding, spiraling introductions into sections. A lot of the praise for his other books was like publius's on "smiley's people" above. A made-up example:
"Le Carre is one of the best spy novelists --- make that novelists --- around"
The prose issue might just be a personal problem. I have a hard time really appreciating good prose. I'm not a "what great prose" kind of guy. Plot and themes and allegory move me, but beautiful prose normally does not (although there is always the road).
Now BAD prose ... that can ruin anything.
My dad gave me the third of the trilogy, but I will be picking up the Honorable Schoolboy with a Borders' gift card I got for XMAS. |
|
| the road |
| posted by: simplicissimus |
11:03 10.20.07 |
wow.
i really can't say enought about this book. you all were right: what a way to get back into fiction.
it is one of the best things i've read in forever. say what you want about his other stuff, which i sometimes find overwrought, this is beautifully written. and i haven't read something that sucked me in quite n this way for quite a long time. i can't quite describe it, but it is at once totally slight-your-wrist-depressing and uplifting at the same time.
and he really is a master at creating a world -- physical and emotional -- and sucking you into it completely. i actually felt dread, sorrow, and relief on cue - something fiction rarely does for me. i'm not sure what else to add.
yeah, i can see how hb had a problem with the end. the deux ex machina is always problematic. but less so in this book than just about any other i've read. (though i like it well enough to re-read the ending
and anybody that pens the line "you forget what you want to remember, and remember what you'd rather forget" is just fine with me.
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|
| Izzi? |
| posted by: horsebeater |
18:08 7.24.07 |
| So what did you read? Or did you just catch up on your masturbating that weekend? |
|
| two comments |
| posted by: ludwig |
09:09 6.29.07 |
I read "the curious incident of the dog in the nightime" on a plane. I didn't particularly care for it. It seemed utterly contrived and far too long. It would have been better as a short story.
As for Philbrick, he's a fairly goood writer - but read Jill Lepore's criticism of his book in the New Yorker:
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/04/24/060424crat_atlarge
As for history, read " The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity" by Lepore. Utterly fascinating. I think I found it particularly interesting becazuse I grew up in and around the places discussed in the book ,but it is a fascinating way to look at Native Americans in the colonial era.
On a further historical note, read Simon Schama. he may be all over TV these days, but he knows his history and he can write better than just about anyone. Read "Dead Certainties." It is a fascinating and easy read, but it presents questions of what exactly is historical "truth". It provoked a lot of controversy when he wrote it. Regardless, it tells a great story.
Read Orwell. Burmese Days, Road to Wiggan Pier, Down and Out in London and Paris . . . all terrific books. |
|
| I feel so literate... |
| posted by: spacehippie |
00:26 6.29.07 |
...and I don't read much at all. I've read both Kavalier and Klay and Ender's Game in the last few years. Based on what you're looking for, Izzy, I'd second HB's Ender's Game recommendation. The only problem is that it might not fill all 2 and a half days worth of family avoidance. It really is that hard to put down, and therefore, can be read in a short amount of time. Pace yourself.
K&K was entertaining enough, but I remember having a hard time getting over the hump in the middle of the book. It just seemed to drag a little, which might have to do with how rarely I read a book cover to cover lately.
A couple of other books that are ridiculously easy, but don't skimp on the entertainment value are Thank You For Smoking by Christopher Buckley, and Red Lobster, White Trash, & the Blue Lagoon: Joe Queenan's America. Now this doesn't meet your fiction requirement, but if you have ever felt just "not getting it" when it comes to pop culture, and don't mind a huge dose of snarkiness, this might just hit the spot over the weekend. One of the few books that actually casued me to laugh out loud. |
|
| one final entry in the "so eas |
| posted by: horsebeater |
15:35 6.28.07 |
is mark haddon's the curious incident of the dog in the nightime.
http://www.amazon.com/Curious-Incident-Dog-Night-Time/dp/1400032717/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-5971378-9432854?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1183059210&sr=8-1
it's told from the point of view of a kid with autism, yet is a mystery novel. the combination is absolutely riveting. |
|
| kavalier and klay |
| posted by: horsebeater |
14:53 6.28.07 |
i did not read that... i read Wonder Boys (simpli still has my copy, but always denies it and swears that it is his, and deep down he knows that he's lying and i fully expect that in his will he is going to fess up to it and bequeath it back to me, but i will of course have been dead for 20 years when that happens) and Mysteries of Pittsburgh. Those are considered Chabon's best two books (I think) and, well, they're good, but neither blew me away. I was a touch disappointed with each.
I think I read a criticism once that says that if someone says that literature is funny, it almost certainly isn't. i often feel like that. and chabon -- and particularly wonder boys -- is supposed to be funny.
So I never bothered with Kavalier and Klay. It seemed awfully fucking long to me (over 600 pages !! danger, danger, will robinson !!) |
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| check out this list, for examp |
| posted by: horsebeater |
14:38 6.28.07 |
http://home.austarnet.com.au/petersykes/topscifi/lists_books_rank1.html
Look at the top ten.
# 1 of all time... Dune... everyone knows Dune for the movie that Sting starred in.
Asimov at # 3 and # 8.
1984 and Brave New World are in there.
Heinlein gets 2 books, Stranger in a Strange Land and Starship Troopers.
Farhenheit 451, Bradbury's famous book.
And of course, the Hitchhiker's Guide, which is the Rocky Horror Picture show of books it is such a cult classic.
I would guess that the average person on the fort knows about 8 or 9 of these books.
Further on down you have Vonnegut, Arthur C Clarke (2001), Phillip K Dick (Blade Runner / Minority Report guy), HG Wells.
...
And then sitting there at # 2 is Ender's Game, in the midst of the giants. |
|
| fever pitch by nick hornby |
| posted by: horsebeater |
14:29 6.28.07 |
very easy read... a memoir about a man's obsession with a sports team (arsenal in the english premier league (it was the first division when the book was written)). Great, spot on stuff. Hornby's first book.
try to ignore the fact that it was americanized and made into an awful jimmy fallon / drew barrymore movie, because it really is a very good book.
******
the road, ball four and gilead are the books i've read in the past 2 years that i've liked the most.
******
If you've never read Tim O'Brien, you should get The Things They Carried or the Lake of the Woods. The Things They Carried is a Vietnam book he wrote in '90 or so (he's a vet). In the Lake of the Woods is about a Vietnam vet but doesn't center on Vietnam. I really liked both of those books. Lake of the Woods is in my all-time top 10. Neither are hard reads.
******
if you really want to read something that you don't want anyone in chicago to see you reading, but that you also won't be able to put down and that you absolutely should read in your lifetime, you should buy ender's game by orson scott card.
this is a horribly embarrassing recommendation, as it is not only science fiction but is ALSO jr. high lit (a la watership down, wrinkle in time, etc.). that said, anyone that has ever picked it up has finished it within a week. my dad gave me the book one afternoon when i was 12 or so and i read it straight through for 13 hours and finished it at 7 a.m. as the sun was coming up.
my wife roundly mocked me for the first year of our marriage that i once read too much science fiction and i challenged her to read it and she couldn't put it down... i woke up one night at 2 a.m. and she was still up reading it (she is normally asleep by midnight).
ender's game has a surprisingly large underground following. not to the same extent as lord of the rings did back before the movies, but 50% or so of that. lots of people adore this book. |
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| come over tonight..... |
| posted by: simplicissimus |
13:36 6.28.07 |
| and borrow dickey's "deliverance". come on over and get it tonight. |
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| Need a quick book rec |
| posted by: isidorus |
12:35 6.28.07 |
I'm off for to what promises to be a very boring family wedding in northeast georgia. The only interesting aspect is that one of the functions is at the Chattahoochee Country Club, which is located, as you might have guessed, way down yonder on the chatahootchee. Which is also the river that they damned up in Deliverance. That's right, I'm only one degree removed from hillbillies.
Mrs.Dorus is (wisely) not attending this affair, leaving me with approximately 2.5 days during which I will spend a lot of time avoiding my family, and hence I will have a lot of reading time.
Recommendations, please. I don't read much, I read slowly, and I don't tend to like heavy, complicated, postmodern stuff. I prefer fiction (although Ball Four is mighty tempting). Last book I read was Saturday by Ian McEwan, which I liked very much. Could go back for more mcewan, but would rather do something else. Have read and enjoyed most hemingway, steinbeck, fitzgerald, some philip roth and updike. Dave Eggers HWOSG was, when I read I read it about a decade ago, amusing for a while and then cloying and then kind of irritating. I recently started the new Zadie Smith book but didn't like it so I stopped after thirty pages. Read War Trash by Ha Jin last year and was indifferent about it, but I finished it, which is saying something. That pretty much sums up all the fiction I've read since grad school. Mrs.Dorus has suggested Kavalier&Klay, but I'd like some more insight from the fort before I commit. I leave tomorrow morning. Help. |
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| Pilgrims & Founding Fathers |
| posted by: prankmonkey |
10:43 5.30.07 |
I've been on a bit of a early US history kick in my leisure reading recently - because I find it interesting and because I like to verify for myself that the platitudes spouted by the Right as to what our Founding Fathers stood for and believed are almost entirely mistaken (i.e., they sure as hell were not Evangelicals - by and large they were Deists who knew mixing God and government was a bad, bad idea). And going further back, those Pilgrims were a hardy, colorful, and complex lot, with all sorts of varying motivation for risking life and limb to build the New World. Anyway, without getting into a big thing here, I'll suggest a few titles that I found to be excellent reads:
1) Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick. A fabulous look at the early Mass Bay colonists and their complicated interactions with the Native populations. And you know a guy with a name like "Nathaniel Philbrick" must have a deep affinity for pilgrims. . .
2) 1491 by Charles Mann. Yes, I just jumped back a couple hundred years, but this look at life int he Americas pre-Columbus is pretty fascinating. This book will force you to re-evaluate existing assumptions about what was happening on this continent before the Europeans arrived.
3) 1776 by David McCullough. This book made a big splash, so everyone's probably read it by now, but if you haven't, you really should. A vivid portait of General Washington, and a fast-paced, exhilirating read. Nothing dry about this one.
4) Benjamin Franklin by Walter Isaacson. I haven't finished this one yet, but it is very good so far. An man, that guy was a stud. Inventor, philospher, international man of mystery. Truly, men wanted to be him and women wanted to be with him. and this book has more and better insights about his personality, accomplishments and failures than I have found anywhere else.
Know our collective history - the good and the bad. It's the only way to know whether someone's full of shit when they try to tell you what the principles of this country are supposed to be. |
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| mccarthy |
| posted by: publius |
13:58 5.17.07 |
i haven't read "the road", but i have read "blood meridian", which is about as dark and gothic as i can imagine a book getting. the character of the judge (errr...brownie) is classic.
that said, mccarthy doesn't really do it for me on the whole...he's a very good writer, just not my cuppa... |
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| le carré / ludlum |
| posted by: publius |
11:29 5.17.07 |
i haven't read ludlum since high school, which is akin to saying i might as well not have read him at all...i'm a huge fan of both the bourne movies, particularly the first, but my impression is that that owes very much to the filmmaker and somewhat less to the novel.
i would definitely say pick up le carré, and i would start with "tinker, tailor, soldier, spy". it's a standard novel, so the reading is easy, there's enough action at parts to almost qualify it as a page-turner, the characters feel like real quirky people (as opposed to the cardboard cutout archetypes you so often find in spy novels) and i can all but guarantee you that le carré is a far better writer than ludlum.
once you're through with "tinker, tailor..." i would recommend completing the trilogy. "the honourable schoolboy", as i remember (going to start re-reading it today) is good, but not quite as good as the two others...but that's mostly for plot reasons...the writing is solid throughout. "smiley's people" is simply a great spy novel, and a pretty damned good just-plain-novel. |
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| the road |
| posted by: squisshy |
11:09 5.17.07 |
is indeed excellent, i highly recommend it. last novel i read, before i got mired in a book of short stories. it's not that they're bad, i just need a plot pulling me along. i picked up a well-reviewed mystery-type that i cannot recall the name of right now to get back on the novel horse myself ... lauyra somebody wrote it ... but also see that Michael Chabon just wrote a new novel, "The Yiddish Policeman's Union," a murder whodunit set in an alternate reality where large numbers of Jews settled in Alaska rather than the Holy Land after WWII. it has also been reviewed well, although that wouldn't really matter to me -- i've loved Chabon ever since wonder boys, one of my all-time favorites. so i've got to go pick that up and get started as well.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/13/books/review/Rafferty-t.html?_r=1&ref=books&oref=slogin
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| le carre / fiction PTSD |
| posted by: horsebeater |
10:04 5.17.07 |
Publius: I've meant to pick up either le carre or ludlum for an easy summer book or two. Which is better? Which would you start with? If you were reading 2 books, would it be one le carre and one ludlum or would you double up?
Simpli: Read McCarthy's The Road. Its not long. It's not particularly complicated. It has a plot. It's the perfect book to get you back on that horse. |
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| i'm not sure where to begin.. |
| posted by: simplicissimus |
23:53 5.16.07 |
...first, i'm bitter because i've been in a PRONOUNCED fiction funk for over a year. i'm not kidding, i think i have PTSD from gravity's rainbow or something. no joke.
...second, because i've been compared to dave eggers and his book, which i've never read (and made fun of nonetheless...which i am sure makes it all even worse).
...third, because i need to get out of my PRONOUNCED fiction funk...it's really depressing me.
...fourth, because i know that i thought ball four was hilarious and awesome and great at reminding me why i love baseball so damn much...but i can't remember any of the stories.
...fifth, because the cleveland cavaliers are dead to me.
---
as you can see, i've a lot on my mind. perhaps i'll start rustling around for a book. though to make sure we don't get off point, i'll recommend "razor's edge" to anyone who asks. fantastic read. |
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| john le carré... |
| posted by: publius |
23:45 5.16.07 |
let's just make this a general book notes thread, shall we?
just finished re-reading "tinker, tailor, soldier, spy" by john le carré, and it's as good as it ever was. when i've got some time to read for pleasure, i'm a sucker for spy novels. there are a ton of really ham-fisted awful ones out there (see the works of jack higgins), but le carré doesn't write them. the best of them are well written, and completely transcend the usual limitations of the genre. i randomly picked up one of his books when i was living in france and was amazed at how good his good books are.
that said, his most recent efforts can be safely avoided...he's gotten overtly preachy and tends to foam at the mouth a bit. which is part of what makes his best books so good - he doesn't do that.
he achieved fame with "the spy who came in from the cold", though i wasn't all that taken with that one. the best ones i've read are a trilogy comprised of "tinker, tailor, soldier, spy", "the honourable schoolboy" and "smiley's people" - you can pick the whole thing up at one omnibus edition called "the quest for karla". the eponymous smiley also happens to be one of the more satisfying fictional characters i've come across in some time.
if you're not in a reading mood, both "tinker, tailor, soldier, spy" and "smiley's people" were made into mini-series in england, starring alec guinness as smiley. they're very good, and extremely faithful to the novels. you can pick them up on netflix. |
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| Heartbreaking Work of Staggeri |
| posted by: horsebeater |
13:54 5.16.07 |
I am probably the only person in the western world to have read Eggers' second book (You Shall Know Our Velocity) before his first. So 6 years after izzi and simpli explained to me (oh so patiently) that the title of the novel was not meant seriously, which had been my hang-up, I finally sat down and read the thing.
There is much to be said for the book... and certainly a lot good to be said for Mr. Eggers. As Eggers himself realizes, after the first 200-250 pages, the book starts to just wander around aimlessly for a while, and it would have been nice if that had been cleaned up or cut out or what have you.
But what I want to talk about here is how blatantly Simpli has stolen his entire attitude toward life from Mr. Eggers.
A quick comparison (Eggers on the left, simpli on the right):
(1) "Down with Irony" = "Down with Irony"
This one is as plain as day. I mean, Eggers says at point point "DOWN WITH IRONY" or something like that and I swear to god simpli must've written that speech on his hand, because I've heard the same thing from him.
(2) Toph = Nelson
Another obvious one. Both Eggers and simpli believe that their relationship with Toph / Nelson is precious and unique and adds depth to their soul and personality.
(3) Might Magazine = Tentfort
Eggers created a cool, snarky magazine behind the idea that the magazine would change the world by .... ? well, he wasn't really sure. And after the fact, Eggers recognizes that the project was silly in some respects.
If this doesn't describe simpli's attitude toward tentfort, I don't know what does.
(4) The tragic death of Eggers' parents = the tragic death of all of simpli's female relationships
Clearly when it comes to the ladies, simpli believes that he is not living a comedy, but living a tragedy.
Like Mr. Eggers, he knows that people have it worse than him, but he also believes that his lady issues is one of his defining characteristics.
******
Think about it. Poor young simpli, struggling with finding his place in life. Do I live with this guy from law school and live with a less than perfect situation or do I pick up and move (like Eggers picking up and moving to Cali)? Do I quit the corporate job and do something I think is more socially worthwhile (like Eggers spurning real work to work on the magazine)? Do I live in wicker park or join the masses living in lincoln park (Eggers desire to live in San Fran)? Do I drink at the nondescript corner bar, or do I look for the hipster bar?
As mr. simpli struggles with all of these questions in 1999, 2000, 2001, along comes Mr. Eggers book. Light bulb!
A Heartbreaking Work of Stagric t's his fucking Siddartha. His Jonathan Livingston Seagull. His Screwtape Letters. His Chicken Soup for the Soul, Greatest Salesman in the World. His The Secret. |
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| Ball Four by Jim Bouton |
| posted by: horsebeater |
14:56 5.15.07 |
I had wanted to read this for at least 15 years and finally finished this two days ago and, wow. Great shit.
Bouton, who was a star with the Yankees in the early 1960s, had arm trouble and came back as a knuckleballer in the late 1960s with the Seattle Pilots expansion team. This is literally an edited diary he kept during the season that became wildly controversial because it exposed drug use in the major leagues and "beaver shooting" which is exactly what you probably think it is. After the book was published, Pete Rose famously started yelling "Fuck you, Shakespeare!" when Bouton was pitching according to the afterward.
Very very easy read, even though its 400 pages.
You watch sports from the outside so much, it's fun to get into the head of a player again. His concerns about making the team in spring training, getting pissed because he never gets into a game unless the team is down by 2 runs or more, etc. It's also very fun for the smart guy who played organized sports and how frustrating that could be.
It isn't a takedown of baseball but isn't a love letter either. It's a guy that really likes the game but can see its flaws as well.
Bouton is clearly a little too full of himself, but other than that, its just a wonderful book.
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| Great Gatbsy by F Scott |
| posted by: horsebeater |
14:43 5.15.07 |
I picked this up again, having read it during the first half but not having read it during THIS half of my life yet. And, for the "greatest American novel" I gotta say I was disappointed.
Part of the magic of the Great Gatsby is, I think, that you're supposed to be mystified by the lifestyle and party scene of both the new rich and the old rich on long island and the book exposes the seedy underbelly of it through the eyes of the moral but naive midwestern narrator. If you aren't mesmerized by the party scene in the first place, however, the expose isn't quite as damning. The idea that rich people can be assholes didn't really wow me.
Everyone identifies with Nick the narrator (and thank God they don't identify with anyone else) and his critique of their lifestyle. But the Big Idea (capital B capital I) of the book is supposed to be that it is symbolic of the decline of the "American Dream"... well, that's what they say. I don't think it works all that well. My fundamental problem is that I never saw a reason to take Gatsby and Tom and Daisy and Jordan and see them as emblematic of the entire nation. They were troubled, idiotic people. I have a hard time identifying with them and feeling sorry for them, and I certainly don't think that theire personal troubles are reason to believe that everything has gone to hell.
But what do I know.
That said, there are tremendous IDEAS in the book that come out in passages passages in the book. On top of that it's an entertaining story. Lots of nifty writing and imagery.
Ultimately, because the greatoverarching theme in this book didn't speak to me. That's the sina qua non of great literature for me, and this didn't have it. It's a Great Book (capital G, capital B) but not a great book.
Of course, the best thing about this book is that its 200 pages or less. What a deal!!! A classic of American literature that you can read comfortably in a weekend!
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| Gatsby, Hornby, McCarthy, Amis |
| posted by: horsebeater |
14:30 5.15.07 |
I've been on quite a reading roll recently, probably reading more in the last 8 months than I have in any 8 month period this decade.
Let's talk about the highlights:
THE ROAD; CORMAC MCCARTHY
Wow. This is getting a lot of press because it was Oprah's second book club selection after reviving the club and was roundly considered a very odd choice for Oprah.
http://www.oprah.com/obc_classic/obc_main.jhtml
But don't hold this against the book.
The book is good shit. Post-apocalyptic. The core of the story is the relationship between a father and son wandering around just trying to survive several years after the destruction of civilization. This is the type of book that could get made into an awful sci-fi movie by the wrong people. I didn't particularly like the ending, but the morality and the tenderness and the hope and the despair is great shit. One of the top 10 books I've ever read. |
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