Books: What are you reading tonight?
We have ongoing threads on t.v. and movies we're watching lately; it's time for one for books. daveT's thread on favori
Just finished Unshrunk by Laura Delano, liked it quite a bit. It's a crazy world and we're all crazy, so they keep pumping us full of these powerful drugs. Then we're trapped! Can't live with em, can't get off of em. She started crazier than most and managed to get out to tell the tale. I definitely think she's onto something, or better put, she's onto everything and the nature of it all, but she probably takes things too far. Honestly, what she really needs is
Spoiler
God, but that's for another place and another book.
Btw, the only rival for great NBA books that Breaks of the Game has is Terry Pluto's Loose Balls, about the old ABA. Just fantastic. Maybe they could merge the 2 books!
True fact: our own John Cole hooped it up a little with Marvin Bad News Barnes as a young man. Now that's a life right there.
Just finished Unshrunk by Laura Delano, liked it quite a bit. It's a crazy world and we're all crazy, so they keep pumping us full of these powerful drugs. Then we're trapped! Can't live with em, can't get off of em. She started crazier than most and managed to get out to tell the tale. I definitely think she's onto something, or better put, she's onto everything and the nature
Maybe the best book review ever.
Btw, the only rival for great NBA books that Breaks of the Game has is Terry Pluto's Loose Balls, about the old ABA. Just fantastic. Maybe they could merge the 2 books!
True fact: our own John Cole hooped it up a little with Marvin Bad News Barnes as a young man. Now that's a life right there.
Wat
He's told the story a few times here, and he's always spoken well of young Marvin. Providence area playground ball thing. I guess I should add iirc.
A couple I really expected to like, but really didn't.
PrairyErth By William Least Heat-Moon. An account of what he found traveling around Chase County, Kansas over the course of six years. Chase County is between KC and Wichita, west of Emporia.
So, as you'd expect, there isn't enough interesting to make up a 600 page+ tome, but he did. Spots were good, but a lot of what seemed like navel-gazing.
Visions by Michio Kaku. Written 1995, his look forward to where things were going to be in the future. Generally composed of three big sections: tech, medical, and science.
Of course, some stuff close to right, some stuff wrong, some laughably wrong (being able to go to the drugstore to get a CD-ROM of your DNA sequence ot take home, and put in your Macintosh for personal review !?!?).
The middle section isn't a particular area of interest to me, so that was a slog. The others piqued my interest more. It was pretty fun at times to see how on track (or not). Overall, not great though.
Surprised and a bit disappointed, as I really like both of these guys' in their other works.
I’ve never seen Princess Bride but my cousin’s DIL just gave me her copy of the oral history book. The chapter on Bride in the recent ATG biography was really good.
Edit: As You Wish by Cary Elwes
About half way through Joe Abercrombie's new dark fantasy book, The Devils.
I loved his First Law series, especially for his great characters and humour, and this is no different. Really enjoying it so far.
Read the 2nd Tony Hillerman murder mystery it won the Edgar in the 1970s. Def enjoyable from a Grand Master mystery writer.
The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis, Irrational Exuberance by Robert J. Shiller, and The Unexpurgated Code by J.P. Donleavy
The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis, Irrational Exuberance by Robert J. Shiller, and The Unexpurgated Code by J.P. Donleavy
The last of those is an alltime masterpiece.
I assume you've read The Ginger Man.
I played basketball against Marvin Barnes, the star of Loose Balls. We lived in the same neighborhood. We went to different high schools that were about a hundred yards apart. Barnes was a freshman and not quite the great player he turned out to be.
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Why Do Clock Run Clockwise? and other Imponderables by David Feldman.
It's a book of questions like the above, and the answers he discovered. Not academic research by any means, it's very light and occasionally interesting reading about how mundane things got to be the way they are.
A good book to change your mindset, especially if you read it more than once, just to absorb information is: " Mindset " by Carol S Dweck.
A good book to change your mindset, especially if you read it more than once, just to absorb information is: " Mindset " by Carol S Dweck.
Many of my colleagues and I use an essay by Dweck at the beginning of the year with our community college students.
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Nice to hear that. It is hard to apply what she says, but I strongly believe that we as humans would be better if we lived our lives by the flexible mindset
I've observed that those who are able to think more flexibly have better outcomes in life. Of course, not a rigorous study. Might be just my perception.
A History of Pi by Petr Beckmann.
Seemed pretty mathematically rigorous when discussing breakthroughs people like Euler made in finding new equations. Pretty boring though. Not a great read.
I think some of it might have been an ESL problem; some odd phrasing here & there.
He also seemed to have some obsession with the old Soviet Union. That gout brought up several times, but not in the context of a Soviet mathematician who did something.
Many of my colleagues and I use an essay by Dweck at the beginning of the year with our community college students.
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which essay?
I've been on a mystery kick lately and read Hollow man by Dickson Carr (book can also be found with the title "Three coffins"). The book is famous for a scene where the detective lists out dozens of scenarios. I thought the solution to the mystery was quite satisfying. I find Agatha Christie is easier to read, but this was fun and I can see why the book is liked so much.
Hollow Man is really great. Quite enjoyable, I've read about 5 of these with that detective.
Read the latest Anthony Horowitz, of course, enjoyed it.
Just downloaded Billy Bathgate, which won the NBCC award, can't remember if I've read Ragtime or any of his stuff years ago.
Finally got around to re-reading Money, by Martin Amis.
An all-time masterpiece, clearly his best work, even better than London Fields.
John Self is one of the great characters in literature, and Amis put the character of himself [lit. Martin Amis, the writer] in probably the only way I've seen in literature that's not super-annoying or overly po-mo. He's a minor character. Self brings him in to touch up a screenplay.
Like the best Amis, it's endlessly funny, dark, crude, sexy et al.
*The scene where Self describes being harangued by the wizened harridan of a female bartender at the strip club, to order more drinks every <10 minutes, is note-perfect.
Top 15 novels since WW2 [not going to be all the classics] in no order:
Catch-22 - Heller
Bridge of Birds - B. Hughart [on Kindle as 3-novel set Chronicles of Master Li &...]
The Name of the Rose - Eco
Crying of Lot 40 - Pynchon
The Names - DeLillo
The Wasp Factory - Banks
Pale Fire - Nabokov
Atonement - McEwan
Infinite Jest - D. F. Wallace
Wittgenstein's Mistress - D. Markson
Rules of Civility - A. Towles
Skippy Dies - P. Murray
Kafka on the Shore - Murakami
Money - Martin Amis
Suttree/Blood Meridian - McCarthy
