On The Road: The Original Scroll by Jack Kerouac. I started this twice in the past, but it went down as DNF, mostly because of extenuating circumstances. Read it this time. 300 pages without a paragraph break. I liked it quite a bit more than the original. This led me to a thrice DNFed book by Kerouac Visions of Cody. Some tough sledding, but after reading a recent biography, I had an idea of what he was up to in this. It drags in spots, and there are places where I wasn't quite clear what he was trying (and I'm not sure he was, either), but there is some damn fine writing, esp. in the last 70-80 pages. And off and on, hanging out in my backpack... Alan Bennett, Writing Home, a miscellaneous collection of his diaries, non fiction pieces, etc.
A couple of John Sandford novels, Easy Prey and Night Prey Bleh. Sandford apparently abandons what I thought was his schtick: showing the killer alongside the detective work of catching him. Easy reads as I've been carting my foster daughter around to various appointments these past couple of weeks, but nothing too interesting. Except for the fact that he stumbled on a great series title: Prey. I'm convinced that the titles are what keeps him selling books, because it's not his writing. And it kind of makes me anxious for my aspiring series of cozy mysteries. I need a good title conceit. And so far, nothing....
Of course no spoilers here,as I wouldn't wish to spoil a book or movie for anyone. I am currently reading Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.I am on the last chapter right now,it is a pretty hard read as it is translated from Russian and parts of the book are needlessly detailed in my opinion but ultimately the book is very rewarding intellectually and a unparalleled character study.The main character Raskolnikov is a very capricious and complex young man,I find him fascinating as I can relate to him in many ways.
Yeh,I enjoyed his early books especially his conversation between police and the cop humour. But after 107 Preys? he got tiresome. He picked himself up again with his Virgil Flowers series.
I finished reading "Manhunt" by Peter Bergen and "Looming Tower" by Lawrence Wright. Both are fascinating books, if you are interested in educating yourself on Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. "Manhunt" reads like a fiction. You can feel the enormity of the stakes as the President and his advisors discuss the ramification of sending in the Seal team for the mission. I am also 70% of the way thru third book of Game of Thrones. I was told that third book is where the action really picks up. Halfway thru, I was utterly bored as nothing of consequence really happens. But that really changes in second half of the book. If you are also bored while reading this book, my advise would be to keep reading. Trust me, the action definitely picks up.
The Big 4 -- Agatha Christie You know, I've never ever even heard of this Agatha Christie mystery. I looked at the four or five volumes I have of Christie, and this isn't listed in any of them. So, imagine my surprise, when 20 years after I thought I'd read all the Hercule Poirot novels, I found this one. It's like being the guy who's gonna find JD Salinger's unpublished treasure trove...
"Dog Company" The boys of Pointe Du Hoc. Patrick K. O'Donnell. Brave guys who got the shit shot out of them, First at Pointe Du Hoc above Utah and Omaha beachheads. Their D-Day last '3' days of heavy fighting.Then they switched them by truck to the Ardenes to take a forest that should have been bypassed, Tough bunch of Rangers though. And yes....I went there couple of years ago and did the D-Day pilgrimage and wandered around the Pointe thinking...who's freekin idea was this.One of the gun emplacements I shot up there. My main reason for being there was to visit the first town liberated on D-Day, "Ranville" My uncle parachuted there on June 5. The reason I joined the paras.Then another uncle was here at the bridge featured in the film "The Longest Day" and went in by glider for the earliest landing of the invasion.
"Flat Out and Flat Broke" Perry McCarthey " Or Formula 1 the Hard Way! is the autobiography of retired racing driver, Perry McCarthy. This book goes through his career, and the hardships he faced while trying to break the ranks of Formula 1. It is also the book where Perry reveals that he was The Stig. " And also where he pissed of "Top Gear who disowned him. His writing is as frantic as his driving, got to have a funny punch line after every comment he makes. Some did have me laughing out loud at times though. I'm into F1 so I really did enjoy the book, lots of info about how the game was run in the 90's and other drivers involved. Seemed like we lost a driver a month back in those days, tough times in the (blood) sport! Interesting though, not one driver has died since Ayrton Senna in '94. Oh and the Granp Prix of China at Shanghai is this weekend. CH 220 on Directv..
I'll be checking this out. My Dad invaded Normandy the more typical way: wading ashore and getting shot at from positions that weren't supposed to be as fortified as they were. His war ended D-Day+3 with an explosion (probably a shell) that took off half his foot. Just finished Jack Kerouac Desolation Angels (1965). Damn good writing in here. Just started An Accidental Autobiography: Selected Letters of Gregory Corso. A poet and friend of Kerouac and all those guys and a damn funny letter writer. Though the fact that he nearly always needed money makes him sound like the Monty Python sketch featuring the Scottish poet Ewan McTeagle: "To Ma Own beloved Lassie. A poem on her 17th Birthday." Lend us a couple of bob till Thursday. I'm absolutely skint. But I'm expecting a postal order and I can pay you back as soon as it comes. "I think what McTeagle's pottery... er... poetry is doing is rejecting all the traditional cliches of modern pottery. No longer do we have to be content with Keats's 'Seasons of mists and mellow fruitfulness', Wordsworth's 'I wandered lonely as a cloud' and Milton's 'Can you lend us two bob till Tuesday'. " http://www.montypython.net/scripts/mcteagle.php
The Aneid -- Vergil My daughter is reading this in Latin, and translating it, so I thought I should read it alongside her. It's really easy reading the classics if they're written for a juvenile adult market.
that's awesome! my mom was a hs latin teacher and she loaned me a couple of her books. i'm through the first one and once the semester's over i'm on to the second. i have a couple of the loeb classical library books, and i was going to start cicero's duties, but that might have to wait.... "comfortable" with latin does not mean "ready to read cicero." lol
I've been fostering my 9 year old goddaughter for past 6 weeks, and while it's been rough, one of the pleasures is that I've been able to read to her the same books that I read to my daughter and my son. But, we're living something of a real-life Pygmalion with Nasia. Her mother is dieing of MS and her family has lived her entire life on mom's SSI and foodstamps and Section 8 housing vouchers. The poverty of Nasia's imagination is .... remarkable ... in it's totality. She is ignorant, and I use that word guardedly, but the only link she has had to the outside world has been reality television. She thinks sharks live throughout the world and attack people everywhere, she thinks every bridge is about to collapse, and that trains and planes are deathtraps. Giving her a real sense of wonder and an imagination beyond premonitions of local news disasters has been a joy. The Forgotten Door -- Alexander Key God, I love this book. Written by the guy who more famously penned Escape to Witch Mountain, my copy looks pretty much like this one. It's about a young alien boy who falls to earth, and since he can read minds, he's feared by the locals and wanted by the government. Most evocative chapter titles ever. The Weirdstone of Brisingamen -- Alan Garner First true fantasy book I ever read, but I learned at an early age that sequels suck. Alan Garner went on to write 3 or 4 more fantasies, and they were terrible. One interesting thing that Nasia has noted in my reading of this: I don't have a very good English accent. Some days it sounds more Scottish, and others, well, one night she wanted to know why Gowther Mossack sounded like a leprechaun... The Chronicles of Robin Hood -- Rosemary Sutcliffe My favorite retelling of Robin Hood. I never read this to my kids, but on long car trips I would regale them with the stories as told by Sutcliffe. According to my wife, I've got long passages memorized almost word for word.... 101 Dalmations -- Dodie Smith This is the book I've read the most in my life. Maybe 30-40 times. I bought this version in a train station in England on a trip as a kid, and it kind of became my traveling book. Google images is incredible. Who would have thought that I could find the cover image from a single printing of the book from the 70s? Actually, that's true of all of these images.
Philip K. Dick -- The Man in the High Castle I'm an occasional science fiction reader, but this may be the first "alternate history" novel I've read. I'm about 2/3 through it and things are stepping into high gear. An interesting read thus far.
I enjoyed The Man in the High Castle, but of Dick's major novels (the four listed on that cover plus Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, A Scanner Darkly and Valis, it's easily the most traditional in its approach.
Eselan: America and the Religion of No Religion by Jeffrey Kripal. Interesting history of the Big Sur institute that has generated some really interesting spiritual and psychological insights as well as massive amount of cosmic woo woo. Was surprised to find it in my public library when I was looking for something else.
Agreed (based on comparison to Ubik & Three Stigmata), though it got pretty weird with both the Mr. Tagomi/jewelry scene and the Juliana Frink at the party scene at the end. Finished that book -- now reading the last (for me) of the four in that collection: Philip K. Dick -- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
The Sleepwalkers by Christopher Clark a (yet another) book on the origins of the first world war. i don't know how long ago it's been, now, since i first read barbara tuchman's The Guns of August (among my very favorite books of all time), but the subject has fascinated me ever since. when i saw this in the store the other day, i told myself, "just don't. 600 pages from now you won't know anything you don't already." and so i didn't buy it. but then i took it to lunch the next day. and then i bought it. clark puts enough meat on the bones to insure there's enough new here to make it worth my while - though whether his final conclusions will satisfy remains to be seen. it could end up just the opposite of david fromkin's Europe's Last Summer, which told me nothing new at all and practically had me yawning, until he summed it up with a slightly new perspective and i suddenly thought i'd read a really cracking book. anyway, i know that if clark goes into as much detail on the rest of what he covers as he does in the first couple of chapters, there will be pertinent bits he simply won't cover (at least not within 560 pages); but still, i feel i'm sitting down to a hefty meal. and it tastes great. like every meal, however, how well it digests remains to be seen.
Only Beautiful, Please John Everard A book written by a former British diplomat in North Korea. Very interesting, makes me feel more fortunate and appreciative of what I have now.
Roughneck by Jim Thompson. An autobiography (more or less) by America's darkest of the noir novelists. The opy I'm reading doesn't have a cover anywhere near this cool, and the book isn't as dark as most of his novels. In fact, it's mostly about the shitty jobs he had (and got fired from) before his wrting took off. Very similar to Charles Bukowski's Factotum, now that I think about it.
I tend to read several books in a period of time. Just finished Quiet, about a third of threw of The First American(big big read) and just started the other two.