If you haven't noticed it, there's this thread stuck to the top of this forum... http://forums.bigsoccer.com/threads/essential-soccer-books.290497/ Essential soccer books (assuming you're a fan, which I hope is a safe bet). The last couple of pages have devolved into the "what new ghost-written player autobiography have you read (which is more than the player who "wrote" it can say)" thread, but there are dozens of good leads there.
Being on sort of a sustained run of preferring short stories, I have commandeered this book my wife checked out of the library by Mrs. Ismitje: Dangerous Women is edited by George R.R. Martin (who has an original Game of Thrones novella in the collection) and Gardner Dozois, who is a long-time editor of short story magazines. So far I've read a western, a crime story, some sci fi, a supernatural thriller, and a couple more. The Jim Butcher story is set in the Dresden universe and the aforementioned Martin story is in that one, so perhaps all of them are part of something broader.
James Liddy: Collected Poems, ed. Brian Arkins. Got an Email a couple weeks ago from a guy in Ireland preparing an edition of the selected letters of Irish poet (who lived in the US the last third of his life in the US, mostly in Milwaukee). He came across my letters in the Liddy archive and asked if I had stll had copies of Liddy's letters to me (I do). Hebalso asked me if I'd consider kicking in a 750-1000 word essay on Liddy for a collection he's editing. So I'm rereading him. He's even better than I remember.
Edward Abbey-The Monkey Wrench Gang Allegedly, the book that started eco-terrorism. So far, a good, fun read.
More Christmas reading... A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman Think Clint Eastwood's character in Gran Torino crossed with Adrian Monk (of the TV show Monk) and you've got Ove. Ove is an unrepentant curmudgeon, who like Monk, has some serious social attachment issues who somehow snagged a loving, indulgent babe wife. Ove is about to commit suicide to join his dead wife in the afterlife when an impossibly rambunctious family of foreigners moves in next door. I'm pretty sure I can see where this is going. The blurbing on the book cover assures me this will be an extremely poignant book, which I'm not seeing yet, but there have been a couple of laugh out loud sentences.
With the TV series starting in Engerland this week, Starts on PBS here in April I believe I thought I'd take a look at Mrs Scouse's book "Wolf Hall." Cromwell, Wolsey, and Thomas More under Henry VIII. It's (for me) a difficult book to get into. The cast of characters would fill a normal book. Each chapter introduces a new character and with a lot of them related I have to keep referring back to the list to see who they are and who is talking. She starts a conversation and goes on a couple of pages before you get an inkling of who is actually conversing, using the words 'he' and 'they' when you haven't a clue who the he's and they's/them's she's on about... Yeah, it could be me but I really know this history. I've been to Hampton Court, Seen Henry's armour in the tower. (He was a big girt bugger) and read one or six other books on the subject. I'll stick with it, it'll all come to me I'm sure.....
Does anybody knows the author Chris Carter? His books are : The Crucifix Killer The Executioner The Night Stalker The Death Sculptor One by One I've read all of his books and i totally love them. All the books are about the LAPD Detective Robert Hunter. It's just always exciting and I love the way Carter writes his books.
So. If you could bear with me... On Sunday, the Washington Post magazine ran an article about a man who, before committing suicide, emailed a note to a couple dozen writers across the country. The email wasn't so much a cry for help as a cry for attention. Turns out the writer had penned half a dozen books, and well, no one had read them. He'd been able to say what he wanted to say, only no one had cared. I found this quote passage particularly interesting: http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifes...dfe8bc-2896-11e4-958c-268a320a60ce_story.html Which brings me to this book, which I completed on a very rainy Sunday... God'll Cut You Down by John Safran This is the rather sad tale of a rather feeble segregationist and white supremacist named Richard Barrett, who I once met. Barrett's was a lonely voice in the white power movement and in that milieu he was not respected. See, Barrett is the guy who kept promoting Edgar Ray Killen as some sort of hero, and keeping him in the public eye. Killen is the one person charged in the Mississippi Freedom Summer murders of Andrew Goodman, Mickey Schwerner and James Chaney. By keeping Killen front and center, he really left prosecutors in Mississippi no choice but to reopen his trial, and convict him, in 2005. Anyway, that's Richard Barrett. And three years ago he was murdered by a black man. Not because of his racist views, but because he stiffed the black guy for some yard work he'd done at his house. How prosaic. Anyway, I don't read much true crime (OK, make that never. The only other true crime I've ever read was Capote's In Cold Blood), and after this book, it may be another 20 years because I didn't really pay full attention to the subtitle of the book: and how I lost a Year in Mississippi. This book was written by a blogger so much of the narrative is how he is doing as he goes about his investigation. It's almost as much about him as it is the story of these two men. And let me tell you, I don't care about John Safran... But... a very interesting literary juxtaposition this weekend, completing this book and reading the Washington Post piece. Barrett was a man who had something to say but no one to actually, you know, listen to him. Sad really...
I think it's in Camus' Myth of Sisyphus that there is a footnote telling about a young writer who killed himself to attract attention to his work. Quoth Albert C., (as best as I remember) "the work was judged to be not good."
I've read four true crime books, three were excellent: Capote's In Cold Blood, Norman Mailer's Executioner's Song (about Gary Gilmore) and Ed Sander's book on Charles Manson, The Family. The other one was crap called Fallen Son about a guy named Charlie Cohen my brother went to HS and the University of Illinois with, carpooling home on weekends, etc. The guy killed his parents and a few other people, and the book is rife with errors. For one thing, Cohen was busted after going to NOLA and calling my brother on the phone. His GF answered and said he was visiting me in Minnesota. She gave him my address and phone number. I learned this not from her, but from two FBI agents that visted me at work telling me a serial killer was coming my way. Fortunately, he had already been caught by that time. So I guess I'm mostly offended that the reporter didn't interview me, or at least my brother. I've yet to repay the GF, now my sister-in-law, the favor of giving my address and phone number to a serial killer, and now I have to wait until their kids are out of the house. But that's not what I'm reading... Confucius: The Great Digest; The Unwobbling Pivot; The Analects; and The Classic Anthology, trans Ezra Pound in the LoA Pound: Poems and Translations.
One of Ours - Willa Cather The protagonist's mother objects to his attending the University of Nebraska (pre WWI): “But how can there be any serious study where they give so much time to athletics and frivolity? They pay their football coach a larger salary than their President. And those fraternity houses are places where boys learn all sorts of evil. I've heard that dreadful things go on in them sometimes.”
The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America by the San Francisco Chronicle's religion reporter, Don Lattin. Glad I picked this up at the library. There's stuff in here that I didn't know about a topic I thought I knew plenty about. Basically a history of research into mind altering chemicals when such research was still legal. Leary comes across more sympathetically than he usually does. He's still an egomaniacal douche, but a douche of lesser magnitude.
IDK how it happened, but I burned out on reading for a year or two and probably only read 2-3 books each year. 22 days into this year and I've finished two already. The spark is back! First one of the year: Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami (2014) This was my 7th Murakami work to read (5 novels, 1 short story collection, 1 nonfiction book) and it really resonated with me. Main character is a thirty-something grappling with some ghosts from his past, in particular being cut off completely (and inexplicably) from a group of friends he'd been very close with for years. He struggles with this social isolation rather unhealthily at first but eventually is able to get on with life despite it constantly nagging. It flashes back between the college times and his adult life where he seeks each of the four friends out to try to get some closure. Not that I'd been through anything like this, but I think it's just a time in life where you kind of struggle a bit between still feeling young, but being firmly in adult territory. Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut (1987) This was my third Vonnegut novel and I have no idea why I've waited this long to delve in further after Slaughterhouse-Five years ago. It's the fictional autobiography of artist and WWII vet Rabo Karabeckian and all of his adventures and misadventures. It was a fun read for me as a fan of a lot of the abstract expressionist painters that Karabeckian rubbed shoulders with. Clearly WWII shook Vonnegut to his core and I imagine it shows up in just about everything he does in some form or other. Can't wait to delve into more.
Try and find Vonnegut's "Welcome to the Monkey House" It has some classic and laugh out loud moments in it's short stories. Quotable lines and characters. It won't disappoint. Add on: I read this in the 70's. I still remember lines and characters. Who could forget Diana Moonglampers as the equalizer general.
just finished "inherent vice." wasn't aware that it was a book until i saw it at the store. decided to read it before seeing the movie. i want to like it more than i did. thought some of the characters were fantastic, but the plot is all over the place. that's kind of the point, but it was a little much for me.
I'm reading it now as well and after about 30 pages it has proved to be the world's most potent sedative. I'm reading it for a book club, so I'll plow though, but I'm not loving it so far.
Understanding Thomas Jefferson by E. M. Halladay I'm a UVa alum, the school of Mr Jefferson's founding, so my shelves are sprinkled with Jefferson related books that I've been given over the years, and have never read. But this one, with it's gawky cover has always caught my eye, so I thought that I would finally read it. Except that sometime in the past 5 years I actually did start the book. I read four chapters, according to the marginalia I annotated on the first read. So I have the double misfortune of not only forgetting that I'd even read something, I'm embarrassed by how trenchant and pithy my notes are from my first reading. I've not thought anything so original this time around. <<<sigh>>> But, if I had gotten to the fifth chapter, I surely would not have forgotten that I had read this book, because it is there that the author drops the bombshell of Jeffersonian bombshells. As many might know, Mr Jefferson had a long-debated dalliance with one of his slaves, Sally Hemings. Devotees of Mr Jefferson,as well as his all-white heirs, might still deny the relationship, but genetic testing seems to indicate that Mr Jefferson did have children with Sally Hemings. Mr Jefferson didn't begin his affair with Hemings until after the death of his beloved wife, Martha, after only 10 years of marriage. Mr Jefferson and Martha were quite smitten with each other, and by all accounts, they were every bit as in love, and as erudite about showing it as say, John and Abigail Adams (though Mr Jefferson destroyed all their letters after her death). Anyway, Sally Hemings' mother was the slave mistress to Martha Jefferson nee Wayles' father. Sally Hemings and Martha Washington were half sisters! Mr Jefferson was keeping it in the family, in a biblical sense. And this may explain some of the attraction between the two. That's what I learned in chapter 5. You can bet I will finish all the way to the footnotes....
I remember the reunion back in may of 99 when the Hemming's descendants were invited. Turned into a nasty battle. People!!! http://articles.philly.com/1999-05-...anks-young-hemings-descendants-hemings-family At Meeting Of Jefferson Kin, Fight Ends First-ever Reunion Both sides of the founding father's family said that a private business meeting of the Thomas Jefferson Family Association turned nasty when members of the group, which represents about 700 of Jefferson's acknowledged kin, demanded a vote to bar the Hemings descendants from a discussion of membership rules.
The Adventures of Ibn Battuta-Ross E. Dunn About the 14th century Muslim traveler. Veddy interesting.
Just when I think I've been through all both the walking books at the public library, someone orers a bunch from England. This is Walking the Woods and the Water: In Patrick Leigh Fermor's Footsteps from the Hook of Holland to the Golden Horn, by Nick Hunt. I hadn't heard of Fermor, but his 1933 walk from Rotterdam to Istanbul is apperently legendary in certain circles. Hunt recreated it, staring in late December, 2011. Good travel writing. And a 100 page supplement, a memoir of Fermor, who died in 2011 at 98, by his Spanish translator, who hung out with him near the end... Drink Time! In the Company of PLF by Dolores Payas.