Jesus! You're not serious are you. Better not answer that this is the reading thread. Google up McGuinness and your find he's a well respected serious author who has been around a while..
Just finished The Lost Hero by Rick Riordan, my first book on my nook, so that was an interesting touch. But anyway, the second of the Heroes of Olympus trilogy, which I am enjoying much more than the Percy Jackson and Olympians quintet. Riordan's dropped the cutesiness of Percy Jackson and come up with far more interesting characters the second time around. It'll be hard to wait until October 2012 for the concluding installment.
This book had it's moments, especially about the hard life in the Alpine sector of the war. Did drag a bit and the author put me off with: "how the sniper had to get 'Upwind' of his prey/target." Well he said it 3 times and should have thought it out. Does give some insight of part of the war you don't hear much about. It's allways been about trenches mud and blood.
http://bigjournalism.com/abreitbart...d-random-house-into-publishing-literary-hoax/ OK, so I searched on Joe McGinniss, as suggested, and you can read the story at the above-cited link if you so desire. I have not read his book, and had no interest in it, but I asked my question earlier in this thread as mainly rhetorical.
re McGinnis-Is this the same guy who knew nothing about soccer but decided to tell the coach of a professional soccer team how to run his team.
Drama: An Actor's Education by John Lithgow. Picked it up at the library because the random pages I read seemed interesting. I'll be curious to see if I think it's as good as Steve Martin's Born Standing Up. How's that differ from me yelling at Tony LaRussa on the TV in order to tell him how to manage his pitching staff?
The Lithgow book was a pretty decent actor's memoir, though like too many books in that genre, he overindulges in deferred name dropping -- that is, he starts an anecdote without referring giving a name until the end, when he says, "and that director was Mike Nichols" or the longest deferred name drop I'd ever read, 4 pages until he gets to "and that's how I met Meryl Streep." Now reading Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen.
Sounds really interesting. I don't know if it'll cover this kind of stuff, but I get into a lot of arguments with people in our local music scene about "the cult of the amateur." Some people won't go to any "big shows" because they want to use their concert dollars to support the little guy. I support the little guy as much as possible too, but I'm sorry, there's nobody in this town that throws down like TV on the Radio or Battles or Animal Collective. I think some people are ripping themselves off by experiencing truly great things (and they'll love these bands on record) by some sort of sense of "duty" to amateurism. Weird.
Chapters four and five are about music. I'm not there yet, but that would seem to fit the drift of his argument so far. But mostly, he's going on about how the web promotes self expression over quality (my paraphrase, not his words) by giving everyone access regardless of talent or capacities.
After seeing Doomsday Book touted in here a few times I finally grabed a copy from the library and waded through it this past week. Always fun when you pick up a scifi book that was written almost twenty years ago isn't it. Present day technology has outstripped the future one in the book especially in communications. She writes a good yarn though and the latter part of the book becomes really engrossing but man, all the peripheral side stories and interuptions drove me to nearly giving up early on.
Finally finished this this morning. Really enjoyed it. The last short story in particular dealt with dislocation from place, separation from people and destruction from nature. Intense stuff. Some really solid stories in there. Heck of a first book. Definitely looking forward to more from him. Now I'm moving onto this giant: 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
A fantasy-adventure novel, White Staff, by Robert Thomas (which I helped edit) is now available on Amazon.