What are you reading now, playas?

[elliegurl]

i resisted responding to this because of the title, hate white people using black talk, but yes i need to lighten up a little...been reading books like crazy. just finished rereading the lovely bones and starting divasadero by michael ondataaje, i hope i spelled his name right.
i love reading in summer!
ellie

[Tokyo Fan]

Fresh Air Fiend: Travel Writings by Paul Theroux. Another repeat read as I've run out of books but I really like Theroux (for the vast majority of the time).

[cind]

Great thread! I have a longass commute so I am always looking for new books to check out.

Just finished:

This Book Will Save Your Life - A.M Homes
In a Sunburned Country - Bill Bryson
Bringing Down the House - Ben Mezrich

About to start:

Intuition - Allegra Goodman
Neither Here nor There - Bill Bryson

Happy reading everyone!

[sturgeongeneral]

gdavis, see my response to o-town on p.1 of this thread.

[gdavis5446]

just finished in the past few days larry brown, fay and father & son.
now reading cormac mccarthy, the road and no country for old men(in preparation for the upcoming coen brothers movie being released this fall).

So how did you like Fay and Father and Son?

[HighPlainsDrifter]

Side reading: Blackhawk: the Battle for the Heart of America, by Kerry Trask. I need to keep my fiction to non-fiction ratio at close to 1:1, so I'm multi-tasking with this one, which looks to be pretty great thus far.

Very nice! I read that one just over a year ago. Good read. Very scholarly in tone and exhaustive. As a narrative, I think there are other books that are superior, but for context and backstory and the larger perspective of what the war meant for its time and place and the players involved, there's nothing better. Enjoy. By the way, were you at all inspired to pick this one up by the reference in 'Out of the Picture'?

Right now I'm reading a sort of biography/action narrative called Raider by Charles W. Sasser, about a WWII Alamo Scout and later Green Beret in Vietnam by the name of Galen Kittleson (an Iowa farmboy, no less) who participated in more POW rescue operations than any serviceman in US history. Fairly light, breezy reading but a really interesting subject.

Going to dive into Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (Max Boot) next.

[sturgeongeneral]

just finished 'the road'. a very fast read and for the most part fascinating. one phrase that i thought farrarian, “creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a fever land”. sounds like lyrics that jay might have chosen. i have two questions:
1. are you carrying the fire?
2. are you one of the good guys?

[blackseacityman]

the road - cormac maccarthy

[Damaged Son]

The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier

[altcountryman]

He describes a visit to Tokyo. He is somewhere overlooking Shibuya Crossing, an area of Tokyo filled with hordes and swarms of young people,(predominantly, but touts and business people, gangsters, etc. 5 road crossing that is ALWAYS chaos. His description was something along the lines of stereotypical Japanese "orderliness" of people crossing the this major intersection. It was just so patently false it made me doubt whether he had ever been there. When I doubted that...because it is what I know, it made me wonder how much of the rest of the book was bullshit. But up to that point I enjoyed it!

Interesting. I know that authors (and others too) pull that stuff from time to time, and I always wonder why. I can see where obvious BS on a topic you know something about would spoil the whole thing.

[countryfeedback]

i try to read a certain ratio of non-fiction also but it seems one person's perspective of non-fiction is simply another form of fiction to me. After the spin effect reality is simply one's perception of of that person's response to external stimuli.
i see blue and you see red
i see good and you see bad
what color is the sky in your world
sky blue sky
going going gone

MR. ERGANIAN
What subject is your book? Non-
fiction?

MILES
No, it's a novel. Fiction. Although
there's a lot from my own life, so I
guess technically some of it is non-
fiction.

MR. ERGANIAN
Good, I like non-fiction. There is
so much to know about the world that
I think reading a story someone just
invented is kind of a waste of time.

[sturgeongeneral]

i try to read a certain ratio of non-fiction also but it seems one person's perspective of non-fiction is simply another form of fiction to me. After the spin effect reality is simply one's perception of of that person's response to external stimuli.
i see blue and you see red
i see good and you see bad
what color is the sky in your world
sky blue sky
going going gone

[the Watcher]

Just finished: The March by E.L. Doctorow. Pretty good. I'd never read any of his work before. The writing struck me as though he were trying to write in such a way as to have it actually read as a 19th century novel. I can't put my finger on exactly what gave me this impression, but the writing itself felt very period-ish.

Just starting: Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon. This is going to be an undertaking. The book is too damn big and my train commute too short to make it worthwhile to take to work each day.

Side reading: Blackhawk: the Battle for the Heart of America, by Kerry Trask. I need to keep my fiction to non-fiction ratio at close to 1:1, so I'm multi-tasking with this one, which looks to be pretty great thus far.

[Trellis]

Common Sense by Thomas Paine
Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince by Rowling

[Tokyo Fan]

His TV show, No Reseravations, is pretty much all I watch.

Yeah, that's a great show. I enjoy all of his stuff. Tony is one of those assholes who's also a cool guy. Or maybe he's a cool guy who's also an asshole. Either way, he'd be one hell of a cat to have drinks with.

Kitchen Confidential is one of my all-time favorites, and one of the books I find myself recommending the most to others. Everyone I know who's read it really enjoyed it.

His others are pretty good. He's done some detective books that aren't really what you'd call "literary" but are entertaining stories, with a little cooking slant to them, which is cool.

I suppose the point of a thread is to have dialogue, so I hope I won't offend by saying that this book is one of the few that I actually tossed out...as in the trash! "Asshole" etc all rings true and unless I have mistakenly recollecting the contents of an entirely different book, this guys description of a scene in Tokyo was so outrageously fabricated to make me doubt the validity of the entire book. (Book check: This is the guy who said never order fish on such and such a night, right , because it can't possibly be fresh...and no, that wasn't the part that made me throw the book out. )

Anyway, no offense meant to those of you who find it a good read.

What made you throw it out?

He describes a visit to Tokyo. He is somewhere overlooking Shibuya Crossing, an area of Tokyo filled with hordes and swarms of young people,(predominantly, but touts and business people, gangsters, etc. 5 road crossing that is ALWAYS chaos. His description was something along the lines of stereotypical Japanese "orderliness" of people crossing the this major intersection. It was just so patently false it made me doubt whether he had ever been there. When I doubted that...because it is what I know, it made me wonder how much of the rest of the book was bullshit. But up to that point I enjoyed it!

Could've been the drugs?

LOL. Maybe. But I don't toss too many books.