BOOKS THREAD

Read 4 books over the past couple of weeks:

-- Out of Sight by Elmore Leonard, which was fantastic
-- Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson. It was a book about the history of soccer tactics. A little dry and too British in places, but an enjoyable read.
-- Fear and Loathing in La Liga by Sid Lowe. Another soccer book by a regular on the Football Weekly podcast. About the Barca-Real Madrid rivalry. A litttle long and dragged in spots, but interesting placing the teams in the context of the history of Spain and the world of big money soccer.
-- The Sting Man - -the book which American Hustle was based on. Meh.

Looking a couple of boxes of books that my mother-in-law is storing with us, I found a copy of Roadkill by Kinky Friedman. Never read any of his stuff, so I am going to give it a shot this weekend.

 

Am in the middle of "The Martian"; about an astronaut on Mars who is thought to be dead and abandoned when the crew flees during a huge sandstorm. Engaging, well written, and thought-provoking.

 

Great, quick, and fun.

 

FYI, The Naked and the Dead is 1,779 pages if you read it on an iphone 6.

 

"Big Roads" by Earl Swift, an account of the planning, construction and (eventually) controversy about the Interstate Highway system, from the first days of automobiles to today.

Good read for highway/road nerds like myself, but not too academic. He focuses on the people behind the decisions, such as "the Chief," Thomas MacDonald, and Frank Turner. And if you live/are familiar with Baltimore, that city is used to show the controversies regarding building urban highways through established neighborhoods. You will learn why I-70 basically dead-ends at the city limits.

 

Thanks for the tip, Coco. I'm going to look for it.

 

Read Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. I would hate to have been a fact-checker on this and while I love detail, it makes for a plodding read. Even so, I have re-read parts of it numerous times. Isaacson made an honest effort to balance the story and minimize the hero worship. I have only briefly used Apple products, don't own any, and knew very little about his life. But I love how-they-did-it stories of historic proportions, and it was compelling. Maybe it was precisely because he was a borderline sociopath control freak that Jobs was able to make history not only founding Apple, but again after returning there triumphantly from exile. As Jobs agreed, you don't have to be brilliant to be a genius.

 

Finished this tonight and really enjoyed it. Lipsyte was a sports columnist without being a big sports fan. Interesting take on the business.

Joe Bob says check it out.

 

Tried to read The Last Boy, Jane Leavy's Mantle bio.

UGH.
I was searching for some good sports books to read. I stumbled on a list that had TLB as one of the 50 best sports book written. I suspect the writer has read a grand total of 52 sports books.
I quit after 300 pages. Too much minutiae about the minutiae of Mantle's life.
A entire chapter devoted to debunking the myth of his 565 ft HR. Pages devoted to the details of finding the kid who found the ball. Flights paths and scientific theories. Another chapter on the medical explanations behind Mantle's bum knee.
God Damn! You are writing a book about the Golden Era of the NY Fucking Yankees! And the Golden Boy of the Golden Era! Rather than stories about Mantle's carousing with Ford and Martin and honest-t0-goodness inside and baseball backstories, I get bored to death with interviews from Mantle's doctors about his injuries, chapters about the family and their history in the US and how they came to Commerce.

 

I, too, enjoyed "Joyland," and I figured other SJ.com King fans might have read it.

Not really a "horror" book, just a fun whodunnit story with lots of carny references/humor.

And the look of the book is clearly in tribute to the 1960s-era paperback crime novels. Even the quotes touting other Hard Case Crime titles are done with throwback fonts and typesetting.

 

What started out as a book about dead wrestlers evolved into a history of professional wrestling. Overall a good read; I had some quibbles about word choice in a few places (the writer used "ilk" a lot, as in talking about a particular wrestler "and the rest of his ilk," which, to me, has negative overtones, but that wasn't what he was trying to convey. Other than that, it was an enjoyable look at the world of pro wrestling.

Joe Bob says check it out.

 

Reading "Ghettoside" by Jill Leovy, who writes about the murder of a black teenager and black-on-black murders in Los Angeles County. Leovy covers the police beat for the L.A. Times, and the depth she puts into Ghettoside is tremendous.

When discussing the teenager's murder, she goes behind the scenes with the white, Irish detective helping solve the crime.

Strongly recommend.