BOOKS THREAD

Read "1919" in college. Quite a ride.

 

Missed this somehow ...
Dr. Z's memoir came out in Sept.

 

My wife's aunt and uncle live in the lower East Side (I think) and they sent me a Strand t-shirt, which I wear proudly in SF.

 

Facing McEnroe, The Romance of Leonardo DaVinci, Wesley The Owl are three books I'm enjoying at the moment.

 

Anthony DeCurtis's new Lou Reed bio is a pretty good look at a guy who was often as inaccessible as much of his music.

 

Reading Jonathan Eig’s Ali biography. Hard to believe no one had really written a definitive Ali biography, perhaps because he was still alive, perhaps because the scope is so large.

 

This is one of Palahniuk's earlier works, from 2002. The story is that there's a certain children's poem, and if it's read to someone, that person dies. It gets to the point that the poem can just be thought, and the person to whom the thought is directed will die. And then it gets weird, as all of his stuff does.

I knocked it out in a couple of days, so it's a quick, easy, fun (if by fun, you mean many people dying after hearing a poem) read.

Joe Bob says check it out, if you dig weird books.

 

My friend Ben handed me a novel a little while ago and said it "devastated" him. I was like, Why would I want to read that? It's called Stoner by John Williams. Anyway, I started reading it, and it is as Ben says. It's also maybe the most precisely written book I've read. I wouldn't be surprised if Williams had spent 100 years on it.

 

Second the endorsement of Stoner. My blurb quote: "Epic, but also not that long."

 

Gaiman's "American Gods."
Enjoyably funky.
Felt like I stepped outside my comfort zone on this. Really enjoyed it.

 

About the best thing i can say about Stephen Davis's new Stevie Nicks bio is it is uneven. large chuNks of it are so fawning it could have come from a fan site while it doesn't hide from the musical and personal mistakes she made while strung out on coke. Davis also makes a bizarre, totally unsubstantiated claim that Nicks is a racist, writing that limo companies were apparently instructed not to send black drivers. Aside from Christine McVie who drifts in and out of the narrative, the members of Fleetwood Mac come off as terrible people: Mick Fleetwood - the source of the only original interviews, it seems - is a lovestruck, perennially bankrupt junkie, John McVie is a brooding drunk and Lindsay Buckingham is savaged on nearly every page.

There is random editorializing (he rips Dennis Wilson who was dating Christine McVie at one point), misspelled names, wrong song titles and dropped words and his lengthy treatise at the beginining of the book on the influence of Wales on rock history (Tom Jones, maybe, but Elvis? Jerry Lee Lewis, really?) is a stretch.

 

Don't bag on the Welsh, my brother!