BOOKS THREAD

I was going to recommend "The Corrections". If you haven't gotten to them yet, earlier John Irving, especially "The World According to Garp", "Hotel New Hampshire" and "A Prayer for Owen Meany" would certainly fit the bill.

 

I will second this. Winslow's The Cartel is great too

 

Not a novel, but long, smart, and absorbing describes Homicide by David Simon, in case you haven't read it.

 

Wow, thanks for all these tips everyone, good stuff!

 

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay by Michael Chabon; The Road and also Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. Won’t find better writing and storytelling in the English language, IMHO

 

Kavalier and Klay is easily Chabon's best. I've got Nick Harkaway's "Gone-Away World" on my nightstand. It's knuckle-headed post-apocalyptic that doesn't take itself too seriously.

 

"The Last Rhinos: My Battle to Save One of the World's Greatest Creatures" was the third, and last, conservation-related book written by Lawrence Anthony, and was just as good as the other two -- "Babylon's Ark" and "The Elephant Whisperer," which I posted about earlier on this thread.

A terrific, conversational writer, he draws you in with his passion, dry humor and obvious care for his subject matter. In this book, he chronicles his (ultimately failed) fight for the last 15 -- later found to actually be four -- surviving northern white rhinos in the wild.

On their behalf, he personally approached, in face-to-face meetings, the Lord's Resistance Army terrorist group in the Congo, gaining the trust of two of the most-wanted men in the world to get the group to become active, unlikely protectors of the rhinos being poached to extinction.

If his books are anything to go by, the author lived some life before dying of a heart attack in 2012.

 

The Age of Ruth and Landis: The Economics of Baseball during the Roaring Twenties. 100 pages in, really informative thus far.

 

I'm thinking of giving Bourdain's graphic novel a try.I've read all of his nonfiction. You can't go wrong with any of them, but you can definitely see a lot of growth as a writer from, say, "Kitchen Confidential" to "The Nasty Bits."

 

On vacation, got halfway through "Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City, 2001-2011." Terrific oral history of the rise of 21st-century bands like the Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol, LCD Soundsystem, etc. Does for that period what "Please Kill Me" did for the '70s punk scene.