BOOKS THREAD

Monsieur Friendless,

I have been meaning to pick up a copy of Love and Hydrogen, because several of my MFA ENCR pals sing its praises often. But I have yet to do so. For what it's worth, some very smart short fiction aficionados speak highly of it though.

 

Dumb question for book lovers ... do you ever get a line or a character stuck in your head like a song? All this morning all I could think of was a girl named Leslie Lapidus (rhymes with ah-feed-us). Couldn't for the life of me remember where it came from and had to google it. Happens to me all the time. Am I alone?

 

Occasionally that happens to me too, HC. Odd thing with me is (and this tends to happen because I listen to music seemingly at all times) is that often I usually end up listening to one particular artist while I'm reading a book. So when I think of the book later, the music I was listening to at the time pops into my head, like the book has it's own soundtrack. It really works out when the tone of the music seems to fit the tenor of the book.

 

I'm the opposite. I can't listen to music while I read, at least not anything with vocals. I'll put on some Debussy or Ravel or maybe the Brandenburg Concertos.

And when I'm doing a show, it's never my music that gets stuck in my head. Usually something from the chorus.

 

This is a great point. I've been unwittingly doing this since I was a kid. At some point in high school and beyond I learned to turn it into a memory tool that worked.

 

I'm reading The Things They Carried on recommendations from this thread. It's fabulous. I wish I had picked it up years ago. This thread has helped me get back into reading. It's the most relaxing and stimulating activity I have found. Of course, it helps that the recommendations here are for some great books.

I also joined Bookins. I have picked up book after book for just the $5 shipping. I've also parted with lots of books that have been collecting dust in the garage for years. The site says it's next venture will be DVD trading. I don't have much of a DVD collection, but this is another great idea. I'm hoping to pick up a few DVDs for my kids. The best scenario would be if I can trade some of my books for DVDs.

 

I didn't like it that much -- I thought he gave huuuuge breaks to those white parents who adopted Oher. The mother, especially, seemed to me to be a prime Type-A egotistical a-hole.

More importantly, it seemed he got most of the story from the parents, and never questioned much whether what he was being told was the truth or not. All kinds of anecdotes where the adoptive Mom charged in and once again heroically cut through some bureaucracy to save Oher....according to her.

And their relationship with their other kids, which to me seemed a bit creepy, was described as perfectly normal.

But it was interesting, and it'll certainly have you following Oher for the rest of his career. I loved the Nick Saban window-treatment anecdote.

 

Mr Down,

Picked up L & H ... the John Ashcroft story (the former A-G being just about the least likely springboard for comitragic fiction) is hysterical, worth the price of admssion.

For those who care: Ford's Canadian content (not his first) surprises few on the publishing scene here given his leg-overs with one publicist (now publishing exec) years back. Unclear who was stalking who ... could be both.

YD&OHS, etc

 

This is saying something, since I rarely if ever put a book down once I start reading it, but I couldn't get through this. Too overwritten, as if Ford couldn't stop clearing his throat to actually pay attention to simple things like a plot.

 

Yeah, I thought it was a bit weird when I read the acknowledgments at the end and saw he went to high school with the "dad." I'd been wondering how he got the story and struck by the level of detail and/or access, thinking it was a phenomenal reporting job. And it certainly did make the parents, particularly the mom, look quite angelic (in a fierce, Type A lioness-mom sort of way). I actually thought he did a decent job of raising concerns that that dad was just using Oher, though.
Still, I thought the broader thrust of the book overrode those bias/balance concerns, and it was a very interesting read. Nick Saban must have loved it indeed.

 

I have no idea why he just didn't put the relationship with the adoptive father up front. He tells a nice little story about how he couldn't get Oher out of his mind and his wife told him to write that story.

 

For a quick, rip-and-read gigglefest, Tim Kurkjian's Is This A Great Game, or What? is far better than I expected. A little bit too much manlove for Brady Anderson, and a general obliviousness regarding suiting up and shooting up (I'm only a quarter of the way through; it may be in there, later) . . . but it does not suck,
and there are very few books in the "Baseball Is A Funny Game" vein you can say that about.