BOOKS THREAD

Decided on Grisham's 'A Painted House' and Crichton's 'The Terminal Man.'

Just started the Grisham book and it's pretty good so far.

 

Great book about one man who's making a difference.

 

Absolutely one of my favorite books. I mentioned it on here a couple years ago, I think. I used it as a partial basis for a paper for a Modern Islam class. What Mortenson has done over there is truly amazing.

 

I posted this on the thread on the new Guns N Roses album:

I read Watch You Bleed, Stephen Davis's new GnR book. It's OK, not in the league of his other books, Hammer Of The Gods, Walk This Way or Old Gods Almost Dead. I didn't think it even appropached the Motley Crue book of a few years back.

Doesn't seem like any of the band, with the exception of maybe Adler, talked to him and much of it is cobbled together from interviews with old metal mags and Rolling Stone. For me, the first part of the book, covering the band's early days, is the best. The last third seems to get bogged down in repetitive stories of fucked-up shows, various acts of debauchery and drug abuse and the incredible insanity of Axl.

The last few pages, chronicling the joke that is Chinese Democracy, is interesting given that the album might be ready to see the light of day. Hey, it's only been 10 years.

Writing is merely OK, some typos and factual errors.

Just finished The End Of Baseball by Peter Schilling, a fictional look at what might of happened in the 1944 baseball season if Bill Veeck had bought the Philadelphia A's and filled the roster with black players. Entertaining if a little offbeat.

 

A disappointment. All the characters talk and think just like Chuck Klosterman talks and thinks. Horrible ending. Almost like he was either sick of writing the book or couldn't think what else to do, so everything kinda gets whitewashed.

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Only a couple more weeks til Wally Lamb's first novel in a decade. Absolutely loved his first two. I'm expecting brilliance.

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This book's lot of fun. NY Post entertainment writer Michael Kane doesn't patronize the gamers while finding some neat personalities to write about.

 

I am sure there are a few people here that read Twilight. How old is the target audience for the series?

 

Just finished "A Spot of Bother" by Mark Haddon. Thoroughly enjoyed the book -- a bit more conventional than "A Curious Incident", but a very engaging story.

 

This book was terrific.

Expectations cannot be anything but low for Klosterman, however.

 

My daughter is almost 14, and I think her friends are interested. I think she read one of the series and liked it, but then read another in the series and didn't like that.

 

This is probably a separate thread, but I'm interested -- of the at least semi-prolific writers out there, who are the people that you go out and get their newest as soon as it's out?

For me, it's John LeCarre and Alan Furst and a couple of Jack Aubrey-era/Age of Sail authors no one's heard of. There's others that I'm blanking on right now.

You know you like an author when your collection of the old books are paperbacks, maybe used, and the newer ones are first-run hardcovers.

 

My list is Carl Hiaasen (though his last one was awful), George Pelecanos, Robert Crais and Michael Connelly. Probably Don Winslow, too - the mystery/crime writer, not the "erotica" writer...

 

Any history nerds? Just started on this one after downing Bourdain's The Nasty Bits -- which was 'meh' -- and it's been excellent thus far.