BOOKS THREAD

Will have to try and find the Braff book. Thanks for the tip.

 

My GF made me read this. Really good book. Also a bonus if you're a Semite, very Jewish-oriented.

 

Bought the new Phil Lesh and Dave Van Ronk memiors; both had excellent reviews.

 

I'm kind of surprised no one's mentioned "America's Game" by Michael MacCambridge. It came out late in 2004 and chronicles the rise of the NFL. Great research; well written. In my opinion it tops Maraniss's Lombardi bio as the best work on pro football.

 

i just finished 'little chapel on the river' about a bar/small store on the hudson river, across from west point in garrison, n.y. a wall street journal writer is forced to relocate after her apartment building was damaged in the 9/11 attacks. she ends up staying in garrison and ends up falling in love with the place and this little irish bar on the river, next to the train tracks running in and out of the city. it's not bad, not great and entertaining and enjoyable at times. there are some characters in the story but the writer skims from the top of those personalities and doesn't go deep enough. she focuses more on "the place" which she paints as a town stuck in a bygone era. it's a quick read, so you won't be entirely disappointed with your investment of time if you don't like it.

my wife just finished michael cunningham's 'specimen days' and she didn't care for it. she said she kept waiting for something to happen and it never did. i haven't decided if i'm going to read it, but like his successful book, 'the hours,' cunningham uses a central literary figure (walt whitman this time and not virginia woolf) throughout the book that spans three different time periods. it seems a bit bogus to use a similar theme in your next novel. but again, i havent' read it.

 

Just finished Volume 1 of Bob Dylan's "Chronicles". Must read for any Dylan fan. It's like his songs--playful and cryptic.

BTW, the greatest song in rock history-"Like a Rolling Stone' just celebrated its 40th birthday.

 

I just picked up Feinstein's "The Punch" at Wal-Mart in the discount bin. Is it worth the $6 I spent?

 

I bet you like it, ijag. A coworker who is not a sports fan but likes good stories read it and raved about it. That Feinstein, he seems to put out a good book every year. Is he his generation's best sports author?

 

I believe Feinstein's next offering is an inside look at the Baltimore Ravens. He spent all of last year with the team and was given an unbelievable amount of access. It should be very interesting.

 

I havent read anything by Feinstein in years.

Have I missed any must reads?

 

Are fly-on-the-wall books about sports teams usually pretty good sellers, or do they need to have some sort of a gimmick to get across?

 

Needed a book for a two-day trip to Chicago. So, without thinking, I grabbed "The Sorrows Of War," by a Vietnamese writer named Bao Dinh. Twist is that Dinh was a soldier in the NVA from the time he was 17 on -- of the 365 people in his unit, 10 were alive at the end of the war -- and it's a harrowing look at Vietnam from the other side. It has a lot of "Going After Cacciato" to it, but it's closer to "All Quiet On The Western Front" in that Kien, the narrator, goes of all full of Communist piss-and-vinegar and gets any idealism steadily beaten out of him as the war grinds on. (His account of the looting of Tan Son Nhut airport is astonishing.) Reading it, you can understand why the people who "won" were so quick to make friends with us in the 90s. They were broke, exhausted, and sick of fighting people. (Kien eventually ducks a chance to fight the Cambodians.)
One caveat -- the book is a translation so the English can be kind of stilted. Vietnamese is so completely different a language that it was probably inevitable.
Also Kriegel's Namath bio is a stunner.