BOOKS THREAD

Not the biggest beatles fan out there but I have read plenty about them. Some that I would recommedn:

The Beatles by Bob Spitz is huge (900+ pages), but worth it. Could be the best look yet at the the guy's lives before the Beatles and the group's early days (they don't get to the US until 400 or so pages in).

Can't Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain and America may not be the scholarly tome the title claims but could be the most thorough look at their music that I have come across.

Shout by Philip Norman is older than the others I have mentioned and may be tough to find in a store but is probably available at Amazon. If you find it, seize it immediately, highly, highly recommended.

Ray Coleman's biography of Brian Epstein, The Man Who Made The Beatles, is worth a read too.

In a fiction vein Paperback Writer by Mark Skipper is a hilarious look at the history of the band and their late-70s comeback.

 

If you think Paul contributed more to the Beatles as a whole than John-boy
and idiot Yoko, you won't like Shout, a little bit.

 

Just finished David Lipsky's book on David Foster Wallace, "Although of Course you end up becoming yourself."

I can't recommend this book enough, even if you weren't a big fan of Wallace's. I loved his nonfiction, struggled with the fiction. But this book is tremendous. Lipsky, of course, wrote that incredible story in Rolling Stone on DFW after he died. The book is not a straight-forward biography (there is a traditional biography in the works on him as well, by another writer). Instead, it's five days on the road with Lipsky and DFW. In 1996, Rolling Stone sent Lipsky to profile Wallace and follow him on the last leg of his reading tour for Infinite Jest, which had made DFW a writing star and celebrity.

The profile never ran - Lipsky instead was assigned a story about heroin addicts in Seattle. But the hours and hours and hours of taped conversation between the two remain. They talk about everything: depression, writing, the writing life, magazine profiles, Margaret Thatcher, wet dreams, heroin, television, the effect of the Internet on our lives and so much more. It's funny, smart, and ultimately heartbreaking, because you know how DFW's story ultimately ended. I wished I could have been in the backseat with these two as they navigated the icy roads of the Midwest. Lipsky writes that DFW spoke in prose; he comes up with lines in normal, everyday conversation that I'd kill to come up with after an hour at the keyboard.

Great book.

 

Just finishing up Tropic of Capricorn. I didn't enjoy it as much as Tropic of Cancer and it can be kind of a slog at points and it sure was a vocabulary expander for me (keep the dictionary handy) but Henry Miller is maybe the most liberated, honest writer I've read.

 

I'll second the recommendation for the Spitz book. It's very thorough. I haven't read the others Huggy has listed.

One I will cite as a particular favourite - "A Day in the Life" by Mark Hertsgaard. It's a detailed examination of all of the Beatles recordings, supplemented by quotes from each of the Beatles (from archival materials) as well as new interviews with George Martin, engineer Geoff Emerick and more.

http://www.markhertsgaard.com/books/103

 

Just finished "The Solitude of Prime Numbers". It's sad and beautiful and true. Absolutely loved it.

 

Re: Beatles books, I'll echo Huggy on not being the group's hugest fan, but enjoying Can't Buy Me Love....made me go out and buy that CD of all their Number One hits. Also agree that it oversells itself in terms of depth and importance, but it's a good read.

 

'King of Kings' - Malachi Martin's 'historical' novel about David.
I wanted to be interested but came away underwhelmed.

 

This is a nice one for the lavatory. (Which is exactly where we keep it.)

 

Me, too. The only sports books I read anymore are the ones I really need to read for professional reasons.

 

I think I need to read that, LJB. I own/do just about everything listed on that typewritten list ...

... well, maybe not the phone sex

 

Some good stuff in there.

A few of the others:
Appendicitis scars
Bald spots
Cash
Comb-overs
Correction fluid
Eating for pleasure
Encyclopedias
Girdles
Lighters at concerts
Milkmen
Pornographic magazines
Sadness
Singles bars
Traditional first names
Traveler's checks
Visible orthodontics
Wrinkles