BOOKS THREAD

Stephen King still knows how to tell a story. I wouldn't call his new time-travel novel "11/22/63" great writing, but it's a good story. Took me about an hour and a half to get 100 pages in. I think I made it through 40 Murakami pages in the same time. Good character voices and I want to see what happens next. Won't take long to find out.

 

Well, I am about halfway through now and the main character is barely close to starting to spy on Oswald to determine if he is the long gunman or part of a conspiracy. Don't know how much of the second half of the book will concern itself with Oswald, but if this is the reason someone wants to read the book, they'll probably be disappointed.

 

A little reading update.

I recently finished Sweetness, Jeff Pearlman's book on Walter Payton. I'm not a Bears fan and I thought the book was quite interesting. I was really impressed that he interviewed nearly 700 people for the book. I thought it was worth the read.

Also recently read a book called Malled: My Unintentional Career in Retail. It is by a woman named Caitlin Kelly. She took a job at The North Face in a suburban NYC mall after being punted from the NY Daily News. It was a quick read, but I certainly didn't love it. It was repetitive in spots and she is one of those journalists who is very arrogant about her work. She must talk 10 times in the book about how she knows many languages and has travelled the world, etc.

I have just started I Want My MTV, which is an oral history of, you guessed it, MTV. I'm only about 10 percent of the way through the book, but it is interesting so far for this child of the 80s. It is a pretty breezy read.

BTW, all three of these were checked out ebooks from my library that I read on my ipad thanks to the Overdrive app. If I had purchased Malled, I would have felt a little ripped off, but since it was free, I don't feel so bad.

 

You bought Pulphead for a dollar? Isn't that a new book? I want to go to your book sale.

 

Usually I wouldn't pump a book I haven't finished yet, but it's Christmastime, and maybe some of you guys are like me and looking for something to ask for.

I'm reading "The Art of Fielding" by Chad Harbach, and I really like it. It reads a lot like a Tom Perrotta or Jonathan Franzen novel - literary, but also readable, if that makes sense. And he gets the baseball stuff down pat, which is impressive because it's a Division III school, and he definitely understands the whole Division III/small liberal arts college dynamic, which is impressive to me because he went to Harvard and UVa., two D-I schools. There are just little details in there - you'll see it when you read it - that indicate that Harbach knows his way around baseball and college sports.

 

I finished Scott Raab's anti-LeBron screed "The Whore of Akron" late last week. On the off-chance that Scott Raab is an SportsJournalists.com member or lurker, I will say that I found it highly entertaining and it certainly held my interest. While I'm not from Cleveland and can never understand the heartbreak fans of its teams have felt over the past 40+ years, he did a good job of getting it across.

On the other hand, if anything happens to LeBron, I've got a good idea whose door the po-po should be knocking on first. Also, Raab probably needs some therapy.

 

Dyno,

I just got "The Whore" from the library. Looking forward to getting to it soon. It's behind two mysteries that expire sooner. But I will get to it.

Looking forward to it.

 

I think the book was some sort of therapy for Raab. It was more about him -- not necessarily a bad thing -- than James, and in certain scenes, it just felt like he cut open a vein and bled. Or cried. It was a deeply personal book, different from what I expected. I expected perspective. I didn't expect to read some of the things in there about Raab and his life. His promotional campaign, with the videos and the tweets, really doesn't do it justice. Reading the book is a different experience than reading his stories, excerpts or tweets.

And, as a Clevelander, as a reader, it was cathartic. I'm not at peace with the whole thing still, but the book was cathartic. It helped move me a little more forward.

 

Earlier this thread, I mentioned David Pietrusza's "1920: The Year of Six Presidents" and "1960: LBJ vs. JFK vs. Nixon" as must-reads for history buffs. Now, you can add "1948: Harry Truman's Improbable Victory and The Year That Transformed America" to the mix.

I'm about 120 pages in and it's fascinating. Not that it would be hard to draw me in, given that Truman is my favorite president. But the thing I love about Pietrusza is the way he brings in not only the marquee players in history, but the supporting cast and points out the effects all of them have on the future while doing their thing in their own time.

His attention to detail and ability to weave readable prose about his subjects brought well-earned comparisons to Theodore White, just so you have a reference.

Plus, as I mentioned before, in "1960," he completely tees up and smackes the Kennedys around for their warts. It's refreshing to see a historian do that, because in a book about the 1960 election, it's easy to beat Nixon like a pinata, but Pietrusza doesn't fall into that one-dimensional trap.

 

I read "1920" and thought it was good. Prohibition is one of my favorite historical eras. That is the only book of his I have read. I take it if you are a Truman fan you've read McCullough's book. Alonzo Hamby's just as good.

And I find it funny how many books about different years have the subtitle "the year that changed America."