BOOKS THREAD

The Tender Bar: A Memoir
J. R. Moehringer

 

BI --
Just finished it.
Spectacular.
Can't wait for the movie.

 

Just tremendous ... A great read that I couldn't put down.

 

Made me thirstier than any book except DUNE, though.

 

A couple of books I've blitzed through in the last few months or so...

Homicide by David Simon -- A year inside the lives of the Baltimore homicide unit. I picked this up after getting hooked on The Wire, the HBO show that Simon, a former newspaper reporter, produces. To be honest, this should be required reading for journalists. Just amazing. The amount of detail is wonderful. It's a little hard to keep track of the characters in the begining because there are so many, but you really learn a lot about how crimes are solved and how police actually do interogations. If you like shows like Law and Order or CSI, you owe it to yourself to read this book.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer -- I was really looking forward to this one, because I thought his last book was so experimental and powerful. However, I'm still not sure what to think about this one, which is the story of a kid who loses his dad on 9/11 and then tries to unravel the mystery of a key he left behind. Incredibly moving in parts -- I actually had tears in my eyes on the final pages -- but also a bit gimmicky in others. After writing two books where the ending is supposed to come together like one big puzzle, I'm worried that this is going to become Foer's "thing."

The Last True Story I'll Ever Tell by John Crawford -- I picked this one up after seeing Crawford, a marine who spend a year in Iraq, on the Daily Show, and because I'm a sucker for war stories. (I really liked Anthony Swofford's "Jarhead.") I liked it, and it gives you incredible insight into what life is like for soldiers over there right now, but I also got the feeling it could have been a little better. He pulls and interesting trick at the end of the book -- don't read this if you require happy endings -- that I thought was really, really well done, but the writing was inconsistent throughout. Every time you read a book of war stories these days, someone says in a blub on the cover that it's "destined to go down as one of the best things written about war since Catch-22 and The Things They Carried." Well, in my opinion, that's sort of like Dan LeBatard saying Dwyane Wade is destined to be the next Jordan (which he does in this week's ESPN the Mag). Wade's a nice player, no doubt, but c'mon. It's Michael-freakin-Jordan. The book gives you the best first-person perspective out there right now on the Iraq war. It's more about the banality of the day-to-day tasks like guarding gas stations and the frustrations of going on pointless missions that put your life in danger.

The Sweet Hereafter by Russell Banks -- I read Affliction and didn't really care for it. It wasn't bad; I just think there are better books out there to devote you time to. I felt similarly about Sweet Hereafter. Supposedly the movie is wonderful, but I haven't seen it. The book just left me bored in stretches. I always appreciate it when an author can switch characters from chapter to chapter and pull it off (Elliot Perlman does this wondefully in "Seven Types of Ambiguity," easily one of the best books I've read this year) but I just don't think Banks is my cup of tea.

Just picked up Tender Bar this week.

 

I hope they don't make a movie of that book. I don't see how they could capture it.

I have horrible images of Matt Damon playing Moehringer. Or the producers trying to make it into a comedy with the guy from That 70s Show (Not Mr. Demi Moore but the skinny one) in the lead.

 

DD --
"The Sweet Hereafter" is one of the best movies of the past 10 years. Rent it today.
Sarah Polley is stunning.

 

Just finished "Ballpark Blues" by C.W. Tooke. Very well done. Can't recall if it was mentioned previously on this thread or not, and I'm too lazy to go back through all 24 pages. Some pretty insightful digs at the sports media.

Just about to finish "White Doves at Morning" by James Lee Burke. It's a Civil War novel that's also an excellent read. He also has a new Dave Robicheaux novel, "Last Car to Elysian Fields" out in hardback but I'll wait until it's out in paperback.

Also saw that Michael Connelly has a new hardcover one, but it's not a Harry Bosch novel.

 

Double Down: Jarhead the movie (starring hottie extraordinaire Jake Gyllenhaal as Swofford) will be out soon.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0418763/

 

I just finished Room Full Of Mirrors, the Charles Cross biography of Jimi Hendrix that was excerpted in Rolling Stone a few issues back.

While the coverage of Jimi's youth, his scuffling early days in the music business and the latter-day battle over his estate are very well documented, there is relatively little discussion of Jimi's music, particularly the fine records that have been released in the wake of his family taking over ownership of his recordings. The Experience Music Project in Seattle merits one sentence.

Charles Shaar Murray's Crosstown Traffic remains the best book on Hendrix.

 

I'm looking for a book that details the rise of grunge music in the early 1990s and its fall a few years later. It has fascinated me, and I'm finally feeling like reading up on it. Thanks in advance.

 

Is there a grunge version of John Savage's brilliant England's Dreaming, which doumented the rise and fall of punk? I don't know, but Charles Cross's Cobain bio, Heavier Than Heaven, is apparently very good (I haven't read it).