BOOKS THREAD

After listening to Howard Jacobson on a podcast, I was intrigued because I've never heard of him and he was called an English Philip Roth. I've been reading "The Mighty Walzer", which is excellent, if a little too English slangy for me at times. If I didn't have a decent understanding of Yiddish from my grandmother and people from the old neighborhood, I'd be totally lost.

For vacation next week, I've got "Little Victories" by Jason Gay and "Das Reboot" by the great soccer writer Raphael Honigstein, which is about how the German soccer team and program underwent a national change in philosophy leading to the WC 2014 victory.

 

Some I have read recently:

Destiny and Power, Jon Meacham's new bio of George H.W. Bush is highly recommended; after coming across Roger Ailes's name in the Bush bio I read but Gabriel Sherman's bio of Ailes, The Loudest Voice in the Room, great stuff, even if that guy is fucking batshit crazy; Dennis Dunaway's new book on his time as the bassist in Alice Cooper has some interesting moments, particularly chronicling the band's early days and the inevitable breakup when Alice became bigger than the band but recreates too many pointless conversations that don't advance the narrative.

 

Finished my last Christmas gift book (I get many books). Our Man in Charleston, by former Newsweek foreign correspondent Christopher Dickey. All about the British consul in that city before and during the Civil War. A look at the war from the British point of view, mostly about how Southern fanaticism about slavery was what kept Britain from intervening on their behalf. The consul was man in the middle, as both Union and Confederacy suspected he was for the other side.

 

Crushed through first half of Station 11 and then hit a wall, the story dragging and the author using some questionable tactics to move the narrative along. It's bouncing all over the place now and I don't identify closely with any of the characters. Wouldn't have cared if all of them had died in the apocalypse, though people whose opinions I respect swear the threads come together and the last 50 pages are great.

 

Read The Martian this week and Karin Slaughter's Pretty Girls.
Loved The Martian. Not a big sci-fi fan, but very really enjoyed the story.
Pretty Girls was good. I couldn't put it down. But it was dark. When I was finished and had time to think about it, it was OK. nothing great, but OK. Some of it was hard to believe. Ok, a lot of it was hard to believe.

 

Very excited to get my hands on Everybody's Fool, Richard Russo's sequel to Nobody's Fool. Just released today.

 

Looking fwd to reading that, too. Ever read "Straight Man"? One of the more underrated comedies, which is difficult to pull off in a crowded field of campus novels.

 

Yes, my least favorite Russo novel. I prefer when he writes about small-town/rural living.

 

I've got three weeks to ready Everybody's Fool before I get this one:

 

Reading "The Neon Bible," the other novel written by John Kennedy Toole, author of "A Confederacy of Dunces." Nowhere close to the skill exhibited in "Dunces," which won the Pulitzer posthumously after Toole offed himself bc no publisher would accept it; but then you have to remind yourself throughout that "Bible" was written by a 16-year-old kid, and it's clear that the world lost a genius far too soon.

 

Magary channeled postmodern horror-comedy in his first novel, The Postmortal, and here taps into a similar vein that posits an Everyman in a video game–like setting, with a Kafka-esque transformation thrown in for good measure. We meet Ben as the suburban family man has left his family in Maryland and arrives at a hotel in rural Pennsylvania for a business meeting the next day. He decides to go for a hike. And then all hell breaks loose. For starting out with such a grounded setup, Magary isn’t shy about getting weird fast. Ben is soon pursued by a pair of killers who wear the disembodied faces of skinned Rottweilers.He’s left messages with his name on them that read, “Stay on the path, or you will die.” He’s kidnapped by a cannibal giantess named Fermona who forces him to fight a man to death in her arena, and that’s before she sics the dwarves on him. Along the way, Ben is told his only solution is to find a demigodlike character called only “The Producer.” “I don’t even know if I’m still on Earth, or if I ate some kind of bad mushroom or something,” Ben tells his only companion, a talking crab named Crab. “I don’t know anything. But this path opened up and any time I leave it, something tries to kill me.” It seems that Ben is in an alternate dimension, one with two moons, death clouds, and time travel. It all unfolds much like a video game does, so readers who don’t enter this weird world with a lot of preconceived notions should have a blast. It’s worth noting that Magary even nails the ending with a Twilight Zone twist that would have Rod Serling nodding with approval.

THE HIKE by Drew Magary | Kirkus Reviews

 

For a glowing review, it didn't leave me wanting to read the book at all.