BOOKS THREAD

It didn't get great reviews but I loved the movie. Lawrence and Edgerton are great, Jeremy Irons fantastic as always and the violence is extremely graphic, which I think makes it work. Nothing cartoonish about the action.

 

Finishing "The Outsider" by Stephen King; I'm not a big King reader, somehow they don't catch my attention (read The Stand, Finders Keepers and one other) but this has been a thrilling ride.

 

Literally had to Google "how to read Lincoln in the Bardo" after five pages, because I was like, What the fuck is going on?

I also sat in the cinema among the What!?! crowd. I also remember, after the last scene about the dreams, a woman getting up and yelling: "That's the dumbest movie ever." She was so mad about all of it.

 

Finished this earlier today. Really well done. Even though I knew the final outcome, reading about the end of Williams' life was tough. I got teary-eyed several times late in the book.

This was well-researched and well-written. Joe Bob, sadly, says check it out.

 

The first book started and finished in 2019 is a winner!

Check out "The Two-Plate Solution," a novel about the making of an American reality-TV cooking show... in Israel. There are many threads, including the inevitable conflict between everyone and everyone else.

The author, Jeff Oliver, used to work at Food Network and is now at Bravo. That makes me even less likely to believe the "unscripted" nature of what I'm seeing on my TV screen!

 

I wrote about 90 pages of a novel about the ghost of Lincoln inhabiting the old statehouse in Springfield in 2004-2005. Then I read "Lincoln in the Bardo" and said to myself, "Huh, this is how a genius would've done that."

 

I had zero doubt, reading it, that I was reading some next-level shit. Like how footy players must watch Messi and think, Yeah, well, okay, I'm just gonna do my best and try to be happy with that.

 

The truly great books, no matter how complicated or sprawling or arcane, should teach the reader how to read them in the first 50 or so pages.

'Ulysses,' is a great example of this.

 

Recently finished two boxing books:

Leigh Montville's Sting Like a Bee: Muhammad Ali vs. the United States of America 1966-71 is an excellent addition to the Ali library. All Ali biographers cover this era, which was co critical to his life and career, but nobody has done it as thoroughly as Montville.

The Murder of Sonny Liston: Las Vegas, heroin and heavyweights by Shaun Assael is an interesting, entertaining look, not only at the life and career of Liston but of the wild west that was Vegas in the 60's and early 70's full of drugs, corrupt cops, racial tension, hustlers and con men. And while the author doesn't quite come up with the figure who murdered Liston it's not like he doesn't offer up some possible suspects.

 

Read that quintessential book-club book - The Joy Luck Club - for my book club.

It's perfectly fine. It's a lot better written than I expected - one of those novels that deserves to be called a literary. I won't be reading anything else by Amy Tan but I'm glad I read this.

 

Just finished "Beartown" by Frederick Backman and was completely absorbed by it. It's sort of about hockey but it's really about loyalty, tribalism and so much more. Honestly couldn't put it down.