BOOKS THREAD

The Sepinwall book on the Sopranos is out today. Pre-ordered it on Amazon.

 

Reading Pearlman’s USFL book, “Football for a Buck.” Enjoying it so far, though I’m not too far in as yet. What sticks out so far is this confusing blurb from L. Jon Wertheim. What the fuck does this even mean? I’ve read it a half dozen times and I still don’t know:

“If foreshadowing were passing yards, this book would be Jim Kelly. A definitive history of a wild and woolly football league fondly remembered three decades after its demise, but also a definitive preview of the forty-fifth president.”

Holy non sequiturs

 

I thought this was really well done on things we find problematic in writing from decades and centuries ago. Instead of using it as an instructive moment, too many young readers just put the book down.

I think we’d all be better readers if we realized that it isn’t the writer who’s the time traveler. It’s the reader. When we pick up an old novel, we’re not bringing the novelist into our world and deciding whether he or she is enlightened enough to belong here; we’re journeying into the novelist’s world and taking a look around.

....

To take an example almost at random: Most of us rely on technology that can be traced to child labor or even slave labor...If you or I were to write a novel with a passage in which someone takes a casual glance at his phone, how might this strike a reader from the future — someone whose understanding of human interconnectedness is far more acute than our own? I’m guessing that readers from the future might find our callousness almost unbearable, and might have to remind themselves that despite the monstrousness into which we could descend in passages like this, some of what we were saying might be worth listening to.

Virginia Woolf? Snob! Richard Wright? Sexist! Dostoyevsky? Anti-Semite!

 

The Passage is coming to Fox tomorrow night and I'm hopeful. I really enjoyed the trilogy, 1 & 3 more than 2nd book (but that's par for the course.)

 

I'm reading the first Game of Thrones book and really enjoying it. I've seen season one of the HBO show, so I think it's helped to orient me to all the characters and places. What surprised me is how well-written it is. I'm not a fan of fantastical writing, Arthurian-type legends, etc., so I have to admit I cast a gimlet eye on this George R.R. Martin fellow. But the book really clips along, bounding back and forth between characters. Given it's huge popularity, I shouldn't have been surprised, I guess. Then again, I read "The Da Vinci Code" in one evening and that was some of the worst writing I've ever encountered. Pure shit.

 

Great book about a series of killings in Austin, Texas, in 1885, what Hollandsworth offers is the first example of a serial killer in America. Early history of Austin and the University of Texas is woven throughout the story, and there's some connections made to Jack the Ripper. Oooohhh....scary!

I heard Hollandsworth talk about the killings last week, and that was pretty fascinating as well. He got kind of graphic as he was talking about how some of the victims were killed, and some folks walked out, but it was their loss.

Joe Bob says check it out.

 

I slogged my way through about half of this before giving up. The opening chapter was written in a weird style, just using pronouns for the characters so it was difficult to keep track of which "he" the author was referring. One "he" was a priest; the other "he" was Charles Whitman, who shot a bunch of folks from the tower on the University of Texas campus in 1966. The book kind of makes a connection between the priest and Whitman, and talks about how the priest may or may not have been in contact with Whitman, or how Whitman may or may not have done this or that. It's a lot of "may or may not have," which is probably why I gave up on it. And, as fascinating as Whitman's story is, this book isn't.

Joe Bob, reluctantly, says don't check it out, because he likes to support authors who are out of the mainstream.

 

Finished "The Dreamers" a notable book cited recently by various outlets. Well-paced, interesting and provoking.

 

Read it as well. Very quick read I'd say there is a dreamy quality to the prose.

 

Just finished “Handsome Johnny”, the recent bio of former Mob fixer and all around incredibly well connected gangster Johnny Rosselli, by Lee Server. Hell of an interesting book that touches a lot of bases rather than be a tome on any one aspect of organized crime. A most unexpected part of the book dealt with his association with the CIA training assassins to kill Castro, their capture and brainwashing only to be sent back to the US to kill JFK. I won’t say any more on that subject.
Like most, I’ve read about the Mafia but this is far more than a cursory telling of their operations. Hollywood’s golden age has some of its warts exposed here, too.
Great read.

 

His final resting place was something else, too.

Just finished "Union Atlantic" by Adam Haslett. All around a good novel, though it tried to be too all-encompassing in its early 2000s milieu -- basically taking what happened with the 2008 financial crisis (using a Bear Stearns stand-in) and moving it up in advance of the 2003 Gulf War. The threads tying all the characters together in such close proximity -- the chairman of the New York Fed, whose sister just happens to be warring with a neighbor who will be central to the financial crisis and thus crosses path with the Fed chairman, too -- is a little too neatly packaged. It leaves a glaring sense that he worked backwards from a plot idea and plugged in certain characters to round out the arc. Still, it clipped along steadily, Haslett obviously knows his finance, and the characters' motives seemed largely believable.

He was a finalist for the Pulitzer and the National Book Award in 2002 for his short story collection "You Are Not a Stranger Here," which I intend to check out next. His 2016 novel "Imagine Me Gone" was also short-listed for the Pulitzer and the NBA.