BOOKS THREAD

I found this while doing some research for an upcoming food thing I'm going to write. It's a collection of poems about food by Ogden Nash, including the classic "Candy is dandy/but liquor is quicker."

Joe Bob says check it out/if you like it, give a shout.

 

Anybody know a way to sell a few hundred feet of used books? Selling on eBay or Amazon don't appeal to me. I don't want to have to deal with shipping books for $2 a pop. The cookbook collection is pretty good, but most of the books are random. Good books, but nothing special in terms of edition or a collection from an author or genre.

 

Facebook Marketplace might be a place to start, or your local Craigslist. Or if your local library has a Friends of the Library or similar organization that has an annual book sale, you can donate them for a tax write-off.

 

Do you have fantasy or science fiction?

 

Read Bill James' The Man on the Train this week. Really interesting, really well done. About a previously unknown serial killer.

 

Lawrence Wright's "The End of October."

The coincidence that Wright thought to novelize a theoretical pandemic right before a real pandemic made for an uncanny valley sensation while reading and sometimes made it hard to read.

 

Loved that one. It was unique in that it provided a lot of context about an era, and crime solving in that era, that's probably hard to wrap your head around if you weren't living through it. (Like trying to explain to teenagers now what life was like without cell phones.)

 

The religion thread inspired me to borrow Tova Mirvis' "The Ladies' Auxiliary" from the library. It was an interesting story about an outsider trying to break into Memphis' Orthodox community.

Spoiler alert: Hilarity does not ensue.

 

I realized I had pretty much stopped reading books and am trying to change that. Been through two so far this year.

"Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland" by Patrick Radden Keefe

Just an amazingly well-done book about the Troubles, focusing in part on the "disappearing" of a Protestant mother of ten. I wanted to learn more about the Troubles. I visited Northern Ireland as a child in 1977, and my family there was.. ahem... deeply involved in the IRA end of things. This book gives a great view of how and why things got to such a level of insanity. If you have any interest in that part of history I highly recommend it.

"See a Little Light: The Trail of Rage and Melody" by Bob Mould

I'm a huge Bob Mould fan. Love his solo work, love his stuff with Sugar and Husker Du. It's an interesting story as his career grows and he grapples with being a not-entirely-out gay man in the hardcore and alternative music scene. About the time Sugar splits up it becomes almost entirely focused on his relationships and his growing comfort as a gay man. It pretty much comes off the rails for me there; after a while it just feels like an endless string of "and then I blew a biker guy in the toilet stall of a leather bar." Highly recommend the music, but can't recommend the book.

 

This one turned out to be one step above chick lit. I feel tricked.

This was on my radar for awhile. It came out around this time last year. It became a Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick. It’s billed as a rumination on race as it begins with a 20something black babysitter is confronted at a grocery store with her 3-year-old white charge. The dispute is recorded.

And then almost nothing comes of this until nearly the end , and even then almost in deux ex machina fashion. Everything in the middle is about the babysitter and the mother of the babysat trying to figure out their lives and hanging out with their friends. Meanwhile the babysitter starts up a relationship with a person she met through the confrontation, which leads to an unbelievable coincidence.

It’s not what I thought it would be. It is a quick read. So if you want something like that thinks it’s heavy, this is for you.

 

Just cracked into Melissa Maerz's "Alright, Alright, Alright" -- oral history of Dazed and Confused. Should be a good one, seeing that I've seen the movie probably 100 times.

 

I found this very interesting. I've read "The Hustler", but that's the only Tevis I that have. "The Hustler", "The Man Who Fell To Earth", and "The Queen's Gambit", all being written by the same person seems so unlikely.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/ente...3c8fb4-6570-11eb-8468-21bc48f07fe5_story.html