BOOKS THREAD

True crime tome "Tinseltown" by William Mann from 2014. This book examines the unsolved murder of Hollywood director William Desmond Taylor in 1922. Several books (both fiction and nonfiction) have tackled the subject with each offering a different murderer. Worth a look.

 

I have focused so much of my reading in the past that the Times’ Top 100 books of the 21st century so far will keep me busy for another decade.

 

A friend of the household writing about Heaney in Harper's. Excellent.

https://harpers.org/archive/2024/08/music-and-mystery-christian-wiman-seamus-heaney/

 

Reading it now — not yet up to the spicy stuff, but it is kind of cool that a hometown kid became a star.

 

Second book I finished about an unsolved 1922 murder in as many weeks "Blood and Ink" by Vanity Fair's Joe Pompeo. Solid read and as you can tell focuses a lot on the media coverage of the case. It involved a married reverend found dead next to the body of a married choir singer from his church in a field outside New Brunswick, NJ.

 

I am reading "Demon Copperhead," by Barbara Kingsolver. It's outstanding.

O just finished "The Wolves of K Street," about some of the lobbying firms in DC. It makes you hate so-call "public servants" who are for sale, the lobbyists who represent drug, insurance and other companies, and the DC media who are more interested in attending fancy parties and being part of the process instead of doing their jobs as watchdogs of the public trust.

The Podestas, Manafort/Stone, Attwater and Tommy Boggs are especially sickening. Lee Attwater died a horrible death, of brain cancer. Reading this book you'd agree he probably deserved every bit of it.

 

I have read one book on that list - Say Nothing, which I can't recommend highly enough - though I picked up a used copy of A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James on the weekend.

 

The Trees by Percival Elliot.

Funny as hell.

 

Funny in a Trump rally kind of way? That book never sounded one ounce past sober to me.

 

“When the News Broke” by Heather Hendershot. A 2022 book about how TV coverage of the 1968 Democratic National Convention (and police riot) in Chicago cemented the “liberal media” narrative in the public’s mind.

A new take on a much covered event, with some new details (about the technical limitations broadcasters faced, for instance) I had not seen before. Very readable and Hendershot does a good job drawing a line between 1968 and today.

Rather timely, too, with another Democratic National Convention in Chicago coming up this month.

 

It took me a while to get through this one, but for no particular reason. I would read it for a while, then forget about it for a couple of weeks, then get back to it.

It's sort of an oral history about the influence Mickey Newbury had on many, many other songwriters. The only thing I knew about Newbury prior to this was the mention of his name in Waylon and Willie's "Luckenbach, Texas." Newbury was a prolific songwriter who really didn't a crap about Nashville. He wanted to write songs his way and his way only. He could have been a much bigger name had he decided to go along with the Nashville establishment, but he didn't.

After I finished reading this earlier today, I went on a listening binge to stuff that Newbury recorded, and he was really good. A few minutes ago, I was driving with my son and I had him play "She Even Woke Me Up To Say Good-bye," which is just an awesome song.

Joe Bob says definitely check this one out.