BOOKS THREAD

my problem with fever pitch was that i didn't know enough of the backstory to really understand the book. i think there's some great observations about what it is to be a fan, but, so much of hte book is written for real english football fans. no reason for me to explain the stuff for me, any more than a red sox fan memoir needs to explain bucky dent or carlton fisk or bill buckner. i enjoyed parts of it, but missing out on so much made it diffiuclt for me to enjoy the entire thing

 

Hoops was right for the most part, but I don't think you need to be an English football expert to enjoy the book. If you have some knowledge, it certainly helps. I wouldn't consider myself super knowledgeable, but I enjoyed the book a lot. I also enjoyed the Colin Firth movie version, but didn't have any desire to see the Jimmy Fallon vehicle.

 

I loved Fever Pitch -- probably my favorite sports/guys book ever. I'm a soccer fan, so I was OK with a lot of that stuff. Some the English cultural references went right over my head though.

Just finished Al Franken's latest -- The Truth (with jokes), which was very well written and quite funny. I usually can't stand him, except his three books, which are all great.

About to start Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, which a friend recommended.

 

I'd love to get the Historical Statistics of the United States just for the little nuggets of info you could learn. But it's $820...

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/22/books/22stats.html?ex=1298264400&en=2210f2c8609977e5&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

 

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is a great book and certainly offers a different perspective than the cowboy-and-Indian movies and attitudes some of us older folks grew up with.

I am curious to see what other people thought of Philip Roth's first book, Goodbye Columbus. I liked it a lot and could appreciate it because I was familiar with the area he wrote about. My niece, who is 28 years younger than me, read it and didn't like it at all.

Philip Roth's "Our Gang", a short book which kind of deals with Richard Nixon, was really funny.

 

On the way back from Maui, finished "Grant and Sherman, The Friendship that Won the Civil War." Enjoyed it, especially the portrayal of Sherman. Wish they'd of spent more time on the post-war relationship between the two, but aside from a couple of mistakes (one date, one calling Jeff Davis' wife "Marina" instead of Varina), it worked.

Re-started McCullough's bio of John Adams, which is taking a while and not just because of the rather vast size, but because I'm wiped out at nights and read all of about 3 pages before crashing.

 

That does sound like it would be interesting. Why not call the publisher and ask for a gratis review copy?

 

The Adams bio was just tremendous. Love how McCullough more or less paints Jefferson as a colonial era Bill Clinton: a blatant womanizer, the ultimate politician (and not in a positive way). At least that's how I read it.

 

Just finished "On Beauty" by Zadie Smith, which was short listed for the Booker Prize, but lost out to John Bainville.

Really enjoyed it. I'm going to enjoy Zadie's books for a long, long time, I think. One thing I think she does with such brilliance is write in the voice of both women and men. There are plenty of authors (even ones I like) who are men and sound laughably false when they try to write women. Zadie nails the main character, Howard Belsey, in this book, a 57-year-old white art-history professor who can't keep his dick in his pants. But at the same time, she also nails his 17-year-old half-black son, a hip-hop devotee and aspring political activist. If you like family epics and university politics, this a damn good read.

It's better than White Teeth, Smith's first book, which I also liked.

 

I was leafing through that last week. I'd bought the book in 2002 when it was a hot grab. McCullough's not much of a stylist, it's a pretty direct, linear narrative. No frills. But that's what made him a good pop historian.

For my money, Richard Brookhiser's book on the Adams legacy -- John, John Quincy, Charles Francis and Henry -- is a much more enjoyable read.

 

About to start McCullough's 1776 -- without any key spoilers (e.g. please don't tell me who won the Revolutionary War), any opinions out there on this one?

 

I just read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," a really short, really simple yet powerful story about a prisoner's life in a Soviet gulag. Solzhenitsyn doesn't create any fancy storylines, just tells of a typical, frozen day.