just finished "agent zigzag" by ben macintyre
and "what is the what" by dave eggers

currently reading "Drood" by Dan Simmons (a fictional story about Charles Dickens and his demons) and "Another Day in the Frontal Lobe: A Brain Surgeon Exposes Life on the Inside" by Katrina Firlik

some good readin' this month

Finished Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-1934 by Bryan Burrough last night.

Considering most of the people who read this thread probably watch a lot of film, most will recognize it as the basis for the film Public Enemies that comes out this summer.

The book details exactly what the title says: Hoover's war on crime in the 1930's at the end of the depression, when outlaws seemed to exude class and honour, and were only there for the money; it was their living, and they were proud of it. The criminals (most notably J. Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, Machine Gun Kelly, Bonnie and Clyde and the Barker-Karpis gang) in the Midwest were robbing banks and trains and getting in shootouts with thompson guns wearing 1930's suits and strawboat hats, and the book focuses on them, and how the FBI was formed to combat them.

I've become a bit of a true crime nut over the last few years and this book definetly holds up. Just the thought that these events actually occured excites and engages me, and honestly I can't get enough of this kind of stuff. I was constantly having to flip pages however, since chronologically some of the main stories were jumping large gaps of time, but again that's part of the reason I really like true crime. I loved this book for the same reasons I loved In Cold Blood and Helter Skelter, among others.

Just Finished "Sex, Drugs and Coco Puffs". I would have probably liked it more if I had read it 5 years ago, but a lot of it was still funny. I found the parts where he writes about an experience he has had to be much much better then the chapters focussing on his observations. The part about the Guns and Roses Trubute band was hysterical. The chapter on Empire Strikes back, blah.

It was a very fast read though and I'm glad I did.

Up next is "The Rum Diary" by HST.

Ken

Has anyone else read The Hypochondriac's Guide to Life. And Death? I recommend it for anyone with a somewhat morbid sense of humour, everyone I know whose read it has really enjoyed it, but it does tend to give you a little bit of hypochondria...

Haven't read that one, Emme, but the title reminds me of one I can recommend called How to Make Yourself Miserable, by Dan Greenburg, which was very funny.

The Devil in the Kitchen: Sex, Pain, Madness, and the Making of a Great Chef by Marco Pierre White

The youngest chef ever to earn 3 stars by the Michelin Guide has written an autobiography. I read this in one sitting today at BN. His writing style is a bit dry and he obviously left out some details of some of the many hostile altercations.

One after the other, his relationships with friends, family, and business partners turn sour, and sometimes violent. He's most well known for having made Gordon Ramsey cry. Here is how he recounts that event (I can't remember the exact words, but this is close enough):

"I don't recall how it came about, but Gordon was huddled in a corner of the kitchen crying and saying "go ahead and sack me, I don't care." I wasn't going to sack him, and in fact, had gotten him a job at another prestigious restaurant where he was starting work tomorrow."

Years later he went to a restaurant for lunch, and discovered that Ramsey was also eating lunch there. Ramsey called him a fat bastard, and MPW responded "is that all you can come up with?"

There were many more of these types of awkward hostile exchanges between MPW and former friends, business partners, chefs, or wives. Each time I thought to myself "this absolutely cannot be the way it actually happened. There is a lot of **** that he doesn't want to talk about, or has conveniently forgotten."

He makes no apologies for his management style in the kitchen. He firmly believes that fear is the best motivator.

Alice Waters and Chez Panisse by Thomes McNamee

In order to save you the boredom of reading this book, I'll summarize the history of Chez Panisse here:

- Alice Waters wants to start a restaurant, but has no money and doesn't know anything about running a restaurant

- she somehow gets enough suckers to throw their money into the restaurant (down the drain)

- the restaurant loses money consistently for give or take 30 years because Waters is a wimp and lets the staff get away with murder, pays them too much, and hires anyone who wanders in off the street

- during this time there's lots of drugs and random sex and annoying pretentious people whining about the food or the other employees

- the one redeeming quality of Waters is that she makes tireless efforts to get the best local, seasonal, and fresh ingredients

Typhoid Mary by Anthony Bourdain

This is written as the cooks' perspective of the woman who was found to have spread typhoid fever around the New York area in the early 1900s.

I had never heard this story before, but I guess there's been a bunch of books written about it.

It was well-written, as is anything by Bourdain. He makes an effort to sympathize with her working conditions, and the way society in those days treated cooks, and Irish immigrants. It was an interesting read, but not anything particularly memorable.

I finished Skeletons on the Zahara a few days ago. It was the story of a ship wrecked on the coast of Africa whose crew was taken into slavery by Muslim desert nomads. Generally, I like survival novels as I find the desire to see home and family again despite all odds real inspirational. This book, however, was almost too much. The brutality and deprivation faced by the sailors at the hands of their captors was eye-opening. In the end, eight of the 12 sailors were able to escape Africa and make it back to Connecticut, a couple died, and the other two were never heard from again (one, the black cook on the ship, was thought to have converted to Islam and have been incorporated into his captives' culture). Really, a truly gut-wrenching novel, but one that shines a bright light on the characters of those it portrays (most noticeably James Riley, the captain, and Sidi Hamet, the Moslem trader who was able to buy the slaves and bring them to safety).

Since then, I've decided to quit reading books and focus on reading magazines, since I'm now getting 10 monthly as a result of frequent flyer miles, so I'm just banging out editions of Newsweek and The Economist weekly, and learning about the world. So far, it's been pretty enjoyable.

I used to be much more informed when I read magazines religiously. Reading news on the web is no substitute, and TV news is not so great. It's a good plan for staying more deeply in touch with what's really happening in the wide world rather than just out own tiny pocket in it.

Sacrilege! Huffpost is the best pseudo-news.

I like that site a lot, but it usually takes some depth to really address an issue fairly, and further, some on-point follow-up. A magazine can do both of those; most web sites don't even bother to do either. They produce disposable news, and if they do more than relate facts, it's usually just layering some rhetoric on top of (or instead of) the facts instead of digging under them and providing adequate context.

Interesting discussion, but maybe out of place in the books thread? Dunno, just occurred to me.

Hi all, new poster here and was looking for a place to get the ball rolling. The book thread seemed pretty appropriate because I've always been a bit of a nut for the printed word. My mum is an obsessive book buyer and one-time first-edition collector and we have so many at home I'm always picking one up off the shelves to flick through. It has led to a skimming habit though, which I'm not so proud of...

At the moment, I have a bunch of books out from the library. A few guides to careers, most notably Dude Where's My Career. I'd recommend it to any student or graduate, confused or otherwise. It's really well written and is reassuring because the author (Tanya de Grunwald) seems to speak to real people who aren't necessarily career machines with all the answers mapped out. :-) The other non-fiction is the mammoth 1000 Albums to Listen To Before You Die, a catalogue book, which I am flicking through and listening-along to using Spotify (a UK music app that allows access to streaming music in the UK and other European countries).

As for fiction, I'm giving Of Mice And Men a go. A nice slim book to read and relevant too, given the current climate. Not sure I'll be out on the dirt roads just yet though!

Well certainly good luck on that. Always wanted to read that book too but somehow Steinbeck has almost entirely avoided me. I just did GOW and The Red Pony and ... The Pearl? I think that was his.

GOW is meant to be amazing.. Might give that a go if I like this one. I'll let you know what I think of MaM when I get done with it. Take care.

Just skipped from the first 50 pages of Martin Amis, London Fields to the last 50 pages and done with it. And picked up Kafka's Amerika/The Lost Ones (if the latter is recalled correctly). I like the Kafka. He has a pretty odd social rigidity or stiffness about him (I'm not really putting it well). But I wonder if critics belittle this book--need to look up--b/c I can see how the story is "slighter", but stylistically it is essentially the same as his two more famous (also) unfinished novels.

edit: previous 2 books--Erofeev, Moscow to the End of the Line (Moscow-Petushki), which I liked a lot and would advise not to give up on as too absurdist b/c it really turns tragic at the end; and Red Badge of Courage, which I also liked. I may favor the cowardly part to the heroic part, but maybe that's just bias.

The Town And The City by Jack Kerouac

I liked this and I'm definitely going to read some more Kerouac soon. I like fiction that kind of meanders around and doesn't really have a clearly defined plot climax. This was the first book of his that I read (I'm going in chronological order). However, I found his obsession with the word "brooding" to be quite irritating. Every character is constantly brooding, or looking broodingly, in every paragraph.

Stephen King definitely writes as he goes. I have read two of his rather longer novels: 'Needful Things' and 'The Talisman'. The former was a beautifully written, taut book, notwithstanding the high degree of length. It, to me at least, has a strong and interesting motif regarding the ancient and untimely demand for weaponry throughout all civilizations and reaches of time. Leland Gaunt is a strange man who moves into and opens up a curio shop in Castle Rock. The man is none other than a malignant demon trying to destroy Castle Rock much like he destroyed many other communities and such as far back as time can remember.

The Talisman is another animal all in its own. It was written earlier in King's career than Needful Things and was written in collaboration with Peter Straub. It is a very surrealistic novel about a kid on a journey to save his mother - to put it very shallowly. It is such a weird dreamlike book whose backdrop is twofold, i.e., there are two dimensions, one into which only a few people can teleport. These two books have different makeups in regard to their structure. They are both excellent, but I would say Needful Things was more taut, structured.

I'm into A Song of Ice of Ice and Fire atm.

Currently reading Barbarians, Marauders and Infidels by Antonio Santosuosso, which is subtitled something like "A Military History of Medieval Europe" or something like that, and its a pretty interesting book. I have huge gaping holes in my knowledge of history, and in particular military history, so this book is filling some of them in nicely. It starts with the tail-end of the Huns conquest, goes through the barbarians in W. Europe like the Visigoths and Longobards, then talks about the rise of Muslims, Vikings, and eventually the Hundred Years War and the arrival of the knight. Basically from the 6th to the 15th centuries, but its only 400 pages so its a fairly superficial, whirlwind tour, focusing on the innovations in armament and defense, strategy, and culture. Pretty interesting book.

In between chapters I'm also reading Duma Key by King, but I've really only just started and dont have much to say at this point.

tricks of the mind by derren brown. Some v interesting content. Writing style is sometimes a bit too fancy, but its a smart dude.

finished 'Into Thin Air' by Jon Krauker (sp?).

It's an adventure book on a Everest expedition gone horribly wrong. The weather was disastrous and the team went to hell.

Overall I really enjoyed this book. The author describes some of the history of high mountain climbing and the dangers/procedures of it. Overall it's quite interesting and makes you want to try climbing. The book itself is fast paced and a quick read. Recommended.

I started 'a heartbreaking work of staggering genius' (i think that's the title) by dave eggars. so we'll see how that goes.

Thanks for this.
Halfway through the first one and I'm loving it.

Could someone give me the premise Cryptonomicon? For the life of me I can't figure out where this is headed. Who are these people and why should I care??? He's obviously a very talented writer with a gift for language and characterization, but **** me what the book is supposed to be about, besides the history of cryptology with some characters thrown in to justify a narrative.

I'm not trying to down the book at all. Several have told me it is a difficult book to get through. Help, please

I enjoyed this one a lot....but I don't remember having a hard time with it like I have with his subsequent books. It's a WWII story about cryptology mixed with a modern-day narrative also about cryptology....they both later merge.