Currently reading Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything ... it is a cookbook and it is amazing

Agreed.

Currently reading The World According To Garp. Am 450/560 pages through in one day. Probably the best thing I've read in a while. Is the rest of his stuff any good? Will probably finish it tomorrow and at a loss as to what to read next. Have a few Grahame Greene books left but have read quite a lot of his stuff recently.

Also, I've started dating a girl I knew from high school. She always got straight As in school and went to University College London (very good UK university) to read English Literature (graduated with a 3rd). She gave me the first Twilight book to read saying I would like it - instadump?

I'd have her found mentally incompetent and seize her assests.

Read The Hotel New Hampshire next.

Yeesh, Just finished reading Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King. This is without a doubt 4 of his most distrubing works, and combined with Under the Dome, you can really see a resurgance of his former brilliance. Its a shame that the final three books of the Dark Tower series came following the accident when he was in the phase of writing that included From a Buick 8 and Dreamcatcher. It will be very interesting to see how he continues the story when Dark Tower 8 comes out, especially with just how good his writing has been in the last few years.

I though Garp was a bit over the top. I quite enjoyed A Prayer for Owen Meaney, however.

I just finished Phillip Roth's newest, Nemesis. It's short--can be read in 3-4 hours--but I wouldn't have minded it being longer. It has real power but seems strangely underdramatized. It's well worth reading, but if you haven't read the earlier major Roth (Goodbye, Columbus, The Ghost Writer, Sabbath's Theatre, American Pastoral) start there.

However, this is Roth's theodicy, his latest and perhaps final statement about the insoluble problem of evil, and it's certainly interesting for that reason.

just started 'blood meridian' by cormac mccarthy the other day... can't put it down so far, like nothing i have ever read before. im prolly gonna have to read all mccarthy books after this.

The books of the Border Trilogy are all excellent as is No Country for Old Men... much better than the movie. I didnt care for The Road nearly as much.

can someone reccomend me a biography or autobiography?

a businessman
did not come from a gifted mother and father
built his empire from scatch
may or may not have had higher education
a millionaire
original and creative
still grinding
a great networker
a go getta

Snowball by Alice Schroeder perhaps. It's about Warren Buffett, one of the richest men in the world. He meets most of your criteria, except that his father was a congressman and that he was a little off socially in his early 20's or so.

I just don' understand how this is possible. Anyone who appreciates literature should see how awful that book is.

Georges Doirot: http://www.amazon.com/Creative-Capit.../dp/1422101223 meets all of the above with the exception that he is deceased.

Doirot was at the forefront of post WWII venture capital. He had no undergraduate degree but upon arriving in the US from France was admitted to HBS where he remained as a professor for decades.

He founded American Research and Development Corp. His most successful and well known backed company was DEC but the book is chock-a-block with stories of the development of of other entities.

Just finished The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood. She always amazes me with her creativity in how she puts her novels together as she continously experiments with the structure and form of a novel (though not in as heavy-handed a way as say the modernists do). I've read three of her novels now and each one has a unique structure (although she does seem to prefer a first-person narrator). This novel is definitely hard to get into initially because it seems to have about 5 different stories going on at once with snippets from another novel referenced in the book interspersed with an old woman writing her life's story in both the past and present interspersed with newspaper clippings. But by the middle of the book, things are definitely being tied together nicely and the end is heart-breaking. I haven't even fully understood all of the implications of the novel yet either. I'm still thinking about how all those little, disparate fragments and pieces fit together with each other ever since I finished it.

Highly recommend (though I wouldn't read it as your first Margaret Atwood novel).

I'm reading Orlando Figes' "A people's tragedy. The Russian Revolution 1891-1924." A pretty epic book in its scope, but not the most captivating writing I've ever seen.

Owen Meany was friggin brilliant.

Finished Dennis Lehane's new book Moonlight Mile just now. Can't say I was impressed. Some parts were decent, but I frequently found myself forcing through most of it. It's definitely no Gone Baby Gone, especially in terms of posing moral dilemmas. Instead of being a grim drama that presents intense ethical questions like its predecessor, Moonlight Mile just feels like some cheap attempt at being nostalgic.

What really irked me most was the fact that...

Finished Corrections by Johnathen Franzen. I've brought this to work and people have asked me, "What's that about?" and when I say, "well, it's about this dysfunctional family and the father has parkinson's and all of the children are messed up and it's about their relationships." I think to myself, that sounds horrible. Yet, when I read it it is amazing.

I don't know, if someone gave me the description of "The Corrections" I probably wouldn't read it, but it is awesome.

Now I am reading, What Do You Care What Other People Think? by Richard Feynmane and it is awesome. I can't wait to by the Feynman lectures.

Bought these 3 books today:

The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins
On the Road - Jack Kerouac
A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson

Could try Richard Branson's autobiog. Not read it myself but has good reviews.

search for books about steve jobs or richard branson

Start with Six Easy Pieces, then move on to the lectures? BTW, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! is great too.

A couple of days ago I discovered F Scott Fitzgerald. I took a chance on The Great Gatsby and was floored by how rich and quotable every line is. I rushed to the bookstore and got a collection of his short stories that has since kept me up late.

From Afteroon of an Author: "Many people, however, would consider it excellent because it was melancholy, had digging in it and was simple to understand."

Heh I wonder who he was writing about...

I need to dive into authors more often like that. I wish I had the time to read using the Blarg-method, but I just don't have that time except in the summers sometimes.

Anyway, I'm diving in partially. I read Catcher, then Nine Stories, and now I'm reading Franny and Zooey. Once I finish that, I'll be reading his last book, and I can say I've read most Salinger.

So that's a start I guess.