There was a good piece in the New York Times Magazine, published right after the appearance of This Boy's Life, about the brothers: http://www.nytimes.com/1989/02/05/ma...l?pagewanted=1

David Foster Wallace - In His Own Words - an audio book collection of readings of his work and interviews with the author. The first interview alone is worth the price of the audiobook. 10/10. I stumbled upon it and I don't know why this wasn't more publicized (or maybe it was and I was oblivious).


Also, can I get recommendations for books with great prose that specifically aare known for their descriptions etc of nature?

Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh it is a pretty bleak picture of nature except for brief flashbacks or comparisons of the present to the time lost, but McCarthy's The Road has terrific descriptions of nature, and Tom Stechschulte is an incredible narrator.

Finished Beth Macy's Factory Man which tells the story of a 4th generation Virginia furniture family who struggles to keep their manufacturing in the US. The narrative is mainly wrapped around John Bassett III, who successfully brought dumping charges against the Chinese to save what is left of domestic furniture production in the South. Bassett is part of the rarefied elites of a Southern small town and much of the writing follows the inner workings of family and social dynamics.

The book kind of has a Studs Terkel feel to it. The editing is kind of rough. The author could lose 75 pages easily. She has a penchant for dropping random quotations made by someone who she identifies only by last name who last appeared 20 pages before.

Yeah, same here. Such a bummer.

Finishing On the Brink by Hank Paulson about the Great Recession. Definitely the best source for information, facts, and opinions about the causes of the crisis and the real-time responses and thinking by him, Bernanke, Geithner, the Bank CEOs, Frank, Dodd, et al.

Early on, Paulson describes a weekend at the beginning of the crisis, saying it was the toughest weekend he could imagine. He drily notes this was before Lehman and nobody knew that crazy hours every weekend for months on end, and once-in-a-lifetime market implosions were right around the corner.

Doesn't pull any punches, and bonus of some penetrating insights into Bush, Obama, McCain as all this is blowing up.

Also, can I get recommendations for books with great prose that specifically aare known for their descriptions etc of nature?

Loren Eisley maybe the top of the heap. Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams as well as his essays are great. Both of these writers were/are poets as well as PhD's in the sciences.
And there is Edward Abbey my favorite personality...a redneck Thoreau.

Hardly hyperbole, as long as the qualifier "living" is applied. The second best short story I've ever read, after A Good Man is Hard to Find (Flannery O'Connor, for youse illiterati), is Bullet in the Brain.

You can easily find the text on .edu sites, but here's a pretty good reading/discussion from the New Yorker Fiction podcast:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQ2nYk5uA08

Blood's a Rover by James Ellroy is pretty great if you can get past the terse sentence structure and bizarre slang. Ellroy's obsessive adherence to Hemingway's short-sentence mandate borders on parody, but the byzantine story is beautifully constructed, and it stings of truth.

This book is a wet dream for tin-foil-helmet-wearing paranoiacs like me. It blames, in guise of fiction, the FBI and the mob for the assassination of MLK, JFK, RFK; drug smuggling; and much of the racial unrest in late-60s/early 70s USA.

J. Edgar Hoover is portrayed exactly as you'd like the old girl to be viewed in perpetuity.

The story involves a wholly believable crossover of FBI thugs, perverted private eyes, Vodou sickos, Commie murderers, Mob *******s, hallucinatory sequences involving the consumption of Vodou concoctions, and all sorts of other sludge from the depths of the American political system.

Highly recommended. I can't wait to read the other two books in Ellroy's Underworld USA Trilogy.

So so good.

I finished In Pharaoh's Army. I don’t read a lot of war stuff, and, having lost a close friend in Vietnam, I particularly don’t seek out Vietnam narratives. However, I found this quite interesting because of the way it continues the story begun in This Boy’s Life and also interesting because it has in the closing pages what that book lacks, a good portrait of Duke Wolf in his later years.

And as a narrative it was good until the end, and then it was great.

Pretty sure Ellroy believes that.

You'd like the non-fiction of Peter Dale Scott.

+1 good lord is Tobias a terrific writer. Like a more accessible Raymond Carver

Stechschulte's narration of No Country for Old Men was great. I started The Road a few years back but didn't finish because it was so suffocatingly bleak and wasn't exactly what I was looking for at the time. You've me sold though, I'll check it out again since McCarthy is the all time GOAT.

"A redneck Thoreau" --- you have my attention

Great recs. I will be checking out the others as well.

This one is on my list.

Have you read All the Devils are Here? I would recommend this one because it starts in the 80s and gives background on the rise of MBS and how housing policy got looser, expanded homeownership, and led to looser underwriting.

I'm in the mood for something weird like a Twilight Zone or Black Mirror episode.

Not Murakami - maybe a George Saunders - or something completely new. Shane Vestal's Godforsaken Idaho had a story or two that scratched that itch.

Roald Dahl's adult stuff?

This one I meant to read and may have missed. Thanks for the reminder.

Martin Dressler...?

Stanley Elkin's The Making of Ashenden (Ithink...long ago)...English Gentleman has sex with bear

Finally finished up The Power Broker a few weeks ago. Caro editorializes a bit too much for my taste I think, but his research and thoroughness counteracts that. Do other people feel this way? I'd prefer he just tell it like it is and let us draw our own conclusions. Still loved the book, would recommend it to everyone with the attention span, and am looking forward to reading his LBJ quadrilogy/quintology.

Currently half way through Black House by Stephen King and Peter Straub, a sequel to their The Talisman.
I really liked The Talisman as a kid but I find the sequel so far to be kinda self indulgent and typical of a King novel, could easily be shorter. It also narrates in the present tense which I'm finding rather annoying.

I didn't know there was a sequel to The Talisman. That was a cool book; I am intrigued.

I didn't know myself and found it purely by chance while browsing in my local library. The story itself so far isn't bad but again, it's kinda bloated and I really don't like the style of the present tense. You may like it though. It takes place years later when Jack Sawyer is an adult.

Look at Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo.