Books

[Jason Southwick]

Ever get in the mood for not just a good book, but a great book that'll maybe change your life, or at least enrich your perspective?

Really? Not me I'm just looking for the next good book to read, now that I've watched pretty much every Law & Order SVU episode ever made. A great book would be okaaaaaaaaay, but not like the last one I never finished that would probably be categorized as new age self-help that advised the reader to let go of expectations and lose the ego and all the other personality blocks and limitations to personal growth. I actually lost the book after about two chapters. Some books you gotta be in the mood for.

Here are the last four that I actually finished, starting at the end of December while on vacation -- the best time to read.

Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garc�a Marquez

This one looked a little intimidating, it being a translation, and by a Nobel Prize winner to boot, and I'm going to Kelley, "I dunno.." as I look at the back cover that says it's all about unrequited love, and glance over at the John Grisham novel, which is beckoning in its shallows, non-uplifting way.

"Got some pretty twisted sex in there," Kelley offers hopefully. And I'm like "Really?" So I give it a shot and it's one of those novels that breaks your heart right in the first chapter, when some strange character who winds up being a non-entity to the plot kills himself and his dog, and it seems the rest of the book will be devoted to the secret of why he killed himself but it isn't.

It's about this poor young guy who falls in love with a young girl and they're Romeo and Juliet in that they can never get together cause her dad won't let her and they send each other letters and her dad takes her away but they're still in love and finally she comes back and they finally get to meet face to face and he's awkward and in about two seconds she's like "Ewwwwww," blows him off and crushes his spirit and he spends his life banging every chick he can -- 100s of conquests in total -- all the time thinking about her and still loving her.

Then when they're about 80 they finally hook up.

As the reader, your heart is broken early, then mangled, then dessicated, so that by the end your heart is pulverized dust, and you want to lay down on a bed of roses so you can cry yourself to death or commit suicide in some poignant, poetic fashion.

But really well written, and a worthwhile read, and no I'm not recommending it.

Then, after all that heaviness, I grabbed one of Kelley's female detective novels -- the ladies' version of the John Grisham novel -- U is for Undertow by Sue Grafton. Nice little mystery where the bad guys get their just deserts. Not really worth the keystrokes to review, except one of the bad guys is getting nagged by his wife to stop drinking then she takes the kids away for the weekend and he's psyched and buys a six-pack and a bottle of something harder and has the perfect plan to just sip sip sip and not overdo it at all and wakes up in the hospital, where his wife, who's megapissed, informs him he's killed a 19-year-old girl in a hit and run accident. Now that's a bad hangover. And that's a good book the way a bowl of spaghetti with unheated jar sauce dumped on it is a good meal.

Next was Broken, by William Cope Moyers, an autobiography/memoir type of book by a guy who's drinking heavily already as a teenager and doing coke then crack by his early 20s, all the time holding onto a good job and married to a nice woman who's got no clue her hubby's a junky. The author is Bill Moyer's son, which, years of therapy teach him, is his underlying problem.

So he gets so addicted and bounces in and out of expensive rehab and loses a series of good jobs and his wife dumps him when it all comes out when he disappears for days and, finally, a whole week, to live in a crack house. He finally overcomes for real after about three fairly devastating relapses and becomes a clean and sober spokesman for the rehabilitation clinic that helped him cure himself.

Blah blah blah but interesting, especially his thought-progression each time he's about to relapse and wants "just one little puff of crack." You the reader are thinking, "Don't do it!"

Next, and most recently, Freakonomics, which posits brilliantly and most memorably, among other things, that the crime wave surging in the mid-1990s subsided because abortion became legal in the 1970s, so all those superpredators who would have fueled the growth of violent crime were never born.

Other fairly irrefutable arguments, all based on careful gathering and analysis of data, show that Sumo Wrestlers and some Chicago teachers cheat, and explain why a lot of drug dealers live with their moms. It's a good book and devotes a lot of time explaining the difference between cause and effect, and correlation, and hence why a lot of popular theories are bogus.

But after a brilliant start, the authors take up a big part of the middle of the book explaining AGAIN, this time in more detail, how Row vs Wade brought about a drop in violent crime, and then go on and on about a bunch of much more boring theories, like the snorer of a last chapter that tries to show how kids with typically black names do worse in life.

Half the book would have been twice as good.

But anyway, who's got a good book recommendation?

[Jeff Prendergast]

I suggest Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace.

If you like tennis and heavy pharmaceuticals, if you are disdainful of all things Canada, if you enjoy a 1000 page book with 80 pages of footnotes, then this is the book for you.

[Greg Van Nest]

One of my most recent favorite books is The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon. If you're at all into comic books, this story revolves around the comic book world of the 40's and 50's. The characters were very interesting, and even though I'm not a comic book fan, I was still very much drawn into this story. Very well-written, the story revolves around family, love and war, and was a very interesting read. Chabon won the Pulitzer for this book. I highly recommend it.

[ekap]

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell. thought about it daily for years after reading it.

[Sjur Soleng]

Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts
and
World Without End by - ? Follet

[Jason Southwick]

"The Sparrow is a novel of ideas and characters. Not the sort of ideas which make the reader gasp and say "Wow," but the type of ideas which make the reader continue to think about them long after the book has been set aside."

[Greg Van Nest]

World Without End by - ? Follet

I never read this one. Is it as good as Pillars of the Earth?

[Sjur Soleng]

Same style, different time period. Pillars is slightly better.

[Matt Arminio]

The Given Day by Dennis Lehane.

Awesome book about fictional characters set in 1920's Boston during the Boston Police strike and workers revolt.

Same author as Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone, and Shutter Island

If you like political fiction books Vince Flynn is a good writer I just finished Pursuit if Honor.

[John Mucciarone]

The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America - Erik Larson (Chicago Worlds Fair. and more)

Another Bulls#*t Night in Suck City - Nick Flynn (local writer, based in Boston)

100 years of Solitude - Marquez.

Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage - Alfred Lansing (you think our winters are bad....)



vacation in a couple weeks....a chance to read again.

[Greg Van Nest]

The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America - Erik Larson (Chicago Worlds Fair. and more)

Oh, yes, I enjoyed that one as well. I tried reading Larson's Thunderstruck, but could never really get into it like I did with Devil.

Greg

[Chris Webb]

I hear that the Harry Potter novels are quite popular with the jet set.

Plus maybe you'll learn to turn disc thieves into toads!

-Webb

[Bill Stewart]

Jason, I'm re-reading one of my favorite Tom Robbins' novels, "Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates." I don't read too many novels (too much to learn in the non-fiction world), but I love Robbins and also John Irving in that regard.

Anyways, Robbins reminds me very much of some of your best posts--very broad diction, witty, odd stories. "Fierce..." is no exception. Robbins will take a page to describe someting that could have been done in a sentance, but invariably has me chuckling my ass off by the end of it.

[Felix Harvey]

Where Men Win Glory by John Krakauer- non fiction about Pat Tillman, the amazing dude who gave up his rising NFL career to get whacked by friendly fire (one of my all-time favorite oxymorons) in Afghanistan.

Returning to Earth also True North by Jim Harrison - novels, only ones I've read by this guy, and just great stuff.

Rule of the Bone by Russel Banks. If you ever smoked a bone read it. Fiction.

Zorroby Isabel Allende. Fiction, and this woman's sentences are just masterful, as if I would know.

If you like murder mysteries then you know Patricia Cornwell, probably. Everything I've read by her is virtually impossible to put down.

Javier Bardom is priceless in Love in the time of Cholera the movie, but I digress.

A walk in the woods by Bill Bryson. Laugh out loud funny

[Jason Southwick]

This thread is basically my new reading list. Thank you all contributors. I just read Sparrow, recommended by Ekap, as a book that he claimed he thought about almost daily for years afterwards. Well conceived, well written. A great story. Depressing that even before you get to know the characters on an asteroid/spaceship to a new world you know they're dead.

Redemption at the most painful cost imaginable. As a Unitarian, which is a non-devout Protestant offshoot for permanent agnostics fed up with organized religion as anything more than a good, thoughtful sermon and coffee and your basic after the service unitarian snack table. I love the little tuna fish and egg salad bunny buns shaped like fat torpedoes.

It's not like we're saying straight up we don't believe in God, it's just that it's hard for Unitarians to be certain without a direct line. The "Sparrow" made me think about faith in God, and to begin to think about approaching something so intangible yet powerful enough to affect your decisions about how to act, how to begin to figure out what to do, as, possibly, God in the background even though if pressed you'd have to admit you haven't much of a clue what God is.

As a Unitarian, God does not necessarily have a white beard.

The God as an all-permeation-of-everything idea might be the actual truth but sounds like a copout and also does not get us further toward the truth that we cannot possibly comprehend. But we've got four seasons, and the only contribution man has made to them is that the river now floods every two years instead of every ten.

It would be nice to settle the God thing for all the agnostics so let's do it. Obviously there's a higher power, and the more I lick the psychotoad the more I believe that, but in the morning there's always doubt again about whether God is nothing but a chemical reaction that created life as we know it.

I digress.

I'm also left with the feeling of being anally probed by the dicks of another, much uglier, and clawed, race. "Nothing is wasted," becomes so much worse than any Solent Green revelation. The degradation is, for our hero Emilio, horrific and complete. Everybody dies except him, and the captors surgically remove all the flesh from his hands, and rape him repeatedly as the new cool thing to do.

After reading this one book, I'll never ever be the same again.

The concept of faith presented by a Jesuit Priest to a Jewish girl as the Star of David, with God at the top reaching down and we people at the bottom reaching up, so that we can meet in the middle, in the middle of the star. So beautiful it makes you want to shave your balls for Jesus Christ, or something.

That "forever" as a term applied to relationships is bunk, because every ten years we're completely different people who have to decide over and over through the changes that it's still worth it to stay together. That's drop to your knees good.

I just loved that book. Thank you Ekap. Like I said, this is my new reading list.

[ekap]

I"m really glad you liked it. I just picked up a used copy to read again.
I thought the follow up novel, Children of God, by the same author, Mary Doria Russell, was just as good. Not a sequel but a continuation. It was thought provoking in a different way. I know you have to read it.

This is the second NEFA thumbs up I heard about the Sparrow.

[Greg Van Nest]

I read The Sparrow after your recommendation, too. I agree that it is a book I think about often, but I really did not think the author did a great job. She had a great concept, but a lousy execution, much like most of my golf shots. I especially feel she dropped the ball with all character development except Emilio. The others were all so flat. The beginning of the book was so good and her concept was so interesting, but ultimately disappointing.

[Eric Desmarais]

Jason,
Check out The Celestine Prophecy by (i think) James Redfeild. It's a good book and untill I got out of the way and stoped trying to define god , and just listened and heard (no toad needed just years of I.V. drug abuse and it's resulting nonsense) it moved me in a very cheesy "I'm a spiritual guy just listen to me recycle someone else's theory and rhetoric with enthusiasm , because I'm different." kind of way. Either way it's worth a read.
Eric

[felix harvey]

Dude, you need to contemplate your naval less, and read some of the books I recommended.

There's no way in freaking hell that we're going to resolve the god issue, especially if you keep licking the toad AND you happen to be over-infdluenced by the Unitarian variable, AKA anything goes as long as you remain in appearance PC. Now lick the toad again and read up on game theory and get back to me.

[Jim Bobka]

'The Perfect Storm' was a fav of mine, I know it's an older book, but it's a page turner anyway. A lot of it has to do with how and why ships capsize, what may have happened to the crew, what happened to the coast guard crew during a couple rescues at that time, etc. Really good.

[Mike Murphy]

Catch 22 by Joseph Heller is great. If you like Vonnegut you should enjoy this book.

[Chris Bolton]

Ishmael was a great book when i read it, i am thinking of picking it up again to read

[Bear Dunn]

Anyone who likes fantasy, The Wheel of Time is pretty much incredible. If you like Lord of the Rings, this has that, and THEN SOME. It's got at least 12 books in the series, numerous characters and storylines interwoven,,, good vs evil, human struggles...Has it all really.

Yes, I'm a dork.

[Charlie Holmgren]

Any book by Harlan Coben.

Tell No One is my personal favorite. They're all awesome though.

[Mike Murphy]

And for people like Bob and Marvin I suggest something like this.

[James Lane]

I haven't read a book in a decade....

but Bear you got me sold I am going to jump right in

[Bear Dunn]

Be ready for a long ride Laner. I'm halfway through my second trip through the saga. And it's not even done yet!

[Andrew McManus]

The Sand County Almanac: By Aldo Leopold- Anyone who appreciates conservation and the roots thereof will love this book...a true classic written by the founding father of the conservation movement.

Into The Wild- By John Krakauer: Even if you've seen the movie (which was quite good), read this book, its truly fascinating.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig- Truly an eye-opener and one of my all time favorites.

[Drew Smith]

My wife just read the Millenium Trilogy (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest) by Stieg Larsson (all published posthumously). She loved 'em.

All three books were made into movies by a Swedish film company. I just watched "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" on Netflix the other night. It was a bit low budget, but the story was great. Pretty disturbing rape scene, but a very satisfying vindication.

And I am planning on reading the trilogy - I'm currently reading The Dome.

[Dave McHale]

drew, i just saw 'girl with the dragon tattoo' last night - definitely liked it, and im planning to go pick up the trilogy to see how the books are.