"The Education of Little Tree"---- Forrest Carter

Curious George Plays WIS

Posted by finn2030 on 7/5/2017 5:12:00 PM (view original):
I've been on another Stephen King binge this year... (all read for the first time)

Started with the entire "Dark Tower" series read in order... I've only eaten lobster a few times in my 60+ years but probably won't again. Dad-a-chum?

"The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon" was a pleasant surprise... I ventured off the beaten path while hiking once, and it aint no fun.

"Insomnia" was okay but not one of my favorites of King's... I did like the little bald doctors though.

Just finished "11-22-63"... it's a corker from start to finish - the ultimate What If? novel.

How do you guys have time to read? With all the great TV shows now there just aren't enough hours in the day. 11-22-63 was recently made into a series. So put down the books and pick up the remote!

I read every night for at least a half hour before bed. At my age it puts me out pretty quickly!

Blow up your TV! You'll have time to read.

Posted by gogotoads on 10/12/2017 1:13:00 PM (view original):

Posted by finn2030 on 7/5/2017 5:12:00 PM (view original):
I've been on another Stephen King binge this year... (all read for the first time)

Started with the entire "Dark Tower" series read in order... I've only eaten lobster a few times in my 60+ years but probably won't again. Dad-a-chum?

"The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon" was a pleasant surprise... I ventured off the beaten path while hiking once, and it aint no fun.

"Insomnia" was okay but not one of my favorites of King's... I did like the little bald doctors though.

Just finished "11-22-63"... it's a corker from start to finish - the ultimate What If? novel.

How do you guys have time to read? With all the great TV shows now there just aren't enough hours in the day. 11-22-63 was recently made into a series. So put down the books and pick up the remote!

i read under the dome when it came out......great...i thought it was pure vintage.

Posted by gogotoads on 10/12/2017 1:13:00 PM (view original):

Posted by finn2030 on 7/5/2017 5:12:00 PM (view original):
I've been on another Stephen King binge this year... (all read for the first time)

Started with the entire "Dark Tower" series read in order... I've only eaten lobster a few times in my 60+ years but probably won't again. Dad-a-chum?

"The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon" was a pleasant surprise... I ventured off the beaten path while hiking once, and it aint no fun.

"Insomnia" was okay but not one of my favorites of King's... I did like the little bald doctors though.

Just finished "11-22-63"... it's a corker from start to finish - the ultimate What If? novel.

How do you guys have time to read? With all the great TV shows now there just aren't enough hours in the day. 11-22-63 was recently made into a series. So put down the books and pick up the remote!

TV is crap... we have expanded basic cable (pretty much only for ROOT sports Mariner games - depressing in itself) but I would rather spend down time reading thrillers, historical novels or sports-themed books like Boys in the Boat than sit and watch inane scripted blather or way too biased cable news shows. I do enjoy the occasional Seinfeld re-run and UW Husky football but most TV bores me.

I'm about halfway through the book "Subverives" by Seth Rosenfeld. It's a great tome; part history and part biography providing perspective in how Hoover/FBI and the neophyte politico Ronald Reagan dealt with the UC Berkeley counter culture issues of the 1960's. It reads like a mystery in parts. While I haven't completed the book yet, it's been fun to read so far.

TV is hi-def now. You guys should check it out.

Both is not an option?

Just finished this. Very interesting reexamination of the career and character of Ty Cobb. Well worth the read.

edit: didn't notice for a few days that the image was humongous... sorry.

The Man from the Train (2017) by Bill James (yes, that Bill James). A fascinating, albeit at times meandering, attempt by the author to crack an unsolved series of axe murders committed in America between 1898 and 1912, the victims being for the most part families asleep in their beds in small towns or rural areas, in houses close to railway lines which presumably facilitated quick escapes for the perp. The best parts of the book are learning about small town life from a century ago, for example the outsize role private detectives played in police work at that time. James really did his research, and I enjoyed the many well-chosen excerpts he included from contemporaneous newspaper accounts. In the end, James makes a compelling case that he's "found" his man.

Two criticisms, one small, one not:

1. Maps would have helped, since James is constantly writing about where this little town is in relation to that little town, the route of the train the murderer likely hopped on to make his getaway, etc. These facts start to get jumbled when you're dealing with so many murders in so many different towns.

2. I disliked James' condescending attitude to the reader. Plenty of times he explains the differences between early 20th and early 21st century life as if he's a kindergarten teacher speaking to his students. If you're holding in your hands a 462-page book and reading it, then chances are you realize, for example, there was no Internet, TV and radio in 1908 (a point James feels necessary to make more than once). He seems to think he's the only one with common sense and empathy. This culminates in a two-page rant near the end of the book that's truly weird. Directly addressing the reader, he defends people from 100 years ago as having lived lives just as rich and varied and interesting as people today. He writes about his own childhood in the 1950s and says that despite growing up in a small town there was plenty to do, it wasn't boring or uneventful. And he says if you (the reader) think that, you are "despicable" and guilty of "bigotry" and "you are revealing yourself to be an ignorant *******" (if WIS is censoring that last word for you, it's "a-hole"). Anyway, just a completely bizarre thing to include in a book like this. I can only assume that someone from his past made fun of James for being from a small town in Kansas, so he carries this huge chip on his shoulder, and he chose this opportunity to let loose.

Still a good read overall, but that rant, especially as it came at the end of the book, left a sour taste in my mouth.

Old Bill's gettin' ornerier and ornerier. Check out this recent Hey Bill Q and A:

Imagine this is 1989. I tell you that in late 2017, John Dowd would attempt, as a member of the legal team of President Donald Trump, to take the fall for an official and self-incriminating communication President Trump made on a universal messenger app that everybody has on their mobile computerphone. Which part surprises you most?
Asked by: Henry F.

Answered: 12/14/2017
There is no official or self-incriminating tweet. What surprises me most is that other intelligent people like yourself keep saying stupid **** like this.

---

Not nice, Bill!

Anyway, I've been on a crime kick recently, and just finished (more or less) True Crime: An American Anthology (2008), an 800+ page collection of mostly non-fiction murder accounts dating from Cotton Mather to Dominick Dunne on the Menendez brothers, edited by Harold Schechter. The pieces are in chronological order, and the last two-thirds -- roughly 1900 to the present day -- was great. I skimmed through most of the first third, as I found the old-timey writing a little too purple and unfocused. Some of the better-known names who contributed pieces I enjoyed: Dunne, AJ Liebling, Damon Runyon, James Thurber, Zora Neale Hurston, Calvin Trillin, Ann Rule, Elizabeth Hardwick, Jimmy Breslin, James Ellroy, Robert Bloch and Gay Talese. Quite a few names I'd never heard of made fine contributions as well, like Miriam Allen Deford on Loeb and Leopold (Hitchcock's Rope guys).

Has anyone read Bill James' crime book "The Man on the Train"?. Yes, THAT Bill James. I haven't, but crazystengel, might be a nice additon to your current reading.

Zora Neale Hurston (by the way largely responsible for much of what modern anthropologists do - she did almost all of Franz Boas' actual research), wrote crime stories?

James Ellroy is a master. Thurber always a nice read.

I am reading books about republics and democracy:

John Keane, "The Life and Death of Democracy", and an old, nearly forgotten classic, well worth the read, and written for the general public in a lively way: William Everdell, "The End of Kings: A History of Republics and Republicanism".

Good books.

Fiction: I finished the AWESOME trilogy by Cixin Liu: "The Three-Body Problem", "The Dark Forest" and "Death's End" - best science fiction since the Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. Impossible to put down.