E.L. Doctorow - World's Fair:

I'd enjoyed Doctorow before in both Ragtime and Book of Daniel, so picking up this title for a couple of bucks at the used book store (ain'tcha) wasn't a big deal. I'd grown used to E.L.'s predilection for mixing actual people into his fictional landscapes. However, I was not prepared for the highly autobigraphical material of World's Fair.

The account begins in earnest -- hurried memories from early childhood. The mundane is detailed so much that the detailed becomes mundane, and I found myself glossing over passages. At times, Doctorow's art is in high evidence. The problem lies in the fact that his talent shows up in brief sketches over the many pages of the book. Still, I kept reading.

Part of me hoped for more of the knowing prose revealing truths about the larger world around the smaller boy. Another part could not help but wonder just how much of the book was biography and how much fiction. The latter part bothered me such that I googled Doctorow immediately after finishing the book. The pages I read offered little in the way of clarification; they merely backed up my suspicion that Fair was deeply biographical yet flawed.

I couldn't agree more. If you enjoy Doctorow and wish to gain insight into part of his life (mostly his early upbringing), then you'll likely somewhat enjoy World's Fair. If you read it hoping for his usual dashing fiction refracted upon true world events and people, you'll end up disappointed.

[hr]

Jonathan Winters - Winters' Tales:

Based on my limited exposure to Mr. Winters -- "Mork & Mindy" and other TV appearances -- I thought this little book might be a jaunt down the lanes of absurdity. At times, it is just that. And the most shocking story is one in which a young man grows up to be a crossdresser and ends up seducing his own grandfather leading to a passage that has to be read to be fully appreciated.

However, most of Winters' twists are simple and predictable. His style is light and breezy. His own past shows up in the many stories set in Ohio and mentions of Presbyterian churches. Winters' delivers steady laughs throughout, but they're mostly the small chuckle or knowing wink type. One of the most interesting things about the book is Winters' illustrations for the various chapters. Those drawings reveal a lot more about Winters' psyche than his simple, enjoyable stories.

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Chicken Feather Bed Bugs Bunny Hop Sing Out Side Street Walker Texas Ranger Cookie Dough Boy Wonder Years

Nicholas Sparks and Micah Sparks - Three Weeks with My Brother:

Suggested by a family member and viewed with due suspicion (the Warner Bros. logo on the spine alone made my brows furrow -- "when did Warner Bros. stop re-issuing Van Halen CDs and start printing books," I wondered), On the surface, Three Weeks is a story about Nicholas Sparks and his three-week journey around the world with his older brother, Micah.

Instead, the real story is about the bond of these two brothers, how it developed during their childhood and continued during adulthood. The trip-around-the-world part is highly secondary to the bond-between-two-brothers part.

The first half of the book is sweet as Nicholas recalls the hardships and triumphs of growing up as a middle child and the joys, tears, etc. shared amongst the brothers, their one sister and mostly their mother. The second half is a downer extraordinaire.

People die. People cry. And the poor reader experiencing the roller coaster hopes that some great wisdom will be shared by the end of the ride. It isn't. I'm not saying the book isn't good, but it's more of a cry-on-my-shoulder thing than a learn-from-this example.

And for someone who visited many of the most amazing sites in the world, Nicholas remains highly nonplussed about them. Of course, that may be due to the fact that a three-week buzz around the world is nothing compared to a lifetime of ups and downs.

[hr]

Bill James' Historical Baseball Abstract:

Okay, I only read the first half of the book -- it's 700 pages after all. And the second half is made up of Jamesian analysis of the Top 100 players at each baseball position. Yeah, that's 1000 players. I don't know if he included 100 DHs, but I doubt it.

Anyway, I focused on what I reasoned would be the best part of the book -- how the game was played. Each decade of baseball is broken down into summaries and capsules covering everything from the uniform styles to rules changes, problems to personalities and what everything meant to the sport at that time.

It's an amazing historical compedium. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I knew a good deal more about the early years and players of the game than I thought. Of course, James provides even more details than the casual fan could hope to learn in a lifetime. And James isn't shy about giving his opinions, but he's earned that right thanks to his relentless research. Really, my only problem with the book was the sloppy editing.

And even though sometimes the Abstract left more questions than answers, it's a valuable source of information and entertainment for most any fan of the game of baseball. <-- Notice I didn't say baseball fan there; I said, "fan of the game."

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Chicken Feather Bed Bugs Bunny Hop Sing Out Side Street Walker Texas Ranger Cookie Dough Boy Wonder Years

****

great book so far...

also on the menu in no particular order:

Tale of Two Cities, The Amazing Maurice an His Educated Rodents, and The Great War series by Turtledove, whose praises i will sing to the grave

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Kill Whitey.

good book. scary how much we're all probably getting manipulated today by our govt's/big business/etc if Machiavelli was talking about techniques to do so back in the early 1500's

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what if nigger meant kite

the stand by stephen king

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asssss

Sam Walker - Fantasyland:

Journalist and author Walker gets in over his head as he tries competing with the top Rotisserie Baseball players in America. Walker has about three months to immerse himself in baseball lore, stats and knowledge before drafting the players which will make up his fantasy baseball team.

He travels to both Florida and Arizona to watch Spring Training games in person. He hires two extra guys at a combined $2700 a month to be his assistants. One, "Nando," is a reader of players and minutae about players who goes by guts and guile in making his suggestions. The other, "Sig," is pretty much a rocket scientist obsessed with baseball stats trying to make future predicitons based on past performance. Walker himself crisscrosses the country upbraiding managers, insulting players and even bugging General Managers in his attempt to field a competitive fantasy baseball team. He spent around $50,000 on this endeavor. Crazy? Perhaps....

However, the time, money and effort spent prove fruitful as together these three differing entities combine their mindpower and run roughshod over the experts. Okay, not really. They finish 8th out of 12 in an AL-only league. But the story is about the journey of how Walker's team arrived in eighth place after being second early on and as high as fifth late in the season and how that journey changes Walker's attitude toward real baseball.

Fantasyland is a breezy, easy read -- lots of fun if you've ever played fantasy baseball. If you've never played fantasy or rotisserie baseball, the story is still pretty compelling in a nerdy sort of way.

The book itself is comparable to Stephen Fatsis' Word Freak in that it is a tale of an everyday guy finding his way through the giants of his sport. In the case of Word Freak, though, the "sport" is competitive Scrabble. Both are good reads; I give the edge to Fatsis mostly based on the Scrabble players profiled. They are a diverse group of slightly-odd to flat-out weird people who have reached varying degress of success and failure in life. The guys in Fantasyland are overall more successful and, as such, a little less interesting. The roto guys may be geeks, but the word guys are freaks.

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Chicken Feather Bed Bugs Bunny Hop Sing Out Side Street Walker Texas Ranger Cookie Dough Boy Wonder Years

i only like rotisserie baseball if its seasoned just right.

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Kill Whitey.

A book about Iggy Pop. He just met David Bowie.

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Poop.

Michael Lewis - Moneyball:

Contrary to Joe Morgan's opinion, Billy Beane did not write Moneyball. Much of the book is about Oakland Athletics GM Beane, his baseball playing career and his baseball general-managing career, but it was not written by Beane.

And even though much of the book is about Beane's beliefs and methods and how they filtered through the A's organization, the book really concerns a new way of thinking about organizing and running a baseball team. Plus, a couple of really great stories emerge about two Oakland A's players.

Moneyball is well-written and well worth the time. All the praise received by this book is deserved. If you have even a slight interest in baseball, this book should be read by you.

[hr]

Harlan Ellison - Edgeworks 2:

Even if you don't recognize the name, you've probably read at least one Ellison story, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. However, that story does not appear in Edgeworks. Edgeworks 2 contains several short stories whose publication dates spread throughout Harlan's career and one early novel, Spiderkiss, which was unfortunately renamed Rockabilly for publication long, long ago.

Though Harlan sometimes relies a bit much on the old plot twist or ironic device -- especailly for his short story endings -- the context and content of his stories are almost always interesting. He writes with a natural ease making the reader comfortable even when the subject matter is not. He throws in two-dollar words that would seem out of place in the hands of lesser authors. And his pacing is beyond compare.

Spiderkiss, though, follows a path of discovery along what could have been the fairly mundane tale of the rise and fall of a Rock and Roll icon, Stag Preston (yes, the name reflects Elvis, but the persona is more Jerry Lee Lewis). Instead, Harlan escorts us through the dreck and mire while holding up a twisted magnifying glass.

Perhaps the brilliance of the novel is that the character focus is not the RNR hero, but his agent, Sheldon "Shelly" Morgenstern. Like Stag, Shelly is flawed and corrupted, but Shelly soon learns that his own vices are nothing when refracted upon the acts and habits of Stag Preston.

I don't want to give away much more, but the ending isn't as easy as lessons learned and forgiveness earned. It's a hard ending in a way because the characters have changed, they just haven't changed very much.

Now if I can just find Edgeworks 1...

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umfumdisii've always wanted to read Moneyball, almost as much as i've always wanted to shoot Joe Morgan in the face

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what if nigger meant kite

I've never read Moneyball, but I had a subscription to Baseball America for about 5 years in the early aughts, so I feel like I've read Moneyball...

And Harlan Ellison is responsible for the single greatest quote in the history of the world:  "The two most common elements in the world are hydrogen and stupidity."

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I has a flavor!

I just got through re-reading Andy Kaufman Exposed! by Bob Zmuda.

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Legend, oh legend, the third wheel legend...always in the way.

seanator

 Are you an Evelyn Wood graduate?

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-=- You eat one lousy foot and they call you a cannibal. What a world. -=-

Did you read them or was it his big box set of books on tape? My wife got those and they're great.

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-=- You eat one lousy foot and they call you a cannibal. What a world. -=-

Since Braveheart is one of my favorite movies I decided to read up on the man:

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Kill Whitey.

i watched that history channel special on the real William Wallace. the experts kept saying that the movie was far from the truth, but the examples they gave weren't that convincing. still felt like the same guy to me

i just finished The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul and am about 80% of the way through Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. i put The Salmon of Doubt on hold at the library which was the unfinished (or unpolished, i'm still not sure) third book in the series that Douglas Adams was finishing (or polishing) at the time of his death. also have The God Delusion lined up to read, which was a Richard Dawkins book which was dedicated to Adams, a good friend of his, who Dawkins names as possibly the only man he'd ever 'converted' to atheism

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what if nigger meant kite

mandingo

Love those books. Didn't know about The Salmon of Doubt. Will check it out. Have read Douglas Adam's Starship Titanic by Terry Jones, though.

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Vlad Cjelli rules.

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Kill Whitey.

umfumdisi

Love those books. Didn't know about The Salmon of Doubt. Will check it out. Have read Douglas Adam's Starship Titanic by Terry Jones, though.

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i knew about the game but not the book. now have it on hold at the library, so thanks

the unfinished Dirk Gently novel was good btw. only 98 pages, but a fax to his editor that was included to give an idea where the story was going shows he had some nice twists lined up. funniest line of it was the second to last imo, which was a nice way to finish

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what if nigger meant kite

This one started out pretty good, but the ending was kinda shitty. Overall, I would pass it by, unless you like bukake novels. (Might have sold better if it had a brown cover?)

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Insert Theme to Mannix here

Just finished this:

 

[IMG]http://i64.photobucket.com/albums/h196/Swamp_Lummox/desperate.jpg[/IMG]

 Those guys really got fucked. Some of it can be argued was their own fault, but still fucked is fucked no?

Now I'm working on this:

 

[IMG]http://i64.photobucket.com/albums/h196/Swamp_Lummox/dresden1.jpg[/IMG]

 

Which is all right for pop fiction. Easy to read, fairly interesting concept and main character and a helluva lot better than the TV series.

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Kill Whitey.

 

Read this book!  Or else!

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I was gonna send a robot back in time, but I got high.

AngryAmericanThe TV series is only loosely based on the books. They only get better as you go along.

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It was such a waste of everyone’s time and money that even the Tokyo stadium’s rape robots apologized– something they were programmed specifically never to do.