What are you reading right NOW?!?!

[Guest martin]

just finished:

freakonomics: another overrated pop science book. not bad, but not worthy of the press it gets. i put it in the same boat with the tipping point.

reading now:

the bad guys won: i was kid in louisiana in 1986, a braves fan and a national league fan. i stayed up late and cheered for mookie wilson in game 6 because he is from my dad's hometown and played on the same high school team. it was awesome. the book is fun. i just read the part about lenny dykstra insulting a fat lady at an autograph signing and i was amused.

also reading: the fabric of the cosmos by brian greene. this one is so hard to grasp i have to read a few chapters and let in sink in for a while. space/time, quantum stuff. interesting, bu too hard.

next: i dunno, maybe i will read the latest michael crichton and see how cheesy he is now. i would prefer to go buy that new letters of richard feynman book.

[Guest ScarletKnight41]

MK received this for his birthday, and he just offered to let me borrow it. Is that a good kid or what? :)

OE - I'm still early into this one, but I'm finding it a bit too conversational and cursory for my taste. It should be a quick read, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone other than the most compulsive completionists.

[Guest cooby]

Almost through with "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" though I have to admit I don't know what's going on half the time.

The scene seems to change at will.

[Theoldmole]

I just finished reading too many mystery novels in a row...have to switch to something more substantial.

[Guest cooby]

Went to the library today and got



and



and

[Theoldmole]

Dick Francis is great.

[Guest cooby]

www.jumptheshark.com

My favorite way to waste time

[Willets Point]

Just finished reading:

A work of fiction, but full of historical detail. A great read for New York City history buffs like myself.

[Guest ScarletKnight41]

I bought this for MK, but he hasn't shown any interest in it so far, so I figured taht I'd read it myself.

On Edit - I looked this over today, and it's a nice instructional book for young pitchers with a lot of practical advice. Seaver is constantly advising the kids to figure out what works for them individually as opposed to mindlessly following one guideline, and he suggests a lot of exercises for building strength and flexibility. As the mother of a Little League pitcher, I feel that this is an excellent book for kids who want to learn how to pitch better.

[Valadius]

Just finishing up "The Great Shark Hunt", by the late, great, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. Soon to start up its sequel, "Generation of Swine".

[Willets Point]

An odd little book with a new take on art appreciation. I think.



It's all like post-modern and shit.

[MFS62]

I re-reading "War and Peace In the Space Age" by General James Gavin.

It originally came out around 1960. The author looked at what had happened to the French at Viet Nam and predicted that future wars would not involve large armies in face-to-face combat.
He argued for a Mobile, Air-Transportable force that could respond to small, non conventional wars anywhere in the world at a momemt's notice.

It took the US several painful years after the book came out ot realize he was correct. But until that happened, he was considered an "odd-ball" by his Pentagon cohorts.

The points he makes are still meaningful today in terms of being able to rapidly responsd to insurgencies and terrorism.

Later

[Guest Rockin' Doc]

I started this one today. It is a historical look at near heroes, "goats", and those that were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Lots of post-season history for the avid fans.

[Guest ScarletKnight41]

This is one of Lupica's older books. I had it on my Barnes and Noble wish list for those times that I had an order that was just short of the $25 minimum for free shipping. That day came last week, when I had to buy an APA style manual for school. I figured I would start this one, since I'm taking MK to Shea on the train, and I need something to do while he's playing his Gameboy (there's no way I'm schlepping my IT textbook to Shea!). I've read three or four of Lupica's fiction books, and have found them to be good, entertaining reads.

[seawolf17]

They finally heard our pleas and released a Bill Simmons column anthology. It's only his best Red Sox-based ones, but I figure if we buy it, they'll eventually publish his complete works.

He's doing a book tour stop at Holy Cross in Worcester, MA tonight; I will be there.

[seawolf17]

Good times last night at Holy Cross, at the Sports Guy book signing. He packed a ballroom... mostly HC students, but I sat next to two guys who drove out from UMass, and talked to two Met fans on the autograph line who had driven out for the event as well. Simmons was funny; he gave a quick twenty-minute speech with advice on college life, answered some questions, and signed my book with a "Let's Go Mets," which was funny.

Big thumbs up.

[Guest cooby]

This seems okay so far. I took it off of a desk at work and brought it home with me

[Guest Edgy DC]

[seawolf17]

I enjoyed the Neyer/James book. I like how they included a Sidd Finch report.

[Guest cooby]

Picked this one off the same desk today, seems promising

[seawolf17]

Note to Cooby's colleagues: stop leaving books around, because Cooby's a bit of a klepto.

[Guest cooby]

Nah, it's an abandoned desk.

Plus I thought I hit the motherlode in the lunchroom today until I noticed they all had titles like "Destiny" and "Passion Lasso" and "The Cowboy's Child".

Shit like Jude Devereax, etc. Puke.

So out of 250 books, I found two and felt good about it.

[Guest SI Metman]

I just went to the public library for the first time in well over 6 years since I've run out of books that I owned to read. I took out the old library card and the librarian looked at it like it was some kind of artifact since they evidently changed cards a few years back.

I took out this book since I'm still on a Tom Clancy kick:



This was the one I just finished:

[Guest Yancy Street Gang]

[url=http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0684848090/104-8825738-3403108?v=glance&n=283155&n=507846&s=books&v=glance]Pillar of Fire : America in the King Years 1963-65[/url]
by Taylor Branch.

[Willets Point]

Just started...

I hope the actual book is less obtuse than the introduction.

[Guest cooby]

These were lying around the office and nobody was even looking at them, so I picked them up...

I've probably already read this

[metirish]

I just started this..

]FROM THE CRITICS Patrick Smith - BusinessWeek John Le Carre's The Constant Gardener ranks with The Russia House as the best he has produced since hitting his peak. If this new book is craft rather than art, it is craft of the very highest caliber. It is no mean feat to entertain while also making a reader think. Yet Le Carre pull this off admirably, weaving together several themes�corporate power, underdevelopment, globalization�that will resonate with a wide audience. Book Magazine A young, beautiful Englishwoman, Tessa Quayle (think of Princess Diana's looks and Mother Teresa's missionary zeal) has been gruesomely murdered near Northern Kenya's Lake Turkana. Tessa had been traveling with Dr. Arnold Bluhm, a black African physician and fellow missionary who has since vanished. The police and Fleet Street have cast the attractive, charismatic Bluhm as her lover and murderer. Yet Justin Quayle, Tessa's devoted and much-older husband, a career diplomat at the British High Commission in Nairobi, has other suspicions. A decent, though not extraordinary, man, Justin is so devastated by his wife's brutal death that he begins a dangerous odyssey in hopes of understanding the mystery of her final days. Relentlessly following a trail of clues through Africa, Italy, Germany and Canada, Justin uncovers secrets about a multinational pharmaceutical firm and its new anti-TB drug, Dypraxa, which has been rushed to market in Africa despite serious side effects. Though the novel has a surfeit of beautiful women and not enough ambiguity between good and evil, Le Carr� (author of The Russia House) delivers a deeply compelling and complex story, full of deceptions and betrayals. �James Schiff

[Guest Rockin' Doc]

Second book in a continuing series. I read the first book almost two years ago. When I received this one as a present, it ended up stored away in a box until I recently stumbled across it. Have been enjoying this one once I caught back up with all the characters. Hopefully, Santa will get me the third book for Christmas.

[Guest cooby]

Is this a new series? Did the first one end yet?

[Guest Edgy DC]

I didn't grow up on comics or really follow anything for a long time, but I had this one pushed on me back around 1991 and thought that David Mazzucchelli was born to draw Gotham in the same way that Alan Lee was born to paint Middle Earth. He changed the stakes for the artists that followed, swung things back toward DC. He and Miller changed the industry by going back to the beginning.

I watched the Batman Begins movie and couldn't stop myself from comparing it to the graphic novel that inspired it.