books

What a great book! I just finished reading “Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions“, and I feel like I need to take a nap. It’s a thrilling, true account of a group of college kids that managed — in two years! — to fleece the big casino corporations out of over $3million by using stastics and good memories to kick ass at blackjack. It will keep you on the edge of your seat, and have you rooting for the Robin-Hood-esque kids the whole time. I highly recommend it.

This list of my favorite books has been floating around my site for about a decade now … Originally I had it prefaced with:

“This is my list of the all-time best books ever written. If you get a chance, read at least one of these before you die. The WWW is great fun, TV is great, the radio is always playing, but nothing compares to a good book. Please, do yourself a favor, read. I’ll add more as I come across them, but the truly great are rare.”

I’ll revise that now to simply say that it’s a list of what were my favorite books in the 90s. Some of them I still consider faves. YMMV.
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I had a great Easter weekend.

• Dinner at La Loggia’s Friday night. (Inexplicably sans web site for linking. A great restaurant in Studio City. Don’t sit in the patio area if you can help it.)
• A fairly uneventful but relaxing Saturday topped off by The Upside of Anger. (A wonderful flick, I loved it.)
• Fell asleep watching Pierce Brosnan’s stint on Inside the Actors Studio.
• Up at 6 for a long-overdue 3.2 mi run on Sunday.
• Mass at Church and then dinner with the gf’s ‘rents followed by The Incredibles. (What a terrific movie! I can’t believe I waited so long to see it!)
• I also started reading The Promise of a Lie by Howard Roughan. (Only about 150 pages so far, but it has me hooked enough to continue.)
• Using the magic that is TiVo, a co-worker of mine recorded Green Day’s performance on Last Call with Carson Daly and we managed to rip it to DVD and then mp3, so for the hell of it, I uploaded for you an awesome live version of Jesus of Suburbia from American Idiot.
• For the grand finale I organized the rest of my ‘04 receipts and bank statements while listening to classic late 80s hair bands.

Theinhko: killed by a farmer whose cucumbers he ate without permission. Theinkho’s Queen, fearing civil disorder, smuggled the farmer into the royal palace and dressed him in royal robes. He was proclaimed King Nyaung-U Sawrhan, and was known as the ‘Cucumber King’. He later transformed his cucumber plantation into a spacious and pleasant royal garden. (931 AD)

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I am apparently in a reading frenzy these days. I just knocked off Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market by Eric Schlosser. The book is not all about marijuana, although it would certainly be compelling enough if it was only concerned with that one topic. Instead it’s three essays on the economic monster that is the Black Market in America. The first is on the “drug war”, the second is on migrant workers in California, and the third is about the porn industry. All three are deliciously intriguing and certainly more than enough to convince even the most apathetic reader to actually do something as maniacal as vote.

Schlosser also wrote Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, which was just incredible. I read that one in one sitting. It’s frighteningly enlightening.

I forgot to mention that I also recently read The Devil in the White City, by Erik Larson. This was an excellent read. It’s a true story about the Chicago World’s Fair and … uhm … a serial killer. I really don’t want to give away too much of the tale, but if you’re simultaneously into turn-of-the-century Americana, architecture, sociopaths, and forensics, you’ll really dig this one. The writing is brilliant and the author did some serious research. I was very much impressed to learn how much of my life has been influenced by the characters in the story.

Note: This one took me about a month and a half to read because — for some reason — I kept misplacing it. I was working pretty much non-stop at the office, so I didn’t have much free time.

I just finished reading Flyboys: A True Story of Courage. My girlfriend’s little sister gave it to me for Christmas, which is some indication of how busy I’ve been this year. It’s a fascinating book, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in learning more about WWII. It focuses mainly on captured Navy pilots and their tribulations on the island of Chichi Jima off the coast of Japan. It’s the kind of book that kids should be reading in high school, but sadly, I know they’re not.

I just gave away my last copy of Adcult USA, so I zipped over to Amazon™ to buy two more. I’ve bought eight — eight! — copies of this thing since I first read it.

I am currently ludicrously behind on my reading list. I’m in the middle of six different tomes and there are another ten or twelve waiting next to the bed. The LA Times Festival of Books was probably not the best way to make any progress. I bought:

• Red Lobster, White Trash, and the Blue Lagoon: Joe Queenan’s America, by Joe Queenan
• Outtakes, by Dan Patrick
• The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963, by Laurence Leamer
• The Lighthouse Stevensons : The Extraordinary Story of the Building of the Scottish Lighthouses by the Ancestors of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Bella Bathurst
• A Civil War: Army Vs. Navy a Year Inside College Football’s Purest Rivalry, by John Feinstein
• Five Against One: The Pearl Jam Story, by Kim Neely
• The Best American Sports Writing 1997 and The Best American Sports Writing 1998

explorant adversa viros — “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.”

Literally it means, “misfortunes put men to the test.”

from Veni, Vidi, Vici: Conquer Your Enemies, Impress Your Friends with Everyday Latin, by Eugene Ehlrich

Placing Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not in the 1930s - an essay by David Gagne
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by P. J. O’Rourke

P. J. O’Rourke is one of my favorite authors and his treatise on economics did not disappoint me.

The book is comprised of eleven satire-filled chapters covering the study of economics and the impacts of economic theories on several nations. O’Rourke deftly explains how communism has created a catastrophe in Cuba and how socialism has somehow survived in Sweden. He presents Tanzania, Albania, and Russia as examples of economic theory gone horribly awry and how the suffering and poverty of the peoples of those nations should be unfavorably compared to the relative prosperity of the United States and Hong Kong. He takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of the planet - from a corporate magazine-financed viewpoint - and shows, warts-and-all - what can happen when good politics is combined with poor management.

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by Peter Lefcourt (Editor), Laura J. Shapiro (Editor), William Goldman
I’m about 70% into this collection of essays by Hollywood authors and scriptwriters and I love it. I devoured that much of it in one sitting and then had to put it down because I wanted to savor it a bit more.

The first story - by Alan Alda of M*A*S*H fame - sets the tone for the book. Alda writes about the first time he felt the thrill of creation while working on a script for an episode of the famous Korean War television series. After Alda’s three-page story the editors deliver a barrage of mini-editorials by some of the most famous creative minds in show business. There are essays by well-known talents such as Lawrence Kasdan, Steven Bochco, and Cameron Crowe that will excite any fan of good writing.

I want to make it very clear that the book is *not* an instruction manual, a tutorial, or a “how-to”. There are no chapters detailing how much writers earn in Hollywood, how to “break into the biz”, or to what address you should send your script for “Ally McBeal”. It is simply a collection of stories written by prominent Hollywood writers about their experiences the first time they ever got paid to write. “Simply” is not a word, though, that should be used to describe this book. If you are a writer, or are fascinated by the process of writing - and by that I mean putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard and creating a story - you will love to read about these authors’ first times.
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I saw a link to Singlefile sometime last week. I visited the site and poked for a minute, but I didn’t really look at it. Then I saw another link to Singlefile on a different site. I visited again for a second, but couldn’t really see why it was such a big deal. Tonight I saw another link to Singlefile. Finally I read the page and learned what Singlefile is. Singlefile is it. Singlefile is the best thing to happen on line since Blogger.
My flabber is gasted.