What Am I Reading This Weekend?

Posted and filed under books.

I took a detour on the way home from the office tonight and hit the Westwood Borders book store. My half-step-sister-in-law gave me a gift card for Christmas that’s been burning a hole in my wallet, and I’ve got a long weekend of reading ahead of me. Here’s what I grabbed: The Drunkard’s Walk: How… Read more »

Friday Five: Stephen King Books

Posted and filed under books.

The Shining – 1976 Night Shift – 1977 Different Seasons – 1982 Skeleton Crew – 1984 It – 1986

The Long Halloween

Posted and filed under books.

I have been reading Batman stories for as long as I can remember. When I was a kid I used to gorge myself on Detective Comics, Batman, and — my favorite — The Brave and the Bold (which was back then always tales of Batman and Superman teaming to fight the bad guys). One of… Read more »

It Never Rains in Tiger Stadium

Posted and filed under books, College Football, sports.

This weekend I finished reading It Never Rains in Tiger Stadium by John Ed Bradley. The book is the memoir of an LSU football player who decided to become a writer, but it is so much more than that. Bradley writes about coming to terms with no longer being on the team and his decades-long… Read more »

Personal Library Hack

Posted and filed under books.

Here’s a little trick to help you keep your books from getting lost forever. If you’re like me, you get a ton of snail-mail spam, what we used to call “junk mail”. Lots and lots of companies — especially those concerned with getting your money to save the whales, the environment, the lives of endangered… Read more »

Weekly Media Recap

Posted and filed under books, movies.

Recent Movies: Pineapple Express ***1/2 Gone Baby Gone **** Bottle Shock ** (based on the book Judgment of Paris) Gone in 60 Seconds *1/2 Currently Reading: Rigged: The True Story of an Ivy League Kid Who Changed the World of Oil, from Wall Street to Dubai, by Ben Mezrich Nature Girl, by Carl Hiaasen How… Read more »

Skinny Dip, by Carl Hiaasen

Posted and filed under books.

I read Carl Hiaasen‘s comedy Skinny Dip on the flight from Denver to Vegas to Los Angeles on Monday morning at the suggestion of a friend at work. I don’t want to reveal too much of the story, but it’s basically about an idiot who attempts to murder his wife, who was the captain of… Read more »

A Day in the Life

Posted and filed under books, music.

I just finished reading Mark Hertsgaard’s excellent book, A Day in the Life: The Music and Artistry of the Beatles and I loved it. My father-in-law — who, in 1974, was actually kicked out of the Troubadour with John for heckling the Smothers Brothers — gave it to me a few weeks ago after he’d… Read more »

Among the Mansions of Eden

Posted and filed under books, Los Angeles.

Last night I finally finished reading Among the Mansions of Eden: Tales of Love, Lust, and Land in Beverly Hills, a book I bought for Tricia about five years ago. I sailed through the first few hundred pages of David Weddle‘s tome a couple of weeks ago and was entranced by the marvelous stories of… Read more »

Gasping for Airtime

Posted and filed under books, comedy, movies.

Jay Mohr’s Gasping for Airtime: Two Years in the Trenches of Saturday Night Live is the second “uncensored” book I’ve read about SNL. (I read Live from New York about two years ago.) Mohr is on the radio pretty frequently here in LA and I really enjoy Last Comic Standing when I catch it. His… Read more »