reading

If you’ve never seen Midnight Run, I’m here to tell you it’s a pretty damn good movie. Charles Grodin always cracks me up. I am way behind on my media consumption this month. There’s the five most recent episodes of Rescue Me and the last two episodes of Entourage waiting on my TiVo.

I’ve been on a bit of a reading binge lately, though. In the last month or so I’ve knocked off How to Lose a Battle: Foolish Plans and Great Military Blunders, Dr. Twitchell’s excellent Branded Nation: The Marketing of Megachurch, College Inc., and Museumworld, and The Best American Sports Writing 2003. I also have four books that I’m dying to read in the on-deck circle right now, too: The Secret Life of Lobsters: How Fishermen and Scientists Are Unraveling the Mysteries of Our Favorite Crustacean, Positively Fifth Street, Next Man Up : A Year Behind the Lines in Today’s NFL, by John Feinstein, and Dr. Twitchell’s Where Men Hide.

Tonight was the premiere of the final season of one of my favorite shows — Six Feet Under, on HBO. It’s really brilliant, this show. I can’t get over how every episode is just so freaking fantastic. I’m going to be a bit sad when it’s gone.

I have been thinking a lot lately about how I used to never watch television. For the first twenty-five years of my life, if you had asked me, I would have said that I didn’t consider myself a tv-watcher, even that I didn’t really like tv (except for football, of course). In the last five or six years, though, I’ve become addicted to quite a few shows: Law & Order, West Wing, CSI: Miami, the Sopranos … I honestly think that some of the best production/writing/acting in media is on these shows, but I am also wondering if it’s really TV that’s getting better or if it’s just that I am getting older.

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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 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

During the Revolution, the American ability to produce food was the one advantage of the Continental Army. The British Army might have been better trained and more experienced, and it was certainly better dressed and equipped. But the Americans were better fed. They were also better paid, and, thanks to Boston rum, they drank better.

One of the Christmas gifts I received this year was a $100 gift certificate to Waldenbooks / Brentano’s book stores. This is sort of like giving a breifcase full of smack to an addict. I spent the better part of the morning today at the Brentano’s in the Century City Mall salivating over the thousands of books I want to consume.

I spotted Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky and was reminded of another book by the same author that I have wanted to read for some time now. It didn’t take me long to find Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, and I gorged myself on this fabulous book this afternoon. It’s a wonderful treatise on the fish and its impact on our daily lives, and if you get a chance to read it you won’t be disappointed.

I’m also currently reading Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus by Thomas Cahill on the advice of my father. I’m only about a fifth of the way into it, but I’m enjoying it immensely. (I don’t know why I didn’t take more history classes in college!)

Here’s a list of the other items I bought today:

• Longitude : The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel
• Hyperspace : A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps and the Tenth Dimension by Michio Kaku
• The Best American Science Writing 2001 edited by Timothy Ferris
• Eat the Rich by P. J. O’Rourke
• the February 2002 issue of Harper’s Magazine
• the March 2002 issue of Discover Magazine
• the March 2002 issue of Wired Magazine

So I have a few books sitting on the desk now. That always happens after I visit my dad. I grabbed some great ones on this trip. For the hell of it, I compiled a list of everything I’m reading right now. (Click on the ‘more’ link to see!) I’m almost done with Just Six Numbers and A Man in Full. Longtime readers of dg.net will note that I’ve been working on AMIF for almost a year now. For some reason I can’t seem to get through it. I just am not really enjoying it. The New Thinking Man’s Guide to Baseball is excellent reading, by the way. In case you’re wondering, yes, I still devour Sports Illustrated the day it arrives. I’m also getting Boston Magazine, Shift, and Maxim. I’m also slowly slogging my way through Sams Teach Yourself CGI Programming in a Week. And of course I was nice enough to provide the amazon link for all of them. Read away!
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Hey! I got my first two (free) issues of Shift magazine last week. I read them on the plane to and from Miami.

The ‘corporate’ web site is pretty busy - far too many bells and whistles for my taste. It betrays the ultimate hep-ness-osity of the magazine. The print version is excellent though. I highly recommend it. Grab a copy if you see it at the bookstore. (Or subscribe at the site!)

You really should be reading Über each and every day. I can’t stress this enough. I’m not kidding. Seriously. I stopped reading for a few weeks and, man, I don’t want to tell you the things that started happening to me. It was bad. Real bad. But now I’m reading Über again and everything is better. So much better. I just feel more … complete. It’s like that feeling you get when you’ve lost something that was really important to you and then realize that it wasn’t lost, you had simply put it behind that other thing so you wouldn’t forget it when you got back from where you were going but since you had so much fun at that place you totally forgot about the thing that was oh-so-supposedly important to you and when you realized yesterday that you didn’t have it and went looking for it and couldn’t find it you freaked and then you spilled your drink on the counter next to that thing that you had balanced on top of the book that was near the box under which you had put that important thing so not only is it lost but now it’s got soda all over it and that is just wrong wrong wrong (why were you hiding it in the first place? you idiot.) so now you’re frustrated and cleaning the soda and you hate to move that box but now there’s going to be carbonated beverage stains all over it and the really old t-shirt that you really liked and had put in that damn box last week before you went to … and then you remember … the important thing is behind that other thing! … and then you get it and it’s got a little soda on it but otherwise it’s okay and man, don’t you feel better? That’s what reading Über every day is like. Kinda.

I’ve recently revised and reorganized my favorite books page. I also added links to the selections at amazon.com so you can grab your own copy.

I like to read. I used to read too much. Now I think I don’t read enough. I spend all day reading the screen and not enough of my time is spent reading books. I’m going to work on that. I’m going to try to read more books. So. Now that that’s out of the way. Here’s a few that I’m consuming right now:

• My Goodness: A Cynic’s Short-Lived Search for Sainthood - Joe Queenan
• A Man in Full - Tom Wolfe
• On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft - Stephen King
• Lempriere’s Dictionary - Lawrence Norfolk (I’ve read this at least 4 times already, though!)
• Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences - Edward Tenner

A friend of mine told me to read Naked by David Sedaris and so I am. I bought it over two months ago and have been gallumphing through it at about two pages per day. Tonight, in a fit of crazed eyeball-roving, I read almost five pages! This is killing me. A book like Naked used to be a one-night stand for me. Now I hardly read anything that’s not on the screen or in one of my favorite magazines (Brill’s, SI, George, Harper’s). Starting tonight I am going to rededicate myself to being the readingest fool I know. It might mean there are fewer updates (Not!), but I am sure I can spare a few more minutes of sleep each night to make sure I am getting my recommended daily allowance of dead trees in my life. I truly love reading. I started doing it so long ago … so very long ago … and it, along with music, has always been my great solace in life. There is nothing to free your mind like reading a good book. And I gotta tell ya … My mind? It needs some release sometimes.
Shameless Plug: Check out my Books to Read Before You Die page!

I finally got around to updating my list of books to read before you die. See if you have been through some of the same ones as me. Let me know. I’m interested. But do me one favor? Read Lempriere’s Dictionary by Lawrence Norfolk as soon as you can.

So yesterday, while I was reading this, I ate an entire bag of microwave popcorn. No, I’m not a slow reader, you dork. I am an extremely fast popcorn-eater. I in-freakin’-hale the stuff. I love popcorn. Then when we went to see X-Men I consumed a Large bag during the previews. So by like nine o’clock I had, literally, two farging pounds of popcorn in my intestines. That cannot possibly be good for a person. Once in college Dr. Twitchell - A genius. Go buy his books at Amazon.Com. - had us write a paper on vampires in late 19th century literature (or something like that) and I handed in a three-page essay on the history of popcorn. If I remember correctly, he called me an asshole - I think he actually wrote that on my essay - but still gave me an A.

‘Tis the good reader that makes the good book.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson