The Last Book You Read...

Walden is an interesting read. I haven't read it in ages.


Today, I have started listening to "In A Sunburned Country" by Bill Bryson.

It is fantastic! I love it. Great, great anecdotes. His writing style is very compelling.

The mystery of cricket is not that Australians play it well, but that they play it at all. It has always seemed to me a game much too restrained for the rough-and-tumble Australian temperament. Australians much prefer games in which brawny men in scanty clothing bloody each others noses. I am quite certain that if the rest of the world vanished over night and the development of cricket was left in Australian hands, within a generation the players would be wearing shorts and using the bats to hit each other. And the thing is, it would be a much better game for it.
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Just finished The Tipping Point and have just started in on Chronic city by Jonathan Lethem.

I went on a Russian lit kick about 15 years ago. That nation is my favorite source of non-English literature (followed closely by Japan).
 
Halfway through listening to "In A Sunburned Country." Just got my copy of Anthony Bourdain's "Medium Raw" today from Amazon, have read the first couple of chapters. I wish I could be as unapologetic as he is. I dunno why, but I am such a fan of his writing, though sometimes the swearing does seem a bit superfluous. However, his recollections of things are painfully funny...

"So, it's the party following the Julie & Julia premiere, and I'm standing there by the end of the buffet, sipping a martini with Ottavia, the woman I'd married in 2007, and two friends, when I feel somebody touching me. There's a hand under my jacket and running up my back and I instantly assume this must be somebody I know really well to touch me in this way--particularly in front of my wife. Ottavia has had a couple years of mixed martial arts training by now, and the last time a female fan was demonstrative in such a way, she leaned over, grabbed her wrist, and said something along the lines of "If you don't take your hands off my husband, I'm going to smash your fucking face in." (In fact, I remember that those were her words exactly. Also, that this was not an idle threat.)

In that peculiar slow motion one experiences in car wrecks, in the brief second or so it took for me to turn, I recall that particularly frightening detail: my wife's expression, significant in that it was frozen into a rictus of a grin, paralyzed with a look I'd never seen before. What could be standing behind me that would put this unusual expression on my wife's face--make her freeze like that--a deer in the headlights?

I turned to find myself staring into the face of Sandra Lee.

Ordinarily by now, a woman's hand up my back, Ottavia would have been across the table with a flying tomohawk chap to the top of the skull--or a vicious elbow to the thorax--followed immediately by a left-right combination and a side kick to the jaw as her victim was on its way to the floor. But no. Such are the strange and terrible powers of television's Queen of Semi-Homemade that we, both of us, stood there like hypnotized chickens. The fact that Sandra was standing next to New York's attorney general--and likely next governor--Andrew Cuomo (her boyfriend), added, I thought, an implied menace.

'You've been a bad boy,' Sandra was saying, perhaps referring to casual comments I may or may not have made, in which I may have suggested that she was the 'hellspawn of Betty Crocker and Charles Manson.' The words 'pure evil' might have come up as well. It is alleged that the words 'war crimes' might also have been used by me--in reference to some of Sandra's more notorious offerings, like her 'Kwanzaa Cake.' Right now, I have no contemporaneous recollection of those comments."
 
The Magicians by Lev Grossman. Harry Potter goes to college and messes with Narnia? and somehow its surprisingly good
 
Horse Control and the Bit by Col. Thom Roberts


A very dull but interesting treatise on bits and how they affect control over the horse.
 
City of Thieves - Davis Benioff

I loved this book. It takes place during the siege of Leningrad and involves the search for a dozen eggs.
 
Congo Journey - Redmond O'Hanlon.

its ok i guess, more for the nostalgia of being way over my head in a remote jungle than anything else
 
I was listening to A Commonwealth of Thieves by Thomas Keneally earlier this morning. It's about the colonization of Australia and is rather fascinating.
 
David Sedaris books are ones I can't do on audiobook. His voice is not a favorite, but he really cracks me up sometimes. I want to read that one.
 
I didn't end up enjoying it. More gimmick than substance for me.

I've read several books since, the most recent being A Prayer for the Dying by Stewart O'Nan. Loved the book.
 
Zoo city by some lady. nice idea (people who do bad things end up with an animal familiar who lets them have some magical power, but have some pretty bad side effects). Set in modern Joburg with a fairly good noirish story, but for some reason it hasn't hooked me.
 
I'm reading Firehouse by Dave Halberstam. It's about 40 Engine and 35 Truck on 9/11. 13 firemen went to the Towers from those crews. 1 survived.
 
I am currently reading Cities of Salt by Abdelrahman Munif. It's about the transformation of an imaginary Middle Eastern country after the discovery of oil in the '30s from the perspective of the locals.
 
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