BOOKS THREAD

This was a really gook look at the early days of New Orleans. No surprise; it was full of booze and hookers less than a decade after it was founded. But a guy with an ax came along and then the Reformers made an appearance and it all went to hell...for a while. Oh, and some guys invented jazz.

The opening pages contain a pretty graphic description of a murder, thus my wife passed this book to me, and I'm glad she did.

Joe Bob says put some Louis Armstrong on the ol' turntable and check this out.

 

If you liked that I bet you like this, terrific first novel;

 

I'm reading "A Wrinkle in Time" for the umpteenth time and not only does it hold up, it just gets better as I get older.

 

This is an admirable level of discipline.

Thanks for your well-considered review of George Saunders. I'm pretty sure I have to read it. I don't know why I am so fearful of doing so.

 

Have thought about re-reading that myself ... especially with the movie coming out soon. Haven't read it since I was a kid.

But first I have to finish Stephen King's "wrinkle in time" book, 11/22/63. About halfway through ... it's keeping me up late because I can't put it down.

 

tl;dr

 

I’ve started Chernow’s Grant biography.

 

Just read All the Money in the World, by John Pearson. It's the story of the 1973 kidnapping of Paul Getty in Italy and also of the Getty family as a whole.

It's a beautifully written, well-researched book that I advise you to never ever read. Well, unless you like reading about damaged people being enabled by great wealth to horribly damage themselves further [while saving time to spawn another generation to continue the merry-go-round.] Than it's awesome.

 

I finished "All The Pieces Matter," the oral history of The Wire by Jonathan Abrams. I got a lot of valuable information from it for my new career, but I don't know that anything less than a diehard fan of the show would enjoy it. I think that's probably an obvious point—why read a 300-page oral history of a show that you're only casually interested in?—but I thought it might say more about TV in general. Some very high percentage of it is dedicated to specific plot points in the show, most interestingly with regard to character deaths and how hard the actors sometimes took them.

 

I always used to love the DVD commentaries of shows for material like this. Even light fare like "Friends," it was fascinating to hear the show-runners discuss how they decided upon a particular arc or how they struggled to come up with a "C" story for a particular episode.

 

There is a quite a bit of that, especially from the writers. (Abrams basically got everybody to talk, and at length, which is impressive.) It's pretty obvious reading the book that Ed Burns played a massive and perhaps underappreciated role in making that show good. He was like the opposite end of the weight to David Simon. Also the late Robert Chew, who played Proposition Joe, was like a father figure to a bunch of the younger actors. I wouldn't have guessed that.