Help, I need a good book ASAP!

Thanks Buck, the Suskind one is a good idea. I'll look up the others.

I just think it's great to have a good book on vacation. They become part of the memory. The last few books I've read on vacation were: Da Vinci Code, In Cold Blood, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and Black Hawk Down, but that's over a span of like five years ...

 

Well, I'm confident enough in my manhood to give it another thought ... but I can't make any promises ...

 

Plus, if your wife reads them, you won't have to pay for them!

 

That's "Me Talk Pretty One Day" by Sedaris. And if you want something shorter, "Holidays on Ice" is gold for the Macy's elf story.
Tom Robbins' second-best novel, "Jitterbug Perfume," is good, too.
David Foster Wallace's "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," but don't bother with the essay on whether the American novel is dead. Mind numbingly esoteric.

 

"The Fortress of Solitude" by Jonathan Letham -- it's about a white kid growing up in a black neighborhood in Brooklyn in the 1970s. Recommended if you're in to comic books, funk, graffiti and/or punk rock.

"Hit Man" by Lawrence Block. It's a collection of short stories about this guy who does murders for hire. The stories have kind of a "Colombo" or "Rockford Files" vibe...like HBO could do a dandy series on this guy's adventures. There are a couple of other books in the series.

Anything by Elmore Leonard -- "Be Cool", "Glitz", "Unknown Man No. 89" and "Swag" are especially good.

 

The Dark Tower series by Stephen King, starting with The Gunslinger.

Hell, anything by King, really ('It' is my favorite).

Da Vinci Code was an engrossing and quick read (though some of the literary types on here I'm sure will slam it).

There's a new Crichton book out, though I don't know anything about it.

 

You should read Fight Club, then watch the movie on a portable DVD player and prepare a 5-7 page report comparing/contrasting the two while placing each in its proper social context.

 

"Rum Punch" Elmore Leonard
"World War Z" Max Brooks
"I Am Legend" Richard Matheson

and speaking of "Fight Club," anything by Chuck Palahniuk if you haven't read him.

 

The White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty

"Gunnar Kaufman comes from a long line of African-American men who, at first glance, might be deemed a disgrace to their race. Well, okay, at second glance, too: His family tree includes a manservant so loyal no one had the nerve to tell him that his white master was dead; a first-generation-free artist who sought inspiration in a return to the slave lifestyle; a music promoter of white acts that ripped off Motown and R&B groups; and his father, who works proudly, wholeheartedly and unconflictedly for the LAPD.

Gunnar has his own problems: his mother "rescues" him from a life of Santa Monica privilege (Generation X style -- picture a smart, ironic boy who listens to Henry Rollins and hangs out with bar-mitzvahed surfers) and plops him down in inner-city L.A. They live near a "bustling Italian intersection, without the Italians" -- but with gangs, guns and girls sporting towering, sculptured hairdos who love to kick his ass." -- Jeanie Pyun (partial review)

 

My bad.
A very, very funny book. 'Naked' was good also. I think I got that title right.

 

"The Tender Bar," i believe was just released on paperback. That's my favorite new book of the past few years without a doubt. Great, great read.

 

I just started Generation Kill by Evan Wright. I'm just a few dozen pages in but it really has me hooked.