Reading Update...

Bill Kauffman's Bye Bye Miss American Empire: Neighborhood Patriots, Backcountry Rebels, And Their Underdog Crusades To Redraw American's Political Map (2010).

Sample quote: "The American Empire is dead. That gathering murmur you hear is not sobbing: Good riddance to the damn monster. Rather, the noise is the sweet hum of revolution, of subjects learning how to be citizens, of people shaking off (or flipping off) their Wall Street and Pentagon overlords and taking charge of their lives once more, whether as members of verdant countryside or the sodality of the city neighborhood."

Reading Update...

The Freedom Manifesto: How To Free Yourself from Anxiety, Fear, Mortgages, Money, Guilt, Debt, Government, Boredom, Supermarkets, Bills, Melancholy, Pain, Depression, Work, and Waste by Tom Hodgkinson (2006)

Sample quote from the chapter titled 'Forget Government:' "Then there is the spectacle of a general election. Every five years or so, the people, who have been more or less ignored by the politicians since the previous election, are suddenly bombarded with the notion that voting is very important. ... I suppose that the whole thing can be enjoyed for a few moments as a piece of entertainment. The mistake is to think that it has the slightest meaning or relevance to our everyday lives whatsoever."

Reading Update...

American Splendor: Unsung Hero by Harvey Pekar and David Collier (2003)

Reading Update...

Runaway American Dream: Listening To Bruce Springsteen (2005) by Jimmy Guterman

Sample quote: “The rock ‘n’ roll era ended some time between the release of Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s Ragged Glory and the death of Kurt Cobain, roughly around the same time ‘hot topic’ changed from something exciting to talk about to the name of a retail chain in shopping malls that specialized in goth and metal fashion. When someone in purple hair, covered with tattoos and sporting a safety -pin-pierced cheek smiles at you in a Hot Topic store and asks, ‘How may I help you, sir?”, the co-option of rock ‘n’ roll culture by commercial culture is pretty much complete.”

Reading Update...

Jesus Land by Julia Scheeres (2005)

Scheeres attended my high school (Harrison High School in West Lafayette, IN) five years before I started there. Part of this memoir is about her time at Harrison H.S. "Weird" is the best word that I can think of to describe the experience of reading a book written by a person that attended my high school at almost the same time that I did. "Weird" and that is for sure.

Reading Update...

The Sorrow Of War: A Novel Of North Vietnam by Bao Ninh (1993)

This novel is written by a veteran of the Vietnam War that fought with the North Vietnamese Army.

Sample quote: "He wrote, cruelly reviving the images of his comrades, of the mortal combat in the jungle that became the Screaming Souls, where his battalion had met its tragic end. He wrote with hands numbed by the cold, trembling with the fury of his endeavor, his lungs suffocating with cigarette smoke, his mouth dry and his breath foul, as all around him the men fought and fell, one by one, with loud painful screams, amidst loud exploding shells, among thunderclaps from the rockets pouring down from the helicopter gunships."

Reading Update...

Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006)

Sample quote: "He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like groundfoxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it."

Reading Update...

War Is Boring: Bored Stiff, Scared To Death In The World's Worst War Zones by David Axe and Matt Bors (2010)

Sample qoute: "We are a world at war, sometimes quietly often not. We are the cleverest monsters, and we deserve everything we've got coming."

Reading Update...

Bret Easton Ellis's Imperial Bedrooms (2010)

This novel is the sequel to Ellis's novel Less Than Zero.

Sample quote: "I go into my office without turning on the lights. I check e-mails from all of the accounts: reminder of a dinner with the Germans financing a script, another director meeting, my TV agent asking if I've finished the Sony pilot yet, a couple of young actors wanting to know what's happening with The Listeners, a series of invites to various Christmas parties, my trainer at Equinox--having heard from another client that I'm back--wondering if I'd like to book any sessions. I take an Ambien to get to sleep since there's not enough vodka."

Reading Update...

Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried (1990)

Sample quote:

"In many cases a true war story cannot be believed. If you believe it, be skeptical. It’s a question of credibility. Often the crazy stuff is true and the normal stuff isn’t, because the normal stuff is necessary to make you believe the truly incredible craziness.

In other cases you can’t even tell a true war story. Sometimes, it’s just beyond telling."

Reading Update...

Mike and Harriet McManus's Living Together: Myths, Risks & Answers (2008)

Sample quote: "Cohabitation is the worst possible preparation for a healthy marriage. It increases the odds of divorce by 50 percent."

Reading Update...

Evelio Rosero's The Armies (2007) [Translated by Anne McLean]

Sample quote:

‘Profesor, he said into my ear, ‘they didn’t kill you while you slept?’
‘Of course not,” I managed to say once I had recovered from the question. And I tried to laugh: ‘Do you not see that I am here with you?’
And, nevertheless, we stood looking at each other for a few seconds, as if we could not believe it.
‘And who was going to kill me?’ I asked. ‘And why?’
‘That’s what I was told,’ he replied.

Reading Update...

Tim O'Brien's The Nuclear Age (1985)

Sample quote: "Is it uncouth to speak plainly? Nuclear war—am I out of key with my times? An object of pity? Am I comic? Here, now, digging, my wife and daughter locked away, the hole egging me on, am I crazy to extrapolate doom from the evidence all around me. Minuteman and Backfire, a world stockpiled with 60,000 warheads? Are the numbers too bald, too clumsy? Am I indiscreet to say it? Nuclear war."

Reading Update...

War Made Easy: How Presidents And Pundits Keep Spinning Us To Death by Norman Solomon (2005)

Sample quote: "As an astute cliche says, truth is the first casualty of war. But another early casualty is conscience. ... Conscience is not on the military's radar screen, and it's not on our television screen. But government officials and media messages do not define the limits and possibilities of conscience. We do."

Reading Update...

The Baseball Maniac's Almanac (2nd Edition) by Bert Randolph Sugar (2010)

Sample Entry:

Players with 400 Home Runs And 10 Steals of Home, Career
Lou Gehrig...493...15
Babe Ruth....714...10

Reading Update...

Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum Of Compulsory Schooling (Special Collector's Edition) by John Taylor Gatto (2005)

Sample quote:

The license I have certifies that I am an instructor of English language and literature, but that isn’t what I do at all. I don’t teach English; I teach school. …
Teaching means different things in different places, but seven lessons are universally taught from Harlem to Hollywood Hills. They constitute a national curriculum. … These are the things I teach … ‘confusion,’ ‘class position,’ ‘indifference,’ ‘emotional dependency,’ ‘intellectual dependency,’ ‘provisional self-esteem,’ and ‘one can’t hide.’

Reading Update...

Keys To The Rain: The Definitive Bob Dylan Encyclopedia (2004) by Oliver Trager

This book answers the question: What do Bob Dylan and the song "Old MacDonald Had A Farm" have to do with each other? Answer: Dylan played an instrumental version of this song to open his concerts in Dallas and Oklahoma in September of 1990.

I didn't read all 724 pages of this book.

Reading Update...

The Underground Baseball Encyclopedia: Baseball Stuff You Never Needed To Know And Can Certainly Live Without by Robert Schnakenberg (2010)

This book is hilarious and great. What else can I say about a book that has entries on Strat-O-Matic Baseball and Jack Kerouac?

Sample entry on Ty Cobb: "Crabby, bigoted Hall of Famer who carved out a well-deserved reputation as one of the game's archetypal bastards. An unreconstructed racist of the old-school Southern variety, the so-called Georgia Peach set a standard for villainy that no player of his magnitude has ever quite matched."

Reading Update...

Shoot Out The Lights by Hayden Childs (2008).

This book is from the 33 1/3 series of books.

Overall, this book was disappointing. My rating is 2 1/2 stars out of five. The music criticism in this book raised the rating by about one star.

The fiction part of the story was not good. Sample quote: "Bonny didn't die the night I went to murder her, but twenty-five years later she did. Sandy Denny didn't die the night she fell down the stairs, but a month later. After the fall, it doesn't matter whether you fell on your own or if there was a hand there to push you. What matters is who you touched along the way, and how fast they'll come running when you need them."

Blech.

Reading Update...

Bob Dylan Revisited (2009)

Overall, I was disappointed with this book because there are too many literal interpretations of the lyrics in the drawings. ("Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" is most guilty.)

My favorite chapter is "Not Dark Yet" by Zep, which is simple and tasteful.