Anybody read a good book lately?

[General_Failure]

Oh sorry, I thought this was the good book thread.

As a public service, here's what will happen in the book.

A conspiracy will be uncovered. The protagonist will be hunted by an unusual assassin. His/her good friend will appear to be helping every step of the way, but will in fact be the villain. Good guy/girl wins, gets the girl/guy.

[Sgt PSN]

everyone who went to see titanic in the theaters already knew the ship would sink at the end and it didn't stop them from making it one of the top grossing films of all time. 

browns' books are decent entertainment that allow for "lazy" reading.  in other words, i typically don't have to re-read paragraphs or look a bunch of words up in the dictionary to understand what's going on. 

the dialogue between the characters is usually cheesy and simple but he does really good job of going into detail and painting a vivid picture of everything that's going on.  visually, just about everything in davinci code and angels & demons looked almost identical to how i pictured it while reading the books. 

[rjs246]

Oh sorry, I thought this was the good book thread.

As a public service, here's what will happen in the book.

A conspiracy will be uncovered. The protagonist will be hunted by an unusual assassin. His/her good friend will appear to be helping every step of the way, but will in fact be the villain. Good guy/girl wins, gets the girl/guy.

Well done.

[General_Failure]

I've got a friend in the publishing business that leaked it to me.

[phattymatty]

wow the people in this country are so dumb right now....

http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/ref=pd_dp_ts_b_1

[Seabiscuit36]

Where the wild things are is farging badass and you know it

[phattymatty]

i was mostly talking about 2 and 3. 

[Sgt PSN]

maybe it's just me, but i'm really not interested in reading someone's memiors when they are only midway through life.  granted, i'm not interested in reading palin's at all but i don't really understand why people are putting their life story out there when they still have a lot of life left to live. 

hell, lebron james has a movie coming out that i guess is somewhat of a biography and dook is like 23 years old.  why the farg would i be interested in lebron's story right now? 

i know it's all just a marketing ploy and way for people to make more money, blah blah blah, but to me, a person's life isn't worth reading about until they've expired.  otherwise, it's an incomplete story. 

[Seabiscuit36]

wonder if the movie will have Nike Confiscating a clip of him getting dunked on by some other kid

[Sgt PSN]

lol.  that whole ordeal was pretty damn funny.  especially since lebron really didn't get dunked on.  it's not like that kid went straight at lebron and threw it down in his face or anything.   

[rjs246]

I don't know if I ever posted my review of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, but here it is: If you like Jane Austen and are embarrassed about it you'll probably enjoy having an excuse to read this book. Or if you enjoy zombies and want to culture yourself for your girlfriend who likes polite English costume dramas about polite English society and polite English cultural observations from the 1800s, then this book is a decent compromise.

If you don't fall into either of those categories, this book is really goddamned boring and the zombie action is weak and thrown into the story without much rhyme or reason making for a pretty choppy read.

I'll give it 3 stars because you have to applaud the effort, but in reality, blah.


The Men Who Stare at Goats: Here's my problem with this book. The author manages to string together a long series of random tidbits in what appears to be a coherent manner, but ultimately there was no point to anything we as readers have learned. "Hey everyone, look at all of the weird things our armed forces experimented with during the war on terror! They played a Barney song over and over! They played a Sesame Street song and the composer tried to sue for royalties! Maybe the CIA killed someone once or maybe they gave them LSD in an experiment and they lost their shtein."

It's all sort of fascinating in its premise (did the secretary of the armed services really believe that he could walk through walls? can you really kill gerbils with your impure thoughts?), but when I was done reading I wasn't sure what the point was. Sometimes the author is praising the idea of alternative battle methods. Sometimes he's mocking. Sometimes he's indifferent as a reporter. Sometimes he is actively goading people into delivering absurd information.

It was entertaining, but by and large it didn't really deliver on its promise as an absurdly entertaining collection of information with a defined message of some sort.


Fup: Only 50 pages or so and very enjoyable. Just a short story about swilling whiskey and fatass ducks and hunting wild boars.

[rjs246]

The Science of Fear: Very farging good. Does an excellent job of explaining why people are convinced that we are living in awful, scary times when in fact humanity has never had it so good. We are more educated, more healthy, longer living, more free and less prone to violence than at any time in the whole of human history. We are also consumed with worry and fear. Advertising, journalism and politicians take the lion's share of the blame here, but our natural inability to understand risk on a large scale is described in great detail.

Fascinating book. Highly recommended.

[SunMo]

I'm reading World War Z now.  it's about zombies.  zombies are bad.

[rjs246]

For all the McCarthy fans out there, I read a book of literary criticism of Blood Meridian put together by this professor at the Univerity of Idaho. I have no idea where one would go about finding it, but it was fantastic. It completely enhanced the experience of reading Blood Meridian and provided a lot of historical and literary context to the book. Great great stuff.

[mussa]

That book was so bad ass