OT - Summer Reading Book Reports

May your colon experience discomfort.

This summer I have read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire.  I'm waiting for The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest to arrive next week.

I have never laughed so much reading Andy Wier's 'The Martian'. So damn funny.

but I would strongly recommend David McCullough's The Wright Brothers. Riveting read, and it gave me a profound appreciation for just how much went into their development of the first successful airplane. 

I've been doing a 41-book reading challenge for 2016 so I've done a lot of summer reading. I'm already at 30 books for the year.

My favorite book I've read this year/summer, by far, is The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach. It revolves around a division 3 baseball player and his little midwestern college. It's amazing. Read it.

I'm not much of a book reader, but I did ready Tim Kurkjian's I'm Fascinated by Sacrifice Flies this summer.  I have always been a big baseball fan since I was little kid. I really enjoyed reading this book. Lots of great stories and statistical oddities in this book.  If you are a big baseball fan, you will really like it.  

Thin Air and Where Men Win glory by Jon Krakeur.  Both very good.  He is one of the best living American authors IMO.  Granted, he is no Cormac McCarthy but when you look at these two along with Into the Wild and Under the Banner of Heaven, he has an impressive body of work.

Second reading of the Coughlin trilogy by Dennis Lehane.  It is a shame more people don't know about those books.  Ben Affleck is adapting the second of the three called Live By Night.  I imagine this will drive some to read all of them.

Rogue Lawyer by Jon Grisham.  Same old stuff but still entertaining.

Columbine by Dave Cullen.  Fascinating and Terrifying.  A must read for true crime readers.

Stephen King's "The Dark Half" at the beginning of the summer. Since starting it, I've read 3 other books:

"Mossflower", childhood classic

"Miss Peregrine's...Children", better than I thought

"2001: A Space Odyssey" , amazingly entertaining for a short read

I have yet to finish "The Dark Half". Not Mr. King's finest work, IMO. 

Highly reccomend "When Breath Becomes Air" by Paul Kalanithi.

Easy read, only 260ish pages. Very well written, and the subject matter is very important. Succesful neurosurgeon about to complete residency is diagnosed with lung cancer- the book chronicles how he deals with the news and what he decides is most important in his life as his lives out his last couple years.

One of the few books I've read that made me tear up multiple times. 

Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow - Excellent retelling of Hamilton's story. I read it before I saw Hamilton this summer. 

The Girls by Emma Cline - Hotshot debut novel about a girl in the 1970s who falls in with a Manson-esque muder-and-sex cult. Excellent prose. Author has a great talent for layering short descriptive sentence on top of each other to great effect. The plot is only so-so. I suspect she will write a truly great novel one day.

Hard Red Spring by Kelley Kerney - Historical fiction about Guatemala from 1900-1990 with emphasis on US intervention (especially that of Pat Robertson) told through the story of four women who overlap in some way. Plot felt very secondary to the author making her point about Guatemalan politics. Still a very good book, would recommend.

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen - Pultizer Prize winner skurnie mentioned above. I enjoyed it in the end but found the first 50 pages to be a slog. Interesting narrative style with the first 75% told as a "confession" to a soldier.

All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr - Best thing I read all summer. 500 pages that flew by about a German soldier and a blind girl in WW2. A masterpiece.

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami - I got into Murakami a few years back and really liked him but I hated this book. Thought it was terrible and all the female characters unrealistic. I have no idea why this particular novel of his was a sensation.

But What If We're Wrong: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past by Chuck Klosterman - Not my favorite set of Klosterman essays but still enjoyable. Basically built around the theme that we look back at people 100 or 200 years ago and see all the things they were "wrong" about (be it science, morality, etc) but when we picture the future, we think it'll be mostly the same as it is now. Attempts to determine what we're "wrong" about. A neat thought experiment.

The Secret History by Donna Tartt - First novel from the author of The Goldfinch. Excellent book about greek classics students. Fantastic read. Probably the second best thing I read this summer.

Zero K by Don DeLillio - Not one of DeLillo's best. A story about cryogenics and the moral reprocussions.

The Plot Against America by Phillip Roth - Historic fiction that posits the idea that Charles Lindburgh runs for President in 1940 and beats FDR running on a campaign on appeasement to the Germans and a refusal to get into WWII. Massive antisemitism then takes over nationwide. Don't want to get into politics but boy, oh boy, did it make me think of a political candidate who is running for something or other.

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara - Trying to finish this up before football season. An extremely well-written novel that feels like a constant gutpunch. Deals with systemica child abuse as a theme and honestly, I put it down sometimes and feel wildly depressed. Can't give it a proper review until its done but so far it seems worthy of the praise (and Man Booker nom) its gotten.

Obviously I also read every page of Hail To The Victors 2016. 5 stars.

It started by the TV show, which was on last summer.  My brother had read the series and said you'd love it.  So I watched and then got invested.

So there's 5 books and they are very good if you like sci-fi, aliens, space, etc.

I started reading them over the summer and now on book 5.  Book 4 is my favorite.  But I rate them at that 4 star 5 star range.  Great characters.  Great plots.  Book 6 comes out in September.  I'd recommend.  George R.R. Martin did.  He loves the books.

I'd be remiss if I didn't say you all should read the Pierce Brown Red Rising Trilogy.  Without a doubt my favorite trilogy of all time. Finished book 3 in about 2 days after it came out earlier this year.  Just fantastic.  Break The Chains!

Been dissapointed with my summer reading so far.

Finally got around to reading The Road (been meaning to for years). I don't get all the praise. The writing style was interesting. But the story was boring and repetitive. And the world building and character development was nothing special.

Also read The Revenant. I did not enjoy reading it at all, found it to be long and pointless.

I have read some David Mitchell and have really enjoyed his stuff (Cloud Atlas, The Bone Clocks, Slade House). So I picked up The 1000 Autumns of Jacob De Zoet.His adapting his writing style to the type of story he is writing usually is very compelling, but in this book I thought it made it very difficult to read. And the story wasn't interesting enough to make up for that.

APOLOGIES FOR THE LENGTH (TL:DR - Recommended  Reading)

Jack Kennedy; Elusive Hero by Chris Matthews - The first biography that I've read of President Kennedy's brief and impressive life. I was surprised by some of the revelations about his struggles with debilitating back problems and other lifelong illnesses that might have held back a less-determined man. LINK

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach - The first novel that I'd read in many years, thanks to the recommendation of a fellow passenger on a flight between New York.and Florida. A reviewer said that “The Art of Fielding is mere baseball fiction the way Moby Dick is just a fish story.”  By using references to Moby Dock throughout the novel, I found that Harbach weaved the lives of five very different people brought together through a baseball team at a small Michigan college in a much more satisfying way than Herman Melville’s tale about the passions and struggles of those aboard the Pequod to catch the elusive white whale. LINK

Back to the Garden: The Story of Woodstock and How It Changed a Generation by Pete Fornatale - I've owned this book for several years and I met the author (a well-known New York City FM Radio DJ) before he died, but every year during the anniversary of the Woodstock Music and Arts Exposition, I like to re-read the book as a reminder of what I missed by having turned down the chance to go to Woodstock. One of my life's great regrets. For those too young to have known about this event and to those like me who vivdly remember the event, it's a great look at one of the seminal music events of the 20th century. LINK

Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann - The book that led to the HBO film about the 2008 Presidential election. Interesting read. There are many more details in the book than the film could reveal. I suspect that their book about the 2016 Presidential election will be quite different. LINK.

The Baseball Whisperer: A Small-Town Coach Who Shaped Big League Dreams by  Michael Tackett - Through his summer baseball team, Merl Eberly of Clarinda, Iowa helped to mold Ozzie Smith into an MLB Hall of Famer and improved the lives of hundreds of young men who played for the Clarinda A's. Eberly might've been cut from the same cloth as Bo Schembechler. An easy read that I read in a day when I didn't have any distractions from Olympics and presidential campaign coverage. Recommended for every member of the Michigan baseball team. LINK

The Plot Against America by Philip Roth - Remember how President Charles A. Lindbergh managed to keep the United States out of World War II with his isolationist, anti-semitic "America First" movement and his alliances with the Nazis and the Axis powers?  Roth takes reminiscences from his childhood in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey, along with actual historical events and a fictional account of a popular demagogue's ascendancy to the presidency and invents a story of what might have been. I found it hard to stop reading. LINK