[SoWhat.]

add any books {fiction/nonfiction} to this thread. works that you're in the midst of reading or novels that you've already read, books that really made an impression on you.

for the most part i read contemporary fiction but i also have a huge respect for the classics, i'm reading 'moby dick' by herman melville at the moment - i'll weigh in with my thoughts on the book after i finish reading it.

i was in a cafe a couple of days ago and this woman was standing there holding a copy of 'moby dick' in her hand. i told her i was reading it as well, we ended up having a great conversation about literature and film, turns out she's in the midst of illustrating a book for children. anyways, one of her favorite kid's books was 'where the wild things are' by maurice sendak, the book that spike jonze had made into a movie in 2009. full circle, one of maurice sendak's favorite authors was herman melville hence why she was reading 'moby dick'. in turn i'm going to check out 'where the wild things are', it's often all about when you come to reading a certain novel as to how much you enjoy it.
Sendak once praised Herman Melville’s writings, saying, “There’s a mystery there, a clue, a nut, a bolt, and if I put it together, I find me.”

 Moby-Dick-or-the-whale.jpg (486.15K)
Number of downloads: 1

[Spur]

Currently reading The Brothers by Lesley Downer. About the Tsutsumi family who are basically the Rockefellers of Japan and how the family came into so much power. Pretty awesome.

[Richard Vogt - bmxmountainbiker]

Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Issacson

I recently read Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation by Joseph Ellis

I look forward to American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson by Joseph Ellis

Richard Vogt
bmxmountainbiker

[Red Baron]

OMG. I feel like I have read 100 books in the past 10 years. It is too late tonite to get into specifics but I will chime in tomorrow.

It will be cool to see what others are into.

[COASTY]

Just finished Dave Mustaines "A life in metal" and am about to start on Ozzys "I am Ozzy"

[keep_it_warm]

Ok, I will admit it...I don't read anymore.

The last BOOK that I held in my hands and read cover to cover was probably 10-12 years ago.

[nycet3]

about to start the Keith Richards autobiography. hear it's pretty great.

[COASTY]

My buddy at work just finished the Keith Richards book. He said it was awesome too.

[SoWhat.]

Spur, on 18 September 2011 - 05:45 PM, said:

Currently reading The Brothers by Lesley Downer. About the Tsutsumi family who are basically the Rockefellers of Japan and how the family came into so much power. Pretty awesome.

i just pulled up the wiki page for the founder of this fortune, intriguing...

Yasujirō was notorious for his sexual appetite. In all, he had three wives and two mistresses by which he had seven acknowledged children, three of whom were legitimate. By all accounts, however, he had many more unacknowledged children by other mistresses and prostitutes, estimates of the number ranging from 50-100.

[PandaProAm420]

I read some H P Lovecraft every year about this time of year. I got a really nice hardcover of his complete works a few months ago, but I find myself reading it on my IPad more often then not.

That is not dead which eternal lies, and with strange eons even death may die...
Ia Ia! All hail the Great Cthulhu!

[Roc]

I'm close to finishing "One Second After" It's basically a story about forced survival in a small NC town, after a series of nuclear devices are detonated in the atmosphere above the Continental US, causing an EMP (Electro Magnetic Pulse)

With no power, communication, radios, transportation, a food chain, medical; everything electronic. Chaos ensues, while the Towns people enact Martial Law in order to gain control and restore a sense of order.

It really gives you something to think about if something like that had ever happened here... we'd be fucked!

[1966bmx]

nycet3, on 19 September 2011 - 04:47 AM, said:

about to start the Keith Richards autobiography. hear it's pretty great.

i wanna read that !

[big fire]

i went to public school and never learned to read !!!!

[Spur]

SoWhat., on 19 September 2011 - 12:06 PM, said:

i just pulled up the wiki page for the founder of this fortune, intriguing...

Yasujirō was notorious for his sexual appetite. In all, he had three wives and two mistresses by which he had seven acknowledged children, three of whom were legitimate. By all accounts, however, he had many more unacknowledged children by other mistresses and prostitutes, estimates of the number ranging from 50-100.

That's just the half of it. Yasujiro is the father of the two brothers (different mothers), came from nothing, was essentially a backwoods rice farmer. It is a great book so far.

[lboorse2]

Reading Dave Grohl: Foo Fighters, Nirvana, and Other Misadventures. It's one of many biographies on Dave.

Couple points I found interesting:

DG has the image of a very down to earth, every day guy who just happens to be in a famous rock band forgoing all of the celebrity BS that most people of his stature seem to be a part of intentionally or not (and I think it's an awesome image to uphold). That said, Dave's been married 3 times.

Anyone that's not a fan of DG or the Foo Fighters might not realize that, if we could harness the energy DG has, we could probably power the entire country without a single electrical power plant (OK - that sounded a little like one of those Chuck Norris quips, I'll admit). This guy literally never stops, and hasn't stopped since he started playing music. He's typically involved in at least one other project simultaneously with the Foo Fighters. A lot of people think Nirvana ended and then he went out and started creating the first Foos album. Dave wrote a lot of the music for the first FF album while on tour with Nirvana. Some of it, before he was even with Nirvana (many people speculate that Dave was planning to leave Nirvana - Cobain suicide or not - though Dave will always deny that). He recorded on his own quite often "for fun" (so he says). I personally believe he kept doing it until he perfected what he was trying to do and once he got it where he wanted it, he'd be ready to go on out on his own. Foo Fighters typically write more than an album's worth of songs ~WHILE~ on tour. If there's more than a year's release time from the end of a tour to the next album, it's likely because he was working on one of many side projects (most recently Them Crooked Vultures).

He's a funny m-fer with a wicked sense of humor (though that can be deduced if you've ever seen almost any Foo Fighters music video).

After Kurt Cobain's death and the resulting end of Nirvana, Dave was asked and seriously considered joining Tom Petty and the Heart Breakers as their full time drummer.

[Richard Vogt - bmxmountainbiker]

big fire, on 19 September 2011 - 02:17 PM, said:

i went to public school and never learned to read !!!!

That's OK, Fire, as long as you know how to keep posting those awesome photographs you have in your stash!

Richard Vogt
bmxmountainbiker

[big fire]

Richard Vogt - bmxmountainbiker, on 19 September 2011 - 02:18 PM, said:

big fire, on 19 September 2011 - 02:17 PM, said:

i went to public school and never learned to read !!!!

That's OK, Fire, as long as you know how to keep posting those awesome photographs you have in your stash!

Richard Vogt
bmxmountainbiker

hey richard thanks. i will post some more tonight after work....

[Richard Vogt - bmxmountainbiker]

"Keith Richards is shooting heroin into his eyeballs and still touring all right! I'm getting mixed signals! I picture nuclear war and two things surviving: Keith and cockroaches!" - Bill Hicks

When my daughter came down to visit this summer from Georgia Tech, she brought a copy of Life and I read a good bit of it. FUCK! Most human beings could not survive the sheer intensity of this guy's life, so it's good we get to look at it through the relatively safe filter of a book...

Richard Vogt
bmxmountainbiker

[getset]

I made a real push to get some books out of the way this Summer and am happy with what I was able to knock out. A few of the books already mentioned here, Melville Moby Dick, Keith Richards Life, Bob Dylan Chronicles, Larry McMurtry Lonesome Dove, Jeannette Walls The Glass Castle, Gogol The Overcoat (and others), Stieig Larsson The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Karel Capek The Absolute At Large, Salman Rushdie Midnight's Children, Cormac McCarthy The Road, Julie Klausner I Don't Care About Your Band. I'd also recommend Legs McNeil Please Shoot Me as a great read for any punk rock fans, I lent my copy out to a friend a few months ago and still haven't gotten it back.

[Richard Vogt - bmxmountainbiker]

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry may be the best novel I've ever read... certainly in my top 5 and the best western ever. I read it 25 years ago and then re-read it recently. It had an entirely different meaning to me now that I have a quarter of a century more years under my belt.



Richard Vogt
bmxmountainbiker