Recommend Some Good Summer Reading
fishmongerfunk
4,154 Posts
a page turner. a fun, easy, satisfying read. fiction or non.ie. i would recommend mario puzo's "the godfather", tom wolfe's "bonfire of the vanities". or david ritz's "divided soul" to those who have not read them.i like elmore leonard but not sure if i have read all the good ones. can you guys drop some knowledge? thanks
Comments
Denis Johnson just wrote a pulp novel, NOBODY MOVE, that I read in an afternoon, and f*cking loved. His literary work is among my favorite, but this one was great for fun.
I really like John D McDonald, he wrote a ton of books with an amazingly high standard throughout. Always some crime, with a good dose of life observation and philosophy thrown in.
Same for Donald Westlake, including his books written as Richard Stark.
Both write satisfying books that are easy to burn through or take slowly, whichever's your mood.
Now Reading this:
A combo of fantasy and alternative history. Takes place during the Napoleonic wars.
not really fun. though best read in the sunnier months over the bleaker ones imo. essential reading still.
vampires + virus + Guillermo Del Toro = awesome, whens the movie out.
I saw that advertised somewhere. It looks very cool.
SO well written, amazing...very recommended
have you ever read "the man whose teeth were all exactly alike"? Another staightforward, no science fiction business Dick novel...enjoyable.
no i havent read that one but i would like to check it out, as well as "confessions of a crap artist" which i guess is not SF and also very good.
"flow my tears" is still in the SF genre but is more linear and just kind of easier to read then some of PKDs other tales, it deals a lot with self-identity and relationships.
You have great taste. This is an epic book. I can see most SS folks getting down with this.
It's made me want to read this one as well...
I found this book to be a real disappointment.
David Halberstam's Breaks of the Game covers a lot of the same material and is infinitely better.
Yeah, it's weird how Feinstein repeats certain detailed segments of the story as if you didn't catch them in the earlier chapters.
I've read Halberstam before, at least I did Summer of '49 about a decade ago...and yeah, my assumption would be that his would be a better treatment.
Guess I'll have to grab that one as well...thanks for the tip.
The Halberstam book was out of print, but you can probably find an inexpensive used copy on half.com or amazon. It's also possible that his death two years ago resulted in the publisher making it available again--really one of the best basketball books ever written.
Not trying to hate w/r/t the Feinstein book, by the way--it just seemed like he had a limited amount of material that he was trying to get as much mileage out of as possible.
Yeah, I've seen the Breaks of the Game book before...just didn't realize what it was about from the title alone.
And yeah, don't worry about dogging the Feinstein book as your critique is dead-on.
I love this man's writing. His Lew Griffin series, set in 1960s New Orleans might arguably be even more astonishing. Really incredible stuff and a very unique style.
I just ordered that from Amazon last week.