Books Thread

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beantownbubba
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Re: Books Thread

Post by beantownbubba »

beantownbubba wrote:
Tue May 30, 2023 11:01 am
Jordan Harper apparently wrote one mystery before Everybody Knows but I had never heard of him or it when I picked this one up And boy was I surprised. Excellent. LA noir for the 21st century. Wonderful writing. I'd have to reach pretty deep to find anything to criticize about this so I won't. Highly recommended.
So, I've now read Harper's first book, She Rides Shotgun. It is a very different kind of book but it is excellent and the lead character, an 11 year old girl named Polly is a marvelous creation. If you are only going to read one, I'd make it Everybody Knows, but both are well worth your time.
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beantownbubba
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Re: Books Thread

Post by beantownbubba »

Barry Eisler is the author of the John Rain series of thrillers which is among the best series in the genre; truly outstanding. His books since then have been less consistent. IMHO they've always been worth the time but they're not as consistently excellent. Eisler is also a really smart guy w/ deep knowledge not only of spying (he was a CIA field agent) but of societal issues like trafficking, abuse and privacy/cybersecurity and his books usually include interesting/knowledgeable takes on one or more of those subjects. All of which is a long way around to saying that I just finished his most recent book, Amok, which features one of the characters in some of the earlier books and this one is a winner. It is mostly set in East Timor, a neglected part of the world that has suffered tremendously as a "passive" non-voluntary participant in "big power" machinations, including significant deaths which may or may not meet the strict definition of "genocide" but which were pretty awful by any definition. I hope that doesn't make the book sound like a polemic, because it's not, but I do appreciate him shining a light in a dark place. The two main characters are very well drawn as is the main villain and the book hits all the requirements of the thriller genre. If I had to choose, I'd read the Rain books (in order) first, but this is a good choice as a standalone especially if you're trying to fill time on a long flight.
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schlanky
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Re: Books Thread

Post by schlanky »

RIP Cormac McCarthy

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beantownbubba wrote:
Mon Jun 12, 2023 11:42 am
Barry Eisler is the author of the John Rain series of thrillers which is among the best series in the genre; truly outstanding.
I'm a big fan of Eisler's and had no idea Amok was out. Thanks for the mention of it, BTB---just placed my order.
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beantownbubba
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Re: Books Thread

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Timing is everything. After long waits I finally got both Dennis Lehane's Small Mercies and S.A. Cosby's All the Sinners Bleed at the same time and read them back to back. Relatively heavy-themed books but so worth it! Early on in Small Mercies a young man dies and a young girl goes missing. The events may be related but this isn't a mystery in the usual sense. It is an incredibly portrait of Boston, especially South Boston, at a particular moment in time, that time being the incredibly incendiary moment after busing has been ordered to desegregate the schools and is about to start with the new school year. The Whitey Bulger based (I assume) character is deservedly skewered but everyone else is portrayed with heart and understanding but without at all overlooking their many serious flaws. What this book really is, is the fictional companion piece to J. Anthony Lukac's non-fiction masterpiece, Common Ground, as far as I know still the unequaled story of those times. Highly recommended as long as you don't expect a "classic" mystery.

I don't want to diminish All the Sinners Bleed in any way, because if I had read them in opposite order, the opposite would be true, but Sinners is in its way a companion piece to Small Mercies in that both books examine racism and its effects on a small microcosm of society with great insight and understanding. Sinners is closer to the genre mystery/thriller but it is mostly concerned with far bigger game, a small southeastern Virginia county's coming to grips with its painful history in still painful ways. Cosby's take is more specifically from the African American perspective which is very welcome and to the extent I can say, he sure seems to nail it. The main character, Titus, is the first Black sheriff in the county and he is faced with a series of horrific crimes in the context of a society still dominated by racism and racial attitudes. A cry of pain, anger and determination. Highly recommended.
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beantownbubba
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Re: Books Thread

Post by beantownbubba »

Gangland by Chuck Hogan. It's not The Town but it's pretty darn good. Like Don Winslow, Hogan has a great gift for turning true stories into pretty compelling, very authentic sounding fiction. It always surprises me when writers display in depth "home town feel" for multiple cities. Charlestown (Boston) and Chicago in Hogan's case.
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beantownbubba
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Re: Books Thread

Post by beantownbubba »

Some of Tom Verlaine's 50,000 book collection is up for sale this weekend in Brooklyn if you're interested.
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chuckrh
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Re: Books Thread

Post by chuckrh »

Excellent read. Can't wait to see the movie when it gets to streaming platforms.
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Re: Books Thread

Post by jr29 »

An Ordinary Man: The Surprising Life and Historic Presidency of Gerald R. Ford

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Re: Books Thread

Post by whatwouldcooleydo? »

jr29 wrote:
Sun Nov 26, 2023 8:59 am
An Ordinary Man: The Surprising Life and Historic Presidency of Gerald R. Ford
Don’t get Coach started on Gerald Ford 🤣



I met both Ford and Carter on the same day on 1976. Both were campaigning in Asheville so we met them at the airport. Got to shake Ford’s hand…and he didn’t fall down 😉 hell, come to think of it, Reagan came through that same day. He was campaigning as well. So I met three POTUS on the same day.
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beantownbubba
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Re: Books Thread

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I guess the ending(s) will appeal to some readers but I found the tie-ups of the various plot strands a bit disappointing, but other than that, Matthew Richardson's The Scarlet Papers is stellar. Totally compelling. A well told very complicated tale that spans decades; it can be a little hard to follow at first but once you catch on to the rhythm the multi-levels, complications, confusions, surprises, large cast of characters, etc are handled masterfully (until, in my case, the very end). Very highly recommended.
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beantownbubba
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Re: Books Thread

Post by beantownbubba »

The Last Devil to Die by Richard Osman is the latest in the Thursday Mystery Club series. About 80% of it is true to form but 20% of it is kind of a sucker punch to the gut. In retrospect I should have expected it, but I didn't, which made for some difficult reading, but still, recommended.
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Re: Books Thread

Post by tinnitus photography »

Clams wrote:
Sun Oct 26, 2014 4:57 pm
The 80 Books Every Man Should Read (from Esquire)

http://www.esquire.com/the-side/feature ... fb#slide-1
sorry for digging up this old post but it was the most recently read in this thread for me... shows how much reading i do.

i totaled 11, which is pathetic.



not as pathetic as the amount of women authors in that list of 80 though.

beantownbubba
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Re: Books Thread

Post by beantownbubba »

I realized that I never posted about Paul Murray's The Bee Sting, which I read a couple of months ago. The book was a sensation last year, winning all kinds of rave reviews, prizes and top ten (often top 1) listings. Whatever else I want to say about the book, it's clear why it earned all those accolades. It is masterfully written and Murray handles and makes use of the complicated structure in impressive fashion. There are multiple sentences that just make you stop and reread them. But...

I found it hard to read. The story is told through the "voices" of several characters and a couple of them are just tough to read. The story centers on a horribly dysfunctional family in which each member is dysfunctional in their unique ways and the combined dysfunction is kind of exponential which is sometimes hard to read about. Some of the difficult events the characters experience are foreshadowed in such a way that the increasing dread made it hard for me to continue to turn the pages, kind of a reverse thriller in that way. But that too is a compliment because one has to be highly engaged in a story and its characters to have that kind of reaction. All in all I'd say I admired the book as much or more than I liked it but I'm glad I read it and there's no question that it's worth your time.
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beantownbubba
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Re: Books Thread

Post by beantownbubba »

So I'm reading Mother, Daughter, Traitor, Spy, the latest book from Susan Elia MacNeal, an author I like. About 2 chapters in she provides the main character's "bio," and says she graduated from Boys & Girls High School in Brooklyn. We already know the character graduated college in 1940 so we're talking 1936ish. There was no Boys & Girls High School in 1936. Boys & Girls High School dates from the mid-1970's merger of Boys HS and Girls HS. I don't know much about Girls HS but Boys HS was/is legendary in Brooklyn and I think all of NYC for both the academic and sports achievements of its students and alumni. I hate stupid and sloppy mistakes like this and wish there were still editors who still edited books. Feh.
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beantownbubba
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Re: Books Thread

Post by beantownbubba »

Gregg Hurwitz's Lone Wolf is one of the best entries in his Orphan X series and a welcome return to form after what I thought were a couple of lesser efforts. The depiction of the protagonist's struggle to deal with and be a part of "the normal world" is one of the best examples of the evolution of a character currently on offer in the mystery/thriller genres. Hurwitz's warnings about the "algorithmic, digital state" and our susceptibility to it is scary, sobering and I suspect much too accurate for comfort (which is the point).
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chuckrh
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Re: Books Thread

Post by chuckrh »

beantownbubba wrote:
Thu Mar 28, 2024 10:58 am
Gregg Hurwitz's Lone Wolf is one of the best entries in his Orphan X series and a welcome return to form after what I thought were a couple of lesser efforts. The depiction of the protagonist's struggle to deal with and be a part of "the normal world" is one of the best examples of the evolution of a character currently on offer in the mystery/thriller genres. Hurwitz's warnings about the "algorithmic, digital state" and our susceptibility to it is scary, sobering and I suspect much too accurate for comfort (which is the point).
I thought it was good, too. Good writer for the most part.

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