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Book Blegging Again

Hi All,

I am trying to commit to some more enjoyable page turners this summer than the typical trudge through dense economics tracts. In the past I have particularly enjoyed things like stories about Ernest Shackleton’s misadventures, novels from John Irving, quirky histories like Dava Sobel’s story of the Longitude prize, and such. Any particularly compelling page turners you could recommend to take as I hike and backpack this summer?

Back to our regularly scheduled programming soon.  And MANY thanks for your suggestions. Almost everything I read and enjoy has come from trusted recommendations.

6 Responses to “Book Blegging Again”

  1. timtimee says:

    London Fields – Martin Amis.

  2. Speedmaster says:

    Some I’ve enjoyed recently.

    Stealing Rembrandts: The Untold Stories of Notorious Art Heists
    Amazon.com: The Armchair Economist: Economics and Everyday Life
    Cruise Confidential: A Hit Below the Waterline: Where the Crew Lives, Eats, Wars, and Parties
    The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari
    Futility Closet: An Idler’s Miscellany of Compendious Amusements
    Heads In Beds by Jacob Tomsky
    Exploding The Phone by Phil Lapsley
    Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America by Gustavo Arellano
    The Sex Lives of Cannibals by J. Maarten Troost

  3. Harry says:

    Tom Clancy’s last novel Command Authority, set in the Ukraine, is the best I have read in the last four months. It is uncanny how Clancy starts a plot, and then a few years later when the book is finally published, it speaks what is happening, though not under the even hand of President Jack Ryan. I have read everything Clancy has written, and his writing voice was better back when he wrote every word himself (with acknowledgement to his editors and the U.S. Navy).

    Vince Flynn also died last summer. Even though every book he wrote had a maddening typo that made me want to tell him to let me be a free copy editor before his next book went to the publisher, his books are fun to read if you like violence done to Islamic Fundamentalists. These books should be read off-campus with a brown paper book cover, like The Tropic of Cancer, out of disapproving view of serious readers or your parents. I would recommend American Assassin, the novel where Mitch Rapp, a lacrosse player from Syracuse (NY) becomes what he is to be, and then the stage is set for subsequent operations. Hamas sympathasizers, the Iranian theocratic leaders, and most regular academic liberals will not like this book because it uses four-letter words.

    Also, I would recommend to WC any of the Arthur Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes short stories that he has not read, or even those he read thirty years ago. If one wants something different, walking over the moor without a smart phone, relying on one’s deductive capacities not to fall into a pit with a man trap, is different experience, if one does not want to read about assination and rocket-propelled grenades. Where the most important clue being that the dog did not bark.

  4. Harry says:

    If WC ever comes by, even for a very short visit, I have a copy of See You Later Alligator, by the novelist William F. Buckley, Jr. By accident, I have not given it to a librarian of our local library, to whom it I recommended, and that is an awkward sentence. Other Buckley spy novels are well worth reading. This is another book you have to cover up with brown paper if you are going to read it in the U of R Library cafeteria, because it has a critical tone about Fidel Castro and Nikita Kruschev.

    I swear, when I started to type Kruschev, my phone prompted Krugman. Don’t read any of these books in front of him. Or get him to autograph your copy of American Assassin.

  5. Dan says:

    Breakfast at Tiffany’s

    The House of Mirth

    Days of Fire

  6. Harry says:

    Forgive me if this is a duplicate post. You should download to your reading device the collected works of Robert Service. There are strange things done ‘neath the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold.

    Yes, literary critics call his verse cheap, but they are the same people who think Poe and Dickens were cheap, as opposed to snoozes like Jane Austen and Henry James, or the author of my copy of The Federal Reserve System, whoever he was. Instant Ambien.

    If you read The Cremation of Sam Magee to your children with some drama, you might get some good reviews around the camp fire.

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