| Summer reading update |
[Jul. 31st, 2005|01:34 pm] |
A few more books I've finished recently:
-- The Great Game: The Myth and Reality of Espionage by Frederick P. Hitz has an interesting premise: comparing and contrasting real-life spy stories with their fictional counterparts. The result is something that while interesting to read isn't exactly something that has much of a long-lasting point.
-- The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson is a fantastic read, if you can swallow the copious details Larson weaves into his story. The result is something both educational and entertaining, though probably not light-reading fare.
-- A friend lent me Pop Goes the Weasal, by James Patterson, and so long as you take it for what it is--a cheap serial thriller--it's actually rather good. Patterson is quite good at making his story suspenseful without being trite, a rarity in the pulp fiction genre.
-- And finally, two books by John le Carré: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, both solid masterworks (though more so, the first one). |
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| Summer reading progress |
[Jun. 25th, 2005|02:27 pm] |
The sweltering heat, need of a break, and lack of my girlfriend have allowed me to finish a few more books lately. In order, most recently completed last:
-- American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin is the superb new biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Though it weighs in at over seven hundred pages, the book never lingers and never allows the reader to tire of this man's fascinating life.
-- Chatter: Dispatches from the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping is about the intelligence business, but the naive presentation given to it by Patrick Radden Keefe makes the book underwhelming most of the time and misguided the remainder.
-- Brassey’s Book of Espionage by John Laffin is a good, Cold War-centric view of the subject if it interests you.
-- 1776 by David McCullough really is as good as the reviews might lead you to believe. This is a smart, fast, and snappily erudite book about one of the most important chapters in world history, but done at a clip and with such an historical lens that you might come away from the book with a more nuanced understanding of the way this year's events culminated into so much.
-- Bel Canto by Ann Patchett is a charming, romantic, and smart book. Patchett lingers too long in her stylistic romanticism but the way her story comes together, and the tenderness with which she renders her characters makes this book another must-read.
This means I'm only up to 13 books finished this summer. I have a ways to go if I'm going to make 50 by the time law school starts. |
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| Three months |
[Jun. 5th, 2005|09:50 pm] |
It occurred to me the other day that one of the things that I don't do much any more is sleep. This thought became particularly apparent when I fell asleep for most of Saturday and did not feel any shame in this. Normally a development such as this would cause me to invoke ancient Urdu chants and stand on one leg whilst I did multivariate calculus. Yesterday though I just sort of slept. When I start law school I won't be able to do things like that. Sleep, I mean. I'm sure Torts will involve some sort of Urdu vocal poetry every now and then. If it doesn't I may very well have to reconsider.
Watched quite a few films this weekend, most of which have been reviewed as usual. I need to read more, though, since again once I start school in the evenings this particular pleasure will likely be denied to me, at least more often than it won't. This is basically a poorly disguised attempt to solicit a list of good books I ought to read with the remaining three months of my Free Time (or near it). Fire away, please--both fiction and non-fiction are appreciated, though because my well-read girlfriend has a penchant for good fiction I'm more lacking in the non-fiction department. I like to think of myself as more grounded in reality, anyway, but I'll let you decide.
To everyone graduating in the next week: congratulations, really. I wish I could be there, but in lieu of that know that there's always a door open for you here in DC. Unless it's not, and then you ought knock. |
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| Bake me a cookie |
[Jun. 1st, 2005|09:48 pm] |
Every now and then I get the chance to read a book, like in my last post about ten years ago, with actual pages and a cover and occasionally even text. A while ago I read The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, a collection of Yann Martel's short stories, and now I think you should do so as well. I was going to write some sort of clever half-baked take on the collection, but there you have it: two months and that's all I'm able to write, folks.
Actually, there is more, come to think of it--all my friends (well, some of them, anyway) are graduating from college now, which places me in a bit of an odd situation since I've been out in the Real World for a bit now. Some of them call me asking for advice when selecting places to live; others want to know if life outside college is really the stuff of public house fireside demon-tales; still others want to know what a 401(k) is and why should they care anyway. In a weird way, I'm also becoming a pseudo-student again: I'll be starting classes at Georgetown beginning August 29th, at which point my life will become, for lack of a better description, absolutely, stunningly insane. Essentially I will be at work and then at class from roughly 0630-2100, Monday through Friday, for a full academic year (the subsequent years are a little lighter, but my inflated point is still there). Still, I'm really looking forward to it--I wouldn't be doing it otherwise, I think. I hope. |
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| Who's this here? |
[Apr. 17th, 2005|07:53 pm] |
After a very long hiatus, I am (sort of) back. Basically I have very little free time outside of work at the moment, a situation that is going to do anything but get better when I start law school part-time this autumn. I intend to post here on an infrequent but still-more-than-not-at-all basis throughout.
I'd the opportunity to finish a couple of books in the past two weeks, including:
-- The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason, a sort of pedantic take on the whole business that Dan Brown got started with his wretched little tome, The Da Vinci Code. Caldwell and Thomason do better than Brown but still basically annoy me to the point that I wish they left a forwarding address on the book's dustjacket so I could send them some Eco. Their time would be better spent reading him than writing their own things. Not recommended.
-- Spycatcher by Peter Wright, a very interesting and at times touchingly amusing account of MI5's counterespionage granddaddy. Recommended.
-- One L by Scott Turow, a harrowing but overdone story of the author's first year at Harvard Law School. Makes me positively giddy I'll be going to Georgetown, and part-time, and that I already have a job I love. Recommended if you're a prospective law student; not otherwise.
-- Thank You For Smoking by Christopher Buckley. Typically amusing Buckley fair; recommended.
-- Saturday by Ian McEwan, a sophisticated and readable account of one day in a British doctor's life, centering around the post-9/11 world and the mindsets and passions that have been brought forth with it. The book actually delivers on the hype. Recommended.
-- Election 2004: How Bush Cheney '04 Won and What You Can Expect in the Future by Evan Thomas et al. An interesting but somewhat myopic view of the 2004 campaigns. Contains some rather funny bits about Joe Trippi in the first chapter that make the entire read worthwhile, if you're in to that sort of thing. Recommended for a quick read during a lazy weekend afternoon. |
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