Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Books!

I've been going through a bit of a reading binge lately (I'm sort of binging on everything but time lately, as I've mentioned), so here's a list of books I think you might enjoy.

First off, there's a wonderful new book about Hunter S. Thompson. It's titled Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson, and it consists entirely of interviews with people who knew him. It is a broad, vast canvas of impressions, as someone like Thompson eminently deserves, and it's tremendous reading.

If you want to understand what's happened in the gaming industry in the last decade, here's what you need to read: Roadshow!: The Fall of Film Musicals in the 1960s. The parallels are uncanny: massive budgets, massive promotion, fewer and fewer projects in production. As a bonus, it's wildly entertaining as well.

I was always (and still am) a huge fan of Richard Pryor, and there's a terrific new biography that just came out: Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him. The pain from which great comedy emerges is nothing short of excruciating.

I find the Lance Armstrong story as interesting as a Shakespearean story arc. He's a Russian nesting doll of fraud, and reading about him never gets old. A new book, Cycle of Lies, includes quite a bit of new information, and it's a dark and excellent read.

Here's a depressing but highly interesting and useful book: Pandora's Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal. The history of American food, surprisingly, is a fascinating subject, and the complexities involved in processed food are just amazing.

I enjoy anything Jeff Pearlman writes, and his new book is Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s. If that was the glory era of the NBA for you (like it was for me), then this is an absolute must-read.

Site Meter