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Gavin B. · 08-31-2010, 01:13 PM

2010 Summer Reading Notes & Book List

I've had a couple of weeks off work & I'm caught up with all my short term writing projects which has given me time to pursue my two favorite leisure activities, reading & listening to music. Today I'm going to cover a few of the books I've read over the summer & my next post will contain some of my favorite music from the summer of 2010.

Review of the Kindle E-Reader

I recently bought a Kindle reader & I'm hooked on it. The biggest benefit of the Kindle is you don't have to lug around any more heavy tomes or wrestle around in bed with 800 page book that weighs 12 pounds. The book prices are okay. At Amazon a book with a $30 list price can be downloaded for between $9.99 & $11.99 but there's a lot of grumbling about the pricing practices of the publishing houses here in the USA. Now that people are starting to use E-readers the list price of book downloads are steadily ticking upward. The price of the Kindle, however, is ticking downwards. Two weeks after I purchased a Kindle for $249, Amazon cut the price of the same model of Kindle to $189. Since then Amazon has developed a non-wireless version of the Kindle that you can synch directly from your computer processor for $139.

Another advantage of an E-Reader is that nearly every book written prior to 1930 is pubic domain and therefore available as a free download. There are a couple of non-profit literacy projects that are putting all the great books of the world into the digital format so people can access those books for free. As a result I've gotten free downloads of books by some of my favorite authors like Poe, Dostoevsky, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dumas, Victor Hugo, Keats, Shelly, Joseph Conrad, Ambrose Bierce & Mark Twain. Now for the book reviews:
==============================

Gavin B's Book Notes for the Summer 2010

Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War by Karl Marlantes- Matterhorn is written by an ex-Vietnam vet who spent almost 40 years putting together the great American novel about the Vietnam War. It's probably the best anti-war epic since Tolstoy's War & Peace. This novel isn't escapist fare & Marlantes' lucid storytelling is so vivid that reading the novel is an exhausting & harrowing experience but it's never dull. This book will make you feel you've done your own tour of duty in Nam by the time you get to the last page.
===================

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larsson
The recently deceased Swedish author Larsson's "The Girl Who" suspense/thriller trilogy have become the biggest sellers in the publishing world since the Harry Potter books. I read all three books of the trilogy early in the summer. They're great mysteries with an alluring & mysterious female computer hacker as the central character. At times Larsson will give you more information that you ever wanted to learn about Swedish politics but it all fits into overarching storyline of the three books.
===================

FDR by Jean Edward Smith- Every American high school graduate is aware of the historical significance of Franklin Roosevelt's 4 term presidency but can probably tell you little more than he was president during the Great Depression & World War II. Since our current worldwide economic situation has been compared to the Great Depression as of late, I decided to learn more about Roosevelt, his life & times. There are 3 or 4 first rate biographies of Roosevelt in print & after agonizing over the choices, I selected the Jean Edward Smith bio because it profiles Roosevelt from a psychosocial perspective & attempts to explain why a man from such a privileged blue blood family would end up become a traitor to his class and become a hero of the downtrodden & oppressed classes. It had a lot to do with Roosevelt's battle with polio which left him immobilized & in a wheelchair for his adult life. The are many parallels to Barack Obama & our current lean economic times. Roosevelt was also the target of hate mongering by the extreme right & the corporate titans who attempted to obstruct the New Deal & economic recovery in the same manner currently being used to deadlock Barack Obama.
====================

The Harvard Psychedelic Club by Don Lattin- This 600+ page book is the first authoritatively written history of Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, and the epic cast of characters that were responsible for the hippie, LSD counterculture. It's the best history of the Sixties revolution I've ever read.
=================

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test- by Thomas Wolfe- Since I've been researching the origins of the psychedelic culture over the summer, I decided to reread the book that started it all. Wolfe's 1968 novel is about renegade author Ken Kesey, the Merry Pranksters, LSD chemist Stanley Owsley & Jerry Garcia & the Grateful Dead's role in pscydelicizing most of the state of California in 1965 & 1966 with their public acid test events. It's supposedly fiction but Wolfe doesn't even bother to change the names of any of the books central characters. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test a classic relic of those bygone days when LSD was legal & live rock & roll was free to the public.
====================

The Passage: A Novel by Justin Cronin- The Passage is an epic horror/apocalypse novel that has been compared by many to Steven King's epic apocalypse novel The Stand. I'm a sucker for apocalypse novels & this one also has vampire themes. Cronin was a young and well regarded rising star among the highbrow literati, so his decision to dabble in the pulp fiction horror genre made his book the most anticipated book event of the early summer. He reportedly got a 1 million dollar advance from Ballantine Books to write the book & Cronin had optioned the film rights to the book to Hollywood überproducer Ridley Scott for another cool million before The Passage was even published. Paying out that much money for film rights to an unpublished book is unheard of in the film industry. I didn't like the book nearly as much as a lot of others did. Cronin took nearly 800 pages to tell a story that could have been told in 400 pages. It was an enjoyable read and I probably would have liked it better if it were written by Stephen King an author with less of a literary reputation than Cronin, but after reading The Passage, I'm wondering if King isn't the better writer of the two.
====================

Tomorrow or maybe the next day, I'll post my music notes for the summer of 2010.

08-31-2010, 01:13 PM	#229 (permalink)
Gavin B. Model Worker Join Date: Jan 2009 Posts: 1,248	2010 Summer Reading Notes & Book List I've had a couple of weeks off work & I'm caught up with all my short term writing projects which has given me time to pursue my two favorite leisure activities, reading & listening to music. Today I'm going to cover a few of the books I've read over the summer & my next post will contain some of my favorite music from the summer of 2010. Review of the Kindle E-Reader I recently bought a Kindle reader & I'm hooked on it. The biggest benefit of the Kindle is you don't have to lug around any more heavy tomes or wrestle around in bed with 800 page book that weighs 12 pounds. The book prices are okay. At Amazon a book with a $30 list price can be downloaded for between $9.99 & $11.99 but there's a lot of grumbling about the pricing practices of the publishing houses here in the USA. Now that people are starting to use E-readers the list price of book downloads are steadily ticking upward. The price of the Kindle, however, is ticking downwards. Two weeks after I purchased a Kindle for $249, Amazon cut the price of the same model of Kindle to $189. Since then Amazon has developed a non-wireless version of the Kindle that you can synch directly from your computer processor for $139. Another advantage of an E-Reader is that nearly every book written prior to 1930 is pubic domain and therefore available as a free download. There are a couple of non-profit literacy projects that are putting all the great books of the world into the digital format so people can access those books for free. As a result I've gotten free downloads of books by some of my favorite authors like Poe, Dostoevsky, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dumas, Victor Hugo, Keats, Shelly, Joseph Conrad, Ambrose Bierce & Mark Twain. Now for the book reviews: ============================== Gavin B's Book Notes for the Summer 2010 Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War by Karl Marlantes- Matterhorn is written by an ex-Vietnam vet who spent almost 40 years putting together the great American novel about the Vietnam War. It's probably the best anti-war epic since Tolstoy's War & Peace. This novel isn't escapist fare & Marlantes' lucid storytelling is so vivid that reading the novel is an exhausting & harrowing experience but it's never dull. This book will make you feel you've done your own tour of duty in Nam by the time you get to the last page. =================== The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larsson The recently deceased Swedish author Larsson's "The Girl Who" suspense/thriller trilogy have become the biggest sellers in the publishing world since the Harry Potter books. I read all three books of the trilogy early in the summer. They're great mysteries with an alluring & mysterious female computer hacker as the central character. At times Larsson will give you more information that you ever wanted to learn about Swedish politics but it all fits into overarching storyline of the three books. =================== FDR by Jean Edward Smith- Every American high school graduate is aware of the historical significance of Franklin Roosevelt's 4 term presidency but can probably tell you little more than he was president during the Great Depression & World War II. Since our current worldwide economic situation has been compared to the Great Depression as of late, I decided to learn more about Roosevelt, his life & times. There are 3 or 4 first rate biographies of Roosevelt in print & after agonizing over the choices, I selected the Jean Edward Smith bio because it profiles Roosevelt from a psychosocial perspective & attempts to explain why a man from such a privileged blue blood family would end up become a traitor to his class and become a hero of the downtrodden & oppressed classes. It had a lot to do with Roosevelt's battle with polio which left him immobilized & in a wheelchair for his adult life. The are many parallels to Barack Obama & our current lean economic times. Roosevelt was also the target of hate mongering by the extreme right & the corporate titans who attempted to obstruct the New Deal & economic recovery in the same manner currently being used to deadlock Barack Obama. ==================== The Harvard Psychedelic Club by Don Lattin- This 600+ page book is the first authoritatively written history of Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, and the epic cast of characters that were responsible for the hippie, LSD counterculture. It's the best history of the Sixties revolution I've ever read. ================= The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test- by Thomas Wolfe- Since I've been researching the origins of the psychedelic culture over the summer, I decided to reread the book that started it all. Wolfe's 1968 novel is about renegade author Ken Kesey, the Merry Pranksters, LSD chemist Stanley Owsley & Jerry Garcia & the Grateful Dead's role in pscydelicizing most of the state of California in 1965 & 1966 with their public acid test events. It's supposedly fiction but Wolfe doesn't even bother to change the names of any of the books central characters. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test a classic relic of those bygone days when LSD was legal & live rock & roll was free to the public. ==================== The Passage: A Novel by Justin Cronin- The Passage is an epic horror/apocalypse novel that has been compared by many to Steven King's epic apocalypse novel The Stand. I'm a sucker for apocalypse novels & this one also has vampire themes. Cronin was a young and well regarded rising star among the highbrow literati, so his decision to dabble in the pulp fiction horror genre made his book the most anticipated book event of the early summer. He reportedly got a 1 million dollar advance from Ballantine Books to write the book & Cronin had optioned the film rights to the book to Hollywood überproducer Ridley Scott for another cool million before The Passage was even published. Paying out that much money for film rights to an unpublished book is unheard of in the film industry. I didn't like the book nearly as much as a lot of others did. Cronin took nearly 800 pages to tell a story that could have been told in 400 pages. It was an enjoyable read and I probably would have liked it better if it were written by Stephen King an author with less of a literary reputation than Cronin, but after reading The Passage, I'm wondering if King isn't the better writer of the two. ==================== Tomorrow or maybe the next day, I'll post my music notes for the summer of 2010. Last edited by Gavin B.; 09-01-2010 at 03:30 AM.