Reading, not the City
John Grisham does In a League of Their Own crossed with The Wiggles
I finished my latest book the other day (Andy Mcnab’s - Crisis Four), which ended dissappointingly I’m sad to say, but we’ll get back to that later, and my housemate handed me a book by the famous author, John Grisham. Not that I’ve read any of his wares, apart from about an hour spent trying to get into The Firm, but a world famous author with such titles (and Hollywood movies) as The Pelican Brief, The Rain Maker, The Firm and The Innocent Man I was expecting a top notch crime thriller.
The books title is Playing for Pizza, and this is it’s blurb:
“Rick Dockery was a quarterback for one of America’s most famous football teams when he gave arguably the worst performance in his league’s history. Overnight Rich became a laughing stock and unemployable in his own country.
But somehow RIck’s agent finds him a job. He is guaranteed a starting position and a salary. The only problem is that the team that wants him is in Parma, Italy. The American footabll league in Italy is tiny and unlike RIck, the Italian players only get paid in free meals.
Rick has never been to Italy, so it’s no surprise that the country has a few surprises for him. What follows is a delightful, heart-warming storay of an innocent abroad.”
Now, I’m not one to judge. I’m not a critic, and my experience with reading books for pleasure only goes back about 9 months, but could you think of a more boring (nor ridculous sounding) synopsis for a book? It’s like every 80’s American sports movie (… You know the ones, underdogs fight hard to win all season, then drama, then the team wins in overtime), crossed with the likes of Home and Away (an Australian soap opera).
I honestly thought I was being had, and the cover was indeed a satircal ploy to get you sucked into a book with all kinds of death and debauchery, but on inspection, its a real book, by a real author, and a good autor at that. The top of the book even claims it to be, “The International Number One Bestseller”, though I’ll garuntee that has nothing to do with this particular title.
As I said though, who am I to judge?!? The quagmire of life experiences undertaken in the story surely leave my solid reading history of crime thrillers for dead, and put the reader at a new level of enlightenment. At least I hope this is the case. I’ll read it though, it sounds interesting enough, and I’m intrigued to find out if there’s something I’m missing like the short for a movie that tells you nothing at all about the movie in general.
Time for me to get started, and report back as soon as possible.
What a movie!
The Growing List
Since I started reading again I’ve notched up fair few titles on the literaty bed post, whatever that means, and I’m loving it so far. I’ll be looking at branching out a bit and trying some new genre’s too. Any suggestions?
The list so far, in the last 12 months:
- I Hope They Server Beer In Hell - Tucker Max
- The Alphabet of Manliness - Maddox
- Gun’s Germs and Steel - Jared Diamond
- One Shot - Lee Child
- Tell No One - Harlen Coben
- Bad Luck & Trouble - Lee Child
- Killing Floor - Lee Child
- The Woods - Harlen Coben
- Hornet’s Nest - Patricia Cornwell
- Die Trying - Lee Child
- Tripwire - Lee Child
- CityBoy, Beer and Loathing in the Square Mile - Geraint Anderson
- Crossfire - Andy McNab
- Fallen Dragon - Peter Hamilton (my first forway into Space Sci-fi, what an awesome book)
- The Visitor - Lee Child
- Echo Burning - Lee Child
- Remote Control - Andy McNab
- Without Fail - Lee Child
- Crisis Four - Andy McNab
- Playing for Pizza - John Grisham (I’m looking forward to it now!)
- Shantaram - Gregory David Roberts (Sitting here waiting to be read)
- Freakonomics - Steven Levitt
- Digital Fortress - Dan Brown
- The rest of the Jack Reacher series by Lee Child
- The rest of the Nick Stone series by Andy McNab
- The Cuckoo’s Egg by Cliff Stoll
- Kite Runner
- One of Peter Hamilton’s Trilogies
- More Harlen Coben
- Try John Grisham’s more serious titles
- One of Len Deighton’s Non Fiction books (a recommendation)
Afterthoughts
I said at the top of this post that I’d get back to why I found the end of Crisis Four (the third book in Andy McNab’s Nick Stone series), and it won’t mean much without having read the book, but I just thought it was too transparent. I could see the outcome of the story after about the first 15 - 20% of the book, and it just ended so abruptly.
I’d say this is a really good reason to space out these series I’ve been reading as I guess like anything else thats done repeatedly you get to know the author, and how his/her writing works, and can quickly weed out plot lines if they’re similar to previous titles. Not only this, I found a dissapointing book a bit of a kick in the guts from what is so far such an awesome series, I’d imagine its better to space out the pleasure of the other books as long as possible.
October 15th, 2008 at 2:43 am
Reading, In the Pursuit of Enlightenment…
I finished my latest book the other day (Andy Mcnab’s - Crisis Four), which ended dissappointingly I’m sad to say, but we’ll get back to that later, and my housemate handed me a book by the famous author, John Grisham. Not that I’ve read any of…
October 16th, 2008 at 4:19 pm
I know you think its crap and it maybe crap but its a quick and easy read…………
October 24th, 2008 at 12:21 am
Hey, good work, I can see you’re getting into it!
I read Neuromancer recently by William Gibson (the person the gibson from hackers is named after, who came up with the term cyberspace) which is a surprisingly good read! He’s got a big catalogue of that whole “cyberpunk” style which I want to give a go as well.
Another author I’m looking to have a crack at is Phillip K. Dick - he wrote Minority Report and A Scanner Darkly. I have a suspicion that reading his stuff might feel a bit like mental athletics though - I get the feeling from the movies that they won’t be a straight forward read.
I’m reading Darkly Dreaming Dexter (can’t remember the author) at the moment, which is really good. I don’t know if you’ve seen the TV show, but that was good as well. I’m only a little way through the first book, but they’re pretty easy to read. It’s about a serial killer who was taught by his father at an early age to intergrate into society and only kill bad people.
I also read The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test by Tome Wolfe a little while back, which you might be interested in - it explores the use of acid in the 70’s by following Ken Kesey (the guy who wrote one flew over the cookoo’s nest) and his gang, The Merry Pranksters, across the US. The subject matter and the events are interesting, but I found it a really difficult read - disjointed and lacking a solid plot.
Also, when you refer to “middle earth” sci-fi, sci-fi purists would probably not class that as fantasy rather than sci-fi. wankers.
I know what you mean about being able to see the ending coming if you read too much of an author. There was an author (i think Ian or Robert Rankin maybe) I used to read, and he used to use the same phrases in all of his books across different characters etc…urgh!
I’ll be interested to hear you opinion of Grisham, I’ve never been able to get into any of his books.
October 24th, 2008 at 12:24 am
Oh, and on Dan Brown, I didn’t think digital fortress was his best work, although it’s still an OK read. Mind you, I get that feeling with a lot of Dan Brown’s stuff - not that great but an easy read.
October 24th, 2008 at 12:29 am
Also - Where did you get the Maddox book, and what was it like?? I’ve been thinking of getting it, but I’ve never seen it anywhere, and I have an aversion to buying novelty books.
November 13th, 2008 at 2:40 am
Woh, I have falled behind:
I know have a list of books that is about ten long, will slowly get through then. I’ve been reading Shantaram for three weeks which is a bit of an epic (~900 pages in small-ish print). It’s been a great read so far though, part fiction, part non-fiction about a guy who escapes from a Melbourne prison and runs to India, and how his life leads on from there.
If you haven’t read it, it probably sounds like a run of the mill fugitive story, but its really not, I’ve found myself laughing, crying (somethign like that anyway), anxious and generally obsessed as to what is about to happen next. Seriously, he finds himself, living and working in a slum as a doctor and treating Cholera, then moves on to drug dealing, money laundering, passport forgery etc. Lots of ups and downs, powerful story and all that.
I got the Maddox book online from Amazon, as far as reads go, its very funny, but Tucker Max probably tells a better story, once you get over his pigheadedness
November 13th, 2008 at 2:41 am
errr. fallen behind that is
November 19th, 2008 at 12:17 am
Shantaram is good isnt’ it? It regularly rates in the top 100 sections in book shops as well, it’s good enough that I really enjoyed it when that sort of book doesn’t appeal to me at all normally.
I’m reading Anthony Kiedis’s biography (Scar Tissue) at the moment, which is realyl good an engaging. Which is surprising, because for the most part it just about him taking drugs, playing music and sleeping with women over and over again. When you get past that though, there’s some really interesting stories and anecdotes about the popular music scene at that time in the US and the cycle of drug addiction.
I originally picked it up at Melbourne airport for something to read on the plane, and it was a choice between that and Slash’s biography. On the page I read Slash was going on about how his clothes got stolen at the start of a tour and he spent the rest of the tour wearing nothing but a pair of leather pants. I had the feeling I’d just end up disliking him if I read too much stuff like that, so I went with Scar Tissue instead…
November 19th, 2008 at 12:37 am
Ah Scar Tissue! Sounds like another good read, though I was just about to ask if it rleated to the Al Pacino flick of the same name, and then I realised I was thinking of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers song.