Best/Worst book you read in 2005

[abcrystcats]

I'm always reading, so this is going to be hard for me -- especially picking a WORST book. I sometimes see bad movies, but I hardly ever read ....oh wait, I've got it!!

The WORST book I read (confess I did not read it all the way through) was Jeffrey Gitomer's "Little Red Book of Selling." Little Red Book of Bullshit, more like. I think I am just a rebel and I need to find my OWN books about selling.

Lots of candidates for BEST book just out of my recent reads:

Edward Rutherford writes a gnarly historical fiction. I read "Russka" and I am now in the middle of "London." Both very very good .

I read "Animals in Translation" by Temple Grandin. See my gushing review of it in the Cathouse.

I've read a few more Jean Plaidy books. They are good to relax with.

I read Sam Harris's "The End of Faith" -- a VERY good first book by a pretty brilliant guy who makes some interesting connections between faith and violence. I definitely recommend it. He'll get you thinking.

I read "The Serpent and the Moon" -- history, not "fiction" by Princess Michael of Kent about her ancestor, Diane de Poitiers, mistress to Henri II and rival of Catherine de Medici.

"Shantaram" -- a first novel by Gregory David Roberts -- very good, very thought-provoking, although he certainly makes himself out to be quite the Great White God, slumming it in India and so forth. This is supposed to be autobiographical in nature.

Traudl Junge's "Until the Final Hour" -- she was Hitler's secretary and stayed with him in the bunker until the very end. This was FASCINATING reading. The up-close-and-personal view of Hitler will change your mind about him, FOREVER. He was NOT a crazed, syphilitic madman, or anything like it. That's the scary part.

I read a few Phillipa Gregory books earlier in the year -- WHAT a snooze! Don't bother with them.

Read:

"Awakenings" by Oliver Sacks
"Mad In America" by Robert Whitaker
"Surviving Schizophrenia" by F. Fuller Torrey, MD (a good book)

The last two had to do with someone on another website, not me, so don't worry.

Also, "Daybreak" by Frank G. Slaughter -- a novel you'll have trouble finding in print. It's very old.

Oh yeah, and Elaine Cassel, "The Other War: The Bush Administration and the End of Civil Liberties"

Check this out:

http://www.counterpunch.org/cassel04262003.html

I can't think what all I read. This is the short list, gleaned from what I have lying around in the room right now.

I agree about "The DaVinci Code."I didn't read it because I knew I wouldn't have patience for it, but I got it on audiobooks and listened to it. Pure pulp. Exactly.

"Tale of Two Cities" ?? Singlemalt? Hun, they made me read "An American Tragedy" (Dreiser) in high school and I liked THAT. "Tale of Two Cities" is a BREEZE to get through. I liked that book, it's fantastic. I did Thomas Wolfe for my junior year high term paper. I had to read four of his books, some short stories, a biography and literary criticism. Sorry, I suppose it sounds like I'm bragging. I'll stop now

[shamatha1]

The blogger Largehearted Boy had a 50 Books challenge; i.e. read 50 books in a year. I didn't technically take of the challenge, but it did get me to write down and keep track of the books I read over the course of the year, and it turned out to be something like a journal. I just wish I'd done more than write down the titles of each book. Made it more of a journal, kept track of dates read and what I felt about it at the time. As it is, I can still look back and see a title and follow it back in memory to the time I was reading it, like the way one can with a particular song from high school or a certain smell. It's a neat memory trip if you're into that sort of thing.

So, the best book I read, I guess, was About this Life by Barry Lopez. Subtitled Journeys on the Threshold of Memory. Lopez is a very metaphysical writer, and there are great meditation on time (in which he flies around on cargo planes all over the world) on art (a long essay on making anagama pottery; called Effleurage, I believe in can be found on line) and of course, memory. I dig memory if that isn't already obvious. Obsessed with it, almost. So I really like this book.

The worst book I read was probably Travels With Charley by John Steinbeck. When he sticks to the actual travel writing, it's good. There's a page or so of a hotel room he checks into in Chicago, before it had been cleaned of the remnants of its previous occupant, and Steinbeck uses the detritus to speculate on who that person had been. It's a master class in writing in a few paragraphs. However, when he gets into "What I, John Steinbeck, think" it really drags. He wrote this long after he'd become famous, and like a lot of celebrities, he had become way too impressed with his own ideas, and when he tries to sound modest it just sounds self-serving. Very disappointing.