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Hell's Angels by Hunter S. Thompson

It's unfortunate that the reissue of this book has such a True Detective type cover. It's not nearly as sensationalist as the cover leads one to expect, and it becomes a little embarrassing to read something that looks like it could contain "Jail-Bait Rape Party XVII".

Midaq Alley, by Naguib Mahfouz

Kat's a bit of a Mahfouz fan, and I was out of books I wanted to read before leaving last Monday morning. I needed something light enough to read in shifts. Metro, airport, airplane, hotel, airport, airplane. I knew the books at the head of my personal queue were not adequate to this requirement, so I thrashed among the bookshelves for something to read.

"Here's a book that's not too thick, has the pulpy pages of an interruptible read, and won't start a conversation with a stranger."

Norwegian Wood, by Haruki Murakami

The Murakami binge¹ continues with one of the more bleakly depressing books I've read in a while. This is mainly because I avoid depressing books, except that all of the Murakami books are depressing in that cloudy, rainy, "poignant" (I hate that word) Japanese way.

This book is all about ill-defined apprehension. I kept waiting for the supernatural element, present in the Murakami books read to date, to manifest. I kept waiting for the horrible realisation that was foreshadowed quite darkly from early on. I kept waiting for the reckoning that seemed due for some of the behavior and attitude criticised in the book. It's almost like reading a Stephen King book, except there, you know demons are going to crawl out and eat the brain of the nearest five year old. In this book, the fear is atmospheric.

Two things:

If you have any interest in making film, read this book. If nothing else, if you ignore every piece of advice in it, it's inspirational. As you can guess from his films, and you can conclude from the frequency that he releases films, the guy has an incredible amount of drive and energy. It's very infectious.

If you have any interest in doing anything that you feel is "too expensive" because of equipment or whatever, read this book. It's a great reminder that resourcefulness (which Rodriguez refers to as "creativity") is worth dozens, hundreds, thousands, or millions of dollars in expensive equipment. Sometimes, the resourcefulness involves more work, sometimes, not. It's an incredibly accessible (almost too much so) book, and you will finish it with your head full of those projects you have wanted to execute, but didn't have the equipment or money.

The Confusion (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 2), by Neal Stephenson

I have this weird relationship with Neal Stephenson. I mean, apart from getting our shirts made at the same tailor. I like some parts of his work. I really like a lot of the first 80% of Zodiac and Snow Crash. I like Cryptonomicon & friends less (about 30%), and Diamond Age least.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami

The first chapter of this appears to be a revision of "The Wind-Up Bird And Tuesday's Women," a short story collected in "The Elephant Vanishes". Details were changed, but it is the same story.

I do not know if the first chapter was extracted into a more-or-less self-contained short story, or if the short story was extrapolated into a larger work. I suspect the latter, not only because it's the common case.

Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941-1968 by Heda Margolius Kovaly, Franci Epstein

I don't like most "downer" books, except for holocaust stories. I don't like those either, but I've been brought up to believe that it's important to keep the fury fresh, so I read a lot of them.

This isn't really about the holocaust. It starts out that way, with the author (Margolius Kovaly, not Epstein) as a young girl dragged off to Auschwitz. This part is really discursive, and honestly, not that involved. It reads very much like the disconnected recollections of someone forty years past the event. In fact, this isn't really the important part of the book, but merely a way to start off the story of her life.

Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players, by Stefan Fatsis

This would be about three great, compelling, magazine articles.

• The process the author went to in the course of improving himself from gifted amateur status to expert in the competitive Scrabble circuit.
• Any of the rather "curious" personalities at the super-expert levels in the competitive Scrabble circuit.
• How competitive Scrabble feels like the perversion of the game, where a large working vocabulary is less important than the memorisation of talmudic rules for playable letter sequences.
• The nutty techniques that take players from being good "living room players" to the sort that have a shot at winning the tiny purses at Scrabble tournaments.

Each of these themes could support a long magazine article of anywhere from three to fifteen pages, probably sorted from longest-legged to shortest.