Rate the last Book you read

American Sniper by Chris Kyle, I like this book

When was the last book that I read? When was the printing press invented

I read that, the guy had ice in his veins.

Mind if I review my second book?





This is a book I've been working on for 16 years. It all started as something TOTALLY different. When my dad had a funny idea for a Geico commercial, I decided to try to do ones for a company I though needed more exposure: SoBe. But I had ZERO good ideas. Overtime, I kept the characters, but it went through various changes, largely going into Don Bluth fantasy about lizards. But I didn't even know who I wanted as a villain.

Then at 20, I started watching experimental films, notably Tarkovsky. My first was Stalker. Falling in love with the psychological conversations, I wanted to implement the idea into SOMETHING< so I chose Lizards. The idea was fleshing out, but something was missing.

And then I watched The Thing again, and I knew: body horror. It all took shape from there. It became a story about lizards who are mutated by a liquid that can cause as much devastation as it can bless them. While they have a stable community, they're still learning things about this mutagen after many, many years, and the darker side has already poisoned other places surrounding them.

I wrote an earlier, more wordy and incomplete version years ago, but my brother took too long to read it, and I lost faith in it for years. But with the publication of Wings of Nialoca, I've had more faith in it, went back and edited some things, and now what you see is my freakiest story so far, and probably the freakiest I'll ever write. I worked really hard on making sure everyone in this novel felt alive.


And GOD is this one freaky. I can't honestly believe some of the things I made up in this. I visualized everything before I typed it, and I did everything I could to keep it as clean as possible without loosing touch of the body horror aspects, that way the themes of trauma can be built up. Honestly, I like this one more than I like my debut.

At The Existentialist Cafe (2016)


Difficult to rate this one, since there is a lot of content the author tries to pack in here. It doesn't so much explain existentialism during the 20th century as much as it does try to provide bios of the people behind the movement. That makes for a whirlwind of names and events that made it hard for me to follow at times.

In the end, existentialism is a nice turn away from traditional philosophy, but it doesn't have the required depth for reality sometimes (and many people behind the movement come to realize that a bit as the book explains).

Read a bio on Pete Rose - his rise and fall. Pete cared about four things in life - Baseball, women, gambling and cars. Not sure in what order I would place them but I think baseball would be number one but ganbling would be a close second. The guy would bet on anything. Pete was a great player but a terrible human being. The book goes into detail about the shady characters he called friends who he sold out in a second to save his reputation. Pete spent the last 35 years of his life signing autographs.

His gambling problem was well known in the 60s, 70s and 80s but the press just would not report it. The fall of Rose is as outlined in detail in this book is depressing. The rise of Pete Rose is a great story. The detemination and hard work he put into becoming baseball's all time hit leader was something else. All that extra batting practice often after the game was over and into the morning hours. The guy had a great eye and a mental book on all the pitchers.

One story about the nickname Charlie Hustle. The Reds and Yankees are playing a preseason game in 1963. Pete is a rookie and is going all out - bunting, stealing and sliding head first in a preseason game. Mickey Mantle sees this and says, "Who the f&*k is this Charlie Hustle?". Pete thought it was a compliment and the name stuck.

The Life Before Us by Romain Gary... Took me a rather long while to get used to it, but from middle onward it became increasingly more involving (and heartbreaking). Won't forget the unlikely friendship between MoMo and Rosa for days to come...

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HEI guys.

I just finished Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes today. I didn't hate it, but honestly I wasn't crazy about it. Mostly, I don't think the evil carnival was utilized in enough creative ways. A carousel isn't the most exciting thing to keep going back to. But it was weird and charming, and there were some effectively creepy moments. I'd say 6 1/2 out of 10.

You'd think you've seen enough portrayals of war and wounded (mentally and physically) soldiers to be done with the descriptions of it's absurdities until you encounter this, which starts by Celine painting the picture from the buttom up and leave you utterly shook.
And that's just the early, battle-field chapters. Once the war is over, it reallly starts.

Good times...

Mountains Beyond Mountains (2003)


Fantastic book detailing one Dr. Paul Farmer and his groundbreaking work in treating tuberculosis and other diseases primarily in Haiti.

In Too Deep: A Reacher Novel by Andrew Grant & Lee Child - This is the 29th Jack Reacher novel and you can tell the series will be different now that Child's brother Andrew will be taking over the writing duties. That's not necessarily a bad thing. For something as long running as this franchise it will ultimately be good to get a fresh perspective on the character.

First read. Loved the details of Henry and Catherine's relationship, same for the settings of the story (both the war-time and the escapist times)...and just when I was feeling it's being uneventful for a bit too long, that ending came and knocked me out. That very last line is one of the best I've ever seen.

I finished Hammer's Slammers tonight. It's a solid book and I enjoyed reading it.

Next up I requested Book Thief from the library. I also want to read Boy Who Saw except the library doesn't have it so I'd need to buy it. Maybe I'll work to get it right before I finish Book Thief. I should check the local book store in March.

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I destroyed the dastardly dairy dame! I made mad milk maid mulch!

I hate insomnia. Oh yeah. Last year I had four cases of it, and each time it lasted three months.

Remember that not all psychopaths are killers. Bernie was a classic example of a man with no conscience. The book goes into great detail of his Ponzi scheme that at the end was suppose to be worth $68 billion but only had $350 million in the bank. He was a tad short. It is amazing how his high end clients like Kevin Bacon were willing to accept the monthy statements from Bernie without question. The book also examines the failings of the banks and SEC who just never questioned the rumors on Wall Street around Bernie and his high returns average anywhere from 10-50%. The book looks into his family of grifters and compares them to another New York family who I won't name. Also a good look had some of the high end clients who had to pay back huge amounts of money. This lawsuits go on even today. Bernie died in prison in 2021 a sad and lonely man and was cremated. There was no service and no one wanted one.

The Myth of American Idealism (2024)


Giving this a 5 despite me not agreeing with everything presented here, but the level of detail in the writing is impressive. Chomsky has generally been too much of a pacifist for me, and that argument does arise in this book often. However, the patterns and facts brought to the surface with regards to the US approach to democracy in the world definitely flipped around my way of thinking about a lot of things.

Finished this one in two days because it's so short. I've given Vonnegut, a well-known author responsible for several thematic "comedy classics," chance after chance. But this is easily the worst of the six books of his I've read so far. Once again we get the very random plot being backed up by world-building that's never fully lived up to, especially where "the future" and "Mars" are concerned, and a bunch of intentionally offbeat or awkward jokes which might generate a few smiles but never any die-hard laughs. This had so much potential and it was wasted. Vonnegut himself said that several publications gave this book a negative review, and I wholeheartedly agree.

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Lone Wolf by Gregg Hurwitz - The ninth installment in the Orphan X/Nowhere Man series. At the age of 12 Evan Smoak is recruited out of a Baltimore group home into the Orphan Program and trained to be a government sanctioned assassin. The black ops program is eventually shut down and he eventually goes freelance, helping out people with nowhere else to turn. This is a well written series and Hurwitz endeavors to make Evan Smoak a complex, emotionally adrift individual.

85/100

My brother sent me this JFK conspiracy book. The thing is it has nothing to do with November 22/1963 but with December 11/1960 when some crazy guy planned to kill then President-elect Kennedy. Not sure this incident warrants a full book but I will give it a spin.

The Ballad of the Whiskey Robber by Julian Rubinstein -

A very entertaining stranger than fiction true crime story about Attila Ambrus, a Hungarian hockey goalie who robbed banks throughout the '90s. A better description of the book is part true crime, part history lesson because after reading it, you will have a thorough understanding of the era's tumultuous economic and political situations in Romania, where Ambrus grew up in a Hungarian community, and of course in Hungary, which led Ambrus to take on a life of crime. To elaborate, they're situations that led the public to treat him less like a criminal and more like a folk hero. The book is incredibly detailed and researched: you get descriptions of everything from how he decorated his homes to how he dressed during robberies to the words in his conversations that make you wonder if author Rubenstein was an accomplice. Also, if anything, it will dispel "eat your vegetables" perceptions of non-fiction like this. It reads like a really absorbing suspense story and is thus hard to put down. That applies to everything proceeding the conclusion, however. It may be just as detailed about what happened when Ambrus's luck ran out, but it took me longer to get through than I would have liked. The important thing is that it spoiled me for this genre. Every true crime novel, podcast, etc. should strive to be as colorful as this one.

A very quick read. Not much known about the attempted assassin, Richard Pavlich, except he was old and angry about everything. He apparently hated Catholics. He followed JFK around after he got elected in November 1960. He had his chance to kill JFK on Dec 11/1960 when he could have driven his car full with dynamite into a car waiting for JFK to go to church in Palm Beach, Florida. The guy was an early suicide bomber but says he changed his mind when he saw that Jackie Kennedy would also be killed. He later approached JFK at church but was stopped by the Secret Service. They take note of his car and license #. He continues to follow JFK planning another attempt but is pulled over by local cops and that ends it. Pavlich is never tried and ends up in psych hospitals and is eventually freed. The thing about these crazy political assassin types is trying to figure out their motives. Whether it is Oswald or the guy who tried to shoot Trump.

The book also deals how JFK and Jackie were so much more difficult to protect than Eisenhower or Truman. The Kennedys were younger with several houses and always on the move. JFK was always campaigning and the Secret Service struggled with it and we know how it ended it November 1963.