Thank you, pizzaboy!

Please go ahead. I'm pleased my review has inspired you, sir!

I hope you enjoy a good read, pizzaboy. Please share your feelings on Putnam's work with me once/if you do indeed have a look.

THE APPEAL, by John Grisham

John Grisham's first legal thriller since THE BROKER in 2005.

I have to admit, I was a bit leery, because his novels have become so formulaic. But this one was hard to put down. It's timely because it highlights today's election politics.

A small Mississippi law firm wins a big verdict over a chemical giant, Krane, that has spread cancer causing pollutants. Krane is fearful that this verdict, if not overturned, will ruin them. They file an appeal that finds it way to the State Supreme Court. They also hire a sleazy firm to help unseat an "unfriendly" sitting Justice. This turns out to be a viable strategy because Mississippi elects their own Supreme Court Justices.

This book is a very believable primer on how to rig an election:

1) Pick a victim.
2) Promote an unknown candidate with no visible record.
3) Ambush the victim by painting him an extreme idealogue (make the southern voters believe a liberal judge will destroy the family).

If done correctly, the judicial process can be subverted.

Not Grisham's best, but certainly one of his better novels this decade.

Next up: DUMA KEY, by Stephen King. I'll let you know.

Lawrence Block - Small Town

Ugh. Not his best work, but I did manage to finish the damn thing.

I am Currently reading this great book

The Wild West History , Myth and the Making of America by Frederick Nolan

I have always been interested in the wild west and this is a great book very well written and imformative

It's more of a short story within a book, but has anybody read "Guts" by Chuck Palahniuk? Somebody told me about it last night, and, intrigued, I've just read it now.

Read it if you haven't, and if you have, your thoughts? Is the rest of the novel (Haunted) worth reading?

Very disgusting but I still couldn't stop reading it.

Not his best. I finished it a few weeks ago and really didnt like it. Thought it was strange, even for him.

I just reread Shogun by James Clavell. If you are someone who really appreciates good writing, in-depth character development, historical epics, and one hell of a good story, read Shogun.

I am nearly finished Teddy Atlas' autobiography.

A great boxing character and a good read!

Its one of my favorite novels and I'll second that recommendation. Lord Toranaga, along with Vito Corleone, is one of my favorite fictional characters.

And now I really want to read that "Bowling Alone" book!

Ma, Ma, Where's my Pa?
He's going to the WhiteHouse. Ha Ha Ha.

Does a bias against "popular" fiction writers (such as Stephen King) exist anywhere in the world but the U.S.?

Literary snobs drive me fucking crazy, like these books write themselves.

MYSTIC RIVER, by Dennis Lehane (2001)

For some reason, I just now got around to this absolutely brilliant novel by Dennis Lehane. I guess that being that I enjoyed the film, I wanted enough time to pass so that I could see the novel in it's own light (the way all novels are meant to be interpreted).

While in and of itself the mystery of who killed the teenage girl is good, MYSTIC RIVER is much more than a murder/mystery. It is a dark, affecting moral drama.

The whole Boston/Irish/Catholic backdrop is very real and the characters are both complex and fascinating. This is a novel about loyalty, friendship and family. While the mystery of the novel is solved in the final pages, the ending is messy and complicated, just like real life (much like the ending to THE SOPRANOS).

Lehane is a brilliant novelist and MYSTIC RIVER is full of sharp dialogue, yet never seems contrived. Not for a single page. It is filled with raw emotion: the pain of losing a child, the horror of child abduction, revenge and madness.

Don't read this book if you're just looking for a "beach read" or a typical murder/mystery, this book is just so much more. It's human drama; an unflinching look at the dark side of human nature.

How do you like the film, PB? (I think it's rubbish.) I imagine the novel is richer than the film.

Currently reading A Maggot by my beloved Fowles. It's amazing. I love how the vast majority of it is written in the narrator-less form of a Q&A murder investigation, and yet the questioner's humanity and personality shines through from dialogue alone. Fowles is a fine linguist (my favourite, actually), but he also knows his history, too...

Any Fowles fans?

Love Fowles. THE EBONY TOWER is my favorite short story collection ever. Period. That's all she wrote.

Read Lehane's MYSTIC RIVER. It's MUCH richer in vision than the film.

Man, The Magus is my favourite novel period. Everytime I read it I shiver with delight. After A Maggot, I intend to read The Ebony Tower, Mantissa and Daniel Martin.

You might also want to read THE FRENCH LT'S WOMAN.

Fowles offering of three endings was brilliant, if not entirely unprecedented.

Another novel that wasn't done justice by the film.

Yeah, Reisz's film suffers from truncation, and so Sarah's mystery is lost; but I found the contemporary adaptation within the film a cool concept, and an acknowledgement in itself of the difficulty of adaptation (not only in script, but in interpreting and tuning actor performances). (It was scripted by Harold Pinter, who's no stranger to writing for actors.) The film's dual endings, one in the fiction and one outside, was clever too.

Streep's good as the actress having to play the eternal mystery, Sarah Woodruff, though as Fowles's fictional character herself she's a bit one-dimensional(... or is she? Note that at one point in the novel Fowles himself asks, "Who is Sarah? Out of what shadows does she come?" and then begins the next chapter (13), with "I do not know", and goes on to intrude upon his own narrative and dedicate a fair chunk to the notions of literary imagination).

Love the novel, though; I'd rank Fowles's top three as The Magus, The French Lieutenant's Woman and The Collector. All three have been adapted into films, of course. The Magus is far too short to be as rich as the novel, though Fowles's own script does well in securing the bare essentials: Michael Caine's a bit wooden, though, and Anthony Quinn's not my ideal Conchis. I'd love to see William Wyler's The Collector, though it's hard to find over here. Wyler's a fine director (he was nominated for more Oscars than any other director), and the novel, unlike The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman, is digestible enough in size and thematic fabric to merit a feature film.

If anybody would ever like to get the gist of my single philosophical outlook on life, check out Fowles's The Aristos.

Just finished "The Bush Tragedy" it shows Bsh as a far more complex man than his caricatures make him out to be, and his family is so dysfunctional it makes the Clintons look like the Cleavers.

Found an old copy of "THE HARDER THEY FALL" by Budd Schulberg!

Going to read it tonight at work

Finished A Maggot. Dazzling, frustrating, complex, rich, profound.

Next up: The Secret History by Donna Tartt.

The book I have in the bathroom for reading is The Brass Wall by David Kocieniewski.

Damn, why didn't he pick a friggin Pen Name?

It starts off with a firefighting part, then a detective trying to solve a case about it, then a cop trying to infiltrate a mafia family.

I'm not that far through it, but so far so good.

I got it at B & N for $5 in their bargain books.

I casually started reading The Secret History the other night after a film had finished. I literally couldn't put it down. Read the first 100 pages in one go. Absolutely amazing.

Just finished The Portable Nietzsche edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann. It's about 700 pages and can be grueling at times but is also very rewarding. The book contains most of Nietzche's most famous works including Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist and Nietzsche contra Wagner. It also contains some of the philosopher's letters and aphorisms. If you're interested in existentialism and re-examining your views on the world it's definitely worth a look.

"MY DARK PLACES" by James Ellroy.

This man is a genius!

I picked this up the last time I was at Barnes & Noble. Very interesting read for Sopranos fans (akin to Harlan Lebo's THE GODFATHER LEGACY for GODFATHER fans).

The actor's insights into their characters were especially interesting to me. The book also goes into details on the production of each episode, as well as an inside look into the props department. There's even a 3 page spread on the infamous "Pine Barrens" episode, including insight from David Chase, Steve Buscemi (who directed the episode), Michael Imperioli, and Tony Sirico.

A very fascinating read that any Soprano's fan should check out.

Yes i have it!

Brilliant.

Word.