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Not quite as good as Into Thin Air or Into the Wild, but another good one from Jon Krakauer. It alternates between the story of All Around Bad Dude Pat Tillman, and a thumbnail history of the events leading up to 9/11, which convinces Tillman to join the Army. Unfortunately his death by friendly fire in Afghanistan is [political] covered up and exploited for political gain by neocon shitbags like Rumsfeld.[/political]

The book left me admiring Tillman as a person and angry as hell at the circumstances leading up to and following his death.

Here you go, Chad. A special thread for you to dazzle everyone with your awesome notspoilers.

Anyone else read this? It's the first of three books published by a Swedish dude who died before the books were published.

A solid page-turner of a mystery/suspense book with some social criticisms thrown in that aren't too heavy-handed. About halfway through the second book and it's even better. The main female character is your standard bisexual computer-hacking goth genius.

No thread about this yet? Some of the funniest dialogue I've heard in a long time. Peter Capaldi is the balls as a foul-mouthed British political fixer.

Seth Bullock as a shoot-first, ask questions later US Marshal. Shane Vendrell as the happy-go-lucky white supremacist thorn in his side. What more could you ask for? The first episode was top-notch.

Quote from: 5laky on September 18, 2008, 07:06:48 PM

Quote from: Jon on September 18, 2008, 06:40:04 PM

Quote from: 5laky on September 18, 2008, 05:03:44 PM
The constant theme of all his books seems to be paranoia and not only are his characters paranoid, you get paranoid because you're not sure what reality or alternate reality the narrative is taking place. For example: talking light bulbs.

This.

And the transition from rational narrative to "what the hell is going on" is seamless in a lot of passages. Gravity's Rainbow is secretly about 500 pages longer than it looks because you end up going back and rereading the last page or so to figure out what you must have missed.

The best part is that the paranoia he instills in the reader is completely intentional. I remember reading the first 20 or 30 pages and thinking, "OK, so far I think I have a pretty good idea of what is going on here." And that went straight to hell immediately after the mention of Slothrop's memories circa 1944 and Blicero's disgusting exploits.

And that's where it gets fun.

Figured this deserved its own topic. Infinite Jest may be my favorite book, and everything I've read compares DFW's style to Pynchon, so I figured what the hell.

What a slog it was getting through this book. Whereas Infinite Jest was 20% maddening and 80% high entertainment, this was the opposite. I understand that the whole idea of the book is confusion and paranoia (along with boners and sexual depravity) and it's supposed to be a challenging read, but I just didn't care enough about the characters (as I did with IJ) to flip back through the book to figure out which of the 8,000 characters or narrative threads the current chapter was about.

Anybody seen this version? Currently available for instant watchery on Netflix. Pretty faithful adaptation, and Richard Burton just pwns as O' Brien.

This would have been the best show of the 90s.

http://warmingglow.uproxx.com/2010/01/holy-crap-this-was-real

The wet dream of mom's basement weirdos might not suck?

Post your thoughts if you see it and your name isn't Weebs.

Well I haven't seen the original and have next to no idea what's going on, but that was an extremely interesting two hours of television. The big white ball was pretty damn cool.

My only complaint: the way they quick cut to a different camera angle every 3 seconds. I'm sure it's supposed to add to the confusion, but it gave me a grapeache.

An excellent read. It was also so depressing it made me want to jump off a 10 story conclusions mat.