I figured after watching three adaptations of this, Stephen King's first novel, I oughtta maybe give it a read. You all know the deal - a high school girl who is bullied winds up gearing telekinetic powers and kills everyone RIP. Maybe what you didn't know is in the book she kills like everyone everyone. The whole town of 500 people wind up dead! Also the book is half epistolary which is kinda cool.
RATING: 71%
There's a great book out there called Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History Of Punk which chronicles the beginning of the punk scene on the east coast. We Got The Neutron Bomb makes for an excellent companion piece to Please Kill Me, as it chronicles, in a similar style, the rise of west coast punk. From the death days of glam rock to The Decline of Western Civilization, the book covers countless bands, zines, venues, trends, triumphs and tragedies. It's a good, quick read that gives you a greater picture of what the west coast punk scene was like in the late seventies and early eighties. And like any good book about music, it made me want to listen to more music, not just the classics in my collection but the stuff I'd never even heard of before.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a crime novel by Stieg Larsson, you may have heard of it. I don't read a lot of crime novels or mysteries or thrillers, so I might not have been the target audience for this book, but I read it anyway. It seemed to me that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was reaching Da Vinci Code levels of literary hype, so I thought I should just go ahead and read it so I wouldn't feel out of touch when I heard people talking about it. At around 800 pages or so, it made for great airport reading. Was it any good? I guess so. It was full of murders and journalists, Nazis and hackers, corporate crimes and casual sex. So, I mean, if that's the kind of stuff you look for in a book, then, you know, you'd probably like it.
I'm not sure if it qualifies as a genre unto itself, but I love semi-serious autobiographies written by comedians. The first one I can remember reading was Drew Carey's Dirty Jokes and Beer: Stories of the Unrefined, which alternated between dick jokes and dark, personal anecdotes. Sarah Silverman devotes a large chunk of her book to her family history, her early battles with depression, and her bed wetting issues (hence the title). There's not a whole lot in the book about her comedy career, though she does take time to discuss some of her more controversial jokes/performances and there is a chapter devoted to her TV show, The Sarah Silverman Program. David Cross' book (I Drink For A Reason) could have been much better had it been written in a similar fashion.
I'm no expert on the works on Charles Bukowski, but Post Office is the the third Bukowski novel that I've read in the last two years. I started reading his novels (I'm not too interested in his poetry) after I had read something on the internets that suggested that Chuck Palahniuk's fans wouldn't know a good book if it bit them on the ass so they should pick up Bukowski's Ham on Rye. Seeing as I couldn't stand the Palahniuk novel I was reading at the time, that sounded like a pretty good idea. Post Office is Bukowski's first novel to feature his semi-autobiographical stand-in Henry Chinaski, though it focuses on a period of his life that comes after the events of later novels such as Ham on Rye and Factotum. I'll avoid ending this review with any hyperbolic praise for Bukowski, as most of his fans are wont to do, all I'll say is that there is already another Bukowski title lined up on my Amazon wish list.
Eating the Dinosaur is a collection of essays written by Chuck Klosterman. Klosterman is an author who's work I had been more or less avoiding for the last few years. His name always seemed to pop up in articles and on websites that I liked, but I always found the praise of his work to be a bit fawning and his responses in interviews to be a bit off-putting (which sorta comes up in one of the book's first essays). Though, in the end, I quite enjoyed the book and found his essays both entertaining and interesting (even the ones about sports). Topics discussed in the book include: journalism, the similarities between Kurt Cobain and David Koresh, basketball, voyeurism, time travel, Garth Brooks' alter ego Chris Gaines, football, ABBA, laugh tracks, Pepsi's advertising strategies, irony, literalism, the lyrics of Rivers Cuomo, and a critique of the Unabomber Manifesto. 
Nobody hates Stephen King more than the people who don't actually read his stuff. Next time you're talking books with a bunch of people, try telling them that you liked It and/or the Dark Tower series and see how well that goes over. King's newest short story/novella Blockade Billy combines his love of baseball and grisly horror with the attention to detail that goes a long way to really flesh out his work. Since I'm such a big movie dork, I couldn't help but think of the story as though it were Major League told using the plot device from Citizen Kane with a horror twist. You can probably still find copies of Blockade Billy at Wal-Mart for 30% off the cover price, because I'm pretty sure they have a hard time selling books that don't involve sparkly vampires.
There exists, to this day, a certain segment of the film fanatic population that continues to collect and fetishize VHS tapes. For them, there are "books" such as Portable Grindhouse: The Lost Art of the VHS Box, which is little more than a collection of photos and scans of approximately one hundred VHS tape boxes. Many of the titles in this collection will likely become lost films once their respective tapes have worn out, with little chance of them seeing a rebirth in the DVD and Blu-ray market. In some cases this loss will be a true tragedy, but for some titles obscurity will be more than appropriate. Despite being a novel idea for a book (get it? novel, book) Portable Grindhouse could have easily been improved by including some commentary on the VHS covers themselves or by organizing the titles with some regard towards genre or era. 
Written by famous minor television personality John Hodgman, More Information Than You Require is the author's second book of humorous fake trivia, following 2005's The Areas of My Expertise. More Information features a variety of lists and fictional facts from such diverse topics as gambling, the future, Mole-men, and American Presidents with hooks for hands. Hodgman's comedic style is essentially absurdist deadpan, which will come as no surprise to those already familiar with his various television appearances. More Information is certainly an entertaining read, though I found The Areas of My Expertise to be the funnier of the two. Hodgman intends to follow up his first two books with an additional volume of fake trivia to be called That Is All.
For lack of a better term, I guess you'd call Clinton Heylin's book, The Act You've Known for All These Years: A Year in the Life of Sgt. Pepper & Friends, a piece of Rock Journalism. The book centers around the recording and release of the classic Beatles album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Heylin does well to include sections in the book concerning other important musicians and bands from the era, including: Bob Dylan, The Beach Boys, Pink Floyd, Cream, The Velvet Underground, Jimi Hendrix, etc. Extensively researched, the book contains many quotes from the band and those involved with the recording of Sgt. Pepper's, though Ringo seems conspicuously absent. An interesting read that avoids excessive hyperbole and idol worship.
No Country for Old Men is a 2005 novel by Cormac McCarthy (which was turned into a kick-ass 2007 film by the Coen Brothers). A thriller of sorts, the novel follows three interweaving character arcs which all stem from a central plot event, a botched drug deal near the Texas/Mexico border. It should be noted that the 2007 film version of No Country for Old Men was very faithful to the original novel, with only some minor variations and additions. McCarthy's writing style is somewhat more accessible in this novel, as compared to The Road, with less poetic language overall and with punctuation only suffering in the dialogue portions. 
The Road is a 2006 novel by Cormac McCarthy. It's the story of a father and son on an arduous journey in a post-apocalyptic future America. Also, it's chock full of cannibalism. You may have heard of it because it was selected to be part of Oprah's Book Club a few years ago (Yay? Boo?). While I don't keep up with Oprah's Book Club selections, I have to assume this one was a bit out of the norm for her club. Even though I recommend the book, it should be noted that McCarthy's minimal punctuation style may frustrate some readers.
I Drink For A Reason is a collection of humorous essays, lists and rants by comedian/actor David Cross (Arrested Development, Mr. Show). Cross' particular brand of angry satire is not for everyone. Not in the "oh, you wouldn't get it" sense but more in the "you'll probably just think he's an asshole" sense. Cross, a self-proclaimed atheist Jew, tackles a variety of targets in the book, including but not limited to: religion, politics, hipsters, hippies, pundits, celebrities, Jim Belushi, Bill O'Reilly and things he thought of while having a bowel movement.
I regarded the Harry Potter series as the Cabbage Patch Kids of the literary world for several years, heaping scorn upon J.K. Rowling and her fans, until I actually read the books and realized how excellent they are. Rowling combines no-nonsense prose, vivid characters and addictive plots with enough escapist fantasy to make it fun, and sociopolitical themes (e.g. the persecution of werewolves, the racist pseudoscience of the "pure bloods" and the quislingism of the Ministry of Magic) of sufficient relevance and sophistication to keep Harry Potter a few steps ahead of the derivative pulp that has been riding on its coattails, so to speak, for the past decade or so.
This is (so far) the worst book I've read this year and the worst high fantasy novel I've ever read. It's not like this book is deliberately offensive, or the like, but it's just not very good. There's no craft or style to the prose, the plot is dull, and the end of the book neither pays any attention to the main character, nor is it...uh...interesting. It's abjectly boring. I only finished it in the hopes that it would get better, and it didn't.
This novel was quite boring. Also, the overwrought, self-conscious similes and metaphors invoked by Griet, the narrator, seemed to me to reflect a kind of narcissistic wish fulfillment on behalf of the author--a somewhat desperate attempt to prove her aesthetic sensitivity through a heroine fashioned in her own psychological self-image. Many writers do this to some extent, but the good ones succeed in giving their characters a life of their own, while the not-so-good ones come off as painfully insecure. It's too bad, because Vermeer's painting itself is simply gorgeous.
"As Ellsion says, forming the civic imagination is not the only role for literature, but it is one salient role. Narrative art has the power to make us see the lives of the different with more than a casual tourist's interest--with involvement and sympathetic understanding, with anger at our society's refusals of visibility. We come to see how circumstances shape the lives of those who share with us some general goals and projects; and we see that circumstances shape not only people's possibilities for action, but also their aspirations and desires, hopes and fears. All of this seems highly pertinent to the decisions we must make as citizens. Understanding, for example, how a history of racial stereotyping can affect self-esteem, achievement, and love enables us to make more informed judgments on issues relating to affirmative action and education" (Nussbaum 88, italics mine.)
Well, this book seemed like a great companion piece to a really fun movie or novel (series). Unfortunately, there is no movie (yet!) or novel...so there's a big empty hole at the heart of this book. Max Brooks has obviously really thought about zombie invasion a lot (like, A LOT a lot), but this book advertises itself as a wonderful contemporary commentary on the state of the world. It's not. In the end, the prose can be a bit clunky and his descriptions of things not-zombie always felt as if they were more than a little lacking...but at the same time it's a fun, harmless read about post-apocalyptic survival and cleverness, packaged and suitable for mass consumption.
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