Still have to read number9dream, but I did just finish The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet. Don't know if you've gotten around to reading it yet but it is quite good, another departure for him and the research must have been insane. I usually feel that most contemporary novels are too long but I kinda wish this would have been 100 pages longer.

Shakespeare - A Midsummer Night's Dream 8.5/10
Shakespeare - Macbeth 9/10

Did you buy one of those ten volume classic literature collections

That isn't a "quiet shot" or anything. My uncle has one of those and it pretty much had every relevant work of literature known to man.

No I just occasionally buy a play when I feel like reading Shakespeare, which I do at the moment. Currently reading Romeo and Juliet, which I read ten years ago for school, but feel the urge to read again. Going to buy Othello and Much a do about nothing next month.

brock lesnar's autobiography

don't waste the money

The Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny, 5 out of 5 stars.

Same, I think.

The Notebook

Pretty good, a little sad. Everyone is living in the past in this book.

Live Fast Die Young: My Life with James Dean by Jonathan Gilmore

really interesting bio on James Dean

Gilmore was a close friend of Dean's before he became famous

he doesn't hesitate to go into detail about Dean's sex life and about the times the two fooled around

and he really paints a portrait of Dean's personality as you really get to understand him

this book did not sit well with alot of his older fans who to this day refuse to believe he was gay

but I thought it was very good and would say it's an 8/10

Assassination Vacation - Sarah Vowell - 7/10

A little heavy on Lincoln but probably because it's Lincoln. Keeps the subject fairly light and is very readable.

http://images.contentreserve.com/Ima...F%7DImg100.jpg


8/10

Fragile Things - Neil Gaiman 8/10

Some pretty good short stories in there, but a couple of them looked almost unfinished. You should still read it just for "A Study in Emerald".

Anansi Boys - Neil Gaiman 10/10

My favorite Gaiman book. In my opinion, better than American Gods. Characters are more charming, less brooding than Shadow is in AG. It's genuinely funny in a lot of parts, and scary when it gets near the end.

Neverwhere - Neil Gaiman 6/10

My least favorite book by this author out of those I've read. It's good, but I didn't feel as invested in the characters, and the setting didn't really grab me either. Just not my type of story, I think.

Yeah, I was a bit on a Neil Gaiman kick lately.

John Dies At The End - David Wong 7/10

It's both a horror novel and a comedy novel. It manages to be both very convincingly, but there's this two chapters span in the middle in which the story drags for a bit. The rest is top notch however. Legit scary, and surprisingly funny, even though there's a lot of dick jokes in there.

W. Somerset Maugham - Of Human Bondage 9/10

The Inbetweeners Yearbook - 10/10 I love the show and the film and now I can say I love the book.

W. Somerset Maugham - Moon and Sixpence 7.5/10

Darkly Dreaming Dexter

10/10

The first season of Dexter was based off this book. I saw the TV series before reading the book, and the book was a little different than the series which was nice. I really liked the difference. It was a good and quick read.

I am currently in the middle of the second book, Dearly Devoted Dexter.

People Like Us - Dominick Dunne

pretty interesting read

7/10

Woops, didn't notice this reply. Yeah I read all about Jacob de Zoet, another great book and fascinating story. Like you I could have read a lot more of it. His style of writing is almost hypnotic at times.

I'm currently reading 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami, on to the second book. Pretty good stuff, although not as fantastic as Dance Dance Dance, Norwegian Wood or Kafka On The Shore for me yet.

I'm actually reading IQ84 as well, i'm about halfway through the first book and it's solid so far. I don't know how much of Murakami's oeuvre (hate this word but whatever) you've gone through, and while I love the three books you mentioned above, The Wind Up Bird Chronicle and Hard-Boiled Wonderland... are def my two favourites. So if you haven't gotten to those yet you're in for a treat.

I'll stick an order in for them now, cheers.

Everybody Wants Some - The Van Halen Saga - Van Halen 10/10
Red - My Uncensored Life in Rock - Sammy Hagar 10/10
No Regrets - Ace Frehley 10/10
Unbound - Metallica 10/10
Encyclopedia of Heavy Metal 10/10

Skipping books I've been re-reading, and instead going with the most recent new one:

Scarlet: 7/10.

I love Stephen Lawhead's narrative retelling Robin Hood as a Welsh nobleman, but the second book still has some of the flaws of the first. Namely that the well-crafted parts are interrupted by parts that drag so much they border on painful to read.

Lawhead would benefit from better editing or maybe stronger criticism. Otherwise, this would probably be a 9/10 or possibly even 10/10 (I'm a sucker for the source material and Welsh stories).

F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Beautiful and Damned 8/10

Back of a snapple bottle label - Snapple Beverage Corp.

9/10. Informative, fairly creative...dunno

A Game of Thrones - 8/10 - Took a while to get going, and the large range of background characters makes it difficult to keep up sometimes, but fantastic read which just continues to build and build the tension throughout.

The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

http://quarterlyconversation.com/wor...junot-diaz.jpg

8.5/10

It was written for the BBC as a series first then re-written into a novel, because it was done 'backwards' Gaiman has said himself he was never 100% happy with the way it turned out.

The series is pretty hit and miss although it does have Peter Capaldi in it as The Angel.

Ripper needs to post more.

Kinda wish the samples would go further in. I hear great things, but like you said...Slow start.

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse - 5/5

recently I read Official and Confidential, The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover by Anthony Summers

8/10

and am now starting A Separate Peace by John Knowles

The American Senator - Anthony Trollope.

6/10.

Started off very interesting, but quickly got diluted into an endless array of "social life" scenes, and basically, rich people and their problems. The main plot that was introduced at the beginning basically did not get adressed until the very end...

Nowhere near as good as Trollope's other works, such as Barchester Towers.

Roger Ebert-Life, Itself: 7/10. Seems like less a biography than a collection of blogs with a bunch of stuff about his childhood. But he's still a fantastic author.

Really couldn't tell you what happened in each individual book specifically, as the whole thing has sort of melded together into one giant story, as do most 'series' I read. So it's hard to tell exactly where I've read certain story points. However, I'll give a general statement of each.

A Song of Ice and Fire

A Game of Thrones - 9/10
Really fucking good intro to the series. I'll say that I was somewhat spoiled by seeing the TV show first, but I picked this up after and was surprised how closely the show followed the book. Still, book was even better.

A Clash of Kings - 8/10
Really good build-up, not as good as the first book IMO, but carried the story on great. Still, most of the book seemed like a build-up to book 3. Not enough Daenerys, although there never seems to be enough of her in any of these books really. Jon Snow is a badass.

A Storm of Swords - 10/10
Third book of the series, and easily the best. One of the best fantasy fictions I've ever read. The build-up was never dull, and once the book hit its rhythm, I was on the edge of my seat. Or bed/pillow as it were. Lots of laugh out loud moments, most notably from Tyrion. Incredible book. Tyrion is genius in this book. His character is witty, clever, and is sick of being pushed around. Fantastic. You just can't help but be overjoyed when certain things happen.

A Feast for Crows - 7/10
Weakest book of the series, although it was still good. For those unaware, this book and the following are 'essentially' one book. They were going to be a single book, but the author decided it was too long and decided to split up the timeline a bit and divided characters/regions of the world between the two. This book gave a lot of insight into characters we hadn't really seen much before, and opened up new regions of the world to us. However, they weren't the characters that I'd already come to love, and so it was somewhat of a letdown. Still, lot of good storytelling. I only hesitate to give it a 6 due to the amount of a certain Lannister and how satisfying his portion of the book was. Really loved learning about his character and hearing his perspective. Also, a certain Stark character was great to read about. The part of this book I just didn't care about were the perspectives of the Iron Island characters. I just.. didn't care about them. There was too much of them in it for me to give the book an overall higher rating. We could have learned about them more indirectly and I would have been happier.

A Dance with Dragons - 7/10
Picked back up as it went back to the viewpoints of characters I loved. Still not enough Daenerys. Damn you George R.R. Martin! However, it was great seeing Tyrion again and the story set up the next fairly well and left me wanting more. The drama at the wall left me wondering where the next book is going to take us. There's just so many options that could happen.

Gorgeous George: The Outrageous Bad-Boy Wrestler Who Created American Pop Culture

9/10

Honestly, probably one of the best wrestling reads I've ever picked up. The book is SO much more than just a biography on GG - which is great in itself, because there is just so many fascinating details on his life and interesting insights from friends / family, etc. - it's really a time period piece that paints a vivid picture of the many amazing changes in our history throughout the decades that it takes place in.

Great book, with quotes and info. from John Waters, Bob Dylan, James Brown, Ali and many others - after reading this, it [his story] definitely deserves a Showtime / HBO mini-series of some nature.

Pulphead: Essays by John Jeremiah Sullivan

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

8.5-9/10