A place for FF's to write and read brief reviews of books and films for the benefit of other FF's.

A place for FF's to write and read brief reviews of books and films for the benefit of other FF's.

Thursday, April 28, 2011

Three Books

I read these three books recently:

Den of Thieves, by James Stewart: This book is about Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky and the culture of insider trading on Wall Street in the 80s. It's in that same style of narrative corporate nonfiction as Barbarians at the Gate and Liar's Poker, though Stewart, a reporter by trade, isn't as good a writer as Michael Lewis (but who is, am I right?). Twenty years later, the lesson of the book is probably that even major scandals ultimately have very little effect on how Wall Street does business.

Riding Toward Everywhere, by William T. Vollmann: I love this dude. He spent a while hopping freight trains ("catching on") and wrote about it. It can be exciting to read an author who has truly transgressive views (sample sentence: "Once upon a time I almost married a Cambodian whore") yet maintains coherence. Vollmann's writing often reminds me of Dos Passos, who is one of my favorite writers.

Carpenter's Gothic, by William Gaddis: I've tried and failed to make headway on J R on a few occasions and don't have The Recognitions, but Carpenter's Gothic is much shorter (262 pp.). I found this book pretty captivating--it was short enough that I never got too frustrated at having to sometimes go back and re-read dialogue I'd attributed to the wrong character--and I'm happy to have finally read some Gaddis.

1 comment:

  1. I have Carpenter's Gothic on my shelves but haven't gotten to it yet. I have read exactly one half of The Recognitions and JR. JR really requires a lot of detective work and marking-up pages where the setting/characters has shifted. If you don't like homework, I wouldn't read JR.

    ReplyDelete