The Night of the Gun by David Carr

Going back over my history has been like crawling over broken glass in the dark. I hit women, scared children, assaulted strangers and chronically lied and gamed to stay high. I read about That Guy with the same sense of disgust that almost anyone would. What. An. Asshole. Here, safe in an Adirondack redoubt where I am piecing together the history of That Guy, I often feel I have very little in common with him. And that distance will keep me typing until he turns in this guy. - David Carr

I became a fan of David Carr (columnist for the NYT) after watching the documentary Page One. The Night of the Gun takes you deep into his past, and he reports on it, eschewing memory, documenting his past through the eyes of the people who knew him, through the eyes of those who lived through his dark days and saw him rise from rock bottom, stumble, rise again, stay afloat and struggle. His writing and reflection is eloquent, harsh and most importantly, real. Be prepared to descend into the depths of his life as an addict. It's gripping. Highly recommended.

I really liked this quote from Terry, one of his old bosses, that Carr relates through his memoir:

"There's a passion, there's a knowing...In a way, you almost have to know how to be a journalist before you commit to being one...If you find out something you can do well, I don't care if it's whittling wood, or fixing a car, or writing a lead, if you find our you're good at being a reporter, you can just want that over and over again. You want that reinforcement, you want that feeling. I know what I'm doing. It feels good to know what you're doing. A lot of people  walking around don't know what they're doing, in anything. In any way. And this is something that is pretty easily measured. Did I win today?"

Detroit: An American Autopsy by Charlie LeDuff

"Detroit was beginning to wear my ass out. I didn't have the usual reportorial detachment anymore. This was home. This was where I lived. This was where I was raising my kid, and my sister's kid dies in some dark basement not six weeks after I arrive. And this morning I'm watching grown men cheer the demolition of a shit box as though it were the Berlin Wall coming down. 

 I looked out the window realizing that Detroit was doing something to me that a story's never done to me before. It was hurting."   (Charlie LeDuff in Detroit, an American Autopsy)

One of the first books of the year under my belt is Charlie LeDuff's "autopsy" for Detroit. It's irreverent, raw and disturbing. There are moments of hope. Moments where you can see something glimmer through the cloud cast over this city…but don't mistake this for a tale of redemption. LeDuff was a staff writer at the New York Times and then went on to be a reporter at the Detroit News. In this book, he dives into his home town and attempts to discover what caused its downfall, explores his own family history, takes you into local firehouses, political corruption and poverty that can make you shudder. It is almost hard to believe this is an American city. Find the NYT book review here.

...and I'm never going back again

"For all the anarchy of the place, it was sometimes easy to miss the changes. A new checkpoint went up on Sadoon Street, Al-Qaeda crept into Adamiyah: those were easy. The deeper changes were more difficult to spot: the shifts in the culture, the turnings inside people's brains. The confusion lay in the violence. After witnessing a car bomb, or wading through a bloody emergency room, I sometimes forgot that violence in Iraq had a shape; that it had a direction, that the violence had a purpose. So much violence and so many purposes, all of them competing and crashing into one another, reshaping the country in their own distinctive ways. In the madness, it was sometimes hard to see." - Dexter Filkins, The Forever War

"What's the angle of deviation at 500 meters that gives you 2 inches to the right?...You don't even want to think about that." - Sebastian Junger, War

I've been meaning to share this recommendation for the past month and find myself with some idle time on my hands as we enter another week of the government shutdown which allows me to catch up. In addition, I was inspired to share this book because of a related recommendation from a dinner guest at our house last night (more on that in a moment).

The Forever War is written by Dexter Filkins, the prizewinning NYT correspondent who witnessed the rise of the Taliban in the 90s, experienced ground zero immediately following 9/11 and was embedded with armed forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. Following the two novels I have read this year about the impacts of the conflict(s) in the Middle East on soldiers, families and locals, Filken's dispatches from the front lines hit home with honest to God true stories of events that in all other circumstances beyond war, you would have a hard time believing.

This book invoked a series of emotions in me ranging from awe at people's courage in times of conflict, frustration with the blinders we see through that influence these global conflicts, to sorrow and horror at some of the visceral scenes that you experience through the author's eyes. It is intense and in my mind, a must read for anyone who wants to try to understand the complexity of the front line in the Middle East.

On to dinner: We had a few friends over last night and one of them recommended a podcast I had never heard of called The Moth. Per their website, The Moth...

"...is dedicated to the art and craft of storytelling. It is a celebration of both the raconteur, who breathes fire into true tales of ordinary life, and the storytelling novice, who has lived through something extraordinary and yearns to share it. At the center of each performance is, of course, the story..."

Specifically, he recommended one podcast from Sebastian Junger, an American journalist who worked on assignment in Afghanistan and co-directed the documentary film Restrepo (2010 Grand Jury Prize winner at the Sundance Film Festival; nominated for an Academy Award). It's a short yet powerful story told by Sebastian and if you have 10 minutes to spare, it will make a difference in your day and echo for quite some after. It is called War and you can listen to it by clicking here.

The preview for Restrepo is below.

The Gods of Gotham by Lindsay Faye

I can never quite fathom what she wanted of me. Not even in the dream. Only what she turned me into. - Timothy Wilde in The Gods of Gotham.

Historical fiction is one of my favorite genres. The Gods of Gotham is set in the middle of the nineteenth century and explores New York City at an inflection point in its history. In 1800, NYC clocked in at about 60,000 residents. By 1850, that number had reached half a million. Lindsay Faye's characters are set in the middle of this city bursting at its seams, struggling to cope with the influx of Irish immigrants arriving as a result of the disastrous potato famine hitting Ireland. Protestant vs. Catholic. Nativists vs. immigrants. The political machine of Tammany hall. The formation of the NYPD. This is the true setting for a mystery with a bartender turned "copper star," sparring with a brutal killer at its center. If you enjoy period pieces, this is one to throw on your to-do list.

The Book of Jonas - Stephen Dau

"Where do you go in your mind?" asks Paul, and Jonas tells him that sometimes he doesn't know, that sometimes he looks up to realize than an hour or more has passed as he sits in the library, or on the edge of his bed, or on a park bench, and that he has no recollection of it.

"Doesn't that worry you?" asks Paul. "How much time do you spend in this way, drifting and unaware, in your head?"

At first, Jonas doesn't understand the question. Or thinks that maybe he understands it differently from the way Paul intends it. But then he thinks that he does understand, and his face lights up with comprehension.

"Oh, lifetimes," he says at last. "I've spent lifetimes unconscious."

Inspired in part by my recent read of The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers, I picked this book up recently and found it an interesting follow-up to Powers' book. While The Yellow Birds focused on the impact of the Iraq war on young soldiers, The Book of Jonas focuses on the impact of an unnamed Middle Eastern war on a refugee and his connections to the mother of an American soldier responsible for saving his life. This book was dark. You can feel the shadow of the painful secret that is revealed towards the end from the minute you finish the first paragraph and read this line "In the village they tried to make sense of it."

The Yellow Birds was dark too. Both seemed fitting given the nightmares that come from the inability to find peaceful resolution to our differences.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil - John Berendt

"For me, Savannah's resistance to change was its saving grace. The city looked inward, sealed off from the noises and distractions of the world at large. It grew inward, too, like hothouse plants tended to by an indulgent gardener. The ordinary became extraordinary. Eccentrics thrived. Every nuance and quirk of personality achieved greater brilliance in that lush enclosure than would have been possible anywhere else in the world."

"The characters in this book are real." This is the first sentence in this book after you finish it. I found myself saying it over and over actually...the entire time I was reading this non-fiction story about Savannah, it's eccentric personalities and the famous murder trial that occurred there throughout the 80s. The title is derived from the voodoo theme that makes its way into the story as the trial progresses. I won't ruin it for you, but if you are ever in a cemetery near midnight, just know that the half hour before midnight is for doing good, and the half hour after is for evil. Well written, amazingly true and I'm headed to track down the movie based on this book for sure.

The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers

"The war tried to kill us in spring. As grass greened the plains of Nineveh and the weather warmed, we patrolled the low-slung hills beyond the cities and towns. We moved over them and through the tall grass on faith, kneading paths into windswept growth like pioneers. While we slept, the war rubbed its thousand ribs against the ground in prayer. When we pressed onward through exhaustion, its eyes were white and open in the dark. While we ate, the war fasted, fed by its own deprivation. It made love and gave birth and spread through fire."

I've been meaning to post about this book for a while. It tells the story of two young soldiers who fought in the Iraq war and the toll the war took on their lives. This is the first book I have read that approached this subject and it was incredibly powerful, emotionally intense, poetic and will make me never look at a young man in army dress the same again. Highly recommended. One of the best books I have read this year. 

Daniyal Mueenuddin - In Other Rooms, Other Wonders

I'll be honest, if you had told me I would enjoy a book of 8 interconnected short stories about feudal society in Pakistan this much, I would not have believed you. However, I would recommend this book to almost anyone. The characters, while developed quickly, provide a deep dive into many levels of Pakistani culture, touching on the lives of the power­ful Harouni family, its employees, man­agers, drivers, gardeners, cooks and servants. The stories are dark, manipulative and gritty. Essentially, they feel real. 

NYT Review clip: "...like watching a game of blackjack, the shrewd players calculating their way beyond their dealt cards in an attempt to beat the dealer. Some bust, others surrender. But in Mueenuddin's world, no one wins."

Paulo Coelho - The Pilgrimage

A parable related to finding your own path, a journey that encourages you to find the extraordinary in the ordinary, a book that makes me want to throw on a backpack, leave it all behind, become a pilgrim and a poet. A dangerous read for that alone.

"....wisdom has value only if it helps us to overcome some obstacle. A hammer would make no sense in the world if there were not nails to be driven. And even given the existence of nails, the hammer would be useless if it only thought 'I can drive those nails with two blows.' The hammer has to act. To put itself into the hands of the carpenter and to be used in its proper function." - Paulo Coelho, The Pilgrimage

The Signal and the Noise - Nate Silver

I'm guessing that this is probably one of the more "dense" books that I will read this year in that it drifts a bit further into statistical theory then I would have thought i would typically enjoy. In the end though, I have to say that Nate Silver does a really good job of taking the topic of predictions and statistical theory and making it accessible through a slew of interesting examples such as baseball, earthquakes, weather forecasting, climate change and terrorism. Silver is the author of the NYT blog FiveThirtyEight, was named one of the 100 most influential people by Time magazine in 2009 and in the 2012 presidential election he correctly predicted the winner of all 50 states. He didn't do so bad in 2008 either, predicting 49 out of 50 states correctly as well as predicting 100% of the senate races. The man knows his stuff.

Information Bias

The instinctual shortcut that we take when we have "too much information" is to engage with it selectively, picking out the parts we like and ignoring the remainder, making allies with those who have made the same choices and enemies of the rest.

- Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise

The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Rounding out my recent journey through Carlos Ruiz Zafón's novels, I finished off The Angel's Game a little while ago. Of the three, I think that I might put this as the second best, with The Shadow of the Wind as the top choice. All around though, if you are looking for an engaging author who brings a sets a good gothic/mystery tone, I would recommend any of his three novels.

Amazon.com description:

In an abandoned mansion at the heart of Barcelona, a young man, David Martín, makes his living by writing sensationalist novels under a pseudonym. The survivor of a troubled childhood, he has taken refuge in the world of books and spends his nights spinning baroque tales about the city’s underworld. But perhaps his dark imaginings are not as strange as they seem, for in a locked room deep within the house lie photographs and letters hinting at the mysterious death of the previous owner.

Like a slow poison, the history of the place seeps into his bones as he struggles with an impossible love. Close to despair, David receives a letter from a reclusive French editor, Andreas Corelli, who makes him the offer of a lifetime. He is to write a book unlike anything that has ever existed--a book with the power to change hearts and minds. In return, he will receive a fortune, and perhaps more. But as David begins the work, he realizes that there is a connection between his haunting book and the shadows that surround his home.

Two Graves - Preston & Child

I've been a fan of the Child/Preston Pendergast series for a while now so when the latest one (Two Graves) was released it was a no brainer to queue up and rip through. Which is what you do with these guys...they write thrillers that suck you into the action immediately and it doesn't stop until the last page. Escapism is a necessity sometimes. 

Plot summary from Amazon.com (no real spoilers here as I think this is just sums up the intro/chapter 1, all the real twists come from other directions):

For twelve years, he believed she died in an accident. Then, he was told she'd been murdered. Now, FBI Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast discovers that his beloved wife Helen is alive. But their reunion is cut short when Helen is brazenly abducted before his eyes. And Pendergast is forced to embark on a furious cross-country chase to rescue her.
But all this turns out to be mere prologue to a far larger plot: one that unleashes a chillingly-almost supernaturally-adept serial killer on New York City. And Helen has one more surprise in store for Pendergast: a piece of their shared past that makes him the one man most suited to hunting down the killer.

A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain - Robert Olen Butler

I bought this book for my wife a year or so ago and randomly found it around Christmas time and decided to give it a shot. This is a collection of short stories which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993, each told by a different Vietnamese immigrant who has settled in Louisiana. While it is not my typical leisure reading fare, I can see why it received the recognition. Each short story has its own unique form of narrative poetry. Butler is an excellent writer and pulls you into a different world with ease. It's fiction, but not my typical kind. I thought I would just grab one or two short stories at a time and then take a break but just like eating popcorn...I failed. Looking for something a little different? This might be for you.

Inside Job

Continuing on the documentary theme, we watched Inside Job this past weekend, a...

...2010 documentary film about the late-2000s financial crisis directed by Charles H. Ferguson. The film is described by Ferguson as being about "the systemic corruption of the United States by the financial services industry and the consequences of that systemic corruption." In five parts, the film explores how changes in the policy environment and banking practices helped create the financial crisis.

I don't have much to say about this film that will not include a superlative. It does a remarkable job of making a complex web of financial instruments easy to understand. So easy that after you understand it, and the greed that triggered their creation and manipulation, you are left disturbed, educated and of course, entertained. If you're a lay person and you want to understand how we got to where we are today with the financial crisis, this movie is a must. Trailer below.

Looking for a great book on the subject? Try The Big Short by Michael Lewis.

A Catalan NY Times-Picayune #Longread

I shared this link on Twitter a few days ago but wanted to post it here as well. This movie just seemed especially relevant after watching the 60 Minutes report this past weekend on Sunday on the cutbacks and focus on digital media that has caused an uproar related to the Times-Picayune, established in 1837 (!).

As someone who has refocused my reading on paper based books this past year, I have an emotional attachment to the idea of a newspaper I guess. Although the concept of reading physical paper books is not something I switched back to for simply emotional reasons. And truth be told, when I watched the 60 Minutes story, I found myself reflecting on the fact that paper-print journalism is not the only way to achieve quality journalism...

Anyways, here is an excellent documentary on The New York Times as it grapples with the similar pressures that led to these changes to the Times-Picayune. Highly, highly recommended.

PS:  Semi-related, I find myself wondering sometimes what it says about our attention span as a society that multi-page articles have led to the introduction of the phrase #longreads into our vocabulary. 

PPS: ...and for you soccer fans out there, did you catch the Barca piece on 60 Minutes as well?!? Cool stuff. Ives posted it here in case you missed it. 

In the Garden of Beasts

"...So it made me wonder what allows a culture to slip its moorings." 

Erik Larson on In the Garden of Beasts

During the Christmas break I was able to finish reading In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson. Larson also wrote a very popular book I read a couple years back called The Devil in the White City about the World's Fair in Chicago in the 1890's (and the story of a serial killer who lived in that time) which I highly recommend.

In the Garden of Beasts is a true story about the ambassador to Germany during Hitler's rise to power in the 30's. To be honest, I would typically avoid reading books that touch this particular topic, but my wife had recommended this one so strongly that I gave it a shot. No regrets here.

The story of Ambassador Dodd and his family in Germany is fascinating, told from a perspective that does not go out of its way to present Dodd as a hero, does so, and then does the exact opposite. One of the best parts of this story was the unique point of view that Larson provides on the thoughts and perspective of various individuals and family members who lived through this pivotal time period. This book made its way under the tree of at least three people on our list this year. Great read.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

I've been remiss in posting recent books the last few months...and I've read through a few good ones. Recently, I've been digging into the work of Carlos Ruiz Zafón, a writer from Barcelona/Los Angeles who created three books in a series known as the Cemetery of Forgotten Books - each of which can be read independently and in any order. I stumbled on Zafón's work simply because of the fact that I had noticed Stephen King had reviewed and recommended his work. I might follow this approach a bit more often in the future because I've found the first two books I have read by Zafón to be very well written - great escapism novels that plunge you into the 40's and 50's in Barcelona. I don't know if I can really pinpoint the quality in his writing that I enjoy but it is a combination of a gothic tone, mystery, strong character development and a style that just seems very fluid to me. Overall, just an enjoyable voice to get lost in.

I started with The Shadow of the Wind and just finished The Prisoner of Heaven. Just bought the third entitled The Angel's Game today. If you are tempted to explore further, check out his website here and I would start with The Shadow of the Wind.

For those of you who are readers of The Economist, here is a quote from their review of The Shadow of the Wind. Read the full review here.

'The book is written by someone witty and knowing enough to spoof himself while still being able to raise the hairs on the back of your neck... Carlos Ruiz Zafón's zest is infectious... He swathes his story with atmospherics... Barcelona becomes a place of doors opening into dark interiors of the mind... Behind all this is a fierce satirical energy against the tyrants and philistines of history... A game it may be, but somewhere in the shadows are the Caprichos of Goya.' 

Swamplandia! by Karen Russell

The back cover of this book would have had to have been a disaster for me to not pick it up and give it a try. As an adopted native of the bayou, the front cover alone was just too good to pass up. Yes, yes, judging a book by its front (or back cover) is probably not something I should admit to but in the end...what can I say. There is a reason that cliche is so popular.


In general, I feel like I have had a lucky year when it comes to reading thus far. Almost every book I have picked up this year has been one that I enjoyed. This one was another good read for sure. Swamplandia! tells the story of a family living in Ten Thousand Islands off the coast of Florida whose alligator wrestling theme/adventure park becomes threatened by change, both personal and economic. The story has a mythical feel to it, told through the eyes of several Bigtree family characters who literally wrestle with growing up in a secluded environment. The primary perspective is that of the Bigtree daughter, Ava,  13 years old and at times both resourceful yet naive. Overall, I would recommend this book to others for sure, although I had a slight issue with the ending. Without ruining the details, I guess I would say that I thought the conclusion came too quick and that I am a fan of a bit more redemption in my fiction. That said, this is another good one to pick up and get lost in for sure.


Here is a quick glimpse of what this one is about (from the Amazon page/Booklist review):

Swamplandia! is a shabby tourist attraction deep in the Everglades, owned by the Bigtree clan of alligator wrestlers. When Hilola, their star performer, dies, her husband and children lose their moorings, and Swamplandia! itself is endangered as audiences dwindle. The Chief leaves. Brother Kiwi, 17, sneaks off to work at the World of Darkness, a new mainland amusement park featuring the “rings of hell.” Otherworldly sister Osceola, 16, vanishes after falling in love with the ghost of a young man who died while working for the ill-fated Dredge and Fill Campaign in the 1930s. 

Bright's Passage by Josh Ritter

I'm such a big fan of Josh Ritter's music that I was worried about reading his first novel (Bright's Passage) quite a bit. Turns out that was totally unfounded. The same story telling craft that Ritter has in his music carries really well into his first book. The story of Henry Bright, his angel, coping with the horrors of World War I, and the birth of his first son is all weaved into multiple timelines with ease. It was literally like taking a Josh Ritter song and turning it into a novel.