Last 5 Books I Read

(Actually the last 5 before Across the Years by Virginius Dabney-- I posted on that already)

5. Masters of Doom by David Kushner

I dont have any time for video games any more. I did have some time when the Doom shareware disks were out ten or eleven years ago. What an incredible game-- possibly the last great videogame. The book is a great success story about two very very flawed young men.

4. A Simple Twist of Fate: Bob Dylan and the Making of Blood on the Tracks by Kevin Odegard

Blood on the Tracks is one of my top two or three records of all time. This book, while flawed, is worth reading if you are a Dylan person. On the advice of his brother, Dylan threw out about half of the original record and re-recorded it in Minnesota at Christmastime 1974. The Minnesota musicans were (and still are) uncredited. If you want to hear the original versions of the signature songs from the record, Tangled up in Blue and Idiot Wind, you can get them on itunes on The Bootleg Series Vol 1-3. That's $1.98 well spent.

3. American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880-1964 by William Manchester

A great book about a mostly forgotten general. Also an excellent primer on the mostly forgotten Pacific War. I listened to this with my ipod-- an Audible.com audiobook. I'll post more on that later.

2. Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis

The linked article says it all-- and even has the great hangover scene. Check out the picture of Amis at the bottom of the linked page.

1. The Beast in the Garden by David Baron

Quoting Scooter's post-it-note: "A well-written book on a fascinating topic; one that touches on my new pet peeve: the anti-evolutionary tendencies of post-modern man." This was the best, or at least the most engrossing, non-fiction book I've read since "Under the Banner of Heaven."

EDIT: I forgot; between Lucky Jim and Beast in the Garden I read the new Harry Potter, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. It was a great improvement over the previous one (Order of the Phoenix), and I recommend it to all readers and followers of pop culture. Also, it is really neat to put a book down and to immediately log on to a huge message board where you can find out what everyone else thinks, in real time.

Wikipedia

I set this blog up this morning. Welcome.

Anyway, I came across Wikipedia a couple of years ago and I have been watching it get better and better. It is an open source encyclopedia. Any idiot can jump in and write or edit an article. Obviously, every once in a while something horrible happens, but generally it gets fixed in a hurry. The scope of the thing is incredible. I think it is the greatest and most ambitious intellectual project of the age. Like anything else on the net, it should be used with caution, but it seems to me that it is unmatched by any other one-stop research source.

This morning, I finished reading a memoir by Virginius Dabney called "Across the Years." Dabney was the editor of the Richmond Times-Dispatch from 1936-1969, and he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947. He wrote a well-regarded one volume history of Virginia, which I had read (actually, started), and a well known (in Virginia) history of Richmond. I found a nice copy of "Across the Years" in an antique store in Kilmarnock VA in June, which I bought for $3. I finally picked it up last week and I read it this week. It was great, if, like me, you like to read about old Virginiana, the University of Virginia, etc.

While I was reading it I took a look at the Wikipedia article on Mr. Dabney. Unfortunately, it was only 2 sentences long-- a "stub," or starter article. So, this afternoon, I sat down and hammered out a few more sentences-- here is the new article.

Second Test

Having.... some... difficulty