Confessions of a Readaholic

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Confessions of a Readaholic
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Month: May 2014

It's MONDAY again, what are you reading?

This Monday certainly came quite fast for me. The weekend got over faster than the light travels. Still I managed to read two books, Drive and Driven both by James Sallis last week. Today I got  Tess of D’Ubervilles by Thomas Hardy from my college’s library. I have this nostalgic feeling of reading something which will fill the void inside for quite a long time now. Yesterday, I even spent an hour on my laptop browsing the collection of eBooks I have but I was unable to decided on a particular title. So I thought it’d be better to read something in paperback. Also, it feels boring to me on reading on a laptop and that’s the reason I used my phone as an eBook reader earlier to read but it got broke last week.  Thus I had to find some other way to get back to my reading, and paperback is the best.

I hope Mr. Hardy’s words do me the favor and I’ll indulge myself into it instantaneously.

 


BOOK REVIEW: Drive by James Sallis

Drive by James Sallis
Genres: Fiction
four-stars

There is so much about this character called Driver, that after watching the movie and reading the book it still bugs me. There is a movie adaption of the book (highly recommended to me by a friend) by the same name starring Ryan Gosling, Carry Mulligan and few more. The movie is an exception, the one you might have never seen before. It proves the statement, “Silence is so freaking good” true. Go and watch it yourself, and you won’t regret watching it.

I am here to talk about the book more, and yes that’s what I’ll do. Drive is a new novella by one of the nation’s most respected and honored writers of noir fiction, James Sallis. Set mostly in Arizona and L.A., the story is, according to Sallis, …”about a guy who does stunt driving for movies by day and drives for criminals at night. In classic noir fashion, he is double-crossed and, though before he has never participated in the violence (‘I drive. That’s all.’), he goes after the ones who double-crossed and tried to kill him.” The guy’s called Driver, he drives on special jobs and one of the few attraction a reader will find here is that the character’s specific name is not mentioned in the entire story. He’s just a driver. He loves to do that, and he can only do that. (more…)

four-stars

It's Monday, what are you reading?

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It’s Monday, fellow bloggers, what are you reading?

I am currently reading Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson.


BOOK REVIEW: The Numbers Game by Chris Anderson & David Sally

The Numbers Game Genres: Sports, Nonfiction
three-stars

When I am in the mood of reading about football (soccer), I hardly find books to read. Eventually, I got this book from a friend of mine, who like me, is suffering from Football Fever. 

In The Numbers Game: Why Everything you should know about soccer is wrong, Chris Anderson, a former professional goalkeeper turned soccer statistics guru, teams up with behavioral analyst David Sally to uncover the numbers that really matter when it comes to predicting a winner. Investigating basic but profound questions—How valuable are corners? Which goal matters most? Is possession really nine-tenths of the law? How should a player’s value be judged?—they deliver an incisive, revolutionary new way of watching and understanding soccer.

The book answers each of the above questions and many more with facts and immense amount of interesting data and evidence supporting it. The book is purely statistical and the authors are assuming that many aspects of the game have reached an equilibrium point and will not change for decades. It is more or less the same genre as Soccernomics by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski  and the only difference that it’s uses large scale of data and is quite informative than the Soccernomics itself. (more…)

three-stars

BOOK REVIEW: Confessions of a Crap Artist

Confessions of a Crap Artist by Philip K. Dick
Genres: Fiction
two-half-stars

I picked this book as an experimental form of reading. Philip K. Dick, who is famous for his science fiction works including Minority Report, Blade Runner, Total Recall, Paycheck, Do Androids  Dream of Electric Sheep? and many more, became my prey. So I picked one of his famous novel Confessions of a Crap Artist which is not a science fiction. My experimentation problem involved to read an author who written books in different genre, and I must say, though I was satisfied when the book got over, but it was not a pleasure to read this particular book.

Confessions of a Crap Artist is one of Philip K. Dick’s weirdest and most accomplished novels but I did not find it accomplished. Jack Isidore, the main protagonist, is a ‘crap artist’ a collector of crackpot ideas (among other things, he believes that the earth is hollow and that sunlight has weight) and worthless objects, a man so grossly unequipped for real life that his sister and brother-in-law feel compelled to rescue him from it. (more…)

two-half-stars

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