Now reading...

[Werf]

Picked up a book I read years ago to give it a revisit: Blind Voices by Tom Reamy. I just started it, so I've yet to discover if the book is as good as my memory says...

I never read his novel, but loved his short stories which were collected in "San Diego Lightfoot Sue and other stories." "The Detweiler Boy" affected my adolescent imagination when I read it originally in "The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction" when it was originally published. The guy reportedly died of a heart attack while banging away at the typewriter.

Currently I'm 140 pages into the new Thomas Pynchon "Against the Day" which I'm enjoying. Only 980 pages left to go...

[ejp626]

Currently I'm 140 pages into the new Thomas Pynchon "Against the Day" which I'm enjoying. Only 980 pages left to go...

I'll be interested to find what people think about this. I generally have enjoyed Pynchon's novels, but thought Mason & Dixon was long, overindulgent and worse of all quite boring.

[pasta]

Charles Beaumont "The Fiend in You"

[rostasi]

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Now starting one of my wife's books, which I think I bought for her in a second hand shop in Namibia a few years ago. "On safari", the autobiography of Armand Denis. In the late fifties, when we got our first TV, Armand and Michaela were THE TV wildlife programme pioneers. What they started, and popularised, has very much changed our perceptions of the world.

My wife's comment was that it was amazing how little they knew about what they were doing. Well, we'll see.

MG

Well, that was an interesting read! Indeed Denis knew very little, when he started out, and was very lucky not to have been killed a few times. But hardly anyone knew much anyway. Denis had a big advantage in that he was a bit of an inventor on the side; one of his inventions was still (in 1963) the standard method used in the film industry to equalise film colouring if it was a bit variable. That background enabled him to lash up all sorts of gear to film animals in difficult situations. And, though he had a romantic view of the ecology, he did change the world (not enough yet).

I think the guy is a hero.

Now beginning to read my way (for the second and, in some cases, the third time) through Katharine Kerr's fantasies.

MG

[Werf]

Currently I'm 140 pages into the new Thomas Pynchon "Against the Day" which I'm enjoying. Only 980 pages left to go...

I'll be interested to find what people think about this. I generally have enjoyed Pynchon's novels, but thought Mason & Dixon was long, overindulgent and worse of all quite boring.

I'm 600 pages into "Against the Day" now, and loving it. The book is hilarious, fast moving, and yet very dense with description. It's almost a comical prose poem, with interludes of tragic violence, epic spectacle, and a stage that stretches from the American West, the Arctic, and Europe. There's penny dreadful adventures, miner anarchists, advanced mathematics, magicians and actors, science fiction, a revenge tale, and lots of slapstick. I can't wait to get home to read more.

[randissimo]

I just finished Donald Westlake's "The Axe".. A pretty dark book about a guy who gets layed off from his midmanagement job in the paper industry.. My next endeavor will be Carl Hiaasen's new book, "Nature Girl". I've read most of his books and find them to be always colorful, funny, and entertaining..

[ejp626]

Am reading Any Human Heart by William Boyd, which is a novel in journal/diary format. It is written as if it were the personal diaries of a British art dealer/critic who meets all kinds of interesting people in London, New York, Lisbon, etc. However, the character is fictional, though many of the people he supposedly interacts with (Picasso, Hemingway) are real. It's generally pretty good. Since the guy largely meets people in these circles, it isn't too much like Zelig where he meets everyone in the 20th C.

I have on deck (and read just a few pages into) Messud's The Emperor's Children, which looks promising -- and is in the same kind of vein as the Boyd novel. This is about a core group of young, talented Manhattanites, generally working in the arts world and their interactions, pre- and post-9/11. FWIW, the Economist considers this one of the best novels of 2006.

[alocispepraluger102]

1. the disposable american-louis uchitelle

2. confessions of a wall street analyst-dan reingold

Outrage Deferred

CONFESSIONS OF A WALL STREET ANALYST

A True Story of Inside Information and

Corruption in the Stock Market

By Dan Reingold with Jennifer Reingold

Collins; 348pp; $25.95

Telecom's spectacular multitrillion-dollar boom and bust seem like ancient history. Once almighty WorldCom, its remnants snapped up by Verizon Communications (VZ ) and its founder headed to jail, is no more. Ditto for scores of upstart 1990s carriers. As for the Wall Street analysts who egged on the telecom train wreck, the ones who haven't been downsized or permanently barred from the industry don't have much left to analyze.

And yet six years later, the excesses of that time retain enough pungency for a Wall Street tell-all. Dan Reingold, a former top-ranked telecom analyst who left Credit Suisse First Boston (CSR ) LLC in 2003, delivers just that in Confessions of a Wall Street Analyst: A True Story of Inside Information and Corruption in the Stock Market. As he explains in his prologue: "Many of the worst transgressions...went unpunished and uncorrected. Hence this book." The cover promises: "What Eliot Spitzer Never Told You." But while Reingold, co-writing with his niece, Fast Company writer and BusinessWeek alum Jennifer Reingold, tramples over his Street confidentiality agreements to share sordid, often appalling anecdotes from the telco bacchanal, Confessions sadly arrives far too late to qualify as meaningful whistle-blowing.

In 1989, Reingold was recruited to genteel Morgan Stanley (MS ) from his investor-relations job at scrappy MCI. Although at MCI he was immersed in the art of finessing earnings guidance, with all the winking and body language that entailed, he says he made the leap to Wall Street intending simply to "write reports from the quiet of an office overlooking Midtown Manhattan as competently as any telecom analyst out there." Future über-analyst Jack Grubman, then a rising telecom researcher at Paine Webber (UBS ), predicted to a colleague that Reingold wouldn't make it. The two would become archrivals over the following decade.

The booming 1990s -- the decade of privatization, deregulation, and the explosive growth of the Internet -- made it nearly impossible for a telecom analyst to avoid the limelight. With billions of dollars in banking fees at play, a guy like Reingold became a hot commodity worthy of headhunting and huge pay packages, first at Merrill Lynch & Co. (MER ) and then at CSFB.

The ensuing workaholism inevitably took its toll. In 1997, while at the hospital where his mother was having surgery on a brain tumor, Reingold scrambled to file reports from a bank of pay phones when news broke that WorldCom was buying MCI. "Yes, my priorities were out of order," he writes, "but that was what Wall Street was all about, wasn't it?"

But Reingold claims he kept his sense of outrage about the increasingly unabashed conflicts of interest between investment banking and research, the kind that Grubman (and his $25 million pay package at Salomon Smith Barney (C )) openly espoused. As evidence, Reingold points to his refusal to let Merrill bankers pressure him to sign off on lucrative IPOs of carriers with suspect business models. At CSFB, he turned down an incentive arrangement wherein he would have answered directly to the bankers. On the other hand, Reingold argues, Grubman tailored his research calls to the demands of the underwriting calendar. Most infamously, he went bullish on AT&T (T ) ahead of the carrier's record $10.6 billion wireless initial public offering in April, 2000 (partly as a quid pro quo for his children's nursery school admission). Reingold also contends that Grubman was using his privileged connection to management and bankers to leak impending merger information to clients. "Grubman's research is a sham," Reingold warned an executive. "In effect, he's a whore and everyone knows it." Grubman did not return phone calls.

And yet Reingold kept the Street's code of silence. "All I could do was sit back and watch," he writes of Grubman's unethical rise to the top. In fact, had Reingold had the courage of his convictions, he would have quit his job and blown the whistle when doing so would have mattered. Instead, he waited until April, 2003, to finally step down from his multimillion-dollar post at CSFB.

Confessions correctly argues that half-baked regulation has not put an end to rampant insider trading and compromised Wall Street research, indignantly noting that the biggest hucksters from the telecom bubble returned only a fraction of their ill-gotten gains. Still, coming in 2006, its value lies mainly in a colorful portrayal of egos, salary negotiations, and the daily dispensing of B.S. Had it been published six years ago, the book would have offered so much more.

Edited December 16, 2006 by alocispepraluger102

[jlhoots]

Tony Hillerman: The Shape Shifter

Hampton Sides: Blood & Thunder

[ejp626]

I have on deck (and read just a few pages into) Messud's The Emperor's Children, which looks promising -- and is in the same kind of vein as the Boyd novel. This is about a core group of young, talented Manhattanites, generally working in the arts world and their interactions, pre- and post-9/11. FWIW, the Economist considers this one of the best novels of 2006.

I finished The Emperor's Children. I have mixed feelings. It was a fairly fast-paced novel about priviledged young people in Manhattan, and two outsiders who try to break in. But I definitely feel that it is getting such high reviews (in NYTimes and the Economist) because the reviewers know so many of these people and actually are these people. And I know a few of these people and was a bit of an outsider the two years I was living in Brooklyn, only rarely going to the parties where the beautiful people hang out. Some of the portraits are fairly cutting about how spoiled these people are, but still it does little to shake their overall conviction that Manhattan is the center of the world (of course, one could say that 9/11 confirmed this in a macabre way). The treatment of 9/11 is a little odd. Messud doesn't dwell on the actual events -- sort of sidesteps it aside from a few pages -- then shows how it affected the characters in a very short time (up to a month after the event) and shows how little it really changed them. Though we do see newly-weds (who never should have married) who will probably soon split up in part due to the strain of events. Maybe it is better than a novel (like McInerney's recent one) that roots around in it (or spends half its time glorifying firefighters), but there are still a few strained coincidences. It did prompt me to remember my experiences, so I guess that's something. So anyway, not a complete success for me. Maybe my expectations were just too high.

I'm about to start Jacobson's Kalooki Nights, which is apparently about a Jewish cartoonist who focuses on the Holocaust. I wonder what Art Spiegelman would have to say about this.

[jazzbo]

"The Pelopenessian War" by Donald Kajan (not his four volume history, but his less scholarly centric single volume work.)

Fascinating. Democracies against facism.

[ghost of miles]

Just finished Steven Isoardi's THE DARK TREE (which I had set aside back in October) and H. Rider Haggard's SHE. Getting ready to start Alec Wilder's book on American popular song.

[Matthew]

Presently, I'm reading Murray Kempton's Part of Our Time: Some Ruins And Monuments Of The Thirties. Very interesting to read, it was written in 1955 with Kempton looking back on some "liberals" from the 1930's. I never realized how shattering of an experience the Sacco-Vanzetti trial/execution was for the left in America. Kempton presents it as the end of certain way that some people had of looking at American justice -- the saying "no one innocent will ever die in America" was proved false. A lot of connections in this book to present day America and liberalism. Glad I picked it up at the used Bookstore I hang-out at.

[jlhoots]

Thomas McGuane: Gallatin Canyon

[Harold_Z]

[B. Goren.]

[jlhoots]

Great book.

[medjuck]

Great book.

The Penguin edition includes a map for a walking tour of Barcelona which takes you to various places mentioned in the book. Unfortunately I read the book shortly after returning from Barcelona this past Spring. I wish I'd read it before we went-- ot=r better yet while we were there. However I did discover that the hotel in which we stayed seems to have been the location for the home of the character Nuria Monfort. My kids stayed in the room which what I think would have been hers.

[ghost of miles]

The entry in the 33 1/3 series for Bob Dylan's HIGHWAY 61 REVISITED. Also taking another crack at Dos Passos' U.S.A.

[paul secor]

Reginald Hill: Death's Jest Book

I've been reading a few of the books from Hill's Dalziel/Pascoe series - entertaining stuff

[ejp626]

I'm about to start Jacobson's Kalooki Nights, which is apparently about a Jewish cartoonist who focuses on the Holocaust. I wonder what Art Spiegelman would have to say about this.

I am not enjoying Kalooki Nights much. It is about a Jewish cartoonist from Manchester who has a complicated relationship with Jews. His father was an atheist, and he appears to wrestle with faith. But most of the novel focuses on him and his ex-wives, who are not only Gentiles, but Jew-hating Gentiles (along with a side story about a childhood friend obsessed with the Holocaust who literally gassed his own parents to death). So there is a lot of anger and self-loathing, and basically just too much of the same thing over and over. I'd say the book is three times as long as it should be, given what I have gotten from it. I have a hundred pages to go and should just drop it. I guess I won't because I'm a bit of a masochist myself and feel obligated to finish books I have started.

Probably the last novel I will read in Jan. is Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, which is about Biafra's fight for independence in Nigeria and the impact that has on the central characters. It has started well, and it seems to be getting largely positive reviews. If I end up disappointed with this as well (4 for 4), I think I will just stop reading contemporary fiction for a while and focus on other things.

[B. Goren.]

Great book.

The Penguin edition includes a map for a walking tour of Barcelona which takes you to various places mentioned in the book. Unfortunately I read the book shortly after returning from Barcelona this past Spring. I wish I'd read it before we went-- ot=r better yet while we were there.

I think it's a good reason to visit Bercelona again.

[Tom in RI]

Just started The System of the World by Neal Stephenson. It's the last book in a trilogy that I started about a year and a half ago. Next up, Feeding The Monster by Seth Mnookin.

[jazzbo]

I'm only half way through the War book. Been reading lots of articles in Jazzbeat (Buck's magazine) and the liner notes of the new Fats Waller box set.