I am a reader. I enjoy reading immensely. I seldom if ever go anywhere without the book I am currently reading. If you know me, you know this to be true. Whether it’s to work, the grocery store, the butcher, the park or anywhere else, I always have my book.
I used to be a voracious reader. That is until the surgery and “the baby.”
Now, I read more at red lights than I do at home or anywhere else. I can’t read on the treadmill because I KNOW that I will catch the siderail and get myself hurt, and then everyone will think I’m an even bigger dork than I already am.
Anyway, since my friend the Madsapper is currently doing this on his website, I’ve decided to review books as I read them and tell you what I think of them. Like I said, there was a time where you’d have gotten a review a week. Now, you may only get one a month. It really depends on the kids.
Right now I’m reading a book I was very much looking forward to called “Sunday Money” by Jeff MacGregor.
Jeff is / was a writer for Sports Illustrated, and in 2002 he and his wife sold their home, bought a 27 foot motorhome / camper and decided to follow the Winston Cup tour for the entire 2002 season (it wasn’t yet the Nextel Cup tour).
While there are parts that are entertaining and funny, for the most part, the book was a waste of $24.95 plus tax.
See, in magazines, I think guys write more when less would do to attract attention to themselves and their style. There are way too many cases in this book where the author takes a page to say what one word would have said. Here’s a paragraph that’s a fine example:
“NASCAR’s success may be the story of how far we’ve all spun past the deep old identifiers, about how millionns of us all over the rolling belly of America are looking for something to do with our Sundays, trying to find grace and sensation at the racetrack, not distraction but definition, then transcendence, in the cars and the drivers and the carnal carnival divine, those long, strange raing weekends at once as fixed and unchanging as the Tridentine mass and as hopped-up with improvised jitterbug mysticism as a Pentacostal prayer meeting, a quarter of a million people all speaking in tongues at once.”
Notice anything funny about what you just read?
IT’S ONE FUCKING SENTENCE!!! 103 words and only one period among them.
Once in a while, that’s okay. But over and over and over again, it gets to be too much. It gets to be tiring to read 300 pages like that, regardless of what it says.
For those who don’t know much about NASCAR, I think this book would be a total waste of time. Hell, for someone that does know alot about NASCAR, this book is pretty much a waste of time with some funny little moments spread throughout it.
I liken it to a movie that uses all the best scenes in the credits, then you find out the movie sucks ass. This book doesn’t suck ass, but suck ass should be it’s neighbor on the shelf.
I give this book one star on a scale of one to five with five being the best. Actually, I will give it two stars. One for the writing and one for doing what I’ve always wanted to do, which is follow “The Show” for a year just to see what that’d be like.
Next up in the reading room is going to be Reckless Abandon by Stuart Woods (A Stone Barrington novel that will absolutely start with the line “Elaine’s…late..). or one of a few others I’ve recently gotten from the hardback bargain bins at Walmart or Barnes and Noble, or else a paperback from the rack at Kroger. Either way, there’ll be more to come.
What say you?