Rollins is back again with another awesome account of his travel and personal experiences. A follow up to A Preferred Blur, Rollins takes right off from where he left with some of his most memorable experiences in A Mad Dash . We love sifting though the memories of one of the most interesting spoken word and music artists of our time!
The buzz around Clooney’s next flick, Up in the Air, is dizzying. Get the book that started it all before the film comes out. Ryan Bingham is a professional business traveler, specializing in career transition consulting (firing people when their boss is too weak to do it themselves). His purpose in life is to travel. He spends his life in Airworld, where the currency is airline miles, and the national past time is acquiring upgrades. Ryan’s white whale is to acquire one million airline miles with a startup airline, and be one of the first ten people to do so. Along the way he deals with the usual issues: identity theft, professional gurus, and crisis of faith. If you spend too much time on the road, you’ll either laugh or cry all the way through. Either way, it’s a fun ride, but much like Bingham’s jags across the map, don’t expect too much deviation from the flight plan. The film comes out on Christmas day and is written and directed by Jason Reitman of “Juno” and “Thank You for Smoking” fame. Up in the Air ($10)
You want to read, but you’re way to busy, we get it. But it doesn’t have to be that way. This website posts one new short story each week. On the bus, or in a meeting, pull it up on your iphone and pretend that you’re texting. With a wide range of authors, from classic wordsmiths like Mark Twain and Fyodr Doestevsky to the modern elite like Jo Kyung Ran and Louise Erdrich, at the very least, you’ll have something interesting to say over drinks this weekend.
Just think if Project Mayhem were used by adolescent terrorists against the U.S. Taking that, Pygmy might sound like a simple plot, but anyone who has read Palahniuk knows that his prose is anything but. If you haven’t read his books before but are at least familiar with the films based on his novels, Fight Club and Choke, you will be in for a treat. Not to mention displaying his covers on your bookshelf puts your library in the cutting edge of post-modernist fiction. ($24.95).
Classy meets comic in this luxe leather-bound collection of, that’s right, Calvin & Hobbes. It’s kind of like getting all dressed up in your smoking jacket for Masterpiece Theater and smoking a bubble pipe. Perfect for capturing nostalgia without being accused of having Peter Pan syndrome. Just don’t let your C&H enthusiast friends wiz on it. ($150 or 94.50 on Amazon)
Bumping Into Geniuses
One of the coolest books we have ever read about the music business as a whole is Danny Goldberg’s “Bumping Into Geniuses.” The accounts of his life are easy to tell as he has held so many jobs in the music industy: reporter, manager, and record company executive. He give exciting recounts of the lives of artists like Led Zeppelin, Stevie Nicks, Warren Zevon, and my particular favorite Kurt Cobain of Nirvana. Goldberg is a clearly gifted observer and writer, who retained a measure of the idealism that first attracted him to the record business and an all-too-rare ability to still distinguish between all of the hype and reality. ($17)
Next time someone asks you if you’ve read Pride and Prejudice, no longer do you have to lie when you say ‘yes’. Now you can answer with a resounding (and truthful) yes. Much like Blade Runner received an extra 40-minutes for the ‘Final Cut’, and all your favorite bands are coming back out with remastered classics, consider this a remastered classic of American Literature. Jane Austen’s tale of love and social prejudice gets just the extra material it needs. The undead. Hordes of them. Complete with illustrations. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
Legendary icon Henry Rollin’s is back and kicking ass in his new book, “A Preferred Blur” which catalogues through journal entries his trips to Syria, Iran, Pakistan, and Iraq. Henry cleverly dissects the American political machine over the Bush years, while also analyzing letters that he’s received from American soldiers on the front lines of both wars. Constantly pushing the limits of his body and never taking a minute off, he provides us with interesting views of life in foreign countries, music, film and travel. After this read, you will have a lengthy book list to explore, and an iTunes library thirsty for more of the punk rock and heavy metal he recommends.
