My favorite thing about books: reading them... or TBA

I definitely read more than I play video games.  By a significant margin.  This might have something to do with my current living arrangement; I share a TV with 6 other people and so it's not often that I can take over my living room for a significant amount of time.  But it also fits my lifestyle better in a few other ways.  For example, I can pick a book up and put it down with less hassle than starting and stopping a video game session.  I also read a fair amount of non-fiction, which has the added bonus of making me feel like I'm educating myself, whether or not this is actually the case.

Now there's an interesting thought... has there ever been a truly non-fiction video game?  How could that possibly function successfully?  Would a game based entirely on historical fact be considered fiction instantly when allowing for very minimal levels of player control over action?  Or if someone wanted to publish something academic, to what extent could a thesis or study be successful as an interactive  "video game," ceteris paribus?  I'm guessing the "game" portion of that name might have to be discarded.

Oh yeah I wanted to do some an MMM for some books I recently finished.  Lets call it Tiny Book Assessments.  TBA.  Nailed it.

Miles: The Autobiography

Heroin is a hell of a drug

The "miles" in this case is one Miles Davis, the prolific trumpet player and composer.  It's a vernacular-heavy, no nonsense account of one of America's most interesting musical figures' life from childhood in 1930/1940s St. Louis to the end of his career in the late 1980s.  It does a good job of balancing its tracing of the music with the tracing of his personal life, and the sometimes absurd number of road blocks and bumps in between.  Let's just say it makes you dislike white people even if you happen to be one.  I would definitely recommend with hesitation, however, reading the tome if you're not a jazz head.  The books was often at its best when sharing juicy personal insight into his relationship with other jazz greats (Mingus, Monk, Diz, Bird, Max Roach, Tony Williams, Trane, Wayne Shorter, Marcus Miller, et al) and I can't imagine that being particularly absorbing if you don't know a bit about the other's lives or music.  Here is where I would go off on a tangent about people "not getting jazz" and my thoughts on the matter, but instead of wasting everyone's time let me just leave it at this: if you don't enjoy listening to it, then don't and that's fine.  It just pisses me off when people try to create arguments about why its objectively not good music, when quite obviously its a subjective experience.  In any case, it still might be worth a read for the story alone.

A Sherlock Holmes Graphic Novel: The Sign of the Four
Whoops this is a graphic novel not a book.  Oh well, suck it up.  This is a adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle's second Sherlock Holmes novel.  I haven't read the original novel, so my opinion suffices only as applied to the graphic novel.  My understanding is that the writing is almost entirely verbatim from the original, but much was cut to make it readable in the comic format.  This being the case, the story flows quite nicely, though I have to admit that I found myself going back a few times to remind myself of character's relationships with one another, a problem which might have been avoided given the more fleshed-out version of events.  The plot is classic Holmes, full of twists and intrigue, and manages to bring a critique of British imperialism to bare as well.  The art was well done, if a bit cartoon-ish for my liking; other might find it endearing, perhaps.

No seriously, it's a hell of a drug

Darkness at Noon
Arthur Koestler was a Hungarian author and journalist writing over a great swath of the 20th Century.  His Darkness at Noon was published in 1940.  It is an account of Rubashov, a fictionalized member of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, and his struggle as an old-guard Bolshevik after Stalin's consolidation of power.  A little background knowledge of the Stalin's purge, Trotsky, and the show trials will help with historical context when reading this gem, but the novel does a good job of putting the battling ideas up front, without too much contextual baggage.  The issue being confronted, at the heart of book, is what you do when your ideas don't align with your conscious.  It examines one man's psychological transformation as he is confronted by a brutal government he helped install.  I can't recommend it highly enough to anyone with a functioning brain.

Next batch of these will most likely include Boomerang, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Last Lecture and Homage to Catalonia.