Here are my thoughts on some of my recent non-fiction reads.
I love the Game Change movie. I can watch that over and over again, it is one of those cannot flick past movies for me. I had never read the book before. The book actually talks more about the Obama and Clinton campaigns than the McCain/Palin campaign. This was a fascinating read, especially now with the US election stuff in full swing.
Imagine your child is kidnapped and murdered. Imagine that a criminal confesses to the crime, but recants, then confesses, then recants. Imagine that the vehicle the criminal was driving at the time is found and fully examined forensically. Imagine 5 rolls of film are taken of various things. Imagine those rolls of film never being developed.
Several years later, they are developed, and all the proof anyone ever needed to say “yes, that criminal committed this crime” is right there on the film. This book provides a troubling insight into how NOT to be a homicide detective. You may have heard of the case because the father of this missing child went on to become the host of America’s Most Wanted – his name is John Walsh.
What can one say about this book? If you know nothing about the assassination of Martin Luther King, this is the best starting place to find out, well, pretty much everything. Incredibly well researched and beautifully written.
It turned out everything I had ever heard about Columbine was wrong. That might be the case for most people. I do recommend this book so you can know what really happened.
About Snoskred & Books –
I love to read books. I have always loved to read books since I was a child. As a teenager many nights when I would be told to go to bed, I would go with a book and read until 2am or so.
A tablet full of books is a blessing – and a curse. In the old days one had to get out of their warm bed and go to the book room to select another book to read, if one finished ones book. Now, one can just flick through a file menu and pick another book to read.
The blessing is that my tablet can hold thousands of books. A virtual library! But even virtual libraries can become difficult to navigate. At some point last year, I tried to sort out the books on my tablet and lost an entire directory of true crime books in the process.
No problem, I have a backup of all the files on the server.. But there was a problem, because those files are all together in big directories sorted by file type. I have 5711 epub files. I have 8268 mobi files. I have 2,361 pdf files.
To find those true crime books again I had to pick through each directory, book by book. Some of them were pretty obvious by the title, others not so much.
This is why a lot of my recent reads have been true crime books.
About Tablet Reading
I use Moonreader on my tablet. I love being able to see how long I spent reading a certain book and at what speed I read it, though the speed is slightly affected by my habit of using my tablet as a light when I need to go to the bathroom.
It is cumulative, too. Because all these books were just added back onto the reader, these numbers are for one read only. If I read the book again, it adds the time I spend reading the book onto these numbers. Since I installed Moonreader, I have spent 49.5 hours reading my trusty reliable Mansfield Park. That is the book I turn to when I have to get to sleep early, that night.
I have spent over 30 hours reading The Stand by Stephen King. I love that book. I would like to rewrite that book with just the world building and not so much good vs evil. ;)
The first time I read The Stand, I came down with a bad cold . . . it’s very easy to convince yourself at 2am that you’re dying of Captain Tripps! The mini-series is also a family favourite, we are always trotting out quotes from it. I’ve always been a big reader and never thought I’d make the move from hard copy books but once I got my Kindle, it opened up a whole new world. My friend Liz had a CD with over 2000 assorted titles on it years ago and I am still steadily working my way through. One thing I have learned is not to waste time on books I’m not interested in. It used to be a matter of principle to plough through regardless and I’d rarely abandon a book. Now, with so much more visibility on the amount of stuff out there, why waste time??
There’s a few here that look interesting to me, although I don’t usually read non-fiction. I’ll check my local library for them.
Agree about Hellhound on His Trail. It’s a wonderful book.
In the same sort of vein – very, very broadly – I’d recommend ‘Ask Not’ by Thurston Clarke, which is about John F. Kennedy’s inauguration speech. It sounds like an unpromisingly narrow topic for a book, but it’s wildly exciting.