CalTrain Book Hour Week 1: Curses, Dot.Bombs, Buccaneers, Gongs

Now I'm taking Caltrain to and from work, I get a chance to read books. Lots of books. In fact, since I have almost a couple of hours per day, and I'm a (unintentionally) speedreading nerd, I'm getting through three or four books a week. So, having stocked up at the spankin' new King Library in San Jose, I'm going to try to do quick single-paragraph reviews on the books I read every week. Starting... now.

'The Dain Curse' by Dashiell Hammett - most famous as the writer of 'The Maltese Falcon', Hammett was an ex-detective who wrote some of the most glorious hard-boiled crime fiction around. 'The Dain Curse', written in 1929, is set in the Bay Area, and has three gloriously twisted acts. Is the Dain family really cursed? Why is death following the heroine of the piece around? Is she the cause? The book is genuinely shocking and tremendously complex, with odd jaunts into ritual murder and rural kidnapping, and it's a wonderful piece of fiction.



'Starving To Death on $200 Million' by James Ledbetter - A genuinely interesting non-fiction book on the boom and bust of weekly tech magazine The Industry Standard. The author headed up the short-lived Industry Standard Europe, so doesn't have a perfect perspective on the demise of the main U.S. offices themselves, but he _is_ perfectly positioned to talk about the good (great reporting, lofty intentions) and the bad (over-diversification, tech bust) in the fall-out from the NASDAQ's collapse. A lot of good material about hard financial journalism, too.



'Master And Commander' by Patrick O'Brian - I didn't get round to seeing the movie yet, but now I'm definitely interested. Although _very_ technical in places when it comes to nineteenth century ship rigging and the mechanics of battle, the first in the series of almost twenty historical novels hooked me into the world of Captain Jack Aubrey and the ship's physician, Dr. Stephen Maturin. It's precisely written, it's borderline epic, and although a little dense, it's very enjoyable.




'Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind' by Chuck Barris - probably the biggest surprise of the week's reading. I'd seen the Charlie Kaufman-scripted movie (though reportedly, George Clooney changed it around significantly while making it), and so I expected that the book was perhaps some kind of averagely written novelty, punched up by Kaufman to more intriguing levels. But oh my, no. Chuck Barris is a great writer, and this is a sometimes lewd and profane, always entertaining book, with a, well, Kaufman-esque insanity to the main premise - what if the creator of 'The Gong Show' was a CIA hitman on the side, and this was his autobiography? Even weirder, it doubles as a genuine autobiography in some places... at least, I believe it does, so Barris has probably won.