The Deep Blue Good-By by John D. MacDonald

Mournful, mid-1960s-era mystery with an even more mournful ending. This is the first "Travis McGee" novel (of twenty-one!), and it's diverting enough to make me read maybe a few more.

I think of Travis McGee as a sort of proto-Jack Reacher (see Lee Child's novels and short stories), although McGee is less perfect, less imposing and more believable.

The author also has a knack for dropping a cute noirish quote here and there ("Never sit in the first row at the ballet" and "Let's just start by assuming it's hopeless and go on from there"), and he occasionally sings out in passages showing how life really grinds people down, especially the young and unlucky:

This novel is competently done with good pacing, accelerating right to a surprise ending.

To Read:

Mark Harris: The Southpaw; Bang the Drum Slowly; A Ticket for a Seamstitch; It Looked Like For Ever (four part "Henry Wiggin" novel series)

Hot, Flat and Crowded by Thomas Friedman

I've now read three of Thomas Friedman's books, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, The World Is Flat, and now, Hot, Flat, and Crowded. And Hot Flat and Crowded is--by far--the weakest book of the three. In fact, a cynic might consider it more of a brand extension than a book--a recycling of The World is Flat to include well-meaning and repetitive chapters on energy policy, the environment and global warming. And despite his earnest and palliative writing tone, Friedman's political message has become shrill, and that shrillness debases many of the potentially intriguing ideas and arguments he makes throughout the book. According to Friedman, everything is the Americans' fault. We're supposed to be leaders of the free world, yet we should only act with the consensus blessing of all the rest of the world's countries. We invaded Iraq, which was wrong. We invaded Afghanistan, which was sort of right, but we're making far too many mistakes there. We don't educat...

A Simple Rule for Getting Rid of Your Excess Books

If you read a lot of books like we do, perhaps you share our problem: Our home is gradually getting overrun by books. Piles of them. Sure, we've made resolutions to control the spread of our collection, like "no more buying books!" and "only get books out of the library!" We've tried these approaches, but unfortunately, not only do rules like these suck the fun out of life, they're also ineffective. The thing is, even though we do get most of our books out of the library, and we don't really make a practice of buying books, we somehow still seem to have more books than we know what to do with. And the piles seem to grow, slowly but surely, with every month and year. Earlier this year, however, we adopted a simple strategy to control our book creep, and it has worked so well for us that I decided to share it with you in this blog: For every new book you bring into your home, you must immediately remove two. It doesn't matter whether you donate th...

Grow Young with HGH by Ronald Klatz and Carol Kahn

Most readers will get 90% of the value of this book just from reading chapters 16-19, which deal with things you can do you increase/enhance your own GH levels naturally via diet, exercise, (non-pharmacological) supplements and other practices. The bulk of the rest of the book covers "studies show" theories, explanations and speculations of how and by what mechanism GH works in the body, and since the book was published in 1997, I'm certain most of these studies have been either debunked or better explained by more recent research. Notes: 1) Key supplements to keep in mind: Melatonin: for sleep/recovery from training Glutamine: up to 2,000 mg/day plus weight training L-Carnitine: one to two grams a day Ubiquinone (Co-enzyme Q10): 60 mg up to 100 mg. Chromium (binds to insulin) 200 micrograms per day Creatine: 45 g per day after heavy exercise Ginseng: for cognition and recovery from stress, 200 to 400 mg a day Dibencozide (coenzyme B12): 1000 micrograms a day Gamma Or...

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