Do you read?

[Brumerican]

I don't read too often but the majority of my books are based upon the Mafia. Sometimes I'll step out of my comfort-zone and will read famous novels but about 70% of books I read are Mafia related. My next book will be "Donnie Brasco: My Undercover Life in the Mafia"; I've watched a couple of documentries about Pistone's involvment as an under-cover FBI agent in the Bonanno family but I really want to read his book to get a more in-depth and personal experience from Pistone; once I have finished reading his book, I will then watch "Donnie Brasco" the film.

I have recently undergone a mafia obsession myself! Its got to the point where I have read nearly all the mob related books in my local library so Im kind of pissed off now.

Special mentions go to

Boss of bosses (The Paul Castellano story by the FBI guys who were assigned to him)

Five families (Epic of a book by Selwynn Raab)

Wiseguy (Nick Pileggi and Henry Hill, and the basis for goodfellas)

The sins of the father (By Albert DeMeo, the son of Gambino Capo Roy Demeo.)

Underboss ( Sammy "the bull" Gravano)

Made Men ( The story of the DeCalvacante family in Jersey and some say the inspiration behind the Sopranos)

Joey Dogs ( The life of Joey Iannuzzi, Gambino informant)

The making of Jack Falcone (Similar to Donnie Brasco in its FBI undercover story).

I have also read Henry Hills updated version about his life in WPP, Joseph Pistones "way of the wiseguy" (which is forgettable to be honest).

I must have read about 20 MAfia books in the last 3 months but Selwynn Raab's Five families is the best , hands down.

[rjw63]

Finished Andy mcnab's "Remote Control" last night, loved it

is it 1998 again?

If it was, you'd be 2 years old

[Brumerican]

Finished Andy mcnab's "Remote Control" last night, loved it

is it 1998 again?

If it was, you'd be 2 years old

Bravo Two Zero and Immediate Action are both cracking reads but I wouldn't wipe my arse with his novels. There are so many non-fiction war stories to read so I dont see the point in reading made up ones!

[rjw63]

Well I like 'em so **** you all! :-)

[Vojskovoda]

I don't read too often but the majority of my books are based upon the Mafia. Sometimes I'll step out of my comfort-zone and will read famous novels but about 70% of books I read are Mafia related. My next book will be "Donnie Brasco: My Undercover Life in the Mafia"; I've watched a couple of documentries about Pistone's involvment as an under-cover FBI agent in the Bonanno family but I really want to read his book to get a more in-depth and personal experience from Pistone; once I have finished reading his book, I will then watch "Donnie Brasco" the film.

I have recently undergone a mafia obsession myself! Its got to the point where I have read nearly all the mob related books in my local library so Im kind of pissed off now.

Special mentions go to

Boss of bosses (The Paul Castellano story by the FBI guys who were assigned to him)

Five families (Epic of a book by Selwynn Raab)

Wiseguy (Nick Pileggi and Henry Hill, and the basis for goodfellas)

The sins of the father (By Albert DeMeo, the son of Gambino Capo Roy Demeo.)

Underboss ( Sammy "the bull" Gravano)

Made Men ( The story of the DeCalvacante family in Jersey and some say the inspiration behind the Sopranos)

Joey Dogs ( The life of Joey Iannuzzi, Gambino informant)

The making of Jack Falcone (Similar to Donnie Brasco in its FBI undercover story).

I have also read Henry Hills updated version about his life in WPP, Joseph Pistones "way of the wiseguy" (which is forgettable to be honest).

I must have read about 20 MAfia books in the last 3 months but Selwynn Raab's Five families is the best , hands down.

Yeah, there are some brilliant well-written books out there who have lots of inside-knowledge when researching what they're doing.

Castellano and Galante are very interesting cases... it's funny to think how Galante thought he had the world in his own hands before his bodygurads from Sicily and two other hitmen murdered him whilst eating pasta... but it led to Donnie Brasco nearly being made a 'made man'.

Do you ever hear of any Mafia on-goings around Miami and Fort Lauderdale these days, or is there not much Mafia organization around that area anymore?

[sparey16]

dont normally read, but reading a book a friend lent me about faith and stuff called Whats So Amazing About Grace. Currently about 1/4 of the way through it.

[Troglodyte]

Read Jekyll and Hyde by Stevenson for the first time last week. It's short, but I thought it was brilliant.

[Brumerican]

I don't read too often but the majority of my books are based upon the Mafia. Sometimes I'll step out of my comfort-zone and will read famous novels but about 70% of books I read are Mafia related. My next book will be "Donnie Brasco: My Undercover Life in the Mafia"; I've watched a couple of documentries about Pistone's involvment as an under-cover FBI agent in the Bonanno family but I really want to read his book to get a more in-depth and personal experience from Pistone; once I have finished reading his book, I will then watch "Donnie Brasco" the film.

I have recently undergone a mafia obsession myself! Its got to the point where I have read nearly all the mob related books in my local library so Im kind of pissed off now.

Special mentions go to

Boss of bosses (The Paul Castellano story by the FBI guys who were assigned to him)

Five families (Epic of a book by Selwynn Raab)

Wiseguy (Nick Pileggi and Henry Hill, and the basis for goodfellas)

The sins of the father (By Albert DeMeo, the son of Gambino Capo Roy Demeo.)

Underboss ( Sammy "the bull" Gravano)

Made Men ( The story of the DeCalvacante family in Jersey and some say the inspiration behind the Sopranos)

Joey Dogs ( The life of Joey Iannuzzi, Gambino informant)

The making of Jack Falcone (Similar to Donnie Brasco in its FBI undercover story).

I have also read Henry Hills updated version about his life in WPP, Joseph Pistones "way of the wiseguy" (which is forgettable to be honest).

I must have read about 20 MAfia books in the last 3 months but Selwynn Raab's Five families is the best , hands down.

Yeah, there are some brilliant well-written books out there who have lots of inside-knowledge when researching what they're doing.

Castellano and Galante are very interesting cases... it's funny to think how Galante thought he had the world in his own hands before his bodygurads from Sicily and two other hitmen murdered him whilst eating pasta... but it led to Donnie Brasco nearly being made a 'made man'.

Do you ever hear of any Mafia on-goings around Miami and Fort Lauderdale these days, or is there not much Mafia organization around that area anymore?

You wearing a wire?

[Santa_Rosa]

Managed to get the first couple of dozen pages of Iain Banks Transition earlier. It hooked me already, looking forward to properly getting stuck into it tomorrow. Pretty sure it's going to be a cracker, which is good because I was a little disappointed with 'Steep Approach..'

[Jezza]

Struggling with "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand at the moment - has anyone managed to finish it? I'm about 1/8 of the way through it, and it's difficult going, but I'm determined to finish it.....

[Chindie]

Atlas Shrugged is a hateful book. I think I got even less of the way through than you. Look up some of what Rand believed and save yourself the time.

[Dr_Alimantado]

Just finished English Passengers by Matthew Kneale. Really enjoyed this one, great read.

[mjmooney]

Atlas Shrugged is a hateful book. I think I got even less of the way through than you. Look up some of what Rand believed and save yourself the time.

This. Turgid proto-fascist shite.

Bin it.

[Jezza]

Atlas Shrugged is a hateful book. I think I got even less of the way through than you. Look up some of what Rand believed and save yourself the time.

This. Turgid proto-fascist shite.

Bin it.

Duly binned. It was pissing me off hugely, even before I read your opinions. Going to find myself something altogether lighter to read -with plenty of sex in it

[leviramsey]

Yes, at first I was happy to be learning how to read. It seemed exciting and magical, but then I read this: Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. I read every last word of this garbage, and because of this piece of shit, I am never reading again.

[Chindie]

Isn't the original printing of Atlas Shrugged supposed to have a 70 page rant disguised as a speech that basically says Objectivism owns all? I think you've made te right decision Jezza. Rand was ****ing nuts.

Still reading Transition, getting more into it and the plots really starting to bite.

[leviramsey]

Cathy Young"]

In the heyday of the Objectivist movement, Rand used to brush off charges that her Übermensch heroes were unrealistic by pointing to herself and the Brandens, at one point shouting during a debate, "Am I impossible?" In fact, what is revealed of Rand in the Brandens' biographies dramatically illustrates the gap between ideology and reality in her own life. In the Randiverse, a man whose beloved left him for another would manfully accept her rational decision--may the best Übermensch win!--and remain friends with her and her new partner. In real life, Rand's "rational" affair with Branden, whom she fantasized as a Galt or Roark come alive, caused devastation all around, to themselves as much as to their spouses. Rand's unshakable belief in the power of the human mind led her to refuse to recognize the mental deterioration of her husband, Frank O'Connor, and she tormented him with exercises in "psycho-epistemology." When she herself was diagnosed with cancer, she refused to disclose her illness publicly, evidently because she believed, according to Barbara Branden, that cancer was the result of philosophical and psychological errors.

Rand's detractors often brand her a fascist. She is not, of course; but does her work have overtones of a totalitarian or dictatorial mentality? This charge irks even ambivalent Rand admirers, such as Nathaniel Branden, who fully recognize the dogmatism and intolerance in the Objectivist movement. They point out that Rand decisively rejects the use of force except in self-defense. True; but as Branden has observed on the topic of emotional repression, it would be wise to pay attention not just to what Rand says but to what she does--in this case, in her novels. Near the end of Atlas Shrugged, when the heroes go to rescue John Galt from the baddies, female railroad magnate Dagny Taggart calmly and quite unnecessarily shoots a guard who can't decide whether to let her in or not. The man, you see, "wanted to exist without the responsibility of consciousness"--obviously a capital crime.

Still more troubling is an earlier passage in Atlas in which bureaucratic incompetence and arrogance lead to a terrible train wreck. Many would say, Rand wryly notes, that the people who died in the accident "were not guilty or responsible for the thing that happened to them." Then, in a series of brief portraits, Rand endeavors to show that the passengers were guilty indeed: All of them had benefited from evil government programs, promoted evil political or philosophical ideas, or both. Rand does not advocate their murder, of course (though she sympathetically depicts a trainmaster who chooses not to avert the disaster, partly in revenge against the regulators); but she does suggest that they had it coming. In Atlas and the nonfiction essays she turned to in her final decades, political and ideological debates are treated as wars with no innocent bystanders, and the dehumanization of "the enemy" reaches levels reminiscent of communist or fascist propaganda.

One inevitable consequence of this attitude toward most other human beings is, to quote the title of a George Orwell essay, "the prevention of literature." There can be no question that Rand was a highly talented writer with a great gift for plot, description, and yes, characterization. The Fountainhead is a brilliant book, and so is Rand's often underappreciated first novel, We the Living, a richly textured, passionate, moving story of life in post-revolutionary Russia.

But in these novels Rand's philosophy has not yet petrified into dogma. Even the larger-than-life romantic heroes have recognizable human emotions. (Rand's detractors often claim that Roark is a robotically unfeeling superman, but consider this passage, when Dominique tells him of her marriage to Peter Keating: "It would have been easy, if she had seen a man distorting his mouth to bite off sound, closing his fists and twisting them in defense against himself. But it was not easy, because she did not see him doing this, yet knew that this was being done, without the relief of a physical gesture.") Rand's moral scale in The Fountainhead still allows for shades of gray. The power-seeking Gail Wynand is a tragic figure whom Roark loves despite the error of his ways; Dominique's father, Guy Francon, is basically a good guy despite exemplifying none of the Randian virtues; even the despicable Peter Keating merits some sympathy, and his failed romance with his true love, Katie, has some dignity and poignancy.

But in Atlas Shrugged, Rand's final novel, the ideologue crushes the writer almost completely. While a few characters show occasional glimpses of humanity, most of the heroes are abstractions of greatness, while the villains are subhuman vermin. The story suffocates under endless speechifying and analysis in which each point is flogged to death and each un-Randian idea is reduced to a straw man the heroes can easily beat down and shred. In this effort, all life and beauty are drained from Rand's prose style, and we are treated to passages like this one, when industrialist Hank Rearden's wife tries to hurt him by telling him she has slept with a man he despises: "There, he thought, was the final abortion of the creed of collective interdependence, the creed of non-identity, non-property, non-fact: the belief that the moral stature of one is at the mercy of the action of another."

For all her flaws, Rand remains a towering figure on the last century's cultural landscape. She arose in an era of competing totalitarian ideologies and declared that communism and Nazism were not opposites but evil twins, and that their true opposite was freedom. In an era when collectivism was seen as the way of the future, she unapologetically asserted the worth of the individual and his right to exist for himself, and declared the spiritual dimension of material achievement. In an age of existential doubt, she offered a celebration of creativity, of the human mind, of the joy of life on this earth. (The Fountainhead has a glorious passage in which a young man who is starting to despair of finding beauty or purpose in life is moved and inspired by the sight of Roark's just-finished construction project.) Atlas Shrugged, clunky and extremist though it is, contains some brilliant and powerful pro-capitalist polemics--such as Francisco D'Anconia's speech on the meaning of money and the tale of one factory's disastrous experiment in implementing the slogan, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."

Rand zealots, and even moderate fans such as the Brandens, are often prone to credit her with almost single-handedly rolling back the tide of socialist ideology in the 20th century. That's quite an exaggeration, as is the notion that her philosophy sprang whole from her mind like Athena from the skull of Zeus. Still, Rand was the most successful and widely read popularizer of the ideas of individual liberty and the free market of her day. In the 21st century, as we face Islamist terrorism abroad and when public discourse at home often seems dominated by religious conservatism on the right and politically correct pieties on the left, Rand's message of reason and liberty, if it's stripped of its odder features, could be a rallying point for what the neo-Objectivist philosopher David Kelley, who runs the Objectivist Center, calls "Enlightenment-based values."

From yet another perspective, Rand can be seen as a great eccentric thinker and writer whose work is less about a practical guide to real life than about a unique, individual, stylized vision, a romantic vision that transforms and transcends real life. Rand's philosophy admitted no contradictions or paradoxes in reality; but reality is full of apparently irreconcilable truths. The truth of what Rand said about the heroic human spirit and individual self-determination does not negate the truth that human beings often find themselves at the mercy of circumstances beyond their control and dependent on others through no fault of theirs. The truth of the self-sufficient soul coexists with the truth of the vital importance of human connections.

Rand herself was a creature of paradox. She was a prophet of freedom and individualism who tolerated no disobedience or independent thought in her acolytes, a rationalist who refused to debate her views. She was an atheist whose worship of Man led her to see the human mind as a godlike entity, impervious to the failings of the body or to environmental influences. (Nathaniel Branden reports that she even disliked the idea of evolution.) She was a strong woman who created independent heroines yet saw sexual submission as the essence of femininity and argued that no healthy woman would want to be president of the United States because it would put her above all men.

This is perhaps how Rand is best appreciated: as a figure of great achievement and great contradictions, a visionary whose vision is one among many, whose truths are important but by no means exclusive. Rand, it is safe to say, would have regarded such appreciation as far worse than outright rejection. But that's just another paradox of life.�

[Jezza]

Leviramsey/Chindie - maaaaate - SO **** glad I ditched "Atlas Shrugged" (now reading "The Collector" by John Fowles!!!)

[Santa_Rosa]

Still reading Transition, getting more into it and the plots really starting to bite.

I'm into the last quarter and will finish it tonight. Great stuff, right up there with his best IMO. The premise, plot and structure are superb.

One thing I have noticed, is the odd moment of sloppiness in terms of words repeated in the same paragraph when others could easily be used (not got an example to hand mind). He's so good though, I'm just assuming this is intentional for some reason that is beyond me.

[mjmooney]

Too many books ongoing ATM.

I'm back on my WWII thing, still reading James Holland's "Italy's Sorrow" (but getting near the end), but have also started Robert Kershaw's "War Without Garlands: Operation Barbarossa 1941-42" and W. G. Sebald's "The Natural History of Destruction".

As well as carrying on with "Inverting the Pyramid - the History of Football Tactics" and also starting Patrick Humpheys' Nick Drake biography.

Sigh. One day I will read one book at a time.

EDIT: Oh yeah, and on my wife's recommendation I started "Jonathan Strange and Mister Norrell" (Susanna Clarke), but I don't think I'll carry on with it.