Lunchtime around El Jefe's establishment, and it's too rainy and yucky looking to go out, and in any case Jefe is not in the mood. Today's lunchtime is reading: current book is Edward Crankshaw's The Fall of the House of Habsburg (Penguin, 1983), about somewhat sleepier and simpler times, before that evil, verminous, Al-Qaeda-like no-goodnik Gavrilo Princip managed to upset lots of applecarts, back before all the horrible "isms" -- communism, socialism, etc., of modern times.
Fiction reading of late has consisted of Jonathan Kellerman's latest paperback, Rage, (Ballantine, 2006), another of Dr. Kellerman's shrink/detective books; and Gerry Carroll's Ghostrider One, (Pocket1995), an excellent novel about a squadron of US Navy A-4 Skyhawk pilots operating off an aircraft carrier in the Vietnam Conflict (an older book I've had sitting around for a few years that I'm glad I found time for).
On deck is Michael R. Gordon's and Lieut.-Gen. Bernard Trainor's Cobra II : The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq (Pantheon, March 2006) -- a recent purchase; and another Iraq war book, this one a gift from T, from the perspective of the business-end: Michael M. Phillips's, The Gift of Valor, (Broadway, 2005), about the life and death of USMC Corporal Jason Dunham, killed in action in Iraq at age 22.
Finally, Mark Winegardner's The Godfather Returns (Ballantine, 2005) is also waiting. El Jefe of course, has a great interest in chronicles of his fellow bosses of bosses, especially fictional ones, so The Godfather is somewhat of a cult for El Jefe. SWMBO no doubt dreads my periodic Godfather phases: when I start going out at all hours to buy Peroni, and Moretti; swilling the Pinot Grigios; snarfing Parmigiano-Reggiano like potato chips; eating too much pasta; telling SWMBO to leave the shoes and take the cannoli; striking Mussolini-like poses; and, finally calling the Heir, "Sonny."
2 comments:
I love Jonathan Kellerman books! Alex Delaware is awesome!!
I buy all Kellerman's stuff the minute it goes into paper. Another good author, who writes very similar stuff, set in Colorado, is Stephen White. His latest, "Missing Persons" just made it into paper.
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