Most anyone that has known me for any length of time has probably noticed that I very rarely read for pleasure. By reading, I mean reading books, of course. I read magazines and essays and articles and every goddamn piece of crap on the internet, but books are usually beyond my attention span.

Now, I don’t know if fell on my head sometime around January, but I’ve cranked through about four or five books since the new year started. It’s been in fits and spurts though, as I finish books pretty quickly as long as I don’t lose interest. It’s a good habit to have I guess, and I’ve been assured that reading is sexy.

Anyway! The first thing I blitzed through was Mainlines, Blood Feasts and Bad Taste, a collection of pieces by Lester Bangs. I’d read bits and pieces from Bangs before, and he really is as good as his reputation. Still, I wasn’t quite blown away by this because even if it’s really good writing about Emerson, Lake and Palmer, I just can’t get excited or angry about the ELP. A lot of the book is about artists I’m indifferent towards, and even Bangs couldn’t really change that. I’ve heard the first collection was much better, so I might have to check that out.

Andy Bellin’s Poker Nation was next, and I finished that in a night. It’s a collection of essays about poker and poker players, and gives us glimpses into all aspects of poker as a national obsession. It starts off with some basic strategy and then goes through profiles of lots of different kinds of players, from low-rent amateur hustlers to the top ranked pros. I think the greatest part of the book is just how unglamorous it is. It really breaks down the psychology of players, showing how basically everyone’s a degenerate gambler, one bad beat away from losing everything. When Bellin talks about a “professional” earning $35,000 a year, mindlessly blowing through hand after hand of low-limit hold’em … well, the glitz and relative glamour you see in the World Series of Poker is far, far away. Fun book, even though it does lack a general point and over-arcing theme.

NEXT! Bringing Down the House has nothing to do with that awful Steve Martin movie, but is actually about a blackjack team from MIT that won millions of dollars from Vegas by using legal card counting techniques. The prose in this book isn’t very good, but the story itself so captivating that it really doesn’t matter. The pages flip faster and faster as you want to find out what happens next to this band of nerdy, vaguely ethnic kids scamming Vegas with fairly simple math techniques. When I first heard of this book, I assumed it was set further back in the past on single deck tables, but it’s actually set in the late 90s, with kids counting six shoe decks. No, none of them were Rain Man savants either. Vegas didn’t switch to continuous shuffle machines recently, and a lot of the team tactics mentioned in this book would still be applicable in a lot of the smaller casinos in Vegas that are working on a multiple deck shoe. After I finished this book, I really wanted to go to Vegas and count blackjack for the hell of it.

I bought a copy of the Seabiscuit DVD and it came with a copy of the Seabiscuit paperback. I watched the movie first, and thought it was pretty good, but not great. The book, on the other hand, is spectacular. I knew virtually nothing about horse racing but loved learning all about it from Hillenbrand. In addition to telling the main narrative about the Biscuit, she was able to squeeze in all this other info, about handicaps and other horses and jockeys and jockey life and Depression life and everything else that it makes the movie seem skeletal in comparison. For instance, Hillenbrand’s coverage of Seabiscuit’s taming is a long, hard road for his trainer, as he has to experiment with various techniques to get Seabiscuit to respond to jockeys properly. In the movie, Chris Cooper takes the horse in a field and says “he just needs to learn to be a horse again.” Um… ok. Anyway, the book is rad. I’m not about to start hanging out at Santa Anita, as I hate the smell of horse poo, but the book is rad.

A couple of nights ago, I started and finished Michael Lewis’ Moneyball in one brutal sitting. I am an absolute baseball freak, on all sides. I love the lore and the sport, but I’ve also read all the new age statistical work and I love working through all these new baseball theories. Moneyball is about Billy Beane’s rapid ascension as the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, building a franchise that has made the playoffs year after year despite working with one of the lowest payrolls in the majors. Beane’s done it by ditching traditional baseball conventions and going with new results based stat work. Crippled by his budget, Beane’s been able to field teams filled with oddballs and riffraff, fat dudes and funky deliveries, good baseball players that have been passed over by everyone else because they don’t quite look like athletes. It’s a great baseball book, but it’s also being held up as an example in discussions of objectivity vs subjectivity, paradigm shifting and good old revolution. Lewis takes a few liberties with the portrayals, and he leaves out lots of details that don’t support his Us vs. Them narrative, but it doesn’t hurt too much.

I had particular interest in this book because Beane’s right hand man Paul DePodesta was recently hired as the general manager for the Los Angeles Dodgers. It should be fun to see DePodesta apply some of the Moneyball theories with twice the payroll. With JP Ricciardi in Toronto and Theo Epstein in Boston, there are now four teams running with the new school. How long before there has to be anothe evolution, and when does Billy Beane become the dinosaur?

Anyway… I think my next book is Positively Fifth Street.

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I wish I could say the lack of updating is because of my incredibly busy and adventurous life, but that’s not really the case.

That said, random bits of my last few weeks:

I read Stefan Fatsis’ Word Freak, a non-fiction book about the world of competitive Scrabble. If it sounds a bit silly, it is. That said, I found it really fascinating. I’m always intrigued by people who are gifted at one specific thing, or those committed to something so much that they can throw 8 hours a day at it without the promise of compensation.

The book chronicles Fatsis’ own descent into Scrabble obsession. He starts off as a researcher and finds himself slowly being swallowed up by the tiles. He eventually begins competing in tournaments and seeking advice from the sage ScrabbleMasters that surround him (most of them being nerdy old White guys, naturally).

Personally, I’m not particularly good at anagramming, and have no desire to pour over pages and pages of word lists. Did you know there are seven words that use the letter Q but do not use a U?

Recommended reading for… word freaks, I guess. Amazon has the first twelve pages available for reading. An interview with the author is located here.

On the movie side of things, it’s been pretty light. I’ve been avoiding most everything, although I have seen the two blockbusters, Harry Potter II and James Bond 20. I wasn’t really super-enthused about either one, but they were both decent ways to spend an evening.

I thought Potter’s second try was considerably better than its first, with the caveat that I haven’t read any of the books. The second film in general has a lot more action and plot, and the setup section is shorter than the first film (which had something like an hour of film before Harry had actually settled in at school).

The movie’s still too long by quite a good half hour. I’m not sure if any of the subplots needed to be cut out completely, but Chris Columbus is a bit too enamored with the kids’ reaction shots, and his camera lingers about too often. In general, the movie spends a bit too much time on plot (yeah, I know I shouldn’t ever say that). By that I mean, there’s all these red herrings and side bits they use for the whodunnit section of the plot, and honestly, I’m not sure anyone really cares about that stuff.

Nobody except the bazillion kids in Gryffindor scarves that are holding knives up to Columbus’ tender bits, I guess.

As for James Bond: Die Another Day, I had a great time. This is surprising, because I pretty much hate the James Bond franchise. Maybe hate is too strong a word, but I think the majority of the movies are pretty dull. Out of 20 films, I probably enjoy about five or six.

I wasn’t planning on seeing this one in the theater at all, but it ended up being the best of my options on Friday afternoon, so I checked out a screening at the beautiful Cineramadome.

The movie has more action than any of the recent Bonds, possibly more than ANY of the Bonds. It starts off strong, with some good nasty villains, a neat hovercraft scene and then a smart little subplot which takes Bond away from the usual glitz and glamour. This slight adjustment makes the character tons more interesting, since the last few films have had Bond in control almost the entire time.

Halle Berry is god awful everytime she speaks or has to make her “action” face, but Rosamund Pike, Toby Stephens and Rick Yune fare better. Later action setpieces set in a giant ice hotel are great, and the Aston Martin/Jaguar car duel on the icelake is outrageous fun.

The movie sputters for another half hour doing next to nothing, but the core of the flick is solid, if slightly disposable, entertainment. If you like Bond, you’ll probably love it.

It’s been a rough couple of weeks as a UCLA sportsfan. Ugh. It’s best I not speak any more of that, as anyone who cares knows exactly what I’m talking about already.

Enough of all that. Sleepy time, the Grind awaits tomorrow.

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