Fourcast! 90: Books!
July 4th, 2011 by david brothers | Tags: podcasts-Do y’all read regular books, too?
-I mean the kind without any pictures?
-Yeah, us too.
-So this time, we’re talking about regular books.
-What we liked as kids.
-What we like as adults.
-And, hopefully, why we like what we like.
-Tell you what: I learned a whole lot about books meant for young girls during this show.
-I didn’t even know that Anne of Green Gables was the first of a series.
-6th Sense’s 4a.m. Instrumental for the theme music.
-Here comes a new challenger!
-See you, space cowboy!
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The great thing about the Kindle is that you can find most every “classic” book for free. I only managed like a couple dozen chapters of “Emma”, but “Treasure Island” was great. Right now I’m occasionally chipping away at “War & Peace”…
And everything I know about “Little Women” I learned from that episode of “Friends” where Joey has to read it as part of a bet where Rachel has to read “the Shining”. And the two have a fight where they end up shouting spoilers at each other…
I couldn’t get into the original Hardy Boys books when I was a kid, I think because I was originally exposed to The Hardy Boys Casefiles relaunch of the late 80s. I absolutely devoured those whenever I could convince my mom to buy me one, so while I was initially excited to find a bunch of my uncles’ original series books at my grandma’s house, I was quite disappointed with the lack of explosions, murders, deadly viruses, and hitmen in books written in the 1920s.
I can’t remember if it was my first book in the series or not, but the one that sticks out the most in my mind wasThe Last Laugh, which features a dude getting kidnapped at San Diego Comic-Con by a literal super-villian.
I wanted to check out the Nancy Drew books but never did since I was too embarrassed to ask for a “girl book” so the closest I ever got was one of the Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys crossover “Super Mysteries”, and even that was sketchy to me since Nancy got top billing over the Hardy brothers…
The Day of the Jackal was the first of the super-researched, “realistic” thrillers. Tom Clancy owes his career to Frederick Forsyth.
Not quite in the same genre, John Le Carré’s The Honourable Schoolboy is another book whose author seems to have been unable to leave out any research. He famously went on a long research trip through Southeast Asia while most of the countries there were undergoing civil wars, and you can tell, reading the book, that he tried to put in a version of every single incident that happened to him or was related to him by someone else, and that most of the minor characters are based on someone he met there.