Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets , In 1988 a Baltimore Sun reporter named David Simon joined the Baltimore Police Homicide Unit as a civilian assistant in order to chronicle a year in the life of a big city homicide squad. His extensive notes, interviews, and observations were eventually published as the book, "Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets." This book served as the inspiration for the TV series "Homicide: Life on the Street" (1993) and much of the first and second seasons of the show are taken from actual events recounted in the book.
Songbook: Nick Hornsby. What interests Nick Hornby? Songs, songwriters, everything, compulsively, passionately. Here is his ultimate list of 31 all-time favorite songs. And here are his smart, funny, and very personal essays about them, written with all the love and care of a perfectly mastered mixed tape...
also by Hornsby.
The Polysyllabic Spree
"Books are, let's face it, better than everything else," writes Nick Hornby in his "Stuff I've Been Reading" column in The Believer. "If we played cultural Fantasy Boxing League, and made books go 15 rounds in the ring against the best that any other art form had to offer, then books would win pretty much every time. Go on, try it. The Magic Flute v. Middlemarch? Middlemarch in six. The Last Supper v. Crime and Punishment? Fyodor on point And every now and again you'd get a shock, because that happens in sport, so Back to the Future III might land a lucky punch on Rabbit, Run; but I'm still backing literature 29 times out of 30." This book collects Hornby's popular columns in a single, artfully illustrated volume with selected passages from the novels, biographies, collections of poetry, and comics under discussion
another must have read.
Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954:In Windblown World, distinguished historian Douglas Brinkley has gathered together a selection of journal entries from the most pivotal period of Kerouac's intrepid life, beginning in 1947 when he was twenty-five years old and ending in 1954. Truly a self-portrait of the artist as a young man, these journals show a sensitive soul charting his own progress as a writer and responding to his most important literary forebears, which included Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Spengler, Joyce, Twain, and Thomas Wolfe. Here is Kerouac as a hungry young writer struggling to perfect and finish his first novel, The Town and the City, while forging crucial friendships with Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Neal Cassady. The journals go on to tell of the events that would eventually be immortalized in On the Road, as Kerouac travels through every region of the country and slowly cultivates his idea for a jazz novel. The peripatetic Kerouac's lifelong devotion to mystical Catholicism and his tremendous love of "the essential and everlasting America" abound in these confessional pages, as do his brooding melancholy, his youthful doubts and chronic fears, and his overriding conviction that there would soon be a "great new revolution of the soul."
these are just 3 of the books I want to read. I will write more books when I can think of them.