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Post series: 2017 Sticky Books (Page 1 of 3)

Recommended reading 2017

Those guys have all the fun

Those Guys Have All the Fun by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales

September 20, 2017 / / 0 Comments
  1. Endurance by Alfred Lansing
  2. Live From New York by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales
  3. Heaven’s Coast by Mark Doty
  4. How To Love Your Wife by John Buri
  5. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
  6. They Cage the Animals at Night by Jennings Michael Burch
  7. Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman
  8. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
  9. Those Guys Have All the Fun by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales

Those guys have all the fun

 

Those Guys Have All the Fun:

Inside the World of ESPN

by James Andrew Miller & Tom Shales

 

James Andrew Miller has a new podcast series out called “Origins” where he explores the “brave beginnings of the worlds of television, movies, sports, music, business, or even human relationships to explain how greatness starts and how critical happenings come to be.” His first six episodes centered around the hilarious hit show “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and how it started. I thought that presented the perfect opportunity to share another one of his books with you. Earlier this year “Live From New York” was a Sticky Book. Nine months later, another excellent oral history by Miller and Shales is joining the list. 

I didn’t share it earlier because it’s not a quotable book in the sense of what we’ve come to enjoy from Sticky Books. There aren’t so many profound pithy quotes to share, so it doesn’t lend itself to the Sticky Book format so much. However, if you like sports or have been curious about ESPN at all, it’s a fascinating read.

I’ll share with you two quotes – one funny and one meaningful.

 

“What I said about Hitler was taken out of context.” This comes from analyst and former coach Lou Holtz, explaining why he used der Führer to dissect Michigan football.
 

Stuart Scott: “I can’t be that concerned with how I’m perceived. I care about how my mother and father think about me and how my friends and how my loved ones think about me. I care about how my ex-wife thinks about me; she and I are still good friends and we do a good job raising our kids. It matters to me. But it doesn’t matter to me what people who are writing a blog on the Internet think. I can’t think about that. Being a father. That’s it. That’s the answer. That’s my answer. I’m convinced of that.”

 

Sticky Books are those that you just can’t get out of your head. They stick with you long after you have put the book down and have moved on to something else. These are some of my Sticky Books. I don’t enjoy reviewing books myself. I find I am either full of far too much praise for the book because I know how difficult it can be to write a book, or I am far too negative about a book because, well, I guess I was just in a bad mood. So instead of reviews, I have pulled some of my favorite quotes from each Sticky Book.

 

Find more writing and publishing tips at Nothing Any Good.

 

The_Fault_in_Our_Stars john green

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

April 12, 2017 / / 0 Comments
  1. Endurance by Alfred Lansing
  2. Live From New York by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales
  3. Heaven’s Coast by Mark Doty
  4. How To Love Your Wife by John Buri
  5. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
  6. They Cage the Animals at Night by Jennings Michael Burch
  7. Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman
  8. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
  9. Those Guys Have All the Fun by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales

The_Fault_in_Our_Stars john green

 

The Fault in Our Stars

 

by John Green

 

The Fault in Our Stars is one of those books that I first saw in theaters. I know, a mortal sin for a writer. I loved the film, though. A writer buddy of mine encouraged me to read the book as well. So I went right out, bought it, and devoured it in a day. It’s a good book. I hate when people smugly stare down the bridge of their nose and say, “The movie was good, but the book is so much better.” I’m not going to say that. I would recommend them both. I thought both were very well done for their own merits. It’s stuck with me. 

 

“Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.”

 

“There will come a time when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that’s what everyone else does.”

 

“You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world…but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices.”

 

“The marks humans leave are too often scars.”

 

“Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.”

 

“What a slut time is. She screws everybody.”

 

“Some tourists think Amsterdam is a city of sin, but in truth it is a city of freedom. And in freedom, most people find sin.”

 

“Without pain, how could we know joy?’ This is an old argument in the field of thinking about suffering and its stupidity and lack of sophistication could be plumbed for centuries but suffice it to say that the existence of broccoli does not, in any way, affect the taste of chocolate.”

 

 

Sticky Books are those that you just can’t get out of your head. They stick with you long after you have put the book down and have moved on to something else. These are some of my Sticky Books. I don’t enjoy reviewing books myself. I find I am either full of far too much praise for the book because I know how difficult it can be to write a book, or I am far too negative about a book because, well, I guess I was just in a bad mood. So instead of reviews, I have pulled some of my favorite quotes from each Sticky Book.

 

Find more writing and publishing tips at Nothing Any Good.

 

Sex Drugs and Cocoa Puffs chuck klosterman

Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman

March 22, 2017 / / 0 Comments
  1. Endurance by Alfred Lansing
  2. Live From New York by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales
  3. Heaven’s Coast by Mark Doty
  4. How To Love Your Wife by John Buri
  5. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
  6. They Cage the Animals at Night by Jennings Michael Burch
  7. Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman
  8. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
  9. Those Guys Have All the Fun by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales

Sex Drugs and Cocoa Puffs chuck klosterman
 

Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs

A Low Culture Manifesto

 

by Chuck Klosterman

 

Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs was my introduction to Chuck Klosterman. Back when Barnes & Noble used to be a thing and I would grab a pile of 10-15 books sitting in their leather chairs trying to decide which books to purchase, I stumbled upon Klosterman’s book. It was 2004 and I was immediately enthralled. I’ve followed a lot Klosterman’s  works since, from his 2015 GQ interview with Tom Brady to Killing Yourself to Live to IV, but it’s Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs that has stuck with me.

 

 

“Everybody is wrong about everything, just about all the time.”

 

“Life is rarely about what happened; it’s mostly about what we think happened.”

 

“Being interesting has been replaced by being identifiable.”

 

“Whenever I can’t sleep, I like to lie in the darkness and pretend I’ve been assassinated. I’ve found this is the best way to get comfortable. I imagine I’m in the coffin at my funeral, and people from my past are walking by my corpse and making comments about my demise.”

 

 

“Important things are inevitably cliche, but nobody wants to admit that.”

 

“Though I obviously have no proof of this, the one aspect of life that seems clear to me is that good people do whatever they believe is the right thing to do. Being virtuous is hard, not easy. The idea of doing good things simply because you’re good seems like a zero-sum game; I’m not even sure those actions would still qualify as ‘good,’ since they’d merely be a function of normal behavior. Regardless of what kind of god you believe in–a loving god, a vengeful god, a capricious god, a snooty beret-wearing French god, or whatever–one has to assume that you can’t be penalized for doing the things you believe to be truly righteous and just. Certainly, this creates some pretty glaring problems: Hitler may have thought he was serving God. Stalin may have thought he was serving God (or something vaguely similar). I’m certain Osama bin Laden was positive he was serving God. It’s not hard to fathom that all of those maniacs were certain that what they were doing was right. Meanwhile, I constantly do things that I know are wrong; they’re not on the same scale as incinerating Jews or blowing up skyscrapers, but my motivations might be worse. I have looked directly into the eyes of a woman I loved and told her lies for no reason, except that those lies would allow me to continue having sex with another woman I cared about less. This act did not kill 20 million Russian peasants, but it might be more ‘diabolical’ in a literal sense. If I died and found out I was going to hell and Stalin was in heaven, I would note the irony, but I couldn’t complain. I don’t make the fucking rules.”

 

“Every relationship is fundamentally a power struggle, and the individual in power is whoever likes the other person less.”

 

“I once loved a girl who almost loved me, but not as much as she loved John Cusack.”

 

“The goal of being alive is to figure out what it means to be alive.”

 

 

Sticky Books are those that you just can’t get out of your head. They stick with you long after you have put the book down and have moved on to something else. These are some of my Sticky Books. I don’t enjoy reviewing books myself. I find I am either full of far too much praise for the book because I know how difficult it can be to write a book, or I am far too negative about a book because, well, I guess I was just in a bad mood. So instead of reviews, I have pulled some of my favorite quotes from each Sticky Book.

 

 

Find more writing and publishing tips at Nothing Any Good.

 

They Cage the Animals at Night quotes

They Cage the Animals at Night by Jennings Michael Burch

March 1, 2017 / / 0 Comments
  1. Endurance by Alfred Lansing
  2. Live From New York by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales
  3. Heaven’s Coast by Mark Doty
  4. How To Love Your Wife by John Buri
  5. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
  6. They Cage the Animals at Night by Jennings Michael Burch
  7. Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman
  8. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
  9. Those Guys Have All the Fun by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales

They Cage the Animals at Night quotes

 

They Cage the Animals at Night

The True Story of an Abandoned Child’s Struggle for Emotional Survival

 

by Jennings Michael Burch

 

 

They Cage the Animals at Night may be the first book that I literally could not put down. I read this in my early-teens. There were books before it that I couldn’t wait to pick up again and thought about every moment until I did, but I could not stop reading this book. I distinctly remember laying under my covers with a flashlight so as to not wake up my brother flipping page after page as the hours ticked by. Each chapter would end and each time I would tell myself, “Just one more chapter.” The next thing I knew, it was 5:30am in the morning and I had an hour before I had to wake up for school.

So, yeah, this is a Sticky Book… Unfortunately I could not find a copy to pull quotes from and there are very few online, so you’ll just have to trust me.  

 

JMB: “Sister, why do you do that?”
S: “Do what?”
JMB: “Cage the animals at night?”
S: “Well…” She looked up and out through the barred window before answering me.”We don’t want to, Jennings, but we have to. You see, the animals that are given to us we have to take care of. If we didn’t cage them up in one place, we might lose them, they might get hurt or damaged. It’s not the best thing, but it’s the only way we have to take care of them.”

JMB: “But if somebody loved one of them,” I asked, “wouldn’t it be a good idea to let them have one? To keep, I mean?”

S: “Yes, it would be. But not everyone would love them and take care of them as you would. I wish I could give them all away tomorrow.” She looked at me. There were tears in her eyes. “But I can’t. My heart would break if I saw just one of those animals lying by the wayside uncared for, unloved. No, Jennings. It’s better if we keep them together.”

 

“The table and chair legs were like bars of the cage around me. This time they weren’t keeping me in, they were keeping her out.”

 

“But sometimes lying’s better. It makes me feel good.” I said. “But only for a little while. When the lie has to stand up from the truth and doesn’t, it hurts twice as much.”

 

“It’s the words,” he said. “So many people think their love won’t be accepted or returned, so they don’t say it. They think by not saying it, they won’t be hurt. They’re wrong.”

 

 

 

Sticky Books are those that you just can’t get out of your head. They stick with you long after you have put the book down and have moved on to something else. These are some of my Sticky Books. I don’t enjoy reviewing books myself. I find I am either full of far too much praise for the book because I know how difficult it can be to write a book, or I am far too negative about a book because, well, I guess I was just in a bad mood. So instead of reviews, I have pulled some of my favorite quotes from each Sticky Book.

 

Find more writing and publishing tips at Nothing Any Good.

 

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