By Indie Authors for Indie Authors.

Tag: sticky books (Page 1 of 5)

Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman

  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“Being interesting has been replaced by being identifiable.”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.

 

Endurance by Alfred Lansing

  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

Endurance Shackleton

 

Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage  

 

by Alfred Lansing

 

Our first Sticky Book of 2017!! It’s here! 

If you are unfamiliar with Sir Ernest Shackleton and his team’s attempt to cross the Antarctic continent in 1914, the story is wonderful and harrowing and beautiful and devastating. Alfred Lansing does an exceptional job recounting the struggle that Shackleton and his 28-man crew endured for nearly two years. Originally published in 1959, the book is a classic you should definitely pick up in 2017. 

 

“In some ways they had come to know themselves better. In this lonely world of ice and emptiness, they had achieved at least a limited kind of contentment. They had been tested and found not wanting.”

 

“Of all their enemies — the cold, the ice, the sea — he feared none more than demoralization.”

 

“In that instant they felt an overwhelming sense of pride and accomplishment. Though they had failed dismally even to come close to the expedition’s original objective, they knew now that somehow they had done much, much more than ever they set out to do.”

 

“We had seen God in His splendors, heard the text that Nature renders. We had reached the naked soul of man.”

 

“Unlike the land, where courage and the simple will to endure can often see a man through, the struggle against the sea is an act of physical combat, and there is no escape. It is a battle against a tireless enemy in which man never actually wins; the most that he can hope for is not to be defeated.”

 

 

“In all the world there is no desolation more complete than the polar night. It is a return to the Ice Age— no warmth, no life, no movement. Only those who have experienced it can fully appreciate what it means to be without the sun day after day and week after week. Few men unaccustomed to it can fight off its effects altogether, and it has driven some men mad.”

 

“The rapidity with which one can completely change one’s ideas . . . and accommodate ourselves to a state of barbarism is wonderful.”

 

“No matter what the odds, a man does not pin his last hope for survival on something and then expect that it will fail.”

 

 

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.
 

Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer

  1. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
  2. Peace Is Every Step by Thich Nhat Hanh
  3. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
  4. Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter
  5. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  6. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
  7. Uniformity With God’s Will By Saint Alphonsus de Liguori
  8. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
  9. Daring Greatly by Brene Brown
  10. They Call Me Coach by John Wooden
  11. The Winner Within by Pat Riley
  12. In My Own Words by Mother Teresa
  13. The World According to Mister Rogers by Fred Rogers
  14. “Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman!” by Richard P. Feynman
  15. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  16. Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner
  17. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
  18. Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Patterson
  19. My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George
  20. Four Miles to Pinecone by Jon Hassler
  21. Runaway Ralph by Beverly Cleary
  22. Skinnybones by Barbara Park
  23. Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
  24. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
  25. At Home by Bill Bryson
  26. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
  27. Broken Monsters by Lauren Beukes
  28. The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
  29. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
  30. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
  31. Furiously Happy by Jenny Lawson
  32. Shane by Jack Schaefer
  33. Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
  34. Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman
  35. The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

into thin air quotes

 

Into Thin Air 

 

by Jon Krakauer

 

This brilliant book is the third book written by Jon Krakauer. After releasing his collection of essays, Eiger Dreams, Krakauer took the bestseller list by storm releasing Into the Wild and Into Thin Air in back-to-back years in 1996 and 1997. Despite being a young high-schooler at the time of release, I was fascinated by both stories of adventure and demise in the outdoors.

 

“Once Everest was determined to be the highest summit on earth, it was only a matter of time before people decided that Everest needed to be climbed.”

 

“Everest has always been a magnet for kooks, publicity seekers, hopeless romantics and others with a shaky hold on reality.”

 

“…I quickly came to understand that climbing Everest was primarily about enduring pain. And in subjecting ourselves to week after week of toil, tedium, and suffering, it struck me that most of use were probably seeking, above else, something like a state of grace.”
“With enough determination, any bloody idiot can get up this hill…The trick is to get back down alive.”

 

“We were too tired to help. Above 8,000 meters is not a place where people can afford morality”

 

“But at times I wondered if I had not come a long way only to find that what I really sought was something I had left behind.”

 

“The plain truth is that I knew better but went to Everest anyway. And in doing so I was a party to the death of good people, which is something that is apt to remain on my conscience for a very long time.”

 

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.

 

Shane by Jack Schaefer

  1. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
  2. Peace Is Every Step by Thich Nhat Hanh
  3. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
  4. Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter
  5. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  6. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
  7. Uniformity With God’s Will By Saint Alphonsus de Liguori
  8. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
  9. Daring Greatly by Brene Brown
  10. They Call Me Coach by John Wooden
  11. The Winner Within by Pat Riley
  12. In My Own Words by Mother Teresa
  13. The World According to Mister Rogers by Fred Rogers
  14. “Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman!” by Richard P. Feynman
  15. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  16. Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner
  17. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
  18. Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Patterson
  19. My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George
  20. Four Miles to Pinecone by Jon Hassler
  21. Runaway Ralph by Beverly Cleary
  22. Skinnybones by Barbara Park
  23. Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
  24. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
  25. At Home by Bill Bryson
  26. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
  27. Broken Monsters by Lauren Beukes
  28. The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
  29. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
  30. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
  31. Furiously Happy by Jenny Lawson
  32. Shane by Jack Schaefer
  33. Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
  34. Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman
  35. The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

quotes from shane

Shane 

by Jack Schaefer

 

This is my mother’s favorite book of all time. She absolutely loves this book. She is an English teacher and it is apart of her curriculum every year. It’s a classic and worth a read.

 

“What a man knows isn’t important. It’s what he is that counts”

 

“A man who watches what is going on around him will make his mark.”

 

“Listen, Bob. A gun is just a tool. No better and no worse than any other tool, a shovel- or an axe or a saddle or a stove or anything. Think of it always that way. A gun is as good- and as bad- as the man who carries it. Remember that.”

 

“When there’s noise, you know where to look and what’s happening. When things are quiet, you’ve got to be most careful.”

 

“They did not look at each other. They did not say a word to each other… They knew that talk is meaningless when a common knowledge is already there. The silence bound them as no words ever could.”

 

“A man is what he is, Bob, and there’s no breaking the mold. I tried that and I’ve lost.”

 

 

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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