This month's selections from Dr. Monkey's Book Club

Top book titles for summer 2014

• An Illustrated History of Your Mom
• How to disinfect your phone in 12 easy steps
• Fried Green Tomatillos
• Salad Dressing or Birth Control?
• The Shitty Paintings of George W. Bush
• Great Presbyterian Sex Scandals
• The Films of Alan Smithee, a Critical Reassessment
• Turning Your Penis into a Fried Chicken Tender for Fun and Profit
• Why No One Gives a Shit About Your Gawd Awful Instagram Pictures
• A Guide to Mass Shooting Sites
• I was a Prostitute for the NRA
• Today's KKK
• Shut Up and Fart
• Holy Shit, What Were We Thinking?

Holiday blockbuster books

My contacts in the publishing business assure me the following books will be huge this holiday season.

Nancy Grace's If You're Under Arrest, You're GUILTY!

My three point plan to bring America to Jesus
by Newt Gingrich

I Don't Have Enough of Your Money Yet, So I Wrote Another Book
by Bill Cosby

Suck It Gay America! I Was Married for 72 Days and You Weren't!
By Kim Kardashian

I, Douchebag
by Alton Brown

What's my favorite kind of kids book? The free kind!

I stopped by the free book table that loiters out in front of one of our local used book stores and I picked up all these kids books for free. Free! Free, I tell you!

Some really cool illustrations in this one.


The cover of this one just screams, "Hey, look, it's the American version of 'Are You Being Served.' "

This is all about how cool and special the oil industry is. It came out in 1975, right around the time of the OPEC oil crisis, so I guess it was meant to calm our fears that we might lose all our precious oil.
This one is full of great photos of marching bands and parades.

This is only the second 'we live in' book I've owned, I previously had the one on East Germany which I scanned, put on Flickr, and got linked on Boing Boing. There's a whole series of them and they came out in the early 1980's. I'm on the look out for the rest of them, especially the ones on the old Soviet Union and it's satellites.
This is the fourth '...is for me' book I've owned. I've had the ones on bicycling, karate, and horseback riding. I really want the ones on serial killing, poisoning, and blaspheming.

Free picture books, epic win for Dr. Monkey and his blog empire!

This won't win me many fans, but...

...after reading three Terry Pratchett novels, I'm not impressed by his work.

Going Postal was mildly amusing. Monstrous Regiment was maddeningly and needlessly long. And I got through two thirds of Night Watch before I threw in the towel, it started out with a great premise and he carried it through for a time but by the final third of the book he got bogged down and I lost interest.

I may give Thud! or Making Money a try some day, but it won't be any time soon.

I'm finishing up a Phillip K. Dick novel called The Cosmic Puppets and I just got The Yiddish Policeman's Union from my local library, plus I've got two books my friend Keith loaned me and two other books I'm kind of reading on as well. And I'm reading a slew of different graphic novels to boot.

Like I said, I may try Pratchett again. I just wish he'd try using an editor.

They came from the stacks!

All of the following books are available through my local library:

One way to avoid falling is to not walk near the ocean where you can get swept away by a wave.

"Mommy, what's a tape recorder?"

Definitely not PETA approved.

"Help! I'm trapped in a one hundred and fifty pound knit dress!"

One man's art is another man's food.

This post was inspired by the great blog Awful Library Books.

Be on the look out for...

...Book Monkey. It's coming soon.

I like mine medium well with a side of cole slaw and a nice cold beer

How do you enjoy your teen-agers?

Swag Update

It's been a banner week for swag here at Monkey Central. Suzy sent me a swag package that I've already shown you in another post and then the other day I got this super cool postcard from Delia Guzman:
That's Natalie Wood walking that dog so joyfully. How did Delia know I had a major crush on Ms. Wood when I was younger?

And today the hits keep on coming. I got this book
from Lisa (The blogger fromerly known as D Cup)! It's a super cool vintage pop up book. It's not culturally sensitive but it's keen nonetheless. Thank you ladies for all the swag, you are too kind!

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Now, for those of you who have not sent me any swag, what the hell are you waiting on?

It looks like you're stuck with me for a little longer

Thankfully it was an uneventful trip to the cardiologist yesterday. He found nothing to be concerned about and it looks like my heart will continue to beat for a bit longer.

It was a nice drive down to Knoxville, the sun was shining and the red buds were in full bloom, which is a change from what we usually have to drive through, sheets of rain and driving wind. Since my appointment was later in the afternoon I didn't have to sit in the waiting room and listen to the coven of receptionists who wear scrubs even though they are not nurses be rude to everyone, especially the older patients who are hard of hearing.

I got to see Dr. Hoadley finally about 40 minutes after they took me back and after a pair of nurses asked me all the usual questions and they gave me the usual EKG. My doctor and I had our usual conversation when he came in:

Doctor H: Hi. Are you smoking again?

Me: No. I haven't smoked a cigarette since the night of my heart attack.

Doctor H: Good. Now you need to lose some weight you fat bastard.

Me: Okay. (He starts to unbutton my shirt.) Umm, Doc, I usually make a guy buy me something to eat before I let him take off my clothes.

Doctor H: Haha, very funny. Are you sure you're not smoking?

Me: Of course I'm sure.

Doctor H: (As he uses his stethoscope on my bare chest.) Okay then. Oh yeah, this weight losing thing, get on it Mr. Fatty McButter Belly. And stay off those cigarettes.

Me: (As I button up my shirt.) Will do.

Doctor H: I'll see you in a year and make sure you pay us before you drop dead or something.

Fin.

Actually, I kid, my cardiologist is a nice guy. We get along well and I trust him with my life, after all he did save my life the first night I met him. And since I don't have to see him as much as I used to, I don't mind going to his office in Knoxville as much as I used to. Oh, I still despise the coven of receptionists who wear scrubs even though they aren't nurses but they're a small price to have to pay to see a top notch cardiology guy.

After I finished with my appointment Sparky and I went and had a super duper late lunch/early supper at one of our favorite restaurants in Knoxville, The Sunspot on the strip near the University of Tennessee. After not eating much all day long I was ready to chow down and I had a chicken breast sandwich that was almost as big as my head, some salty as hell fries, and several glasses of sweet tea. I'm not sure what Sparky ate because I was too busy strapping on my own feed bag.

After our meal we went to two of my favorite places in Knoxville, Disc Exchange and Book Eddy.

Disc Exchange sells new and used CD's, DVD's and other entertainment related shit and we picked up three used CD's while there. We got a Replacements CD, an EP on CD by Southern Culture on the Skids, and we scored a used She and Him CD. If you're not familiar with She and Him, they are a musical group that consists of the actress Zooey Deschanel and some guy who plays guitar. Her singing sounds like a cross between Julie London and Patsy Cline, with a dash of natural sweetness thrown in, it very lovely and highly addictive. I now see why Samurai Frog has been on their band wagon for so long now.

To say Book Eddy is a used book store is to say that a used Rolls Royce is just a used car. Book Eddy sells used books yes, but the used books it sells are a cut above, although there are great deals to be found when you go through their stacks. They are also respectful of books at Book Eddy, they don't stick sticky gooey price tags all over the front of their books, they write the price, in pencil, on the first page of the book as as not to devalue the book by defacing the cover. They also carry, in addition to thousands of cool old books, some vintage magazines, record albums, and shelf after shelf of pulp sci fi, mystery, and suspense paperbacks from the 1940's on up through the '70's. I could spend days in that place just looking at all the great pulp covers. I was lucky enough this trip to find some books in the bargain bin such as these two:

I found a few more and I paid a little over three bucks for all of them, woo hoo! Sparky bought some books as well so all in all it was a good excursion. We got new to us music and kick ass used books, could geeks like us ask for more? I don't think so.

It's a good thing I only have to see my cardiologist once a year now because if I went much more than that I'd end up spending far too much time and money in the Disc Exchange and Book Eddy.

The reviews are in

The name of this book is The Death of Napoleon.
I bought this slim little novel at my local library's used book sale a few weeks ago and as I read it it seemed very familiar to me. Well it turns out there was a good reason for that, it's because I had seen the film adaption of it years before I had read the novel and I loved it. Now I can say I love the novel that they based the film on as well.

As I said it's a slim short work of fiction but it's 128 pages are more evocative and well written than most anything I have ever read. The prose in this book is almost poetic and that's saying something since it was written in French first and then translated into English later. The book tells the story of how Napoleon got off St. Helena, made his way across the ocean and back to Paris, only to arrive unrecognized (with one notable exception) though not unloved. I'm not going to deeper into the plot because if I do then I'll be giving something away and I'd hate to do that in case one of you decided to read this book one day.

I highly recommend this book. You will enjoy it even if you aren't a history buff or scholar. It's at times melancholy, wistful, and sweet. The film and the book differ a bit, especially the endings, but both are worth checking out.

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We saw this film the other night:

On the whole I rather liked it. It's a dark comedy about cheating spouses, gym employees, and people on the fringe of the Washington DC intelligence apparatus. A computer disc with some quasi important information on it gets left behind in a locker room in a gym and the worlds of those involved come crashing down as a result.

George Clooney is good in this movie, as is Brad Pitt, and Frances McDormand. John Malkovich is really good in this movie and if you ask me he's at his best in roles like this one and the one he did in Art School Confidential. I guess Tilda Swinton was all right in this film but I'm not the best judge of her cinematic work because I think she's scary. That's right, she scares me. And I think she's unattractive too. The thought of cozying up to next to her at night in bed sends shivers down my spine. I never said I wasn't shallow, now did I?

I recommend the movie in spite of Ms. Swinton, although don't expect it to be a laugh riot. It's more a black comedy than anything.

I love my local library

I do, I love my local library.

I love my local library waaaaaaaay more than any human should. And it's not just because my friend Bob is the new big cheese at the library, although that's part of it. I love my local library because it's huge, it's well lit, it has books, magazines, CD's, DVD's, graphic novels, and because it's within walking distance of my house. But the reason I am loving my local library today is because they had a massive used book sale there today.

They had a deal where you pay $20 bucks and you could get all the books you could pack in a box. When we found that out we went wild. Sparky got a bunch of novels and a few non fiction books as well and I got these books:
A Foot in the Grave has some really cool and creepy illustrations in it. Zhou Enlai has great shots of vintage Communists in it. Puppet Making spoke to me and it said, "Touch the puppet head." I look forward to reading the slim novel about how Napoleon cheated death.

I really made a score when I picked up those two USDA books about our nation's food supply, one is from 1966 and the other is from 1969. They both are packed with great vintage photos of farms, animals, people, and food from that era. I got a book about by a guy who directed exploitation movies in the '50's, '60's and '70's, a book about the history of wine, and a book of essay's on food.
Speaking of food, I found four, count them four, cookbooks that are filled with pictures of bad food. I can wait to share them with you on my blogs and on Flickr.

Thanks Johnson City Public Library!

"And what have you been reading over the past few months Monkey?"

I'm glad you asked. Here's what I've been reading over the past few months:


Blog buddy Jess Wundrun let me borrow this book and it's a very good read. It goes in depth into the wasteful ways coal is mined in this country and it also gives some of the history of mining. Overall it's very good but towards the end Mr. Goodell gets a too technical for me and I skimmed it. I do recommend this book though, especially to anyone who wants to pursue solar or other types of ways to power their home or business.


I saw this on Captain Karen's blog side bar and it looked interesting so I checked it out of my local library. I've read books about maritime stuff from this time period and they were always very good and this book was no exception. As a historian and writer Mr. Bown does himself proud with this fine history of how scurvy was beaten. It's a sometimes harrowing book, especially when you find out that hundreds of thousands died needlessly because the British government at that time did not want to spend the money needed to procure citrus fruit for it's ships. During the two weeks it took me to finish this book my vitamin C intake increased dramatically. I highly recommend this book.


Thunderbolt Kid is a funny fast read. Bryson was born about ten years before me so what was new and novel to him was old hat to me, i.e. TV, processed foods, other modern amenities. But despite that there was enough shared experience in his book to hook me. I may not have grown up in Iowa where he did but I went through a lot of what he writes about and I recognized places I lived when I was his age in this book. It's a very funny entertaining read.

The main things I learned form this book is that Mario Batali is a huge douchebag and that the author is a glutton for punishment. This one did not live up to it's hype at all and I say give it a pass if you are tempted to read it.

I was blown away by this graphic novel that was recommended to me by my buddy at the library, and not to brag or anything but my buddy is the big cheese at our local library, and by big cheese I mean he's the library director. So when a graphic novel lovin' dude like him recommends something to me, I jumped all over it. This graphic novel is a bout what happened to all those fairy tale characters you read about as a little kid. In this imaginative tale they've all been run out of their former kingdoms and dwellings and they've taken up residence in NYC. I'm not going to delve too much into the plot because to do so would spoil it for you but trust me when I say it's a good read. What I liked most about it is how the writer and artists brought the stale old fairy tale characters to not only life, but to a new and decidedly unfairy tale like life. There's more in this series and I may just have to look them up someday soon. I highly recommend this fine piece of literature.

Once more, with feeling

Just in time for the big holiday season I'm offering you all one more chance to buy my out of print novel.
It's a wild pulp noir crime novel that got great reviews when it first came out. You can get a copy emailed to you, whereupon you can read it on your computer or you can print it off and read it on paper. The choices are endless!

How do you get this great work of contemporary fiction? Well kids, it's simple. All you have to do is make an $11 donation to my Paypal account and when it shows up I'll email the novel to you. If you'd like to get my novel please send me an email to monkeymuckATgmailDOTcom with the words 'I want Trouble!' in the subject line. When I get your email I'll check if you have made the donation to my Paypal account and if you have sent it in, I'll send you the novel via the interwebs.

J.K. Rowling, Terry Pratchett, and Stephen King don't need any more sales, I however could use a few hundred or more, so buy my novel and encourage others to do the same.

Tanya went to Europe and all I got was this lousy 1998 Berlitz guide book

Look what the hottest gal in Toronto sent me:

Thanks for the book my little Tanya.  

Reviews of things past

I love the art of Gustav Klimt, I like most of the acting work done by John Malkovich, and I really like the way Saffron Burrows looks. But none of that was enough to make me like this turkey of movie:
Sweet tiny batter fried and dusted with powdered sugar Jesus this movie is an arty pretentious piece of crap. It assumes we all know the back story of Klimt's life and then it blithely skips around to all kinds of places and locations in time and by the end of the film any goodwill you had towards anyone who made this steaming piece of shit has long gone and you're just about ready to not only murder the writer/director, the actors, and the studio who put it out, you're ready to knee cap the best boy and the on set caterer as well.

Everyone in this film has done far better work elsewhere, I'm sure that true of the multitude of German and Austrian actors who populate this turkey too.

Avoid this at all costs. And if someone insists you watch it, you may want to knock them in the head with a blunt object and terminate your friendship with them forever.

You can read my observations, I can't call it a review since I didn't finish it, of the biography of Jane Goodall I've been reading for the past few weeks by clicking here. Consider yourself lucky I didn't write a post about it that was in any way near as long as the book itself.

A Zombie Ate My Bestseller

My good blog friend Barbara tagged me with a literary meme and I'm happy to comply.

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Which book do you irrationally cringe away from reading, despite seeing only positive reviews? Anything by C. S. Lewis. The god squad drones who I went to college with always tried to push his books at me, I think they hoped I'd get all saved and shit if I read that Christian allegory crap he wrote. It didn't work then and it won't work now. I won't see movies based on his books, or even movies about his life. I'd rather gouge my bowels out with a rusty tin can lid than read anything by C. S. Lewis.

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If you could bring three characters to life for a social event (afternoon tea, a night of clubbing, perhaps a world cruise), who would they be and what would the event be? With so many to choose from it's hard to decide but if pressed I'd go with:

Clara Bowden from White Teeth. She's a hip free spirit yet serious when she has to be woman who is also spur of the moment funky fun. (White Teeth is in my list top ten favorite novels of all time.)Sissy Hankshaw Gitch from Even Cowgirls Get The Blues. Everybody wants Sissy, guys, gals, senior citizens, and endangered birds. She's smart, sexy, and a blast to be around. (Even Cowgirls Get The Blues is my favorite novel of all time.)
Oskar Matzerath from The Tin Drum. Any person who can stop growing and who is the conscience of a country in the grip of an insane right wing dictator is my kind of person. Sure we'd have that language thing to work out but I think young Oskar and I would get along fine.

Now, since we'd have a juvenile in our party we'd probably do something like go for a picnic, probably on a beach somewhere, maybe Atlantic Beach, NC even. We'd hang out, swim, talk, play games, collect sea shells, and then we'd all go back to the condo we rented and I'd cook up some seafood and we'd drink beers and shoot the breeze until the wee hours of the morning.

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You are told you can't die until you read the most boring novel on the planet. While this immortality is great for awhile, eventually you realise it's past time to die. Which book would you expect to get you a nice grave? I'd go with Pilgrims Progress. It's the only way I'd ever read it and I'd burn through it knowing that the sweet release of death awaited me.

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Which book have you pretended, or at least hinted, that you've read, when in fact you've been nowhere near it? In college I was supposed to read The Children of the Light and the Children of the Darkness by Reinhold Niebuhr and do a oral presentation on it. Every time I opened it and tried to read it I hated it. So I skimmed it and tried to bluff my way through the oral report on it. I got busted for not reading it and I got slapped with a "D" on that project. I still hate German theologians to this day because of that incident.

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As an addition to the last question, has there been a book that you really thought you had read, only to realise when you read a review about it/go to 'reread' it that you haven't? Nope.

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You've been appointed Book Advisor to a VIP (who's not a big reader). What's the first book you'd recommend and why? Hands down I'd recommend this novel:

It's DeLillo's best in my opinion and it tells the story of the events of the JFK murder from the perspective of Lee Harvey Oswald. It's chilling and stunningly good how DeLillo took what I thought was material that had been hashed to death and somehow turned it into something fresh and urgent and compelling. I gained alot of sympathy for Oswald after this novel.

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A good fairy comes and grants you one wish: you will have perfect reading comprehension in the foreign language of your choice. Which language do you go with? Spanish. It would be great to read Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Cervantes, and Che in Spanish.

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A mischievous fairy comes and says that you must choose one book that you will reread once a year for the rest of your life (you can read other books as well). Which book would you pick?
I've already read it four or five times and I know I'll read it a couple more times before it's all said and done.

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What's one bookish thing you 'discovered' from book blogging (maybe a new genre, or author, or new appreciation for cover art-anything)? I've discovered that my love of books and reading is shared by some of the smartest and nicest people I've ever known. I love all the blog posts by people on my blogroll about the books they read and how infectious the love of the written word is among all those smart people. It's refresing to see that so many of us still love to read and discuss and share with others what we read.

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That good fairy is back for one final visit. Now, she's granting you your dream library! Describe it. Is everything leatherbound? Is it full of first edition hardcovers? Pristine trade paperbacks? Perhaps a few favourite authors have inscribed their works? Go ahead-let your imagination run free. It's in a big well lit room that has comfy chairs, perhaps recliners, in it. The walls are lined with built in bookshelves and on those shelves are books that intrigue, entertain, and fascinate me. Also there are graphic novels on the shelves and several shelves are lined with DVD's, because you have to do something when your eyes get tired from reading. My computer is also in there and a big well stocked kitchen in the next room.

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Thanks for the tag Barbara! Since I got tagged by a hot babe, I'm going to pass this meme along to some hot babes on my blog roll, MNmom, Suzy, and my book lovin' Georgia blog gal pal Beth can do this meme if they like. Have at it ladies.

Look what I got for fifty cents today

It's full of great monkey and ape photos that I'll soon be scanning and sharing with all of you on both my personal blogs. I also picked up a picture book from the 1950's that is full of stereotypes about people who live in the South. And I managed to find a few pulp sci fi books with great covers that I already scanned and will soon be uploaded to one of my many Flickr accounts.

The reviews are in

Read my review of Paul Theroux's Dark Star Safari over at the Winter Reading Challenge blog.

Go on, read a damn book, would it kill you?

Hey you. Yeah you. You need to join the Winter Reading Challenge. All the cool kids are doing it, yeah I know they slipped up and let me in. The whole thing, to the best of my knowledge, was put together by this gal:

In case you don't know her, Karen is the Captain of the HMS Swiftsure. When not making cool looking hats, doing karaoke, and lusting after Tom Jones and that guy from that Dirty Jobs TV show, she's heavy into reading.

The reading challenge is pretty simple really, all you do is submit a list of books you're going to read and then after you read each one you write about it on the Winter Reading Challenge blog. It's a neat way to connect with other people and to learn more about books. I'm super stoked to see what others are reading and I'm looking forward to sharing my observations about what I'm reading for the next few months. So go on, join up. It's easy to do so, just go to one of the blogs I've linked here and send the lovely Captain Karen an email. No worries kids, she's Canadian so she's real nice, she'll let you join up, I promise.