Winning Through Worst Practices
by Christopher Locke
Read the full text of the first two chapters.
The End of Business as Usual
by Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls &
David Weinberger
The entire book is now online.
by Umberto Eco
An EGR reader wrote: "You have omitted Foucault's Pendulum, by Umberto Eco. I can't understand why." We responded: "No, you must have missed it. It's right there at the top of the list!"
by Christopher Moore
A pilot for a medical missionary on a remote island hooks up with a transvestite navigator and a talking fruit bat before being waylaid by a typhoon and a cranky cannibal. Need we say more?
Edited by Jesse Sheidlower
An entire volume devoted to the provenance and prolific usage of EGR's favorite word. Hotter than a freshly fucked fox in a forest fire -- a useful phrase we learned from this book.
edited by Lagasse, Goldman and Hobson
At 3200 pages, the 6th edition of this venerable work is an enormous volume, well worth the hefty price. Published June 2000.
Where gonzo got it's good name. We actually hadn't read this until the second year we we're doing EGR, which was only about 20 years after it was published. Better late than never.
by Hunter S. Thompson
The 1962 section begins: "Fuck you, I quit..." Fortunately for us, he did not. Here's the evidence.
by Hunter S. Thompson
I opened the book to this: "Krassner, you treacherous cocksucker..." Ah, how refreshing after reading so much of the industry trade press.
Just out, this is one hell of a book by a guy we've been talking to for years. A whacking great read -- but also a useful manual on how not to lose your soul to the Internet biz. Five stars.
We were impressed that Daniel Oran sent us email: "If you give Ulterior Motive a try, I hope you'll let me know what you think." We will -- on both counts.
Certainly one of the stranger novels ever written. Pynchon is a trip. Get lost in the language, get lost in the rock and roll. Not to be missed is the song "The Penis He Thought Was His Own."
We've read this book twice and still can't remember what the hell it was about. Very strange. Granted, this may not be the book's problem.
Deliciously paranoid. After reading this book we encountered posthorns everywhere. Whatever Pynchon was driving at here, he was probably right.
This one got a lot of shit from The Reviewers for not being another brilliant multi-layered structural masterpiece. Yeah well, there's lotsa dope in it and we thought it was like cool.
Another brilliant multi-layered structural masterpiece, what can we say? We really plan to read it. No, really. Right after we get done with Dr. Thompson's letters. Hey look, it's intertextuality!
It was a long time ago, but we recall laughing till we couldn't breathe. Milo Minderbinder could teach the Internet MLM crowd a trick or two. Better than the movie by several orders of magnitude.
This is Early Vintage Weird. Everything you ever wanted to know about paregoric Pall Malls. And a bunch of other stuff that was going on before the lid blew off the '60s.
The message of the book is that Big Nurse will get you. Written before Kesey discovered acid and several possible escape routes. Possible we said...
What Kesey and the Merry Pranksters did then. Which was pretty much a lot more acid. Also something about a bus. Further.
Robbins has written a whole lot since, but when it first appeared we'd never read anything quite like this one. Wonder if it still holds up if you're not wrecked outta your head...
One of the few books we've read that is rolling-on-the-floor funny and really spooky at the same time. Kilgore Trout mixes it up with bad chemicals. Look out!
At a tender age, we read The Air Conditioned Nightmare and Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch. As far as we can tell, Miller was enlightened, or at the very least, a guy who knew exactly who he was.
This boxed set of four novels -- Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive and Clea -- will immerse you in language that becomes its own reason for the story these books tell four times through the eyes of four different characters.
This sumptuous Library of America edition of the world's greatest detective fiction writer includes early pulp stories, The Big Sleep, Farewell My Lovely, and The High Window. Drool...
Volume 2 includes The Lady in the Lake, The Little Sister, The Long Goodbye, Playback, and Double Indemnity, as well as selected essays and letters. Double drool...
edited by Horace McCoy
The first in another cool two-volume Library of America set. Includes The Postman Always Rings Twice, Thieves Like Us, Nightmare Alley, The Big Clock, They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, and I Married a Dead Man.
edited by Jim Thompson et al.
Volume 2. Includes Pick-Up, The Killer Inside Me, Down There, The Real Cool Killers, and The Talented Mr. Ripley.
This is a placeholder for everything Ross MacDonald ever wrote, which was basically a whole raft of noir private-eye novels about Lew Archer sleuthing around LA and Southern California.
Here's another one. Next to Chandler, Ross MacDonald was the master as far as we're concerned. Hell, just go to this link and buy all of it. We did.
Forget black&white nostalgia, Elroy proves it's still possible. Noir goes technicolor. And the film ain't bad either.
We love everything we've read by Carl Hiaasen, and we've read nearly everything he's written. Collect the whole set!
by Carl Hiaasen
Oh, this is rich! A short and to-the-point hatchet job on Disney. This is part of a series called The Library of Contemporary Thought, which seems to be publishing interesting little monographs.
Getting into a Le Carre novel can require changing gears until you get used to the rhythm of his language. Once you get into it though, what a trip! Check out all his stuff.
"Based on your selections, I recommend Good Omens if by some horrendous oversight you haven't read it yet." (-Nancy, an EGR Irregular.) We had not, but will. Sounds good.
An EGR reader says: "...one of the best reads I've had in a long time, if you can get past a few of the gruesome murders perpetrated by the cyber-medical genius antagonist."
by Gregory Jaynes
An EGR reader says: "A journalist having a midlife crisis hops a Russian freighter to travel around the world looking for himself. One of the passengers he calls Toxic June. The humor is just my style."
by Mark Twain
An EGR reader says: "Tall tales of the Comstock silver boom where everyone was walking around giving friendly strangers stock in their usually worthless silver mines. From reading it, I get the impression we're just in a second Gilded Age right now."
Mrs. Hotdogbun is an especially finely drawn character. Don't miss RageBoy's review at the Amazon page this links to. You need this book!
How globalism and tribalism are reshaping the world. Worldwide consumerism versus religious/cultural fundamentalism. Buy two, they're small!
The world is headed toward staggering overcapacity, surplus goods and labor, frenzied speculation, recurring debt crisis, mass underemployment and social chaos. Have a nice day!
An earlier jeremiad from a Rolling Stone writer who isn't having any, this time on why U.S. politics is fundamentally fucked.
by Thomas A. Stewart
Tom Stewart, Fortune editor and Friend of EGR, shows how products and processes gain value from the intelligence they incorporate. RageBoy is listed in the Acknowledgments.
While the plot's a little thin, this book does reprint an article Proto-RageBoy wrote several years ago for Information Week, including the line "Work less, play more, dream always."
This one includes a full-length interview with Proto-RageBoy along with similar raps with "CIOs, Webmasters, and Other Visionaries" from Netscape, Sun, Microsoft and like that.
by Jeannie Novak, Pete Markiewicz
Proto-RageBoy is quoted in several places and there's more here if you can stand waiting for the page to load.
by Peter Kent
The author sent us a copy. We like that. We wish we'd had this book a couple years ago. The title says it all...
by Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville
You can't go wrong with books from O'Reilly & Associates. Here's one of their newer titles. If you haven't been to their site yet, do check it out.
by Ian Grey
"Ian Grey is a literary terrorist. He uses his PC like a .357 Magnum. If you're a movie mogul, run for cover." -J.P. Miller, author of Days of Wine and Roses.