Have you checked out the eBooks and eAudio at the SFPL? We're itching to try out the audio options, but they don't have anything that works on Macs or iPods. Boo!

After a weekend double feature of In Cold Blood and Capote, both never seen before by SFist Rain, she got the urge to actually, finally, read the book that was (in a sense) responsible for both films: Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. It is a testament to the quality of the book that, after seeing its events portrayed twice the previous weekend, Rain was instantly engrossed and unable to put the book down. It also reminded her that "true crime" books don't have to be hackneyed and painful to read. Hell, it proved that the majority of the books she has been reading recently (and not worth even mentioning to SFist Reads for months) have been badly written. How nice it is to read a book by someone who really knows how to capture a reader and maintain beautiful prose, even when describing some gruesome events indeed.

SFist Cheshire is barrelling through The Hot Kid, by Elmore Leonard. As usual from Mr. Leonard, it's a good, fast read with sharp dialogue and hardboiled characters. This time it's a crime novel taking place during prohibition in Oklahoma and Kansas, about a deputy U.S. Marshal, a sort of young Tommy Lee Jones character. It's got old-fashioned bank robberies, whorehouses, deceit, killings, all the good stuff. Not quite as good as Get Shorty, but way the hell better than Be Cool, the two other Leonard books Chesh has read.

SFist Jon finally sat down and started reading a book he's been wanting to read for awhile, Arthur Phillips' Prague: A Novel. Prague: A Novel is basically about that time in the early 90's when everyone was going to the newly free Eastern Europe and Prague was supposed to be the new Paris. Of course, this book takes place in Budapest, but Budapest/Prague, same thing. Anyways, it's basically the adventures of five ex-pats living abroad and what it was like to be there when the world seemed new and everything seemed just a little bit within reach. Unfortunately, he is having a problem reading it. It's not that it isn't well written or the characters aren't interesting-- in fact, actually, it's almost the opposite problem. The book is so well-written that it's taking Jon back to when he was young and backpacking through Europe and spent a long, languorous week in Prague that was fun in the way only backpacking through foreign countries in your early twenties can be. In other words, probably the most fun one could have, like, ever. In fact, like a lot of his fellow Gen-X'ers, he too had visions of staying in Prague and was perhaps a George H.W. Bush re-election away from making it his home. The problem is that it's making him a bit nostalgic for those long ago days of yore when everything seemed like it was all going to get better-- alt-rock was rampaging through Hair Band hegemony, "Seinfeld" was in its ascendancy, and people actually thought it was possible a Democrat could win the White House. We were young and we were innocent and like everyone else in the early 90's, thought the impossible was possible. Oh, how silly we were.

In other words, this book is making him feel nostalgic and he hates nostalgia.

It's a great book, though.