Deacon King Kong

Deacon King Kong / James McBride, read by Dominic Hoffman, 370 pages

Sportcoat is the old drunk, a deacon at the Five Ends Baptist Church.  He shots a young drug dealer in his neighborhood.  A kid he used to teach in Sunday school and coached on a baseball team. He is so drunk at the time, he has no memory of the shooting.  Deems, the young dealer, lives and puts off taking his revenge.  But Sportcoat has kicked off a chain reaction involving the church, neighborhood history, the Italian mob and the new drug trade kings.  Funny and yet serious at times, this story shows the relationships and tells the history of the neighborhood around a New York housing project. Captivating.

Ablutions

Ablutions: notes for a novel / Patrick deWitt, 164 pgs.

This novel is the saddest collection of notes by a writer/bartender who works at a down-and-out Hollywood bar whose clientele seems to be in a contest for biggest loser.  I'm not talking about the losing weight type of thing.  Right there in the contest is the writer himself.  The bartender who is himself a raging drunk who doesn't realize the notes are more of a mishmash of his own failings.  Sometimes it seems kind of funny but mostly it seems very sad and lonely.

I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell

I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell by Tucker Max, 200 of 326 pages

I'll be honest: I decided to listen to this audiobook because of the title. Stupid, stupid, stupid me. In this appallingly unappealing book, Max recounts stories of his drunk and disorderly debauchery, including all of the horrible things he and his friends have done to have sex with random women, all of whom are treated as objects. I'm generally a pretty open-minded person, willing to read or listen to whatever, but this one was just too much for me. If even half of Max's stories are half-true... ugh. I can't believe I stuck with this one as long as I did. I guess I was hoping that Max would experience some sort of, I dunno, personal growth or something. Sadly, that's not the case.

Avoid this one like the plague. I mean, unless you're into hearing stories about random drunken sexual encounters, entitled drunk men insulting women just for the fun of it, and explosive diarrhea from a guy that has no remorse. Then go for it.