Books I am Reading Right Now

Poker books. There isn’t one specific poker book I am reading, I am basically checking out every book on poker from library and skimming them for tips and tricks. I am studying from the masters so that one day I can quit my day job and play online poker from money from home and make millions. How awesome would that be to wake up late, sit around in your pajamas, play a few games of high stakes online poker and then call it day. It’s a dream, my friends, that one day I hope to achieve. If I do, I’ll have even more time to write awesome articles like this for your perusing pleasure.

Besides poker books to help me make my millions, I’ve also been reading some fiction, mainly stuff by Vladimir Nabokov. It is almost unfair how great of a writer Nabokov is. You may know him as the famous author of the controversial novel and film “Lolita” about an older man’s affections for a teenage girl. When you boil the plot down to just one sentence like that, of course it sounds tawdry and dirty but until you’ve actually read it, I feel like one shouldn’t comment on it. “Lolita” and his later novel “Ada” (which is about an incestual relationship and a treatise on the passage of time) are both done a great injustice by a cursory summary. Nabokov was fluent in English, French and Russian and his novels are filled the verbiage and cleverness of a person who knows language very well. The way he plays with words, creates new ones and weaves a coherent story amidst so many snaking plotlines is genius.

From classic fiction literature to something a little more lowbrow, I’ve also been enjoying “World War Z.” The son of writer, director and actor Mel Brooks (“Blazing Saddles,” “Young Frankenstein”), Max Brooks debuting on the literary scene with “The Zombie Survial Guide,” a mock-handbook detailing how to keep your brains if there should ever be a zombie outbreak. The success of that novel led to a sort of sequel, “World War Z.” What makes “World War Z” so great is how seriously Brooks deals with the subject matter. His scenarios about how the different nations and countries would deal with a zombie outbreak is oftentimes frighteningly realistic. Told through a number of vignettes, the book is able to cover the outbreak from many different angles showing how people react to the outbreak and how the world combats it. For any true horror or zombie fan you have to read “World War Z” for the most realistic picture of what would really happen if the something as strange, unlikely and horrific as a zombie outbreak were to really plague the earth.