Books Special
Fred Wilson
Venture Capitalist, Union Square Ventures
"I am reading Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo right now. My favorite book of all time is too hard to answer. There are just too many great books. The best book this year was The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon."
"Someone read me a quote from the book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It says that oppressed people can't be free until they free their oppressors, until they give them back their humanity. It was so profound. It's a beautiful book."
"I'm reading Money, by Martin Amis. I heard about Amis, and wanted to read something by him. It's about New York, so that's fun. I wanted to see his take on the Reagan 80s, to see how controversial he could get."
"The last book I read was Bob Dylan's Chronicles, Volume One on the recommendations of a couple of friends. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that he's got a way with words, but I had no idea how strong his prose would be. The book is much more than a curio for fans. I'm currently in progress on Edith Grossman's recent translation of Don Quixote. A few years ago I made an attempt at an older stuffier translation and found it rough going. So far, I'm loving this version."
"A friend recommended The Dhammapada to me, though I had read about it elsewhere. How to describe it? It is an uninhibited perspective of pure insight."
"I just finished Matthew Pearl's The Dante Club, a tale set in 1865 in which a serial killer is murdering prominent individuals based on the punishments of the damned from Dante's Inferno. This plagues and intrigues The Dante Club, formed by Boston Dante aficionados (Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, J.T. Fields) who are supporting H. W. Longfellow as he works on the first American translation of Alighieri's poem. A fine work for a first novel, though I thought the leading characters could have used a bit more characterization and depth. For this sort of fiction, Caleb Carr is more to my taste with his insightful The Alienist and Angel of Darkness."
"I'm still reading Kite Runner. I've got 20 pages to go. It was a gift, because it's my friend's favorite book, and she wanted to share it with me. It's an interesting topic since it's something you don't know a lot about, given the current state of Afghanistan. You know bad things are going to happen, but you still keep reading it."
"I actually tend to read more than one book at a time, which I suppose is evidence of a fracturing attention span. So I'm going to name two books. The first isn't being published until August. The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright. It's easily the most lucid, dramatic, and insightful book I've ever read on the subject. The other is Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. I mean, here I'd been, going along, reading a perfectly good literary novel with sci-fi overtones, and the guy had to go and knock the wind out of me at the end. Maybe the most intelligent sucker punch ever thrown."
"I'm reading volume three of Graham Greene's biography. The author is Norman Sherry. It came out a couple of years ago. I'm also re-reading Appointment in Samarra. I don't know why. I was sitting around the house, and I decided to flip through it again."
"The last book I read was Cormac McCarthy's forthcoming novel (due out in the fall) called simply The Road. It is an absolutely gripping post-apocalyptic tale of a nameless man and his young son and their struggle for survival in a harsh, unforgiving landscape. It is nothing less than a small masterpiece with echoes of Greek Tragedy, and once you start it you won't be able to stop. I guarantee it."
"The last book I read was Left To Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust by Immaculee Ilibagiza. My all time favorite book is The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. It's a wonderful book that shows there always hope."