Here are ten books I read this year and liked enough to recommend them to you (in no particular order)…
Eric Idle kept track of the entire process of turning “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” into a Broadway musical twenty years ago, and this is the result. Oftentimes hilarious, oftentimes frustrating, centered on his collaboration with director Mike Nichols, Idle is very open about the difficulties the team encountered in creating the final product. “Spamalot” was nominated for fourteen Tony Awards, winning three, and would be very high on a list of the best musicals I’ve seen in this century. In a cast that included Tim Curry, David Hyde Pierce, Hank Azaria, Christian Borle, and Michael McGrath, Idle pours a lot of admiration on Sara Ramirez, who won the Best Featured Actress Tony as The Lady Of The Lake.
“Cue the sun!” is a line from the movie “The Truman Show” uttered by Ed Harris as the creator of a reality TV show about an innocent character played by Jim Carrey who doesn’t know he’s a TV star. Emily Nussbaum’s book traces the history of reality shows from their earliest days (“Candid Camera” and “Queen For A Day”) through “American Family,” “The Gong Show,” “The Real World,” “Survivor,” and an entire chapter on “The Apprentice.” Reading about some of the shows reminded me what a sacrifice I made in watching absolute garbage, just so I could talk about them on my radio show. Because if not for that, I would never have wasted my time on Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie in “The Simple Life” (which is being re-booted as I type this) or Rick Rockwell and Darva Conger on “Who Wants To Marry A Millionaire.” But I sure did enjoy reading Nussbaum’s dissection of them, with plenty of quotes and stories from the people who made — and continue to make — programs that redefine the word “reality.”
I had never read a Carl Hiaasen book, but after enjoying Vince Vaughn in Apple TV’s “Bad Monkey,” I thought I’d dive into one of Hiaasen’s other adventures, and “Skin Tight” turned out to be a good choice. It’s about a former detective for the Florida prosecutor’s office, who is forced out of retirement when he becomes the target of a murder plot by a corrupt plastic surgeon. Suffice to say that Hiaasen and his friend Dave Barry have few peers when it comes to writing about any number of Florida Men. This may have been my first foray into Hiaasen’s books, but it won’t be the last.
Now don’t make too much fun of me — I had never read a Stephen King book, either, mostly because I’m not a fan of horror stories. But a few years ago, a recommendation from my wife made me pick up “Mr. Mercedes,” the first book in which the character Holly Gibney appears. That led me to the sequel, “Finders Keepers,” and then this one, in which Holly is a private investigator asked to look into the disappearance of a child, and before long King steers the tale towards a pair of elderly cannibals. Fortunately, even with that c-word in the plotline, “Holly” is not particularly gory, but is a well-told mystery that sucked me in from the very start.
Christina Kovac’s novel, “The Cutaway,” is about Virginia Knightly, a television news producer in Washington, DC, who finds out a young attorney has gone missing. As she investigates, the story swerves into a world of cover-ups and corruption. It reminded me of Gillian Flynn’s “Gone Girl,” and if “The Cutaway” is not made into a movie or streaming series soon, I’ll be shocked.
Kara Swisher has long been one of the top reporters on all things tech. Having witnessed the often repellent antics of the tech elite and their cluelessness regarding privacy and threats to democracy, Kara has outright disdain for many of them and doesn’t hold back in her writing. Among the Silicon Valley bros she burns are Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick. But she also writes about people in the industry she admires, from Mark Cuban to Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai, and Microsoft’s current CEO, Satya Nadella. How clued in is Kara to this business? There’s a great story in the book about a CEO who had a supposedly secret closed-door meeting with his staff, but when it was over, he got a call from Kara asking him to confirm the things he’d just told his employees, one of whom had tipped her off during the meeting.
This memoir by director Ed Zwick is full of details about the creative process and lots of behind-the-scenes anecdotes from the more than two dozen movies he has directed, including “Courage Under Fire,” “Blood Diamond,” “The Siege,” “The Last Samurai,” and “About Last Night.” The chapter on how Harvey Weinstein screwed him out of credit for “Shakespeare In Love” made my stomach turn, and the story about Matthew Broderick’s mother intervening in the production of “Glory” had me shaking my head. And yes, Zwick talks about “thirtysomething,” the late-1980s TV series that put him on the map (with partner Marshall Herskovitz).
While working as a flight attendant, TJ Newman wrote her debut novel, “Falling,” a thriller about an airplane pilot being blackmailed to crash a jet full of passengers or have his family killed by terrorists. It was a huge bestseller and is being turned into a movie. That got her a contract for a follow-up, “Drowning,” about another airplane disaster, this time involving a jet that crashes into the Pacific shortly after takeoff. It, too, was a bestseller, and is being developed for the big screen by director Paul Greengrass. This year, she published her third novel, “Worst Case Scenario,” in which a pilot has a heart attack and the jet crashes into a nuclear power plant. I’ve read all three of Newman’s novels and found them compelling from start to finish. I’m looking forward to her next.
Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert were arguably the most popular movie critics in the country, with a lot of influence not just on moviegoers but on Hollywood itself. In “Opposable Thumbs,” Matt Singer traces their years as individual newspaper columnists and the history of their TV partnership, with lots of stories from the people who made their shows work and filmmakers who got big boosts from Siskel and Ebert turning their thumbs up. Along the way, Singer slips in plenty of details about movie legends, box office disasters, and the dog that used to join the guys in their balcony.