If you have not read "A Million Little Pieces" I suggest you do now
 

another thread made me remember reading this, so I thought I would share

one of the best books I have read in years, I could not put it down, I read it from start to finish in 10 hours

it is a first person account of this dudes addiction recovery from crack and alcohol...

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/038...lance&n=283155

to top it all off, his doctor said if he had continued doing drugs and alcohol like he did for 3 more days, he would have been dead.

this is the first page of the book, if this doesn't suck you in I don't know what will

Wow, read the first few pages, I am gonna get that one...

been there done that, why in the hell would I wanna read a book about it?

Fiction or non?

true story, non-fiction

I bought this book last weekend. I was at Barnes and Noble and this girl recommended it... I bought it just cause she was cute but I loved it. Probably the first book I have read in 8 years and now I want to start reading more often.

It's a great book!

it sucks you in so fast doesn't it? i could believe that I sat and read it all in one sitting

I just finished reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez "One Hundred Years of Solitude", so it seems that "A Million Little Pieces" is gonna be the next.

Thanks for recommendation.

Yes it does... it took me a few days of reading it. The night before I finished the book I was reading it for a few hours. I looked up at the clock and it was almost 3am. I only had about 50 pages left but I had to go to sleep.

I almost want to pick it up and start reading it again! I had to read it alone cause a few times I started crying... especially the last page! It's bad enough I was reading a book with a "Oprah's book club" sticker on it. lol

Do I need to feel some sort of empathy in order to be attatched to this book? Or should I expect to feel sympathetic about his plight? Because if its the latter I don't want to read that shit...and if its empathy then that emotion can not be drawn out of becuase I have never been addicted to anything (food, cigarettes, alcohol, drugs....nothing).

Sounds like it would make an interesting documentary or Sunday ABC movie but I may have to pass on this book.

Someone convince me. I am an avid reader.

this book sucked me in like you spoke of...

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/067...books&v=glance

it's about the beginning of the Navy Seals during Vietnam and the shit he had to do during that war. Very good.

I need some new pleasure reading... ill check it out

thanks for the heads up sounds very interesting

Reading it now - absolutely incredible book. "My Friend Leonard" is also supposed to be good.

will have to check into that

i gotta get that. thanks man.

Good book. Read that years ago, when it first came out. I was a voracious reader on anything NAVSPECWARFARE as I wanted in. Being color blind sucks ass more than I can say.

Looking back though, I'm happy my life took this route. It just wasn't meant to be.

bump for this...

You will find a connection even if you do not have addictions. I do not have an addictive personality either but it was interesting to see how it affected him.

There is currently a movie version of this book in production as well.

Amazing Book. The Follow up "My Friend Leonard" Is also top notch. Refreshing writing style that's very entertaining and doesn't let up. Real Shit.

nah man....dude, even oprah had it on the top of her book list for all the fat housewives to read, and it stayed #1 for weeks

ive had this book sitting in my bedroom for a while now and havnt started reading it yet. Sounded really good so i bought it. Just havnt had the time

" My head hurts, my mouth hurts, my eyes hurt, my hands hurt. Things without names hurt." - okay, that was strong!

Just ordered the book. Thanks for the heads up, as i am an avid reader and always looking for new stuff to add to my 'next read' stack.

Strange use of capitalization. Seems like a strong read, but basic. Not really a topic that interests me, though.

Sounds interesting. Gonna pick it up.

I just saw that book and its writer on Oprah several weeks ago. Reading that excerp makes me want to buy the book.

it is a very strange use of capitalization, all through the book

I tried to grasp it, but couldn't understand why really

Its all made up bullshit.

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive...amesfrey1.html


"Oooh, i saw it on Oprah, it must be great!!"


http://tblogs.bootsnall.com/chuck//a...20Stampede.jpg

That's an interesting read but true or not, the book excerpt is still very compelling.

The book is a fake, it isn't really based off of true events.

I'm almost done ... it gets so much better.

If it's fraud, I'm gonna be pissed.

I understood why, I think. : )

Notice the words he capitalizes, Book, Criminal, Home, Addict. These are the things that are in his mind the most important.

I read the book before Oprah jumped on it and I thought it was amazing. VERY powerful.

The facts that The Smoking Gun is disputing are about his criminal record, not about his actual addiction or recovery which is the central theme. The criminal aspect is a VERY SMALL portion of the book, even if he did exagerate that part. Really nothing to take away from the powerful message in the book.

It's a little tough to read because he doesn't follow proper grammar, sentence, and paragraph structure but that adds to the 'feel' of his situation. I'm actually reading his other book My Friend Leonard right now and it's almost as good.

It was an excellent book. I just think it should have been marketed a bit different. The message is now being marred by all this aviodale controversy.

I just started reading it 3 days ago - right before thesmokinggun made the accusation. I'm still going to read it but I hope the shit is true.

yeah, exactly....who cares anyway, real or not it was an EXCELLENT read and really sucks you into what the main character goes through

half the shit the president says is lies, but James Frey gets more press about it

http://www.exile.ru/2005-December-15..._the_wall.html

"This is the worst thing I've ever read.

A Million Little Pieces is the dregs of a degraded genre, the rehab memoir. Rehab stories provide a way for pampered trust-fund brats like Frey to claim victim status. These swine already have money, security and position and now want to corner the market in suffering and scars, the consolation prizes of the truly lost. It's a fitting literary metonymy for the Bush era: the rich have decided to steal it all, even the tears of the losers.

Frey sums up his entire life in one sentence from p. 351 of this 382-page memoir: "I took money from my parents and I spent it on drugs." Given the simplicity and familiarity of the story, you might wonder what Frey does in the other 381 pages. The story itself is simple: he goes through rehab at an expensive private clinic, with his parents footing the bill. That's it. 400 pages of hanging around a rehab clinic.

It feels longer. It feels like years.

For all Frey's childish impersonation of the laconic Hemingway style, this is one of the most heavily padded pieces of prose I've seen since I stopped reading first-year student essays. Frey manages to puff up this simple story to book length thanks to one simple gimmick: he repeats. Repeats the beginnings of sentences. Repeats the beginnings of phrases. And the endings. Endings of phrases. Phrases and sentences.

And while his prose is repeating, his tale is descending. Descending into Bathos. Bathos in which he wallows. Wallows. In bathos. Bathos, bathos, bathos.

The results can be quite funny, altogether unintentionally, as when Frey tries to dramatize the travails of love:

"I start crying again.

Softly crying.

I think of Lilly and I cry.

It's all I can do.

Cry."

I found myself laughing every time I read this, imagining Daffy Duck doing the scene: "It'th all I can do!" then turning to the audience to clarify things: "Cry, that ith."

Of all Frey's repetitions, the most common is the conjunction "and." It's "and" after "and" after "and." He seems to think he's broken the transition problem right open. Every time he needs to connect two thoughts or actions, he simply plops an "and" between them.

This can work, when it's done by somebody with talent -- Frank O'Hara, for example. O'Hara's poem "the Day Lady Died" uses a breathless, self-centered narrative full of "and"s to contrast with the sudden stop when he learns of the death of Billie Holliday.

The trouble is that there's no end, no variation and no irony whatsoever in Frey's awed, non-stop list of his every move, as in this gripping account of going to the dentist: "I go back to the medical unit and I find a Nurse and I tell her I have to go to the Dentist and she checks the outside appointment book and it checks and she sends me to a waiting room and I wait."

I found myself becoming morbidly fascinated by the number of conjunctions Frey could pile into a single sentence. The one I just quoted has six "and"s. Not bad, but hardly a record. A few pages earlier, Frey offers a sparkling account of getting a bowl of oatmeal which is sustained by seven "and"s; "...I see that I'm late and I see People look up and stare at me and I ignore them and I get a bowl of gray mushy oatmeal and I dump a large pile of sugar on it and I find a place at an empty table and I sit down."

Frey has another stylistic tic almost as distracting as his conjunctions: he capitalizes some but not all nouns, making his would-be laconic, macho narrative look as if it had been dictated to Emily Dickinson on a day she'd been sipping laudanum. Lulled by the dull story, you drift into consideration of the pattern, if any, behind these capitalized nouns.

But the caps make no sense, study them as you will. They can be downright confusing..."




And so on.

hmm i love to read, got about 100 books on hold right now, i may just bump this one.

Try reading threads first, retard.