Seabiscuit

Title: Seabiscuit: An American Legend
Author: Laura Hillenbrand
Genre: Biography
Pages (words): 453 (119,056)
Readability: 7.7
Rating (out of 5 stars): ****
Reviewed by: Ben
Description: Seabiscuit is a racing horse unlike any other, and not in a good way.  He's built like a tank and runs with an odd gait.  But Tom Smith sees something in him that no one else does, and decides to train him to see what he can do.  Seabiscuit: An American Legend details the horse's historic rise and ultimate triumph in thoroughbred racing, during which he becomes an icon of hope for America in the Depression.
Thoughts: Seabiscuit's story is the thing that a movie studio dreams of: a runt horse beats the odds to become a champion.  The fact that the story is true is just icing on the cake.  And, just like everyone else, I'm a sucker for the underdog, so I really enjoyed this book.  But, although I certainly enjoyed the story (and the book is very well written, I might add), I knew the basic plot already from Seabiscuit the movie.  But the book had so much more detail than the movie, and that's what made it captivating.  I was fascinated by the intricacies of horse racing and the back story of the men who owned, trained, and rode Seabiscuit.  It was almost enough to make me want to watch the next Kentucky Derby.  Really a great book.
Disclaimer: The jockeys and trainers tend to use some rather coarse language, but besides that this book is quite clean.

The book list is back!

Confession:  When school started all recreational reading stopped for me for about a month as I tried to adjust to having a new baby and absolutely insane amounts of homework to attend to.  After a few weeks of reading only economics textbooks (with such thrilling titles as Microeconomic Theory, and Dynamic Programming in Economic Applications), I was going nuts.  In my desperation I grabbed a book that was sure to be both light and captivating at the same time: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.  The plan was to re-read just this first book in the Harry Potter series and then get back to my regular reading whenever I could find the time.  Well, all you Potter-philes out there can probably guess what happened.  When the first book was done, I thought I'd try the second one since, after all, it had been over seven years since I read it the first time.  Well, one thing led to another and yesterday I finally finished the seventh and last book in the series.  That's why the book list has been at a standstill for the past six months.

Now that I've gotten that out of my system, I've got big news for the book list in 2009:  For Christmas I got a sweet mp3 player (the Sansa Clip) which I will use to listen to audiobooks on my commute.  As it is, at least half of my commute is walking and waiting for the bus, so being able to listen for all of this time will allow me to get through a lot more than I could last semester.  I'm already most of the way through Seabiscuit, and I've got East of Eden all lined up and ready to go.  In short, the book list is back!