part of a big lot i bought on ebay

this really is a great book. fast paced and compelling. the author could easily have been overly graphic, but he wasn't at all. now i'm going to rent the movie and see how it stacks up.

i'm gonna set this aside for possible use in my "they made a movie out of that" bookbox

bookbox shipping this week

Caught from the "They Made That Into a Movie" bookbox.

Thanks :)

I picked this book out of the box, because I remembered the movie hype from years ago and it was a movie I'd never gotten around to seeing. Probably because I'm one of those need-to-read-the-book-first types.

Now that I've read the book, I can say that I have no interest in seeing the movie.

The book reads more like a movie treatment than a memoir or a novel. It's full of b-movie dialogue, gangster film tropes, and on-screen prison cliches. It's got rape scenes that seem more like hard core porn fantasy than real rape. It's got implausible for reality - but not for fiction - plot points. The ending gives the book an overall Grimm Brothers fairy tale feel, because its just too neat a package.

And let's not forget the fraudulent marketing, near-plagiarism, or near slandor/libel as uncovered by New York Daily News, New York Times, and Roger Friedman (of New York Magazine at the time of his original review). I also hear tell that ABC did an expose as well, but I can't find anything on das interwebz from them.

I'll be honest with you; I was completely unaware of the controversy surrounding this book when I picked it out of the box. But the protagonists nearly killing an innocent bystander, in a theft gone awry from their own sheer idiocy, which was described as "not big enough for the papers" set off my bs detector. It was a statement that seemed to serve no other purpose than to taunt the cynical reader, and to explain away lack of evidence to the gullible.

Since I'm the the former category, I couldn't help but read the reviews over at Amazon to see what people were saying. And it turns out, I wasn't the only person who was suspicious of the author's "memoir." Those reviews led me to search out the links above. And not that Wikipedia is the final arbiter of anything, but even they consider the book as fiction.

The story was interesting enough to read to the end, but I really had to force myself through some tedious scenes. I repeatedly thought of Jillsy Sloper from The World According to Garp: There's only one reason to read a book to the end - because you want to know what happens.

I wanted to know. But not as much as I would've liked to have wanted. I think I may have been better off reading the book that Carcaterra ripped off.

I will most likely wild release this book.

I can't find this book, so I'm assuming I wild released it somewhere shortly after I finished reading it.