Reading Recommendations for Real Men

Holiday recommendations for real men--the bowl games will be bullshit, the NBA's a joke, the AFC playoffs will provide the only true contests(and were' only talking one or two good games at that, and "Lost" won't be on until February. Y'all might as well read by the firelight, damn it. Expand your mind and lay off the Playstation 3. So, here it goes:

First is "300" a massive graphic novel by Sin City's author, the godlike Frank Miller. This is his take on the bravery and sacrifice of the 300 Spartans under King Leonidas at Thermopalye. 300 men (all bi-sexuals--they were Spartans, after all, replete with the letter "Lambda" on their shields), held off a Persian army of thousands for three days in a mountain pass. Ironically, these faggots likely saved the very Western culture that the right wing preacher types say gays threaten now! The artwork is vivid, often lurid. 180 degrees from the grays and shadows of Sin City. Miller isn't going for historical accuracy; it's a punch in the solar plexus splash of blood, pagentry, nudity, sizzling sex (no gay sex so don't trip; lots of big brown breasts and booties), bronze swords and sweaty brawn. It will be a movie in 2007, shot in the Sin City green-screen style. For you crunchy granola espresso shop brothas and whiteboys, Padron Gabriel Garcia Marquez is back with Memories of My Melancholy Whores. Out in paperback November 15; sultry, poetic--don't let your woman dissuade you from the book based on the title. Hey, the title's just the cherry on top, so to speak. Basically, young dude goes to the ho-house to practice before he gets married. He's a virgin and wants a virgin as his rented companion. The girl turns out to be exhausted, bored and sad all the time, and they spend their trysts sleeping and lounging...hey, I made it sound boring but it's funny as hell and anything but ennui-producing.
Finally, my mentor, my idol, Mr. Tom Harris, is back after that crappy Hannibal (the movie was a million times better--you gotta love eating Ray Liotta's brains with shallots, and all that crap with the pigs, plus I've loved Julianne Moore since Boogie Nights). Hannibal Rising, also coming out on film in 2007, expands on chapters in Hannibal and elucidates on the childhood of our favorite meat-eating shrink. Harrowing indeed--his parents were Latvian royalty who were savaged first by Stalin's secret police, then by invading Germans who came as "liberators" in 1941. The family is destroyed during the last horrific death struggle between the Nazi and the Soviet armies in 1944. Young Hannibal survives the carnage and witnesses the death of his baby sister at the hands of starving Russian soldiers. Catch my drift? Made quite an impression on young Hanny. Eventually he's in Baltimore, starting his psychiarty practice after Hopkins Med School, bottle of hot sauce and steak knife in hand. Bravo Tom! Thriller readers and fellow thriller authors will love this triumphant return!
So bruhs, fellas, esais, colleagues, dudes--enjoy the fruit of amazing minds. Hey, where do you think the ideas for all that horsecrap on Playstation comes from? Amazing how brains expand with just a little education; a teen thug at a gamer store melted in wonderment when I schooled him how HALO, along with numerous other games, plus films, TV shows, etc. from the past 30 years all sprung from one of the most important sci fi novels of all time, Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers (no, not the awful, campy movie version). This was a complex, visceral story and there are complex, visceral stories still to tell, y'all...

Check out my story in ThugLit, volume 10, link to the right or clink the title.