Did you happen to catch the Billboard Music Awards a few days ago? Me neither. These types of award shows only exist so that every schlub who ever appeared on programs like American Idol and The Voice can win something. Good for them. The youth of today needs the positive reinforcement that comes along with a “participation” trophy.

Anyway, had you endured the four or five hours of drum machines and break dancing and single-syllable lyrics and being hippety-hoppety, you surely would have become desperate for literacy.

A good book can be an uplifting antidote for pop culture. It can be an intellectual shot in the arm, a gateway to history. It can incite your rage or warm your heart or restore your faith in mankind … now all’s you have to do is find one (a good book that is).

Finding a good book is a sport, a competition. You have to know where to look, you need a strategy. They don’t just present themselves, you need to be on the lookout for them. To flush them out into the open you need to be diligent, relentless and, basically, a nut job for books.

The good books come in waves. Like a covey of quail hiding in the underbrush, when you find one, a lot of times you uncover a bunch. All the good books seem to be interrelated, one leads to the next, kinda like six degrees of separation. On some days the book hunt produces an abundance, but there can be weeks when you’re out alone on the reading prairie without seeing any sign of life – not a single turning page.

At times like these that you need to dig deep. Read the New York Times Book Review (always), read the obituaries (Tom Wolfe just died, I’d barely even heard of him … turns out he’s an author and now I’m reading his book The Right Stuff), get book recommendations from Amazon and Goodreads and sign-up for alerts (if you review books at either of these places you will be building a reading profile and then they will feed you books they think you’ll like). Go to the places online or in real life where people are discussing the subjects that interest you.

I listen to the Deep Tracks channel on Sirius-XM and they were playing oldies on a Saturday afternoon and as an intro to the song “Save the Last Dance for Me” they told a quick story about the dude who wrote the song, Doc Pomus. I found a cool book about the guy and that led me to biographies on Hank Williams and Pete Seeger.

I recently discovered James Michener. I was reading a book about Rogers & Hammerstein. They wrote so much wonderful music, including the musical South Pacific. Turns out the Broadway show was based on a book by Michener. I picked up that book … Game changer.

♦

I have some good hunting lately.

Tales of the South Pacific and The Bridges at Toko-Ri by James Michener … The first book is the basis for the Broadway musical and movie South Pacific. It’s really historical/fact-based fiction and the characters are rich and the dialog brilliant and you can learn a lot about World War II and world geography. The Bridges at Toko-Ri is a Korean War saga (again, fact-based fiction) that’s fast-paced and just totally engaging. In his lifetime Michener gave away over $100 million, the result of writing nearly fifty books. Seventy-five million of his books are still in print, a wonderful writer.

Something Wonderful: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway Revolution by Todd S. Purdum … If you don’t care about the Great American Songbook or American music in general, if you’re not curious about how books become dimensional stage shows then you won’t like this. Still, it’s filled with fun facts and I loved it. The musical Oklahoma won the Pulitzer Prize and ran on Broadway for 2,212 performances -that’s five years and nine weeks. And one more, Richard Rodgers wrote over 900 songs and in at least one estimation, he is the most-played composer of any kind of ever.

Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling … This book will make you smarter. The story goes like this, almost everyone on Earth has an overdramatic worldview, that is, almost all people think the world is more frightening, more violent and more hopeless – in short, more dramatic -than it really is. In the book, the author uses indisputable facts and charts and statistics to prove his theory and it’s brilliant. Society, on a grand scale, is ignorant of the facts; one example, only nine percent of the world lives in a “low-income” countries but, on average, people believe that fifty-nine percent of the world’s population lives in these countries.

Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World by Bob Sheffield … Maybe the most fun Beatles book I ever read. Fab in almost every way. The author is funny and opinionated and uses Beatles song lyrics, bits of them, in clever ways and in clever spots along the way. He states his completely subjective opinion as fact – and I like that. He’s having fun at the Beatles expense and the pure joy he resonates by simply being in the Beatles’ presence, at talking and thinking of them, is the joy we all get by dreaming of the Beatles … it’s pure enjoyment and a cool accomplishment.

If you get desperate for something to read, on my blog (www.thewritemacke.com), if you scroll all the way down, it shows what I’m reading and provides a path to my book reviews on www.goodreads.com.

I’d hate to see any of you have to turn to the Billboard Music Awards for mental stimulation.

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