What I've Been Reading

Here are a few books that I have read, or still reading, this past month.

Fiction
Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter: A client at the gym brought in a bag of twenty something books and told me to have at them. This was the first one I chose. I was in need of some fiction and this story was pretty interesting. The main character is a man who has been ostracized by his community for something that happened during his youth. The twists include disappearing children, racism, dead drug dealers, and a creepy snake character with a foul mouth and messed up sense of reality. Once you get past that you learn about a broken friendship and one man getting an opportunity at redemption.

The Fault in Our Stars: This book was given to me by the same man who lent me Geek Love. (If you dont remember my review of that one, here is the link http://cflucktraining.blogspot.com/2013/08/what-ive-been-reading.html). Anyway, this book had my attention. This is a story of teenagers who have been dealt a crappy hand. They make the most of their situation by being sarcastic and making light of each others ailments. The book has the unique ability of making you laugh one second and (nearly) cry the next. In the end, it offers you an opportunity to read about what some young teenagers have to go through and opens your eyes to how good you may have it.

Football
The Essential Smart Football: One of the opening sentences of this book is the reason I chose it, "Learning football is a lifetime endeavor". Just like everything else in life it always seems that there is someone out there who knows more than you or is better than you at your job. And that is what motivates me to become the best coach I can. This book offers a good history of the game and discusses trends and how they came about. Like the book states, "the history of football is essentially the history of ideas meeting talent meeting a moment".
 
History
City Of Scoundrels: This work of non-fiction is almost unbelievable. The story is about a twelve day period in Chicago that led "gave birth to modern Chicago". In this span, there was a blimp crashing into a bank killing over a dozen, a young girl was kidnapped and found dead, racial violence was at an all-time high and a transit strike that paralyzed the city. Add in some shady political dealings and you have yourself a solid work of non-fiction about Chicago in the early nineteen hundreds.

Fitness
The Paleo Diet for Athletes: Still working on this one. A busy weekend left me very little time to read but it has been informative so far.

Hope you all enjoyed the weekend!
Chris Fluck