Books...

[IolarCoisCuain]

Anyone with a 9/11 interest could do worse than "The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11" by Lawrence Wright.

For GAA books, Denis Walsh's "Hurling: The Revolution Years" and Breandán Ó hEithir's "Over the Bar" would be clear of the field for me.

As for holiday reading, I'm hearing great things about "Crystal" by Katie Price. I'd say you'd learn a lot about the world outside the GAA reading Ms P. 

[ziggysego]

I am currently reading Stephen King's Cell.

[The Real Laoislad]

A brilliant book for Liverpool fans and soccer fans in general is
A Season on the Brink: A Portrait of Rafa Benitez's Liverpool by Guillem Balague
A great insight into the ongoings of a football club

[mannix]

Read sammy gravanos "sammy the bull" story about the mob and how he killed 18 people, very good reading."The Perfect Storm" also a good read and Lovely Bones was brilliant, the story of a young girl murdered in a field and the story told through her in life and in death watching from above.
I too have a fascination with the WTC disaster, was crossing the brigge into manhattan when the second plane hit and we were lucky enough to turn around before the traffic got screwed.I think you can buy the video the 2 french brothers were making with the nyfd at the time, it is chilling to say the least.Lots of books in new york or online at barnes and noble about it.
Reading Ryanair at the minute.

[his holiness nb]

What about fiction, I reckon "the curious incident of the dog in the night" was pretty good, quite emotional for a non girly book, and no I aint talking about the Ross O'Carroll Kelly one!!

Just finshed reading Robert Harris (or richard  )  Pompeii, which was a decent read.

But for a good bit of make believe I think you cant beat Jeffrey Archer, pure storytelling genius.
So many great books, would probably pick "as the crow flies" as my favourite but there are so many great ones.

[his holiness nb]

Not to mention the greatest story ever told.....
sorry jesus but I was talking about "lord of the rings".
Goes so much deeper than the films (which were still bloody good!)

[CiKe]

recently read "A Thousand Splendid Suns" the second book by the author of the "The Kite Runner". Powerful stuff. Last one I read wa s Hemingway's "For whom the bell tolls". Great read

[Goats Do Shave]

Last book I read was the Righteous Men - I enjoyed it!

Was Fergie the author? 

Sam Bourne I think!? Does sound like a book about the Red Devils though all right!

[Donagh]

Picked up 'Snow' by Orhan Pamuk in the airport the other week. Pamuk won the Nobel Prize for Literature last year and has been a bit inaccessible in the past but this one should launch him into the mainstream. It a great read, set in a Turkish/Kurdish border town which has been snowed in for a few days it tells the story of an exiled poet back home to bag his childhood sweetheart but gets mixed up in a coup. Provides a great insight into the tensions in Turkish society between the Islamisists and secularists and into the mind of the Muslim fundamentalist. A few reviews from the press below:
 
"Snow is also an avowedly political work of fiction, of a kind still relatively rare in Britain. It finds voices for religious and other fanatics, for reactionaries and the occasional moderniser, and those who maintain that their arcane beliefs need not be challenged with reason. (...) It's a novel full of orchestrated surprises and shocks, and perhaps too many overlong digressions. Pamuk has fared badly in the past with some English translations, but Maureen Freely has served him excellently here." - Paul Bailey, The Independent

"Pamuk has hitherto been an acquired taste in the West; but this sprawling, emotionally charged story, with its flashes of black comedy, could well secure him the readership he deserves. (...) To a Western reader, the logic of events will be as foreign as the c**k-fights which seem to be the main after-dark entertainment in Kars. But in the excellent, sardonic Pamuk, they have a first-rate guide to the social tensions of provincial Turkey." - David Robson, Daily Telegraph

"It is also a tragic love story, a thriller and, more broadly, a dark journey into familiar Pamuk territory: faith, identity, betrayal and solitude. (...) One of the achievements of "Snow" is to look beyond the tired arguments about why so many Turkish women cover their heads." - The Economist

"This is playful, postmodern Pamuk, the author of The White Castle and My Name Is Red, who nods in passing at Oedipus, Robespierre, Stendhal, Mallarmé, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Conrad. But in its sendup of romantic poetry, political theater, and the anthropological relationship between Marxism-Leninism and anti-Western nationalism, Snow is also written by the man who got into trouble for supporting the rights of Kurds and opposing Iran's fatwa on Rushdie." - John Leonard, Harper's

[Aerlik]

I'm currently reading "Midnight in the garden of Evil Kinevil" about an English journalist documenting the role of sport in the media in the 1990's.  It would suit those of you who can remember/care about the English media/sport at that time.  Des Lynam and David Coleman come in for a bit of grief.  Pretty much a retrospective read if anything.

Re. Falcanio, I was in the pub where Joanne Lees was taken to by the truck driver who found her after her "ordeal".  The owner is/was a Dublin woman who took her to her apartment in Alice Springs for a few days to avoid the media.  She told me Lees' reaction was either one of sheer shock or sheer drama, as she had no real feelings towards anything.  Also that night, one of the lads at the bar, a local station hand, asked me how many airstrips I had noticed along the way north from Alice.  He then told me there were dozens to service the massive stations all along the way and it was quite simple to get in a light aircraft and bugger off somewhere without any one knowing. 

Having said that, the DNA evidence has linked Murdoch with the disappearance.  I know people who knew him in Broome and they said he was a loose cannon, prone to raging outbursts.  I never knew or met the man myself.  Likewise, there are vast areas of land here that no human has ever been near never mind set foot on so you wouldn't need to bury the body as it would be dust before too long.

[mc_grens]

Muhammad Ali: The Life and Times, by Thams Hauser.

Its made up completely of interviews with people who were close to him, and is completely authorised, so the people involved include lads like Howard Bingham, and his wives and kids.

Absolutely amazing book.