Favourite books of Michael McKean

Michael McKean

Michael McKean is an actor, comedian, and musician best known for his roles in Best In Show, A Mighty Wind, This Is Spinal Tap, and many, many more.

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Favorite books of Michael McKean:

Bleak House by Charles Dickens

Michael McKean recommends Bleak House

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The law courts prevailing over the case of Jarndyce & Jarndyce are overwhelming in their pedantic, futile red-tape bureaucratic adherence to old principles and are partly based on Dickens' time as a young law clerk. With a massive cast of characters--many with ingeniously comic names--and his most complex plot, Bleak House is believed by many to be Dickens' greatest work. This is a free digital copy of a book that has been carefully scanned by Google as part of a project to make the world's books discoverable online. To make this print edition available as an ebook, we have extracted the text using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology and submitted it to a review process to ensure its accuracy and legibility across different screen sizes and devices. Google is proud to partner with libraries to make this book available to readers everywhere.

Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

Michael McKean recommends Cat's Cradle

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Cats Cradle is Kurt Vonneguts satirical commentary on modern man and his madness. An apocalyptic tale of this planets ultimate fate, it features a midget as the protagonist, a complete, original theology created by a calypso singer, and a vision of the future that is at once blackly fatalistic and hilariously funny. A book that left an indelible mark on an entire generation of readers, Cats Cradle is one of the twentieth centurys most important worksand Vonnegut at his very best. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

Michael McKean recommends Lonesome Dove

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Chronicles a cattle drive in the nineteenth century from Texas to Montana, and follows the lives of Gus and Call, the cowboys heading the drive, Gus's woman, Lorena, and Blue Duck, a sinister Indian renegade.

The Road by Joe Penhall, Cormac McCarthy

Michael McKean recommends The Road

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Also recommended by: Scott Aukerman

"You think I come from another world, don't you? Filled with all these strange things you've never seen...Well I do, I guess." Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction in 2006. Released shortly after his No Country for Old Men was turned into an Oscar-winning film, The Road's cinema version of the novel is directed by John Hillcoat, stars Viggo Mortensen and Charlize Theron and is an official selection for the 66th Venice Film Festival 2009. Joe Penhall's adaptation is a faithful, careful crafting of the book for the screen, fully evoking the atmosphere of menace and desperation. The Road is set a few years after an unexplained cataclysmic world disaster has left the earth poisoned, barren and hostile. While ash blocks out the sun and the earth no longer fosters plant or animal life, men either starve or join the maruading gangs of cannibals. The plot follows an unnamed father and son on a bleak epic across the wasteland and features a series of horrifc encounters in a merciless world starved of life and hope. This edition includes a full list of cast and crew credits.

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Ross Macdonald is the main pseudonym that was used by the American-Canadian writer of crime fiction Kenneth Millar. He is best known for his series of hardboiled novels set in southern California and featuring private detective Lew Archer.

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Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE was an English author and one of the most widely read humorists of the 20th century.

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Rex Todhunter Stout was an American writer noted for his detective fiction, particularly the 33 novels and approximately 40 novellas that featured the detective Nero Wolfe and his assistant Archie Goodwin between 1934 and 1975.

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Theodore Sturgeon was an American science fiction and horror writer and critic. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database credits him with about 400 reviews and more than 200 stories.

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

Michael McKean recommends East of Eden

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A masterpiece of Biblical scope, and the magnum opus of one of Americas most enduring authors, in a commemorative hardcover edition In his journal, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck called East of Eden "the first book," and indeed it has the primordial power and simplicity of myth. Set in the rich farmland of California's Salinas Valley, this sprawling and often brutal novel follows the intertwined destinies of two familiesthe Trasks and the Hamiltonswhose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel. The masterpiece of Steinbecks later years, East of Eden is a work in which Steinbeck created his most mesmerizing characters and explored his most enduring themes: the mystery of identity, the inexplicability of love, and the murderous consequences of love's absence. Adapted for the 1955 film directed by Elia Kazan introducing James Dean, and read by thousands as the book that brought Oprahs Book Club back, East of Eden has remained vitally present in American culture for over half a century.

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