Finished The Lost City Of Z, which was pretty cool, but the ending lacks punch. It describes Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett's, he was the Micheal Jordan of exploring, journey from National Geographic Society graduate to madness brought on by his obsession with finding The Lost City of Z. The parts where David Gran tells Fawcett's story are a fascinating read, but when he talks about his own experience with tracking down Fawcett and finding out more about him it goes a bit flat. The jungle is deep, dark and daunting, as much as a character as PHF, who is ultimately consumed by it. There's mention of some of the explorers who went in to look for Fawcett, a father and sun team even get captured by natives! Like I said is a bit weak, it's almost as if the Lost City of Z in our hearts, but not really. I admire those old school explorers, they didn't have all sorts of fancy equipment, none of this gps, radar, air tight tents; woven hammocks, machetes, compasses, whiskey and guts is all they had to rely on. Well, maybe not the whiskey, but it probably helped.

Right now I'm reading Payback, which was originally titled The Hunter, by Richard Stark. Yes, the Mel Gibson movie, which is fucking dope, AND appereantly a remake of a movie called Point Blank starring Lee Marvin, which is based on the novel! The book is a lot meaner than the movie. Made up of sparse, cinder block like prose. The book is about Parker, a bad man who does bad things for a living. Parker is betrayed by one of the guys who was working with him on the score and his own wife. They leave him for dead, but he survives and starts hunting suckers down. Ahem:
"What are you going to do, Parker?" she asked, and the quaver of fear had finally reached her voice.
"I'm going to drink his blood," he said. I'm going to chew up his heart and spit it into the gutter for the dogs to raise a leg at. I'm going to peel the skin off him and rip out his veins and hang him with them."
Good stuff! I also got a few more books to read, but this really has my attention.