Just Another eBay Scam

Does anyone even use eBay these days? My love affair with eBay ended on the day that someone in the U.K. managed to hack into eBay's database long enough to hijack my account and password. That thief then proceeded to make offers (above the amounts being asked by sellers) on more than a dozen computers with the request that they be sent immediately to an address in England. I was very lucky to notice what was happening early on that Labor Day morning and I quickly locked my PayPal account before funds could be stolen to pay for the computers. I contacted the sellers, some of whom had already posted their suspicions to my "feedback" account, and explained the problem. It was a long process - and I have been soured on the eBay/PayPal experience since then, refusing to participate in either ever again.

I was naive enough to believe that a site as popular and prominent as eBay could not possibly let something like this happen. I was wrong. I was naive enough to believe that eBay had some liability when something like this happens. I was wrong. I was naive enough to believe that eBay cared about its members and their personal security. I was most definitely wrong.

Now, Philly.com has news about another huge problem on the site, dishonest sellers getting away with murder (not that this is unusual at all other than maybe in the amount of money stolen):

For more than six years, Forrest R. Smith III forged the signatures of many famous authors in books and then sold those books at inflated prices on eBay.

Smith's scam victimized hundreds of book collectors who thought that they were buying works signed by such literary luminaries as Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut and Toni Morrison.

In reality, the books had only been stamped with forged signatures created by Smith.

Smith, 48, of Reading, was sentenced yesterday to 33 months behind bars and ordered to make restitution of $120,000 to his victims.

[...]

Authorities said that Smith carried out his scheme from March 2002 until at least September 2008.

The feds said that Smith used two accounts on eBay - one registered in his name with the screen name "bigdaddy_books" and one registered in his wife's name.

Smith used the "bigdaddy_books" account to purchase unsigned books, then forged authors' signatures in them and resold them as "signed" from his wife's account.

Authorities said that by representing that the books with the forged signatures had been signed by their authors, Smith could sell them at a much higher price than he would have been able to sell unsigned copies.

Smith and the government stipulated that there had been more than 250 victims and that he had netted $120,000 to $200,000 in the scam.

I do hope that eBay is more cooperative in helping this group of victims than it was with me when I needed someone to help me out of a fix. Good luck, folks. I hope you get your money back.

Transfer of Power

Transfer of Power, Vince Flynn’s second novel, introduces Mitch Rapp, the CIA counterterrorist who has since been the main character in another nine Flynn thrillers. Those just discovering the Mitch Rapp series are likely to find the earliest novels in the series (this one was published in 1999) to be even more poignant than those who read them prior to the murders of September 11, 2001. New readers will also notice how Flynn’s style has changed over the years as he, thankfully, lost most of his “Tom Clancy style” and streamlined his novels into even better thrillers.

The White House is under the control of a small band of Arab terrorists led by the notorious Rafique Aziz. Although President Robert Hayes makes it to the relative safety of his basement security bunker, he is, in effect, trapped inside the building along with at least 80 other hostages. The country can only watch in horror as Aziz executes a man and a woman on live television and promises to kill one additional hostage each hour until his demands are met by the United States government.

Rafique Aziz is no ordinary terrorist. He has specific goals in mind and he does not intend to blow himself up along with his hostages unless the U.S. military attempts to retake the White House by force. Aziz understands that most ordinary Americans, and some inside the government, have no stomach for witnessing the systematic slaughter of another 80 hostages, and he counts on the media to apply so much pressure on the government to negotiate that all of his demands will be met. And in the person of Vice President Sherman Baxter, now acting President, Aziz has just the man in place to make it all work out just as he planned it.

Sherman Baxter is the worst kind of politician, a weak-willed, almost cowardly man with an intense desire to be President of the United States. He wants to appear strong but he is afraid to make any kind of mistake because he realizes that his handling of the hostage standoff will very likely make or break his political career. Much to the disgust of the Pentagon, FBI and CIA, Baxter is more willing to listen to advice from his amoral chief-of-staff than he is to what his counterterrorist experts tell him. If the President and other hostages are to be rescued, it will have to happen without the knowledge or cooperation of the Vice President.

Vice President Baxter agrees to allow Mitch Rapp, an “off the books” CIA counterterrorism operative, to sneak into the White House but, when Rapp reports that the White House will have to be taken back by force, and soon, the Vice President refuses to give the order to do so. Rapp, along with a civilian volunteer and a female hostage he manages to snatch from her captors, negotiates his way through secret passages, tunnels and hidden rooms inside the White House gathering the intelligence needed by those planning the President’s rescue.

Transfer of Power is a good political thriller and Vince Flynn successfully increases the reader’s tension as the book draws nearer and nearer its exciting conclusion. The action does stall on occasion, however, because of the excessive amount of technical detail Flynn includes about weaponry and the like, detail that, though it may add authenticity to the storyline, will be meaningless (or even boring) to most readers. Despite this handicap, something the later Mitch Rapp books do not suffer as much from, Transfer of Power is a satisfying thriller that clearly displays the promise of a decade-younger Vince Flynn.

Rated at: 3.5

Best of 2010, Update 8

I have finished two books since my last update: The Bronx Kill, a graphic novel by Peter Milligan, and Transfer of Power, a Mitch Rapp novel by Vince Flynn. Neither of the two books is likely to be anywhere near my Top 10 list by the end of the year but I'm placing Transfer of Power at number nine for the moment.



Top 10 after 13 entrants:

1. Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese (novel)
2. Man of Constant Sorrow - Ralph Stanley and Eddie Dean (biography)
3. The Opposite Field - Jesse Katz (memoir)
4. The Calligrapher's Daughter - Eugenia Kim (novel)
5. Homer & Langley - E.L. Doctorow - 4.0 (novel)
6. Blind Submission - Debra Ginsberg (2006 novel)
7. Goosetown: Reconstructing an Akron Neighborhood - Joyce Dyer (memoir)
8. Get Out of the Way - Daniel Dinges (novel)
9. Transfer of Power - Vince Flynn (novel)
10. Boston Noir - Dennis Lehane, Editor (short story collection)

The Bronx Kill

The Bronx Kill is my first experience with a graphic novel and, frankly, I had no idea it was presented in that format when I ordered it. However, despite the surprise (I was unfamiliar with the Vertigo Crime imprint) about the book’s format, I found it to be an interesting reading experience and do not regret my mistake. After all, most boys of my generation honed their reading skills on the comic books of the day, and The Bronx Kill is pretty much a dark comic book for adults, a nostalgic reminder of those hundreds of comics I read as a kid.

Martin Keane, an insecure novelist, is battling the sophomore jinx. His second novel has been universally trashed by the critics and he is taking it personally. Even Erin, his wife, finally admits that she found the book to be slow and that while reading it she kept wishing he would just “get to the point.” Keane men, since the time of Martin’s great-grandfather have been cops, and Martin’s decision to be a writer instead of a cop has already ruined his relationship with his father. The last thing he needs now is to fail at the job by which he defines his whole world.

Martin, knowing that his third book has to be something completely different from his last, decides that his family’s tragic history has the makings of a good historical thriller. What he learns while researching his family history in Ireland for four months convinces him that he is right. But when his wife disappears one night after reading a few pages of the new manuscript, Martin finds himself eerily reliving the details of his own family history – and the pages of his new novel.

I suspect that most readers of The Bronx Kill will figure out where the book is heading long before Martin solves the mystery of his wife’s disappearance but that is not a big problem. The book’s strong suit is the dark, other worldly, mood it creates, a combination of the noir fiction of the 1940s and the best pulp fiction of earlier decades. James Romberger contributes much of that mood through his black and white illustrations, especially those set in the Bronx Kill area, a nasty, isolated patch of the inner city key to Keane family history.

Overall, The Bronx Kill succeeds in telling its complicated story with a minimum of words, but graphic novels leave little space for character development, and I found this to be a hard-to-overcome handicap. As I said earlier, since this is my first graphic novel, I am unable to compare The Bronx Kill to other novels of its type. However, I can say that, because of reading this one, I am more likely to pick up other graphic novels in the future – and that surprises me.

Rated at: 3.0

(review copy provided by publisher)

Man Gave Names to All the Animals

There are a handful of record albums that I find myself coming back to year after year. Two of those are Bob Dylan albums, but probably not the ones most would think of first when listing Dylan's recordings: Nashville Skyline and Slow Train Coming.

With Nashville Skyline, Dylan went country, even going to Nashville to record the album and inviting Johnny Cash to record a song with him (beginning a long friendship between the two men). Slow Train Coming is Dylan's first Christian album, one of three he recorded after announcing that he had become a born-again Christian. I find the combination of simplicity and heartfelt emotion in these two albums to be particularly appealing for some reason.

Now comes word from Rolling Stone that a new children's book based on one of the Slow Train Coming songs, "Man Gave Names to All the Animals," is to be published in September:

“From the first time I heard it, the lyrics created pictures in my mind of a land of primeval beauty,” Arnosky (artist) said in a press release. “I thought this vision would make a dream of a book, and I asked for Bob Dylan’s permission to make this dream come true. Happily, he said yes.”

[...]

“[Arnosly] has outdone himself with the lush, detailed illustrations, and we couldn’t be more delighted to have this opportunity to work with Bob Dylan,” said Sterling Children’s Book Senior Editor Meredith Mundy in a press release. Sterling previously released a children’s book dedicated to “Puff the Magic Dragon,” and its success persuaded them to publish another book by a folk legend.

Those unfamiliar with the song lyrics might want to watch the YouTube video I've attached, below. Do keep in mind that the illustrations shown in this video have absolutely nothing to do with the new picture book, however. (In fact, I'm not at all sure I understand what these pictures are all about- if anyone gets their point, please do enlighten me.)

The Lost Man Booker Prize

Peter Straus, honorary archivist to the Booker Prize Foundation, has come up with a neat twist on the Booker Prize for best novel this next time around. It seems a rule change made in 1971 had the effect of eliminating from consideration every single novel published in 1970.

Booksellers (New Zealand) explains it this way:

In 1971, just two years after it began, the Booker Prize ceased to be awarded retrospectively and became a prize for the best novel in the year of publication. At the same time, the award moved from April to November, creating a whole year's gap when fiction published in1970 fell through the net.

So now, some 29 years later, a group of 1970 finalists has been released. From this group of finalists, a short list will be announced in March and, from that short list, the "international reading public" will choose the winner (to be announced in May 2010).

These are the 22 finalists:

The Hand Reared Boy - Brian Aldiss
A Little Of What You Fancy? - H.E.Bates
The Birds On The Trees - Nina Bawden
A Place In England - Melvyn Bragg
Down All The Days - Christy Brown
Bomber - Len Deighton
Troubles - J.G.Farrell
The Circle Elaine - Feinstein
The Bay Of Noon - Shirley Hazzard
A Clubbable Woman - Reginald Hill
I'm The King Of The Castle - Susan Hill
A Domestic Anima -l Francis King
The Fire Dwellers - Margaret Laurence
Out Of The Shelter - David Lodge
A Fairly Honourable Defeat - Iris Murdoch
Fireflies - Shiva Naipaul
Master and Commander - Patrick O'Brian
Head To Toe - Joe Orton
Fire From Heaven - Mary Renault
A Guilty Thing Surprised - Ruth Rendell
The Driver's Seat - Muriel Spark
The Vivisector - Patrick White

If you like this kind of thing, keep your eyes and ears open so that you don't miss your chance to vote. I'm sorry to say that I've only read two of these twenty-two finalists (embarrassed is probably a better word for how I feel about that) so I hope to do a little catching up before the voting period. I know, I know...good intentions get you nowhere by themselves.

Cutting for Stone

Cutting for Stone is one of those novels whose size and reputation could easily intimidate its prospective readers. It comes in at almost 550 pages, after all, and most of the story takes place in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, of all places. Its main characters are Ethiopian, Eritrean, Indian, British, or some mix of those nationalities and, even when the action moves to New York City, it is to a part of the city few Americans know anything about. The novel is part history lesson, part love story; it is both a modern novel and a reminder of the kind of thing Charles Dickens wrote on his best days; it is a science lesson and a travelogue. Bottom line: This is a very special novel, a reading experience everyone should at least consider having. Pick up this book; flip through it; read a few pages to see if it is something for you. If not, put it aside and try it again in a few months. Maybe you will get lucky the second time around.

When Sister Mary Joseph Praise gives birth to twin boys, no one is more surprised than the people trying to save her life – even Dr. Thomas Stone, the man suspected of being the father of the babies cannot believe what he is seeing. Stone feels such shock and dismay at his failure to save the nun that he walks out of the lives of his sons even as they are struggling to draw their first breaths.

Right up to the moment of her tragic death, Sister Mary Joseph Praise and Dr. Stone have been integral parts of the Missing Hospital community (called Missing only because native speakers have difficulty pronouncing the word Mission). Now, Hema, the mission’s obstetrician, decides that she needs to devote herself to raising the twins, and Ghosh, the only other doctor, has to transform himself into a confident surgeon. Marion and Shiva Stone will grow into young men surrounded by loving and supportive people but, to say the least, they live in interesting times.

The boys will prove to be good students and, with the encouragement of Hema and Ghosh, both develop the interest in medicine that will define their lives. What better place can there be than Missing Hospital for would-be medical doctors to gain countless hours of hands-on experience other medical students can only dream about.? Unfortunately, politics, in the form of military coups and Eritrean separatist rebels, will have tragic consequences for some of those closest to Marion and Shiva, even to the point that Marion is forced to leave Missing Hospital for work in a New York ghetto hospital. But that is far from the end of Marion and Shiva Stone’s story.

Readers will be totally immersed in the world and characters Abraham Verghese has created in Cutting for Stone, and will find that Marion and Shiva Stone soon become believable characters despite their rather mythical entry into the world. Their relationship suffers over the years but, despite everything that happens between them, the pair shares the kind of bond only experienced by identical twins. They are so close, in fact, that Marion often feels they should be called MarionShiva rather than by their individual names. The reader will also come to love most of the supporting cast, despite the fatal flaws exhibited by a few of them, with which Verghese surrounds the Stone brothers.

I do have one warning about Cutting for Stone (and I say this with a smile): Keep in mind that Abraham Verghese is a doctor and that he uses surgical detail and medical condition descriptions to add authenticity and passion to his prose. This is not a book to be read during lunch or dinner by anyone with a “weak stomach.” Those who have read the book will know what I mean; those who have not should consider themselves warned.

Rated at: 5.0

Best of 2010, Update 7

I finished Abraham Verghese's Cutting for Stone Sunday night and I'll be posting my thoughts about the book in a few minutes. Simply stated: I love the book and the time I spent in mid-20th century Ethiopia with Marion and Shiva Stone. This one goes to number 1 and it might be there for a while.



So, after 11 books, I have dropped the first book off the list and I'm left with this Top 10:

1. Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese (novel)
2. Man of Constant Sorrow - Ralph Stanley and Eddie Dean (biography)
3. The Opposite Field - Jesse Katz (memoir)
4. The Calligrapher's Daughter - Eugenia Kim (novel)
5. Homer & Langley - E.L. Doctorow - 4.0 (novel)
6. Blind Submission - Debra Ginsberg (2006 novel)
7. Goosetown: Reconstructing an Akron Neighborhood - Joyce Dyer (memoir)
8. Get Out of the Way - Daniel Dinges (novel)
9. Boston Noir - Dennis Lehane, Editor (short story collection)
10. The Unnamed - Joshua Ferris (novel)

Amazon vs. Macmillan

There seems to be a temporary truce in the new war between Amazon.com and book publisher Macmillan over the publisher's demand that Amazon sell Macmillan's bestselling e-books at prices ranging from $12.99 to $14.99 rather than at Amazon's standard price of $9.99 per e-book. It will be interesting to see how other publishers react. Will they join Macmillan by raising their own prices or will they try to grab a bigger piece of the e-book pie by undercutting the new Macmillan pricing scheme?

I do find Amazon's spin amusing. The giant retailer is crying foul and is tremendously upset, it claims, about how this price increase affects its customers.

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

Amazon said it briefly halted sales of e-books from Macmillan for its Kindle e-reader device after learning that Macmillan wanted to charge between US$12.99 to $14.99 for e-book versions of bestsellers and most hardcover releases.

[...]

In a pointed notice to customers posted Sunday night, Amazon said it expressed its "strong disagreement" with Macmillan and temporarily cut off the sale of all Macmillan titles.

That decision, however, was soon overturned.

"We want you to know that ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan's terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books," the company said. "Amazon customers will at that point decide for themselves whether they believe it's reasonable to pay $14.99 for a bestselling e-book."

Amazon said it doesn't expect any of the other five big publishers to make the same decision. Amazon suggested the price increase will create opportunities for other authors and publishing companies to supply "attractively priced e-books as an alternative."

Not mentioned by Amazon is the impact that higher e-book prices will have on the sale of the Kindle reader itself. Having this happen just when the new Apple iPad is set to enter the market has to have Amazon wondering if its Kindle sales numbers have peaked and its e-book reader market share is about to shrink. Time will tell.

Goosetown: Reconstructing an Akron Neighborhood

Joyce Dyer is searching for what she considers her “missing years,” those first four or five years of life of which few people can salvage many reliable memories. Dyer does remember a few things about when she lived in Goosetown, an Akron neighborhood, but she wonders if her memories are more akin to the product of someone else’s stories or of the few old photographs of herself in Goosetown settings she has studied. Now, along with her elderly uncle, Dyer is traveling the streets of her old neighborhood in search of buildings and street corners that might help her recover memories of a time and place she barely recalls.

Goosetown: Reconstructing an Akron Neighborhood is as much about Dyer’s reconstruction of what she knows about her family as it is about reconstructing the old neighborhood. She finds, despite how little Goosetown now resembles the area she remembers, that the buildings, homes and other physical markers from her youth point her toward truths about herself and her family she never expected to learn. Goosetown may no longer exist, but what it can teach her about her family will change her forever.

Joyce Dyer, in effect, had two sets of parents. Joyce’s mother reacted badly to her birth and was never able to fully accept, or fill, her role as mother to the little girl, and her father dealt with the problem largely by ignoring it and getting on with his own life. Luckily, Joyce’s Aunt Ruth (her mother’s sister) and Uncle Paul were there to give her the love and guidance she did not always get at home. Joyce spent as much time with Ruth and Paul as she spent with her own parents, and she became as much a sister to their son Paul as she was his cousin. She was also close to her young cousins Carol and Eddie, although Eddie was struck and killed on a Goosetown street when he was just five years old.

Now, all these years later, it is her 89-year-old Uncle Paul, a man who has outlived two wives and jokingly calls himself the “Mayor of Goosetown,” who accompanies Dyer on her quest. Paul is there to answer her questions and to put what she learns about her Haberkost grandparents into its proper perspective. Some revelations are triggered by the neighborhood’s geography; others come from her study of public records, family letters and diaries; and still others are mined from the memories of relatives. What she learns about her family’s history of alcoholism, depression and its tendency to suffer from Early-Onset Alzheimer’s explains to her much about the family skeletons she had never really understood.

Near the end of Goosetown, Dyer hints about the skeletons still in her own closet and what remains to be said if she is ever to tell the whole truth - all the things she keeps inside at the risk of her own well-being. Perhaps what she has learned about Goosetown and her family will make it easier for her to reveal the rest of her story. I hope so.

(Look at the book's cover and you'll spot the author in the center of the picture - there's something going on there for sure.)

Rated at: 4.0

(Review copy provided by publisher)

My Prison, My Home: One Woman's Story of Captivity in Iran

In 2007, at 67 years of age, Haleh Esfandiari survived a nightmare experienced by so many of her fellow Iranians during the last several decades. She was arrested by the Iranian secret police on trumped up charges, interrogated endlessly, and finally placed in solitary confinement inside the infamous Evin Prison for 105 days. That she survived her ordeal, and did not suffer physical torture at the hands of her interrogators, makes her one of the lucky ones.

Esfandiari is not the typical citizen of Iran. She is, in fact, the founding director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington D.C. and she has taught at Princeton University. She lives in Maryland with her Iranian husband, a Jewish George Mason University professor, whom she married in Iran in 1964. Herself the product of a mixed marriage (her father is Iranian and her mother Austrian), Esfandiari, an avowed feminist, worked for Iranian newspapers before leaving the country in 1980 for political reasons. Esfandiari’s mother, however, decided to remain in Iran even after her husband’s death so that, when her time came, she could be buried next to him.

On December 31, 2006, Haleh Esfandiari had just completed an extended visit to her 93-year-old mother and was being driven to the airport for her return flight to the United States. Before she could make it to the airport, her car was stopped and she was robbed of her possessions, including her passport. Despite the warnings of some of her Iranian friends that this was no ordinary mugging, Esfandiari wanted to believe that she had been targeted by robbers only because of her apparent wealth rather than for political reasons. She would soon learn how wrong she was.

Esfandiari’s 105 days of imprisonment would be proceeded by four months of almost daily interrogation at the hands of investigators determined to force her to confess that she was part of a United States conspiracy to overthrow the Iranian government. Despite the mind-numbing repetitiveness of the questions (as well as that of her consistent responses) and the increasing threats of a life in prison sentence, or worse, for her refusal to cooperate, Esfandiari refused to sign a confession even after being taken to the notorious Evin Prison.

My Prison, My Home: One Woman’s Story of Captivity in Iran is Haleh Esfandiari’s account of how she maintained her sanity and physical health during her eight-month ordeal. Early on, she sensed that a system of routine and order would be instrumental in fighting off the despair and confusion she could so easily fall into during her confinement. Because during the early weeks of her imprisonment she was allowed no reading material other than the Koran, Esfandiari used physical exercise as both an escape and a means of setting goals for herself. She knew she had to be as mentally tough as her interrogators if she was to survive what they had planned for her.

The most unexpected aspect of My Prison, My Home is the relationship that developed between Esfandiari and some of those holding her, especially the female guards in control of her daily routine. A surprising number of these women came to sympathize with Esfandiari and to develop a personal relationship with her. Esfandiari, on her part, would take such an interest in their lives that she became a grandmother-like figure to some of the young women. Even her interrogators and the prison doctor sometimes displayed what seemed to be genuine concern for her mental and physical health while they continued to pressure her for a confession.

Despite the tremendous emotional and physical ordeal Haleh Esfandiari suffered at the hands of her countrymen, her prose is, at times, flat and rather unemotional, almost as if she cannot allow herself to feel again the pain and despair of those days. Perhaps, too, her tone is such because something inside her has died and she knows that she will never again see her beloved Iran as she saw it before her imprisonment. Much more than her passport and possessions were stolen from her on December 31, 2006.


Rated at: 4.0

(Review copy provided by publisher)

Best of 2010, Update 6

I'm almost half way through Abraham Verghese's Cutting for Stone and I'm finding myself totally immersed in his 1950s Ethiopian setting. This one comes in at 534 pages and I suspect that I will be sorry to see it end. Thanks to the heads-up from Class Factotum (and because my library finally got it on the shelves) I didn't miss out on this experience...late as I am to the party.

This lunchtime I finished up the Joyce Dyer memoir, Goosetown: Reconstructing an Akron Neighborhood, the book in which she revisits the neighborhood in which she spent the first five years of her life. Because so little of her old neighborhood looks anything like she remembers it, Dyer takes an interesting approach to her "reconstruction" of those early years and learns and reveals many intimate details from her family history. My review of the book will come in a day or so.

So, after 10 books, this is what the real time list now looks like:

1. Man of Constant Sorrow - Ralph Stanley and Eddie Dean (biography)
2. The Opposite Field - Jesse Katz (memoir)
3. The Calligrapher's Daughter - Eugenia Kim (novel)
4. Homer & Langley - E.L. Doctorow - 4.0 (novel)
5. Blind Submission - Debra Ginsberg (2006 novel)
6. Goosetown: Reconstructing an Akron Neighborhood - Joyce Dyer (memoir)
7. Get Out of the Way - Daniel Dinges (novel)
8. Boston Noir - Dennis Lehane, Editor (short story collection)
9. The Unnamed - Joshua Ferris (novel)
10. William S. and the Great Escape - Zilpha Keattey Snyder (Children's book)

Just a reminder: When I reach 11 total books, one will drop off to reflect a current Top Ten. From that point onward, a book will drop from the list each time I add a new one - and once a book drops off the list, it is gone forever.

We Have a Winner

It's time to give away the Advance Reader's Copy of John Irving's Last Night in Twisted River that I offered last week.

To that end, I took the six "random numbers" chosen in the fourteen comments about Book Chase's third birthday and slipped them into my handy-dandy Random Number Generator:

Kate - 21
Elizabeth - 3
Melanie - 5
Megan - 24
Sheila - 6
Donna - 15

I asked for a number between 3 and 24 to be generated and, on the third try, I hit on one of the six numbers chosen by the contest entrants.

...and the winner is Sheila's number 6. So, Sheila, send me an email with your mailing instructions and I'll get the book out to you as quickly as I can. Thanks to everyone who entered or otherwise commented last week; I appreciate your kind words.

Where Books Come to Life

This very clever video presentation comes from the New Zealand Book Council. In it, Maurice Gees' Going West comes to life before your eyes.

Take a look.

Best of 2010, Update 5

I finished the latest E.L. Doctorow novel, Homer & Langley, during lunch today and have posted a full review directly below this post. I've read lots of Doctorow over the years and I always expect to be wowed by his work, something deserving a clear 5.0 rating. It never quite seems to happen that way for me, though, and this one was no exception. This, in my opinion, is another very good - but not great - E.L. Doctorow novel.



So, after 9 books, this is what the real time list now looks like:

1. Man of Constant Sorrow - Ralph Stanley and Eddie Dean (biography)
2. The Opposite Field - Jesse Katz (memoir)
3. The Calligrapher's Daughter - Eugenia Kim (novel)
4. Homer & Langley - E.L. Doctorow - 4.0 (novel)
5. Blind Submission - Debra Ginsberg (2006 novel)
6. Get Out of the Way - Daniel Dinges (novel)
7. Boston Noir - Dennis Lehane, Editor (short story collection)
8. The Unnamed - Joshua Ferris (novel)
9. William S. and the Great Escape - Zilpha Keattey Snyder (Children's book)

Just a reminder: When I reach 11 total books, one will drop off to reflect a current Top Ten. From that point onward, a book will drop from the list each time I add a new one - and once a book drops off the list, it is gone forever.

Homer & Langley

The Collyer brothers of E.L. Doctorow’s Homer & Langley are loosely based on a pair of real life brothers whose eccentric lifestyle created a sensation when they were found dead in their New York City Fifth Avenue home in 1947. Like their real life counterparts, by the time of their deaths, Doctorow’s Homer and Langley Collyer had filled their once extravagant home with so many newspapers, books, magazines, and whatever else Langley decided to drag home (including the Model T that filled one room) that they could barely move around inside the home. Doctorow’s fictional brothers, however, do not meet their deaths until well into the 1970s, allowing them to witness the Korean War, the Viet Nam War and the flower children of the sixties.

Homer introduces himself in the book’s first sentence by saying, “I’m Homer, the blind brother,” and from that moment, everything is “seen” and recounted from his point-of-view. Homer is the younger brother, the one left behind with his wealthy parents when older brother Langley leaves for the battlefields of World War I France. Langley would return to the family, his health ruined by the poisonous gas he inhaled during his last fight, only to find both parents dead from the flu epidemic that had so devastated the country.

The brothers, one unable to work because of his sightlessness and the other because of the war damage to his lungs, will live together for more than 50 years as recluses in the only home they have ever known. As the years pass and the last of their domestic help leaves them, Homer and Langley venture from home less and less, Homer usually only to sit in the park across the street from the brownstone and Langley to scavenge more of the things he convinces himself might prove useful one day.

Langley, seemingly on the edge of serious mental illness, has three goals in life: pay as little to New York’s public utility companies as possible; create the ultimate newspaper, one that will tell everything its readers ever need to know in a single, one-time edition; and collect duplicates of every item that catches his fancy. Homer has his music and his brother, and he would find it difficult to survive without either. Homer and Langley may not have gotten out much but life had a way of coming to them over the years in the form of visits from gangsters, prostitutes, bill collectors, dance party customers, sixties hippies, the FBI, and even a few single women, one of whom would, for a time, become Langley’s wife.

Upon their deaths, many would see the real Homer and Langley Collyer as nothing more than obsessed junk collectors because they left little behind that would prove otherwise. Doctorow’s sympathetic characterization of the two men reminds there has to have been much more to them than that. Homer & Langley, at times, has the unfortunate feel of a Forest Gump satire but readers will find it to be an excellent character study.

Rated at: 4.0

Blind Submission

Angel Montgomery, an insatiable reader, has landed a job in what is arguably the most successful literary agency on the West Coast. She can hardly believe that she is working for the famous Lucy Fiamma Literary Agency or that she answers the phone almost every day with the chance of finding one of her favorite authors on the other end of the line. But, while she is thrilled to discover her natural ability to transform promising manuscripts into potential best sellers, she is shocked that Lucy Fiamma expects her to work around the clock to earn her pitiful salary. Her dream job has quickly become the job from hell. What does she do now?

She sticks it out - because reading has been the only constant in her life for as long as she can remember. She explains: “…reading was only part of the thrill that a book represented. I got a dizzy pleasure from the weight and feel of a new book in my hand, a sensual delight from the smell and crispness of the pages. I loved the smoothness and bright colors of their jackets. For me, a stacked, unread pyramid of books was one of the sexiest architectural designs there was. Because what I loved most about books was their promise, the anticipation of what lay between the covers, waiting to be found.” How could anyone who feels that way quit this particular job?

Despite a failing romantic relationship, deteriorating health and lack of anything resembling a personal life, Angel continues to work the agency’s blind submission stack in search of the agency’s next big thing. She learns how to survive the bizarre list of demands Lucy drops on her the first thing every morning and to tolerate the rest of the office staff. And, in the process, she is turning into a very fine literary assistant.

Crazy as the job already is, everything is kicked up a notch when Angel begins working on an anonymously written manuscript about a West Coast literary agency and the people who work there. Despite the mystery of the blind submission’s origin, Angel is impressed enough with it to bring it to Lucy’s attention and is soon working with the mysterious writer, via email, to turn the pages into a novel the agency can sell. She recognizes from the start that the manuscript describes an agency eerily similar to hers, but Angel begins to panic when later chapters begin to reveal intimate secrets about her own work life and personal relationships. The details are so personal, she realizes, that the anonymous author has to be someone close to her. But why would someone so close want to disgrace and discredit her?

Blind Submission is a satirical look at the “sausage making” part of the publishing world book lovers find fascinating but seldom see for themselves. This 2006 novel's setting is what initially appealed to me but I also found it to be a satisfying mystery that kept me guessing until near the end of Ginsberg’s story. Blind Submission successfully crosses several genre lines, in fact, and other readers will undoubtedly enjoy its romance/chick lit aspects most. There seems to be something here for just about every kind of reader.

Best of 2010, Update 4

I finished Blind Submission yesterday morning, perhaps the strangest ride I've had so far this year. I changed my opinion of the book at least three times over the course of reading it and finally settled on a 4.0 rating. Blind Submission takes place inside the offices of a famous West Coast literary agent and is special fun for all the "book nuts" out there. I'll explain my changing reaction to the book in a formal review sometime in the next day or so.



After 8 books, this is what the real time list now looks like:

1. Man of Constant Sorrow - Ralph Stanley and Eddie Dean (biography)
2. The Opposite Field - Jesse Katz (memoir)
3. The Calligrapher's Daughter - Eugenia Kim (novel)
4. Blind Submission - Debra Ginsberg (2006 novel)
5. Get Out of the Way - Daniel Dinges (novel)
6. Boston Noir - Dennis Lehane, Editor (short story collection)
7. The Unnamed - Joshua Ferris (novel)
8. William S. and the Great Escape - Zilpha Keattey Snyder (Children's book)

Just a reminder: When I reach 11 total books, one will drop off to reflect a current Top Ten. From that point onward, a book will drop from the list each time I add a new one.

Get Out of the Way

Every so often, if a reader is lucky, along comes a book that strikes really close to home because it centers around one of the reader’s own life experiences. Get Out of the Way, a new novel set in the late 1960s when the military draft that provided fresh soldiers for the battlefields of Viet Nam was reaching its peak, is one of those books for me. Because author Daniel Dinges uses historical events such as the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy to mark what was happening in America during Tom Daniels’ Army basic training – two tragedies that occurred during my own 1968 training – I found myself closely identifying with young Tom Daniels and his confusion about the war in Viet Nam.

Tom Daniels does not have many options to choose from in early 1968. For almost two years he has avoided the draft by claiming a student deferment despite the fact that he drops his college classes not long after he signs up for them so that he can find fulltime work. His scam works because, by the time the draft board has processed the paperwork needed to cancel his student deferment, Tom has registered for a new semester of classes and the cycle begins again. Timing is everything - but now the board has figured out Tom Daniels and he needs a new plan. He is in good physical condition, he is not homosexual, he does not want to become a fulltime college student, and running for the Canadian border is not something he would ever consider. So what is he to do?

What Tom decides to do will shock those who know him and, at the same time, arouse the suspicions of his local draft board. He volunteers for the next list, figuring that since he is older and better educated than the average inductee, he will be able to snag a noncombat position for himself among the thousands of clerks and administrators who support the combat troops. He is so confident he can pull it off that he is willing to gamble his life in the effort.

Tom Daniels is a stand-in for the hundreds of thousands of young men who experienced exactly the same thing he faced in 1968. What Daniel Dinges describes about the life-changing decision forced upon Tom Daniels, and about his experiences in the U.S. military, apply to the countless thousands who experienced the same in the real world. Get Out of the Way is a rather simplistic history lesson covering a volatile period in American history because it is told entirely through the eyes of a young man confronted by the politics that might cost him his life. He is not a sophisticated person; he is the average American male fresh out of high school and wondering what comes next. No matter how they may have resolved the issue of Viet Nam for themselves, male readers who were around in the late 1960s will recognize a little of themselves in Tom Daniels.

Get Out of the Way suffers a bit in that Tom Daniels is the only character in the book that is near to being a fully developed one. The supporting cast is defined only in terms of its interaction with Tom and, consequently, those characters do not become quite real to the reader. I found myself wanting to know more about Tom’s parents, his brother, the young women in his life and some of the soldiers he met during his two years in the Army because knowing more about those characters would have given me a better understanding of Tom himself.

Readers of a certain age, those who were there, will find themselves revisiting old memories as they read Get Out of the Way. Younger readers will come away from the book with a better understanding of the life or death situation their very young fathers and grandfathers faced when confronted by such an unpopular war. The decisions those young men made went a long way in determining whom they would become or if they would survive to old age.

Rated at: 3.5

Best of 2010, Update 3

I have finished a review copy of Get Out of the Way, a new novel by Daniel Dinges. This one will bring back lots of memories, good and bad ones, for men who had to plan their lives solely around the Viet Nam War and the military draft required to sustain that misguided effort. This is a novel based on the author's experiences but I found that his story takes place in almost exactly the same months of 1968 during which I found myself snatched up by the system.



After 7 books, this is what the real time list now looks like:

1. Man of Constant Sorrow - Ralph Stanley and Eddie Dean (biography)
2. The Opposite Field - Jesse Katz (memoir)
3. The Calligrapher's Daughter - Eugenia Kim (novel)
4. Get Out of the Way - Daniel Dinges (novel)
5. Boston Noir - Dennis Lehane, Editor (short story collection)
6. The Unnamed - Joshua Ferris (novel)
7. William S. and the Great Escape - Zilpha Keattey Snyder (Children's book)

Just a reminder: When I reach 11 total books, one will drop off to reflect a current Top Ten. From that point onward, a book will drop from the list each time I add a new one.

Do E-Reader Owners Buy More Books Than Others?

According to at least one survey, they do. GigaOM cites this L.E.K. Consulting survey that seems to prove that owners of e-readers are reading more than they read before purchasing the readers - and that a substantial percentage of their reading is of recently published books:

Of the 10 percent of consumers who own e-readers, 48 percent told L.E.K. that they were reading more books vs. just 7 percent who said their book reading decreased. E-reader owners also said they were reading more newspapers than before (59 percent) and more magazines (44 percent). According to L.E.K., 36 percent of the books read by people with e-readers are “incremental consumption,” representing new books rather than books the owner would otherwise have read in print.

[...]

“The fact that Amazon sold more Kindle books than printed books on Christmas Day 2009 speaks volumes,” L.E.K. vice president Dan Schechter said in a news release. “We’ve dubbed the 10 percent of consumers who own an e-reader as the ‘E-reader Republic,’ and think that it is a potential goldmine for content providers and advertisers alike.”

While iPod owners consumed about nine hours per week of new media, e-reader owners consumed more than 18 hours a week. L.E.K. said the survey is considered demographically representative of the U.S. population over 18 years of age.

This kind of news has to be encouraging to publishers despite the fear that low e-book prices might make consumers more resistant to the significantly higher prices publishers charge for physical copies of the same books. Publishers need to adapt quickly, and logically, if they want to avoid the fate of the big record labels. Have you been to a record store lately? Let's not let the same thing happen to bookstores.

Book Chase Is Three

I suddenly realized this afternoon that today marks three full years of existence for Book Chase. I made a mental note a couple of weeks ago to prepare something for the occasion but mental notes don't seem to work very well for me anymore.

I do, though, want to express my appreciation to everyone who stops by here on a regular basis to see what might be happening. I thoroughly enjoy your comments and books suggestions - pretty much everything but what the spammers try to sneak in, in fact. That interaction and instant feedback is what blogging is all about.

My reading habits have changed greatly in the last three years and that is largely due to all the great lit blogs I've discovered since I started one of my own. Before Book Chase, I never imagined the existence of such a huge online community of book lovers and lit bloggers. In fact, the sheer number of lit blogs still staggers me.

So, three years are in the books (excuse the pun), resulting in almost 1200 separate posts, a few thousand comments and over 400 book reviews. It has been quite a ride and, frankly, I never expected it to last this long. It has become such a big part of my regular routine now, however, that I can't imagine closing shop.

As part of my own tiny celebration, I am giving away an unread Advance Reader Copy of John Irving's latest novel, Last Night in Twisted River. All you have to do to enter the giveaway is to leave a comment under this post in which you pick a number from 1 to 25. I will use my random number generator to pick a winner from the entries, but this way you get to choose your own "random number." Just be sure to check comments earlier than yours so that you don't choose an already-taken number.

Good luck.

Robert B. Parker Dead at 77

I was shocked this afternoon to learn of the sudden death of Spenser creator, Robert B. Parker. Mr. Parker was only 77 years old and, these days, that doesn't really seem to be all that old. Parker wrote books other than the ones in his Spencer series, of course, but he will be long remembered for creating that wonderful Boston detective.

In my reading experience, Spenser broke new ground. He was a man's man and he was a woman's man. He could take care of himself and he showed little fear; he believed that the fight of good against evil was a worthy one; he loved to help the underdog and was especially protective of women. He had a long-term relationship with a beautiful woman and he never cheated on her. His best friend was a huge African American man and their friendship was so special that their relationship became one of my favorite things about a Spenser novel. Parker allowed Spenser to age over the years but he remained the same man he always was.

Other writers took the Spenser model and modified it enough to create series characters of their own but Spenser was out there very early in the game, helping to show them the way. I didn't discover Robert B. Parker until 1982 and I remember being thrilled to find out about all the earlier Spenser books. Within a few months, I caught up and had read all the Spenser novels written to that point - and for many years I read the new ones as quickly as I could find them.

Rest in peace, Mr. Parker. I thank you for all the books I've enjoyed over the years and I will really miss you.

(The second photo is from the back flap of 1983's The Widening Gyre, the tenth Spenser novel and the first one I purchased in hardcover - when hardcovers were going for $12.95 each.)

Man of Constant Sorrow: My Life and Times

When it comes to country music history, Ralph Stanley has pretty much seen it all. Now, at age 82, he has partnered with author Eddie Dean to share some of that with the rest of us. The book they co-authored, Man of Constant Sorrow: My Life and Times, will, of course be especially appreciated by bluegrass fans, Stanley Brothers fans, and fans of the work Ralph has done since Carter’s death on December 1, 1966. Others, even those that are not fans of Stanley or of bluegrass music, will find the book to be a remarkable snapshot of a pivotal period in American music history, a time during which musicians like the Stanley Brothers earned their livings through live radio shows, relatively primitive recordings, and driving countless miles from one paying gig to the next.

Stanley was born in 1927 in the Clinch mountains of southwestern Virginia and he still lives very near the old home place where he grew up with his older brother Carter. Carter and Ralph were still teenagers when they began performing as the Stanley Brothers and, for the rest of their lives, the brothers would depend on music to provide their living, difficult as that would often prove to be (think about the impact of Elvis Presley). Carter would be gone much too soon, dead by age 42 primarily because of an inability to control his alcohol consumption, but Ralph would find new lead singers to keep the music of the Stanley Brothers alive to the present day.

First to replace Carter was18-year-old Larry Sparks, but Sparks would be followed over the years by others, including an even younger Keith Whitley who joined the Clinch Mountain Boys with his singing buddy Ricky Skaggs. As Stanley recounts, Whitley would move on to a successful stint with J.D. Crowe before himself dying of alcohol poisoning when just on the verge of a career-making mainstream breakthrough.

Man of Constant Sorrow includes stories about many of the men that have been members of the Clinch Mountain Boys for the past six decades. Stanley shares both the good and the bad about his life and he does the same for the men with whom he worked all those years, even to providing details (as he understands them) of the murder of Roy Lee Centers and the legal system that let off his killer with the lightest of sentences imaginable. Stanley speaks often of losing band members to death or illness and addresses how difficult it was for him to fire various Clinch Mountain Boys over the years.

The beauty of Man of Constant Sorrow is that it is told in Ralph Stanley’s voice, mountain dialect and spelling, included. The voice is so accurate (and, at times so rambling) that one has to believe that Dr. Ralph’s contribution to the book was largely made via a recording device into which he spoke his memories and that Eddie Dean’s job was to put everything in the proper order for a book presentation.

This stream-of-consciousness approach also contributes to an unpleasant surprise or two for those of us who know Ralph Stanley only through his onstage persona. Stanley, it seems, has a tendency to give praise to others with one hand while, with the other, explaining that he does it better than they ever did (be “it” music or some standard of behavior), and a willingness to tell degrading stories about the people he does not like or approve of, even if they are long dead. I was particularly struck by the paragraphs devoted to how delightful if was for the band to have a dim-witted picker on the road with them, someone at whom the rest of the band could always laugh to relieve the tension and fatigue of the road. This light streak of cruelty and lack of empathy in some of Stanley’s stories truly surprises me and exposes an inability to see himself through the eyes of others.

Man of Constant Sorrow suffers, too, from the glaring gaps left in its chronology. Very little is said about Carter Stanley’s children and how they survived after Carter’s death despite the fact that one of them, Jeanie, is herself an excellent bluegrass singer. There is also the matter of Ralph own first marriage, to which I can find only one quick reference where Stanley discusses his mother’s reaction to his surprise marriage to Jimmie: “My first marriage didn’t really count in her book. And not in mine, neither. I had to go through the bad marriage to be ready for a woman like Jimmie, I reckon.” To those unaware of Stanley’s first marriage, this is the equivalent of a neck-twisting double-take, and I still wonder where in his long story this failed marriage fits. Lastly, there is little mention of Ralph’s own children, despite the fact that Ralph Stanley II was a Clinch Mountain Boy for about 20 years and that one grandson is a current member of the band.

Despite the gaps in the book, and, in my personal opinion , some of what Dr. Ralph reveals about his nature, Man of Constant Sorrow is a worthy addition to country music history and it deserves a wide audience. It is, after all, Ralph Stanley’s story - and he gets to decide what he wants to share and what he wants to reveal about himself in the process.

Rated at: 4.0

Best of 2010, Update 2

I have finished the new Ralph Stanley biography, Man of Constant Sorrow: My Life and Times. The book is officially authored by Ralph Stanley and Eddie Dean so I am not sure if this should be considered a biography, an autobiography, or some hybrid of the two. Perhaps there should be a new category called "celebrity biography" because of the way they are written from interviews and taped conversations. This one, for instance, is entirely in the spoken voice of Ralph Stanley.




After 6 books, this is what the real time list now looks like:

1. Man of Constant Sorrow - Ralph Stanley and Eddie Dean (biography)
2. The Opposite Field - Jesse Katz (memoir)
3. The Calligrapher's Daughter - Eugenia Kim (novel)
4. Boston Noir - Dennis Lehane, Editor (short story collection)
5. The Unnamed - Joshua Ferris (novel)
6. William S. and the Great Escape - Zilpha Keattey Snyder (Children's book)

I'm a bit surprised that I still have not found a 5.0 rated book. I have already abandoned three books, too, so maybe I'm just more impatient than I was at the end of last year.

"Mama, books and death"

What better tribute can a person whose life has been defined by a love of books receive than something like this?

Tina McElroy Ansa, who lost her mother last week, celebrates her life in this special Macon.com piece:

One of the first memories I have of my mother is of her sitting in her pink reading chair in the living room with a hard book in her hand. At age 5 or so, I’d come running up to show her something I’d found out in the yard.

She would stop, look me in the face and say softly yet sternly, “Not now, baby. Mama’s reading.” Then she would go back to her book.

I would stomp off for a couple of minutes, probably seconds, and return with the same request, “Hey, Mama, look at this leaf I found. Smell it!”

She would put the book down in her lap again, her manicured finger holding her page, and patiently, slowly repeat her rule.

“Not now, baby. Mama’s reading.”

And I would storm off again, wondering what magic was there in between the pages of those books. Because of my mother, I soon discovered that magic.

[...]

My mother fed us wonderful books in just the way she fed us fried Silver Queen corn in summer and chitlins and rich vegetable soup in winter.

This sharing of books was our family practice initiated by my mother until her death. While I was on the road promoting my books, I was always on the lookout for books I know she would enjoy. My friend Blanche, a bookstore owner in the San Francisco Bay area who made friends with my mother when Mama and her childhood friend, Aunt Mary, joined me on book tour there, made sure all the really good authors who came through her stores signed copies of their books for Mama. Just weeks ago, one of Mama’s granddaughters shared the memoir of Diahann Carroll with her, and they discussed it over the phone.

[...]

My mother gave me words. My writing taught compassion. My mother died. Fifty thousand Haitians are killed. And I know how it feels to mourn for all of them and each of them.

Universally and specifically.

Avid readers already know how books can positively shape a person's character and life in ways that non-readers will never enjoy. Nellie McElroy understood that. She dearly loved books and reading and she gifted successive generations of her family with that same love, in the process creating new readers that are likely to think of her every time they open the covers of a new book. How great is this?

Boston Noir

Boston Noir is, by my count, the thirty-fourth book in a series of darkish short story collections set in major cities around the world. Each of the featured cities has distinct enough a personality to set a unique tone for its particular volume, even, at times becoming as much a character in the stories as the chief protagonists themselves.

This particular volume is home to eleven short stories, some of which have been written by authors already well known to genre readers and others by lesser known writers. Dennis Lehane contributes both the book’s introduction and a story entitled “Animal Rescue” about a seemingly simple man with an unexpected hard edge to him. Other contributors include: Stewart O’Nan, Lynne Heitman, Jim Fusilli, Patricia Powell and John Dufresne.

The stories have a tough, sometimes depressing, tone to them but they are kept lighter than they otherwise would have been by the bits of ironic humor that sneak into them when least expected. Even readers unfamiliar with the term “noir,” will be tempted to explore the collection after reading Lehane’s definition of what it takes to be a “noir hero” –

“In Shakespeare, tragic heroes fall from mountaintops; in noir, they fall from curbs. Tragic heroes die in a blaze of their own ill-advised conflation. Noir heroes die clutching fences or crumpled in trunks or, in the case of poor Eddie Coyle, they simply doze off drunkenly in a car and take one in the back of the head before they have a chance to wake up again. No wise words, no music swelling on the soundtrack.”

These are stories about white collar people who finally reach their breaking point; people who see an opportunity to stick it to the system and grab the chance to do so; people eager to profit from the deaths of others; hard people that suffer because of soft hearts; inept criminals who somehow manage to bluff their way through; and the worst kind of sex predator – something for everyone.

Stories collected from so many different writers will, of course, vary in quality, and those gathered in Boston Noir are no exception to that rule. What is rather unusual, unfortunately, is that the quality of these stories range all the way from very effective to almost incomprehensible, meaning that most readers are likely to consider Boston Noir to be, at best, an average collection of short stories.

Rated at: 3.0

Illegal Downloading of E-books Is a Growing Problem

As far as illegal downloads go, 9 million copies is small potatoes in comparison to how many illegal music downloads are still occurring every year. I get that. But I am still impressed with the fact that 9 million copyrighted books were "stolen" via the internet last year. (I wouldn't feel badly if they were all titles by Dan Brown and James Patterson, but that's another story.)

According to this Washington Post article, the bulk of the downloading pertained to some 913 titles, each of which was illegally downloaded about 10,000 times:

The study, conducted by the online monitoring and enforcement service Attributor, highlights the drain from piracy on publishers revenues and the need for more effective protections online for copy-righted material.

[...]

The study examined 14 categories to capture a representative sample of the industry, including business and investing, health, mind and body, fiction and reference. Business and investing titles suffered the highest number of illegal downloads, averaging 13,000 copies per title, with a potential loss of more than $1 million on each title, Attributor estimated. Popular fiction titles averaged about 6,000 illegal downloads each.

"Freakonomics" by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, for example, was pirated 1,132 times from just one of the hosting sites. Attributor would not release total individual numbers. In fiction, "Angels and Demons" by Dan Brown was pirated 8,177 times from one site.

I have also linked to the study so that you can see the details for yourselves, including a listing of the sites responsible for allowing the bulk of the 9 million illegal downloads. I'm going to visit some of those sites (if the links are real) just to see what's going on. I suspect that the industry is watching them closely, too, and I wonder how much increased traffic the sites will receive now that they've been "outed." This is one of those Catch-22 situations for publishers.

Best of 2010, Update 1

I finished a short story collection late last night so it is time for my first update to my Best of 2010 list. Boston Noir is a collection of 11 short stories set in and around Boston, stories involving assorted crimes and criminals that definitely fall in the "noir" category.




After 5 books, this is what the real time list now looks like:

1. The Opposite Field - Jesse Katz (nonfiction)
2. The Calligrapher's Daughter - Eugenia Kim (novel)
3. Boston Noir - Dennis Lehane, Editor (short story collection)
4. The Unnamed - Joshua Ferris (novel)
5. William S. and the Great Escape - Zilpha Keattey Snyder (Children's book)

Alert readers will note that my numeric book ratings do not fall perfectly in line on this list. I try to rate an individual book according to what I perceive to be its overall merit and quality. My Best of 2010 list, on the other hand, is based on how much I enjoyed the book and how likely I am to ever be tempted to read it again. Fuzzy enough for you?

Something a Little Different

The hardest thing for me at the end of each calendar year is putting together my "Best of the Year" post. I am starting to believe that the books I read during the first quarter of a given year just don't get a fair shake because they are a little dimmer in my memory than those books I read later in the year.

So, this year, I'm going to keep a "real time" Top 10 list. It will be a floating ranking of the books as I read them. At least at the beginning, I will mix fiction and nonfiction titles in the same list but it might make more sense later on to split the list into two. Each time that I finish a book, I will rank it relative to the books I read before it and when I come to book number 11, one will drop off the list. That way I'll be all set at the end of the year. My only concern is that this might take all the "suspense" from the list, but I honestly think it will be more meaningful.

This is where I am as of January 13:

1. The Opposite Field - Jesse Katz (nonfiction)
2. The Calligrapher's Daughter - Eugenia Kim (novel)
3. The Unnamed - Joshua Ferris (novel)
4. William S. and the Great Escape - Zilpha Keattey Snyder (Children's book)

The race is on. And it's a marathon.

The Opposite Field

Learning to hit consistently to the opposite field can transform an average hitter into a baseball star. More importantly, the ability to “hit 'em where they’re pitched” in the real world can be the difference between being a failure and being a success at life itself. Jesse Katz is one of life’s better opposite filed hitters.

The hook of Katz’s The Opposite Field is what Katz experienced as a youth league baseball commissioner in Monterey Park, California: irrational parents, deadbeats, suspicious parents, fundraisers and budgets, tricky player drafts, prima donna coaches more interested in winning than in kids, complicated game scheduling, parental custody disputes, dishonest uniform and trophy suppliers, and all the other headaches that seem to come with the territory. Admittedly, it was fun to read about all the things Katz never saw coming and how he handled the league’s problems on the fly, often barely managing to keep things together. But the real story in The Opposite Field is Katz’s immense love for his son Danny, a boy he largely raised alone after he and his Nicaraguan wife separated.

That is precisely why Katz, not the most athletic guy in the world, decided to sign his five-year-old up for baseball – with himself as team coach, to boot. Then, when it appeared that the league might fold before his son’s second season, Katz made the life-changing decision to run the entire facility, not just his son’s team. He had little idea of what he was getting himself into but, with the help of a few other dedicated parents, Katz would oversee several of the best years La Loma Park’s families ever experienced.

Despite the fact that La Loma Park dominated Jesse Katz’s time, he did have a life outside its four ballparks, and he is remarkably honest in sharing that life with readers of The Opposite Field. Katz explains how he got to be the man he is: only child of high-achieving New Yorker parents (who divorced when he was 16) who raised him in liberal Portland, Oregon; a man with a great love of Latin cultures around the world, especially, it seems the women of those cultures. Fluent in Spanish, Katz chose his Los Angeles neighborhood in large part because of his fascination with the racial diversity of the people who lived there.

The neighborhood would become home to Katz despite its distance from his mother and father. He met and fell in his love with his wife there, a full-of-life woman from Nicaragua who was in the United States illegally but who was not at all apologetic about her status. Over the years, the two would experience much together, some of it good and some of it not so good. Katz would grow close to his Nicaraguan family members, several of whom eventually made their way to Los Angles, but would struggle to relate to his out-of-control stepson. He would watch helplessly from afar as his mother battled cancer and would marvel at the support his father would lend his mother despite their divorce.

As young Danny approached his teenage years, his natural yearning for more independence would both test his relationship with his father and lead to one of life’s more beautiful gifts: one final season in La Loma Park playing baseball for his father. The Opposite Field can be a bit rambling at times as Katz moves between tales of his own youth and that of his son but, by the book’s end, it all comes together beautifully. This is a book for those wanting to be reminded of their own Little League days but it is more than that; it is a book for fathers and their sons.

Rated at: 4.0

(Review copy provided by Crown)

William S. and the Great Escape

It is August 1938 and, despite the Great Depression gripping the country, William cannot tell that anything has changed for the Baggett family. His father and stepmother depend on government handouts to feed their large family just like they always have; he still has to avoid attracting the attention of his older half-brothers who delight in tormenting him; and he will never understand how his mother could have ever married “Big Ed,” his father, in the first place.

William, who is twelve years old, has been planning to run away from the Baggetts for a long time and he hopes to save enough money in the next few months to make that happen. His plans change, though, when his younger sister Jancy suffers a loss at the hands of the older Baggetts and convinces William that now is time for the four youngest Baggetts to make their escape. One morning before daybreak, William, his two younger sisters, and four-year-old Buddy sneak away to walk the five miles to town where they hope to catch a bus to their Aunt’s house - some 65 miles up the road.

If it were that easy, of course, William S. and his siblings would not have experienced much of a “great escape.” Even before they make it to town things get shaky, but the young Baggetts are offered temporary shelter by Clarice, a little girl whose dog discovers them walking down the street. William’s biggest problem while hiding out with Clarice’s help is how to keep the two youngest Baggett kids from bouncing off the walls from boredom, a predicament he handles by performing Shakespeare’s The Tempest for them. William and Jancy, despite the odds against them getting there, are determined to make it to their Aunt and, when they do, they find they may have completed only what will be the first leg of a longer journey.

William S. and the Great Escape will, I think, be enjoyed by children from about 10 to 13 years of age. Children of that age are generally already familiar with classic tales about stepchildren being abused or ignored by parents who favor their own older children, so they should be sympathetic to the plight of the youngest Baggetts. They will also thrill to the dangers and close calls the children face as they try to outwit the adult world. The author, though, in her zeal to promote the works of William Shakespeare to her young audience, may have overdone it to such a degree that some of those young readers resort to skimming whole chapters of the book in order to get back to “the good parts.”

I passed William S. and the Great Escape on to my 10-year-old granddaughter yesterday and I look forward to hearing what she thinks of it. I suspect that, since she is part of the book’s target audience, she might see it very differently from the way I did.

Rated at: 3.5

The Books of the Century Challenge

I am a chronic failure when it comes to all those great reading challenges that pepper the book blog world. I have started, but failed to complete, at least ten challenges in the last three years and I try not to be tempted into accepting new ones anymore. But along comes Tim Gebhart from A Progressive on the Prairie with another great idea, and I here I go again. This challenge offers so much flexibility that I should be able to handle it, for a change (famous last words I've uttered before).

Tim calls it The Books of the Century Challenge and bases it on Daniel Immerwahr's The Books of the Century website. Click on the Challenge link for all the details and book choices involved and I think you will be pleasantly surprised to find that this is the most flexible challenge you may have ever run across. It can be a one-year thing for you, a five-year quest, or even something that can last you the rest of your life. It's all up to you - and you can consider yourself to be a winner by reading only five books if that's the goal you want to set. If I fail at this one, I'm really going to give up forever.

I think this will be the perfect challenge for readers with new e-book readers because of all the free classics available via the readers - and it will be great for library patrons because lesser known 100 year old classics can be difficult to find.

Tim's Books of the Century Challenge blog explains it all, so take a look and think about joining us in this one.

HalfPintIngalls Has a Lot to Say

Fans of Laura Ingalls Wilder have to check out the Twitter posts being made under the name "HalfPintIngalls." HalfPint's Twitter biography goes like this:

Name: Laura Ingalls Wilder

Location: the prairie

Bio: I was born in 1867 in a log cabin in the Big Woods of Wisconsin.

HalfPint, as of this minute, has 5,357 followers (me among them) and she has tweeted almost 500 times - not bad for a little girl way out there on the prairie.

Here are a few examples of what she has to say:

School let out before the blizzard hit, so we didn't have to burn the store-boughten desks for warmth. Not even a few! OH WELL...

On the other hand, when we get a "snow day" off from school it lasts four whole months.

If you're celebrating in town tonight, be sure to give the buggy reins to a trusted friend on your way home from the saloon. (New Year's Eve tweet)

I love the shiny penny I got for Christmas! Stared at the "heads" side all morning. Saving "tails" for later to prolong the fun! (Christmas day tweet)

It's SO COLD that one of my pigtails just snapped off. Awesome.

Today was a pretty good day until the horse died from bloat

Oof. Ate so much my new nickname is "Two-Thirds-Pint." (Thanksgiving day tweet)

Just walked 160 acres for this stupid piece of candy. 160 acres until the next one. HATE trick-or-treating on the prairie. (Halloween tweet)

All I said was, "I see you've got an extra big bustle, Nellie Oleson! Is that the new style?" I don't know why she's so upset.

According to the Christian Science Monitor, HalfPint's "Twittergraph" started sending messages to the world in July 2008. If you are curious about who might be behind all the fun, read the article for one theory on just whom it might be.

This is my kind of humor.

If you are on Twitter, book lovers, you need to make HalfPintIngalls a friend.

A Dave Robicheaux Special

I've been a fan of James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux novels since 1989 when I stumbled onto Black Cherry Blues in one of those old Crown Books bookstores (Crown was one of the earliest book discounters but would eventually give way to Barnes & Noble and Borders). I was so taken with the character and story that I immediately went in search of hardcover first editions of the first two books in the series. I remember paying about $30 for each of those and how $60 seemed like a whole lot of money to be spending for two books - and it probably was a lot of money 20 years ago. But the books turned out to be a great investment because, last time I checked, I think that each of them were going for several hundred dollars.

I've continued to purchase each new Dave Robicheaux novel as soon as it hits the bookstore shelves but, as alert Dave Robicheaux fans will notice, I seem to be one book short of having a complete set of the books. Someone-who-will-remain-nameless talked me into loaning him a copy over a long, cold weekend with the promise that the book would be returned to me in the same condition, smoke-free, early the following week. Never happened because it seems that Mr. Nameless decided to read the book while soaking in a warm tub, fell asleep, and awoke only to find the book floating face down in the bathwater like one of the bad guys in a Dave Robicheaux novel. I keep forgetting to find myself a pristine replacement copy of the missing volume - and Mr. Nameless has long since disappeared from my list of friends. Live and learn is what I took from that experience.

Sitting atop the books is a baseball cap I purchased at Houston's "Murder by the Book" a bunch of years ago. It is still in great shape despite the fact that I wear it regularly on weekends and during the summer. In the dozens and dozens of times I've worn the cap, not once has anyone caught on to the fact that the bait shop logo refers to a bait shop existing only in the mind of James Lee Burke and his thousands of fans. I keep hoping that I will one day run into someone who gets the joke - but I'm not holding my breath anymore. Hmmm, maybe it will happen if I wear the cap to this year's Texas book festival (end of October). I need to write myself a note...

The Calligrapher's Daughter

The Calligrapher’s Daughter is Eugenia Kim’s debut novel and, as so many first novels do, the book tells a story very close to the author’s heart, one, in this case, inspired by her own mother’s life. Set in Korea between 1915 and 1945, it recounts the suffering inflicted upon the country by Japanese invaders that arrived there early in the 20th century. Japanese administrators, determined to wipe out any memory of an independent Korea, allowed only Japanese to be spoken in schools, taught only Japanese history to Korean children, destroyed the Korean royal family, and filled local prisons with those that dared protest. During World War II, when Japan realized its chances of prevailing were slipping away, life became particularly desperate for Koreans because Japan saw Korea as little more than a source of slave labor, food and raw materials to be exploited for the Japanese war effort.

Many Korean patriots, however, refused to submit to the inevitable – and they paid a heavy price for their resistance. Najin Han’s father was one of those. Najin began life as her Christian family’s first born child, enjoying the comfortable lifestyle her well known artist father was able to provide. But, though she was too young to recognize it, all was not well in her world. By the time she was five years old, Japan was well into its efforts to annex her country and her father had begun to attract the attention of local Japanese authorities concerned with snuffing out the resistance.

Over the course of the next thirty years, Najin will struggle to carve out an independent life for herself, one with which her tradition bound father will never be completely happy. Najin is fortunate, however, to have as ally a mother willing to defy her husband in the best interest of her daughter. Rather than capitulate to her husband’s decision to marry off his 14-year-old daughter (to the 12-year-old son of an old friend of his), Mrs. Han secretly sends Najin to the royal court in Seoul where Najin’s dream of an education is made possible.

The Calligrapher’s Daughter is, though, as much the story of 20th century Korea as it is an engaging family saga. Readers, like me, whose sense of Korean history begins with the Korean War of the 1950s and ends with the horrors perpetrated by the almost cartoonish North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il, will come away from the book with a new appreciation of Korean culture and the suffering its people have endured for the last 100 years. They will also become emotionally attached to Najin and her family as they follow the course of Najin’s life and everything that happens to her during this violent period in Korean history.

Some readers may find the book’s initial pacing to be a bit sluggish. I want to encourage those readers not to give up on the book too quickly because its pacing mimics that of Japan’s efforts to assimilate Korea – things begin to happen quicker and quicker as the country, and the book, move toward their climaxes.

Rated at: 4.0

Borders Makes Another Move in E-Books Battle

According to the Washington Post there is another snazzy e-book reader on the horizon, one that will use color more than the rest of the readers currently on the market. And, although it's not mentioned in this Post article, Borders has apparently struck a deal with Spring Design, the new reader's manufacturer, to ensure that the Borders e-book store is the first thing to be seen when readers power up the thing.

The device will feature a Google Android-based platform with full Web browsing capabilities, Wi-Fi connectivity, audio and video playback and image viewing in a variety of formats. The Alex eReader will also be able to run a number of Android apps.

The Alex eReader boasts a 6? EPD (Electronic Paper Display) screen which allows users to browse the Web in full color while simultaneously searching for and reading digital books. Users can thus click on hyperlinks within online books that lead to relevant information or multimedia content found online in order to enrich their reading experience. EPUB digital books can be searched and downloaded using Google API applications provided by Alex?s eReader.

This is another e-book reader using the EPUB format, further isolating Amazon's Kindle users, and it won't be the last.

As the article points out, Spring Design, just a few months ago, sued Barnes & Noble, claiming that the giant bookseller stole its trade secrets and incorporated them into The Nook. It's a cruel old e-book world out there for booksellers, isn't it?

Take a look:

Pensioners Burning Books to Stay Warm

Mark this down as another of those stories I never expected to hear. It seems that some old age pensioners in the U.K. are burning books, instead of coal, as they try to stay warm during this unusually cold winter weather (are you paying attention, Mr. Gore?).

The complete article can be found here at this Metro website:

Volunteers have reported that ‘a large number’ of elderly customers are snapping up hardbacks as cheap fuel for their fires and stoves.

[...]

Workers at one charity shop in Swansea, in south Wales, described how the most vulnerable shoppers were seeking out thick books such as encyclopaedias for a few pence because they were cheaper than coal.

One assistant said: ‘Book burning seems terribly wrong but we have to get rid of unsold stock for pennies and some of the pensioners say the books make ideal slow-burning fuel for fires and stoves.

A lot of them buy up large hardback volumes so they can stick them in the fire to last all night.’

A 500g book can sell for as little as 5p, while a 20kg bag of coal costs £5.

Since January 2008, gas bills have risen 40 per cent and electricity prices 20 per cent, although people over 60 are entitled to a winter fuel allowance of between £125 and £400.

Just when you think you've heard it all...

The Unnamed

I suspect that the temptation to “walk away from it all” is a common one that almost everyone thinks about, even if only for an instant, at one time or another. Few of us, however, succumb to the temptation because our good sense allows us to control the fleeting urge to chuck it all away for a fresh start. What would happen, though, if, like Tim Farnsworth, the urge to walk away had to be responded to literally – no other option allowed? How would we survive the elements and the dangers of the streets? What would happen to those we leave behind? Joshua Ferris explores those questions in The Unnamed.

Tim Farnsworth, a wealthy Harvard-educated attorney and partner at a prestigious New York City firm, lives with a monster: an unnamed disease that requires him to walk until he drops into a deep sleep from sheer exhaustion. The disease comes and goes, sometimes disappearing for years at a time, but when the urge to start walking strikes, Tim Farnsworth has no choice. He starts walking, and neither the obligations of his job nor those of his family can check his need to hit the streets.

Tim and his wife, by now, know what to expect when the disease returns. Tim is able to alert his wife to what his happening to him and she quickly outfits him in his warmest clothing and makes sure that he leaves the house (or office) with a backpack filled with things to help him survive on his own. Even all this planning does not always work, however, because Tim has a way of walking away from his possessions when coming out of one of his deep sleeps.

The Unnamed, despite the bleakness of its theme, is a terrific character study because it places the reader deep inside Tim Farnsworth’s head as he struggles to understand and control the disease that is slowly, but steadily, killing him. We share his frustration and despair when even the best doctors fail him; we worry with him about how his wife and daughter are holding up back home; we understand his anger at how his longtime legal colleagues take advantage of his illness; and, through his eyes, we see life stripped to its most fundamental elements.

This is a difficult novel to read because of its theme and storyline, and I have no quarrel with that. Ferris succeeds in making the reader feel Tim’s struggle not to surrender to the hopelessness of his situation as the unnamed disease more and more dominates his life. As a result, some readers might, after putting down the book, be a bit reluctant to return to it. This feeling, though, only illustrates how successful Ferris is in making the reader feel the Farnsworth family’s pain. On the other hand, I did struggle during the somewhat tedious section of the book during which Tim loses touch with reality to such an extent that he cannot distinguish the real world from his dream world. This overlong section of the book would have been more effective had it been presented concisely because, as it is written, I found myself rushing through it in order to get to the rest of the story.

The Unnamed is one of those books I will think about for a while – but not one that I am likely to want to read a second time. There is a lot to be gained from reading it once, however, and I recommend it to anyone ready to contemplate life at its most basic.

Rated at: 3.5

New "TV Book Club" in U.K.

BBC4 pulled the plug on Richard and Judy a while back and that had to be bad news for publishers, authors and booksellers in the U.K. because it also meant that the Richard and Judy Book Club would no longer have access to its large BBC audience. Richard and Judy may not have have sold books in Oprah- style numbers but the show did create its share of U.K. bestsellers, so lots of people took a hit when the show ended.

Now, in a bit of good news for U.K. book people, British producer Amanda Ross has announced the first picks for her new "TV Book Club." The complete article may be found here at The Los Angeles Times website:

Called the Simon Cowell of publishing, Ross was the woman behind Richard and Judy's book club. For years, the popular talk show "Richard & Judy" -- or "chat show," as they say in the UK -- included, among its many topics, a book club. Like Oprah Winfrey's book selections, Richard and Judy's picks could turn quiet books into mega-bestsellers. At its height, the Richard and Judy Book Club accounted for 26% of the 100 bestsellers in the UK.

[...]

Though Richard and Judy have continued their show elsewhere, it hasn't had the same profile. And Ross has embarked on a new venture, the upcoming "TV Book Club," a show that promises to talk about books on TV. Ten books were announced for 2010, featuring Abraham Verghese's "Cutting for Stone."

[...]

Verghese's book is joined by Nick Hornby's "Juliet, Naked," "The Little Stranger" by Sarah Waters and George Pelecanos' "The Way Home," among others, in the first roster of the new show. But it remains to be seen whether British readers/viewers will embrace Ross' new show -- will the not-yet unveiled format, which promises new hosts and visiting comedians -- make a show dedicated to books a success?

This sounds like fun and I wish there were a way it could be made available to U.S. viewers via the internet (wishful thinking, I know). Am I the only one wishing that our own Book TV would feature fiction as well as nonfiction books? There are some weekends during which I am just not in the mood for another bunch of political books, biographies, and histories. I suppose that is just more wishful thinking but I cannot, for the life of me, understand why fiction has been banned by Book TV.

Summer

Tame by today’s standards, Summer, Edith Wharton’s most sexually explicit novel, probably shocked more than a few readers when it was first published almost 100 years ago. That it is also one of only two novels Wharton placed in a rural setting makes Summer even more unique among her novels.

Charity Royall is bored with her little North Dormer community and only works as the town librarian so she can save enough money to escape the life she endures there. She cares little for books and is perfectly willing to allow them to self-destruct on the shelves while she daydreams about a more exciting existence. But, as it turns out, her fate will be forever linked to the little library.

Lucius Harney, a young architect, has come to North Dormer to visit his aunt and to study and sketch some of the old homes in the area. When he wanders into the library one day in search of a book about the old houses, Charity is smitten with him and unknowingly sets the course that will alter the rest of her life. It is the start of a relationship that, even though it begins innocently, is best kept from the prying eyes of the town gossips. Charity knows that her guardian, Lawyer Royall, the man who did a better job of raising her before his wife died than after, would never approve the match – and that there are those in town who would relish the opportunity to tell him about it.

Secrecy, though, requires privacy, and privacy often leads to a degree of intimacy that results in tragic consequences for the unwed. Only after Harney returns to his life in New York, does Charity realize that she is pregnant - and on her own. As Wharton makes clear, a woman of this period facing Charity’s dilemma had few options: illegal abortion, being sent away to have the baby in secrecy, running away in shame, or perhaps the unlikely luck of finding a sympathetic man willing to marry her.

Charity moves from desperation to despair when she realizes how limited her choices have become and that the life she was already unhappy with has been forever changed, and that change being for the worse. As she moves from one poor decision to the next, at times risking her very life, one is reminded of how greatly American mores and values have changed in the last five decades.

Summer, even though it was governed by the stricter limits of its time on language and theme, is a memorable portrayal of what it was like for a woman to be “in trouble” during the first half of the 20th century. That it still can have a strong impact on the reader today leaves one wondering why it was not more of a sensation when first published. Edith Wharton fans should not overlook this fine novel.

Rated at: 4.0

Will 2010 Be the Year?

Will 2010 be the year it happens? Are e-books and e-book readers fast approaching the tipping point from which they will eventually come to dominate the publishing industry? Will Amazon rethink its approach to e-book formatting before it loses its dominant share of the e-publishing market? I am starting to believe that this could be a pivotal year for publishers and booksellers, alike, one in which independent bookstores continue to close shop at a horrifying pace, the national bookstore chains continue to bleed money, and publishers finally begin to rethink their own business plans.

I do not for a minute believe that e-publishing will ever kill off the publishing of bound books. Newspapers and magazines, on the other hand, could very well be doomed when e-book readers are finally able to cope with color, photos, graphics, and all the other flash that make magazines (and some newspapers) so appealing to the eye. At the moment, reading a newspaper or magazine on a Kindle can be a frustrating experience and it remains to be seen if the new Sony Reader Daily Edition will do a much better job. Newspaper and magazine circulation has already been clobbered by the internet and the availability of more graphically sophisticated e-readers could finish that job.

Sony is probably Amazon’s biggest challenger in 2010 but several smaller companies also have e-readers on the market. What Sony and the smaller challengers have going for them is their decision to use the standard EPUB format on their readers. This means that the owner of a Sony Reader is able to purchase books directly from Sony and other sellers, find hundreds of thousands of free books on the web, and download bestsellers from his local library without ever leaving home. Kindle users do not have those luxuries because Amazon uses its own proprietary format - limiting the usage of Kindle books to Kindle readers, PCs and certain smart phones. As Kindle owners begin to wonder what good all those Kindle books are if they decide one day to move on to a better reader, Amazon might find itself losing market share to companies using the open format.

What makes me think that 2010 might turn out to be a big year for e-books? Simply put: buzz. For the first time, I am hearing people talk about e-book readers and I am seeing them shop for readers at Barnes & Noble, Borders and the big box electronic stores. E-book readers are prominently displayed now, often alongside mp3 players, and shoppers are starting to notice them. Barnes & Noble displays the Nook right at the front door in its own huge display space, making the Nook impossible to miss. Shoppers are getting used to seeing e-readers and they probably know someone that uses one. There is a new awareness of their existence and, if sales progress at the pace that mp3 player sales did, in only a few years e-book readers might be a commodity product with too many manufacturers to count.

I know that something has changed already, though, because a friend of mine purchased a Kindle for his wife this Christmas and she is not a particularly avid reader. Amazingly, she came into the office last week saying how much she loved the gadget and how great it was to be able to buy bestsellers for $9.99 a pop. Time will tell, of course, but for now she is more excited about reading than she has been for years and that cannot be a bad thing for publishers.

As for me, I was one of the Sony Reader early adopters and I have recently upgraded my original reader with the purchase of a new Sony Touch. I am happy with the touch features, the built-in dictionary, the note taking capabilities, and those hundreds of thousands of free books I can read. But what I like most about the reader is that I can download books directly from my local library system - and the “hold” lines are, at this point, shorter than those for the same physical books. Don’t get me wrong. I love books, real books, and I will continue to add them to my shelves, just at a somewhat slower pace than in previous years.

E-books have reached a tipping point in my world - and those are words I never dreamed I would be saying.

The Third Option

The Third Option, published in 2000, is the third book in Vince Flynn’s Mitch Rapp series and, while the book still holds up well as a political thriller, today’s readers will almost certainly think about how much has happened in the decade following its publication. Mitch is in Germany on what he plans as his last counterterrorism mission: taking out a wealthy German industrialist before the man can supply Saddam Hussein’s scientists with the material needed for Iraq to produce nuclear weapons to benefit those waging war on the West.

One more kill, and Vince plans to walk away from his old life and into the arms of the woman he plans to spend the rest of his life with - but, in Vince’s business, things have a way of getting complicated. Vince Rapp is not used to failure but this time, despite his best efforts, the mission goes badly and he finds himself on the run in Europe, wondering who set-him up and why they did it. All he knows is that someone is going to pay the ultimate price for what they did to him - even if the order came from inside the Agency.

When he finally surfaces to confront his bosses in Washington D.C. about their knowledge of what happened in Germany, Rapp becomes convinced that CIA Director Stansfield and Irene Kennedy, Director of the Counterterrorism Center, are as much in the dark as he is. Director Stansfield, Rapp learns, is dying of cancer and Stansfield strongly believes that Irene Kennedy is the only choice to succeed him. However, some powerful government people disagree with Stansfield and they considered Rapp and his mission to be expendable if the ensuing embarrassment would keep Kennedy from the nomination.

The Third Option is a first rate thriller throughout but I was disappointed in its open-ended finish. It is obvious that the fourth book of the Mitch Rapp series picks up exactly where this third book ends - and that might have been more acceptable back in 2000 when there were only three books in the series. But now there are ten of them, and the earlier books can be difficult to find in libraries and bookstores, so it might be a while before I find out how book three’s chief villain is finally brought to justice. Bummer.

Rated at: 4.0

2009 Unfinished Business

I'm coming into 2010 a little bit further behind than I like to start a new reading year because I finished several books in the last 10 days of December 2009, three of which I have yet to review: Summer by Edith Wharton, The Third Option by Vince Flynn and My Prison, My Home by Haleh Esfandiari.

And, because I was able to sneak in a few extra reading hours today, I was able to finish my first book of 2010 and I have another review to add to my to-do list: The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris. Speaking of Ferris, in a strange bit of sheer chance, this makes two years in-a-row that I have started off with a Joshua Ferris novel (and he has only written two of them, I think). What are the odds of that happening?

Here's hoping that you all have enjoyed the holidays and are ready to move into the new year. I am hopeful that 2010 will be a better year for this country, and the rest of the world, than the year through which we all just suffered. Surely, that will be the case. Right?

Best Books of 2009

This year I have combined my fiction and my nonfiction reading into one list of my 2009 favorites. The only two nonfiction books to make the list, in fact, sandwich my eight favorite novels of the year. After studying similar lists on other book blogs these last few days, I am fascinated that there is so little overlap on any of them, including this one. So many great books...so little time to read them.

Even more fascinating to me is that six of the eight novels listed are debut novels. I doubt that will ever happen to me again.

1. Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women – Harriet Reisen
This Louisa May Alcott biography answered all the questions I had about the Alcott family and its relationship with many of the literary stars and great thinkers of its day. The book is written in a very readable style and, because most readers already know so much about Louisa and her family, it almost reads like a novel. From my review of the book: "There is so much here that even the biggest Alcott fan will come away with a new appreciation of what this great writer accomplished in her relatively short lifetime."

2. Spooner – Pete Dexter
Pete Dexter has what some would consider a rather peculiar sense of humor – and I enjoy it so much I could listen to him tell stories all day long. The next best thing to that experience is reading a Pete Dexter novel and Spooner, in which Dexter creates one of his more memorable characters (Warren Spooner), is a real treat for Pete Dexter fans. From my review of the book: "He arrived only a few seconds after his more handsome twin brother and, even though his twin never took a breath, Spooner knew that his dead brother would always be his mother’s favorite child."

3. Bad Things Happen – Harry Dolan
Harry Dolan pays tribute to those who preceded him. Bad Things Happen is of the Raymond Chandler/James Cain/Dashiell Hammett school of mystery writing and this, Dolan's first novel, does not suffer in the comparison. From my review of the book: Its finely-crafted plot, filled with unexpected twists and turns, will keep readers guessing the murderer’s identify all the way to the end – wondering even to the last page if they have it figured out this time.”

4. The Brightest Moon of the Century – Christopher Meeks
This debut novel, based on one of my favorite Chris Meeks short stories, begins when Edward Meopian is 14-years old and ends when he is 45. A lot happens to Edward in those three decades, very little of it planned, and most of it seeming to get him no closer to achieving his dream. And when he does finally get there, life happens. From my review of the book: “Meeks’s characters, and his slightly off-centered view of life, continue to remind me of John Irving’s early work, definitely a good thing.”

5. Etta: A Novel – Gerald Kolpan
If you’re like me, I’ll bet you still have an imaged embedded in your brain of Etta Place riding a bicycle in that classic move about Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid. I’ll also bet that pretty much everything you know about Etta Place, you acquired from that one movie. Really, not much is known about Etta and how she became an outlaw, but Gerald Kolpan’s version of “what if” is great fun to read. From my review of the book: “First-time novelist Gerald Kolpan now offers Etta, the perfect companion piece to the movie that reintroduced Etta to the world some forty years ago.”

6. Travel Writing - Peter Ferry
This is a first novel that takes a (excuse me for this) novel approach to storytelling. Peter Ferry is the main character of his own novel and, beginning with the book's dedication, the reader will be wondering what is real and what is not. Ferry pulls off to great effect here one of those "novel within a novel" things and I suspect he drove more than a few readers nuts in the process. From my review of the book: "Peter Ferry is a storyteller and his debut novel, Travel Writing, is one terrific story.

7. American Rust: A Novel - Philipp Meyer
Yet another debut novel, but a much more serious one than the ones previously mentioned, American Rust takes a long, hard look at life in small town America. Meyer's story is a tragic one involving a bright young man whose life goes wrong in an instant, so wrong that he fears he could end up spending the rest of his life in prison. From my review of the book: "American Rust, Philipp Meyer’s debut novel, is a hard story to forget. Beyond a doubt, it is one of the bleakest portrayals of small town America written since the Great Depression and its plot, for good reason, is a reminder of the fiction that came out of that era."

8. Rain Gods: A Novel - James Lee Burke
James Lee Burke is a master at his craft, a man I've read since the '80s and whose work I always snap up as soon as it is published. I feel like Dave Robicheaux is a personal friend; I even own a baseball cap that features Dave's old bait shop on the front and I actually wear it around town just to see if anyone gets the joke. Rain Gods, though, is a Hack Holland novel, not one of Dave's. I don't yet feel quite as attached to Hack as I do to Dave but Mr. Burke is getting me closer with every novel. This is one of the most atmospheric novels I've read in a long while and the writing is simply beautiful. Enough said.

9. Woodsburner: A Novel - John Pipkin
Would you believe another excellent debut novel? This one is about what had to be perhaps the worst day in Henry David Thoreau's life, the day he accidentally set fire to the Concord Woods and almost burned down the city of Concord. Pipkin uses this largely forgotten incident from Thoreau's life to create one of the best character studies of 2009. From my review of the book: "In the process of creating a back-history for each of his main characters, Pipkin provides a revealing look at Massachusetts society of the 1840s and theorizes on how Thoreau’s mistake heavily influenced the rest of his life and career."

10. Where Men Win Glory - Jon Krakauer
Pat Tilman is a hero, a special young man who felt it was his duty to defend America after the 9-11 murders. Most everyone knows how Tilman gave up a multi-million dollar contract to join the Army's special forces and of his death in Afghanistan. Jon Krakauer tells the rest of the story, including the military's attempt to cover up what really happened in the tragic firefight that killed Pat Tilman. From my review of the book: "Human nature being what it is, almost from the moment Tillman’s body was recovered, some on the ground seem to have been more concerned with covering up the poor tactical decisions that contributed to his death than they were about reporting the truth."

Shoptimism

There is no doubt about it: America is a nation of shoppers and ours is an economy driven more by consumption than by production. For some of us, the craziness of Black Friday is to be avoided at all cost; for others it is a contact sport they look forward to all year long. Lee Eisenberg’s Shoptimism: Why the American Consumer Will Keep on buying No Matter What, attempts to explain why that is.

Eisenberg divides Shoptimism into two parts, one from “The Sell Side” (Them Versus You) and one from “The Buy Side” (You Versus You). The first part focuses on the efforts retailers make to convince unwary buyers they cannot live without what the seller has to offer. It includes a history of retailing, advertising, marketing research and what, at times, seems like psychological warfare being waged upon the buyer by the seller. Eisenberg, in a past life, was executive vice president of Land’s End and he knows exactly how “They” play the game of getting cash from your pocket into theirs.

The book’s second part focuses on the “Why” and the “Who” of shopping. Why do we shop the way we do? Why do brands mean everything to some shoppers while others see avoiding popular brands as a badge of honor? How do male and female shoppers differ? Can shopping truly be an addiction or is that just an excuse some shoppers use to rationalize their spending habits? This section of the book includes chapters on “The Classic Buyer,” one that tries to get the most for his dollar and is willing to do the research needed to increase his odds of succeeding, and “The Romantic Buyer” that shops more with an impulsive heart than with a fact-filled head.

Although he uses graphs, tables, lists and illustrations for summary and clarification purposes, Eisenberg builds his case largely through the anecdotal style he uses to recount his own shopping experiences and observations. Thankfully, he also puts today’s shopping habits into historical context, explaining how we arrived at the point that President Bush would dare suggest shortly after 9-11 that the best things Americans could do for their country was to return to its shopping malls. According to Eisenberg, it was during the 1950s that America “underwent a bloodless coup that transformed us from engaged citizens into self-indulgent consumers.” In postwar America, Americans found that buying things made them happy – and American consumption has only gotten more frantic with each succeeding generation.

Some might find it easy to ridicule the shopping habits of their fellow citizens but before getting too carried away they should consider some of the things that now eat up such a large chunk of their own disposable income, expenses our grandparents never dreamed of: mobile phones, cable television, internet bills, hugely expensive printer ink, and the like. As one consultant tells Eisenberg, “The average American household spends more a year on technology-related products and services than it does on clothes, health insurance, prescription drugs or entertainment.” Consumerism has a way, in other words, of sneaking up on the best of us.

Rated at: 4.0

End-of-Year Stats

Another year is done and I've managed to pull together some end-of-year numbers that reflect the kind of reading year 2009 was for me. I find that I was fairly consistent from month-to-month with my reading but that I had extended periods during which nothing really impressed me as being even remotely special. Sometimes when that happens I think I'm more to blame than the authors because I do seem to go in streaks of mediocre books vs. really good books. I wonder how much a reader's mood has to do with his reaction to a book, even to a classic?



Anyway, here's what 2009 looked like for me:

Number of Books Read = 124
Fiction = 86
Nonfiction = 38

Novels - 85
Short Story Collections = 1

Memoirs = 11
Biographies = 9
True Crime = 4
Essay Collections = 2
Sociology = 5
Business = 2
Health = 1
Education = 1
Current Events = 3

Written by Men = 80
Written by Women = 42
Co-Authored = 2

Abandoned = 10
Review Copies = 79
Translations = 4
E-Books = 7
Audio Books = 7

Author Nationality:

British = 13
Irish = 1
Canadian = 2
Spanish = 1
Iranian = 2
American = 105

I don't usually start the year with reading goals, but I think I'll do that this year without getting extremely specific about my aims. In general terms, though, I hope to read more from the rest of the world, a little more nonfiction, more short story collections, a series or two, more classics and more from some of my favorite genres. That should be vague enough to give me an alibi for whatever I fail to do by this time next year.

Superfreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance

My internet break is officially over. I decided to go almost "cold turkey" 0ver the Christmas holiday, only checking in via my phone to respond to any email requiring a quick response (plus using my phone to check a few football scores when radio or television was not available). Surprisingly, I suffered no withdrawal pain and I find myself returning to the net rather reluctantly this morning (especially since so many book bloggers seem to have done the same thing).

Now I need to see if I can remember how to write a relatively coherent book review, so here goes.

I am a fan 0f the previous "Freakonomics" book by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dunbar so I knew what to expect when I began Superfreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance. The book's tantalizing subtitle displays the overall tone and subject matter of the book: an irreverent look at topical issues, using humor and common sense to debunk some of the most common assumptions most of us have made about our world. Much as the first book, Superfreakonomics is fun to read and will leave the reader wondering why facts that make so much sense come as such a surprise.

Some of what the authors say will scare the reader and some of it will make him laugh and feel better about the world. In either case, however, the reader is not likely to forget what he learns, nor is he likely ever again to look at that topic the way he looked at it before beginning Superfreakonomics. The authors tackle big, important topics that affect all of us as well as subjects which, although they might have no impact on our individual lives, are intriguing because of how the authors present them through surprising facts and relationships that change what we thought we knew.

One of the more terrifying chapters in Superfreakonomics involves the astounding number of patients that die in hospital from causes unrelated to the treatment they sought there in the first place. The authors, via statistics, interviews and observation, determine why secondary infection is still such a problem in American hospitals and who is responsible for spreading the infection to unsuspecting patients. The "who" is not so surprising; it is the "why" that will anger most readers. The chapter also explores the "luck of the draw" involved in doctor-assignments to emergency room patients - with surprising revelations about which doctor offers the patient the best chance of survival.

Other topics include: the relative ineffectiveness of chemotherapy, why prostitutes make more money for less work on one particular night of the week, why switching to kangaroo burgers could help save the world, a comparison of seat belt effectiveness to that of car seats for children two and up, and a likely solution to the global warming problem that the world can actually afford (but will probably ignore because it will be repugnant to those too "green" to consider it).

Superfreakonomics might not be a book for everyone (if there is such a thing) but readers should not be put off by its title and subject matter. This book is fun to read and it will give its readers something to talk about at the next boring party or group dinner - topics that are likely to dominate the conversation for the rest of the evening.

Rated at: 5.0

One Hacker Aims to "Unswindle" the Kindle

Hardly a day goes by anymore without some interesting news about e-book readers and the companies that produce them. Today it is about the Amazon Kindle and how at least two hackers have broken the code that keeps purchasers of Kindle books from reading those books on devices sold by other companies such as Sony or Barnes & Noble.

CIO Today offers the details:

Internet retailer Amazon.com had all the luck in getting its family of proprietary Kindle e-book readers into the hands of consumers while its rivals were faced with delays, but its luck may have turned. The Kindle's copyright protection Relevant Products/Services has been hacked.

An Israeli hacker who goes by the name Labba says he has been able to break the Kindle's digital-rights management protection, allowing its electronic books to be viewed on non-Kindle devices.

A U.S. hacker has also reportedly created a program called Unswindle that converts books stored in the free Kindle for PC application into other formats.

[...]

Amazon may close the door on the DRM hack, but other hackers will likely attempt a hack again, observers say.

Eventually, Amazon may follow Apple's lead. After launching its iTunes Store, a hacker broke Apple's DRM protection. As a result, Apple closed the security Relevant Products/Services hole, only to be hacked again. Apple now offers DRM-free music on iTunes

[...]

Amazon may close the door on the DRM hack, but other hackers will likely attempt a hack again, observers say.

Eventually, Amazon may follow Apple's lead. After launching its iTunes Store, a hacker broke Apple's DRM protection. As a result, Apple closed the security Relevant Products/Services hole, only to be hacked again. Apple now offers DRM-free music on iTunes

Personally, I hate the idea of DRM because when I buy a record album or a book I believe I have the right to copy it and enjoy it on other compatible devices I may own. I understand the potential copyright violations me having that ability implies but, since I am not a pirate wanting to steal my original copy of the work or to sell it to others, I refuse to purchase digital content that limits how I use it. That is why I will never own a Kindle and why, until Apple stopped that kind of foolishness, I refused to buy music via Apple's iTunes store. Who really believes that first-time Kindle buyers will remain content to own a Kindle forever? When better hardware comes along, why shouldn't Amazon customers be able to move their books to a different device?

This is exactly what drove me to purchase my second Sony Reader a few weeks ago. Thank you, Sony Corporation for having the sense to choose a customer friendly business model.

Barnes & Noble Updates Nook Software

I suspected this would happen - but not this soon. Barnes & Noble is already pushing a system software update out to early bird owners of its Nook readers. Considering the poor reviews the Nook received upon its release a couple of weeks ago, this is an excellent move on the bookseller's part.

According to Brighthand.com, this is what Nook owners can expect after the software update is automatically installed on their readers:

* Page turning and formatting of downloaded e-books has been improved.

* Start-up time for My Library, The Daily, and Setting has been improved.

* Barnes & Noble in-store content and promotions roll-out is fully supported.

* Launches reader immediately on Select from The Daily and My Library for books and subscriptions that have already been downloaded.

* Reading Now takes customer straight into the last book page read without reformatting the content.

* Displays the correct time on the status bar.

* No longer unprompted to the home screen when pressing the arrow or the select button.

* Displays correct error-message for pre-ordering books that are not yet available.

Good move, Barnes & Noble. I'm pulling for you guys to get this thing done right.