The Kindle Reads The New Classics: EW's 100 Best Books of the Last 25 Years

Today's Amazon Kindle status: IN STOCK for free two-day delivery!

The June 27/July 4 double issue of Entertainment Weekly includes a list of one hundred books, both fiction and nonfiction, that ET calls "The New Classics: The Best Books of the Last 25 Years". As the Kindle wasn't in existence for twenty-four of those twenty-five years, I was surprised to find that thirty-five of the one hundred titles are already available for the device. Here's the list of the "New Classics" now available in Kindle editions:

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. Knopf, 2007. NOVEL. Kindle edition $7.96.

Beloved, by Toni Morrison. Vintage.. NOVEL. Kindle edition $7.96.

Mystic River, by Dennis Lehane. HarperCollins. NOVEL. Kindle edition $6.39.

Into Thin Air, by Jon Krakauer. Villard. NONFICTION. Kindle edition $4.76.

Rabbit at Rest, by John Updike. Rosetta Books. NOVEL. Kindle edition $7.19.

On Beauty, by Zadie Smith. Penguin. NOVEL. Kindle edition $9.99.

Bridget Jones's Diary, by Helen Fielding. Penguin. NOVEL. Kindle edition $9.99.

On Writing, by Stephen King. Scribner. NONFICTION. Kindle edition $6.39.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz. Riverhead. NOVEL. Kindle edition $9.99.

The Joy Luck Club, by Amy Tan. Rosetta Books. NOVEL. Kindle edition $7.19.

Neuromancer, by William Gibson. Ace. SCIENCE FICTION. Kindle edition $5.59.

Bel Canto, by Ann Patchett. HarperCollins. NOVEL. Kindle edition $5.19.

Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63, by Taylor Branch. Simon & Schuster. NONFICTION. Kindle edition $9.99.

The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion. Vintage. MEMOIR. Kindle edition $7.96.

The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold. Little, Brown and Company. NOVEL. Kindle edition $7.96.

Angela's Ashes, by Frank McCourt. Scribner. MEMOIR. Kindle edition $5.95.

His Dark Materials (a trilogy including The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass), by Phillip Pullman. FANTASY. Kindle edition $6.00 per volume.

LaBrava, by Elmore Leonard. HarperCollins. NOVEL. Kindle edition $6.00.

The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver. HarperCollins. NOVEL. Kindle edition $9.56.

Waiting to Exhale, by Terry McMillan. NAL. NOVEL. Kindle edition $7.99.

The Glass Castle, by Jeannette Walls. Scribner. MEMOIR. Kindle edition $9.00.

Drop City, by T. C. Boyle. Penguin. NOVEL. Kindle edition $9.99.

Underworld, by Dom DeLillo. Scribner. NOVEL. Kindle edition $9.16.

The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini. Riverhead. NOVEL. Kindle edition $9.00.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon. Vintage. NOVEL. Kindle edition $7.96.

Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream, by H. G. Bissinger. Da Capo Press. NONFICTION. Kindle edition announced, no price yet.

Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia, by Elizabeth Gilbert. Viking. MEMOIR. Kindle edition $9.00.

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, by Malcolm Gladwell. Little, Brown & Co. NONFICTION. Kindle edition $7.99.

Atonement, by Ian Mcewan. Knopf. NOVEL. Kindle edition $7.96.

Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson. FSG. NOVEL. Kindle edition $9.99.

The Ruins, by Scott Smith. Knopf. NOVEL. Kindle edition $5.59.

High Fidelity, by Nick Hornby. Publisher, Date. NONFICTION. Kindle edition $9.99.

Close Range: Wyoming Stories, by Annie Proulx. Publisher, Date. SHORT STORIES. Kindle edition $4.99.

Comfort Me With Apples: More Adventures at the Table, by Ruth Reichl. Random House. ESSAYS. Kindle edition $7.96.

The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown. Doubleday. NOVEL. Kindle edition $5.59.

Battlestar Galactica: Free Science Fiction for your Kindle

Today's Amazon Kindle status: IN STOCK for free two-day delivery!

To publicize their soon-to-be launched new social website for fans of science fiction and fantasy, Tor Books is giving away one e-book a week.

This week's offering, Battlestar Galactica, is available for free by registering at Tor.com. Once you register, you will receive by return e-mail a link to download the book. Please note that some folks have had to wait for the e-mail for several days. It is also available in a Kindle edition at Amazon.com.

Battlestar Galactica, by Jeffrey A. Carver. Tor Books, 2005. SCIENCE FICTION.

"Battlestar Galactica, an original SCI FI Channel miniseries, electrified viewers and critics alike and was hailed as a landmark in sci-fi television. Here, for the first time, is the novel based on that exciting drama.

For forty years, the Twelve Colonies of Man were at peace, united since the war against the robotic Cylons. These mechanical beings, created by mankind to perform the manual labor civilization required, were gone forever…or so humanity thought. But in those years, the Cylons developed new Cylons that looked and acted like humans…and then they attacked the Twelve Worlds.

Only a single warship survived the massive attack: Battlestar Galactica, the oldest ship in the fleet, ready to be decommissioned and turned into a museum. Commander William Adama, himself set to retire, had but one course: to marshal his meager forces, and somehow keep the Cylons from wiping out the last vestiges of the human race. But their inhuman Cylon enemies—stronger, smarter, and driven to destroy—may be too powerful for them, and all of humanity, to survive." - Amazon book description.

Seize the Night: Free Fantasy Novel for your Kindle

Seize the Night by Sherrilyn Kenyon will be available for free download to your Amazon Kindle until July 3 so if you enjoy paranormal romance fiction, grab it here while you can.

"Sherrilyn Kenyon (born 1965) is a bestselling and award-winning American author. Under her own name she is known for her paranormal romance and vampire chronicles. Under the pseudonym Kinley MacGregor she is also well known for her historical romance novels. Kenyon's novels have an 'international cult following,' with over ten million copies in print in twenty-six countries. Under both names, her books have appeared on the top ten of the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, and USA Today lists, and they are frequent bestsellers in Germany, Australia, and the United Kingdom. " - Wikipedia.

Seize the Night, by Sherrilyn Kenyon. St. Martin's, 2004. FANTASY. Dark-Hunter series. Kindle edition $0.00 until July 3, 2008.

"Valerius isn't a popular Dark-Hunter-he's a Roman, which means that the largely Greek Hunters have a major grudge against him and his civilization for superceding them. To make things worse, he's very conscious of his aristocratic background and breeding. So it serves him right when he runs into Tabitha Devereaux. She's sassy, sexy, and completely unwilling to take him seriously...What Tabitha does take seriously is hunting and killing vampires-and soon she and Val have to grapple with the deadliest of all Daimons - one who's managed to come back from the dead, and one who holds a serious grudge against both of them. To win against evil, Val will have to loosen up, learn to trust, and put everything on the line to protect a man he hates and a woman who drives him nuts." - Amazon book description.

A Week of Entertainment: Books Reviewed in Entertainment Weekly 06/20/08

Today's Amazon Kindle status: IN STOCK for free two-day delivery!

Each week Entertainment Weekly reviews a small selection of popular new books. Titles available for the Kindle and reviewed in the June 20th issue include:

Painter in a Savage Land: The Strange Saga of the First European Artist in North America, by Miles Harvey. Random House. NONFICTION. EW rating: B+. Amazon customer rating: None yet. Kindle edition $9.99.
"In this vibrantly told, meticulously researched book, Miles Harvey reveals one of the most fascinating and overlooked lives in American history... the thrilling story of Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, the first European artist to journey to what is now the continental United States with the express purpose of recording its wonders in pencil and paint. Le Moyne’s images, which survive today in a series of spectacular engravings, provide a rare glimpse of Native American life at the pivotal time of first contact with the Europeans–most of whom arrived with the preconceived notion that the New World was an almost mythical place in which anything was possible...
In re-creating the life and legacy of Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, Miles Harvey weaves a tale of both intellectual intrigue and swashbuckling drama. Replete with shipwrecks, mutinies, religious wars, pirate raids, and Indian attacks, Painter in a Savage Land is truly a tour de force of narrative nonfiction." - Amazon book description.

America America: A Novel, by Ethan Canin. Random House. NOVEL. EW rating: B+. Amazon customer rating: 4 stars. Kindle edition $9.99.
"In the early 1970s, Corey Sifter, the son of working-class parents, becomes a yard boy on the grand estate of the powerful Metarey family. Soon, through the family’s generosity, he is a student at a private boarding school and an aide to the great New York senator Henry Bonwiller, who is running for president of the United States. Before long, Corey finds himself involved with one of the Metarey daughters as well, and he begins to leave behind the world of his upbringing. As the Bonwiller campaign gains momentum, Corey finds himself caught up in a complex web of events in which loyalty, politics, sex, and gratitude conflict with morality, love, and the truth." - Amazon book description.

Stanza: A Kindle e-Book Converter for the Mac

Recently I've been playing around with the beta 5 version of Stanza, a digital e-book reader for the Macintosh. The application is designed for reading text on the Mac and/or exporting it to digital devices like the Kindle.

While Stanza can convert PDF documents to the Kindle's native .azw format, it removes much of the formatting of the text and excludes graphics. This makes it an ideal candidate for downloading books from websites like Project Gutenberg where text is king.

When I was a child, I loved the Young Trailer series by Joseph A. Altsheler. The series is now in the public domain and seven of the eight volumes are available in Project Gutenberg.

Let's go through the procedure I used to get the eighth volume of the series (The Border Watch) on my Kindle using Stanza.

1. I went to Project Gutenberg and searched for The Border Watch.

2. At the web page for The Border Watch, I scrolled down to "formats available for download" and copied to the clipboard the link location for the plain text us-ascii version.

3. I opened Stanza, chose "Open Location" from the File menu, and pasted in the link location. This downloaded the entire book into Stanza.

4. I chose "Export Book As" from the File menu and saved the book in the "Amazon Kindle" format.

5. I connected my Mac to the Kindle and copied the .azw file for the book to the documents folder of the Kindle where it is ready for my Kindle reading pleasure.

I would be interested in hearing about your experiments with Stanza. It is free for downloading during the beta period.

Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine for the Kindle

First let me say that although I enjoy reading good mysteries, science fiction/fantasy is my genre of choice. So when subscriptions to Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine became available for the Kindle, I didn't get too excited.

Then I noticed that Steven King had described EQMM as the "best mystery magazine in the world, bar none". That got my attention as did the positive reviews for the magazine on Amazon. I requested a trial subscription and must say that if the current issue is representative, I'll be a long-time subscriber.

The July 2008 issue features eight short stories, a novella, reviews of blogs relating to mystery fiction, and a poem. I was immediately impressed by the high quality of the writing and the variety of subject matter in the stories - the secret lives of cats, mysteries set in the Old West and on the isle of Crete, a traditional whodunit with a surprise ending, an "environmental cozy", and an chilling look at murder in an historic Main Line residence where all is not as it appears and death takes a bizarre twist.

Although the Kindle has the ability to display 4-level gray scale illustrations, few publishers take advantage of this capability. I like the fact that EQMM includes a small selection of illustrations from the printed edition, including the magazine cover.

Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Monthly Price: $2.99, including free wireless delivery via Amazon Whispernet within the United States. For those Kindle owners without Whispernet access, issues may be downloaded to your computer and moved to the Kindle manually via USB. The Kindle Edition of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine features double issues in the months of March and September. Subscription includes a free 14-day trial period.

Feeding Your Kindle e-Book Addiction: The New Mobipocket Download Guide

Today's Amazon Kindle status: IN STOCK for free two-day delivery!

Far be it from me to be an enabler, but let's face it, finding good reads for your Kindle that are also free is a rush. The three sources I go to first for free Kindle books are: MobileRead, ManyBooks and FeedBooks and of these three venues, MobileRead is my favorite because the public domain e-books featured there are hand-formatted for the Kindle by volunteers, often with many little extras like cover art, illustrations and tables of contents.

On June 20, MobileRead announced its new Mobipocket Download Guide, inspired by the popular Feedbooks Kindle Download Guide. The guide, - updated every 24 hours - makes it possible for the Kindle owner to transfer e-books directly to the device over the Internet using the Kindle's experimental web browser.

You can download the guide to your computer or enter the URL into the Kindle's Web browser. The download guide is at http://www.mobileread.com/mobiguide.

Once you have the download guide on your Kindle, clicking the link for any book takes you to a page with a brief description of the book and a download URL. Click on the link and - assuming you have the Kindle's wireless turned on - the book is automatically downloaded to your Kindle.


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In the Midnight Hour: Free Paranormal Romance Novel for your Kindle

To publicize their soon-to-be launched new social website for fans of science fiction and fantasy, Tor Books is giving away one e-book a week.

This week's offering is In the Midnight Hour, by Patti O'Shea. The first volume in the author's Light Warriors series, it is available for free by registering at Tor.com. Once you register, you will receive by return e-mail a link to download the book for your Kindle.

In the Midnight Hour is also available in a Kindle edition at Amazon.com. Volume two of the series is In Twlight's Shadow.

"Ryne is a magical troubleshooter, sworn to protect the innocent from being harmed by magic, and she's been chasing Anise, her former mentor, for six years. Deke is a private investigator who knows something key to defeating Anise. But Anise cast a dark spell over him, and even though Ryne has managed to temporarily lift the curse, Deke can't remember what it is that he knows. Ryne has sworn to never get involved with a human, but Deke is sexy, charming, brave and irresistible-and as Ryne and Deke are pulled further into Anise's evil schemes, it's harder and harder for Ryne to resist the attraction. But dark magic has its own attraction, and in order to defeat Anise and lift Deke's curse permanently, Ryne will have to risk following in Anise's footsteps and succumbing to the lure of the darkness..." - Amazon book description.

Buy a Friend a Kindle e-Book!

The lazy days of June mark the beginning of the summer reading season - time to think about giving family and friends Kindle e-books to take to the beach or on that long plane flight.

If a friend or relative has an Amazon account with a credit card attached to it, you can send them a gift card and they will be able to use it to buy Kindle books, magazines or blog subscriptions. Once they receive the gift card, they apply it to their account and their gift card balance will be automatically applied to any purchase they make on Amazon. Of course they must have the valid credit card on file with Amazon in case their purchases exceed the value of the balance remaining on the gift card.

Give an Amazon Gift Card to your Favorite Kindle Owner.


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Kindle Book du Jour: Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing

Quick update on this post. It appears that Amazon pulled this book out of the Kindle bookstore sometime this morning. I purchased it yesterday so hopefully it will be available again soon. Update to update: See note from author in comment section below. The book will be available on July 8.

Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing, by Mignon Fogarty. Holt. NONFICTION. Kindle edition $9.99.

Grammar Girl, AKA Mignon Fogarty, wants you to become a better writer. She also wants you to enjoy yourself in the process. The Grammar Girl phenomenon began with a podcast on the fine points of English grammar and usage that Fogarty, a freelance writer and editor, decided to record as a hobby simply because she had recording equipment sitting around doing nothing. To her amazement, the Grammar Girl became the #1 Podcast on iTunes. Then The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and Business Week picked up the story and she was invited to the Oprah show to field language questions from the audience.

I've just started reading the book and already have learned something my grammar school teachers didn't tell me about the use of "a" versus the use of "an". Seems they didn't have it quite right when they said that you use "a" before a word starting with a consonant and "an" before a word starting with a vowel. Gee, maybe this book will convince me to start writing in complete sentences. Maybe not. In any event, The Grammar Girl is supremely entertaining, with lots of examples illustrating everything from pronouns gone astray to the language of the Internet.

And guess what? This book is not going to be published in a tree version until July 8, but you can read it today on your Kindle. Way to go, Amazon.

Give an Amazon Gift Card to your Favorite Kindle Owner.

A Week of Entertainment: Books Reviewed in Entertainment Weekly 06/13/08

Today's Amazon Kindle status: IN STOCK for free two-day delivery!

Each week Entertainment Weekly reviews a small selection of popular new books. Titles available for the Kindle and reviewed in the June 13th issue include:

Say You're One of Them, by Uwen Akpan. Little, Brown and Company. STORY COLLECTION. EW rating: A. Amazon customer rating: 5 stars. Kindle edition $9.99.

The author of this collection of five long stories is a Nigerian-born Jesuit priest. "Uwem Akpan's stunning stories humanize the perils of poverty and violence so piercingly that few readers will feel they've ever encountered Africa so immediately... [they] take the reader inside Nigeria, Benin, and Ethiopia, revealing in beautiful prose the harsh consequences for children of life in Africa. Akpan's voice is a literary miracle, rendering lives of almost unimaginable deprivation and terror into stories that are nothing short of transcendent." - Amazon book description.

Not in the Flesh: A Wexford Novel, by Ruth Rendell. Crown. MYSTERY. EW rating: B-. Amazon customer rating: 3 stars. Kindle edition $16.02.
Inspector Wexford is once again on the case in the latest mystery title from an author who has been called the best mystery writer in the English-speaking world.
"When the truffle-hunting dog starts to dig furiously, his master’s first reaction is delight at the size of the clump the dog has unearthed: at the going rate, this one truffle might be worth several hundred pounds. Then the dirt falls away to reveal not a precious mushroom but the bones and tendons of what is clearly a human hand." - Amazon book description.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, by David Wroblewski. HarperCollins. NOVEL. EW rating: A. Amazon customer rating: 5 stars. Kindle edition $9.99.
"Amazon Best of the Month, June 2008: It's gutsy for a debut novelist to offer a modern take on Hamlet set in rural Wisconsin--particularly one in which the young hero, born mute, communicates with people, dogs, and the occasional ghost through his own mix of sign and body language. But David Wroblewski's extraordinary way with language in The Story of Edgar Sawtelle immerses readers in a living, breathing world that is both fantastic and utterly believable." - Amazon book description.

The Last Fish Tale, by Mark Kurlansky. Ballantine Books. NONFICTION. EW rating: A-. Amazon customer rating: None yet. Kindle edition $9.99.
"The bestselling author of Cod, Salt, and The Big Oyster has enthralled readers with his incisive blend of culinary, cultural, and social history. Now, in his most colorful, personal, and important book to date, Mark Kurlansky turns his attention to a disappearing way of life: fishing –how it has thrived in and defined one particular town for centuries, and what its imperiled future means for the rest of the world." - Amazon book description.

Married Lovers, by Jackie Collins. St. Martin's Press. NOVEL. EW rating: B-. Amazon customer rating: 3 stars. Kindle edition $15.44.
"In her latest sizzling blockbuster, internationally bestselling author Jackie Collins explores what happens when lust and desire collide with marriage and power—and the results lead to murder." - Amazon book description.

The Monster of Florence, by Douglas Preston, with Mario Spezi. Grand Central Publishing. NONFICTION. EW rating: B. Amazon customer rating: 3 1/2 stars. Kindle edition $9.99.
"When author Douglas Preston moved his family to Florence he never expected he would soon become obsessed and entwined in a horrific crime story whose true-life details rivaled the plots of his own bestselling thrillers." - Amazon book description.

Whacked, by Jules Asner. Weinstein Books. FIRST NOVEL. EW rating: C-. Amazon customer rating: 3 1/2 stars. Kindle edition $9.99.
"Asner—ex-model, wife of director Steven Soderbergh and E! Entertainment Television personality—debuts with a dishy mix of Tinseltown hackdom, chick lit and, surprisingly, a chilling plot." - Publishers Weekly.

Love Today: Stories, by Maxim Biller. Simon & Schuster. STORY COLLECTION. EW rating: B+. Amazon customer rating: None yet. Kindle edition $9.99.
"Following the appearance of two stories in The New Yorker, German author, playwright, and journalist Maxim Biller makes his English-language debut with a collection of remarkable and beautifully wrought short stories, Love Today.These twenty-seven exquisite vignettes reveal the frustration, longing, and loneliness of human intimacy and love in the twenty-first century." - Amazon book description.

How to be Single, by Liz Tuccillo. Atria Books. CHICK LIT. EW rating: B+. Amazon customer rating: None yet. Kindle edition $9.99.
"Irked by the NYC dating scene, 38-year-old publicist Julie treks around the world to compare how women in different cultures cope with the stigma of being unattached." - Lindsay Soll for EW.

Secrets of a Shoe Addict, by Beth Harbison. St. Martin's Press. CHCK LIT. EW rating: B. Amazon customer rating: None yet. Kindle edition $9.99.
"In this deliciously sassy novel, three very different women bond when they find themselves in more than one kind of trouble. It’s the story of how sometimes you have a secret that can get you in---and out---of dire straits. It’s about romance, friendship, kids, revenge, affairs, and, most of all, a love of the well-heeled things in life." - Amazon book description.

Free E-Books in French for Your Kindle

Looking to brush up your French? Then check out Ebooks Libres & Gratuits, a site with more than 1200 downloadable documents in French. Here you can search by author, title, genre or broad category for books written in French.

Available on this site is one of my childhood favorites, Le Petit Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. The English translation, The Little Prince, is available in paperback on Amazon.

"Antoine de Saint-Exupéry first published The Little Prince in 1943, only a year before his Lockheed P-38 vanished over the Mediterranean during a reconnaissance mission. More than a half century later, this fable of love and loneliness has lost none of its power. The narrator is a downed pilot in the Sahara Desert, frantically trying to repair his wrecked plane. His efforts are interrupted one day by the apparition of a little, well, prince, who asks him to draw a sheep. 'In the face of an overpowering mystery, you don't dare disobey," the narrator recalls. 'Absurd as it seemed, a thousand miles from all inhabited regions and in danger of death, I took a scrap of paper and a pen out of my pocket.' And so begins their dialogue, which stretches the narrator's imagination in all sorts of surprising, childlike directions." - Amazon book description.

In the Garden of Iden: Free Science Fiction for your Kindle

To publicize their soon-to-be launched new social website for fans of science fiction and fantasy, Tor Books is giving away one e-book a week.

This week's offering, In the Garden of Iden, the first volume in Kage Baker's series historical time-travel adventures, is available for free by registering at Tor.com. Once you register, you will receive by return e-mail a link to download the book.

It is also available in a paperback edition at Amazon.com. In the Garden of Iden, by Kage Baker. Tor Books, 2005. SCIENCE FICTION.
"In 16th-century Spain, everybody expects the Spanish Inquisition, as they have a well-known tendency to cart people off to their dungeons on trumped-up charges. What 5-year-old Mendoza, on the brink of being tortured as a Jew, is totally unprepared for is to be rescued by the Company--the ultimate bureaucracy of the 24th century--and made immortal. In return, all she has to do is travel through time on a series of assignments for the Company and collect endangered botanical specimens. The wisecracking, mildly misanthropic Mendoza wants nothing to do with historical humans, but her first assignment is to travel to England in 1553--uncomfortably close to those damn Inquisitors--with Joseph and Nefer, two other Company operatives. Their intent is to gather herb samples from the garden of Sir Walter Iden, a foolish though generous country squire." - Amazon book description.

Looking for a gift for a Kindle owner? Buy them an Amazon Gift Card they can use to purchase Kindle books.

Too Many M&Ms, or, My Kindle is Thinking Diet

Give Amazon Gift Cards for Father's Day

In choosing books for my Kindle reading pleasure, I read reviews and those all-important free samples from the Kindle book store. To a Kindle owner, free samples are like M&Ms to a chocolate addict. My Kindle has eaten a lot of M&Ms.

The problem with samples - one that I hope will be solved in upcoming software releases - is that you have no option to automatically remove a sample after reading it. Even if you decide to purchase the book, the samples remain on your Kindle until you go into the Content Manager and remove them manually. At this point my poor Kindle has 45 screens of samples so I've decided to put it on a diet.

Luckily putting the Kindle on a diet doesn't require me to give up chocolate or take diet pills. I'm going to start by removing the samples I've already read and then make it a rule-of-thumb to read samples as I request them and delete them immediately. That way my book collection will be easier to handle. If I get an uncontrollable urge to request more samples than I can read, I'll note them down in a waiting list in the notes section of my e-mail program. At least that's the plan.

Readers, what has been your experience with samples? Love them? Hate them?


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Samples were a big factor in my decision to buy the two books that I'm reading now, one a novel and the other an autobiography:

The Wolfman, by Nicholas Pekearo. Tor Books, June 2008. CRIME FICTION/HORROR. Amazon customer rating: Five stars. Kindle edition $9.99.

The opening paragraph of the sample drew me in. It reads "Let me paint a picture for you: The full moon was bulbous and yellow like the blind and rotted eye of a witch that peered down from the murky sky with bad intentions, and a million little stars shone down on the sleepy Southern town of Evelyn. The breeze was gentle and cool, carrying on it the scent of flowers and wet earth from the recent rain spell. The only thing missing was the children singing hymns, and I'm sure it would have been enough to make someone happy to be alive."

Ghost: Confessions of a Counterterrorism Agent, by Fred Burton. Random House, June 2008. MEMOIR. Amazon customer rating: Five stars. Kindle edition $9.99.

This account of the life and work of an agent in the Diplomatic Security Service (the arm of the State Department that protects U.S. embassy officials abroad) begins "I carry a list of names with me at all times...Each name on my list has eluded pursuit and is still out there, on the loose. There is a story behind every one. Images of their victims still hover in my view. Some are frozen in time, forever young, with loved ones and family members and children standing by grave sites, left, sometimes forever, to wonder what happened...I don't need the list to remember their names, for they are all burned into my memory like the sharp flash of a revolver in a dark alley. I close my eyes and recall the sophisticated street dances of surveillance, the code names and radio traffic chattering in my earpiece while my feet ached from standing so long on post..."

U.S. News & World Report: New Weekly Magazine for the Kindle

Today's Amazon Kindle status: IN STOCK for free two-day delivery!

The U.S. News & World Report is now available in the Kindle store. Monthly Price: $1.99, including free wireless delivery via Amazon Whispernet within the United States. For those Kindle owners without Whispernet access, issues may be downloaded to your computer and moved to the Kindle manually via USB. Subscription includes a free 14-day trial period.


"Founded in 1933, the weekly national news magazine U.S.News & World Report is devoted to investigative journalism and reporting, and to analyzing national and international affairs, politics, business, health, science, technology, and social trends. Through its annual rankings of America's Best Colleges, America's Best Graduate Schools, and America's Best Hospitals, and its News You Can Use® brand of journalism, U.S. News has earned a reputation as the leading provider of service news and information that improves the quality of life of its readers....The Kindle Edition of U.S.News & World Report contains most articles found in the print edition, but will not include all images and tables." - Amazon description.

Free Books for Your Kindle

The newest addition to the Find Books for Your Kindle list (see list on the right hand side of this Kindle Reader page) is the New Free Books site where you will find links to fiction (mystery, science fiction, romance, fantasy, etc.) and non-fiction. New Free Books links to complete e-books still covered by copyright, but legally distributed in most cases from the author's own websites.

Just a word of caution about this site: You have to do a bit of scrolling to see all the titles and as each title links to a different web site, you will find that some books are more Kindle-friendly than others. Some are designed to be read on a computer and require cutting and pasting of chapters into a text file to get separate chapters all together to transfer to your Kindle. Others are simple PDF downloads, while some require you to register at the web site before reading them. Check it out. You might find something to add to your growing Kindle library.


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A Week of Entertainment: Books Reviewed in Entertainment Weekly 06/06/08

Today's Amazon Kindle status: IN STOCK for free two-day delivery!

Each week Entertainment Weekly reviews a small selection of popular new books. Titles available for the Kindle and reviewed in the June 6th issue include:

Crazy Good: The True Story of Dan Patch, the Most Famous Horse in America, by Charles Leerhsen. Simon & Schuster. BIOGRAPHY. EW rating: A-. Amazon customer rating: 5 stars. Kindle edition $9.99.
"The first superstar of 20th-century sports was a horse: Dan Patch had the bloodlines, talent, and temperament to break most of the era's records...Sports Illustrated executive editor Leerhsen vividly recounts Dan-mania and digs up dirt on the colorful gamblers and shady horse handlers of the 1900s..." - Bob Cannon, EW.

Devil May Care, by Sebastian Faulks. Publisher. THRILLER. EW rating: B. Amazon customer rating: 3 1/2 stars. Kindle edition $9.99. Written to celebrate the centenary of Ian Fleming’s birth on May 28, 1908.
"An Algerian drug runner is savagely executed in the desolate outskirts of Paris. This seemingly isolated event leads to the recall of Agent 007 from his sabbatical in Rome and his return to the world of intrigue and danger where he is most at home. The head of MI6, M, assigns him to shadow the mysterious Dr. Julius Gorner, a power-crazed pharmaceutical magnate, whose wealth is exceeded only by his greed. Gorner has lately taken a disquieting interest in opiate derivatives, both legal and illegal, and this urgently bears looking into." - Amazon book description.

Redneck Boy in the Promised Land: The Confessions of "Crazy Cooter", by Ben Jones. Harmony. MEMOIR. EW rating: B. Amazon customer rating: none yet. Kindle edition $9.99.
"Ben Jones’s hilarious, uplifting life story of escaping the rail yards and finding success in the unlikeliest places. As a child, Jones called a dingy railroad shack with no electricity or indoor plumbing home. An unabashed Southern redneck..., Jones grew up in the depressed railroad docks outside of Portsmouth, Virginia, and spent most of his days dreaming about where the tracks out of town could take him. That he would go on to become a beloved television icon on The Dukes of Hazzard and a firebrand two-term Congressman is a story that no one could have ever seen coming . . . least of all ol’ "Cooter" himself.

Outtakes from a Marriage, by Ann Leary.. Shaye Areheart Books. FIRST NOVEL. EW rating: B-. Amazon customer rating: none yet. Kindle edition $9.99. Debut novel by the wife of Denis Leary of the TV series Rescue Me.
"Julia and Joe Ferraro are living the good life in Manhattan now that Joe’s finally made it; he’s the star of a hit TV show and has just been nominated for a Golden Globe award. After many lean years, they’ve got a grand Upper West Side apartment and an Amagansett beach house, and their two kids go to elite private schools. Even better, Julia and Joe are still madly in love. Or so Julia thinks until the fateful evening when she accidentally hears a voice mail on Joe’s phone— a message left by a sultry-sounding woman who clearly isn’t just a friend...A unique take on the perennially popular issue of women trying not to lose themselves in matrimony and motherhood... set against the Manhattan preschool mafia, the Hollywood machine, and the ticking clock of a waiting red carpet." - Amazon book description.

When you are Engulfed in Flames, by David Sedaris. Little, Brown and Company. HUMOROUS ESSAYS. EW rating: B. Amazon customer rating: 4 stars. Kindle edition $9.99. Repetition alert: some of these essays were previously published in the New Yorker or heard on This American Life.
"David Sedaris's ability to transform the mortification of everyday life into wildly entertaining art, (The Christian Science Monitor) is elevated to wilder and more entertaining heights than ever in this remarkable new book." - Amazon book description.

Nothing to Lose, by Lee Child. Delacorte Press. THRILLER. EW rating: A-. Amazon customer rating: 3 stars. Kindle edition $9.99.
"Two lonely towns in Colorado: Hope and Despair. Between them, twelve miles of empty road. Jack Reacher never turns back. It's not in his nature. All he wants is a cup of coffee. What he gets is big trouble. So in Lee Child’s electrifying new novel, Reacher—a man with no fear, no illusions, and nothing to lose—goes to war against a town that not only wants him gone, it wants him dead." - Amazon book description.

The Spies of Warsaw, by Alan Furst. Random House. THRILLER. EW rating: B-. Amazon customer rating: 5 stars. Kindle edition $9.99.
"An autumn evening in 1937. A German engineer arrives at the Warsaw railway station. Tonight, he will be with his Polish mistress; tomorrow, at a workers’ bar in the city’s factory district, he will meet with the military attaché from the French embassy. Information will be exchanged for money. So begins The Spies of Warsaw, the brilliant new novel by Alan Furst, lauded by The New York Times as 'America’s preeminent spy novelist.' "- Amazon book description.

Final Theory, by Mark Alpert. Simon & Schuster. THRILLER. EW rating: C+. Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars. Kindle edition $9.99.
"David Swift, a professor at Columbia University, is called to the hospital to comfort his mentor, a physicist who's been brutally tortured. Before dying, the old man wheezes "Einheitliche Feldtheorie." The Theory of Everything. The Destroyer of Worlds. Could this be Einstein's proposed Unified Theory--a set of equations that combines the physics of galaxies with the laws of atoms? Einstein died without discovering it. Or did he? Within hours of hearing his mentor's last words, David is running for his life. The FBI and a ruthless mercenary are vying to get their hands on the long-hidden theory. Teaming up with his old girlfriend, a brilliant Princeton scientist, David frantically works out Einstein's final theory to reveal the staggering scope of its consequences." - Amazon book description.

The Other, by David Guterson. Knopf. NOVEL. EW rating: A. Amazon customer rating: 4 stars. Kindle edition $9.99.
"When John William Barry and Neil Countryman meet at a high school track meet in the early 1970s, they are two sides of the same coin: John is a trust fund baby and student of a prestigious private school while Neil is solidly working class, but they share an affinity for the outdoors and apprehension over impending changes in their lives. After an unintentionally challenging week lost in the wilds of the North Cascades, John is compelled to an ascetic path: life in a remote river valley in the Olympic Peninsula rainforest... Neil meanwhile chooses a traditional path as a father and school teacher, despite his troubled friend's exhortations to eschew 'hamburger world' and find truth in a simpler, stripped-down existence. Nothing is that simple, of course, and The Other compellingly explores the compromises we make to balance meaning and security in our lives through the choices (and their subsequent consequences) of these two men." - Jon Foro.

Loose Girl, by Kerry Cohen. Hyperion. MEMOIR. EW rating: B+. Amazon customer rating: none yet. Kindle edition $9.99.
"Kerry Cohen's extraordinary memoir tells it like it is -- she's a teenager like any other, dealing with parents, school, and friends, but for some reason, 'standing out' seems to have become almost impossible. Boys - and men - are a different matter altogether, and young Kerry soon realizes that, with the right clothes and attitude, she can get all the male attention she wants. What she doesn't realize is how easy it is to get more than you're ready for. In rich, engaging detail, Loose Girl discovers what it's like to live for sex. Looking back on her girlhood, Kerry Cohen remembers how it felt to be in that desperate moment, and why it's so important to come to terms with it -- moving forward with confidence and strength." - Amazon book description.

Accidentally on Purpose, by Mary F. Pols. HarperCollins. MEMOIR. EW rating: A-. Amazon customer rating: none yet. Kindle edition $9.99.
"At thirty-nine, movie critic Mary Pols knew she wanted to have a baby. But never - not in a million years - on her own. To take on the physical, emotional, and financial challenges of motherhood without a perfect soul mate/husband would be absurd, kind of like not bothering to use a condom during a one-night stand with an adorable but jobless guy ten years her junior. Pols spends the ensuing weeks despairing over everything, from the financial nightmare of single motherhood to the end of her hopes for a traditional life. With humor, insight, and compelling honesty, she reveals what it means to compromise in the name of love and to find joy in an accidental life, suddenly brimming with purpose." - Amazon book description.

Two Free Mystery Novels for Your Kindle

A quick bulletin for Kindle owners who might have missed yesterday's issue of the Kindle Daily Post. In addition to Orphans of Chaos (mentioned in yesterday's post), two mystery titles will be available for free through the Kindle book store until June 12, 2008:

1. In the Bleak Midwinter, by Julia Spencer-Fleming. St. Martin's Press. MYSTERY FICTION. Amazon customer rating: 5 1/2 stars. Kindle edition $0.00. "This first novel, winner of St. Martin's Malice Domestic Award for 2001, introduces an unusual investigative partnership and a probable new series. Russ Van Alstyne, police chief of Millers Kill, and Clare Fergusson, new-to-town Episcopal priest, first meet when she reports a baby abandoned at the church. The two later discover the body of the baby's young mother. As the investigation progresses, Clare runs into opposition from staid church members, two of whom will do anything to adopt the child." - Library Journal.

2. A Fountain Filled with Blood, by Julia Spencer-Fleming. St. Martin's Press. MYSTERY FICTION. Amazon customer rating: Four stars. Kindle edition $0.00. "Spencer-Fleming's second cozy-cum-thriller to feature the Reverend Clare Fergusson, an ex-army helicopter pilot turned Anglican priest, is every bit as riveting as her first... A series of gay bashings, the discovery of PCBs in a local elementary school playground and a brutal murder heat up the Adirondacks town of Millers Kill, N.Y., hotter than the July weather. Clare, rector of St. Alban's Episcopal Church, and the very much married police chief Russ Van Alstyne, who have spent the last six months avoiding each other in hopes of dispelling their mutual attraction, find themselves working together on a perilous murder investigation." - Publishers Weekly.

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Note to readers: The book prices quoted here are the Amazon.com prices in effect at the time of the blog posting. Please follow the links to the individual book to check the current price.

Orphans of Chaos: Free Fantasy Novel for your Kindle

Today's Amazon Kindle status: IN STOCK for free two-day delivery!

To celebrate their soon-to-be launched new social website for fans of science fiction and fantasy, Tor Books is giving away one e-book a week.

Orphans of Chaos is this week's offering and it's available either at the Amazon Kindle bookstore or by registering at Tor.com and downloading it to your computer. Wright is an American author of science fiction and fantasy novels and was a Nebula award finalist for Orphans of Chaos. In reviewing his debut novel The Golden Age, Publishers Weekly termed him "this fledgling century's most important new SF talent."

Orphans of Chaos, by John C. Wright. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. SCIENCE FICTION. Kindle edition $0.00.

"In the first installment of the Chronicles of Chaos series, common associations of high school with prison prove spectacularly well founded. The five teen protagonists are hostages in a British boarding school run by pagan gods. Sustaining themes of lost identity from Wright's respected Golden Age trilogy and heavily borrowing from the work of Roger Zelazny, the narrative charts the teens' discovery of their true identities--they're shape-shifters who hail from Chaos--then pits their budding powers against school authorities who have proceeded from acting in loco parentis to being ominous and occasionally lascivious oppressors." - Amazon book description.

Amazon Shorts for the Kindle

Today's Amazon Kindle status: IN STOCK for free two-day delivery!

Read any good Shorts lately?

Amazon Shorts are coffee-break-size short works of fiction or non-fiction by well-known authors. Each Short costs 49 cents and once purchased, it's available in your Amazon Media Library, as an HTML web page, a PDF file or as text sent to your e-mail address. Amazon Shorts never expire, and you can download them as text files to your computer and move them to your Kindle via the USB cable. If you're feeling lazy, you can e-mail the text or pdf version to your Kindle e-mail account and let Amazon deliver it wirelessly to your Kindle.

Some shorts that I've enjoyed recently include:

Faces, by David McCullough. 1,718 words.
How do we know what the historical figures we see only in the painted portraits of a pre-camera age really looked like? McCullough, author of 1776 and His Excellency: George Washington, ponders this question.

Growing Up Peculiar, by Bernard Cornwell. 3,270 words, 12 pages.
This autobiographical essay on the harrowing childhood of the famed historical novelist gives the reader some insight on how it may have influenced his writing.

Why I Write About Elves, by Terry Brooks. 2,302 words, 11 pages.
Brooks, author of eighteen New York Times bestsellers, was inspired to write fantasy after reading The Lord of the Rings. This eleven page essay is a very personal account of why he writes in this genre.

For more Shorts, visit the Amazon Shorts Store

Should You Buy a Kindle?

Today's Amazon Kindle status: IN STOCK for free two-day delivery!

I blog about the Kindle so you'd be right in guessing that I think it's a marvelous device. It is not, however, a device for everyone. I was in a used book store not so long ago when a man pushed passed me on his way to the computer software/video game section. As he passed, I heard him say to a friend "I don't understand why all these people are interested in books when they could be playing video games." If you are that guy, you probably are not thinking of buying a Kindle.

If you are trying to decide whether or not to purchase a Kindle, try answering the following questions. The more "yes" answers, the more the likelihood that you and the Kindle will hit it off.

1. Do you like to read current bestsellers, classics, mysteries, science fiction, fantasy, romance novels, popular science, biography, history and/or current affairs books for enjoyment? This type of book is readily available for the Kindle and bestsellers will usually save you a lot of money in Kindle editions. There are also so many free books for the Kindle that - especially if you prefer the classics - you would never have to purchase a single book from Amazon. On the down side, if art history, graphic novels, or photography books are what you enjoy reading most, the Kindle, with its emphasis on text, may not be your first choice. If you read primarily for work and that reading involves intricately-formatted PDF documents, the Kindle may not be for you either. I have successfully converted a number of PDF documents for the Kindle, but documents with multiple columns, tables and graphs can present a problem.

2. Do you enjoy browsing through book stores? Do you have a library card? The Kindle book store is open 24/7 and sample chapters are free. I love shopping in the middle of the night when I can't get to sleep.

3. Would you like to be able to control the size of print in any book you buy? The Kindle has six different type sizes up to the equivalent of 20 pt type on a computer and you can change the type size instantly with just one click.

4. Do you travel a lot and like the idea of carrying a whole library of books in one small device? The Kindle will hold approximately 200 books. Add a memory card and you can have hundreds of books at your fingertips.

5. Do you like the idea of having a dictionary built in to your book so you can quickly look up words that are new to you? The Kindle has The New Oxford America Dictionary built in for easy reference.

6. Do you live in an area covered by Sprint's national high-speed (EVDO) data network? If you don't know, check your coverage at http://www.showmycoverage.com/mycoverage.jsp?id=A921ZON. If you are not in the covered area, you can still use the Kindle by downloading books, magazines and newspapers and transferring them from your computer to your Kindle via the USB 2.0 cable included with each Kindle purchase.

7. Does the idea of using your Kindle as a free elementary web browser appeal to you? The Kindle includes a rudimentary web browser that can be very useful when you are out and about and far from your computer.

8. Would you use Now Now, the free Kindle reference question service? You send Now Now a question from your Kindle and get up to three different answers from Kindle researchers (these are the folks who work for Amazon's Mechanical Turk). Questions I've had answered include: "What is the current interest rate for US treasury bills and notes?", "How many US World War II veterans are still living today?" and "Ear buds for my iPod are marked 'left' and 'right.' Is is important to make sure I put them in the correct ear and if so, why?"

9. Do you like to listen to music while you read? You can transfer MP3 files to your Kindle and listen to them through the Kindle's speaker. You can also listen to audiobooks from Audible if you have a PC.

10. Does the idea of looking up information in the Wikipdia right from your Kindle appeal to you? Often when I'm reading, a question comes to mind that can be answered with a quick visit to the Wikipedia which can be searched through the Kindle's Whispernet connection.

11. Do you like the eco-friendly nature of the Kindle? No trees are cut down to create Kindle books and no trucks are needed to ship them to you.

12. Do you want to be the first kid on your block to buy what may be a collector's item of the future? Gee, I wish I'd kept all those comic books...

I hope these simple questions have helped you in making the decision to purchase a Kindle...or not. If you are looking for an electronic reading device that is also an iPod, a telephone, a PDF reader, a television set, a radio and/or a dishwasher, the Kindle may not be for you. Otherwise, welcome to the world of the Kindle and happy reading!


more cat pictures

A Week of Entertainment: Books Reviewed in Entertainment Weekly 05/30/08

Today's Amazon Kindle status: IN STOCK for free two-day delivery!

Each week Entertainment Weekly reviews a small selection of popular new books. Titles available for the Kindle and reviewed in the May 30th issue include:

The Enchantress of Florence, by Salman Rushdie. Random House. NOVEL. EW rating: A-. Amazon customer rating: 5 stars. Kindle edition $9.99.
"The Enchantress of Florence is the story of a woman attempting to command her own destiny in a man’s world. It is the story of two cities, unknown to each other, at the height of their powers–the hedonistic Mughal capital, in which the brilliant Akbar the Great wrestles daily with questions of belief, desire, and the treachery of his sons, and the equally sensual city of Florence during the High Renaissance, where Niccolò Machiavelli takes a starring role as he learns, the hard way, about the true brutality of power. Vivid, gripping, irreverent, bawdy, profoundly moving, and completely absorbing, The Enchantress of Florence is a dazzling book full of wonders by one of the world’s most important living writers." - Amazon book description.

Chasing Harry Winston, by Lauren Weisberger. Simon & Schuster. NOVEL. EW rating: C-. Amazon customer rating: 3 1/2 stars. Kindle edition $9.99.
"The bestselling author of The Devil Wears Prada and Everyone Worth Knowing returns with the story of three best friends who vow to change their entire lives...and change them fast...Three best friends. Two resolutions. One year to pull it off." - Amazon book description.

Assisted Loving, by Bob Morris. HarperCollins. MEMOIR. EW rating: B+. Amazon customer rating: None yet. Kindle edition $9.99.
"What would you do if your eighty-year-old father dragged you into his hell-bent hunt for new love? Bob Morris, a seriously single son, tells you all about it in this warm, witty, and wacky chronicle of a year of dating dangerously... With wicked humor and a dollop of compassion, Bob Morris gleefully explores the impact of senior parents on their boomer kids and the perils of dating at any age." - Amazon book description.

Black Out, by Lisa Unger. Shaye Areheart Books. THRILLER. EW rating: B+. Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars. Kindle edition $9.99.
"When my mother named me Ophelia, she thought she was being literary. She didn’t realize she was being tragic. On the surface, Annie Powers’s life in a wealthy Floridian suburb is happy and idyllic. Her husband, Gray, loves her fiercely; together, they dote on their beautiful young daughter, Victory. But the bubble surrounding Annie is pricked when she senses that the demons of her past have resurfaced and, to her horror, are now creeping up on her." - Amazon book description.

The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce, and Obsession, by Adam Leith Gollner. Scribner. NONFICTION. EW rating: B. Amazon customer rating: None yet. Kindle edition $9.99.
"Delicious, lethal, hallucinogenic and medicinal, fruits have led nations to war, fueled dictatorships and lured people into new worlds. An expedition through the fascinating world of fruit, The Fruit Hunters is the engrossing story of some of Earth's most desired foods...Peopled with a cast of characters as varied and bizarre as the fruit -- smugglers, inventors, explorers and epicures -- this extraordinary book unveils the mysterious universe of fruit, from the jungles of Borneo to the prized orchards of Florida's fruit hunters to American supermarkets...Gollner examines the fruits we eat and explains why we eat them (the scientific, economic and aesthetic reasons); traces the life of mass-produced fruits (how they are created, grown and marketed) and explores the underworld of fruits that are inaccessible, ignored and even forbidden in the Western world."

Netherland, by Joseph O'Neill. Pantheon. NOVEL. EW rating: B. Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars. Kindle edition $9.99.
"In a New York City made phantasmagorical by the events of 9/11, Hans--a banker originally from the Netherlands--finds himself marooned among the strange occupants of the Chelsea Hotel after his English wife and son return to London. Alone and untethered, feeling lost in the country he had come to regard as home, Hans stumbles upon the vibrant New York subculture of cricket, where he revisits his lost childhood and, thanks to a friendship with a charismatic and charming Trinidadian named Chuck Ramkissoon, begins to reconnect with his life and his adopted country." - Amazon book description.

Panic in Level 4, by Richard Preston. Random House. NONFICTION. EW rating: B. Amazon customer rating: None yet. Kindle edition $9.99.
"Bizarre illnesses and plagues that kill people in the most unspeakable ways. Obsessive and inspired efforts by scientists to solve mysteries and save lives...In fascinating, intimate, and exhilarating detail, Richard Preston portrays the frightening forces and constructive discoveries that are currently roiling and reordering our world, once again proving himself a master of the nonfiction narrative and, as noted in The Washington Post, a science writer with an uncommon gift for turning complex biology into riveting page-turners." - Amazon book description.