Penguin Classics Hardcover Collection [Hardcover]

Beautiful collection of 12 brand new books designed by Penguin Classics book designer Coralie Bickford-Smith. This collection includes Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell, Emma by Jane Austen, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence, The Odyssey by Homer, A Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, Sense & Sensibility by Jane Austen, Tess of the D'Urbevilles by Thomas Hardy, Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. These are all brand new books. Since they look so beautiful together and no one else sells them as a collection, we have decided to do so.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest

Just as Tolkein's "Lord of the Rings" is held up as the trilogy to which all fantasy trilogies are inevitably compared, I've little doubt that Larsson's Millenium series will play that benchmark role for mystery thrillers over the next few decades.

"The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest" is an incredibly worthy successor to the previous two books in the trilogy. And toward the end, there will be moments when tears are brought to your eyes. Larrson knew precisely how to play with timing, rhythm, and wording to pace the story and its ending just right. I'm hard pressed to even guess how else he could have ended this series.

The story follows the natural conclusion of the events in the first two books as everything dovetails toward a "behind-closed-door" trial. Larrson did a very good job of the first part of this book that takes place in the hospital where Lisbeth is recovering. I really enjoyed reading things from her perspective, then spinning out to others involved and each of their limited pieces of the evolving puzzle. And things just get better as the book moves along.

Frankly, once you hit part three of the book, it's almost impossible to put down. I picked it up just once...just to read a chapter or two in the second half of the book...only to find that three hours had gone by and the book was over.

Larrson's tying up of many loose ends throughout the book - and this is key - throughout the book (not all in the last few chapters like so many other writers) is masterful. And that emphasizes the one tragic aspect of this final book: knowing that we will never again be graced with Larrson's storytelling mastery.

(From Publishers Weekly)  "The exhilarating conclusion to bestseller Larsson's Millennium trilogy (after The Girl Who Played with Fire) finds Lisbeth Salander, the brilliant computer hacker who was shot in the head in the final pages of Fire, alive, though still the prime suspect in three murders in Stockholm. " (Read More)

My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands

This is a classic memoir of some ridiculously funny random sexual experiences, coupled with rampant alcohol and drug overindulgence. Chelsea's is a rare breed; a talented comic and contagious writer. Each chapter is an outlandish collection of the painful things that go wrong in her sexual conquests and latent promiscuity. The midget sex story was my favorite. Oh my!

Some great one-liners and insults in every other sentence.

Very embarrassing and hilarious stories, right from the first chapter. Chelsea is the ultimate tomboy, and can be outrageously funny. What makes this book so great is the shock value. Not just the content. Heavy drinking, drugs, and numerous sex partners are just not what you expect to read from an accomplished woman. It's just so very rare a girl is so open about her excess indulgence and spontaneous sex life like this.
She has a real talent at storytelling as well, which comes from her stand up comic days.

For fans of this genre, I'd also highly recommend the male version of this book for out of control laughs. Ripping comedy - outrageous penthouse letter stories.

Amazon Kindle 2

On the one hand I love my Kindle 1... I use it everyday, I subscribe to my favorite newspaper, I mark up my books with annotations, highlights and bookmarks.

On the other hand my Kindle 1 annoys me... unintended page changes, the awkward way I sometimes have to hold it to keep from hitting buttons, the sometimes slow page refresh, and the screen freezes that now has me traveling with a paper clip lest I need to do a reset while commuting on the train.

I've had the Kindle 2 in my hands for almost a day and have carried it on one commute. What follows is my "first impressions" review of the Kindle 2 from the perspective of an owner of the original K1. What's different, what's better and what's worse?

5 big things I immediately noticed as different:

First, when taking the K2 out of the box I immediately noted that the back cover is not easily removable (if at all) and won't slip off in my hands - as was frequent with the K1. The keyboard is also much much smaller and less obtrusive.

The second thing I noticed is power management. No longer do I have to press and hold two buttons to put the device to sleep. The switches for On/Off and Wireless On/Off are gone. There's a single small switch at the top of the K2 that handles Sleep.

The third thing I noticed - where's the silver strip? In fact, the entire navigation structure has been completely revised - I'm still getting used to it but it's a huge step forward. The silver strip has been replaced by a 4-way rocker that can also be pressed for "OK" commands, creating bookmarks, and doing highlighting.

The fourth thing I noticed - while page changing doesn't seem to me to be particularly faster - almost every other interaction on the screen is vastly accelerated... scrolling the cursor, looking up words, highlighting text, and typing text.

The fifth thing I noticed - a new power cable. This unit uses USB cables that are not compatible with K1. It's a bit of a bummer since I was hoping my wife and I could share power cables (she's taking over my K1).

What's better:

Navigation is a huge improvement. Moving the cursor to a word and having the definition of the word immediately pop up on the bottom of the screen is terrific. Using the rocker to move between articles in a newspaper makes scanning the paper much faster and enjoyable. Calling up the Menu strip is much faster and interactive. Clearly, Amazon was hard at work to make navigation quicker and easier. The hard work is apparent.

Buttons: The K1 was a constant struggle with inadvertent page changes. The design was flawed from the beginning. The single best improvement in the K2 took a few minutes of concentrated reading to realize... the button hinges are on the outside - at the edge - of the K2. You need to press on the interior of the button to get it to click. This change alone has saved me from several inadvertent page changes. Combine that with the smaller button sizes and one major source of frustration has been instantly eliminated!

Size: The K2 is thinner than the iPhone. It feels denser and maybe a tad heavier - although I did buy the premium cover which snaps into the K2 and adds to the weight (btw, I love the premium cover and think it's worth the investment).

Network Speed: The K2 can use G3 cellphone connections and when it's activated it makes a considerable difference in interactivity to the Kindle Store and when downloading Archived content.

Power Management: The little power button at the top of the Kindle is really a power slide. That is, slide it to toggle Sleep mode on and off. Slide and hold to do a full power down. And the K1's wireless on-off switch has been replaced by a menu choice in software. Works for me. Also, compared to the K1 waking from sleep is super-fast.

What's worse...

There isn't much I liked better in the K1 than the K2. One thing: calling up clippings and notes. In the K2 these items only list the first sentence or two of my highlights. In the K1 it displays the entire highlight - which makes reading through them much easier and more like reading Cliff Notes. The new interface in K2 is annoying and makes the feature much less useful. I'll be writing to Amazon to see if we can get that changed.

Closing thoughts...

The K2 is a big refinement over the K1. It feels as easy to read as the K1 but doesn't seem any crisper to my eyes (I usually read at point sizes 3 & 4). In this regard, as a book, the K1 and K2 are comparable. I wouldn't run up my credit card to buy the K2 from a belief that it's fundamentally easier to read. However, in my short time with the K2 it's a more enjoyable device to use. The change in the hinging and size of the buttons is major plus and would make it hard to go back to the K1. Amazon broke a few paradigms that K1 users are accustomed to and I found myself going to the K2 User Guide to figure out some content management issues that have been changed in this release.

Why 4 stars and not 5? The Kindle will never get 5 stars from me until Amazon implements the notion of a lending library where I can lend another Kindle user a book; which would have the book would disappear from my Kindle and appear on theirs. After x number of days the book would automatically be returned to me and taken off the other person's Kindle. Amazon says they want the device to disappear and content to stand out. I say: Until I can lend a friend a book the Kindle will never quite live up to that standard and will be, in my book, stuck at 4 stars.

Stephinie Meyer, Breaking Dawn (The Twilight Saga)

To quickly qualify my review - I discovered the Twilight Saga about a month ago, so I have basically read all four books as one 2500-page novel. I'm in my fifties, and the series was recommended to me by a 20 something guy at a bookstore. Bottom line, I can't speak to the young adult audience for whom the saga was written, and I didn't have years between books to ruminate about how it would all end. Also, whether the laws of Meyer's supernatural world were bent or broken during the writing of this book is for other reviewers to debate.

As I read the Twilight saga, the two things that carried me were the romance and suspense. The romance (whether you're a member of Team Edward or Team Jacob) was palpable throughout. The works that inspired the first three books in the saga - Pride and Prejudice, Romeo and Juliet, and Wuthering Heights - number among the great romantic stories of our time, and Meyer adapted them brilliantly to her story of first love in town of Forks, WA. In terms of suspense, big battles never seemed to be the author's choice. Tense moments were built more out of implication than body count. The final showdown with James in Twilight seemed to me the most graphic battle of the first three books. The scenes with Laurent and the Volturi in New Moon were suspenseful, but no blood was shed in either. Even in Eclipse, the confrontation with Victoria and her minions played out like the chorus describing an off-stage battle in a Greek tragedy (with a bit of head rolling tossed in for good measure). So, tense and dramatic, yes. But violent and filled with depictions of hand-to-hand combat, no.

Having said that, I think that Breaking Dawn needed more of the kind of "Cowbell" that made me a fan in the first place. All the heat of that torchy, end-of-the-world, young love was reduced to a patio-sized chiminea. The newlywed's preoccupation with sex was not a problem for me. After all, these kids had two years of pent-up passion to work out of their systems. Heck, I was almost as frustrated as they were by the time they hit that island. For me, the issue had more to do with the small amount of screen time given to Bella and Edward's great LOVE. It seemed as though the wedding guests were still picking rice of our their hair when Bella's first bout of morning sickness made an appearance. Where was the cuddling, the pillow talk, the connection between two young lovers who have finally become one? As for the other kind of Cowbell, i.e., suspense, there's a good reason that no one ever refers to The Merchant of Venice as real page turner. While the play includes a great bit of debate over a pound of flesh, I never for one moment thought that a pound of flesh would actually be extracted. Same here. I didn't expect a limb-tearing, flying-head, re-do of The 300. That's never been Meyer's style. What I did expect, though, was to believe that the characters believed - even for a moment - that they were really in danger. And I didn't.

If I'd been Meyer's editor, I'd have advised her to go for more romance (with a capital R) between Bella and Edward, less Shylock and more Buffy on the battlefield, and I'd have given that vampire UN (like the U.S. Congress) the rest of the summer off. I wasn't Meyer's editor, though. I was just one of her many readers. And as one of her readers, I have to say that I had a pretty bitchin' summer thanks to the Twilight Saga. The story kept me turning pages for about a month, and I can't remember the last time I did that much reading without a thesis paper due at the end. Also, I think Meyer does a great acknowledgements page and, based on her recommendation, I discovered the band Muse. If it's possible for music to "sound like" a book, Muse actually evokes for me memories of the Twilight Saga. Pretty cool, eh?

I hope that the negative reviews of Breaking Dawn don't keep people from making a stop in the town of Forks. It's actually a pretty interesting place with some pretty interesting people -- and an inordinate number of really cool cars.

Kerry Miller, Passive Aggressive Notes: Painfully Polite and Hilariously Hostile Writings

I always LOL at the PAN site, so I was thrilled to check out notes that didn't make it to the web. This book didn't disappoint. Somehow, the new stuff in the book is even more hilarious than what I've seen on the site. I'm just in awe of all the crazy people out there that write these notes! I've already passed the book to one of my co-workers who shares my distaste for people who'd rather write a note than make a verbal request. This is the perfect gift for your roommate or cube-mate (but read it yourself, first!).

Justin Halpern, Sh*t My Dad Says

Reading Justin Halpern's book brought back memories of my own father's words of wisdom. Although my father (a southern gentleman by birth) was somewhat more prudent in his use of curse words and references to sex, he never hesitated in telling his children (or anyone else for that matter) exactly what was on his mind. I remember when I introduced him to my first really serious girlfriend, a young woman who was more than a foot shorter than myself. He took me aside and said, "What's the matter, didn't they have one in your size?" However, when we later announced our engagement he was the first to congratulate us and brought out the bottle of Cold Duck that he was saving for such an occasion.

When the author was 28 years old he was suddenly dumped by his girlfriend and needed a place to live when he made the decision to move back in with his mother and his then retired father. Working from his new "home" as a writer for Maxim Magazine gave him the time (an awful lot of time according to the author) to see his father through new, adult eyes. The terror that he had felt in his youth due to his father's "bluntness" began to be replaced by admiration for the only person that he had ever known who really spoke his mind without self-censorship. It was only then that he began to see the wisdom in his father's tersely worded observations and began posting them on his Twitter page with the same title as this book.

Because Mr. Halpern Sr. has the gift of being able to "swear with great expertise" I can't quote many of them on Amazon, but here are a few of my favorite PG rated quips:

ON THE DEATH OF OUR FIRST DOG
He was a good dog. Your brother is pretty broken up about it, so go easy on him. He had a nice last moment with Brownie before the vet tossed him in the garbage.

ON MY BLOODY NOSE
What happened? Did somebody punch you in the face?!... The what? The air is dry? Do me a favor and tell people you got punched in the face.

ON THE MEDICINAL EFFECT OF BACON
You worry too much. Eat some bacon... What? No, I got no idea if it'll make you feel better, I just made too much bacon.

ON SHOPPING FOR PRESENTS FOR HIS BIRTHDAY
If it's not bourbon or sweatpants, it's going in the garbage... No, don't get creative. Now is not a creative time. Now is a bourbon and sweatpants time.

ON BEING ONE WITH THE WILDERNESS
I'm not sure you can call that roughing it son... Well, for one, there was a (EXPLETIVE) minivan parked forty feet from your sleeping bags.

ON SILENCE
I just want silence... Jesus, it doesn't mean I don't like you. It just means right now, I like silence more.

If you grew up with a Ward Cleaver type of father (or wish that you did) you may find Mr. Halpern's way of expressing himself to be crude, unfeeling, or even uncaring. Far from it. The author augments the pithy quotes (some recent, other's from his childhood) with brief essays that gives the reader a little more of the back story of this unique father-and-son relationship. Is it ideal? I have learned that, for me at least, the best way to judge someone's parenting is by the adult it produces. Justin Halpern's book reads to me as a love letter to a father that always tells it like it is and who made you who you are.

My father passed away at age 87 in 2008. At his wake (we are Irish after all so alcohol was involved) his former co-workers, friends and family paid tribute to him by telling our own little stories and quotes from a man who could be described as both taciturn and brutally honest. The recollections from my three brothers, my sons and myself included stories and things that my dad said that to the outside observer might have also seemed acerbic or even caustic, but to us it was the way that he showed us that he cared

This book is not for those addicted to a PC idea of what a father should be or for those who are easily offended by real life conversation. But if you, like me, value frank and seemingly brutal honesty (especially from someone who brought you into this world) this book will delight you as much as it has me. I only wish that I could give this to my dad for Father's Day. He would have laughed his (BLANK) off!