Book Reviews by Today, I Read…

Remember how I was saying it’s nearly impossible to leave the house and not come home with a bunch of books? Well, it seems that I don’t even need to leave anymore. The books, they will find me. And I think I kind of like it this way.

Two books came in for review on Monday. First up courtesy of Simon & Schuster is a middle grade fantasy adventure titled Jack Blank and The Imagine Nation by Matt Myklusch. Second is Passing Strange by Daniel Waters (that cover is the UK version, btw), third book in the Generation Dead saga, courtesy of Price Minister.

The next two just arrived two, courtesy of the UPS lady. I ordered them from Amazon after they sat in my “to be ordered later” shopping cart for a few months. Both are a set of short stories for children. First is The Devil’s Storybook by Natalie Babbitt and the second is Half-Human compiled and edited by Bruce Coville.

That, combined with the other books on my shelf waiting to be read should keep me busy for a little while.

Kindle books, according to Mashable, are outselling hardcovers. Over the last three months there was a 30% margin and in the last month there was a 44% margin. Granted, these numbers are skewed since Amazon doesn’t reveal all of its data (i.e. how many books were actually sold) nor does it compare to how many paperback books were sold.

The article, however, did get me thinking about why ebook sales might be on the rise. One thing that comes to mind is the intangible nature of the ebook. With a traditional hardcover, or even paperback, the customer will need to pick it up, hold it in her hands, sniff at it a little bit, figure out where she’s going to put it, and then flip it over to see the heart-stopping amount of money she’ll need to dish out for it.

On the flip side, ebooks are ephemeral. There’s no need to make room for it and it’s (usually) much cheaper than the hardcover equivalent. For the price of one hardcover, you can grab two ebooks (assuming that it’s not a bestseller or renowned author). Plus, it’s easy.

With the click of a couple buttons, sometimes only one, you have a new book waiting to be read. It’s so easy to be caught up in the whirlwind of buying that you don’t realize how many books you’ve just bought…and it all goes back to ebooks having an ephemeral quality. With physical books, you can look at the stacks and say to yourself, I think I’ve picked up too many books, but with ebooks, you don’t have that. Or am I wrong?

I’m curious, if you’re an ebook reader, why? Do you appreciate the books taking up less space? Do you appreciate the blazing speed at which you can have the book and start reading? Is it something else altogether?

Fresh on the heels of finishing both Pharos by Alice Thompson and Stolen by Lucy Christopher (finally!), I discovered another book, Plain Kate by Erin Bow, waiting for me in my mailbox on Saturday and I couldn’t resist starting it.

Pharos was an intriguing read. The best part about the book was the prose. It was evocative, (usually) spare, and eloquent. The story itself wasn’t bad, but I still need to digest it a bit before I try to express my opinions coherently.

Stolen. Oh, Stolen. What can I say about that book? Well, first I’d say that it’s agonizingly slow in the beginning and although it does pick up somewhat around the later middle and end, it’s still relatively slow throughout. That said, I did like the story. Basically, I kinda wish it was written by someone else. But that one is also digesting so I can write a cogent review.

I’m about two thirds of the way through Plain Kate and I’m enjoying the journey. There is so much to love about this book so far: it’s a fairytale without gratuitous sugarcoating, there’s talk of witchcraft, there’s a blood-sucking ghost, and the protagonist isn’t handed all of her heart’s desires on a silver platter—she actually has to work for it. That said, I’ve spotted a couple of (minor) problems which I’ll address in the review, but as of now, this one’s a winner. (I’m totally in love with Taggle, Kate’s cat, because he’s just plain hilarious.)

Assuming I finish Plain Kate today (which I’m positive I will), I’ll take in a few short stories or possibly read one of the new books that came home with me today.

And speaking of new books, I’m now of the belief that it’s darn near impossible to leave the house without coming back with a bucket-load of books. This morning while grocery shopping, I noticed that they were having a 75% off sale, so I decided to rummage through the remains and have now added 3 new books (technically 4, but one of them is a craft book) to my library. I’m not really complaining though because they were only a buck apiece.

I hadn’t realized I’d picked up two books by the same author, but I’m hoping that I really like her style because she’s a new to me author (both of them actually).  Also, I hadn’t realized that The Wire in the Blood is the second book of a series, so I’ll have to scout out the first one before reading it.

If anyone has read Flynn or McDermid or these books specifically, I’d love to hear about your experiences with them.

Happy Tuesday! It’s time again for another edition of Teaser Tuesdays…

Here are the rules:

• Grab your current read
• Let the book fall open to a random page
• Share with us two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• You also need to share the title of the book where you get your teaser from…that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given
• Please avoid spoilers

This week’s teaser:

"He had not looked at her closely until now. And he saw true hatred in her eyes, unforgiving, murderous hatred." pg. 191 East of Eden by John Steinbeck

I’m going to admit something: I don’t remember reading anything by Steinbeck. It doesn’t mean I haven’t read anything by him (actually, I’m 99% sure I did, at least for one of my myriad Literature classes), I just don’t remember it. And lately I’ve been craving more substantial reads–books that make my mind dig deep and peer beneath the surface–and this book was just sitting on my shelf and I figured, allegory…that’ll make my mind start looking for a shovel.

Every so often I come across a scene that is so potent that it lingers long after I’ve finished reading it. That’s where the idea for this feature came from. Each Monday I intend to share with you a memorable scene from one (or more) of my reads.

If you like the idea I invite you to join me in sharing a memorable scene on your blog and link to it in a comment or just share the scene in the comment itself. (Please remember to include the book’s title and author so our wishlists and TBR stacks can grow. Also, if your scene is a spoiler, please clearly mark it as one.)

This week’s scene comes from Pharos: A Ghost Story by Alice Thompson.

The next day the pain from the burn developed into a fever and she was forced to retire to bed. Late afternoon, someone knocked on the door and she lifted her head from her pillow to see the young assistant keeper enter. Her heart sank. His looks disconcerted her. He had a very still face with green eyes that reminded her of a snake or wild creature, something from the sea. His hands moved delicately, like anemones. As if they had a life of their own, quite apart from the rest of his body, which was lithe and fluid like an acrobat’s. His body looked as if it were always alert, as if it were about to jump up and do a somersault in the air, that sitting down never quite satisfied it. But he was sitting down in front of her in the small, round room, on a wooden chair, his hands nervously twisting in his lap.

She wondered what she looked like to him. But she hardly cared and neither, it seemed, did he, as he was acting as if it were quite normal for him to come into a strange, ill woman’s bedroom and make conversation.

‘Would you like to see a trick? It might help while away the time for you.’

She tried not to smile. Being cooped up in a lighthouse must make people strange, she thought. She nodded.

He bent towards her and at first she thought he was coming towards her to kiss her, until she saw him keeping on bending, clasping his hands over his head. He moved himself over and round until he was a circle in the middle of the room. He rolled around in the center of the room like a wheel.

‘That’s not a trick,’ she said rather disappointedly.

Then she watched as suddenly, to her astonishment, he seemed to catch fire. Flames were coming out of his body as he was turning, now on the spot, as if he had been transformed into a Catherine wheel. He lit up the room in the encroaching twilight. Bright red, orange flames spun out of his curved body as he turned and she could no longer see where his head met his hands or even his body at all. He had turned into a wheel of fire.

-pg 26-7

This book had been sitting on my TBR stack for a while and for some strange reason, I was struck with a desire to read it. So far, Thompson’s writing has a tactile quality to it, which engages all the senses. It really is rather beautiful. The story is shaping up to be a mind-bending one as clues have been dropped that not everything on Jacob’s Rock is as it seems.