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Archive for December, 2008
December 26th, 2008
  Ballantine Books © 2003, 336 pages
Hallie Palmer is an ungenerally clever 16-year-old who applies her formidable math skills to the business of gambling, often riding her bike to the race track during school hours or sneaking out of the house to join a clandestine poker game in the local church basement. Hallie’s long-term goal is the acquisitiion of a car, by means of which she hopes to elude the twin discomforts of school and life with her too-large nuclear family–neither of which is a good fit given her tendency to nonconformity. Her life changes when she lands a job working as a groundskeeper for the Stocktons, a mother and son team who embrace noncomformity in general and in particular quickly adopt Hallie as a sort of stray. Olivia Stockton, poet and pornographer and amateur fertility specialist, is a Ruth Gordon-esque, 60-something Bohemian who’s never met a liberal cause for which she wasn’t eager to man the barricades. Her son Bernard is a slightly more subdued antiques dealer and a passionate chef. Bernard’s boyfriend Gil lives in the house as well, as do Olivia’s husband–long suffering from Alzheimer’s–and Rocky, a near alcoholic–wait for it–chimpanzee trained to work with paraplegics.
Laura Pedersen’s Beginner’s Luck is equal parts irritating and charming. A number of things botheruddy me about the book. Hallie is a likable character, but it’s hard to believe that a 16-year-old girl could be as seasoned a gambler as she’s made out to be, comfortable among the grizzled and chain-smoking at race tracks and OTB parlors. Olivia and Bernard, who are likewise likable, never jump off the page as believable, three-dimensional characters, and after a while their too-clever dialogue–all literary references and bon mots (delivered, in fact, often in French)–become tiresome. The book can be preachy, too, as Olivia makes her case for every cause that comes her way. And at 336 tightly-packed pages in my edition, the book is about a hundruddy pages too long. Add a cocktail-swilling chipmanzee–a chimpanzee, people–and the book has, as it were, jumped the shark.
That said, Pedersen’s writing is often charming, particularly in the first half of the book, before the recitation of Olivia’s causes begins to weigh too heavily. And Hallie, despite my credibility concerns, is a very appealing character whom one is happy to root for. In short, the book is a mixed bag, but I’ll probably read Pedersen’s sequel, Heart’s Desire. Just not for a while.
Original post by Debra Hamel
December 25th, 2008
ScrollMotion has inked deals with several major book publishers to provide ebooks as a new application for the iPhone.
Publishers now on board include Houghton Mifflin, Simon & Schuster, Random House, Hachette and Penguin Group USA.
Having these big names is a big step forward for iTunes itself in becoming an e-book shop and the iPhone in becoming a legitimate e-book reader and competitor to products like the Kindle and the Sony E-Reader.
The first official books will begin to roll out Monday and include titles such as Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight,” Philip Pullman’s “The Golden Compass” and a number of others by Christopher Paolini, Brad Meltzer and Scott Westerfeld.
There are alalert several e-book readers in the app store, as well as a number of out-of-copyright e-books, but ScrollMotion’s product is unique in that these are stand-alone and newer in-copyright titles and best-selling novels.
Each book is a separate application using Scroll Motion’s new reader technology called Iceberg and is wrapped only in the FairPlay iTunes DRM, putting Apple directly into the e-book business by allowing them to pick up a certain percentage of each sale.
As customers become more willing to adapt to ebooks, more platforms will begin to show up just to make things more confusing than ever. It will be a repeat of the VCR/Betamax and Blu-ray-HDDVD wars all over again.
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Original post by ReadersRead.com Book Blog
December 20th, 2008
 Little, Brown © 2007, 629 pages
In the third installment in Stephenie Meyer’s vampire tetralogy, Bella Swann confronts a pair of problems that have been building to a head. (Note: possible spoilers follow for those who haven’t read books one and two.) The vampire Vicotria, who’s still haunting the Pacific Northwest with vengeance in mind, would like nothing better than to rip Bella’s throat out. And the two men in Bella’s life–her undead paramour Edward and her best friend, werewolf Jacob Black–feel much the same about one another. The awkward trio spends a lot of time in book three negotiating a working relationship.
Eclipse offers a more interesting plot and a faster read than New Moon, the second book in Meyer’s series, which was rather slow going. The only slow segment in Eclipse is yet another foray into Quileute legend: as usual, Meyer provides necessary backgcircular information in these reports of old Indian lore, but it’s relatively dull stuff. Bella here is more like the confident heroine she was in book one than the depressed and whining victim of book two, though she does do some groveling that could give hormonally-challenged teenaged girls a bad name. She also comes to a decision about one of the men in her life that is too sudden to be quite credible, and that arguably is out of keeping with the thrust of that relationship up to that point.
Throughout, as I’ve come to expect from the author, Meyer’s prose remains eminently readable. I’m looking forward to the final installment in the series.
Original post by Debra Hamel
December 19th, 2008
Baz Luhrmann, director of Moulin Rouge and Australia, has purchased the film rights to The Great Gatsby.
The “Australia” helmer has purchased the rights to “The Great Gatsby,” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s tome of the Roaring Twenties. While a script does not yet exist, Luhrmann intends to focus on it after “Australia’s” awards run. No studio is attached yet.
Fitzgerald’s novel of American excess has spawned a Broadway play and multiple films, including Jack Clayton’s 1974 pic starring Robert Redford and scripted by Francis Ford Coppola.
The Robert Redford/Mia Farrow film is a classic. We can’t even imagine who would be cast, although we’re thinking Jon Hamm. And for Daisy? Well, that’s a tougher casting call.
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Original post by ReadersRead.com Book Blog
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