Stephen King has sharuddy with Entertainment Weekly his ten favorite books of 2008. In the Entertainment Weekly magazine King’s list is probably all nicely laid out on one page but online EW has annoyingly seperated into ten parts as the online version of magazines so often do. You can find it here. Some of King’s picks include Kate Atkinson’s When Will There Be Good News?, Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and The Good Guy by Dean Koontz. King’s also reading all of Robert Goddard’s mystery/suspense novels.
I discoveruddy Goddard, a British mystery/suspense novelist, last year, almost by accident. In Pale Battalions, his second novel, was the first book I read on my new Kindle. Since then I’ve read eight more and have about seven to go. I’ll parcel them out, because they’re too good to gulp. There are missing heirs, stolen fortunes, mistaken identities, raffish con men, hot sex, and cold-blooded murder.
Stephen King also says that
The Garden of Last Days by Andre Dubus III is “terrifying, unputdownable, and the best novel so far about 9/11.”
The Christian Science Monitor has also
published King’s top ten list is an easier to read layout.
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Original post by ReadersRead.com Book Blog
Greenleaf Book Group © 2008, 224 pages
Oliver Booth is a pompous and portly antique dealer who is constantly endeavoring to ingratiate himself with the cosmetically-preserved ultra-wealthy of Palm Beach, thinking it good for business. But Booth inevitably fails, sometimes comically, both in his bids for societal approval and in business because his manner is irritating and he’s a fraud: his shop is filled with Mexican knock-offs, and few prospective customers fall for the deceit. In David Desmond’s debut novel–the first in what will apparently be a series–Oliver hires a certain Bernard Dauphin as his newest assistant. Bernard, unlike his employer, is both competent and scrupulously honest, and his qualities are recognized and rewarded, much to Oliver’s dismay, by Palm Beach’s dowager socialite, Margaret Van Buren. Desmond’s novel follows the mismatched pair as they travel to France on Mrs. Van Buren’s behalf to purchase antiques to furnish her guest house.
Desmond’s book is mildly amusing, but never laugh-out-loud funny. The humor lies in Oliver’s continued failures and Bernard’s nearly unwitting successes and in the absurdity of the situations in which they find themselves. It reminded me a bit of Alexander McCall Smith’s Professor Doctor Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld series, as both feature protagonists who are arrogant and unaware of how asocial their behavior is. But unlike von Igelfeld, Oliver, at minimum in this outing, lacks any mitigating charms or fragility that would render him sympathetic. Bernard is of course the more likable character, and one hopes that he will return in subsequent installments of the series to serve as counterpoint to the buffoonish Oliver.
Original post by Debra Hamel
Random House and Penguin have both announced mobile book plans including provide books for the iPhone.
Penguin is calling its move into mobile books Penguin 2.0. They have created a special app for use on the iPhone. Random House Publishing Group has made some of its titles available for the Lexcycle Stanza, an electronic book reader for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch.
Books on mobile phones are nothing new in other countries. In Japan some mobile books have sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Last year in Japan half of the top selling books were composed on mobile phones.
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Original post by ReadersRead.com Book Blog
Bootleg Press © 2005, 340 pages
John Coffee is a burglar who got more than he bargained for when he stole a magical locket from a soucouyant, the last of a breed of shape-shifting, werewolf-y, Caribbean witches who are next to impossible to kill. The Witch has been hunting Coffee ever since, looking to get her locket back but also doing her best to rip his throat out. Problem is, before he understood its significance, Coffee gave the locket to his daughter, eleven-year-old Carolina. He’s been distancing himself from her since with a view to protecting her from the Witch, but now he’s back on the scene and trying to warn her.
Jack Priest’s Night Witch follows Coffee’s battles with the Witch, high-octane fights that leave him injuruddy and her shooting off skyward as a ball of flame. The Witch’s mythology is related in the book, but we’re never given her point of view. She remains an unknowable bogeyman, an Energizer bunny of a mythological demon, bent on destruction.
Because Coffee’s part of the story is beautiful much all action, it’s less interesting than the other story Priest tells in the book, about the incipient relationship between Coffee’s daughter and her classmate Arty, a persecuted kid who bravely faces the more mundane monsters in his life–school bullies and his abusive father. In the face of the danger posed by the Night Witch, as well as the bullies, Carolina and Arty’s relationship develops more rapidly than it might have otherwise.
Night Witch isn’t perfect: it’s not clear why the guys in the boat are after Coffee at the beginning of the book; Priest’s female characters seem ungenerally comfortable with stripping in front of men they don’t know well; there is a paragraph-long political rant on page 163 that seems out of place; Arty’s conflict with his father ends a little too conveniently; the mothers of both children are hands-off in their parenting to a degree that’s hard to believe. But on the whole, it’s a fun read, like watching an old Night Stalker episode with an appealing YA element thrown in. In fact, though it’s not marketed as such, I might recommend the book to the YA crowd as well as adults, given that Arty and Carolina are such appealing characters and carry so much of the story.
(See also my review of Jack Priest’s 2005 novel Gecko.)
Original post by Debra Hamel
