Amazon – 1 : Barnes and Noble – 0

If you enjoy reading e-books you, much like me, were probably gearing up for what should have been a very interesting fight between Amazon and Barnes and Noble in which eBook would reader would reign supreme in Kitchen Stadium (….Iron Chef reference.. if you don’t get it don’t ask.) While the Kindle has been the champion (with the iCan’tReadABookOnABacklitScreenWithoutAHeadache trying to catch on for ebooks) the Nook has made a strong showing with an initial lower price point and being able to test the physical unit itself in stores. The in store part being a key selling point for those who were unsure if they wanted an ereader or not.

Geared up for a great fight yes? Well apparently not. A small piece of news slipped through the cracks yesterday – Barnes and Noble has put itself up for sale.

Let that sink in a minute. The largest brick and mortar book store (well primarily book store as Walmart has been catching up on sales) is looking to leave us. While I clearly have embraced the idea of a digital book the removal of the largest chain of book sellers can only hurt publishing in general.

While the company’s sales have raised 31% the previous quarter and almost 50% in the last quarter it was all on the digital front that this has been occurring. Physical book sales have been dropping.

I personally know multiple independent publishers at this point due to Buy Zombie and know first hand that across the board the successes they are seeing are primarily from online sales. This isn’t the case across the board but it is at the very least in digital store fronts that their books are being moves for those who are selling physical copies.

The world for publishing has been changing for years and this is going to mark a huge blow against the sale of physical copies in the mind of many from my generation. I fondly remember walking through book stores, browsing titles, finding new authors and soon all of this is going to be a thing of the past.

Fortunately they aren’t closing their doors quite yet and with a potential new owner might not be for a long time to come. I do need to make a trip over though to the ‘giant’ who killed so many smaller book shops in it’s time. It’s oddly entertaining how a company who was ‘responsible’ for so many shops closing might have to close due to a book seller who has no physical stores of it’s own.

What Am I Doing Tonight? “An Evening with Laurell K. Hamilton”

To celebrate the release of her latest Anita Blake novel, Bullet, Laurell K. Hamilton is travelling the country to celebrate it’s release. Guess where the first event is? Chicago baby. So tonight Leah and I will be heading over to the Music Box for a few hours to listen to Laurell talk about… whatever she feels like talking about (probably Anita Blake, the series, the latest novel, and possibly her Meredith Gentry series as well) and doing a Q&A with the audience. Leah got me into Anita Blake originally 10 years ago so we’re lucky to be able to hit this one up as it should be a ton of fun.

BULLET TOUR

As of May 14, 2010
Tuesday, June 1-Chicago, IL (kick-off event)
“An Evening with Laurell K. Hamilton”
7:00 – 9:00 PM
Music Box Theater (sponsored by Borders Books & Music)
3733 North Southport Avenue
Chicago, IL 60613-3718

• Admission is free with the purchase of a signed copy of Bullet ($18.86 plus tax after 30% event discount). There will also be $5 tickets available for anyone who wishes to hear Laurell’s talk but not receive a signed book.
• Laurell will talk and answer questions from the audience for approximately 2 hours.
• Please note that Laurell’s talks can include R-rated topics. Please use discretion in bringing children / teenagers to this event.
• All copies of Bullet will be pre-signed, signature only. Nothing at all (including earlier titles) will be signed during the event. Please do not bring books or other merchandise from home.
• Tickets will be available for sale starting May 17, 2010 at the Borders Oak Brook (630-574-0800), Borders State St. (312-606-0750) and Borders Oak Park (708-386-6927) locations. Tickets can be purchased in person or by phone.
• You will be able to pick up pre-purchased signed books the day of the event starting at 5:00 pm at The Music Box Theater. Signed books will be unavailable until this point.
• Please contact the following Borders locations with questions: Borders Oak Brook (630-574-0800), Borders State St. (312-606-0750) or Borders Oak Park (708-386-6927) locations.

Finished reading Compulsion by Jonathan Kellerman. This is the 22nd novel in the Alex Delaware series, about a child psychologist who had been enlisted to help the LAPD by his friend Milo Sturgis. One would think that a series 22 books in by the same author would get old and repetitive? Not the case at all! The characters have been been being developed over the years in a masterful style that keeps you not only interested in the characters but feverishly tearing through the pages to see what happens.

In Compulsion, a murderer is apparently randomly killing people while using expensive cars. It’s very vague and the evidence linking everything together doesn’t give any idea of a suspect and barely ties the cases together. Milo and Alex of course find the thread curious enough to follow and it leads them to a great end that ties everything together. As the investigation continues the body count starts to add up with ‘possibly’ other murders being connected to this one. When the end comes though there is no dues ex here and the hints actually allow you to get an idea of who the killer is before the final act comes to a close. My main fault with Kellerman’s previous novels is that I could barely guess ahead of time who the murderer is and this time we have suspects which end up giving you the ability to think it through. (Not a real fault as I’m obviously addicted to the books being 22 in and still buying them! You usually get enough of a hint 3/4th of the way through but this is the first that you could start making serious guesses 1/4th in.) The problem with writing on any murder/mystery is you can’t really go into details without starting to give away key ones and I know at least 2 of the people who follow this blog are fans of the series.

The subplot in the novel felt a bit under developed and there was low character development between Alex and woman he loves (Robin) however you do get so sucked in by the main plot that these are really much room for the usual subplots to get fleshed out. More than worth picking up if you follow the series. If you don’t, do yourself a favor: Buy the first one and read through it!

Amazon

Frank Herbert’s Dune series has always been close to my heart for all things sci-fi. Even with Battlestar’s emergence as my new favorite show, Dune (the original trilogy) has held onto the lofty spot of what IS science fiction to me. In recent years Brian Herbert (his son) and Kevin J. Anderson have continued on the series with 2 prequel trilogies to help explain the back story of Dune as well as 2 new novel’s to tie up how the series was truly meant to end based off of many notes and rough drafts that Frank had written before his untimely death. While they have all done a good job to date this and the previous novel were the 2 that were to tie up the loose ends. (There is another novel on the way to bridge the gap between Dune and Dune Messiah but that’s for the future. It’s actually out in hardcover now but.. it’s rare I purchase hardcovers.) Every novel up to this one has shown to be golden material on the Dune universe. So how does Sandworms of Dune stack up?

The novel starts out perfectly. Duncan Idaho and his crew are still on the run. The ‘enemy’ who was revealed in the previous novel is still hard at work and are a great added twist that helps span the entire series. The New Sisterhood is in full force on bringing together an army to stand against the oncoming threat. Face dancers are everywhere and have a plan. The most important part was that the ghoala’s brought back from the past are growing up and starting to regain the memories of their previous lives. The first 4/5′th of the novel is the build up of what is happening. The fights are intense, everything is adding up. EVERYTHING works. Until the last fifth of the novel. While this is a must read for Dune fans who want to know where the series goes the ending is very dues ex machina. I was a bit annoyed with how they dealt with the defeating of ‘the enemy’, Duncan’s role, Paul’s role, Leto II’s role, and how everything was tied together and explained. With how well everything was going, the resurrection of the Baron, the fact that there are 2 Paul ghoala’s ad odds, everything was going so well. I don’t understand how they could write the ending in such a way, specifically with the role that Duncan played. I think I really just wanted more focus on Paul or Leto II. Mainly on Paul. Still it’s worth a read to Dune fans it’s just disappointing the route they went which feels too rushed and stagnant after the great hype of the golden path and return of Paul.

Amazon

So a quick run down of the week.. Saturday night Cassie and her roommate Ashley were over which involved chronic abuse of the Wii and Guitar Hero 3… While everyone else stayed up til 3/5am I was drained and passed out somewhere between midnight and one. Sadness.

Sunday was Mother’s day so was in Oak Brook with the fam for lunch (parents, grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles, a whole slew of the Conover clan.. frightening!) After Molly came over after to crash for the night and spend the next few days pretending to look for jobs and hanging out.

You know.. while most of the females in my life read it’s rare lately that any bring a book to my attention I didn’t have yet. So Rose.. thank you. Clown Girl is one of the best novels I’ve read in quite awhile and amazingly how close in style to Chuck Palahniuk. This is a must pick up book. I haven’t read a novel that was able to drag me into it so readily in quite awhile. I actually skimped on video games and sleep to get this finished since I wanted to know where it was going. Buy this one if you enjoy reading! It’s dark, cynical, and worthwhile in every way possible. It doesn’t go with the strange over the top twist Chuck does but I think it works better with the slight differences in her writing style.

So check it out… I learned something new with html. It’s very VERY simple. It’s something I should have looked up about a year ago. I feel kind of like an idiot for not having looked it up earlier… but I discovered I should add CLEAR=ALL at the end of my br statements. What does that mean to you? Not a whole lot aside from fixing some formatting issues on anything I type that I put next to a picture. Something you really probably didn’t notice and wouldn’t… however I enjoy learning new things.. such as simple things. I should have known. Years ago. *cringes*

I got off of work for the day of my previous post. Zombie Walk. Chicago. Sweet. I wonder if it’s anywhere near my condo… they really need to post where it’s going to be..

If your even a semi-regular reader of my blog you may have noticed that I enjoy the show House M.D…. The main character is bitter, cynical, and many other fun such attributes. However did you know he wrote a book? Yes… The Gunseller by Hugh Laurie is a pulp styled detective novel set in London and a few other areas of Europe in the same style with which he acts. (Personally I want to see a movie of this with him playing the main character..) It felt like a light version of any of the pulp styled movies with more cynical humor. If you enjoy reading you would be doing yourself a favor to pick this up. It’s a light read, a quick read, you won’t get overly attached to the characters.. but you’ll love every chapter of it.

Sunday I introduced Neil to the TV version of Dune that Sci Fi put out. (The low budget first mini-series and the much higher budget second mini-series.) As a fan of the original movie he was instantly interested and quickly got caught up in the remake. (DID I MENTION THERES A MOVIE COMING OUT?!?!?! SCORE!) We were under the impression this was because the budget was spent on William Hurt as Leto for the first mini-series. At any rate. I’ve been saturated with Dune mythos from Sunday to Tuesday night and am fully into the series again. Damnit. There’s nothing else to read or watch right now. Gah!

So Molly came over Wednesday on my day off to hang out. We hand a light lunch, ordered pizza for dinner, showed her the new place, killed a lot of time talking, and went up to visit her friend that lives on the 11′th floor (so strange we’re in the same building.) Oh yes and most importantly we opened up my 50 pack set of 30′s-50′s horror movies and watched Bluebeard!

Probably one of the first movies with a character to be based loosely on Jack the Ripper. I was quite entertained though as usual any ‘horror’ movie from that era I stick in the suspense or drama category. Still it was an entertaining movie.. though I’m not usually one for a flick that puts you in the eyes of the killer unless there’s a huge twist at the end.. and let me tell you.. there wasn’t. Twists in movies I don’t think were invented yet Still.. for a movie that none of you will EVER watch.. enjoyable for a black and white flick with no semblance of special effects!

…I feel like I’m forgetting something

I have no excuse for not updating yesterday with how slow work was. With 2 people short we still had less calls come in than we have in over a year. So first we’ll start off with Sunday’s at work movie…

Michael Douglas plays the roll of someone who everyone thinks is crazy, and while he actually is crazy, discovers the secret hiding place of a treasure from ancient times. I do have to admit though the journal he finds and how he finds it are a bit.. off. While obviously insane his daughter allows him to play out his fantasies and ends up believing in them, if nothing more than to be close to her father. Evan Rachel Wood, who played the daughter, is turning out to be a decent actress (she also played Lucy in Across the Universe.) While most of her rolls aren’t too strong this one was very enjoyable (even though I’ve read reviews to the opposite she played a character able to just ‘deal with it’ regardless of how insane ‘it’ may be.) Lovers of indy movies will enjoy this, outside of that it’s a hit or miss kind of movie.

While a graphic novel and not a book I figured that I would toss up my thoughts on it anyway. The story had a very in depth look on some more realistic insights on a “What if masked heroes were real?” followed by a “what happens to the masked heroes if a TRUE super hero came into the picture?” It showed the entertainment of the novel idea of masked men running around fighting crime, followed by the acceptance, and finally the ridicule of a bunch of men running around in tights. When they are legitimized by the government this eventually turns to hatred as one of the biggest questions come into play, “Who watches the watchmen?” as in who truly polices this group of people? End all of that with a being of true super powers (somewhere between the idea of Superman and God) and how this makes the regular hero’s worthless, as well as makes the government he is affiliated with nearly all powerful just by knowing what they have in terms of a weapon. It has a lot of interesting commentary and is quite deep considering you wouldn’t notice half of that without truly paying attention to what they were doing.

Monday work is the slowest it’s been in over a year so I didn’t spend any time working on other things of say fitting a movie in while I was there.. *ahem*
We Own the Night is another one of the many cop/crime movies that have been coming out. While it is enjoyable and worth a watch I’m going to start this off by saying rent don’t buy. The replay value on this isn’t super high after an initial viewing, and while a great way to kill a slow afternoon at work not something that I’ll be returning to watch again anytime soon. With so many movies in this ‘style’ on the market (American Gangster, Gone Baby Gone, and The Departed) that are have a huge replay value I just have to stress that ahead of time. Now onto the movie itself it was enjoyable (aside from the fact that any guy watching will enjoy the first 5 minutes of the movie where Eva Mendes gets herself worked up for a fun night.) The plot was a bit on the weak side and while it carried through you didn’t get the feel for the character interaction that started off strong in the first half of the movie and slowly ebbed into a tale of revenge that also leaves Mark Wahllberg as a weak and if not annoying character.. a boring one.

Finished the night up with playing some CoD 4 with Matt.

I know I know it’s been.. a few days *ahem*… moving along. There might be big news in the world of Stu soon. While some of you already know about it some don’t so I’ll leave it a surprise because if it doesn’t happen you won’t care.. if it does it’s semi-interesting. At least for me.

With my added activities and massive Call of Duty 4 play lately I haven’t been able to get nearly as many books read as I’ve wanted to. Being able to finish off The Simeon Chamber was long overdue (though I am out of books now..) I’ve gone from reading a book a day.. to a book every few days… to a book a week.. and now I’m on a book every few weeks. It’s kind of sad. At any rate this is a lawyer turned detective novel that was a bit over the top on the plot but enjoyable nonetheless. There were multiple plot lines running through the novel all done extremely well and were enjoyable aside from the one resolved at the very end which was a ‘surprise’ that was stuck into it. This ‘surprise’ ending felt far too rushed and sadly that hurt the book. Not because it was bad, just because it felt thrown in at the very end.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford while slow at parts was part western, part revenge, and part coming of age all bundled into one. The plot itself was a great look at the killer of one of our most famous outlaws. While billed as a Brad Pitt movie the true star had to be Casey Affleck. Pitt’s character while very quiet through the majority of the movie of course had a strong presence (hell he was one of the two main characters) but it wasn’t the charismatic main character he usually is and Casey’s role as the man who kills him. Slow movie? Yes. Western? Yes… if you can deal with both of those it’s worth seeing. At the least a rent as I’m not sure how the replay value would be on this one.

There were a lot of other various things since the last update: 2 new episodes of House, 1 of which was after some small football game you haven’t already heard about , a couple episodes of sopranos, killing my knee from running too much, not being able to visit my grandmother due to her being sick, and Rex and I went out for some drinks last night as he wanted to chill for a bit. I did not use this time to harass him into buying CoD4 the next time he saw it or speak on the important things of life… (women.. booze.. video games.. etc)

Having to get up at 8am to drive my mother to the doctor was OH SO FUN!.. specially after being out til 1 and up til who knows when Bitching aside I at least had almost 2 hours to read which gave me JUST enough time to finish up:

Yes that’s right I finally had enough time to finish up the newest in paperback Kellerman book (by finish I mean of course that I started it the night before and finished it that morning… had I not been distracted by drinking it would have been done Wednesday night…) Gone was.. as every Kellerman book to date.. completely distracting of my free time. I can’t help but get sucked into his books though I have to admit this was (I think..) the first one of his that I felt I knew who was responsible in the first 1/4′th of the book.. and I’m not sure why either. Still.. great book and great to see how Alex’s personal life is coming back together. Kellerman has yet to let me down aside from not writing fast enough!

While I didn’t go with the running route again I alternated between situps, pushups, and finally giving up realizing I was still half asleep from the night before while watching:
*sighs* I don’t know what I can do aside from sigh. Keifer voicing the character he was born to voice and still I sigh. Dragonlance was one of the only novels set partially in the view of D&D that I could get into (for a WHOLE slew of series) and I had nothing but high hopes for the animated movie. With how well animated movies are going now how could I not be excited? While the plot was transferred over pretty well… the animation for the most part felt as if it was from a mid to early 90′s American cartoon… as in… It hurt to watch a lot of it. On top of that the voice acting aside from the main characters was sub-par and the end of the ‘movie’ felt entirely too rushed. Unless you are a hardcore fan this is just not worth the effort in purchasing or getting a copy of, and I feel bad about that.

Dinner with the parents, some online gaming with friends, and finally watched:
Having not seen a horror movie in awhile I have to say Return to House on Haunted Hill was perfect to pick it back up. The transition from the first movie to the sequel was ok but where they went with the plot after that didn’t really seem to follow the ideas of the plot. Still it went over well and had a lot of continuance from the first movie including plot, characters, and location. (Though I hope they don’t use the ending to make a third since there’s no possible way the series could work from it… unless they go with a new name based off the same concept through threw in. That’d be ‘ok’) While the gore level for a horror movie was decent the creativity on the death by ghosts was a 50/50 split on being ok to enjoyable. Some of the kills (specially the very last one… which, while basic, fit perfectly) were spectacular and fit great. Some were just ridiculous. Worth a watch for horror fans who enjoyed the first… a buy? Probably not.

You don’t know HOW close I was to not updating. In fact the only reason I am is because I was running so late on getting everything done today that I sped and somehow now have 20 minutes to blow off anyway I feel fit. So will do a quicky update and go make some lunch before I head back out until.. probably tomorrow.

Before I go into the movie of the day and book of the week I have to first say Jen, I’m so sorry for the news you got yesterday. You deserve better anyway!

When I first saw the previews for Joshua the only thing I could think was that they were trying to remake The Omen… the second time I saw previews I felt they were trying to remake The Omen recreating the character as a sociopath instead of the Antichrist. Seeing the movie itself showed basically a sociopath. I really enjoy the whole view of using kids as ‘the bad guy’ or being something scary in a movie. Kids can be freaky. They don’t know better, were raised wrong, whatever. The problem with this movie is they tried to show the kid as just kind of ‘snapping’ while there was a progression into his madness it seemed rather abrupt and not fully motivated. I liked it though it felt a bit rushed. Maybe theres a director’s cut out there I can find as I think my main complaint is that it felt a bit rushed. The Dave Matthews song that was on the soundtrack… “The Fly” … so perfect and a great song on top of it.

I’ve been trying to get around to finishing Above Suspicion. I’m stuck in this murder / mystery / noir streak and this falls right in being about a detective unit assigned to work on a serial killer who has been killing prostitutes across London for 10 years that no one was able to tie together until this time due to the length of time and the lack of work put into the cases. I felt the writen interaction between characters was done rather well and my only complaint is how they worked the ending on knowing who the killer was. Most crime novels you have proof of who it is but you don’t really know who until the end, this one is more of knowing it was and trying to find the proof. Good read and a change of pace from the usual murder/mystery of late.