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Happy birthday to you! Alternate Susan!

You can get it right now from the link above. Amazon in a week, bookstores and other places in a month or two, ebook soon.

I got this off bookbub, figuring that I was willing to take a chance on a free book. It’s exactly as promised: stories of cops who went from excelling in their career to being persona-non-grata, usually because of hubris.

Fortier has a direct style of writing. For the most part, it’s “just the facts” but when he has an opinion of a person’s character, he doesn’t hide it. Ther stories themselves are fascinating, and more than once I wished he would expand on it. Any one of these stories could be the outline for its own novel. I’ve read many true-crime novels with less material to work with. So in a way, it was frustrating that Fortier didn’t elaborate and find out more details in some cases. He’d just say something like “so and so eventually got caught in a drug bust and arrested for being with an underage girl” and I’d think “Wait, tell us more about that!” but he’d just go on to the next story.

I liked this book. It was pretty short, but it had a distinct viewpoint that felt authentic and I enjoyed getting to know more about what it’s like to be a cop.

I recommend this for fans of true crime novels.

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http://www.littlebrown.co.uk/Books/detail.page?isbn=9781405528825 This is just out. Follow the link to get the book.

My story “She’s Taking her Tits to the Grave” is in it, but there are a lot of other people you might also have heard of.

I started this book not having any preconceived notions of what it was or what it was about except that the cover said it was an international bestseller.

I can see why it was an international bestseller. While the story is a simple story (which I had heard before, slightly altered–I don’t know which was the original) the tone is one of solid, confident, wisdom. Coelho writes like a man who knows the secrets of the world, and will tell them to you one by one, if you are only wise enough to listen. Some people hunger for that kind of unyielding faith.

When I first started reading it, I appreciated the spiritual feel-goodery of it. I don’t mind a little spirituality now and again. As a skeptic and a critical cynic, it didn’t take long before I saw enough flaws in the message of the book to get disgruntled. There’d be a “that is the way of the world, that is the way the world is” and I’d be like “now just a doggone minute, there partner, I can think of three examples in which that is clearly untrue.” It started to irritate me. I realized if I wanted to continue, I’d have to ignore the questionable spiritual message and just see it as a fantasy story based on someone else’s religious beliefs.

I didn’t mind the style. I don’t mind folklore and fairy tales now and again, and that’s basically what this book is. The philosophy is flawed, but as folklore, it’s not bad.

I recommend this book for new age seeker types, and for people who like old stories and folklore set in the Mediterranean.

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I bought this book after attending a panel and workshop presented by the author at a con, and I was so hungry to learn more that I bought her book. Class in America is a subject that we don’t like to talk about. In fact, many people pretend (and maybe even believe)it doesn’t exist.

Jensen is an academic, and the writing lapses into a more academic style at times, but she peppers this book with enough anecdotes to make it accessible to ordinary people. She talks about the differences between working class and middle class people, from raising children to the structure of family gatherings to work culture and attitudes towards independence and school and solidarity. She talks about how cultural differences between classes are sometimes couched as differences in morality or taste.

What I liked most about this book is the way in which it made me think about the difference between classes as cultural differences. It made me realize that “go to school and get an education so you can get ahead” basically just means to go from working class to middle class, with the inherent costs of distancing oneself from ones culture. It made me think about the war on the working class. I think it’s no surprise that more than one television show that invites the middle class to mock the working class came out right after the Occupy Wall Street movement. After all, the first thing that the CIA does when it wants to destabilize a country (so they can take over)is to inflame preexisting internecine tensions.

The author has a distinct liberal slant, which isn’t surprising considering the subject matter. I roll my eyes at Obama-worship, but I skimmed past the political slant, because this book has very valuable information here about class in America. I recommend this for people who want to know more about how our country works.

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I thought I’d grown tired of YA fantasy, but apparently I can be wooed back into the fold with time travelers. I got this as an audiobook, and was drawn in by the narrator’s depiction of an average modern British teen who just happens to see ghosts and have a cousin who’s fated to be a time traveler.

There’s plenty of intrigue and mysteries and danger in this, as well as some cute costumes and a little bit of romance, provided by a cute, green-eyed boy who looks good in knee britches and knows how to fence. There are evil counts, gargoyles, dopplegangers, a hidden society, and a mysterious kiss.

I was afraid by the pacing that the plot would not be resolved in only one book, and unfortunately, that turned out to be the case. Intrigues are set up but not explained, and there isn’t a traditional plot arc. This book will be unsatisfying unless you recognize that it’s part of a larger story. I recommend this for YA fans who don’t mind getting involved in a series.

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This is a very well done urban fantasy with the unusual twist in that it takes place in a dystopian future with gas rationings and road blocks, where terroist attacks disrupt daily life everywhere in America.

There are two stories here, one of which is Evie, who has gone home to Hope Springs, Colorado, to visit her dying father. The other is the story of Sinon of Ithaca, fierce warrior better known for his role in convincing the denizens of Troy to accept the wooden horse. Vaughn combines these stories through a magic store room, where lost treasures of the world await their true owners.

Sinon and Evie’s stories get wrapped up with other myths of legend, as various gods and demigods come to the store room to gather things that belong to them (or not). The end of the world may or may not be nigh, and Evie has to decide whom to help.

What I liked about this novel was the setting. I liked the feeling of being in a small town where everyone knows you, juxtaposed with the paranoid future American where it’s considered patriotic to report strangers to the police. I liked the tidbits of the history of the store room, and the small history of the town and Evie’s family. I also liked Sinon’s story, because he’s a less-well-known figure of history/legend. I’m generally not a fan of more famous figures being interwoven into the story, for example, Arthur and Merlin (though there’s a great scene with the sword that made me laugh.) It didn’t break the story for me, however.

Vaughn’s a great writer, and I loved the character development of Evie, especially with her relation to Tracker, the heroine of the comic she writes scripts for. She was a plausible, believable character, as was Sinon. Sinon’s relationship with Apollo was also creative and well done, with some gritty realism you don’t usually get from mythological rewrites. The only thing I didn’t like was the ending. It seemed as if everything happened so quickly that I wasn’t sure what really happened. Also, Evie and her father fought valiantly agains something that they eventually just succumbed to without a second thought. I didn’t have a good sense of why they made that decision, and I didn’t have a sense of whether or not it was a good decision.

There’s a faint romantic subplot which I liked, though it was only a faint thread in the story and not a major component. The characters were well done, and I liked the setting, and I would have really, really liked this book if the ending had been clearer and more logical.

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I like Seth Godin very much and had high hopes for this book. I’d heard it was his best, and I’ve enjoyed some of his other books. I hoped that by reading it I’d learn when to quit and when to stick. There are situations in my life when I don’t know which I should do, and I thought he might have some insight.

I don’t think this book teaches you when to quit and when to stick. It talks about how quitting is important, and that you have to stick with things when they get tough or you’ll never be the best in the world at whatever, and that the best in the world is subjective. I got confused, and felt that his ideas weren’t outlined coherently enough. I know that sometimes quitting is important, and sometimes sticking with something difficult is important, but I still don’t have a way of telling which is which, and I don’t think this book helped.

I did like the fact that it included drawings. I wished there was a chart for the cul-de-sac, and maybe some examples.  Actually, it needed a lot more examples.

I don’t really recommend this book. I think you’ll get better advice by reading his blog. Sorry, Seth. It just didn’t do it for me.

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The subtitle of this book reads: A Journey Through the Madness Industry, and that’s exactly what this book is like. A journey. It begins when Ronson starts to investigate a mysterious book, copies of which have been sent to various academics around the world.

I almost didn’t want to listen to this book, because the previous audiobook I was listening to was so dark, and a non-fiction book about madness didn’t promise to be a pick-me-up. However, I’m glad I gave this a chance. It’s charming and funny. It helps that Ronson reads his own book, so that we get his anxious, educated, “nebbishy” voice, like a British Woody Allen. He agrees to puzzle out the mystery of a hand-print version of a philosophy book, but his ulterior motive is that he hopes to find out why he himself is so anxious all the time.

When he discovers the perpetrator of the mystery, it gets him thinking about how a crazy person can alter the lives of so many other people. Ronson starts to investigate how the label of insanity affect a person’s life. He talks with a psychopath in Broadmoor hospital, speaks with Kerr, the author of the psychopath test, interviews a man accused of corporate psychopathy, and even talks about conspiracy theorists, scientologists, and the people who work for reality television, whose job it is to find people who are the right sort of crazy.

This book talks about psycopathy, and around psychopathy, and raises more questions than it asks. Ronson doesn’t claim to be an expert in the subject, except in the most self-deprecating way, and he’s generally very respectful to his subjects, even the ones who are mentally far out there. If you like psychology, travel, and fun stories about unusual people, this is a good book. If you want something meatier, with charts and graphs and a splendid bibliography, this might not fit the bill.

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I found this book charming, with engaging characters, a nice mystery, and plenty of action.

The main character is Celia West, the daughter of wealthy socialites who happen to also be superheroes. I’d say the bulk of the conflict in the novel involves Celia struggling to get out from under the shadow of her parents. Not only is every relationship she has colored by her association with them, but Celia also gets kidnapped frequently. In fact, she’s been kidnapped so often it’s not even alarming to her anymore. The novel opens with her being kidnapped, and she sees it as an annoyance.

There’s an arch villain in this story too, “The Destructor” with whom Celia has a hidden past. He’s locked behind bars, but a series of high-profile thefts makes the superheroes in town (led by Celia’s parents) believe he’s masterminding something.

Celia is an accountant now, and she uses her accounting skills to track down evidence that will be used in the prosecution against the Destructor. This was a nice little mystery, especially as it led to another subplot and further complications. I liked how the investigation plot helped flesh out Celia’s relationship with her parents, especially her father. I also liked that Celia ended up romantically involved with the person I thought she should be with.

I liked that the conflicts between Celia and the other characters had decent closure, (though her relationship with her mother wasn’t as developed as it could have been –book two maybe?) There were a few holes I had a problem with, (for example, how Typhoon’s secret identity remained secret from Celia’s parents even after they met her, when Celia spotted Typhoon as herself from a quick glance.) I liked the mystery, and I didn’t notice problems with it (mostly because I see a mystery as a vehicle for character development and never try to out-puzzle the main characters.) I did find the ending a little long, but some people really like to know that the ending is happy.

All in all, this is a fun read with compelling characters. People who love superheroes won’t want to miss this, but it’s also good for people like me, who are merely ambivalent about superheroes.

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