Knowing yourself and living with your choices are major themes explored in way that has broad appeal despite the story’s focus on spirituality which would normally limit the audience.

What drew me to the book

Quite simply, this description is what drew me to the book, “An American housewife is transformed by an intriguing manuscript about the Sufi mystic poet Rumi.” Hey, this is a book blog, so of course I like the idea of being transformed by a book (I’m still looking for the one that will transform me into a happy skinny millionaire ).

If you’re not familiar with this book, the short plot synopsis is that a housewife gets a job evaluating unsolicited manuscripts send to a literary agency. In an extreme bit of good luck (seriously, if you’ve ever read from a slush pile you’ll know how unlikely this part of the book is), she is handed a manuscript submitted by a writer half way across the world that is not only good but also life changing. As she starts reading the manuscript, she realizes that the manuscript story mirrors her own and is inspired to start a correspondence with the author. She starts to believe that the author is playing the role of the mystic in her life (as Rumi does to a character in the manuscript she reads) come to set her free from a life she is realizing she really does not like.

My thoughts on the book

I really like The Forty Rules of Love: A Novel of Rumi. It is very well written and will appeal to many people, especially those who feel stuck in their lives or are looking to transform themselves like the main character.

The 40 rules of the title are actually the rules of religious love. It’s a good thing that was left out of the title or I would not have considered reading it. As presented, these 40 rules are really the rules for loving yourself which is what makes the appeal of this book broad rather than narrow.

The book has two stories, one that takes place in the past and is presented as the novel that the main character in the present is evaluating for a literary agent. Normally when I read books that have two stories like this, I find that one or the other is not engaging and, in fact, one story could be removed entirely without affecting the book too much. In The Forty Rules of Love: A Novel of Rumi both stories interested me and came across as two indispensable halves of a whole.

The main character is a woman who is waking up to the fact that she has been living for other people, just making do, and not really questioning what she is doing with/getting out of her life. I was surprised by the way her story turned out (in a good way, but I won’t spoil it for you). I simply could not figure out where the author was going to take this woman’s story and I’m glad that there is no cop-out happily-ever-after in this book.

About the book author

Elif Shafak has written several other books, including The Flea Palace, Bastard Of Istanbul, and The Saint of Incipient Insanities. Elif Shafak can be found online at her official site.

Find this book online

The Forty Rules of Love: A Novel of Rumi: Amazon US * Amazon Canada * Amazon UK * Book Depository * Barnes & Noble

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Many years ago I wrote a rather sardonic espionage thriller, The Hungarian Game, that became a minor best-seller. Somewhere around 500,000 copies were peddled in a number of languages worldwide, and it earned some favorable reviews as well. (And a few brickbats – but let’s not touch that one, okay?)

I didn’t write a sequel because I felt I’d said all I had to say on the subject.

A few years ago, however, the political situation and the systematic corruption and dismemberment of America’s intell community in the runup to war made me realize I did have more to say on the subject. And so I returned to my trusty Underwood, adding a few more wry comments by way of a rousing adventure yarn, The Last Days of Las Vegas.

You can download a copy of The Last Days of Las Vegas by Roy Hayes either from the author’s site or from Scribd.

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One-line review

The core premise, once revealed, seems contrived and I found some elements of the story distracting, but The Last Surgeon still managed to hook me for a day’s reading.

What drew me to the book

I’ve been reading medical thrillers for a long, long time. Michael Palmer is one of the three that I started out reading (the others were Michael Crichton and Robin Cook) and the only one that I continued to read into the ’90s. He is still on my auto-read list of writers, along with Tess Gerritsen, Diana Gabaldon, and Karen Marie Moning (er, most of those writers write in different genres than Michael Palmer so don’t take that as a list of if-you-like-these-authors-you’ll-like-this-one).

My thoughts on the book

There are some books that I pick up and then have to read all the way through, putting off all other things that I had planned for my day. I expect certain authors to deliver that kind of book, so I wasn’t surprised that an entire day of to-dos didn’t get done when I picked up The Last Surgeon.

If you read the prologue to The Last Surgeon you can see how I got sucked into the book. It did keep me turning the pages despite a few distracting elements that will probably keep me from re-reading this one.

As I was reading this book, I had a vague sense of deja vu because the medical victims reminded me somewhat of the victims in Extreme Measures (both books’ victims are drawn from the homeless population and are experimented upon). I found the similarity a bit distracting because I kept comparing the two books.

The protagonist has Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) from a tour in Afghanistan, which is timely, but I often got the feeling I was being deliberately “educated.” Palmer is fund raising for PTSD as part of his book launch so it may be that the intent was to educate the public through the book (laudable), but it felt a bit forced in the novel.

There were aspects of this book that I enjoyed, like the killer making all the murders appear to be accidents rather than murders (as you can read in the excerpt), and others that left me feeling a bit ‘meh.’ As I closed the book I was left thinking, why didn’t they just do B instead of A and avoid all this in the first place?

The Last Surgeon was a good read, but isn’t a book I’ll re-read like some of his other books. Flashback is still my favourite for that.

You can still enter to win a copy of this book until tomorrow. [This giveaway is now closed.]

About the book author

Michael Palmer can be found at his online home where you can read the prologue to The Last Surgeon. He is the author of fourteen other medical thrillers:

Find this book online

The Last Surgeon: Amazon US * Amazon Canada * Amazon UK * Book Depository * Barnes & Noble

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I’ve been swamped this week so I haven’t had a chance to do any blog posts, but I came across the latest Wallace & Gromit movie on the Vanity Fair web site and thought I’d share it with you. I love Nick Park’s storytelling and I’m not the only one–once again, a Wallace & Gromit short is up for an Oscar in the short film category.

But then I looked at the source of the video on the Vanity Fair site.

Surely, Vanity Fair would have an official source for the movie they’re displaying, right? I mean traditional media outlets get very cranky when you pirate their writing and such, so surely they would respect the copyright of other professionals.

Right?

It turns out that the source of the video is a MySpace profile for some 19-year-old in the UK who is NOT Nick Parks or the official MySpace page for Wallace & Gromit. And the official web site for Wallace & Gromit only lets you look at clips of the new movie Loaf and Death, presumably because the money is made on the DVDs or iTunes downloads.

Looks like a pirated movie. Smells like a pirated movie. Walks like a pirated movie.

What am I to think?

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“It’s not supposed to be fun for the writers; it’s supposed to be fun for the audience.”

“The secret is to make people throw up around 8:07 [pm].”

“An audience wants the story to be over. An audience wants a happy ending and an audience wants to relax. Those are all things that someone who is conveying to a mass audience can’t possibly put up with.”

“I didn’t make this up; I wish I knew who did (I would give them credit): If you cleave to–if you support, as an entertainer–the basic values of your culture and society you have a much better chance of reaching a mass audience than if you challenge the morays and morals of the society.”

“Of all the lines I’ve gotten on American television: ‘Jesus is not a zombie.’ I’m so proud.”

“We get a lot of mail about Brennan’s insensitive statements about God, the Pope. I don’t know if anyone watches the show a lot; I make a lot of fun of the Pope’s hat. And I treasure every one of them. The funny thing, to me, is that the same letters will say, ‘Thank God, Booth was there to set you straight.’ I’m, like, I wrote that too! Apparently, I’m writing the atheist, but Jesus is writing Booth–I don’t know.”

“You have to be proud of what you do if you’re going to entertain a lot of people.”

[Note to cover my derriere: The punctuation is mine; the words are Hart Hanson's. Every effort has been made to be accurate in punctuating these quotes to remain true to the tone in which they were spoken.]

Hart Hanson is a funny guy and a smart guy. If you weren’t there, you missed out. I hope the rest of the conference is just as good! More to come.

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[This giveaway is now closed.]

So I was hanging out on Twitter when I saw an author asking bloggers if they wanted to read his new book. That happens quite a bit. But this time it was Michael Palmer. As in New York Times bestselling author Michael Palmer. As in one of the triad of authors who got me interested in science and medicine Michael Palmer (the others were Robin Cook and Michael Crichton).

Except he wasn’t asking me.

So I very politely and demurely said “ME PLEASE! GIMME PLEASE!” Or words to that effect (sometimes it’s hard to remember what I said out loud as opposed to what I was thinking).

A week or so later I got The Last Surgeon in the mail along with a note offering an autographed copy of the The Last Surgeon to Booklorn readers. Which brings me to today’s post: Giveaway!

Not only is Michael Palmer autographing the book, but he’s happy to ship it to a winner ANYWHERE in the world.

In case you’re unfamiliar with his books, Michael Palmer writes medical thrillers. I’ve read my copy and it’s a good read (in keeping with his other books). I haven’t had time to write up my review, but I hope to do that by next week so you’ll see it before the giveaway closes.

I’ve been reading Michael Palmer since I was a teen (or maybe even a tween — like most book-loving kids I was reading grown up books ahead of my peers). I’ve probably read every book that he’s written AND he’s the only one of the triad that I continued to read beyond the ’90s. If you like medical thrillers, you’ll want to enter this giveaway.

Here are the details:

• Random draw.
• Open worldwide.
• Fill out the form below to enter.
• Give me an e-mail address that you check because that’s how I’ll contact you if you win.
• Giveaway closes on February 15th at 1 am MST.

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In case you’re blissfully unaware, MacMillan placed an ad in Publishers Weekly explaining that they were changing the prices of their ebooks, which Amazon was none too happy with.

Amazon responded by informing MacMillan that they would no longer sell any MacMillan books–digital or otherwise. Basically, Jeff Bezos took his ball and went home. On Sunday afternoon, Amazon quietly announced in its Kindle forum that maybe it would sell MacMillan books after all. Apparently, Bezos realized the game would go on — with or without him.

I wasn’t going to blog about this is because — and this will come as a shock to you — I don’t care. I don’t care because I don’t buy ebooks from middlemen.

Every ebook I’ve bought has been bought from the publisher’s or author’s website because I don’t see why you need a middleman for an eBook. There’s no shipping or inventory advantage to a middleman like there is with physical objects. It amazes me that established publishers like MacMillan don’t learn from successful epubs who sell exclusively through their web sites. Heck, Simon & Schuster sold ebooks direct to consumers ten years ago.

I think Bezos is afraid that consumers and publishers will wake up and realise that his company and other booksellers can easily be bypassed. In fact, I would bet money that the motivation behind the Kindle is to lock consumers into a particular vendor to preserve the middleman.

Otherwise, Amazon could one day be obsolete and Bezos knows it.

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Fascinating ideas on society’s view of talent, but concerns about the quality of fact-checking tarnished my enjoyment of the book.

What drew me to the book

I’ve been reading about making a career of what you like doing, which led to an exploration of the nature of talent and success. Also, I figured it was about time I read this very popular book by Malcolm Gladwell (whom I have never read before).

My thoughts on the book

In Outliers: The Story of Success, Gladwell uses case studies to support the contention that talent does not explain people who lie outside the norm (outliers) with respect to success. Instead, Gladwell suggests that opportunity, experience, a minimum IQ, social acumen, and legacy (cultural and linguistic) explain outliers. He does not discount hard work, but rather suggests that hard work alone is not enough–an idea that runs counter to cultural beliefs. Gladwell didn’t come up with the theories he discusses (as his extensive list of cited sources indicates), but he has put them together in a very accessible format.

The case studies include a number of well known people, groups, and incidents:

• The Beatles,
• Bill Gates,
• the founders of Sun Microsystems,
• the Hatfield-McCoy feud
• the stereotype that Asians are good at math,
• the safety record of Korean Airline/Korean Air

The very idea that culture is a factor in success is politically incorrect. I was satisfied that Gladwell used studies and statistics to support the ideas that he put forward in the book rather than speculation or prejudice. However, statistics and studies must be interpreted through one’s own world view. In some cases, I disagree with the interpretation.

Gladwell’s explanation for the stereotype that the Chinese are hardworking is that rice farming is more intensive on a daily basis than the type of farming that is done in the West. In particular, he suggests that during the winter most Western farmers hibernate and do very little work at all. I find the assertion about Western farming difficult to reconcile with what I’ve heard of homesteading from my extended family (some of whom continue to farm the same land today).

I found the chapter “The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes” particularly interesting so I handed Outliers to the pilot in the household. After reading that chapter, he wasn’t inclined to read the rest of the book because of what he deemed inexcusable factual errors in the description of the landing scenario, the plane, and pretty much anything to do with the mechanics and procedures of aviation. He had no issues with Gladwell’s argument that cultural norms affecting the interaction between pilot, co-pilot, and air traffic control can contribute to plane crashes.

While none of the facts that were wrong (according to my subject matter expert) affected the theory, the fact that there were so many errors in a single chapter worries me. It calls into question the fact checking in other chapters. Unless you’re an expert on a particular topic, it’s difficult to catch inaccuracies so while the theories put forth in Outliers are interesting I wouldn’t use them in an argument without doing my own background research.

About the book author

Malcom Gladwell can be found online at his site Gladwell.com. He is a staff writer at The New Yorker and has published a number of books, including Outliers: The Story of Success, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures, and Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.

Find this book online (links go directly to book page)

Amazon.com * Amazon Canada * Amazon UK * The Book Depository * Barnes & Noble

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I just finished reading “What Are Enhanced Ebooks?” over at Booksquare. Kassia’s answer is that nobody knows, but that some publishers feel “enhancements” are the cure for low ebook prices. Apparently, they think that consumers will pay more for an ebook with enhancements than they will for a hardcover.

I think they’re delusional.

When I went through my first technology upgrade after buying ebooks ten years ago, I didn’t realize that my ebooks would become so many useless 1s and 0s. You know which enhancement I want? Ebooks that I can read in five or even ten year’s time. When I buy a book, I expect a DVD-like permanence, not a one-time movie pass.

In the last ten years, I’ve noticed that the quality of ebooks has actually decreased when it comes to formatting, layout, and editing. Many are quite hard to read and some are downright unreadable. So guess which other enhancement I would like? Ebooks with proper layout and formatting.

For those publishers that don’t know what that means, let me spell it out: no double-spacing, no headers or page numbers in the middle of the page, no funky justification issues, and no incomprehensible words due to an uncorrected OCR scan. Punctuation would also be nice. I’m not asking for the moon here, just give me something I can read where I don’t have to spend half my time figuring out what’s going on with the layout. Because dealing with the layout isn’t the reader’s job; it’s the publisher’s job.

Another thing that’s not my job to deal with, as a reader, is copy protection. Seriously, if it takes me thirty minutes and enough personal information to steal my identity to open the ebook, then you, the publisher, have lost a paying customer. Readers (those would be your customers) who have paid money (that would be the stuff your accountants are so fond of) should not have to jump through hoops to open an ebook. Would you sell a hardcover with a padlock on it? Here’s an enhancement: let readers actually read the book that they paid for.

I don’t want bells, whistles, videos, or soundtracks. I especially don’t want “enhancements” from publishers that can’t get the substance of an ebook, the text, right. Can you imagine what they would do to multimedia? I don’t want reader guides, online maps, author interviews, soundtracks, or any of those other things. Those things mean I can get fewer books on my iPod. I don’t want to need an Internet connection just to read a book. Books are the things I read to get away from the Internet so don’t drag me back onto it with “enhancements.”

Maybe I’m just bitter because I lost my collection of Star Trek ebooks to the ravages of technology creep.

What about you? Are there any enhancements that would make YOU pay more than the price of a hardcover for an ebook?

I’d really like to know, because I can’t think of any.

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