Pleasant Hill Book Club

February Book of the Month: The Lover's Dictionary by David Levithan

2012-02-09T21:02:00.000-08:00

via goodreads.com

There has to be a moment at the beginning when you wonder whether you’re in love with the person or in love with the feeling of love itself.

If the moment doesn’t pass, that’s it—you’re done. And if the moment does pass, it never goes that far. It stands in the distance, ready for whenever you want it back. Sometimes it’s even there when you thought you were searching for something else, like an escape route, or your lover’s face.

How does one talk about love? Do we even have the right words to describe something that can be both utterly mundane and completely transcendent, pulling us out of our everyday lives and making us feel a part of something greater than ourselves? Taking a unique approach to this problem, the nameless narrator of David Levithan’s The Lover’s Dictionary has constructed the story of his relationship as a dictionary. Through these short entries, he provides an intimate window into the great events and quotidian trifles of being within a couple, giving us an indelible and deeply moving portrait of love in our time.

Book of the Year Award 2011

2012-02-06T10:34:00.000-08:00

After a close vote, the winner of the Pleasant Hill Book Club Best Book of 2011 goes to....

Water for Elephants!
(2nd place- In the Heart of the Sea)
(3rd place- City of Thieves)

After a not so close vote, the run away winner for Pleasant Hill Book Club Worst Book of 2011 goes to....

The People of The Book! Truly a classic in bad writing.
(2nd place- Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy)
(3rd place- Plan B)

Congrats also go out to PHBC mamber Erica S. for choosing both the Best and Worst books of the year! Well done!

What One Unemployed Irishman Did With 1.4 Billion Euros

2012-01-28T13:36:00.000-08:00

via Yahoo News

What would you do with $1.82 billion worth of shredded money? In Ireland, people build houses out of it — at least that's what Dublin-based artist Frank Buckley did. The unemployed artist originally wanted to create a gallery for his series of mixed-media artworks called "Expressions of Recession," but he ended up building a house instead.

Buckley has been working roughly 12 hours a day every day since the beginning of December. During the early part of the construction process, he made bricks out of the decommissioned Euros Ireland's mint lent him. In all, around 50,000 money bricks went into building the house that consists of a bedroom, a bathroom, and a living room. He plans to continue expanding the house that sits on an empty office building to include a kitchen, a shower, and a patio.

If you're wondering how it feels to live in a house made out of paper currency, he said that it's quite warm inside: "Whatever you say about the Euro, it's a great insulator." Frank is one of the countless people all over the globe affected by recession, and he built the house because he "wanted to create something from nothing." It will take around seven more weeks to complete building his new home, but Buckley (who's been living in the house since December) welcomes any visitor who wants to take a look at his billion-dollar masterpiece.

Irish Times via Treehugger

This article was written by Mariella Moon and originally appeared on Tecca

Neil Gaiman on Lewis, Tolkein, and Chesterton

2012-01-28T10:36:00.001-08:00

http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/2014230-a-speech-i-once-gave-on-lewis-tolkien-and-chesterton

Stephen Colbert with Maurice Sendak

2012-01-26T22:28:00.000-08:00

Both videos are hilarious. Great line about e-books at the end of the second one.

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Grim Colberty Tales with Maurice Sendak Pt. 1

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog

Video Archive

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Grim Colberty Tales with Maurice Sendak Pt. 2

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog

Video Archive

Michael Lewis Discusses Boomerang on The Daily Show

2012-01-21T14:16:00.000-08:00

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Exclusive - Michael Lewis Extended Interview Pt. 1

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog

The Daily Show on Facebook

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Exclusive - Michael Lewis Extended Interview Pt. 2

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog

The Daily Show on Facebook

Michael Lewis Discusses Boomerang on Charlie Rose

2012-01-21T14:04:00.001-08:00

Favorite quote from clip, "We have socialism for capitalists, and capitalism for everyone else."

2011 PHBC Book of the Year Awards Ballot

2012-01-15T21:44:00.000-08:00

Book of the Year Award 2011
The process has begun and the ballots are ready...

Best Book of the Year
In the Heart of the Sea
Water For Elephants
City of Thieves

Worst Book of the Year
Plan B
The People of the Book
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Voting will take place February 1st! Stay Tuned!

January Book of the Month: Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World by Michael Lewis

2012-01-04T21:34:00.000-08:00

via goodreads.com

The tsunami of cheap credit that rolled across the planet between 2002 and 2008 was more than a simple financial phenomenon: it was temptation, offering entire societies the chance to reveal aspects of their characters they could not normally afford to indulge.

Icelanders wanted to stop fishing and become investment bankers. The Greeks wanted to turn their country into a piñata stuffed with cash and allow as many citizens as possible to take a whack at it. The Germans wanted to be even more German; the Irish wanted to stop being Irish.

Michael Lewis's investigation of bubbles beyond our shores is so brilliantly, sadly hilarious that it leads the American reader to a comfortable complacency: oh, those foolish foreigners. But when he turns a merciless eye on California and Washington, DC, we see that the narrative is a trap baited with humor, and we understand the reckoning that awaits the greatest and greediest of debtor nations.

NY Times Fiasco

2011-12-28T20:36:00.000-08:00

via Mercury News

http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_19634121?source=rss

Kindle Deal of the Day

2011-12-26T16:13:00.000-08:00

I recently found this and I think anyone who owns a Kindle should know about it (if they don't already).

The Kindle "deal of the day" has a different great book deal each day of the week. Today's deal (7hrs left at the time of post) was 99 cents for The Life of Pi (one of my favorite books).

Click the link below to get it! I'm excited to see what's coming tomorrow!

Kindle Deal of the Day

Interesting Web-Site

2011-12-24T19:50:00.000-08:00

Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America
http://www.abaa.org/

On Book Thievery

2011-12-24T19:38:00.000-08:00

"For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner ... let him be struck with palsy, & all his members blasted. ... Let the bookworms gnaw his entrails in token of the Worm that dieth not, & when at last he goeth to his final punishment, let the flames of Hell consume him forever."

-Anathema in a medieval manuscript from the Monastery of San Pedro in Barcelona

This is the opening to the book, The Man Who Loved Books Too Much.

Tinker, Trailor, Soldier, SPy

2011-12-15T19:34:00.001-08:00

I hear it comes highly recommended by a Sir D. Warmer

December Book of the Month: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John Le Carre

2011-12-15T19:24:00.000-08:00

Kindle (under)Fire

2011-12-12T15:58:00.000-08:00

via Yahoo News and The New York Times:

By DAVID STREITFELD

The Kindle Fire, Amazon’s heavily promoted tablet, is less than a blazing success with many of its early users. The most disgruntled are packing the device up and firing it back to the retailer.

A few of their many complaints: there is no external volume control. The off switch is easy to hit by accident. Web pages take a long time to load. There is no privacy on the device; a spouse or child who picks it up will instantly know everything you have been doing. The touch screen is frequently hesitant and sometimes downright balky.

All the individual grievances — recorded on Amazon’s own Web site — received a measure of confirmation last week when Jakob Nielsen, a usability expert, denounced the Fire, saying it offered “a disappointingly poor” experience. For users whose fingers are not as slender as toothpicks, he warned, the screen could be particularly frustrating to manipulate.

“I feel the Fire is going to be a failure,” Mr. Nielsen, of the Nielsen Norman Group, a Silicon Valley consulting firm, said in an interview. “I can’t recommend buying it.”

All this would be enough to send some products directly to the graveyard where the Apple Newton, the Edsel, New Coke and McDonald’s Arch Deluxe languish. But as a range of retailers and tech firms could tell you, it would be foolish to underestimate Amazon.

Amazon sees the Kindle line of devices as critical for its future as a virtual store, and is willing to lose money on the sale of each one for the sake of market share. Once dominance is achieved, it plans to make money on the movies, books and music that users download directly from Amazon.

First, however, it needs to make the devices ubiquitous. Promoting them every day to its tens of millions of customers at the cheapest possible price will surely help. If Apple brought the notion of the tablet into the mainstream, Amazon is making it affordable.

The retailer says the Kindle Fire is the most successful product it has ever introduced, a measure of enthusiasm that reveals nothing; it has not specified how many Fires it has sold, nor how many Kindles it has ever sold. It also says it is building even more Fires to meet the strong demand. But, at the same time, it acknowledges that it is working on improvements.

“In less than two weeks, we’re rolling out an over-the-air update to Kindle Fire,” said Drew Herdener, a company spokesman.

There will be improvements in performance and multitouch navigation, and customers will have the option of editing the list of items that show what they have recently been doing. No more will wives wonder why their husbands were looking at a dating site when they said they were playing Angry Birds.

Amazon declines to say, but soon — probably in the spring — there will be an improved version of the device itself. One more shot is all the retailer will get, Mr. Nielsen said. “If that’s a failure, then the Fire is doomed to the dust pile of history.”

Despite Amazon’s silence on the matter, analysts have been estimating the company will sell from three to five million Fires this quarter. They are neither raising their estimates nor lowering them.

Amazon’s devotion to this product line is such that it has stripped down the original Kindle e-reader, reduced its price and begun to sell it through other retailers like Best Buy and Wal-Mart for $79, as well as prominently on its Web site. If Amazon had Apple-like margins, analysts estimate that the basic Kindle might cost $180.

According to calculations by the research firm IHS iSuppli, the $79 Kindle costs Amazon $84 to make. That sum does not include research and development, shipping or, with a third-party retailer, the wholesale discount. Add these up, and Amazon might be losing as much as $20 on every $79 Kindle sold at, for example, Best Buy.

For most hardware makers, that would be a recipe for corporate suicide. But once the device is activated in a buyer’s home, the losses stop and the consumption begins.

“What else are you going to do on this Kindle?” asked Andrew Rassweiler, senior director of teardown services at iSuppli. “Nothing. It’s a useless device unless you’re planning on putting books, a lot of books, on it.”

The Fire is trying to do much more than be an e-book reader, a function some say it does not do as well as the original Kindle. Slightly more than a third of the 4,500 reviewers of the Fire on Amazon have given it mixed to negative reviews, three stars or fewer. Of Amazon reviewers of the iPad 2, 22 percent have given three stars or fewer; for the original Kindle, that number is 11 percent. (There are a few caveats. At least some of the iPad reviewers bought not from Apple but from resellers, the real target of their ire. As for the original Kindle, after four years it has both a huge number of reviews — over 34,000 — and the advantage of being a known quantity.)

Many of the initial customers of the Fire seem to have bought it on a mixture of faith and hype. The striking thing even about some of the one-star reviewers is that they are regretful rather than angry. One review, couched as an open letter to Amazon’s chief executive, Jeff Bezos, began: “I have spent thousands on your outstanding site. I own and love the original kindle. When asked about why I would buy a Fire when I had an ipad, I said that half of me wanted to just support your effort and that I believed amazon just did things right.” The reviewer is now recommending that friends skip lunch to buy an iPad.

Gene Munster, an analyst with Piper Jaffray, has been tracking the opinions as more reviews are posted on Amazon. Since Nov. 18, five-star reviews have fallen slightly, to 47 percent from 50 percent, he says. One-star reviews have held relatively steady at about 13 percent.

“I would have expected things to be even worse at this point,” Mr. Munster said, adding that initial buyers were usually the most critical. Pricing will save the Fire, he predicted. At $199 versus $500 for an iPad, “Amazon has a lot of air cover to have a B-level product.”

Mr. Nielsen, the consultant, disagreed.

The 7-inch Fire does a good job displaying sites optimized for smaller mobile devices, he said, but stumbles when it tries to show pages designed for 10-inch tablets. “Like squeezing a size-10 person into a size-7 suit,” Mr. Nielsen wrote in his report. “Not going to look good.” As for displaying desktop sites, forget it.

It is true that the device is only $199, but so what? “Look at your hand. Is it thin or fat?” he asked. “If it’s fat, you just know it’s going to be bad.”

The device does do one thing well, he said. Shopping on Amazon is a breeze. “If I were given to conspiracy theories, I’d say that Amazon deliberately designed a poor Web browsing user experience to keep Fire users from shopping on competing sites,” Mr. Nielsen said.

More 2011 Book Awards

2011-12-08T15:05:00.000-08:00

http://www.goodreads.com/award/choice/2011

Follow the above link to goodreads.com's top book winners of 2011. There are 22 categories of books.

Below is a video of Veronica Roth, author of favorite book of 2011 winner Divergent

Top Books of 2011

2011-12-01T12:27:00.000-08:00

To view the NY Times top 10 list:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/11/books/10-best-books-of-2011.html?_r=1&hp

To view Amazon.com's top 20 list:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html/ref=pe_184240_21893570_pe_btn/?node=3321372011

To view the Pleasant Hill Book Club's top pick...you'll have to wait till February!

Happy Holidays From the Book Club!

2011-12-01T12:23:00.000-08:00

Happy Holidays! (I'm actually just posting this so I can get a coupon from Shutterfly. Shameless, I know. Enjoy!)

5x7 Folded Card

View the entire collection of cards.

One Trick Pony

2011-11-26T14:11:00.000-08:00

Saw this in my New York Review of Books a couple weeks back. I wonder if he gets tied of writing about whales. It seems like most of his other books are also boating related.

Went to the movies...

2011-11-26T14:07:00.000-08:00

and guess what I saw.

It's already getting paned by fans of the book. I'll still watch it though. If you've never read the book, go to the library today and pick it up! (or download it, etc.)

Hunger Games Trailer

2011-11-15T20:36:00.001-08:00

Kindle Lending Library

2011-11-05T06:19:00.000-07:00

Amazon.com has introduced its new 'library' for Kindle owners. Before you sign-up, however, I suggest you read the following article.

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/11/kindle-lending-library/

November Book of the Month: Plan B and Jonathan Tropper

2011-11-05T06:10:00.000-07:00

via goodreads.com

Turning thirty was never supposed to be like this. Ten years ago, Ben, Lindsey, Chuck, Alison, and Jack graduated from New York University and went out into the world, fresh-faced and full of dreams for the future. But now Ben's getting a divorce; Lindsey's unemployed; Alison and Chuck seem stuck in ruts of their own making; and Jack is getting more publicity for his cocaine addiction than his multimillion-dollar Hollywood successes.

Suddenly, turning thirty-- past the age their parents were when they were born, older than every current star athlete or pop music sensation-- seems to be both more meaningful and less than they'd imagined ten years ago.

Jonathan Tropper's wonderful debut novel is about more than friendship, love, celebrity, addiction, kidnapping, or even turning thirty-- it's a heartfelt comic riff on what it means to be an adult against your will, to be single when you thought you'd have a family, to discover you are not, in fact, immortal, and to learn that Star Wars is as good a life lesson today as it was when you were six years old.

Pleasant Hill Book Club

February Book of the Month: The Lover's Dictionary by David Levithan

Book of the Year Award 2011

What One Unemployed Irishman Did With 1.4 Billion Euros

Neil Gaiman on Lewis, Tolkein, and Chesterton

Stephen Colbert with Maurice Sendak

Michael Lewis Discusses Boomerang on The Daily Show

Michael Lewis Discusses Boomerang on Charlie Rose

2011 PHBC Book of the Year Awards Ballot

January Book of the Month: Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World by Michael Lewis

NY Times Fiasco

Kindle Deal of the Day

Interesting Web-Site

On Book Thievery

Top Book Stories of the Week

Tinker, Trailor, Soldier, SPy

December Book of the Month: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John Le Carre

Kindle (under)Fire

More 2011 Book Awards

Top Books of 2011

Happy Holidays From the Book Club!

One Trick Pony

Went to the movies...

Hunger Games Trailer

Kindle Lending Library

November Book of the Month: Plan B and Jonathan Tropper