Royce Eddington

Kaplan Publishing is giving away a lot of their high-end eBooks for free on the iBookstore August 24 -30th!

The official giveaway site says all you need to do is “visit www.kaplanpublishing.com/iTunes on your iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch.” From there, it launches the iBooks application on your iPad (or iPhone or iPod Touch) and takes you to the giveaway page on the bookstore site.

Looking at the link from my iPad, they’ve got

• 15 books in the COLLEGE section (SAT, ACT and PSAT books)
• 10 books in the GRADUATE section (GMAT and GRE books)
• 22 books in the LAW section (a ton of PMBR books as well as general information books)
• 19 books in the MEDICINE section (MCAT and a lot of general information books)
• 14 books in the NURSING section (both CCRN and NCLEXRN and some general information books)
• 12 books in the EDUCATION section (Practice question books and a lot of general information books)

Don’t forget to hit the tiny little SEE ALL button by each category to get to all the free books because the main sale page only lists 6 books for each category.

My only complaint is that you have to click each book to download. There’s no batch-download.

But aside from that? Totally geeked out.

Thanks Kaplan!

Did you ever have something nagging you in the back of your mind? Something that says you’re just on the tip of catching something, but you can’t quite put your finger on it?

I was on my weekly Barnes and Noble indulgence about a month ago and noticed Stephen King had a new book out called “Under the Dome.”

Stephen King's Under The Dome book

According to a review on Amazon.com, it’s about “a small New England town… suddenly, inexplicably cut off from the rest of the world, trapping a large cast of characters inside (or outside) a huge, clear dome. As the emergency escalates, various heroes (and villains) emerge to play a part in the drama. What is the dome? Why is it there? Will the town survive?”

For some reason, that bugged me. But I couldn’t place why.

Flash forward to last night. Apparently the brain cell responsible for pulling data from the archives finally got around to finding the right files.

To me, Stephen King’s “Under the Dome” looks a lot like the “Girls” comic book series by Jonathan and Joshua Luna, published way back in 2005.

Check out these three pages from Girls issue #6 leading up to something that looks a bit like Stephen King’s book cover…

Girls issue #6 part 1

Girls Issue #6 part 2

Girls Issue #6 Part 3

Plus, on the Girls comic book wikipedia page, the plot of the comic Girls is described as “…the story of the people of Pennystown, a community of 63 who are cut off from the rest of the world… The situation is complicated by… the discovery of an enormous reflective dome separating Pennystown from outside aid.”

I remember reading that comic series now! A small town named Pennystown suddenly and inexplicably was cut off from the rest of the world, trapping a large cast of characters inside a huge, opaque dome. As the emergency escalates (and monsters start appearing), various heroes, rednecks, innocents, and villains emerge in the drama. The story revolved on why the dome appeared, who brought it there, and who in the town would survive the attacks from the monsters.

Plus, at the introductory pages of the Girls comic book, there’s a map of the town of who lives where.

Girls comic map

And Stephen King’s book?

Stephen King's Under The Dome Map

Hmmmm.

If I turned in something like this in college, I think I would have been called in to the dean and asked to explain some things.

Just sayin’.

The Power of Myth

10 words or less: Inspiring examination of the permeation of mythology in everyday life.

Long version: I loved this book. Really loved it. So much so, that as soon as I completed it, I flipped back to the first page and re-read it again. I’ve never done that with any book before. It was overall a great read, and gave me numerous pre-existing foundations to ponder and even more questions to actively pursue the answer(s) to.

The discussion between Campbell and Moyers is fluid and deep. The topic is constrained to the myriad effects of mythology in culture and on the self, but the enormous field leaves a fantastically wide amount of space to cover. Topics such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Roman Catholicism, Philosophers, Physics and even Star Wars are touched on. Reading this book, you can not only see the consistency of plot devices throughout movies and books, but a striking parallel with daily “live” events as well.

As an example, the following discussion covers the effects of mythology on the the apparently simple act of eating, and how the stories and beliefs of eating and hunting manifest in our conscious life.

“Campbell : There’s a wonderful saying in one of the Upanishads: ‘Oh wonderful, oh wonderful, oh wonderful, I am food, I am food, I am food! I am an eater of food, I am an eater of food, I am an eater of food.’ We don’t think that way today about ourselves, but holding on to yourself and not letting yourself become food is the primary life-denying negative act. You’re stopping the flow! And yielding to the flow is the great mystery experience that goes with thanking an animal that is about to be eaten for having given of itself. You, too, will be given in time.”

That’s an interesting story, but in all the animals I have hunted, none have voluntarily given themselves to being food. They have all run, all tried to hide, and tried everything in their ability for me not to kill them. They had no interest whatsoever in becoming my food, and so, by their own instinctual actions, they were actively “stopping the flow”. So by default, isn’t the process of willfully denying the flow (of becoming food) a critical part of being alive? And in the future, when it is possible to consume synthetic meat and food that has never been “alive” in any sense of the word, are we becoming part of a new life-flow, are we attempting to realize ourselves in our own self-made mythology, or is this just another byzantine denial of the perceived inevitability of death?

See? Stuff like that is why I shouldn’t read books like this!

The book is full of quotable material, but taking it out of context risks mitigating the effectiveness of the surrounding conversation and the philosophical path it took to get there. Trust me, though, it’s all good.

My only issue with this book is the complete dependence on God and/or a “higher purpose” to base their structure on. There really isn’t a deep examination of the possibility of a God not existing – on whether the experience of humanity without a God or a living deity is possible and what that would entail. There are moments where this is almost brought out, such as…

“Moyers : And your life comes from where?
Campbell: From the ultimate energy that is the life of the universe. And then do you say ‘Well there must be somebody generating that energy?’ Why do you have to say that? Why can’t the ultimate mystery be impersonal?”

…but that lack of an overt discussion isn’t any reason to skip this book at all.

I really enjoyed this book and think it should be mandatory reading. I rank it as material from a Philosophy 201 class… far more material to digest than a simple 101 class, but not as deep as a 301 or higher class. It’s a big read at 665 pages on my Sony PRS-505, but it’s worth it.

Highly, highly recommended. Five stars.

Plato and a Platypus

10 words or less: Fun. Like throwing a skipping stone over deep philosophical waters.

Long version : This book was a impulse buy at the local bookstore this weekend. Normally I only hit the bargain bins, but this book looked interesting and was reviewed well based on everything all over the jacket cover, so I grabbed at at face value.

It was a fun and breezy read. Just tapping on the cusps of philosophical ideas and ideologies, the authors take a few moments on each topic being serious, and turn right around and make a joke in contrasting boldface that illustrates the type of philosophy and/or topic being discussed.

For example, when talking about existentialism…
“The extentialists’ emphasis on facing the anxiety of death has given life to a new mini-industry, the hospice movement, founded on Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s twentieth-century bioethical philosophy that encourages the honest acceptance of death.
Customer in a restaurant: How do you prepare your chickens?
Cook: Oh, nothing special really. We just tell them they’re gonna die.”

At the end of the 215 page book, the authors gently point to “suggested reading” list for those who found the shallow end fun and want to try something a little deeper next time. Kant, Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, Foucault, Hume, Locke and more are on the list, so there’s a fair chance someone starting on this book may just find something wonderful waiting for them should they choose to follow some of the abbreviated suggestions in the list.

This was a fun book that was pretty much philosophy 099. OK, maybe philosophy 101. A quick glance into the basics of philosophy, an overview of some major ideas, and a few nuggets to chew on. All easily digestible.

I’m probably going to head back and pick up their sequel “Heidegger and a Hippo walk through the pearly gates: Using Philosophy (and jokes!) to explain life, death, the afterlife, and everything else in between.” If nothing else, for the title alone!

Four out of five stars.

One of the better things I learned how to do was speed read. Combine that with a mild case of insomnia, too many magazine subscriptions, and a book-a-week habit and I’m pretty sure I’ve given myself ADD. Or ADHD-PI (ADHD predominantly inattentive) ifya’ want to be technical about it.

The good thing is that I retain most of what I read.  Ask me where I left my car keys, though, and I can’t help you.

Over time I’ve gradually increased my reading speed to where it is now. According to a basic speed reading test at Speed Reading Soft’s site I clock in at 1050 WPM. Retention was somewhere around 90%. Another site, How Fast Do you Read, has me at their max of 850-900 WPM with a similar retention score.

If you want to see what it’s like when I read, go to Spreeder.com and click on the SETTINGS button. Change the words per minute to 950 and press the play button. That looks about right.

Anyhow, this is a list of all the magazines I subscribe to as of 2008 (update: 2010). Some of these magzines have gone out of business since I started getting them but most still trickle in every week.

The ones that consistently get my attention are New Yorker, New Scientist (although they seem to have dumbed it down recently), Chain Drug Review, Sport Diver, Rolling Stone, Food Business News, Wired, Gun Tests, Motor Cyclist, and Muscle and Fitness.

Most magazines are donated to the business where I work when I’m done with them. The rest are recycled as part of this city’s weekly services.

——–

EDIT 06 / 01 / 2010 : Added some that were missing : American Cop, Watch!, Poder, Sports Illustrated and HHMi Bulletin (Howard Hughes Medical Institute)

The Taking by Dean Koontz

10 words or less : Great start, poor ending. Had potential to be really great.

Long version : “The Taking” was my first book by Dean Koontz. Like most of the books I buy, it was in the bargain bin at a local book store, so I grabbed it for a quick weekend read.

Before I go on with the review, I have to say that horror movies and horror books seldom work on me. The solution to 85% of horror movies? Shotgun. Jason Voorhees? Shotgun. Michael Myers? Shotgun. Blair Witch? Shotgun. I know what you did last blah blah blah? Shotgun. Just shoot the friggin’ bad guy and be done with it.

As for the paranormal kind of horror, most of the time I think those kind of things are just really funny. If I ever run across a ghost, I’ll probably pull a Ray Stantz on them… take some technical readings, and then make fun of them.

Movies that worked for me? Aliens. The Thing. The Shining. Session 9. The Silence of the Lambs. Movies with intelligent people who were in situations appropriate for their characters, who were also properly equipped for their environment, and who were still having really bad things happen to them.

Now, having said all that, I think “The Taking” was almost great. Almost. And that’s what’s really frustrating about it.

The book starts off with a rush. Bad things start to happen immediately and you get to know the characters as the book unfolds and as things happen to them. It reminded me a little of the very first episode of LOST.

The story and characters are well written, and they react like people with decent intelligence and some self-defense capabilities would in their given situation. And they had a shotgun! Bonus! I was really getting into this book.

But a little more than midway in, the terror part of the book runs out of gas. Things push way too far into the unbelievable, and the bad guys’ motivations and abilities become far too excessive. I was wondering if this story was heading for a sequel when a textbook “deus ex machina” tied up the ending. And not to ruin the book, but if that was who the bad guys were, then what exactly were the good guys? That’s a far more disturbing thought for me.

Amazon reviewers say not to judge this book as one of Koontz’s better ones. So having seen those comments, and being very impressed with the first part of the book, I will try one of his earlier books for next time. Because if Koontz can write a whole book like the first few chapters of “The Taking”, I’ll be really impressed.

Checking in at around 450 pages, “The Taking” was a decent summer / weekend read.

Three and 3/8 out of five stars.

American Gods

10 words or less : Overrated. Unbelievable situations. Good sections, but twists visible miles away.

Long version : I need to preface this by saying I am not a fan of deep-end fantasy books. Magic, enchanted objects, and out-of-the-butt mystic speak?

No.

Characters who are supposed to be gods relating to humans with the equivalent of “Oi m boyo! C’mere and have a beer!”?

Hell no.

Having said that, I picked up American Gods by Neil Gaman based on the multiple four and five star reviews on Amazon as well as critical praise on the jacket cover. General fiction is fine with me, so I thought I would give this book a try.

The book is about the “American Gods”… gods that were brought over to America by the immigrants who believed in them. As the people who believed in these gods blended into America’s culture (or flat out died), the transplanted gods withered and turned mortal-ish.

Que Joan Osborne.

Anyhow, some “new” gods eventually appear on the scene, and they were (off the top of my head) the god of computers, credit cards, TV, media and “Mr. World”.

Wait! It gets better!

The “new” gods are tired of the old gods hanging around taking their mojo. So a “storm is coming”… as every single character says over and over and over and over.

The main hero, Shadow, is the chosen one. He has a hobag of a woman who keeps showing up for him a lot like Jack Goodman did for David in the movie American Werewolf in London. Except this character is played seriously.

On a side note – Shadow. Who the hell names their kid Shadow?

Anyhow, fantasy ensues. A few plot twists and pages and pages later, “the storm is here”.

Not to ruin anything, but the book didn’t have Mohamed or Jesus in it. Every other god with a popular identity shows up throughout the book, and most get to fight in the big finale, so where were the top two representatives of the current religions? If the god of computers can be a card carrying member of the almighty god club, where the hell were the big players in this book? Where was THE big capital-G God in all this? If gods exist just because people believe in them, shouldn’t the capital-G God, Jesus and Mohamed have been in this book putting the smack down?

See, stuff like this is why I can’t read these kind of books.

The book has the main character travel through America as part of him finding himself and his allies, but you’ll get more “real” America from Alton Brown’s road trip series.

It was entertaining in sections, and the writing style flowed fairly well. A few chapters were really imaginative, but most of the chapters were tedious and overly detailed. I see the author was going for a slow buildup over the 600 plus pages of the book, but I could see the “twist(s)” coming five chapters away. Even in the dénouement.

I recommend reading the first few paragraphs of the Wikipedia page on “American Gods” that summarize the book to see if it’s for you. American Gods won the Hugo and Nebula awards (among many other sci-fi specific writing awards), but it was nothing more than moderately entertaining summer-like reading for me.

Three out of five stars.

10 words or less : Incredible. Fun and entertaining. A very moving and symbolic story.

Life Of Pi Book

Long version :  The Life of Pi by Yann Martel is a wonderful read. It’s the kind of book that will raise the bar on the kind of material you will want to read afterward. It’s a relatively short book, around 300 pages, but it works on so many levels… both as a superficial “look-no-deeper” story and as a very, very symbolic multi-layer opus.

The top-layer story is basically about a shipwrecked boy who is stuck on a lifeboat for 227 days in the Pacific Ocean with a tiger, hyena, zebra, and an orangutan. The pacing is so well structured you will be halfway through the book before you know it.

The Life of Pi won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, the South African Boeke Prize, the Le combat des livres reading competition, CBC Radio’s Canada Reads, and the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction. It won all these awards even though it was only the second book from the author at the time.

There’s almost 2,000 reviews for it on Amazon.com at this time, and even a new deluxe illustrated version that I’m going to have to get for the bookshelf. Be careful on Amazon, though. Many people posted the entire story in their review, which ruins the thrill of reading the book for the first time.

Supposedly Ang Lee is going to make a movie about the book for release in 2011. I’m not sure he can pull it off, but I’ll be in line to see it on the big screen.

Five out of five stars.

10 words or less : Absolutely brilliant. Best comic ever. Still fun after multiple readings.

The Complete Calvin and Hobbes

Long Version : I love the complete Calvin and Hobbes collection. I’ve read it cover to cover many times already, but I still flip open this collection’s books and scan ten to twenty pages a week. I finished another umpteenth re-reading last night, and even though it’s not a new book, it still merits reviewing.

Calvin and Hobbes became something far more than ink on newsprint in the short time it was published. I still can not think of any other strip that I couldn’t wait to read in the newspaper. Bloom County, which ran around the same time as Calvin and Hobbes, did have its’ moments, but I thought it was eventually dragged down by heavy handed preaching and outlandish scenarios. Calvin and Hobbes was always fun to read. It never beat me over the head with its’ views, never took itself too seriously, and seemed to be perfectly centered for both kids and adults to enjoy. This series still genuinely makes me laugh, and leaves me with a little more appreciation of the everyday things in life.

If you haven’t read it, you need to. Unfortunately, Amazon doesn’t have any “used” versions of this series, but that also says a lot about this collection.

Fortunately, Bill Watterson walked away before Calvin and Hobbes were commercialized and “cheapened“. The result of his then-unheard of act is a perfectly preserved work of art. There are no studio actors’ voices to muddle your thoughts when reading this. There are no slick but soulless animations to glaze over on a television set. There are no stuffed animals that cement in reality what each character looks like. Everything is still alive and up to your imagination with every reading.

Bill Watterson? Thank you.

Five out of five stars.

I’ve been very, very happy with my Sony E-reader 505 and am still chewing through my first ebook on the device. (American Gods by Neil Gaiman – I’ll post a quick review it when I’m done) Yesterday I got lucky and found a lot of accessories for the Sony 505 e-reader on clearance at a local store and grabbed everything I could.

The big find was a “Sony E-reader cover with light for the 505 series”. The new cover is black on the outside, which is a much better look than the muted brown cover that initially came with the 505. Inside the new cover is a small glass-like square that just covers the LCD screen of the 505. It’s not actually a light in itself, but illuminated from a light source inside the spine of the cover. It works by sending light into the glass and not illuminating from it… kind of like putting a flashlight under bottled water.

The light pane can be moved out of the way to the left side just like a page of a book, and has two intensities to select from, depending on how much light you want to frame the LCD screen with. I found the first intensity setting perfectly acceptable for both low light and complete darkness.

This is how the 505 looks with the new cover in very low light…

Sony 505 e-reader in dim light

…and this is how the 505 looks in complete darkness.

Sony 505 e-reader in complete darkness

Not bad at all!

The cover with light does add a little weight to the overall feel of the e-reader, but it’s not enough to change how I’ve been using it. It still fits in the same dimensions the previous cover did, and the light pane is barely noticeable if left in position while it is powered off. The new cover uses AA batteries, but it has a 30 hour runtime estimate.

Overall, I think this is a fantastic accessory for the 505. Even though the newer and touchscreen-enabled versions of Sony’s e-reader are hitting the store shelves, you can’t go wrong picking up a “previous generation” 505 and one of these cover lights if you can find them. Four and a half out of five stars.