09:40 PM by poohbear_nc in Miscellaneous | Announcements

Please join with all of us "greenies" to welcome Tom to the ranks of the immensely powerful forces of good!

[actually he followed me here from the lounge and Alex said we could keep him as long as he was house broken!]

He's already swung into action, stamping out spam with a single bound, and we think he's going to be just dandy in his new role here!

06:00 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Week in Review

Have something interesting to say about e-books or mobile computing? Join our forums and share your view on topics like the ones discussed at MobileRead this past week...

E-Book General - Reading Recommendations

• Discussion: The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins (spoliers)
• January 2011 Mobile Read Book Club Vote

07:23 PM by pilotbob in Reading Recommendations | Book Clubs

Help up choose a book as the January 2011 eBook for the Mobile Read Book Club. The poll will be open for 7 days. We will start the discussion thread for this book on January 20th. Select from the following books:

(Reminder, January is "Second Chance" month so there is no nomination thread. The books in the poll are the 2nd place titles from the 2010 months.)

Disclaimer:
There were two ties for second place. As self-appointed grand pooba I have broken those ties with my personal choice. Sorry if this offends anyone.

December, classic:
War of the Worlds by H G Wells
Uploaded by HarryT epub & mobi/prc & lrf | Upload by JSWolf lrf | Project Gutenberg | feedbooks | Inkmesh search

H.G. Wells's science fiction classic, the first novel to explore the possibilities of intelligent life from other planets, it still startling and vivid nearly after a century after its appearance, and a half-century after Orson Wells's infamous 1938 radio adaptation. The daring portrayal of aliens landing on English soil, with its themes of interplanetary imperialism, technological holocaust and chaos, is central to the career of H.G. Wells, who died at the dawn of the atomic age. The survival of mankind in the face of "vast and cool and unsympathetic" scientific powers spinning out of control was a crucial theme throughout his work. Visionary, shocking and chilling, The War Of The Worlds has lost none of its impact since its first publication in 1898.

November, science fiction:
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy By Douglas Adams - [obs20, lila55, ficbot, Quake1028]
Inkmesh search

Description: "IRRESISTIBLE!" --The Boston Globe Seconds before the Earth is demolished to make way for a galactic freeway, Arthur Dent is plucked off the planet by his friend Ford Prefect, a researcher for the revised edition of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy who, for the last fifteen years, has been posing as an out-of-work actor. Together this dynamic pair begin a journey through space aided by … more »quotes from The Hitchhiker's Guide ("A towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have") and a galaxy-full of fellow travelers: Zaphod Beeblebrox--the two-headed, three-armed ex-hippie and totally out-to-lunch president of the galaxy; Trillian, Zaphod's girlfriend (formally Tricia McMillan), whom Arthur tried to pick up at a cocktail party once upon a time zone; Marvin, a paranoid, brilliant, and chronically depressed robot; Veet Voojagig, a former graduate student who is obsessed with the disappearance of all the ballpoint pens he bought over the years. Where are these pens? Why are we born? Why do we die? Why do we spend so much time between wearing digital watches? For all the answers stick your thumb to the stars. And don't forget to bring a towel! "[A] WHIMSICAL ODYSSEY...Characters frolic through the galaxy with infectious joy." --Publishers Weekly From the Paperback edition. (from eBooks.com)

October, horror:
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
In case anyone isn't familiar with the plot, Dr. Jekyll is a kindly doctor who is experimenting with "mind altering" drugs. One of these drugs accidentally turns him in a homicidal maniac, who calls himself Edward Hyde, and whose personality gradually takes over that of Dr. Jekyll, until he can no longer control his transformations. A story of a man's decent into madness. Still as gripping today as when it was written in 1886. (HarryT)

September, Mystery/Crime:
The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
Harry T says: "The Moonstone", published in 1868, is widely regarded as the precursor of the modern mystery and suspense novels. T. S. Eliot called it "the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels"...A fabulous story. Both a classic and fun to read...

August, free for all:
Sh*t My Dad Says by Halpern, Justin
More than a million people now follow Mr. Halpern's philosophical musings on Twitter, and in this book, his son weaves a brilliantly funny, touching coming-of-age memoir around the best of his quotes. An all-American story that unfolds on the Little League field, in Denny's, during excruciating family road trips, and, most frequently, in the Halperns' kitchen over bowls of Grape-Nuts, Sh*t My Dad Says is a chaotic, hilarious, true portrait of a father-son relationship from a major new comic voice.

July, fantasy:
American Gods by Neil Gaiman
Titans clash, but with more fuss than fury in this fantasy demi-epic from the author of Neverwhere. The intriguing premise of Gaiman's tale is that the gods of European yore, who came to North America with their immigrant believers, are squaring off for a rumble with new indigenous deities: "gods of credit card and freeway, of Internet and telephone, of radio and hospital and television, gods of plastic and of beeper and of neon." They all walk around in mufti, disguised as ordinary people, which causes no end of trouble for 32-year-old protagonist Shadow Moon, who can't turn around without bumping into a minor divinity. Released from prison the day after his beloved wife dies in a car accident, Shadow takes a job as emissary for Mr. Wednesday, avatar of the Norse god Grimnir, unaware that his boss's recruiting trip across the American heartland will subject him to repeat visits from the reanimated corpse of his dead wife and brutal roughing up by the goons of Wednesday's adversary, Mr. World. At last Shadow must reevaluate his own deeply held beliefs in order to determine his crucial role in the final showdown. Gaiman tries to keep the magical and the mundane evenly balanced, but he is clearly more interested in the activities of his human protagonists: Shadow's poignant personal moments and the tale's affectionate slices of smalltown life are much better developed than the aimless plot, which bounces Shadow from one episodic encounter to another in a design only the gods seem to know. Mere mortal readers will enjoy the tale's wit, but puzzle over its strained mythopoeia. (One-day laydown, June 19)Forecast: Even when he isn't in top form, Gaiman, creator of the acclaimed Sandman comics series, trumps many storytellers. Momentously titled, and allotted a dramatic one-day laydown with a 12-city author tour, his latest will appeal to fans and attract mainstream review coverage for better or for worse because of the rich possibilities of its premise.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

June, thriller/suspense:
Shutter Island by Dennis LeHane
The year is 1954. U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels and his new partner, Chuck Aule, have come to Shutter Island, home of Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane, to investigate the disappearance of a patient. Multiple murderess Rachel Solando is loose somewhere on this remote and barren island, despite having been kept in a locked cell under constant surveillance. As a killer hurricane bears relentlessly down on them, a strange case takes on even darker, more sinister shades--with hints of radical experimentation, horrifying surgeries, and lethal countermoves made in the cause of a covert shadow war. No one is going to escape Shutter Island unscathed, because nothing at Ashecliffe Hospital is what it seems. But then neither is Teddy Daniels.

May, classic
Kim by Rudyard Kipling
Kim is an orphan boy in India in the late 1800s. He becomes involved in an old Lama's search for a sacred river, and in a British spy ring, playing the "Great Game".
"The book presents a vivid picture of India, its teeming populations, religions, and superstitions, and the life of the bazaars and the road."
..........— The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature. Ed. Margaret Drabble and Jenny Stringer. Oxford University Press, 2007.

April, humor:
The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
"The first in a series of outlandishly clever adventures featuring the resourceful, fearless literary detective Thursday Next-a New York Times bestseller!In Jasper Fforde's Great Britain, circa 1985, time travel is routine, cloning is a reality (dodos are the resurrected pet of choice), and literature is taken very, very seriously. England is a virtual police state where an aunt can get lost (literally) in a Wordsworth poem and forging Byronic verse is a punishable offense. All this is business as usual for Thursday Next, renowned Special Operative in literary detection. But when someone begins kidnapping characters from works of literature and plucks Jane Eyre from the pages of Bront?'s novel, Thursday is faced with the challenge of her career. Fforde's ingenious fantasy-enhanced by a Web site that re-creates the world of the novel-unites intrigue with English literature in a delightfully witty mix."

March, Nonfiction:
Quirkology: How We Discover the Big Truths in Small Things by Richard Wiseman.
An award-winning psychologist exposes the truth behind life's little oddities and absurdities in this quirky and practical guide to life.
For over twenty years, psychologist Professor Richard Wiseman has examined the quirky science of everyday life. In Quirkology, he navigates the backwaters of human behavior, discovering the tell-tale signs that give away a liar, the secret science behind speed-dating and personal ads, and what a person's sense of humor reveals about the innermost workings of their mind-- all along paying tribute to others who have carried out similarly weird and wonderful work. Wiseman's research has involved secretly observing people as they go about their daily business, conducting unusual experiments in art exhibitions and music concerts, and even staging fake séances in allegedly haunted buildings. With thousands of research subjects from all over the world, including enamored couples, unwitting pedestrians, and guileless dinner guests, Wiseman presents a fun, clever, and unexpected picture of the human mind.

February, romance:
Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris
Dead Until Dark is the first book in Charlaine Harris's series The Southern Vampire Mysteries / Sookie Stackhouse novels. In this first installment, the author introduces the character of Sookie Stackhouse, a young telepathic waitress from the fictional town of Bon Temps, Louisiana, and her world, an alternate history where vampires, shapeshifters and other supernatual beings coexist with humans. In Dead Until Dark Sookie begins a romantic entanglement with her vampire neighbor and is faced with a series of murders in town.
Magic Bites by Ilona Andrews. It's a romantic mystery / urban fantasy. It's actually written by married couple. It has an e-book version.

06:57 PM by pilotbob in Reading Recommendations | Book Clubs

Wow! It's the 20th already?! Only 4 shopping days until Christmas. Where does the time go, I haven't even started this one yet.

But, the club must go on. Tell us what you thought about the book, the characters, the story, the blue one next to the fish... wait that's not right.

BOb

06:00 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Week in Review

Have something interesting to say about e-books or mobile computing? Join our forums and share your view on topics like the ones discussed at MobileRead this past week...

E-Book General - Reading Recommendations

• December 2010 Book Club Nominations
• December 2010 Mobile Read Book Club Vote

E-Book Readers - Apple Devices

• iOS4.2 is out

Miscellaneous - Announcements

• Drumroll please... MobileRead Fall Contest winners revealed!

10:11 AM by pshrynk in E-Book Readers | Apple Devices

I just got an e-mail from Apple that I can download and install iOS 4.2 to my iPad. Now all I gotta do is get home where I can hook up with WiFi and get it. Yay.

Here is the link on Apple.com

01:49 PM by pilotbob in Reading Recommendations | Book Clubs

Help up choose a book as the December 2010 eBook for the Mobile Read Book Club. The poll will be open for 5 days. We will start the discussion thread for this book on December 20th. Select from the following books.

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
upload on MR by Roy White lrf & mobi/prc | upload by =X= lrf & mobi/prc & IMP | feedbooks | manybooks

The Washington Post says: "[Dostoevsky is] at once the most literary and compulsively readable of novelists we continue to regard as great . . . The Brothers Karamazov stands as the culmination of his art – his last, longest, richest, and most capacious book." (quoted at Amazon's website)

Walden by Henry David Thoreau
upload on MR by Strether lrf & mobi/prc | feedbooks | Project Gutenberg

One of the great books of American letters and a masterpiece of reflective philosophizing. Accounts of Thoreau's daily life on the shores of Walden Pond outside Concord, Massachusetts, are interwoven with musings on the virtues of self-reliance and individual freedom, on society, government, and other topics.

Call of the Wild by Jack London
upload on MR by Madam Broshkina lrf & mobi/prc | feedbooks

From Wikipedia: The Call of the Wild is a novel by American writer Jack London. The plot concerns a previously domesticated and even somewhat pampered dog named Buck whose primordial instincts return after a series of events finds him serving as a sled dog in the treacherous, frigid Yukon during the days of the 19th century Gold Rushes.

Published in 1903, The Call of the Wild is one of London's most read books and it is generally considered one of his best. Because the protagonist is a dog, it is sometimes classified as a juvenile novel, suitable for children, but it is dark in tone and contains numerous scenes of cruelty and violence.

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Upload on MR by HarryT (Illustrated) epub & lrf & mobi/prc | Project Gutenberg

"Great Expectations" opens unforgettably in a twilit and overgrown churchyard on the eerie Kent marshes. There, the orphan Pip is disturbed to meet an escaped convict, Magwitch, but gives him food, in an encounter that is to haunt both their lives. How Pip receives riches from a mysterious benefactor, snobbishly abandons his friends for London society and "great expectations", and grows through misfortune and suffering to maturity is the theme of one of Dicken's best-loved novels.

In "Great Expectations", Dickens blends gripping drama with penetrating satire to give a compelling story rich in comedy and pathos: he has also created two of his finest, most haunting characters in Pip and Miss Havisham.

On a personal note I must add that this is one of my favourite of Dickens' novels and, indeed, one of my "all time" favourite books.

Contains the original black and white illustrations by Charles Green.

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
Upload on MR by HarryT lrf & mobi/prc | Upload by AlexBell (Illustrated) epub | Inkmesh search

"Secrets, mistaken identities, surprise revelations, amnesia, locked rooms and locked asylums, and an unorthodox villain made this mystery thriller an instant success when it first appeared in 1860, and it has continued to enthrall readers ever since. From the hero’s foreboding before his arrival at Limmeridge House to the nefarious plot concerning the beautiful Laura, the breathtaking tension of Collins’s narrative created a new literary genre of suspense fiction, which profoundly shaped the course of English popular writing." (Amazon)

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas
Uploaded on MR by HarryT lrf & epub & mobi/prc | Uploaded by crutledge mobi/prc | Inkmesh search

From Amazon: Set against the tumultuous years of the post-Napoleonic era, The Count of Monte Cristo recounts the swashbuckling adventures of Edmond Dantes, a dashing young sailor falsely accused of treason. The story of his long imprisonment, dramatic escape, and carefully wrought revenge offers up a vision of France that has become immortal.

A Room With A View by E. M. Forster
Uploaded on MR by weatherwax epub | Upload by BenG lrf | Upload by MicheleC mobi/prc | Inkmesh search

"This Edwardian social comedy explores love and prim propriety among an eccentric cast of characters assembled in an Italian pensione and in a corner of Surrey, England. A charming young English woman, Lucy Honeychurch, faints into the arms of a fellow Britisher when she witnesses a murder in a Florentine piazza. Attracted to this man, George Emerson--who is entirely unsuitable and whose father just may be a Socialist--Lucy is soon at war with the snobbery of her class and her own conflicting desires.

Back in England she is courted by a more acceptable, if stifling, suitor, and soon realizes she must make a startling decision that will decide the course of her future: she is forced to choose between convention and passion.

The enduring delight of this tale of romantic intrigue is rooted in Forster's colorful characters, including outrageous spinsters, pompous clergymen and outspoken patriots. Written in 1908, A Room With A View is one of E.M. Forster's earliest and most celebrated works."

War of the Worlds by H G Wells
Uploaded by HarryT epub & mobi/prc & lrf | Upload by JSWolf lrf | Project Gutenberg | feedbooks | Inkmesh search

H.G. Wells's science fiction classic, the first novel to explore the possibilities of intelligent life from other planets, it still startling and vivid nearly after a century after its appearance, and a half-century after Orson Wells's infamous 1938 radio adaptation. The daring portrayal of aliens landing on English soil, with its themes of interplanetary imperialism, technological holocaust and chaos, is central to the career of H.G. Wells, who died at the dawn of the atomic age. The survival of mankind in the face of "vast and cool and unsympathetic" scientific powers spinning out of control was a crucial theme throughout his work. Visionary, shocking and chilling, The War Of The Worlds has lost none of its impact since its first publication in 1898.

Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain
upload on MR by Madam Broshkina mobi/prc & IMP | feedbooks

Wikipedia: Life on the Mississippi is a memoir by Mark Twain detailing his days as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River before the American Civil War.

The book begins with a brief history of the river from its discovery by Hernando de Soto in 1541. It continues with anecdotes of Twain's training as a steamboat pilot, as the 'cub' of an experienced pilot. He describes, with great affection, the science of navigating the ever-changing Mississippi River.

In the second half, the book describes Twain's return, many years later, to travel on a steamboat from St. Louis to New Orleans. He describes the competition from railroads, the new, large cities, and his observations on greed, gullibility, tragedy, and bad architecture. He also tells some stories that are most likely tall tales.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
upload on MR by HarryT epub & Mobi/PRC

Wuthering Heights is the only novel by Emily Brontë. It was first published in 1847 under the pseudonym Ellis Bell, and a posthumous second edition was edited by her sister Charlotte.

The name of the novel comes from the Yorkshire manor on the moors on which the story centres (as an adjective; wuthering is a Yorkshire word referring to turbulent weather). The narrative tells the tale of the all-encompassing and passionate, yet thwarted, love between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw, and how this unresolved passion eventually destroys them and many around them.

07:51 PM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Announcements

A few weeks ago we put a challenge to our readers: impress us with your detective skills and help us discover the murderer in What The Butler Saw (ePub). We were truly impressed by the overwhelming response, and I gotta tell ya, we were humbled, silenced and taken by all the wonderful thoughts you sent our way. So thank you all!

And now for the moment everyone on the Internet (just play along) has been waiting for: it's time to announce the winners (randomly chosen).

The First Prize (ebook reader of your choice) goes to ...Schauberger!

The Second Prize (Amazon Kindle 3G) goes to ... Leep!

The Third Prize (Amazon Kindle 3G) goes to ... IceHand!

The Fourth Prize (PocketBook Pro 902) goes to ... jpuntd!

Furthermore, the ten e-book vouchers (from a store of your choice) go to:
federzwoelf, antoniorafael, omk3, lovestoreadalot, FlorenceArt, thrawn_aj, LCF, WT Sharpe, mrscoach, and Bilbo1967!

A big congrats to the winners!

My personal thank you to the entire MobileRead team who worked unbelievably hard behind the scenes - it seriously means the world to me that you believe in what we're doing here! And finally, a big thumbs up to PocketBook for sponsoring a shiny new PocketBook Pro 902 device!

Now, you're probably thinking: "but what about MEEEEE?!" We have good news for you too; Santa has tons of e-book goodies in his sleigh, meaning, stay tuned for our next contest!