02:54 PM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Announcements

Due to some unforeseen circumstances we will be conducting a maintenance tonight. The affected server is dedicated to our e-mail services (thread subscriptions, for instance) and to hosting the developer platform. I'll keep you updated and let you know when it's complete!

The operations of the MR forum is _not_ affected.

Thank you.

07:00 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Week in Review

Previously at MobileRead:

E-Book General - Reading Recommendations

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

11:47 AM by pilotbob in Reading Recommendations | Book Clubs

Help up choose a book as the June 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 June 20th. Select from the following books.

Thin Blood by MR member author Vicki Tyley
A stockbroker’s wife disappears. Blood on his hands and an adulterous affair with the missing woman’s younger sister sees him charged with murder. With no body and only circumstantial evidence he walks free. Ten years later, journalist Jacinta Deller decides to investigate, only to become embroiled in a warped game of delusion and murder. Available at smashwords.

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.

The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan.
Reviews on Amazon say: An effortless adventure classic that spans the void between dime shocker and quality literature. The rapid elaboration of the plot, that is so well known that it has passed many images into popular conciousness, is still satisfying after many reads....It was not until recently that actor Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and others learned and revealed the information that John Buchan, author of "The Thirty-nine Steps" as well as the highly successful Greenmantle series, had been the head of the secretive British domestic intelligence agency which parallels the FBI in the United States, MI-5. With that knowledge it is increasingly easier to see how the Scotland-born Buchan was able to write such penetrating spy stories, which contain such a strong tone of believability....John Buchan's novel The Thirty-Nine Steps is the prototype of the modern thriller novel, what he called a "shocker." In it, Buchan introduced Richard Hannay, the prototype of the resourceful, intelligent, and tenacious hero of the modern thriller. And while the story may not be as intricate or exciting as its descendents', The Thirty-Nine Steps still succeeds at what Buchan set out to do--entertain.

Last Man Standing by David Baldacci.
Quote:
It took ten seconds for Web London to lose everything: his friends, his team, his reputation. Point man of the FBI's super-elite Hostage Rescue Team, Web roared into a blind alley toward a drug dealer's lair, only to meet a high-tech, custom-designed ambush that killed everyone around him. Now coping with the blame-filled words of anguished widows and the suspicions of colleagues, Web tries to put his life back together with the help of his psychiatrist, Dr. Claire Daniels. To do so, he must discover why he was the one man who lived through the ambush--and find the only other person who came out of that alley alive...a ten-year-old boy who has since disappeared.
Web's search leads him from inner-city Washington, D.C., to the rolling hills of Virginia horse country--while people connected to him are violently silenced. Acting on his instincts, Web believes he knows where the killer will strike next. Only this time, he may not survive the attack. LAST MAN STANDING is an explosive psychological thriller about a man desperate to find answers--from the secret terrors he has kept from himself to his unbearable guilt. His fight to save himself and those he cares for will come at a high cost...and threaten everything he has grown to believe in. With vividly realized characters and a breathtaking pace, this is another spellbinding novel from David Baldacci, one of today's best storytellers.

Resurrection by Gabriel May
On the eve of a new Millennium, Jon York expected midnight to come and go without incident. Instead, a brutal home invasion left Jon in a coma, his wife dead, and his daughter beaten and raped.
Eight years later Jon awakens from the coma with no recollection of the attack. Fueled by rage, he will stop at nothing to avenge what has been done to his family.

Mystic River by Dennis Lehane
When they were children, Sean Devine, Jimmy Marcus, and Dave Boyle were friends. But then a strange car drove up their street. One boy got in the car, two did not, and something terrible happened -- something that ended their friendship and changed all three boys forever. Twenty-five years later, Sean is a homicide detective. Jimmy is an ex-con. And Dave is trying to hold his marriage together and keep his demons at bay-demons that urge him to do horrific things.
When Jimmy's daughter is found murdered, Sean is assigned to the case. His investigation brings him into serious conflict with Jimmy. And then there is Dave, who came home covered in someone else's blood the night Jimmy's daughter died. While Sean attempts to use the law to return peace and order to the neighborhood, Jimmy finds his need for vengeance pushing him ever closer to a moral abyss from which he won't be able to return.
A tense and unnerving psychological thriller, Mystic River is also an epic novel of love, loyalty, faith, and family.

Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell
Wikipedia:
Inside an almost isolated Skåne farmhouse in Lunnarp, an old man, Johannes Lovgren is tortured to death and his wife Maria savagely beaten and left for dead with a noose around her neck. Inspector Kurt Wallander, a forty-two-year-old Ystad police detective, and his team – Rydberg, an aging detective with a rheumatism; Martinsson, a 29-year-old rookie; Naslund, a thirty-year veteran; Svedberg, a balding, forty-something-year-old detective; Hansson; and Peters – are put on the case. Maria Lovgren is taken to a hospital, but dies anyway. Her last word: "foreign"
Rydberg has been examining the noose around Mrs Lovgren's neck and "has never seen one like it before". He thinks that Mrs Lovgren's last word is accurate, and that the murderers are foreign. But his conclusion leads to several racially-motivated attacks after the information is leaked to the press.
The story focuses on Sweden's liberal attitude regarding immigration, and explores themes of racism and national identity.

Casino Royale (1953) by Ian Fleming
The allure of James Bond was best described by Raymond Chandler, who insisted that 007 is "what every man would like to be and what every woman would like to have between her sheets." Who can argue with that? This month marks the 40th anniversary of the film release of Dr. No, which was the first Bond adventure to make the big screen, and two big coffee-table books are being published to honor the occasion (LJ 10/1/02, p. 96). Shockingly, Fleming's original novels have gone out of print, but Penguin here reproduces a trio of the British secret agent's early outings, released in 1952, 1958, and 1959, respectively, sporting stylish cover art. These stories were racy for the nifty Fifties but are quite tame by today's standards. Still, they can be fun.

Killing Floor by Lee Child
All is not well in Margrave, Georgia.
The sleepy, forgotten town hasn't seen a crime in decades, but within the span of three days it witnesses events that leave everyone stunned. An unidentified man is found beaten and shot to death on a lonely country road. The police chief and his wife are butchered on a quiet Sunday morning. Then a bank executive disappears from his home, leaving his keys on the table and his wife frozen with fear.
The easiest suspect is Jack Reacher - an outsider, a man just passing through. But Reacher is not just any drifter. He is a tough ex-military policeman, trained to think fast and act faster. He has lived with and hunted the worst: the hard men of the American military gone bad.

Dead(ish) by by MR member author Naomi Kramer
Linda’s had a bad day. First her boyfriend killed her. Then she woke up, still on this boring plane of existence, and with an odd obsession about her missing body. Mike won’t tell her what he did with her body, and she can’t find the stupid thing herself. There’s only one thing she can do - torment the bastard until he coughs up the information.

08:44 PM by pilotbob in Reading Recommendations | Book Clubs

Help us select the next book that the Mobile Read book club will read for June 2010.

The nominations will run through May 27.
Voting (new poll thread) will run for 5 days starting May 27.

Book selection category for June per the "official" club opening thread is:

June 2010
Thriller/Suspense

In order for a book to be included in the poll it needs THREE NOMINATIONS (original nomination, a second and a third).

How Does This Work?
The Mobile Read Book Club (MRBC) is an informal club that requires nothing of you. Each month a book is selected by polling. On the last week of that month a discussion thread is started for the book. If you want to participate feel free. There is no need to "join" or sign up. All are welcome.

How Does a Book Get Selected?
Each book that is nominated will be listed in a pool at the end of the nomination period. The book that polls the most votes will be the official selection.

How Many Nominations Can I Make?
Each participant has 3 nominations. You can nominate a new book for consideration or nominate (second, third) one that has already been nominated by another person.

How Do I Nominate a Book?
Please just post a message with your nomination. If you are the FIRST to nominate a book, please try to provide an abstract to the book so others may consider their level of interest.

How Do I Know What Has Been Nominated?
Just follow the thread. This message will be updated with the status of the nominations as often as I can. If one is missed, please just post a message with a multi-quote of the 3 nominations and it will be added to the list ASAP.

When is the Poll?
The poll thread will open at the end of the nomination period, or once there have been 10 books with 3 nominations each. At that time a link to the poll thread will be posted here and this thread will be closed.

The floor is open to nominations.

Official choices each with three nominations:

Thin Blood by MR member author Vicki Tyley
A stockbroker’s wife disappears. Blood on his hands and an adulterous affair with the missing woman’s younger sister sees him charged with murder. With no body and only circumstantial evidence he walks free. Ten years later, journalist Jacinta Deller decides to investigate, only to become embroiled in a warped game of delusion and murder. Available at smashwords.

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.

The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan.
Reviews on Amazon say: An effortless adventure classic that spans the void between dime shocker and quality literature. The rapid elaboration of the plot, that is so well known that it has passed many images into popular conciousness, is still satisfying after many reads....It was not until recently that actor Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and others learned and revealed the information that John Buchan, author of "The Thirty-nine Steps" as well as the highly successful Greenmantle series, had been the head of the secretive British domestic intelligence agency which parallels the FBI in the United States, MI-5. With that knowledge it is increasingly easier to see how the Scotland-born Buchan was able to write such penetrating spy stories, which contain such a strong tone of believability....John Buchan's novel The Thirty-Nine Steps is the prototype of the modern thriller novel, what he called a "shocker." In it, Buchan introduced Richard Hannay, the prototype of the resourceful, intelligent, and tenacious hero of the modern thriller. And while the story may not be as intricate or exciting as its descendents', The Thirty-Nine Steps still succeeds at what Buchan set out to do--entertain.

Last Man Standing by David Baldacci.
Quote:
It took ten seconds for Web London to lose everything: his friends, his team, his reputation. Point man of the FBI's super-elite Hostage Rescue Team, Web roared into a blind alley toward a drug dealer's lair, only to meet a high-tech, custom-designed ambush that killed everyone around him. Now coping with the blame-filled words of anguished widows and the suspicions of colleagues, Web tries to put his life back together with the help of his psychiatrist, Dr. Claire Daniels. To do so, he must discover why he was the one man who lived through the ambush--and find the only other person who came out of that alley alive...a ten-year-old boy who has since disappeared.
Web's search leads him from inner-city Washington, D.C., to the rolling hills of Virginia horse country--while people connected to him are violently silenced. Acting on his instincts, Web believes he knows where the killer will strike next. Only this time, he may not survive the attack. LAST MAN STANDING is an explosive psychological thriller about a man desperate to find answers--from the secret terrors he has kept from himself to his unbearable guilt. His fight to save himself and those he cares for will come at a high cost...and threaten everything he has grown to believe in. With vividly realized characters and a breathtaking pace, this is another spellbinding novel from David Baldacci, one of today's best storytellers.

Resurrection by Gabriel May
On the eve of a new Millennium, Jon York expected midnight to come and go without incident. Instead, a brutal home invasion left Jon in a coma, his wife dead, and his daughter beaten and raped.
Eight years later Jon awakens from the coma with no recollection of the attack. Fueled by rage, he will stop at nothing to avenge what has been done to his family.

The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan.
Reviews on Amazon say: An effortless adventure classic that spans the void between dime shocker and quality literature. The rapid elaboration of the plot, that is so well known that it has passed many images into popular conciousness, is still satisfying after many reads....It was not until recently that actor Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and others learned and revealed the information that John Buchan, author of "The Thirty-nine Steps" as well as the highly successful Greenmantle series, had been the head of the secretive British domestic intelligence agency which parallels the FBI in the United States, MI-5. With that knowledge it is increasingly easier to see how the Scotland-born Buchan was able to write such penetrating spy stories, which contain such a strong tone of believability....John Buchan's novel The Thirty-Nine Steps is the prototype of the modern thriller novel, what he called a "shocker." In it, Buchan introduced Richard Hannay, the prototype of the resourceful, intelligent, and tenacious hero of the modern thriller. And while the story may not be as intricate or exciting as its descendents', The Thirty-Nine Steps still succeeds at what Buchan set out to do--entertain.

Mystic River by Dennis Lehane
When they were children, Sean Devine, Jimmy Marcus, and Dave Boyle were friends. But then a strange car drove up their street. One boy got in the car, two did not, and something terrible happened -- something that ended their friendship and changed all three boys forever. Twenty-five years later, Sean is a homicide detective. Jimmy is an ex-con. And Dave is trying to hold his marriage together and keep his demons at bay-demons that urge him to do horrific things.
When Jimmy's daughter is found murdered, Sean is assigned to the case. His investigation brings him into serious conflict with Jimmy. And then there is Dave, who came home covered in someone else's blood the night Jimmy's daughter died. While Sean attempts to use the law to return peace and order to the neighborhood, Jimmy finds his need for vengeance pushing him ever closer to a moral abyss from which he won't be able to return.
A tense and unnerving psychological thriller, Mystic River is also an epic novel of love, loyalty, faith, and family.

Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell
Wikipedia:
Inside an almost isolated Skåne farmhouse in Lunnarp, an old man, Johannes Lovgren is tortured to death and his wife Maria savagely beaten and left for dead with a noose around her neck. Inspector Kurt Wallander, a forty-two-year-old Ystad police detective, and his team – Rydberg, an aging detective with a rheumatism; Martinsson, a 29-year-old rookie; Naslund, a thirty-year veteran; Svedberg, a balding, forty-something-year-old detective; Hansson; and Peters – are put on the case. Maria Lovgren is taken to a hospital, but dies anyway. Her last word: "foreign"
Rydberg has been examining the noose around Mrs Lovgren's neck and "has never seen one like it before". He thinks that Mrs Lovgren's last word is accurate, and that the murderers are foreign. But his conclusion leads to several racially-motivated attacks after the information is leaked to the press.
The story focuses on Sweden's liberal attitude regarding immigration, and explores themes of racism and national identity.

Casino Royale (1953) by Ian Fleming
The allure of James Bond was best described by Raymond Chandler, who insisted that 007 is "what every man would like to be and what every woman would like to have between her sheets." Who can argue with that? This month marks the 40th anniversary of the film release of Dr. No, which was the first Bond adventure to make the big screen, and two big coffee-table books are being published to honor the occasion (LJ 10/1/02, p. 96). Shockingly, Fleming's original novels have gone out of print, but Penguin here reproduces a trio of the British secret agent's early outings, released in 1952, 1958, and 1959, respectively, sporting stylish cover art. These stories were racy for the nifty Fifties but are quite tame by today's standards. Still, they can be fun.

Killing Floor by Lee Child
All is not well in Margrave, Georgia.
The sleepy, forgotten town hasn't seen a crime in decades, but within the span of three days it witnesses events that leave everyone stunned. An unidentified man is found beaten and shot to death on a lonely country road. The police chief and his wife are butchered on a quiet Sunday morning. Then a bank executive disappears from his home, leaving his keys on the table and his wife frozen with fear.
The easiest suspect is Jack Reacher - an outsider, a man just passing through. But Reacher is not just any drifter. He is a tough ex-military policeman, trained to think fast and act faster. He has lived with and hunted the worst: the hard men of the American military gone bad.

Dead(ish) by Naomi Kramer
(need summary)

07:00 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Week in Review

If you missed our frontpage news at any point this week, here is the best way to catch up:

E-Book General - News

• B&N Announces PubIt! self-publishing platform
• Back to the Future: Paper E-Books?

E-Book General - General Discussions

• Editorial: Are Too Many E-books Stealing the Pleasure of Reading?

Miscellaneous - Announcements

• MobileRead Spring Contest - The Winners!

03:58 PM by Bob Russell in E-Book General | News

All this fuss about creating electronic books, and yet the future might be paper books after all. New research has demonstrated the ability to create a capacitor that can potentially power paper electronics. This may eventually open the door for circuits that are printed on paper, and cheap disposable electronics.

Imagine that... your e-books and paper books are the same thing. Products should be available for holiday shopping in the year 2096 or so.

See more at PhysOrg.com.

06:12 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Announcements

At long last! Sorry for the delay guys, but here are your winners for our MobileRead Spring Contest.

The main prizes go to:

PocketBooks:
GeoffC and nikkie

Astak Pocket PROs:
Blue Monkey and Freckles

The 20 Directebooks vouchers go to:

• AJ Starr
• argentsly
• ATDrake
• cassidym
• cu_cannon
• desdemona
• DocChip
• dsvick
• Ham88
• Historiann
• karenh
• Latinandgreek
• Lettir
• loldevin
• MantleTyper
• PKFFW
• R_Dollish
• SilverGhost40
• Sourpy
• sqrt(-1)

Another round of Directebook vouchers for outstandingly entertaining entries go to:

• Beppe
• LCF
• omk3
• poohbear
• SneakySnake
• Steve Jordan
• WT Sharpe

So who killed pshrynk? The answer: mtravellerh! All of you who submitted the right answer - you have shown us some excellent deductive and wildly creative reasoning that would even make Sherlock Holmes tremble with envy.

Even if you didn't win a reading device or a voucher this time, a big thank you to everyone for making this such a great game. As promised, attached you find the special, leather-bound in a crush proof cover, gold-leaf collector's edition of Rock Lobster's case notes for your maximum enjoyment.

My personal thanks to the MobileRead team who I believe did an amazing job in making this contest come true. You guys rock!!!!

Last but not least, thank you to our friends at PocketBook, Astak and Directebooks who sponsored this contest.

PS: Be on the lookout for more MobileRead contests soon!

11:25 AM by Steven Lyle Jordan in E-Book General | News

Barnes & Noble announces PubIt!, essentially a self-publishing platform on their own servers, ala Amazon's Digital Text Platform. It seems accepting ebooks from the likes of Smashwords doesn't satisfy them, they want to be a direct supplier. (It could also cause those who use the service to possibly bypass services like Smashwords, thereby possibly cutting down the amount of material processed by Smashwords and sent to competitors like Sony and Kobo... but I'm sure that's an accidental result of the move. )