What I’m Reading – May 15, 2013

It seems like it’s been a while since I did one of these posts.  Time has not been nice to me lately.  🙂

What do I have on the recent reading list on my various reading devices?  Let’s see:

Lets get visibleLet’s Get Visible – How To Get Noticed and Sell More Books

Dave Gaughran’s follow up to Let’s Get Digital is not quite a PR and promotion treatise as it is a manifesto on how to take advantage of Amazon’s inner workings…the algorithms and the tricks that they play.  The book is required reading for any indie author.

 

Accept No Substitutes – A Sugar Divorce Resourcesugar divorce

Suzanna Stinnson — A great theory overall, but like a lot of free books, very short on real help that hasn’t already been repeated umpty thousand times somewhere else.

 

Wheat Belly

Whea

William Davis M.D.

I think everyone has heard of a beer belly before, but the world is slowly catching onto the idea that the spread around our middles that many people struggle with is the same thing.  It’s caused by excess wheat consumption, but it’s not our fault:  Wheat has been genetically modified to feed starving millions efficiently and in the process it has become addictive, toxic and dangerous to our health.  Don’t believe me?  Read the book.  The proof is all there.   People who have gone wheat free have lost 20-30 pounds and more in weeks, and their flabby gut in the process.  Even if you don’t convert to the idea of wheat-free yourself, the book is compulsive reading.

 

Dirty Martini

J.A.Konrath

dirty martiniHe’s the guru of self-publishing and the defacto spokeperson for indie publishing, and currently ranked the #2 author on Kindle overall.  While I’ve spent years quoting Konrath and reading his blog for every skerrick to do with indie publishing, I had never read one of his fiction books until now.  I thought it was time to attend to that ommission.

While I can see why they’re very successful, I can say now that they’re not my cup of tea.   Even as a taut suspense thriller with a finely-crafted plot, and a female heroine close to my own age, this book just didn’t hit my buttons.  I am going to have to stew for a while over it to figure out why, because there is nothing wrong with the book and I started reading it with every intention of liking it.  I don’t dislike it, either.  I’m just halfway through and in no rush to finish…and probably won’t despite the entire population of the greater Chicago area being in dire straits when I left off reading.  It could simply come down to it being that tough wise-cracking female cop thrillers are not my thing.  That’s okay – Konrath will never read one of my books, either, because mine are most certainly not his thing.  J

 

If_Tomorrow_ComesIf Tomorrow Comes

Sydney Sheldon

I read this book when it was first released, back in the eighties.  It was a smash hit back then, and it was made into a mini-series on TV (mini-series were also big back then).  This was the book that started my love affair with professional thieves in fiction, which I’ve written about twice — so far.  I may yet feature them again, because there’s so much fertile ground for drama and conflict.

I was immediately drawn into this story because the heroine was called Tracy, and the antagonist’s last name was Cooper…

I re-acquired and reread the book just recently because of this remembered fondness and was disappointed.  Sheldon hits all the right points with precise mastery:  There’s angst, emotional conflict, a romance, suspense, action, bad guys, glamour…all the right ingredients, and they’re all stirred precisely.  It’s no wonder the book was a runaway smash hit.

But I’m not sure if it’s because I’m a writer now, and have fourteen years of publishing experience under my belt, or if I’m just that much older (ugh), but I actually feel the author working the wires.  There’s no genuine feeling there at all.  It’s a story put together like a paint-by-numbers landscape.  I usually perk up at any hint of a romance which can, for me, pull a dull book into the readable category at least.  This one left me as flat and uninterested as I would be in yesterday’s teapot leavings.

But I finished the book out of curiosity — after all, I had loved it back when I was just a reader.  I wanted to see why.

I’m still not sure.  More food for thought.

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Have you had any joy with your reading lately?  Tell me about it!

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