Dan Simmons is one of those authors I stumbled upon by accident while browsing through my local bookstore. I saw this book entitled  The Terror (aff link) in the bargain section. It looked interesting enough so I decided to give it a shot.  After reading a few chapters, I couldn’t put it down. I wrote a review of The Terror so you can see what it’s all about.

Fast forward a year and I decide to come back to Dan Simmons. This time I buy his novel A Winter Haunting (aff link) as an ebook. I didn’t find it as enjoyable as The Terror, but it kept me entertained.

The novel centers around down-and-out English professor Dale Stewart, who decides to take his sabbatical in his old home town of Elm Haven, Illinois. His wife has left him, his career as a writer is stagnant and a love affair that ended abruptly, has left him depressed, with one suicide attempt and a cocktail of antidepressants.

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I’m always on the lookout for good authors that I believe are greatly underappreciated. Timothy Frost is one of those authors. I previously read his novel Final Passage (aff link) earlier this year – which I gave a rave review. The cool part was, I picked the book on a whim to read on my iPhone whenever I had a few moments to spare. I couldn’t put the book down.

So when I found out that Timothy Frost had released The Abigail Affair (aff link), I jumped at the opportunity to read it. Only this time I downloaded it to my Sony Pocket eReader.

This novel is escapist reading at its best. The plot is full of twists and turns and plenty of adventure. It’s one of my favorite types of novels – a page turner.

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I just finished reading the final novel in Stieg Larsson’s

Reading books was a large part of my childhood. My parents not only encouraged me to read, but also set a good example. To this day, I still have vivid memories of the books I read during my younger years.

One of those books I really enjoyed (and read multiple times) was

I just finished reading Final Passage by Timothy Frost on my iPhone. I downloaded his novel from the Barnes & Noble ebookstore as a free purchase. Frost’s novel is made available to B&N.com via Smashwords (aff link). The novel’s synopsis looked really interesting, so I gave it a shot. And I must say, I’m glad I did.

The premise of Final Passage is the main character, Martin Lancaster, is trying to figure out what really happened to his father – who was killed at sea while sailing. During his investigation, Martin is unable to find his father’s logbook, a piece of evidence that would shed more light on the elder Lancaster’s untimely death.

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I’ve been reading Stephen King since high school. Most of his novels are okay, and there have been a few I really loved. So when I bought his most recent magnum opus, Under the Dome (aff link) as an ebook, I didn’t know what to expect.

The basic premise of Stephen King’s Under the Dome is very simple: A mysterious dome falls over the town of Chester’s Mill, cutting the town and its inhabitants off from the rest of the world. Families are split apart. Electricity is cut off. No more shipments of food or other supplies. Worst of all, even the town’s air supply is isolated and quickly becomes stale and filled with pollutants. And like a window left unwashed, the dome gets dirty, blurring the sun and turning the stars strange colors.

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When I first picked up the book The Terror (aff link) by Dan Simmons off the shelf at my local Barnes & Noble, I automatically thought it’d be yet another novel based on some sort of nefarious international terrorist plot. I was both right and wrong.. I read the synopsis on the inside cover and realized that the novel had nothing to do with terrorism. The story takes place in the cold Arctic Sea, explorers aboard two ships from the Royal British Navy are trying to find the northwest passage. And the terror the men of the two ships face is literally and figuratively quite chilling.

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I finished reading Dan Brown’s long awaited novel The Lost Symbol (aff link) last night and thought I’d write a review. Actually, this isn’t really a review, it’s just a few thoughts I have about the novel and wanted to share with all of you. The novel is entertaining. I didn’t expect it to be high-brow literature when I purchased it at my local bookstore, so I didn’t feel disappointed in that regard.

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I wanted to read David Rothman’s novel The Solomon Scandals (aff link) for a few reasons. First , it seemed like a good book. I had read good things about the novel on various websites and I wanted to read it for myself. I also greatly admire David, he’s one of the bloggers over at Teleread who keeps us informed about the world of ebooks. And finally, the novel is available in many different formats, including print, and just about every ebook format you can think of – so I was happily able to download this book onto my Sony PRS-500.

The Solomon Scandals is a good mix of mystery, thriller with a dash of literary fiction. I found it refreshing not to read about your cliched characters of genre fiction, rather, the novel centers on a newspaper reporter, editors, a gossip columnist, government bureaucrats, a real estate tycoon and even the President of the United States. Add in a dash of humor and you have yourself a really great read.
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It’s rare that I finish a book in one day. Not that I’m a slow reader, I just like to savor the experience of reading a book (yeah, that’s it!). But I just started, and finished this book in less than a day. Of course I’m talking about Lisa Genova’s book Still Alice (aff link). I have written briefly about this book in this post because Lisa originally self-published this book before signing on with a traditional publishing house.

The novel follows Alice Howland, a fifty year old Harvard professor, married and a mother of three. She is, by any measure a successful woman at the top of her game. And this is what makes it so tragic and chilling when she is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease. The symptoms start innocently enough; forgetting words, an occasional appointment and other lapses of absentmindedness we all fall into during the course of our lives. But when she is out running and becomes lost in Harvard Square, a place she has known for 25 years, her life is kicked off track.

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