I just finished the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It was a free download from Amazon onto my Kindle.

You know what I really liked it. Sherlock Holmes is really fun smart guy except he cannot let his super logical brain be diverted by any sort of female wanderings. It makes me wonder about him. He is also a cocaine addict and proud of it. It helps him sort things out. And he has been known to hang out in opium dens.

The stories are very clever and well written. I mean how many people actually have actually read the book? I never had.

Anyways, I give the books a three out of five stars. Three is worth reading. The stories get a little repetitive and I admit I only read about half of them. Sorry!

I’m changing my rating system because the whole world uses one to five.

I just finished reading The Help. It is set in Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960’s and is about the often cruel relationships between white middle class housewives and their maids “the help.” “Skeeter” a daughter of one of the housewives comes home with a degree from Ole Miss and finds out that Constantine, the family maid and lady who raised her as a baby, is gone and Skeeter’s mother refuses to talk about it and won’t even say where Constantine went.

This gets Skeeter thinking about the maids and their relationship to the families and begins to see with new eyes the help’s predicament. She has an idea to write a book about the stories the maids could tell. Writing such a book is a dangerous thing to do in the Mississippi back then. The novel then goes on to describe the efforts f Skeeter and the maids to solicit other women to tell their stories and get the book published.

Despite my lackluster synopsis above, I found the book very compelling and interesting. The stories ring true and the book is very even handed, given the situation. I fell in love with the characters.

I give it four stars out of four. It’s a great book.

Check out Kathryn Stockett’s web page. Apparently they are going to make a movie out of this book.

I finally finished this book last night, late. Reading it is all I’ve been doing since I started on it Friday night. It has ruined my sleep. I missed most of the US Open coverage on Sunday and pretty much neglected my family  duties in order to see this book through to the end. I did get the lawn mowed last night though.

Its got motorcycle gangs, red necks, skinheads, psychopaths, cocaine addicted doctors, complicated craniatamies,  pistols, gunshots, hand grenades, double crosses, double double crosses, and a string of innocent and not so innocent victims scattered across Minnesota and several detectives who just can’t seem to get ahead of the game until the very end. Its a testament to the losers among us who can create so much chaos for so little gain.

This book is great. I give it four stars out of four. I got a free copy from the library. The Kindle version is priced too high at $12.99.

I was reading the online New York Times a week or so ago and they discussed the literary phenomenon of the Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson a Swedish author who wrote the three books and then died. His books became a posthumous best seller. I said “What, a best selling series that doesn’t involve vampires and whiny teenage girls.” How come I’ve never heard of it?

So I picked up a paperback copy and started reading. I was hooked. bad. It is a crime novel set in a small town in Sweden. It features Mikael Blomkvist a journalist who lost his mojo and a criminal libel trial and is facing a short prison term and his eventual sidekick, Lisbeth Salander, a computer hacker/investigator who Blomkvist suspects has Asperger’s Syndrome. Lisbeth is one tough girl. She is nobody to mess with. The original Swedish title of the book translates as “Men who Hate Women.” The guys that mess with Lisbeth eventually get their butts kicked, hard by this 90 pound woman.

Blomkvist is offered a job to solve a long standing missing persons case of somebody who disappeared from a small island in Sweden over 34 years ago. He starts on his investigation and things get very interesting very quickly then they get dangerous, very dangerous. This is one of those books you can’t put down. Or at least I couldn’t. It is full of intrigue and evil people, but no vampires and no whining.

I give this book four stars out of four. I have already bought the second book in the trilogy, “The Girl who Played with Fire,” on my Kindle. The Kindle price is the same as the paperback price, about $7.99 or so. I’ll do that. The last book in the trilogy,”The Girl who Kicked the Hornets Nest” is out in hardback now. It is under $10 bucks for the Kindle version so I’ll do that also.

I just finished Strip with a library copy. The Kindle edition was $14.30 which is about what you could buy the hardback for. What’s up with the prices of the ebooks?  Libraries are free, thank you very much.

Anyway this a great book. It has several strong but dangerous characters: Manco Kapak, a strip club owner who has been getting robbed repeatedly and is determined to do something about it, Spence, Kapak’s right hand man who has been assigned the task of getting rid of the robber, Joe Carver, a wealthy homeless guy who is the prime suspect but is innocent but is no guy to mess with, Nick Slosser, a bigamous police lieutenant  who has a big problem on the horizon. Perry sets all these, and a host of other characters up and then sends them crashing into each other. This is a book about setups and double crosses and double double crosses.

It reminds me of the old acts on television where the guy sets a bunch of plates spinning on rods. Well that is is what Perry does in this book. Then he sets the puts the the rods in motion also with chaotic results. This is a totally satisfying read if you like crime/thriller type books. It gets four stars out of four. Go to your local library and get a copy. Save yourself some bucks, send a message to the publisher.

I just finished reading 61 hours on my Kindle. 61 Hours is another novel by Lee Child featuring Jack Reacher,  the 6’5″ ex Military Police Officer ascetic who is rough and tough with quick one-liners. Reacher travels around the country carrying only an ATM card and the clothes on his back. He buys new clothes every three days. Typically he travels from place to place by walking.

This time though things are different. I mean some things are the same. He has a real mean bad dude named Plato to deal with. Plato is mean. He is also only 4′ 11″ tall. One 6′ guy called him a midget. That dummy woke up in a hospital downsized to 4′ 10″. Yeah, who’s a midget now, midget?

But this book is different. It is set in South Dakota in the winter in 30 degrees below zero weather. Not only that Reacher isn’t walking he bummed a ride on a tour bus. Uh, a tour bus full of old people? Oh Jack, what are you doing? Then the tour bus crashes and Jack finds himself stuck in this small town for several days, about 61 hours. He has to protect people and go after bad guys but its like he’s different. The cold bothers him, he even shivers. He gets all moony with a lady who has his old MP job back east. Jack Reacher has turned into a weenie. I mean even I have been in minus 30 degree weather. Big deal.

I don’t like this new Jack Reacher one bit. This is supposed to be brain candy for guys, not moping self reflection. I attribute the change in Jack to his wearing panties with too much rayon in them. Somebody told me that too much rayon in cold weather is bad for guys wearing panties. It binds them up too tight or something. I don’t know.

Whatever the cause is I didn’t much care for this Jack Reacher. No taunts or wise cracks or anything. He doesn’t say one witty thing in the whole novel. I give this novel about 2.5 stars out of 4. Its OK but not up to par.

Come on Lee Child, Jack Reacher needs to man up!

I’m loving my new Kindle. Not only is it fun to read books on it but Amazon has a bunch of free books, including Alice in Wonderland. I’m not sure that I’ve read “Alice” so I decided to give it a go.

It is a really good book. The action starts on the very first page when Alice falls asleep and follows the rabbit down the hole. It is a fast paced book with all sorts of twists and turns.

After I got into it I realized that I had read it or had it read to me a long time ago because I remember a lot of stuff that bothered me. How Alice grows and shrinks. She grows so much at one point that she has to put an arm out the window of a cottage and her foot up the chimney. I found that very very claustrophobic and disturbing as a kid and it still weirds me out.

The other thing that bothered me as a kid was the nonsense spoke by the King and Queen and the judge and many of the other characters. That bothered me also. But hey, after years of listening to Hillary and Bill Clinton, George Bush, Sarah Palin, and Glenn Beck I am much better at dealing with nonsensical language than what I was as a child.

What really struck me about the book is Alice progressing from being a victim where she just lets stuff happen to her to where at the last she is controlling events in Wonderland. She learns how to control just how big or small she needs to be by eating on the left or right side of the mushroom and she goes from taking everybody’s crap to where she tells everybody off. I thought that is very cool.

I give the book three and a half stars out of four.

This non-fiction book by Richard Gulliatt and Peter Hohnen is just amazing. It is about a German merchant ship converted over to a disguised warship during World War I. It left Germany loaded with heavy guns, torpedos, and mines in order to prey upon merchant ships and mine harbors.

It was wildly successful. It sunk either by direct action or its mines almost 30 ships. It would come upon ships at sea and force them to surrender, transfer the crew and passengers and anything worth taking off the captured vessel and then sink it. Since it was a merchant ship it lots of room for prisoners. The ship never released any prisoners because they were afraid the prisoners would spill the beans about the ship.

One reason the ship was so successful was because its very existence embarrassed the allies so they kept it a secret. So no merchant ships were ever warned about its presence nor were they warned that many of the harbors of the world were mined by the ship.

The ship was at sea for over a year and made a triumphant return to Germany with over 700 prisoners in its hold.

A side story is just how gentlemanly naval war was back then. When a ship was captured the Wolf’s captain would come over and introduce himself to the captain of the captured ship. A big meal was ordered up for everybody and afterward the prisoners were transferred over to the Wolf and it would take several days to transfer the coal, cargo, food and such and then everybody would gather up on deck to watch the captured ship be blown up.

The captured officers would be provided an orderly and would be given the run of the ship. After the war many of the former prisoners went to Germany to look up the old buddies, the crewmen of the Wolf.

Contrast that with World War II where Germany again had Commerce Raiders as these ships were called but their captains would open fire on unarmed passenger ships and leave everybody, men, women, and children, in the sea as the raider steamed off.

This is a great read. I give it four stars out of four.

This interesting book tries to describe how little things turn into large trends. He writes how Hush Puppy shoes went from almost disappearing into a fashion statement, the success of Sesame Street and Blues Clues and even why Paul Revere was so successful in rousing the militia during his midnight ride.

It gives me a lot to think about. I think advertisers and marketers have been trying to jump start trends for their clients. If you have been blogging for a while maybe you have been contacted by companies who try and get you to pimp various products in exchange for merchandise. I don’t know about you but don’t you get tired of being marketed to, manipulated, and spun? I am not saying that taking the stuff is a bad thing. I have taken free books and reviewed them (and have disclosed that they were free) but I haven’t taken the bait yet on pimping an insurance agency in exchange for free quotes (has anybody out there paid for an insurance quote? Ever, in the history of the world), or a bag of biblical survival seeds to use when O and his evil minions turn us over to the Taliban.

Anyway, interesting book. I give it three stars out of four.