The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by the late Swedish author Stieg Larsson, dominated the #1 spot on the Kindle bestseller list for a long time, and has maintained a spot in the top 100 for an astounding 630 days.  Dragon Tattoo was just recently unseated from the #1 spot by Daniel Silva’s The Rembrandt Affair.  The others in the Larsson’s much sought out trilogy, The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest are not far behind with about a year in the top 100.

The trilogy follows financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist and brilliant young private investigator Lisbeth Salander as they seek to solve several intense, mind blowing murder mysteries.  In Dragon Tattoo, they get an assignment to solve the mystery of a nearly 40 year old murder case involving 82 year old Henrik Vanger’s beloved great niece, Harriet.  Throughout the process, Blomkvist does his research in exile on Vanger’s vast estate.  The pair uncover a great deal of corruption within Vanger family and about Salander’s own past.

The Girl who Played with Fire follows the duo again as Salandar is accused of murdering a couple in their Stockholm apartment based on her previous violent tendencies, and the presence of her fingerprints on the murder weapon. The trilogy goes out with a bang in Hornet’s Nest as Blomkvist works to figure out who harmed Salander in a previous circumstance and murdered Salander’s father, a longtime asset to the Swedish Secret Police.

The reviews for the whole trilogy are very positive overall.  There are some dissenters who say that Blomkvist’s character is not fully developed, and that the Swedish words are kind of distracting.  I’m currently reading Dragon Tattoo, and I echo what a lot of reviewers and peers have said in that it is a bit boring for the first hundred pages because of financial jargon and other plot set up. After that, it starts to pick up and then you can’t put it down.  I also highly recommend the Kindle version over the paperback because the paperback is bulky, and the print size is tiny.  So be patient, put on your seat belt and get ready for a wild ride.

So what do you think?  If you’ve read any of these books, do you think this trilogy is as good as the hype surrounding it suggests?

To all of you Beatles fans out there, there is acoustic guitar lesson book available for Kindle with the new audio feature enabled.  It is called Best of the Beatles for Acoustic Guitar by Wolf Marshall.  The Kindle version is $9.99, which is the same as most bestsellers.  Since the audio and video feature is so new, there aren’t any reviews on it yet.  However, the paperback version has gotten great reviews with a few exceptions.

The reviewers note that this book is great for players who already know how to play the guitar, but the explanations and demonstrations included are very well documented.  The songs listed in the book are popular Beatles hits such as “Hey Jude,” “Here Comes the Sun,” “Till There Was You” and more. The CD included with the paperback version has a demonstration played at a normal speed and slow speed which helps with understanding how to play the songs.  The Kindle audio feature should include the same demonstrations.

If you are interested in learning how to play the acoustic guitar elements for other bands such as Eric Clapton, Indigo Girls, John Mellencamp, the Rolling Stones and others in the same genre, then you should check out Acoustic Guitar, by Chad Johnson.  It also comes with the new Kindle audio feature.  The reviewers stressed that this book is not meant for beginners, but that it does include background on techniques and chords.

If you are a beginner who is interested in learning how to play the guitar, you should try Guitar 1 or Guitar Method Book 1 2^nd Ed by Greg Koch.  Guitar Method has awesome reviews and includes clear, well paced instructions for beginners  The book included traditional songs such as “Amazing Grace” and “Greensleeves.”  As a piano and violin player who started out on simple books like these, I know they can get boring really fast, but its good to know the basics before you go for the challenging stuff.

For those of you who are interested in playing songs in other genres, there are several other books available for the Kindle with audio.  If you enjoy classical guitar music, check out Classical Guitar, or for country music fans, Country Guitar… by Greg Koch.

There are a lot of music books with sheet music available on Kindle now with the audio and video feature enabled.  If you are interested in musicals and play the piano, you should check out the Wicked book. It includes sheet music and a piano play along audio piece.  Wicked is about the unlikely friendship between the Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda the Good Witch as young girls.  One was born with green skin and was a misfit in society. The other was charming, beautiful and popular.  It takes place long before Dorothy even landed in the Wizard of Oz.

The book includes songs from the popular Wicked musical such as “Dancing through Life,” “The Wizard and I,” “Defying Gravity” and more.  The audio includes a full performance and a “play along” performance that allows the pianist to play the melody.

I’ve read part of the book Wicked, but I hear the musical is a lot better.  I have also heard that the soundtrack is amazing.  So this book should be a great addition to the collection.  The reviews are good overall.

Mama Mia, the popular movie musical with Meryl Streep and Amanda Seyfried is also available on Kindle audio. This is a great movie set on a Greek island that is about a bride to be who searches for her father.  The music is from the popular 70’s band ABBA.  Some of the songs are: “Dancing Queen,” “Gimme Gimme Gimme” and “Honey Honey.”

Amazon does not include a very good description of this book and there are no reviews, but based on my own observations from the movie and from listening to the music associated with it, this book should be a fun, lighthearted one to play along with.

Since these books have sheet music in them, I would assume they would work best on the iPad since it is a larger device.  The iPhone and IPod Touch are fairly small.  However, the audio included should work well with all of these devices.

Amazon just started offering a sound and video feature for the Kindle.  Right now there are only 13 books available with this feature enabled, but hopefully more will be added soon.  The video and audio versions are only available for Kindle for iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch.  Will Amazon incorporate this capability into its next generation of the Kindle, or market it through its software outlets?  It will be an interesting trend to watch.

Knitting for Dummies 2^nd Edition is a great book for beginners who want to learn the basics of knitting.  It is also great for intermediate knitters who are looking for a guide to perfecting certain stitches, or ways to correct mistakes.  There are a wide variety of projects from basic dish cloths to sweaters to choose from.   This book comes with 6 knitting technique videos.  The authors are Pam Allen, who is the author of the 1^st edition of Knitting for Dummies, Tracy L. Barr, a writer/editor and avid knitter and Shannon Okey, an author of dozens of knitting books and a columnist for knit.1 magazine.

I am a knitter and I’ve been looking for a good book to use as a guide for learning more advanced stitches since getting to a class is difficult due to none being nearby.  So, the video idea is perfect for someone who doesn’t have the time, money or transportation necessary to get to a knitting class.

The reviews for Knitting for Dummies 2^nd Edition are overwhelmingly positive.  The reviewers rave over the how easy to understand the instructions are, and how fast they were able to pick up knitting.  It even includes instructions for left handed knitters like myself!  One reviewer said that they had to have a live demonstration to go along with the directions from the book, but this issue might be resolved with the new video demonstrations.  Overall, this book is a great reference guide and the video addition will definitely be a very helpful tool for new and veteran knitters alike.

As of today, 6/16/2010, Random House’s Magic Tree House series, a childrens’ staple since 1992 by Mary Pope Osborne has been released for the Kindle.  All 43 books in the amazingly popular series are now up for sale in the Kindle Store as I write this, with the 44th already available for preorder, anticipating its September 14th release.

The Magic Tree House series has sold over 70 million copies worldwide, been translated into 28 languages, and distributed in 31 countries over the course of its life cycle so far.  It is a widely acknowledged tool in promoting childrens’ literacy and can be(and often is) coupled with Random House-distributed educational material related to the stories for use in classrooms as a teaching aid in any number of subjects.

Much publicity has focused on what the Kindle can do on college and high school campuses, but this brings useful attention to the fact that an eReader with a properly durable case, perhaps even a library’s worth of them, could easily enhance the learning experiences of children at any age.  The Text-to-Speech feature is helpful for any struggling reader and the ability to vary the font size can make a text more approachable for easily overwhelmed young readers still unsure of their ability.  Clearly a step in the right direction.

Amazon’s(NASDAQ:AMZN) first publishing imprint, AmazonEncore, has announced plans to bring us ten titles for the fall of this year from a variety of areas.  For those who are unaware, AmazonEncore is a program that uses information from the Amazon.com site, in the form of sales trends, review data, etc, to identify new or outstanding works that deserve a wider audience and introduce or re-introduce these books to the public through both digital and print media.

This fall’s lineup will include:

• A Scattered Life by Karen McQuestion
• Sweet Farts: Rippin’ it Old School by Raymond Bean
• The First Assassin by John J. Miller
• Russell Wiley is Out to Lunch by Richard Hine
• AWOL on the Appalachian Trail by David Miller
• Mercury Falls by Robert Kroese
• Shaken by J.A. Konrath
• The Grove by John Rector
• Final Price by J. Gregory Smith
• MetaGame by Sam Landstrom

These titles range from self-published works, including what I believe to be the first self-published Kindle edition to get optioned for a movie(A Scattered Life), to complete originals.  There’s something there for almost any audience.  So check them out.  Seriously.  Go on, I can wait.  Anyway, it’s good stuff.  Clichès aside, I’m going to go order some of my own now.

Amazon Kindle English-Russian Dictionary

One of the Amazon Kindle features that I love the most is the built-in dictionary that lets you easily look up definitions for almost every word in any book. Since Kindle allows you to install and change dictionary that is used for lookups you could look up pretty much everything, including translations. There were some English-Russian dictionaries in circulation for some time but they weren’t perfect.

First, most of them used Cyrillic letters. This means that users need to install Unicode Font Hack in order to use it (and not everyone is willing to do that).

Second, these dictionaries lacked support for word forms. So you could look up the translation of word “read”, but if you were to move your cursor to word “reading” there would be nothing.

We decided that it’s about time to fix that. We’ve compiled “English-Russian Dictionary with Transcriptions” that you can now download from Amazon Kindle Store, install and use for word lookups. This dictionary has over 55,000 words in more than 250,000 different forms which gives it much better coverage  than freeware dictionaries available elsewhere. We used transliteration for Russian words so that this dictionary could be used without replacing default Kindle fonts.

Hopefully some day Amazon will install Unicode fonts on Amazon Kindle so no hacking would be needed and we could publish this dictionary with proper Cyrillic letters. But for transliteration is the way to go.

Several of my friends tested this dictionary and they couldn’t be happier about the ease with which they could read English books, learn new words and improve their language skills.

If you are a native Russian speaker who likes to read English books on Kindle but needs to looks a translation of some word on a occasion – this book is for you! People who are learning Russian will also find it useful.

As the owner of several eReader devices and a large library of DRM-free, yet often oddly formatted, eBooks, it can be difficult to make sure that I have access to what I want to read on the device I want to read it on on a given day.  Yeah, I know, this isn’t exactly going to be a common problem, but the software that solves it for me is going to be useful to just about anybody working with a large number of eBooks.  Especially if many of them are from free book sources like Google Books, where you’re likely to get some really shoddy labeling and tagging.

Many of you may already have heard of Calibre, actually.  If so, this may be a bit basic.  For those who haven’t, it is a third party piece of software that allows you to manage all of your eBooks and the associated information, including file conversion and meta-data editing.  It’s worked flawlessly for me for years now and can even handle converting things for the Kindle from Sony’s somewhat outdated BBEB formats.  Just add your book file to the library, set the title and author properly, assuming they aren’t already, and download all the rest of the information right down to the cover art automatically.  Really, couldn’t get much simpler.  As far as the occasional DRM encumbered eBook, which we all have to settle for sometimes when there aren’t any options available, the Calibre library can include the files, it simply can’t alter them.  Not that big a deal, usually, since if somebody went to the trouble of protecting their files I’ve usually found them to be fairly well labeled and tagged as well.

This is just one user’s review, of course.  I’m not even getting into all the many features like building/editing eBook in-text formatting, plug-ins, etc. that many people like about it.  The fact that it functions on a day to day basis with no problems across multiple devices and never causes me issues, however, makes this software invaluable to me more than any extra feature I can think to add.

It has been 14 months since I monitor Kindle book store size on a daily basis. I started it in April 2009. Back then Kindle software 2.0.2 was just released, Amazon was being sued by Discovery Communications and Amazon itself was sending DMCA takedown notes to MobileRead.com, Fujitsu FLEPia was expected to take eReader market by storm with it’s color eInk and first rumors about what would become 9.7″ Kindle DX surfaced. Kindle Book Store just broke 250,000 book margin back then…

Now there are 510,000+ books in Kindle Store and counting. I used to publish Kindle book numbers on a monthly basis but then I got lazy. It is time to fix this and publish all 14 months worth of data at once!

As you can see, the book count was increasing in more or less linear fashion. There may be some seasonality or irregularities to it. Hard to say since one year is clearly not enough to spot seasonal trends (if they exist in publishing industry).

Some children are voracious readers.  They look beyond the vast size of the Harry Potter or Twilight series and focus on the stories themselves.  They see reading as an adventure, and the bigger the book, the bigger the accomplishment.  Other children are reluctant readers.  They read what they have to for school and nothing else.  They see reading as a chore instead of a pleasure.  The Kindle has the ability to change that mentality.  Readers see the book one page at a time on the Kindle, instead of a large 500 page book.  By breaking the book down into smaller chunks, the book is perceived as less intimidating.

On the Amazon Kindle forums, there is a story written by the mother of a young teenager who does not like to read.  But once she tried the Kindle, she was hooked.  The post on the forum also pointed out the font adjustment feature on the Kindle.  Setting it to a larger font size equates to easier reading.  Many posters in the forum alluded to the fact that making the font larger does the trick.

Considering that the Kindle is not a book, but a container for many books, kids can find their niche in reading.  They have a large selection to choose from.  So, if one kid likes fantasy, they can quickly choose Harry Potter, or if another prefers the Chronicles of  Narnia, then it is right there as well.  The Kindle has great potential to be incorporated into the classroom.  Young readers will have vast libraries of books right at the click of a button.

In a rather interesting move, Amazon seems to have increased the general utility of their Kindle. It could, in fact, be on its way to becoming a must-have for vacation-goers this summer. Sure there’s the expected advantage of being able to lug a pile of books to the beach in your pocket, but the sightseers are targeted now too.

In short, it’s been reported that Amazon has recently acquired exclusive rights to sell the always helpful Michelin Driving guides. When added to the functionality of browser-based mapping programs like Google Maps, you can find yourself with an entertaining way to tour the nation without ever getting sidetracked. At present, such offerings as a driving tour of California Wine Country or a run around the Florida Keys are going for a mere $3.99. There’s certainly no shortage of other material there for the taking either, with popular publications like the Zagat Restaurant Guides, Frommer’s Travel Guides, and the Regional Hiking series already available at reasonable prices.

As a fun aside, as you prepare for the upcoming vacation weather, remember that road trips with kids are much more tolerable when they’re having a good time and for the moment Amazon can be very helpful there too with the majority of the popular Series of Unfortunate Events books being available free of charge to Kindle customers for what will likely be a very limited time!

In welcome move, Amazon has decided to open up the Kindle platform to authors who are situated outside the US. So now authors from all over the world can sell their works on the various Kindles. This ensures a win-win situation for everyone involved — Amazon, Kindle users and the authors/publishers.

A lot of good literature gets published outside in the US. In fact, if you look at popular fiction genres, you will see that many of the world best sellers come from outside the US. I mention works of fiction mainly because those are the ones that sell the most. And with those facts in mind, it is easy to see why this would benefit Amazon. Amazon has really ushered the era of eBooks by making the Kindle and tying it up with the Whispernet platform. With this new move, they ensure that there is a steady supply of fresh material that is much greater in number than their current competitors. The great diversity that the Kindle Store will gain as a result of this will be really good for Amazon’s business.

For the average user, this means more choices and that is always a good thing. Plus it will also mean that you can finally carry your favorite non-US author on your Kindle, in addition to having the printed editions. With better choices and more diversity, you will probably end up buying even more books on your Kindle and less from physical bookstores. And that is exactly what Amazon wants.

As for the Authors, this basically means a new market has opened up to them. Book sales have been down for a long time now and they have been getting worse. But eBooks are gaining momentum by keeping the print media relevant. So many of them will undoubtedly see the great opportunity that it is for them and jump right in.

As of 26th of September 2009, the Kindle version of The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown is no longer outselling the hardcover on Amazon. Perhaps all of the Kindle crowd who wanted it purchased the book and already have it so the sales peaked and the dropped while folks who read paper books are still generating the steady demand for the hardcover.

Embracing The Wide Sky

I’ve discoved “Embracing the Wide Sky: A Tour Across the Horizons of the Mind” by Daniel Tammet entirely by chance. As I was touring the UK in a car, my favorite radio station of choice became BBC Radio 2. I specifically liked the Jeremy Vine show. During one of the shows Jeremy interviewed the author of this book. The show really caught my attention as Daniel was nothing like “The Rain Man” , a stereotypical autistic savant as depicted by Hollywood. Just by listening to the interview you wouldn’t be able to tell that the person speaking memorized 22,514 digits of the number Pi. So as soon as I could get my PC connected to the Internet I checked Amazon for Kindle version of this book and downloaded it.

“Embracing The Wide Sky” is a book about human mind and how it works in general. Daniel also goes into some detail about his special abilities related to math and linguistics. This book contains collection of interesting facts and factoids related to human mind and percenption. An example of such factoid would be: “Russian language speakers are on average better at distinguishing shades of blue than English speakers, which is most likely due to the fact that Russian language contains two distinct words for “blue”: “синий” which correstponds to the darker shares and “голубой” which corresponds to the lighter shades as opposed to one commonly used work in English”. Things like that made me think about how I think and perceive the world around me.

Entire chapter of the book is dedicated to the topic of how to treat everyday life analytically, mathematically and statistically and why being innumral is almost just as bad as being illeterate. The same chapter also goes into exploring things related to chance and coincidence such as lottery, elections etc.

“Embracing the Wide Sky” is however much more than collection of peculiar factoids. And while I personally disagree with the author on the point of human brain having nothing in common with a computer that was stated several times thoughout the book I still enjoyed reading it a lot and would highly recommend it for reading.

Rather that going over authors that caught my attention (which after 17 posts has drained my imagination considerably) I’m going to change the format of these series and instead write about specific books I’ve recently read. This time I’m going to cover two books: “A Briefer History Of Time” by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, and “The Elegant Universe” by Brian Greene.

I’ve grouped these two Kindle eBooks together because I’ve read them one after another and they are complimentary to each other in many ways.

A Briefer History Of Time

A Briefer History Of Time is an abridged and updated edition of “A Brief History Of Time” that was originally published in 1988. It was published in 2005. The book is about human percenption of time, space and cosmology and how it changed and developed over time starting as early as ancient times of Aristotle and all the way to modern superstring frontier of theoretical physics. It covers established (and some outdated) scientific theories such as Newton’s treory of gravity, Einstein’s special and general relativity, quantum mechanics etc. “A Briefer History Of Time” does a great job at popularizing these complex theories to a level understandable by most people without background in math and physics. I derived a lot of enjoyment from reading this book by recollecting how I studied this or that concept in high school and university. If you are curious about what makes the world tick the way it does I strongly recommend reading this book. “A Briefer History of Time” is published by Amazon with “Optimized for Kindle DX” badge.

The Elegant Universe

The Elegant Universe, although written by another author picks up where “A Briefer History Of Time” left off. Although most of the book is dedicated to string theory, there is quite a bit of information about theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. “The Elegant Universe” describes how these two well established and verified theories are in fundamental conflict with each other and how string theory (as well as it’s variants superstring theory and M-theory) which depicts the universe as myriads of miniature strings similar to the ones you’ll find on a guitar or violin that become elementary particles by vibrating one way or the other attempts to resolve this conflict. Although “The Elegant Universe” is more technical than “A Briefer History of Time” it is still well within the realm of understanding by most people. For mathematically and scientifically savvy readers additional information is provided in appendixes. In final chapters the author really lets his imagination fly loose when touching on such subjects as multiverse. Although the books is somewhat biased (you can see that Greene really wants the string theory to come out as the Ultimate Theory of Everything) it still found it well worth reading.

The Dark Tower

First I would like to state that this post constitutes my humble opinion and nothing more. You may consider it wrong, it may be wrong, I respect Stephen King fans so lets not get personal about it. This post may also contain what some may consider spoilers although in very general sense. No plot details are revealed here. However if you are someone like me it can save you quite a bit of time…

I’ve started reading the Dark Tower series even before I got my Kindle 2, read it for a while when I got my Kindle DX and then quit after reading around 70% of the Wolves Of Calla. I actually stared hating Stephen King passionately around the end of The Waste Lands… and here’s why: as he himself admits in the introduction he set out to write an epic “and in some ways (at least in size) he succeeded” but at a cost: at first The Dark Tower series books are very fascinating read because the world described is so self-contradicting that you can’t help to wonder how is he going to pull it all together in the end. But as the books progress contradictions only increase but what is more frustrating is that there are still a lot of interesting and fascinating parts that are buried in completely boring passages or outright retelling (sometimes to the point of copy-paste) of events already described. This becomes even more agonizing as you wonder more and more about how is it going to come together in the end but also as you try go though increasingly lengthy boring stuff as you try to get the interesting parts. For me there was just barely enough of the later to keep me from giving up on the book altogether. That’s what made it so agonizing.

So recently as I was reading though Wolves Of Calla, my wife asked me what I’m reading about currently. As I mustered all my “Uhm”s, “Well”s and “You know”s I’ve realized that I have nothing of interest to say about probably last 100 pages that I’ve read and this was the point when I said – enough is enough. I turned off my Kindle, turned on my notebook and went to wikipedia (god bless it) to find out how does it actually end. Ok, now here comes pseudo-spoiler: at the end it doesn’t all come together and become clear and whole picture – it becomes much bigger self-contradicting mess than you can imagine. I sighed with relief as I’ve realized that I’ve saved myself dozens of hours worth of reading Song Of Susannah and The Dark Tower.

Don’t get me wrong – these books aren’t the worst literature that I’ve read in my lifetime however I don’t think that mr. King’s desire to “outwrite” J.R.R.Tolkien justifies all the suffering he inflicted on humble readers like me. If I were to choose one book of the 7 book series that I were to recommend to someone to read, I’d choose Wizard and Glass. My second choise would probably be The Drawing of The Three with first part of The Wastelands added.

Agatha Christie is often referred as the “Queen of Crime”, due to the crime novels and short stories featuring  the famous detectives Hercule Poirot and and Miss Jane Marple. Lots of her works have been adapted into films, television and radio; according to the Guinness Book of World Records, she is as bestselling writer as William Shakespeare. Now, Amazon has a wide selection of Agatha Christie’s works in Kindle edition.

The Mysterious Affair at Styles (published in 1920) was the author’s first published novel. A typical sample of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, it investigates a murder in an isolated manor, with suspects concealing  facts about themselves and unexpected plot twists.  Hercule Poirot, a Belgian detective, was first introduced in this novel; he proved to be a very long-lived character, appearing in 32 other novels and  51 short stories following his debut. “The key to the success of this style of detective novel,” writes Elizabeth George in her Introduction, “lies in how the author deals with both the clues and the red herrings, and it has to be said that no one bettered Agatha Christie at this game.”

The Thirteen Problems is a short stories collection first published in UK in 1932. The first chapter, The Tuesday Night Club, was actually published in 1927 and introduced then another famous character, an elderly Miss Marple; though an amateur detective, she solves the mysteries and reveals the crimes that have nonplussed the police. “it is always Miss Marple’s quiet genius that names the criminal or the means of the misdeed. As indeed is true in subsequent gatherings at the country home of Colonel and Mrs Bantry, where another set of terrible wrongs is related by the assembled guests–and righted, by Miss Marple.”

Agatha Christie by Mark Campbell is a good book to read if you want to learn more about this prominent woman, her works and film adaptations.

Agatha Christie on Kindle

Joseph Conrad is famous not only for his works adapted into well-known films such as Apocalypse Now and Sabotage; he also stands out as he was a Polish-born novelist who learned to speak English fluently in his twenties and then wrote in English, too. Many books are available now in Kindle edition, some of them for free.

Heart of Darkness first appeared as a series in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1899 and was published as a novella in 1902. It was partially based on Conrad’s experiences in the Congo as he served as a steamer captain. Though the book is famous on its own, Francis Ford Coppola made it even more well-known, having adapted the novella into Apocalypse Now changing the Congo to Vietnam and Cambodia during the Vietnam War. “Assigned by an ivory company to take command of a cargo boat stranded in the interior, Marlow makes his way through the treacherous forest, witnessing the brutalization of the natives by white traders and hearing tantalizing stories of a Mr. Kurtz, the company’s most successful representative.”

The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (published in 1907) is set around the life of Mr. Verloc, a London businessman and spy. The book is different from other Conrad’s works as it does not deal with the usual seafaring themes; instead, it is considered a political novel since it describes revolutionary groups and anarchists. Alfred Hitchcock had adapted the book for his movie Sabotage released in 1936. “This absurdist story is noted for its adept characterizations, melodramatic irony, and psychological intrigue.”

Lord Jim (published in 1899-1900 in Blackwood’s Magazine) is believed to be based on true facts, though Joseph Conrad never admitted that openly. As a ship with pilgrims travelling to Mecca is about to sink, the crew members abandon the vessel and the passengers. Having faced the court for this crime, the first mate Jim redeems his guilt in a remote settlement in the Indonesian archipelago. “The novel, which explores the nature of the human spirit, is a delicately crafted picture of a character who reaches the status of literary hero.” The book was twice adapted into movies: by Victor Fleming in 1925 and by Richard Brooks in 1965.

Joseph Conrad on Kindle

Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle, DL was a British author born to an English father of Irish descent and an Irish mother.  Though having chosen the profession of a physician at first, he later took up writing, thus becoming the author of the famous stories and novels about Sherlock Holmes and Professor Challenger. Many of these are available now in Kindle edition.

Sherlock Holmes: the Complete Collection includes 4 novels:

• A Study in Scarlet (published in 1987)
• The Sign of the Four (published in 1880)
• The Hound of the Baskervilles (serialized in 1901-1902 in the Strand magazine)
• The Valley of Fear (serialized in 1914-1915)

and 5 short stories collections:

• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (published in 1891-1892 in the Strand magazine)
• The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (published in 1892-1893 in the Strand magazine)
• The Return of Sherlock Holmes (published in 1903-1904 in the Strand magazine)
• His Last Bow (published in 1908-1913 and 1917)
• The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (published in 1921-1927)

In The Lost World Conan Doyle introduced another prominent character, Professor Challenger; a real person, professor of physiology William Rutherford, whom the author met at Edinburgh University,  is believed to be his prototype. During an expedition to South America, Professor Challenger and his teammates find “the lost world” where prehistoric animals still survive. “As one of the most important works of dinosaur-related fiction, The Lost World is highly recommended for those who are interested in dinosaurs or those who are fans of the writings of Arthur Conan Doyle.”

If you’d like to learn more about this fascinating writer, you may want to read The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes: The Life and Times of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle by Andrew Lycett. With an intention to show Conan Doyle’s full life, the author comes with a well-organized and detailed biography. “Lycett combines assiduous research with penetrating insight to offer the most comprehensive, lucid and sympathetic portrait yet of Conan Doyle’s personal journey from student to doctor, from world-famous author to ardent spiritualist.”

Arthur Conan Doyle on Kindle

Haruki Murakami began his writing career much later than most authors; he finished his first novel when he was 29. Since then, as if to catch up, he has proved to be very prolific and penned a lot of fiction and non-fiction works. Some of them are available now in Kindle edition.

Kafka on the Shore (published in 2002) is a complex novel with two different, yet interrelated plots about a run-away schoolboy and an elderly finder of lost cats. After the novel had been released, the readers asked thousands of questions concerning its meaning on the official website, and Murakami personally answered many of them. He emphasized that “Kafka on the Shore contains several riddles, but there aren’t any solutions provided. Instead, several of these riddles combine, and through their interaction the possibility of a solution takes shape. And the form this solution takes will be different for each reader.” For the novel, Murakami received Franz Kafka Prize and World Fantasy Award.

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is a collection of short stories written between 1981 and 2005; it gives the reader a great opportunity to follow the evolution of Murakami’s style, often allegoric and surreal. As Murakami himself noted, “I find writing novels a challenge, writing stories a joy. If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden.”

After Dark (published in 2004) is a classic Haruki Murakami novel with extensive attention to detail both in characters and settings, themes of loneliness and fate, and vivid pictures of Japanese urban life. “Murakami’s trademark humor, psychological insight, and grasp of spirit and morality are here distilled with an extraordinary, harmonious mastery.”

Haruki Murakami On Kindle

Today Amazon starts shipping Kindle DX eBook readers. As of now the reader is still in stock and the if you order it within the next hour, Amazon promises that it will ship today with overnight delivery tomorrow. Mine is already in the pipeline and expected to ship soon. So you can expect some first impressions from me tomorrow.

In an effort to promote Kindle DX, Amazon created a special section on their website for books “that look good on DX’s 9.7″ screen. It includes such books as: Akiko on the Planel Smoo, The Digital Photography Book, The Cook’s Illustrated How-to-Cook Library, etc.

George Orwell is a pen name of English author Eric Arthur Blair; he is most known for his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four and the concepts like “thought police” and “doublethink” derived from it.  In 2005 the book was listed among the hundred best English-language novels published since 1923. Now this novel as well as some other works by George Orwell are available in Kindle edition.

Nineteen Eighty-Four (published in 1949) is a classic dystopia showing a repressed society with a totalitarian regime where the rights of an individual are totally sacrificed for national politics. To keep control over population, the government develops a complex invasive system of surveillance (“Big Brother is Watching You“), propaganda and “Newspeak” (a language based on English but with a much smaller vocabulary and grammar simplified to make it impossible to commit “thoughtcrime”, any alternative thinking). The book was written in 1948; some scholars believe that the title was derived from this year as Orwell reversed the numbers on purpose to show that the events taking place in the novel were not so distant, rather they might be contemporary. “The story of one man’s nightmare odyssey as he pursues a forbidden love affair through a world ruled by warring states and a power structure that controls not only information but also individual thought and memory, 1984 is a prophetic, haunting tale.”

Animal Farm (published in 1945) is another dystopian masterpiece by George Orwell. In 1996, it won a Retrospective Hugo Award; Modern Library ranks it 31 among Best 20th-Century Novels. At first, the author had great difficulty getting it accepted; one of four publishers finally agreed but later refused to publish the manuscript, having consulted with the Ministry of Information. At last, the first edition was published by Secker and Warburg in 1945. In a satirical allegory, Orwell severely criticizes Stalinism and outcomes of Bolshevik Revolution; though allegedly stating that all are equal, they created “more equal species” corrupted by power and greed. “Fueled by Orwell’s intense disillusionment with Soviet Communism, Animal Farm is a nearly perfect piece of writing, both an engaging story and an allegory that actually works.”

George Orwell On Kindle

Aldous Huxley’s books are often received with mixed emotions or even controversy. In 2006 Time magazine excluded Brave New World, Point Counter Point and Island from Best 100 novels list, which caused a lot of commotion; the American Library Association ranks Brave New World # 52 among most challenged books. Despite different views on his works, one can’t deny they’re thought-provoking and plentiful of interesting ideas. Some of Huxley’s novels are available now in Kindle edition.

Brave New World (published in 1932) was actually written as a parody of by H.G.Wells’ utopia Men Like Gods; as a result it turned into “a negative utopia” with a pessimistic vision of the future world where reproductive technologies and hallucinogenic drugs mutilate the society. The book may even seem scary and too gloomy, but it’s well worth reading. “Huxley foreshadowed many of the practices and gadgets we take for granted today–let’s hope the sterility and absence of individuality he predicted aren’t yet to come.”

Crome Yellow (published in 1921) is a satirical novel about English aristocrats dwelling at a country estate during a summer vacation; it entertains with lengthy conversations and interesting psychological portraits. “The end of the world is announced, virginity is lost, and inspirational aphorisms are conceived in a trances. When our hero, Denis Stone, tries to capture it all in poetry, love disappoints him.“

if you’d like to read about this controversial man, you may consider Aldous Huxley: A Biography by Nicholas Murray. Having accessed diaries and documents not available earlier, Murray draws a thorough picture of Huxley’s colorful life and “the gloriously kinetic chemistry of his erudite, playful, and deeply spiritual mind”.

Aldous Huxley on Kindle

When I last checked Kindle Store none of the J.R.R.Tolkien books were there. There were some books about Tolkien himself and his writings but that was that. Oh, well I though, no big surprise here – you can sell these books in paper for centuries from now and people would gladly buy them, myself included.

I was checking out Kindle Store recently and discovered the most wonderful thing: Harper Collins published most of J.R.R.Tolkien’s books on Kindle! It turns out that some of these books were added as early as April 2009.

I first read Lord Of The Rings in Russian many years ago. Here’s an interesting fact for those who are not familiar with Russian translations of J.R.R.Tolkien: back then there were at least 3 major Russians  translations of The Lord Of The Rings. They were identified by the way Frodo’s last name was translated: there was one where Baggins was just transliterated into Cyrillic and then there were Сумкинс (Sumkins) and Торбинс (Torbins). The latter are variations of Russian word for “bag”.

“The Silmarillion” was probably the best reading experience I’ve had ever. I read it after reading “The Lord Of The Rings” and “The Hobbit”. I was reading the original English text, while listening to my favorite tracks of Blind Guardian, while smoking a pipe, while wrapped in a warm blanket during long winter evenings. I was totally there!

I guess that having to flip paper pages was part of the reading pleasure as well. I’m not sure if I would have had the same experience if I were reading it in Kindle Edition. However it’s still great to see these books finally available on Kindle. Here’s a list of what you can currently buy:

• The Lord Of The Rings (Trilogy). What’s a bit hilarious is that the first sentence in this book is: “J.R.R. Tolkien’s the Lord Of The Rings is often erroneously called a trilogy, when it is in fact a single novel, consisting of six books plus appendices, sometimes published in three volumes“. I guess that HarperCollins put “trilogy” in the product title just to prove their point even more. You can also get “The Fellowship Of The Ring“, “The Two Towers” and “The Return Of The King” as three separate books if you prefer. The eBook is based on the 50th Anniversary Edition.
• The Hobbit. In case somebody doesn’t know. It covers events before the ones described in “The Lord Of The Rings” and among other things contains the story of Bilbo finding the ring of power. In case you are wondering – yes, there’s two part movie based on the book in the works and yes, Peter Jackson is producing it. It’s scheduled to hit the theaters in December 2011 and December 2012. In case you don’t want to wait that long – there’s animated film made in 1977.
• The Silmarillion. It is another great read. It contains legends some of which are referenced in “The Lord Of The Rings” and “The Hobbit” and covers history of the Middle-Earth since it was created until the events leading to “The Lord Of The Rings”: the fall of Morgoth, rise of Sauron and fall of Sauron and forging the rings of power.
• Unfinished Tales is a collection of unfinished works of J.R.R.Tolkien published by Christopher Tolkien. It contains additional pieces of information related to the events in The Lord Of The Rings.
• The Children of Húrin covers events that took place 6,500 years after the War Of The Ring.
• The Legend Of Sigurd And Gudrún is an epic poem that J.R.R.Tolkien wrote in 1920s and 1930s. It was just released in 2009 and is not linked to The Lord Of The Rings and Middle-Earth but rather based on Norse mythology.

This can only be topped by release of exteneded edition of “The Lord Of The Rings” movie trilogy on Blu-Ray :) Currently you can only pre-order blu-ray version of the theatrical cut. However, according to SlashFilm, extended editions will also be released sometime closer to theatrical release of “The Hobbit”.

J.R.R.Tolkien on Kindle

Douglas Noel Adams is best known for the science fiction comedy Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Originally radio broadcast series, they later inspired “a trilogy in five parts” as well as TV series, a movie and stage productions. Some of these are available in Kindle edition.

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is the first book of the “trilogy”. Published in 1979,  it was soon number one on the Sunday Times bestseller list, and in five years its 1,000,000th copy was sold. The novel is written in the form of an encyclopedia that helps Arthur Dent and his alien friend, Ford Prefect, in their travel through the universe. “Required reading for science fiction fans, this book (and its follow-ups) is also sure to please fans of Monty Python, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, and British sitcoms.”

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe was published in 1980 as the second book of the series. It continues the funny adventures of  Arthur, Ford and their strange pal Zaphod Beeblebrox in entertaining and unusual style. Adams himself thought this novel to be the best of the five.

Unlike the previous two books, Life, the Universe and Everything was not  adapted from radio series, but was originally written as a novel.  In the US edition the book was censored, you can find the differences here. “Join Arthur Dent, earthling, “jerk”, kneebiter and time-traveler; sexy space cadet Trillian; mad alien Ford Prefect; unflappable Slartibartfast; two-headed, three-armed ex-head Honcho of the Universe Zaphod Beeblebrox… and learn to fly.”

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (published in 1984) is the fourth book in the series; the title has since become a humorous “goodbye phrase” among science fiction fans. Arthur returns to the Earth that has been replaced by Dolphins in the “Save the Humans” campaign, and falls in love with a girl named Frenchurch. “Was the earth really demolished? Why did all the dolphins disappear? What is God’s final message to His creatures? Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, and the new voivoid gang are off (by commercial airline) on a wacked-out quest to answer these truly unimportant questions.” While the previous novels showed Adams’ rather negative attitude towards computers, he definitely changed his mind at the time of writing this one, which is reflected in the plot. By the way, he claimed to have bought two of the first three Macintosh available in the UK.

Mostly Harmless (published in 1992) is “The fifth book in the increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhikers Trilogy”, as it reads on the cover.  The plot of the previous books continues to evolve, with Infinidim Enterprises trying to destroy Earth in every possible dimension.

Douglas Adams on Kindle