Catch-Up Links

While I was on medical hiatus, I stopped writing for Heroes & Heartbreakers. I continued my work for Publishers Weekly and, as I felt well enough, wrote some brief reviews for Amazon and Amazon Vine. Here are the links you missed, beginning with a link from my return to the H&H rotation:

• Kindle Magic (or How to Organize Your Kindle) article by Laurie Gold for Heroes & Heartbreakers
• Vine review of Lustfully Ever After by Kristina Wright (Erotic Romance)
• Vine review of Dermacontrol Foam Wash by Cetaphil (Skincare)
• Vine review of Apron Anxiety by Alysssa Shelasky (Memoir)
• Vine review of Paris in Love by Eloisa James (Memoir)
• Vine review of Curly-Q Dinnerware Set by Rachael Ray (Housewares)
• Review of Women's JB-6210-F "Victory" Pink Stainless Steel Diamond Watch by Just Bling (Jewelry/Watches)
• Review of Colored Gemstones by Paul Deasy (Reference)
• Vine review of Mio, Mango Peach by Kraft (Water Enhancer)
• Vine review of Fruit Design Post-It Notes by 3M (Office Supplies)
• Review of Catherine the Great by Robert K. Massie (Biography)
• Review of Conan O'Brien Can't Stop (documentary) DVD, directed by Rodman Flender
  

Catch-Up Links

Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin

Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin

Calvin Trillin

Grade: B

"Calvin Trillin is a wonderfully funny storyteller, whether or not his stories are true or fictional. He's a quintessential New Yorker, but his appeal is universal, if more than a little ethnic. I'd read previously many of the essays included in this new compilation, but re-reading them was just as funny the second time around. The essays, some of which are more than thirty years old, remain funny today; many that were written in the Reagan era could have been written last week. The included essays are short enough and filled with enough gems of humor that they simply cry out to be read aloud, and in this instance my husband was the happy recipient."

Read this review in its entirety at Amazon. It is not a Vine review; I received a digital copy from the publisher.

Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin

Invicta Men's 1107 Pro Diver Chronograph Black Dial Black Polyurethane Watch

Men's 1107 Pro Diver Chronograph Black Dial Black Polyurethane Watch

Invicta

Grade: C

When this watch became available on Amazon Vine, I ordered it for my brother-in-law to try because he is quite tall and the watch face, at 49 milimeters, is large. After wearing it for a month, he provided me with these pros and cons, first noting that the watch is a diver's watch and he does not dive...

Read this Amazon Vine review in its entirety at Amazon.

Invicta Men's 1107 Pro Diver Chronograph Black Dial Black Polyurethane Watch

Withering Tights by Louise Rennison

Withering Tights

Louise Rennison

Young Adult/Chick Lit for Teens

Grade: B

"As an avid fan of the first several Georgia Nicholson books, I jumped at the chance to read and review Withering Tights, which kicks off a new series by Louise Rennison. Although my daughter and I both outgrew the original series by the time we'd finished book five, I hoped for the best, and was not at all disappointed."

Read this Amazon Vine review in its entirety at Amazon.

Withering Tights by Louise Rennison

You Don't Sweat Much for a Fat Girl by Celia Rivenbark

You Don't Sweat Much for a Fat Girl

Celia Rivenbark

Humor

Grade: B-

"If Joe Bob Briggs and Libby Gelman-Waxner had a love-child (improbable in more ways than one, not the least of which is that both were invented characters) who grew up Southern and wrote a book, she would be Celia Rivenbark and the book would be You Don't Sweat Much for a Fat Girl. Filled with colorful, inventive and often invented prose, pop culture-infused content that remains unconcerned with political correctness, mockery of self and others, the book is breezy and easy to read fun."

Read this brief Amazon Vine review in its entirety at Amazon.

You Don't Sweat Much for a Fat Girl by Celia Rivenbark

SoundHound

SoundHound

Smart Phone App

Grade: A

How many times are you listening to the radio in your car when a song begins to play that you cannot name or that you'd definitely download if you were at home? Well, it happens to me a few times a week, and I've begun to keep this app open on my phone when driving so I can easily do so when stopped at a light...

Read this short Amazon review in its entirety at Amazon.

SoundHound

Targus 90 W AC Laptop Charger with USB Fast Charging Port

Laptop Charger with USB Fast Charging Port APA32US

Targus

Grade: B

Frequent travelers often run out of USB ports. Indeed, I have three USB ports on my Lenovo Thinkpad and at times I need four. When on the road I dedicate a USB port to my USB modem, leaving me with two while often needing to charge a phone, Kindle, and backup/transfer data with flash drives and/or an external hard drive...

Read this Amazon Vine review in its entirety at Amazon.

Targus 90 W AC Laptop Charger with USB Fast Charging Port

iHome iA63 Alarm Clock Radio with Rotating Dock

iHome iA63 App-Enhanced Alarm Clock FM Radio Stereo Speaker System with Motorized Rotating Dock for iPhone and iPod

iHome

iPod dock/alarm clock radio

Grade: C

Music for my husband is critical. For that reason and because he uses an alarm clock, I asked him to test the iHome iA63. He did over a period of weeks and deemed it "yet another device that tries to be all things, and does none of them great."

Read this Amazon Vine review in its entirety at Amazon.

iHome iA63 Alarm Clock Radio with Rotating Dock

You've Got Mail

On Thursday my daughter and I went out to lunch, then stopped off at a local B&N before moving on. After being accosted by the Nook salesman, I realized how off-putting my own Nook selling must have been for many of the customers I hawked at. I did enjoy playing with the new B&W touchscreen Nook, but didn't like the salesman's getting a basic Kindle fact wrong in trying to contrast the two. All in all, not a great experience, and one that alerted me to the reality that I no longer enjoy visiting B&N. Since the Borders across the street—there first for years before B&N moved in on their territory with a boutique-like store that remains one of my least favorites—closed a couple of months ago, it's the only game in town, save the big Half Price Books nearby, and as much as I enjoy a bargain, the experiences are not the same.

As I told my daughter over lunch when she launched into Luddite mode about the death of retail (yes, she's only 19), the world changes, and we must change with it. I told her about Lee leaving his job as lead in the Music section because he didn't want to preside over its eventual dismantling. I told her that although I left to earn that abortive MLIS degree, I knew that every Nook I sold would eventually eliminate my job. I understood that the necessary cannibalization of B&N's brick and mortar stores through lower prices at B&N.com would eventually do the same. It just depressed the hell out of me to be in the thick of it.

Well, last night I had an epiphany of sorts. The three of us were watching You've Got Mail for the first time—I'd TiVo'd it probably two years ago—when I realized that what B&N did to locally-owned bookstores in the 90s, Amazon is now doing to super-bookstores like B&N.

Is that a bad thing? Well, last Thursday my daughter wanted two older books. They were available at Amazon and I planned to order them until she asked if we could get them at B&N so she could start one immediately. I did that whole text me if you have them thing...and never heard back. Meanwhile, I went ahead and ordered the books from Amazon, and they arrived Friday afternoon, a full day before we expected them. Now, you may not be able to browse at Amazon, or sit in a comfy chair...oh, wait...you can't do the latter at many local B&N's anymore either. The store I worked at never had the great chairs, and at some point the management removed all customer chairs save those in front of the window at tables near the magazines. Another local store removed most of their comfy chairs; the last three times I visited and wanted to sit and read awhile, there was no place to do so, leaving me feeling bait & switched: "You once invited me to spend the afternoon by providing a comfortable place to sit and read, and now, unless I go spend more money at your cafe, you'd really prefer that I leave."

I'm hoping this disaffection with visiting B&N ends, because as a life-long reader, spending time wandering around bookstores has been a favorite activity. Even throughout my two-years as a B&N bookseller I enjoyed visiting various stores throughout the country as a customer, although I forever straightened up display tables and put books away that others had left behind. But because actually buying at a B&N tends to be a costly experience, and because Amazon's prices tend to be lower (sometimes by a little...sometimes by a lot) than B&N.com's prices, I don't expect it to go away any time soon.

Sigh.

BTW, I did take exception to one scene in the movie. When Kathleen Kelly wanders into Fox's books and sits in the Kids section, a customer asks a salesman about a particular book, and he can't help her because he's simply an anonymous clerk who might well have been working at Home Depot. At least at our B&N, we had answers most of the time because those of us who worked there actually, you know, read. At least at our B&N, that woman would have been offered help and/or a recommendation by the time she landed in the Kids section.

You've Got Mail

TomTom Go 2435 TM

TomTom Go 2435 TM

Read my attempt at installing and using this special Lifetime Map Updates TomTom at Amazon Vine.

P.S. It wasn't fun.

TomTom Go 2435 TM

Blood, Bones, and Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton

Blood, Bones, and Butter

Gabrielle Hamilton

Memoir

Grade: C+

Ever since I saw the first "wow, this is great!" review of Gabrielle Hamilton's Blood, Bones, and Butter, I knew I had to read it. When Amazon offered it through their Vine program, I requested a copy. As advertised, the author's voice is clear, strong, and very descriptive; it's not surprising to learn she earned a master's degree in writing. When she describes the "pig-urine stench of panchetta," I sat back, thought about it, and realized she was absolutely...incredibly...right on the nose. The book's structure, though, didn't work as well as the prose itself. I would have preferred seeing her in my mind's eye as an adult first, and a chef, before reading about her very unusual upbringing. Context is necessary on both ends, and without the later context, her background seemed all the more foreign.

Read this Amazon Vine review in its entirety at Amazon.

Blood, Bones, and Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton

Griftopia by Matt Taibbi

Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America

Matt Taibbi

Grade: B+

"Follow the money" has long been my mantra, and Matt Taibbi's cogent reporting does the best job describing various economic crises of the last fifteen years of any that I've read, peeling away each level of complexity in a way that the layman reader can easily understand our world turned upside down as a result of greedy financiers and their collusion with the government. He details the creation and bursting of the dot.com bubble, the 2004 energy crisis, and the 2008 economic collapse, and like the prosecutor in a Mafia trial, lays out a scathing indictment of Wall Street and those who set monetary policy in the U.S., starting with Alan Greenspan, whose Ayn Randian views continue to pervade economic policy long after her death in the early 1980s.

Read this Amazon Vine review in its entirety at Amazon.

Griftopia by Matt Taibbi

365 Thank Yous by John Kralik

365 Thank Yous

John Kralik

Grade: C/C+

While John Kralik hadn't fallen as low as Michael Gates Gill, author of How Starbucks Saved My Life, and is fifteen years younger, both men hit rock bottom in their personal and professional lives when they took unusual actions to save themselves. Gill learned, through menial work once thought beneath him, among people he would otherwise never have met, how to regain his self-worth and get by, happily, with far less than he'd grown accustomed. John Kralik, who years earlier had quit his high-end law partnership to go the noble, Jerry Maguire route, discovered doing the right thing doesn't always end well.

Read this Amazon Vine review in its entirety at Amazon.

365 Thank Yous by John Kralik

Not That Kind of Girl by Siobhan Vivian

Not That Kind of Girl

Siobhan Vivian

Grade: B-

To be honest, nearly two weeks after finishing Not that Kind of Girl, I can't honestly say I "liked" it. What I can say is that the lead character's drive, focus, and need for control affected me on a deep, personal level, and for that reason alone I recommend it.

Read this Amazon Vine review in its entirety at Amazon.

Not That Kind of Girl by Siobhan Vivian

Indulgence in Death by J.D. Robb

Indulgence in Death

J.D. Robb

Grade: B-

Although I came late to J.D. Robb's long-running futuristic romantic suspense series, it didn't take long for me to become a zealot for it. Seven of the series' titles sit on my all-time keeper shelf, and an additional nine earned B+ grades from me, which adds up, astonishingly enough, to nearly half the series to date. I often hand-sell the first titles at the bookstore, using my sister as an example. I tell potential customers that although the series continues after fifteen years in the making, quality remains high; one of my favorites (Promises in Death), after all, was published just last year. Then I add this as the kicker: "My sister doesn't even like to read and she got hooked on this series, reading them like candy." That said, though, Robb may be at her tipping point with the series. Make no mistake about it - I can't wait to pick up each successive book/story in the series - but "only" two of those B+'s cropped up in the last fourteen titles...while three of the four C range grades appear in that same list of fourteen.

Read this review in its entirety at Amazon.

Indulgence in Death by J.D. Robb

Queen of Your Own Life by Kathy Kinney and Cindy Ratzlaff

Queen of Your Own Life

Kathy Kinney and Cindy Ratzlaff

Grade: C

Non-Fiction

Queen of Your Own Life would have been a five-star magazine article, but there's not enough content to justify a full book. Kathy Kinney, who portrayed horny librarian Miss Goddard on Newhart and Mimi on The Drew Carey Show to perfection, co-wrote the book with her long-time friend Cindy Ratzlaff, who created the marketing plans for more than a hundred NYTimes bestsellers. The book features "the seven bet gifts a woman can give herself": 1)Claim your beauty and feel your power; 2) Clean your mental closet and find your queen voice; 3) Admire yourself for who you've become; 4) Build deep, fulfilling frienships with other women; 5) Establish firm boundaries that will strengthen all your relationships; 6) Learn the simple trick to finally being happy; and 7) Proclaim yourself queen of your own life.

Read this Amazon Vine review in its entirety at Amazon.

Queen of Your Own Life by Kathy Kinney and Cindy Ratzlaff

Do Over by Mari Carr

Do Over

Mari Carr

Grade: C

Mari Carr's Do Over sounded romantic and sexy - a long-married woman whose second child just left the nest and whose husband works long hours is offered a "do-over" on their 25th wedding anniversary - but didn't do much for me.

Read this review in its entirety at Amazon. It is not a Vine review; I received a digital copy from the publisher.

Do Over by Mari Carr

Compromising Positions by Jenna Bayley-Burke

Compromising Positions

Jenna Bayley-Burke

Grade: B-

As a general rule I'm not one for contemporary romances featuring virginal heroines well into their twenties. All too often these women seem to have sexually-defined careers - they are radio sex therapists or some such - yet also manage to remain wholly unaware of their own bodies. Thankfully petite Sophie Delfino doesn't fit the mold, although the romance is centered around the Kama Sutra/yogo fitness classes for couples she is sub-teaching with David Strong. Sophie is the majority - but silent - partner in a fitness club also owned by Daphne, her sister, and managing partner. When Daphne got pregnant and put on bed rest, Sophie left her job as a forensic accountant to keep the club going. As for her virginal status, well, first she spent years caring for ailing parents, and while she dates plenty, she's fantasized with her trusty vibrator about David ever since spying him at Daphne's wedding. She wants him...and only him...to relieve her of her virginity. Trouble is, David doesn't do virgins, he only sleeps with tall blonds - and never more than once - and his best friend Craig, Daphne's husband, would probably kill him if he took advantage of her.

Read this review in its entirety at Amazon.

Compromising Positions by Jenna Bayley-Burke

Kindle

My first generation Kindle is as basic as basic can get. Yesterday I realized the memory is completely used up, which explains why I'd been unable to download, so I began to move items over to my SD card. Then I sat back and began to think about how difficult it is for me to find things now that I have more than a thousand items on the device, and said to myself, "I think it's time to upgrade." The decision made itself once LinnieGayl explained that Kindle 3 offers a folders option, which means I can create alphabetical folders and/or book type folders to make it easier to find what I want. I called my local Super Target this morning and they said they had both Kindle 3's in stock, so I decided that's where I'd get my flu shot. Alas, they lied. They had neither in stock and the only store that might was near downtown and it's Friday and getting close to rush hour. Best Buy had none in stock either.

I'd worked out what to do instead by the time I got home: I'd order Kindle 3 from Amazon and in the interim would use Calibre to change the meta tags and clean up my library. Then I realized I could get a month free of Amazon Prime, and overnight shipping for $4 an item, an ordered the Kindle 3 wifi and a cover to be delivered tomorrow.

Of course, the decision to order the wifi-only versus the 3G version took me many agonizing hours of dithering, and it was only on a call with Myretta Robens that I realized my 3G phone is always with me - if I need to order a book when I'm not at home or at an AT&T hotspot (which includes all Starbucks), I can always rely on the phone. Besides, the $50 difference between the 3G and wifi-only will pay for several books. My mom's cheapness always vies with my dad's "spend it while you got it" nature, so a decision like this does not come easy to me.

Now that I've got my new Kindle coming, I will work on a few Calibre meta-tag changes, then will do the rest slowly over time, as I learn how best to use the folders. One thing I know for certain...LinnieGayl's use of a TBR folder is one I am appropriating for myself.

But for now, I'm going to spend the next hour or so doing some final clean-up work on my Goodreads library as compared to Visual Bookshelf.

This project is likely to consume me for awhile; luckily my husband knows when I get into something like this I hyper-focus and hunker down. I work tomorrow night and Sunday afternoon, and have to squeeze in a very short book to review for PW for mid-day Monday, but since it is super short, I can handle it.

See you when I come up for air.

Kindle

Bulova Women's 96R000 Sport Marine Star Diamond Watch

Bulova Women's 96R000 Sport Marine Star Diamond Watch

Grade: A

I've been a Bulova lover for awhile now, ever since buying the Bulova Men's 98C62 Marine Star Watch as an inexpensive alternative to the Omega diving watch Daniel Craig wore in his first James Bond movie. While that watch is great, with its over-sized face, it's a sporty watch and for women, not quite suitable for dressier ensembles. As a result I began to look for a less casual watch, and once again found a Bulova to suit my sensibilities.

Read this review in its entirety at Amazon.

Bulova Women's 96R000 Sport Marine Star Diamond Watch