Posts Tagged ‘review’

"Heat Wave," best-selling mystery author Richard Castle's eagerly awaited new book (the first about his new character, Nikki Heat) hit bookstores today!

If you have no idea who best-selling mystery author Richard Castle is, you haven't been watching ABC's "Castle" starring Nathan Fillion. And if you haven't, shame on you. Aside from the fact that Fillion is in it, "Castle" is a refreshing change from the endlessly intense police procedurals and CSI: Whatevers that load up the screen. "Castle" is attitude-TV, the latest progeny of the Rockford Files-Columbo-Murder She Wrote school of detective shows where the actual crime is secondary to watching the stars be wiseasses at each other as they solve it.

Castle is an internationally famous mystery writer who has killed off his main character and needs a new idea. Enter NYPD Detective Kate Beckett, working on a case in which the murder scenes resemble scenes from his books. Castle discovers his new muse — hard-as-nails, intelligent, beautiful Beckett — and uses his pull with the mayor to  hang around the department for "research." Just about everyone on the show shines, but if nothing else watch it for Fillion's charm and the novelty of finally seeing him on a show in its second season.

Through the first season we saw newly-inspired Castle write his new book, "Heat Wave." And then ABC and Hyperion Books actually published the thing, which presents a problem.

We've been told, over and over, that he's a world-class writer, right? So there's a certain level of expectation for the book. Can we, reading it, believe that a best-selling writer wrote it?

The answer is yes, but that writer is Dan Brown.

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It might not come as a terrible shock to discover that I'm a big Kevin Smith fan. Seen all his movies, from Clerks to Zack and Miri Make a Porno. Read all the comics. Read the books. Even read the scriptbooks of the movies. Bought his three live DVDs. Seen him in person several times, met him at MegaCon, watched him answer questions for 6 hours at a screenwriting seminar. Followed his blog and his Twitter feed.

And he'll talk about anything. No topic is too personal, every aspect of his life gets put out there for everyone to see.

So by now you'd think I'd have a pretty good handle on what he was like in person, right?

I came in late to the SModcast, the weekly podcast Smith records with his longtime friend and producer Scott Mosier, mostly because I never listened to podcasts of any kind until fairly recently and besides, I'd heard all his stories, right? But I got a better car stereo, and an iPod Touch, and I started working out and needed something to distract me from the unpleasant chore of making my body move around, and so when I did look for podcasts his was the first I grabbed. And I learned two valuable lessons.

First, the polished storyteller Kevin I saw on stage telling oft-told tales of Hollywood with the confident ease of long practice did not prepare me for the giggling Kev spinning wild and almost unspeakably deviant fantasies which he then hilariously acts out, with Mosier and other familiar View Askew faces like Walt Flanagan, Bryan Johnson and Malcolm Ingram. His remarkably tolerant wife Jen and daughter Harley even make appearances. Smith is more than a little like his character Randall in the way he pushes and pushes at a situation, making it worse and worse until you finally give in, whereupon he makes it worse.

Second, it's a really bad idea to be holding a lot of weight over your head at the Y when Kevin starts doing Harry Potter's voice, explaining to a panicky Ron that screaming "Forgeticus!" after fumbling with a half-awake Harry under the covers in the Hogwarts dorms really doesn't work. (Mosier: It's called "being on the down low, Ron") Nor will the average elderly Y-goer understand why you're trying desperately not to lose it as "Harry" tells Hermione to try gulping some gillyweed before oral sex to hold her breath longer.

This is Kevin Smith at his most raw, when he's coming up with ideas right there in the company of the people who make him laugh. And his new book, "Shootin' the Sh*t With Kevin Smith: The Best of SModcast," on sale tomorrow, is a transcript of some of the best segments. You do lose some of the impact without the sound effects, the fake voices and the background music, but it's still funny and utterly wrong as hell.

Did Helen Keller have a sex life? Did Smith recently have sex with his wife's leg? How long would Smith and Mosier last on the Lost island before they started looking good to each other? Would Scott Mosier perform a sexual act on a dying fan, at the fan's request? What if the Make-A-Wish Foundation forced him to do it? What's up with the Godzilla Jesus movie, or Stalin's monkey soldier army, or bukkake eggs, or why Kevin was willing to let Alanis Morrisette get mugged.

In his previous book, New York Times bestseller "My Boring Ass Life," Smith gave us a peek into his life. This time he lets us into his brain.You might want to wear waders, but don't miss the trip.

Get it from Amazon, or order a signed one from Jay and Silent Bob's Secret Stash, or take a shot at winning a free copy in my "Which Kevin Smith Character Would You Nail?" contest.

NSFW excerpt after the jump:

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In the beginning, there was Peanut Press. One of the oldest e-book publishers and sellers (and by oldest, I mean almost 10 years old, ancient by e-publishing clocks), they built up a good rep, got bought by Palm to become Palm Reader and then eReader, and then finally getting bought by Fictionwise (which just got bought by Barnes and Noble!). eReader has been around forever, is what I'm saying, and they've built up a solid and dependable program that works on possibly more hardware than any other. eReader is available for Palm, Pocket PCs, Symbian phones, your Windows, Mac or OQO desktop, the iPhone and iPod Touch (shown), and as of this week, the Blackberry, all for free.

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Before the Kindle app came along, Stanza was the big dog in iPhone e-book reading. And with good reason.

It's free. It does what it does with minimum fuss, with easy-to-understand menus and directions. Once you use it once you've pretty well got it figured out. And getting books from the Web, from a variety of places, is quick and easy. And it's free.

Pros:

The convenience. Download Stanza from the iTunes store and most of your e-book reading is now covered. Stanza can read DRM-free Amazon Kindle files, Mobipocket, Microsoft LIT,  PalmDoc, Microsoft Word, Rich Text Format, HTML, and PDF, as well as eReader files in both secure and unsecure formats.  Tap the screen to turn a page and you're off and reading.
The experience. Once you're actually in the book, it's pretty much the same as every other e-book reader. The font is crisp, the page-turning animation can be changed to a sliding effect or turned off completely, it saves your place and lets you add bookmarks, and you can search for words.
The customization. Don't like something about Stanza, you can probably change it. You can change text size through the settings or on the fly with the iPhone's pinch and unpinch gesture. You can change the background color, line spacing, margin widths, alignment, you can even change the cover of the book you're reading if you prefer a different one.
The content. Stanza allows you to connect easily to several major e-books sites such as Fictionwise.com, ereader.com, Manybooks.net, and more. Best might be Project Gutenberg, which has thousands of public domain books ready for you to nab for free, and Stanza handles searching and downloading from Project Gutenberg with ease.

The cons:

Not a lot, really. Stanza is a well-designed program.

I do have a few gripes, though. Stanza breaks books into chapters (presumably for faster loading) but that means you can't easily jump around or search inside the entire book, and the scroll bar isn't always very responsive even within the chapter. Getting your personal content into Stanza on your iPhone is a pain, but that's the case with every iPhone e-reader app (Stanza offers a free desktop app that works as a server for you to download from, or you can upload your content to a personal space at Fictionwise.com). And I prefer swiping to tapping for my page-turning, not an option here.

But other than that, I like Stanza. If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, so will you.

Photo by Richard Masoner

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OK, it's not the most Christmassy book you've ever heard of, but your kid will thank you.

Neil Gaiman ("Sandman," American Gods," "Coraline") has dipped into Rudyard Kipling's well and created The Graveyard Book, a timeless story of an abandoned young boy raised by someone other than his parents. In this case, a graveyard full of ghosts. It's not a bad life, really.

Bod, as a toddler, escaped from the murders of his family to find safety and guardianship surrounded by haunts and crumbling headstones. They teach him well (although some of the lessons are a few hundred years out of date) and through Gaiman's seemingly effortless prose we watch him face wonders and dangers: a magical Danse Macrabre, the ancient Indigo Man under the hill, a new living friend, the carnivorous ghouls, and, most dangerous of all, the man Jack who killed his family and still seeks to finish the job.

The Graveyard Book is a fast read, which is good because before you read it to your child you'll want to devour it yourself. It takes a graveyard to raise a child.

Just when you thought you were done with sending J.K. Rowling all of your money… In the final book of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Harry finds clues in the book of fairy tales wizards read to their children. And now you can get a copy of Tales of Beedle the Bard for yourself. I mean, for your kids. Obviously.

Only one of the stories in Beedle is referenced in Deathly Hallows.
That's "The Tale of the Three Brothers," and it's joined by "The Fountain of Fair
Fortune," "The Warlock's Hairy Heart," "The Wizard and the Hopping Pot"
and "Rabbitty Babbitty and Her Cackling Stump."

Advance sales are strong, as you'd expect. There's a $12.99 hardcover edition coming out this week, massively discounted at just about every retail outlet. And Amazon is publishing 100,000 copies of a $100 collector's edition.

The most collectible edition would be one of the seven illustrated, hand-written copies of Beedle Rowling had made last year. Six went to close friends, and one was sold at auction (to Amazon, for a magical $4 million) to benefit The Children's High Level
Group, a charity she helped found in 2005.

Net proceeds of Beedle will help institutionalized
children in European countries including Romania, the Czech Republic,
Georgia, Moldova and Armenia.

The Serenity blueprints from QMx were stunning, no question. Insanely detailed, carefully thought out, presented as beautiful art prints suitable for framing.

Only… they're kinda big to play with. And kinda pricey to pass around the gaming table, especially when Cheetos are involved (and they always are). Also, they're sold out.

So QMx produced a smaller version for reference and general fun. And, QMx being QMx, they added 23 more pages of material on top of that, everything you ever wanted to know – details, history, markings, marketing – Firefly-class transport Serenity. I can't wait for you guys to flip through the new stuff in here.

And so I won't, I'll tell you about them instead. Let's go page by page. First you get an intro by science fiction author Orson Scott Card – um, sorry. From curator Orison Scard, Aries Commonwealth, Ezra — on what a ship like Serenity means to us.

Next is a copy of Serenity's dedication plaque, sort of. Each page has detailed descriptions of the contents, including some backstory here and there, and the provenance of this plaque is a bit dodgy. Read the rest of this entry »

First off, let's see what it is.

Dark Horse's biggest hit of 2006 is now available in a special-edition hardcover!

Joss Whedon, the pop-culture mastermind behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer, bridged the gap between his cult-hit Firefly TV series and his Serenity motion picture with this three-issue miniseries.

Penned by Whedon and Brett Matthews, a Firefly show writer, the ragtag crew takes on a scavenger mission with the promise of a big payoff. Only too late do they realize the gig is orchestrated by an old enemy eager to remake their acquaintance.

* Sporting a new cover by Adam Hughes, this oversized collection shows off the work of penciller Will Conrad and colorist Laura Martin, and the array of pinups by phenomenal guest artists. In addition, over a dozen backup pages delve into the work and art behind the scenes-original material assembled especially for this hardcover edition.

And it is all that. Beautiful new cover — where's the poster for this, Dark Horse? — and the production and colors are great. If you peek under the slipcover you'll even see a nice Serenity logo on the book cover. All the stories and covers* from the original 3-issue, 9-cover series are here, as promised, and Nathan's intro from the paperback collection came along for the ride. All well and good.

My problem with the book? The extras.

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