True Grit by Charles Portis

What 14-year-old Mattie Ross doesn't have in age and experience she makes up for double in spunk! This is what will have you loving True Grit by Charles Portis! When Mattie looks for a man with no nonsense determination, and someone who can take care of business without a lot of fuss- someone with True Grit, she finds Rooster Cogburn. And we find a great story of the American West. It's adventure, it's revenge, it's redemption. It's the landscape of the wild west. It's friendship, it's survival, it's ultimately knowing what's right and wrong. True Grit is made up of all the elements of a true classic, with a remarkable cast of unforgettable characters on a quest to fulfill their destinies, and we are fortunate to be able to go along for the ride. (On horseback no less!)

True Grit is the story of Mattie Ross avenging her fathers senseless murder by a low-life drifter, Tom Chaney, that worked for him. The story is told by Mattie Ross, many years later, in a matter of fact tone that is one of her endearing qualities...

"People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father's blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day."


It becomes clear from the start of the story that Mattie is mature way beyond her years as she boards a train with Yarnell Pointdexter, a black man who Mattie's Papa arranged to look in on his family while he was traveling with Chaney to buy some ponies some "seventy miles as the bird flies" in Fort Smith. She boards that train to claim the body of her father, but as circumstances present themselves, what turned out to be a simple plan to bring her father home became an adventure through Indian territory to avenge her father's murder by hunting down the man who killed him and bring him to justice... the same kind of justice her father received.

What she finds when she gets to Fort Smith is a sheriff who was apathetic at best. The sheriff assumed Tom Chaney the murderer (actually the sheriff didn't even have Chaney's name right) had fled to the Indian Territories, which local authorities have no authority over, but the sheriff had asked for a fugitive warranty on Tom Chaney with the federal authorities, which are the U.S. Marshalls. Were the U.S. Marshalls on the trail yet? Well Mattie Ross was going to take care of all that herself...

"Who is the best marshal they have?"
The sheriff thought on it for a minute. He said, "I would have to weigh that proposition. There is near about two hundred of them. I reckon William Waters is the best tracker. He is a helf-breed Comanche and it is something to see, watching him cut for a sign. The meanest one is Rooster Cogburn. He is a pitiless man, double-tough, and fear don't enter into his thinking. He loves to pull a cork. Now L.T. Quinn, he brings his prisoners in alive. He may let one get by now and then but he believes even the worst of men is entitled to a fair shake. Also the court does not pay any fees for dead men. Quinn is a good peace officer and a lay preacher to boot. He will not plant evidence or abuse a prisoner. He is straight as a string. Yes, I will say Quinn is about the best they have."
I said, "Where can I find this Rooster?"

And so the adventure begins. True Grit has been compared to Huckleberry Finn, but there is nothing light-hearted about Mattie Ross or Rooster Cogburn. That's not to say there isn't humor to be found throughout the story, it's just that the beauty of Charles Portis' writing is his ability to let the humor shine through without distracting you from the story. And where that story brings you is across the American landscape shortly after the Civil War. There is this under current of the after effects of a war where neighbor fought neighbor, which helps shape the landscape of men that existed back then. Portis also paints a wonderful picture of the desolation and isolation the wild west had to offer, which is often times romanticized in literature. I could feel the cold through my coat, and the sting of the snow against my face.

If you want to open the pages to memorable characters, great writing, and a story that will have you wanting more, get yourself a copy of True Grit by Charles Portis to read. I can turn to any page in that book now and enjoy just reading a part of it, and it will be one of those books I can see myself rereading some point in time.


About the author
Charles Portis has long been acclaimed as one of America's foremost comic writers. True Grit is his most famous novel--first published in 1968, and the basis for the movie of the same name starring John Wayne. It tells the story of Mattie Ross, who is just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name of Tom Chaney shoots her father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robs him of his life, his horse, and $150 in cash money. Mattie leaves home to avenge her father's blood. With the one-eyed Rooster Cogburn, the meanest available U.S. Marshal, by her side, Mattie pursues the homicide into Indian Territory.

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Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand

On a May afternoon in 1943, an Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean and disappeared, leaving only a spray of debris and a slick of oil, gasoline, and blood. Then, on the ocean surface, a face appeared. It was that of a young lieutenant, the plane’s bombardier, who was struggling to a life raft and pulling himself aboard. So began one of the most extraordinary odysseys of the Second World War.

The lieutenant’s name was Louis Zamperini. In boyhood, he’d been a cunning and incorrigible delinquent, breaking into houses, brawling, and fleeing his home to ride the rails. As a teenager, he had channeled his defiance into running, discovering a prodigious talent that had carried him to the Berlin Olympics and within sight of the four-minute mile. But when war had come, the athlete had become an airman, embarking on a journey that led to his doomed flight, a tiny raft, and a drift into the unknown.

Ahead of Zamperini lay thousands of miles of open ocean, leaping sharks, a foundering raft, thirst and starvation, enemy aircraft, and, beyond, a trial even greater. Driven to the limits of endurance, Zamperini would answer desperation with ingenuity; suffering with hope, resolve, and humor; brutality with rebellion. His fate, whether triumph or tragedy, would be suspended on the fraying wire of his will.

In her long-awaited new book, Laura Hillenbrand writes with the same rich and vivid narrative voice she displayed in Seabiscuit. Telling an unforgettable story of a man’s journey into extremity, Unbroken is a testament to the resilience of the human mind, body, and spirit.

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What the Night knows by Dean Koontz

In the late summer of a long ago year, a killer arrived in a small city. His name was Alton Turner Blackwood, and in the space of a few months he brutally murdered four families. His savage spree ended only when he himself was killed by the last survivor of the last family, a fourteen-year-old boy.

Half a continent away and two decades later, someone is murdering families again, recreating in detail Blackwood’s crimes. Homicide detective John Calvino is certain that his own family—his wife and three children—will be targets in the fourth crime, just as his parents and sisters were victims on that distant night when he was fourteen and killed their slayer.

As a detective, John is a man of reason who deals in cold facts. But an extraordinary experience convinces him that sometimes death is not a one-way journey, that sometimes the dead return.

Here is a ghost story like no other you have read. In the Calvinos, Dean Koontz brings to life a family that might be your own, in a war for their survival against an adversary more malevolent than any he has yet created, with their own home the battleground. Of all his acclaimed novels, none exceeds What the Night Knows in power, in chilling suspense, and in sheer mesmerizing storytelling.

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The Sentry by Robert Crais

The extraordinary new crime novel from the New York Times bestselling author.

Joe Pike is in love. Bad idea for Pike, and maybe not so great for fans of Robert Crais' series of crime novels featuring wisecracking private detective Elvis Cole and Pike, his formerly strong, silent partner.

For seven books, Pike hid behind sunglasses he never took off. He usually wore a sweatshirt with the sleeves ripped off to show tattoos of red arrows (pointing forward, of course) on his biceps. He owned a gun shop and drove a Jeep he kept spotlessly clean and always had Cole's back in a jam. The most emotion he showed was when the corner of his mouth twitched after Cole said something particularly funny.

Cole is a winning character, Pike is a great sidekick, and Crais had a winning formula going until he expanded it and became a better writer. "L.A. Requiem" (1999) was a bigger, deeper book that revealed some of Pike's backstory and cut down Cole's quips in favor of a more nuanced worldview. Readers and reviewers loved it, and Crais responded by going outside the series for some stand-alone thrillers ("Demolition Angel," "Hostage") that increased his sales and sharpened his chops without hurting his credibility. He wrote two more books with Cole as the lead character before making Pike the focus of "The Watchman" and last year's "The First Rule."

"The Watchman" was a winner, but Pike doesn't seem all that comfortable at center stage. He has to do things he doesn't like to do (talk, emote) before he can do what he really wants to do (fight, disappear). He's loyal to his friends, especially Cole, and his lonely side is coming out over the last few books. It's making him behave oddly and get involved with people he'd never bother with in the past, like the seemingly innocent man and his niece whose sandwich shop gets attacked by Mexican gangbangers in Venice, Calif., at the start of "The Sentry."

Pike makes quick work of the gangsters, of course, and sparks fly with Dru Rayne, the hot young niece from New Orleans. They go on a friendly little date and all sorts of trouble results. Dru Rayne and her uncle aren't what they seem, the FBI and the Mexican mafia and a scary hit man sent by some South American drug lords are all in the mix, with Pike in the middle and Cole watching out for him for a change.

Crais is an excellent plotter who never lets his story get away from him, but there's lots of talk and no real tension in "The Sentry." As Cole and Pike move toward a shootout with the bad guys, a too-familiar finale in this series, there's never a satisfactory answer to a simple question: Why would Pike get involved in this case? For love? Really, Joe?

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The Inner Circle by Brad Meltzer

"There are stories no one knows. Hidden stories. I love those stories. And since I work in the National Archives, I find those stories for a living." Beecher White, a young archivist, spends his days working with the most important documents of the U.S. government. He has always been the keeper of other people's stories, never a part of the story himself . . .

Until now.

When Clementine Kaye, Beecher's first childhood crush, shows up at the National Archives asking for his help tracking down her long-lost father, Beecher tries to impress her by showing her the secret vault where the President of the United States privately reviews classified documents. After they accidentally happen upon a priceless artifact—a two-hundred-year-old dictionary that once belonged to George Washington—hidden underneath a desk chair, Beecher and Clementine find themselves suddenly entangled in a web of deception, conspiracy, and murder.

Soon a man is dead and Beecher is on the run as he races to learn the truth behind this mysterious national treasure. His search will lead him to discover a coded and ingenious puzzle that conceals a disturbing secret from the founding of our nation. It is a secret, Beecher soon discovers, that some believe is worth killing for.

Gripping, fast-paced, and filled with the fascinating historical detail for which he is famous, THE INNER CIRCLE is a thrilling novel that once again proves Brad Meltzer as a brilliant author, writing at the height of his craft.

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e-book in the cloud

Booki.sh launches Australian ebook store where you can’t download your purchases

Posted in: Australia, Paul Biba

By Chris Walters

It begins! The ebooks-in-the-cloud concept that I warned against earlier this week, the one publishers say is the ideal future marketplace (for them, not for consumers), is in private beta right now in Australia.
It’s using the Monocle web-based ebook reader–which I find really awesome, to tell the truth–and partnering with Readings, a small Australian book chain, to sell ebooks to Australian customers. It looks great. It’s the future of ebook sales. And it stinks.
I really don’t have any complaints about Monocle, except that I caught a couple of bugs during my brief testing of the interface on the Readings website. As far as making it easy to read an ebook online, Monocle works great, and it’s compatible across a wide variety of devices. You can try it out for yourself on the Booki.sh site.
The small detail that ruins everything, though, is that when you buy an ebook from Readings/Booki.sh, you never get to download the file to your computer or device. It’s stored permanently with the retailer, then called up and displayed to you whenever you request it. To head off customer complaints, Booki.sh takes advantage of HTML5′s ability to store offline files in your browser, so in general it’s possible to read your purchases even if you’re not online.
But you’re never given the option to download a file of the ebook, even a file with DRM. Here is how Booki.sh puts it on their “about” page:

Can I download ebook files to read in another app? – In Booki.sh, an ebook is a web link – we believe books are part of the web, in much the same way as a YouTube video is part of the web. It’s always there when you want it, but you don’t “download” anything.

I’ll give them points for copywriting–that sure sounds like a perfectly reasonable and forward-thinking approach, when it’s put that way!–but it doesn’t change the fact that Booki.sh is basically telling you, “We keep full control of your purchases, so suck it.” You will never be able to do anything with your ebook that Booki.sh doesn’t approve of first.
No matter how nice the Monocle interface looks, it fills me with loathing. It’s the most anti-consumer approach to ebook retailing yet, and you can bet it’s going to spread to other retailers in the coming years if enough consumers don’t push back.

Watch the promo video of Google Editions - (e)books in the cloud

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Kindle is Amazon's All Time Best Selling Product

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CES Asus unveils four tablet PCs

Not one, not two, but four new tablet pc' for Asus. They believe in tablets!! As you and us, but it is a lot. We like it!



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CES Entourage the Pocket Edge

We need this one! We liked Entourage with the double screen, but this one is a great one, too!!Entourage likes them either, very large or small ;-).

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CES Toshiba Tablet

In the row of new tablets, here is the Toshiba. It looks like this year more and more brands like to get some part of the pie in the tablet world. But, this one is a worth a watch!

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CES RIM Blackberry Playbook

We already talked about the new device of RIM, but now it's life and kicking at the CES in Las Vegas.



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CES Vizio tablet

Another new player on the market of tablet pc's, Vizio. Here is there device:


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CES NEC dual screen tablet at Read-an-ebook

 More news of the CES in Las Vegas comming up.

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CES Las Vegas - Opera Software as browser for tablets

Consumer Electronics Show -Browser-maker Opera Software is taking advantage of the tablet rage at CES this year to demo a preview build of the Opera browser for tablets and Netbook PCs.
Our friends of CNET got a look at on an Android-powered Galaxy Tab and on a Windows 7-powered IdeaPad tablet.

What they see has potential. Opera for tablets has the usual URL and Google search bars, and tabbed browsing. It also has the typical features of search, bookmarking, and history, to name a few. The browser adds zoom and pinch, and automatically scales to fit various tablet screen sizes.

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Stieg Larsson ebooks via Read-an-ebook.com

The article written about Stieg Larsson has been rewritten fully. Now it includes interviews and a video about how to become the Girl with the Dragon tattoo ;-)
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Joni Piclult House Rules via Read-an-ebook

New Hampshire writer Jodi Picoult published her first novel in 1992. Since then, she has written just about a book a year, and also squeezed out four issues of DC Comic’s Wonder Woman. Three novels have become television movies, one a feature film starring Cameron Diaz and Abigail Breslin. All her stories depict themes of familial love, loyalty and betrayal, romantic love and justice. House Rules, her 17th novel, is no exception and fits nicely into her body of work.

Jacob Hunt is an 18-year-old Asperger’s child who only wants to fit in. His mother, Emma, has done everything in her power to make him feel as “neurotypical” as possible, including enrolling him in regular schools rather than those for special-needs kids. She calls his requirement for order and routine, his inability to look people in the eye, his outbursts, his lack of empathy and his fixation on topics such as forensic science “quirks,” and caters to his needs to the exclusion of his younger brother, Theo.

With no father present in the house – he left the family when he couldn’t handle Jacob’s condition – Theo begins spying on happy families in the neighbourhood, each time becoming more brazen, until he finds himself breaking into houses and stealing iPods, CDs, Wii games: all the fun items his mom can’t afford to buy him.

Meanwhile, Jacob is enjoying the time he gets to spend with his tutor, Jess, whom he believes understands him better than anyone and is his only real friend. Their sessions concentrate on teaching him how to interact socially – something his Asperger’s doesn’t allow him to do very easily. But lately, Jess’s time has been too divided by the attention of her new boyfriend. Jacob suspects he isn’t treating her right, but above all else, her attitude toward Jacob has changed. They argue, and when she turns up missing and then dead a few days later, young Jacob is taken into custody.

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The story, basically about how one type of justice applies to the “neurotypical” and another to a person with a disability, is told through multiple narrators, which serve as chapter headings; Emma, Jacob, Theo, Rich, the detective, and Oliver, the lawyer. This allows Picoult to give us Jacob’s point of view, and the voice of Asberger’s: highly intelligent and deductive, yet wholly lacking in the kind of feeling the other characters exhibit.

Included in the mother’s story is the dialectic of autism, and the argument about whether infant immunization shots are the cause. Theo’s tells the tale of the left-out kid, and the reverse responsibility of always having to look after his big brother. Through the twenty-something lawyer, we get the conflict between succeeding on his first real case, while slowly falling in love with his client’s forty-something mother. Finally, with Rich, the detective, we get all the police procedural clichés.

There’s a twist at the end and lots of saccharine, predictable moments in between.

This book is a hefty 532 pages, though it could have been told in half the space, in fewer voices. In fact, it could have gone straight to screenplay, since it has the distinct feel of being written for that purpose. Picoult’s legions of fans will love it, and some bright up-and-comer will play Jacob in the film, an aged-out actress will be cast as the mom and one of the newest Hollywood hotties will play the lawyer. That’s what happens when an author becomes a brand.

Jodi Picourt about her ebook House Rules




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Stephen King Full Dark No Stars via Read-an-ebook.com

It has been almost 30 years since Stephen King's first set of four novellas, Different Seasons, four stories written in the golden dawn of his career. They were mostly fantasy-free, and three of them were filmed (as Stand By Me, The Shawshank Redemption and Apt Pupil). They were sharp, smart, dark stories of a perfect length to film – longer than the short stories King had written for men's magazines early in his career, shorter than the blockbuster novels he had started to carve out, following the success of Carrie (which was itself a novella, padded out to novel-length with commentary on the events of the book).

It has been 20 years since Four Past Midnight, from King's hazy afternoon period. Another four stories, less remarkable (one film, Secret Window, one TV special, The Langoliers).

Now, in the evening of his immense career, we get Full Dark, No Stars, a final set of four novellas. (At least, it is easy to presume that this is the final set. It is also perfectly conceivable that King, 63, who talks about retiring and laying down his pen, but for whom ceasing to write seems unthinkable, will bring out another set 20 years from now.)

King in novella form tends to avoid or to downplay the supernatural. "1922", the opening story, is simply as good as anything he has done. Inspired, King says in his afterword, by Michael Lesy's collection of clippings and photographs Wisconsin Death Trip (1973) (a book that I sometimes imagine must have inspired as many books as it has sold), it is a first-person narrative: Wilfred Leland James, a small farmer in Nebraska, murders his wife, having first talked his 14-year-old son into helping him. "I cozened him into it, playing upon his fears and beating down his quite normal objections over a period of two months," James tells us. "This is a thing I regret even more bitterly than the crime, for reasons this document will show." And show us he does. The murder of his wife and disposal of her body in a well is only the beginning: the consequences, for James, for his son and for their neighbours, are far-reaching, monstrous and inevitable. It's compulsive reading, sometimes scary, revolting, ultimately heartbreaking and King tells it in a precise manner that's far from his usual voice. There is a hint of the supernatural in it, although the borderline between a haunting and madness here is a hairline fracture, and one that King exploits elegantly all the way to the end.

"Big Driver", the second novella, is told in King's usual voice: it's easy, comfortable reading, deceptively so. Like many of his stories, it features a writer, in this case Tess, author of a series of uninspired mysteries, who has just driven to give a talk to a small-town book club. On her way home she's sent on a short cut, and is brutally raped and almost murdered by the eponymous "big driver". An efficient revenge fantasy, this was the only one of the stories in which the beats were predictable, and, for me, it was the least satisfying. I took the most pleasure in the snapshot of contemporary America in the background of the story.

"Fair Extension" begins as pastiche, gentle, amiable and insinuating. It appears to be a John Collier story, a classical "deal with the devil" tale. Dave Streeter is dying of a cancer that is rapid and incurable. A mysterious Mr Elvid offers him a life extension: he'll get at least 15 years of healthy life. But there is a catch (there is always a catch): if good things are happening to Streeter, bad things must happen to someone he hates, in this case his best friend.

While it begins as a pastiche, it does something else as it goes. The story gains its power from its betrayal of deal-with-the-devil tropes: there is no twist ending, no clever way out. It becomes an act of extended sadism in which the reader is initially complicit and then increasingly horrified. The anagrammatic Mr Elvid tells us that he "wouldn't know a soul if it bit me on the buttocks", but we are watching Streeter's soul being taken, a little at a time, until there's nothing left.

The final novella, "A Good Marriage", is a simple idea, perfectly told. Darcy Anderson has been married to her husband Bob, an accountant and coin collector, for almost 30 years. "It was a good marriage, one of the fifty percent or so that kept working over the long haul. She believed that in the same unquestioning way that she believed that gravity would hold her to the earth when she walked down the sidewalk. Until that night in the garage." Bob is off on a business trip. In the garage that night, Darcy finds a box containing evidence that tells her that Bob might be a serial killer. But Bob is coming home.

These are stories of retribution and complicity: of crimes that seem inevitable, of ways that we justify the world to ourselves and ourselves to the world. Powerful, and each in its own way profoundly nasty.

In his afterword, King states that he wanted the stories to linger in the imagination. And they do. They linger, and perhaps sometimes they even fester. But they are never less than satisfying and are fine stories to take with us into the night.

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Interview with Stephen King


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Samsung Galaxy Tab The official live demo via Read-an-ebook.com

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