Book & Baking Blog Entry 26

Crush: The Final Moments

I have to say that I wrote my last blog believing that Jacobson's Crush  really had no further hilarity to be shared.  I wrote the blog without the true badness that the ending brought to me.  How bad?  Bad bad.

I don't think that there can be a spoiler.  We have some real fun as the book winds down.  A character introduced about 1/2 to 2/3 through the book ends up being our killer.  Of course he was hitting on (successfully) our local hottie cop.  What's amazing is that the FBI agent had the entire department chasing a number of others, jumping from one theory to the next with wild abandon.  Two of these suspects were police themselves.  She totally ignores the one cop who is acting suspiciously which is telegraphed in a heavy handed way.  Can I say again that I hope that the FBI are not quite so arrogant or ineffective as Agent Vail.  And how embarrassing for the FBI mentioned in the acknowledgements.  Really, did you LIKE the character?  Seriously?

So, Vail gets a number of people killed, only finds the killer because he tries to kill the cop that he's hitting on when she gets the call with his name given to her by a microsoft tech!  (Thumbs up to Microsoft--the true hero of this tale.)   Vail follows up her fiasco of a manhunt with an embarrassingly amateurish interview.  Was it supposed to seem like she even knew what she was doing?  AND since when do you really just send one very tired cop in to question such an important suspect.  It's also funny that Napa Valley still has no idea that there was a serial killer in their midst.

So, to end this the suspect just tells our "heroine" that she just doesn't get and probably never will and he knows that this will make her crazy (which she acknowledges to herself is the truth--why not just walk away from this nut-job?), her boyfriend has disappeared, and our actual suspicious cop has been somehow secretly working with the killer because his wife and son were threatened.  THE END. 

So, no ACTUAL payoff at all.  Except hours wasted.  I wish I read faster.

Book & Baking Blog Entry 12

DOWNER ALERT: not a fun read. or maybe it is.

So I spent an hour trying to write my blog yesterday and then deleted it I was so tired. And annoyed. So here's why I am annoyed.

I love my kindle. I love my audiobooks. I am appalled that I went to buy a book for my kindle and realized that the publisher, who set the price, was charging more for my electronic edition than for the mass market paperback. I can't begin to tell you how mad I was (am.) This is ludicrous. So I did what any right-minded person would do, I sent the company an email. I posted on my facebook and twitter accounts and now, I'm adding it to my blog.

I buy a lot of books. Frankly, since owning the kindle I've probably bought a much wider variety of authors simply because I can sample the goods. I love being able to read a chapter or 2 and realize that yes, I like this (although that doesn't always work out) or gee, no, not for me. I probably doubled the number of books that I've bought. Kindle has probably created more business for more authors than any single factor in the last 100 years.

I realize that people need to be paid for books. I do not advocate selling books at a loss to anyone. I believe in capitalism. I believe that authors should be paid good money for their ability to entertain.

I realize that there are a lot more people, other than authors, that go into a book. There is the agent, the editor, and people who make the actual paper and binding materials. Oh yeah, but with an ebook you don't have to pay them. Hmmmm. And doesn't the author pay the agent? OK. So who desperately needs this e-money?! The author is getting a bigger percentage even though there are no materials to buy.



This is simple greed. I will be listing, as I discover, publishers who do this. My intent is to do my best not to buy books from these publishers. They have shown me nothing but contempt. Eventually Steve Jobs will put them out of business and until then, I will eschew them.



For those interested yesterdays capitalist pig (by the way, not ALL capitalists are pigs!):



Hachette Book Group distributes books for the following:

Chronicle Books

Filipacchi Publishing

Guinness World Records

Hachette UK

Harry N. Abrams Inc. ...

Innovative Kids

Octopus Publishing

Oxmoor House

Phaidon Press

Time Inc. Home Entertainment.



This is per the Publishing house website of Little, Brown and Company that had the book on Kindle that cost MORE than the print edition in mass market paperback. I'll be only getting these books at the library.

Happy reading. Watch out for sharks....:)