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Category Archives: Free reads

Book review: Concrete Underground by Moxie Mezcal

19 Sunday Jun 2011

Posted by A. J. Braithwaite in 'Show me the free' challenge, Free reads, Indie writing, Reviews, Writers

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Concrete Underground

Concrete Underground by Moxie Mezcal

It’s been a while since I’ve done a book review on here. Not because I haven’t been reading (or reviewing, for that matter), but simply because most of my reading of late has been of traditionally-published books. In this blog, I highlight independently-published works which I’ve enjoyed.

Looking at the last 20 books I’ve read, about one in five are independently published. The quality has varied, but generally they’ve been good. Concrete Underground stands out from them in a number of ways. For one thing, it is uncompromisingly violent and raunchy compared to the rest – not something I usually seek out in a book or movie. Yet the physical abuse and sex scenes are written in a very matter-of-fact way, which doesn’t negate their impact, but carries the reader along without making him or her cringe in horror or embarrassment.

The book is also interesting in that it raises more questions than it answers. My response to reaching the end of it was to start reading from the beginning all over again, as I wanted to try to work out what the answers to those questions are. The writing was of such a high quality that this was not any sort of hardship.

Concrete Underground is also different from my other recent reads in relation to its genre. It’s been described elsewhere as ‘postmodern pulp fiction’, which is as good a description as any. The book is a mystery, with a morals-free, Mexican investigative journalist main character who is looking into the activities of a search-engine company’s CEO. The story takes a sideways look at the overly-monitored lives we lead today. One passage that sums this up stood out:

…the age of surveillance is only a symptom of the new hyper-narcissism that has infected our collective reality tunnels. We invite the surveillance cameras into our homes because they are proof that someone is paying attention to us.

If you’re willing to try something new and aren’t put off by adult content, I highly recommend this novel. It’s not always a comfortable read, and may leave you feeling more confused at the end than you were at the beginning, but it is definitely worth the ride.

Amazon update update

12 Thursday May 2011

Posted by A. J. Braithwaite in epublishing, Free reads, Sales

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Well, how quickly things change in this new epublishing world. Last week I was delighted because I’d had two sales in May through Amazon – bringing my total Amazon tally to a not-terribly-awe-inspiring FIVE WHOLE BOOKS. Well, five whole files, anyway.

Yesterday morning Amazon marked the price down from 99 cents/70 pence to… FREE! The effect on downloads via the Kindle Store was instantaneous By this morning my four Amazon.com downloads had burgeoned to a more impressive 1,072, while the UK sales had grown to a sedate but respectable 122. Of course there won’t be any royalties as no-one is making any money out of this arrangement, but it does mean that The Roman and the Runaway will be lurking on people’s Kindles and may even get read by some of them. 😉

Audio books: pros and cons

20 Sunday Mar 2011

Posted by A. J. Braithwaite in ereading, Free reads, Reviews

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I mentioned in my last post on statistics that I had been listening to a few audio books from the library, despite having thought previously that I wouldn’t be making much use of that particular variety of ebook. My thinking had been that audio books are fine for long car journeys, but that they didn’t really fit into my current lifestyle very well, since long car journeys don’t feature in it much.

Well I have to eat my words on that, as we have listened to four audio books since my original scepticism. One was so-so, the other three very good. As I mentioned before, the experience of listening rather than reading a book is different in important respects. For one thing, it takes a lot longer to listen to a book than it does to read one (part of my original prejudice against them, I admit). There’s also the problem of the narrator actually intruding on the book. The second book I heard was The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde. It was very well done and I enjoyed the narration. The two books after that were the next in the series, Lost in a Good Book and The Well of Lost Plots. In these, the narration was generally good, but there were some things that jarred with me. For one thing, the books are written from a first-person viewpoint, and Thursday Next, the protagonist, comes from the town of Swindon, Wiltshire. So the Lancashire accent of the narrator seemed…odd.

The second narrator also pronounced some things differently from the earlier one, so that ‘Spec Ops’, the abbreviated name for ‘Special Operations’ was pronounced ‘Spesh Ops’ by the first one and ‘Speck Ops’ by the second. Now I know this marks me out as a complete pedant, but the lack of consistency bothered me (couldn’t they just have asked Jasper Fforde which one he preferred?). The occasional mispronunciation of words can also be annoying. Of course it’s perfectly possible that I’ve been pronouncing those words wrongly all these years – but in a text-based book, it’s not something that I have to worry about. The prosody (the stress on words) was sometimes off, too. On a few occasions I found myself thinking that the author probably didn’t mean the sentence to be read with the emphasis on that word. Distracting…

There’s a social aspect to an audio book that’s very different from a text book. I really enjoyed the way that my husband and I were laughing at the jokes in the Thursday Next books as we heard them. It was a shared experience in a way that ‘regular’ reading can’t be (unless you’re a member of a book club, I suppose, but even then, you’re not experiencing the words at the same time as each other). The two later books in the Thursday Next series were only available as printed books from the library. We’ve both read and enjoyed them, but not at the same time. And there’s that element of book-jealousy, too, as one of us had to read them before the other. This only happens occasionally, but the problem reached a peak with one of the Harry Potter books, Order of the Phoenix, I think, where we were reading it in shifts. Audio books avoid that problem neatly.

The other problem with audio books is that it is easier to lose concentration than it is with a printed book. Some interruption can easily distract the listener and, before you know it, you’ve missed a key part of the plot. Price is also something that concerns me about audio books. Since mine have all come from the library service, this isn’t something I can honestly complain about, but the audio book version of The Eyre Affair is $31.93 at audible.com, whereas the ebook is $10.99. That seems like an enormous disparity: quite hard to justify, I’d say. Is this a tax on laziness?

Ebook quality

28 Friday Jan 2011

Posted by A. J. Braithwaite in Editing, epublishing, ereading, Free reads, Libraries

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To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis

She was watching them and biting her Up.

…from the sideboard as! I held their attention…

Ill work on Terence and make another stab at the diary.

“J think he lost the battle because of his hemorrhoids.”

Kõiõing-neeaies as sne spoêe.

Authors of self-published books are often criticised for poor editing. It is, of course, notoriously difficult to edit one’s own writing – this is one area where a book that goes through the traditional publication process is almost always going to have an advantage. Almost always…

The examples above are not from a self-published book. They’re from the first ebook I borrowed from my public library (via the OverDrive service I discussed the other week). In theory, from a book which has undergone a rigorous quality-control procedure. Oh yeah?

They’re clearly errors which have crept in through an OCR (optical character recognition) process. Which has been poorly checked. Now I haven’t paid anything for this book, having read it through the library service, but if this is the same file that is made available for purchase, then I would have paid between $6.07 and $7.99 for it. And would have been even more annoyed by the mistakes. It’s not just self-published books which need careful proof-reading.

The book is an excellent read, by the way, despite the distracting errors.

Book review: Smallworld by Dominic Green

04 Tuesday Jan 2011

Posted by A. J. Braithwaite in 'Show me the free' challenge, ereading, Free reads, Reviews

≈ 1 Comment

My first free read of 2011 was Smallworld by Dominic Green, available free from Smashwords. Sci-fi is a little outside my comfort zone, and there were so many strange words in the first few pages that I began to wonder if I’d be able to continue reading. But I persevered, and I’m glad I did. The story concerns a tiny moonlet which is home to the Reborn-in-Jesus family, their various adopted children, a mysterious hermit and a Devil. The Devil has a habit of killing anyone who threatens the peace of the colony. The reason the Reborn-in-Jesuses have so many adopted children is because their parents were all killed by the Devil.

The novel has some great side-swipes at issues of genetic engineering (the McChickens), religious indoctrination, slavish exploitation of technology and the abuse of power in general. There are some laugh-out-loud moments: I liked this description of the state schools on other worlds, for example:

“Those schools incorporate electric shock discipline, chemical aversion therapy, and subliminal messaging.”
“Granted,” nodded the Pastor, “but it is not all good.”

There were a few minor typos and, in some places, I felt there was a paucity of commas. But nothing major. I will admit that the ending left me feeling slightly puzzled, but maybe I hadn’t been paying close enough attention.

I’ve come to the conclusion (after a whole week and a half of ereading) that there are two types of ebooks: those where you keep checking the page number you’re up to (and how much further there is to go), and those where you don’t care what page number you’re on, because you’re enjoying the book. Rather like being on a long car journey – if it’s a tedious one, you keep looking at the road signs to see how many miles/kilometres you’ve got until your destination. If the scenery is beautiful, you’re not so worried. At the beginning of this book, I was checking the page numbers, but by half-way through, I was enjoying the ride. Thanks, Dominic!

Free ebook

The Roman and the Runaway

Ebook: $2.99

The Viking and the Vendetta

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