Specials by Scott Westerfeld

Hot damn I love these books. Amy says that Pretties is her favorite, but I can't make up my mind—I love them all! However, I am not crazy about the cover designs. I don't think they live up to the content.

About Specials:

Special Circumstances:

The words have sent chills down Tally's spine since her days as a repellent, rebellious ugly. Back then Specials were a sinister rumor—frighteningly beautiful, dangerously strong, breathtakingly fast. Ordinary pretties might live their whole lives without meeting a Special. But Tally's never been ordinary.

And now she's been turned into one of them: a superamped fighting machine, engineered to keep the uglies down and the pretties stupid.

The strength, the speed, and the clarity and focus of her thinking feel better than anything Tally can remember. Most of the time. One tiny corner of her heart still remembers something more.

Still, it's easy to tune that out—until Tally's offered a chance to stamp out the rebels of the New Smoke permanently. It all comes down to one last choice: listen to that tiny, faint heartbeat, or carry out the mission she's programmed to complete. Either way, Tally's world will never be the same.

Now I need to get Extras. Boingboing calls Extras "a superb volume in the Uglies series."

The Killing of the Tinkers by Ken Bruen

Dark. Gritty. Grim. A pal of mine at work recommended Ken Bruen. This was the only title available on eReader (c'mon already!) even though it is the second in the series about ex-Guard Jack Taylor.

Jack Taylor, a disgraced ex-cop in Galway, has slid further down the slope of despair. After a year in London he returns to his home town of Galway with a leather coat and a coke habit. Someone is systematically slaughtering young travellers and dumping their bodies in the city centre. Even in the state he's in, Jack Taylor has an uncanny ability to know where to look, what questions to ask, and with the aid of an English policeman, apparently solves the case. Now he stands poised on the precipice of the most devastating decision of his career, while at the same time a rare opportunity of real and enduring love also materialises

BookTour

BookTour: Where Authors and Audiences Meet

This site (still in beta) helps you find and follow authors: you can browse by genre as well as name, and updates are available vie email or RSS. One particularly cool feature is the ability to link with your Amazon account so that you automatically receive updates on authors whose books you bought through Amazon. I hope that they expand this function to include other sites like GoodReads and LibraryThing.

The Lilac Bus by Maeve Binchy

Sometimes you just need a little Binchy.

Every Friday night Tom Fitzgerald’s lilac-coloured minibus is a meeting place for the same cast of seven, who always use it to travel home from Dublin to spend the weekend in Rathdoon. Disparate characters, who embark at an anonymous pick-up point, each one has an inner life unknown to his or her fellow passengers. There’s Nancy Morris, a real ‘Miss Mouse’ who is known for her meanness; Dee Burke–engrossed in her affair with an unfaithful hospital consultant; and Kev Kennedy who is a bit of a mystery to everyone, including his own family. Then there’s Celia Ryan. Each time she returns home to Ryan’s Bar, it is only to find her mother making a drunken exhibition of herself in front of half the local population. And, of course, Tom Fitzgerald himself has his own reasons for returning home so regularly. . .

The Bone Garden by Tess Gerritsen

I read this one when I was on vacation. About all I can say about it is that it was ok.

Present day: Julia Hamill has made a horrifying discovery on the grounds of her new home in rural Massachusetts: a skull buried in the rocky soil—human, female, and, according to the trained eye of Boston medical examiner Maura Isles, scarred with the unmistakable marks of murder. But whoever this nameless woman was, and whatever befell her, is knowledge lost to another time. . . .

More good stuff from TOC

The O'Reilly blog, Tools of Change for Publishing, is a great resource for anyone in the industry. I find myself regularly sharing their posts on Google Reader.

This looks like a really valuable resource:

StartWithXML is an effort to understand and spread the knowledge publishers need to move forward with XML. It's about the business issues driving the "why" of XML in publishing and the technical and organizational issues, strategies, and tactics underlying the "how" of getting started.

David Foster Wallace

RIP

New York Times
Los Angeles Times

List of his books at books.google.com
Interview from the Chicage Tribune
Salon interview
Charlie Rose interview from March 1997