Second, I'm working on joining up with a contest to give my readers a chance to win a Kindle Fire! If nothing else, you'll get some inside tips on free books (and hopefully pass along the info to others, which should result in more readers here on the blog). Stay tuned - if it all works out, it will start sometime next week.
Third, if you've been on the fence about one of the 25 Award-Winning Books for $1 in the current KSO offer, don't dally. Two of the books on the original list are already gone (and one of them, The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan), also dropped out of the Kindle Lending Library at the same time. Amazon has added two books as replacements, so there are still 25, but there's no telling how long the current books that are there will last. Of the ones left, my top choices are (although not necessarily in this order):
- The Spirit Ring, by Lois McMaster Bujold
- The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi
- A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole
- Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keyes
- The Crossing Places (Ruth Galloway), by Elly Griffiths
Of my top picks, most are in mobi format, but (for those who care), A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole, is in Topaz format. That always means a larger file size and often some formatting issues (although sometimes only noticeable at certain font sizes). I just checked and the free version at Audible is still (or once again) free! You won't find it searching in the store, though, so follow this link to add it to your Audible library. If you are on the fence on which KSO book to get, you can grab this one and use the KSO offer on a different selection.Book Description
"A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once."
So enters one of the most memorable characters in recent American fiction. The hero of John Kennedy Toole's incomparable, Pulitzer Prize-winning comic classic is one Ignatius J. Reilly, "huge, obese, fractious, fastidious, a latter-day Gargantua, a Don Quixote of the French Quarter". His story bursts with wholly original characters, denizens of New Orleans' lower depths, incredibly true-to-life dialogue, and the zaniest series of high and low comic adventures.
As you may know, one of the methods of subscribing to my blog is to get it in the Amazon Kindle store. I checked late last night and I was up to #91 in Arts & Entertainment blogs (I've crept up a bit since then, it looks like). I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Amazon has dropped the price to only 99 cents a month (I don't have any control over the pricing; Amazon sets it based on content and frequency of posting). It has been at $1.99 for a long time, no doubt due to the frequency of posts. For whatever reason, though, it's now less than cup of coffee or a soda (at least, at most places I've tried around here) - I know one of the commenters mentioned the price (of $1.99/month) as their only issue with the subscription. Amazon updates the blog during the day to your subscribed Kindle device (it looks like they have made it available on all the eInk Kindles), so those of you who aren't around a computer during the day might find this a better way of keeping up with any limited time promotions I might mention.The website OverHalfSale.com has a 16GB micro-SDHC card (with adapter) on sale today for $11.99 (plus $2 shipping). I haven't tried them out, but have read comments from others that have, and it seems to be a decent bargains website. If you need a memory card for your phone, nookColor, nookTablet or just to use for backups, this might be a great chance to get one. The sales there are limited time and while they last, so there are only about 9 hours left to get this one.
