LibraryThing Early Reviewers/Members Giveaway: The School with Chocolate Air by Jenifer Rubloff

I received this book in the Member Giveaway and started reading it today. I couldn't make it past the first six pages as it was absolutely bad. Sorry Jenifer but this book needs some work. The story is poorly written from the start and you need to win your reader over from the first word. I expected a book written in the vein of Matilda or Madeline where a poor orphan girl goes to a girls' boarding school and wins the hearts of everyone (I don't know if that is what this book is about because I didn't get very far). I expected a whimsical yet poignant coming of age tale, etc judging by the title (we do still judge books by their covers). Whether it is that I now will never know. Sorry Jenifer, better luck next time.

The NEW!!! iPad 3 - How excited should I get??

I heard about the newly released iPad 3 or HD or whatever its called and I was thinking to myself, "How excited should I be getting for this thing?" Wasn't the iPad 2 released just a couple of months ago? Maybe I should wait until the iPad 4 comes out before I get really excited or should I wait for the iPad 5 or maybe the 6...

So many Pads or tablets are released and then re-released and then they release a better one under a different name and I just wonder whether it's all worth it? I have been toying with the idea of getting one of these things for a while now but I just can't decide whether getting it would add anything to my productivity at all. A tablet isn't a laptop in that you can't do the same stuff on there that you do on your laptop. I like the idea of watching movies on there but I can do that on my laptop too. It is bigger but I can live with that. Its basically a BIG phone and I like that because sometimes there are things that don't display quite as well on your phone and a bigger screen would be great. But I can use my laptop for that too. It's bigger and bulkier but I can live with that.

What I really, truly want is an ebook reader that I can whip out on a long flight or a quiet afternoon on the couch and immerse myself in a good book. I have quite a lot of ebooks to read now that I have joined LibraryThing Early Reviewers but without one of those ebook readers I have to resort to reading it off my laptop screen or printing it out. The former isn't that great for my eyes and the latter isn't that great for the environment since I chuck away the pages once I'm done with the book (hope there'll be no lynch-mob outside my house after that admission). So is the iPad a good ebook reader or should I get maybe a Kindle or a Gobii or an iRiver... I was going through the specs on the Apple website this morning and it seems like it could be a pretty decent reader but what about that glare. And the size... I can whip out the Kindle on a flight and get stuck into a book while the hostess or stewardess, or whatever they're called these days, drones on about the in-flight safety and the temperature at our destination but whipping out the iPad might result in the maiming of my fellow passenger. It's quite large. Could be quite messy. Mmmm...

iPad...Kindle...Gobii? I think I'll wait for the 5 or 6 and in the meantime I'll get the ebook reader I want because as a niche product it does the one thing I want it to do really well and that's good enough for me.

LibraryThing Early Reviewers/Members Giveaway: Ten Kinds of Trouble by Ian Ashe

The stories were mostly about violent crime and involved death and in some cases a fair amount of gore. It might seem as if violence is the only theme running through the stories but there is another theme. Many of the main characters were people who were dragged into the violent crimes they are portrayed as committing against their will. What I liked most was the fact that the stories were short and were easy to read. The characterisation for some of the stories was a little sketchy and in some cases the plot seemed a little contrived but there were instances of brilliance and many times I was impressed by what I was reading. My favourite story of the batch was "A Night Without Mercy". The entire story is told in the form of calls to 911 and it is a very interesting method used.

All in I would give the book a 5/10