It’s official! I love the Kindle App on my phone. I thought that I was a voracious reader before, but now I have millions of books literally at my fingertips. Also, contributing to my frequent book orgies, is the fact that many of the titles are reasonably priced (I can justify any impulse buy between .99 and 5.99) so I have been reading a lot more lately. I have also discovered a lot of great new authors this way. One of my recent finds has been T.R. Ragan, author of the Lizzy Gardner Series. The first book, Abducted, introduces Private Detective, Lizzy Gardner. Lizzy is the only surviving victim of Spiderman (not the beloved costumed superhero) but a serial killer who abducted and murdered a number of teenage girls in the Sacramento area. Lizzy escaped him but Spiderman was never captured. The murders stopped for over a decade, but now they have started again. Lizzy has never fully recovered from her abduction and neither did her family. Her parents divorced soon after her return and her father no longer speaks to her. Her sister, Cathy, harbors deeply held and barely concealed resentment towards Lizzy, but her teenage daughter, Brittany, is very close to her aunt. I have read a lot of fiction about serial killers such as Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal, and Red Dragon. Those books have all scared the living crap out of me and probably left me with some deep psychological scars. Abduction was definitely suspenseful and it had some frightening moments, but it wasn’t overly graphic or cringe inducing. I really connected to the character of Lizzy. She has emotional damage from the abduction, but she is not a victim. She works hard to not let Spiderman and his actions define her. It’s a great read and fortunately it has a sequel, Dead...

Last week, I went through probably one of the most traumatic experiences of my life. Hurricane Sandy was barreling towards New York and I was right in her path. Stuck inside my flooded apartment, I was forced by my boss to find an uncongenial means to get to work. Without power, internet, and spotty cell phone service – I turned to books! Yeah, big deal, we all have books.  But, in this case – they were my lifeline. Stuck on the flooded New Jersey side of the Hudson River, and like thousands of others in my area, I was desperately trying to find a way across the river. While New York City is only a stone’s throw from the Jersey waterfront, in this case – it might have well been miles away. The state was no help. With PATH trains and the Holland Tunnel flooded, the Lincoln Tunnel and George Washington Bridge quickly became parking lots. Not sure what to do, I decided to try and drive in. Driving in my neighborhood quickly became next to impossible. Streets were flooded or littered with debris, while others were sparks of downed live eclectic wires. I was given permission from my boss to stay home for the day, but was told it was mandatory to report for work, tomorrow. Years before moving to the New York metro area, I purchased several guides to familiarize myself with everything from subways to flea markets. Frommer’s New York City Guide 2006 and Newcomer’s Handbook for Moving to and Living in New York City. I think I might have opened these books one other time before. Initially, I purchased these to read on my train commute to work, but never got around to really reading them. Since then, they have sat on a shelf collecting dust. Turns out…...

There are probably around a dozen books in my library that I either haven’t started or haven’t finished. It’s a shame, sort of. A few are loaners from family that I’ll get to when everything else around me is exhausted. Several I purchased because I love the author, and the premise sounded interesting, but I get distracted by shiny new stories, so I lay those older books aside, promising to pick them up at the soonest opportunity. And admittedly, there are a couple who I’m half-way through but found myself getting so overwhelmed or bored with minute detailing of history (I’m looking at you 1491) that I had to book mark them and cleanse my mind with some YA before even thinking of cracking them open again. A good number, of these neglected tomes, are books on writing. So my house is over-run with books. Also, I live with somebody who has lots of books of their own. If I mention wanting to buy a new and exciting book, he’ll eyeball the stack of unread novels and history books precariously perched on the nightstand next to my pillow. “Why do you want to buy another book when you still have these to read?” (It should be noted that this person always gifts me with at least one book on Christmas and birthdays.) Since I’m not made of money, and my storage space is finite, the library is my go-to book fix. Libraries are easy. Borrow a book and then hand it back once you’ve thoroughly examined it’s world. But some of those books affect me so much, I must own them. There is an odd power that story has over a person. When it really connects, it’s as if a piece of my soul...

I was always the vocal luddite who advocated for paper books and damned the e-reader. Then, in June, my birthday came on the heels of a week spent traveling around Colorado, my shoulder bag loaded with three library books. I came home from Colorado with a pinched nerve in my neck, from carrying around three big library books in my shoulder bag. Two weeks later, my husband presented me with my birthday gift, a Nook! (He’s an excellent gift giver, noticing my subtle hints, such as “My neck hurts sooo bad from travelling with books. You should get me a Nook for my birthday.”) When I flew back to Colorado in August, the Nook took the place of all books. My carry-on felt about one thousand times lighter. I loved my Nook! I loaded it up with library books and a few purchases from the BN.com site. An availability of titles at our local library was the reason I chose a Nook over the Kindle, they didn’t have Kindle ready files (then, they do now.) I just wanted the simple e-reader, (not the ostentatious tablet) so that saved us the expense of possibly considering an iPad. The Nook rocked my reading life. It went everywhere with me, especially to bed. I loved it so much, I tossed the original packaging, just to show how committed we were to each other. Then, for Christmas, I got the surprise of the decade when I opened a present to discover an iPad2 (3G no less). “Are you Freaking KIDDING me?” I stammered about 8 times. Just so you get the full effect, the present came via delivery about 3 days prior to the holiday, while I was on a very contentious conference call for work. You know...

This past May, Sixkill by Robert B. Parker arrived in bookstores. It’s the thirty-ninth book in Parker’s Spenser detective series and I’ve read each of the previous thirty-eight at least a half dozen times. The day it arrived I hauled my ass down to the local Barnes and Noble and bought a copy. Which was an odd experience since these days I buy books almost exclusively for my iPad, and before that it was my Kindle. Flash forward six months and that copy of Sixkill still sits pristine and unopened on my nightstand. Why? Because Parker, dubbed “The Dean of American Crime Fiction”, died last year and Sixkill is his last. Between 1973 and 2011, Parker published nearly 70 books and almost all of them were bestsellers. He’s most well known his Spenser series, featuring the wise-cracking, street-smart Boston private-eye, which earned him a devoted following and reams of critical acclaim. (It’s worth clarifying that these excellent mysteries were the inspiration for the dreadful and unwatchable show Spenser: For Hire which eschewed the gritty character and ambiguity of situation that make the books so compelling for the cloying tidiness network television demands.) I’ve been a mystery fan since I was given a set of Encyclopedia Brown books for my eighth birthday. A voracious reader, I quickly finished those, then burned through all of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew in no time at all. Since this was before there was a robust Young Adult market, I leapt into the grown up stuff, and quickly fell under the spell of mystery and noir. Carroll John Daly, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane. I’d read them all by the time I became a teenager. And then, I found Spenser. I grew up in a safe middle class...