The Ninety Days of Genevieve was first published over a decade ago, and has now been re-released with a subtle, simple new cover, which has a graphic proclaiming "If you like Fifty Shades of Grey You'll LOVE this!". I certainly don't blame anyone for jumping on the bandwagon, and I can definitely see the similarities between this book and the infamous Fifty Shades.  However, although I liked Fifty Shades (I did a piece on its many faults, too!), I didn't love The Ninety Days of Genevieve. The premise is that Genevieve Loften has a 90-day contract with businessman James Sinclair. In order for her to win his extremely sought-after custom for the advertising agency she works for, she'll do whatever he orders--in a sexual sense--for the duration of the contract. As a high-flying, determined career girl, Genevieve agrees to Sinclair's terms, thinking of the early promotion she'll get at the end of it....more

It is hard for me to believe that Metallica have really been around for over 30 years now. The new If You Like Metallica... from Backbeat Books is not so much a celebration of their time together, as it is something of a guidebook for fans. This new series from Hal Leonard Publishing has issued a number of titles, including books on The Beatles, Monty Python, and The Sopranos so far, and they have all made for excellent reading. The basic idea is to give those of us who “like” the group or show or whatever, some pointers as to other items that we might enjoy as well....more

Puerto Vallarta is a tropical destination with pristine, sandy beaches and funky little bars replete with thatched roofs where the tequila flows freely and your cares and woes melt away. A virtual paradise on the Mexican coast, surrounded by, yet untouched by the political and criminal chaos that is the rest of Mexico with its drug wars and rampant corruption. A place where dressing for dinner means putting on a shirt or wrapping a sarong over your bikini....more

Yoshiyuko Tomino is one of Japan's most popular science fiction anime directors, best known recently for the immensely popular Gundam TV series. He is also an excellent writer, and this compilation of three volumes of novelization based on the animation. I admit that I have only seen a few episodes of the original series of Gundam, although my husband has seen many of them. The series features giant robot suits operated from the inside by humans, and in the series they and the battles are, of course, the main focus....more

Do you have a difficult time teaching your kids good table manners?  If you do, Karin Lafranc’s A Quest for Good Manners is for you.  This is a great children’s picture book about how to teach kids good manners. Many kids have a difficult time learning how to eat politely and act with kindness and compassion. They slurp and throw their food. Other times, they don’t practice good table manners such as saying please and thank you to Mom and Dad.  And they don’t treat others with kindness unless taught....more

Motherless Brooklyn, Jonathan Lethem's 1999 winner of the National Book Critics Circle award for fiction, remains a hell of a read over a decade after its original publication. Unlike award winners that lose steam with every passing year, Lethem's graft of literary fiction on genre fiction in infused with the kind of creative vitality that makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts even when those parts stand that cliché testing of time quite well on their own. This is not a case of a genre writer with literary pretensions, not that there's anything wrong with that. Think instead of those writers who have take genre fiction and pushed it into something else entirely. Think what a Philip K. Dick did with science fiction, think Cormac McCarthy and the western....more

Email is a gradual offshoot of the telecommunication revolution brought about by successive innovations such as telegraphy and the invention of telephone. Telegraphy and telex are some of the pre-cursors to full-fledged text messages over email. Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 does an exhaustive coverage of the Microsoft exchange technologies and provides tips and tricks at all stages of the deployment and usage of the Microsoft Exchange Server and hence a useful reference....more

Anyone who follows popular culture or media is aware that the Apocalypse is coming this year. After all, didn't the Mayans predict it? Thus, you shouldn't be surprised by the publication of books talking about potential doomsday events. But set aside the pseudoscience, pseudohistory, and metaphysical psychobabble when it comes to John Casti's X-Events: The Collapse of Everything....more

Matt Rigney's In Pursuit Of Giants brought something out of me that I wasn't quite expecting; a love for fishing. The reason that was unexpected was due to the fact that while I was around fishing all of my childhood I never learned to enjoy it. Actually, that's not true, because the act of  fishing itself is quite relaxing and is a wonderful way to spend the day with your father....more

The second of Horace McCoy’s noir classics was republished in April by Open Road Media in a nicely formatted eBook with perhaps the most extensive biography of McCoy available. Published in 1948 at the start of what scholars consider the beginning of the Noir/Paperback era in crime fiction (and the end of the hardboiled era of authors like Dashiell Hammett, Chandler and the pulp magazines and their authors), Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (Midnight Classics) leans towards the hardboiled genre, that had just past, but enters the noir era. It is full of lively dialogue and tough guys and femme fatales who are also “tough gals”, and though it comes nowhere close to Raymond Chandler's snappy, cynical wit, it stacks up nicely with most of the hardboiled writing of the era....more