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Your place for book reviews and book news.

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Read the books and watch the show! GAME OF THRONES! Earn a bounty for new free trial sign-ups to HBO on Amazon Channels.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B06XNZHGH1?ref_=assoc_tag_ph_1500590597427&_encoding=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&linkCode=pf4&tag=ookarty-20&linkId=%7B%7Blink_id%7D%7D

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books!

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The Dark by Jay Hal I read this to my kids the other day and it was a hit. Jay Hal wrote a fun and wonderful little rhyming tale for the kids.

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Shop Amazon - Used Textbooks - Save up to 90% Ah, used books. They smell like childhood, and they’re good for the environment. What could be better? Of course, we salute devoted library-goers. But when you know a book will be a keeper, or at least one conducive to a whole lot of margin-writing, we suggest buying the half-priced, beat-up version. Of course, there are exceptions: Used versions of Stephen King’s sequel to “The Shining,” or the final installment of Margaret Atwood’s “MaddAddam” trilogy won’t exactly be floating around in abundance right now. But as far as we’re concerned, a previously owned book should be opted for whenever possible. Here’s why: 1. They’re affordable. $29.99 is a steep price to pay. That’s three matinees! Six Starbucks drinks! You get the gist. If you can afford to drop that kind of cash every time a new release catches your eye, be our guest. But your financial situation should never deter you from reading, which is precisely why you should buy used versions instead. 2. Browsing your favorite bookstore is the perfect Sunday afternoon pastime. Scanning shelves can help you discover books and authors you didn’t even know existed. 3. Plus, there’s always a chance you could meet the love of your life in a bookstore. ...as you both reach for the latest Neil Gaiman title. 4. Or at least seek out recommendations from the totally cute incredibly knowledgeable bookstore employees. It is their job, after all. 5. Used bookstores need your help and support. They aren’t just for selling books; they organize readings, literacy programs, and community events. 6. E-readers are great and all, but some books just have to be read the old fashioned way. “Middlemarch” may weigh as much as a small pet, but reading it on a screen is like watching “Avatar” on an iPod. 7. The 7th edition isn’t really that different from the 8th edition. Your professor is being a little nitpicky when insisting that you have to buy the latest textbooks. Especially when it comes to, say, Shakespearean studies or the history of Romanticism. 8. They have that old book smell. Paper, ink and glue, when exposed to light, heat and moisture: Nothing compares. 9. You never know who owned them before you. Which is kind of exciting, right? 10. The margin notes can be entertaining. Sure, Kindle has a lending library, but physical used books often have margin notes, little insights into the mind of their previous owners. Some may offer fresh perspectives on the themes; Others are intimate glances at another person’s reading experiences. There’s something whimsical about margin notes - they’re a way to literally leave your mark. 11. You won’t feel AS awful for bending the spine... Because you obviously bought it that way. 12. Or losing the dust jacket, or staining it with your morning coffee. Weathered books are great for beach reading, subway reading, and all sorts of other high-intensity situations that you wouldn’t dare subject a new, pristine book to. 13. You can pass it along to someone else. Acquiring and passing along a book gives the object a life of its own, and creates a more tangible community of readers. We can’t think of any better reason than that.

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This is a great deal if you dig audio books! I've been using Audible for years and not only is it great but customer service there is wonderful too.

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Kindle VS Paper

This seems like a pretty good deal of you're a Kindle user. I've been using mine for years and I love it. That said, I also buy tons of paperbacks and hardcovers.

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Online shopping from a great selection at Books Store.

Here are the top 100 books on Amazon right now! It's not too late to find a summer read! TOP 100 BEST SELLERS RIGHT NOW

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The Late Show - Kindle edition by Michael Connelly. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading The Late Show.

BOOK REVIEW: 3.5 stars for this new Michael Connelly novel which introduces another character in his L.A. universe, LAPD Detective Renee Ballard. Clocking in at 405 pages the pace is brisk and filled with the details of police procedure typical of Connelly's popular 'Bosch' series. Renee's from Hawaii, single, and lives out of a van and sleeps in a tent on the beach with her rescue dog Lola- she's essentially homeless by choice. She works what's known as the 'late show', the night shift at the LAPD where she was exiled after a failed sexual harrassment complaint against her supervisor. Her greatest frustration is not being able to follow through on cases and having to hand them off in the morning to the day shift detectives. In this novel Renee decides to swim up-stream and pursue two cases; a brutal assault of a transgender prostitute and a multiple homicide nightclub shooting on her own. Overall I found this book engaging but was not all that enchanted with Det. Ballard. She is a loose cannon and she shares Harry Bosch's iconoclastic anti-authority style. Bucking authority for a junior detective seems like a poor approach if she's interested in career longevity; Bosch's been around for decades and "earned" the right to challenge bureaucracy but Ballard has not. Unlike Bosch young Renee is tech saavy and we get a few too many details about what apps she's using on her i-Phone and how she does internet data searches. Her lifestyle is kind of weird, the sleeping on the beach thing to begin with and she's apparently an insomniac who almost never sleeps. Why she rescued Lola the dog is a mystery as she's always dumping her off with the 'critter-sitter' and spends little time with her pet- she should consider getting a goldfish. The remaining cast of characters are not well fleshed out and fairly one-dimensional; perhaps Connelly felt he needed to spend the time in establishing Ballard's identity. The plot is fairly tight and things wrap up reasonably at the conclusion but the motive for the nightclub shooter was unclear to me (maybe I missed it). In summary, this new series from Mr. Connelly has potential and I would read another to see how things develop. I hope Det. Ballard rents an apartment, finds a mentor to help her dial back her attitude a bit, spends more time with her dog, and we get some more depth to the supporting cast.

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Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone - Kindle edition by J.K. Rowling, Mary GrandPré. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.

By MICHAEL WINERIP HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCERER'S STONE By J. K. Rowling. Illustrated by Mary GrandPre. 309 pp. New York: Arthur A. Levine Books/ Scholastic Press. $16.95. (Ages 8 to 12) So many of the beloved heroes and heroines of children's literature -- from Cinderella and Snow White to Oliver Twist and the Little Princess to Matilda, Maniac Magee and the great Gilly Hopkins -- begin their lives being raised by monstrously wicked, clueless adults, too stupid to see what we the readers know practically from page 1: This is a terrific person we'd love to have for a best friend. And so it is with Harry Potter, the star of ''Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone,'' by J. K. Rowling, a wonderful first novel from England that won major literary awards and has been at the top of the adult best-seller lists there, and is having the same kind of success here too. Poor Harry Potter is orphaned as a baby and is sent to live with his odious aunt and uncle, Petunia and Vernon Dursley, and their fat son, Dudley. While Fat Dudley Dursley has two bedrooms (one just for his surplus toys, like the television set he put his foot through when his favorite show was canceled), Harry is forced to sleep in a crawl space under the stairs, has never had a birthday party in his 11 years and must wear his cousin's way baggy hand-me-down clothes. But Harry is destined for greatness, as we know from the lightning-shaped scar on his forehead, and one day he mysteriously receives a notice in the mail announcing that he has been chosen to attend Hogwarts, the nation's elite school for training wizards and witches, the Harvard of sorcery. Before he is done, Harry Potter will meet a dragon, make friends with a melancholy centaur and do battle with a three-headed dog; he will learn how to fly a broom and how to use a cloak that makes him invisible. Though all this hocus-pocus is delightful, the magic in the book is not the real magic of the book. Much like Roald Dahl, J. K. Rowling has a gift for keeping the emotions, fears and triumphs of her characters on a human scale, even while the supernatural is popping out all over. We feel Harry's fear when for the first time he is traveling to a faraway place, an 11-year-old boy arriving alone at the King's Cross train station with a trunk bigger than he is, and no idea how to find Platform 9. This is a world where some people know from birth that they are wizards, and are raised by their sorcerer parents to attend fair old Hogwarts, while others, like Harry -- raised in human or what Rowling calls ''Muggle'' families -- don't find out that they have special powers until they receive their acceptance letters. As Harry worries that first day about whether he can compete with the privileged children of Hogwarts alums, I found myself thinking back 30 years to my first days at Harvard, wondering how, coming from a blue-collar shipyard town and a public high school, I could ever compete with preppies from Exeter and Andover. ''I bet I'm the worst in the class,'' says Harry. ''You won't be,'' says a friend. ''There's loads of people who come from Muggle families and they learn quick enough.'' The book is full of wonderful, sly humor. Exam period at Hogwarts means not just essay tests, but practical exams too. ''Professor Flitwick called them one by one into his class to see if they could make a pineapple tap-dance across a desk. Professor McGonagall watched them turn a mouse into a snuffbox -- points were given for how pretty the snuffbox was, but taken away if it had whiskers.'' Throughout most of the book, the characters are impressively three-dimensional (occasionally four-dimensional!) and move along seamlessly through the narrative. However, a few times in the last four chapters, the storytelling begins to sputter, and there are twists I found irritating and contrived. To serve the plot, characters begin behaving out of character. Most noticeably, Hagrid, the gentle giant of a groundskeeper who has selflessly protected Harry over and over, suddenly turns so selfish he is willing to let Harry be punished for something that is Hagrid's fault. That's not the Hagrid I'd come to know. These are minor criticisms. On the whole, ''Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone'' is as funny, moving and impressive as the story behind its writing. J. K. Rowling, a teacher by training, was a 30-year-old single mother living on welfare in a cold one-bedroom flat in Edinburgh when she began writing it in longhand during her baby daughter's nap times. But like Harry Potter, she had wizardry inside, and has soared beyond her modest Muggle surroundings to achieve something quite special. Michael Winerip is a senior staff writer for The New York Times Magazine.