Book Reviews

I started this thread on mobileread, hoping to get others to join in recommending some good free ebooks from indie authors. So far there’ve been a few additions.

Recommended: Free Ebooks by Indie Authors

Free ebooks by indie authors are getting kind of a bad reputation lately, and while it’s true that you have to dig through a lot of earth to find a little gold, this is true for “traditionally published” books too! I don’t want this thread to be confused with ‘Author Self-Promotions’ – there’s a place for that here – http://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=226 – but I do want to […]

This is without a doubt the most unique book reviewed here. Michael Jacobson is at the forefront of asemic writing. What’s asemic writing? A work that is a collection of symbols totally invented by the author. We know the symbol “F” to represent the “ef” sound, but really F is just a representationof that sound. Asemic writing takes this premise and invents a totally new language – open entirely to reader interpretation. This means both that no two asemic books are the same and each experience reading it is different.

It is a style of writing with a long history[…]

Leviathan’s Master: The Wreck of the World’s Largest Sailing Ship
David M. Quinn
Review by Carol Buchanan

The leviathan of this short novel is the Thomas W. Lawson, a 7-masted schooner and the largest sailing ship ever built, which went down in a hurricane off Britain’s Scilly Isles on December 13, 1907. Her captain, or master, George W. Dow, and one other crewman survived the wreck. In Leviathan’s Master, David Quinn tells the story in first person from Dow’s perspective as he recuperates from his injuries.

Dow’s voice is clear and engaging, and Dow is a likable character, but […]

Below, a review of Samuel Babbitt’s Limited Engagement, a self-published history of the short but glorious life of Kirkland College, of which Babbitt was the founding and only president. Limited Engagement shows how self-publishing makes it possible to create great books that have a fundamentally limited audience. This review was originally posted on my site Wetmachine, part of a my very occasional series of reviews of self-published books.

One night in the late spring of 1978, two young women broke into the registrar’s office at Hamilton College. Their mission was simple: to remove their academic records, along […]

Review by Joel Friedlander, TheBookDesigner.com

Our next book for review is a book of short stories, Stories from the Asphalt by John Sparger 5.5″ x 8.5″ 208 pages, softbound, ISBN 978-0979865008, Publisher: Unabashed Media, 2008.

In his email, John informed me that the book was printed by Lightning Source. The cover artwork is by Baron von Lind, the cover design by Erich Russek, and the interior artwork by Aaron Allen. John designed and produced the interior using Adobe InDesign.

Here’s what he has to say about Stories from the Asphalt:

Through an interconnected collage of short stories, flash fiction,

The structure of this novel might make a writer sit up and say, “Why didn’t I think of this?”  The book follows Tuesday Morning (her real name) throughout her life in a series of diary entries and real life events.  The book will switch from 2009 to 1990 to 1998 and back again.  It’s a great way to illustrate the timelessness of life – how old events are with us, almost as if they’re always happening in real time.  Tuesday decides to reimagine her diary as a way of reimagining her life – as if she can rewrite her real […]