Books are cheaper than heroin, but they DO add up....
Amy, Carrie, Chanin and Sarah buy (and read and review) their own stuff. They've been known to shop around from dealer to dealer looking for the best price. If you're interested in slipping them something to try out, just contact us.
You know how every time I review a Mary Russell book by Laurie R. King I tell you to start at the beginning?
So when I reviewed The God of the Hive here and Dreaming Spieshere, I was basically telling you "This is a great book that you can't read yet. Go do your homework and come back to this review." Which is not nice, really. I think that makes me a bit of a tease.
Today I can make it up to you.
In order to promote the release of Dreaming Spies (that happens on February 17, 2015), the lovely people at Random House are giving away an iPad mini preloaded with all of the Mary Russell books (and all of Laurie R. King's other books).
So it seems we've been blogging on our itty bitty book blog for about a year now. My how quickly the pages turn! It makes us feel like we should celebrate so this month each one of us is giving a book away. And I'm going to start! But before we get to the free book, how 'bout I review one? Mmkay? Okay.
I'm not going to lie or try to dress this up. I read this for the gossip. It's huge (745 pages) much like the network it tracks from an idea by an out-of-work father and son to the sprawling multi-national mega-corporation it is now. Even if you're not into sports, I bet you'd know what you can find on ESPN (Which they used to refer to as E.S.P. Network. Which I find amusing.). The book is easy to read despite its ability to kill an entire colony of ants in one fell swoop. It reads like a documentary; the name of the speaker is given and then large amounts of direct quotes. It's clear that the authors shaped and edited the content (as in didn't put a Mark Shapiro quote about the show PTI in the section discussing the initial funding for the network), but the entire book is 90% direct quotes from what must have been thousands of hours of interviews. A lot of time and work went into the making of this book, but fortunately it won't take you as long to read it.
What brought me to this book is my love of Dan Patrick. He is unaware of our relationship, but we're boyfriend/girlfriend. I listen or watch his show exclusively now, so it's pretty serious. His split from ESPN (where he was part of what I consider to be the greatestSportsCenter duo ever) was acrimonious to say the least, so when the book came out I wanted to read up on all the gossip I could. There is plenty of information here, but the breadth of the subject is so wide that it doesn't focus nearly enough on my boyfriend. Of course, I could be biased. Overall, the book casts a positive tone; choosing to regard ESPN as a competitive entity in the sports information world. Which is certainly is. There are people who feel that ESPN is too powerful and has too much sway in certain sports and media circles, but the book doesn't really get into that in great detail. Regardless of that, if you're looking for information about this gigantic, 24-hour, sports-fueled machine called ESPN, then look no further.
Here are some things I learned:
1. Dick Vitale, Bob Ley, and Chris Berman all joined ESPN within the first year (1979 ish) and all are still with the company.
2. The infamous promos for SportsCenter, all ending with the tag-line "This is SportsCenter", developed from one of many skirmishes between Keith Olbermann and the management.
3. We have ESPN to thank for the NFL Draft being as annoying as it is. It was their idea to televise it starting in 1980.
4. Denise Austin used to have air-time on ESPN. They made her acquire her own sponsor, she produced her own exercise show, and now she's an aerobics legend.
5. If it weren't for the NCAA wanting a place for its basketball tournament and Getty family money being at the discretion of a guy who liked sports and off-beat ideas, then we'd still be getting sports information from our local news.
6. For my brother: In 1979, RCA was making "concept sales" of satellite transmissions. Everyone knew about cable and its physical locations, but very few people understood the implications of satellite broadcasting. Basically that something that got picked up on one spot could be sent world wide. They convinced the Rasmussen's of the fledgling ESP Network to buy one of their two transponders for $34, 167 a month.
7. While we all know how incredibly stupid and obnoxious The Decision was (in terms of both television programming and humanity in general), LeBron James and his decision about his talents were watched in about 10 million homes.
8. It's a long, complicated, wild book, but worth the read.
FREE BOOK!!!!!!!
Speaking of complicated and wild.....I'm giving away Wild Rideby Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayer to one lucky commenter. I reviewed one of their other books, Agnes and the Hitman, earlier. You can find the review here. I picked this book to give away because: it's a lot of fun to read; it's got romance, humor, demons, ice cream AND amusement parks; it's been something of a wild ride for us here lately. The only thing you need to do to enter is leave a comment telling us your favorite book and your email address. Leave a comment by Thursday, Feb. 9th, at midnight. Yay! Free book!
So we've all discussed how we kind of hoard books in all forms. We read compulsively. We like to talk to people about reading, particularly about books we have in common. Or books we should have in common. Talking about books feeds our reading addiction. We talk about books to you and then you tell us about books you've read and then we have MORE books we want to read! It's a wonderful, vicious cycle.
Just to make sure this wonderful, vicious cycle continues, we're going to start giving books away. (And if this makes us seem even more awesome than we already were, so be it. We can handle it.) We have books we want to give you. Yes, yes, we're amazingly generous, it's true. I mean, who doesn't want free books?! OK, fine. We might get a little something out of it......I guess it helps feed our addiction if you have books to talk about with us. But really, we came up with the idea because we're awesome and we think you're awesome too.
Here's the deal
Once a month, one of us will write a review and then we'll run a give-away for that book or a related book. For example, one month we might review a cookbook and give away the cookbook author's biography. Or we might give away the actual cookbook. We're crazy like that. These are all books purchased by one of us (Amy, Carrie, or Sarah). And in order to garner the free book you'll need to follow the guidelines in the review of the giveaway. It's that simple. Our first give-away starts now incidentally. Just look below for Sarah's review of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest and enter! We're that awesome. And so are you. But we have to warn you, this reading thing is addictive.
The last one in the trilogy, and it was good enough that I found myself brainstorming about who I would like to have ghost write more books for this series. It's not short and it's not short on characters, but it's still good. Good enough to give away as a matter of fact! More on that later....
Lisbeth Salander was left in a very precarious situation at the end of The Girl Who Played with Fire. Seriously injured and in a huge legal mess, she wakes up in a hospital. Though she's under arrest and guarded, she is unable to flee due to the severity of the injuries she sustained. Even worse, the reason she's injured and in a legal mess - her father - is a few doors down recovering and plotting his revenge on her. It's not a good place to be. But things have been set in motion that are above and way beyond just Lisbeth and our intrepid journalist Michael Blomkvist.
Blomkvist is still digging up as much information as he can about Lisbeth's life and the circumstances surrounding the death of two of his friends. He's being followed, as well as the rest of the staff at the Millenium, and his sister (acting as Lisbeth's attorney) is also being followed and is mugged. His apartment has been broken into, his cell phone is tapped, and people are doing their best to undermine his investigation which happens to include an attempt on his life. His life is also not a great place to be at the time.
However, through a long and ever-expanding list of characters, Blomkvist and Lisbeth manage to bring the truth to light. I'm being intentionally vague because I don't want to ruin any of the suspense for anyone who hasn't read the book yet. I really liked this whole series and that's due in part to the fact that I couldn't easily predict what was going to happen next. I don't want to ruin that for anyone else. My only complaint about the final installment of this series is that I felt like I needed to get a whiteboard and start charting the characters so I could keep track of everyone. There are A LOT of people running around in the second and third books. A LOT. And in my expert opinion (I'm an expert at having opinions, not necessarily an expert about which I'm opining.), I'm not sure we needed all of the characters. But overall, I was sad to finish this book. I want there to be more, and not just because I want Daniel Craig to have more work. Though that's certainly not a bad thing....
I'm giving this book away! I loved all three in this series. The first one is currently in theaters if you somehow missed all the blathering on I've done about Daniel Craig. And the third one can be in your hands if you get randomly selected. How do you make this possible? It's as simple as a few clicks of the mouse.
1. Follow our blog. You'll see the word "Followers" on the upper right of the blog, and if you haven't followed yet that's where you can get started. Once you have become an official follower, or if you already were a follower, leave a comment on this post saying you follow The Family Addiction. Please leave your email address in the comment as well so we can contact you if you win. To reduce the likelihood of spam or scams, use this format: youremailaddress(at)youremailservice(dot)com. As an example, luvrbooks(at)gmail(dot)com.
2. Doing that is one entry. For another entry, Like our facebook page. You can find it here. Then leave a comment that you're an official Liker along with your email address.
3. That's two entries if you did all that by Wednesday, January 4, midnight CST! We'll randomly select from the entries that are there by Wednesday, January 4, midnight CST and notify a lucky Follower/Liker/Commenter by email.
Any questions? Leave a comment or email us and we'll get right back to you. Promise. We're addicts but we take our addiction seriously. And just to prove it, here's some more Daniel Craig.
How fabulous is that?
