(William Brown, The Undertaker, ISBN 9781617505119, Kindle eBook)

Do you believe “bargain eBook” means “poor quality”?  Think again.  One of my own readers offered a counter example: in one download session, she bought ten bargain eBooks and enjoyed seven of them.  Not even Derek Jeter has that kind of batting average.  (You can argue that the other three were badly written, but readers’ likes are very subjective—so maybe not.)  The digital revolution is a wonderful boon to readers (maybe not so much for authors), but good books like William Brown’s The Undertaker will make just as much for the author via quantity of sales as any high-priced eBook for an author published by one of the Big Six publishers (I just use this label to group some publishing conglomerates together, not in a pejorative sense).  It’s why some authors (for example, Barry Eisler of thriller fame) are foregoing those Big Six contracts and publishing eBooks on their own.

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Wouldn’t you know it?  I was gifted a copy of Jeffery Deaver’s Carte Blanche, his new 007 thriller.  Put a book in my hands and I start turning pages.  In this case, they were real pages, although I understand that the book is also doing well as an eBook.  I was curious, I’ll admit.  What could Mr. Deaver do with Bond that hasn’t been done before?

Pre-existing biases and genre prejudices shouldn’t count in the reviewer’s world even though, in my case, I’m also a writer with my own way of doing things (which continuously evolves, but that’s another story)—the title of Jane Friedman’s well known blog, There Are No Rules, is really a corollary to the writer’s commandment “Know what the rules are.”  Yet a writer’s style goes beyond rules and is as personal as his fingerprints.  I generally like Deaver’s, but, as I mentioned in a post a few weeks ago, I didn’t want to have anything to do with James Bond.

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Some news about three of my favorite duplicitous countries:  (1) The Pakistani spy agency has been implicated in the murder of journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad.  Yes, these are the same guys that arrested the people who helped us send OBL to hell where he belongs.  They’re also the same guys who knew where he was all the time.  (2)  It turns out the Afghan police (army?  it’s hard to tell in a Third World country) were incapable of putting down the attackers at that hotel in Kabul.  They needed the help of NATO attack helicopters.  (3) The Saudis have purchased some special tanks from German companies.  These tanks are equipped with special crowd-control features.  Is Angela Merkel and her government embarrassed?

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Last Sunday Pradnya Joshi wrote an alarming article titled “We Knew They Got Raises.  But This?”  It was in the Business section of the N.Y. Times.  I say “alarming” because, not only were American CEOs not particularly hurt by a recession that has hammered the U.S. middle class, they managed to eke out on average a measly 23% raise over their pay in 2009.  The median pay for top executives at 200 companies last year was reported in this article to be $10.8 million.

Why is this obscene?  Let’s assume that the hypothetical median executive really works his butt off 24/7, 365 days per year.  That’s 8760 hours.  So, $10.8 million translates to about $1200 per hour.  That’s about 165 times the federal minimum wage.  Of course, no CEO works 24/7 365 days per year, not even if his alias is Iron Man.  He enjoys his yacht, his summer home, his time on the golf course, a mistress or two perhaps—all of which take time from his job.  He puts his pants on the same as me—and, unlike me, takes them off for the mistresses while the trophy wife is in the country club (the membership is often paid as a company benefit).  Are you getting the idea?

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