Dave's Fiction Warehouse

The last time I mentioned Amazon's Kindle, it was in that dismissive, mocking tone I reserve for things I don't fully understand. Basically, I was incredulous that anybody would shell out several hundred bucks for a device that seemed much less convenient than the paperback book it purports to replace. Now, as is so often the case, I see that I was wrong. As this piece in Slate points out , the second generation Kindle "makes buying, storing, and organizing your favorite books and magazines effortless. You can take your entire library with you wherever you go and switch from reading the latest New Yorker to the latest best-seller without rolling out of bed. ... The Kindle is the future of publishing." OK, that shows how much I know. If you've got an extra $359 around to buy one, fine. But keep reading the Slate article: the thrust of it is not how great the Kindle is, but how bad it might eventually become for this pursuit we call reading. The problem is twofold...

So far it hasn't been a great year, but today dawned clear and warm with the smell of spring in the air and it all seemed to augur well for another trip around the sun. The exact number of this trip shall remain unspoken -- such is the foolish vanity of baby boomers when they start getting mail from AARP. Let's just say the proprietor of Dave's Fiction Warehouse is not all that anxious for the senior discount. Which is not to say I'm ready for a life without birthdays. True, as a reminder of my advancing age, they're nothing to celebrate. But as a reminder of how many people might miss me if I weren't around, they're not bad. Gift cards come in the mail, and phone calls come in from the kids, and my wife takes me out to lunch. I guess if you want to measure success in life, you just count up the number of people who feel obligated to remember your birthday. If it requires more than, say, one hand -- well, how bad can life be? Anyway, if growing older isn...

T his year I'm taking a break from fiction writing to concentrate on finishing up my motivational book, Seven Years to a Less Hideous You . It'll soon be dominating the entrances of Barnes & Noble stores everywhere, but I'm offering regular readers a "sneak peek" long before the rest of the rubes and suckers. It's my way of giving back to the community. I feel good about Seven Years . My basic premise is that, despite the glacial corrosion of time and the occasional bout with alcoholism and unemployment, nearly everyone can leverage my hard-won insights, delicious recipes and sex secrets to become, if not the person they always wanted to be, at least a better person than that creepy dude they're always running into at the library. I know; you're skeptical. Like me, you've probably got a copy of Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People in a box down in the basement. I didn't get anything out of that one either, probably b...

So for three days running, a top story on all the news sites was the chimpanzee who ran amok and tore off somebody's face, and was then shot for his trouble. It was eclipsed only by the ongoing story about the federal stimulus package and its myriad shortcomings. So you'd think that when a cartoonist attempted to play off both headlines, the result would be polite yuks at best, bored shrugs at worst. Then again, this is America, where Al Sharpton remains at large and the only thing we have more of than bad debt is sweet, sweet outrage. Sharpton was among the professionally aggrieved who looked at the cartoon Wednesday and perceived in it the specter of racism . The president of the National Association of Black Journalists, evidently unaware of the 24/7 coverage of the rogue chimp, saw a direct racial caricature of President Obama. A New York state senator saw a tacit endorsement of assassination and fond nod to the days of lynching. And those were the more moderate interpreta...

Jodi Sanderholm's murder is just another atrocity in a nation full of them. If you don't live in south-central Kansas, you've probably never heard of it. The big news here in Wichita today is that Justin Thurber has been sentenced to die for killing her in January 2007. As might be expected, the sentence has prompted a lot of hand-wringing from death penalty foes, who are always quick to point out the obvious : killing the perpetrator won't bring back the victim. OK, I think we all understand that, just as we understand that the possibility of a death sentence does not necessarily deter those predisposed to commit unspeakable acts. One look at the simian Thurber, and a cursory review of his short, useless life, and you realize that this is not a man given to reflection on cause and effect. Look at the evidence presented during the trial, and it's hard not to conclude that if ever a man deserved to die, it's him. Jodi Sanderholm deserved to live, too, but we ca...