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...

This 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 be...

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...

Read any good books lately? Neither have I. In fact, since the start of the year, I can count the number of books I've finished on one hand -- and three of them I've read before. What's up with that? The hip, facile answer would be to blame New Media. These days the Web is full of people talking -- with a strange sort of pride -- about how things like Twitter and Hulu and Facebook and YouTube are pushing Old Media, like TV and movies and books, off to the side of the road. The thrust of this CNET piece , for example, is that the guy spends a lot more time these days Tweeting about things than actually experiencing them. You can see how far this has gone by pondering the headline: "How the Web changed my content consumption." Did I refer to "TV and movies and books" in that last paragraph? What I meant was "content." You don't read a book or watch a show anymore, you consume content. And you'd better be quick about it, or you'll end...

I've been watching The Nazis: A Warning from History , which is probably not the best way to dispel a dark mood in the dead of winter. Especially with the world as we know it now atilt, and the objects on it trembling slightly toward the edge. OK, maybe I exaggerate. I'm not one of those dummies who equates every small bump in the road in America with Hitler's Germany; I hate when people do that. But this two-disc BBC documentary (1997) does seem alarmingly current in its calm portrayal of something that happened 70 years ago. And it's not reassuring to see how normal, under normal circumstances, so many of the perpetrators were. In interviews, they are just old people with their memories and their reasons -- and chillingly devoid of convincing regret. One former businessman seems almost wistful as he recalls bleeding the Jews of the Lodz ghetto of everything they owned in exchange for ever smaller amounts of food. For him, it was just the time-honored law of supply and...

Now they tell me. Turns out the worst thing you can do when you have a cold is blow your nose . I've been blowing mine about every 90 seconds for the last two days, ever since this cold swept down like the wrath of a vengeful god. Also, my head aches, my joints creak and my throat feels like somebody slipped ground glass into my Cheerios. Under these circumstances, blowing my nose had become a bright spot in the day. But no, they say. Don't blow your nose. Use decongestants instead. And presumably, let mucus run all over your upper lip and shirt should the decongestants take awhile to reach full effectiveness. OK, now I'm grossing myself out. I hate the word mucus . But here's another helpful tip from the geniuses at the University of Virginia: If you must blow your nose, blow one nostril at a time. Hey, thanks for the heads up. Never would have thought of that on my own. Just blow the problem nostril, not the other one, right? Got it. I hate letting a cold run its cou...

Look, if A-Rod has the stones to admit using performance-enhancing drugs, I guess it's time for me to step up as well. There were times during the late '60s and early '70s when I used certain substances to enhance my performance on the dance floor. For that, A-Rod and I are on the same page: We are "very sorry and deeply regretful." That's a measure of how sincere we are: a guy blowing smoke would only be "very sorry" or "deeply regretful," but not both. Hell, as long as I'm at it, I'll admit using performance-enhancing substances on a number of other occasions. Most involved large parties or talking to attractive girls. Like A-Rod, "I felt like I needed something, a push, without over-investigating what I was taking, to get me to the next level." And so when friends would pass back a bottle of warm Bali Hai, I was only too happy to bogart the damned thing until someone else demanded a swig. What can I say? I was young,...

Whenever I visit my folks' place in Montana, I can never head back home without a sack lunch and a hundred pounds of books. Mom's always got a lot more food around than the two of them can eat -- some of it a few weeks past the sell-by date -- and a lot more books than her groaning shelves can safely hold. Putting away the lunch was the easy part. Now I'm wondering what to do with these dusty books. My own shelves are long since full, mostly paperbacks that I'd be embarrassed about should President Obama wander through. The stuff Mom sent home with me defies easy categorization: Best Tales of the Yukon , a collection of Robert Service poems; The Walls of Jericho, by Paul E. Wellman (Mom thought I'd like it because it's set in Kansas); The Waverley Novels , by Sir Walter Scott. And a whole raft of other ancient tomes by authors unknown to me. Whether I'll ever get around to reading them, I can't say. But it's been interesting to look them over. Most ...