eBooks For My Kindle

Spent the better part of my evening browsing through Amazon’s Kindle Section to find books, I was able to transfer some ebooks I bought before by emailing the PDF to Amazon and getting a link to download a Kindle-friendly version of the ebook which you can transfer using the USB cable. You can also get it wirelessly but you have to pay $.99 per document that they send thru Whispernet. But since most of the ebooks I have already read, I want to look for new stuff for my Kindle especially with the upcoming trip to Shanghai.

So here are 13 books which I plan on buying, 4 of them I have the actual book, of the 4: 2 are unread and 2 I have ready a few years ago. I also have read 1 book online on Nifty but want a copy on hand.

Almost Like Being in Love

I have read this a few years back and is one of those books that I don’t mind reading again. So I’m thinking I should buy it in case I want to reread the book while on the go.

Product Description – A high school jock and nerd fall in love senior year, only to part after an amazing summer of discovery to attend their respective colleges. They keep in touch at first, but then slowly drift apart.Flash forward twenty years.Travis and Craig both have great lives, careers, and loves. But something is missing …. Travis is the first to figure it out. He’s still in love with Craig, and come what may, he’s going after the boy who captured his heart, even if it means forsaking his job, making a fool of himself, and entering the great unknown. Told in narrative, letters, checklists, and more, this is the must-read novel for anyone who’s wondered what ever happened to that first great love.

Born Round

I’ve always liked food…and I’ve always been in search of a great foodie read…and since it was selected as Amazon Best of the Month for August 2009 I’m sure it would be a good read.

Product Description – The New York Times restaurant critic-s heartbreaking and hilarious account of how he learned to love food just enough after decades of wrestling with his weightFrank Bruni was born round. Round as in stout, chubby, and hungry, always and endlessly hungry. He grew up in a big, loud Italian family in White Plains, New York, where meals were epic, outsize affairs. At those meals, he demonstrated one of his foremost qualifications for his future career: an epic, outsize appetite for food. But his relationship with eating was tricky, and his difficulties with managing it began early. When he was named the restaurant critic for the New York Times in 2004, he knew enough to be nervous. He would be performing one of the most closely watched tasks in the epicurean universe; a bumpy ride was inevitable, especially for someone whose writing beforehand had focused on politics, presidential campaigns, and the Pope. But as he tackled his new role as one of the most loved and hated tastemakers in the New York restaurant world, he also had to make sense of a decades-long love-hate affair with food, which had been his enemy as well as his friend. Now he-d have to face down this enemy at meal after indulgent meal. His Italian grandmother had often said, -Born round, you don-t die square.- Would he fall back into his worst old habits? Or had he established a truce with the food on his plate? In tracing the highly unusual path Bruni traveled to become a restaurant critic, Born Round tells the captivating story of an unpredictable journalistic odyssey and provides an unflinching account of one person-s tumultuous, often painful lifelong struggle with his weight. How does a committed eater embrace food without being undone by it? Born Round will speak to every hungry hedonist who has ever had to rein in an appetite to avoid letting out a waistband, and it will delight anyone interested in matters of family, matters of the heart, and the big role food plays in both.

Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster

I’ve always been meaning to pick this book up when I see it the bookstore but haven’t been successful in getting past the aisle before returning it to it’s place and promising to get it next time.

Product Description – “Dana Thomas, style and cultural reporter for Newsweek, brings a hard-hitting behind-the-scenes look at the world of “New Luxury” and how the massification of luxury goods has ensured that luxury isn’t luxurious any longer There was a time when luxury was available to only the rarefied and aristocratic world of old money and royalty. Luxury wasn’t simply a product, it was a lifestyle, one that denoted a history of tradition, superior quality, and a pampered buying experience. Today’s luxury marketplace would be virtually unrecognizable to the old-world elite. Gone are the family-owned businesses dedicated to integrity and quality; the industry is now run by massive corporations focused only on growth, visibility, brand awareness, advertising, and, above all, profits. Handmade goods are practically extinct, and almost all manufacturing has been outsourced to large factories in places such as China, where your expensive brand-name handbag is being assembled right next to one from a mass-market label that will cost substantially less. Dana Thomas, a journalist who has covered style and the luxury business for The Washington Post, Newsweek,and The New York Times Magazine from Paris for the past fifteen years, digs down into the dark side of the luxury industry to uncover all the secrets that Prada, Gucci, and Burberry don’t want us to know. Traveling from the laboratories in Grasse, where Christian Dior and Prada perfumes are manufactured, to the crowded factories in China, where workers glue together “Made in Italy” bags by the thousands, Thomas explores the whole of today’s high-end shopping experience to answer some pressing questions: What is the new definition of luxury when advertising for this upscale lifestyle is targeted mainly to the middle-class masses? What are we paying for when quality has given way to quantity, and luxury is no longer just for the upper-class elite? Thomas has travelled all over the world to interview corporate heads and factory workers, the old-money, old-luxury clients and the new luxury-obsessed middle-class consumer, and she paints a surprising picture of today’s New Luxury. With Deluxe, she delivers a fast-paced, uncompromising look at the real world behind the glossy magazines and red carpet couture and asks: How did luxury lose its luster?”

Dumb Jock

I originally read this one on Nifty but couldn’t find it when I came back to search for it recently. I wasn’t surprised to find it already published which would explain why the free copy is no longer available online.

Product Description – Dumb Jock is a touching, coming-of-age story about a reserved, self-conscious, teenage boy growing up in a small northern-Michigan town. Jeff Irwin is short for his age, timid and studious, never yet having dared to take any chances for fear of ultimate rejection or failure. He is a bit of a social outcast and lives quietly in the shadows of the popular kids at his school.

Afforded the opportunity to assist the town’s high school football hero Brett Willson, Jeff embarks upon the challenge of educating the world’s dumbest jock. The ensuing relationship that develops between the two young men proves far more challenging, however, than any tutoring session. Their budding friendship helps bring Jeff out of his shell and reveals a much deeper side of the dumb jock.

Tragedies befall the ill-suited young couple, and the losses they endure are unthinkable. In the end, however, they must decide whether to be true to their identities or return to the previously held conformity of their comfortable stereotypes.

Empress

A historical fiction loosely based on the life of Empress Wu, the only female to have become the absolute ruler of China during the Tang Dynasty. I have always loved this book and often go back to it when I want something nice to read.

Product Description – Such is the voice of Shan Sa’s unforgettable heroine in her latest literary masterpiece, Empress. Empress Wu, one of China’s most controversial figures, was its first and only female emperor, who emerged in the seventh century during the great Tang Dynasty and ushered in a golden age. Throughout history, her name has been defamed and her story distorted by those taking vengeance on a woman who dared to become emperor. But now, for the first time in thirteen centuries, Empress Wu (or Heavenlight, as we come to know her) flings open the gates of the Forbidden City and tells her own astonishing tale — revealing a fascinating, complex figure who in many ways remains modern to this day. Writing with epic assurance, poetry, and vivid historic detail, Shan Sa plumbs the psychological and philosophical depths of what it means to be a striving mortal in a tumultuous, power-hungry world. Empress is a great literary feat and a revelation for the ages.

Fashion Babylon

After having read Air Babylon I have followed all of Imogen Edward-Jones’ books but when Sophie (our dog) munched down on my copy of Fashion Babylon, I have never gotten around to reading my new copy (which I picked up the following day after discovering our dog making a chew toy out of it.) It’s such a pity that Air Babylon and Hotel Babylon doesn’t have a Kindle version or else I would have gotten a copies of it too.

Product Description - What is fashion? What is fashionable? Who decides what’s in and what’s out? Why is it green one year and blue the next? Why is one little black dress worth five thousand dollars and another worth fifty? Is the catwalk really that catty? What makes a supermodel so super?

And a designer too hot to touch? Who is making money? Who owns whom? Who hates whom? And who’s in each other’s pockets? The answers are all to be found in Fashion Babylon.

Taking the reader through six months in a designer’s life, it explains how a collection is put together — from the objects of inspiration to the catwalk, into the shops and, hopefully, onto the cover of a magazine. It examines who goes to the shows and where they sit…and whose backside they have to kiss to get there. Narrated from the point of view of an anonymous A-list British fashion designer looking to break out across the pond and structured around three of the annual “must” industry events in London, Paris and New York, this irresistible work of reportage goes inside the well-cut seams of the fashion world, where women are paid tens of thousands of dollars for simply getting dressed and where a wrong skirt length can cost you your career.

Fashion Babylon decodes the markups and the comedowns, the fabulous extremes and the shoddy shortcuts behind one of the most lucrative and secretive businesses in the world. Witty, naughty and packed with celebrity gossip, this book will forever change the way you peruse the racks at Bergdorf’s or flip through the pages of Vogue.

Fundamentals of Philosophy

This is quite an expensive ebook at $20+ but I sure hope it’s worth it. I still remember one of my professors in my majors class in Philosophy in college telling us that as “Philosophy majors we must baffle the minds of the lesser mortals” and after working for 6 years away from Philosophy there are days when you miss all the babble and intellectual masturbation.

Product Description – Fundamentals of Philosophy is a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the major topics in philosophy and is designed to be used as a companion to any undergraduate philosophy course.

Each chapter provides an authoritative overview of topics commonly taught at the undergraduate level, focusing on the major issues that typically arise when studying the subject. Discussions are up to date and written in an engaging manner so as to provide students with the core building-blocks of their degree course.

Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen

If you have read one of my last entries on my old blog, you would know that the movie based from this book was the tipping point for closing it down and moving to a new blog. And since movies have a tendency to water down the books it was actually based on I want to see (read) what this book is all about.

Product Description – With the humor of Bridget Jones and the vitality of Augusten Burroughs, Julie Powell recounts how she conquered every recipe in Julia Child+s Mastering the Art of French Cooking and saved her soul. Julie Powell is 30-years-old, living in a rundown apartment in Queens and working at a soul-sucking secretarial job that+s going nowhere. She needs something to break the monotony of her life, and she invents a deranged assignment. She will take her mother+s dog-eared copy of Julia Child’s 1961 classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and she will cook all 524 recipes. In the span of one year. At first she thinks it will be easy. But as she moves from the simple Potage Parmentier (potato soup) into the more complicated realm of aspics and crpes, she realizes there’s more to Mastering the Art of French Cooking than meets the eye. With Julia’s stern warble always in her ear, Julie haunts the local butcher, buying kidneys and sweetbreads. She sends her husband on late-night runs for yet more butter and rarely serves dinner before midnight. She discovers how to mold the perfect Orange Bavarian, the trick to extracting marrow from bone, and the intense pleasure of eating liver.And somewhere along the line she realizes she has turned her kitchen into a miracle of creation and cuisine. She has eclipsed her life’s ordinariness through spectacular humor, hysteria, and perseverance.

Kitchen Confidential

My brother had asked me to look for a copy of this book years ago but never actually found one here in Manila. I saw it in Singapore but forgot to pick it up and didn’t have enough change with me when I saw it again at the airport flying home.

Product Description – Kitchen Confidential reveals what Bourdain calls “twenty-five years of sex, drugs, bad behavior and haute cuisine.” Last summer, The New Yorker published Chef Bourdain’s shocking, “Don’t Eat Before Reading This.” Bourdain spared no one’s appetite when he told all about what happens behind the kitchen door. Bourdain uses the same “take-no-prisoners” attitude in his deliciously funny and shockingly delectable book, sure to delight gourmands and philistines alike. From Bourdain’s first oyster in the Gironde, to his lowly position as dishwasher in a honky tonk fish restaurant in Provincetown (where he witnesses for the first time the real delights of being a chef); from the kitchen of the Rainbow Room atop Rockefeller Center, to drug dealers in the east village, from Tokyo to Paris and back to New York again, Bourdain’s tales of the kitchen are as passionate as they are unpredictable. Kitchen Confidential will make your mouth water while your belly aches with laughter. You’ll beg the chef for more, please. Anthony Bourdain is the author of Bone in the Throat. This is his first work of non-fiction. He is the executive chef at Brasserie Les Halles in New York City. ‘Benedict Arnold. Alger Hiss. Anthony Bourdain.’-London Evening Standard ‘With equal parts wit and wickedness, Bourdain [does] the unthinkable by revealing trade secrets that chefs and restauratrs cringe to read.’ -Restaurant Business magazine

Men are Pigs, But We Love Bacon

I have been searching for a copy of this book for years, and since it has been out of print for a while I have given up all hope in getting my hands on a copy. So I was ecstatic when I found a Kindle version of the book!

Product Description - If You’re Looking For Warmth And Compassion About Your Sexual Worries, You Picked The Wrong Book… Yes, you’ll get all your burning and why-is-it-burning questions answered, but the advice is coming from a son-of-a-bitch with a breathtaking gift for the gratuitous insult.

In these pages, you’ll find medical answers to everything from how you can ejaculate farther to how you can take–ahem–more cargo on your loading dock. Alvear answers questions with the compassion of a caffeine addict out of coffee, lining up a panel of doctors and psychologists against the wall and beating the truth out of them. The result is a marriage of impeccably accurate information, politically incorrect opinion and withering sarcasm.

Because the questions come from gay men all over the country, they’re like a peephole into the anxieties, concerns and worries that gay men have about sex.

Object of Desire

I have been following William J. Mann ever since reading Where The Boys Are. Which is actually one of the first Gay fictions I have read, I actually have the hardbound copy of this book but haven’t even started reading it.

Product Description - Danny Fortunato seemed to have it all. He was cute, funny, sexy, smart-the hottest go-go boy in West Hollywood. When he danced on stage, all eyes were upon him and all men desired him. But something always kept Danny from ever really believing he was the golden boy that others said he was…a secret that he’d carried with him ever since he was a teenager.

Twenty years later, living in Palm Springs, Danny is celebrating his 41st birthday-although -celebrating- might not be the right word for how he feels about his life today. To the outside world, he’s still golden: he still has his looks, and he still loves Frank, his boyfriend of nearly two decades. But something is missing in his life. Passion. Romance. Adventure. The same something that’s been missing ever since that day when he turned fourteen, when his sister Becky disappeared and his whole world flipped upside-down.

Now into Danny’s life walks a gorgeous young bartender named Kelly, who becomes for Danny an obsession, an object of desire and fascination. But Kelly’s indifference to this onetime golden boy only confirms what Danny secretly believes: that he-s -vanishing- into thin air-like his sister, so long ago.

As he reflects on his angst-ridden childhood-the shattering of his family, the sex and drugs of his youth as one of L.A.-s most coveted boy toys-Danny begins to recognize certain patterns. Somewhere along the way, he gave up on his dreams-not only of becoming an actor, but his very lust for life.

And yet-all that-s about to change, when a surprising, agonizing connection with Kelly sends Danny on a soul-searching quest to reclaim the things he has loved and lost.

Filled with unforgettable warmth, incorrigible humor, and irresistible charm, Object of Desire takes readers through three milestone eras in one man-s life-his youth in the 1970s, his days of abandon in the 1980s, and his more sober, reflective existence today-and reaffirms William J. Mann-s reputation as one of gay fiction-s major narrative powers.

Outliners: The Story of Success

I have Malcom Gladwell’s 2 books but I haven’t gotten around to picking up this one.

Product Description – In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of “outliers”–the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different? His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing. Along the way he explains the secrets of software billionaires, what it takes to be a great soccer player, why Asians are good at math, and what made the Beatles the greatest rock band.

The Pig That Wants To Be Eaten

I was browsing through Philosophy ebooks when I found this one whose title was very intriguing.

Product Description - Both entertaining and startling, The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten offers one hundred philosophical puzzles that stimulate thought on a host of moral, social, and personal dilemmas. Taking examples from sources as diverse as Plato and Steven Spielberg, author Julian Baggini presents abstract philosophical issues in concrete terms, suggesting possible solutions while encouraging readers to draw their own conclusions:

Lively, clever, and thought-provoking, The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten is a portable feast for the mind that is sure to satisfy any intellectual appetite. BACKCOVER: -Thinking again is what this taut, incisive, bullet-hard book is dedicated to promoting.-
-The Sunday Times (London)

-This book is like the Sudoku of moral philosophy: apply your mind to any of its -thought experiments- while stuck on the Tube, and quickly be transported out of rush-hour hell.-
-New Statesman