Whenever I get tired of checking the bestseller lists on my Kindle book reader for new novels to read -- the top of the list has been owned by Hunger Games and Lisbeth Salander ever since I got the thing -- I like to try out a few of the cheap e-books. It's a bit like checking out experimental theater productions: Most of them turn out to not be very good, but sometimes they're unusual and different enough to get your attention.

I've been thinking for a while that it might be fun to blog about a few of these books, and the first one I'd like to tell you about is Shifted, by Colin D. Jones. It's been a while since I read it, and even at the time, it defied easy explanation, but I'll try.

First, however, I should point out that even though the main character is a werewolf of sorts, Shifted is not one of those books spawned by the popularity of the Twilight books or the Underworld movies. It's not even a counterpoint to those storylines. Colin Jones arrives at his werewolf story from a whole different direction.

Or maybe from several different directions. Shifted is kind of a coming-of-age story about a kid who grows up in an abusive environment and discovers that he has a...werewolf, of sorts...inside him, or maybe alongside him, since there's something about quantum physics and multiple universes. There's a ghost of sorts too, and secretive government agents, and a little bit about Norse legends.

Jones pulls these elements together from all over the place, and assembles them into a story that -- while not exactly a seamless whole -- isn't nearly as messy as it sounds. Jones's writing style is simple and unpretentious, and the book is a pretty quick read.

Over at Nobody's Business, I've put up my review of part 1 of The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong with America by Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch.

Update: And I got a mighty nice shout-out from Matt Welch at Hit & Run.

Well, Amazon Order Tracking says that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is on the way. The shipping origin is right here in Illinois, so when Amazon shipped it yesterday, it only took three hours to reach Chicago, but Amazon put in a request to hold the package until tomorrow.

I actually thought about driving over to the UPS depot that serves my area to try to pick it up at the customer service desk.

Yeah, I've caught Harry Potter fever.

[Be sure to read the comments: I wrote the first few of these here, but a lot of people have contributed some truly funny endings.]

The end of the Harry Potter series, as written by

Mario Puzo (The Godfather) :

Replacing the fallen Dumbledore as head of Hogwarts, Professor Minerva McGonagall proves to have balls of steel. In a well-coordinated series of carefully-timed attacks, the Order of the Phoenix kills every single Death Eater in a single night, settling all accounts.

John Grisham (The Firm, The Rainmaker, The Pelican Brief) :

Over the course of the book, Harry becomes disillusioned with the wizarding life as he realizes that it's just endless conflict in the service of his corrupt and power-hungry masters. He and Ginny change their names and assume new identities so they can leave the wizarding world and live happily ever after.

George Lucas (American Graffiti, Star Wars, Star Wars, Star Wars, Star Wars, Star Wars, Star Wars) :

The battle between Harry and Voldemort comes to a close with an exciting magical glowing sword fight in the never-before-seen high-tech part of Hogwarts during which Voldemort reveals that he's Harry's real father. Then the Death Star blows up.

Joe Haldeman (The Forever War, Forever Free, Worlds Enough and Time) :

During the final confrontation, Neville Longbottom reveals unsuspected powers when he kills all the Death Eaters all over the world, including Lord Voldemort, by making them blow up into steaming bloody chunks. Neville explains that he is God The Creator Of The World in disguise, and then he blows up all the muggles in the world. God-Neville then proceeds to blow up all the all the wizards and witches in the world except Harry. Then he blows up Harry.

Dean Koontz (Bestselling Thriller Author) :

While Voldemort is preparing his final assault on Hogwarts, Arthur Weasley uses his knowledge of muggle artifacts come up with a plan to defeat Voldemort. He and Ron work desperately to connect the flue network to a fireplace in the house of a major Columbian drug lord. Harry and Hermione go through, stun everyone in the house, and steal all their Uzi submachineguns. When the Death Eaters arrive at Hogwarts, members of the Order of the Phoenix gun them down.

Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly) :

As the conflict with Voldemort comes to a head, Ron Weasley is suddenly and shockingly killed. Hermione responds with steely determination, joined by Luna Lovegood, who turns out to be a rare witch who has super-powerful martial arts skills. While Harry tries ineffectively to help—often with comic results—Luna kills the Death Eaters with Unblockable Scorpion Kicks and Hermione defeats Voldemort in a head-on battle of magic.

Tom Clancy (The Hunt For Red October, The Sum of All Fears, Rainbow 6) :

All seems lost for Harry until the Voldemort problem is brought to the attention of American President Jack Ryan, who sends the Enterprise Carrier Group to defeat the Death Eaters in a series of air strikes. Distrustful of the Ministry of Magic, Harry Potter defects to the United States where he helps Ryan get elected to his fourth term as President.

David Chase (The Sopranos) :

Discouraged by Lord Voldemort's tiresome battle against Harry Potter, Lucius Malfoy makes peace with Harry Potter in a bid to take over the Death Eaters for himself. Meanwhile, Alicia Spinnet spots Lord Voldemort in Diagon Alley and catches him by surprise, killing him easily. Through a strange series of random events, all Voldemort's horcruxes are also destroyed. Thinking the danger is over, Harry, Ginny, Ron, and Hermione make plans to meet at the Three Broomsticks for butterbeers. Just as the last of them arrives

I've just picked up The Cult of the Amateur: How today's Internet is killing our culture by Andrew Keen. I spotted the book at Borders and read the jacket copy, which surprised me in its ability to make me seethe with anger:

in a hard-hitting and provocative polemic...Andrew Keen exposes the grave consequences of today's new participatory Web 2.0 and reveals how it threatens our values, economy, and ultimately the very innovation and creativity that form the fabric of American achievement.

...

In today's self-broadcasting culture, where amateurism is celebrated and anyone with an opinion, however ill-informed, can publish a blog, post a video on YouTube, or change an entry on Wikipedia, the distinction between trained expert and uninformed amateur becomes dangerously blurred. When anonymous bloggers and videographers, unconstrained by professional standards or editorial filters, can alter the public debate and manipulate public opinion, truth becomes a commodity to be bought, sold, packaged, and reinvented.

The just strikes me as so, so...wrong. I figured this book will either piss me off or teach me something important, so I bought it.

(I also bought it just so I can blog about it. Windypundit is earning more than enough ad revenue to cover my hosting fees, so I'm going to use some of the income to buy stuff for me to blog about, like this book. That's right, here at Windypundit we take the profits and plow them right back in to improve our product!)

What I Expect From This Book: Elitism. More to the point, unwarranted elitism. It's one thing to be elitist when the subject is, say, one of the hard sciences where there are known facts and right answers. We listen to scientists and engineers because doing so produces useful results.

Elitism is not so easy to justify when the subject is something softer, such as art criticism or cultural commentary. I've never read a movie critic or book reviewer who I agreed with all the time. I suppose that could be because I'm an amateur, but not only don't I agree with them, other critics don't agree with them either. I rarely have this problem with astronomers or biologists.

Elitism is nearly useless when the subject is political and we can't distinguish the elite commentator's authority from his service to an agenda: George Bush and Barack Obama both are in a position to know more about the war in Iraq than I do, but that doesn't mean I should believe either of them.

What I Hope Is In This Book: Something better than what I expect.

I have real reservations about things on the web. Forums and blog comment areas that become popular are too often overrun with trolls, spammers, and social cliques, and I have doubts about the ability of Wikipedia to stay useful as ever more people arrive who have reason to ruin it. (Of course, I thought that years ago, and so far I've been wrong.)

Web 2.0 proponents talk a lot about the advantages of self-organizing systems, but I'm not convinced that the web is built on good self-organizing principles.

I hope the book will surpass my prejudices and say something important and useful about the web.

If you work with computers, you have to see this. Unfortunately, you have to read the English subtitles at the top.

(video link)

(Hat tip: Glenn)

In the spirit of Jon Swift, I'm going to review Mark W. Smith's Disrobed: The New Battle Plan to Break the Left's Stranglehold on the Courts without reading it. In fact, I think all I have to read is this part of the description:

America’s courts, legal culture, and law schools remain solidly in the Left’s camp. Decades of liberal legal precedents fill volumes of law tomes. Absent a sweeping change—precisely what bestselling author Mark W. Smith calls for in Disrobed—liberals will ruthlessly exploit their dominant position in the law to continue advancing their radical agenda, as they have for the past seventy years.

Smith, a nationally recognized attorney, lays out an aggressive new battle plan to thwart the liberal assault on America by turning the courts into allies of the conservative movement. Be warned, Disrobed is not for the fainthearted. Smith implores conservatives: Toss out practically everything you think you know about courts, judges, and American law—because it’s naive, anachronistic, and self-defeating.

Yes, that must be it. You might think that with Republicans in Control of the House, the Senate, and the Presidency, they'd be able to get stuff done. But you'd be wrong. Liberal courts have ruined nearly all their plans.

• It's the liberal courts that have prevented the Republican House and the Republican Senate from passing a Social Security privatization bill for the Republican President to sign.
• It's the liberal courts that forced the Republican House and the Republican Senate to pass the enormous Medicare drug bill, creating a trillion dollars of future entitlements, and then forced the Republican President to sign it.
• It's the liberal courts that kept the tax cuts from becoming permanent.
• It's the liberal courts that kept the estate tax from being repealed.
• It's the liberal courts that prevented Republicans from enacting their large-scale plans for school vouchers, forcing them to settle for the failed-schools-only voucher plan of the No Child Left Behind Act, and it's the liberal courts that nearly gutted even that voucher plan, leaving only a federal monitoring program.
• It's the liberal courts that forced the creation of yet another cabinet-level department.
• It's the liberal courts that forced the federal deficit up far higher than it was when President Bush came to office.
• It's the liberal courts that caused Tom DeLay's ethical troubles.
• It's the liberal courts that provided bad intelligence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and it's the liberal courts that have caused the Iraq war to last as long as it has.
• It's the liberal courts that made sure FEMA was run by an unqualified political hack.

Good thing someone is speaking out about those damned judges that have caused all this trouble!

Philipp Lenssen points out that an Amazon user named Jon Swift has a habit of reviewing books he hasn't read. Here are a few examples:

	Winning the Future: A 21st Century Contract With America by Newt Gingrich
	A Contract As Good As the Paper It's Written On I have not actually read this book but I think a new Contract with America is a great idea. The last Contract with America promised term limits, a balanced budget and an end to "scandal and disgrace" in Congress. I hope this contract is as successful as the last one.
	Right Turns: Unconventional Lesons from a Controversial Life by Michael Medved
	A lonely man I have not actually read this book but I feel very sorry for Mr. Medved. It must be difficult being a film critic who hates films and the people who make them and I wonder if he wouldn't have been happier in some other line of work...
	Left Illusions: An Intellectual Odyssey by David Horowitz
	Former communist I have not actually read this book but the author is a former communist who suddenly changed into a conservative. I think if the McCarthy hearings taught us anything, they taught us that you can't trust former communists even if they were communists a long time ago.
	Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild by Michelle Malkin
	I'm puzzled I have not actually read this book but I'm a little puzzled that Ms. Malkin would have written it. Although she is a woman and not white she often attacks women and believes that we should be suspicious of people who are not white, which is very open-minded of her...

Read them all.

Update: In an obvious bid for attention, Jon Swift (if that is his real name) has emailed me to tell me that he has a blog.

Mike at Crime & Federalism wants reading suggestions. He prefers practical non-fiction and enjoys "books that are that are hybrids of insight and practicality."

Here are my suggestions:

Armchair Economist by Steven Landsburg. It's about thinking carefully about incentives and how people respond to them. Good for thinking about public policy, but I've also found this way of thinking useful in other ways, such as how to structure a business deal so both sides have an incentive to do the right thing.

A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness by V. S. Ramachandran. A few glimpses of the modern way of thinking about thinking.

Anatomy of Movement by Blandine C. Germain. How your muscles and skeleton work, with lots of diagrams. If this doesn't sound useful now, just wait until you get older

.

Anybody else have ideas?

Philipp Lenssen has finally released his book 55 Ways to Have Fun With Google which he describes as "A cabinet of search engine curiosities, riddles, games, and a little bit of usefulness."

Philipp is the author of the Google Blogoscoped blog, which is consistently one of the most interesting technical sites on the web. It's more than just news about Google services and Google the company—although there's plenty of that—it's also about interesting things to do with Google.

If you're interested in search engines and what you can do with them, Philipp's blog is worth checking out, as is his book. Philipp Lenssen has an inquisitive mind, and he spends a lot of time finding interesting ways to use Google and similar technologies. Then he tells us about them. He's kind of a Mr. Wizard for the search-engine set.

Disclaimer: Philipp sent me an advanced copy of this book a couple of months ago and at his request I suggested a few changes, so I have a small ego investment in this book, and I hope he sells a lot of copies.