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I don't care who you are, where you are from, what you are doing, or what your religious or political beliefs are - you NEED to do yourself a favor and read this book.

The author is a former Southern Baptist preacher who one day woke up to the realization that perhaps much of what he had been taught and was teaching about Jesus was wro...

Overall, the short stories in this collection are just that - short. Yet Robinson still manages to tell distinct, engaging stories in each. The explanations after each are rather interesting as well. For example, the motivation for the actual 'Insomnia' short story was Robinson's own battle with a disorder he has given a character in one of his actual books and how it typically keeps him awake at night longing for sleep.

This project was something Robinson has called a "...

This book was originally published in 5 parts. Here are my reviews in order:

DESCENT:

I've been speaking with the author over the past couple of days about this book, and my trepidation of buying it even though I am an avid fan of his work. The reason for my trepidation is one factor alone: the Young Adult classification.

But I bit the bullet and bought the book last night - and even though it didn't arrive on my Kindle until 12:01a, I've already finished it. It is that good. I don't know how Kindle lines translate to pages, but as far as length goes this was 4K or so lines compared to 6K or so from Lee Child's Worth Dying For, which was the first book I bought on my Kindle.

TRUST ME: Buy this book! It is from the ANTARKTOS RISING universe, and as its title implies, it is set up to be a multi-part series. That fact - that you can feel throughout that it is destined to be a multi-book story - is the ONLY drawback to this book. It is set at least a few years prior to the events of ANTARKTOS RISING, as the creatures are still buried under the ice.

The story is intense. Shortly after his 13th birthday, a young boy travels to Antarctica - the land of his birth - with his parents. While there, he is abducted, taken underground, and broken. He is forced to learn an entirely new way of life, encountering myriad strange creatures. He is nearly killed several times, and comes face to face with many of the entities and characters from ANTARKTOS RISING, many of which are terrifying. Along the way, he becomes a strong, stealthy hunter - the last hunter.

It is at this point that he learns what is truly expected of him - and that there is much more to him than even his captors realize.

This story takes the ANTARKTOS RISING mythology to a whole ...

This was an AMAZING book. Better than Cussler's *Atlantis Rising*, better than Alten's *Domain*, and yet this guy doesn't have a major publishing contract yet!!

I found Jeremy Robinson on myspace after he invited me to be his friend there. Ordered Antarktos Rising and Didymus Contingency that day from his site, got them two days later, and had Antarktos finished 2 days afte...

I literally finished this book in about 36 hours after starting it - I couldn't put it down!

The action starts with the Chess Team getting ready for a relaxing barbeque with the President - his way of thanking them for their battles in PULSE and other successful missions between the books, since they refuse any other medals or commendations.

All of a sudden, the Team is ca...

This week, we're talking about a new to me time period of historical fiction from yet another new to me Lake Union author. This week, we're talking about The Beautiful Strangers by Camille Di Maio.

This was an excellent tale of going on a quest to find one's true self - and along the way, we meet and get a very human look at some Hollywood legends in Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, and Jack Lemmon. Monroe in particular is central to th...

This week we're looking at a tale of three people who come together to face nearly insurmountable odds during World War II. This week, we're looking at The Spitfire Girls by Soraya M. Lane.

The story here was brilliantly executed... in its first two thirds. In this section, the drama focuses around the race to determine who will be the first female to pilot a four engine bomber beyond training and the race to get Spitfire fighters to the USS Wasp for an emergency trip to...

This week, we look at a multi-generational tale of a mother's love from yet another new-to-me Lake Union author. This week, we look at Loving Liberty Levine by Colin Falconer.

This book was a bit structurally divergent from most other Lake Union books I've read - while also being longer than others at 442 pages, it divided those pages up into nearly 70 short-ish chapters rather than the more common 20-30 mid-length ...

This week, we look at an excellent historical fiction novel from yet another new=to-me Lake Union author. This week, we're talking about The Victory Garden by Rhys Bowen.

This book presents an interesting case when looking at it alongside Aimie K Runyan's Girls On the Line, as both tell a story of a woman falling in love in the middle of World War I - Line from the perspective of an American socialite who chooses to go to the ...

One of the singular most common questions one will encounter in almost any group of readers where one member of the group mentions having recieved an ARC is "How can I get one?". It is a question asked with somewhat alarming regularity, to the level that some authors have recently spoken up about writing being a business - and they are not wrong.

As we saw in the discussion of the business justification for Advance Review Copies, ARCs are, when used ideally, loss leaders for the publishing agent - the idea is to give away X copies of the book in anticipation that these free copies will generate AX sales, where the larger A is the more money those involved in writing and publishing the book are making. As a business strategy, it suffers one flaw that could one day prove to be fatal:

Not all people requesting ARCs are trustworthy.

They either are not aware of ARC etiquette or actively ignore it. While little can be done about someone who actively ignores ARC etiquette other than not giving them an ARC in the future, I am seeing more and more publishing agents being more and more explicit about ARC etiquette before selecting a given reader to receive an ARC.

Which leads directly to the titular question here: What can a given reader do to increase their chances of ...