Airport bookstores are great...

For charging to much, sure. But also for (at least me) finding books and authors I'd never otherwise find. I try to find new things at Amazon, but it just never works. There's never enough info, or reviews or whatever, i never want to take the chance.

That's not the case at airport bookstores. I walk the aisles, i pick up and carry books around, I read the back covers, I flip through them, I sit them back on their shelves and pick up a different one. I browse.

This past week I had a conference in Chicago, so I was hanging in DIA, and decided to kill some time in the book store. Not even an airport Borders like in SEATAC, but an over priced Hudson News.

I found two books that piqued my interest.

The first was "Looking Glass Wars" by Frank Beddor. I had never heard of him, and surely wouldn't have have found him on Amazon, there's just too many choices.

That said, I'm glad I found it. It was great. I picked it up Saturday afternoon, and had it finished by Tuesday. It's not a fatty, only 358 pages, but still, at a conference where I was networking, eating, and drinking all day/night. that's pretty impressive (to me at least).

The short of it is that it's the "true" story of Alyss Heart from Wonderland. The Cartoon we saw, and the book by Lewis Carroll, were not the way it really happenned. I didn't realize that it was part of a trilogy, but already I can't wait for the next installments.

The Second find, was by an other I enjoy reading, so I might have found it on Amazon, but probably not since I didn't know he had a new series and hadn't read his work in a while now. It's "Hidden Empire, the Saga of the Seven Suns"

I've just started it and it's a bit slower of a read than Frank's book, but so far so good. Kevin J Anderson is a great Sci Fi writer, his Star Wars stuff is still on the book shelf (high praise in my book shelf).

I'll be making an amazon order as soon as I hit "save" to pick up whatever is already in Paperback of the rest of the series. I highly recommend it, if you're a Sci Fi fan.

Reading books like these definitely rekindles the Writer Me, and makes him scream for release.