About Me

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Growing up in a strait-laced Southern family, I was always fascinated with casinos. In my twenties on a summer hiatus from teaching in North Carolina, I drove to California and became a dealer at Caesars in Lake Tahoe. Well, I can tell you that after teaching high school, handling an unruly gambler was a piece of cake. My mother highly disapproved of my working in a casino, "a place so bad it has 'sin' in the middle." I wanted to write the first realistic novel about casino life from the perspective of an experienced table games dealer. I spent the next five years circling the globe for Princess Cruises. Sometimes life exceeds your dreams. I was awed by the wonders of Venice, the fjords of Norway, and the Northern Lights in Leningrad. I returned from ships with a very special souvenir, my Scottish husband Ray. We went to work in Palm Springs. We now live in Hollywood, Florida, where I write about my casino years while wistfully gazing out at the ocean.

Saturday, November 5, 2011

WEBSITES DESIGNED TO FIND YOU A GOOD BOOK INCLUDING CRUISE QUARTERS

With the demise of bookstores all around us, both national chains and local independents, the question now is how do you find a good book? My favorite hobby used to be browsing through the bookstore stopping to read the first few pages of any book that caught my eye. I also am a subscriber to the Los Angeles Times and so every Sunday I would look forward to reading their book review section, but over time I found that most of the books reviewed there didn't really interest me. I enjoyed books that made me laugh where the words flowed easily off the page and where I picked up some insight into human nature.

So two years ago when my husband surprised me with a Kindle for my birthday I wondered how I would find a good book. But in the last two years E-books have exploded and I have found that there are so many great sites that inform the reader about new books that I don't have room to even begin to describe them all here but I will spotlight some great ones.

The most notable of all would have to be Daily Cheap Reads. Here new books priced up to $9.99 are introduced all day and links to the book at Amazon are provided. You can browse their archives to find books in a genre that interests you.
Click the link for Daily Cheap Reads

There is also another great site, No Trees Harmed, and as you can tell by the title the focus is on E-books. Their motto is 'Good Reads for a Paperless World'. There you will also find links to many other blogs reviewing books. Click on some of the links and you will find a maze of websites all designed to find you a good book.

Another excellent blog is 'I am a Reader not a Writer'. I hosted a book giveaway there. If you follow the link you will find my interview and the great contest entries the readers provided.

I have been fortunate to have my novel Cruise Quarters - A Novel About Casinos and Cruise Ships featured on all of these sites. The links take you to my interviews and from there you can navigate around the sites, and then on to Amazon. If you are anything like me you will download free sample chapters from the books that interest you. What a great feature, by being able to download the first chapter I never end up with a dud book.

I also wonder how did you find my blog? I know that just this week I have had readers from Russia, Australia and the United Kingdom as well as the US. So if you are a reader please let me know a little bit more about you. You can comment here but sometimes that can be difficult, so feel free to e-mail me at carabertoia@yahoo.com.

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