My First Free E-Book (A Pleasant Surprise)

Speculation by Edmund Jorgensen
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was my first free Kindle e-book. To be honest, I wasn't expecting much. One of my friends on Facebook mentioned that it was great and free for the next couple of weeks, so I figured, well, no one's ever recommended a free book to me before, I'll give it a shot.

The summary sounded intriguing: a man's best friend dies and leaves him 10 million dollars and a sealed envelope. The catch? He has to choose just one. Pick the money and the envelope will be destroyed. Pick the envelope and bye-bye millionaire-dom.

Maybe part of the reason I enjoyed this book so much is because I went in with such low expectations. Lately I've been slogging through a slew of critically-acclaimed e-books from traditional publishers that are FULL OF TYPOS AND HORRIBLE GRAMMATICAL ERRORS. Like, have we just decided that since people will buy e-books anyway, we don't care about making them decent or even readable? Have we cut budgets in the production department so far that we've fired all of the copyeditors?

Anyway. Enough ranting. Because this book was very well-written. Nary a typo caught my eye! But that could've been because I was so caught up in the story, too.

Looking back on it, I am not sure how to categorize this novel. Philosophical thriller? Let's go with that. Because it did have a plot and burning questions that kept you pushing onward into the wee hours of the night. But the best part of the novel was how smart it was. I'm not a philosophy major. I could've been bored to tears or completely confused by the majority of this storyline. Instead, the author struck a perfect balance between trusting his readers to not be complete morons, and not beating us over the head with the philosophers and theories he so clearly loves -- but he also didn't leave us non-philosophers hanging. He explained the basics so that I was able to follow the characters' discussions perfectly.

Again, disclaimer: I am not a philosophy major. In fact I have never taken a single class in it. I went to one course while shopping around my sophomore year, and a student was arguing with the teacher about how they could prove the chairs we were sitting in existed. I left. Call me an uneducated jackass if you will, I know that many people love and find excitement in those kinds of discussions. I'm just not one of them.

So if you're not a huge philosophy geek, I still recommend this book. Plus it might make you want to read some philosophy. I am kind of regretting my ignorance on the subject now. Maybe I'll steal a copy of my roomie's Metaphysics of Morals by Kant or something.

If you are a philospher yourself, maybe this book won't be as mind-blowing. Or maybe you'll love it because the author so clearly adores the subject, I dunno. Either way, give it a shot! Plus it's free, so what the heck? :)

... I think I'm beginning to understand why authors want to give away free books now, because I will definitely read anything by this guy in the future...

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