A true diversity of cheap Kindle books right now available:

Wonders of the Universe (Wonders Series) by Brian Cox and Andrew Cohen. I’m not sure if this is the ideal Kindle book because the original print version is full of illustrations that may or may not translate well, but that might depend on what you want to do with it. I like having print copies, if I get them cheap, that go along with excellent documentaries (and this is a book that goes along with an excellent documentary), and a kindle version might be fantastic for that since it is searchable, and the whole idea is to have a memory jogger or a reference.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown is a classic. It was one of the key early books (ca 1970) to revise, as in making more accurate, the American conception of the history of Native Americans. The Kindle version contains additional information not found in the original.

If you read the Chroncles of Brother Cadfael and are not up to book 14, you may want to grab The Hermit of Eyton Forest , by Ellis Peters, which is book 14 in that series!

A veritable plethora of cheap Kindle books that as a reader of this blog, you may enjoy if you don’t have them already. Some classics, and a wide range of topics. I’ll give you the title, link, the description. Some prices are for today only (supposedly) and they range from $0.99 to about $2.50, but most under $2.00.

Now a major motion picture, The Giver, was one of a quartet of original books, required reading (in many schools, anyway) and nice pieces of literature. They are on Kindle cheap: The Giver Quartet Omnibus

This first-ever Lois Lowry single-volume collection includes unabridged editions of the Newbery Medal–winning The Giver, Gathering Blue, Messenger, and Son. Lois Lowry’s groundbreaking dystopian series comes alive in a single volume. An affordable addition to the shelves of teen fans and collectors alike.

I’ve never read Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel, but it has been recommended time and again, and I have a copy of it on my eShelf!

Jonathan Safran Foer emerged as one of the most original writers of his generation with his best-selling debut novel, Everything Is Illuminated. Now, with humor, tenderness, and awe, he confronts the traumas of our recent history. What he discovers is solace in that most human quality, imagination.
Meet Oskar Schell, an inventor, Francophile, tambourine player, Shakespearean actor, jeweler, pacifist, correspondent with Stephen Hawking and Ringo Starr. He is nine years old. And he is on an urgent, secret search through the five boroughs of New York. His mission is to find the lock that fits a mysterious key belonging to his father, who died in the World Trade Center on 9/11.

An inspired innocent, Oskar is alternately endearing, exasperating, and hilarious as he careens from Central Park to Coney Island to Harlem on his search. Along the way he is always dreaming up inventions to keep those he loves safe from harm. What about a birdseed shirt to let you fly away? What if you could actually hear everyone’s heartbeat? His goal is hopeful, but the past speaks a loud warning in stories of those who’ve lost loved ones before. As Oskar roams New York, he encounters a motley assortment of humanity who are all survivors in their own way. He befriends a 103-year-old war reporter, a tour guide who never leaves the Empire State Building, and lovers enraptured or scorned. Ultimately, Oskar ends his journey where it began, at his father’s grave. But now he is accompanied by the silent stranger who has been renting the spare room of his grandmother’s apartment. They are there to dig up his father’s empty coffin.

A classic, you’ve probably read it, but if not, here is your chance for two bucks: The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (Hainish Cycle Book 5) by Ursula Le Guin.

If you you are going to read one historical novel set in the context of World War II, read Mare Piercey’s Gone to Soldiers. Multiple parallel stories connected to various degrees (or not) about the mundane intersecting with the extraordinary during one of the most trying times our society has ever encountered, written by a feminist author. Ten narrators, ten voices, ten stories, and it may be the only historical war book that is a total take-down of the Bechdel Test. This books should be part of the 20th century literary cannon for modern Americans.

These books are cheap in Kindle form right now.

First, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich: A Novel (FSG Classics). I mention this here simply because it was a book that influenced me as a kid. Made me realize that starvation was a thing.

If you’ve not read The Martian: A Novel, read it. Fun book. This is where science fiction is enhanced significantly but science and math geekiness. Destine to become a classic.

I know a lot of you are fans of forensic fiction. Puruant to that interest, these two books by Patricia Cornwell: Ripper: The Secret Life of Walter Sickert [Kindle in Motion] and Chasing the Ripper (Kindle Single), in which life imitates art.

…. if you don’t already have them.

First, the tenth in Aaron Elkins; Gideon Oliver series, Skeleton Dance for two bucks on Kindle.

Second, and I don’t know anything about this but I figure some of my readers would: The Complete Aliens Omnibus: Volume One (Earth Hive, Nightmare Asylum, The Female War). Also in Kindle form, for a buck.

Two items I know many of you have been planning to read someday, currently cheap on Kindle:
Beyond Belief: My Secret Life Inside Scientology and My Harrowing Escape

Jenna Miscavige Hill, niece of Church of Scientology leader David Miscavige, was raised as a Scientologist but left the controversial religion in 2005. In Beyond Belief, she shares her true story of life inside the upper ranks of the sect, details her experiences as a member Sea Org—the church’s highest ministry, speaks of her “disconnection” from family outside of the organization, and tells the story of her ultimate escape.

In this tell-all memoir, complete with family photographs from her time in the Church, Jenna Miscavige Hill, a prominent critic of Scientology who now helps others leave the organization, offers an insider’s profile of the beliefs, rituals, and secrets of the religion that has captured the fascination of millions, including some of Hollywood’s brightest stars such as Tom Cruise and John Travolta.

The Guns of August: The Outbreak of World War I; Barbara W. Tuchman’s Great War Series (Modern Library 100 Best Nonfiction Books)

In this landmark, Pulitzer Prize–winning account, renowned historian Barbara W. Tuchman re-creates the first month of World War I: thirty days in the summer of 1914 that determined the course of the conflict, the century, and ultimately our present world. Beginning with the funeral of Edward VII, Tuchman traces each step that led to the inevitable clash. And inevitable it was, with all sides plotting their war for a generation. Dizzyingly comprehensive and spectacularly portrayed with her famous talent for evoking the characters of the war’s key players, Tuchman’s magnum opus is a classic for the ages.

Anne, in this case, continuing the tradition:

Cave of Bones (A Leaphorn, Chee & Manuelito Novel)

The Birthday of the World: And Other Stories

For more than four decades, Ursula K. Le Guin has enthralled readers with her imagination, clarity, and moral vision. The recipient of numerous literary prizes, including the National Book Award, the Kafka Award, and five Hugo and five Nebula Awards, this renowned writer has, in each story and novel, created a provocative, ever-evolving universe filled with diverse worlds and rich characters reminiscent of our earthly selves. Now, in The Birthday of the World, this gifted artist returns to these worlds in eight brilliant short works, including a never-before-published novella, each of which probes the essence of humanity.

Here are stories that explore complex social interactions and troublesome issues of gender and sex; that define and defy notions of personal relationships and of society itself; that examine loyalty, survival, and introversion; that bring to light the vicissitudes of slavery and the meaning of transformation, religion, and history.

The first six tales in this spectacular volume are set in the author’s signature world of the Ekumen, “my pseudo-coherent universe with holes in the elbows,” as Le Guin describes it — a world made familiar in her award-winning novel The Left Hand of Darkness. The seventh, title story was hailed by Publishers Weekly as “remarkable . . . a standout.” The final offering in the collection, Paradises Lost, is a mesmerizing novella of space exploration and the pursuit of happiness.

In her foreword, Ursula K. Le Guin writes, “to create difference-to establish strangeness-then to let the fiery arc of human emotion leap and close the gap: this acrobatics of the imagination fascinates and satisfies me as no other.” In The Birthday of the World, this gifted literary acrobat exhibits a dazzling array of skills that will fascinate and satisfy us all.

The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos

The bestselling author of The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos tackles perhaps the most mind-bending question in modern physics and cosmology: Is our universe the only universe?

There was a time when “universe” meant all there is. Everything. Yet, a number of theories are converging on the possibility that our universe may be but one among many parallel universes populating a vast multiverse. Here, Briane Greene, one of our foremost physicists and science writers, takes us on a breathtaking journey to a multiverse comprising an endless series of big bangs, a multiverse with duplicates of every one of us, a multiverse populated by vast sheets of spacetime, a multiverse in which all we consider real are holographic illusions, and even a multiverse made purely of math–and reveals the reality hidden within each.

Using his trademark wit and precision, Greene presents a thrilling survey of cutting-edge physics and confronts the inevitable question: How can fundamental science progress if great swaths of reality lie beyond our reach? The Hidden Reality is a remarkable adventure through a world more vast and strange than anything we could have imagined.

Now cheap in Kindle format.

Jailbird: A Novel by Kurt Vonnegut.

Jailbird takes us into a fractured and comic, pure Vonnegut world of high crimes and misdemeanors in government—and in the heart. This wry tale follows bumbling bureaucrat Walter F. Starbuck from Harvard to the Nixon White House to the penitentiary as Watergate’s least known co-conspirator. But the humor turns dark when Vonnegut shines his spotlight on the cold hearts and calculated greed of the mighty, giving a razor-sharp edge to an unforgettable portrait of power and politics in our times.

I don’t know about Generation Robot: A Century of Science Fiction, Fact, and Speculation by Terri Favro, but it looks interesting.

Generation Robot covers a century of science fiction, fact and, speculation—from the 1950 publication of Isaac Asimov’s seminal robot masterpiece, I, Robot, to the 2050 Singularity when artificial and human intelligence are predicted to merge. Beginning with a childhood informed by pop-culture robots in movies, in comic books, and on TV in the 1960s to adulthood where the possibilities of self-driving cars and virtual reality are daily conversation, Terri Favro offers a unique perspective on how our relationship with robotics and futuristic technologies has shifted over time. Peppered with pop-culture fun-facts about Superman’s kryptonite, the human-machine relationships in the cult TV show Firefly, and the sexual and moral implications of the film Ex Machina, Generation Robot explores how the techno-triumphs and resulting anxieties of reality bleed into the fantasies of our collective culture.

Clever and accessible, Generation Robot isn’t just for the serious, scientific reader—it’s for everyone interested in robotics and technology since their science-fiction origins. By looking back at the future she once imagined, analyzing the plugged-in present, and speculating on what is on the horizon, Terri Favro allows readers the chance to consider what was, what is, and what could be. This is a captivating book that looks at the pop-culture of our society to explain how the world works—now and tomorrow.

Both are topics of some books now cheap in Kindle form.

The Dinosaur Hunters: A True Story of Scientific Rivalry and the Discovery of the Prehistoric World (Text Only Edition) by Deborah Cadbury (previously published under a different name, I think) may be a bit esoteric for some, but for a dollar-ninety-nine …

The story of two nineteenth-century scientists who revealed one of the most significant and exciting events in the natural history of this planet: the existence of dinosaurs. In `The Dinosaur Hunters’ Deborah Cadbury brilliantly recreates the remarkable story of the bitter rivalry between two men: Gideon Mantell uncovered giant bones in a Sussex quarry, became obsessed with the lost world of the reptiles and was driven to despair. Richard Owen, a brilliant anatomist, gave the extinct creatures their name and secured for himself unrivaled international acclaim.

The Guns of August: The Outbreak of World War I; Barbara W. Tuchman’s Great War Series (Modern Library 100 Best Nonfiction Books) by one of the great earlier popularizers of history Barbara Tuchman:

In this landmark, Pulitzer Prize–winning account, renowned historian Barbara W. Tuchman re-creates the first month of World War I: thirty days in the summer of 1914 that determined the course of the conflict, the century, and ultimately our present world. Beginning with the funeral of Edward VII, Tuchman traces each step that led to the inevitable clash. And inevitable it was, with all sides plotting their war for a generation. Dizzyingly comprehensive and spectacularly portrayed with her famous talent for evoking the characters of the war’s key players, Tuchman’s magnum opus is a classic for the ages.

And not on sale, but I’m putting it here because you may want to read it: All Quiet on the Western Front: A Novel by Erich Maria Remarque. If you don’t know the book, you should. Also a great movie.