First of all, the thing's going for the low, low price of ten bucks on Amazon as I type this, which is actually pretty good for a decent coffee table book about your favorite show. Messages from the Island contains a lot of concept art and storyboards that are interesting in the way that concept art is always inexplicably interesting, without actually being relevant to anything, cool anecdotes from Darlton and a few other producers (no J.J. of course, that bastard), trivia about how they cast everyone, which may be familiar to you or not, depending on how deep your Lost trivia well is -- Yunjin Kim originally read for the role of Kate, Jorge Garcia read for Sawyer (which still blows my mind), they were originally going to kill Jack in the pilot, etc. There are also some pretty in depth interviews with all the central cast, some of which were actually kind of interesting, though Evangeline Lilly and Josh Holloway both feel very strongly that Atlas Shrugged is the perfect book to represent both their characters even though it is not. Aww, actors!

My favorite bit was the sound guy admitting that the Smoke Monster's sounds are indeed wooden roller coaster noises, which I've always thought, but people have always told me I was wrong about. Vindicated! Oh, and there was a whole chapter devoted to the Jack/Kate/Sawyer love triangle that I skipped over for obvious reasons.

So yeah, lots of pretty pictures and entertaining Darlton action, but it's still only about Season 2, so there's not much Ben and they're still talking a great deal about Shannon, like who gives a hell about Shannon anymore? So it's a give and take, I guess. Buyer beware!

You can purchase the book here, Sally Slingshot.