**Update** This contest has ended. Watch for the next one!

Well, not really.

If you’ve spent time around the blogosphere lately, you might have noticed that some bloggers are giving away some pretty fantastic prizes. Gift cards worth hundreds of dollars, vacuum cleaners worth hundreds of dollars, cases of books.

Those blogs, of course, have sponsors. I do not. But I do get free books throughout the year because of the kind people who shop through my Amazon affiliate link.

Which is great. An occasional free book or two is plenty of incentive to keep me blogging indefinitely.

But I want to give a little something back.

So welcome to my very first Writing and Living Giveaway: The I Love Mondays Giveaway.

Clever title, no?

Once a month I’m going to give away a brand new book, for free, to one of my lucky readers (lucky because you win the book, not necessarily because you’re one of my readers).

I’m pretty much making this up as I go, but here’s how it’s going to work. For this month, anyway.

If you want to enter the drawing for the book, please leave a comment. Please include an E-mail address so I’ll no how to contact you if you win (Don’t worry – no one will see your E-mail address but me. I promise not to spam you.)

Please enter only once. I don’t have any fancy way of knowing if you enter more than once, other than looking over the entries myself, but just don’t. You can enter any time in the next week.

Next Sunday night, October 28, at approximately ten o’clock, I will pick a number using a random number generator (or I will them out of a hat). I know that’s not a Monday, but I hate to name a time on Monday morning, in case I decide to sleep in.

The results will be certified by Theodore, my husband. He’s not an accountant, but he writes computer code for accountants, so I figure that’s close enough. If he’s asleep when the drawing takes place he obviously won’t be certifying the results. But it’s not like you’re going to be able to prove that he didn’t.

Anyone can enter. It doesn’t matter if you’re not a regular reader. It doesn’t matter if you’ve never purchased anything through my links. Most of you have your own blogs with your own links to purchase things through. I appreciate your visiting and reading just the same.

So what’s the fabulous prize? I thought long and hard about this. My reading tastes are pretty much all over the map. But most of my readers are homeschooling parents, so I thought I’d start with a book that would appeal to most homeschoolers.

Are you ready?

The Shakespeare Stealer

Widge, an orphan in England in 1601, has been ordered to steal Shakespeare’s Hamlet from a rival theater owner. This novel will give young readers a picture of life in Elizabethan England and the importance of Shakespeare and his plays in that time. Not to mention the fact that it’s a fun read.

So come one, come all. Please enter.

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44 Scotland Street and Espresso Tales begged to be reviewed together. So I shall.

Originally serialized in the Scotsman, these novels follow the lives of the residents of an Edinburgh apartment building. There’s Pat, a young girl on her second gap year; Bruce, her narcissistic roommate; Domenica, an anthropologist of independent means; and Bertie, a very bright five-year-old saddled with an impossibly domineering mother.

Since these novels first appeared in serialized format, the chapters are short and often end with a cliffhanger. But in spite of that, these novels are decidedly character-driven.

The best books, in my opinion, are the ones that leave you wondering about the characters after the book is finished. 44 Scotland Street and Espresso Tales both do so. McCall Smith is deft with his handling of his characters. He gently pokes fun at their human foibles without coming across as apologetic or caustic.

The writing is delightful and the humor is wonderfully droll. Perfect for curling up on the couch with. It’s a shame that it feels like July outside – these books really make you want to light a fire in the fireplace and read all afternoon.

And did I mention that the setting is Scotland? I’ll mention it again. Carol commented that in the Isabel Dalhousie mysteries the city of Edinburgh is treated like a character in the book. The same could also be said of these books as well.

Reading up on Scotland will certainly come in handy for that day when someone pays me a bunch of money to move to a cottage on an island off the Scottish coast and knit for a living.

Hey, everybody’s got to have a dream.

And just in case you were worried that my ruminations on Scotland might be coming to an end, you’re in luck. The third book in the series is coming out in November.

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From Espresso Tales by Alexander McCall Smith:

Ramsey was a northerner by temperament. He felt ill at ease whenever he travelled south, to England or to France, feeling inside him that things were just too bright, and dusty – almost as if the sun had taken something out of the countryside and blanched it. And the air was stale in such latitudes, he thought; stale and stagnant. Ramsey liked Scottish light, pure and clean, and sharp. He liked long, cool evenings in summer and the comfortable darkness of winter days. He liked Scotland exactly as it was: unfussy, cold, and sometimes only half-visible. “I am not a Mediterranean type,” he had once remarked to his wife, Betty. And she had looked at him and sighed. He was not. And nor, she reflected, was she.

Isn’t it nice to read a passage in a novel that sums up something one has been feeling for a long time? (Although I should point out that I’ve still never been to Scotland.)

But isn’t it disconcerting when the character credited with such reflections is…a fool?

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HT Drew

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I know The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series has been very popular, but I never seemed to get into it. I’m sure it’s just me. But the Isabel Dalhousie mysteries intrigued me for many reasons.

1) The name of the heroine. People who know me in real life will understand, but I’m not going to go into that here. Ahem.

2) The setting. I love Scotland, despite the fact that I’ve never been there. I am so narrowly traveled that you could draw a triangle from Florida to North Carolina and over to Denver and pretty much cover the extent of my lifetime ramblings. Traveling requires time, money, and energy, none of which I have. But I love Scotland just the same.

3) The word “philosophy” in the title. For the past fifteen years I have been buying books on philosophy and reading about half of each one. I think to truly be a philosopher you have to actually leave the house and talk to people. I am, perhaps, half a philosopher.

So, for those reasons, I picked it up.

This is perfect light reading. Entertaining and well-written. The heroine is smart and interesting. I would imagine some would find Isabel Dalhousie’s tendency to ponder philosophical questions to be distracting, but I enjoyed it.

The mystery is almost secondary in this book. One certainly wants to know who did it, but Isabel’s daily wanderings through Edinburgh and the people she meets are just as entertaining. Perfect reading for a lazy weekend afternoon.

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I have a difficult time getting things returned to the library on time. I always over-estimate how much I will be able to read in a three week period, so I stagger out of the library with a pile of books taller than I am (I am pretty short, but still). I never get them all read, I always think I’ll call and renew, and, well, don’t.

There’s no hope for me. Fines don’t stop me. My hometown librarian used to stand at the front desk and call people who had overdue books. His voice was LOUD, and the town was small enough that you could usually figure out who he was talking to. Even the prospect of public embarrassment wasn’t enough to stop me.

Since I use two public libraries (the one in my town and the big town next door), and the church library, it gets a little ridiculous. I am so, so glad the church library doesn’t charge fines.

I have ten books going right now (thankfully not all of them are library books). I know a lot of people can handle this, but that’s too many for me. I’ve been dipping into each of them every day or so, and I now have a hodge-podge of ideas rattling around in my brain. And I hate to admit this, but there are another five books that I’ve checked out and haven’t touched. Let’s not even talk about the books I’ve bought and haven’t read.

To help counter this I checked three MORE books out of the church library this evening.

But I got good news in the mail today. My local library sent a card to inform me that I have five books checked out that are due…on 3/12/17. I’m so glad I have ten whole years to get them back.

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That is the name the local doctors have given the virus that is making the rounds around here: The Hundred Day Cough. It’s very fitting.

I’m this close to saying I’m well. I woke up at 5:30 in a fit of coughing (which was actually fortunate since Theodore forgot to set his alarm), but most of the time I barely cough at all.

I ran into a friend today who had it much worse than I did. I was still able to keep up with the laundry and the cooking, which is really a good thing.

I came up on a horrific accident on the interstate today seconds after it happened (actually, I drove over it on the overpass, just to clarify for real-life friends who read), but miraculously everyone survived with relatively minor injuries. It’s a shame that it takes something like that to remind us how fragile we really are.

So it was a good day. We did school. We saw some friends at our homeschool PE group. I read three chapters of Corrie Ten Boom: Keeper of the Angels’ Den without any major coughing fits.

Good night!

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How to Be Your Own Selfish Pig, And Other Ways You’ve Been Brainwashed by Susan Schaeffer Macauley is the first book in the Worldview Reading List from TheGreatBooks.com.

The daughter of Christian thinker Francis Schaeffer, Macauley takes many of the ideas in her father’s works and places them in simpler language geared to teenagers, kind of “easy apologetics” if you will.

While the comparisons to her father’s books are inevitable, I was also reminded of C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity as I read this.

The main point of the book is that we need to take the time to think about what we believe and why. Mrs. Macauley uses several examples of people she has known through her work at L’Abri in England and the crises of faith they experienced when life got difficult. With these stories as a launching point, she delves into the tough questions such as, “Don’t all religions lead to God?” and “How can we know the Bible is true?”

While the book could be read and understood by upper elementary children, it does touch on issues such as sexual promiscuity and homosexuality, so I wouldn’t recommend it for a student younger than junior high. It’s a worthwhile book that I feel would foster good discussion between parents and children. It’s more than handing a child a list saying, “Don’t do this, and this, and this,” it encourages the reader to think about the “why” behind the rules, and to help them determine what they believe about God and how to live in a fallen world.

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Recently finished:

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield. Very entertaining, and well-written to boot. Not something one comes across every day. I have been whining for a long time about how some modern authors get so caught up in writing pretty sentences that they completely neglect plot, but Setterfield manages both well in this book. Well done.

The Shop on Blossom Street by Debbie Macomber. Thoughts? Meh. It is a Mira book (the women’s fiction division of Harlequin, for those of you who didn’t spend a good portion of your life trying to get a novel published), so I wasn’t expecting great literature. You’ll know within the first, oh, thirty pages how the novel is going to end. The book is centered around a yarn store, which is why I read it. If you want an easy read, it’ll do, but I think Jennifer Weiner and Elinor Lipman do the easy read thing a bit better.

(HT to Mental Multivitamin for introducing me to Lipman.)

There’s a sequel to The Shop on Blossom Street:

I checked it out from the library, but can’t bring myself to start it, which is perhaps the best indicator of how I feel about the first one.

What I’m currently reading:

North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell. (Not to be confused with the Civil War book and miniseries from the 80s.) I have been wanting to read this since I finished Wives and Daughters, but completely forgot about it until The Crib Chick reminded me of it a few weeks ago. I really like Gaskell, and if I would pick this book up before eleven at night when I’m already exhausted, I’d probably be finished.

In spite of all that, this is what I inexplicably pulled off the shelf before bed last night:

Yep, Jane Eyre. I read this, oh, twenty years ago, but it’s alluded to in The Thirteenth Tale, so I’m longing to read it again.

Probably going back to the library unread is Citizen Girl by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus. While I did enjoy their previous book, The Nanny Diaries, this book feels disjointed, and I find myself having to reread sentences a lot to decipher their meaning. While I don’t think reading is always supposed to be effortless, it shouldn’t be this difficult to sort out a bit of dialogue concerning whose turn it is at the copy machine. I might give it a few more pages, though.

It appears that I’m not the only re-reader in the family. Peter is currently reading Eragon for the second time. I haven’t read it, but he tells me it’s the best book ever. (He also re-read the Harry Potter books and a couple of the Narnia books.) I’m actually pleased as punch that he’s reading books more than once, as that, to me, indicates a real love of the characters and story. Considering that I once despaired that this child would ever learn to read, it also causes me to breath a great sigh of relief. Now, as far as his handwriting is concerned…

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I am by no means convinced that we ought not all to be evangelicals, and am at least persuaded that they who are so from reason and feeling must be happiest and safest.

Heh.

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