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**GIVEAWAY HAS ENDED. THANK YOU, EVERYONE!**
No regulars here in the book blogosphere need any introduction to the wonderful Michelle Moran, therefore I'm going to skip all the appetizers and get right down to the main course:
One lucky winner here at Books 'N Border Collies will have delivered to her (or him!) an Autographed Copy of Michelle's upcoming novel, Cleopatra's Daughter. But that's not all! The winner will also receive an Autographed Hard Cover Copy of her previous book, The Heretic Queen that I've been keeping stashed away for a moment just like this!
Leave a comment on this post along with an email address if I can't easily find one in your profile, and you could be the lucky winner of both of these fabulous books! Everyone is eligible. Entries will be accepted until Sept. 9, 6:00 pm Central Time. The winner will be announced the morning of Sept. 10.
And keep your eyes peeled here at Books 'N Border Collies for another fantastic giveaway next week for those of you who were hoping to get your hands on the cool new Jeanne Kalogridis book. The publisher sent me a little surprise . . .
is a remarkable book. Harsh and realistic in a manner that its inspiration only hinted at, it does not have the whimsical charm of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn but is a perfect companion and foil.
is, on the surface, the story of a woman's life as mother, sister, lover and writer. Yet it is also a profound and haunting meditation on the nature of storytelling that only a writer of Coetzee's caliber could accomplish." (From the back cover of the Penguin Books edition.)
is not action-packed. It is subtle and graceful in its questions of right and wrong and its demand to know if the end sometimes can justify the means. It never offers an answer, but the one you give yourself may surprise you.
is more a series of episodes focusing on the various inhabitants of the town than a plot-driven story, and the love of the narrator, Mary Smith, for her former home and its residents is clear right from the start. It's not fawning or smothering, but realistic and powerful in its quaint honesty. She understands the eccentricities of the town but can watch and tell in a less "involved" manner, and her anecdotes highlight the friendship, jealously, resourcefulness and fierce emotion among women that it takes another woman to truly understand.
made portions of the book more predictable but no less evocative and added a rich layer of meaning to many of the scenes. Like so many books about WWII and the Holocaust, this one is difficult but necessary. What I found most memorable was that not all of the Nazi's were stereotyped. There were those who questioned their orders, and those brave souls are the ones who lifted this particular WWII/Holocaust story to a higher plane.
, a comedic and satirical take on American xenophobia. As part of a massive terrorist plot, a handful of young adults head to the Midwestern United States disguised as foreign exchange students. Palahniuk focuses on one of the young terrorists, Pygmy, who chronicles his time in the American Midwest as he and others plan a horrific, spiteful act." (From the CD container.)
is the "book about books" I'm a tiny bit jealous I didn't write. It now serves as my current inspiration. What I really loved about it was that it was less about the books themselves than about the reading life, what it's like to be a dedicated reader. I know many people who read this generated wonderful lists of books they wanted to read, but I was more intrigued by the stories about the act of reading -- the ups and downs and weird obsessive behaviour we reading addicts tend to engage in.
, I was all set to find some DVDs of Hector Mann's films until I remembered he's not real. I wanted to experience for myself the magic of the works described so vividly in the book and to suddenly realize that wasn't possible was almost like a slap in the face. The book deeply explores the many people we are inside, the person we choose to present to the world at different times and who those personae belong to, so the need to come to terms with the fiction of all the creations in their entirety was an odd sensation. I could have sworn I knew them for real! Which, I believe, was part of the point. Who, including ourselves, do we know for real? And do we need to really know someone for that particular relationship to be meaningful to us or to be a force that shapes our lives?
and 
, because I read 
tells the story of a woman of extraordinary beauty and ambition who, catching the eye of the newly crowned boy king, marries him in secret and ascends to royalty. While Elizabeth rises to the demands of her exalted position and fights for the success of her family, her two sons become central figures in a mystery that has confounded historians for centuries: the missing princes in the Tower of London whose fate is still unknown." (From the cover flap.)
. Unfortunately, it didn't live up to my expectations.
as a whole. I am a huge Jeffery Deaver fan, and if that's how he wants to make teens talk, fine. Just get on with the story. And he does.
Dickens presents a critical picture of England in 1853. He condemns the insidious power of a hideous legal system which creeps like London fog into the lives of every character in the book. Dickens ingeniously links characters from all backgrounds from Esther Summerson, an orphan given support by the kindly Mr. Jarndyce, owner of Bleak House, to Lady Dedlock who lives with a secret she can't reveal. Tulkinghorn, the ruthless lawyer, Krook the shopkeeper and Jo, the pathetic crossing-sweeper, are all finely drawn characters that enrich this story of the unravelling of Lady Dedlock's secret by Inspector Bucket, whose appearance in this novel can give it a claim to be the first English detective novel." (From the CD container.)
is rather small and doesn't look like it contains much great information, but it's got some fun trivia questions on each page and I can't help but pick up books about books.
. That one line told me he knows of what he speaks. I can't wait to get to this one!! It looks like he has a blog, too: 
to be an extremely interesting book. It takes on the battles of "Gut v. Intellect" and "Personality v. Expertise". He talks about the above noted Great Premises as they pertain to television and the internet, Intelligent Design v. Darwinism, sensationalist media, talk radio, reality TV, global warming, Terry Schiavo, 9/11, the Iraq War, the War on Terror, the 2008 presidential election, and more. Conservatives will hate this book. Liberals will most likely love it, but they don't completely escape Charles Pierce's scathing commentary either. His irritation is not completely politically driven and therefore merrily crosses party lines here and there. It's not that Pierce believes that America has dumbed itself down, but that it is "selling off what ought never to be rendered a product, . . . and believing itself to have made a good bargain with itself." (p. 276)
