I'm Reading More, So Should You Too GIVEAWAY!

I'm really trying to clock more hours on the reading front, and just finished a must-read! Go to your local library, bookstore, Internet shopping spot, wherever, and pick up a copy of Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore.  It's perfect! (More on what I'm reading now in a later post. Ohhhh, it's good!)



Need some convincing? How about finding out who was Jesus' (as in Christ, yes)  BFF? How about learning how sarcasm came about?

Not enough? What about finding out what the H stands for in Jesus H. Christ? Yea...that!

I'm not trying to be disrespectful or offensive. My faith made this book all the better!

With humorous anachronisms and even a soap opera watching angel, Moore takes us on a journey with Christ as he figures out this whole I'm-divine-yet-fully-human thing. Check out reviews on amazon if you aren't convinced.  Then buy it.

And yes, I mentioned a give-away. What else is summer for but for trying to catch up on all the reading you plan all year long? BUT, I can't give you Lamb. I would love to. It's not mine, and frankly, it would be rude to give away a friend's book, right?

So I did a glance over the bookshelf and decided that there are three worth sharing. No, I'm not giving away something new. No, they aren't expensive. I don't have a ton of followers. I don't have sponsors. It's just little ole me and my bookshelf aight! Don't judge; let's just share some literary love. If you enter and win, at least you can say you won something. And maybe it'll start a great string of awesome giveaway winning luck on your end!

Get to the books already right? Well, let me tell you the rules. First, entering ends Friday, June 17 at midnight CST. Winner will be announced Saturday for my SMS!  Good luck!

You must:
A. Be a follower
B. Comment on this post telling which sounds the most interesting to you

Easy right?
If you want more chances (Extra chances for each):
A. Share this link on fb and leave a comment telling me you did so.
B. Share this link on twitter and tell me you did so.

Boom. Done. Win, and get your reading on!

**Atonement is pretty old. You've probably seen the movie or read it, but maybe not. But here's what the reviewers give us:

From Publishers Weekly

This haunting novel, which just failed to win the Booker this year, is at once McEwan at his most closely observed and psychologically penetrating, and his most sweeping and expansive. It is in effect two, or even three, books in one, all masterfully crafted. The first part ushers us into a domestic crisis that becomes a crime story centered around an event that changes the lives of half a dozen people in an upper-middle-class country home on a hot English summer's day in 1935. Young Briony Tallis, a hyperimaginative 13-year-old who sees her older sister, Cecilia, mysteriously involved with their neighbor Robbie Turner, a fellow Cambridge student subsidized by the Tallis family, points a finger at Robbie when her young cousin is assaulted in the grounds that night; on her testimony alone, Robbie is jailed. The second part of the book moves forward five years to focus on Robbie, now freed and part of the British Army that was cornered and eventually evacuated by a fleet of small boats at Dunkirk during the early days of WWII. This is an astonishingly imagined fresco that bares the full anguish of what Britain in later years came to see as a kind of victory. In the third part, Briony becomes a nurse amid wonderfully observed scenes of London as the nation mobilizes. No, she doesn't have Robbie as a patient, but she begins to come to terms with what she has done and offers to make amends to him and Cecilia, now together as lovers. In an ironic epilogue that is yet another coup de the tre, McEwan offers Briony as an elderly novelist today, revisiting her past in fact and fancy and contributing a moving windup to the sustained flight of a deeply novelistic imagination. With each book McEwan ranges wider, and his powers have never been more fully in evidence than here. Author tour. (Mar. 19)Forecast: McEwan's work has been building a strong literary readership, and the brilliantly evoked prewar and wartime scenes here should extend that; expect strong results from handselling to the faithful. The cover photo of a stately English home nicely establishes the novel's atmosphere

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

**Sarah's Key was...interesting. You just have to check it out.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. De Rosnay's U.S. debut fictionalizes the 1942 Paris roundups and deportations, in which thousands of Jewish families were arrested, held at the Vélodrome d'Hiver outside the city, then transported to Auschwitz. Forty-five-year-old Julia Jarmond, American by birth, moved to Paris when she was 20 and is married to the arrogant, unfaithful Bertrand Tézac, with whom she has an 11-year-old daughter. Julia writes for an American magazine and her editor assigns her to cover the 60th anniversary of the Vél' d'Hiv' roundups. Julia soon learns that the apartment she and Bertrand plan to move into was acquired by Bertrand's family when its Jewish occupants were dispossessed and deported 60 years before. She resolves to find out what happened to the former occupants: Wladyslaw and Rywka Starzynski, parents of 10-year-old Sarah and four-year-old Michel. The more Julia discovers—especially about Sarah, the only member of the Starzynski family to survive—the more she uncovers about Bertrand's family, about France and, finally, herself. Already translated into 15 languages, the novel is De Rosnay's 10th (but her first written in English, her first language). It beautifully conveys Julia's conflicting loyalties, and makes Sarah's trials so riveting, her innocence so absorbing, that the book is hard to put down. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

**And finally, The Postmistress was my favorite of the bunch.

From Publishers Weekly

Weaving together the stories of three very different women loosely tied to each other, debut novelist Blake takes readers back and forth between small town America and war-torn Europe in 1940. Single, 40-year-old postmistress Iris James and young newlywed Emma Trask are both new arrivals to Franklin, Mass., on Cape Cod. While Iris and Emma go about their daily lives, they follow American reporter Frankie Bard on the radio as she delivers powerful and personal accounts from the London Blitz and elsewhere in Europe. While Trask waits for the return of her husband—a volunteer doctor stationed in England—James comes across a letter with valuable information that she chooses to hide. Blake captures two different worlds—a naïve nation in denial and, across the ocean, a continent wracked with terror—with a deft sense of character and plot, and a perfect willingness to take on big, complex questions, such as the merits of truth and truth-telling in wartime. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.