Mailbox Monday and GIVEAWAY

Thanks for joining me for Mailbox Monday! I also have a new GIVEAWAY this week and three winners of last week's giveaway.  Keep reading through the post to find all the goodies.

MAILBOX MONDAY

Mailbox Monday is the gathering place for readers to share the books that came into their house last week. (Library books don’t count, but eBooks & audiobooks do). Warning: Mailbox Monday can lead to envy, toppling TBR piles and humongous wish lists!

Mailbox Monday was created by Marcia at The Printed Page, who graciously hosted it for a long, long time, before turning it into a touring meme (details here). I am very pleased to host this month.

Please leave the link to your Mailbox Monday post with Mr. Linky. If you do not have a blog, leave your mailbox list in a comment.

GIVEAWAY WINNER

Last week I had three copies to give away of Emotional Currency: A Woman's Guide to Building a Healthy Relationship with Moneyby Kate Levinson, PhD.  The full title gives a pretty good description.  It sounds like a book all women should read.



THE BOOK: Emotional Currency gives women the tools to understand – and challenge – their psychological relationship with money so they can make smarter decisions about their current and future financial responsibilities.

Here’s the book every woman (and most men) need: a clear, thoughtful, and beautifully-written guide for how to cope with the myriad of emotions caused by money. Kate Levinson – practicing therapist and businesswoman –shows how money is both mercilessly public and intimately personal – stirring up our deepest feelings about dependence and independence, status, attractiveness, and terrifying confusion between net worth and self worth. Women in today’s economy are especially vulnerable because of gender biases in the workplace, patterns of parenting and upbringing that assume women do not “handle” financial matters well, and social norms that still disapprove of money-wise women. This book is a wise and important antidote.

Robert B. Reich
Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy
Goldman School of Public Policy
University of California, Berkeley

THE WINNERS: Based on random.org's choices, the winners are:

• J.G. at Hotchpot Cafe
• LKT at The Infusion
• Carol at Carol's Notebook

Thank you to all who participated and congratulations to the winners!  I will contact you shortly.

THIS WEEK'S GIVAWAY

Again thanks to book publicist extraordinaire, Mary Bisbee-Beek, I have three copies of JOYRIDE: Pedaling Toward A Healthier Planet By Mia Birk with Joe "Metal Cowboy" Kurmaskie (published by Cadence Press). These are finished books, not ARCS.

Mia Birk lives in Portland and is available for speaking engagements in the area.  She is also available for blog interviews.  If anyone is interested, please contact Mary Bisbee-Beek via her LinkedIn profile, or leave your email in a comment and Mary will contact you.




THE BOOK: This is the inspiring story of pioneering transportation leader Mia Birk's 20-year crusade to integrate bicycling into daily life. With a table scrap of funding, Mia led a revolution that grew Portland, Oregon into the #1 American cycling city. Mia then hit the road, helping make communities across the nation -- even her hometown of Dallas, Texas -- more human, healthy, safe, and livable. While many books today extol the pain of our world's problems, Mia's funny, touching Joyride is the antidote, offering hope to any and everyone interested in changing our world, one pedal stroke at a time.


THE RULES: The contest is open until Sunday, January 30, 2011. To enter, do any or all of the following, but you must leave a comment for each one:

1. Leave a comment on this post. You must include a way to contact you (email or website address in your comment or available in your profile). If I can't find a way to contact you I will draw another winner. (1 entry)

2. Blog about this giveaway. (Posting the giveaway on your sidebar is also acceptable.) Leave a separate comment with a link to your post. (1 entry)

3. Subscribe to my rss feed, follow me on blogger, or subscribe via email (or tell me if you already are a subscriber or follower). Leave a separate comment for this. (1 entry)

4. Tweet this post on Twitter. Leave me a separate comment with your twitter user name. (1 entry)

5. Stumble this blog, digg it, technorati fave it, or link it on facebook. Leave a separate comment. (1 entry)

There are a lot of ways to enter (maximum of five entries), but you must LEAVE A SEPARATE COMMENT for each one or they will not count. I will use random.org to pick the winners from the comments.

This contest is open to entries from the U.S. and Canada only. The deadline for entry is 9:00 PM, Pacific Time, on Sunday, January 30, 2011. I will draw and post the winner's name in my Mailbox Monday post for January 31, 2011.

MY MAILBOX

My New Year's reading resolution was to tackle my Guilt List and to stop adding to it.  Luckily, I keep a separate list for LibraryThing Early Reviewer books, so this one doesn't count. Really.



Shipwrecks, Monsters, and Mysteries of the Great Lakes by Ed Butts.  This is a short book with 10 stories of Great Lakes adventures.  I asked for it because it would tickle my husband's reading fancy, but I am going to tear through it myself.

I also hit the jackpot at Powell's the other day.  I always check the Anthony Powell shelf when I am there (no relation, and the book store name rhymes with "towel," while the author's name sounds more like "pole"), looking for books other than A Dance to the Music of Time.  The Dance books are always there, but it is hard to find his others.  I got lucky.



From a View to a Death, his third novel, first published in 1933, before he started Dance.



What's Become of Waring, his fifth novel, first published in 1939, also before he started Dance.

To Keep the Ball Rolling: Infants of the Spring and To Keep the Ball Rolling: Messengers of Day, the first two volumes of his four-volume memoirs, published in1976 and 1978. They have plain gray covers with no dustjackets.



The Fisher King, a novel first published in 1986, after he completed Dance.

Opening Sentence of the Day: 365 Thank Yous

"On December 22, 2007, I felt my life was at an irreversible personal nadir."

-- 365 Thank Yous: The Year a Simple Act of Daily Gratitude Changed My Life by John Kralik.

The senior partner at my firm gave me this for Christmas.  Then, just the other day, he wrote me a letter thanking me for joining the firm as a partner and saying some very nice things about me.  He laid it on pretty thick, but I have to say that it sure made my day.  He told me he has been writing similar letters to people because he was inspired by this book. I'm intrigued.

Opening Sentence of the Day: G

"The father of the principal protagonist of this book was called Umberto."

-- G by John Berger.

This is one of only three books to win both the Booker Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.  I am reading it as my last book for the 2010 Battle of the Prizes, British Version, which ends on January 31.

I am only 67 pages into it and I like it so far.  I am worried that it is going to take a weird or bad turn that will leave me not liking it, because J.G. at Hotchpot Cafe doesn't care for it and we have similar taste in books.

Literary Blog Hop: Hateful

The Blue Bookcase hosts a "Literary Blog Hop" for blogs "that primarily feature reviews of literary fiction, classic literature, and general literary discussion."

Each week, in addition to hopping around and visiting some terrific book blogs, participants answer a bookish question.  This week's question -- answered very well for the BB team by Lucia -- is:

Discuss a work of literary merit that you hated when you were made to read it in school or university. Why did you dislike it?

"School or university" was a long time ago and, looking back, I can think of several books I "hated" while I was reading them. The Grapes of Wrath, 1984, Sister Carrie, and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage come immediately to mind.  But, the thing is, I don't think I would hate them now.  I simply didn't understand them when I read them or was bored by them with the profound boredom of a teenager.  I re-read Sister Carrie, for instance, and enjoyed it tremendously (review here).

But there is one book that I can honestly say I hated -- I hated it then and I am certain I would hate it now:  Waiting for Godot.

I don't care if this confession brands me a literary Philistine.  Irish critic Vivian Mercier famously described Samuel Beckett's masterpiece as "a play in which nothing happens, twice."  I had to read it twice, for two different college classes, and I saw it performed once in London, so in my personal experience, nothing happened six times.

Why did I hate it? I found it excruciating. Absurdist theater is not for those who seek a plot. Or character development. Or clever dialog. Or even just a scintilla of entertainment.

In Annie Hall, Woody Allen tells Diane Keaton, "Never take a class where they make read Beowulf." My advise is to skip any class involving Waiting for Godot.

Review of the Day: One City's Wilderness

One of Portland's many blessings is Forest Park, a swath of green on the city's western flank, covering over 5,100 acres and containing close to 80 miles of trails, including the Wildwood Trail, the longest contiguous trail in a city park in the United States.

In the updated and expanded third edition of One City's Wilderness, Marcy Cottrell Houle provides the quintessential guide to this incredible urban park. The book contains detailed descriptions of 29 hikes covering all the trails through the park. Each description includes a full-color map; useful statistics, including GPS coordinates; an elevation chart showing elevation gained and lost over the course of the hike; a precise description of the trail and what you will see; and useful sidebars providing tidbits on the history, flora, fauna, and geology relevant to that section of the park. There is also a foldout color map of the entire park inside the back cover.

The book is chock-o-block full of photographs of the park, including color pictures of the park's most beautiful features, field guide sections on plants and birds, and a few black and white photos depicting the park's history.

Houle also includes informative chapters on the history of the park, its geology, watersheds, vegetation, and wildlife. These later include checklists of the plants, mammals, and birds to be found in the park.

But the book is primarily about the trails because hiking through Forrest Park is how best to experience and enjoy it. As Houle explains:

Forest Park is not overrun with asphalt, swimming pools, picnic areas, or developed sports fields. Instead, since its inception sixty years ago, it has offered a quiet kind of enjoyment, the kind most cherished by lovers of the outdoors. The eighty miles of trails and firelanes . . . and the hundreds of acres of hills and canyons in between, make Forest Park a haven for hikers, bird watchers, nature photographers, runners, bicyclists, equestrians, teachers, and students – in short, anyone needing close-in inspiration and natural refreshment.

Every reader will be inspired to accept Houle's "All Trails Challenge" to undertake all of the 29 hikes described. Conveniently, the book contains a challenge section listing the hikes and including a place to record the date each one is accomplished.

One City's Wilderness is a must-have guide for every hiker living in or visiting Portland.

OTHER REVIEWS

(If you would like your review of this book listed here, please leave a comment with a link and I will add it.  Also, if you have hiked any of the trails described in this book and would like your review of that hike listed here, leave a comment with a link and I will list that post.)

NOTES

This is another high quality book from the Oregon State University Press.