Congratulations to today’s winner: Jane! She chose the spine-chiller Grave Intent by Deborah LaBlanc. Jane, please send your shipping information to katrina (at) stonoff (dot) com, and I’ll get your book in the mail.

For next week, I have a selection of award winners for two winners to choose from:

• The Echo Makers by Richard Power (National Book Award winner 2006)
• March by Geraldine Brooks (Pulitzer Prize winner 2006)
• A Ship Made of Paper by Scott Spencer (National Book Award Finalist 2003)
• Waiting by Ha Jin (National Book Award winner 1999)
• The Stone Diaries (Pulitzer Prize winner 1995)

To win, just comment below with the name of your first and second choices before noon Sunday (Pacific Time). Then come back next week to see if you’ve won. Contest is open to anyone, anywhere, as long as mail service can reach you.

Not into award winners? Come back next Monday for Your Choice, Any Book, and in two weeks for Beach Reads.

Here’s the hat from which Mad Scientist chose the winners today.

This is one of the most distinctive hats I own, and one of my favorites (I love designs that are imbalanced). The round part sits on the back of your head, and the strip that sticks out wraps around the front just above your forehead. I can’t remember where I got it, but it’s definitely vintage. The label says “Norman Durand Original.” The hat is velvet, and the ribbon is silk, both black though it doesn’t look that way in the picture. The veil (which needs to be steamed) is one of the softest I’ve felt. Very fun to wear, and even just to look at.

Big thanks to all the bloggers who help promote the Monday Book Giveaway: A Contest Blog, A Striped Armchair, Ardently Book Reviews, Blog Giveaways, CallMeaBookworm, Fiction Scribe, In Spring It Is the Dawn, Juxtabook, Laura Williams’ Musings, Melody’s Reading Corner, Mom of 2 Dancers, My Friend Amy, My Weblog, Out of the Blue, Prize-a-Tron, Proud Bookworm, QuiverFullFamily, S. Krishna’s Books, Tara’s View on Books, Things Mean a Lot, and West of Mars. If you found the giveaway via a different blog, please let me know, so I can thank them for the link.

*Yep. Tuesday again. *sigh*

Edited to add photograph

Congratulations to today’s winners: Margay and StampedwithGrace! They each win a copy of Michelle Richmond’s brand new book, No One You Know (which I reviewed here). You’re gonna love this one! Please send your shipping information to katrina (at) stonoff (dot) com, and I’ll get your books on their way to you.

For next week, once again you can win any book I’ve mentioned. It can be a book I’ve already given away, one I’ve referred to on the blog, something I’ve reviewed here or here, or any book on either of my giveaway shelves.

Just leave a comment, telling me which book you want, before noon Sunday (Pacific Time). I’ll choose a winner from one of my hats. Contest is open to anyone, anywhere, as long as mail service can reach you.

Here’s the hat from which Tenor Sensation chose the winners today. I think it’s the last of the vintage hats I bought on ebay.

Funny thing about this hat: I’d never seen it before last week! If you look carefully at last week’s hat, you can see the netting is turquoise though the hat itself is baby blue and white. I’ve never worn it because I thought the netting clashed, plus it was stiff and stuck out in a funny way.

Still, I like the hat other than that, so I photographed it and posted it. As I was putting it away, though, I noticed something weird. Turned out, today’s hat was wedged inside! And this hat is adorable, and a color I wear all the time. In fact, I would have posted a pic of me wearing this one if I hadn’t been alone when I photographed it (I’m not very good at the hold-your-camera-at-arm’s-length thing).

This one also might be homemade as there is no label. It’s made of multiple layers of turquoise tulle wrapped around a stiff frame. The netting, with a lace medallion and beads stitched onto it, is just laid over the top and tacked down.

Big thanks to S. Krishna’s Books, Proud Bookworm, and all the bloggers who help promote the Monday Book Giveaway: A Contest Blog, A Striped Armchair, Ardently Book Reviews, Blog Giveaways, CallMeaBookworm, Fiction Scribe, In Spring It Is the Dawn, Juxtabook, Laura Williams’ Musings, Melody’s Reading Corner, Mom of 2 Dancers, My Friend Amy, My Weblog, Out of the Blue, Prize-a-Tron, QuiverFullFamily, Tara’s View on Books, Things Mean a Lot, and West of Mars. If you found the giveaway via a different blog, please let me know, so I can thank them for the link.

Today we had some extra time in children’s church. Of course I was willing to fill it by leading the children in some of their favorite songs. They chose a song I taught them two or three years ago. It’s a favorite, and we all know it by heart, but we haven’t sung it in several months.

I could not remember how it started, so I asked the children who could remember the first line (yes, I’m clever that way). Several children volunteered different “first lines,” but none of them sounded familiar to me. Could they have forgotten one of our favorite songs?

I asked the pianist to play the first line, to remind us how it started, and she played a snippet of melody with one hand. It was completely unfamiliar. I swear, I had never heard that song before. I repeated the name of the song, thinking she must be playing something else. But she just nodded and repeated the unfamiliar melody.

I didn’t know what else to do, so I told her to play the introduction, and hopefully we’d all remember it when it was time to sing. And indeed, within a measure of the introduction, the song dropped into place like an old friend, and I sang it without hesitation. But I sure didn’t recognize it from just the snippets of melody and the first line!

It reminds me of something that happened when I was working at Arizona State University to pay my tuition. I was secretary to a chemistry professor, and I did a lot of transcribing with a dictaphone from microcassettes. I was good at it: fast and accurate, and I’d gotten the job because on my practice test, I’d spelled unknown chemical names and processes correctly, just by sounding them out.

Well, one day, for whatever reason, I was merrily typing away, and I got to an common, one-syllable word we all use every day. But I could NOT remember how to spell it. I backed up the tape, tried to turn off my over-analytical brain, and took another run at the sentence. Nothing. I did fine up to that word, but then my brain just stalled. I could not spell it. I tried spelling it phonetically, but nothing looked right. I checked my little pamphlet of “Commonly Misspelled Words,” but it wasn’t listed. I even tried looking it up in the dictionary, but it’s impossible to find a word in the dictionary if you don’t know how to spell it!

I spent probably 15 or 20 minutes trying to figure out how to spell this simple, familiar word, but eventually I had to give up. I asked my boss.

To his credit, he said nothing, simply spelled the word for me (though he did give me a VERY strange, “Are you serious?!” look). And of course, the moment he did, it was obvious, and I had to laugh at myself for not remembering it.

The word I couldn’t remember how to spell?

“Of.”

Today’s winners are … rat-a-tat-atat! … Christy H. and Pamela White! Each wins a copy of Sarah Strohmeyer’s brand new book, Sweet Love, signed and inscribed by the author. Congratulations! Please send your shipping information (and the name to whom you want the book inscribed) to katrina (at) stonoff (dot) com, and I’ll have Sarah get your personalized books in the mail!

For this week, I have another, brand new book to give away! Michelle Richmond’s No One You Know. As I said in my review, this a fabulous book, my favorite so far in 2008, and I am very excited to share it with you. I expect to be hearing a lot about it this year, and this is your chance to read it before your friends. Then you can help create the buzz!

For a chance to win, comment below before noon Sunday (Pacific Time). Next Monday, I’ll announce two winners. Anyone can enter, even if you’ve won before or are related to me, as long as you have access to reliable mail service. Good luck!

Now, the hat from which Girly Girl picked the winners:

This is another of the hats I bought on e-bay, which I believe belonged to the same, Southern woman. It’s made of bridal netting in turquoise and white, perhaps made by hand since there’s no label.

Big thanks to Proud Bookworm and all the bloggers who help promote the Monday Book Giveaway: A Contest Blog, A Striped Armchair, Ardently Book Reviews, Blog Giveaways, CallMeaBookworm, Fiction Scribe, In Spring It Is the Dawn, Juxtabook, Laura Williams’ Musings, Melody’s Reading Corner, Mom of 2 Dancers, My Friend Amy, My Weblog, Out of the Blue, Prize-a-Tron, QuiverFullFamily, Tara’s View on Books, Things Mean a Lot, and West of Mars. If you found the giveaway via a different blog, please let me know, so I can thank them for the link.

I had planned to post a thoughtful, erudite literary analysis of No One You Know, by Michelle Richmond, the kind of review you might read in the New York Times Review of Books, the kind of review a book of this caliber really deserves.

But I live in the real world, and it’s messy. My parents have been visiting all week, and the seven of us have been passing two sets of bugs back and forth the whole time. The only person who hasn’t been sick is my 10-year-old daughter.

And now it’s Sunday evening, and I’m out of time. So instead of insightful literary commentary, you get just me: pumped full of codeine cough syrup and trying to think through a head filled with congestion.

So I’ll simply state in plain, won’t-impress-nobody language: this book is exquisite. Richmond’s previous novel, A Year of Fog, was one of my two favorite books of 2007, and No One You Know is even stronger. More compelling, more complex, and even more satisfying. Definitely my favorite novel of 2008 (at least, so far).

It’s about Ellie, a coffee buyer who is haunted by the unsolved 20-year-old murder of her sister Lila. A chance encounter in a obscure Nicaraguan cafe leads her on a search to answer the question, once and for all, of what happened.

The opening scene takes place in a cafe (”the kind of establishment where one could order a plate of beans and a cup of coffee any time of the day or night”) at the end of a crooked alleyway in Diriomo, a town locals call Pueblo Brujo, or “bewitched village.”

And indeed, I felt betwitched. I was immediately transported, and a part of me remains there still, sitting in that cafe, eating a nacatamal, watching an oddly familiar stranger in the candlelight as he ducks his head and pulls down his baseball cap.

In fact, so mesmerizing is this book, that a day or two after finishing it, I caught a whiff of coffee brewing somewhere, and I instinctively reached for a spoon, to break the dark crust. For that split second, I was no longer Katrina at all, but Ellie in a cupping room, about to take the first scent and taste of a new blend.

There are so many fascinating elements of this book. The process of making coffee, for one. The study of mathematics, for another. Even a detailed observance of El Dia de los Muertos (of particular interest to me because I also included this celebration in my as-yet-unpublished novel, East of Jesus).

And patterns, patterns that form from randomness. This theme is introduced visually in the first scene, through candlelight flickering on the wall, making images “too lovely and symmetrical to be random.” It comes full circle at the end when Ellie says, “I had long believed that Diriomo was an exceptional place, where the ordinary laws of randomness did not apply. But maybe I had been wrong. Maybe there was symmetry everywhere.”

No One You Know has everything a great book should have: fascinating characters who live and breath independently; philosophical questions for a reader to mull over long after the book has been set aside; exquisite settings that truly exist in the reader’s mind; and a driving suspense that keeps the reader inexorably turning pages even when she’d rather slow down to make the experience last longer.

Reading No One You Know changed me. It changed the way I smell coffee. It changed the way I think about the stories we tell ourselves. It changed my view of math and Nicaragua and the quest to write bestselling fiction. It even changed the way I carry myself through space. It burrowed inside me and took root, and now, like all great stories, it becomes something different, shaped through my perspective.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

Whoo hoo! What a fun, fun day! I get to give away two reader’s choice books, offer Sarah Strohmeyer’s new book, AND give you all a little something sweet, to say thank you for reading.

First, two new winners <insert drum roll here>: Ginnie and Lace!! Congratulations! Ginnie chose the Southern Living Cooking (this one?), and Lace chose Inkdeath by Cornelia Funke (pre-orders are fine, Lace). Ginnie and Lace, please send your shipping information to katrina (at) stonoff (dot) com, and I’ll get your books in the mail.

If you didn’t win today, come back! I do a book giveaway every Monday, and every four weeks or so, it’s Your Choice.

For next week, I may have mentioned (*ahem*) that Sarah Strohmeyer’s new book comes out Thursday. I cannot wait! I pre-ordered it the day she sent notice to her fans that it was coming. It’s called Sweet Love, and it features a woman who expresses love by cooking spectacular desserts (and her daughter Julie, who is alone at age 40 because Mom chased off her only love when she was 17). What’s not to love? You can read an excerpt here. Even better, Sarah has graciously agreed to inscribe the books to the winners. Yay!

So, to win an autographed copy of Sweet Love by Sarah Strohmeyer, just comment below by noon Sunday (Pacific Time). Monday, I’ll announce the two winners. Contest open to anyone who has access to reliable mail service.

And come back next week. I’ll be offering another brand new release by an amazing author: No One You Know by Michelle Richmond. It’s a STUNNING book, even better than A Year of Fog (my favorite book of 2007). I’ll be posting a glowing review of it later this week, so watch for it! And come back next Monday to win.

Now, my gift to you. Inspired by Sarah Strohmeyer’s dessert-cooking character, I offer you an original recipe for a cake that will give you a culinary orgasm. Yes, it’s that good*.

Lime Upon Lime Cake

This is a very rich, very dense and moist cake with lime curd filling and a glaze that crystallizes for a satisfying crunch. Every bite tastes like fresh lime. If you’d like to make it, I’ve posted the recipe here.

And finally, here’s the hat from which my mother chose the winners (she didn’t enter this week, don’t worry).

Again, it’s vintage (an ebay find), with a Chapeaux label. My sister (fabric artist extraordinaire) said the fabric appears to be a silk velvet, and it has a silk brocade lining. It’s decorated with loads of beads and metallic braid and embroidery. Very fun hat!

Big thanks to all the bloggers who help promote the Monday Book Giveaway: A Contest Blog, A Striped Armchair, Ardently Book Reviews, Blog Giveaways, CallMeaBookworm, Fiction Scribe, In Spring It Is the Dawn, Juxtabook, Laura Williams’ Musings, Melody’s Reading Corner, Mom of 2 Dancers, My Friend Amy, My Weblog, Out of the Blue, Prize-a-Tron, QuiverFullFamily, Tara’s View on Books, Things Mean a Lot, and West of Mars. If you found the giveaway via a different blog, please let me know, so I can thank them for the link.

*Sadly, however, it is not “that” pretty, at least not in this picture. Because the cake has to be assembled fast, I prepped all the ingredients before I started. I even sifted the powdered sugar to make sure the glaze wouldn’t be clumpy. But my family is visiting, and when it came time to mix the glaze, I was yakking with my sister. And instead of putting two tablespoons of water into the powdered sugar, I put in two cups! I had to dump the glaze and start over, but I didn’t have time to sift the sugar again. *sigh* But trust me … she might not look sexy, but you’ll moan with every bite.

Mad Scientist told Mars he had a sore on his leg, so Mars examined it and found a reddish bump. “Is this it?” he asked.

“No,” Mad Scientist said. “That’s my lucky pimple.”

I drove the kids to school today to deliver little gifts to their teachers, and when I left the school, I went to the local bakery/coffee shop to pick up some bread. Here’s what I saw.

Nowhere to park! I parked in the next block and while I was walking down the sidewalk, I noticed something odd. Every single vehicle was a Mommymobile: a minivan or SUV large enough for at least a week’s worth of groceries and four children with no squabbling for real estate.

I figured they were at the bakery enjoying one last undisturbed croissant before the seething masses descended on their peace and quiet. *ahem* I meant to say, celebrating that in a scant few hours their beloved school age children would be home 24-7.

Sure enough. I stepped into the coffee shop to find 20 or 25 women and half a dozen preschoolers. Commiserating. Or celebrating, one or the other.

Image via Wikipedia

I do have rocks in my head!

Well, technically, they are in my inner ear, but that’s definitely in my head.

I have had dizzy spells once or twice a year for several years now. I mentioned them to my doctor, and she said, “That happens sometimes.” I’ve been treated for inner infections and given anti-nausea medicine, but it doesn’t help. Still, since they only lasted a day or two, I didn’t worry too much about it.

Wednesday morning I awoke, sat up, and promptly keeled over as the room spun around me. It was a busy week though, and I couldn’t afford to sit it out. So I eased myself up until I could sit upright, and went about my life. Thursday I had an orthodontist appointment, and when the assistant leaned my chair back, I went into orbit. Nearly passed out, and this time, it lasted for a full week. But it turned out to be lucky because two women in the office were familiar with the problem and gave me a name to Google: Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo (BPPV).

Apparently, dizziness is the third most common reason people go to the doctor. Fifty percent of dizziness is related to inner ear problems, and fifty percent of the time, it’s BPPV. But many doctors don’t know about it, and most don’t know the treatment: very simple, in-office maneuvers that have a incredibly high success rate.

Essentially, BPPV is caused by crystals that grow in the inner ear (usually in older people or after head injuries and migraines). They disturb the canals that help us keep our balance, so you get motion sickness every time you move your head.

Once I knew that, I found a physical therapist who could treat it and got an appointment for Monday. It took a few days for the nausea to settle, but I’m pretty much back to normal now. Yeah!

Oh, and my mother didn’t really say I had rocks in my head. Nope. What she said was that I had a hole in my head.

Two winners today! And they are … ba dump bump … Teresa W. and Cheryl S.! Congratulations! Each wins her choice of a book by Sarah Strohmeyer. Please send your shipping information to katrina (at) stonoff (dot) com, and I’ll get your books on their way. Cheryl chose The Cinderella Pact, and Teresa chose The Sleeping Beauty Proposal. Congrats again, both of you!

Don’t forget to come back next week for a chance at an autographed, inscribed copy of Strohmeyer’s brand new book, Sweet Love (you can read the first chapter if you click on the link). AND something very special and extra sweet from me.

But today it’s another Choose Your Own Book giveaway! One winner. Any book. That’s right, any book (well, any book readily available for $25 or less, not counting shipping). Just comment below by noon Sunday (Pacific Time), and I’ll choose a winner. Anyone can win — even my mother and today’s winners — as long as you have access to reliable mail service

Here’s the hat from which Tenor Sensation (home from college) chose the winners today.

This one is also a vintage hat though I can’t remember where I got it (maybe a yard sale?). It’s 100 percent wool and deceptively simple. I say deceptively because this is actually one of the cutest hats I own, but the appeal is in its impeccable shape. One of the ways I can tell it’s vintage, though, is that it’s very small (apparently heads ran smaller way back then). It perches on the top of my hair like a bird afraid to settle into the nest.

Big thanks to Out of the Blue and all the bloggers who help promote the Monday Book Giveaway: A Contest Blog, A Striped Armchair, Ardently Book Reviews, Blog Giveaways, CallMeaBookworm, Fiction Scribe, In Spring It Is the Dawn, Juxtabook, Laura Williams’ Musings, Melody’s Reading Corner, Mom of 2 Dancers, My Friend Amy, My Weblog, Prize-a-Tron, QuiverFullFamily, Tara’s View on Books, Things Mean a Lot, and West of Mars. If you found the giveaway via a different blog, please let me know, so I can thank them for the link.

*Yeah, it’s Tuesday again. And late in the day at that. *sigh* Sorry!