The Winner of the copy of Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game is:
Keith R. (firstaidkeith)
Congratulations, Keith! Your book will be in the mail to you shortly.
Thank you to everyone who commented!
Archive for June, 2014
Free Book Friday Winner!
Sunday, June 15th, 2014Oh say can you see…
Saturday, June 14th, 2014
Free Book Friday!
Friday, June 13th, 2014
This week’s Free Book Friday prize is:
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
Winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards — For the perfect holiday gift for the reader on your list, pick up this special gift edition of one of the most beloved Science Fiction novels ever written. Andrew “Ender” Wiggin thinks he is playing computer simulated war games at the Battle School; he is, in fact, engaged in something far more desperate. Ender is the most talented result of Earth’s desperate quest to create the military genius that the planet needs in its all-out war with an alien enemy.Is Ender the general Earth needs? The only way to find out is to throw the child into ever harsher training, to chip away and find the diamond inside, or destroy him utterly. Ender Wiggin is six years old when it begins. He will grow up fast.But Ender is not the only result of the experiment. The war with the Formics has been raging for a hundred years, and the quest for the perfect general has been underway for almost as long. Ender’s two older siblings, Peter and Valentine, are every bit as unusual as he is, but in very different ways.Between the three of them lie the abilities to remake a world. If, that is, the world survives.
ISBN 9780765317384, Hardcover
1 lucky winner will receive a brand-new copy!
To enter, simply leave a comment on this Blog post. You must be a PaperBackSwap member to win.
We will choose 1 lucky winner at random from comments we receive here on the Blog from PBS members.
You have until Sunday, June 15, 2014 at 12 noon EDT, to leave a comment.
Good Luck to everyone!
Note: All the books given away on Free Book Friday are available in the PBS Market. We have thousands of new and new overstock titles available right now, with more added hourly. Some of the prices are amazing – and you can use a PBS credit to make the deal even better!
Life Lessons
Wednesday, June 11th, 2014Dear Members,
I read something the other day that stopped me and really made me think. You’ve probably run across it on the Internet yourself. Just a simple sentence: “If we all threw our problems in a pile and saw everyone else’s, we’d grab ours back.“ What a powerful statement. It says: We’re not so different from each other – we all have troubles. Even those folks who seem like everything’s perfect have something worrying them. It also says: Be kind. You don’t know what’s troubling someone else, and a little patience, not to mention a smile, can go such a long way. It says: Consider others. Even though it’s human nature to be self-centered, taking a break from it can really lighten life’s burdens.
I kept thinking about that sentence, and I decided to look up its origin. I figured it might be one of those anonymous sayings without a known author, so I was happily surprised to discover that’s not the case. It’s just one of 50 “Life Lessons” penned by Regina Brett in a column she wrote for the Cleveland Plain Dealer in 2006. The whole list is really worth a read! Each one of you will probably find your own favorite there.
Stumbling across something like that list reminds me how the Internet has benefited us all. Not just because we can shop more easily now, or get movies on demand, or video chat with faraway loved ones. Those are wonderful innovations, indeed – but simpler, deeper changes abound. A column in a local paper can reach much farther than it ever could in the days before the Internet. A book that would have been read once and then stayed neglected on a bookshelf can now travel around the country sharing its story with reader after reader. Yes, there were many great things about the world before it went online – and those things don’t need to be lost in the face of progress. We can perpetuate them: we can write a letter now and then instead of an email. We can play Monopoly or Crazy Eights on a rainy day, without a screen in sight. We can lie in a hammock reading a book – a book that we’ll send along to another PaperBackSwap member when we’re done. We can blend the best of both worlds. Nothing’s stopping us!
Happy June,
Richard and
The PaperBackSwap Team
Free Book Friday Winner!
Sunday, June 8th, 2014
The Time Quake by Linda Buckley-Archer
The winner of this week’s Free Book Friday prize is:
Norma M. (virgo)
Congratulations! Your book will be to you soon!
Thank you to everyone who commented!
Free Book Friday!
Friday, June 6th, 2014
This week’s Free Book Friday prize is:
The Time Quake by Linda Buckley-Archer
Time itself is splintering. If the catastrophic consequences of time travel are now impossible to ignore, Lord Luxon only has eyes for its awesome possibilities. He has his sights set on no lesser prize than America. Abducted to 1763, Peter and Kate begin to understand that history has arrived at its tipping point. Adrift in time, Kate transforms into an oracle, able to see the future as easily as the past. While Gideon does all he can to help, he is tormented by the knowledge that The Tar Man, his nemesis, is also his own brother. As they pursue him through the dark streets of eighteenth-century London, and the time quakes begin, Peter realises that this monster may hold the fate of all of us in his hands.
ISBN 9781416915300, Trade Size Paperback
1 lucky winner will receive a brand-new copy!
To enter, simply leave a comment on this Blog post. You must be a PaperBackSwap member to win.
We will choose 1 lucky winner at random from comments we receive here on the Blog from PBS members.
You have until Sunday, June 8, 2014 at 12 noon EDT, to leave a comment.
Good Luck to everyone!
Note: All the books given away on Free Book Friday are available in the PBS Market. We have thousands of new and new overstock titles available right now, with more added hourly. Some of the prices are amazing – and you can use a PBS credit to make the deal even better!
Mystery Monday – Tour De Force
Monday, June 2nd, 2014
Tour De Force by Christianna Brand
Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)
Like Cyril Hare, who wrote only about 10 mysteries before he died young, Christianna Brand wrote only eight whodunnits in the 1940s and early 1950s before raising a family became a bigger priority. Prior to this one, I’d read only Green for Danger (review here), regarded as a classic novel and movie.
As in Green for Danger, Tour De Force features a small group, any member of which had more or less the same motive and opportunity to do in the vic. Brand’s cat and mouse game involves giving the reader fair clues all the way down the line, so it’s excellent for readers who enjoy puzzlers.
Her series character is Detective Inspector Cockrill, nicknamed Cockie, which is as well since we never find out his first name. Bird-like but tough, ironic, mercifully quirk-free but middle-aged enough to be tender-hearted, his base is Kent, but in Tour De Force, he is vacationing solo to San Juan el Pirata (John the Pirate). He is tired of his fellow tourists on the package tour even before he disembarks, and about a third into the novel is he tired of abroad as well.
Indeed, the tourists run the gamut. Cecil Prout is a fashion designer who doesn’t seem to mind who knows he’s gay. Miss Trapp is a lonely woman who is getting the glad eye from Fernando, a Spanish-British tour guide from Gibraltar. Leo Rodd used to be a concert pianist before he lost an arm and his wife Helen helps him so much that she gets on his nerves. A young woman with red hair and lots of flash, Louvaine Barker is in fact a noted novelist. Vanda Lane is a reclusive young woman who is man-hunting. All the characters are well-developed and convincing.
A member of the group turns out to be a blackmailer and ends up with a knife in the chest. Strangely, the suspects were on the beach in plain view of Inspector Cockrill. The local police, smugglers one and all, need a patsy to appease touristic opinion so anybody will do, evidence be damned. Cockie, then, must act to protect his fellow nationals from the horror of injustice at the hands of feudal and sinister foreigners. Underling the farcical aspects of the incidents in the story, Cockie must don the “hapless overseas” mask in a funny scene hinging on the language barrier.
I must confess that at more than 250 pages any mystery starts to weary me and this was no exception. But that’s just me. The reveal is truly a rocker. Justifying the gutsy choice of a title for this novel. I’m sure that readers who like puzzlers a la Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr would get a kick out of this story.
