Happy Haulidays Giveaway! Win $500 worth of books from Chronicle Books! (Holiday Gift Guide)

Holiday Gift Guide posts feature books and products that I feel would make great holiday gifts for yourself or for someone else.

Have you ever sat and wondered, "Wow; if I had $500 to spend just on books, I wonder what I'd get?"  I have ... and I figured out that $500 gives you a heckofalotta books!

Here's my list (very eclectic, as is my reading style):

CRAFTY/FOODIE/KNITTY:

Fast Breads: 50 Recipes for Easy, Delicious Bread - $19.95 - Best-selling author and baking authority Elinor Klivans presents 65 of the finest and fastest recipes for baking homemade breads. With simple, easy-to-master techniques, anyone can quickly make such delightful treats as Apricot Corn Muffins, Butter Crescents, plus really super-fast favorites like Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Pancakes and Very Big Popovers, all with a minimum of sweat in the kitchen. From morning treats like crumpets, muffins, and sticky breads to savory and nutritious multigrains and dark ryes, Fast Breads will make a master bread maker of any baker—in record fast time, too!

Field Guide to Candy: How to Identify and Make Virtually Every Candy Imaginable - $15.95 - What puts the crunch in buttercrunch toffee? How do you cook the perfect raspberry chocolate truffle? What's the secret to making lollipops and lemon drops? Discover these answers and more in Field Guide to Candy, a handy pocket reference to more than 100 recipes, complete with serving suggestions and fascinating historical trivia (in the 1940s, gumdrop cakes were among the most popular desserts in America).

Field Guide to Candy includes traditional favorites and exotic treats from all over the world, everything from peanut butter cups and salt-water taffy to Pastelia (Greek honey candy) and Turkish Delight. Each candy is photographed in glorious full color, with step-by-step instructions on how to prepare, make, serve, and store your creations. Yummy homemade confections are just minutes away with Field Guide to Candy in your pantry!

D.I.Y. Delicious: Recipes and Ideas for Simple Food from Scratch - $24.95 - For crafty green types who want to master the fundamentals of a scratch pantry and have graduated from simple weekend jam and baking activities, this book offers a wide variety of recipes and blueprints for artisanal food projects. Forty projects with accompanying recipes appeal to a range of skill levels and palates. D.I.Y. Delicious goes beyond pickling and preserving into fermenting, culturing cheese, and brewing sodas and tonics. A total of 75 recipes and more than 50 step-by-step, color photographs lead the way to outfitting a scratch pantry that uses fewer ingredients to make delicious staples at a much lower cost.

Baby Knits Kit: Instructions and Tools for 25 Snuggly Projects by Sara Lucas  - $24.95 - From beautiful baby bonnets to soft sweaters and blankets, the Baby Knits Kit is filled with ways to dress new arrivals in style. Inside the 64-page booklet are easy-to-follow instructions and illustrations for getting started, and each of the 25 project cards feature color photographs of the finished projects. Kit includes:
• A set of circular needles
• Two stitch markers
• 50 yards of yarn

The Illuminated Lettering Kit: Materials, Techniques, and Projects for Decorative Calligraphy by George Thomson - $24.95 - Illuminated lettering is an art form from medieval times that maintains its allure and beauty today. Combining calligraphy, painting, and gilding, illuminated lettering is a skill that's surprisingly easy to learn. With this kit, you have everything you need to create your own illuminated masterpieces, perfect for holidays, as birthday gifts, or to adorn your home. Includes an easy-to-follow instruction book with alphabets and templates to trace and varied project ideas, and all the materials to get you started.

Knit Knack Kit Simple Instructions and Tools for 25 Terrific Knitting Projects - $22.95 - Knit Knack Kit offers everything you need to get the knack for knitting. Based on the book Knitting Pretty, this handy kit includes a book illustrating knitting stiches and techniques, circular needles, stitch holders, a yarn needle, and 25 simple yet chic patterns (including nine new patterns!). From quick and easy projects (Plain Old Scarf) to grander endeavors (Hipster Kerchief) the Knit Knack Kit makes it fun to curl up and purl up!

Mastering the Art of Beading: Essential Tools and Techniques Every Jewelry Maker Must Know by Genevieve A. Sterbenz - $27.50 - Mastering the Art of Beading will do for jewelry making what Julia Child did for French food. In this definitive guide to all things beads, expert jewelry maker Genevieve A. Sterbenz covers all of the terms, tools, skills, and shortcuts necessary for creating beautiful beaded jewelry. With more than 800 how-to photographs, detailed and illustrated techniques, a photographic glossary, and useful resources, this book is packed to the brim with beading essentials. In addition, Sterbenz presents step-by-step instructions for 50 stunning projects in a range of techniques and styles. An accessible compendium dissecting every aspect of this popular craft, Mastering the Art of Beading will be the resource crafters—dabblers and experts alike—will want on their bookshelf for years to come.

FOR MY READING PLEASURE:

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies Deluxe Heirloom Edition - $24.95 - "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains." So begins Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, an expanded edition of the beloved Jane Austen novel featuring all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie mayhem. This deluxe heirloom edition includes a new preface by coauthor Seth Grahame-Smith, thirteen oil-painting illustrations by Roberto Parada, and a fascinating afterword by Dr. Allen Grove of Alfred University. Best of all, this limited special edition features an incredible 30 percent more zombies—via even more all-new scenes of carnage, corpse slaying, and cannibalism. Complete with a satin ribbon marker and a leatherette binding designed to endure for generations, this hardcover volume honors a masterpiece of classic zombie literature.

The Gravedigger by Peter Grandbois - $13.95 - "Reminiscent of the work of Luis Alberto Urrea and Gabriel García Márquez” (Booklist), this enchanting first novel—now in paperback—was an Original Voices feature at Borders and a Discover Great New Writers selection at Barnes & Noble. Juan Rodrigo, a gravedigger in a small Andalusian village, hears the voices of the dead and tells their stories to the living—a job that turns out to have both rewards and dangers in a magical place where spirits and people coexist harmoniously, and where readers will linger with delight.

Small Town Odds by Jason Headley  - $12.95 - "With winning wit and compassionate, delightful prose" (Publishers Weekly), Jason Headley tells the story of a young man trapped in a small West Virginia town. Enormously likable and a habitual screw-up, Eric Mercer has settled into a sometimes raucous, underachieving life in his one-stoplight hometown—a life cobbled together from his part-time activities as bartender at the American Legion, assistant mortician, and father to his beloved 5-year-old daughter, Tess. Tess seems to be the main reason smart, talented, twenty-four-year-old Eric is staying in town, though her mom, a centerfold-quality beauty, would have it otherwise. When Jill, the lost love of his life, returns to Pinely in the same week that the town goes nuts in preparation for the high school football team's Big Game, life unexpectedly shifts into high gear, and Eric must blunder his way toward enlightenment—fast. Authentic and refreshingly unpredictable, Small Town Odds is written with an acute sense of place and character reminiscent of Richard Russo.

Any Bitter Thing: A Novel by Monica Wood - $23.95 - Richard Russo has celebrated Monica Wood's fiction as "thoroughly captivating…warm and wise and beautifully written," and Andre Dubus III praised it as "luminous and graceful…entertaining yet transcendent." Any Bitter Thing, Wood's brilliant new novel, is her breakout book, a timely, gripping, and compassionate tale of family, faith, and deeply hidden truths. One of its greatest strengths is its continuous ability to defy expectations. It's not what you think. It is worse. Lizzy Mitchell was raised from the age of two by her uncle, a Catholic priest. When she was nine, he was falsely accused of improprieties with her and dismissed from his church, and she was sent away to boarding school. Now thirty years old and in a failing marriage, she is nearly killed in a traffic accident. What she discovers when she sets out to find the truths surrounding the accident—and about the accusations that led to her uncle's death—does more than change her life. With deft insight into the snares of the human heart, Monica Wood has written an intimate and emotionally expansive novel full of understanding and hope

The Wishing Box:  A Novel by Dashka Slater - $22.95 $9.18 - A sometimes funny, sometimes magical first novel, The Wishing Box explores the surprising and unintended consequences of getting what you ask for. Julia, an almost-30 single mom whose life is mostly together, lives in Oakland with her seven-year-old son. Never suspecting it will actually work, she and her sister create a wishing box and half-seriously hold a ceremony for the return of the father who abandoned them as children. Astonishingly, he comes back—but Julia's life has already moved abruptly in a new direction, and she has taken off in much the same way her father had many years before. Julia and her unusual family are at the heart of this novel about appearances and disappearances, the desire to control the future and explain the past, and the legacies passed on from one generation to another.

FUN FOR ME AND BEBE BOY JAMES:

Masterpuppet Theater - $14.95 - All the world's a stage—and with this extraordinary book-plus kit, you can dramatize the most memorable scenes in all of theatre. Contents include:

• Sixty finger-puppet cards featuring Shakespeare's most famous characters, including Hamlet, Lady Macbeth, King Lear, Othello, Shylock, and Falstaff
• Twelve stand-up sets of castles, forests, balconies, and battlefields
• A 96-page "folio" of classic scenes—from Hamlet's "To Be or Not to Be" soliloquy to Romeo and Juliet's classic balcony serenade

Once you've finished staging the Bard's entire canon, you can mix and match masterpuppets to produce your own Shakespearean mash-ups. Perhaps your Romeo will fall in love with Lady Macbeth!

Every Day's a Holiday:Year-Round Crafting with Kids - $22.50 - Kids love making crafts, and no one knows that better than Heidi Kenney, creator of the popular blog My Paper Crane. In this festive how-to book, Heidi shares a year's worth of classic and not-so-classic projects that the whole family will enjoy, from the National Bird Day embroidered handmade book to the St. Patrick's Day mini leprechaun pin. Fifty fully photographed projects are geared to all age levels and abilities. Some—like the New Year's Day newspaper hats—are simple enough for small kids to make themselves with minimum assistance, while more complicated projects require a little extra help from mom or dad. With so many fun projects to bring the family together, Every Day's a Holiday proves that every day really is a holiday.

FOR BEBE BOY JAMES:

Aesop's Fables: A Classic Illustrated Edition by Russell Ash and Bernard Higton - $19.99 -  The Hare and the Tortoise. The Lion and the Mouse. The Boy Who Cried Wolf. The Jackdaw and the Borrowed Plumage. For generations, these titles and scores of others have been synonymous with the best in the timeless literature of childhood. Although he was probably as mythical as the tales attributed to him, the legendary name of Aesop has been associated for thousands of years with an enduringly popular collection of enchanting fables. In the lavish tradition of Chronicle Books' classic illustrated edition of A Child's Garden of Verses, this delightful selection of Aesop's parables--some of them universally recognizable, others refreshingly unfamiliar--is magnificently complemented by illustrations taken from a variety of antique editions. Among the artists represented in this superbly designed and beautifully reproduced new volume are Arthur Rackham, Thomas Bewick, Walter Crane, Charles Robinson, and Randolph Caldecott. Fully captioned illustrations, a complete bibliography of sources, and a set of biographical notes on the artists make this stunning compendium an ideal gift for any child as well as a valutable companion for collectors of fine illustrated books.

Olive, the Other Reindeer, Deluxe Edition - J.otto Seibold and Vivian Walsh - $19.99 - This beautiful deluxe edition marks the tenth anniversary of J.otto Seibold and Vivian Walsh's modern Christmas classic—the story of a little dog named Olive with big reindeer dreams! When the book was first published in 1997, it enjoyed great reviews and has since sold more than 1 million copies. This new edition is a larger version of the original book, and it features flaps to lift, spots to scratch and sniff, and a pop-up grand finale. Designed to be a perfect holiday gift, this edition will appeal to Olive's many fans and is sure to make new ones.

The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook: Junior Edition Boxed Setby David Borgenicht, Justin Heimberg, and Robin Epstein - $19.99 - Boxed set includes:
• The Original Junior Edition
• Extreme Junior Edition
• Weird Junior Edition 

Blinkybugs! Make Your Own Electric Insects by Ken Murphy - $19.99 - These fuzzy, brightly colored, illuminated pets will teach kids all about electricity and circuitry. Everything kids need to build three bugs is in here—coin-cell batteries, colored pipe cleaners, copper tubes, red, yellow, and green LEDs, pom-poms, and more! Step-by-step instructions are presented in a compelling comic book format.

Magic Scratchers:  40 Tricks with Amazing Scratch-off Surprises by Danny Orleans - $9.95 - Scratch for magic! Kids won't believe their eyes as they follow the steps on 40 scratchable cards, watch the magic unfold, and then scratch for the eye-popping reveals! Written by a professional magician, these amazing tricks will keep kids awestruck for hours.

FOR GIGI STORYTIME WITH THE GRANDBEBES:

The First Christmas:  An Angel Came to Nazareth by Anthony Knott - $9.99 - The perfect stocking stuffer! This unique version of the first Christmas story is just right for snuggling and sharing around the tree. Lavish illustrations, eye-catching foil, and a sweet pocket-size format make each reading extra special, through the holidays and all year round.

Day and Night by Teddy Newton - $14.99 -  Day meets Night and Night meets Day in this delightful picture book based on the Pixar short, Day & Night, which premiered with Toy Story 3 in 2010. Kids will delight in the way these two characters explore their differences and eventually realize how much they like and enjoy each other. A wonderful way to experience the magic of this Pixar short again and again and—rejoice in the attraction of opposites!

Sound Bingo by Kindermusik - $16.99 - This sound-inspired game features 6 double-sided bingo cards, 100 vinyl game pieces, and a variety of sounds, from animals to musical instruments. Pop in the CD, identify the sounds, and find the corresponding picture on a card. The first to fill the card declares "bingo!" and wins the game. Play at home, in the car, or anywhere a CD player is available. Guaranteed to keep ears and eyes amused! 

Puppy in Circles by DwellStudio - $8.99 - DwellStudio adds an inventive new finger puppet format to its line of best-selling books. Created from Dwell's distinctive and playful designs, Puppy in Circles will delight and engage babies and toddlers with hours of fun.

Giant Pop-Out Farm:  A Pop-Out Surprise Book - $10.99 - Packed full of impressive pop-out features, this interactive book is sure to engage and entertain curious preschoolers. Simple clues nestled within words and pictures allow children to guess what hides behind each flap. And then. . . surprise! Giant Pop-Out Farm features farm favorites—a cow, a pig, and a barn, among others. The large pop-outs are simple and sturdy, making them well suited for and appealing to young children.

Hide and Seek Dinosaurs! by Betty Ann Schwartz - $6.99 - Beware: Four dinosaurs are hiding inside this book! Die-cut, slide-out dinosaurs peek from these pages, making this simple board book delightfully interactive. Curious toddlers will enjoy discovering each dinosaur character again and again.

You Can't Buy a Dinosaur with a Dime by Harriet Ziefert - $6.95 - Clink, clink, clink, clink...Clink, clink, clinkity... Money saved in a bank makes your brain think-thinkity!
Children are fascinated by money—how it looks, feels, smells, and most of all, what it buys. And Pete is no exception. The rhymed verse describes how Pete saves his allowance, spends too much of it, has second thoughts, and starts over. Young readers will not only applaud Pete's decisions, but join him in his computations as he saves, spends, and strategizes over future purchases. The lively combination of fact and fiction, plus humorous art, will prove both thought-provoking and thoroughly enjoyable.

MoMA Modern Play House - $19.99 - 10 x 4-3/4 x 2-1/8 in; 96 boxes; 6-page informational booklet, 8 pieces of press-out card furniture, 12 vinyl decals, full-color throughout, ages 3 and up

FOR NOT-SO-BEBE-GIRL AUTUMN:

The House That Crack Built by Clark Taylor - $6.95 -

Awards and honors for The House That Crack Built:
ALA, "Best Books for Reluctant Readers"
ALA, "Best Books for Young Adults"
American Bookseller, "Pick of the Lists"
Bookbuilders West Award
Publishers Weekly, "Best Books of 1992"
Publishers Weekly, starred review

With a beat reminiscent of hip hop or rap music, a well known nursery rhyme is brilliantly transformed into a powerful poem about the tragic problem of illegal drugs and its victims. From the harvesting of the coca plants to dealers and gangs to the innocent crack babies born everyday, cocaine's journey is starkly traced from beginning to end. The rhythmic text, which is realistic but not moralizing, will appeal to teenagers and adults. But it is also accessible for even very young children, making this a valuable resource for parents, teachers, librarians, caregivers, and everyone else who is looking for a way to broach this difficult subject. A list of organizations is provided for those seeking help for a loved one or a way out for themselves. A forword by children's advocate Michael Pritchard teaches us that we are all victims of this debilitating drug but reminds us that we also have the ability to change our world.

The Space Between Trees by Katie Williams - $17.99 - Not your everyday coming-of-age novel…

This story was supposed to be about Evie—how she hasn't made a friend in years, how she tends to stretch the truth (especially about her so-called relationship with college drop-out Jonah Luks), and how she finally comes into her own once she learns to just be herself—but it isn't. Because when her classmate Elizabeth "Zabet" McCabe's murdered body is found in the woods, everything changes…and Evie's life is never the same again.



I can hear you now!  "Goodness, that's a holly gee willakers lot of books!  And a BUNCH of them look like something I'd want too! and WHERE is the giveaway?!?"

WIN IT:  WOOT!  Chronicle Books is giving you a chance to win this list of books! That's right, if your comment wins, we both win!  Yay!  Balloons and streamers come floating down out of the sky! (just picture it, OK?)

ANYway, :) since this is a special giveaway, I INSIST on one entry per household/IP address - no entering for your sister, neighbor, husband, wife, or dog.  (This hasn't changed from any of my other giveaways; however, here's the big one: I will delete any comments that don't comply with this rule).  I want it to be fair to everyone.

EASY PEASY ENTRY:  Make a meaningful comment on this post!  (really?!?  that's all?) ... Really ... that's all.

Eligibility:  US Residents only through 12/14/2010 (there's some conflict between the rules and the entry page, so I'm using the earlier date).

I hope we win!  You can visit the Happy Haulidays page to see which other blogs are participating and enter on THEIR blogs as well!

BLOGGERS!!!  Put together your own post and you can win as well!  Last day for submissions is December 10th!

Good luck!