Book Quarterly Giveaway Week is coming to a close, and since Tuesday was giveaway-less, we’re tripling our efforts today to make up for it.

In the pages of last week’s very-wild Book Quarterly, you’ll find reviews of Nick Hornby’s Juliet, Naked; David Byrne’s Bicycle Diaries; and Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna. Our critics swooned over these titles, so we figured it’d be nice to share.

But before we do, read snippets of the reviews:

Bicycle Diaries: “David Byrne doesn’t ride a fixie. Nor is he training for the Tour de France. Instead, the former Talking Head represents an oft-forgotten segment of the biking population: commuters who also like to leisurely explore neighborhoods from their banana seats. And Byrne is a famous musician with a folding bike, so he gets around. Bicycle Diaries collects his observations biking in about 15 cities, including Berlin, Buenos Aires and his home base of New York. (No chapter on Philly, sadly.) Everywhere he goes, Byrne maintains an open curiosity about his surroundings, delivered in a smart yet unfussy writing style that isn’t far removed from his lyrics.” —Michael Pelusi

Juliet, Naked: “Annie, railing against a partner she never loved and his obsessive-compulsive devotion to forgotten rock ‘n’ roller Tucker Crowe, posts an against-the-grain review of a recently released Tucker album. Her successful, if unorthodox, analysis drives her boyfriend into the arms of another woman and, like a magnet, sucks Tucker out of his 20-year silence, straight into her English orbit. During those lost years, Tucker surrounded himself with ex-wives who pity him and children who don’t know him. His loneliness, like Annie’s, just slowly happened as life went on around him. Recognizing kindred spirits, Annie and Tucker sweetly and powerfully begin making up for lost time.” —Char Vandermeer

The Lacuna: “A lacuna, Kingsolver’s powerful new novel explains, is ‘an opening, like a mouth, that swallows things,’ and Harrison Shepherd, 11, dragged from 1929 America by his husband-hunting mother, finds one offshore in Mexico. When tides cooperate, his underwater passage leads to a secret opening in the nearby jungle. Later, when Harrison mixes plaster, cooks, types for Diego Rivera and becomes Frida Kahlo’s confidant, he defines lacuna as ‘a missing piece, a hole in the story.’ Kingsolver’s no name-dropper: The passionate painters appear long before they’re identified, and Harrison’s lack of ego — he journals in third person — makes him a wise, incisive observer.” —Mark Cofta

To win a copy of one of these three books, answer this BQ-related (that’s a hint) trivia question:

Maurice Sendak is working on a new children’s book. What’s the working title?

E-mail your answers to carolyn.huckabay@citypaper.net, and be sure to tell me which book you’d like. One book per winner. Thanks for playing!

Hyperion, 288 pp., $25.99, Oct. 12

In anticipation of Eoin Colfer’s talk tonight at the Free Library, we’re giving away a copy of his just-out And Another Thing … , a continuation of the late Douglas Adams’ sci-fi masterpiece The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Colfer’s event (7:30 p.m., free, Free Library, Central Branch, 1901 Vine St., 215-567-4341, freelibrary.org) kicks off his U.S. tour — and as a special treat, the library will be giving out “Don’t Panic” towels as well as special limited Hitchhiker’s editions, while supplies last.

Said Colfer (whose first name is pronounced “Owen,” FYI) of the Guide: “Being given the chance to write this book is like suddenly being offered the superpower of your choice. For years I have been finishing this incredible story in my head and now I have the opportunity to do it in the real world.”

From the novel’s press release:

When last we saw Arthur Dent, our towel-toting hero had traveled the length, breadth, and depth of known, and unknown, space. No sooner had he made his way home to (one rather pleasant version) planet Earth than he discovered that it was about to be blown up … again. Since 1997, Hitchhiker’s fans have featured Arthur and friends dead, but now, in And Another Thing … , Eoin Colfer revives Adams’ beloved characters using his own brand of humor to propel them through another intergalactic screwball adventure.

To win a copy, be the first to answer this trivia question:

In City Paper’s Food section last month, we asked a local bartender to reimagine what Hitchhiker’s interstellar cocktail?

E-mail your answers to carolyn.huckabay@citypaper.net for a chance to win.

Knopf, 688 pp., $26.95, Oct. 6

Our Book Quarterly Giveaway Week continues with A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book, which, as Janet Anderson points out in her City Paper review, ain’t for kids — especially since it clocks in at a hefty 688 pages. Oof.

Byatt’s novel, about Victorian idealists whose lives aren’t quite as pristine as they’d like everyone to think, is already a best-seller in England and Canada, and was short-listed for this year’s Man Booker Prize. (Her 1991 novel, Possession, is a Booker winner.)

From Anderson’s review:

These middle-class folks engage in the most advanced ideas of their era — socialism, Marxism, anarchism, anti-vivesectionism, theosophy, folklore analysis, women’s rights, Fabianism. They celebrate a modern world of steamships, newspapers and electricity. Initially, it seems, they’re living their utopian vision of human life to the fullest. But as the story unfolds, it becomes clear there’s more afoot than individual righteousness. Family lines blur as parentage is questioned; relationships disintegrate as guilt, sex and greed enter the equation. This isn’t a world opened up by enlightenment but real life, where people make bad choices, and connections between idealism and actuality lie only in the imagination.

To win a copy, answer the following trivia question:

What Roman general is the Fabian Society named after?

E-mail your answers to carolyn.huckabay@citypaper.net for a chance to win. And check back with the Clog on Monday for a chance to win a copy of Nick Hornby’s Juliet, Naked.

Doubleday, 480 pp., $27.95, Oct. 13

Headlining our fiction review page in this week’s Book Quarterly, City Paper lit critic Justin Bauer assesses Jonathan Lethem’s latest novel, Chronic City, which follows the life of “handsome, inoffensive” Manhattanite Chase Insteadman. The author of such crazy-popular works as Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude focuses this time on the vapid lives of New Yorkers “wrapped in their own delusions, desires and lies.” Burn.

Says Bauer of the novel, which was recently named Amazon’s Best of the Month for October:

Chronic City estranges Manhattan, literalizing recessionary anxiety by choking the financial district in sinister fog and setting an elemental beast loose on Second Avenue. Lethem’s charming misfit cartoon characters, adrift in this landscape, repeat Pynchonian paranoia as stoned farce, caught in virtuoso drifts of authorial free-association. Each wraps himself tight in alienation or obsession, ensuring that even should their affairs work out, they’re too timid to get their own pants off.

To celebrate the BQ, and in anticipation of Lethem’s upcoming talk at the Free Library, we’re giving away a copy to our faithful readers. Just be the first to answer this trivia question:

Chronic City’s protagonist, Chase Insteadman, was a child star on what made-up sitcom?

E-mail your answers right quick to carolyn.huckabay@citypaper.net for a chance to win. And remember, keep watching the Clog through next week for more BQ giveaways and trivia games.

[UPDATE, 1:45 p.m.]: Congratulations to Clog reader Marcos, who correctly guessed that Chase Insteadman, Chronic City protagonist, starred in a fictional sitcom called Martyr & Pesty. Thanks to all who played!

Ballantine, Aug. 25

In today’s Shelf Life lit column, Justin Bauer compares four novelists who grapple with notions of identity — Boualem Sansal, Rawi Hage, Michelle Huneven and Dan Chaon — with varying success.

He particularly dug Chaon’s Await Your Reply:

Chaon’s characters — three sets of them, in three independent, loosely linked storylines — each willingly shuck off the lives they’ve been given. They get into their cars and set off to create entirely new selves, in the barrenness of the Michigan backwoods or an abandoned Great Plains motel or trekking through the Canadian tundra.

On one hand, Chaon’s bleak, thrilling high-wire stories celebrate the freedom of losing yourself, even as this lack of stability opens up his narrative to weirdness and terror. But in showing the ease with which his characters cast off one identity and assume another, Chaon questions the basic existence of a single identity.

Since today feels like the kind of day we’d like to trade our identity out for someone else’s (maybe someone who has Phils playoff tickets?), we’re giving away a copy to the first Clog reader who can answer the following trivia question:

At which Midwestern college does Chaon teach?

E-mail me at carolyn.huckabay@citypaper.net for a chance to win. (Go Phils!)

Knopf, $28.95, Sept. 22

From the snap-brim-sharp author who brought you the staccato cadences of The Black Dahlia comes what James Ellroy’s called a ghastly tale of political malfeasance and bad juju. The finale to his Underworld USA trilogy, Blood’s a Rover brings something scummy, cold, rapier fast and deeply corrupt: From its first pages, Ellroy comes out shooting, splashing blood across the stinking corpses of Howard Hughes’ Las Vegas, Richard Nixon’s 1968 run for the White House and J. Edgar Hoover’s abusive grasp of the FBI.

Ellroy’s latest is a whopper — some 600 pages of blood-splashing. We’ve got a copy to give away, and all you’ve gotta do is be the first to answer the following trivia question:

By what nickname is James Ellroy most commonly called?

E-mail carolyn.huckabay@citypaper.net for a chance to win, and in the meantime, get yourself over to the Free Library.

Thu., Sept. 24, 7:30 p.m., free, Free Library, Central Branch, 1901 Vine St., 215-567-4341, freelibrary.org.

Random House, 144 pp., $17, Sept. 1

Today we’re giving away a copy of New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus’ The Death of Conservatism — just in time for his talk tonight at the Central Branch of the Free Library.

Here’s what freelibrary.org has to say about Tanenhaus, whose appearance tonight is part of the Meelya Gordon Memorial Lecture Series:

Tanenhaus is the author of the National Book Award finalist Whittaker Chambers, a biography of the man whose accusations sparked the post-war crusade against suspected American communists. His new book, The Death of Conservatism, argues that modern conservatism is a counter-revolutionary movement with two sides: “realists� who believe in tradition and “revanchists� who often find themselves at war with the United States.

Mr. Tanenhaus will be interviewed on-stage by Carlin Romano, critic-at-large for The Chronicle of Higher Education.

To win a copy, answer this trivia question:

Sam Tanenhaus can be heard chatting with authors and critics on what weekly podcast?

E-mail carolyn.huckabay@citypaper.net for a chance to win.

Sam Tanenhaus reading/signing, Tue., Sept. 15, 7:30 p.m., $14, Free Library, Central Branch, 1901 Vine St., 215-567-4341, freelibrary.org.

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 291 pp., $25, Sept. 9

As promised, I’m back today with a Get Lit Wednesday special: I’ve got a shiny-new copy of Michelle Huneven’s Blame, a novel about a woman’s recovery from alcoholism, to give away to a faithful summer reader.

Entertainment Weekly gave Blame an A- this week. Here’s a snippet of the review:

Patsy McLemoore is a newly minted college professor in Southern California with long legs, a Colgate smile, and seemingly limitless academic promise. She’s also a blackout alcoholic. When the 29-year-old wakes up from one obliterated evening in county jail, she is met with sickening news: She has killed a young mother and daughter with her car, a brutal, irreversible crime that she can only hazily recall.

What follows is a chronicle of her imprisonment, and subsequent lifelong search for atonement — until a lightning-bolt revelation forces her to reassess nearly everything that came before. It’s a plot that, in the kind of foil-embossed paperbacks you pick up at the airport newsstand, could easily turn hamfisted or hokey. But the award-winning Michelle Huneven unfurls her tale with unflagging emotional nuance: Patsy emerges as smart, self-aware, and very much flawed, neither a monster nor a redeemed angel.

To win a copy, answer me this:

According to official Alcoholics Anonymous data, how many people are members of AA worldwide?

E-mail me at carolyn.huckabay@citypaper.net for a chance to win.

[UPDATE, 1:20 p.m.]: Congratulations to Clog reader Jackie, who correctly responded that 2 million people around the world are members of Alcoholics Anonymous (in more than 180 countries, y’all).

Graywolf, 244 pp., $22, September

I was too busy finishing The Kite Runner (finally) last week to give any books away, and that’s just selfish. So watch the Clog tomorrow for an additional Get Lit trivia game (I’ll be offering up a copy of Michelle Huneven’s Blame).

In the meantime, there’s this: Stephen Elliott’s The Adderall Diaries: A memoir of Moods, Masochism, and Murder, which explores the author’s drug dependency/writer’s block/obsession with a real-life murder case. Yesterday, CP news intern Morgan Davis reviewed the book for our A&E blog, Critical Mass, and was none too pleased:

The premise of the book is exciting — a murder mystery as written through the memoir of an unrelated man. Elliott approaches the book with a clear idea of what he wants. He’s going to examine Reiser and Sturgeon and break apart the red herrings in the case (like Sturgeon’s outlandish murder confession), all while examining his own troubled life and making comparisons between the two. But the result, much like Elliott’s life, is more jumbled mess than brilliant exposé.

Throughout the book, Elliott feels unfocused on anything besides how miserable his life is. The story begins with Elliott’s childhood, setting the stage for turmoil with a tale about his lying, seemingly psychotic father. From there, the author jumps from mini-story to mini-story, telling about his troubled youth, his drug addictions, his self-destructive love life and lack of inspiration to write, all while occasionally throwing in something about Reiser’s trial. By the time you actually get to the play-by-play description of the trial, you feel like Elliott’s dragged you on a bad acid trip while watching his home movies.

Burn! But I think you should decide for yourselves.

Here’s your trivia question:

What Arizona Cardinal received a four-game suspension as the result of using Adderall to enhance his performance?

E-mail me at carolyn.huckabay@citypaper.net for a chance to win. And remember, there’s always tomorrow.

[UPDATE, 1 p.m.]: Congratulations to Clog reader Liza C., who correctly answered that Ben Patrick is the Adderall-addled Cardinal.

Pantheon, Aug. 18

Neufeld “depicts in vivid color the extraordinary true stories of seven real New Orleans residents and their tales of survival in the days leading up to and following Hurricane Katrina,” according to the book’s press release. From an amazon.com Q&A with the author, Neufeld describes some of those characters:

I selected Denise after hearing her on a public radio program. The mainstream media, in the days following the storm, inaccurately reported roving gangs, shootings, rapes, and murders at the New Orleans Convention Center. Denise witnessed what really happened, how the people there were abandoned by the authorities and how they did their best to help one another. …

I found Leo (and, by extension, Michelle) online. Leo had been a reader of the blog I kept as a Red Cross volunteer, and when I then read his blog and learned that in addition to everything else he had lost his extensive comics collection, I felt an intuitive understanding for him. …

And the Doctor, of course, is a real-life French Quarter raconteur — as well as being a key participant in the post-Katrina relief and recovery efforts.

The book debuts today, and we’ve got a copy to give away. It’s trivia time:

Before it was compiled into a hardcover book, A.D. was published serially in what online magazine?

E-mail me at carolyn.huckabay@citypaper.net for a chance to win.

Hey kids, how’s summer reading going so far? I’m about a hundred pages into The Kite Runner, and something tells me it isn’t going to end well. (I’ve just gotten to the kite race in 1975, and the story’s narrator keeps saying things like, “That was the last time I would ever see Hassan smile” and “Everything changed after that day.” OK, I get it.)

Pantheon, 269 pp., $22.95, Aug. 4

Today’s giveaway is Michael Rubens’ The Sheriff of Yrnameer, which, I admit, has a lot of aesthetic, I’m-judging-a-book-by-its-cover-right-now appeal. The kelly green sleeve has this amazing matte, almost gritty texture that nearly caused me to keep it for myself — but that wouldn’t be very nice. There’s also the look-at-me quote on the back from Stephen Colbert — “a science fiction book your grandmother would love … if she’s a lustful, violent lady.” We’re hooked.

Rubens, former producer of The Daily Show, fills his sci-fi debut with heartless criminals, nonexistent planets and references to 2001: A Space Odyssey. Here’s a blurb from the book jacket:

Our hero, Cole, a hapless space scoundrel on the run, is having a bad day. His sidekick has run off with his girlfriend. His spaceship has been disintegrated by an officious traffic robot. And now the space yacht he’s stolen to escape from a tentacled alien bounty hunter — after Cole for some serious gambling debts — turns out to be filled with freeze-dried orphans. Their destination: the mysterious — and possibly nonexistent — planet of Yrnameer, the last unspoiled and unsponsored world in the galaxy (hence the name: yrnameer being a contraction of “your name here,” a planet without a corporate sponsor).

You had us at “freeze-dried orphans,” Rubens.

And now, for some 2001: A Space Odyssey trivia:

When Dr. Floyd falls asleep while traveling to the moon, his flight attendant tucks what personal item back into his shirt pocket?

E-mail me at carolyn.huckabay@citypaper.net for a chance to win a copy of The Sheriff of Yrnameer.

Riverhead, Aug. 6

Here’s a snippet from Michael Pelusi’s interview:

CP: Does Lou Barlow know he’s a character in the book?

JP: Yes he does. I asked him permission first. I had a funny exchange with him. I wrote him, I said, “Hey Lou, I’m writing this novel, I’ll send you the chapter if you want, I’d like to use you as a fictional character. Don’t worry, you’re a decent guy in the book.” And he wrote back and said, “Oh, thanks for asking. You can use me in the book. Make me a dick if it’s more appropriate.”

To win a copy of It Feels So Good When I Stop, be the first to answer this trivia question:

While on tour, Joe Pernice didn’t have a permit to bring his band T-shirts into Canada, so he donated them to a local shelter. What did the shirts say?

E-mail carolyn.huckabay@citypaper.net for a chance to win!

Crap, it’s August and I still haven’t made good on my promise to read more this summer. Doesn’t mean you can’t, though.

Riverhead, 432 pp., $25.95, Aug. 6

The handsome author will be in Philly one week from today at the Wynnewood Borders (Aug. 11, 7 p.m., free) to sign copies.

Sez the novel’s press release:

Jonathan Marcus is a young rising star at the international law firm Dulling and Pierce, and as a former doctoral student in classics, he has become a sought-after commodity among less scrupulous antiquities dealers. But when he is summoned from New York to Rome in the dead of night to examine a client’s artifact, a startling discovery will force him to choose between his career and his soul.

Marcus’ discovery of a hidden inscription compels him to join forces with Dr. Emili Travia, the passionate U.N. preservationist he was brought to Rome to discredit in court. Together the uncover not only an ancient intelligence operation to protect the sacred menorah of Herod’s Temple, but also a ruthless modern plot to destroy it.

Heavy. The good news is that we’ve got THREE (count ‘em) copies to give away. The bad news is you’ve gotta answer the following trivia question to get one:

Paul Bettany, who plays Silas in the 2006 film The Da Vinci Code, has a son named after what Swedish actor?

Holler at carolyn.huckabay@citypaper.net for a chance to win.

Knopf, 316 pp., $25.95, July 20

While Hyde takes care to bring the scenery to life — the “rich emerald green� of the water, the “thickets of wild grape� and the towering canyon walls of “glistening black schist, shot through with lightning forks of pink granite� — her true artistry shows not in her landscapes but in her portraits. Each person on the trip is engaged in a voyage of self-discovery. With no escape from social interaction, no privacy and none of the distractions of the modern world’s “engines and asphalt, clocks and credit cards and news reports that didn’t really matter,� they’re forced to wrestle with their own thorny natures.

Amazon.com has an interesting interview with the author, who tells us about where the idea for the novel germinated:

We were on Day 8 of our trip [down the Deubendorff Rapid in the Grand Canyon], and with a dozen or so big rapids behind us, I was in a kind of “Hey, cool, another roller-coaster ride, and have you guys noticed my shoulder muscles lately?� mode. But before I knew what happened, we were careening into a wall of water at the wrong angle, and our paddle captain’s scoutlike commands turned into war cries. “LEFT TURN!� he yelled. “Come on, paddlers—LEFT!� But it was too late. The boat reared up like that last scene in The Perfect Storm, and down I went.

Speaking of which, it’s trivia time:

In 1991, a swordfish boat was lost at sea during an intense storm off the coast of Canada’s Sable Island, inspiring the book and movie versions of The Perfect Storm. What was the name of the boat?

E-mail your answers to carolyn.huckabay@citypaper.net for a chance to win a copy of In the Heart of the Canyon. Good luck!