Today is the last day to enter to win a copy of Zachary Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey. To enter, email bookliciousblog [at] gmail [dot] com with Odyssey giveaway in the subject line and your name and mailing address in the body. You must be located in the U.S. to enter. The winner will be announced Monday.

This is such a clever shelving solution. Instead of throwing up their arms in surrender, Halligan Norris Smith and Adam Smith embraced their stairs. The result is shelving that is as fun as it is functional. Makes me wish I had stairs so that I could replicate it!

Nothing can really cure a case of the Mondays, but maybe a free book will help. Booklicious is giving away a copy of Zachary Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey: A Novel to one lucky reader (located in the U.S. or Canada). To enter, send an email with "Odyssey giveaway" in the subject line to bookliciousblog [at] gmail [dot] com with your name and mailing address. You have through this Friday to enter. We'll use the fabulous Randomizer to pick the winner, who will be announced on the blog next Monday. 

I love group board games. Unfortunately, Mr. Booklicious and I recently moved to a new city, which has put a severe dent in our social lives and thus a damper on competitive play. But for all of you who do throw game nights, here's a collection of bookish board games that look like a good time. 

There's a feature of Booklicious you might not know about. If you scroll down to the bottom of the page, you'll see three boxes listing the current New York Times bestsellers, London Times bestsellers, and bestsellers from a sometimes-randomly, sometimes-deliberately, selected year in the past. These are updated every weekend.

These wickedly cool baroque bookshelves by across-the-pond store Graham & Green are firmly established on my wish list. The metal shelves are open at both sides, which contributes to the floating/built-in effect. The exterior of the square/single shelf is about 12.5" by 12.5"; the interior is about 3.5" deep and about 8.25" wide.

There's something to be said for casual, simple organization. Maybe it's just the cheerful yellow doors giving me a boost of good feeling (aren't they just delicious?!), but I really like this. It's not stuffy, not pretentious - it's just a homey room with shelving stuffed with books. I can easily imagine myself grabbing a book from the shelf, plopping down on that comfy-looking sofa and reading for hours. 

They're at it again. Quirk Books just started another author spinning in his grave with the announcement that Anna Karenina will become the fourth book to receive their controversial mash-up treatment. It has been rechristened Android Karenina and given a release date of June 6. 

From Quirk: "As in the original novel, our story follows two relationships: The tragic adulterous love affair of Anna Karenina and Count Alexei Vronsky, and the more hopeful marriage of Nikolai Levin and Princess Kitty Shcherbatskaya. These characters live in a steampunk-inspired world of robotic butlers, clumsy automatons, and rudimentary mechanical devices. But when these copper-plated machines begin to revolt against their human masters, our characters must fight back using state-of-the-art 19th-century technology—and a sleek new model of ultra-human cyborgs like nothing the world has ever seen."

Quirk has ordered a print run of 200,000 copies and clearly hopes to repeat the New York Times-bestselling success of its first two releases, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. Its third title, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls, goes on sale March 23. 

"American poet, novelist and critic Jay Parini, author of The Last Station - a novel about Tolstoy's final days - said the author would have been 'horrified by the notion of changing his work in absurd ways for the purposes of amusement. He was not a man with a sense of humour,' Parini said. 'In fact, he could be rather grim, as the late essays suggest.'" (via The Guardian)

You can pre-order Android Karenina from Amazon or you can buy a real book.

If you look at my Now Reading page, you'll see that I read a fair bit. I don't limit myself to books, however - I'm also a fairly avid browser of home design blogs, which is how I came across this odd little bed. Intrigued, I tracked down the original source of all the publicity - a BBC News story - and discovered that this piece has been a fixture on design blogs for five years! The designer of the bed, Nottingham University graduate Karen Babel, won a 2005 prize for the unique bed/bookcase hybrid, prompting a flurry of attention that has yet to dissipate. It seems the bed is so noteworthy - in every sense - that people can't stop talking about it.  

I love Penguin Classics.  The story of Penguin's origins makes my insides go all melty-gooey - wish I could meet that dear man and smother him with grateful kisses - and who can resist those sleekly designed covers? I never can resist placing all my copies next to each other, despite my best efforts to implement an author- or period-based categorization system. Despite my great appreciation for the editions, however, I only recently learned this staggering fact about them: did you know that you can buy the all the Penguin Classics - all 1,082 of them - as a complete set on Amazon? (Gift wrapping is not available for this item, however. I know; I'm disappointed, too.) Doesn't the thought just blow your mind? How do they deliver the 763-pound package? Via a forklifted pallet? An entire shipping container? Does a semi pull up to your door carrying your order and a dedicated team of UPS package handlers? Someone had better order a set so we can find out the answer. By the way, that'll be $8,047.98 - before shipping.

I started to put together a post about writers who died in 2009, then found this moving tribute by The Guardian. Instead of putting together standard obituaries, friends and fellow authors have shared their memories of those who passed away this decade. The stories are full of warm anecdotes, funny tales and incredible facts - did you know, for instance, that Barbara Cartland, that doyenne of romance, wrote 723 books? Or that William Styron hated all things English and told his publishers, "It is a matter of supreme indifference to me if I am read in England," after hearing of bad reviews by English critics? Incredible.

“My husband can’t remember any names. We must have been married for 10 years when, in an airport, he met an ex-colleague. Introductions ensued: 'And this is my wife, Elizabeth,' said my husband. I — inconveniently — said I wasn’t Elizabeth. So the ex-colleague presumed that there was a wife, Elizabeth, who was elsewhere. It was all rather tricky.” From column by Gill Hornby, aka Mrs. Robert Harris, The Daily Telegraph