I love books. I especially love winning them. I especially, especially love winning them and helping a worthy cause. You’ve probably already heard of Colleen McKie’s Slave Lake Book Auction. Aimed at raising funds for Slave Lake (she explains what happened to Slave Lake here), Colleen’s auction has a whole bunch of bookish goodness (including signed hardcovers and manuscript critiques; full list here) that book lovers can bid on. Buy books and help a community at the same time — sounds good, eh?

Just to show what big-hearted company I keep online, I have another online friend offering books for charity. Jen, the same Jen who introduced me to Maisie Dobbs in the first place and is a self-declared book pimp, is holding a raffle to raise funds for spina bifida. To be honest, I’d never heard of spina bifida before, and had to Google it to write this post. Basically, Jen’s eldest son Jake has myelomeningocele, which is a serious, but common form, and Jen explains it best here. She has a book blog, a spina bifida blog, and from her tweets, I wouldn’t be surprised if she comes up with an Adventures of a Cougar Librarian blog next. So, worthy cause, nice book pimpish cougar librarian doing it for her kid, and I happily tweeted about the raffle.

Plus, to be completely honest, I also wanted to win some great swag. Check out some of the items she has up for grabs:

• A Kobo e-reader, signed by YA authors Meg Cabot, Lauren Oliver and Veronica Roth, and by Indigo National Events Director Cammy (also known to his over 3.5k Twitter followers as the hilarious @indigogreenroom)
• An autographed “Naughty and Nice” pack
• A signed “Jen’s Favourites” pack, which includes a signed Charlaine Harris!
  

  Jen's Favourites

• A signed Kelley Armstrong pack (no one request this! I want that signed Men of the Otherworld!)
  

  Signed Kelley Armstrong

• A signed package that includes Late, Late at Night by Rick Springfield, The Quiet Twin by Dan Vyleta, Don’t Be Afraid by Steven Hayward, and 2010 Giller winner The Sentimentalists by Johanna Skibsrud

And that’s only about half of the prizes up for grabs! So yes, quite a few that caught my eye and made me want to enter the raffle.

Then Jen decides to add an appeal to my mercenary, Bon Jovi lovin’ li’l heart and issues me a challenge I couldn’t refuse: get ten people to donate to her raffle, and she’ll give me this Bon Jovi chair:

How awesome does that look, eh? 😉

How do you donate and enter the raffle? Check out Jen’s blog post here. Every $5 you donate entitles you to a shot at any one of Jen’s great prize packs. So yes, if you donate $20, you get a shot at four prizes or four shots at a prize or… you get the idea. Raffle closes June 20th.

Thanks for reading and good luck to everyone who enters!