Sunday Sidelines

This has been a very difficult month and an especially difficult week. My mother died on Tuesday evening (November 23, 2010) ~ she has been ill for about three years, but we have known the end was near for about a month. She was at peace. Now my sister and I are trying to find the same peace. The funeral is tomorrow, so I am hopeful that it will make me feel some better...to officially give her over to God. She was 83 years old and I will miss her every day for the rest of my life.

BBC Booklist!!

"The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here."

Instructions:

•Copy this list.
•Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety.
•Italicise the ones you started but didn’t finish or read only an excerpt.
•Tag other book nerds.
•Highlight the ones that you have but haven't read.

So, here is my list (feel pretty good about reading 39 of these great books):

Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
The King James Bible
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
Nineteen Eighty Four (1984) – George Orwell
His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
Complete Works of Shakespeare
Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
Middlemarch – George Eliot
Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
Emma -Jane Austen
Persuasion – Jane Austen
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – CS Lewis
The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne
Animal Farm – George Orwell
The DaVinci Code – Dan Brown
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
Atonement – Ian McEwan
Life of Pi – Yann Martel
Dune – Frank Herbert
Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
The Secret History – Donna Tartt
The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
On The Road – Jack Kerouac
Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
Moby Dick – Herman Melville
Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
Dracula – Bram Stoker
The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
Ulysses – James Joyce
The Inferno – Dante
Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
Germinal – Emile Zola
Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
Possession – AS Byatt
Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
The Color Purple – Alice Walker
The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White
The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
Watership Down – Richard Adams
A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
Hamlet – William Shakespeare
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Wishing you all a wonderful week ~ with reading and love for your family. Please say a little prayer for me and mine.

Sunday Sidelines (And Awards, ~squee~)

So, today is a special Sunday around our house ~ it is my husband's birthday! He is 42 today and we are celebrating with a special dinner with vanilla cake (with vanilla icing) [his choice, as per our household agreement, birthday person picks cake and icing flavor]!

What a sweet thing to find in my comments today! CMash @ CMash Loves to Read gave me the following two awards:

The Honest Scrap award is given to bloggers who share honest bits of information about yourself. And the Versatile Blogger award is given to a new blog that you think is fantastic. So first, I want to thank CMash for these two awards. It is always nice to know that someone out there is reading what you write and thinks of you. I love reading CMash's posts so I feel very special to receive these awards.

And now for the criteria:
To accept these awards it is required that I share ten things about myself.

1. I have four chihuahuas that I treat like my children ~ I have four of those as well, but they are all grown.

2. My husband is fifteen years younger than I am, we both work for the same library!

3. I have two grandsons and wish that my other three children would get busy and provide me with some granddaughters!

4. I wake up two or three times each night and go outside and read ~ probably not good for my health, but I get some reading done!

5. I have so many books that I have read and not reviewed that I could just cry ~ all of the Outlander series, about four review books from publishers, two from LibraryThing ~ oh, goodness the list just goes on and on! I'm working on it.

6. I love playing all of the Lego games on the Wii ~ sometimes I have to get one of my children to beat a level so I can more forward.

7. I work with young people all day long, and I think it keeps me young as well. Now if some how they could just help me lose weight??!!

8. I traveled to Eastern Europe and absolutely fell in love! I hope that I get the opportunity to return.

9. I have another blog that focuses on Holocaust resources for children. I am really drawn to these books and feel it is important to provide this information to our children.

10. I have really enjoyed getting to know all of the book bloggers out in the blogosphere! What a great bunch of people. Thanks again to CMash!

I would like to pass the award on to the following bloggers, in no particular order:

Crazy for Books

In Which a Girl Reads

Lost in the Library

Peaceful Reader

Reading While Female

If you don't already follow these blogs, you should definitely check them out ~ they are fantastic!

Don't forget LunaNina and the Word Association Game:

1.Mustache :: Pete
2.Person :: of interest
3.Restore :: my health
4.Discretion :: is the better part of valor
5.Lamp :: Lava
6.Pillow cover :: so soft
7.Arousal :: sexual
8.Seattle :: needle
9.ATM :: card
10.Custard :: vanilla

Wishing everyone a Happy Sunday and a wonderful week!

Sunday Sidelines

Welcome to another Sunday Sidelines! I have so much to talk about today. It has been an exciting week and another exciting week will be coming up!

I hope that you will take some time today to visit the blogs who are participating in BlogFest 2010! Over 200 bloggers are offering giveaways on top of the opportunity to visit their wonderful reading blogs. The host, A Journey of Books, has created a tracking site where you can keep up with which ones you have visited. It all ends at 11:59 pm tonight, so start visiting!

Another fun thing I do every week is Unconscious Mutterings, hosted by Luna Nina! It is so much fun to see answer these free association suggestions and go back and see how others have answered. Participation has been down a bit so I hope you will go play her game so that she continues to do this!

Singapore :: Nights
blah blah blah :: Seinfeld
Stall :: bathroom
Bowls :: 300
Entrance :: Exam
Antique :: dresser
Elizabeth :: Bennett
Hook :: line and sinker
Width :: and depth
Photo journalism :: Viet Nam War

Next week starts another big event in the world of blogging. Book Blogger Appreciation Week will be full of wonderful surprises - blogs with awards, interviews with other bloggers - so I hope you will stop by for a visit throughout the week. On Tuesday, I will be posting my interview with Heather J. from Age 30+...A Lifetime of Books. It is oh so exciting!

Sunday Sidelines

So, in my little neck of the woods, it has rained and poured all weekend long. It could not have happened at a better time. I finished The Hunger Games and Catching Fire (both on the Kindle) and now I can start Mockingjay. The only review I allowed myself to read was rather negative, so I am a bit sad because I want it to be as good as the first two. If you have read the final book and would like to encourage me PLEASE leave me a little comment telling me how good it really is! But no spoilers, please.

Please visit Merit Badger to decide which badge you have already earned as a reader or a writer! I read through many of them and have decided that I have earned the Voracious Reader badge:

Sure, writers write. But they should read, too! Earn the “voracious reader” merit badge by giving yourself permission to refill your head with words every now and again.

Since I am always reading two or three books at a time, I think I have earned this one for sure. Visit this unique blog to see which badges you have earned!

1.Bangs :: cut too short
2.Diaper :: change
3.Coffee table :: book
4.Cops :: and robbers
5.Matches :: cigarettes
6.250 :: dollars
7.Hurricane :: Katrina
8.Bad :: news
9.Confirmation :: church
10.Fiber :: One Bar

Unconscious Mutterings is a weekly word association game created by Luna Nina. Visit her blog to play along and see if anyone else matches your answers!!

I have one other question for you today...do you use Intense Debate for your comments, and if so do you like it better than the standard comment management on your platform?

Wishing you a great week ahead.

Sunday Sidelines

Good morning and welcome to another Sunday Sidelines!

I reviewed the Kindle and Drive by Daniel Pink this week. I very much liked both!!

It is also time for Luna Nina's Unconscious Mutterings:

1.Leads :: follows
2.Concierge :: tip
3.Thousand :: and one nights
4.Engines :: cars
5.Argument :: constant
6.2006 :: so long ago
7.Knot :: tied
8.F*** :: my life
9.Handsome :: is as handsome does
10.Ridge :: Noth Carolina

I would like to share another website and activity with you this week. It is called Postcrossing and I enjoy it very much! Share postcards with people all over the world. I have been collecting postcards since I was 14 (umm, over 40 years now) and I absolutely love this site. Check it out!!

Check out my review of A Special Fate: Chiune Sugihara, hero of the Holocaust to learn about one of the largest rescues of European Jews during the Holocaust. Another Holocaust review this week is The Good Liar.

I have been doing a lot of reading and hope to get some more posts up soon. But the school year starts tomorrow and I have over seventy students in one class and I am dedicated to establishing a real relationship with each and every one of them (in an online environment) - this involves quite a bit of time. And I expect the library to be very busy as we move into the semester. So we will see where I can carve out reading, reviewing, and posting time!

I would love to hear about your week (grab the logo and leave a comment to your post) and hope you have a great upcoming seven days! !

Sunday Sidelines

Do you ever play the Sunday Luna Nina Association game? Every Sunday, she posts ten words that you should copy and then add the first word, or words, that you think of; then you add your link to hers and you can visit other participants and see what they thought of when presented with the same words. I try to play every week - fun times!

1. Rhythm :: and blues
2. Baby :: carriage
3. Sanctimonious :: pretentious
4. I like :: Big Butts and I cannot lie
5. Constipated :: ugh
6. Sleep late :: on the weekends
7. Over easy :: eggs
8. Erratic :: behaviors
9. Umbrella :: Unbrella
10. You don’t :: know what its like...to love somebody!

Last Sunday, my husband, my daughter and I went to Atlanta to see a Braves game and to visit the Georgia Aquarium. We drove up on Sunday, checked in to the hotel, took MARTA to Underground Atlanta, and went to the game. We had perfect seats and the Braves won, so it was a blast.

On Monday morning we managed to find our way to the Aquarium, which was magnificent. We spent a few hours wandering through five different exhibits. I think my favorite place was in front of the Beluga whales - they were enormous of course, but so graceful. The otters in the same tank were fairly funny! Here is a short video of the whales in action.

I did manage to get some reading and reviewing done as well. How are you doing this Sunday? What are the highlights of your last week? Have a great upcoming week!

Sunday Sidelines

So it is Sunday again. It has been an average sort of day, with all of us doing the things we usually do. Are there any ritual things you do on Sunday other than church? When my kids were small we would always go out to my ex-in-laws farm for a big Sunday dinner. That was fun, but no one goes now even though they still live on the farm.

Today I spent time getting caught up on grading since our big trip to Atlanta will be on the weekend before grades are due (sadly I planned that!). Then I spent some time reading and writing a review on Holocaust memoir Isabella: From Auschwitz to Freedom. I finished Adam and Eve: A Novel and should have that review posted here early in the week. I have a few more Holocaust books to review, but that may have to wait until next weekend!

Is there anything that made this weekend special for you? Sunday Sidelines is designed for us to learn something about each other - outside of just our book reviews! I would love to hear about your weekend rituals!

Sunday Sidelines

This has been a different kind of weekend, and therefore, a different kind of Sunday. My mother is 84 years old and she went to the hospital (only about 5 minutes from our house, thank goodness) via ambulance on Thursday afternoon. She has Congestive Heart Failure and COPD, which means that if she catches any kind of bug, it is very easy for her lungs to become compromised. And this time, like the last two hospitalizations, she has bacterial pneumonia. Thankfully, we seem to catch it earlier now that we know what to watch for in her day to day activities. Even so, they usually have to keep her in the hospital at least a week, so my sister and I have been taking turns visiting and helping her this weekend. My dear husband and daughter have been helping as well. I haven't called my sons, who are really too busy to help and after we found out what was wrong, it seemed there was no immediate danger. All that said, I am so tired. So I didn't do too much else this weekend. It will all wait!

So here is some much better news! My daughter is a huge Braves fan and we have not been to a game in about 10 years. So last week we decided we would plan a trip to see an August home game. We originally thought we would drive up, watch the game, and drive home - why? Because of the dogs! Then it just sort of snowballed. My father-in-law arranged an overnight stay for our birthdays (all late August and early September)! Then my sister called a friend and got us Free Tickets!!! Yes! So now that our money is not tied up in game tickets, we are planning to visit the Atlanta Aquarium - which is the largest aquarium in. the. world! So we are so excited. And no we did not forget about the dogs - a good friend called the same day to offer to come by and stay with them, or just check on them if they won't stop their eternal yapping. So our little short vacation has turned into a nice few days trip. Good times, people! Good times!

Sunday Sidelines

Good morning and happy spring Sunday to all. This weekend has been about flowers at our house. It all started because a friend gave us a very small moon flower. We nurtured it in the house forever - not because we had to - because we were lazy, err slow? Anyway, we wanted to see these large white blooms that we heard about - they only bloom at night, so we decided it was time to send this small plant to the real world. And of course this became a production. Here are some photos - hard to believe these five small pots of flowers took us all morning!



The moon flower is the leafy plant in the back of the square planter. We had to put a mini-arbor type thing in the back of the planter because moon plants like to climb. My favorite at this point is the red and white flower in the flower flowerpot. It is really beautiful to see. Maybe next weekend we will be able to do more.








I hope that you will take the time to read some book reviews of Holocaust Resources for children:
Angel Girl - A controversial story


A Family Secret - A graphic novel

And maybe come by and tell me about your week!

Sunday Sidelines

Welcome to another Sunday Sidelines. It has been a beautiful week in Northwest Florida with spring weather a warm welcome after an unusually cold winter. I managed to take the day off on Friday and my husband, my daughter and I took our two grandsons to Pensacola Beach. It was still a bit too cold to get in the water, although there were some brave souls who seemed to be having fun splashing about in the waves. Instead we walked to the end of the long fishing pier on the Gulf Side and wandered a bit on the Sound Side.

The water was beautiful and fairly calm for the Gulf Side. We did watch four or five people surfing - long boards, because the waves were too small for a short board.

Today we started with yard work...twelve bags full of leaves and still only half done. The leaves are falling faster than we can rake and sweep them up! We had to have the philosopical argument with our daughter who insists putting the leaves in bags is an environmental travesty. Still I suspect our neighbors appreciate our leaves being contained, plus it was faster.

Then this afternoon we all three went to a production of Grease at the University of West Florida. It was a student production and overall quite cute. The music was good and some of the singers were great!

This last week, I finished a few books and should have reviews posted early in the week:

An Unfinished Score - Elise Blackwell

She's So Dead to Us - Kieran Scott

Have a wonderful week!!

Sunday Sidelines

Welcome to my Sunday Sidelines. This is just a mish-mash of what I am thinking about this week. I hope that you will leave a comment telling me what you are thinking!

Here is something fun I do every Sunday. It is Unconscious Mutterings hosted by Luna Nina. She supplies the words, you supply the associations. And check out what others are associating!

1. Philanthropy :: buy a cow


2. Said :: well


3. Blanks :: fill in the


4. Tapas :: Spanish


5. Orgasm :: Ummmm


6. Movement :: slight


7. Detention :: in trouble


8. Restaurant :: Chili's


9. Weird :: and strange


10. Sniffle :: snort

WOW - now what I am really excited about. I am excited about BASKETBALL!! In particular, I am excited about Butler. And that is saying something for me, since my daughter reminded me last night that she had a Duke hat and a Duke t-shirt growing up because I was undeniably a Duke fan. And I won't be crushed if they win the championship, but I am really pulling for Butler. As for the women - well who can win other than UConn. But know I will be watching tonight.

While I am not watching basketball this weekend, I have been sitting at my desk at home grading student projects. Sugar Pie doesn't like to hang without me, so I bought a baby sling and she happily snuggles up in it while I am at the computer. The other three chihuahuas are too big for it and a bit jealous, but that it the perk of being the smallest. She has food in her little pouch and is quite content to sit there as long as I do. Such a little love.

Well, wishing you all a blessed day.

Donna

Sunday Sidelines

I have a new meme, Sunday Sidelines. Many of us have blogs dedicated to one thing or another. Reading the many posts by different bloggers, we come to know them. Sunday Sidelines is an opportunity to step outside of the normal blog post and share something that is on your sidelines. If you would like to join in, just leave a comment. I would love to hear from you.




Perhaps it is possible
to be gentle no matter what, to seek not restraint
but surrender entirely, to turn
from the snarling reproach not into the keening
dismissal of hope but to whatever bright
fluttering is next, the bright fluttering
of wisteria petals, a felicitous
phrase, fingers touching
a face. ...
- From "Fuschia" by Charlie Smith







I love this single fluttering of wisteria petals on my back fence. It reminds me that spring is coming. Soon the backyard will be filled with people swimming, sunning, and eating...family time will be tripled. I am anxious for this to begin.


Poem: "Fuschia" by Charlie Smith via PoetryFoundation.org From Indistinguishable from the Darkness. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1990.