Comments (8)

By bethany (dreadlock girl), September 15, 2009 02:57

We are in Spain for the next bit, some of you have begged for pictures, others have done nothing short of threatening me….either way I feel the love, thanks! We have loved every day so far, and we are headed to Segovia to see the sights there, the castle there is impressive and the aqueduct is insanely cool. Stay tuned, I hope to have pictures up of that soon….depending on internet connection. Until then, enjoy a little tidbit of our journey in photos.

I will try to post pictures here again, but I will be uploading them all to my flickr album España.

If you want to see our pictures of Spain in your google (or selected) reader sign up for the RSS for the España flickr album.

Comments (17)

By bethany (dreadlock girl), August 10, 2009 00:34

Alyce, Susan and Jandi

Susan

I started a book club almost two years ago, it has changed and morphed, but just gotten better and better. It has made it through the season where all my friends wanted to come just to hang out, and now only my friends who actually want to read and live in the area come. It is a perfect size now (not that we would ever not welcome other peeps!!) Alyce, a fellow book blogger from At Home With Books is local and is a member of the group as well!

I love it, we go out to eat first and just hang out, then we go to coffee and dessert and talk more and then talk about the books. We all love books, and most of the time we all read the book, our only fault is that sometimes we have a hard time getting (and staying) on the subject of the book we actually read. After we talk and discuss the book and are full to the brim we have been known to go out to a movie (if we can get that figured out) or over to one of the members house to sit and relax in the hot tub.

Our book club I think is a little different than most in that we actually are friends outside of book club, and our relationships go deeper than books. I love my local book club…it is nice to meet once a month for girl time, an evening to just hang.

This month we are going to read Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, next month Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins!

Becky and babe

Alyce & Susan

Susan & Jandi

I was there too, but I never end up in the pictures, bummer.

These are the books we have read so far in our bookclub, with links to my book reivews:
Half a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The Wednesday Sisters by Meg Waite Clayton
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith (Not reviewed yet)
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (not yet reviewed)
Plain Truth by Jodi Picoult
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom
March by Geraldine Brooks
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Watership Down by Richard Adams

There are more books, but I’ll stop there.

Is your book club as fun as ours????

Comments (8)

By bethany (dreadlock girl), August 9, 2009 15:31

I am currently reading Amy Tan’s, The Kitchen God’s Wife and it is excellent! I love getting the preloaded audio books from my library. Does every one’s library have these? It is the size of a deck of cards and lighter and you just have to plug in your headphones and hit play. No need for an ipod or to put it onto your computer and then transport it into a different format to work on your MP3 player, it fab.This is what they look like:

It really is a great idea. So far I have listened to two of them, last week I listened to Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, before that John Green’s Paper Towns and this week I loving The Kitchen God’s Wife. For my little ones I checked out The Island of Blue Dolphins, and Charlie and the Chocolate factory two books I enjoyed as a kid. Our library gets them through Playaway, and the quality is good, you can even mess with the settings and speed up the reading if you want. They are marketing to the military, schools and libraries, places where more than one person would benefit from the usage of the pre-loads, I tell you….I can’t get enough!

I have enjoyed the online download audiobooks that our library has, but these are even way more fun!

What about your library? Do they embrace new technology or is your library slower to accommodate the changing times? Tell me something you love about your local library, I’d love to hear it!

Comments (3)

By bethany (dreadlock girl), July 14, 2009 12:45

Even though June was one of the craziest months for us ever, I couldn’t handle not heading  to Powell’s to see an author. And the choice was hard, last month they had Carlos Ruiz Zafon, David Sedaris, Lisa See, among many other equally exciting authors. However, after having twittered with them for months, I just had to choose Luis Alberto Urrea and his lovely wife and kids at the Powell’s Books event on his tour to promote Into the Beautiful North. I warned them that I was a tad bit shy in person and they promised to be cuddly and they most certainly were. In all honesty I have never met an author like Luis Urrea, he was kind, attentive and he captured the audience with such ease, as he is just as good at public speaking as he is at writing. I loved him from the minute I saw him, and it was easy to see everyone else there did too. He was swarmed at the end, and he spent time meeting every person individually that wanted to talk or had questions.

Beyond how amazing of a public speaker, storyteller and writer Luis Urrea is, what I most enjoyed was seeing how personable he was with his adoring fans, and with his family. He is a real person, and I loved meeting him!!

When he explained his journey to writing Into the Beautiful North, what stood out to me the most was how he used bits and pieces of his family members, his friends, and people he has grown to admire or fear. Each character is based on someone, someone that has impacted Urrea’s life and by sharing those characters with us, he shares them with his readers giving us segments of them as we read. And after finishing Into the Beautiful North I can say that it really works, by making them hold a hint of a real-life person, they become real, they are real.

What is he up to now? You want the full dish? He informed the peeps there that his book Hummingbird’s Daughter is going to be made into a film, it is already on its way, and will start filming in January. Also he is working on a sequel to The Hummingbird’s Daughter, so keep your eyes open for it.

Urrea is full of surprises and great ones at that!

For more bookie pictures go to my flickr album: All things BOOK related

Comments (3)

By bethany (dreadlock girl), June 29, 2009 22:38

Winners:

Chris from Bookarama

Jen from Sew and Sox

Send me your snail mail addies and CONGRATS!!!

Comments (9)

By bethany (dreadlock girl), June 14, 2009 18:13

Some days on this earth seem to have the fill of a week of joy. Days spent with the Chalupskys are days just like that. When every moment is packed with play and joy and the shuffling of little feet, that is when you know, when you really can get just how special life is and that there are friends that will always be friends.

More than friends, they are as close as family. I have known my closest friend Jessica since before I was married, she was my maid of honour, I was her matron on honour- after we were married we went camping with our spouses together, lived in the same house, cooked brownies for eachother. Now we both have a set of boys, and our kids love playing together. We go out to the Chulupskys and are so blessed, loved on encouraged and the good thing is that we can do the same for them, living life only matters when you pour out what good is inside you, and also when you learn to get rid of the bad.

More than a house, family, friends– I have learned something from Anne of Green Gables, the Chalupskys are kindred spirits.

Thanks for the blessing that you are to us!

Comments (25)

By bethany dreadlock girl, April 28, 2009 15:54

I am posting a letter that Gautami sent out, just so you all are aware of what could happen to your blog too. I am now going to back up all my stuff. I hope Gautami can find her blog again, and recover the files.

Hello friends,

As of now my blog http://readingandmorereading.blogspot.com has been deleted without any information or intimation. I am in some kind of shock. As all of you know, our blogs are our tiny worlds, our family. And loss of a book blog is like cutting of the intellect side.

I have lost 650 posts. Out of which more than half were book reviews. Starting from scratch seems like a burden. But I will do that if I am unable to retrieve it in a couple of days.

I was thinking of having a mirror blog for my book review blog like I have for my poetry blog but before I got around it, it was deleted. Why/how, I can’t answer it.

I have gone to the help forum but I don’t know if they will help me. As I see it, lots of blog have been deleted over the weekend.

King Rat did send me a website for searching and retrieving. I am still trying to get around it without much success.

Meanwhile I need your support love and lot more.

AND ALSO THAT TO WARN OTHER BLOGGERS TO HAVE BACKUPS OF SOME KIND.

I will leave messages on my poetry blog. Please do visit me there:

http://firmlyrooted.blogspot.com

You can also direct people there

Thanks,
Gautami

Loser of:

http://readingandmorereading.blogspot.com