General | Suspension of Disbelief

Jul

I participated in Blogathon 2006, but things were too crazy last summer for me to try and do it again (moving, applying for grad school, new job, new boyfriend . . .). I decided I wanted to participate again this year, because I really did enjoy it last time. I got all excited, I went to the Blogathon website . . . and saw that they’re not doing the Blogathon this year !!! They’re taking a year off to make 2009 awesome. I was sad, but then I saw that there’s an “unofficial” Blogathon that will be happening in its place.

So, this year I will be participating the Day of Blogs 2008! The crowd’s a bit smaller, but it’s still for a great purpose, so I’m in! This Saturday, July 26 (at 9AM EST) I will begin blogging every half hour for 24 hours. Bring on the caffeine!

This year, the charity that I have chosen is Children’s Literacy Initiative. Anyone who knows me knows that I LOVE reading (I mean, I double majored in English and theatre - that’s a lot of reading, LOL). I have hundreds of books at home, and I’m always reading something. I attribute my passion for reading to my early childhood experiences with books, mostly from my parents and my teachers. I’ll share more of my personal experiences during Day of Blogs, but know that reading is something I am quite dedicated to, and believe every child should have significant exposure to. Children’s Literacy Initiative doesn’t just support childhood literacy - it trains the teachers of pre-K through 3rd grade students who will work with these children on ways to effectively reach them and grant them a fulfilling education.

Children’s Literacy Initiative Mission Statement

Children’s Literacy Initiative works with teachers of our youngest children to transform instruction so that all children become powerful readers, writers, and thinkers.

From their profile on Charity Navigator:

Children’s Literacy Initiative (CLI) was founded in 1988 to enhance the opportunity for children from low-income families to enter school ready to learn and, once in school, to be successful in learning to read. CLI works to increase children’s literacy skills and to foster a love of reading by providing professional development for teachers of pre-kindergarten through third grade students. Our programs are designed to provide training in the most effective literacy practices and include quality books and materials for creating a literacy-rich classroom environment. CLI is involved in large projects in the public school systems of Philadelphia, Newark (NJ), Camden, Baltimore, and Boston, as well as training in several school districts in Pennsylvania.

Please consider sponsoring me for Day of Blogs. Donations can be received through Network for Good via the link at the end of each post during Day of Blogs (or by clicking HERE) or you may click through the widget on my sidebar.

There are all sorts of answers that you can find on the Day of Blogs website, but as always, feel free to contact me if you have any questions!

This post is for the Day of Blogs 2008! I am blogging for Children’s Literacy Initiative. For more information about what I am doing, please click here, or you can sponsor me!

Posted at 10:58 pm in: Blogginess, Books, General, Randomness
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1/31/2006 -- Questions from you!
1/23/2008 -- Holidays, Hospitals, and Higher Learning
12/8/2006 -- ABC Meme!

Jul

The Big Read: Book Meme

According to The Big Read, the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books on this list.

The instructions:
Look at the list and:
Bold those you have read.
Italicize those you intend to read.
Underline the books you LOVE.

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. 1984 - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchel
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’ Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92.The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Hat Tip: Sassymonkey Reads

Post Info:
Shout out to Nichole and Rachel!
Tags: Books | meme

Posted at 9:05 pm in: Blogginess, Books, General, Randomness
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3/10/2007 -- A Bookish Meme
2/22/2007 -- Thursday Thirteen #39
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Jun

Trip to California!

OK, I finally have a chance to post about our trip!

First, AJ, Bo, and I met up in San Francisco. It was a little weird that Bo and I were on vacation together without my parents. I guess we’re really grown up now, huh? LOL!

Pier 39 with Bo

Pier 39 with AJ

The first full day was our big sightseeing day. We took a sightseeing tour bus that drove us all around town and showed us everything. It took us to the top of a hill where we could see the whole city - it’s so big and hilly!

Lindsey and AJ at San Francisco

And then the bus took us to Golden Gate Bridge:

Bo at the Golden Gate Bridge

Then we traveled to Muir Woods, which was a beautiful state park. The redwoods were so gorgeous! So, of course, AJ had to act goofy in the middle of them

AJ in Muir Woods

Then, that night, we went to see Al Capone’s old haunt - Alcatraz:

Alcatraz

The next few days we spent exploring the city, including visiting the original Ghirardelli store.

Lindsey at Ghirardelli

We also spent an afternoon at Haight Ashbury, which is a place I’ve been wanting to visit for YEARS! We also smoked a little hookah in a hookah bar at Haight Ashbury, which just seemed too appropriate. This is a horrible angle for me, but look, I was there!

Lindsey at Haight Ashbury

Then we met up with my parents and we all headed to Napa Valley! We had the best time. We probably went to 15-20 wineries.

All the fam at Sterling Vineyards!

AJ and I slowly collected a case’s worth of wine to bring home with us . . . until we went to the last winery. We had tours at several of the wineries, and tastings at almost everyone, but the last winery we went to was a little different. At Del Dotto, we did a barrel tasting - we tasted the wine straight from the barrels that were in the caves! It was so cool!

Barrels at Sterling Vineyards

This was some of the best wine that we have ever tasted, and since the vineyard is a smaller vineyard that only sells wine from the winery (not in stores or resteraunts), we bought another half case of wine there, LOL! We’re going to let the wine age, so AJ and I used a Christmas gift certificate I had saved to by this AWESOME wine fridge.

So, I guess can check off #37 on my 101 in 1001 - I’ve been to California! For all the pictures, see my Flickr.

Then, Mama, Daddy, and Bo all went home and AJ and I went to New York for a couple of days. We saw August: Osage County (which was soooooo amazing) and American Ballet Theatre’s production of Sleeping Beauty (which meant a lot to me - Disney’s movie has been my favorite movie since I was 2, and I’ve always wanted to see the ballet). We also got to spend some time with my best friend Stephanie. She lives in NYC now, and she’s never had a chance to meet AJ.

So, we’re back now, and completely exhausted, but we had a truly great vacation! I think I’ve decided to give wine tasting/journaling another shot now that I’ve been to Napa and have a bit more knowledge about the whole thing.

Oh, and while I’m posting, we can also scratch #69 off of my 101 in 1001 list - over the past year I’ve really switched a lot of my grocery purchasing to organic food, and I try to consciously pick the organic options, even if they do cost a little more!

Posted at 9:26 pm in: 101 in 1001, General, My Life
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Jun

The Year of Living Biblically

I recently read a book that I REALLY enjoyed. It’s about a guy who decides to follow all the rules in the Bible for a year as literally as possible. Not just “love thy neighbor,” but also all the weird rules about facial hair, dietary needs, etc. I thought I’d just be amused by this book, but it’s actually made me think quite a bit! The author is not a Christian, yet he treats the Bible with quite a bit of reverence, and allows himself to be open to new ideas and theology.

I won’t go into too much detail about the book because I really feel like it’s worth the read! But part of what struck me so much about this book was the amount of research that A. J. Jacobs put into the different rules he was reading about (and the reasons behind them). He read hundreds of books during this process, and shared a lot of his findings throughout the book. Here are a few of the books that I’ve added to my wishlist as a result of reading this book:

- Reading the Bible Again For the First Time: Taking the Bible Seriously But Not Literally, Marcus J. Borg
- Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism: A Bishop Rethinks the Meaning of Scripture, John Shelby Spong - very divided reader reviews on this one!
- God: A Biography, Jack Miles
- Unauthorized Version: Truth and Fiction in the Bible, Robin Lane Fox - more divided reader reviews
- Daily Life in Biblical Times, Oded Borowski

Also, Jacobs uses the website Charity Navigator to help him figure out how to tithe his money. I think this is a really neat site, and I’ve added it to my bookmarks!

There’s also another website that he mentioned called MoveOn.org. I’m still not 100% what this website’s purpose is, but I’m intrigued.

And on the rare off-chance that A. J. Jacobs is “self-Googling” (pg. 151) - I LOVED your book! I have Post-It notes all over my book and send a copy to my mom. Thanks for the great read!