About Me

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I am a Catholic wife and mother living in western New York State.

Meet the Family

  • DoorMan - Husband and Dad, extremely talented garage door guy
  • B - budding new media evangelist, avid reader, soccer lover, boy age 14
  • B - karate white belt and lover of Legos, boy age 8
  • MAB - me: wife, mom, homemaker, and more

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Wednesday, April 30, 2008

LibraryThing Meme

If you know me, you know I love LibraryThing. Well, there is a new meme. You take the top 106 books tagged "unread" and comment on if you've ever read them, never read them, etc. So, here goes:

  1. The ultimate hitchhiker's guide by Douglas Adams (43) never read, no interest
  2. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke (236) never read, no interest
  3. The kite runner by Khaled Hosseini (19) never read, no interest
  4. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (211) maybe someday
  5. Life of Pi : a novel by Yann Martel (17) never read, no interest
  6. Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra (152) TBR pile
  7. Crime and punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (176) maybe someday
  8. One hundred years of solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (183) maybe someday
  9. Vanity fair by William Makepeace Thackeray (115) maybe someday
  10. The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien (155) maybe someday
  11. Ulysses by James Joyce (135) maybe someday
  12. War and peace by Leo Tolstoy (132) maybe someday
  13. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (132) maybe someday
  14. The brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (136) maybe someday
  15. Catch-22 a novel by Joseph Heller (158) never read, no interest
  16. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte (162) read
  17. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood (110) never read, no interest
  18. Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle I) by Neal Stephenson (92) never read, no interest
  19. A tale of two cities by Charles Dickens (124) maybe someday
  20. The satanic verses by Salman Rushdie (88) never read, no interest
  21. Middlemarch by George Eliot (96) TBR pile
  22. Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books by Azar Nafisi (96) never read, no interest
  23. The name of the rose by Umberto Eco (120) never read, no interest
  24. The Kor'an by Anonymous (11) never read, no interest
  25. Moby Dick by Herman Melville (119) maybe someday
  26. The Odyssey by Homer (136) maybe someday
  27. The Canterbury tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (108) TBR pile
  28. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (114) maybe someday
  29. The hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo (75) maybe someday
  30. The historian : a novel by Elizabeth Kostova (108) never read, no interest
  31. Foucault's pendulum by Umberto Eco (101) never read, no interest
  32. Atlas shrugged by Ayn Rand (102) never read, no interest
  33. The history of Tom Jones, a foundling by Henry Fielding (67) never read, no interest
  34. The three musketeers by Alexandre Dumas (87) TBR pile
  35. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (95) maybe someday
  36. The sound and the fury by William Faulkner (94) never read, no interest
  37. The Iliad by Homer (117) maybe someday
  38. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (97) never read, no interest
  39. Emma by Jane Austen (117) read it, loved it! My favorite Austen book
  40. Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak (64) maybe someday
  41. Sons and lovers by D.H. Lawrence (69) never read, no interest
  42. Gulliver's travels by Jonathan Swift (88) maybe someday
  43. The house of the seven gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne (62) maybe someday
  44. Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies by Jared Diamond (104) never read, no interest
  45. Dracula by Bram Stoker (100) read
  46. Lady Chatterley's lover by D.H. Lawrence (73) never read, no interest
  47. A heartbreaking work of staggering genius by Dave Eggers (97) never read, no interest
  48. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens (83) maybe someday
  49. The once and future king by T. H. White (81) never read, no interest
  50. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (82) maybe someday
  51. To the lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (83) never read, no interest
  52. Mansfield Park by Jane Austen (88) read
  53. Oryx and Crake : a novel by Margaret Atwood (78) never read, no interest
  54. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (106) maybe someday
  55. Labyrinth by Kate Mosse (56) never read, no interest
  56. Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy (83) maybe someday
  57. Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed by Jared Diamond (76) never read, no interest
  58. The corrections by Jonathan Franzen (84) never read, no interest
  59. Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe (58) maybe someday
  60. Underworld by Don DeLillo (64) never read, no interest
  61. Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott (63) maybe someday
  62. The grapes of wrath by John Steinbeck (99) read
  63. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (124) read
  64. The Gormenghast trilogy by Mervyn Peake (47) never read, no interest
  65. The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells (66) maybe someday
  66. Jude the obscure by Thomas Hardy (65) never read, no interest
  67. The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin (62) never read, no interest
  68. Tender is the night by F. Scott Fitzgerald (66) never read, no interest
  69. A portrait of the artist as a young man by James Joyce (89) read
  70. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain (59) maybe someday
  71. The divine comedy by Dante Alighieri (63) TBR pile
  72. The inferno by Dante Alighieri (84) same as above
  73. Gravity's rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (66) never read, no interest
  74. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (83) never read, no interest
  75. Swann's way by Marcel Proust (59) never read, no interest
  76. The poisonwood Bible : a novel by Barbara Kingsolver (91) never read, no interest
  77. The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay : a novel by Michael Chabon (83) never read, no interest
  78. Sense and sensibility by Jane Austen (96) read
  79. The portrait of a lady by Henry James (62) never read, no interest
  80. Silas Marner by George Eliot (57) read
  81. The picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (89) read
  82. The man in the iron mask by Alexandre Dumas (43) never read, no interest
  83. The god of small things by Arundhati Roy (80)never read, no interest
  84. The book thief by Markus Zusak (67) never read, no interest
  85. The confusion by Neal Stephenson (61) never read, no interest
  86. One flew over the cuckoo's nest by Ken Kesey (82) never read, no interest
  87. Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (97) read
  88. Bleak House by Charles Dickens (63) TBR pile
  89. The system of the world by Neal Stephenson (55) never read, no interest
  90. The elegant universe : superstrings, hidden dimensions, and… by Brian Greene (60) never read, no interest
  91. Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson (78) never read, no interest
  92. The known world by Edward P. Jones (53) never read, no interest
  93. The time traveler's wife by Audrey Niffenegger (105) never read, no interest
  94. The mill on the Floss by George Eliot (54) maybe someday
  95. The English patient by Michael Ondaatje (64) never read, no interest
  96. Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon (47) never read, no interest
  97. Dubliners by James Joyce (78) never read, no interest
  98. Les misérables by Victor Hugo (73) never read, no interest
  99. The bonesetter's daughter by Amy Tan (56) never read, no interest
  100. Infinite jest : a novel by David Foster Wallace (54) never read, no interest
  101. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad (53) never read, no interest
  102. Beloved : a novel by Toni Morrison (77) never read, no interest
  103. Persuasion by Jane Austen (82) read
  104. A clockwork orange by Anthony Burgess (83) never read, no interest
  105. The personal history of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (69) maybe someday
  106. Tropic of cancer by Henry Miller (54) never read, no interest

Friday, April 11, 2008

Home Education and Books

It is the time of year when my thoughts turn toward next school year, and all of the books we will need or want. I usually try to time my book purchases just after the arrival of our income tax refunds. I like to have everything in place before summer, so I can relax!

But things are different now than they were when my oldest began kindergarten five years ago. I have discovered "living books." And the library. And their book sales. And the swap sites. And LibraryThing. We are in a different home, and possibly moving again this year. We have a different income stream, which is sometimes a trickle. I now plan, acquire and manage my resources in a vastly different way than I did back then.

So I thought I would write up some posts on my whole Book Thing. I should come clean first and foremost and admit that I am a book junkie. I love to read. I love to buy books. I even love to sell them! I've made a nice, if small, bundle over the past nine years selling used books online. I even want to write one. I even have one started!

My boys love books. They both love to read. Hardly a day goes by that they don't read or are read to. Except maybe summer, when they play hard outdoors all day. That is just fine with me, too. My oldest wrote and illustrated an alphabet book for his brother, which I had published on LuLu.

My ever-patient husband says that our duplex is bursting at the seams with all of the books we own. They are starting to make him nervous. They are everywhere. We actually do have bookshelves in every single room in the house, including the hallways, and excepting only the foyer and the two bathrooms. And we are out of shelf space.

Thursday, April 03, 2008

Pope John Paul II



We read this book in memory of our beloved JPII. I can't wait until this is a day on the church calendar with a Mass and everything!

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