britty books

Photo: Eddie~S/Wiki

Welcome to Britty Books!

If you’re here to take a peek at the bullying prevention book review for this month, please see links below:

• September: Charlie, Charlie Fat Head Barley: A Book Review on Bullying in Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon
• October: Survival of the Cruelest: Bean’s Manipulation of Street Bullies in Ender’s Shadow: Orson Scott Card
• November: You’re Acting Like a Crowd of Kids…and Other Statements that Led to Piggy’s Downfall in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies
  
• December: Strategies for Thwarting, Coping and Changing Behaviours for the Better in Confessions of a Former Bully: Trudy Ludwig, Beth Adams
• January: A Bully with a Background in Gregory Macguire’s Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
  

Thanks for visiting!  Why not subscribe to my RSS feed today so we can see more of one another?

To find out more about J. Richard Knapp’s International Bullying Prevention monthly newsletter or to subscribe to it, see his website.

It's not too late to join the 31 days challenge!

I am currently doing a 31-Days to Build a Better Blog with the empowered ladies in the widget on the right (SITS girls).  This campaign to to help people concentrate on specific aspects of improving their own blogs with encourage from a lot of other people doing exactly the same thing at the same time.  The program is built around a wonderful book by Darren Rowse, which you can purchase here, if so inclined.  This is my second time through the book and let me tell you, there is always something to improve.

It’s Day Two and we’re focusing on writing a list post.  My lists always revolve around books as you can tell from my “Too Many Lists” page.  Love lists.

Here are some book bloggers I love to follow both because they have interesting things to say and they read great books:

• Arukiyomi. I love to read what he’s reading.  He doesn’t shy away from the heavy classics.  Plus, his book cover photos are fantastic!
• Book Browse. Many readers give a detailed review of what they’ve just read.  I love to read what real people have to say, instead of newspaper reviewers.
• Book-A-Rama. This blog reminds to get personal with my readers but to stay on topic.  I have an affinity for clean-looking blogs as well.

Some good book sites, in general include:

• Library Thing. A great place to start cataloging your personal library.
• Good Reads. Another catalog. Also has a very good newsletter that is released monthly.
• Living Social. Has an application for your Facebook page called virtual bookshelf so you can keep others up to date on what you’re reading.

This is a little something I found on Facebook notes.  How do you rate?

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here apparently.
Instructions:
Copy this into your NOTES. Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read. Tag other “Book Nerds” or just some friends. I know the selection is a bit biased in places and random in others.

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 X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee X
6 The Bible X
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

Total: 4

11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier X
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger X
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger X
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot

Total: 5

21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
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 X
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck X
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame X

Total: 4

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 X
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hossein X
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden X
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne X

Total: 4

41 Animal Farm – George Orwell X
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown X
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez X
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving X
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery X
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood X
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding X
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan

Total: 7

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel X
52 Dune – Frank Herbert X
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 X
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime – Mark Haddon X
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez X

Total: 5

61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck X
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov X
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold X
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac X
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding X
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie X
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville

Total: 6

71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett X
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

Total: 1

80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens X
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker X
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro X
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry X
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom X
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton

Total: 6

91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad X
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery X
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams X
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo X

Total: 5

Grand Total: 47, whoot!

Win this book by leaving a comment about what you're reading this summer

Well, the word is out! Tish Cohen, the author of a great summer read The Truth About Delilah Blue, is due to appear on this site along with my Britty Book Review on July 21st.  It’s my official first Book Blog Tour and I’d love to celebrate with you!  Leave a comment below with what you’re reading this summer for a chance to win.  Contest ends on July 31, 2010 at 11:59 MST.

While you’re here, click subscribe to receive all the latest updates on the books you love, including the Tish Cohen interview.  Enjoy the remainder of your summer!

Friendly turtle or smelly enemy? Photo by Dustykid/Wiki

Happy belated Canada Day and Independence Day! I celebrated at Baynes Lake in British Columbia, home of the painted turtles. Ever own a turtle and forget to clean it’s water for a week or two? Multiply that by a lakeful and you have the general properties of smell we were dealing with there.

Only saw one person swimming. Strangely enough, never saw him again…Killer turtles?

Really good thing with the lack of water activities, was the extremity of book reading! Finished up The Truth About Delilah Blue by Tish Cohen (see sidebar regarding book blog tour). Can’t say yet how this book rates as you’ll have to wait on the review in the third week of July.  Also look for a word from the author, Tish Cohen, who’ll be posting her thoughts right here on Britty Books.

If you don’t want to miss it, click on the “subscribe” button in the top right sidebar.

I promise to keep the killer turtles at bay.

As Canadians, we are used to watching eligible Americans apply for every known contest or reality TV show under the sun and we gladly sit by the sidelines cheering them on. Canadians are the wallflowers of North America relegated to a lifetime of admiring our more athletic, talented, able and graceful Uncle Sam, all the while moaning the loss of Canadian Idol (was it Ben Mulroney that tanked the show?).

This will make many of my Canadian friends upset. We really don’t like to think we’re second to anyone, least of all the U.S. of A. My Canadian friends will leave comments about how Canada is way better, we have health care, blah, blah, Margaret Atwood, Yann Martel, yadda, yoo.

I’m not saying we’re not great. I know, as much as all Canadians know, we rock.

The thing is: it’s hard to compete with being ineligible for every interesting things because their weatherman thinks the rain stops at the topmost border of North Dakota. What is beyond that? We’ll never know….

Then, out of the blue comes Harper Collins Canada to reinforce my faith in my personal Canadian reality. And yes, out of the blue comes The Truth About Delilah Blue a book by Tish Kohen that they would like my thoughts on. My thoughts! So, I read the book…and think. Then the cool part is: I write about what those thoughts are.

Wait, here’s the really coolest part: an interview with Tish Kohen will be appearing on this blog sometime in the third week of July!

This blog!

Can’t wait. My first real interview/guest post. With a real author. With a real, Canadian author.

O Canada!

Browse Inside this book Get this for your site

There’s nothing like the threat of family coming to stay-over that makes one think about the cleanliness of one’s home.  That could go into the truth categories, but it remains a solid fact today.

So, to cleaning up the guestroom/my office.

This room serves two main purposes: to sleep guests & to have somewhere to put my library/writing books/write/do psychology quizzes, etc.

Somehow or another, this room became the breeding grounds of ‘stuff’.  The weird thing about ‘stuff’, it multiplies faster than rabbits, faster than speeding bullets, faster than Viagra..you get the point.  Another strange thing about stuff – it leaves behind waste in the form of dust bunnies or, as I’ve heard them also called, ghost turds.  Even if you move the ‘stuff’, you know where the ‘stuff’ has been.

The whole point of cleaning up, really, was to get one bookshelf over to sit beside his two brothers on another wall.  In the meantime, the were two buckets of recycling papers and a little bag of garbage ‘stuff’ that went.  Beyond that, here’s some things you may discover when you rearrange the shelves:

• I own a lot more poetry books than I thought I did.  Considering how slender the volumes are, I have one whole shelf full!
• I have two copies of Vanity Fair.  One, though, was originally sold for 75 cents.  I have never read Vanity Fair.
• I have a new Compassion Child named Mango or something.  He has the same last name as the other Compassion Child whose mother removed him from the program, so I thought he was just using a nickname.  Nope.
• I found some old poems I wrote on paper…I do that sometimes when the computer is not in my pocket.
• I found some records of poems I published and had forgotten about.  I will try and link them up here sometime this week.
• I have a folder full of transfer credits, who knew?
• I own way too many journals…I never use journals.  I should.
• I didn’t find a copy of The Great Gatsby.  I thought I owned that.  Maybe I haven’t looked hard enough yet.
• I do have a desktop.  I do.
• I have a whack of plays but I don’t have A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  That’s something I should study in the future, having never read it. 
• I need to put photos into albums.
• I need somewhere to put photo albums.
• We should sell some of our older DVD movies.  Although looking at them I can’t see any I want to part with.
• I have a lot of dictionaries and thesauruses.
• I have trouble keeping pens handy.
• I love postcards (I have a quarter-wall full of framed cards).  I have about another 40 waiting to be framed.
• I am addicted to quotations and inspirational sayings.  Today’s card says, “A miracle is often the willingness to see the common in an uncommon way.”  I don’t know who this is attributed to as my mother gave me a networking board game and these were the cards inside.  Now they sit in a  Sucrets container on my desk.
• I have two friendly stuffed sharks looking down at me from atop my bookshelves.
• This rooms calms me, especially when it’s clean.

But – and there always is a but – I am being responsible to both the environment and to my pocketbook.  I only buy library discards.  Right now my library is having a 2 for 1 sale.  The best part is librarians are not good at math so they look at my pile of books and usually say $3.00.

Whoot!

Picked up two books on web design/desktop printing and publications for work, two ‘little’ books (you know those wee books that have striped covers?), The Roaring Girl whose cover has been calling to me for a few years (50 cents, baby!), and probably a few others I’ve already forgotten.

The bad thing about library discards is:

1. The secondhand bookstore won’t take them for trade.

2.  I feel really cheap giving them to friends to read and keep on a recommendation.

3.  They’re usually hardcover and no good for taking on the infamous train.

I just bought another bookshelf at work and my three at home are full to bursting.  Do I need an intervention?

Since the Calgary Reads booksale was such a great deal last year, went again this year.  Well I went tonight, I should say because I might go again tomorrow.  This was the first time they’ve done a Friday night opening and it was lined up down the block!!  And we parked three blocks away!

I’m still a bit choked about the $2 ‘donation’/entry fee but my daughter pointed out that it might stop some of the browsers from attending.  What browsers?  the books are a dolla’ …holla’.  Word.  Lots of them.

So, here’s what I bought tonight (alas, they were unable to take credit cards just as I got to the teller so I had to put some back):

1.  Roses Are Difficult Here by W.O. Mitchell.  This dude is a prairie standard and I’ve never, ever read one of his books.  I took a writing course with his nephew, though, if that counts.

2.  The Spire and The Paper Men by William Golding.  I’m just going off of Lord of the Flies here.  I hope they’re good.

3.  The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Stories by Mark Twain.  This is a wee, tiny, odd shaped, little square book with a giant title.  Plus, I really like Mark Twain.  Plus, I might send this one to my friend B. because it would fit into a regular envelope.  The recesion is effecting my book choices now.

4.  Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray.  I have a sneaking suspicion I might already own this book but the cover price was 75 (the original list price) and the cover is so cute and it is in super condition for having been printed in 1958.  Wow! I should really stop judging a book by its cover….(but I’m good).

5.  A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley.  I think this is on one of my lists of books toreads before I croak or break a hip or something.  I recently bought her non-fiction title 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel.  Yeah, haven’t started that one yet.

6.  The Time in Between by David Bergen.  This was my find of the sale.  It was on the Canadian Authors table for $1.  It was also in hardcover on the Bestsellers table for $5.  I got the $1 one, whoot!  Recession strikes again!

And that’s it!  The books I had to put back since that other $20 bill I thought I had in my wallet mysteriously disappeared (I think I spent it, no mystery there) were:  Kim by Rudyard Kipling, Labryinth by Kate Moss, and The Tiger’s Claw by Shauna Singh Baldwin.  Oh well.  Next time I’ll tell my kiddies that a book about High School Musical movie is not as important as classic literature but since they actually let me look for nearly 10 whole minutes, I’ve forgive them this time.

Big booksale today for Calgary Reads of whom I knew nothing about before…besides seeing this booksale advertized in previous years.  I still know nothing about them but the booksale was quite fabulous!  A whole indoor skating arena sans ice filled with tables and table of glorious books.  They charged me a couple of bucks to get in, which I think is simply beyond the point.  I AM going to spend gadfuls of money there anyway, why the superfluous token fee?

Besides this one little old lady in black who kept pushing me around the Classics area (really lady, they are Classics because they are not going out of style anytime soon.  Why the rush?), they had some awesome selection for paperbacks, surprisingly.  Usually, the library disgard paperbacks are so read that the spine is practically chalk.  These books, for the most part, were gently used and some looked brand new.  I swear some people only create libraries for show and don’t actually read their own books but replace them as trends change.

The only disappointment were the two tables Calgary Reads deemed as Bestsellers, which they were.  I was very impressed with the knowledge of the people who put that table together because the books have been very good, and might I add very literary, reads of the past couple of years.  The only problem was that they wanted $5 a shot for them.  Granted, it’s a lot cheaper than buying them for $20-30-50 brand new, but it would certainly bump up my book shopping accounts quite expendiently so I reluctantly replaced the Sylvanus Now signed by the Donna Morrissey, the author, and went back to getting pushed around the table by the little old lady (I think perhaps that was her job).

One last table of interest:  the silent auction table.  It had a hardcover copy of The Journals of Susanna Moodie by Maragaret Atwood with a starting bid of $30.  There were no bids yet.  They had a book 246 years old, and a few books from the 1800′s.  One, in particular, a textbook of the grammar of the Cree Language looked very interesting.  The starting on that one was $180, I think.  The super old one had a bookplate from The Duke of Montrose.  This is why I always ruin my books with plates.  I plan for people to ponder me and my taste in books once I’m dust.  It’ll be like a Dan Brown mystery but more tasteful and less exciting.

Getting to the point, these are the books I bought:

1.  My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier

2.  Misery by Stephen King (beautiful trade edition, rare).

3.  Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence

4.  Three Novellas by D.H. Lawrence (take THAT little old lady)

5.  Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton

6.  Obasan by Joy Kogawa (my treasure find)

7.  A Widow for One Year by John Irving

8.  Who Has Seen the Wind? by W.O. Mitchell (a SK standard I never read)

9.  Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle

and one book of poems for my friend, B. that I can’t say what ’tis since I have to send it to him!  I bought an armful of chapters books for the kidlings and a John La Carre for the hubby.  There was plenty’o'La Carre.  Guy’s a maniac.  The total, plus admission, was $23.  Not too shabby!  I just might go back tomorrow and see about Ms. Atwood.