Southern Reading Challenge: Garden Spells

I finished this one a couple of days ago, but I'm just now getting around to blogging it.

Allen, Sarah Addison. Garden Spells. New York: Bantam, 2007.

This is a delightful book. Sydney Waverley had always wanted nothing more than to get out of her town of Bascom, North Carolina. After being involved in an abusive relationship, she finds herself heading back there to provide safety and security for her daughter Bay. She moves in with her sister Claire who has never been involved in a romantic relationship. There is an apple tree in their yard with magical powers, a colorful relative named Evanelle who has quite the instinct for gift-giving, and several other memorable characters. It was a fascinating read that held my attention as I waited on the inevitable to happen. I do caution fellow Christians that the book contains premarital sex and characters who live alternative lifestyles.

What an Animal Challenge!

Kristi at Passion for the Page is hosting the What an Animal Reading Challenge. The books can be fiction or non-fiction. You only have to read 6 books before June 30, 2009 that fit the criteria. Since I'm reading one at the moment that fits, I'll have only 5 more to go. Basically any animal will do. The animal role can be as simple as a picture of an animal on the cover or in the title of the book, an animal with a major role in the book, or a main character that turns into an animal (although I doubt any of mine will fit into that last category). You just have to sign up with Mr. Linky at Kristi's site.

My first book is the latest Miss Zukas mystery by Jo Dereske entitled Index to Murder. It has a cat on the cover. Those of you who have read previous Miss Zukas mysteries know that Helma's cat is Boy Cat Zukas. I'm going to opt to not list the other five I intend to read right now because I have no idea which ones from my stash, the library, or books that I purchase between now and the time I finish that 6th book I'll be motivated to pick up first!

UPDATE OF BOOKS READ ALONG WITH DATES COMPLETED:

Dereske, Jo. Index to Murder. (completed 4 July 2008)

51st Carnival of Genealogy

I slipped up and didn't get a story into the 51st Carnival of Genealogy which Thomas has posted. I just never came up with the story I wanted for it. There were stories I did not want to include because of living relatives. Others I had shared before in the blog. I just was drawing a blank on what to share. Hopefully I can come up with one to go with the "age" theme in the 52nd edition.

Web Roundup - July 4

It's the news for which we've all been waiting! (I want to downgrade!)


Washington's boyhood home has been discovered by archaeologists.

Harold at Midwestern Microhistory shares a tip about searching geographic information in BYU's digital collections. I've added this site to my del.icio.us bookmarks!

Lesa shared a wonderful story about her family vacations when she was a child in her post about forgotten books. I'm just trying to picture 30 books plus all the other things the family must have had to bring along in that van! I wonder if today's children will have similar stories of their "staycations."

Thanks to Becky for bringing back memories of what I used to do on the 4th of July.

The Cincinnati Enquirer has an interesting story about a Revolutionary War patriot and his burial location--possibly in the ball park!

Tuesday Thingers: Top 100

This week's Tuesday Thingers involves the top 100 books on LibraryThing. Here are the instructions: Bold what you own, italicize what you've read. Star what you liked. Star multiple times what you loved!

Just a side note. I used to own many more of the classic literary works, but I parted with them in a move a few years ago. I owned some of the ones that are not marked in any way on here now because I didn't read them!

1. Harry Potter and the sorcerer's stone by J.K. Rowling (32,484)
2. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Book 6) by J.K. Rowling (29,939)
3. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Book 5) by J.K. Rowling (28,728)
4. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Book 2) by J.K. Rowling (27,926)
5. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Book 3) by J.K. Rowling (27,643)
6. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Book 4) by J.K. Rowling (27,641)
7. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (23,266)
8. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien (21,325)
9. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7) by J.K. Rowling (20,485)
10. 1984 by George Orwell (19,735)
11. Pride and Prejudice (Bantam Classics) by Jane Austen (19,583)
12. The catcher in the rye by J.D. Salinger (19,082)
13. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (17,586) *
14. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (16,210)
15. The lord of the rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (15,483)
16. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini (14,566)
17. Jane Eyre (Penguin Classics) by Charlotte Bronte (14,449) *
18. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon (13,946)**
19. Life of Pi by Yann Martel (13,272)
20. Animal Farm by George Orwell (13,091)
21. Angels & demons by Dan Brown (13,089)
22. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (13,005)
23. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte (12,777)*
24. One Hundred Years of Solitude (Oprah's Book Club) by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (12,634)
25. The Fellowship of the Ring (The Lord of the Rings, Part 1) by J.R.R. Tolkien (12,276)
26. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden (12,147)
27. The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (11,976)
28. The Two Towers (The Lord of the Rings, Part 2) by J.R.R. Tolkien (11,512)
29. The Odyssey by Homer (11,483)
30. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (11,392)
31. Slaughterhouse-five by Kurt Vonnegut (11,360)
32. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (11,257)
33. The return of the king : being the third part of The lord of the rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (11,082)
34. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (10,979)
35. American Gods: A Novel by Neil Gaiman (10,823)
36. The chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis (10,603) *
37. The hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy by Douglas Adams (10,537)
38. Lord of the Flies by William Golding (10,435)
39. The lovely bones : a novel by Alice Sebold (10,125)
40. Ender's Game (Ender, Book 1) by Orson Scott Card (10,092)
41. The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, Book 1) by Philip Pullman (9,827)
42. Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Neil Gaiman (9,745)
43. Dune by Frank Herbert (9,671)
44. Emma by Jane Austen (9,610) *
45. Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (9,598)
46. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Bantam Classics) by Mark Twain (9,593) *
47. Anna Karenina (Oprah's Book Club) by Leo Tolstoy (9,433)
48. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke (9,413)
49. Middlesex: A Novel by Jeffrey Eugenides (9,343)
50. Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire (9,336)
51. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (9,274)
52. The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien (9,246)
53. The Iliad by Homer (9,153)
54. The Stranger by Albert Camus (9,084)
55. Sense and Sensibility (Penguin Classics) by Jane Austen (9,080)
56. Great Expectations (Penguin Classics) by Charles Dickens (9,027)
57. The Handmaid's Tale: A Novel by Margaret Atwood (8,960)
58. On the Road by Jack Kerouac (8,904)
59. Freakonomics [Revised and Expanded]: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt (8,813)
60. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint Exupery - (8,764)
61. The lion, the witch and the wardrobe by C. S. Lewis (8,421) *
62. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle (8,417)*
63. Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman (8,368)
64. The Grapes of Wrath (Centennial Edition) by John Steinbeck (8,255)
65. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (8,214)***
66. The Name of the Rose: including Postscript to the Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (8,191)
67. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (8,169) *** [This is not showing up in my LibraryThing, but I know I own it. It's one of those that is packed in a box.]
68. Moby Dick by Herman Melville (8,129)
69. The complete works by William Shakespeare (8,096)
70. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond (7,843)
71. Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris (7,834)
72. The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel (Perennial Classics) by Barbara Kingsolver (7,829)
73. Hamlet (Folger Shakespeare Library) by William Shakespeare (7,808)
74. Of Mice and Men (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century) by John Steinbeck (7,807)
75. A Tale of Two Cities (Penguin Classics) by Charles Dickens (7,793)
76. The Alchemist (Plus) by Paulo Coelho (7,710)
77. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (7,648)
78. The Picture of Dorian Gray (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (Barnes & Noble Classics) by Oscar Wilde (7,598)
79. The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition by William Strunk (7,569)
80. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (7,557)
81. The Subtle Knife (His Dark Materials, Book 2) by Philip Pullman (7,534)
82. Atonement: A Novel by Ian McEwan (7,530)
83. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (7,512)
84. The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd (7,436)
85. Dracula by Bram Stoker (7,238)
86. Heart of Darkness (Dover Thrift Editions) by Joseph Conrad (7,153)
87. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (7,055)
88. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (7,052)*
89. The amber spyglass by Philip Pullman (7,043)
90. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Penguin Classics) by James Joyce (6,933)
91. The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel (Perennial Classics) by Milan Kundera (6,901)
92. Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse (6,899)
93. Neuromancer by William Gibson (6,890)
94. The Canterbury Tales (Penguin Classics) by Geoffrey Chaucer (6,868)
95. Persuasion (Penguin Classics) by Jane Austen (6,862)
96. Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman (6,841)
97. The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova (6,794)
98. Angela's Ashes: A Memoir by Frank McCourt (6,715)
99. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers (6,708)
100. The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli (6,697)

Non-Fiction Five Challenge: Book 4

Maxwell, Nancy Kalikow. Sacred Stacks: The Higher Purpose of Libraries and Librarianship. Chicago: American Library Association, 2006.

3 stars. The author draws an analogy between religious calling and the calling of librarianship. There were parts of this book with which I could nod my head in agreement; however, the author takes an analogy and consistently stretches it too far throughout most of the book. I had to force myself to continue throughout most of the early chapters, but the later chapters were written in a more engaging style. I struggled as to whether or not I should rate this as a 2.5 or 3. I decided to err with the more generous rating although I'm not sure that it's quite at that level.

Morristown Power Outage

Last Friday night, 2/3 of Morristown was without power. I was driving back from Knoxville and had noticed the outage as I got into town. I was very grateful that those of us who lived in the county had power, but it's pretty bad when your grocery store is pitch black. Morristown's paper does not publish on Saturday, but on Sunday morning we discovered what the cause of the outage was. It's one of those things that is too good to give away so I'll let you read all about it in the Citizen Tribune.

Nanny's Diary

I rediscovered my maternal grandmother's diary recently. It had been in a box that hadn't been opened in awhile. I pulled it out to read. One of the things that amazed me is that she would often mention events that occurred on that day in history.

For example, on Dec. 7, 1976, she stated:

This is Pearl Harbor day. Seems so long ago.
So many changes have taken place in my life since then & in the world also.

On April 25, 1977, she wrote:

On April 25, 1910 we had snow. It killed some of my father's young cotton and he had [to] plant over in some places.

Most of her entries talked about the weather or who had phoned or came to visit. However, these (and several other entries) offered so many insights.

I wish she'd gone on and on about how things were before and after Pearl Harbor so we could know a little more about the changes she had witnessed.

I wonder how she could so clearly remember the date of a snow 67 years before when I can't remember them from one year to the next!

Hazle Boss Neet (1921-2008)

Many persons doing genealogical research in northeast Mississippi will recognize the name of Hazle Boss Neet who published a book of records on Pontotoc County records. She died last Saturday and will be buried this coming Sunday. Her obituary appears in the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal.

Why I've Been So Quiet This Week

You may notice that I've not really been blogging much this week. It's because I've been spending a lot of time working on the church library. We are in the process of reorganizing it. We basically emptied the library and once we had it emptied for a fresh coat of paint and a little new furniture, we started selecting the books we wanted to keep. Several of us have spent most Saturday mornings this year going through the books. We finally made it through the 7000 or so books that were in there by the end of April or first week of May. I've begun the process of cataloging those that we are keeping on our new automation system. We will eventually mount the catalog for searching on the church's web site. I've trained several of the other volunteers in book processing. (Believe it or not, I'm way ahead of them. At my real library job, I struggle to stay ahead of our student workers who do the processing.) This week has been a bit of a challenge. The church's server crashed last week. While most of the offices are back online (and the server was being replaced today), the church library and things on that side of the building are still offline. I've not been able to import books from the Internet so I've been going through books to see which ones we are keeping lack ISBNs which is the field on which all imports are done on this system. I've listed those books with enough information in Excel spreadsheets that I can go home and do authority work and determine subject headings and call numbers for the items. I then take that back to the library so that I can plug away at it the next day in the church library. While I've made some progress this week, I've been able to do probably 25% of what I could have done if the Internet connection had been live. I've been spending the time I would normally spend blogging or synthesizing and inputting information from my recent New England trip trying to make my next day profitable. I got far enough ahead of myself last night that I didn't have to bring "homework" tonight!

So . . . what are we doing with all those books that we aren't keeping? I'm so glad you asked. We're having a book sale, of course! It's this Saturday at First Baptist Church, Morristown, Tennessee. We will be open for church members only in the morning; however, we are open to the public from noon to 3 p.m. All items are 50 cents. Besides books, there are records, audiocassettes, and videocassettes. Most of the books are duplicates or items that don't fit our new collection scope. (We had a lot of classic children's books but our new collection development policy limits what we are collecting to mostly Christian materials.) In other words, we have some good stuff available. The church is located at 504 W. Main. You may enter the book sale from the Jackson Avenue entrance near 1st North.

Tuesday Thingers

This is the first time I've participated in this meme. I saw it today at Boston Bibliophile.

Last week I asked what was the most popular book in your library- this week I'm going to ask about the most unpopular books you own. Do you have any unique books in your library- books only you have on LT? How many? Did you find cataloging information on your unique books, or did you hand-enter them? Do they fall into a particular category or categories, or are they a mix of different things? Have you ever looked at the "You and none other" feature on your statistics page, which shows books owned by only you and one other user? Ever made an LT friend by seeing what you share with only one other user?

I found 302 of my 1411 titles in LibraryThing were unique to my library. Many of my unique titles are from my genealogical books (especially surname-specific or locality-specific ones) or from my cookbook collection. (Most of those which were unique were locally published titles.) I have manually entered 222 titles; however, I often think creatively about which libraries might have a title before giving up! I have occasionally looked at the you and one other user page. In fact, I did tonight and discovered that my best friend and I share a book that we probably both purchased on a trip to San Diego a few years ago. I will have to say that I'm going to have to communicate with one of the others that I spotted on there who obviously shares an interest in Monroe County, Mississippi history and genealogy.