30-31 out of 100 How About You???

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 books from this list. Copy the list into your own note. Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read. Delete ‘x’ from any you have not read. Post the number you have read in the note title.

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen X
2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien   Tried and couldn’t finish.
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte X .
4. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee X
6. The Bible X
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
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
16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien Tried and couldn’t finish.
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife
20. Middlemarch – George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell X
22. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald Tried and couldn’t finish.
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  Tried and couldn’t finish.
30. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame X
31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy X
32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis X 
34.  Emma – Jane Austen
35. Persuasion – Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis X
37. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden X
40. Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne X
41. Animal Farm – George Orwell X
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 X
47. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies – William Golding X
50. Atonement – Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi – Yann Martel X
52. Dune – Frank Herbert 
53.  Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen X
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 Night-time – Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck X
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’s Diary – Helen Fielding 
69.  Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick – Herman Melville 
71.  Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens X 
72.  Dracula – Bram Stoker 
73.  The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett Tried and couldn’t finish.
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
80.  Possession – AS Byatt 
81.  A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens X 
82.  Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell 
83.  The Color Purple – Alice Walker  Tried and couldn’t finish.
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 X
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch AlbomX
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X
90. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-ExuperyX
93.  The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94. Watership Down – Richard Adams X
95. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute X
97. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas X
98. Hamlet – William Shakespeare X
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl X
100.  Les Miserables – Victor Hugo X

February 2009 Book Give Away!

Hi, everyone!  I’ve got another list of books to give away.  If you check out the December list, there are still some left that I will take to donate to the library next week, so you still have some time to grab them!

Just three requests:

1. You like books!  HAHAHA!
2. You live in Japan
3. You don’t mind paying the shipping cost.  Usually 800-900 yen for a box of 5-6 books.  Probably less for fewer!

 

1. The Black Mountain by Rex Stout (PB) Nero Wolf series.  Old copy.
2. The Cat Who Saw Stars by Lilian Jackson Braun (PB)  ISBN 0-515-12739-6
3. Dead Heatby Dick Francis (PB) (I paid $14 USD at the airport for this!!!!!!!!  CRAZY!)
4. Crooked House by Agatha Christie (old PB)
5. Lake Newsby Barbara Delinsky (PB) ISBN 0-671-03619-X
6. Miss Bianca and the Bridesmaidby Margery Sharp (HB)  Old library copy
7. The Case for Christby Lee Strobel (PB) ISBN 0-310-20930-7
8. A Season for Simplicityby Donny Finley (Gift book in ENglish) ISBN 0-7369-0108-6
9. Forgive and Forgetby Lewis B. Smedes (PB)
10. The Comfort of Rest and Reassuranceby Roy Lessin (HB) ISBN 1-59310-653-X

Leave a comment if you would like any of these books.   You can send me your snail mail address at kimsbookshelf@yahoo.com, for confidentiality!  Let your Expat/English reading friends know too, yeah?

Sankaku Tanguramu Puzzle – KUMON

We got this puzzle as a present when Jun was 1 1/2.  It was beyond her and my abilities then, but, I found it before going home to the States for Christmas last year and took it along.  Junnie and Grammy and Grandpa ALL loved this puzzle.  Each of the adults tried to get it away from Jun so they could figure out the patterns on some of the harder ones.  Jun has even those nearly down pat now.

Basically, there are pictures with shapes cut out in them.  There are 8 triangle wooden blocks that fit in the shapes.  Some are very easy.  One triangle per puzzle.  Others are harder 7 or 8 triangles are needed to fill in the shape.  I noticed on Amazon.co.jp, that KUMON has a few other puzzles too, like this. 

There is no need to understand a word of Japanese to use this puzzle with your child.  My Mom figured it out just fine! 

I never did well on spacial tests in school, so I hope this puzzle and ones like it will give Jun a leg up in this area.  Jun just enjoys the tickles she “earns” when she gets a puzzle right!

Leap’s Phonics Pond – Help requested

Jun got her very own computer (Leap’s Phonics Pond) for Christmas.  Grammy found it at a recycle shop and got it for a steal.  Of course, being the knowledgeable parents we are – or are not – we didn’t know exactly how much of a steal till I checked it out on Amazon.  Nice $50 price tag.

It teaches lower case letters, gives a quiz on those letters, teaches and tests on phonics, does some basic spelling and…the reason for this post – has a song or some kind of music assigned to each letter.  Well, my musical Junnie LOVES the music feature.  However, there are no words to the songs.  I have been trying to recognize the songs and remember/search for the lyrics so I can teach her the songs too.  So far I have come up with the following.  I hope it might be helpful to someone else too!  There are a few I can’t figure out.  If you can…PLEASE tell me!  THANKS!

a – Part one of the ABC song:  a-b-c-d-e-f-g

b – Billy Boy

c – Clementine

d – Do you Remember Sweet Betsy from Pike?

e – fun sound

f – Farmer in the Dell

g – Same sound/rhythm as “k”

h – Part two of the ABC song: h-i-j-k-l-m-n-o-p

i – I’ve Been Working on the Railroad

j – Jimmy Crack Corn

k – Same sound/rhythm as “g”

l – London Bridge

m – fun sound

n – Sounds like the tune of I’ll Fly Away.  Again  – should start with an “n”, though, shouldn’t it?

o – ?? but sounds like some song!?

p – Pop Goes the Weasel

q – Part three of the ABC song:  q-r-s-t-u-v

r – Row, Row Your Boat

s – She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain

t – This Old Man

u – fun sound

v – fun sound

w – Part four of the ABC song: w-x-y-z, Now I know my ABC’s, next time won’t you sing with me!

x – fun sound

y - Yankee Doodle

z – fun sound

Any ideas on the question marks?

December 2008 Book Give Away

I was so happy to send books out to two readers last month.  Just think how happy we would all have been if I had gotten the right box of books to the right person!!!!  Yep, between the post office lady and myself, we managed to send Nagano’s books to Hyogo, and vice versa!  Thanks to the kindness of both readers, they read each other’s books and will soon be sending them on to each other!

I will try to do better this time around!  I will be sending these books out the first of January, but wanted to give you a chance to look at the list before I took off for Christmas vacation.

Three Requirements:

1. You love books
2. You live in Japan
3. You don’t mind paying COD charges.  (I found you can get quite a few books in a box for 800-900 yen COD.)

Leave a comment in the Comments, and send me an e-mail at kims.bookshelf@yahoo.com with your snail mail address. 

Click the links – (Amazon.com) to look at the books.

Here are December’s books:

1. One-Way to Ansonia (PB) ISBN 0-425-08880-4 GONE
2. Praying God’s Will for my Marriage (PB) ISBN 0-8407-9223-9
3. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (PB) ISBN 4-89684-515-3
4. An American Childhood (PB) ISBN 0-06-091518-8 GONE
5. Murder in Three Acts (PB) 0-425-09041-8
6. Surrender (PB) ISBN 0-8024-1280-7
7. Pollyanna (PB) ISBN 978-1-85326-145-9 GONE
8. The Three Musketeers (PB) ISBN 0-14-044025-9
9. Shame and Grace(HB) ISBN 0-06-067521-7
10. American Tall Tales(HB)  Old library copy (1952) GONE

The Proper Care & Feeding of Husbands by Dr. Laura Schlessinger

When I got married, seven years ago, I read a lot of books on marriage.  Some were really good.  As this is our anniversary month, I would like to introduce some of them to you.  I personally think these books are good to read before marriage too.  Even if “Mr./Mrs. Right” is no where in sight yet.

I listen to Dr. Laura on the military radio station Sunday evenings.  She is quite sharp in replying to callers, so my soft heart only allows me to listen to a little of the show.  However, even in that short time, I learn something.

Dr. Laura has very clear standards for life.  She holds on to these standards very tightly.  And her standards make real sense.  In a world where grey is so much more prevelant that black or white, it is refreshing to listen to someone who knows what she believes, and lives by it (at least I hope she does!)

I was introduced to this book through a Christian internet radio station, and was a little surprised to see it there.  But, I bought it, and I like it.  This book is a little unusual in that it SUPPORTS the husband.  So many books around say that the husband needs to get his act together and understand his wife.  He needs to learn her language.  He needs to change, etc.  Well, many of us wives may feel that way, but waiting around for our husbands to change may take a life-time of frustration and bitterness.  Instead, we can be the catylist for change in our marriage by learning our husband’s language, and learning to understand him.

Thus the title, The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands.

This book is easy to read, remember and apply!

November 2008 Book Give Away

It is getting COLD here.  Well, colder than before, anyway!  Jun still streaks around the house claiming she is “hot”, so it must not be too cold yet.  A two year old with hot flashes?

But, for those of us who feel the cold, a good book and a quilt can warm us right up!  Huh? 

Please check out this list of books for the November 2008 Book Give Away and see if any will warm you up. 

Three criteria only:

1. You live in Japan
2. You don’t mind paying shipping COD
3. You LOVE books!

Leave a comment in the Comments, and send me an e-mail at kims.bookshelf@yahoo.com with your snail mail address, and I will send the books to you by the end of November.  Happy reading!

Here are November’s 10 Books. 

Click the links – (Amazon.com) to look at them.

1. Reader’s Digest One DIsh Meals (HB) ISBN 0-89577-389-9 GONE
2. The Christmas Box Collection (PB) ISBN 0-671-02764-6 GONE
3. Spiritual Secret of Hudson Taylor (PB) ISBN 0-88368-387-3
4. Anne Frank:  The Diary of a Young GIrl (PB) ISBN 0-671-69009-4
5. Around the World in Eighty Days (PB) ISBN 978-0-14036-711-9
6. The Eternal Spring of Mr. Ito(HB-old library version) ISBN 0-02-73700-2 GONE
7. Mark Twain:  Four Complete Novels(HB) ISBN 978-0-517-09289-7 GONE
8. Tarzan of the Apes (PB) ISBN 978-1-59308-227-7
9. Fiddler on the Roof (PB) ISBN 0-87910-136-9
10. Quentins (PB) ISBN1-55278-308-1 GONE

October Book Give Away

Hi!  Be sure to check the list of books to see if any are calling your name.  I will post a new list on Nov. 1st

October Book Give Away

Meet The Little Engine That Could by Watty Piper

What can I say???  I love this book!  Growing up, we had the full version and I loved each page of it.  Especially the phrase “I think I can!”

I wanted to share the message of “I think I can!” with the Mamas and Kids in my Toddler’s class.  However, the full story would have been more than the Mamas would have been able to learn to read to their kiddos.  So, I searched and searched and searched. 

This particular book is a Beginning Reader’s version.  Not many words, same cute pictures, and “I think I can!” nicely repeated.  Of course, when I read it aloud, I multiply the times we shout “I think I can!” while bouncing up and down, to my heart’s content.

So, this is not the full story – but it is great for ESL.  Give it a try.  This particular book has another story about the Little Engine and a Hippo.  Hmmm.  We won’t use that one in class, though, if you have a child, they may enjoy it too.

Big Dog and Little Dog by Dav Pilkey

We have really been going to the dogs around here!  HA!  This is the current craze at our house.   We actually have The Complete Adventures of Big Dog and Little Dog!  It has five stories in it.  This book has so many things going for it!

• The stories are short and cute.
• The illustrations are colorful and easy to understand with no words.
• The text repeats A LOT!  This book will be great when Jun is reading by herself.
• The human illustrations are just perfect for the adults reading the book. 
• Each story ends with a cute twist.
• Big Dog and Little Dog are GREAT friends!
• Those two dogs remind me SO much of my daily life with a two year old!  Too funny!

If you haven’t read a Big Dog and Little Dog book, give it a try!