Princess Academy

Once again Shannon Hale has penned a wonderful book in a rich and beautiful world. Unlike so much of the fiction out there she helps empower our daughters.

This is the story of Miri is a fourteen-year-old girl from Mt. Eskel, a isolated mining community. She feels inadequate because her father doesn't allow her to work in the mine as everyone else in the village does. Life is hard in the small community as they slave to carve enough linder, a rock used to build buildings, to feed themselves until the next group of traders come.

In the spring when the traders arrive so does an official messenger from the Crown. He announces that the bride of the current prince will come from Mt. Eskel and so during the coming winter all the eligible girls will attend the Princess Academy to make sure they can conduct themselves when the meet the Prince. In other parts of the country this is usually a formality, but in Mt. Eskel it is necessary no one knows how to read or much of life outside the village.

At first no one wants to go, but when the soldiers come for the girls the villagers relent. Life at the Academy is hard for the girl as they struggle to understand what is being taught and the teacher's discipline is harsh.

But Miri so learns to read and begins to see a much larger world that she never knew about. With her new found knowledge she learns things that will not only make her families life easier but the whole village. She also learns the secret of quarry speech and uses it to help the other girls.

Miri is a wonderful character that girls and women alike can live up to. She is strong and although she is not sure what she wants out of life, she keeps moving forward seeking the answer rather than waiting for it to fall in her lap. Too many times authors create a damsel in distress instead of a heroine.

This is a story of a young girl becoming a woman and finding out just who she is and what she wants out of life. I would recommend this book for anyone with daughters. If we can raise woman like Miri the world would be a much better place.

BBC Reading List

Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. I'd be interested to hear which ones you've read and loved.

From what I can find online this list was initially compiled for voting on 'best-loved' novels.

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.
2) Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4)Tilda (~) Not Going to Read
5)Tally your total at the bottom.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X+
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X+
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X+
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X+
6 The Bible X+
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte X
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman ~
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens X
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 X+
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger ~
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot *
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell X
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 X+
34 Emma - Jane Austen X
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen X
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
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne X
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X
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
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 X+
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 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 X
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 X
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 X+
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles DickensX
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 X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven X
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad X
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 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

Total 34

Grammar and Writing Books

Writing Books

Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose
Author: Constance Hale

Writing Magic: Writing stories that Fly
Author: Gail Carson Levine

Sometimes the Magic Works: Lessons from a Writing Life
Author: Terry Brooks

Grammar Books

Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing
Author: Mignon Fogarty

The New Well Tempered Sentence: A Punctuation Handbook for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed
Author: Karen Elizabeth Gordon

The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation: An Easy-to-Use Guide with Clear Rules, Real-World Examples, and Reproducible Quizzes
Author: Jane Straus

What Child is This? A Christmas Story

By Caroline B, Clooney


Matt is a foster child who has never had a home. His mother has appeared periodically in his life only to leave again just as quickly no matter how hard he tries to hold on to her.

At present he lives with the Rowans. An older couple who have time and effort for him, but when eight year old Katie is placed in their home, Matt begins to wonder if his time in their home is over. Matt fears that if he leaves this home he will be sent to live in Cambridge, a home for those who are too much trouble to live in families.

As Christmas approaches the social worker arrives with beautiful white bells. He tell the kids to write their Christmas wishes on them. Matt is too old and has seen too much real life to believe in wishes. Katie on the other hand knows what she wants. She wants a family and to be loved. Pollard the social worker tells her that wish it too big and Christmas is about the little things. Another smaller, simpler wish is written on the bell.

Katie takes a blank bell to keep. To her it is beautiful and full of hope. Matt takes her bell and writes on it: Katie age 8 wants a family and hangs it on the Christmas tree at the restaurant where he works.

Liz's family has everything but the true meaning of Christmas. She looks at how her family celebrates and wonders why they can't see what they are missing. She tries to coax them into see what is important but they close their eyes and don't want to see.

She takes one of the bells and gives one of the children their wish. Her father on the the other hand rips up Katie's bell and throws it away.

Everyone had a choice about how they lived their lives. Some chose to be better people while others just stayed trapped in their narrow lives.

This book made me look at what I was doing and made me ask if I had made a difference this year.

Have you?

Life As We knew It and The Dead and Gone

By Susan Beth Pfeffer

I reticently read both of these books. I usually really like post apocalyptic stories where people rise above their circumstances. To me these are books like 451 Fahrenheit, The Postman, and Alas Babylon. I'm sure there are others but these are books that I have read more than once.

These two books had a lot of potential but to me all these character just lived. They never tried to make life better for others or change how they lived. In both stories they waited to die and just when their lives changed for the better the author cut off the story. We never got to see where they went and what they made of the new world they lived it.

Like in the first book, Life As We Knew It, they go to the grocery store to buy what they needed. They came home with many things they needed but hardly any yeast. If I remember it was enough to make three loaves, so after they yeast was gone they could no longer make bread.

I immediately thought all they needed to do was to let the yeast grow and them harvest what they needed. There is also sourdough. I have no idea how to make it but in the story the internet worked when they had electricity so they would have been able to look it up.

As well there were may strange things that worked, like their water pump. They were on well water, and that was fine, but how did they get the water out without electricity. Growing up we were on well water and if there was no power we still had no water.

Over all I found both stories depressing and basically downer books. There was really no solutions or growth in the books. All the character existed, until there was a chance to see how they adapted to their new worlds and the novels ended.

If you like a story about people starving and doing nothing to change it you will enjoy these books.

Jasper/Mount Robson trip 2008

2008
Originally uploaded by Kelli Bullock

I really liked this picture. The clouds look really cool.

Trip to Jasper/Mount Robson July 2008

On Wednesday July 16, we headed to Mount Robson to go camping with our five children and my in laws. On the way we passed through Jasper National Park. We did not stop because we planned on hiking there the next day.

We spent the night at Lucerne campground on Yellowhead lake. If you are entering Mount Robson Provincial Park for the east side it is the first campground you will come across.

It is a nicely treed campground with a beach and one short hiking trail. The children enjoyed the beach and lake. They spent a lot of time playing in the water and digging in the sand. Next time we will definitely bring our swimming suits.

Across the lake from the beach is the railroad tracks and there were trains every so often. The lake also seems like a nice place to bring a canoe and paddle around the lake. It is a large lake and very scenic.

It rained sporadically on the drive from Edmonton, but once we arrived the clouds cleared away; we were able to set up camp and eat our lunch. My only complaint was the squirrels. These little critters had no fear of people. They came and sat on the picnic table while we were setting up lunch. The varmints continued to annoy us until we left the next morning. One even got into the van while we packed up. This meant that we kept the doors closed between loading the van.

The next morning we left the campground after breakfast and headed to Maligne Canyon. This is on the east side of Jasper on Maligne Lake Road. This is a beautiful spot to see. The water has carved itself a path through the rock. There is a longer hike that you can take but we just did the short little loop. Even along this short walk there is some spectacular views of waterfalls. The walkway is fenced off, clearly marked and paved for access with a stroller.

My only annoyance with this spot is that there was nowhere nice to eat lunch. There were some picnic tables but they were in the parking lot between the rows of cars.

After lunch we went to Annette Lake. There is a nice walking trail around the lake that is paved and accessible for strollers and wheelchairs. We did not go all the way around the lake, instead we went only as far as the larger parking lot. This is where I would stop next time.

There was much nicer picnic site and more room for the children to run around. Not far away, there is a beach where I have been told that you can swim in July and August. From the part of the trail we walked there was a nice view of Mount Edit Cavell and some of the other peaks.

Here is a link to our pictures in flickr