How Many…

BBC 100 books - how many have you read?

71 read

The BBC apparently believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here:

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
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
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
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
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
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
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
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe 
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
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell 
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
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy.
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
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 
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
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
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
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
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.
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
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
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
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
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Facebook Facts:

“Would I rather be feared or loved? Um… Easy, both. I want people to be afraid of how much they love me.”

ANALYSIS: Horn of Africa famine as much about geopolitics as drought - World - CBC News

ANALYSIS: Horn of Africa famine as much about geopolitics as drought - World - CBC News

My son is from this region… but this isn’t the only reason I care… they are our neighbors, our brothers and sisters… we should care because it effects us as well!

Compassion Anyone?

“Everybody is God’s Somebody!”

I am the first person to admit that I am not always as compassionate as I could be.  I am sassy and sarcastic.  I am snarky and (sometimes) an elitist.  I generously admit it.  Yet, even having said that, I am passionate (get passionate post link) about a few things and helping people in need is one of them! 

Compassion literally means to suffer with.  So, when Jesus was “moved with compassion” for His people, he literally suffered with them.  And ultimately for them.  But this isn’t about Jesus nor is it really about me (well that isn’t totally true).  I recently met a couple who are homeless.  I have seen them around the area where I work, and the “wife” is always reading a book.  Now this may not strike you as odd or out of the ordinary, but every time I have seen her, she’s had a different book (*please remember that I am an English professor, I notice when people are actually reading)!

Now when I say homeless—some people automatically assume alcohol, drugs, mental illness… but as we may be learning through this financial downturn—that isn’t always the case anymore!!!

Not only that, I see them “carrying” all their belongings around town and my nosey-ness got the best of me.  I finally decided to ask them if they wanted some food.  I am always hesitant to just offer, out of the blue, simply because it has backfired on me before where a woman got belligerent with me and said, “I don’t want food Bi#$%!  I want money!”  However, since I had seen them a lot lately, I decided to introduce myself.  After making initial “Hi my name is…” I found out that her name is Anne and his is name Richard. 
I asked them if I could buy them a meal.  Anne was hesitant to respond, so I pressed, “No really, can I buy you two some food?”  And then things happened swiftly—with food in hand, the conversation started.  Now, K and I feed the homeless guys who roam the park near our house on a regular basis, but as stated previously, my fortune for helping the random person hasn’t always worked out so well for me.  But this was different.  This couple, once they warmed up to me, was amazing and in love with each other and caring and completely open about their situation. 

While I would love to share the whole encounter with you, I want to keep most of it for my own memory bank.  These people taught me so many things in our moments together.  I learned more about love and loyalty.  I was slapped in the face with a real life example of what not being able to find a job (resumes in hand and really looking) has done to family units.  I learned about laughing at situations—because if you don’t, you will cry all the time.  And finally, I learned about hope—because “if you lose hope that tomorrow will be better—you don’t have anything to look forward to!”

High Five for Friday—week of 07.22.11

*It is my goal that even when I kvetch, I still have an attitude of gratitude, so each Friday, I want to share at least 5 fantastical things that have happened to me!

PS—these aren’t in any particular order!

1.  Hanging with friends and boyfriend at the same time!

2.  Working out 5 days this week when 4 days was my goal!

3.  A vendor friend going to Barcelona and offering to pick up a purse I have been wanting that you can ONLY purchase in Spain!!!!!

4.  K telling me he loves me “this” much (arms spread really really really wide!).

5.  49 days until Hawaii!

Terrific Tuesday

So...what you're saying is...

The Lighter the Skin, the Shorter the Prison Term?

By: Topher Sanders

Posted: July 5, 2011 at 12:01 AM

A recent study of women convicted of crimes shows that dark-complexioned blacks serve more time in jail.

Colin Powell said it, Sen. Harry Reid hinted at it about President Barack Obama, and black folks have known it for hundreds of years. There are advantages to being a light-skinned black person in the United States.

Research on those advantages isn’t new, but with the release of a recent study by Villanova University, the breadth of quantitative studies that examine colorism, or discrimination based on skin tone, continues to increase. From housing opportunities to employment chances to which women have a good shot at getting married, the lighter-is-better dynamic is at play, research shows.

Villanova researchers studied more than 12,000 cases of African-American women imprisoned in North Carolina and found that women with lighter skin tones received more-lenient sentences and served less time than women with darker skin tones.

The researchers found that light-skinned women were sentenced to approximately 12 percent less time behind bars than their darker-skinned counterparts. Women with light skin also served 11 percent less time than darker women.

The study took into account the type of crimes the women committed and each woman’s criminal history to generate apples-to-apples comparisons. The work builds on previous studies by Stanford University, the University of Colorado at Boulder and other institutions, which have examined how “black-looking” features and skin tone can impact black men in the criminal-justice arena.

But researchers say this is the first study to look at how colorism affects black women and how long they may spend in jail. Part of the reason may simply come down to how pretty jurors consider a defendant to be, and that being light-skinned and thin (also a factor studied in the research) are seen as more attractive, says Lance Hannon, co-author of the Villanova study.

Racism gets all the headlines, but colorism is just as real and impacting, Hannon explains. How “white” someone is perceived matters. “Colorism is clearly not taken as seriously or is not publicly discussed as much as racism, and yet these effects are pretty strong and the evidence is pretty strong,” he says. “It’s a very real problem, and people need to pay attention to it more.”

Christina Swarns, director of the Criminal Justice Practice for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, says the study’s findings are part of a larger problem in how the justice system deals with African Americans. “It is obviously part and parcel of the problem of overincarceration of the African-American community in this country,” she says. “There is unquestionably … an association between race and criminality, and I think this study emphasizes how skin color plays an important role in that perception of a link between race and criminality.”

William Darity, professor of African-American studies and economics at Duke University and director of the Research Network on Racial & Ethnic Inequality, has studied the impact of skin shade on marriage rates for women and employment for men.

Darity says the Villanova study expands previous research and underscores a known truth. “This has been a long-standing issue and problem that all blacks don’t face the same type or degree of discrimination,” he says.

Treating people differently because of the lightness or darkness of their skin isn’t exclusive to whites. As an example, Darity cites his research, which found that there are “real” disadvantages for darker-skinned black women when it comes to their chances of getting married.

“And one would have to say that’s to a large degree the consequence of preferences on the part of black men,” he says. That same preference for lighter-skinned black women over darker-skinned black women is true for white men, Darity adds.

But there has been recent movement by the government to take colorism more seriously, Hannon says. He pointed to a 2008 initiative by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that explicitly considers colorism. Hannon also notes that because the Civil Rights Act refers to “color” and not simply race, the door is open for litigation around colorism, which could also push the policy dial.

Darity believes that the benefits of light skin have to be addressed to cause change. “There are clear social and pecuniary benefits to being lighter-skinned in America,” Darity says. “Unless we eliminate those benefits, this will go on, because the advantages are real.”

Topher Sanders is a newspaper reporter living in Jacksonville, Fla., with his wife and son.

Tuesday Truth-day! July 19, 2011

*I will use each Tuesday to rat myself out about something!  It’s all in good fun and I am sure that these “truth-day” revelations won’t be things people don’t already know about me!

As someone who frequents a Drive Thru or two every now and again, it irks me when people pull up and have NO IDEA what they want.  Seriously, it’s lunchtime lady!  There have been 2 versions of your food options leading up to the point where they ask you what you want. Is this the first time you have EVER been to McDonalds?  Really?  Don’t you know if you want crème and sugar in your coffee?  When they ask you if you want fries or apple dippers, it isn’t rocket science, y’all!  Make a choice.  You either know what you want your kid to have or you don’t. 

But it doesn’t end there, does it?  No… You don’t have your money out, do you?  They told you and showed you on the screen how much you owed and you don’t have your purse handy, do ya?  Do ya? Do ya? (in my Dory voice).  Please, please please, please, please be prepared.  I know that we all have those days, but oi vey!

Paramedic Crack Up!

Scene:  Driving home from church at a stop light, next to an ambulance.  I roll K’s window down because he LOVES anything with a siren and lights!

K:  Hi there!  Is that your ambalamps?

Ambulance Driver (AD):  Yes it is!  How are you buddy?

K:  I’m fine!  Can I drive your ambalamps right now?

AD:  Not today buddy.  Is that your Mommy?

K:  Yeah!  She doesn’t have a husband.

AD:  Oh, is that right?  (Looking at me then back to him)  Does she want one? (looking back at me!)

*Thankfully the light turned green and I sped off, with my son yelling, “Bye! See you later!”

Open your mouth only...

“Open your mouth only if what you have to say is more beautiful than silence.”

— Arabic Proverb

Priceless

Sherbet push up Popsicle.  One Hippo bib—trashed.  Two hands—dripping orange stuff.  Superhero pajamas—saturated.  Face—yeah, pretty disgusting.  Black pleather couches—orange, wet and sticky.  48 baby wipes—worth every penny!  Laughing hysterically with Mommy because it tastes so good—Priceless! 

So…what you’re saying is…

The Lighter the Skin, the Shorter the Prison Term?

By: Topher Sanders

Posted: July 5, 2011 at 12:01 AM

A recent study of women convicted of crimes shows that dark-complexioned blacks serve more time in jail.

Colin Powell said it, Sen. Harry Reid hinted at it about President Barack Obama, and black folks have known it for hundreds of years. There are advantages to being a light-skinned black person in the United States.

Research on those advantages isn’t new, but with the release of a recent study by Villanova University, the breadth of quantitative studies that examine colorism, or discrimination based on skin tone, continues to increase. From housing opportunities to employment chances to which women have a good shot at getting married, the lighter-is-better dynamic is at play, research shows.

Villanova researchers studied more than 12,000 cases of African-American women imprisoned in North Carolina and found that women with lighter skin tones received more-lenient sentences and served less time than women with darker skin tones.

The researchers found that light-skinned women were sentenced to approximately 12 percent less time behind bars than their darker-skinned counterparts. Women with light skin also served 11 percent less time than darker women.

The study took into account the type of crimes the women committed and each woman’s criminal history to generate apples-to-apples comparisons. The work builds on previous studies by Stanford University, the University of Colorado at Boulder and other institutions, which have examined how “black-looking” features and skin tone can impact black men in the criminal-justice arena.

But researchers say this is the first study to look at how colorism affects black women and how long they may spend in jail. Part of the reason may simply come down to how pretty jurors consider a defendant to be, and that being light-skinned and thin (also a factor studied in the research) are seen as more attractive, says Lance Hannon, co-author of the Villanova study.

Racism gets all the headlines, but colorism is just as real and impacting, Hannon explains. How “white” someone is perceived matters. “Colorism is clearly not taken as seriously or is not publicly discussed as much as racism, and yet these effects are pretty strong and the evidence is pretty strong,” he says. “It’s a very real problem, and people need to pay attention to it more.”

Christina Swarns, director of the Criminal Justice Practice for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, says the study’s findings are part of a larger problem in how the justice system deals with African Americans. “It is obviously part and parcel of the problem of overincarceration of the African-American community in this country,” she says. “There is unquestionably … an association between race and criminality, and I think this study emphasizes how skin color plays an important role in that perception of a link between race and criminality.”

William Darity, professor of African-American studies and economics at Duke University and director of the Research Network on Racial & Ethnic Inequality, has studied the impact of skin shade on marriage rates for women and employment for men.

Darity says the Villanova study expands previous research and underscores a known truth. “This has been a long-standing issue and problem that all blacks don’t face the same type or degree of discrimination,” he says.

Treating people differently because of the lightness or darkness of their skin isn’t exclusive to whites. As an example, Darity cites his research, which found that there are “real” disadvantages for darker-skinned black women when it comes to their chances of getting married.

“And one would have to say that’s to a large degree the consequence of preferences on the part of black men,” he says. That same preference for lighter-skinned black women over darker-skinned black women is true for white men, Darity adds.

But there has been recent movement by the government to take colorism more seriously, Hannon says. He pointed to a 2008 initiative by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that explicitly considers colorism. Hannon also notes that because the Civil Rights Act refers to “color” and not simply race, the door is open for litigation around colorism, which could also push the policy dial.

Darity believes that the benefits of light skin have to be addressed to cause change. “There are clear social and pecuniary benefits to being lighter-skinned in America,” Darity says. “Unless we eliminate those benefits, this will go on, because the advantages are real.”

Topher Sanders is a newspaper reporter living in Jacksonville, Fla., with his wife and son.