an old favorite

I don't know why, but I never get tired of this book:



As a youngster, I loved this story, mainly the part with the dogs all heading for the tree. What is up on top of that tree, anyway? Oh, the anticipation!! I also loved the page with all the dogs asleep, except for one. (What I realize now is that maybe that little dog is asleep, too, just with eyes wide open.... A little scary, but whatever.)

I've been reading it again (a lot) the past 8-12 months, give or take. Mostly because I enjoy it, and it's long enough to be reading for a while. And my little one seems to be fascinated by (the idea of) dogs.

I've been noticing lately that the dogs with hats:

"Do you like my hat?"
"I do not."
"Goodbye."
"Goodbye."

really provide some comic relief and break up the reading and tie it all together at the same time. Clever.

And I still love that dog party! What a cool dog party! And what's up with that dog that's sleeping up there in the tree in the middle of the party??

changing the world one loan at a time

My mom bought this book

for me off my wishlist which, by the way, is amazing and I recommend it.

The author, Muhammud Yunus, started a microlending institution in his native Bangladesh about 25 years ago (ish), and he and the Grameen Bank have been lending small amounts of money to the poor ever since. His goal is to eradicate poverty. The stories he tells are incredibly moving. He was the head of the economics department at a university in Bangladesh when he started questioning why economics and development practices don't help those who are below the poverty level. He saw how lending someone as small a sum as $27 (I think that was the amount) would be enough to start helping someone get out of basically a slave-labor situation. One of the things that's interesting about the Grameen bank is the extraordinarily low default rate, which is something like less than one percent (don't quote me on that number), compared to a much, much higher default rate amongst borrowers who actually have collateral.

With the book, my mom sent a note saying that I should check out Kiva.org which is a microlending organization that she had been lending with for a couple of years or so. I remember reading about microlending sometime back in the '80s and wanted to get involved then, but didn't know where to start. Kiva makes it very easy, and you can choose who you lend to. I recommend checking them out, too. They've been having a lot of publicity lately, which means that occasionally they actually run out of people who are looking for loans.

LibraryThing's to read or not...

This is copied from ElanaJane at what she said too (I hope it's OK that I copied it).

these are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users. this is how i shape up against them....

books i've read are in bold,
the ones i started but couldn't/didn't finish are in italics,
what i couldn't stand has a strike through,
and those underlined are on my To Be Read list.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and punishment
Catch-22
One hundred years of solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi
The name of the rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveller's Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius
Atlas shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury tales
The Historian : a novel
A portrait of the artist as a young man
Love in the time of cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault's pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A clockwork orange
Anansi boys
The once and future king
The grapes of wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & demons
The inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One flew over the cuckoo's nest
To the lighthouse
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver's travels
Les misérables
The corrections
The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The curious incident of the dog in the night-time
Dune
The prince
The sound and the fury
Angela's ashes
The god of small things
A people's history of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A confederacy of dunces
A short history of nearly everything
Dubliners
The unbearable lightness of being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity's Rainbow
The Hobbit
In cold blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

I noticed that there were a lot of books on this list that I read in high school, as well as some after. Not many that have been read recently. Maybe because "unread/unfinished" books tend to be those we are required to read.