I am almost done my 11th BAM book and want to again thank Katie for this challenge. I am seriously thinking about using this concept next year with our Readers' Advisory training. I haven't worked out all the bugs, but I need to make some major changes to how we do RA.

My book for the November challenge is Mayflower: a story of courage community and war by Nathaniel Philbrick. I now know more about the pilgrims than most of my friends would ever want me to know. My habit, when I learn something new, is to tell the world. Just ask some people I know about how I keep boring them with stuff from The Ominvore's Dilemma.

I am now going to go off and finish the book.

Reading Challenges - why do people do so many? I just encountered a blog where the owner is doing more than 30 challenges this year. I am doing two and only on one of them am I posting to the blog. I have enough people telling me what to read.

I have 12 books to read for my book group; 4 books to read for Readers' Advisory (I actually will probably do more); books to read for The Big Read; and my mom will instruct me to read at least something more over the course of the year.

I read a lot - my list at Good Reads has 86 titles that I read so far this year. But how would I keep up with more than 30 challenges. Even with the fact you can use a book for more than one challenge -more power to those of you who can keep up with all this reading.

I think I will go back to my romance of the week - Charming the Prince. It is fun, light and not for any challenge except to keep my stress level down.

Title: The Rover
Author: Mel Odom
Genre: Fantasy
Reading Level: Adult

June's BAM challenge is Knowledge. Katie gave us lots of ideas, but I had had good luck searching our catalog and NoveList Plus before, so I started with our catalog (http://www.pamcat.org/). Found two books with knowledge in the title that looked good, until they came in delivery.

Using NoveList Plus, I just entered "knowledge" as a search term and limited it to adult and fiction. What I got was The Rover by Mel Odom (among other things). I remember that when I purchased this for our library, this fantasy intrigued me, but I did not remember that Wick (the main character) is a Third Level Librarian in the Vault of all Known Knowledge. So The Rover looked like the perfect choice.

I happen to love books where I get to follow characters around a world that I am unfamiliar with. It can be Tudor England, modern day Kansas, or a spaceship winging its way to a new planet. I am not picky about genre (the only one I don't read is westerns) and the pacing can be fast or slow. I mostly want to fall into a world and live there for a few hours or days.

I lived with Edgewick Lamplighter for most of last weekend. I had no plans except to relax and read and so I opened The Rover with great anticipation. Odom did not steer me wrong. He has created a wonderful world with pirate, trolls, elves and great battles of good versus evil. Just what I needed for an extended read.

Edgewick Lamplighter has been a third level librarian for way too long. He works in the Vault of all Known Knowledge where they are busily cataloging the history of the world. He spends much of his free time reading books from the Hralbomm Wing of the library - these books are full of frivolity, which apparently has "no place in the proper history of the world."

Fortunately for us all, Edgewick, Wick to his friends, has to deliver a message for the Grandmagister. And although I could see that this was going to give Wick the opportunity for quest, I could not have ever guessed how the author was going to get Wick the adventures of a lifetime.

The story is a magical quest, like The Hobbit and even a bit like Harry Potter, but Odom took familiar stories and made them new. I give The Rover 3 stars (***). Next time I have a long weekend, the next volume, The Destruction of the Books is probably going along.

What did you know about New Orleans before Katrina hit? Had you visited the city? Maybe for Mardi Gras? I had never been to New Orleans or even Lousiana. Neither had my husband.

However, after Katrina, my husband, two colleagues and a group of students went to New Orleans the January after the hurricane to tear down houses. It changed Bill's life. It gave both of us lots of questions about why such things could even happen.

Heart Like Water by Joshua Clark has given me more food for thought. It also gave me an opportunity to see into New Orleans at its most trying time. Clark stayed in the French Quarter for the whole terrible mess. He saw things that I can't even imagine.

As Kirkus says this is a "difficult and joyless read". It probably wasn't the book for the month of hearts and love. But thanks to the Book of the month challenge, I found it and I am not sorry to read it. I just hope and pray we can avoid another tragedy like this in our national history.

I am almost caught up. That is what happens when you do three tasks in one afternoon. If you go to the very bottom of my blog, you will see my Rollyo list.

Eventually, I will stop hoping that hand weaving and computers have any links to each other. I know that there are looms that are operated by computers, but there are very few links on the web to actual weaving and weavers. So my first Rollyo was not very helpful.

However I made a Rollyo on RA. I am hoping I find that more useful.

Merry Christmas to one and all!

So do you believe in synchonicity? Or maybe it is just serendipity. I am reading the second of three books that I found in PamCat by searching under the word "stumbling" as a title word.

The first book (with stumbling in the title) would be a great book for our Readers' advisory group when we do Travel books. That book, The Gods Drink Whiskey: Stumbling Toward Enlightenment In The Land Of The Tattered Buddha, was a fasinating look into Buddhism in Cambodia. I don't know much about either Buddhism or Cambodia, but thanks to Steve Asma, I now know more.

Asma has a great sense of humor, which is useful when you have been hired to teach Buddhism in a country that has believed in this religion much longer than the US has existed. Thanks to the politics of Cambodia over the last 30 years, the average person knows little about their native religion.

I would recommend this book to any one interested in religion, history and foreign politics.

The second book, which I am reading now is Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. I will let you all know if this book is as good.

So here is the sychronicity or serendipity or whatever. Asma quotes Gilbert in his book on Buddhism. Doesn't that seem odd to you? Did Asma deliberately use the word stumbling? And will the third book have any relationship to these two.

By the way, I was looking for a book that I thought had stumbling in the title. It did not, apparently, and I don't ever think I found the title I was looking for. However, it was a good way to find at least two good reads.

If you have ever stumbled on good reads through our catalog or another library catalog, please leave me a comment.