Until I read
Deb's Readerbuzz post today, I'd forgotten about a blog I started in early 2007 called "
Around the World in 80 Books." I posted 60 times (more or less), but I haven't blogged there in about a dozen years. One place I visited was
Wales (pictured above), saying, "I've been to Wales, via book." The book was
A String in the Harp by Nancy Bond (1976, YA fiction, 8/10, which I also posted
on this blog). Maybe I should revisit my early idea, where I also wrote in a post about
Nigeria:
"The next best thing to an actual trip is a reading trip. Through books we can read about a country and its people and learn quite a lot about the culture and the way that people live."
One children's book on that blog that I remember fondly is
Winston of Churchill: One Bear's Battle Against Global Warming by Jean Davies Okimoto (2007). Churchill, with a population 923 in 2006, is a town on the shore of Hudson Bay in Manitoba, Canada. The small community stands at an ecotone, the juncture of three ecoregions: the boreal forest to the south, the Arctic tundra to the northwest, and the Hudson Bay to the north. It is most famous for the many polar bears that move toward the shore from inland in the autumn, leading to the nickname "Polar Bear Capital of the World" that has helped the growing tourism industry there.
Winston of Churchill was a great white bear. Every year in the late fall and early winter, Winston and the other polar bears came to hunt from the ice of Hudson Bay near the town of Churchill, in the Canadian province of Manitoba. Winston was a fierce, brave bear, and when Winston spoke, every bear listened. And what he talked about was the melting ice. The book is about climate change.
- One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd ~ by Jim Fergus (1998, fiction, Nebraska)
- Snow Failing on Cedars ~ by David Guterson (1994, fiction, Washington).
How pitiful is that? Still, it's a good idea. I wonder how many books I've read since then that would have helped to fill out the list of 50 states?
3 comments:
Maybe this would be a good time to revisit those blogs and repost your posts here? It would be interesting to see the books you read then and your thoughts about them. Les at Lesley's Book Nook (https://lesleysbooknook.blogspot.com/) often reposts her old book reviews, occasionally rereads the book, and then comments on the book. If you still like doing this, maybe you could add new titles and reviews to your trip around the world?
I would certainly like that.
It's a great idea, but I think juggling multiple blogs is tough! You could take those great ideas and do them on this main blog. That would be fun for us to read.
Deb and Helen, I wrote about those books on this blog, too. It wasn't one or the other, but both places. What I wrote, though, was not necessarily the exact same thing.
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