Travel the World in Books Readathon, Day 2
Welcome to Day 2 of our Travel the World in Books Readathon. How did you do on your reading? Were you able to start your Book Map with Guiltless Reading’s very helpful tutorial? Keep track of your reading and Readathon activities this week and we’ll have a linkup on Sunday for you to share your progress.
Getting to Know You Questions
I enjoy getting to know you better and hope you met some new to you bloggers yesterday. So I’ve got more questions for you and hope you answer in the comments.
1. What’s the name of your blog, your blog URL and how long have you been blogging?
* I’m Tanya from Mom’s Small Victories and I’ve been blogging for about 2.5 years on my self-hosted blog and about a year before that on a free blogger blog.
2. How many kids and/or fur babies do you have?
* I have 3 sons: a middle schooler, an elementary schooler and a preschooler. We had two Westie doggies who are in heaven now and are missed everyday.
3. Where in the world does your family originate from?
* My family is from India. My husband’s from Mexico.
4. Can you speak any foreign languages?
* I can understand my parents when they speak Konkani (our small Indian dialect) but I have a terribly American accent. I can’t make some of the sounds in Konkani and being incredibly self-conscious, I was too embarrassed to speak it. I respond to them in English.
Marrying into a Hispanic family, I understand just enough Spanish to be dangerous, trying to understand but probably misinterpreting half of what I hear.
I took French in middle and high school, again remembering just enough to be dangerous. Perhaps the bottom line is no, I don’t know any foreign languages.
5. Give a shout out to a blogger you visited during the Readathon.
* I love that Deb from Readerbuzz is using the Readathon as a way to choose books from around the world to read to her classes in the school library. She will be planning music and activities for the kids for each country. If you have kids’ book recommendations about a particular country/culture, stop by and let her know. She’s also giving 2 books away, so give her big thanks for that too!
Mini-Challenge
Today, Tanya from Girl XOXO is bringing us the Global Reading Exposure Mini-Challenge. The challenge is simple: share a favorite book that’s set in a different region of the world from where you live.
(My response is Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See for China. I absolutely loved this book, beautifully written.)
Stop by Girl XOXO’s blog, she not only reads great books around the world, completes challenges to read award winning books, but she gives us really helpful blogging tips to make our blogging lives a little easier and reading, eating and drinking posts to make our bellies a little happier too. I especially love her healthy snacks and wine and cocktail recommendations with her #WeekendReading!
Sign Up, Goals, Schedule and Giveaways
If you haven’t yet, be sure to sign up so that you are eligible for our great adult and kids book giveaways. If you have a readathon goals post, link it up here. Be sure to keep the Schedule bookmarked as we continue to update it for our author interviews and guest posts.
How did your first day go? What do you hope to accomplish today?
1. What’s the name of your blog, your blog URL and how long have you been blogging?
The name of my blog is MAD Hoydenish (http://madhoydenish.blogspot.com/). I have been blogging off and on for about 5 years.
2. How many kids and/or fur babies do you have? 3
3. Where in the world does your family originate from?
Everyone in my family was made in America. Well, except for my cousin (by marriage) whose family is from Japan.
4. Can you speak any foreign languages?
I kinda sorta, but not really speak little to no Spanish (studied in high school and college). I started working on learning French last month. I’ll be talking about it more in a future readathon post.
5. Give a shout out to a blogger you visited during the Readathon.
I visited Guiltless Reading to check out the Make Your Own Book Map Mini-Challenge. It looks pretty cool, but I must admit that I am a little intimidated. I hope to start on my map when I return from vacation.
1. What’s the name of your blog, your blog URL and how long have you been blogging?
* It’s Aloi from Guiltless Reading. I’ve been blogging since 2006!
2. How many kids and/or fur babies do you have?
* 1 young ‘un (who’s not so young, now a teen!).
3. Where in the world does your family originate from?
* The Philippines
4. Can you speak any foreign languages?
* English is foreign to me 😉 I also speak Tagalog.
5. Give a shout out to a blogger you visited during the Readathon.
* Shout out to Heather at The Spirit Blog for her helpful alternate way of embedding a book map! We gotta help each other out 😉
Cool, I didn’t know you were from the Phillipines and I never would have guessed that English is your second language! You write English so well! As we know from my answers, it’d be really pathetic if I attempted to write in anything other than language. Have you lived in Canada all your life? I’m so glad Heather found another way to embed the book map, Gail from KY was having trouble figuring out how to send the link to enter the giveaway on the giveaway page. I told her to ask you, I hope she figured it out too. Thanks for letting us get to know you better. Hope you are able to join our Facebook chat on my page in a little more than an hour! Let’s hope this storm doesn’t cut out my power!
1. My blog is Victorian Soul (Book) Critiques, http://victoriansoulcritiques.blogspot.com , but I started blogging when I was 14 (in 2006) for a short stint (six months) at a previous blog. I have been blogging at VSC since April 2014.
2. I have no kids, but I have adopted two rowdy dogs: Torrie is an Australian Kelpie/Schipperke who thinks she’s a she-wolf because she spent the first year of her life wandering the Crow Reservation (MT), and then I recently adopted Keisha, a Dorkie (Dachshund/Yorkie) who is the same age as Torrie (six years old) and is very adventurous (i.e. thinks she can climb mountains- and does).
3.My family is mostly from Europe (Ireland, Norway, Germany, Scotland, and probably other countries) and my mom’s birthmother’s great grandma was a Native American from the Plains somewhere. (Yep, it’s a stretch, but it’s probably the only interesting thing about my ancestry. 🙂 )
4. I can speak some Spanish. Like I can ask to go to the bathroom and say hello, but that’s about it. I’ve always aspired to someday learn Gaelic, but for now, a bit of Spanish is all I know.
5. Give a shout out to a blogger you visited during the Readathon.
A blogger? Umm, well I’ll narrow it to two. Without Becca (I’m Lost In Books) and Joy Weese Moll (Joy’s Book Blog) I wouldn’t have found out about this readathon and been a participant, and therefore not having a lot of fun paring down my massive pile of TBRs.
You’ve got an interesting mix of European and native American ancestry. I love how Europeans can easily be a mix of several different nationalities, all with different languages. My family is all Indian until me and my cousins who were born in the US and some of whom married non-Indians. Your puppies sound adorable. My puppies were little too and thought they were vicious attack dogs until someone actually came in the house. Then they’d be licked to death. Thanks for joining us on our Readathon and my thanks to Becca and Joy for bringing you here!
The link to the challenge is missing “.php” on the end – should be -> http://girlxoxo.com/book-discussions/global-reading-exposure-travel-the-world-read-a-thon-challenge.php 🙂
So sorry about that. Fixed now!
1. I’m Lucy and I’ve been blogging on The Fictional 100 since Jan 2010. I just started a second blog Northern Lights Reading Project (northernlightsreading.com) at the beginning of August and it is a pleasure to see it find a niche in this challenge, which is helping me to organize my plans for it.
2. I have one daughter, all grown up, and happily for me, she lives in a neighboring town with her wonderful husband.
3. My family comes from Ireland, Wales, and Scotland. My great-grandmother came over by herself from County Kerry after losing her husband. She was a brave, resourceful woman–I wish I’d known her, and I’d like to inherit some of her pluckiness. 🙂
4. I learned French and a little German in school. I can still read French. I’ve picked up a little Italian and Hindi from self-study, and I’m trying to learn Icelandic! It would be cool to read bits of the 800-yr-old sagas in the original language, which amazingly is not that different from the language of modern-day Icelanders.
5. I’ve been delighted to visit the blogs of our three challenge hosts, and Guiltless Reader’s map tutorials, as well as Joy Weese Moll’s lovely blog. I’m meeting some new people, and also gettting a chance to spend time with posts by people I have only talked to via Twitter. Fun and inspiring!
I think that’s great-great-grandmother, for number 3. I missed a generation, but you get the idea! ^_^
I’m impressed you’ve picked up a little Hindi 🙂 I love hearing about people’s ancestry. I can’t believe your great-great grandmother came here alone. She’s braver than I. I don’t think I could move to a different country alone, but I guess I should not say never. I never know what will happen. Thanks for sharing your story with us and good luck learning Hindi, Italian and Icelandic. I tried learning Spanish after a semester of French in middle school and it was too confusing. I stuck with the french though in retrospect, I should’ve stayed with Spanish so I could communicate with my hubby’s sweet grandma. I need to learn Spanish as the kids learn too.
1. I’m Kate from The diary of an Urban Housewife http://thediaryofanurbanhousewife.blogspot.nl/ I’ve been blogging for a little over a year now!
2. I just have one human “baby”, she is 14 now…and off at a school camp for this whole week! I am lonely..until hubby gets home anyway.
3.We are American through and through…my dad’s family did originate from what is now the Czech Republic and my mom’s family from Sweden and Canada.
4.Not really. I can speak enough French to get by when shopping in France lol I can speak enough Spanish to order coffee really, and I am currently learning Dutch…I can’t really say most of the words but I know what they are when spoken to me. I do greet people in Dutch though I am confident enough in those few simple words hehe
5. Give a shout out to a blogger you visited during the Readathon.
I loved visiting Northern Lights Reading. That is such a fun way to travel through books…and I am slightly obsessed with the Northern Lights lol Such a fascinating phenomenon!
Oh they will always be our babies right? My oldest son will officially be entering teenagerhood this year. Yikes! I loved visiting Lucy and Northern Lights Reading too, I thought it was a very unique way to focus reading on the countries that get nature’s amazing light show!
1. I’m Heather from Based on a True Story. I’ve been blogging for nine years.
2. I have a dog, 2 cats, and Baird.
3. I’m 75% English and 25% Polish. My husband is mostly Italian.
4. I’m studying French with Duolingo but I’m nowhere near able to speak it well.
Wow, 9 years! Way to go, that is so awesome! Duolingo is great…when we were living in Canada and my daughter was needing to catch up to the kids in her class with French that really, really helped! We are using a programme called Dutch in 3 Months from DK. It has been very helpful. I don’t have very good linguistic recall so I don’t know if I will ever be able to speak Dutch fluently, but I can understand already most of what is said to me. So you could look for something like that if you were wanting to really learn. It also helps if others in your family are learning so you can speak it often 😉
We have Duolingo too for Spanish. My in-laws had an exchange student from Spain who stayed with them and she recommended it to us when she was learning English. The kids and I do need to learn Spanish together.
I need to check out Duolingo for Spanish. 9 years! That’s impressive. Thanks for sharing Heather. Glad to get to know you better.