One month, one hundred books!

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Jax is a UK-based home-educating mother of three and - to use her own words - has been "blogging, ranting, wibbling and waffling" at Making it up since 2003. I came across her blog a few weeks ago. You know how it is with the world wide web: you jump from link to link and from page to page and half of the time you don't actually find anything that can hold your interest for more than a few moments. That's not the case with Making it up! What grabbed my full attention was a post announcing her and her children's intention to read 100 books in a month to help raise money for charity. Yes, that's right: one hundred books in one month. I just had to contact this woman to know more and she kindly agreed to write a piece for the readers of Book After Book, explaining how this wonderful but intimidating idea was born!

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Recently, I took part in a Simplify Your Christmas carnival hosted by Who’s the Mummy. The item I chose to highlight was the Oxfam Unwrapped library - build a library somewhere that doesn't have one.

Libraries are fantastic facilities. If you can't afford books, and maybe don't have much access to education, how much better can it get to have books free to borrow, as well as computers and other tools to use too?

So, after I'd blogged all of that, I got to thinking. I got to thinking about how I'd like to use my blog for some good, and the good I'd really like to do is building a library. (Or more, I wouldn't say no to building more.) So I set up a fundraising page to run for a year to see if we could build a library.

The first fundraising challenge we've set ourselves as a family is to read and blog/review 100 books in January. This seemed like a great idea when we discussed it but now that January is getting nearer it's beginning to seem rather daunting. 100 books is a big pile, and even though we plan to include the baby by reading board and picture books to and with her (say 1 or 2 a day), that's still 40 books in 30 days for me and the two children who can already read.

Say the 7 and 10 year-old (11 part way through our challenge) manage a book every three days (they are both voracious readers; if we can find books that they enjoy, it's probably doable). That leaves 20 books for me to read. I'd probably better step away from anything meaty, but I really don't want to just plough through 20 piles of mindless twaddle. So I'd love some help, obviously in the form of sponsorship, but also by people commenting, suggesting books to read and really getting behind us on this.

If you've book suggestions for any of us, I'd love if you can comment here, or trek over to my blog, where I'm opening a page on the challenge to keep track of suggestions.

Thanks to Silvia for hosting this and getting behind the challenge by publicising it!

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If you're curious to know how Jax and her children will prepare for the challenge they have set for themselves and how they will cope with it, keep following as there will be more updates here on Book After Book!

Comments

  1. liveotherwise18 December 2010 at 15:50

    What a fantastic introduction! Thank so much for getting behind the idea and helping to publicise it :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Silvia_reads18 December 2010 at 16:03

    Glad you like it!

    Have you ever heard of the Quick Reads project? I think it started a few years ago with the aim of encouraging more adults to start reading again. The books are written by bestselling authours and, despite being easy to read, they are quality reading. Kate Mosse wrote "The Cave", which was then going on to become the starting point for her latest novel, "The Winter Ghosts". I remember picking up and enjoying "The Thief" by Ruth Rendell in 2008.

    You can have a look here: http://www.quickreads.org.uk/ However, they seem to list only their latest titles. If you search for "quick reads" on Amazon you will come up with more. And I'm sure your local library stocks quite a few of them.

    ReplyDelete
  3. liveotherwise18 December 2010 at 21:37

    That's a fab suggestion, I'll pop on there and have a look later.

    ReplyDelete

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