Book Lists and Comment Challenge

The Cybils Finalists have been posted -- five great books in each of eleven categories/genres.

Jules has done an amazing 2011 blog retrospective over at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast. It's a visual feast.

Sylvia Vardell shares her top 20 children's poetry books from 2011 at Poetry For Children.

And the motherlode of all lists: Susan's 2011 Best Children's Books: A List of Lists and Awards at Chicken Spaghetti.

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On another note, there's been lots of talk here at A Year of Reading and around the Kidlitosphere about reading goals. How about we all make it a goal to reading more blogs? And comment.

Mother Reader and Lee Wind have just the thing for us. For the next three weeks, they are running a comment challenge. Five comments on book blogs every day for 21 days. Get out of your rut and get (back) in the habit. Stop letting blog posts pile up in your reader until you finally just click "mark all read" on every blog and start over fresh...only to let it happen again in another couple of weeks. (Not that I know about that first hand or anything...)

Sign up for the comment challenge HERE.

25

USA Today is celebrating its 25th year with 25 lists of 25. This week's list is 25 Lives of Indelible Impact. I might have sorted the list in a different order, but these are all amazing and inspiring people from the last 25 years.

Last week was 25 Years of 'Eureka' Moments -- inventions that have changed our lives since 1982. As I scanned this list, some were integral to my life, and some seemed irrelevant. I wondered what my 5th graders would make of the list, how they would sort it (important vs. irrelevant), and if they would notice anything missing.

Predictably, things like debit cards, lettuce in a bag, and online stock trading aren't a very big deal for 11 year-olds. You want to know they think is missing from the list? (Cable TV was also on their list of missing items, but I just Googled it -- 1948, if you can believe that!)

• game consoles (PSP, Nintendo, X Box, Wii, etc.)
• self-scan lines at the grocery
• energy drinks
• hybrid cars
• Google and Wikipedia
• Pokemon and Yu-ghi-o cards
  

Which items on the list are most important in your life? Of the 25 USA Today picked, my important ones would probably be debit cards, pay at the pump gas and my iPod. Which items on the list are most irrelevant to you? Online stock trading, electronic tolls, TiVo, Big Bertha golf clubs, home satellite TV and karaoke are all at the bottom of my list.