Monday, July 04, 2005

BookCrossing

I am in St. Louis for a couple of weeks, at a family reunion at my in-laws' house. I had brought a bunch of books with me, and for the last three or four days I have been obsessed with reading. I read Middlesex, The Kite Runner, several of Kafka's stories from a complete collection that John got, and now I am reading Life of Pi, which I will undoubtedly finish tonight some time.

Finding these excellent books has been mostly the result of joining BookCrossing. "Bookcrossing" is defined as "the practice of leaving a book in a public place to be picked up and read by others, who then do likewise." It's a great website. There is an active forum with such topics as "July 4: What are you reading?" (often in a variety of languages), or "Do you ever become obsessed with one author?" I've learned about so many books I want to read from the forum.

I haven't left any books "in the wild" yet, but I did put BookCrossing stickers in several of my books, and am passing them around to people I know. I gave a copy of Mongo to Terry, and he gave me Grand Central Winter. Now I'm passing Grand Central Winter on. The only problem is -- it's hard to let go of books I love.

When I read, I am lifted away from things that disappoint me.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh i quite liked The Life of Pi, did you enjoy it?

Unknown said...

I liked it too. I was intrigued by the question at the end of the book. I'm not going to do a spoiler here, but I will only say fiction is fiction and you can make of it what you want!