Burning the old kerosene down in all my Aladdin lamps, so I can refill them with fresh fuel against the winter. I did the Watchman and the Lincoln Drape last week, and today I’m doing the Corinthian; after that I only have the Washington Drape to do and they’ll all be set again.
When I went to Bouchercon last month, I was given two book bags full of crime fiction of various sorts. For a while I wondered what to do with them, because of the whole bunch there was only one that I really wanted to keep (Charlaine Harris’s Dead Until Dark, about a telepathic waitress working in a Louisiana bar who takes up with a vampire boyfriend—yes, it really is good, and plausible, and a lot funnier than any of Anne Rice’s legion of copycats), although a number of them were amusing “read-once” books, and others just weren’t to my taste. I thought of taking them to Half Price Books, but somehow that didn’t seem fair, since I got given ’em in the first place.
And then I found BookCrossing, and the problem solved itself. (I don’t remember on whose blog it was that I first read about the place.)
So for the last week or so, I’ve been registering my B’con book cache with BookCrossing, and gradually releasing them “into the wild,” i.e., labeling them and leaving them in public places with a note that this is a free book to be read, logged on the BookCrossing site to chronicle its peregrinations (good word, that), and then left someplace for the next guy. I’ve released eight books since the sixth of the month, and at the rate I’m going it’ll be well into December before my captive stash are all feral books again.
Oh—and if someone reads this and decides to join BookCrossing as a result, tell ’em curmudgn sent you, OK? I get special brownie points for referrals.
You must meet Oprah Winfrey in beautiful downtown Burbank and get the vacillating radio. Fnord.
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