One of my great pleasures in life is to come home from work and find a box of free books on my doorstep. Yesterday was one such day. It was a bookbox* I had hosted that came full circle...and it was FULL of good books. Probably nearly 40 good books. I just wanted to throw them all down on the floor and wallow around in them, but I maintained my dignity and just touched all of them instead.
Right now I'm reading Steinbeck's East of Eden. I don't think I've ever read a complete Steinbeck novel and I'll admit that this book has languished on my shelf for a long time. The cover is not enticing. Neither is the vague description on the back. But it fits the theme of a bookbox I'll be participating in soon, so I decided to give it a try. I'm loving it! One of the things I love most about bookboxes (besides coming home to them--it's like Christmas!) is that they're almost always themed. And the theme causes me to pull books off my TBR shelf that might have hidden there forever. For instance, I'm reading this one for a "Flower Power" bookbox. All of the books included have to have a flower on the cover. It may seem odd to the unitiated, but for those of us who have...oh...90ish books on our TBR shelf, sometimes we need something like this to help us "randomly" select which books to read.
I'm also reading Good In Bed by Jennifer Weiner. It's very good, but due to the very misleading title, I only read it in the privacy of my own home. I talked to another lady who has read it and she said it's the only book she can remember using a book cover on!
*Bookboxes are...boxes of books, duh! :) I swap them with other Bookcrossing.com members. The person who hosts the box allows a certain number of people to join. Each person who receives the box takes out the books they want and replaces them with an equal or greater number of books that fit the theme. Then they send it on to the next person on the list. The last person on the list sends the box back to the host and they have essentially swapped out all of their old/already been read books for new ones. All for the price of media mail postage. My box started with probably 15-20 books and came back with probably 40ish books.
9 comments:
that book box thing is cool!
It's a lot of fun. Occasionally boxes get lost in the mail or sucked into the clutches of deadbeats, but for the most part, they work out well.
Whoops! I am not Kevin, I am me! :)
doh!
did you get any of the same books back - put in my someone else who didn't know it was one of the originals?
Three of the books that I originally put in the box were still in there.
Sometimes other copies of books that originally started the box will end up in there at the end, but that's just part of it.
I won't keep all 40 of the books that came back to me. I'm keeping about 7 of them (some of the other ones are copies of books I've already read or are genres that don't interest me). I'll use the extras to go in other book boxes or give away.
It's always good to hear when one makes its rounds successfully! Glad you found a few that you're looking forward to!
What did you think of Angela's Ashes?
Mandy,
I did not love Angela's Ashes. Too depressing.
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