Bookcrossing.com

I finished reading Committed: Confessions of a Fantasy Football Junkie. I have actually learned enough about football to enjoy this book. I laughed at the appropriate times, I knew enough about the players and their positions to understand the trades, and I appreciated the strategy and knowledge necessary to play this "game" well. I don't think I'm about to quit my job so I have the time needed to win the fantasy football Superbowl. I don't even think I am going to draft a team in a fantasy football league. But I am proud that I read and enjoyed 2 books about football in the last month.

While we are on the topic of books, I have been spending lots of time at Bookcrossing.com. If you are not familiar with this website, it is a community of people who love to read and share books. You have to join, but it is free. Books are registered and given a unique ID number. Then they are sometimes "released in the wild," with the hope that someone will find it, read it, and log onto bookcrossing.com and make an entry about that book before giving it to someone else to read. And some books are advertised as available on the website, and then bookrings are set up, with the books traveling from one person to another over months or even years. Each person that reads the book makes an entry about the book, and you can follow these books on their journeys. So if you join a bookring, you have to be willing to spend a couple of dollars to mail the book on to the next person in the ring. I suppose you could just reserve the book at your local library and not pay postage, but then you don't get to follow the book from reader to reader. There's just something really inviting and enticing about finding a book in your mailbox that has been sent to you by someone who loves books as much as you do. Many of them arrive with postcards and bookmarks from all over the world. I have mailed a few books overseas, and they take so long to get there, that its a wonderful surprise when they do arrive because usually the person receiving it has forgotten that it is on its way. Over the last 2 years that I have been "hanging out" at bookcrossing, my bookshelves have become much more dynamic! Books come and go, not at an overwhelming pace, but enough that I have never felt that I have nothing interesting to read. And I have read some really wonderful books that I never would have picked up if not for Bookcrossing.

I have joined lots of bookrings. Here are a few books that I have finished and sent on to the next bookcrosser:
Galileo's Daughter by David Sobel
Flu by Gina Kolata
Possession by A S Byatt
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Sijie Dai

And here are some bookrings that I have joined and I'm waiting for my turn:
Ahab's Wife by Sena Jeter Naslund
Driving Mr. Albert by Michael Paterniti
A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian by Marina Lewycka
Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang
March by Geraldine Brooks
If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things by Jon McGregor