Meetup and Halloween releases

Our regular last Sunday of the month Breakfast Meetup was this morning. As usual, we met at Trattorie, where Libragirl has set up an OCZ. Not a huge turnout today, just me, Lytteltonwitch, her ex-husband (who’s acting as her chauffeur at the moment), and Awhina, but we had a nice breakfast, swapped a few books, and restocked the OCZ shelves with the ones none of us wanted. And the really good news is that lytteltonwitch has had the clearance to fly from her doctor, so she’ll be coming to Sydney after all!

She’s pretty limited with releasing books at the moment, though, because she’s not allowed to lift heavy weights (and it’s amazing how heavy a bag of books can get!), so she asked me to take a few ghost-themed kid’s books and release them for her, in honour of Halloween. She had them all labelled up, and in protective plastic bags, so I walked home through the park and left them on benches and in trees around the playground.

One of the books I got for myself at the meetup was Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach . It’s actually a bookring book, but I spotted it at Lytteltonwitch’s last weekend, and after flicking through a few pages, was immediately hooked, so she said I could read it before she sends it off to the next person. She finished reading it while she was in the hospital, and brought it along to the meetup today, along with a pre-addressed posting bag so I won’t forget to send it on to the next person 🙂

Now, I’ve got a final exam for my university psyc paper on Tuesday, so I’d intended to spend the rest of the day studying. But when I got home from the meetup, I thought I’d just sit down and read a chapter of Stiff first, and then get into the serious study… yep, you guessed it: six hours later, I was still reading! The book was just so incredibly interesting, that I really couldn’t put it down. So, no study done, and finished reading the book in one sitting. Oh well, I can always do a bit of last-minute study tomorrow night…

Had some trick or treaters turn up at the door tonight for the first time ever. We don’t really do Halloween in New Zealand (though you wouldn’t know that from all the ads on TV – places like The Warehouse seem determined to get the tradition started here so they can sell costumes and lollies!), so of course we hadn’t prepared at all, and didn’t have any lollies or anything to give them. But I remembered some of the Americans talking on the forum about giving out books to trick or treaters, so I said to the kids “You can have a book if you like”, and to my utter surprise, they all said “Yes please!” and were really keen to get a book (I’m just too cynical, I think – I expect kids to turn up their noses at books, yet when I was that age, I would have reacted in exactly the same way!). So I brought out my box of ready to be released books, and let them pick one each. They were all very excited, and dug around in the box to find something they liked. Of course, I didn’t manage to see what they all picked, so I haven’t been able to make journal entries for the books saying where they’ve gone, but who cares – anything that gets kids keen on reading has got to be a good thing! And you never know, one of them might see the bookcrossing stickers and journal their book.

Currently reading: Potiki by Patricia Grace