The good stuff from the weekend

On Friday night, lytteltonwitch, rarsberry and I went over to Lyttelton for the Festival of Lights (which I kept calling the Firelight Festival – I’ve obviously been watching too much Gilmore Girls).

After getting there too early last year, so that they hadn’t even set up the stalls, we decided to go over a bit later this year, which of course meant all the decent parks were taken, so we ended up parking miles away at the top of a very steep hill (ok, so it’s Lyttelton – everything is at the top of a very steep hill!), beside an even steeper bank. That provided a moment of drama (and later hilarity), when I slipped on some wet grass as I stepped out of the car, and in my efforts to stop myself falling over the bank, ended up dropping my bag so all the books I’d brought to release went flying over it instead. Lytteltonwitch and Rarsberry commended me on my new technique of mass releasing 🙂 Finding all the books again by torchlight was a bit of a challenge, but eventually we got them all gathered up (they weren’t in plastic bags so they would have got too damp overnight if I had left them as genuine wild releases), and we headed down to the street party.

It turned out the schedule had changed from last year, so we’d missed the parade, but we wandered around the stalls dropping books, and sampling the wares of the chocolate stall, and only managed to lose each other once, which was pretty good going in that crowd. The fireworks were earlier than last year too, so caught us by surprise, but we fought our way out of the crowd and down to a good viewing spot on the waterfront just in time.

The fireworks would have been great, except that it was a very foggy night. And because the air was still, the smoke from the fireworks stayed in one place, thickening the fog even further. So after the first few, all you could see was a glowing cloud of different colours 🙂 Actually, it was kind of pretty (I wished I had a decent camera with me – a time exposure would have produced an amazing photo), but not quite as spectacular as fireworks should be. I’m not sure whether they cut the display short because of that, or if their budget was just smaller than last year, but it was much shorter this year too, which was a bit disappointing.

But although the festival wasn’t as much fun as last year’s, we still enjoyed ourselves, and we did manage to release a LOT of books over the course of the evening – I think 46 altogether. Mine were:

• The Party Wall by Annabel Dilke (on a wall, of course)
• Sea Witch by Alistair MacLean (on the waterfront)
• An Important Family by Dorothy Eden
• You Only Live Twice by Ian Flemming
• Ruined City by Nevil Shute
• Policeman’s Patch by Harry Cole (in the police station)
• Back from the Brink by Paul McGrath
• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
• The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
• The Overlanders by Garry Hogg
• Zen Comics by Ioanna Salajan
• Saint Joan by George Bernard Shaw
• The Blue Ice by Hammond Innes
• The Man in Charge by Richard Jessup
• A Streetcar Named Desire and The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
• Back to Methuselah by George Bernard Shaw
• Landslide by Desmond Bagley
• Slow Heat by Erica Spindler
• Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
• How to Make a Habit of Succeeding by Mack R Douglas (caught the next day!)
• The Greatest Salesman in the World by Og Mandino
• The Twelfth Angel by Og Mandino
• Unto This Last and Traffic by John Ruskin
• The Men of Dallas by Burt Hirschfeld

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Other releases last week were:

Monday 16 June

• In the Wet by Nevil Shute
• Salinger edited by Henry Anatole Grunwald
• Longfellow’s Poetical Works

Tuesday 17 June

• The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris
• In a Yellow Wood by Gore Vidal
• The Steven Spielberg Story by Tony Crawley
• 14 Great Plays

Wednesday 18 June

• Fred Hollows by Fred Hollows and Peter Corris
• The Chequer Board by Nevil Shute
• Lovely She Goes by William Mitford
• Little Lord Fauntleroy by FH Burnett

Thursday 19 June

• Banco by Henri Charriere (caught!)
• Wheels by Arthur Hailey
• Cyborg by Martin Caidin
• Angel Fire East by Terry Brooks
• The Westminster Disaster by Fred and Geoffrey Hoyle

Friday 20 June

• Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell
• Language and Learning by James Britton
• Deadeye Dick by Kurt Vonnegut

I wasn’t in the mood for releasing over the weekend or yesterday, but I released a couple this morning, The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe edited by Eric W Carlson and Freud’s Discovery of Psychoanalysis by William J McGrath, and was rewarded by the psychology book being caught almost immediately! Catches may not be everything,
but they’re a great inspiration to keep releasing 🙂

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Currently reading: Mercy by Jodi Picoult
Currently listening to: Erewhon by Samuel Butler