Books, books, and more books

Well the snow didn’t last very long – rain on Saturday evening meant it was pretty much gone by morning. Oh well, at least it was white and pretty for a couple of hours…

At least I managed to get out on Sunday for my planned release walk (with a secondary aim of a bit of shopping at Northlands). Northlands works well as a target of a release walk – it’s far enough away to be a decent walk without being too exhausting (it takes about half an hour to walk there if you’re not stopping every few minutes to release books :-)), and there’s a couple of decent parks along the way. The rain was threatening again, though, so I didn’t release as many books as I could have:

Temptation Island by Graeme Lay
Pearls by Celia Brayfield
The Sunday Woman by Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini
The Goose Girl by Joan Collins
Owls in the Family by Farley Mowat
Never Too Rich by Judith Gould
Goldilocks and the Three Bears
Vespers by Jeff Rovin
Kiss Mommy Goodbye by Joy Fielding

Despite the cold weather, there were still quite a few people in the parks, and I even got a catch (for Never Too Rich) before I got home!

Then there was another almost instant catch yesterday morning, when I released George Bernard Shaw’s Complete Plays at the university, and it was caught within the hour.

Last night was meetup night, and we had quite a crowd round the table: angela7715, a very excited lytteltonwitch still buzzing from the Brisbane convention, and bearing gifts from Skyring (thanks Pete, they’re gorgeous!), rarsberry, keenreda, MarcieNZ, and awhina. Oh, and me of course 🙂

Lots of books, lots of talk, and lots of laughter. Always a fun way to spend a Tuesday night.

I picked up The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips by Michael Morpurgo, The Schoolmistress with the Golden Eyes by Stratis Myrivilis, and Feline Witches and Wizards by Elizabeth Hardy, and released In Code by Sarah and David Flannery, Galileo’s Daughter by Dava Sobel, The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, Brothers by Ted van Lieshout, and Armageddon the Musical and They Came and Ate Us by Robert Rankin, so amazingly, I actually managed to leave with fewer books than I arrived with, thus totally throwing the science of Bookcrossing Mathematics* on its head. (It’s ok, the balance of the universe was restored at work today, when I managed to acquire a largish pile of books someone was getting rid of :-))

I’m starting to lose a bit of inspiration for my daily releases, mainly because there’s only a few decent release locations between here and work, and I don’t want to overuse them (otherwise the same people always pick up the books, so there’s less chance of getting new members). At least the students are back next week, so it’ll be worth releasing around the university again, which greatly expands my range of release locations, so I might get reinspired. Anyway, I only released three books today, A Slight Change of Plans by Glenda Garland, Cassidy by Morris West, and Around the World in 80 Days by Michael Palin.

* Bookcrossing Mathematics is based around the observation that at any meetup or convention, every bookcrosser somehow manages to go home with more books than they arrived with. As this is obviously impossible under the rules of normal mathematics, it has been posited that just as in restaurants (Adams, 1982), mathematics obeys different rules at a bookcrossing gathering. Now we’ve just got to figure out how to use this awesome new power we’ve discovered…