Free Your Books!!

This is the absolute best idea I've seen in a long, long time. It's called "Bookcrossing." The basic concept: turn the world at large into one giant lending library. How does it work? Basically, you take a book that you want to "release into the wild," and register it at bookcrossing.com. They give you a unique tracking number for the book, which you write on the inside cover, along with the website's url. Then you leave the book somewhere--at your local coffee shop, at the grocery store, at church, at a bus stop, wherever you want--and when someone finds it, they go to the website, log in using the book's tracking number, and mark where they found the book. Then, when they're done reading it, they do the exact same thing. You can go to the website and look up the book you've released and see where in the world it's gone--you wouldn't believe all the countries where this is happening! From Afghanistan (currently listing 3 books in the wild) to Burkina Faso (I don't even know where that is, but they have 2 books) to Spain (1,389 books) to the good ole' US of A (16,002 books--but we have an unfair advantage since we started the program). You can click on a country and go all the way down to the city level to see how many books are currently listed as being there--here in RSM there are apparently 7 floating around. And guess what?! Two members have "Worlds Collide" listed as being in their possession!

There's a lot more to the site than just this; go take a look so you can see what all they do. For those of us who consider reading to be more important than, say, eating, this is a dream come true. I can't wait to release some of my books into the wild!

Tell me who I am!

*It has come to my attention that you can barely see the text in the table I've included--I'm trying to figure out how to change it but so far have had no luck. Sorry!!*

I'm a sucker for profiles and personality tests--it's why I joined eHarmony in the first place, to get that free personality profile! Robin Lee Hatcher had a link to this one on her blog, and of course I couldn't resist. Here are the results of the kind of American English I speak:

Your Linguistic Profile:

65% General American English

15% Upper Midwestern

15% Yankee

5% Dixie

0% Midwestern

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

5% Dixie, eh? Must be because I admitted to saying "y'all" on a frequent basis. Not even sure where I picked it up. Anyway, this site is great--another fantastic time-eating tool--they have tons of other profiles and quizzes. Knock yourself out!