Books!
I didn't consciously know today was World Book Day, but somewhere in my subconscious I was obviously aware. After reading Erin's story of joining BookCrossing to get rid of read books and pass along the joy of reading to a stranger, I decided to join up too.
What is BookCrossing? Well it's someone's brilliant idea to leave a book in "the wild" for someone else to discover, only to track it through the modern world that is the internet and discover what other people think of the book and where it goes. I love this idea. I leave books at places anyway and this seems like a much better idea than when I just randomly left Barack Obama's memoir in a tiny hotel in a tiny town in Norway. I'll never know if someone in that town read the book, if a German fly-fishing tourist picked it up or if (stranger things have happened) another American stumbled upon it. With bookcrossing I can find out all those things.
Today I left three books in or around Union Station. The train station has the benefit of high traffic, lots of places to "leave" a book without being suspicious and being only a few blocks from my office. I dropped one on a bench (trying to be incognito) on my way to pick up some lunch. When I walked back past the spot 10 minutes later it was already gone. This got me psyched up to drop the other two I was carrying but I decided I don't like being obvious about it. As a major transit center, Union Station is always crawling with security guards, the occasional police person, cleaning people, not to mention the hundreds of people who work there. I felt very self conscious about just leaving a book on a bench and tried to make sure no one was watching me. That's kinda hard to do at a busy train station in a major city at the lunch hour, but I managed somehow.
I'm anxious to drop some more and see if I get any feedback on the website (not to mention giving my bookshelves a bit of a cleaning).