Creature of Mad Enthusiasms

So. There's this thing called World Book Night. It started in Britain, but the US has woken up and this year gave away 1 million special-edition books, including The Hunger Games, Little Bee, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, A Reliable Wife, The Poisonwood Bible, The Namesake, The Lovely Bones, and (ironically) The Book Thief.

You know me. Free books? I'm SO there! I've signed up for World Book Night notices, and I've just got the one asking me to send in suggestions for 4 books to be given away next year. Fiction, nonfiction, classics all allowed. (They aren't interested in children's books.) They tend to trope towards classics and bestsellers, but I'm still going to put in a pitch for some outliers.

The problem is - only 4? I can think of 40! Which books do I pick? The Checklist Manifesto? Having Our Say? The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes? Dandelion Wine? Holmes on the Range? In the Bleak Midwinter? Chicks Unravel Time? (and congrats to everyone who is published in that, by the way.) The latest of any number of authors I know?


Sing out in comments. If you could encourage anyone to read book X by giving out copies of something you really loved, it would be...? (And authors, go ahead and pimp your work.)

For those who don't follow the Baker Street Babes, Episode 25 is about the book Steampunk Holmes: Legacy of the Nautilus (crossing Captain Nemo and Sherlock Holmes) and includes a code to download a free ecopy from Smashwords.com.

Smashwords has a version for every ereader plus HTML and text, and allows international downloading.

I'd give the code, but it's their offer and thus their site hits. I have neither read the book nor listened to the podcast yet, so this isn't a rec as much as me living up to my belief that books, like air, should circulate.


In other book news, in the tiny keyhole of time I have between getting home early from work and getting downtown to the mock trial, is that I've been down to the Town Office and have official permission from the woman who handles the town code to set up a Little Free Library in my yard as long as it's by my steps and not too close to the curb.