Read All About It!

It is said that revelation may be found in the most unlikely places.

Today we found it in Mishawaka, IN.

We spent the afternoon with the visionary, casual, funny, intelligent, and generally rocking guys at Better World Books, whose achievements over the last few years include collecting more than three million books from 900-plus campuses and 500-plus libraries, raising more than $1.3 million for approximately 70 literacy and education non-profit organizations, and providing more than 450,000 books to Books for Africa and the National Center for Family Literacy. Go check them out. Be amazed. Get inspired. And then do your part and buy some books so people across the world can learn to read them.

I realize that it is entirely unlikely that everyone will like the same books I read. But due to a lack of inspiring blog post ideas, I figured, “Hey! why not tell people about a good book I’ve just read!?”

So the good book I just read was The Life of Pi, by Yann Martel. It made me think about quite a lot of different things in new ways, zoo keeping, religion, survival and the mystique and down right scariness of being stranded. I loved the relationship between Pi and Richard Parker. I loved how I came to find out who Richard Parker was. I was finding myself eating not one but two bowls of cereal in the morning just so I could read one more chapter.

Via Playfuls.com:

A 15-month-old who demanded her babysitter buy her a book from a Stockbridge, Ga., Goodwill store discovered $1,300 pressed between the pages.

Sheila Laughridge, who purchased the book for 25 cents, said the child, Rhiannon Barnes, discovered a small brown paper bag inside the folds of the book that contained multiple torn and tattered $100, $50, $20 and $10 bills, the Henry (Ga.) Herald reported Monday.

“I was just bored that day and we rode up there,” Laughridge told the newspaper. “We started walking around (the store) and she saw the book and started to pitch a fit.”

Laughridge said Rhiannon only wanted the book because it had a sailboat on the cover.

“It’s not even a readable book,” Laughridge said.

Laughridge told the Herald she took the money to a bank and received $300 of the money back, while the badly damaged bills were shipped off the U.S. Treasury Department.

Although we have yet to score quite so financially with any of our books, we have been collecting a few other treasures caught in their pages: letters, recipes, business cards, etc. If room allows, we’ll display them in the store, and eventually we’ll put them in a scrapbook to browse in the café. But how cool would it be to theme an event around this when we do all the unpacking? Treasure hunt in the stacks — small children, especially those with a penchant for sailboats, especially welcome.

Oh my.

Because there are so many of them, it is impossible to go through all the books in the living room. It is also impossible to resist the temptation of pulling a few out of an open bag or box just to see what treasures lie within. But, upon reflection, it might have been wiser not to have chosen this one as a random sample.

Whatever Real Thing used to be in that plastic bubble at the top right of the cover is gone now, possibly somewhere in amongst the thousands of books in the living room.

Hm.

Let us hope it is not as Real as the photos and jaunty red arrow indicate.

Quick: what’s on your shelves? Mine? Your best friend’s? Shelfari, today’s Elsewhere Wednesday pick, has the answers — and a lot of other good stuff as well.

According to the site, Shelfari enables people passionate about books to:

• Build virtual bookshelves to express themselves to their friends and to the world
• Discover books that are popular in their trusted circles of friends
• Influence peers by rating & discussing books online
• Discover and learn from other people with similar reading tastes
• Participate in online book groups to further explore literature
• Interact with and learn from authors

Good stuff, all of it. Put on your virtual pith helmet and head on over.