Books Books Books

Today, I want to talk about books.  Naturally, I will be including affiliate links for your convenience, and a tiny potential profit for me.  Thanks for your support.  

I've always enjoyed the Jane Austen movies, but I'd never taken the time to actually read the books.  

A few months back, Paul and I were at Costco and we spied Pride & Prejudice, which came home with us.  I started reading it aloud in the car on the way home, and we ended up reading the whole book together.

After finishing P&P, I picked up Persuasion from the library.  I hope to make my way through the rest of the Austen books next year.

Recently I talked about how much I've been enjoying volunteering at the SPCA.  Well, SPCA holds a huge fall book sale every year.  Paul and I went last month and brought home some new-to-us books.

You can probably guess which pile is whose.  Yes, my pile is full of "mental fluff."  I'm okay with that.  I've got Northanger Abbey and Jane Eyre in there, too, so it's not all junk food.

The nice thing is, as I read them, I can either take them to SPCA with me, or take them to the Book Den which is another place I've been volunteering.  The Book Den is a pretty amazing offshoot of the Friends of the Library here.  It's part warehouse, part book shop.  And volunteers get paid in books.  This makes me very happy.

I've been going to volunteer about once a week, and I've brought home some treats, including this book for Paul.

One of the things I do at the Book Den is what's called "first sort" out in the warehouse.  This is really fun because it's sorting through boxes of donated books, and you literally never know what you're going to get.  I've seen books that were in my grandmother's collection, and books that came out this year.  Books that I've read, books that I'd like to read, and books that I'd never cross paths with, ordinarily.

Brianna read The Things They Carried for school, and a couple weeks after she was telling me about it, not one, but two different copies showed up in the boxes I was sorting.

Last week, I brought home this Christmas book, since I've read some of Rita Mae Brown's other books before.  It was a quick read, and I'll be taking it back to the Book Den tomorrow.  There's a Christmas section up right now, so hopefully someone else will enjoy it this season, too.

In other book-related news, Paul finished reading the Chronicles of Narnia to the children.  He's started reading them the Little House books now.

I helped out at a Friends of the Library event at my local branch recently.  Book First is a program that gives a free book to every first grader in local schools with a high percentage of students who qualify for free or reduced lunch.  This event was in preparation for Book First season.  We stickered books with reading levels to make it easier to get the right levels into the kids' hands during a distribution day.

Then we walked around the room, compiling classroom packs.

Each pack contained 30 books, in 5 reading levels.  Then we placed labels inside the books and bagged them up.

This was about a third of the bags we created.  I hope to be able to help out at at least one of the distribution days, where we're actually helping kids choose their own books to take home.  For many of those children, it will be their first book of their very own.

Not really book related, but I've also started washing the story time toys at my local library once a week.  I like being able to volunteer at the branch that the kids and I patronize. 


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