BookCrossing Liz

Caving Liz whose intrepid exploits lead her to clamber up topographical features and spelunk down into the bowls of the earth, makes an earthshattering new discovery at I Utama : there's an official BookCrossing zone!

It's located on the ground floor outside Parkson and MPH are sponsoring 50 free books a month. But of course, the whole point of BookCrossing is to release some of your own books, so that readers can enjoy them. Here's more about it on the 1Utama website.

Liz says :

There is a small book case and a lounge area for people to sit and read - although the people I saw there were just using the seats for a rest or to read the newspaper!

It will be very interesting to see how the scheme works out. I've crossed quite a few books in the past but find the person who picks them up doesn't tend to play fair and pass them on, which is a bit disappointing because it's nice to see how far books travel and what happens to them on their journey.



Here's an article about the BookCrossing Zone from The Star.

Free books for London Commuters

The BBC reports on a great new initiative to encourage reading in London. Stalls outside five London tube stations hand out free books to commuters once a month, and they can be returned via drop boxes the following month.

Choose What You Read was started by Alfie Boyd and his friend Claire Wilson as an alternative to the free newspapers currently given out daily. Each commuter is encouraged to add their name to a list of readers on the inside cover. (BBC video here.)

But why not tap into the already very successful Bookcrossing scheme instead of setting up something new, asks Richard Lea on The Guardian blog.

One blogger goes along to help out.

KLAB Curry

Went to the first day of the KL Alternative Bookfair yesterday, and it was a really fun event where I couldn't turn without getting hugged by yet another bookloving friend.

Chet was doing a brilliant job organising a free book stall where people could donate books and take up to three donated by someone else. I took along a couple of bags of books and took just one - a historical imprint about tigers in Terengganu, but I was sad when I got the book hope later and found pages seriously infected with mildew!

Noorul was selling books in aid of the Malaysia-UK Exchange.

Ted was selling books for Suara-Suara publications, and also selling off some books Raja Ahmad had culled from his shelves, so I bought Prizewinning Asian Fiction by Leon Comber.

Bought a copy of poet/singer-songwriter Jerome Kugan's excellent first album Songs for Shadows. (Listen to songs here.) Also really love Shahril Nizam's art work on the cover.

Writer-publishers Sufian Abas and RuhayatX also had a table to flog their books. I'm glad to hear that the next edition of Elarti is due out soon.

Malaysian Bookcrossers were also giving away books - the only catch - you have to pass the book on to someone when you're done with it and register it online so that its journey can be tracked.

Bersih (The Campaign for Free and Fair Elections) launched (with a little help from Bubu the Clown) Selak a stunning book of photographs of the November 10th Rally. I didn't stay long because I realised I was hungry and there was so much else on in the afternoon. Guat came with me to enjoy the delights of the mamak shop downstairs. (Best naan and tandoori in the city?)

The lovely Farish Noor (looking remarkably gym-toned) on his way to talk give his talk about post-colonial race politics.

(More pictures to come.)

Save Trees, Swap Books

A passionate plea from Charlotte Northedge, on the Guardian's environmental pages, for readers to swap books rather than buy new ones.

Here's a scary fact uncovered by Greenpeace :

... one Canadian spruce produces just 24 books, which means that if you get through one book every two weeks your reading habits destroy almost one large tree every year.

The article has links to lots of book swap sites on the internet. (More here.) In the Klang Valley, there's a very active BookCrosser group who meet regularly to swap book and talk about them. They're going to be at KLAB tomorrow.

I wanted to save a few trees myself and decided finally to go and buy a Sony Reader and join the valiant e-book set. Of course the sales assistant in the Sony shop hadn't even heard of it!!!

(This was the same assistant who had told me sniffily some time before that Sony doesn't sell cassette tapes because the technology has moved on ... even though the voice recorders in the show case were the kind which use cassettes. Duh!)

Catch and Release Missions - for Books

The mission began at dusk, in a light rain. I carried the package under my arm, hoping not to attract attention. As my husband and I approached the target — a large hospital — from the south, I whispered, “Try to look normal.”

“How can I look normal when I’m soaking wet?” he asked. “This is ridiculous.”

“Sweep the perimeter and stop skulking,” I hissed as I surveyed the lobby.

Empty waiting room. Darkened gift shop window. Good. Casually, I wandered to a seating area and laid the package — a hardcover copy of “The Wind in the Willows,” the children’s classic by Kenneth Grahame — on an end table.

Minutes later, my husband skulked back, empty-handed. That wasn’t part of the plan.

“Where is the other book?” I asked.

“It wasn’t there,” he said. “Can we please go home now?”

Now it was my turn to skulk. On the three-block walk to the car, I tried to figure out where the operation had gone wrong.

Apparently more than 60,000 people take part in “catch and release” missions worldwide. Michelle Slatalla writes about the joys of Bookcrossing in the New York Times.

Who can argue with the aim of turning the world into one big library? I wrote about Bookcrossing in Malaysia here and you can get in touch with fellow bookcrossers through this yahoogroup.

Free Books, Crossed Books

Want some good books to read without spending a cent? Why not go to a BookCrossing meet?

What's BookCrossing? Quite simply, it is:

n. the practice of leaving a book in a public place to be picked up and read by others, who then do likewise. (added to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary in August 2004)

BookCrossers register themselves and the book they wish to cross on the website, and then the person who receives it leaves a note there to say they have picked it up.

It's extra good if they also say what they thought of it too. They then re-release the book into the wild for some other lucky person to find, and the book continues in this way around the world making lots of people happy.

The trouble is that in the Malaysian context this doesn't seem to work to well, so the local group operates in a slightly different way.

Azwan was kind enough to send me details and invite you guys along too:

There is a local community of bookcrossers here in Malaysia with active members in Klang Valley having a meet-up once a month. Usually we have our meet-ups in Amcorp Mall on a chosen Sunday. (If you are a booklover in Klang Valley, you will understand why at that place, and why on Sunday!). Sometimes one of us will host a meet-up at other places. Last year, we even had a wonderful picnic at the Lake Garden. For this month, I'm hosting the meet-up which will be held at 2.00 pm tomorrow, 11 August 2007, at Bakerzin, Bangsar Village. Please come to check out what this bookcrossing culture is all about. And off course, to bring back home free books!

What?: August Malaysian Bookcrossers Meet-up
When?: Saturday, 11 August 2007, 2.00pm
Where?: Bakerzin @ Bangsar Village
Why?: To meet other bookcrossers for conversation, free books & a bit of madness

(Pre meet-up: 12.00pm banana leaf lunch @ the nearby Sri Nirwana Maju Restaurant, followed by a brief visit to Silverfish Books.
Post meet-up: ???)

What? You want another makan after that??

I joined way back ... long before I knew there was a local group. I released books but no-one ever registered the find on the website, so I was disheartened. In the end I gave them to Raman to put on his freebie shelf in Silverfish.

I decided to leave another bookcrossing book (a spare copy of Roddy Doyle's wonderful The Van) with my friend Abby who would then pass it to the other participants on my first writing course.

At that time Abby, one of the founders of the incredibly successful Delicious restaurant chain, was managing the I Utama branch. She was thoroughly enjoying the novel one day when she got called away by a customer. She put the book down by her coffee cup ... and it walked. She was so sad I had to go and buy her another copy.

The "thief" of course had seen the BookCrossing sticker in the front of the book and assumed the copy was up for grabs.

A month or two later the book was replaced quietly in the restaurant, and on the same table.

Shelfish Reasons

I recognise the symptoms of what BookLust calls Bibliomania, "the best disease bar none" only too well ...

She does rather make things worse though by suggesting a list of guides to book collecting which I know simply must have. Am now running out of shelf space again and a big reshuffle of my shelves is planned which will probably take weeks ... and I dread it, not so much because I hate cleaning (which I do) but because I keep finding old friends on the shelves and have to sit down and read them.

I've acquired a tiny handheld vacuum cleaner which will be just the thing for cleaning the books without realising clouds of dust into the air. It was a free gift from the nice folks at the car workshop after I spent many thousands on repairs to parts of the innards I didn't even know existed. (The money that could have been better spent on antique bookshelves and numerous rare first editions.)

I've noticed that there's nothing bibliomaniacs (that's you guys!) love to talk about more than how they organize their collection. (The idea of organising a book collection by colour prompted a lot of discussion and made me realise just how many different ways there are to organise books ... and how idiosyncratic we all are!)

The topic comes up again today on the Guardian blog where Sarah Crown makes a plea for advice, as she struggles to reshelf her books after a house move:

Believe me, I've tried nearly everything. I used to favour the popular "by genre" approach: different shelves for poetry, plays, fiction, non-fiction, travel, cookery ... The problem there, though, is that the travel shelf ends up only half-full, and then you're faced with the problem of what to complete it with. So you pick cookery, but cookery spills over onto the next shelf ... and so it goes. Even if you decide that, despite its flaws, the genre system is for you, there are further choices to be made. Do you organise each genre alphabetically? Do you attempt the infinitely tricky but profoundly impressive, if you can pull it off, genre-bleed - science into sci-fi, history books into historical fiction?

I enjoyed the reader comments, suggesting all kinds of solutions I would never have thought of, including:

• organising books by the price you paid for them
• putting heavier books at either end of a shelf so they don't warp (invented by an engineer)

If, like Kak Teh the other day, you simply have too many books and need to cull them, why not bookcross them? This is a tad risky in Malaysia where most people don't seem to understand the concept, but you could donate them to the local bookcrossing group or leave them on the bookcrossing shelf at Silverfish. (From which I seem to pick up more titles than I leave, which isn't the point, really.)

There are also a number of bookswapping sites now on the internet and the Librarything blog has done a good job of highlighting these recently, and here's a list of sites they recommend:

• Title Traders
• SwapThing
• Lendmonkey
• Bookins
• Swapsimple
• Bookmooch
• WhatsOnMyBookshelf

I don't mind getting rid of books - but it always seems to be that the books I get rid of seem a little further down the line to be the books I need desperately to refer to ... and I end up buying another copy!

Postscript

Someone added the best suggestion yet on the blog ... arrange your books in dinner-party order i.e. according to which authors would most like to sit by each other. I love that!

Books Without Breaking the Bank

Didn't have time yesterday to comment on Elizabeth Tai's very timely and useful piece The Savvy Bookworm about how book addicts can get a steady supply of books without breaking the bank, particularly as most people here find books expensive.

The first solution Elizabeth comes up with is renting.

I wonder - are book rental stores a typically Malaysian solution to the problem of few libraries and high book prices?

Elizabeth interviews Alex (left) and Susan Ooi who run Reader's Corner at Subang Parade who started the business out of a personal passion for reading:

Alex said that business is tough simply because there aren’t many avid readers out there. “You’re lucky if you survive in this business,” he said. Said Susan: “In the past, after exams are over, our store would be filled with customers. Now, there isn’t that much fanfare. Before, many kids used to spend money to rent books. Now kids use their allowance to go shopping, watch movies in the cinemas; the computer and the Internet don’t help, either. This has influenced kids to give up reading. There doesn’t seem to be many avid readers from the younger generation now.”

Then there's swapping books. Elizabeth interviews a group of bookcrossers (right) who meet monthly to exchange books.

The Malaysian chapter was created in Dec 19, 2003, by a then 16-year-old Andy Lim. There are now 207 members but only a few meet once a month to swap books while others mail books to one another.

As the article points out, the real aim of bookcrossing is supposed to be that you release books "into the wild" for others to find and enjoy, and the progress of the book is tracked across the internet. But it doesn't really work in Malaysia (as I know from personal experience!) where you never seem to hear of your books again. (Although I've since discovered that books can be crossed at Silverfish with more success and have picked up one or two from the "freebie" shelf myself.) You can contact the group via their yahoo group.

Another solution is looking out for discounts and special offers. Ah, I also can't rest Kinokuniya's Gems of the Month and snipping discount vouchers from the papers.

Yours truly (left, on a bad hair day) burbles on about the joy of warehouse sales (as I have many times on this blog!).

The final solution - and the one that would be most obvious to readers in the West - is to borrow books from libraries. Here there are not enough branch libraries and those that do exist tend to close too early for folks to make use of their services. (Librarians are civil servants in Malaysia and work government hours.)

The article reports how Anne Tham (right) and husband Tham Ah Meng have set up a private library to complement their work at Ace Ed–Venture at USJ9's Business Centre in Subang Jaya where they not only teach English and communication skills but also develop the love of reading in children. They spend RM20,000 a year on books for the kids.

Close to my own heart (because I've been involved in listing purchases of latest stuff for it) is the British Council Library.

So yes, it's possible to be an enthusiastic reader in Malaysia without breaking the bank, and thanks Elizabeth for spreading the word.

Goldilocks

My friend Jaeson Iskandar declared that he is a "goldilocks sort of a reader", meaning that (like Goldilocks in the house of the three bears tasting the porridge, trying the chairs and the beds until she finds the one that's "just right") - he is an extremely fussy reader, taking nibbly little bites at a whole lot of fiction but unwilling to stick for long with any novel that he doesn't really connect with. (Jaes is blessed with single-minded determination in any case.)

I loved the expression - and wish that I were more of a Goldilocks myself - usually I feel honour bound to finish a book once I've begun it. Especially if I've spent good (or even bad!) money on it. It seems like an admission of defeat. Belonging to a book club makes it hard of course, you are so often faced with a book you can't enjoy, but you struggle through it because you know that you're going to be discussing it - and besides everyone stuck it out to read the book that you recommended the previous month but they weren't enamoured by.

Such a book for me was Dennis Lehane's "Mystic River" - an above average thriller with decent characters, some good plotting and vividly realised scenes ... but ... there was something iside me screaming life is just too short to stick with a book that doesn't do a whole lot for you. (I shall probably enjoy the film version though when it's out.)

I set the book free. Liberated it. Turned it into the wild to fend for itself. In other words bookcrossed it and left it for some unknown other who might adopt it and love it more than I do. In other words stuffed it behind a sofa cushion at Darling Muse on Chap Goh Mei at Dax and Yusof's Chinese New Year party. Hope it gets found, and then of course passed on, as is the whole idea with this bookcrossing thing.