my FLW pop-up reviews

For Maurice Sendak's Mommy? and Encyclopedia Prehistorica Dinosaurs by Robert Sabuda and Matthew Reinhart.

http://www.flashlightworthybooks.com/Best-Pop-Up-Books/238?fd=3066-1829#bid-3066

like the '90s all over again

I think I've figured out why I like mailing PBS books so much. It's like therapy. Printing out a two-sheet mailing label, finding some way to scotch-tape them together to make something big enough to wrap an oversized paperback, and securing the whole thing with enough packing tape to immobilize a full-grown man - there's something so 1996 about it. As well-intentioned and sweetly primitive as a mix tape, all wrapped up and shipped off with all your hopes that the receiver will like it as much as you did.

Mailing Hotel Honolulu today.

:)

the pig is a magical animal

Wow. At last check-in, I swore no one would touch my PBS bookshelf with a ten-foot pole, but thus far I've gotten four requests: The Blank Slate: Modern Denial of Human Nature, Tales of a Female Nomad, Exterminate All The Brutes, and Lost in a Good Book (Thursday Next Book 2).

Since I was so awesomely productive, getting all the books down to the PO on time (although I did send them off at the recommended parcel post rate, which is dreadfully, awfully, hideously SLOW), I took myself to Barnes and Noble and bought Kitchen Confidential.

Yah, I know. Defeating the purpose of blah blah blah. But not really! Because I am slowly - and I daresay, albeit prematurely, surely - clearing the shelves of the books I will probably never read. I am clearing the shelves of the books that need a better home than the one I'm providing. And I'm replacing them with books that get gobbled up on the spot (like Kitchen Confidential and the one PBS book I've received so far, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America. Next to Bourdain, Bill Bryson might be the love of my nonfiction life.

Today I took great pleasure in an activity most others would probably find very weird: I got a takeout lunch (chopped salad and chicken chowder) and sat in my car in a congested mall parking lot, reading and eating. Bliss - the perfect end to an imperfect but satisfying Spring Break.

except no one wants what i'm willing to part with

All right, I'm all set up on PaperbackSwap.com. Please don't consider my bookshelf a reflection of my taste in reading - those are, after all, the books I'm willing to part with. This is in response to my husband(!)'s pleas to me to "please get rid of some of your books." I stuffed the most disappointing ones I could find into a box, posted the titles on PBS, and with my two automatic free credits promptly sent out for The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America by Bill Bryson, and Songbook by Nick Hornby. This means that in about a week, I will have added two books to my shelf and gotten rid of none. Good times!

Temple Grandin has a new book. Like Animals in Translation, which I really enjoyed (thesis: it's perfectly fine to eat meat, but we owe farm animals a good life and a quick end before they become our dinner), it's co-written with Catherine Johnson. I can't add anything to my bookshelf right now, though. Boo.