...as seen on miketroll 's blog. I'm not that much of a reader (I know, I know... and I'm ashamed but it's how it is!) but even I should be able to score above 6 on this list. Let's see.

The BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books listed here.

1) Put an 'x' after those you have read.
2) Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading (as in, they are somewhere in the house).
4) Tally your total at the bottom.

( Behind the cut )

...and I don't even own one.

Why is it that people seem to think that getting an e-reader involves signing a contract that states that you'll never read, hold, buy or gift another paper book?
If I got a euro for every time someone on the BookCrossing forums says 'Oh no, I could never get used to using one of those, because I like holding paper books' , '... I don't want to get rid of all my books', or '... when I'm giving books as presents I want something to wrap', I'd have a nice sum. And if I got another euro for every time someone says 'Oh no, I could never read an e-book because I dislike reading off a computer screen for longer times, the flickering makes my eyes hurt' or something similar, I could probably afford one of these by now:


This is a nice-looking, simple, very portable e-reader I saw in a store yesterday, priced at 300 euros. I could definitely see uses for it. And no, the screen does not flicker anymore than paper books do.

But seriously. E-readers do not flicker. They read like paper, only you can make the font bigger. Is that a Bad Thing? And no one will come to your house and take all your books once you get one.
It's like people are saying 'Oh no, I would never get one of these newfangled telephone thingies, I like talking to people face to face.'
Why are people so afraid of new options?

...of my mother's husband, whose latest book just came out. It's called 'Fewer Headaches, Less Migraine' (Minder Hoofdpijn en Migraine), and it's his third book. The other two were 'the Jules Verne guide' and a book he wrote together with my mother called 'Growing Old Meaningfully'.
(These books are in Dutch, I translated the titles for your convenience.)
I've made a simple website about the book. Click the cover pic to see it.

I just went to the recycling centre / second hand shop across the street.
I took the shopping trolley that we keep in the Book Room as a receptacle for books that are falling apart, or that we can't possibly imagine anyone being happy about finding. The trolley was half full (although some people would say it was half empty).

I used the available space for pizza boxes from the kitchen, and empty glass jars and bottles. By the time there were none left in the kitchen, the trolley was more than full. This is a wine, peanut butter and pizza loving, four-person household (I use the term 'house' loosely).

While throwing the books and boxes in the waste paper container, I happened to find some books that were not falling apart, and suitable for BookCrossing purposes. So I took them home.

They were:
Room at the top (John Braine), Penguin, decent condition
A twist in the tale (Jeffrey Archer), paperback, decent condition
Serenade (Leon de Winter), a Dutch National Book Week gift, good condition
The incredible journey (Sheila Burnford), Dutch translation in reasonable condition
Brave new world (Aldous Huxley), nice tacky '50s Bantam pocket, rather brittle.

This last one goes straight onto Mt. TBR, no matter what miketroll says.

Inside the shop I bought an aluminium strainer, sieve or possibly a steaming dish, suitable for washing engine parts in a part washer such as stoneshop has.

All in all quite a useful little trip.

I found something odd in the boxes of books that I'd gotten for BookCrossing recently.
A book in Esperanto! I'd never seen one of those before.

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed. Well, let's see.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicise those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them ;-)

Themed, even. All of them had an outdoorsy word in the title, and I tried to fit the release spots to those words.
They all have pictures, too!

The Smell of Grass. Near some grass.
The House behind the Hill. Near a hill, of course.
View with Grain of Sand. A poetry book by a Polish poet.
A Forest of Candles. In the forest. Caught!
Under the Ombu-tree (whatever that is). In a tree. Caught!

It was a wonderful day for a walk with a good friend. Which is exactly what I did.

Nijmegen, a city close to where I live, used to have two OBCZs (dedicated BookCrossing points of presence, maintained by one or more members). But one is closed now, because the building is being renovated, and it's not likely to open again during this year. So this afternoon, Emmeken, Marsala and I are going 'OBCZ-shopping' in Nijmegen, because we want to find a new spot.
We've got our eye on this place:

Today was Queen's Day. If we have a national holiday, this is it: it's a celebration of our Queen's birthday, only it's not her birthday, because that's in February and we'd have awful weather. So we celebrate it on her mother's birthday instead.

I'll be off to Rubberchicken's place in an hour. Tomorrow morning we fly to London for the International BookCrossing Convention. I've heard  the weather won't be all that good, so I've taken my precautions.
Fellow conventioneers, 'tis by my Brellycumber thou shalt know me.

I've been meaning to tell you about this dream I had.
It was a bit like an outline for a book or a story; this story was about a book.

The book was a very special book: what was inside, depended entirely on who was reading the book. It was different for every person who'd read it.
There was a man in the story; he found the book. It looked very old, but at the same time it looked like it had just been printed. He took the book with him, read it, and after a while he discovered the book's secret.


As soon as he found out about the book being different for everyone who'd read it, he realised that the book was very special, and that it was important that people knew about it. He felt it was his duty to show it to the world.
The only trouble was, the world didn't believe him. No one believed what he told them about the book; they thought it was a trick. He tried to seek publicity, but ended up losing his job, his money and finally his friends in the process.

Eventually he ended up on a street corner, homeless, with nothing left but the book and the clothes he had on.
Still, he tried to show people the book and convince them that they should read it and see how special it was. He said things like: "Read this book, it's not like other books... this is the book everybody is looking for. This book is all you'll ever need to read. There's no second book like this one anywhere in the world."
And people would glance at the book, then at his face; he looked dirty, thin and unshaven. And then they'd look away and walk on. Those who'd bother to reply would simply say 'No thanks, I'm not interested in religion' or 'I've already got a bible'.

That's the story I dreamed up. When I told my mother about it, she said that ithe book in the story must be the Book of Life. I don't know, because the contents of the book wasn't in my dream. What do you think?

Fun with powertools; not for the faint of heart.
Most of us know about the quote by Dorothy Parker: "This novel is not to be tossed lightly aside, but to be hurled with great force." Stoneshop takes it one step further here.
( Photo series behind the cut, for those who can handle it. )

Read recently:

Self, by Yann Martell
A bit of a disappointment, I must say. I expected to love it, because I loved Life of Pi. But I didn't. It never really grabbed me and so took me a long time to read. The idea of gender change was, well... different. But I didn't see what it did for the story. It seemed superfluous to me.
The multi-lingual thing was similarly original but didn't really do much for me either, mainly because most of the time the text appeared to be the same, just in two different languages.
It's not a bad book per sé; it's just one I expected more from.





Een goede man slaat soms zijn vrouw, by Joris Luyendijk.
Very good and informative book about everyday life in Egypt, mainly among Egyptian students. Luyendijk allowed himself to get involved into the lives of his subjects as much as he could, and writes about them with humour, honest curiousity and sometimes endearingly naive. Makes you wonder how people from Western Europe and the Middle East can ever really learn to understand each other, though.






Reading right now:

Maus, vertelling van een overlevende, by Art Spiegelman.
Good stuff. Art tells us about the story of his father and the way he survived the war as a Jew in Europe.
The comic strip format works well and is never in bad taste. The drawing style is simple and stark. It's not funny, nor is it meant to be.
Could be a very good way to tell (older) children about the war and the way it helped shape most of Europe.





All of them ringbooks, as I see now. After this one, I have no ringbooks left for a while, so I can read whatever I choose, which is nice too!

We just had a very nice BookCrossing meeting in my city yesterday.
I was the organiser, and since we have two OBCZs here, I thought it would be nice if we could visit both of them. They're within walking distance from each other, so that shouldn't be a problem. But couldn't we make that short walk a bit more interesting by releasing books along the way?
This is what we ended up doing:

First of all, some BookCrossers came to my house to pick up some boxes of books for registering and releasing. They had a jolly good time digging around in the Book Room, and it wasn't easy to get them out by the time we had to leave in order to meet the others. I practically had to grab their feet and pull!

We all met at two o'clock at OBCZ Manu.

We were welcomed by the two owners, who are very BookCrossing-friendly, and who had started their OBCZ themselves.
Even though it was quite crowded, we somehow managed to fit in (there were about 15 or 20 of us). Each of us had something nice to drink and chatted for a while. I handed out some small maps of the city center so no one would get lost, and I had marked my favourite release spots on them.
People formed small groups and started their walk through the city centre, most of them were carrying books to release.
It was great fun thinking of good release spots, and then finding some of them already taken by other people's books! Over a hundred books were released all in all.
We all met again in OBCZ Bazoeka around four o'clock.


By the time I got there (about ten past four) some BookCrossers were huddling on the doorstep because the place opened a bit late, but as soon as we were inside that was forgotten. We settled to exchange release stories and leftover books, one of our most appreciated members (nrrdgrrl) showed up from South-Africa and a good time was had by all.
Finally we decided to go for a meal together. Some of us had gone home, but there were twelve BookCrossers left, including Stoneshop who met us at the restaurant.
After a very pleasant meal, everyone went their separate ways again.

You'll find some pictures of this meeting here, on BookCrosser LuieLezer's website.

I co-manage an OBCZ in a nearby city, which is why I don't often go there. It's not far, but I hardly ever have anything else to do there during the opening hours of the OBCZ, so I can't often combine it with other errands.
But the Go Hunting page showed that there hadn't been any books released there in three or four months, so it was high time someone did something. Stoneshop and I decided to go down there with a bag of books.

...inspired by texaswren's posting.

(Originally posted on MySpace)
It's been a while since I posted about books. And that was because I've been reading some Dutch books which many of you haven't heard about. I have not made a list so I won't name them all, because I can't be bothered to remember  ;-)
But lately I've been reading the popular First Ladies Detective series by Alexander McCall Smith, and enjoying them. It's light reading, funny, feel-good stuff. A bit on the predictable side, and a bit too goody-goody for my liking; but nevertheless nice for a change.
Here are the books in the series that I've read so far, and excuse the images from Amazon with the ugly 'Look inside!' lettering on them:


There are more, and I'm sure I'll get my hands on them and read them sooner or later. For now I'll just say that I recommend them as a pleasant, light read.

Just yesterday I finished something very different: the Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon. It's a story as seen by an autistic 15-year  old, which makes it very different from most other books, and that's interesting. The book is well written which makes it believeable and captivating. This is not a very pleasant or light read, but I liked it very much even though it's hard to explain why. Just try it and see for yourself.

(Originally posted on MySpace.)
 As some of you may remember, I was in Bremen last november, to meet the delightful antof9 . Read all about it here.
We 'released' eight books that day, and two of them were caught within a few days.
Now the third one has been reported as found, too! Three out of eight, that's wonderful. And the journal entry is quite elaborate, too.
Seems the book has done a bit of travelling on its own since I left it, it's gained a new member, and it has been read and will eventually travel on! What more can an old, battered hardcover sans dust jacket hope for?

Those of you who can read German will probably enjoy reading the journal entry.
Others can at least click the picture for a bigger version... it shows where I left the book.

(Originally posted on MySpace)
Not all that much, really.
I just finished a rather weird and fragmentaric book by Charlotte Mutsaers, called De Markiezin. It was a bit vague, but the fragments in themselves were all interesting and/or funny, so I did finish it.

Other than that, I haven't really been reading. Just some BC and Wizard of Id comic pocket books.
I released one of them (yes, I'm talking about BookCrossing again, check it out if you haven't by now!) here in Arnhem, and it was found two weeks later in Alkmaar, by someone from Hilversum who's going to release it there. Way to go, brave little book!