Bookish Things: World Book Night, Jane Austen Earrings, etc

Y'all, I'm in that weird reading phase again for work, where I'm reading the first 50-100 pages of about a dozen books to evaluate them as selections for our signed First Editions Club -- which means I've not completed any books lately to write a full-on review.  It's not bad, because I've really liked all of the books I've been sampling, but it's a little frustrating to be forever starting new books and not having the time to finish them because I need to start in on the next one.  Thus this week you are treated to this post of Bookish Things.

April 23 of last week was World Book Night.  If you're reading my bookish blog posts, then I assume that you are pro-book and pro-reading.  If you've not already participated in World Book Night, then what on earth are you waiting for?  It's just about the best thing in the history of 21st century bookish things.  A committee composed of authors, publishers, booksellers, and librarians choose 25+ titles each year that they think will have a wide range of potential readership.  Then people like you and me can pick a book from that list and give copies of it away to non-readers.  For free.  It's an amazing program and this is the third year that I participated in it.  Join their email list NOW so that you can be notified when the giving process opens to applicants again in the fall for 2015 WBN.

I picked Peter Heller's novel The Dog Stars, one of the most gorgeously-wrought post-apocalyptic novels I've ever read, as my giveaway book. I go on and on about it here, but the short version for why I chose it is because it demonstrates that there is no story so bleak that it cannot benefit from a sense of humor and from inventive, poetic prose. My only problem was that at the time I picked this book, I had Wednesday nights off and had planned to give it away on the street corner like I did this year.  But about a month ago, my work schedule changed and now I work Wednesday nights, so what to do?

The young women of The Care Center

I joined up with Joan, my friend & colleague, to give books away on Wednesday morning at a place called The Care Center, a local nonprofit alternative learning program for pregnant and parenting teens to continue their education.  It's cool, because it offers health services and day care, too, to these young girls and women. While I cannot say that I would have chosen The Dog Stars with these readers in mind, some of them were pretty excited about it.  We also took copies of The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Zora & Me,  and Code Name Verity, all of which were more age appropriate for these folks.  You can read a little more about it here on the MassLive website, including a short interview with two of the girls.

Check out those beauties.  Last year for my birthday, one of my lovely and generous co-workers gave me this pair of Jane Austen earrings.  I love that they're almost as lovely on the reverse side as they are on the front, and I like the mis-matched, old-fashioned typewriter keys that are part of the design.  I wear them all the time, but it's only recently that I've started getting lots of comments about them because I just lobbed about 8" off of my hair and now they're more visible.  I wore them to work today along with my Austen sweatshirt from Out of Print Clothing company and every customer I interacted with complimented me on them.