Posted by Skyring in Cool

26 Sep 2011

Some books just resonate with BookCrossers. The Lovely Bones was one, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society another.

 

Perhaps Wild Animus is the title most associated with BookCrossing.com, at least in the early years. But that’s another story.

More recently, Alice Bliss is making a big impact, with both author Laura Harrington and the BookCrossing.com site benefitting.

More books sold, more books read, more readers reading and re-reading the same books. This is win-win-win. I love to hear about good books and then go out to find them, bring them home and snuggle up with them. Life’s too short to spend time reading the not-so-good books. And then I pass on the joy when I finish.

I’ve been seduced into writing another post about this book and its associated joy, through stumbling onto a really cool blog. Riding the Roller Coaster is a blog written by a military wife “Wife on the Roller Coaster“, and she just nails the experience in a totally cool way, beginning with the eye-catching graphic at the top of her blog pages.

She begins this post with a reference to a review she wrote about the novel:

“When I first started reading Alice Bliss, a novel by Laura Harrington about a teenage girl coping with her father’s deployment to Iraq, I had no intention of getting overly emotional. I’ve lived through my husband’s deployments. I’ve lived vicariously through friends’ deployments. I’ve read military spouse memoirs about deployments. This book can’t possibly present a perspective of life on the home front that I haven’t previously encountered in some way, shape, or form. Plus, it’s a novel. It’s not real. It’s just a story. Right?”

Laura Harrington read the review, contacted Wife, and introduced her to both the Where’s Alice Bliss? project and BookCrossing.com.

Loving the notion(s), Wife registered her copy on BookCrossing, and released it where she was sure it would go to a member of a military family: at the coffee shop beside the base commissary. All BookCrossers will be delighted to learn what happened to the book next – just click on the photograph for the continuing story!

I’ve met a few BookCrossing military wives in my time. Allysther, currently in Hawai’i, who has been kind enough to help show me around Frankfurt a couple of times, and has just registered her own Alice, I note! Crrcookie, who drove me along Route 66 one year, explored an old schloss with me in Kaiserslauter the next, and bought me a soda at Pops outside Oklahoma City the year after that. Not to mention the Charleston thing, and that was a hoot as well.

Then there’s my own time in uniform – well before BookCrossing.com came along, or even the internet, but I read whole shelves of books in the copious time I spent doing boring stuff. Reading Tristram Shandy
while guarding an entrance to a remote firing range down near Wallangarra, for example. Just me and Tristram and a couple of distant wild pigs wondering why I was rolling around on the ground, helpless with laughter.

And of course, years later, the roles were reversed when my wife joined the navy and sailed off to exciting places while I staid at home with the babies in the dinky little married quarters on the patch at HMAS Cerberus.

I’ve got a soft spot for the military, and although it’s decades since I last put on a set of starchies and spit-polished boots, I have to report that I still feel uneasy if I find I’ve left a shirt pocket unbuttoned.

But you don’t need a military connection to love Wife’s blog. Cool book, cool blog, cool reading!

—Skyring

P.S. Image credit – Riding the Roller Coaster. I love illustrating releases – here’s the book, all dressed up in its BookCrossing clobber, just set free, wave goodbye as it starts a new life!