I have just returned from a week’s break in the house of some friends in a sunny clime. I brought with me only one physical book. The rest of my reading was to be done on my Kindle, but it never happened. Instead I fell with enthusiasm on my friends’ bookshelves and discovered several well-thumbed volumes to fill the indolent hours.
Reading a book because it’s there, and not because it has just been published or is on your must-read list, brings its own rewards. I presume this is one of the reasons for the success of BookCrossing, where you leave books you’ve read in public places such as cafes and pubs for others to find and enjoy.
Bookcrossing.com shows the level of sophistication the phenomenon has reached. But despite our apparent love of literature, Ireland does not feature in the top 10 countries on the site. There are Irish members, and you can track where they are and how many books each of them has “released”. But we don’t seem to have taken to it with much enthusiasm. The day I checked there were 18 books in Dublin and only one in Cork, whereas in Berlin there were 1,208.
In France, Circul’livres (circul-livre.blogspirit.com) facilitates the giving away of books in an appealing and sociable way. It started in Paris in 2004, and its current map of the city shows 78 pick-up points, where people come to deposit and collect books on designated days, all free of charge.
There are regular gatherings of readers, which gives it its sociability. The only requirement is that when you’ve read your book you deposit it again.
In other parts of France there are boîtes à livres, which are like post boxes where you drop a book into a perspex box to be retrieved by the next reader. In England, decommissioned phone boxes have been used for this purpose.
Of course libraries are the best sources of preread books. But it’s the serendipity of the discovery, where the book finds the reader rather than the other way around, that makes this form of accidental reading such a refreshing experience.
Doireann Ní Bhriain is a writer and broadcaster
