Are You A Reader? Or Book TV Viewer?

I love to read, and I love to read good, old fashioned paper books!  I buy books all the time, both new and used.  I've been known to read an entire book in a weekend, or to stay up until the wee hours on a weeknight to finish one I cannot put down.

And don't even get me started on books about sewing and knitting and crafting!  I never met a bookstore or in-the-lobby book sale that I didn't like.  Like the one in our lobby last week Thursday, where I picked up a copy of J.A. Jance's Fatal Error.  I started reading it at lunchtime and finished it up on Friday evening.  It was a page-turner!!

This weekend, while I was knitting a scarf for Miss E, I watched some Book TV on CSpan 2 on cable TV.  For those of you who have never watched, it's normally 48 hours of discussions, lectures, reviews and more about non-fiction books that runs on the network that usually carried live coverage of the US Government during the week.  Yeah, boring but true, Congress has its own network.

On holiday weekends, it will be 72 hours, beginning on Saturday morning at 6 a.m.  I tuned in this weekend.  They were interviewing one of the librarians from the Library of Congress about an exhibit at the library of Books That Shaped America.  And if you don't happen to be in Washington D.C., you can check it out at the LOC website at www.loc.gov/bookfest .

Off I toddled to check out the entire list.  The librarian had talked about a few of them, and why they were chosen.  Somehow I thought there would be more, but there were only 88 books.  But what a bunch of great books!  I discovered that I have heard of most of them, and I have read 28 of them.  Books like Catch-22 and Beloved and Goodnight Moon.

There is a wonderful interactive list that can be sorted by book, author or year, and if you click on the book title it will tell you why the book was selected.  For example, the book Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (maybe you saw the movie) was a satirical treatment of military bureaucracy that made the title a catch phrase for the eternal do-loop. 

If you're interested in books of all kinds, there is a Festival Of The Book coming in to the National Mall in Washington D.C. on September 22-23.  I bet it will be televised on Book TV.

Google book festivals, I'll bet there's one near you!

Sew on!