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A stranger in Portland handed me her copy of Their Eyes Were Watching God at a coffee shop, and I still think about it
Two winters back I was sitting in a cafe on Alberta Street in Portland, reading a beat up paperback I'd grabbed from a little free library, and a woman at the next table asked what I thought of it. We ended up talking for an hour, and when she got up to leave she just pressed her own copy of Their Eyes Were Watching God into my hands and said "pass it on when you're done, don't keep it." I read it in three days and mailed it to my sister in Boise, and she mailed it to a friend in Chicago, and that book has now bounced through six people I can name. I've got a shelf of books I've been hoarding for years and I can't bring myself to break up, but that one little handoff got me thinking I should just start letting them go. Has anyone here done one of those traveling book chains that actually kept going, or do they always seem to die after the second or third person?
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felix_black1mo ago
Does it really matter if the chain dies off? I've seen a few of these traveling book things and most of them fizzle out after person two or three, which is fine. Six people is already a good run, way more than most get. And honestly, mailing a book around costs money and takes effort, so no wonder people drop off. A book sitting on your shelf unread isn't doing anyone any good either way. Let it go and whatever happens happens.
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