I saw this challenge over on IG (OliviaReadsFiction) and tried it last month. You all voted to have me read All the Light We Cannont See by Anthony Doerr. I finished it and really liked it, thank you!

New month, new word. YOU can easily see what word I found on my TBR shelves the most. Which one should I read next. I’ll tally up the votes this weekend. You don’t have to have read the book to vote for it.

Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness by Kristen Radtke. “When I started writing this book in 2016, rates of loneliness had already been increasing exponentially for decades, yet it wasn’t a subject I heard people talk about very often, at least not in relation to themselves.” this is a graphic novel.

Watching You by Lisa Jewell. “Dear Diary, September 20, 1996, I don’t know what to think.”

Now You See Us by Balli Kaur Jaswal. “Breaking News. A woman was found dead in her home in the east of Singapore on Sunday evening.”

Regretting You by Colleen Hoover. “I wonder if humans are the only living creatures that ever feel hollow inside.”

Which one should I start next week?

The real reason I wanted to join the Board of our Friends of the Library was simple. I wanted to get my hands on ALL of the books! Do we raise money to support the library, its programs, and staff? Absolutely. Does my contribution help us raise more money? Yes! I give freely of my time, because I LOVE it. I help with the ongoing sorting by going through donations a few times a week and deciding what goes out in our ongoing sale. We make around $1000 a month from this small ongoing sale.

Twice a year, we throw a big bash and invite all of the books! We store them in many secret places…

We start with the meeting room that’s set up for groups to reserve and have to move tables out and bring 20 big tables in. I draw the map (I tweak it every sale and it gets tweaked further as we start putting books out) and we start by bringing the presorted boxes out to their correct area. We usually have a few loaders and deliverers and the rest start unpacking. After that we bring in the books from the mess of a sorting room and from our ongoing sale. I was there at 4 on Wednesday to start moving tables around and around 8 volunteers came in at 6pm and we worked til the library closed at 9. We were back at it first thing (I took Gage to camp so only had and hour and 45 minutes) with 4 volunteers. They left at 12. I was back at 4 with Gage and it took me about an hour and a half to finish up. At 6 pm 2 volunteers set up the membership table and started the line. We had 6 volunteers for the sale itself that started at 7pm.

We have a board of 15 and every member signs up for a shift and some a few shifts. I’m there for the long haul. I took off only 2 1/2 hours the whole time. I told you I loved the books 🙂 A month and a half before the sale I contact all Friends members who had expressed an interested in helping. There were 7 this time. As a bonus the high school Key Club teacher gave me a list of kids and when they wanted to help. I tried to verify with all 12 of them their times. Even with that only half showed up when they were supposed to. At least half I never even saw!

The sale ran 2 hours for members on Thursday, Friday and Saturday from 9-5, and Sunday from 1-3:30 (bag day). We made over $3100.

On Sunday we allow pre-approved non-profits to come and take several bags of book for their charity. This time around we had 7, our largest turnout yet!

Then from 3:30-5 we tear down the sale by boxing up the books for other libraries. In the past we’ve had one library with very low funding, come and take all of our unsold books to sell at their sale and it was great. They rented a U-Haul and brought a team and took EVERYTHING. They can no longer do this so we had to do some different things with everything we didn’t sell. First, we divvied them up between 5 libraries based on the types of books they requested. We always have one board member who comes and gets all cookbooks to donate to Edwin’s. I am so grateful to her for doing this for such a worthy cause.

So, that leaves us with hundreds of books. This time we decided to put them all out in our ongoing sale area and try to sell them for 25 cents. That will run until Saturday. On Sunday we have a LFL steward who will come and take as much as she wants of what’s left and we’ll, sadly, recycle the rest. Thankfully, our library system recycles them for us if we get them packed up in bins.

You might be asking how many books I came home with. I always buy a bag on bag day and throw things in it as we tear down the sale. I came home 7 books, 2 of them Jason tossed in.

So, there you have it in all of the nitty gritty detail. How different is your library sale? I always love to hear new ideas!

Oh, and as an added bonus, Cindy, from Cindy’s Book Corner came by and we were able to chat a bit. I’m hoping we’ll be able to meet up again soon. Book people are the best people 🙂

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones and Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White.

What are your reading plans today? We had movie night last night and around 11:30 Gage started feeling sick. He spend the beginning of 2022 puking his guts out and falling asleep on the couch.

“This isn’t a good way to start 2022,” he says. We can only go up from here!

I saw these lists popping up on a few blogs and couldn’t resist taking stock of my own close encounters with bestselling authors.  As I started making notes I wondered how I was going to list them.  Favorites first?  Pulitzer Prize winners lead the way?  The authors I’ve met more than once?  Best selling?  Locals first?  Too many choices!  So, I decided to stick with the authors I have photos of and to be as random as possible in the order I list these wordsmiths 🙂

Taylor Stevens.  I met Taylor in 2012 at Bouchercon before I’d read her book.  I had a second chance to dine with her in 2013.  I’ve read and loved both of her series.

Thrity Umrigar is a bestselling author and she’s local.  You can read how she ended up in Cleveland from her home in India.

Eloisa James was a fun evening.  I love Shakespeare so hearing a Shakespeare professor wax poetic about romance was a treat.

Susan Elizabeth Phillips is one of my all-time romance faves and I was able to meet her and others when Avon KissCon came to Cleveland in 2016.

Anthony Doerr grew up in the Cleveland area and way before he won his Pulitzer Prize he visited to talk about his book Four Season in Rome (which I loved).

Paula McLain is another bestselling local and she was was a great speaker.  She was actually in Solon last year at a fun event put on by the library.

Ian Rankin made his way to Cleveland from Scotland for just one night (thank you Cuyahoga County Public Library!)  I could have listened to him talk all night.  I love his books.

Harlan Coben is one of my all-time favorites and I’ve read all of his books.  Jason and I met him in Houston years and years ago and last year when he came to Cleveland I took my mom.

Kristan Higgins is another favorite and it was a treat to hear her speak last year.  It was an emotional time for me and she made it better 🙂

Bernie Kosar is a Cleveland legend and, yes, he wrote a book and came to our local Friends of the Library event. He spent and hour charming the crowd before talking to the almost 200 people who were able to get tickets.

Beth Hoffman is one of the warmest people you will ever meet.  This is me meeting her for the fist time in 2010 and I also met her again on tour for her second book.

There are more on my list, but I am tired 🙂  Here are some of the other big names I’ve met, but have no picture proof (or I’m too lazy to find them right now): Diana Gabaldon, Mitch Albom, Tracy Chevalier, Mary Doria Russell, Carl Hiaasen, Emilie Richards, Les Roberts…

Who on my list have you also met?

The day is almost gone and I was thisclose to forgetting to mark the anniversary of my opening up shop here on WordPress.  Eleven years ago I wrote my first post and have maintained a steady schedule since then.  I posted 280 times that first year and it was my most prolific. Since then it’s gone done a bit every year with last year clocking in at 113.  Amazingly, the number of views and visitors while taking a dive in 2016 has gone up considerably the last two years.

I didn’t start this blog to crunch numbers and I don’t stick around because a few more people have found their way here.  I’m still here writing and connecting because of you, my fellow book nerds.  May we continue to support each other for many more years to come 🙂