conuly

On April 24th, the ETG is participating in this... event they run yearly. One of the main attractions, as far as I'm concerned, is the bookswap. If I play my cards right, I can get my living room back. The place is literally floor to ceiling with books... and when I say literally, I mean the place is literally floor to ceiling with books. There's a liiiiiitle itty bitty path to get from the front to the back of the house.

And much though I am loathe to say it, we actually don't need - or want! - many of those books. (If we really want them, we may have multiple copies anyway.)

So I'm going to sort through the books, group the ones we're keeping, and hopefully ditch most of the rest of them. I could just leave them on our neighbor's wall (this "thing" she does where people leave their junk on her wall and other people take them away, kinda like a poor man's freecycle), but I like having a deadline. And when I go there, I'll try, with a herculean force of will, to NOT get any new books! *crosses fingers*

So, yeah, this is my plan. It's a good plan. There must be somebody out there who truly, desperately needs more dictionaries than they can shake a stick at. Old dictionaries, too. (I have to admit, it's scary to realize that for all our glut of dictionaries I still actually need a new one.)

Now, on the subject of books, my sister has a plan to turn the ceiling in the girl's room (which is a dormer, so the ceiling touches the floor) into a big bookcase. This is an awesome plan. Now we have room for all our chapter books! And let's face it, a mostly tend to buy kidlit and YA anyway, so I don't mind letting them store those books for me! (Turning THEIR room into the library is a heck of a lot better than turning MY room into the library, which is what people often think we should do.) So once again, I ask you - any chapter books we urgently need to buy? Fond memories? New ones I might've missed? I am not getting the entire BSC, Goosebumps, or Sweet Valley canon, but just about anything else is fair game!

And since we're still still on the subject of books, I've made two momentous decisions recently.

The first is to go through the picture books, suck it up, and label them with their Guided Reading Levels if I can find 'em online. (How are those even determined, anyway?) That's the system the niece's school uses, and it'll be convenient to say, when they go to read for school (as opposed to reading for fun, of course) that they should stick more or less on the level they're theoretically on. So I'll take a day or two to do this.

The second is to start adding chapter books (!) to my librarything and goodreads libraries. The horror! (I may double up and label THESE with their reading level too!) I had originally decided not to do so because I have such a fucking lot of them. (And we're still just in kid's books!) This will clearly have to wait until after we clear out the unwanteds. I mean, duh. Can you guys give me some moral support for this?