When I was growing up, there were always more books in our house than…well, everything. I think the combined total of food items, socks & underwear, and unfinished projects were heavily outnumbered by our books. No, I’m not exaggerating. Not even a little.

As an adult, or more specifically as a person who no longer lives with their parents (adult is such a yucky word), I made every attempt to mirror the bookshelves I loved as a child. Numerous pieces of furniture held uncountable volumes. My books seemed to procreate by themselves – even the wild rabbits were jealous.

Marriage brought with it even more books and a fellow bibliophile to help the cause along. Then one day, we looked around at all of our books and grew disgusted. There were too many. There were books that weren’t getting read, books that would never get re-read, books that were partially read and marked for future reference. All of these marvelous words and no one using them!

Then we stumbled upon BookMooch and felt the same sense of excitement and joy we used to get when we entered the local bookstore. We spent an entire day sorting through our books and making piles. One to give to family and friends, another for the library book sale, another to list on BookMooch, and so on. The books that didn’t end up in piles on our floor were keepers – at least for the time being.

That evening we entered all of the moochable books into our account and within minutes we had requests from all over the country and around the world! The next day, we shipped all of the books of to their new homes with a blessing. It felt so good to clean off our shelves and share the written word with fellow readers.

If you’ve got some dusty novels laying around, I suggest you check out BookMooch and share them with the world. It’s free to sign-up, list, and request books. You just pay the nominal shipping fees (use the media mail rate at your post office) to send your books on their way.

BookMooch / How it Works / Join (it’s FREE!) / Get a Book

I was just listening to NPR and heard a list of suggested summer reading. Two of the books in particular caught my interest: Young Romantics: The Tangled Lives of English Poetry’s Greatest Generation by Daisy Hay, and 97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement by Jane Ziegelman.

From the Publisher: Young Romantics tells the story of the interlinked lives of the young English Romantic poets from an entirely fresh perspective–celebrating their extreme youth and outsize yearning for friendship as well as their individuality and political radicalism.

The book focuses on the network of writers and readers who gathered around Percy Bysshe Shelley and the campaigning journalist Leigh Hunt. They included Lord Byron, John Keats, and Mary Shelley, as well as a host of fascinating lesser-known figures: Mary Shelley’s stepsister and Byron’s mistress, Claire Clairmont; Hunt’s botanist sister-in-law, Elizabeth Kent; the musician Vincent Novello; the painters Benjamin Haydon and Joseph Severn; and writers such as Charles and Mary Lamb, Thomas Love Peacock, and William Hazlitt. They were characterized by talent, idealism, and youthful ardor, and these qualities shaped and informed their politically oppositional stances–as did their chaotic family arrangements, which often left the young women, despite their talents, facing the consequences of the men’s philosophies.

In Young Romantics, Daisy Hay follows the group’s exploits, from its inception in Hunt’s prison cell in 1813 to its disintegration after Shelley’s premature death in 1822. It is an enthralling tale of love, betrayal, sacrifice, and friendship, all of which were played out against a background of political turbulence and intense literary creativity.

From the Publisher: In 97 Orchard, Jane Ziegelman explores the culinary life that was the heart and soul of New York’s Lower East Side around the turn of the twentieth century–a city within a city, where Germans, Irish, Italians, and Eastern European Jews attempted to forge a new life. Through the experiences of five families, all of them residents of 97 Orchard Street, she takes readers on a vivid and unforgettable tour, from impossibly cramped tenement apartments down dimly lit stairwells where children played and neighbors socialized, beyond the front stoops where immigrant housewives found respite and company, and out into the hubbub of the dirty, teeming streets.

Ziegelman shows how immigrant cooks brought their ingenuity to the daily task of feeding their families, preserving traditions from home but always ready to improvise. While health officials worried that pushcarts were unsanitary and that pickles made immigrants too excitable to be good citizens, a culinary revolution was taking place in the streets of what had been culturally an English city. Along the East River, German immigrants founded breweries, dispensing their beloved lager in the dozens of beer gardens that opened along the Bowery. Russian Jews opened tea parlors serving blintzes and strudel next door to Romanian nightclubs that specialized in goose pastrami. On the streets, Italian peddlers hawked the cheese-and-tomato pies known as pizzarelli, while Jews sold knishes and squares of halvah. Gradually, as Americans began to explore the immigrant ghetto, they uncovered the array of comestible enticements of their foreign-born neighbors. 97 Orchard charts this exciting process of discovery as it lays bare the roots of our collective culinary heritage.

The segment also got me to thinking…and designing. So in honor of lazy summer days in the shade, we’re releasing: Summertime and the Reading is Easy…

We’re lifting up the latest design in BiblioGifts to Support Literacy! Here are few disturbing facts, and some very good reasons for you to encourage reading among everyone you know…

44 million adults in the U.S. can’t read well enough to read a simple story to a child.
- National Adult Literacy Survey (1992) NCED, U.S. Department of Education

More than 20 percent of adults read at or below a fifth-grade level – far below the level needed to earn a living wage.
- National Institute for Literacy, Fast Facts on Literacy, 2001

Students who reported having all four types of reading materials (books, magazines, newspapers, encyclopedias) in their home scored, on average, higher than those who reporter having fewer reading materials.
- The Nation’s Report Card: Fourth-Grade Reading 2000, April 2001, The National Center for Education Statistics

In 1999, only 53 percent of children aged 3 to 5 were read to daily by a family member. Children in families with incomes below the poverty line are less likely to be read aloud to everyday than are children in families with incomes at or above the poverty line.
- The National Center for Education Statistics, NCES Fast Facts, Family Reading

So strong is the link between literacy and being a useful member of society that some states use grade-level reading statistics as a factor in projecting future prison construction.
- Bob Chase, President, National Education Association

Since 1983, more than 10 million Americans reached the 12th grade without having learned to read at a basic level.
- A Nation Still at Risk, U.S. Department of Education, 1999

Source: Get Caught Reading

There is a wealth of information regarding literacy trends worldwide at UNESCO, the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization.

A few other sites you may find interesting:

• First Book
• Reading is Fundamental
• National Institute for Literacy (US)