If you are looking for a gift idea this year and a coffee table book will fit the bill, then check out a new release titled Wild Delaware. The book contains photographs taken by Kevin Fleming that capture “the beauty of Delaware’s wildlife and wild places.” According to the Wild Delaware site, over half of the 1,000 signed and number books are already reserved. Check out a preview of some of the pages on the Wild Delaware web site.

The call for submissions is out for the 2009 edition of The Delmarva Review.

The Delmarva Review is a literary review publishing short fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and short reviews. We feature new writing from the Delmarva and Chesapeake Bay region, but all writers will be considered. Send us your best work.

Submissions can also include illustrative artwork in the form of line drawings and black and white or color photography that can be considered for the cover. All material must be unpublished, and the deadline is December 31, 2008. The Delmarva Review web site includes specific requirements for the categories and form of the submissions. The Delmarva Review is sponsored and published by the Eastern Shore Writers’ Association.

I am a collector of things. Some might call me a packrat. Others might say I have a disorder. I have been selling books on eBay
and half.com for about nine years now, and one of the consequences of buying and selling hundreds of books is the leftover books that are inhabiting the shelves of our home office. Last year, I started looking for a way to pare down the stacks of less valuable volumes that are not candidates for selling online. These are mostly mass market paperbacks that quickly lose their value after millions are printed and read. Kind of the Ford Taurus of the book world.

The first method I found for setting these books free was BookCrossing.com. BookCrossing provides a somewhat clandestine method for freeing your books. After you register as a member of the site, select one of your books and click on ‘register book’ to get started. Your book will be assigned a BookCrossing ID, and you will write that number inside the book or print out one of BookCrossing’s labels which helps identify your book as a BC book. Then you take your book out and leave it somewhere for a new reader to find. BookCrossing has the following suggestions for places to release your books.

The list where books can be left or released is really limitless.
You can release them at cafes, restaurants, coffee houses, those newspaper boxes for free papers, a bus, hospitals, doctor’s offices, anywhere people have to wait, on top of ATM’s, the DMV, museums, park benches, gyms, etc. And that’s just the beginning !!!

Once your book is caught, the new caretaker can visit BookCrossing.com and make a journal entry with the BookCrossing ID. This allows members to track the journey of their books around the world. BookCrossing has over 650,000 members with over 4.5 million books registered. In some places, it has become a social network for booklovers who gather to trade their books or set up special locations for regular releases. According to BookCrossing, shared books are happy books.

Another option for sharing your books doesn’t even require you to leave home. Bookins.com is a book trading site where you can list your books to trade and create a wishlist of books you wish to receive. After registering on Bookins, you are given an account with complimentary points to get you started. You can accumulate more points when your books are requested by other members, and you mail them to complete the transaction. The person who requests your book pays a flat $4.49 to Bookins for shipping. Bookins provides you a link to print out the shipping label with postage, and the only cost to you is the envelope to ship the book in, unless you are a packrat like me, and you have a box full of envelopes saved for reuse. Once the new owner receives your book, your account is credited with the points. Different books have different point values, and your account must have an adequate number of points to order the books on your want list. Some books are worth two or three points, while others can be as much as 20 or 30, but you still only pay $4.49 if you request a book. I currently have 37 points in my account, and I have a few books that I want, but I will wait until I make some more room on the shelves. Bookins includes paperbacks and hardcovers, as well as audiobooks. The site is also starting up a DVD section. Bookins is a great way to find your old books a new home.

One more option that I have yet to try is PaperBackSwap.com. PaperbackSwap works on a point system like Bookins, and members receive 2 free book credits after listing 10 books to swap. With the PBS system, the person who mails the book pays the postage, which usually costs $2.13. To prepare a PBS book for shipping, you print out a ‘wrapper’ which consists of two printed pages that include the mailing label. No envelope is needed. Shippers must add the postage and drop the book in the mail. When a member receives your book, you are given a credit which you can use to order a book for yourself. PaperbackSwap currently claims to have almost two million books available, and selections also include audiobooks (2 credits each), as well as sister sites for trading CDs and DVDs. PaperbackSwap is probably the best deal for those who want to receive as many books as they ship.

So hopefully my collection of books will continue to shrink as I take advantage of the many options available for setting books free. I know that my better half will be glad to see them go.

The publisher of the blog PostSecret and author of books compiled from thousands of posted secrets will be in Salisbury, MD, on January 31, 2008. Frank Warren will give a lecture at 7:00 PM in the Holloway Hall Auditorium on the campus of Salisbury University. Warren updates his blog on a weekly basis with a post containing a couple of dozen secrets on handmade postcards that people from all over the world mail to his Germantown, MD, address. PostSecret won an award for the Best Weblog of the Year in 2007.

SALISBURY, MD—From wearing shoes held together with safety pins to coloring her skin with markers to disguise holes in her clothes, Jeannette Walls grew up the child of poor, eccentric parents too determined to give up on life.

The Walls children learned to take care of themselves thanks to—and often in spite of—their free-spirit mother, a brilliant but often drunk and destructive father, and others who became part of their young lives. Today a freelance correspondent for MSNBC.com, Walls captures her impoverished, sometimes humorous, early life in her memoir The Glass Castle, this year’s SU New Student Reader.

Entertainment Weekly calls The Glass Castle “nothing short of spectacular.” The community will have an opportunity to hear Walls speak about her acclaimed work 6 p.m. Friday, August 24, in the Great Hall of Holloway Hall. A book signing is 5-5:45 p.m. SU Press Release…

If that line doesn’t evoke images in your mind, then you may not have one. I recently finished the audiobook version of Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, and for me, this line defines the old man, Santiago. This book was written late in Hemingway’s career, which is probably why the story of an old man whose body is failing him seems so sincere. Santiago is determined to overcome the bad luck which has fallen on him after going weeks without bringing home a fish on his skiff. A young boy who knows Santiago lets us see the old man from another perspective, while the old man does his best to retain his pride. The audiobook is available at the Wicomico County Free Library, along with print versions of this 55 year old tale. Hemingway won the 1953 Pulitzer Prize for fiction with this novel, and it is one of those books that you will always remember.

If you have read the book Atlas Shrugged, then you know the significance of this question. This novel by Ayn Rand has been on my ‘want to read’ list for a long time, but the daunting task of the 1200 page volume was more than my inadequate attention span could handle. As I was searching the inventory of the Tri-County Library Consortium online, I ran across an abridged audio version of this book. Since I spend many hours in the car toting kids to and fro, I was able to finish the audiobook, which runs 12 hours on 8 cassettes, in a reasonable number of days. I expected a somewhat tedious tale promoting Rand’s philosophy of objectivism, but the reality was a riveting story of industry and intrigue. Rand’s story traces the events which lead to the literal and metaphorical stopping of the motor of the world. As a bureaucracy nationalizes many industries for the benefit of the common man, the minds of the world go on strike. The events occurring in Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, including the nationalization of the oil industry, make this novel relevant even after 50 years. Sometime in the not so distant future, Chavez will be begging someone to solve his problems. Atlas Shrugged is a must read.

In order to keep the attention of teens studying for the SAT, author Justin Heimberg has created what he hopes to be the next big thing in SAT review. The Yo Momma Vocabulary Builder promises to make learning bearable. Here is a sample of the put downs to learn by.

Yo momma’s so corpulent, when her beeper goes off, people think she is backing up.

Yo momma’s so emaciated, she can hula hoop in a fruit loop.

What will they think of next?

The Tipping Point by Malcom Gladwell is an interesting book about the course of social epidemics from fashion fads to crime. One of the most memorable portions of this book was about the solution to crime on the New York subway system. The conventional wisdom would be to load the trains with police to arrest the muggers and drug dealers, but that was not what fixed the problem. The crime rate was greatly decreased as a result of two targets of enforcement. The first was the removal of all graffiti on trains and stations along with the daily removal of any new graffiti. The second was enforcement of fares, which were routinely bypassed by the criminal element before this effort. These two areas of enforcement led to a greatly reduced crime rate on the subway system.

The subject of graffiti has become more common in Salisbury’s news, and although it seems unfair to building owners who are victims of the defacement of their property, the city must enforce laws requiring the removal of the graffiti. It must be clear to the criminals that deface our property that we will not tolerate any level of crime, no matter how trivial it seems to some citizens. The long term presence of this graffiti could be the tipping point that leads to more serious crime problems.

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference