Booking Through Thursday: Friendship

September 27, 2007

This week's question from Booking Through Thursday:

Buy a Friend a Book Week is October 1-7 (as well as the first weeks of January, April, and July). During this week, you’re encouraged to buy a friend a book for no good reason. Not for their birthday, not because it’s a holiday, not to cheer them up–just because it’s a book.

What book would you choose to give to a friend and why? And, if you’re feeling generous enough–head on over to Amazon and actually send one on its way!

That would depend entirely on the friend. If I had a friend that was contemplating homeschooling, I would buy him/her John Taylor Gatto's Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling.
If I were to buy a friend a book of poetry, it might be Li-Young Lee's Rose. If my friend was looking for Christian fiction, I would buy Francine Rivers' Mark of the Lion series. For the best book I've read this year: The Kite Runner. For perhaps my favorite book of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird.

But the thing is: among my group of friends, we circulate books as soon as we finish them. We are a living, breathing, paperback swap. And for anyone else: I'd probably just buy an amazon.com gift certificate. Too often we've bought books for friends or family only to discover they already have that book on their shelves. Kindly, they'll say, "That's OK! This hardback copy is nice, too!" And so. The gift card suffices.