The library is a beautiful place full of books and people, and those people give amazing book recommendations. Here in library land, we call this book recommending phenomenon-Reader’s Advisory, or RA for short. Most of us here at the library are avid readers, and we are constantly bothering each other for new things to read; we have a lot of internal RA going on here in the group chat. If you ever asked someone for a book to read, you participated in the wild, wild world of RA! As Smokey the Bear would say, “you too can prevent reading boredom.” Well, he would say that if forest fires were books. Recently library employees were asked to participate in a Book Swap. (Participation was voluntary.) The deal was: fill out a form letting the proverbial them know what you like and dislike, and they give your info to a random employee.  That random employee/book swap buddy will find a book to gift you based on the information you submitted. This is actually a treat and not work because books are still fun ladies and gentlemen. Big fun. The facts are I love a good challenge, and I love talking about books with people; hence my working at KHCPL. This is the golden opportunity to really go nuts for donuts or books, in this case. Herein lies the beauty of the book swap: learning more about the people around you. You may love horror but find out your book swap buddy loves romance. This is ample time to get to know themes you never pick up and break out of your comfort zone. Learning what a person loves to read gives a good tell about who they are and what they like, a glimpse of personality if you will; you can find things out about people through books that you wouldn’t in regular conversation. Importantly, you also learn about yourself: what you like, and maybe find a book to add to your own overflowing TBR pile. (I’m convinced adding to your TBR is a hobby too.) Little book-shaped parcels, as pictured above, started floating around and so did the smiles. My coworkers started opening up their recommendations and ran to tell everyone that they were bumping up their gifts to be read next. Another thing that makes the swap beautiful is that someone listens and they seek out something just for their buddy that they think would be loved. I’d call that a friend-building exercise. If you didn’t know reading was a communal sport, now you do. It’s much more fun to involve others in your reading. Try out book swapping, thrift some wallpaper from Goodwill, be whimsical and use it to wrap up your book recommendation, and hand it to your friends. After all that, talk about the books, share secrets, make clubs, and create obsessions! Give the gift of RA, just like us book nerds here in the library. I think you will be pleasantly surprised.

For more book recommendations, please tune in to Off the Books with B&S Podcast on any of your podcasting platforms; new episodes air every other Thursday.

Bethann