BookCrossing: Aztec

I released Aztec on September 11, 2010, at the Seattle Premium Outlets in Tulalip, WA, and a catch came in the very next day. The book has already been re-released at Tampa International Airport in Florida. Here's the catch:

Found on a bench outside Restoration Hardware (Seattle Premium Outlets in Tulalip, Washington USA) at 1:30 p.m. on September 11, 2010

three times since

I checked to see whether there were any messages now. The thing was, I had already checked for messages three times since Lorna and Dell had sat down across from me. When I was at my desk, I checked about every three minutes.

-- Fear the Worst by Linwood Barclay

BookCrossing: Fall on Your Knees

Last month my wife and I packed up our two kids and hit the road. Destination: Calgary. It was a furtive trip, with no friends and only select members of our respective families knowing, because two friends of ours absolutely could not find out we were going. Those two friends were arriving at the Calgary airport - making a permanent move to Canada from Malaysia - on August 17, 2010, and we wanted to surprise them with an in-person welcome.

Having grown up in Vancouver, I've spent a fair amount of time in the Okanagan area. However, before last month's roadtrip the furthest east I'd been in Canada was Nelson, B.C., except for a flight to Toronto about ten years ago to attend a wedding, followed by a flight back to Vancouver, which, in my books, doesn't really count. Being the devoted BookCrosser that I am, I made sure to have a stash of books to release en route. We planned on making it to Calgary in one day and left our Coquitlam driveway at about 4:20 a.m. on August 16 to make that happen. That meant we were sitting in a booth at Denny's in Kelowna at 9 a.m. - normally the time we start driving anywhere! I released two books at the Denny's, and one of them was journaled by a new member before we even got to our Calgary hotel that evening at approximately 7:30 p.m. (We made pretty good time from Coquitlam to Calgary, eh?)

In fact, by the time I logged on to make release notes 12 hours after the fact, meggantough had not only journaled Fall on Your Knees, s/he had also joined BookCrossing, registered two of his/her own books, and released one of those two books in Kelowna's Orchard Park Mall! Adding to the coolness of this catch: Fall on Your Knees was registered by my mama. The catch:

I found it at work in Denny's. I'll be sure to read it & pass it along!

Generation A by Douglas Coupland

I have the hardcover, and on the dust jacket's front cover book flap there is a quote from Kurt Vonnegut, from his Syracuse University commencement address on May 8, 1994:

"Now you young twerps want a new name for your generation? Probably not, you just want jobs, right? Well, the media do us all such tremendous favors when they call you Generation X, right? Two clicks from the very end of the alphabet. I hereby declare you Generation A, as much at the beginning of a series of astonishing triumphs and failures as Adam and Eve were so long ago."

This is a story about stories, or as put on Coupland's website: "Generation A mirrors the structure of 1991's Generation X as it champions the act of reading and storytelling as one of the few defenses we still have against the constant bombardment of the senses in a digital world."

There were many wonderful scenes and moments in the story, and the surprise of my parents' hometown as a key setting was tops among them for me.

Generation A on BookCrossing.