The First (Annual?) Summer Ninja Book Swap

A while ago I posted about how Hanna and I were organising the first Summer Ninja Book Swap, so that people didn’t have to wait till Christmas for secret santa style awesomes. So, a few people signed up for it and we’ve been quietly organising away for the last few weeks. Yesterday was the deadline for sending things out, and every single person who signed up (even the one whose emails didn't get through to her till two days before the deadline!) managed to send their parcels on time!

Because the person who was sending my parcel was super organised and sent it early, I got it on Friday and it was amazing. 

There was going to be a super awesome picture here, which I took properly so it was nice and well lit and stuff, but our home internet is dead at the moment (it was the BT WiFi thing and it stopped working so we cancelled it and now it turns out that none of the other wireless options will work in our area, so it will be down for at least a month while we work out if getting a landline and broadband is a viable financial option for us) and all the internet I've tried to use today seems to be massively opposed to this picture :-( I cannot understand why, because it is awesome. Anyway! My  swapper was the lovely Charlotte from Lit Addicted Brit, and she sent me an amazing parcel with not one but two awesome books, a box of chocolates and a great, bookish card. The books I got were both ones I've been after for a while as well; Un Lun Dun by China Mieville, which I read an extract from in The Library Book and have wanted ever since, and The Outsider by Albert Camus, which has been on my list since A Levels but I've somehow never got around to! Those plus a box of yummy Thornton's chocolates equal a parcel made of awesome I think you'll agree! 

I don't know how everybody else (especially Hanna, who did all the matching up!) would feel about it, but I think this is something definitely worth repeating at least on an annual, if not more frequently (Halloween swap anyone?) basis. And yes, that's me volunteering to organise it again :-) 

In other news, I had to break my partial library ban today because they had The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There by Catherynne M. Valente and as I read the first one this time last year and have had to be forcibly restrained from buying this several times I thought I couldn't not borrow it, really. And they also had The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, and I'm on a bit of a John Green kick at the moment. So it was unavoidable, really. 

If things are a little quiet around here for a few weeks, I apologise. It will be due to the aforementioned lack of internet, and also because we're going on holiday to Devon for a couple of weeks. I promise to be back to regularly scheduled programming soon though! I'm also planning a kind of feature with bookish lists that I've got the first few posts on the go for, so if you're a list person, watch this space...