Ok. This is a crazy idea.

One of my secret pleasures is to slurk into a quiet corner of the week and try on three or five new books for size and fit. I may or may not commit to any or all of them. I read maybe a chapter, explore the back matter, sniff the spine.

My Books that I’ve Been Meaning to Get To (which, as you are all perfectly aware, is a completely different pile than the To Be Read pile) has about five books in it now. They glare at me as I walk past, picking up some other book instead, yet again putting off the pleasure of that possibly perfect read.

So, I wanted to make a time to take the “meaning to” out of BTIBMTGT and actually get to ‘em.

What say, your place, next Friday (August 24) for a Try On New Books party?

Maybe your BTIBMTGT pile includes a classics or two, maybe a book that (gasp) is non-fiction, perhaps your hang-up is…well, I don’t know what your hang up might be, but some of the hitches in my get along are:

• I’ve heard a lot of wonderful things about this book and I don’t want to be disappointed.
• It’s big. I’ll read it when I finish these seven-thousand other shorter books.
• I don’t have a copy. (??? don’t look at me like that! I dunno, these things happen.)
• I’m not sure I can or want to review this book on my blog and so I should read these others that I feel more comfortable reviewing.
• No one should know that I read this book…and live to tell the tale.

So here’s what I thought would be fun. Gather your books and arrange your affairs for whatever time is good for you to do LeaveMeAlone Booky Time, sometime over the weekend next weekend (23rd-27th August-ish).

Sign up here in comments. I’ll post the blogs that are participating and email a list out to those who have left a comment here.

On YOUR BLOG, I want to read a post about the books that you tried on for size and fit, I want to know why you chose them, what you thought of them and so on. They don’t have to be whole reviews for the whole book, just the initial impressions. (If a post like this doesn’t fit well in your blog for whatever reason, I’m happy to post guest posts here.) I’ll continue to post cross-links for the participating blogs so that we can go and explore.

Hum? Dumb idea? If this works out, we’ll do it again in another month or so, with a different Book Selection Matrix.