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Books are amazing.
They have the ability to bring people together in very interesting ways.
I attended the 2011 StoryMoja Hay festival, where I met the people behind ‘Pods Must be Crazy‘, a social experiment/book club that collects books and encourages people to leave them in public places for others to find and read.
The whole point, first of all, is to make it a habit for people to read books, and as soon as they are done, they leave them in public places for others to find, and (hopefully) read and leave in another public place. The books have little tracking forms in them, where people write where they found the books.
Granted the titles available were kinda hard to read (like ‘The Children’s Encyclopedia’), but with luck, and the addition of books that are sitting in people’s houses gathering dust, the collection will grow larger and more varied.
In a rather interesting twist, I got Landed Gently, a crime thriller, which I traded for Hamlet, and that is what I’m reading now.
Hopefully I shall find a book or two after I finish with mine and leave it somewhere random.
I think, therefore I am, I think... 
this sounds like an intriguing idea. Are they still leaving books in random places?
(I am not sure I would trust the person who picks up my book in some random place in Kampala not to just sell it somewhere on the street)
Not sure if other people are leaving random books, but I still do it and twitpic every one I leave lying around. There’s monthly meetups where books are traded, tagged with the appropriate stickers, are read, and then get passed on to the next reader.
There’s lots of trust involved, like hoping the one who finds your book doesn’t have intention to sell.
You could try it over there… Get a couple of musty old books nobody’s reading for the first round, then hope it catches on…
Also, hello. I’m Mugendi 🙂
Hi Mugendi. I go by Birdie on the interwebs 🙂
That sounds like a great idea, me thinks. I just might try it… nothing like finding a good book somewhere randomly. Ugandans usually do a bookswap thing though and might feel safer continuing with that
There wasn’t a proper book-swapping gig in Nairobi, so the guys at Pods Must Be Crazy devised this one.
How does your book swap work, you guys meet, get to know each other (assuming you don’t know each other) and then swap?
We arrange beforehand and alert on facebook, people say what books they have and what books they wish to have (to make sure people carry books that will actually get swapped) then we meet and hang out and swap books.
It’s pretty informal
There wasn’t anything like this in Nairobi, so the guys at The Pods Must Be Crazy filled the void rather nicely.
But now the problem is people don’t give away books they like, so some weird mixes and titles get swapped…