Crossing Paths - the BookCrossing novel

A very strange book. A book about BookCrossing, which the author compares to "a parallel universe." I joined BC a year ago and it's a lot of fun and the community is great, but it's much more *normal* in the reality. I still haven't caught any wild releases and I knew only one other bookcrosser in Tbilisi. In the book, they stumble upon bookcrossers and wild releases all the time, they fall in love with each other after a couple of messages, they confess love in journal entries, they pass the same book back and forth to each other several times, the books seem to follow them, books travel from the US to Europe in less than a week and other unbelievable things happen.

Furthermore, I could not feel Jane's grief and she often really acted show more like a mad woman. Her obsession with her father seemed disproportionate to her other traumatic life experiences, which were barely mentioned. And what was so special about her that all the men were falling head over heels over her? And finally, all that new age stuff was getting too much for my liking towards the end - signs, coincidences, visions, dreams, ghosts, sinchronicity.

Is it a self-published book? Anyways, it is quite rare and somebody on BC got a hold of it and offered it as a ray. It's rather Australia-centric because many book references were from AUS/NZ and I also noticed that a lot of bookcrossers were from Australia in the book. Unfortunately, there were quite a few typos - misspelled words, mixed up names, mixed up time - PM mixed up with AM.

What I liked about the book - BC references, travel (I often Googled up pictures of locations and discovered some nice ones on the way) and bookish references (most literature seemed too depressing for my liking, but maybe I will note down some AUS/NZ related books and authors). show less

A gift to me from the lovely author of this book. Received October 9, 2010. Registered on BookCrossing October 14, 2010

Finished November 9, 2010:

Finished this last night and am amazed at a number of things. The author certainly put a lot of hard work into details in this book -- matching up books with specific locations etc. I must admit, it left me feeling a little inadequate. I love themed releases, and if I'm travelling, may seek books with titles or subjects that would fit my destination, but I've never travelled to someplace only because I wanted to release a book there. (No, wait, that's not true entirely. I wanted to release Fahrenheit 451 at Bebelplatz, the spot where books were burned by the German Student Association May 10, show more 1933, but I didn't travel to Berlin just to do it. I knew I was going to Berlin and brought the book with me for that release.)

But in this book, Jane/Ali/Sarah hops on a train and travels to another country just to make a release based on the book's plot. It was a little stalker-ish that there were so many people tracing and predicting her moves by her bookshelf, and trying to figure out where she'd go next based on the titles she had left to release. I guess our Charleston BookCrossing group, close as we are, doesn't interact the way other BookCrossers do. Or maybe we're not that attentive. Dunno. Are there really groups that are as close and intertwined (both as friends and lovers) as these folks are? And are there really people as fortunate to hunt and find as many books as these people do, or have as many catches out in the wild by other BookCrossers? If so, I'm living in the wrong part of the world. And though I'm fairly well-read, there were a number of titles I'd not heard of, which I will have to track down to investigate. I may have to change my approach to themed releasing, though. I'm pretty simple in those -- a book with boats in the title at the Marina, a book with "eye" in the title at an optician's shop. If I were to be a character in this book, I should have travelled to the Batangan Peninsula or to Yorkshire to make true themed releases.

Anyhow, this was an interesting exercise, and I applaud Debbie's efforts. How she kept the various threads straight and the books in the right hands is a wonder. I imagine she had a wall full of post-it notes that got moved around according to the timeline. I did get a bit confused, but probably due to reading late at night when I was already half in dreamland. But paths were crossing, indeed, all through the story.

One thing that I would have wished for is more of a sense of place in each location. Here were some fabulous and beautiful locations, yet I never really felt as if I travelled there in my mind's eye. I'd love to go to Greece, or France, or even to that lovely B&B in Canada, and am not likely to get there except through my reading. It was nice to run into familiar BookCrossing names in the journal entries, but I do wonder what someone who is not a BookCrosser will make of it all.

But, all in all, I'm glad I read it. It's a monumental effort and I'll be interested to hear what others think.

here has been a lot of discussion about various aspects of this book. For reference sake, here are some of the forum threads:

The books in the book here. (A total of 52 books get mentioned.)

Where BookCrossers first appear. (40 real life BookCrossers appear in Crossing Paths, including yours truly, though the section I helped Debbie with for Folly Beach and Charleston got edited out. But I do have a journal entry on page 138,) show less

I got hold of this book because I'm a BookCrosser myself and was eager to see what a novel involving it would be like. I was disappointed, however. I think maybe this author should have stuck to reading books, and BookCrossing them, leaving the writing to others. There were many things that bothered me about this book, particularly these:

1. The length. 600 pages may not be a problem for a bestselling page-turner, or if the reader is a big fan of the author of the book. Otherwise, more than 400 pages is too much.

2. The improbability of events. Obviously this is fiction, not real life, and therefore some lack of resemblance to reality is a reasonable expectation. But no semblance of reality at all, in a book that isn't science fiction? show more That's a problem, and likely to make less determined readers than I give up reading. Although BookCrossing is a great site and many people including myself have made friends through it, not many have found partners across the world and fallen in love straight off. Nor have we found BookCrossing books released everywhere we go, and friendly fellow BookCrossers worrying about us and following us around the world. It's just not happening. Except in this book.

3. Inaccuracies. Ealing is West London, not East.

It's mostly those. There are many more inaccuracies specifically related to BookCrossing, but I will leave those for others to moan about. Apart from all this, I found that something kept me turning the pages and persevering to finish the book. I did like some of the characters despite the unlikely things they did, and wanted to see what would happen to them. I'm afraid, based on my overall experience of this book, I can only recommend this book to people who are very determined to read it. Otherwise, don't waste your time. show less