In addition to the exhibitionistic thrill of showing off your good taste in literature – and the possibility of who might see – it makes those moments when you put your book down that much more special when you can look around and see things a little differently with your fresh knowledge.

I’ve always agonized over bringing the perfect book with me on holiday. What’s the best thing to read in London or Paris? Mexico? The stories told in those books always seem to melt into my own travel experience, and rereading them later always returns forgotten memories of past travels.

But, why do I only do that on vacation?

There are so many books written about the places that we visit each day. Part of the inspiration in our BookCrossing experiment was to return the books to where they came from. A well-described setting makes it obvious that the author walked through those same streets, crafting the same book that you’re now reading – with the hope that one day you’d read it.

So to start this off, our authors are sending us photos of them, with their local books, in their local bookstores. You eat local, buy local, why not read local?

The first to join in is Gerry Boyce, author of Belleville.

And we’re adding more all the time on our Read Local Map.

When you pick up your book and find the right setting to read it in, add a photo to our Facebook page. We’d love to see where you take them.

Read the stories around you. There are lots of them. Don’t save that magic for a special trip.

When I first heard about BookCrossing, I thought it was a great idea and I was so excited to try it myself. This week, I finally had the chance to!

As they explain on their website:

BookCrossing is earth-friendly, and gives you a way to share your books, clear your shelves, and conserve precious resources at the same time. Through our own unique method of recycling reads, BookCrossers give life to books. A book registered on BookCrossing is ready for adventure.

Leave it on a park bench, a coffee shop, at a hotel on vacation. Share it with a friend or tuck it onto a bookshelf at the gym — anywhere it might find a new reader! What happens next is up to fate, and we never know where our books might travel. Track the book’s journey around the world as it is passed on from person to person.

We followed the directions on the site to register our new mystery book, Grave Doubts. We decided to release it at Hart House, since it’s mentioned in the book and the main character takes frequent walks down Harbord Street and University circle.

We left lots of information on the books to lead them back to the BookCrossing site and here, at Defining Canada. We’re excited to see the journey that our books will have, and hope that whoever finds them will let us know.

Since Hart House is such a stunning building, we brought along our new camera and made a short film to promote our new BookCrossing experiment and the Quin and Morgan detective series.

What do you think?