Weekly update #8: Oh happy day! Book shipment #1 ♪

So I met Emmie through the tadoku.org boards, which was a tremendously lucky thing for me in many ways! We’ve become friends and she’s great fun to chat with on Twitter, and also she offered to send me some of her children’s books that she didn’t need anymore if I paid for shipping. Well, they just arrived this week! (I asked her to send them through the cheapest method, surface mail; this is because I am a cheapskate who now measures things like dinners out and new skirts in terms of how many Japanese books they could buy.)

There’s some books right at my current reading level, some above it and some picture books, which I’m glad for because I’m going to try to start some extensive reading groups in this area and nicely-done picture books are always good to have around! It was fantastic, and it really made me feel lucky not just to have found out about extensive reading, but to have met so many wonderful people in the process!

If this wasn’t enough evidence of Emmie’s kindness, she’s also allowing me to use her address, so I can buy used books online and have them sent to her, then she’ll send them over to me and I’ll pay her back for shipping. I will write more about this process, exactly what the costs are and so on. In the meantime, I’ve ordered fifteen books, and am looking forward to seeing them arrive at my door!

In other news, I wrote a little more about extensive reading. I had this exchange with my husband while writing it:

“What are you doing?”
“I’m writing a long blog post about extensive reading.”
“I was prepared to make a joke about how that was compared to all your very short blog posts about extensive reading, but I think I’ll refrain.”

As for my actual reading progress, I’m up to 176,441 words, and I’m starting to think I may get bored of level 3 books before I hit 200,000.