Being Generous in our Book-Buying Habits.
How to Support the Authors We Love. Part 3 in our series: "How to Build a Personal Library Without Breaking the Bank" (Paid Subscribers only)
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One of the perks for our paid subscribers is a quarterly Zoom conversation with an author. I’m delighted to announce that we’ve scheduled the first of these conversations!
On Wednesday January 10, we will be hosting Marlena Graves, author of the new book, Bearing God: Living a Christ-formed Life in Uncharted Waters. The conversation will start at 8pm ET (5pm PT). Marlena will introduce her book, but we plan to allow plenty of time for participants to interact with Marlena. The conversation will be recorded for paid subscribers who are not able to attend the online event.
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This post is the third one in our ongoing series "How to Read Voraciously and Build a Personal Library Without Breaking the Bank"… HOWEVER, since we’re in the holiday season, I’m going to take the series on a brief detour, and instead of offering ideas of how to save money on books, I’ll offer a few thoughts on how we can generously support our friends and acquaintances who are authors. Thanks to one of our readers, who inquired about this! It’s an important question, and this time of year seems well-suited to reflect on how we can be generous in our reading and book-buying habits.
Previous Posts in this series:
(Part One) This Habit Can Save You Hundreds of Dollars on Books!
(Part Two) Mindful Practices of Book Buying
Why am I Writing this Series?
Why focus on building a library and saving money on books? Sure, reading is important to the flourishing life of communities (insert shameless plug here for my 2016 book Reading for the Common Good, if you have not already read it), as is having the access to read and re-read the books that have been important to us, but is the ultimate goal of our thrift in book-buying simply that we might be able to buy even more books? I’m convinced that it is not. Rather, our thrift in buying books can create in us a capacity for being generous people. And, of course, one related way that this generosity might express itself is supporting the work of friends, acquaintances, and other authors whose work we deeply believe in and want to see flourish. Just because I’m challenging us to be thrifty in our book-buying habits, doesn’t mean that there’s not some really good situations when we might choose to buy a book at full retail price in order to support its author.