Random book thoughts

• I'm going to do a wimpy version of Carl V's R.I.P. reading challenge: I'm going to read ... Dracula. The idea is to set yourself a challenge of some scary, eerie, frightening reading to be completed by Halloween. Many people are choosing five books, which is great, but I'm going to be realistic and set myself a "challenge" I know I can complete. I've been meaning to read Dracula for quite a while, just waiting around for the perfect time to do it -- and here it is! Thanks Carl, for the idea.
• I've joined BookMooch and have become a fan. I've been a member for maybe 1 1/2 weeks, and I've gotten two requests for books, and I've mooched three. The idea is that people will post books they'd like to give away, and then people will ask for yours and you'll ask for others. All it costs is the postage to mail people books. I figured I had enough books sitting around I wouldn't mind giving away, mostly contemporary fiction I didn't like and a few things I acquired in some random ways. So I mailed off a copy of Meghan Daum's The Quality of Life Report to somebody in Canada today, and I'll be receiving Kate Atkinson's Case Histories, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, and Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace. Isn't that the coolest?
• I'll be deciding any moment now which novel to pick up next. Dracula I think I'll put off until October. For now, I'm not sure if I want something contemporary or something older. I tend to read older, "classic"-type books fairly regularly interspersed between two or three or four more contemporary novels, and it's getting time to pick up something older. But -- maybe not yet. I do want to read something I already own (no need to run off to the bookstore at all, no, not at all). I've got a copy of Balzac's Cousin Bette which has been calling out to me, but I've also got my eye on Michael Martone's book Michael Martone (which AC sent me -- thanks!) and Orhan Pamuk's Snow, and I picked up a copy of Alison Lurie's The War Between the Tates at one of my local used bookstores after Litlove wrote about her. But there is also Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall which a random person at work gave me, if I do decide on something older. The reader's dilemma -- what next?