Richard Armitage fans write about and donate their favorite books: The second annual Spread the Love Book Challenge is live!

It’s here again: 2015’s first spReAd the love challenge — in honor of Dr. Seuss’ birthday on March 1st, and in recognition of the actor who learned to love reading with The Hobbit and then got to play Thorin Oakenshield. Jazzy and Obscure, the project’s chief co-conspiRAtors, invite each of us to write about a favorite children’s book and share a copy with a person or institution we know would like it. They are also looking for an anonymous co-conspiRAtor to make matching donations to Armitage’s JustGiving endorsements. Target date for the event is the week or so leading up to Dr. Seuss’ birthday on March 1st, and the days afterward.

Last year we managed to donate 27 books as a group, and I’m hoping we can break that record this year. On this blog, Rosiepig blogged about what Anne of Green Gables, meant to her, and I wrote about A Wrinkle in Time and Hop on Pop. Readers who have a favorite children’s book or young adult novel they’d like to remember, give to a child of their acquaintance, or donate to a local library in traditional or virtual format, are invited to get in touch via the form on the right hand side bar to do a guest post about what that book meant to them. Obscura, Jazzy, and Armitage Authors Network are all willing to host as well.

In case you’re hesitating because your favorite children’s book is not in English, guests are also welcome to blog here in any language I can read on my own (German, Spanish, French, Latin, Yiddish being the main ones besides English) or get along in with the aid of a machine translation (Italian, Dutch, Swedish). If you want to me to translate your post about a children’s book into English for publication here, I volunteer to do so from German, Spanish or French. I’m sure these posts will be some of the more interesting one. Fanny, who grew up in Belgium, did one of these last year.

As I did last year, I am blogging in this event on behalf of a friend whose school library can use some support. I will donate one book to her library for every post on this blog made by me or someone else in response to this challenge. Her library’s wish list is here. There’s something on it for everyone — Dr. Seuss for the Seuss fans, a Hobbit graphic novel for the Hobbit / Tolkien fans, lots of inspiring biography for girls, some history (including Holocaust history), traditional favorites like The Boxcar Children, and lots of books I’m not familiar with that look like they’d just be fun. If you enjoy reading “me + richard armitage” and like to support children reading, please consider making a post here, or a purchase from her wishlist in honor of the spReAd the love fan kindness initiative.

And I’m trying to figure out what book to blog about. Some possibilities for me are Little Women, Linnets and Valerians, The Yearling, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase — too many to name, really. I’m sure I will think of something.

What books moved you as a child? Which ones would you like to be in the hands of your young friends and relatives, or in libraries for other children to discover? Think about it, check out the challenge, and let me know if you’d like to say more.

~ by Servetus on February 8, 2015.