Usually if people ask me if I’ll run a book discussion, I fly away as fast as my wings can carry me…but now I’m signed up to lead one about On Beauty by Zadie Smith. I’ve been sucked right in (or should I say, “engaged by”) the new Book Flower bed in the Readers’ Garden on Cybrary City II (teleport there now).

Princess Ivory and Alphonsus Peck have been working on the Readers’ Garden together. Last night I helped him test drive the new Book Flower garden.

To play, you click on the flower bed controller next to the bed. You can select a bush of irises, pansies or cosmos, which is planted out in the garden bed for you to find. When you find it, you click on it and are prompted for the title, author and description of the book you’d like to discuss.

Other people can now come to the garden, see your flower and click on it to register their interest in discussing the book too. If you have entered your email address, then you will be notified by email when someone shows interest.

So now, having sown the seeds of the idea, I’m waiting for interest to bloom and then I’ll set a suggested date and time for the discussion. Simple, engaging and fun. We’ve come a long way from the first Second Life library collections that just involved links to external sites from objects inworld.