November 11, 2026

What I Wouldn’t Do for a Free Book

I don’t know what I wouldn’t do for book in the mail, which is something that occurred to me the other day as I signed on to receive a newsletter from the media outlet Be Giant in exchange for a book they’d created. And did I need that book? Probably not. Do I already have a professional life that involves books arriving in my mailbox on a regular basis, many of them unsolicited? Absolutely. And yet there I was, happily relinquishing my personal information, consenting to yet another corporate email appearing my inbox, because I’d been promised a book, and I was fine with that.

Not even 24 hours later, I’d done it again, purchasing two boxes of Mini-Wheats as part of Kellogg’s Feeding Reading campaign. With the purchase receipt for these two boxes I was eligible to receive a selection from a list of children’s books in the mail, and naturally I was all in, never mind that my children have aged out of the books on the list, and no one in our household eats cereal for breakfast under ordinary circumstances anyway. But free books in the mail are hardly ordinary circumstances, even if you’re sending away for them all the time, and when called upon our family will rise to the occasion.

I’m actually well practised at books for breakfast—we partook in Feeding Reading last winter, ate a ton of Mini Wheats, and ended up with three books for my kids. (Feeding Reading had more YA titles then.) Almost 25 years ago, when I lived in the UK, book tokens in cereal boxes earned me Laura Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit and Wild Swans, by Jung Chang, and the fact that I could earn books by ingesting whole grains still fills me with abject delight.

Reader, this is who I’ve always been. When I was a kid, there used to be television advertisements in the daytime for an actual sequel to the Bible that you could get if you called the phone number across the bottom of the screen, and I wanted that book so bad—I went to Sunday school, but they’d never once mentioned the Bible Part Deux, so I was curious. And while I’m really sure I called that number in quest of the book, that it never arrived makes it more likely that I didn’t call at all for fear of the kind of telephone charges you might incur for calling the Psychic Network—I was ten, so who was I to discern?

And that is the story of how I never managed to get my grubby mitts on a complimentary copy of The Book of Mormon, an injustice I’ve been making up for in all the years since by trying to acquire all the other books in the universe.