As part of my 50by50 list, I wanted my reading to take me some place different. While I read fiction in lots of different genres (suspense, thriller, mystery, literary, historical, etc.), my non-fiction reading tends to be about either goals / personal change, writing, or organizational development/theory. However, there was a story in the U.S. press about big box stores, specifically old bookstores, being converted into other uses, and in one of the online fora that I follow, the discussion of this topic mentioned a larger book about it – an author named Julia Christensen wrote “Big Box Reuse” back in 2008.

I was intrigued by the idea, and when I checked the public library, I was pleasantly surprised to see we had it in our system. I considered buying it outright off Amazon but it was $70 in hardcover, $47 on Kindle, and even used was $20, so free it was! 🙂 And so I signed it out and started plowing through it. The book is organized around ten chapters, and just for fun, I started doing what I frequently do with non-fiction books…I wrote a blog about each Chapter. And when I was done, I wrote an overall Book Review (Big Box Reuse by Julia Christensen (BR00115)).

Since they were just “chapter” reviews, the posts are not super long…while the book is textbook-sized and 240 pages, it was a relatively light read for each chapter, and the author included a number of decent pictures of the buildings interspersed throughout. Did it revolutionize my world? No, not really. Some of the chapters were throwaways – reuse of the land, not the building, or simply just another retailer taking it over. Not exactly “reuse” in my view. But there were some really interesting elements, which I teased out in the posts as well as my formal book review.

If you want to see the full set of chapter reviews, here are the links:

• Reading “Big Box Reuse” by Julia Christensen – Intro, Chapter 1
• Reading “Big Box Reuse” by Julia Christensen – Chapter 2
• Reading “Big Box Reuse” by Julia Christensen – Chapter 3
• Reading “Big Box Reuse” by Julia Christensen – Chapter 4
• Reading “Big Box Reuse” by Julia Christensen – Chapter 5
• Reading “Big Box Reuse” by Julia Christensen – Chapter 6
• Reading “Big Box Reuse” by Julia Christensen – Chapter 7
• Reading “Big Box Reuse” by Julia Christensen – Chapter 8
• Reading “Big Box Reuse” by Julia Christensen – Chapter 9
• Reading “Big Box Reuse” by Julia Christensen – Chapter 10