Writer and now pen pal Nell Minow, author of “The Movie Mom’s Guide to Family Movies,” sent me a link to her own blog post about the pleasures of re-reading favorite books from childhood. At the end of that piece, she describes how she and her extended family once held a family book exchange. I think this is such a wonderful idea that I’m sharing with you here how she and her family successfully spanned the generations with good books. She writes:

On this summer’s vacation with my extended family, each of us was asked to bring a book we loved and share it with the group. One night, all eleven of us — ranging in age from 13 to 79 — sat down together to describe our books and swap them around. The enthusiasm was so infectious that my serious lawyer father who can’t tell Mick Jagger from Steven Tyler ended up reading my college senior son’s selection — Frank Zappa’s autobiography. I loved my daughter’s description of Natalie Babbitt’s wonderful “The Search for Delicious” so much, I am on the list to reread it as soon as my sister is finished with it. My daughter borrowed her uncle’s copy of the new Jonathan Safran Foer book, “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” and her uncle took my copy of Connie Willis’ book, “Bellwether.” I can’t wait to begin my niece’s “The Gammage Cup,” by Carol Kendall, which she read because it was her much older cousin’s favorite childhood book. She promises me it is completely engrossing.

I look forward to trying this with the extended Chattering clan!