The cold, hard truth is that some things are just not that easy to hand over. Your favourite T-shirt, for example. French fries (particularly when your girlfriend has insisted she doesn't want anything from the drive-through and five minutes later she's sneaking fries in such a stealth-like fashion you start referring to her as Winona).

The remains of the last bottle of wine at a particularly banal wedding (at which the bridegroom keeps referring to the bride as his "special lady"). The TV remote control during the Eurovision Song Contest. Money. Fame. Glory. The doona.

Try sharing any of the above and for many of us our inner two-year-old comes out swinging. "Mine!" we scream, diving commando-style for the TV remote control (knowing full well our unhealthy attachment to televised singing competitions is, once again, about to come under full-scale attack).

Sure, I'm with you on all of it.

But once in a while, something comes along that, once experienced, leaves us with an urgent need to shove it down everyone else's throat.

Perhaps we've discovered the genius of Edward Monkton and want to share his Penguin of Death greeting card with everyone (edwardmonkton.com for those interested).

We taste Red Rock Deli Lime and Black Pepper Potato Chips and immediately declare to anyone who will listen that they are not living full and complete lives unless they taste them.

We spend a rainy Sunday listening to Ryan Adams's Gold CD and feel inspired and dizzy and sad and happy and insist that everyone who walks through our front door sits for a moment, eyes closed, and listen to the words of La Cienega Just Smiled. And we start saying "Shoosh". A lot. And, "You're not even listening! Listen to the words!" in an uptight tone - even though the Energex guy says that he really just came to read the meter and can he go now?

And then there are books. Books that fate drops into your hands and they feel as if they were written just for you. Books that change the way you see yourself and the world. Books that make your own crazy, ridiculous, slightly screwball life make sense. Books that somehow dog-ear part of your soul in the same way that you dog-ear the pages. Books that, once read, you simply must share with others. That's where bookcrossing.com comes in. It's sharing on a global scale.

Dubbed the "liberation of literature", Book Crossing is a tantalising and ever-so-slightly subversive underground bookswapping movement. On the Book Crossing website there's a stirring call to arms. Read and release. Help turn the world into a library by leaving your favourite novel somewhere for others to stumble upon and enjoy.

Picture this: You're sitting in the New Farm Park rotunda and there, on one of the seats, you notice a copy of Zadie Smith's White Teeth. In the change room of the Jindalee public pool you find a battered edition of Jack Kerouac's On The Road. You enter a phone booth in Mackay and find yourself staring at a copy of Richard Yaxley's The Rose Leopard. Minding it's own business, just waiting to be picked up. By someone like you.

How do you know this book is meant to be Book Crossed and isn't just an accidentally left-behind novel? Easy. Book Crossing books are "tagged" with a note and a code, letting the "finder" know that this book is free to be taken home, read, loved and then set free again into the wild for someone else to enjoy. By tagging your novel before you release it, the Book Crossing website allows you to track where your novel travels from a phone booth in Brisbane to a youth hostel in Berlin.

Better still, future readers are encouraged to log on to the website and not only say where they found your favourite book, but also their thoughts on it. And this, according to Book Crossing co-founder Ron Hornbaker, is the beauty of the concept.

"I guess you could say it's the karma of literature," says Hornbaker, on the official website. "Releasing your books 'into the wild' and tracking their progress and the lives they touch is just more fascinating, and more fulfilling, than hoarding them on a shelf somewhere."

Exactly. Right now there are 1,325,847 books being Book Crossed around the planet. Of course, the fact that this figure includes 500 Jackie Collins novels leads me to believe that some people are Book Crossing books they detest in a hope they never run into them again. A bit like giving a pesky relative a one-way ticket to Sierra Leone.