The last few weeks have been very busy with booktalks! It is definitely a challenge to do 3-4 booktalks in a day. Prior to GBN, the most experience I had with booktalks was during my student teaching experience. I had prepared the booktalk beforehand, and I had read all of the books I talked about. I did the same books for 5 different classes. It was succesful, but I realize now that booktalking the exact same books 5 classes in a row is rather tedious!
All of the booktalks we have done have given me some ideas for keeping up my enthusiasm. I believe that my attitude is picked up by the students, so if I seem bored, then I'm sure they will be too.
My main method of avoiding this "booktalk burnout" is to just keep reading more books! I feel I have greatly improved my abilities to sell a book without having read it. Example: during a booktalk, I held up Nicholas Sparks' The Wedding and said something like "This book is sort of a sequel to The Notebook. The main character finds that the love has gone from his marriage, unlike the marriage of his in-laws, who are Allie and Noah from The Notebook." I hadn't read either of these books, but after the booktalk, a girl ran up and snatched it, saying she hadn't known there was a sequel.
However, I still feel most comfortable when I have read a book. I don't like to be caught off guard, and I just feel more confident if I actually know the whole story. So, my solution to this is to read as many books as I can, of all genres.
Which leads to my next point: genres. I can recall a time, back in high school, when I read only one type of genre: mysteries. They had to be mysteries by a particular author as well: Agatha Christie. If you tried to suggest other books to me, I would have politely nodded, and then, when you were safely out of sight, headed over to the Agatha Christie section. Luckily, Agatha Christie was a prolific author, and my high school years were happily filled with reading nearly all of her novels (when I wasn't reading for school, of course). I was an avid Christie fan, to the extent that I wrote a 12 page research paper about her in Honors Advanced English my junior year, I read her whole biography, and I researched and later purchased, all of the novels she wrote under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott.
Today Agatha Christie remains one of my favorite authors. However, I have discovered a whole world of books out there. During the course of library school, I discovered books that I never would have dreamed of reading in high school, such as Ender's Game , The House of Stairs, or even The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials Trilogy). These three books are among my favorites. If I wasn't a librarian, I probably would have never read these books. It has taken me a while to get to this point, so I hope you will bear with me.
How do we get students to read out of their genres? How do we show them that the books they would have walked by without a second glance may turn out to be one of their favorites? Booktalking is a great way to do this. Some phrases that I find helpful are:
"if you liked this...
this isn't your typical vampire story....
if you think sci fi is all about robots, think again...
fantasy isn't just dragons and fairies..."
I especially think that explaining the variety within a genre can be very useful. For example, there are all types of science fiction, from dystopian/utopian societies, cyberpunk, hard science fiction, etc. I believe that it is our job to point out that labels are broad, and one should not avoid a book simply because it has the sticker that says "Fantasy" on it.
Another point about labeling genres: some books simply can't be put into one genre. Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials is a good example. Many people would label it as a fantasy. However, it has elements of science fiction, romance, adventure religion, philosophy, and coming of age stories. This book is not just a book about talking animal companions. It is a complex, delicately woven tale that defies typical genre definitions.
Many other books have multiple elements: The Twilight series, by Stephenie Meyer, is, at first glance, about vampires. But it's also about relationships, romance, suspense, and adventure. Of course, this series has been very popular in our library. I believe that one of the reasons it is so popular is the fact that we have booktalked it as a romance between a girl and a boy...and the boy happens to be a vampire. It's a way of getting out of the whole "vampire/horror" theme.
I believe I have made this entirely too long, so I will stop now. I am curious though: what were your reading preferences in high school? Did you stick to one genre? How have your reading habits changed since then? Have they broadened?
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