For my club, which was LS but is now rising 8th and 9th graders ("Guys Read"):  Read The Door Within by Wayne Thomas Batson; also finish the Lord of the Rings trilogy if you haven't already done so.  There will be a new movie version of The Hobbit in the next couple of years, and we want to be ready. 

Mrs. Crosby's club ("The Finer Things"):  Going Bovine by Libba Bray and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby.  Several people are already looking forward to being in this group, which is usually made up of juniors and seniors.

Mr. Reese has agreed to sponsor a new Harry Potter book club in the fall, so look over those books again during the summer if you'd like to participate.

I'll try to put out a list of suggested summer reading before the end of school.  If you want to recommend a book that we never read this year, send it to me and I'll include it.  And if you still want to go to a movie, we'll meet and decide next week.

I also was lucky enough to live across the street from my parents’ college and have access to the children’s reading room, set up for teachers in training, and filled with books for all ages.  My friend Debra and I spent one summer, when we were 9 or 10, riding our bikes to that library every day and reading right there in that room—no need to check anything out!  We had a good public library in town and we used it too, but the college library was right there and the reading room was a little hideaway we had all to ourselves.

When I try to imagine a world without physical books, where everything is digital and electronic, I always wonder how our kids would be exposed to the stories?  Would they choose to pick up an e-reader and scroll up and down on a tiny screen, or would they just default to the video game and television set sitting right in front of them?  How would they be aware that the books exist?  I know they say that a person’s educational success can be predicted by the number of books in their parents’ house,* so what would happen to the kids’ intellects if there were no physical books to look at?  That’s one of many reasons I think the physical book will never go away, although e-books are fine for some purposes.

Wal-Mart is said to have a display system called “Actionality” where likely impulse purchases are put right out in front of the consumers in order to attract their attention and sell more items, whether they were intending to get those things or not.  Books need to be out in front of kids, where they can see them, pick them up, and flip through them.  Else they will probably never know that a lot of these books ever existed.

*“Home library size has a very substantial effect on educational attainment, even adjusting for parents’ education, father’s occupational status and other family background characteristics,” reports [a] study in the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility. “Growing up in a home with 500 books would propel a child 3.2 years further in education, on average, than would growing up in a similar home with few or no books."

At our final meeting on April 23, we'll have pizza and will find out about our end-of-the-year party for all book club members school-wide.  See you then!

Update:  We postponed our meeting and are trying to see if more people will read it. It's hard to put down--funny, sad, and thought-provoking at the same time.   

For March, we'll be reading the first book in a new series by Frank Beddor:  The Looking-Glass Wars.  No one had really heard much about Steampunk, but I had brought up the new genre because of the Scott Westerfeld book Leviathan.  Seamus nominated the Beddor book, and now it turns out that there's a bit of Steampunk action in this book--it involves robotic creatures and contraptions during Victorian times.  On top of that, it's well-timed to coincide with the opening of Johnny Depp's new Alice in Wonderland movie.  But this book has a lot characters you won't see in the movie:  Hatter Madigan, Dodge Anders, someone named Redd, and the generals Doppel and Ganger.  (Yes and someone named Alyss....)

Part of the fun of this book club has been the fact that almost all of our choices have been made into movies, after we read them.  It's fun to compare the books and movies, and it's challenging to keep up with all the comments made by our garrulous members.  Next meeting is planned for Friday, March 26.

The US Change the World book club will meet on March 24 in the conference room instead of March 3. 

We picked two titles to read over the Christmas holidays:  The Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett, which will introduce us to the world of 'speculative fiction,' and The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins.  The US book club read The Hunger Games earlier this year, and The Color of Magic is the first book in a whole collection of books involving Discworld, "where it all begins."  Happy reading for the holidays!  We'll meet again on January 22.

Right now the LS group is reading The Alchemyst.  We meet again during lunch on Nov. 20.  If you want to join, just let me know.

Then, the next week we'll honor everyone who's been in a book club this year with some Chik-Fil-A treats.  More on that later...