For Christmas, my husband got me a literary fiction subscription to one of our local independent bookstores, A Room of One's Own in Madison, WI: https://www.roomofonesown.com/subscription-boxes
What a timely column! My high school senior is in Creative Writing club, and their project this week was "Blind Date with a Book"! For Valentine's Day, they gift-wrapped a bunch of books and made a themed display in the school library, listing only the genre on the outside of each book, the idea being that you borrow a "blind date" book in your desired genre, a surprise grab-bag of sorts. I know that's something that's been around, but I thought it was great of them to adopt this as a cool club activity.
(It also doubles as sort of a blind "Staff Recommendation" you would see in a bookstore, because it seems many of the students chose well-known and lesser-known personal favorites, hoping that others would discover them, too.)
Thanks for sharing Richard. How fun for them and what a great way to press books into the hands of students. Making reading fun is half the battle in creating readers in our youth.
In a book club I participated in, we used to do this twice a year and we all had a blast. We also approached this as a "white elephant" exchange where one person would choose a "blind date" book, not open it yet and then the next person could either choose that book or chose another one from a stack. We had some really creative "describers" in what the book is and in the process of choosing we were also guessing what the book is. Such fun we had; we could have done this at every book club meeting and I would have left an even happier reader than I already was. :)
For Christmas, my husband got me a literary fiction subscription to one of our local independent bookstores, A Room of One's Own in Madison, WI: https://www.roomofonesown.com/subscription-boxes
It may be the best present he has ever given me.
What a nice husband you have. :) It takes so little to make a reader happy.
True (on both counts) 😊
What a timely column! My high school senior is in Creative Writing club, and their project this week was "Blind Date with a Book"! For Valentine's Day, they gift-wrapped a bunch of books and made a themed display in the school library, listing only the genre on the outside of each book, the idea being that you borrow a "blind date" book in your desired genre, a surprise grab-bag of sorts. I know that's something that's been around, but I thought it was great of them to adopt this as a cool club activity.
(It also doubles as sort of a blind "Staff Recommendation" you would see in a bookstore, because it seems many of the students chose well-known and lesser-known personal favorites, hoping that others would discover them, too.)
Thanks for sharing Richard. How fun for them and what a great way to press books into the hands of students. Making reading fun is half the battle in creating readers in our youth.
In a book club I participated in, we used to do this twice a year and we all had a blast. We also approached this as a "white elephant" exchange where one person would choose a "blind date" book, not open it yet and then the next person could either choose that book or chose another one from a stack. We had some really creative "describers" in what the book is and in the process of choosing we were also guessing what the book is. Such fun we had; we could have done this at every book club meeting and I would have left an even happier reader than I already was. :)