Creating Bookworms

This is not the first Buzz Books edition I have read, but this is the first one I have talked about. In short Buzz Books is a gathering of soon-to-be-published excerpts of novels chosen by Publishers Lunch. 

I initially thought that I would use this space to talk about my very long history with Young Adult books and how the books that I gravitate towards influences how I choose my own books to read, but this edition has made me think about how book choosing and book reading has changed and how I have to change.

I started writing about my belief in bringing tradebooks into my classroom for pleasure reading and how in 1992 when I started as a high school English teacher, there was a sad lack of used YA books that would appeal to my juniors and seniors in high school. However, that evolution as a teacher with nothing but a class set of Cormier's The Chocolate War and leaving my middle school classroom 20 plus years later with thousands of tradebooks all chosen by me for specific kinds of readers is another long story.

The short story is that I give my students a specific strategy for choosing books. 

1. Look at the cover. If it appeals, keep going, if not, put it back. 
2. Read the little description on the back or the inside cover. Again, yes keep going, no put it back.
3. Read the lead until you lose appeal. If you have gotten through the first one or two chapters by the time you look away, grab it, borrow it, steal it. 

The change in strategy is that the assumption with this strategy is that my classroom is fully stocked, the school library is fully stocked and not being used for testing, or my local bookstore is fully stocked. This is not always the case.

My new strategy relies on me searching out ebooks with readers in mind, and when I come across books through a plethora of means (Buzz Books, other blogs, Net Galley), pass it on. It is no longer possible to stock my shelves. E-books have limited the experience that students have in choosing their own books by touch, by sight, by smell. Students will no longer remember what a brand new book smells like. They won't know what a book with its pages still a little crisp and tacky feels like. This is a new world. Relying on publishers to open up their pages in things like Buzz Books is the new way to choose the next read on the students' readers.