 This is 16, a collection of short stories, edited by Don Gallo. Every high school has one. A bully, I mean. Someone who roams the halls looking for smaller, weaker kids to pick on. In this particular high school, it was Monk Clutner. Monk ran that school like it was his personal Garden of Eden. The only thing that he forgot was that every Garden of Eden has its serpent. Book talks are a come on. They're a sales pitch for a book. Book talking is the most effective way that I have found of convincing people that reading really can be fun and it can be used as a kind of recreation. I try to say something to the listeners that will reach out and grab them, that will involve them in the stories and in the characters. Monk slithers up. Who is it around here doesn't know about Monk Clutner? Never heard of him. Kid, he said, reaching for Melvin. You'd better teach your girlfriend some manners. But his hands never quite made it to Melvin because at that moment Priscilla caught him in a gigantic hammerlock lifting him completely off the floor. Neck cracking, eyes popping and with one enormous shove pushed him right into her locker. It was incredible. One moment he was there, the next moment he was gone. Wedged in, a perfect fit. Priscilla slammed the door, twirled the combination lock and she and Melvin walked out of school. And that is where fate, which is an even stronger force than Priscilla Roseberry stepped in because that night there was a snowstorm. As a matter of fact, there was a blizzard. The whole town iced over and school closed for a week. And that's only one of the exciting or funny or suspenseful stories that you'll find in 16 by Don Gallo. A good book talk always leaves your listeners wanting more. A book talk isn't a book report or a book review. It isn't something you use to evaluate a book. It starts with the premise that this is a book that is good, that you enjoyed and that somebody else might want to enjoy too. Group 6 knew they were special. They just didn't know exactly how or why. Of course, there is many different kinds of book talks as there are book talkers. But basically, book talks fall into four major categories based on the actual focus of excitement in the book. The plot summary, the anecdote or short story, the character description and the mood-based book talk. Plot summary is probably the kind of book talk that's most frequently done. It involves sketching in what is going on in the plot up to a particular climactic moment and then stopping. Any book that has plot and suspense as the main focus of the book itself is going to fit well into a plot summary book talk. So they weren't too surprised at having to do this rather unusual thing. Their teacher was named Nate. He was 22 and he didn't look like he was 22 and he certainly didn't look or act like he was a teacher. But Group 6 knew that Cold Brook Country School was the perfect boarding school. It was very private, it was very discreet, it was very expensive, it was very innovative. And so they weren't too surprised when they were told that the five of them and Nate would be taking a trip into the woods as part of their orientation. They didn't think too much about it until they discovered that Nate was covering up their tracks. When they confronted him about it, they found out the horrible truth about just exactly why they were so special. Find out what happens with Group 6 in The Grounding of Group 6 by Julian Thompson. The anecdotal short story book talk works well with two different types of books. Of course you can do it with short stories. You can talk about several short stories telling just a little bit about each of them. Or you can talk about one short story and tell it completely. It's called Heads You Lose and Other Apocryphal Tales by Francis Grieg. One of my favorite stories in this concerns the fellow who can't get on an airplane. He is terrified to go on planes. In addition to that, there are books that fall into anecdotes or episodes. And you can do these kinds of books the same way that you do short story collections. You can tell all about one of the anecdotes or you can tell a little bit about several of them. Paul says, think nothing of it. Why don't you catch the train going out tonight? Instead of catching the plane, you can catch the train. He says, great, packs his bags, rushes down to the station, gets on board a train. He had forgotten about all the pleasures, all the amenities of travel by rail. He goes to the dining car and has a sumptuous meal. He sits and talks with some of his fellow passengers. And then as night comes on, he decides to retire. In fact, he falls asleep with a smile on his face. And never even wakes up as the 747 that he was supposed to take to Los Angeles falls out of the sky and crashes into his train, killing everyone on board. Stories like that are in heads you lose and other apocryphal tales. Sometimes an unusual writing style or the mood of the story itself is the focus of excitement in a book. In that case, you want to make sure that you capture that particular mood when you do your book talk. Let's talk about fear. We won't raise our voices and we won't scream. We'll talk very rationally about the kind of fear that takes us to the rim of madness and perhaps over the edge. Night shift is about fear. It's a collection of stories, horrible, fearful, scary stories. Stories about rats. Rats on the third floor of a fiber mill. Rats that only come out during the graveyard shift between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m. They come out and they sit on the ledge of the window and they watch the workers with their unblinking black eyes waiting to strike in night shift. In a character sketch book talk, the book talk itself is based on a description of one or more of the characters in the book. The book talker can describe the character from a third person point of view or can actually play the part of the character. I'm mad. I'm mad at the laws that keep Edith Goodinough shut up inside that hospital at a time when she ought to be looking back on all of her accomplishments. The laws that say that she's got to have handcuffs on those frail 80-year-old wrists when she goes to trial. And I'm mad at the life that she saw no way out of that led her to this mockery of a trial. In my book talk on the tie that binds, I speak as Sanders Roscoe, one of the characters in the book. I'm sorry. You've never heard the story, have you? Sure, I'll be glad to tell it to you, but it's sort of long. It'll take a couple more beers. Okay. It started back in the 1800s. Roy Goodinough brought his wife Ada out from the east to Homestead a farm. Ada didn't last long, just long enough to have two kids, Edith and Lyman, and then she died. It was on that same farm years later that Edith and Lyman saw Roy Goodinough caught in a harvester and lose nine of his fingers. They knew then they'd be trapped for good. They'd never leave that farm. Edith never left, not even after Roy died. And she's never said no to anybody but herself, never heard a living thing, and now Bud Seely wants to put her on trial for murder. Now I'll do anything to keep her away from him, anything to keep her safe. Of course you don't know why I care. When I prepare my book talks, I sit down and think about what I would say to convince somebody to read the book or why I picked it up in the first place. I write my notes down and then I practice them and then copy them over onto a book talk card, and that's what I use when I do my actual presentations. I make sure that all my talks are written down verbatim and that they're kept in some sort of order. All book talkers have their own style and their own way of presenting book talks. I think it's an individual thing. I'm a structured person, so I need to know what I'm going to say and how I'm going to say it. I prepare my book talk by going back and looking at the book again and decide which action or activity that's happening in the book that I want to talk about. Then I write it out. I do about two or three drafts. Then I have it typed on what we call book talk cards, a special order book talk cards, and from those cards I read it over and over again and I say it to myself. I put it in front of my mirror, my bathroom, and I say it over and over again. I try to memorize the sequence, not necessarily word for word, but it's basically the sequence. My approach to book talking isn't necessarily the traditional one or the correct one. I never write my book talks down. I think about them an awful lot. I turn them over in my mind until I feel that I have something that works. At that point I'll practice it to myself or try it out in my family, try it out on other people in my school. I just let them work themselves out and present it in a more extemporaneous manner than other people might. How many of you have read anything by Stephen King? Seen any movies by Stephen King? Stephen King, not all that long ago, was a high school English teacher up in Maine. He's always been a struggling author. He's always written, but during the last 10 years... There's no right or wrong way to do book talks. For instance, Stephen King's Fire Starter. I do a plot summary book talk. Larry Raycow sets the stage by describing the 60s, and Jackie Woody uses a very short book talk. Anyways, the Fire Starter. Long, long ago, long before marijuana and LSD and cocaine became household words, strong mind-altering drugs were given to college students and members of the American military forces in order to assess these drugs' potential as weapons of war. Now that's true. Fire Starter by Stephen King is not fact, but King uses those incidents which took place back in the wild in woolly 1960s as a basis for his book. Andy and Vicki are two college students who take part in just such an experiment. My book talk for Fire Starter is based firmly in my own experience during the 1960s. I probably think more about what it was like during the 1960s and how students were used and what their lives were like so that I wait mind heavily towards the beginning of that story and tell more about the experiment that takes place than other people might. Some people might stress the role of the shop. Other people might stress Charlie and Andy being on the run. Daddy! Daddy, I can't run anymore! Andy McGee stopped and turned to pick up his daughter Charlie, glancing over her shoulder as he did so at the three deliberately unsuspicious looking men in the innocuous car that was crawling down the crowded street just half a block behind them. They were from the shop and they were waiting, waiting for him to make a mistake. It had all begun 12 years before in 1966 when Andy had participated in a psych experiment in college. Due to Andy and Vicki's participation in this experiment, their beautiful precious daughter Charlie was born with one of the most destructive powers a human being could have, the ability to start fires simply by thinking about them. Now Charlie is six years old and she has to be saved from herself and from the government who have decided that they want her back to use as their weapon. Some book talks, of course, are less formal and are done on the library floor in a more reader's advisory capacity. These book talks are done more or less in passing and certainly without a captive audience, so they need to be limited to perhaps less than a minute. Did you ever read The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley? No. Oh, this is a neat book. Do you like books about dragons? Yeah. Erin is the daughter of Arlbeth, the king of Damar, a fantasy land. And she's a great dragon hunter. When I book talk The Hero and the Crown or any other book for that matter, I usually have a number of different book talks available so that when I'm in a classroom presenting a formal book talk, I might offer the longer version. And when I'm in a library, I might talk the same book but give a very different book talk, one that I might make up on the spot based on the longer book talk that I've thought out more carefully. It's more one-to-one, more immediate and more correct. If you're looking for a fun book to read, let me tell you about Harold and Maude. Harold and Maude is a love story, sort of. Harold is 19 and Maude is almost 79 and they're in love. But they're about as different as two people could be. Maude is in love with life. She's always looking for some new and exciting adventure. Harold, on the other hand, is obsessed with death. He drives a hers for a car. He's always trying to commit fake suicides just to upset his mother. And he goes to funerals just because he thinks he's fun. He doesn't know the people. He just goes and sits at the funerals. That's how he meets Maude. One day, she's at the back of the church eating watermelons and spitting the seeds out during the funeral service. He gets to know Maude and they become very good friends. Then Harold's mother decides that it's time for Harold to get married. So Harold thinks that he knows the perfect person. Harold and Maude. Book talking has traditionally been the method whereby a public librarian introduces herself or himself to a school. A school librarian really has a leg up. He or she is already a member of the faculty, already knows kids inside the school. And I think that it presents an opportunity for more of an ongoing approach to readers' advising. The individual student who comes up to you, you're going to be seeing on a daily basis. Good choice. How have you been doing? Pretty good except that I was out sick yesterday. Sick yesterday? Who are you trying to be? Peggy Ann McKay? Who's Peggy Ann McKay? You don't know Peggy Ann McKay. You never read Shell Silversteins where the sidewalk ends? I think it was just returned. Hang on. Yep, here it is. Let's see. I cannot go to school today, said little Peggy Ann McKay. I have the measles and the mumps, a gash, a rash, and purple bumps. My mouth is wet. My throat is dry. I'm going blind in my right eye. My tonsils are as big as rocks. I've counted 16 chicken pox. And there's one more. That's 17. And don't you think my face looks green? Something else that's very important to remember is to make sure that kids have access to the books. Make sure that the book is in your library or in a library very close by. You might like this one. This is called Killing Mr. Griffin. It's about five high school seniors that decide to kill their English teacher. And then they do. Does that sound good? Yes. Thank you. Matt, let me have first. Now let's see. Shane, you wanted something that was fantasy. When I first started book talking, I was nervous about forgetting my talks and going in and being a fool in front of the kids. And I'll still probably always be nervous about it. One of the ways that I handle my nervousness is to make my first book talk one that actually helps me relax and one that I'm very familiar with so I don't have to worry about forgetting it. By Patty Campbell. In it, you'll meet all kinds of people that perform on the streets. Mimes or jugglers or magicians or musicians. The pickers and the pluckers, they call themselves, that ply their trades on the city streets. Patty Campbell is a... Most book talks are on fiction. But make sure that you include some talks on popular nonfiction and your repertoire as well. Just make sure there is entertaining as your talks on fiction. But of all the people that I met in this book, the Butterfly Man is my favorite. He's a juggler, the son of a Nobel Prize winner and a former scientist himself. And he used to perform at Pier 39 in San Francisco. He's a master juggler at his craft, respected by his colleagues and adored by his fans. And he closes his performance after a wild unicycle ride through the audience and lots of mad juggling and lots of laughter. He sweeps off his hat and bows low to his audience showing the butterflies tattooed all over his head ensuring he will never return to the straight world again. My way of introducing nonfiction materials to students is by letting them know that there are no secrets, anything they want to know they can find out about in the library. And it's one of the reasons that I became a librarian. We know virtually nothing, but we know where to find it. Everything is in the library. If you want to find out enough about something, you can find out about it in the library. I proved that to myself during lunch this afternoon. I went down to the library and I took out a book called The Secrets of Alcazar, a book of magic by Alan Zola Kronzek. I've always wanted to know how to do magic. Do we have any volunteers from the library? When I use magic during a book talk, I usually use it as a way of sparking interest in nonfiction materials in a way that's fun and exciting and makes it seem very, very appealing. Their interest is immediately peaked. It's one of those props that you can use in book talking that's guaranteed to produce results and that doesn't take a great deal of time or money in order to produce. It is the nine of... No, the nine of hearts. Is that correct? Show it to the audience, please. When I'm invited into a classroom and present a series of book talks, there are any numbers of ways to structure that presentation. Sometimes the books that you've chosen sort of fall into a natural pattern. You want to start off with a saco book talk, one that catches kids' attention and makes them want to listen to the second one. But after you've sort of peaked early on, you can work into more thoughtful or slower works and then finally build up to a climax again, sort of the same way that a good book works. Other times, I'm invited into a classroom and asked to present material on a specific theme. You have to make each one sound interesting. After all, the teacher wants you to be an exciting student about something that's going to be studied in class afterwards. A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry is considered a classic in black American literature. It's a drama that has also become a successful Broadway play and a film. It's the story of the younger family. It seemed that everything in the younger family's apartment was tired and worn out, including a lot of the uninvited pests. Too many people had lived there for too many years. The younger family consisted of Mama Younger, who was a recent widow and now head of the family, her son Walter, his wife. There are very few rules about book talking, but there are three that are really almost basically unbreakable. First of all, don't talk about a book you don't like, don't talk about a book you haven't read, and don't tell the ending. The idea isn't to tell the people that you're talking to everything about the book. The idea is to tell them just enough to make them want to read it, enough money to make ends meet, but in spite of that ambition ran high in this family. Mama Younger puts a down payment on a house in a much nicer neighborhood, so a lot of joy is experienced in the younger family's household for the next few weeks, and Moving Day finally comes. Before the moving vans arrive, Walter has a visit from one of his other partners who has been the investment, and when they leave, Mama can't believe what she's overheard. She asks Walter, is it true, son? Did you really lose all of the money? What happens to a family's dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? We've talked mostly about how to perform book talks, but of course you need an audience to perform them for. They can work with anyone, from kindergarteners to senior citizens, and can be done in a variety of settings. Frequently, school classes are the best audience that you can find. In order to get in touch with those classes, you probably need to get in touch with the principal or the librarian at one of your local schools. Explain to them what you'd like to do, and how you can turn kids on to books through book talking. I never hesitate to tell teachers in my building that I'm available to come into their classrooms and acquaint their students with the new material that's continuously coming into the library. The best thing about book talking is the connection that it makes with students. It's very easy sometimes for librarians to sit behind their reference desk and answer the same sort of questions over and over and over again. But to move out from behind that desk and to invade foreign territory, to go out into classrooms and talk to kids directly, to confront them in the stacks and help them find the kind of books that they want, provides a kind of reward that their reference question is never, never going to give you. I like the human aspect of being a librarian. I like the connection that it makes with students and book talking provides that bridge. Because I like reading so much and I like sharing books with kids and working with young adults, that's my personal reward if I've had the opportunity to go and talk to them about the book. It's rewarding when somebody applauds when they rush right up at the end of the talk and at the end of the class period and say, can I take this book home now? Is it in my school library? What time does your library open? Those are personal rewards for me. This is a book called A.C.I.D. Research and Experience both show that book talking works. Kids do come into the library, ask for and check out the books and read them and then come back and ask for more. That's why book talking is important and that's why I do it.