Book Tastings
1. A problem
There are whole worlds in books, but too few kids read.
Opening a book can open a life. For any kid, the library holds hundreds of hours of sheer joy. There’s a unique combination of books there for them — some which their friends would also enjoy, some which are just for them — and if they can find those books, new life paths will open to them.
Few kids will ever crack the covers.
2. Basic plan
Crack the covers.
Once a month, do a “book tasting” — bring in a pile of good books on a host of topics & from a plurality of genres. Give kids a few minutes to browse them, picking them up, perhaps making faces, only looking at their front and back covers.
Then let them each choose one, set a timer for 5 minutes, and have them open them up.
Repeat, repeat, repeat.
3. What you might see
Kids running around the room, vying to be the next one to read Diary of a Wimpy Kid or Bea Wolf or one of the Science Comics.
Kids saying, “eh, not for me” and putting one back in the pile.
Kids putting a hold on the book from the local library.
New interests and loves proliferating.
4. Why?
Each year, billions of dollars go to some of our most powerful minds to arrange pixels in novel ways to snare kids’ attentions. Books start off at a disadvantage.
Matching up kids with books, and holding open a few minutes for a first date, might be one of the absolute best things we can do with our time.
5. Egan’s insight
Where do we see this in the human experience?
Around the year 1500, intellectuals faced a novel problem: there were too many new books published each year for anyone to read them all.
Before this, books had been scarce; the proper way to read them was slowly. Francis “I Am the Scientific Revolution” found a solution —
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.
He goes on to explain —
Some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few are to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.
And this moment in history saw one of the greatest explosions of genius the world has ever experienced.
How might this build different kinds of understanding?
Good book are already built on Egan’s tools. (Really, this is a lazy pattern, piggybacking on what authors have done.) What this pattern adds, though, is a 🧙♂️GAME — it lets us turn choosing a book into play. (What do these weird emoji mean?)
And the essence of games, as Ian Bogost tells us in Play Anything, is to give us a goal, and then arbitrarily restrict what we can do to achieve it.
Does that sound odd? Think about golf: the goal is to get the ball into the hole, but you can only hit the ball with a stick. Or think about basketball: the goal is to get the ball into the hole, but you can only hit the ball with your hand. Or think about hockey…okay, a lot of games are actually just the same thing?
Bogost writes:
What we lack is a method for treating anything as inspiring like Christmas and vacation, autumn and weekend soccer.
Restriction is the trick to unlocking excitement.1
6. This might be especially useful for…
Kids who don’t see themselves as “readers”, not knowing that the secret to being a reader is just to find the right books.
Also: kids who respect book too much. Sometimes I hear a friend moan that they can’t start a new book because they need to finish an old one first. No! Wrong! The purpose of the book is to help you. Your purpose is not to finish the book.
Which is to say: we should teach kids to read selfishly.2
7. Critical questions
Q: I’m a classroom teacher, and have A LOT OF STUDENTS. Where am I going to get these books?
This is a great moment to reflect on who the children’s librarians are in your area, what their favorite kind of wine is, and whether you can get it shipped in before spring break.
By which I mean, of course, that, yeah, it’s hard to pick out great books that specifically appeal to the specific kids you have in class! This might be a great moment to call in a professional.
Q: What about hearing from the students about topics they’d like to see books on?
Yes, that sounds excellent! I can imagine a few minutes invested in having kids write down topics they’re interested in, or even having a white erase board on the wall where they can always make note of this. (…why didn’t I do this when I was a classroom teacher?)
Q: Nonfiction or fiction?
Since some kids are drawn to fiction, and others are drawn to nonfiction, I suggest alternating: part of the goal of an Egan education is to expand kids’ tastes. To get a geeky nonfiction kid interested in fiction, you don’t want to perpetually distract them with shiny fiction, and vice-versa.
Q: Say this works perfectly — don’t you stand the chance of kids getting into fist-fights over who gets to read a book next?
Randall Munroe addressed this well.
Q: I’m a parent. Can I just… take my kids to the library, and do this there?
Yes! …I think this is how I became a reader. My dad took my sister and I to the library every other week; I have fond memories of lugging home bags overflowing with books on dinosaurs. (The “five-minute timer” aspect is something I’ve added on as an adult.)
Q: Our library is haunted. Does this work with a bookstore?
Yep. Our family celebrates “Book Christmas” on the twenty-fifth of each month, and treks over to our local Barnes and Noble. Everyone gets to walk out with a new book.3
Have fond memories of your own about falling in love with books? Have any suggestions for how this might be done even better? The devil’s in the details! Become a paid subscriber and join in the comments conversation.
8. Classroom setup
You’ll want a big table to splay the books out on, and special bookshelves, so they don’t get lost.
9. Who else is doing this?
Like I said above, all this was inspired by I and my wife’s childhood memories; we formally instantiated an early version of this when we led a classroom. But I wonder if I wasn’t ultimately influenced by the for-profit “book fairs” that the publisher Scholastic puts on every year in elementary schools. Gosh I loved getting those catalogs…
How might we do this small, now?
Take your kid to the library! Task them with making a tall stack of books that look interesting. Then give them a timer, and have them go through it, five minutes a book. After each spurt, they should place the book in a “put back” or “keep” pile.
10. Related patterns
We’ll be doing a few other patterns that use Egan’s tools to help kids get into books — Living Books° (May 15) will borrow a notion on how to find good books. Book X-rays° (June 7) will suggest a method for plucking the big ideas of nonfiction quickly, and Speed-Reading° will suggest we teach kids methods for getting through more books. To balance that out, Slow-Reading° will point out all the troubles with that, and suggest we cultivate the opposite set of habits, too. Get Thee to a Library° will sketch out some ideas on how we can help families make a habit of going to the library.
Afterword: Going full-meta, here
I found the lost notebook. (Turns out I had hid it under the passenger seat of my car, so anyone breaking in to steal my iPad wouldn’t see it.) So, happy day, expect posts to return to their regularly-scheduled release dates.
Play Anything is my favorite book on games, and one of my favorite works of philosophy, and I’m just seeing now that it’s available for free on Audible if you have a Prime subscription. Recommended reading for anyone who wants to defeat irony or understand how to enjoy a Walmart more than an art museum.
My classical-education-minded friends may want to chime in that we also have a responsibility to the great authors of the past, yada yada yada. I think they have a point — and I’m very much a fan of classical education — but I prefer to flip it around: selfishly, we should be wanting to read Homer and Confucius and Austen because they offer us something important.
We make enough money now that this isn’t a hardship — but when it was, I’d recite the 16th century humanist Erasmus: “When I have a little money, I buy books; if I have any left, I buy food and clothes.”
I love the concept of book tasting and am trying to incorporate it more into my homeschooling approach. I have a kid who struggles deeply with reading assigned books, but loves to read (and re-read) books in which my kid finds a connection/meaning/purpose. Assigned book club books at school pretty much destroyed that love of reading for nearly 12 months and we're still in the recovery phase.
For my kid, quick tastes are super helpful as it reduces the pressure, provides a forum in which DISLIKING a book is ok (because in order to like or fall in love with a book, my kid needs to have the valid option to dislike/put it down and never look at it again) and a chance to get curious/observe what might make a book appealing. It also opens up the opportunity to get curious, notice details and discuss without judgement about why my kid might not like a book....and we find ways to celebrate these insights... knowing what you don't like can be just as helpful (and sometimes easier to put into words) than what you do like. Over the course of the past 5 months, my kid has returned to some beloved book series (Warriors, Harry Potter, Keeper of the Lost Cities) and discovered new loves (Calvin and Hobbes tops that list right now).
In my personal experience first as a student and now as a parent, conventional approaches to school seem to put a lot of emphasis in the lower elementary years on helping kids find books they love to read (and it's ok to stop reading something halfway through). But by the upper elementary, middle, and high school levels it seems to shift more to the "you have to read it from start to finish" approach. When I think back to some of the book club projects my kid wrote last year, I think the writing and analysis would probably have been far richer if my kid had been allowed to midway through the book write an essay outlining all of the reasons she did not like the assigned book rather than having to continuing going through all the motions.
And Brandon, I'm glad you found your notebook!