Just to warn you.
First of all, I'm still excited about my Reader's Advisory class, though I think I got a taste of reality today. In my Acquisitions class, we had sort of a book "discussion" based on our selection assignment. We were supposed to find four books, find two reviews about each of those books, and talk about whether they'd be a good acquisition. For the class portion, we were supposed to share the books and our genre. Oh yeah, all the books had to be in a certain genre.
I was fairly excited about this. I think that you can sometimes find new books in situations like this, and I did come home with a list of 10 or so books that I might look to see if my library has. So I went into class mostly looking forward to what was going to happen. Within the first ten minutes of the book "discussion" I wanted to bludgeon my brain out or rip my eyes out or puncture my ear drums. One of the three.
You see, people don't know how to talk about books. I don't need to know every plot point in the book; that's what reading it is for. I don't even really need to know what it's about, save for one sentence or two. Telling me the plot isn't helping me analyze whether or not to read the book. Was it good? Was it bad? Were the reviews good? Bad? Should my library purchase it? Should I read it? Saying this is not good: "So there's this boy and he's kind of nerdy but then this girl decides to play a joke on him by dating him and that's kind of mean of her, but the other kids think it's funny and make fun of him and then the mean kid is mean to this cat and the other nerdy kid wants to rescue the cat but doesn't know how and has all these schemes like wearing different clothes or eating gross food and then the girl realizes she's been mean and sticks up for the nerdy kid and they end up dating which makes the mean kid mad and so he acts meaner but it all works out, sort of."
Um, no. And it was like this all morning. It took 6 women an hour to talk about these books, and only because 2 of the six understood how to keep it to a minimum. It seems like these are people who simply don't read a lot, or don't talk about what they read, at the very least. Because part of talking about books is NOT recounting the plot. Part of talking about books is showing some comprehension of what the book is aiming for; part of talking about books is putting the book within some sort of context. And part of talking about books is knowing what information is pertinent and what information is useless. And a blow by blow account of the plot of a book doesn't work for me. I looked at the clock during one woman's turn, and she took 5 minutes alone to talk about a 32-page kids book. She basically read us the story, but in her own words. It wasn't story-time! It seems to me that maybe these women didn't understand the purpose of what we were doing.
So you can see why I might worry. Still, I have a lot of faith in the instructor of my RA class; and I don't think that class will in any way resemble what happened today. Which is why I'm still mostly excited with a tinge of worry, instead of worried with a tinge of excitement. I still can't wait to rip into sanctioned romance reading. It might be the best ever class just because I can finally say that my romance reading helped me in my career.
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