Book Club Rumble

I love talking books with like minds, and yesterday's D.C. Kidlit book club was my monthly outing to do just that. Unlike most of our meetings, this one was a free-for-all discussion of most of the ALA winners and honor books.  Newbery, Printz, Caldecott, Geisel, Odyssey....everything!  

It went something like: NO! YES! MEH. REALLY? WHY? WHAT ABOUT ____?? WHY NOT  _____??? DID YOU SEE GAIMAN'S TWITTER?  (Backed up by passionately argued facts, of course. We're trained in the art of verbal combat.)  I half expected the non-book-wielding people near us to edge away in polite horror. Not because we were uncivil, but because we were so opinionated and enthusiastic. I mean, when's the last time you saw a bunch of people raving about books in public? 

At the end of the mad jumble of ALA books, we saved time for a more focused look at the National Book Award winner, What I Saw and How I Lied.   There was much discussion of who was a "bad guy" in this book and who wasn't, not really. Do we expect YA heroines to "do the right thing" even if everyone around them isn't? Does how deeply you get sucked into a character's point of view alter how you experience a novel? (Of course it does! But why do some readers remain distant and others buy in immediately?)

Afterwards, I was reading more of The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia and found this great quote: 

"If literary writing has any distinguishing characteristic, it's that the more you look at it the more you see, and the more you see the more you want to go on looking." 

Thanks for making me want to go on looking, book club!