Christmas Book Talk

I took a bag of Cybils books with me to the family gathering so I could distribute them to two young relatives who are beginning careers in teaching. The young man has a master's degree in education and will begin a long-term sub position with a fifth grade class on January 2. The young woman is about to start her junior year as an undergraduate education major.

Okay, I got the young man started on the Artemis Fowl series a couple of years ago. So he received my copy of The Lost Colony. I got him so seriously hooked on the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series that he went out and bought book two. So the young woman received The Sea of Monsters because she didn't have it, and the young man received the other "heroic" series book Samurai.

The young man was into comic books in his youth, so I gave him Abadazad because it started out life as a comic book series. I also gave him Homefree because I saw the third X-Men movie Saturday night, and I thought I saw similiarities between the two because they both involved kids with paranormal abilities being recruited for a school for people like themselves.

The young woman is into science, so she ended up with The Extraordinary and Unusual Adventures of Horatio Lyle. She also took Into the Woods.

I gave the young man The Softwire because he seems like someone who could get into hardcore scifi. He was also interested in Hellbent for himself. And when he heard that Beka Cooper was a police procedural, he took that for himself, too. Both those books are too old for gradeschoolers.

The Beasts of Clawstone Castle and The Changeling went to the young woman. She thought the premise for The Lurkers sounded interesting, so she took that as well.

The young man's mother has just finished Larklight and will pass it on to him. If he reads it, he'll be the fourth family member to do so. We like that book.

There were other books in my bag, but I can no longer recall what went to whom. And there will be more books to come in the future.

These are all worthy books because someone liked them enough to nominate them for a Cybil. My hope is that the children in these new teachers' classrooms will pick them up, read them, and become new fans for these authors and this genre.