How to Do a Book Talk

Gale Eaton
Massachusetts School Library Media Association
Annual Conference, October 28, 2002
Sturbridge, MA

Booktalking: One method of pushing books

My assigned topic today is "How to Do a Book Talk."

The purpose of booktalking is to get people you care about to read books you care about. It's only one of a librarian's tools for promoting good books, but it's one of my favorite ones - partly because you can't do it online. You can write reviews and annotations and summaries of books and post them online. You can even post the scripts for book talks online. But a genuine book talk involves talking.

As a form of communication, booktalking involves a speaker, a message, and an audience. Let me start with the audience.

Audience

The best audiences for booktalks are above the primary grades: older children, teenagers, and adults. For young children, I like storytelling or reading aloud better. But by the time they're in middle school, you want to entice children to read longer books - novels, biographies, and assorted nonfiction. You need to tell them just enough to whet their appetites, and set them free to explore on their own.

Booktalking works: Joni Bodart's research has shown that booktalking is an effective way to get high school students to read selected titles. And it's worth doing: Stephen Krashen, in The Power of Reading, demonstrates that the more students read for pleasure, the better their reading skills become. Even if what they choose to read is comic books, their reading improves. 

Booktalk audiences can be individuals or groups. A librarian who knows both her collection and her users can give on-the-hoof reader's advisory service to individuals, talking up just those books that are most likely to appeal to the reader or serve a need. A children's or young adult librarian can give a booktalk to a classroom or an auditorium full of kids, weaving bits on diverse books around a single theme. A librarian can give booktalks to clubs, teachers doing in-service training, or groups of senior citizens.

If librarians don't book talk, others will. Commercial interests will. Some of the slickest booktalks nowadays are on television, and it can be scary for us to compete. But here are two good things to remember:

• First, there wouldn't be booktalking on TV if there weren't a market for it; people do want to hear about books.
• Second, if you're booktalking in person, you have at least one advantage over any TV personality: you're there, and you're responsive.

Even if you aren't a professional entertainer, the sincerity of your interest in your audience and in the books will help create a friendly context for the booktalk. One librarian even wrote letters in advance to members of the class she was asked to address. 

Speaker

Getting to know your audience is one important way to prepare for booktalking. You need to know their interests and capacities, and, more important, you need to care about them.

You also need to know and care about the books you're going to discuss. Faith Hektoen, as a state library consultant in Connecticut some decades back, reported that the average children's librarian had a repertoire of about 20 titles to recommend. When you consider children's range of interests and reading abilities, that's just not enough. Under Margaret Edwards, a pioneer of young adult services at the Baltimore Public Library, new YA librarians had to memorize no fewer than 300 booktalks before she recognized them as full professionals.  

Booktalking also calls for a few speaking skills. If you're nervous, these are things you can practice:

• A relaxed posture - try to stand straight, shoulders back, feet slightly apart.
• Deep breaths - with your diaphragm. Journalist Ida Tarbell, who took up speaking late in life, practiced by lying down with a stack of books on her stomach and soon learned to project more strongly.
• Relaxation - a choir director used to call for "idiot jaw" and recommend yawning ease tight vocal cords.
• Eye contact - preferably with somebody in the audience who looks friendly and encouraging. 

Message: Choosing materials to talk about

• Things in your collection - no sense creating a demand for something you can't supply.
• Materials your audience might not find on their own, but will probably enjoy once discovered. You don't have to booktalk the most popular stuff, because they're already reading it; if you include one or two of those titles in your talk, do it because 1) you like them, 2) you can reasonably expect them to help you create rapport with your audience, and 3) you can use them as an introduction to other, less known titles your audience will enjoy. One of the worst booktalks I've ever seen featured an out-of-date series about the 50 states, not worth trying to sell (even if you could) because they were assigned reading already. 
• A mix of materials. If you're talking to a class, for instance, pick some books that will challenge the good readers in your audience, and others that won't intimidate the slowest; some that will appeal to girls and others to boys; possibly a video or two, or magazines, or comics or graphic novels, among the books.

The most important rule: Don't booktalk anything unless you've read and enjoyed it yourself.

Message: Organizing your talk

Choose titles; choose a theme; and decide if you want to use a novel approach or gimmick for all or any of your titles.

The traditional pattern is to talk about 3 to 5 featured books for maybe 4 or 5 minutes each, and to mention a few others in snappy one-liners. If you are in a school or a library, you can wheel in a truckload of books to display, but you won't have time to talk about all of them. Since you can't discuss every book, you may want to distribute an annotated list with additional selections.

It's also traditional to connect the books you're talking about with a theme. Hazel Rochman, in Tales of Love and Terror, has demonstrated how you can link classics and popular fiction by connecting them to a broad theme like "love" or "horror." This approach is flexible, and allows you to include something for everybody in the audience. Using the theme in transition passages between one featured book and the next also makes it easier to avoid ending your descriptions with that old chestnut, "If you want to know what happened next, you'll have to read the book." You can leave an audience hanging without coming right out and telling them you're leaving them hanging.

Remember that adolescents, especially, have a developmental need for participation.

• Margaret Edwards could send her well-versed YA librarians into classrooms with lists of 100 titles, where they'd let the kids choose which titles they wanted to hear about - kind of an interactive game. And of course the kids ended up with the lists.
• Sometimes it's fun to invent new participatory formats for booktalking. A wheel of fortune format? A Trivial Pursuits format? A talk show? Let your imagination run wild.

Message: What to say about each title

No matter what your organization is, it's important to do justice to each title you talk about.

• There are some familiar formulas that make it easier to do the first draft of your booktalk - things like "This is a really great book," or "If you want to know what happened next, you'll have to read the book." But these get stale quickly, and I recommend not using them - or at least not using any of them more than once in a single booktalk, no matter how many books you cover.
• Also avoid telling the whole plot (or everything but the end) in a blow-by-blow narration.
• Time is limited, so you have to be selective. Tell one episode, or adopt the accent and mannerisms of a character in the book while describing one of the other characters through his or her eyes; or evoke a mood ("Have you ever felt as if somebody is watching you, even though there's nobody there but you?"). But whatever aspect of the book you select, make sure it's representative of the book - don't retell the only funny episode in a heart-rending story, or get everybody in the mood for horror when you're offering a pleasant family chronicle.

• Nonfiction and fiction often complement each other; consider using both if they fit your theme.
• When you're booktalking nonfiction, you may not be able to organize your talk around a plot or a main character; the most familiar "book report" formulae fail you. I think if there's one overused formula in booktalks (and reviews) of nonfiction, it's probably the series: "Learn about this great subject, including x, y, and z." Oh, that's another formula - "learn about," or "let's find out about" - I challenge you not to use those phrases too often!
• Use your imagination. Your booktalk on magic books could begin with a flourish and a trick, performed in silence before you say a word (at least, maybe yours could - mine couldn't, because I would muff the trick). Remember the riddle game Bilbo played with the Gollum in The Hobbit? You could probably build a science booktalk around that, featuring books about eggs and fish and the roots of mountains and the things people hide in their pockets; the riddle format could lend itself to talking about science.

Message: Practice and delivery

A lot of thought goes into a successful booktalk. You can:

• Write it all down - the individual booktalks and the artful introduction, transitions, and conclusion, too - or just outline it.
• Memorize it (the Margaret Edwards way; she kept her workers' texts on file and they weren't supposed to deviate) - or simply remember and retell it spontaneously in new words every time (my way; I prefer to make stuff up as I go along) - or rely on written notes. A trick for maintaining eye contact if you have to use written notes is to tape them on the backs of books you'll be holding up as props.
• Practice on your family, your cat, the car ahead of you at the stop light.... Or tape yourself and listen to how it sounds.
• Time yourself. Ken Morse tells about a little boy who went to church with his father and noticed the minister putting his pocket watch on the pulpit. "What does that mean?" the little boy asked, and his father said, "It don't mean a damn thing, son." A fifteen-minute sermon (or booktalk) is almost always better than a twenty-minute one.

• Breathe from your diaphragm; relax your throat
• Maintain eye contact with your audience
• Pace your talk - don't rush it or drag it, but keep it short
• Never booktalk a book you haven't read or don't like
• Never mislead your audience about what a book is like
• Always respect your audience

Booktalking can be a huge pleasure for the booktalker. If you get the right combination, you see interest, curiosity, and even eagerness flicker across listeners' faces. You get a satisfied customer coming back and asking for more books just like the one you pitched, only different. You get a feeling of connection, which is one of the greatest highs in librarianship. 

Script for a sample booktalk