Shelfie Winners Lunch: Round 1

It’s Thanksgiving week, and what better way to kick it off than with a feast? For Teen Read week we had a #shelfie contest, and one of the prizes was lunch with three friends (prepared by the librarian). Sarina R. was the happy recipient on behalf of Middle School, and her winning entry can be seen here. Her three lunchmates were Vaishnavi D., Meg C., and Kayla S. They enjoyed homemade Macaroni & Cheese, salad, white bean bruschetta, and brownies! Yum!

We Had a Speakeasy!

On Friday we had our annual lunchtime speakeasy, sponsored by the Glass Knife. Not only did we have some fantastic spoken word poetry, we also had the musical stylings of Keaton, Anny, and Jaspreet. And we had a lot of snacks, thanks to the fine Glass Knife staffers. So much cheese!

Stay tuned for the next speakeasy–which will be from 7pm-9pm on Friday, February 27th, 2015.

November Book Club

Since it’s finally feeling a lot like Fall, the apple cider and brownies didn’t last very long during book club on Wednesday. And we can’t believe that the next book club will be focused on Winter Break reads! Where does the time go?

Anywho, here are some discussion highlights:

• Ms. Melinson talked about the new Patrick Rothfuss book, The Slow Regard of Silent Things. To the disappointment of some fans, it’s not the next installment of the Kingkiller Chronicles, but instead a book devoted to one of the characters in the series.
• Claire and Elena are stoked (as is the author of this post) about the upcoming Netflix adaptation of Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events.
• The topic of emailing authors came up, and Ms. Melinson said she highly recommends it; very rarely does an author not return her inquiries. Elena and Ms. Batarseh shared times they wrote handwritten letters to authors and received handwritten letters back. Very cool!
• Inquiring minds wanted to know what were some upcoming trends with new books. Ms. Melinson assured everyone that dystopian novels aren’t going anywhere any time soon, and the tearjerker novels a la John Green are also holding their ground.
• Anny is enjoying the latest novel from Scott Westerfeld, Afterworlds, which is about an 18 year old girl named Darcy who drops her college plans to move to New York and finish her novel. The narrative splits between Darcy’s story and Lizzie’s story–the protagonist within her novel who finds herself being a guide to souls in the afterworld.

For a complete list of books recommended during Book Club, check out our GoodReads list here.