Book Clubbing

I have a book club full of girls and one brave guy who love books, the problem is that they can never agree on what book they'd like to read so what we've done is implement the Blind Date.

Blind Dates are easy. I usually wrap a book and "tag" it with genre and single word elements so that they can't see the cover or read the backflap. It looks a little like this:

For instance Cinder by Marissa Meyer might say : Robots, Romance, Fairy-Tale Retelling

I was wary at first because the kids are so picky, but when I added the element of mystery their natural inclination to reject a thing was replaced by a stronger association of happiness that accompanies opening a gift. Only a few kids didn't like their blind date.

I wonder if the publishing industry tried this how well it would work. Trends take on a life of their own and suddenly contemporaries are done, vampires are outdated and literary is dead, but libraries are full of people who buy and read books of all genres. When all the gloss is taken away the kids just want to know, "Is it good?"

Yes, yes ma'am, it is.