Book-to-Book Game: Four Book Streak
Sometimes I unconsciously play a game with myself where I keep track of the similarities and ties between one book and another. When you read a bunch of children’s books in a row and there isn’t much lag time, your instinct is to make connections. I call it the Book-to-Book Game. Well recently I had a hitherto unheard of four book streak. Man, if anyone else can beat this, I would love to hear about it. Remember, the rules stipulate that you’re reading these books randomly and NOT because you think you’ll be able to make connections. The connections have to be entirely out of the blue. Here’s what I found:
Cicada Summer by Andrea Beatty – A sentence from page 39 says, “Fern and Dad chat about this and that, but after a while, Fern gets quiet and closes her eyes, and her hand taps out the beat to a song only she can hear.”
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White Sands, Red Menace by Ellen Klages – Similar to the page 74 sentence, “He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel once his ice cream was gone, keeping time to some music only he could hear.”
The book also contains a main character named Dewey.
Down Sand Mountain by Steve Watkins – Mr. Watkins’s book ALSO stars a main character named Dewey.
And then the sentence on page 216 is, “Then he said there was this thing he had figured out in the war and he guessed I didn’t understand it just yet – a lot of people didn’t understand it – that there might be hundreds of categories for the living, but there wasn’t but one category for dead.”
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman – Which finally led to the page 27 line, “A graveyard is not normally a democracy, and yet death is the great democracy . . .”
Then I read Rex Zero: King of Nothing and lost my streak, but it was still pretty good!
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About Betsy Bird
Betsy Bird is currently the Collection Development Manager of the Evanston Public Library system and a former Materials Specialist for New York Public Library. She has served on Newbery, written for Kirkus, and has done other lovely little things that she'd love to tell you about but that she's sure you'd find more interesting to hear of in person. Her opinions are her own and do not reflect those of EPL, SLJ, or any of the other acronyms you might be able to name. Follow her on BlueSky at: @fuse8.bsky.social
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OMG – when I first read your final sentence, I thought that “Rex Zero” had provoked horrible vomiting.
Now I realize it’s just a typo for “streak.”
So glad you weren’t ill after all!