When I was in Melbourne for the Australian Booksellers' Conference recently, the keynote speaker was Hiroshi Sogo, the MD of Kinokuniya Bookstore, who spoke about the popularity of the Biblio-Battle in Japan. The Biblio-Battle is a social book review game that was developed at Kyoto University. The idea is, that each participant reviews a book for 5 minutes and then the group discussing it further for 3 minutes. At the end, the group decides on the book that they want to read the most.I thought it would be a good idea for our Teen Book Club to give this a go and we all had a great time. It allowed the group to discuss why they like certain books with each other and what they liked about them.
Congratulations to Kate who won the first Biblio-Battle! She was lucky enough to receive a copy of Te Papa's The Curioseum: Collected Stories of the Odd & Marvellous which has been signed by all of the authors.
