Lovestruck Part 2: Blind Date With a Book

Dating can be tough, but a blind date, well that's just asking for a letdown — right?

Not necessarily, especially when that blind date is a book you never thought of checking out!

I began doing Blind Date With A Book about five years ago. It's a wonderful way for students to connect with a book that they may not have ordinarily given a second glance, due to its cover, genre, age, or format. Blind dates, after all, come with a mystery to their character, their histories, their stories.  So, when we give them a chance to reveal their personalities, they often surprise us and the date ends with a new appreciation and sometimes, a blossoming love.

During a normal year, students could come to the Learning Commons and select their blind date from a display of prepackaged, heart-decorated dates that have humourous puns on the packaging that would give clues to the date's personality. The packages would have copied barcodes glued to the back so the dates could be checked out without the students knowing the dates' true identities. With the advent of a pandemic, however, the process looks a little different, albeit just as fun!

This year, to order a blind date, all students need to do is use the Online Book Order Form and instead of typing in the name of the book they want to check out in the "Title" section, all they need to do is type in Blind Date instead. They can even add the preferred personality (aka genre) of their blind date, such as:

• Humour
• Mystery 
• Science Fiction
• Suspense/Thriller
• Action and Adventure 
• Horror
• Romance
• Fantasy
• Magical
• Dystopian
• Historical Fiction (fictional stories based on historic events)
• Real Fiction (fictional stories based on real-life events)
• Animal Fiction (stories were animals are the main characters: ie. Warriors, Puppy Tales, A Dog's Purpose)
• LGBTQ
• Graphic Novel
• Fiction in Verse (Poetry)
• Or a combination of two genres! 
  
  
  

After submitting their orders, I get to work selecting a date for the students, packaging the dates in envelopes decorated with hearts and a couple of puns about their date's personalities/characters, include Valentine's Day Bookmarks, seal it all up and quarantine the dates for three days, as per the Learning Commons' protocols, and then they are delivered to the students' classrooms on the Heart Cart!

Blind Date With a Book will be running all through the month of February, so as many students as possible can have the opportunity to enter the book-dating scene!

As of 8 a.m. on Feb. 10, I've fixed up 32 blind dates for students!

And that is one love story that will stand the test of time: The love of reading something new!