Where Books Come to Life: Grade 9 English Seminar Presents Living Libraries

Each year, the event is a highly anticipated culmination of one unit within Grade 9 English Seminar, an application-only subsection of the Grade 9 English program. Compared to a traditional English class, the format of the seminar is more of a “book club” style, with students choosing the book they want to read and discuss in small sections. The sections, each run by a faculty mentor, meet once per week in the spring semester. The seminar is pass/fail, relieving some of the pressure on grades to focus more on discussion. 

For the Living Libraries, students find a variety of creative ways to respond to the prompt: “Make the book come alive in a room.” Students have a small budget and are tasked with making an immersive experience for their peers and other visitors to their “library.” Each experience is about 15 minutes long.

Maddy Smith, Upper School English teacher and seminar coordinator, leads one of the five sections of the seminar, with other sections led by Jennie Jacoby, Mac Caplan, Julian Willard, and Mary Mertsch. 

“We tend to pick good books that are pushing students’ level a little bit, and topics that they wouldn’t read in a typical English class,” said Smith. Mysteries are one genre that doesn’t usually fall within the traditional English curriculum, and several of the students’ picks for this year’s Living Libraries fell within this category.

“We essentially come up with titles that we think are worthwhile reads and ones that young teens will appreciate,” said Jacoby. “In other years, my students have read such varied titles as Wuthering Heights, Owen Meany, and Snow Falling on Cedars.” 

“It’s very interactive and student-driven,” said Paula Schechter ’28, a student in Willard’s section, on the structure of the seminar class. 

This year, students in Willard’s section chose to read In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O’Brien. The novel, which follows a Vietnam War veteran making sense of his past, plays with different timelines and narratives. In interpreting the book for their Living Library experience, the group considered many different ideas.

“The book is very descriptive, so I thought it would be a good idea to have a whole new experience of all the senses,” said Schechter. “The fact that the book was set in the woods—that’s a very cool setting to portray in a classroom.” 

The group filled the room with ivy plants and created a mist in the air, playing with the senses.

Charlie Tandon ’28, another member of the section, said, “It’s an unsettling kind of book. As the reader, you gradually learn more as you go on. We wanted to have the same effect when people walked through the room.” Participants had to walk through a tight space upon entering the classroom. “The room was built around making people feel uneasy and unsure of what is happening,” Tandon explained.

Another Living Library choice, All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, is a novel set in World War II in which the protagonist, Marie, is blind. The group sought to simulate a high-pressure situation in their room. Participants sat opposite a partner, and one person from each pair was blindfolded. The seeing partner then had to describe how to open a puzzle box in a short period of time and quickly exit the room to “escape.” Adding to the sensory experience was a soundtrack of Debussy’s Clair de Lune, a tie-in to the novel’s setting in France. 

In the room for Beartown by Fredrik Backman, which centers on a crime surrounding a youth hockey team in a small town, the group played with the idea of narrative perspective. Each participant received a slip of paper with the name of a character and letters and numbers corresponding to quotes from the book scattered and labeled across the room as perspective in a court case. At the end of the 15 minutes, the participants gathered and voted on whether they thought a particular character was guilty of the crime, based on the perspective they gained from their assigned character. 

Individual choices play a big role in how the libraries come to life, and students are given lots of creative license, as shown by groups interpreting the same book in very different ways. 

Two sections this year read Miracle Creek by Angie Kim, which is described as a literary courtroom thriller about an immigrant family and a young single mother accused of killing her autistic son. 

One group framed this as a murder mystery—creating a dark room with information pages of the suspects posted on the walls for visitors to browse and crack the clues. The other group simulated the experimental health treatment center that is a large part of the novel’s setting. In the book, patients receive treatment for a variety of health ailments in hyperbaric oxygen tanks. In the classroom, participants donned “oxygen masks” and watched Barney & Friends on television, mimicking an environment the child in the book may have experienced. 

There is a competitive element to the Living Libraries as well—at the end of the event, the faculty mentors meet and vote on the groups’ success in different categories: most creative, most immersive, best use of text, clearest vision, and most ambitious. Each of the libraries had shining qualities in one or more of these categories, but In the Lake of the Woods earned the highest vote from the students. 

The prizes are mostly beside the point, though. “The prompt of the Living Library is to make the book come alive in a room,” said Smith. And if this year was any indication, students not only met that charge, but exceeded it. 

Students were equally thrilled by their peers’ creativity in the different rooms. “They all had such fun activities,” said Schechter. “They really make you feel the emotions the different characters are feeling.” 

Tandon concluded, “It was really cool how different groups interpreted their books in different ways and set up their groups. They each took elements from the books and turned it into a really visual and sensory experience.”