Via Sandra Schwab via email, and the Professors Brilliant at Teach Me Tonight, everybody book your trips to Chicago to go curtsy gracefully to University of Chicago student Elizabeth Litchfield, who won the 2008 T. Kimball Brooker Prize for Undergraduate Book Collecting.
Her entry, A Library of Love: Challenging the social order one couple (or threesome?) at a time, won her not only a monetary prize, but also a special display of eight romances, once of which is Schwab’s The Lily Brand. In the comments on her blog, Litchfield writes,
I really enjoyed The Lily Brand and thought it stood out from the crowd in a lot of respects. I also like that people really hassle me about the cover, but when I get them to read the book they invariably are impressed and enjoy themselves as well. That little surprise and undermining of expectations is one of my favorite parts of pushing romances on unsuspecting doubters.
Well played, Ms. Litchfield, well played. Congratulations!
I wonder how many other people are going to print this list and take it to the used bookstore with them the next time they go….
/em raises her hand
I’m definitely looking for some of the books off that list. And it was accompanied by an excellent essay.
I really enjoyed reading her essay. *wishing MY students were as articulate, sigh* I think her collection and mine probably have many titles in common! Now if only someone would offer a prize that would encourage me to organize and catalog my shelves and piles into a personal library.
I soooooo want to read Sandra’s books, but they’re not in ebook anywhere I can find, and I hate waiting for books. This is really cool.
That’s just amazing.
I am in love with this list. Every time I got to a new subgenre I’d think, well, I own x and y authors that would fit here—and every time, she’d have those authors on her list.
Wow. Litchfield definitely deserves an award for this. I’m saving the list for my next trip to the bookstore, and I hope it will also inspire me to organize my own collection…. Oh, who am I kidding? It’s never as much fun to sort through your own books as it is to riffle through another’s collection. SonomaLass, need help cataloging your books?
I have been in full giggles and waving hands mode for a while now. I am so pleased that people are reading my essay and finding my bibliography useful (when I constructed my list I was in full not-writing-my-thesis-denial mode and there are a couple of errors), especially since I thought that the committee at the Reg would read it and that would be the end of it.
So thank you for reading and being interested! It has really made my week. (Whom am I kidding? My month, or maybe even both April and May…)