John Umland
February 29, 2016 6:40 PM
Sonora Academy Book Club, Fourth Edition. by John Umland
When John had first returned to Sonora for his fourth year, most of his thoughts had been about whether or not returning to America when already convinced he’d only made a narrow escape in the first place was the worst of the many bad ideas he’d had in his life. Once he had started to regain some confidence in his odds of not being arrested any time soon, other things had seized his attention: classes, research, Science Club, learning to work with Seekers on top of still practicing his regular Beating, watching his back against his challenge teammates….Boredom was something John had never understood. He could always find something to fill the time. His notes on Sonora’s avian populations had just run into a new volume, he had begun documenting behavior as well as just numbers, and he always had at least a couple of experiments going in his room. He had never been completely devoid of a social life since he was five, but since he always had at least one family member around to provide that bare minimum of human interaction necessary to make sure he didn’t lose all his social skills and start lashing out at people for breathing too loudly, he thought that he could have kept himself reasonably entertained even if coming to Sonora had left him without any friends or friendly non-family acquaintances instead of working out surprisingly well for him.
Not really needing a social life was not, however, the same thing as not wanting one. His success rate for fitting in with them was mixed, but John had always liked clubs because they provided social contact with a purpose beyond just having social contact for its own sake – everyone in a club was there to do something, which made it a lot easier to figure out starting points for conversations and to keep conversations going. Clark provided his favorite such opportunity, but after he settled into something like a routine, John had noticed that nobody had picked up where his sister had left off with the Book Club. He might not have noticed if he had not been in a book club continuously ever since he had learned to read books where the text-to-picture ratio noticeably favored the words, but since he had, he had felt the loss and wondered when someone was going to do something about it. Doing so himself had not initially occurred to him; every previous head of the book club, including the founder John was a month too young to have ever met, had been a girl in Advanced classes, and two of them had been Teppenpaws. A fourth year Aladren guy met none of the established criteria for book club leadership.
After a few months, though, it had started to look like nobody else was going to do it, so John had decided it couldn’t hurt to try. He’d done a little research, made a few posters, made a few lists, and then sat down in the social area of the library to wait and see if anyone would turn up.
He was, to his surprise, a little nervous at the prospect of speaking to those who did. He told himself it was just a presentation, not much different than any of the ones he’d ever done on different cultures’ myths about the Pleiades or the history of Wales when he was younger, but the thing he was trying to sell was, basically, the idea that people should accept his suggestions about what to do. John had done that before, too, but usually while three other guys were trying to talk over him. Having the floor was new.
“Hello,” he said. “I’m John Umland, the guy who made the posters about this meeting.” He had debated invoking his relationship to the previous head of the book club since he thought his sister had been generally well-respected around the school, but had finally decided against it. New year, new start and all that, plus it might be offputting to any first years who'd never heard of her and might make everyone think something nepotistic had gone on, which was one of the last kinds of things he'd ever want anyone to think he was involved in. “Nice to see you all.”
He picked up a stack of papers and handed them to the person closest to him. “I’m passing around a list of some titles – recent acquisitions, and some stuff I think I can probably get multiple copies of – so you can mark anything you think sounds interesting and write any suggestions you have on the bottom. How often you’d like to meet, any activities you’d like to do. I was thinking of stuff like – genre-themed recruitment posters for next year, or practical meetings where we try out stuff from some books, maybe put on a play if people want to and it works out with the staff – lots of stuff we could do, and that’s just stuff I thought up. Interested to see what everyone else can. And while we mark these, we can go around with introductions and - favorite genres, or specific books if you want.” He figured he needed to do something interactive right away if he wanted to hold their attention.
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