I have made it to be a panellist at Readercon, in my third year of trying. My thanks to those who recommended me.

Thursday July 13
9:00 PM 6 A Hero by Any Other Name. Randee Dawn, Greer Gilman, Elaine Isaak, Kenneth Schneyer (leader), Tamara Vardomskaya. Would Maleficent be less terrifying if her name were Suzy? Would Arthur Dent and Zaphod Beeblebrox have been able to have each other’s adventures? In literature, names can serve as shorthand to imply a character’s age, ethnicity, time or place of origin, and emotional and psychological makeup. This panel will explore the art and psychology of character names.

(That was the panel description for which I went grabity-grabity-give-them-me, and I’m very glad I got it as a newbie Readerconner. I can have more panels as I grow up.)

Friday July 14
3:00 PM BH Classic YA Book Club: The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper. Victoria Janssen (leader), Sandra Kasturi, Miriam Newman, Sonya Taaffe, Tamara Vardomskaya. Will Stanton discovers on his 11th birthday that he is no mere boy. He is the Sign-Seeker, last of the immortal Old Ones, destined to battle the powers of evil that trouble the land. His task is monumental: he must find and guard the six great Signs of the Light, which, when joined, will create a force strong enough to match and perhaps overcome that of the Dark. Embarking on this endeavor is dangerous as well as deeply rewarding, Will must work within a continuum of time and space much broader than he ever imagined. Susan Cooper creates a world where the conflict between good and evil reaches epic proportions. She ranks with C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien in her ability to deliver a moral vision in the context of breathtaking adventure. We are especially interested in discussing this book in conjunction with the recent YA book club selection, The Raven Boys.

I realized as I settled down to re-reading it that mine was among the last cohorts to come through tween-hood without knowing Harry Potter. I first heard of Harry Potter in grade eight, first through a newspaper article about the first three books starting to gather steam as a publishing phenomenon, then through my friends mentioning it. But in grade six, I had read The Dark Is Rising. My, the landscape, but particularly the marketing of children’s books was different then.