Last night I had a lot of fun speaking at The Bookstall in Winnetka about the trends of 2015, 2016, and all the 2016 books I was excited about.  Afterwards a bunch of us sat down for dinner and drinks and the conversation turned, as is natural, to robots.  I had mentioned in my talk earlier that as a 9-year-old I had avoided any and all books that were potentially “meaningful” and that I sometimes have to fight that same instinct today.  A little later we started talking about robots.  To be more specific, we were talking about what happens when you replace a word in a book’s title with the word “robot”.  That’s when it suddenly occurred to me that the books I had avoided in the past would have been far more palatable to my young self, had they contained a significant uptick in robots.

Examples:

• Julie of the Robots

• Island of the Blue Robots

• Robots to Terabithia

• Robot Tremain

• Are You There, Robot? It’s Me Margaret

Then I started thinking about adult titles.  Again, robots have a tendency to make everything better.

Examples:

– Moby Robot

– Robots and Prejudice

– Remembrance of Robots Past

– Robot in the Rye

The moral of the story is that I need more robots in my reading fare.  Also, that silly season has officially begun and I need to start doing some more serious posts here.

For the record, I wouldn’t mind hearing some additional serious-books-improved-with-robot suggestions on either the juv or adult side of things.  YA is also acceptable (after all, you cannot tell me Twilight isn’t cooler if the vampires are robots).