Students from Wah Yan College (Kowloon) won the competition.The annual competition is open to students from Secondary One to Three. It promotes reading for fun at schools. The read-a-thon started among international schools but has since spread to 16 local schools.
This year's final took place at Law Ting Pong Secondary School last Thursday. Students of the four finalist schools - Wah Yah, TWGHs SC Gaw Memorial College (Tsing Yi), St Mark's School and YMCA of Hong Kong Christian College - answered brain-teasing questions about the 12 books they had been asked to read. "It's my last year in this, so it's a memorable ending," Wah Yan's student Mathew Ho Yiu-chung said.
Members of the boy school's team said they had no special plans for the competition and just read the books they enjoyed reading most.
"Our strategy is to read more and practise more so that we don't get frightened onstage," team member Arthur Lau Chak-kai said.
The duo said they enjoyed learning about history from the novels. Among the books they read were The Ink-Keeper's Apprentice, a novel about old Japan, and The Melting Pot, a tale of Chinese immigrants in Australia. "It's not really about the competition. It's about reading for pleasure," said founder Janet Mann, a librarian at Law Ting Pong.
Visit www.battleofthebooks.hk for more details.