Picking Your Goods at the Bookstore

Reading books is akin to eating. You will only enjoy and continue eating food that suits your palate. So, how do you pick books that “suit your palate”? Selecting a book to read sounds simple enough, but there actually is an art to it. Here are some questions you can ask yourself before choosing your books and also some book-choosing tips I have discovered from my own reading experience that may help to enhance your own.

1) Do you prefer stories written in the first-person or third-person account?
2) What type of writing style do you like? Descriptive? Action-packed? Lots of dialogue?
3) What length of story are you comfortable with? Trilogies? Multiple-book series? Short stories? This is very important, or you will probably loose interest halfway through.
4) What kind of era do you like your story to be set in? Ancient? Modern? Futuristic?
5) Always look up book reviews on the internet first before deciding to buy a book. (Amazon is a good choice) Through these reviews, you will be able to get a glimpse into the story and you can decide whether the content of the book is to your interest.
6) Try to read free excerpts of the book on websites such as RandomHouse (it provides the first chapter free) before buying it to get a feel of what the story is like.
7) Always choose the genre that you like.

The Hobbit

Well, this is the first book I have read by J. R. R. Tolkien. Quite a boring book, I must say, as I read it at a wrong age of 16. If I had read this book eight or nine years ago, I might have enjoyed it as The Hobbit was written for children. So, if you’re around eight to ten years old and you like the fairytale kind of book, this book is one of the best I can recommend to you. However, if you’re older and you like action-packed fantasy with wars and magic and such, I would suggest that you stay away from this one. Anyway, no book is ever perfect. Now, don’t be worried, I’m not going to launch into a lengthy review here. Just a few important points…

1) There is simply too much unneeded dialogue. It decreased the quality of the story as the author seemed to be rambling on and on about unimportant stuff. It made me terribly bored.

2) The story didn’t manage to get me emotionally involved. Nothing made me laugh or weep. The characters were one-dimensional and they were simply moving from place to place.

3) Smaug died too abruptly and easily. It seemed as if the author created the character, then felt that it was a mistake or got tired of it, and so got rid of it in a slipshod manner. A supposedly powerful and fearsome dragon dying of an arrow-shot that easily? I was expecting some great battle. Oh well, this is a children’s book.