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 Benefits of Reading Part One

Being an avid reader, the fact that some people dislike reading is simply incomprehensible to me. You see, reading has so many benefits that I feel that it would be a loss if I did not like it. I see the need to convince these book-haters that reading is good and so I will post the benefits of reading in a few parts. The first part is as follows:

1) Reading is a form of self-discovery. When you read storybooks, you will come to like and dislike certain characters. After reading more books, you will notice a trend in the type of characters you like or dislike. For example, all the characters possess a similar quality (quiet? strong-willed? compassionate? pragmatic? studious?). This will be an indication of what kind of people you would get along well with or most probably end up arguing with in real life. With this knowledge, you’ll be able to find the type of friends that will suit you most or the type of project partners that you are less likely to have a conflict with. Also, when you read, you will realise that you like certain types of places or environments (e.g. type of workplace, education system, house etc). A trend in your preferences will again surface and you can use this trend to help you choose an environment in which you would most probably feel comfortable with in real life.