Read What You Want

I read about 200 books a year.

I read almost exclusively new fiction (titles published the same year I read them). AND YET my TBR (to be read) pile continues to grow because I can’t fit in reading every title that appeals to me. AND YET YET I spent a bit of time today talking to someone who reads a subset of new fiction that I never read.  

Like, literally, there is SO MUCH THAT GETS PUBLISHED EVERY YEAR! And so this post is about how we pick the books we are going to read in the limited book reading time we have available. No matter how much we read we need to be somewhat selective. 

I think somewhere in our schooling we are fed the idea that some books are Better than others (that capitalization of Better is intentional). We learn that there is a canon of Western Literature that we need to read to be considered an educated individual.  

While there is a case to be made for this canon, it is also just clearly notoriously non-diverse (by definition), very much a product of western culture.  

That said, having a broad understanding of the canon can be important simply to understand cultural references. One could make the case for the canon being a long, drawn-out version of today’s meme culture. It’s just a very specific kind of cultural literacy to be able to catch when someone, say, throws a Shakespeare quote into a conversation. Every new publishing year there are awards that crown new books considered of the highest quality. They are sometimes popular, but not always.  

Sometimes they are actively unpleasant to read. For example, last year’s Flesh was definitely NOT my cuppa. 

Somewhat discouragingly, we also tend to be dismissive of truly popular authors in the present day and ignore the fact that Dickens, for example, was POPULAR during his own time. Think Stephen King-level popularity in terms of broad appeal and general recognizability. Somehow modern readers see present-day popularity more as a sign of lack of quality than a sign of quality…and I think it’s fair to suggest that we reflect on what that says about us rather than what it says about the canon.  

NOTE: I would not go so far as to suggest that all very popular titles that touch a chord SHOULD be added to the canon. For example, it’s important we remember that Fifty Shades of Grey was a publishing phenomenon when it came out more so than that we all read more thinly disguised Twilight fanfiction. Yes, that’s snarky. If you love Fifty Shades and other dark romance titles, you do you, all good.  I’m more pointing out that books can be BOTH high quality and popular, but there is a Ven diagram involved here AND we are all able to have our own opinion about these things because we’re all reading for different reasons.

But let’s talk a bit about popularity, because that can be a really good way to determine books to read. The idea being: if a lot of other people found this entertaining, then maybe I will too. I also think we live in a time where folks are generally a little leery of trusting the masses to determine what is best for them, in part because of the political climate and broader feelings that we aren’t necessarily always satisfied with the choice the majority makes, no matter what that choice is. AND BUT SO there are best seller lists, and they can be a very good way to determine what books might be titles with broad universal appeal. I especially look for titles that have been on the bestseller list for multiple weeks (or the whole ding dang series; looking at you Dungeon Crawler Carl). The best current example of broadly long term popularity right now is probably The Correspondent. I’ll unpack that comment in a subsequent post when we talk about finding readalikes for books we’ve loved. 

AND then there’s the way publishing works…which is to identify a BIG hit from the bestseller lists, then cultivate a whole lot of readalikes (there’s that word again, really just a book with very similar appeal factors to each other) to the point that the quality of the offerings in that category inevitably collapses and the truly good examples of that microgenre become very difficult to identify because they are all marketed as being interchangeable (right down to their cover art!) 

Really the point I’m trying to get to is once we’ve gotten through our schooling and are literate adults, we are allowed to make our own decisions about what books are to our tastes. I am of the firm opinion that no one should read based on what others will think about what they are reading, but rather to meet whatever need they have at the time.   

Each of us reads for so many reasons, from information seeking to personal improvement to entertainment. And when it comes to entertainment, we all have different ideas of what is entertaining.   

Are you wanting to be comforted? Are you wanting to be grossed out? Do you want to be swept up in a romantic whirlwind? Are you wanting to think about the world around you? Are you wanting to be immersed in a setting that is far from your own experience? Do you want to learn more about a period in time? Do you want to challenge your thinking? There are so many reasons we pick up the books that we do.  

In my next post I’ll dig deeper into some of these threads and will teach you librarian tricks for finding your next great read.  That said, we are always happy to help you out, so come to the library or fill out the form at JCLS Discovery for some virtual book finding help! Happy reading.