What makes you choose the books you read?
Genre? Reviews? Certain authors? Covers? Recommendations?
Anything and everything. Well, maybe not genre—I think of that as functional and contextual, rather something interesting in and of itself. But if I see a good review, it’s on the list. Is it someone I’ve been meaning to read? Boom, on the list. Did someone I trust recommend it to me? On the list. Is the cover pretty? Boom, on the list. There’s a reason this blog is called The Literary Omnivore: I will read just about anything, and my selection process is far from, well, selective. If I identified with bird imagery at all, Magpie would be in the name of this blog.
Essentially, it’s whatever catches my fickle eye, and that can be anything from an interesting presentation to a story element to an author’s name to just looking cool. Whenever I’m at a library, I will come home with stuff that’s on my list—and anything that looks remotely interesting, like a book on candy or an oral history of NBC.
If you’d like to see what this looks like in practice, let me direct you to my “Books to Read” spreadsheet.
I agree about the hard-to-untangle confluence of reasons but there is yet another moment of choosing and that is the moment you grab one of these books from the TBR pile. I have no idea about what makes me take one over another although I do know there is a preference for “light” or not at the time. Otherwise, it’s very hard to say!
Yeah, sometimes there’s a reason I pick up one book instead of another… but eventually, I’ll get around to the other book!
When I add a book to my stacks, it’s usually because I’ve been noticing that book…in the blogosphere, in magazines, on Goodreads, on Amazon….and once I have the book, my mood often dictates what I read in a given week.
Here’s MY BTT POST
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I love your post! If you’re a magpie, allow me to crash into your nest so I can read your books, too?🙂
My BTT post – http://asjennflipsthrough.blogspot.com/2013/06/booking-through-thursday-choosing.html
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It’s really an all of the above answer for me. Sometimes it’s the cover, sometimes it’s a review or recommendation.
2 Kids and Tired Books BTT
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