how to read more: ask yourself one question

It’s the book review off-season for me. This is intoxicating – I can read w.h.a.t.e.v.e.r. I want, and on my own timeline. However, I know from experience that this reader’s high can wear off quickly. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – there’s an inevitable ebb and flow to any reading life – but personally, I find it more difficult to pick up and finish new books if I’ve taken too long of a break.

For me, best way to maintain reading momentum is picking the right books. It’s so much easier to find time to read when you can’t put the book down; it’s like the book itself does the heavy motivational lifting for you. For me, the books don’t have to be universally GREAT, five-star reads. They just have to be good enough and well paced enough and otherwise interesting enough to keep me moving through and on to the next; identifying and gathering those enough books is key.

So how do you keep the virtuous cycle churning and find these enough books? The right book for the right time? The specifics of what and how you read are personal, but I’ll tell you what I did a few weeks ago to gather up some potential good enough books.

First, I thought about where the various pools of potential books that I want to read “live.” Like literary tastes, reading methods and preferences vary between individuals, but the places you find new books to read are likely somewhat discrete. Some people like to keep a towering stack of books next to their bedside, others a TBR list in a notebook, others a few MBs of purchased Kindle books they haven’t yet virtually cracked. Some people like to spend time reading reviews or blogs to find reccs on the fly, others prefer to visit their books in person – at a store or the library – and see where their whims take them.

My Potential Reads live in a few places:

On my physical bookshelves at home, where I put them after I bought them or someone bought them for me, or when I brought them home from the library.
On my library holds list.
In the small hoard of galleys I keep at work.
On my embarrassingly large To-Read shelf on Goodreads.

For some, enviously more decisive people than I am, this might be enough to arm you with a battalion of good books. If you thought it was interesting enough to buy, check out, or list then it’s probably good enough to read! But for me, it’s not quite enough. Reading through every book I own just because it happens to live in my house or on my eReader seems like a grand idea, but to me, it ends up feeling depressingly like required reading. Which is not a feeling that usually inspires me to read.

So I took another step. I reviewed each “pool” of books briefly and asked myself this question of each:

“Do I definitely want to read this book, eventually?”

And this was enough to help me separate the wheat from the chaff in my too-long to-read lists, to pinpoint those good enough books that actually compel me to read them.

Lastly, I wrote down the first five or six titles that yes, I did want to read someday, eventually, and then took a second to check my list for balance. My list was a little adult nonfiction heavy. I reviewed my to-read lists again with an eye for fiction, especially children’s and YA, and wrote down the first few I found that, yes, I did want to read. Someday.

And since I made the list, just a few weeks ago, I have finally read three books that I definitely wanted to read some day. Three down, three hundred thousand to go!