Hi everyone, happy Monday! I hope you’re doing well! Today I think I’m posting my first discussion post ever on my blog! Today I’m going to give an overview on how I choose what books to read. Let’s dive in!

I’ve wanted to write this for a while, but I’ve just never gotten around to it; it’s always felt very daunting, but today I’m going to try and tackle it. This post is now coming into existence because a few weeks ago, Zainab @Zainab Chats asked me exactly that, how I choose what to read, so that’s how we’ve gotten here.

Before I start, I need to state that I’m not a mood reader (shocker I know!) I think I’m in the 1% of readers in this category. That’s why I feel like how I choose my books is so different from everyone else. There’s a lot of method to my madness!

Now to start, I feel like I need to give a breakdown on where I get my book recommendations from, because they don’t come out of thin air! 😂

Recommendations:

1. Goodreads – a place most people get them (although I want to start getting them from StoryGraph)
2. My diverse reads calendar
3. The Canada Reads long list
4. Other bloggers/Instagram/friends
5. My Stephen King and Classics projects

That pretty much sums up all the places where I get my book recommendations. From there I have a breakdown of how I go about picking books from each place. Every three weeks I put library books on hold and I place 4 books – 2 from Goodreads, 1 from my Diverse Reads Calendar and 1 from Canada Reads. In between my library books I try to read a book I own or an ebook.

The Breakdown:

I will go into each place in detail as to how I choose the books.

1. Goodreads
   • I don’t know about you guys, but I get a bunch of emails from Goodreads. Now, I just delete them, I don’t save them anymore. But back in 2015 I created a folder in my email to save them so I could go back and get book recommendations from. I did this for years… and I still have emails in there to this day. In 2020 I stopped, but the emails that are still there, I still go through because I want to be able to say I cleared it out. I’m currently at the beginning of 2018… Goodreads used to send me 2 – 5 emails a month, so you can imagine I’ve got quite a few in there. It ranges from ‘new’ (at this point they are 5 years old) YA to top books of the month for each month of each year… 😅

• So to start, I will open an email and I’ll look at the list of books, which consists of roughly 5 books (sometimes a book will show up in multiple emails) and my first thing is to check if it’s part of a series or not.
  • If it’s not part of a series, I’ll check to see if the library has it. If they do, it goes on my physical notebook on the standalone page. If the library doesn’t have it, I move on, obviously.
  • If it is part of a series, I check to see how many books are in the series, and if the series finished. I then check the library to see if they have all the books. If they’re missing more than one or two books, I won’t add it to my list. If they do have all the books, it goes onto my physical notebook on the series page.

• Because I like to go into all my reads blind, this works really well, and I never know what I’m going to get (this goes for all the places I get my book recs).

• I’ll go through about 3 or 4 emails to add to my physical list. Once I finish reading those, I’ll go back to the folder and repeat the process. I still have a ways to go, but I like the satisfaction of deleting emails and crossing books off my list.

2. Diverse Reads Calendar

• This one is very new because I only got this calendar this year, but even once the year is over, I plan to keep getting recs from it. I really want to go in order from January to December and read all the ones I haven’t gotten to yet.

• This one doesn’t really have a rhyme or reason to it. Every month, when it’s time to put library books on hold (every three weeks) I will just pick one (that the library has) and read it. Most of the books I’ve picked have been really good reads and I can’t wait to really dive in.

3. Canada Reads

• Every January CBC will send out the long list for Canada Reads for the year. The winner is announced in March and I never read them in time because I like to take my time with them.

• This one is very self explanatory. There are 15 books listed and every time I go to the library I pick one to read. So it roughly takes me the year to read them all. This year has been really good. I have 4 more left for this year and I’m sad it’s coming to an end, but the next year’s books will be released very soon!

4. Other bloggers/Instagram/friends

• These are typically the books that I actually buy because I’ve heard and seen great things about.

• These ones I read in between my library books and I tend to read them in order of when I bought them because like I said, I’m like the 1% of the population who isn’t a mood reader (which is why all of this works).

5. Stephen King Project

• I’m going to break my last point up in two here just because it’ll be easier to follow (I hope!). For this project, my goal is to read all of his books. And the way I’ve been doing that is going one book at a time, reading a chapter (or more) every Sunday, in chronological order.

• So that’s how I pick my next King read every few months. I’m currently in the early 80s!

6. Classics Project

• For this project, I have 2 websites I’ve been using to get classic recs from – Penguins Classics that has 100 books on it and I found this blog, the Booklist Queen, where she’s also got 100 books on her list. I’ve gone back and forth between the two (and some of the books overlap).

• I read a chapter every day of a classic read. I started this project picking a book from the Penguin website, so once I finish a book I go to the Booklist Queen and I go back and forth between the two websites.

• So far, I’ve been loving this because it’s really let me read books I never would have picked up otherwise!

And just like that, that’s the secret to how I choose my next read. It’s very methodical rather than by mood. Do you have a certain way you choose you next read? Are you as methodical as I am? Let me know in the comments below!