The Rules of Reading —
How do you decide what to read next? Do you have a “to be read” pile by your chair? Once you read a book, do you record the title in some type of journal?
I use the internet to find a lot of my reading material. Goodreads and Amazon are two websites that help or recommend titles of interest. I also use magazines as a great source to get ideas for what to read. People magazine and Entertainment Weekly publish reviews of upcoming books and also talk of movies based on books. Twitter, Library Journal, Booklist are other sources to find lists of must read books.
Libraryreads.org is a website that picks ten new books each month. Librarians across the United States recommend the titles. Every book comes with a guarantee that it is a librarian picked good read! I try to order all ten books every month for the library.
Being the librarian that orders books for the Drake Library, I find myself constantly thinking about what books people want to read. When I go in a bookstore, new or used, I whip out my phone and take pictures of books I want to order for the library. My daughter who is 17 taught me this trick and it works well. Before I had a purse full of scribbled scraps of paper full of titles and ideas. I don’t read James Patterson myself, but he is the most wanted author at the library, so his books are automatically ordered!
I use a “jobber” to order most of the library books. Baker and Taylor is a company that provides a substantial discount to libraries for books. State organizations negotiate with jobbers to get the best discounts for the libraries within that state. I order books online these days. Book orders in the past were faxed or called in to jobbers. But the online shopping cart experience is the way to go these days! I get up to date inventory information and the library discount is automatically applied to the cart before it is submitted online.
I also talk to patrons and take requests for books to order. I am lucky enough that a member of my staff reads Science Fiction and Young Adult. Two areas I don’t read. She keeps me up to date on the books I need to order for those genres. I do the best I can, but I do appreciate patron requests.
Do you have a list of books you have read? I use Goodreads to enter all my books after I finish them. I also rate them at the time, then I don’t have to keep track of a journal. Some people use computer spread sheets for their lists. I know several ladies that have pocket notebooks full of authors and titles. Other people don’t track their reading at all. But I find it is fun to go back and look at all the books I read in a year or a season. I also sometimes cruise Amazon and read other people’s reviews of a book I just finished to see if I missed something or to commiserate with them about a sloppy plot twist.
Remember, whoever dies with the biggest pile of books to be read, wins! Or maybe it is the biggest pile of books already read.
