What are you going to read this year?
While it’s always fun to reread favorite books, I’m sure you’re going to read plenty of new books, too. But here’s a suggestion: Don’t just read new books—read new kinds of books, too. Explore your bookstore and/or your library for books outside your usual spheres of interest.
As a stagestruck teen, many decades ago, I was delighted to discover one day that play-scripts are published in book form. I was browsing through the humorous nonfiction in the library—an area I haunted regularly as humorous essays were then even as they are now among my favorite reading matter—and idle curiosity inspired me to start exploring what lay beyond the Dewey Decimal area I was most accustomed to. I soon found myself facing a book titled something like Best Plays of 1957. Entranced, I pulled out the book and looked at it. What a treasure trove! While reading a script didn’t have quite the same allure as seeing a real Broadway show (or even a local amateur production of a play), it nonetheless opened a whole new world for me—Broadway shows in print. And it was a world I would never have been aware of if not for my own not-so-idle (as it turns out) curiosity.
This accidental discovery not only led me to a whole new and totally wonderful area of reading matter, it started me on the delightful habit of browsing the stacks in the library to see what other fascinating finds I could make outside of the areas I usually looked for books in.
If you are hooked on mysteries to the exclusion of almost all else, have you given mainstream fiction a chance? If sci-fi is your thing, how about fantasy or speculative fiction? Better yet, if you normally read only novels, how about giving nonfiction a chance? Or vice versa?
If you read the newspaper daily with an avid interest in current affairs, do you follow through in your local bookstore—or does habit confine you only to the shelves of your preferred motivational books? Do you restrain your explorations to the cookbook section when you might find something absorbing under Religion & Spirituality?
Be like Columbus—an explorer! There are new worlds to discover out there, new reading enjoyments to explore. Whether you cruise the stacks in the library or your local B&N or indie bookstore, bring home something different the next time you set foot in whichever place you go to for a fresh “fix” of reading matter.
Make 2016 the year you make new discoveries and widen your reading pleasures.