Picking Out The Right Book

Story by Maddie Lajewski

Photos by Lillian Sherman

A good book can be hard to come across. Sometimes you get halfway through a book and lose interest, which can be extremely frustrating.

Finding a good book can be as simple as asking a friend for recommendations, searching online for that month’s most popular novels or just going to Barnes and Noble and reading summaries of a book that just happens to catch your eye.

“I don’t go to Barnes and Noble a lot,” said sophomore Lillian Sherman. “That’s where I’ll buy a lot of my books. But if I’m going to go just randomly, I’ll go to Target or something. They actually have a good selection there. But besides that, I go to the library.”

One could also search for a book within their favorite reading category, a genre that they know they will enjoy.

Sherman talked about her love for Twilight and vampire fantasy growing up and how that rekindled her love for reading.

“I read a lot growing up especially in middle school,” Sherman said. “I kind of stopped reading for a while though, but then I started reading fan-fictions.”

If you want to branch out from the genre you normally stick to and know you enjoy, go to a different section at a bookstore, pick a cover or title that catches your eye, read the summary and go from there. If you do not find the summary interesting, you most likely would not enjoy the actual book.

Sometimes you may want to read a classic novel. You try to love it, but you cannot even stay awake to attempt to be interested in finishing it. Try putting the book down and trying again later or put the book down for good. Many people do not realize it is ok to not finish a book or to not even want to, especially when it comes to classics.

“At first I liked the typical Jane Austen stories, going old school,” Sherman said. “But recently I’ve been liking more modern stuff like The Outsiders and The Catcher In the Rye.”

Discovering a passion for classic novels helped Sherman discover a possibility for her future as an English major that she had never considered before.

“Reading The Outsiders made me want to teach middle school,” Sherman said. “Middle school’s kind of where reading habits truly begin, I’d say. If I were to teach in middle school, I’d teach a novel to the class, then most of the time I’d have them choose what they wanted to read as long as it’s their grade level.”

So many people hate to read now because in school they were forced to read things they did not enjoy or find interesting. Now is the time to change that.

Find a love for reading by exploring your own interests and doing it for yourself; not for anyone else, not for an assignment or a grade, but because you want to.