5 Tips on How to Pick Up Books

A part of one of my bookshelves

I remember every summer my grandfather used to take me to a library and I would sit there the whole day reading books. There was no TV, ipad or mobile devices to keep me busy. Thankfully I was a voracious reader. It's helped me all along my life. I'm a true book lover and I love shopping online and at book stores. I have three bookshelves at home filled with books.
So here are 5 tips to buy books and read more this summer!

1. Mix Genres - Every book store and online mart has books by genres. Fiction, Nonfiction, Self-help, Travel, etc. It’s easy to go to a books store or online and go through the genre you really like. But what’s even more interesting is to pick up a genre you’ve never read. If you’re a hard core romance person, why not try a self-help book? If you only like reading thrillers, why not glance at a travel book? Don’t limit yourself to what you like. There’s a whole world of books out there that you should be reading to expand your knowledge and understanding of the world and develop your personality!

2. Mix Fat and Thin – Some people like only reading thin books so they can get through a lot of books soon and say “Oh I’ve read fifty books.” But the purpose of reading a book is to do many things – entertain you, or educate you, or make you think, or suck you into a world that you’ve never imagined and enlighten you. What it’s not supposed to do is make you brag about how quickly you read it. So for every three thin books you read, find one that is at least 400 or more pages and read that!

3. Covers & Colours – Sometimes we like the cover of a book and we pick it up. Most often it’s the mood we’re in that draws us to the colours of the book. Say you want to read something new but don’t know what you feel like buying. Close your eyes and imagine a colour. Let the colour embrace you. Then if you’re in a book store, go and find 5 books with that colour on the cover. Or online type the colour and see how many books you find with the colour as a title. You’ll see that you’ll find a story that you may want to read!

4. Blurb and Bestsellers – Often we pick up a book for the genre, the cover and/or because it’s a bestseller but we don’t read the blurb. The blurb is the most important part of the book. It actually takes longer for an author to write the perfect blurb than write out characters for their novel! It’s the brief synopsis that goes on the back cover of the book. It tells you what the book is about, the characters, the era when it is happening and maybe a twist. I urge people of all ages to always read the blurb before buying the book. Let it appeal to you. Let the story sink in. Do you want to know more about it? Then only buy it. Never buy just because it’s a bestseller and everyone is reading it. You might actually hate it later and kick yourself for wasting money instead of buying another less popular book with a better blurb!

5. The First Chapter & Classics– Every good fiction author takes plenty of time to write his first chapter. This is the hook for the reader to get into the book. I would recommend that you always read a sample of the book which is generally the first chapter before you buy a book. Often we are expecting the same thing since we are prone to like only one genre. I would recommend that everyone tries something new at least once in three months. Pick up an author you’ve never read, a genre you’ve never tried or a classic book like Charles Dickens or Thomas Hardy or Naipaul or Forester that it very different. Open up your reading to vast experiences and you’ll be rich with stories for the rest of your life.