How to Select a Book

A friend asked me recently what I was reading currently and how I chose my books. That got me thinking…how DO I chose books to read? With so many books on bookstore shelves, listed online, and catalogued in libraries, it can be difficult deciding which book to read…and there are always more books than I have time to read. I realised I had three ways of selecting books: a targeted approach, a general browsing approach, and a totally random approach.
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The reading writer: finding inspiration from your reading

Like a Bowerbird, I have become an avid collector. I imagine inside my mind there is an open space delicately lined with found language, words of beauty – it is quite a thing to behold! I tuck each snippet away, weaving one line, one word, with others.

Bower-Bird-NestIt is the hope of every male Bowerbird that his blue-blessed bower will attract a twittering mate. My bower will attract great ideas from which stories will flow. As I gently tuck these phrases into my collection, other previously collected words stand out, or are plucked out, and used to prompt my writing. Of this I am certain: collecting small well-crafted gems from other writers inspires me in ways I would never have thought possible. Photo credit.

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The reading writer – more first page study

Author Francine Prose, in her book Reading like a Writer, says she learnt to write by reading. “I read for pleasure, first, but also more analytically, conscious of style, of diction, of how sentences were formed and information was conveyed, how the writer was structuring a plot creating characters, employing detail and dialogue.”

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