How I choose a good read

Well this will be my last post on this domain. I will do another post after this one giving you my new link to go to and read my future posts. My challenge is to write a post everyday for 365 days about my personal experiences and how they shaped me to be me. I do sincerely apologize about my non edited work. I do however feel it makes it more authentic (to all those who care).

How do I pick a good book? How do best sellers make it credible yet unreliable?

I contemplated before writing this two part blog. I hope this will help you on decide how to pick your next book or maybe it won't and you have your own style in which you choose buying books. Either way I do encourage you to read because it opens your mind to so many more possibilities and opportunities. This blog post is not about how it opens new doors for you, however in my future post I can certainly elaborate.

So the first part is on how do I pick a good book. So far I have been happy with all my choices and I am not sure if it is by luck or sheer coincidence or the fact that I have only read only so many books this past year that I like them all. I do follow somewhat of a structure in choosing my books. Of course there is an old saying "don't judge a book by its cover" however it is in our nature to do exactly what we are told not to do. I do judge the book by it's cover, if the cover doesn't appeal to me unfortunately I would need a recommendation or reference to that book from one of my friends or a authors of which he/she mentions it in their book. Next I would look at the inside cover of the book, is there a write up of a short summary of the book and is there a write up on the author. I enjoy reading books that are written by credible people, who have long life experience of which they are sharing (yes I am horrible I know, stereotyping). I don't care so much for the reviews because everyone has their own tastes, and some could be skewed in terms of favorability by the reviewer. Lastly I would open to a page randomly in a book and read maybe 1-3 pages to observe the author's style of writing, everyone has their own style of writing. If you don't know what style you like, then just keep reading books until you come across a writing style of which you do not enjoy reading, make a mental note of that and when you browse through your next choices for books you can pick up on the style you don't like. So far I have not come across any style I did not enjoy, maybe it's because the content outweighed the writer's style.

Everyone has their own taste in books, that is what makes us unique.

Second part of this blog post I want to write about how some books that are best sellers are not a reliable source in which to choose your book. I recently read a blog (my apologies I forget the author's name) he wrote about how people could easily have a best seller book on sites such as amazon. He actually went ahead and proved it. Without even writing anything except for the form he filled out on the site, he took a picture of his foot, he chose 2 categories to put it in, ones that are not very popular or have many selections to choose from, asked his 2 best friends to buy the copies, whala it became the best seller. He even gives us the step by step approach in a 5 minute read. Why is it so skewed? It is because of the limited regulation I believe.

When you see the tag best seller, it is important to see who tagged it a best seller, New York Times is a reliable source and so is the washington post. Another thing to look for is how long has the book been a best seller for and the most important are how many copies were sold. A book of someones foot that sold two copies to be a best seller is not right.

I will end it on this note, don't let money discourage you from buying books, the best investment you can make is in yourself!

To be continued....