Book Blogger Hop #37 – How Do You Choose the Next Book to Read?

The Book Blogger Hop is a weekly meme with a prompt featuring a book related question. The hop begins on a Friday and ends on a Thursday and should hopefully give people the opportunity to learn something new about the blogger.

The Book Blogger Hop can be found on Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer and obviously my answers can be found here!

I don’t choose the book, the book chooses me.

Hahahahahahahahahahaha.

Yeah, sure.

I believe that the above statement is true for cats – the cat chooses you, not the other way around. And unless we live in a fantasy or magical realism world where at times the book really does choose the reader – and opens up a whole new set of problems/ issues – in this world we’re pretty much left to our own book choosing devices.

So, what are my methods?

This is where I take the structured and organised approach and look at the books that have sat on my bookshelf or Kindle for what seems like forever and determine that something must be done.

I also look at any ARC’s I’ve requested (which is usually way too many) and note their release date.

A sexy spreadsheet is then created with all those ARC’s recorded in date order and a deadline is given (to myself, from myself) by which I need to have read and reviewed them. I then randomly pick those books that I’ve had forever and and slot them in and around those ARC’s.

This is all then made obsolete by the next approach.

My brain is always at war with itself. I am a Pisces in the Zodiac and the dual nature of two fish swimming in opposing directions is rather apt.

I am a social introvert and a smiling depressive. I like control and reckless abandonment. I want to plan every thing but give myself free time for spontaneity. I want my fun to be scheduled darn-it.

I like to plan and will always have one but there’s side of me that will always chuck out the plan and go with what I feel like at the time. There’s nothing worse that having scheduled that 700 page epic hero’s journey fantasy when you just want to read 250 pages of fluffy contemporary romance.

So this approach often trumps the first one.

I haven’t actually followed a lot of the challenges that have been created by other bloggers or by publications such as Pop Sugar but I’m not adverse to doing so, I just haven’t done anything like that yet.

I decided to do a ‘Mini Magic Challenge’ over the summer and picked five books that I wanted to read that had the same theme which was magic or magical themes in some way.

I’ve read two out of the five thus far because there both the ‘structured’ approach and the ‘mood’ approach crept in when I realised I really did need to read an ARC and also when I randomly got in the mood to read some graphic novels.

This one tends to crop up if I have either ‘mood’ read or ‘scheduled’ read book one in a series/ trilogy/ duology but then have fallen so madly in love with it that I throw out the rest of the schedule or any other approaches because I must read the next book, I MUST.

When all else fails and I reach untold levels of desperation I just chuck a whole bunch of unread books on the floor, plonk the cat in front of them and the first one she sniffs out I’ll go with.

If she lies down on one that definitely means I need to read it asap. As soon as she moves from it obviously. Which can be a while.

As mentioned on the last blog hop post I’m temporarily pausing this part of the blog because I’m struggling to write content and blog hop and write non blog content and live my day to day life.

This doesn’t mean that I’m not going to look at other people’s blogs ever again. Of course not! In fact I miss doing it very much!

I’m hoping that I can get ahead and write and pre-schedule a ton of posts which can free up some of my time to look back through everything I have missed and to get back to a place where I’m more in control!

So these are my approaches. Designed to reach dizzying realms of success right? Right?!

Do you subscribe/ not subscribe to any of these? What are your approaches? What’s your weirdest approach because let’s face it. We all have one.

Until next time when I should be talking about whether I’ve enjoyed the same book in two or more formats!