One of the things I love about my book club, Flips Flipping Pages, is how it opened up new worlds of reading for me.
In the past, I was averse to reading books other people raved about, mainly because I like discovering books on my own, and with the exception of my cousin Dianne, I don’t know anyone who has the same taste in books as I do. The more a book was foisted on me, the more I resisted it, and if I was interested in a popular book, I usually chose to read it long after the hype had gone down.
Making friends with other readers made me realize a bunch of things. One, I was missing out on a whole lot of books. Two, people with entirely different tastes in books can like a same book, or even find different elements to like in one book. And three, you don’t even have to like a book to find it interesting!
Of course, this realization has had its repercussions: the inability to walk out of a book store empty-handed, the triple-layered shelves of TBR books, and transforming from a strict monobookist to a juggling polybookist, but because there are other people as pathologically addicted as I am to books, I don’t really mind.