How Do You Like To Read?

And once the story's done, how do you engage with what you've read?

At one point during my Montenegro trip, my friend asked me, “How do you like to read?”

I hesitated. Normally, my answer is paperbacks, but I have been doing a lot of Hoopla reads on my phone lately, so maybe I should change my answer, when she continued.

“Do you like to review them?”

She wasn’t asking what format I preferred; she wanted to know how I preferred to interact with stories. Which, I’ll be frank, I’ve never thought about.

“I usually read and discard,” I admitted. “I don’t really talk about the books I read outside of my ace bookclub. I just finish one and move to the next. My to-be-read shelf is so long.”

She nodded.

I felt awkward as soon as I said it; we’d gone back and forth the previous night about so many titles we enjoyed or didn’t, passing recommendations. But it was the truth - once I read a book, I don’t typically discuss it.

Yet, as I finished the book my friend loaned me at the airport days later, I realized I didn’t want to just read and move on. I wanted to talk about it - what I liked and what I didn’t. I just rarely did so because, outside of my bookclub, I didn’t read things that overlapped with my friends’ in terms of title or memory.

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I’ve always talked books with people - what am I reading, sharing book recs, hitting a bookstore and passing interesting titles between friends - but that’s always felt like general conversation. It’s chatting about a shared hobby, not a particular book. But my friend’s question still lingered - how do I like to read? How do I like to engage with a story once I’m done?

Photo by Eliott Reyna on Unsplash

I started paying attention to not just book culture but book interactions, and came up with a myriad of ways of interacting with stories.

• Leaving reviews on sites like Goodreads or personal blogs and social media

• Tracking reads, building a record in journals or a spreadsheet

• Building recommendation lists

• Having conversations with friends

• Fandom creations - drawing fan art, creating costumes, drafting up fanfic

• Consuming fandom creations online

• Completing personal reading challenges, be it books per year or PopSugar

• Participating in competitive challenges, via a library or school, for a prize

• Dreading it cuz it’s a chore

• Desiring more so reading other works by the author

• Curious to learn more so picking up books on similar topics

• Sharing knowledge summaries of nonfiction

• Gifting books you’ve liked

• Showcasing books you enjoyed

• Beautifying books by spraying their edges or adding jewels

• Read and move on

You can shout your love (or hate) for a story to the world or keep it to your small group of friends. Maybe just yourself, even. You can launch yourself into something different or something similar. You can think and rotate the story in your head, or you can toss it aside to make way for something new.

There’s so many, many ways to engage with a story, and I’m learning that how I interact with visual media (lots of fandom creation) is different from how I interact with written media (I want to chat!). None of it is wrong, and all of it can be deeply personal based on the impact a story has on us.

But I want to know - how do you like to read?