Assuming one or two a month counts as “avid” then I count.
Some combination of what’s on sale, what my friends/family/favourite bloggers are reading, and what’s in a field I feel like I could use more background in for the fiction I write. (Anything that’s all three at once gets read first, then anything with two of the three, and then whatever fits at least one of those.)
I sometimes buy outdated books on subjects that I remember being weird (metal alloys, ancient history) or charming/grounding (history of languages, the biological aspect of forensics etc.) from the time when I attended high school. Of course, I am not an avid reader, and sometimes I put the book aside. OTOH, my parents’ library has more books than I care to read, some of them nonfiction, so I can just pull out anything and trust it will be either interesting to read or at the very list a conversation starter.
Yes. I follow authors, I ask avid readers similar to me for recommendations, I observe best-of-category polls, I scan through collections of categorized stories for topics that interest me, I click through “Also Liked” and “Similar” links for stories I like. My backlog of things to read is effectively infinite.
Are you an avid reader of non-fiction books outside your field of work? If so, how do you choose which books to read?
Assuming one or two a month counts as “avid” then I count.
Some combination of what’s on sale, what my friends/family/favourite bloggers are reading, and what’s in a field I feel like I could use more background in for the fiction I write. (Anything that’s all three at once gets read first, then anything with two of the three, and then whatever fits at least one of those.)
I sometimes buy outdated books on subjects that I remember being weird (metal alloys, ancient history) or charming/grounding (history of languages, the biological aspect of forensics etc.) from the time when I attended high school. Of course, I am not an avid reader, and sometimes I put the book aside. OTOH, my parents’ library has more books than I care to read, some of them nonfiction, so I can just pull out anything and trust it will be either interesting to read or at the very list a conversation starter.
Yes. I follow authors, I ask avid readers similar to me for recommendations, I observe best-of-category polls, I scan through collections of categorized stories for topics that interest me, I click through “Also Liked” and “Similar” links for stories I like. My backlog of things to read is effectively infinite.