What do you value in a book the most based on Nancy Pearl’s Four Doors of Reading? Link here if you want to learn more, including TED Talk at the end: https://teralynnchilds.com/nancy-pearls-four-doors-reading/ (I tried to embed link but I forgot how)

Excerpt from above link:

🚪 The Four Doors 🚪 📖 Story — Plot. Action. The sequence of events that the character(s) go through to reach the end. These are page turners, the books you can’t put down, and that keep you needing to find out what happens next.

🙂 Character — People. Protagonists. Villains. Heroes. The cast of characters who embark on the story. Books in which the characters feel real and you miss them when the book is over.

🌆 Setting — Worldbuilding. This is what makes you feel like you’re in another place or time (or even this exact place and time). Makes the world feel familiar, and makes you want to live in or visit that place.

✍️ Language — Words. Grammar. Style. These books make you want to savor every word, to the point where you’re not sure you even know or care what the book is about.

Every book contains all four of these elements to varying degrees. You can’t write a story without character, plot, setting, and words. But often (usually) one or more doorways are bigger than others. The blockbuster books, the ones that become huge bestsellers across audiences and age groups, have four really big doors.

🚪 Find Your Door 🚪 Discovering your door to reading! Which doorway is yours? Or what order would you rank the four doors from most to least important? Think about your favorite book. Usually the first thing you describe is a clue.

My Doors Ranked: 🌆 📖 🙂 ✍️ I would rank world building as most important for me. Closely followed by plot. I need a great setting and often magic system to keep me hooked. I also need plot throughout. Character driven books don’t work for me as well as plot driven books or a mix. I enjoy character arcs but I value setting and plot more. I also don’t need good writing to enjoy a story so that one is very much last for me.

I look forward to hearing about yours 🥰

Hi everyone, we're excited to share the 4 selections for the Fall Readalong, running September - November! We announce Readalong titles a month in advance to give everyone time to place library holds. The Seasonal Readalong page will be updated soon with the books below, but in the meantime, feel free to add them to your TBR!

How to Be Eaten by Maria Adelmann: A darkly funny horror novel featuring group therapy, fairytale retellings, and feminism.

The Incandescent by Emily Tesh: A sapphic dark academia fantasy set at an elite boarding school, where our heroine is a powerful demonology teacher on a mission.

Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor: A genre-bending sci-fi novel that interweaves the story of Zelu, a disabled Nigerian-American writer, with chapters from the novel she's writing, blurring the boundary between the real world and the created world.

The Ornithologist's Field Guide to Love by India Holton: A cozy and whimsical Victorian era romcom with 2 rival ornithologists, travel via parasol, and a lot of scheming and flirting.

Excited to read with everyone in the coming months!

Happy reading, Jennifer & Lucy

This book is frustrating me. I feel like I could like it, like I should like it, but its just not clicking for me. Some of the stuff that's happening is cool, but I'm just not invested and I don't know why. I semi care about Blue, but the others I just feel kinda mehhh about. Idk. I'm gonna try and finish it. Maybe I'll end up caring more.