Musing- It’s still Monday somewhere!

Very late on this week’s Musing Monday.  But I like the question.

How often do you recommend books to others, and who do you recommend them to? Do you only recommend books to your “reading friends” or to anyone you think might find the book interesting? What does it take for a book to make it to your ‘recommendation’ list?

I recommend books to other people All.  The.  Time.   I think I always have.   Friends, family, complete strangers.  I’m fearless/shameless about joining conversations I overhear in bookstores and libraries- “I’m looking for a book about this, for someone who likes that.”  A lot of the time I have an answer!

Exchanging book recommendations and opinions is a big part of how I get to know someone, and how I expect people to get to know me.  (For a future post- some of the definitive books I make sure people read as we’re becoming friends.)  I’ve never been part of a book club in the real world, though I love the dialogue of book bloggers and readers.    Many of my friendships, though, are like two or three-person book groups, riffing on a book we have in common, or exchanging and reacting to titles.

Sometimes I’ll recommend a book just because it completely blows me away.  More often, though, I try to tailor the recommendations.  Here, I’m going to draw a distinction between “mention a book” which is a cornerstone of my conversation and “recommend a book to you” because they serve two completely different conversational functions.

For example- I love both sci-fi and poetry.   Although most of the people I talk to on a daily basis are reading something- it might not be those genres.  So, unless they ask for my advice on a crash intro  course, I might not recommend the latest Orson Scott Card or Billy Collins to them.    (Having said that- I love introducing people to books in my favorite genres, and finding out what aspects of the genre a friend might welcome or dislike.  The evolution and knowledge I gain from the conversation matters so much more to me than getting them to agree with me.)

I mention books because they’re so much a part of my life- not just the work I do (and would like to expand in the coming year) as a book reviewer, but a significant part of my life.   Christmas was about books given and received.   The answer to “What’d you do last weekend?” invariably involves starting or finishing a book.

And isn’t everybody’s mind and conversation a repository of half-remembered stories and quotations that we “read somewhere?”