On Reading Taste
A word and thoughts overspill that occurred when I started thinking more deeply about what I read.
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If you were to read the year-end report cards that we were sent home with in primary school, you’d note that mine are littered with phrases like ‘bookworm’, ‘head in her books’, ‘loves the library’, ‘enjoys helping to organise the book cubby’. In short, I have always been a book girlie. Of course, there’s nothing inherently wrong about being into what everybody else is – that makes it even more fun! More people to rave about my hobbies with! – but I mean that I’m not really into the swathe of BookTok books that seem to be displayed at every book-related establishment in existence. (This Dublin secondhand bookshop a glorious exception.)
Perhaps it’s joining bookstagram and a great online book club, or maybe it’s that more of my friends are getting back into reading and keep asking me what I read, but I recently found myself deeply ruminating my reading tastes, considering what makes a book ‘good’ in my, well, books, and reflecting on the concept of intellectualism. Nobody’s any smarter or has better taste, because taste in books in incredibly subjective.
Find me on Goodreads and StoryGraph to see what I’m reading and reviewing in real-time.
My reading taste
Although I was a complete bookworm as a child, that completely dropped off during formal education and I didn’t really read outside of what I had to. I must have returned to reading regularly in my mid-twenties, gravitating towards fantasy (I read and loved the A Song of Ice and Fire series when I was 23!) and whatever was on the tables in Waterstones. This is a perfectly fine way to read and discover books – what other purpose would these displays serve? But it definitely took a good few years of reading in general before I honed in on what I like.
Right now, my reading taste hovers around speculative fiction (fantasy, sci-fi and dystopia), nature writing, own voices, eldest daughter perspectives, the Chinese diaspora, and historical fiction with a feminist viewpoint. I find I particularly love quiet family sagas that enwrap some of these themes together. And, surely, a part of reading is about finding a part of ourselves nestled between the pages?
What I’m looking for in a book
It stands to reason that what I’m looking for in a book is a well-told story. At its core, that is what I want: a good story with nuance, humanness, joy, solidly interweaving themes (my preferences are identity, belonging, nature, sustainability, sociology and society), and characters that show growth. Of course, what we look for in a book can and will change all the time. It’s my personal belief that our tastes change as we change, the books we select becoming a portal and time capsule to who we are becoming and who we have been.
In the years following the pandemic, I’d gravitate towards ‘easy’ cosy fiction like Before the Coffee Gets Cold to delve into sentimental, quiet stories where I knew the characters would get a ‘good’ resolution to their qualms. Or, I’d read low-stake literary fiction, just for a slice of life and humanity in the Before Times. As life calmed down and we built new normals, I returned to the epic fantasy stories I loved and delved into own voices, to uplift the authentic stories and lived experiences of underrepresented authors. After going viral for defending Chinese takeaways during the pandemic, I was briefly a spokesperson for the hugely underrepresented British-born Chinese community in the UK. My reading directly reflected that, too.
My auto-buy authors
Haruki Murakami
Min Jin Lee
Sue Lynn Tan
V.E. Schwab
Phillip Pullman
Ursula K. Le Guin – can’t decide if I can count her, but I do want to complete her work
Stacey Halls
Some of my all-time favourites
Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
Jade City by Fonda Lee
Northern Lights by Phillip Pullman
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
Have you ever given your reading preferences and tastes a proper thought? I’d love to learn about yours.
Love this Michelle! I typically read anything that interests me, but I particularly enjoy dystopian and fantasy - I'd never even properly read fantasy until last year and now I'm loving it! I definitely enjoy darker reads, though sometimes I need a "fluffier" story to break them up.
I find it so difficult to put my reading taste into word because it‘s so versatile. When people ask which books I read, my usual and admittedly very generic answer is „fiction“. :D
I tend to like contemporary fiction set at an exotic to me environment (it could be the main characters job or an actual country/region I‘ve never been to), I enjoy the perspective of lovely elder characters and I love a metaphoric style of writing that wants to be read slowly (like Murakami^^).