Read a Series 📚

A tip for always knowing and looking forward to your next read.

Tale 🤫

I snuck down the spiral wooden staircase. The stairs creaked loudly, which made me wince. I was trying to covertly retrieve the final book in the Lockwood & Co. series. Unfortunately, the stuffy librarians had decided to shelf this literary masterpiece in the children’s library section.

Despite this snub, I was dying to know how the series ended so I was sneaking into the children’s library section during a mid-afternoon lull, and hoping no one would see me. As I stepped into the section, I was pleased to find it deserted. I scanned the short book shelves—which were organized alphabetically by the author’s name—and realized that I needed to go into the adjacent room. I walked into the next room, whistling tunelessly, and immediately stopped in my tracks.

Seated in a circle in the middle of the room were 15 college students. They looked up at me with curiosity. A bespectacled professor, who was standing in the center of the circle, cleared her throat irritably.

“Yes?” she asked.

“Uh, what’s going on?” I asked.

“This is the introductory children’s book illustration class,” the professor said. “Are you enrolled in this class? I thought there were just 15 students signed up.”

“Oh, no,” I said, “I’m just hear to collect a book.”

“From the children’s section?” the professor asked, incredulously. “Shouldn’t you be reading at the college level?”

One of the students snickered.

“It was an administrative error,” I said. “They shelved it in the wrong section.”

I turned to the book shelves lining the room. I felt the collective hostile gaze of the students and the professor as a prickle on the back of my neck. I quickly scanned the correct shelf, searching for The Empty Grave. I let out an audible sigh when I found it. I grabbed the book, and hurried out of the room, sweating slightly.

Tip 📕📗📘

After my harrowing children’s library encounter, I now own all the e-books in the Lockwood & Co. series.

Two of the most common hurdles to sustaining a reading habit are not knowing which book to read next and being unmotivated to start reading a new book.

My tip for this month—read a series—tackles both hurdles. If you pick a series by a prolific author, there’s always a next book to read (and even plodding authors usually manage to write at least a trilogy). And if the series is any good, by the time you’re a book or two in, you’ll be burning with curiosity about what happens next. The pages will practically turn themselves.

The familiar cast of characters and places also makes returning to a series an inviting prospect. You’re likely to be accustomed to the author’s prose by that point as well. All of which makes returning to a series much less daunting than starting a new book.

So, the next time you’re browsing for a book to read, consider starting a series—preferably one not from the children’s section of the library.