Recently, I've had trouble picking out a good book. Since it's summer, I've found myself wandering around numerous bookstores, looking for good books to add to my reading list. For the life of me, however, I don't know what to pick. Looking back, I've never had this issue before. Lately, though, I feel like every book I pick up has recommendations like "Absolutely brilliant," "Fast-paced throughout" or some such generic claim. This is aside from it being on such-and-such bestseller lists and the averagely-impressive number of copies it has sold. It places the innocent reader in the middle of a warzone. How am I to know, for instance, that this apparent international bestseller (among hundreds) won't leave me groaning at cliche phraseology or diction. Don't get me wrong, I am all for light-hearted, summer reads (I find it quite therapeutic actually). I just don't want to purchase a book that has a potentially intriguing idea and find that its shallowness is something to be marvelled at. Gone are the days, apparently, when I'd know a good book just by picking it up.

I hope I don't sound like an absolute priss saying this, but I avoid going into a bookstore with a physical reading list; it ruins the magic of the experience. Having a pristine, technical list of books to look for takes away those moments of breathlessly opening up a random novel and being inexplicably hooked, devouring the first few chapters while walking up to the cash register. For me, wandering around the bookstore with a list makes shopping a terribly clinical procedure, like buying one's weekly round of milk-- very little thought is required. I have always believed that the real way to buy a book is to have that irresistable gut feeling convincing you that the book absolutely needs to be on your shelf. Given this, perhaps ridiculous, penchant in the way I buy books, I have noted with increasing alarm the aforementioned difficulty ofpicking out a particularly good book; intuition often fails me in the face of a particularly summery cover, and the words that hook me are also likely to be found in a dozen other brightly-coloured books littering the area. Nowadays, I always buy them with a frantic prayer that the purchase is well-deserved and that I'm not spending extravagantly on "throw immediately once read and never ever recommend" novels. Oh the risky life I lead.