What to Read When You Don’t Know What to Read: A List of Books About Reading

This installment of Riot Recommendation is sponsored by Book Riot’s own Start Here: Read Your Way Into 25 Amazing Authors. Here’s the book, in a nutshell: There are so many fantastic authors and great books out there that sometimes it’s hard to know where to begin. Start Here solves that problem; it tells you how to read your way into 25 amazing authors from a wide range of genres–from classics to contemporary fiction to comics. Each chapter presents an author, explains why you might want to try them, and lays out a 3- or 4-book reading sequence designed to help you experience fully what they have to offer. It’s a fun, accessible, and informative way to enrich your reading life. It’s available as an ebook in the usual places: Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the iBookstore, and if they’re signed up with Kobo, your local independent bookstore. And it’s just three bucks! (in the US at least.) _________________________ Now that we’ve written a book about what to read and why, we’re even more curious than usual about other books in the genre. So last week, we asked you to tell us about your favorite books about reading. Here’s a round-up of the recommendations from Facebook, Twitter, and the comments section. Enjoy! Why Read the Classics? by Italo Calvino How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster The Anatomy of Bibliomania by Holbrook Jackson How Beautiful It Is: And How Easily It Can Be Broken by Daneil Mendelsohn The New Lifetime Reading Plan by Clifton Fadiman and John S. Major The Joy of Reading by Charles Van Doren Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop by Lewis Buzbee How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler & Charles Van Doren Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading by Maureen Corrigan The Book on the Bookshelf by Henry Petroski Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott Let’s Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14 by Erica Bauermeister and Holly Smith Reading Like a Writer by Francise Prose How to Read Better and Faster by Norman Lewis A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel The Dancing Mind by Toni Morrison Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust series Letters to Alice: On First Reading Jane Austen by Fay Weldon anything by Michael Dirda Used and Rare by Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone anything by Nicholas Basbanes Booked to Die by John Dunning Read This Next: 500 of the Best Books You’ll Ever Read by Howard Mittelmark and Sandra Newman How to Read and Why by Harold Bloom Okay, hit us: what did we miss?