Finding Good Books
You just received a brand-new book from the store! It looked so good, with its flashing cover and bold title. You bought it without a second look, knowing it was the one for you, and are now cracking it open for the first time—Only to find yourself closing it after a few chapters.
At first it looked great and started off with fun characters! Then…it slowly turned to ideas, words, and thoughts that are not Christ-centered. So what do you do? Besides stopping the book, how can you prevent it in the first place? How can you find good books with Christian themes in a fallen world? How can you find clean books in general?
While I wish I could say there’s this one proven trick and all clean books have exactly 2,000 commas in them or their titles always end in a ‘l’ I can’t. However there are some ways that you can find clean books to read, so don’t get discouraged! Here’s three tips for finding clean books:
Ask people you trust.
A lot of us have friends that are also readers and first hand experiences are always something to treasure! But make sure the people you’re asking know what you consider to be a clean book and what books you have enjoyed in the past. This will help them to give you good suggestions worth your time and theirs!
Use your resources!
There are some very good sights out there for researching books and figuring out if they’re going to be good reads! Places like…
Plugged In book reviews. https://www.pluggedin.com/
and Good Reads book reviews https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/book-reviews
are good to check out when you find a new book you want to read but need to learn a little more about it.
See what authors are suggesting!
The authors you love that write good clean books have also probably read a few!
You may be surprised how many times your favorite authors recommend other books! Did they have a series they loved growing up? Do they mention what other books they’ve enjoyed recently? While this isn’t always a sure thing and you should compare it to numbers 1 and 2 it can be helpful!
I know not everyone is interested in clean books, most are fine reading it as long as the writing is good. But it’s important that you’re surrounding yourself with good themes, characters, and ideas, not just good writing. If you spend a lot of hours, like I do, reading, then you’ll start to notice you lean towards acting like the characters in the books you read. So set yourself up for success, and hope! Read good clean books with characters you would be flattered to be compared to.
Read good books and write good books!
With Faith, Hope, and Love,
Inertia.
