How Much Information Is Too Much Information

Summertime is here. And at the library, summertime is about reading. For our adult summer reading club, all you need to do is read a book, any book and enter your name at the library and you could win a gift certificate to a local restaurant.

Where do you go to find a good book? Do you go online and read all the reviews, all the comments on Amazon or on MyCatalog or LibraryThing or Shelfari or Facebook? How much do you really want to know about a book before you read it?

Since I read a gazillion reviews I find out a lot about books before I read them. But too much information will ruin an otherwise great book. I am quickly becoming a minimalist when it comes to what I want to know about a book before I read it. I am tiring of letting the reviewers and commenters tell me a story before I let the author do it. I long for the days of picking up a book knowing little about it and then getting wrapped up in the story. That is what summer reading is about, getting swept away. But it is hard to do when there is so much information out there.

I recently found a book and I am thoroughly enjoying it. I'm not going to tell you much about it. After reading another book by Blake Crouch, I went to see what else he had written. His older book Abandon didn't have a blurb or annotation (and I purposely didn't go looking for one). In the library catalog there were just a couple of subject headings: Ghost Towns - Fiction, Abandoned Mines - Fiction, Haunted Places - Fiction, Wilderness Areas - Colorado - Fiction. That was enough for me. Now I just need a field where I can lay down and read.