Monday Discussion: Feeling the Fall

Here in the Chicagoland area, we are feeling the change of temperatures. Fall has moved in with full force. The furnace has been fired up. The leaves have begun changing, and I am going apple picking this coming weekend.

When the seasons change, many readers like to change up their reading a bit too. One of the most popular genres for fall is a horror title.  Halloween puts us in a creepy mood.  For help there, here are links to some of my horror lists, including one called "Horror for the Squeamish," for your novices.

But that is not all. I know that many people tend to switch to longer slower paced books in the Fall and Winter. In summer, in general, patrons are looking for faster-paced reads. Books they can take to the beach, books they can read in snippets, books that are best read outdoors. These are many of the requests we get in the summer.

As the weather turns and the nights get longer, I see more patrons asking for books they can curl up with on the couch. They want characters they can spend time with, stories that will last them a bit longer. They also ask for books that are part of a series, so they can read a bunch of books with the same characters.

On the other hand, I have patrons who, as soon as they have to turn on the heat at home, want to switch to books set in warm places. I am not even sure they know they are doing this on purpose, but year after year, I see them coming in and checking out books set in the summer, or hot and steamy romances, to warm them up.

For me personally, I do tend to tackle the longer books as the weather gets colder. In the summer, if there is a long, involved book I want to read, I tend to check it out on audio. This way, it is still portable (via my ipod) for outside reading. Also, I have an easier time starting and stopping a more in depth book as a listener than a reader, but this is purely a personal quirk of mine.

But overall, in the Fall and into the Winter, if I think about it, I definitely look for those longer books. We are a family of readers (shocking, I know), and with the coming of the cold weather, me, my husband, and the kids, spend many an afternoon and evening, all curled up on a couch or chair in our living room, having family reading time. A nice heavy book, fits well in the lap for these reading binges.

So for today's Monday Discussion, do your reading tastes change with the seasons? Are there any specific books or types of books that you turn to in the fall?

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