I realized I haven’t answered one of these in a very long while, so I decided to post it in spite of the day being nearly over.

Have you ever felt pressured to read something because ‘everyone else’ was reading it? Have you ever given in and read the book(s) in question or do you resist? If you are a reviewer, etc, do you feel it’s your duty to keep up on current trends?

I’ve never read or not read something because of what other people are doing, at least not in the sense that I feel like if “everyone else is reading that” I should or shouldn’t read it. I might read a book if I see someone interesting or surprising reading it. For instance, I held off on reading Harry Potter for a very long time, until I started seeing grown-ups reading it. I don’t care about seeming grown-up, but I figured that if all these adults were willing to read it in public, squeezing it in during breaks at work or finding themselves unable to put it down at the bookstore, it might be worth looking into.

Books I could not be persuaded to read no matter how many other people had read them: The DaVinci Code (ugh, lame. There’s even an historical error in the title!), His Dark Materials, The Shack. Books I read even though everybody else was reading them: Harry Potter, Twilight saga, Bridget Jones’s Diary. So it really doesn’t matter to me whether a book is popular or unpopular. Sometimes it’s fun to join in on the crazed book openings and obsessive over-analysis, and sometimes it’s fun to turn up your nose at a book everyone else is gaga for.

(Just as a side note, I’d like to point out that people who decide not to read something because it’s popular are still deciding based on popularity, ie letting other people make their decision for them.)

As a writer and would-be sometime reviewer, I do feel like it’s important for me to be up on trends, but even that can’t induce me to read some books. Vampire books for instance. (Nevermind that I read all of Twilight saga.)