I’ve seen this trend of going on a blind date with a book on social media plenty of times and I always thought it was an interesting idea.  We’re so quick to judge a book by it’s cover, or even the first few pages, that we can end up missing out on a good book.

So when I saw a section of these in Barnes & Noble a while ago, I couldn’t resist buying one that sounded very interesting.

The system that Barnes & Noble uses with their blind date books is to tell you what genre the book is and give three main points of the book as opposed to a synopsis.  Here’s what mine said:

Book Genre: Fiction

• A cantankerous bookseller main character for readers to either empathize with… or despise.
• A theft in the dark of the night, precious and rare words stolen.
• An original and exemplary tale of character development.

I’ll be honest, what really got me on this description was that it was about a bookseller.  After reading Karen Kingsbury’s The Bridge and my desire to own a bookstore there was no way I could resist a story where the main character is a bookseller.

Now I didn’t read this book right away, since I was in the middle of a different book at the time and had planned on reading Left Behind next.  So intend of opening it right away, it sat in the dining room for a while… still a complete mystery as to what book it could be.

Then one morning I finally said to my mom that I was going to open it because I really wanted to know what it was.  And as I predicted, it was a book I’d never heard of before…

The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin

Even though I had never heard of it, I was still excited to read it.  Like I said, I was interested in reading a book where the main character was a bookseller.  Plus, you know, I paid for it.  I might as well read it, even if I didn’t end up liking the synopsis on the back of the book.

Thankfully, I did.

If you want to know what I actually thought of the book, you can check out my review over on my new book blog – Books We Left Unread.  Spoiler alert: I liked it.

Overall, I enjoyed the ‘blind date with a book’ experience and I would gladly try it again.  It’s a cool way to discover a new book that you probably wouldn’t have picked out otherwise.  I can tell you right now that I probably wouldn’t have given this book a second thought just based on the name.  Yes, it’s shallow… but it’s the truth.

Have you ever tried a blind date with a book?  If you haven’t, would you?