Your Guide to Epic Buddy Reads (with Mikayla, Kate, and Cheesecake)

Today my awesome friend Mikayla and I completed our fourth official buddy read. (There have been one or two “accidental” ones, for the record.) We thought it would be super fun to share some of our buddy reading tips with you. 😉

(Photo credit: Mikayla)

1. Choose a book you both want to read. It’s usually a good idea to have it be something you both haven’t read (but are interested in) so you can share the entire experience and your initial reactions. Series are great for this! The buddy read we just finished was book four of The Mysterious Benedict Society series. We both enjoyed the other books and were eager to read this one, so it was the perfect fit. 😉
2. Set a chapter amount and time frame for reading that works for both of you. Mikayla is always great at organizing us on this. We talk about the length of the book when we choose it, divide it by the number of days we’d like to read it in, and read that number of chapters. This number is open to negotiation, like this time when we realized we were so excited that two chapters at a time would NOT be enough. XD
3. Have pre set-up times to chat. Also something Mikayla is awesome at. We both have *pretty* flexible schedules, but if we have a particularly busy day coming up we tell each other beforehand so we can work around it. We tend to like to chat every one to two days, depending on what time allows. We like to schedule a videocall for when we’re done reading so we can crow about the book in real-time. 😀
4. Be honest in your opinion of the book and don’t be afraid of asking tough questions. You’ll learn so much from and about your buddy. Seriously, buddy reading is one of the most fun ways to grow a friendship and your empathy. With our latest read, I related so much to one of characters that I was focusing almost entirely on his experience of a conflict. Mikayla noticed some of the other characters’ perspectives way better and drew my attention to them. 😀 It was a fun discussion.
5. Bonus tip: Eat cheesecake. This is generally good life advice, but we ate cheesecake over videocall once as a celebration of the end of a series, and it was great fun. 😀

(One of my favorite chapters… Photo credit: Pearl)

For tips #6-10 (including how to deal with DNFs), check out Mikayla’s post, and enjoy your next buddy read. 😀