The holiday season is a time to get together with friends and family. The odds are pretty good that some of the people you’ll be connecting with are readers, just like you. So, ask them for reading recommendations.

You can ask them to name the best book they’ve read recently or narrow that down to the best book on a particular topic or the best novel.

Some recommendations will probably be outside your normal range. That’s great. It expands your horizons. The benefits of asking people close to you for reading recommendations are that it gives you both a way to share and something in common to talk about.

That leads me to the second part of this tip. Ask them the question before you get together. That will be one of the conversation starters when you get together.

What I’m Reading (just in case we wind up at the same party)

I’m currently reading History’s People: Personalities and the Past by Margaret MacMillan