You Know You’re Reading A Good Book When:

1. Weeks after you’ve finished the pages, you wonder how the characters are doing, what they might be up to now, and feeling sad that you can’t read more about them. (I’m looking at your books, Celeste Ng)
2. It feels like the time you spent reading it feels like you’ve been in another dimension. When you stop reading, you feel out of sorts, like you’re stuck in some sort of limbo between worlds. (Camila Lackberg and Dean Koontz, you do it every time!)
3. You get within 100 pages of the end, and you suddenly stop, because you don’t want it to end. You don’t want it to all be over. (Elizabeth Strout, always.)
4. You think of characters as your friends, in real life, as though they really exist and that you truly experienced the story alongside them. (JK Rowling. Duh.)
5. Shaking your head, you read another book in a series, only to be faced with another twist, turn and tragedy to occur to the same group of people again, and again, and again. You relinquish that the likelihood of this continuing to happen is zilch, but you just can’t stop yourself from picking up another in the series, over and over! (Karin Slaughter, those poor people of Grant County, Georgia!)

You Know You’re Reading A Crappy Book When:

1. You get to the end and want to gouge out your eyes because you just spent 600 pages being built up, only to be let down with the worst copout ending that ever existed. (I’m looking at you, Stephen King. More often than not.)
2. You put the book down after you’ve read half of it (or less!) and have zero inclination to pick it up again and finish it. (Corben Addison, sorry not sorry.)
3. Once you finish, you shake your head in disbelief, thinking to yourself, “So that was it?” (Anthony Doerr. Come ONNNN.)

(I’ve also learned something new about myself today: I really love female authors, and not so much the men… Unless of course your name is Dean Koontz!)