There are many ways to read outside of your comfort zone, but first let’s discuss what it means to read IN your comfort zone. To read in a comfort zone is to only read certain types of books based on what you like. While this is ok to do, it doesn’t give you a real grasp on other concepts. For example, you may like reading the outdoorsy mystery books written by Nevada Barr, where you will learn all about the different National Parks in America as well as enjoy a wonderful mystery, but if that is all you read, you’ll lose interest in the genre fast. I did this a lot in high school. I would read one of the Spencer novels by Robert B. Parker basically every day. I devoured the first twenty books in the series, but they got repetitive and bland quickly. It’s only until now that I picked up another mystery book.

I adored mystery novels, but that was all I ever read. I saw the endings coming and they just didn’t suit my interests anymore. Once I got to college, my tastes changed when I was forced out of my comfort zone by different professors in order to grasp the concepts throughout the history of literature. I read everything from magical realism from Latin America, to post-modern literature that uses new and innovative ways to tell a story. Through my professors challenging me to read outside of my comfort zone, I was able to discover new genres that I had never even heard of that sparked my interest even more than the general mystery genre which I had loved growing up.

Now that I have discovered new genres to read, I talk with many different people about the books that are coming out that are changing the way one looks at books. I jumped right into a novel where the author played with the words on the page, much like Lemony Snicket, but in a way that showed that the book was more than just a book. The author made it so that the book was three dimensional. Some of the pages had footnotes in the middle of the pages and were reflected backwards on the other side of the page. The book was demanding attention the way no other book had dared to before. I would never have dared to try these new and strange books had it not been for taking that leap of faith out of my comfort zone and exploring new ideas or just different ideas than my own.