What makes a good book good? For me, there are three ingredients that will help guarantee my enjoyment: pace, humor, and growth.

There are few things I hate more than a slow read. Are you with me? It’s fine to spend a little time building character rather than moving along the plot, but a 500-page novel is almost always going to be too slow-paced for me to really love it. A good, healthy pace makes me ravenous for more!

Humor is also vital. I don’t know about you, but if I don’t laugh on one single page, I feel a bit cheated. I can turn on the news if I want to be depressed. I enjoy a sad story on occasion, but even sad stories can be written with a little comic relief, right?

Finally, we come to growth. I like a book where flawed characters work their way through a conflict and come out a better man, even in a small way. Or where they learn some great truth about themselves or humanity that, of course, the reader learns along with them. A book about characters that are the exact same at the beginning and end is just not as interesting to me.

What are your three ingredients for a great read?

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Sarah Forrest is a Reading Specialist for the Easyread System, an innovative online course developed for children with highly visual learning styles, dyslexia, auditory processing disorders, poor memory, ADHD, and more.