Nom nom nom!!

If you grew up with Sesame Street like I did, for better or worse, you know that sound.

The blue fuzzy monster that can carry on a conversation with inflection and depth all with the use of one word.

Cookie.

Possibly inspired by Cookie Monster’s vast ability to communicate using a suppositive noun—but through his diverse ways of expression can speak the word “cookie” to turn it into a verb, adverb, adjective, even a proper noun—giggling teens and social media memes alike have scooped up this language technique and applied it with vim, vigor, and good humor to the socially mildly-acceptable F word.

So focused and hungry is our dear blue monster with googly eyes and four fingered paws that his life mission is to find and devour cookies.

Such life commitment is inspirational, really.

Something to be admired.

Or committed for.

But either way, Cookie Monster is an icon.

Which is why when I talk reader cookies, I can only see myself as said committed and committable monster.

But let’s take a step back and make sure you understand the tasty deliciousness that is a reader cookie, that would send me so close to the brink as to call myself or to claim to be in the possession of an internal Reader Cookie Monster.

A reader cookie is a reading tasty treat that when in a story it makes me jump up and down and get excited about a book.

It gets my backside digging in a wiggling way, deeper into whatever plushy reading surface I am perched on, and snuggle even deeper into a book.

The world goes away.

I’m EATING HERE!

Nom nom nom!!!

For instance, I loooooove contemporary fantasy. Magic here in the real world.

OK, that is kind of general.

But when the main character is living a normal life with said fantasy element, yes. Better.

And good gravy if we are going along in a normal story and suddenly there is a huge real world surprise, like—by the way there are underground bridges that were already in place when we built the New York subway system, so the toll your pay to ride on the subway doesn’t go to the city but actually the trolls that live under those bridges…What!?!?

HELLO I AM HOOKED!!

And I am ravagely (it’s a word…in my world) eating that like a starving…well anything.

Nom nom nom – reader coooookieeeees.

What are all the story reader cookies you like?

I prefer me a romance of some sort in the story. A love interest. Yeps!

I love a good puzzle mystery, and thrillers. Give me short chapters and lots of action!

I love military space opera – but if the lead character is also a woman?

NOM NOM NOM!

And I really don’t get full. I just want to keep reading.

But there is a bitter side.

Anti-Reader Cookies.

*sigh*

These are the turn-offs.

The maybe I’ll give it another chapter since I love this author.

Or that reading bite is so metallic and offensive that book goes airborne, never to grace my eyeballs again.

The “…aaaaand you lost me” syndrome.

For me it’s…stupid characters. The “too stupid to live” people whose actions make no sense except to move the plot along.

Blarg!

Also, bad guys as good guys. Or bad guys as the main character. Big one for me. If I can’t like the main character then nope!

Breaking Bad? Not my jam.

Or if too much of a book is from the POV (point of view) of the bad guy. I don’t know what too much is, buuuuut I see bad guys POV more as a storytelling spice. A quick bit of information I need to know as the reader, not as a main character of the book.

Yuck.

I have others, and sitting here typing and thinking I am realizing I should pay more attention to that. As a couple of both the reader cookie (yummy reading) and the anti-reader cookie (get thee away from me!) came to mind kinda quickly, but not as easily as I’d thought.

Which makes me think: how can I find a new favorite book if I don’t know 1) what I REALLY like, all the reading boxes of cookies I could tick to hit the ding-ding-ding of favorite status and 2) what I don’t like and then wasting my time on. Especially in the hemming and hawing reading stage.

I remember reading a book that I knew from the first couple pages I did not like. The writing style and subject was sand-bland to me. Not even Vanilla, which I love to eat by the way. Vanilla ice cream – yummmm.

But anyways, it was recommended by a friend that loved it. I told them it wasn’t my jam and they begged me to read it. “It gets better.”

It didn’t.

800 pages into the 1000 page brick I had fingernails-on-chalkboard crawled through until I set myself free with a flight of fluttering pages and a reading sigh of relief.

So, my point is—what are your reader cookies?

What feeds your Reader Cookie Monster and make him nom nom nom?

And what scares that monster into hiding?

Rabidly search for the former and be ever vigilant of avoiding the later.

But to have a happy Reader Cookie Monster, first you must learn what he likes.

(Oreos, the black cookie part. Leaving the white stuffing for me.)

(Mine is a generous cookie monster.)