Expanding Your Bookshelf Beyond The Book

Jamie Millard

EDITOR’S NOTE – Our newest Peepshow author is Jamie Millard, who joined Fast Horse this month as a client relationship manager. Jamie is a former communications specialist at the Charities Review Council. She also is a founder of the literary magazine Paper Darts and recently forged a great partnership between Paper Darts and the Twin Cities networking community Pollen.

We all judge books by their covers. I mean, how could you not when a book’s cover is as gorgeous as this?

Similarly, we judge people by the contents of their bookshelves — no matter how painful the idea of that might be.

The content we consume — whether it’s from the books we read before bed, the online articles we half-skim, or the mere 140 characters of a tweet — shapes our ability to think critically and get creative.

An inherent understanding and appreciation of the value of good content is one of the big reasons I recently joined Fast Horse. When you know how to recognize, create, and promote good content… well, it doesn’t get much better. And it’s my belief that creating good content begins with consuming good content.

When someone asks me what I’m reading, I too often rack my brain for the most recent, smart-enough-sounding book I can spout off. Sometimes it starts to feel like I don’t read enough, but I know that’s not true — I’m reading all. day. long. It’s time to reinvent what we mean by a bookshelf and start placing value on nontraditional forms of content consumption. I would even go a step further and argue that ingesting a broader range of content formats is more valuable than exclusively reading critically acclaimed novels.

So as I’m the newest member of the Fast Horse team, it’s only fair for you to ask:

What am I reading?