Picking Up English Reading Again?

This afternoon, during a meeting with my advisor, Matt and I was asked to read more in English as ( I guess so) he might think our writing was a mass. This was not the first time he mentioned this. Ever since I started to meet regularly with him, he has kept testing us upon an article from New York Times right before each meeting. For quite some time this act was forgotten by him, but now it's retained again... He strongly recommended NYT over others, as he reckons that it's the most well-established publication among all in the U.S.

But don't expect that's enough to improve English skills--especially writing one. He also 'suggests' that we read paper books, such as novels, regularly from now on. Actually I like this suggestion coz I do like reading. Thus right after that meeting, I went to a bookstore with sis. I looked through almost all the shelves but failed to find any title that I was quite familiar with... How should I decide which one to buy? Picking up a book randomly or by reading the introduction? --That's the suggestion from sis. But I don't want to do that. If the book I selected is not my dish, it's unlikely that I will persuade myself to keep reading it. Then I decided to go back home first and do some searching job to learn what books I might have interest in.


Now I am trying searching. But there seems not to be a good website in English for me to see the comments of books from other readers. I found one named 'goodreads', which looks similar to the Chinese website I use a lot to find interesting books -- www. douban.com. But apparently this American is not that well-designed as douban... Amazon may be another option, but it suffers the same problem with goodreads. Anyway, I will try to get used to them as long as I need to find English reading materials.


Paper-based reading materials? Apart from my academic books and papers, I have not read in this type for quite a while. Don't need to doodle on Chinese-version twitter, or FB, or Renren before get asleep. Isn't that an exciting news?