8 Hobbies That Can Make Reading More Fun and Inclusive

Reading can be quiet, but it doesn’t have to stay that way. Make things with the books you read. Photograph them. Collect and redesign them.

Reading doesn’t have to end when you close the book. There’s so much more you can do to make your hobbies more fun. 

You can learn how books get made, change how your favourite covers look, photograph your reading, or take a book out into the world with you.

Some of these activities need nothing more than your shelf and a bit of curiosity.  

For book clubs or reading buddies looking to spice up their literary experience, here are 8 hobbies you can choose from. 

1. Bookbinding

Bookbinding teaches you to see a book as an object, not just text.

Start simple—anyone who’s had a notebook already half-knows how to bind loose pages. From there, you can move into stitched bindings, hardcover construction, decorative endpapers, and book repair.

You choose everything: paper, cover, thread, size, and the book ends up looking exactly how you want it to.

Got an old book with loose pages or a damaged cover? Don’t toss it. Learn to repair it instead. Remember, a stitch in time saves nine applies here too. 

Grab a basic kit and a few cheap materials. You don’t need a studio for this. And if you get good enough at it, you can turn it into a side gig.

2. Design New Covers for Your Favourite Books

A great cover sells a book on its own. That makes redesigning covers a fun exercise if you’ve got any design instinct.

Pick a classic. Pretend you’re designing a new edition for a modern publisher. Forget the original cover completely. Think about setting, characters, mood. What image tells the story without giving it away?

Try Jane Eyre, The Great Gatsby, or Things Fall Apart. Make three versions: one focuses on photography, the next typography only, and the last one inspired by vintage editions.

Use Canva, Adobe, or paper, paint, and collage. The exercise sharpens your eye for the small choices that separate one edition from another.

3. Fore-Edge Painting

Look at the outer edges of a closed book. Some antique and special edition books hide paintings there. Close the book and the image appears. Open it, and it vanishes.

This tradition goes back centuries, and some examples are stunning. Picture a hardback copy of Things Fall Apart with a painting tucked into the edge.

Don’t start on an expensive antique. Grab a cheap second-hand copy and practice first. Learn how the pages move before you get ambitious. Tutorials exist online for this.

Paint a landscape, flowers, a building, or a scene from the book. This hobby sits between painting and book collecting. It also makes you think of a book as three-dimensional, not a flat cover with pages inside.

4. Book Photography

You don’t need a fancy camera. A phone, decent natural light, and some attention to composition go a long way. Penguin Random House recommends natural light over overhead fluorescent light, which can throw off color and create glare.

Photograph a book next to objects from its story. Build a flat lay. Shoot spines and pages. Build a visual theme around one novel.

There’s a professional side too. Justina Nekrašaitė, known as The Book Photographer, runs a studio in Amsterdam shooting books, magazines, and printed objects. Her work zeroes in on paper, binding, typography, and layout.

A few Bookstagram accounts worth following for looser inspiration: @booksandquills, @blueeyedbiblio, @themilelongbookshelf. Study their light, background, and composition, then build your own style.

5. Book Collecting

Owning a lot of books and collecting them are different things. A real collection has a reason behind it. Different editions of one novel. First editions. Vintage Penguin covers. Translated lit. Books from indie publishers. Novels from one specific decade. 

You could even collect different covers of the same title.

Take One Hundred Years of Solitude, for example. Track down editions from different countries, and you see the novel differently each time, since every cover designer made their own call on how to present it.

Collecting gives you a reason to hit second-hand shops, charity shops, book fairs, and antique markets. Pick a theme first. Otherwise, “I collect books” turns into “I’ve run out of shelf space” fast.

6. Literary Travel

Visit places tied to writers, movements, and specific books: author homes, historic libraries, indie bookshops, literary festivals, real locations from novels.

London gives you Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, and Charles Dickens. Dublin means James Joyce. Paris means Hemingway and Baldwin.

You don’t need to leave the country. Nigeria has its own literary geography, with places tied to writers, literary events, indie bookshops, and locations pulled straight from Nigerian fiction.

Research first. A literary trip gets more interesting once you know why a street or a building matters.

7. Learn Calligraphy

Calligraphy pairs naturally with reading. Books give you endless material to practise on.

Copy a favourite poem. Write out a passage. List character names. Reproduce a quote in a few lettering styles. Start with basic brush lettering or a plain pen. You don’t need to turn every page into a masterpiece.

It changes how you read too. Write a sentence out by hand, and you notice every word. A passage you’d normally skim hits differently.

Your favourite lines can become framed pieces, bookmarks, journal pages, gifts.

8. Record Yourself Reading Poetry Aloud

Poetry was meant to be heard, not just read silently. Recording yourself out loud forces you to slow down and notice rhythm, punctuation, pauses, and sound.

Pick one poem. Read it a few times. Record the first attempt without worrying about how it sounds. Listen back. Try again.

You’ll likely notice a line you thought was simple has a strange rhythm, or that you’ve been stressing the wrong word the whole time. Spoken aloud, a poem can turn into something else entirely.

Keep the recordings private, or build an audio archive to share with people you love. Imagine getting one from someone special on a meaningful day.

If you like it, explore spoken-word poetry. Listen to how other poets read their own work, then compare it to yours. Good practice too if you want to get comfortable with public speaking or voice recording.

Reading can be quiet, but it doesn’t have to stay that way. 

Make things with the books you read. Photograph them. Collect and redesign them. Travel around the world because of your favourite author. Give their words a voice.