How do you choose which book to read (or listen to) next? For a long time, I added books to my To Be Read pile based on recommendations from every person under the sun: my mom, my professors, my friends from school, my friends from [insert hobby here], strangers, random bloggers, promotional emails, and so on. Sometimes a friend would gush over a book that put me right to sleep or, worse, sent me straight into angry grammar-related spirals. Over a long, long time, I realized that 1) people have different taste in books (shocking!) and 2) I didn’t have to accept any old recommendation!*
For a while, this changed my life. No more was I beholden to lists of “100 Classic Books You Must Read To Be Considered a Smart Person” or slogging through weird, half-baked books “written” for publicity purposes. Why did I ever feel like lists tailored to the most generic, aimless reader were meant to be followed religiously? Probably a confluence of culture and psychology, which I opt to ignore for now. More importantly, absent random recommendations, how does a TBR pile accumulate?
On the one hand, trusted recommenders are a go-to source for me. After spending many reading-hours on (to me) clunkers, I might be too stringent with the strictures for “trustworthy” sources. Either the recommender is a friend with whom I spend many hours talking and share many experiences and acknowledge similar guiding principles, etc., -- this is a very small group of people -- or a stranger counts books and authors I love among their favorites. This might be the way reasonable people intuitively add to their own TBR piles. If that’s you, I salute your self-knowledge. If that’s not you, I am with you!
But! Even after all of this, I struggle to enjoy the book I’m currently reading under the weight of all the as-yet unread books straining in my TBR pile. In my opinion, this is the hardest part about working in a library: coming into contact everyday with innumerable nice-looking covers and clever blurbs. It’s hard to resist them. For me, it also starts to feel like ping-pong: rush through a riveting sci-fi novel to start a Troubles history to skim a new book of poetry. Nothing ends up sinking in, and while the number of books I have #read rises, I’m not really engaging with an author’s creation. Which is the whole point, right?
So I have a new approach, or what I am pedantically calling a new reading rhythm. This is where I (metaphorically) marinate my books. Rather than hurrying through page quotas and leaping from one random-but-interesting topic to another, I am trying to slow… down… and think through the questions and themes posed by each book I read. I let the book stew in my brain, like a little chicken in olive oil and lemon juice. Ideally, I want to develop a chain of books that doubles as a mental pathway: one book surfaces a question in my mind, the next is sought out to further explore the question. This feels to me like a more purposeful (and majorly neurotic, yes) TBR pile. Where does it lead? That’s less the point, of course, than the pathway itself.
![ferment](https://d4804za1f1gw.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/sites/56/2021/04/ferment-300x247.jpg)
How do you choose which book to read next? Have you noticed any rhythms in your own reading life? I would love to know -- leave a comment!
*Book Squad: don’t laugh at me too hard!
P.S. I did find some books on reading for us neurotic readers to study at length. I am going to ignore any reading tactics that don't appeal to me, and I hope you do, too.
-Hazlett Henderson is an Information Services Assistant at Lawrence Public Library.
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