We’ve all been there: consumed with a desire to read but without any concrete idea of what in particular one wants to read. There are many strategies for finding books to read—which I will get back to at a later time—and it is quite possible to end up with so many potential reads that choosing between them seems an impossibly large task. In such cases, external tools to narrow down the possibilities can be useful. Allow me to suggest some guideposts that might direct you to your next book.1
Is this unclear? Perhaps five examples will help. But be aware, each comes with potential drawbacks.
Themes
The simplest solution is to seek out books sharing some specific common element that appeals to you. Found families, interplanetary flight, books set in the year 2000, post-apocalyptic, authors who dated or were married to Judith Merril… The exact nature of the common element need only be two-fold: it should interest you, and there should be a number of available books.
Possible problems: (1) Themes that are too broad, giving me so many choices that I have a hard time choosing just one. (2) Themes that are so narrow that few or no books fit. There was a long stretch in the 1990s when I kept rereading the same interplanetary SF books because so few new ones were being written.
Book Series
Another possibility is set out to read the complete run of a sufficiently diverting series. There are many series out there. Indeed, sometimes it seems as if it is harder to find non-series books than series books. Series offer a number of advantages, not least of which is being able to watch authors’ development over the course of their careers.
You may want to decide whether you prefer ongoing series or completed ones; the first provides the delightful anticipation of unwritten books (which may never be written), while the other provides a concrete goal towards which you can read (and having read, find oneself needing a new goal). Also, it’s probably a good idea to establish beforehand whether you prefer series in which each book stands alone or series that are essentially one very long book.
Anthology Series
Anthologies series offer the same multivolume reading experience as novel series, with the added benefit of letting you sample many different authors. Also, with the possible exception of shared universe projects, the odds are very good that each story will provide a complete tale. If you run into a story you don’t enjoy, the next one will be along soon enough.
The only possible catch to focusing on anthologies is that even if we exclude all the one-and-done anthologies, there are so many possible choices that further decision paralysis may ensue. Perhaps it would be best to decide what sort of anthology—Best SFF annuals, shared worlds, specific editors, and so on2—one prefers, to narrow down the field somewhat.
Prolific Authors
If you have specific tastes, then you may want to focus on particular authors, the more prolific the better. Happily, there have been and are authors who have had long careers or write so quickly that even the most determined reader would be hard pressed to list all of the author’s works, let along read them all. In some cases, readers may find it difficult to keep up. Not naming names here, Seanan and Adrian…
There is really only one catch to this approach, but it is a significant one. Reading a stack of books by the same author is an excellent way to discover and become increasingly annoyed by some of the writers’ stylistic and thematic quirks. While reading fifty Poul Anderson books3, one must needs mutter “Judas Priest” on encountering the same Anderson-specific turn of phrase over and over.
Awards
Finally, one can leave the heavy lifting of winnowing out the chaff to hard-working award juries and voters. Speculative fiction loves its awards. Even if you ignore the awards that failed to prosper4, there have been and are enough awards that at least one is likely to align with your interests. Venerable awards will suggest enough winners to keep most readers busy for some time. Unusually quick readers can expand the candidate pool to include the finalists.
The catch here—there’s always a catch—is that juries and voter pools evolve over time, as does the pool of fiction eligible for awards. For example, the stories in Asimov’s second Hugo winners anthology are radically different from the more prosaic stories in the first. It is not uncommon to find one’s tastes and the award’s tastes diverging.
* * *
Those are five methods I use. Perhaps there are additional methods. Better methods. If you know of some, please mention them in comments.
[1]Do not throw darts at book cases to select your next book, as it damages the books. Certainly do not throw darts at crowds of authors, as they will get cranky and bleed on the furniture. Throwing dice might work.
[2]Cover art by John Berkey comes to mind. I can only think of one anthology series for which he did a complete run of covers—Pohl’s Star anthologies. Note: it is a good series.
[3]I joke! I think I’ve read closer to one hundred Poul Anderson books.
[4]Even short-lived awards can provide a diverting reading experience. For example, the International Fantasy Award (1951–1955, plus 1957) handed its laurels to this intriguing set of winners. Fiction: “Fancies and Goodnights” by John Collier; “A Mirror for Observers” by Edgar Pangborn; “City” by Clifford D. Simak; “Earth Abides” by George R. Stewart; “More Than Human” by Theodore Sturgeon; “The Lord of the Rings” by J.R.R. Tolkien. Non-fiction: “The Exploration of Space” by Arthur C. Clarke; “Lands Beyond” by L. Sprague de Camp and Willy Ley; “The Conquest of Space” by Willy Ley and Chesley Bonestell.
My strategy from 2001 – 2014 was for other people to select almost all of my reading for me according to their need for reviews. On the down side, not always to my taste. On the upside, I had no idea that herpetologists are so prone to retirement by venomous reptile bite until I began being sent books on the matter.
I’ll soon be able to read many more books by my favorite authors, dead or alive, that have been written with AI coauthors. At the moment the only way I can read such novels is by frequenting that bookstore, the unsigned one with the grumpy or mysterious owner, in a building that I’ve never seen before despite frequenting that part of town, the one which is never there again after you leave with your purchases.
James presumably has his own sources of necrollaboration (necro-laborated?) literature.
One change in my reading habits that has tended to slow down the pace of my reading but made life more interesting is to vary the type of books I’m reading. In other words, switch between novels and short story collections (or anthologies), between newer books and older ones (sometimes much older), and trying to experience a range of different types of books, including nonfiction, more realistic fiction from previous centuries, mysteries and espionage tales, as well as various different subgenres within the overall genre of fantastic fiction. Since no one type of book becomes tiresome as easily using this approach, it sometimes leads to other associated books (same author, style or subject) getting added to the TBR stack faster than books are coming off, which may frustrate the purpose this article is describing. And to take this approach, your TBR stack has to have some variety to begin with.
I am pretty it’s impossible to die if one owns unread books so it’s not bad if TBRs keep growing (as long as you don’t overload the joists). I just hate the paralysis when it comes to reading the next book.
3: I think I may shuffle my review categories to add non-fiction. I have a stack of as read unread but enticing looking non-fiction. Ditto rpgs: it turns out they won’t read themselves.
My strategy is to see what the cat knocks off the pile and read that. Of course, with a sufficiently determined cat, your entire TBR pile is transferred to the floor, which doesn’t help.
My late cat Hillary thought it terribly amusing to scamper down shelves behind books, bursting out through them when she got tired of hiding….
(She also used to get trapped behind a tall, heavy bookcase. Retrieving her required taking off all of the books and then moving it enough for her to escape. One day, I put off rescuing her. Half an hour later, she walked into my office with an annoyed expression. As soon as she was sure I saw her, she ran back and jumped down behind the bookcase)
My take was that dying with a TBR stack leaves an unquiet spirit that can’t be released until it finishes the job.
My tsundoku has been such that I could probably go the rest of my life (but I’m not as young as I was) without buying a single new book, and not run out of things to read — even if I never reread another book, which is problematic. (Alas, family history suggests that I will not live forever, and may even become unable to read before some time I draw my final breath; or, I could wind up like my grandfather, who could have been endlessly entertained by a single collection of short-shorts: a thought which I find utterly terrifying.)
My stragety* is a sort of modified LIFO — I tend, by habit, to gravitate towards recent purchases. I consciously modify this by trying to regularly read older books, preferably ones I already own. I also consciously try to read at least ten to twnety per cent nonfiction, for a generous definition of “nonfiction.” Nonetheless, when new books of certain series, or by certain writers, arrive chez Danehy-Oakes, they tend to migrate immediately to the head of the list…
One other substragety: I belong to an office-based book club (at an office where I no longer work, more’s the pity) which tends to read book I would never have touched on my own, and which introduces me to some significant modern non-SFF writers that I really enjoy. (Most recently, this would be Barbara Kingsolver, whose Demon Copperhead is frickin’ brilliant, especially if you’re familiar with a certain DIckens novel…)
——
“You mean strategy, dollink?”
“No, stragety — ve stragety string across door, and vhen Moose comes out he trips on it.”
8 being an angry ghost intangibly raging at the living isn’t that different from what I do now…
My problem with the ‘themes’ approach is usually that I have trouble defining the theme. I used to solve this by throwing a bunch of books I enjoyed into a Goodreads shelf and use that to generate recommendations, but the algorithm isn’t what it used to be…
“Perhaps there are addition methods.”
That is the most counter-productive typo I think I’ve ever seen. I already keep adding more books to my TBR pile than I have time to read!
@12 – Typo corrected, thanks :D
@8, @10,
Justine Larbalestier’s Razorhurst had a ghost who- in order to finish the book she was reading when she died- had to find a child she could communicate with, and then teach that child to read.
If all other things are truly equal, then a random choice, pick by publication date, or pick by shortest page count are a few reliable methods.
@3; I take a similar approach; I tend to jump from one genre to another, and usually have a couple of anthologies and short story collection in the current reading stack which I dip into whenever I feel like a break from whatever novel(s) and non-fiction books (usually history) I have on the go.
I like the idea of being unable to die, or at least unable to depart this world, with books still unread. It was some years ago that I realised that it would be impossible to read all the books I possess in the years likely remaining to me, even if I somehow managed to read 24/7 – and I’d have to simultaneously be watching all those banked-up DVDs that I’ve yet to view.
@16: Your second paragraph: have you been spying on me? Add comics to the book and DVD mix…
@1 – How many herpetologists do you know of that have been retired by venomous reptile bite? I can only think of two, and I’ve forgotten the second one’s name.
We’re generally pretty careful when we’re dealing with dangerous species.
It’s been a decade so I don’t remember the names. One was a researcher who reached into a bag he had been told did not contain kraits. It did. Another didn’t quite die after being bitten by a Gila lizard, then deciding he was OK enough to drive himself to emerg. He wasn’t. Then there were a bunch from a book about synergizing the illegal reptile trade and the illicit drugs. Turns out cobra handling and cocaine use are a bad mix.
The trouble with following prolific authors simply because they are prolific is that prolific doesn’t necessarily mean good, especially authors who start off OK but descend into mediocrity, are OK but only in the “something to read if there’s nothing more interesting around” category, or are in the “So bad I read them with horrified fascination category” – I cite Isaac Asimov, Lionel Fanthorpe and Piers Anthony, not necessarily in that order.
favorite authors, then award winners (according to preference; for some reason I typically bounce hard off of urban fantasy), and of course I rely heavily on james davis nicoll’s reviews to winnow out the merely good/interesting from the must read ’cause james liked it. all filtered through whatever I can most readily access from my local socialist reading room (library).
Raskos @18 — ISTR that Seanan McGuire had to get out of animal rescue after having been envenomated too many times. That is, retired from that field, not “retired” from everything.
@14 Reminds me of Jetboy’s last words — “I can’t die. I haven’t seen The Jolson Story!”
@20 One might take exception to putting Asimov in with Anthony and Fanthorpe. He was not a brilliant prose stylist, but at least he told many an interesting story — and his prose was (is) good enough and clear enough to explain complex concepts so that the average Jane or Joe can understand them, a gift he shared with (of all people) C.S. Lewis.
@19 – Thanks. I think that the krait-in-a-bag incident involved the fellow whose name I couldn’t remember – it made something of a splash in the field at the time.
Any sort of serious envenomation by a Gila monster is quite rare – they’re generally too lazy to do much damage. Their teeth aren’t designed to inject venom as a snake’s do, in any case.
I wouldn’t call drug-dealing animal smugglers “herpetologists”, but given what they do, it’s still refreshing to see natural selection in action.
Joseph Bruno Slownski was the person who took someone else’s word that a bag of snakes had only harmless krait-mimics. Special circumstances were involved: the incident happened in rural Myanmar, the weather was bad, and because it happened September 11, 2001, the US embassy was somewhat distracted.
I do not remember who it was who got gnawed on by a Gila lizard.
The drug trade incident happened when people involved in rare lizard smuggling realized the same network that could deliver a sack of cocaine to LA could also deliver blue tree monitors and the like. The lizard side of things did have experts, some of whom made the poor life choice of sampling the other goods being shipped. Turns out being stoned off one’s ass does not facilitate proper animal management.
Alas, I seem to be missing a bunch of reviews from that period so I cannot remember the titles of two books. The first one was, I think, The Snake Charmer.
@25 – Thanks for following this up. The Slownski case sounds like the one I remember, although I’d forgotten his name – the details jibe with what I do remember of his obituary.
I don’t recall of hearing of any professional herpetologists being involved in lizard and drug smuggling. However, there are a lot of highly-proficient herpetological amateurs and some of them can be a bit shady.
Thanks again for digging. I have a copy of Stolen World sitting right here and should really take a look at it, but hell, it’s so depressing to learn about what the wild animal trade is doing to natural populations. Just reviewed a paper about turtle home ranges in China, and the authors actually congratulated themselves for being able to find a wild population (of a formerly common species, something like painted turtles in NA) that they could work on.
@@@@@ James Nicoll #4
As a counterpoint see dorktower2056
There was a snake charmer in LA in the 40’s, Grace Wilwy.. She died of a cobra bite.
One of my new year’s resolutions this year is actually to prune down my TBR list – I used to feel obligated to bow to completionist tendencies, or to read the kinds of things I ‘should’ be reading, and honestly, some of my reading list also reflects interests I don’t have as strongly any more. I want to feel a little more freedom to pursue books that look fun instead of feeling overwhelmed by it or like I’m ‘getting behind’, especially as I face the truth I will die before I read all of it.
The past few years I’ve been really successful with picking an author to focus on. While I am trying to get over my ‘completionist’ tendencies, there ARE a few authors I really like (and loved back in the day) and wanted to read their other books but never got around to it. So I’ve been rediscovering those authors and really enjoy it. But it’s a treatment for a select few :)
Join book clubs. The initial reason was to be able to talk about science fiction with other people, but as added bonus i got introduced to a great number of books i probably would not have considered, but liked a lot.
I am currently rotating through 4 reading lists.
1) Strictly chronological. Started years ago with “Ancient Egyptian Literature, vol 1”, and “The Gilgamesh Epic and Old Testament Parallels”. Last one read was “Quest of the Holy Grail”, 1225 AD.
2) I read a book “What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew”, a book explaining life in 19th-Century England: titles, religion, politics, country life, etc. specifically useful for understanding 19th Century English Literature. From the index I noted every referenced novel, and made a chronological reading list of that – covering Jane Austen through Oscar Wilde. Many of these books are quite long. Currently at Trollope’s “The Prime Minister”
3) All the books and stories I have by a particular author picked at random from my catalog, read chronologically. Previous author was Henry Kuttner; current author is Isaac Asimov. I just finished his 1990 novel “Nemesis”. He died in 1992, so I’m almost done. When I pick the next random author the more prolific ones are more likely to be selected.
4) Since I have many works that might not fit any pre-planned criteria, the 4th item is always a random story or book. Again, more prolific authors get selected – I’ve read 3 O. Henry stories since I started doing this. Next up “Omar Khayyam” by Harold Lamb, a historical novel.
Since I will never read them all, and since some of the unread are classic (e.g. Robinson Crusoe, Olaf Stapledon), I think after I finish the 19th Century English Literature I will replace it with 3 new lists
– best works of literature, using some list(s) I find online
– best works of SF/Fantasy, using some list(s) I find online, such as Locus 1975 poll
– best Western books, using one list I found online, plus the Spur award winners.
These will all be read chronologically.
As others have said above, my book reading competes with DVDs, comic books, and video games.
My criteria the last few years has been
1) Is this an ARC and what’s the deadline to leave a review.
2) ‘celebration’ cheap kindle unlimited offer! read ALL the things! QUICKLY before it expires!
3) fanfic, lots and LOTS of fanfic
4) I made the mistake of walking into the library and this stuff can only be rechecked once!
5) oh look! I have a house FULL of BOOKS that NEED to be READ!!! I have bought more books and have shelving issues, let’s read some of these suckers and send them on their way thru PBSwap . . . also leading to yet more books coming IN from aforementioned PBSwap. : /
6) give up, I’ll never die :p
I simply use my To Be Read list as a library. If I don’t have an urgent ARC or editing review to do, I cruise through my TBR books & pick one!
My reading lists:
1) Pre-read books that I think my 11 year old would like, or that she has requested, or managed to check out from the library when her dad wasn’t looking. I read fast, she reads faster, so this has recently become my default thematic element.
2) Read books I already own, trying to find the one I am thinking about reading. E.g. it was about a dragon, and there was a school… but not this one.
3) Read books by favorite authors that I pre-ordered and somehow haven’t read as soon as they downloaded!!?!?! How this category ever rises above zero is a mystery. This was never a problem before e-readers.
4) If I have exhausted categories 1-3, my fallback is completionist, finish books that Goodreads thinks I haven’t finished.
I like your (@james Davis Nicoll) style of writing footnotes but lately, it’s been hard for me to read them because of the cookies preferences widget on the bottom left of my screen. Now I have to scroll down to the bottom of the article to read the whole footnote. Is there any way to fix this?
Anyway, back on topic.
Technically, I ignore my TBR list. That list is just a library for holding all the books that I own and haven’t read yet. I pick books to read based on my mood and how much time I have to read. For example, if I’m in the mood for fantasy and I am procrastinating from work, then I pick books that are in a series. So I just have to look through my books to see if there’s a series that I want to read. It could be a new one that just became available on a website that I subscribe to, an old one that just had a spin off series drop necessitating a re-read or even a series I’ve read before that is so engaging it can take my mind off of the anxiety that procrastination can cause.
I have no control over that widget. I hope it’s not present on Reactor.
I’ve just started a ‘short list’. For a new bookshelf in my main room and it holds my library books and a small section (like 5 books) of my ‘read next’ items. This way I am looking at the physical books I will read next every day. It gives me motivation to get to them.
Last year I kept reading library books to return them but forgetting that the books I really wanted to read were ones I’d already bought!
I also always have one of each on the go: – physical book, ebook, audiobook, graphic novel and anthology of short stories.
Sometimes I have ebook and print of something so I can swap between mediums (same with audiobooks) but usually I have 4-5 books on the go, with one as the ‘primary’ read. Keeps me on my toes and allows me to swap stories when I need to use a different format or get bored
All the books on my TBR are in a book with a number. I use a random number generator to choose my next read. I know I can’t lose because all the books are ones I’ve acquired because I like the sound of them. And I like the surprise element of not knowing which book the generator will choose for me.