With more than 1 million new books being published worldwide each year, how do you choose which books to read? I’m reminded of Kevin Kelly’s quote in The Inevitable:
Life is short, and there are too many books to read. Someone, or something, has to choose, or whisper in our ear to help us decide.
-Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable
I’ve followed two main book choice paths in my life. I refer to these as the Recommendation Trail and the Reading List:
Recommendation Trail
The recommendation trail always starts with a nudge towards a certain book. This can come from a newspaper article, a suggestion from a friend, a podcast, or browsing a book store. One books seems to stick out from the pack. Once I pick up that book, it almost always leads to more books. These additional books can come from recommendations by the author, a desire to remedy a lack of knowledge about a topic in the book, or the bibliography. I can usually look at my bookshelf and trace the steps back to the path that led to that particular book.
Reading Lists
The second way I’ve come across books to read is through reading lists. These curated lists have come from a variety of places. The top three for me are:
- The Atlanta Journal Constitution once posted a list of all books that were required reading for each high school in the Atlanta area. I cut that out and checked off the books as I read them. I’m including two images on this blog that show those recommended books.
- Top 10 lists – I love reading the articles that highlight the top 10 favorite books of different people. I have often used these list to influence the books I read.
- Tools of Titans – my favorite part of Tim Ferriss’ Tools of Titans was the list of recommended and most-gifted books by each person Tim wrote about. That list was gold and led me to undertake this Books of Titans project.
As Kevin Kelly pointed out in The Inevitable, filtration and curation will continue to increase in importance as we are continually presented with more books, movies, songs, articles, podcasts, etc. The question is, who will you trust to curate for you? Amazon tries to do this by “people who read this also liked this.” Google tries to do this by personalizing your search results. Facebook does this by algorithmically adjusting your feed based on what you’ve liked, looked at, and passed by in the past. Reading lists usually get outside of these technological filtering mechanisms by pointing to books that have stood the test of time.
In this age of choice abundance, how do you determine the books you read?
2 Comments. Leave new
Hello. For me it’s a slow process of reading say, multiple lists of nonfiction books only, or lists of science books only, and then going over those lists slowly at first and then fast, back and forth between say only the numerous top/favorite science books on the various lists and see which ones keep coming up. The ones that make it on the most lists I make a note of. (This is very similar to what some websites do, (which they call Metalist or metalists of books. Which is a great way to skip all the searching I do. However there not the easiest to find always, as you get into specific topics. However for fiction, nonfiction, fantasy, and other general, non specific genres they can be real good). Then I look at those and see which ones interest me the most. It’s a very slow and time consuming process that I may not do forever, but it’s fun for me for now. I’m a slow reader so I want to make sure I’m reading an all around great book.
Having a metalist that shows this book showed up on 24 lists can be helpful. Those lists are often popular lists like nyt book review list and other prestigious lists. Also I have a lot of books that recommend other books, like “1000 books to read before you die”, not to be confused with the inferior “1001 books to read before you die”. Thanks for your website!
I like that. Thanks for sharing!