How to Choose Your Next Book
How do you choose your next book to read? It’s such a personal question, right? Do you have a strict TBR pile that you work through methodically, or do you randomly attack your shelves for whatever takes your fancy? Do you, like me, buy millions of new books before finishing everything in your house, then never actually get round to reading them? (I’m looking at you, new George Saunders that arrived on my doorstep today and I just know I won’t ever be “in the mood” for but couldn’t resist buying regardless…) I threw the question out to some friends on Instagram, and the responses were as varied as I’d hoped — do any of them resonate with you? There are the bookseller approaches: perhaps you’re like Nick, who cycles between a few different genres — I do a bit of this too, trying to balance fiction and non-fiction especially — or maybe you’re more like Caz, who sends a photo of her TBR pile to a trusted friend and lets them choose. (I like this way of doing it, I like the restrictiveness, but without the feeling of “homework” you can sometimes get from reading, say, your book club’s choice.) I sometimes show my partner two books I want to read and ask him to choose which one I should start; this often leads to me deciding to pick up the opposite, as his deciding for me has made me realise that actually the other one is the one I really want to read.
Becca, who works in publishing, says she chooses based on “vibes”, and Melissa, whom I work with, had a similar response of judging the “mood” both of herself and the books: I have to admit this is much closer to my method too — sometimes I just know what’s coming next, other times I stare at the bookcase for fifteen minutes solid before something jumps out. Dafne describes her TBR methodology as “a mess”, often going instinctively off what friends are posting about on Instagram and book reviews. The only theme she follows is New York — if anything New York related comes across her path it gets an automatic queue jump. My friend Emily is more of a completist, aiming to work through a single author’s back catalogue before moving onto the next, as she says it can take her a while to find something that grips her, so when she does she clings on tight. I have great admiration for this but I can never quite bring myself to do it — if I like a writer I always want to leave them unfinished, to know there’s still more out there I could potentially read for the first time.
There was some consensus on a desire to be rigorous, even if that wasn’t always followed through. Connor, who is definitely the most prolific reader I know, sets aside a certain amount of money for ordering new books each month, does a big order at Hive, and then reads them in the order they arrive. Not following this pattern triggers his anxiety — I definitely know the feeling. My chest feels tight when I think about how many unread books there are in my house (and yet I still buy more?), so I wish I had Connor’s self control, and his discipline for reading as much as he does too. My friend Mike, another bookseller, has a similar but slightly looser method of making a list at the start of the month, often encompassing recent recommendations from friends, things that have come up thematically, and trying to include books he’s been meaning to read for a while as well as fresh new things. This list often, he admits, goes out the window, but it is interesting that almost everyone I spoke to craved some structure to their reading, even if they struggled to impose it on themselves. I know I fall into that camp.
Do you take recommendations or are you a contrarian? I get most of my reading choices from the recommendations of friends and fellow booksellers, but the crucial thing is that they have to be delivered in the right way. If one person tells me passionately how much a book changed their life, how much they loved it, I’ll buy it then and there. If several people tell me, “Oh Rosie, you would love this, it’s so you!” — well, that’s it, never reading that author. (Hence the stack of unread Murakami novels on my shelves that will never be opened.) I couldn’t tell you where this compulsion comes from, but if someone tells me something is “so me” then it’s cursed, I will never enjoy it, because I know I’ll just be searching for the exact image or phrase that made them think that — instead of focussing on the book, I’ll just be attempting to analyse my friend’s attempt to analyse me. Yet, despite the awareness of how much this style of recommending grates on me, I still do this to other people too. I spent months trying to convince a colleague to read Lolly Willowes last year because it was “so her” — I’m not sure if she ever actually did, or indeed if she did, whether she was offended by the comparison. (I hope not, because Lolly is one of my favourite characters of all time.)
When recommended to me properly, there’s nothing better than a book another bookseller is passionate about. I’m currently in the middle of Slow Days, Fast Company by Eve Babitz, which was recommended to me by a colleague — we only started working together in June, and when we started talking about our all-time favourite books her sheer affection for Babitz’s work completely bowled me over. I made sure we ordered some in, and as soon as I unpacked Slow Days from our delivery it went straight through the till and straight home with me. It’s taken me a few months to get to it, granted, but I’m so glad I have. Similarly, my reading of Patrik Svensson’s The Gospel of the Eels (as discussed in my 2020 round-up) was inspired by my friend Dafne’s passion for the book. I once overheard Mike describe reading A Month in the Country to a customer as “like stepping out into the light” and I knew then I needed to read it — Mike had been inspired to read in a similar way by another bookseller, who had been inspired by another bookseller in turn, a chain leading back through generations of booksellers. (You can usually tell if someone was in a particular bookselling cohort of a certain central London Waterstones by whether they rhapsodise about this book.)
Aside from fellow booksellers, my favourite way to find something new is just to unpack deliveries. There are few purer joys in bookselling; it’s something to do with the fact that in retail you never get to do a task all the way to the end, so unpacking a whole delivery is one of the rare moments of total completion, but also that you can combine this satisfaction with the frisson of encountering the new. I really miss it. There are millions of photos on my phone of me holding up books I’ve just unpacked, often sent to other booksellers in other shops with captions like “WHAT IS THIS?????” — I think the most recent one was two in the same delivery, Faber’s gorgeous reissue of Brigid Brophy’s The Snow Ball and Andrés Barba’s A Luminous Republic which I’m still mad I missed off my best of 2020 list. Sometimes, I’m not ashamed to say, this gut feeling of “WOW!” is based on the cover art — book jackets can truly be works of art these days — but a lot of the time it’s more to do with my familiarity with the inventory we already have, and being able to look in a box of books and instantly see which one is new to our shelves. If it’s not coming straight home with me, I love knowing exactly which colleague to show it to first, watching their eyes light up and the conflicting emotions of desire and guilt at already reneging on their promise to themselves to not! buy! any! more! books! this! month!
But this is not about choosing which book to buy next — a very easy decision, it’s all of them — we’re talking about what gets read next, which is a completely different proposition. During normal work times, I probably buy an average of 5 books a week, and that’s with some attempt at self control. There is no possible way I can read them all, and read everything unread in my house. When I moved to London 4 years ago I made a point of only bringing stuff I hadn’t read yet with me, in an effort to try to plough through all those things I’d been meaning to get to for so long. My collection has grown vastly in the time I’ve been here, and most of it is still unread. Why can’t I get to it? There’s the pressure, when at work, to constantly be reading the new things, though the periods of furlough over the past year have been useful for breaking that mindset and allowing me to read some classics — modern and older — without feeling “guilty”.
Where does that guilt come from? Some of my bookseller friends were discussing a recent customer phenomenon at the end of last year: it seems as though everyone is concerned with what book is “the best one”, with no real idea what that exactly means. “Which one is better though?” a customer will ask, while weighing up a self-help book about forming habits and this year’s Pulitzer winning novel. “I can’t really compare them,” is usually my bewildered response, to which the customer looks even more nonplussed. (Worse still is when customers are buying gifts and ask a similar question — not only can the two books in question not be compared, I don’t even know the person you’re buying for. I can’t tell you which one they’ll like more! What do you mean you don’t know anything about them either? You just told me it’s for your brother!) It comes down to an anxiety we all have these days, a need for all our time to be spent in the best possible way — everything should be optimised. We don’t have time to read average books! We need the best ones! No time for average TV or films! Only the best!
But not only does that attitude wreak havoc on our ability to enjoy something for what it is, rather than being paralysed by the anxiety of choice, it leads to a toxic kind of fan culture too. We’ve put time and effort into consuming a thing, be it book, TV show, whatever. We’ve put that time in, that’s a sunk cost now. We need to prove to everyone else that we made the right decision. So we double down on our opinions, dig our heels in, adamantly declare that yes, it was the best. It would be healthier for us as individuals and for cultural discourse in general if we could just admit flaws. We don’t have to agree with everything we see in a piece of media to be able to enjoy it. It doesn’t have to be the most intellectually stimulating thing in the world ever actually, and nor do we have to hide behind the guise of a “guilty pleasure”. This stuff is there for your entertainment, and sometimes for making you look at your life or the world around you from a different perspective, and sometimes to challenge yourself. It’s ok for a book to simply be an enjoyable ride though, whether your form of enjoyment is Sophie Kinsella or Han Kang or James Patterson or John Berger. So when I meet those customers who ask “which is the best one though?” I just want to hold their hands and say, “It’s ok. In the end it’s all experience and all experience is something. You can pick whichever one you fancy the most. You don’t have to justify it.” To answer the question from the title: pick whatever you like. Don’t feel guilty. Your next book doesn’t have to change your life. It might, but it doesn’t have to. In the words of my friend Mike, “It’s all composting.”
